The Hand of the
Past
As soon as Dorcas said, “You never asked me
what I saw today,” I realized that I had been trying to steer the
conversation away from it. I had a premonition that it would be
something quite meaningless to me, to which Dorcas would attach
great meaning, as madmen do who believe the tracks of worms beneath
the bark of fallen trees to be a supernatural script. I said, “I
thought it might be better to keep your mind off it, whatever it
was.”
“No doubt it would, if only we could do
it. It was a chair.”
“A chair?”
“An old chair. And a table, and several
other things. It seems that there is a shop in the Turners’ Street
that sells old furniture to the eclectics, and to those among the
autochthons who have absorbed enough of our culture to want it.
There is no source here to supply the demand, and so two or three
times a year the owner and his sons go to Nessus—to the abandoned
quarters of the south—and fill their boat. I talked to him, you
see; I know all about it. There are tens of thousands of empty
houses there. Some have fallen in long ago, but some are still
standing as their owners left them. Most have been looted, yet they
still find silver and bits of jewelry now and then. And though most
have lost most of their furniture, the owners who moved almost
always left some things behind.”
I felt that she was about to weep, and
I leaned forward to stroke her forehead. She showed me by a glance
that she did not wish me to, and laid herself on the bed again as
she had been before.
“In some of those houses, all the
furnishings are still there. Those are the best, he said. He thinks
that a few families, or perhaps only a few people living alone,
remained behind when the quarter died. They were too old to move,
or too stubborn. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure some of them
must have had something there they could not bear to leave. A
grave, perhaps. They boarded their windows against the marauders,
and they kept dogs, and worse things, to protect them. Eventually
they left—or they came to the end of life, and their animals
devoured their bodies and broke free; but by that time there was no
one there, not even looters or scavengers, not until this man and
his sons.”
“There must be a great many old
chairs,” I said.
“Not like that one. I knew everything
about it—the carving on the legs and even the pattern in the grain
of the arms. So much came back then. And then here, when I vomited
those pieces of lead, things like hard, heavy seeds, then I knew.
Do you remember, Severian, how it was when we left the Botanic
Garden? You, Agia, and I came out of that great, glass vivarium,
and you hired a boat to take us from the island to the shore, and
the river was full of nenuphars with blue flowers and shining green
leaves. Their seeds are like that, hard and heavy and dark, and I
have heard that they sink to the bottom of Gyoll and remain there
for whole ages of the world. But when chance brings them near the
surface they sprout no matter how old they may be, so that the
flowers of a chiliad past are seen to bloom again.”
“I have heard that too,” I said. “But
it means nothing to you or me.”
Dorcas lay still, but her voice
trembled. “What is the power that calls them back? Can you explain
it?”
“The sunshine, I suppose—but no, I
cannot explain it.”
“And is there no source of sunlight
except the sun?”
I knew then what it was she meant,
though something in me could not accept it.
“When that man—Hildegrin, the man we
met a second time on top of the tomb in the ruined stone town—was
ferrying us across the Lake of Birds, he talked of millions of dead
people, people whose bodies had been sunk in that water. How were
they made to sink, Severian? Bodies float. How do they weight them?
I don’t know. Do you?”
I did. “They force lead shot down the
throats.”
“I thought so.” Her voice was so weak
now that I could scarcely hear her, even in that silent little
room. “No, I knew so. I knew it when I saw them.”
“You think that the Claw brought you
back.”
Dorcas nodded.
“It has acted, sometimes, I’ll admit
that. But only when I took it out, and not always then. When you
pulled me out of the water in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it was
in my sabretache and I didn’t even know I had it.”
“Severian, you allowed me to hold it
once before. Could I see it again now?”
I pulled it from its soft pouch and
held it up. The blue fires seemed sleepy, but I could see the
cruel-looking hook at the center of the gem that had given it its
name. Dorcas extended her hand, but I shook my head, remembering
the wineglass.
“You think I will do it some harm,
don’t you? I won’t. It would be a sacrilege.”
“If you believe what you say, and I
think you do, then you must hate it for drawing you back
…”
“From death.” She was watching the
ceiling again, now smiling as if she shared some deep and ludicrous
secret with it. “Go ahead and say it. It won’t hurt
you.”
“From sleep,” I said. “Since if one can
be recalled from it, it is not
death—not death as we have always understood it, the death that is
in our minds when we say death. Although I
have to confess it is still almost impossible for me to believe
that the Conciliator, dead now for so many thousands of years,
should act through this stone to raise others.”
Dorcas made no reply. I could not even
be sure she was listening.
“You mentioned Hildegrin,” I said, “and
the time he rowed us across the lake in his boat, to pick the
avern. Do you remember what he said of death? It was that she was a
good friend to the birds. Perhaps we ought to have known then that
such a death could not be death as we imagine it.”
“If I say I believe all that, will you
let me hold the Claw?”
I shook my head again.
Dorcas was not looking at me, but she
must have seen the motion of my shadow; or perhaps it was only that
her mental Severian on the ceiling shook his head as well. “You are
right, then—I was going to destroy it if I could. Shall I tell you
what I really believe? I believe I have been dead—not sleeping, but
dead. That all my life took place a long, long time ago when I
lived with my husband above a little shop, and took care of our
child. That this Conciliator of yours who came so long ago was an
adventurer from one of the ancient races who outlived the universal
death.” Her hands clutched the blanket. “I ask you, Severian, when
he comes again, isn’t he to be called the New Sun? Doesn’t that
sound like it? And I believe that when he came he brought with him
something that had the same power over time that Father Inire’s
mirrors are said to have over distance. It is that gem of
yours.”
She stopped and turned her head to look
at me defiantly; when I said nothing, she continued. “Severian,
when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw
twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you
half healed your friend’s wounds, it was because it bent the moment
to one when they would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the
fen in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it must have touched me or
nearly touched me, and for me it became the time in which I had
lived, so that I lived again. But I have been dead. For a long,
long time I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved in the brown
water. And there is something in me that is dead
still.”
“There is something in all of us that
has always been dead,” I said. “If only because we know that
eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest
children.”
“I’m going to go back, Severian. I know
that now, and that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I have to
go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened
to me. I know you can’t go with me …”
I nodded.
“And I’m not asking you to. I don’t
even want you to. I love you, but you are another death, a death
that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the
lake did, but death all the same. I don’t want to take death with
me when I go to look for my life.”
“I understand,” I said.
“My child may still be alive—an old
man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to know.”
“Yes,” I said. But I could not help
adding, “There was a time when you told me I was not death. That I
must not let others persuade me to think of myself in that way. It
was behind the orchard on the grounds of the House Absolute. Do you
remember?”
“You have been death to me,” she said.
“I have succumbed to the trap I warned you of, if you like. Perhaps
you are not death, but you will remain what you are, a torturer and
a carnifex, and your hands will run with blood. Since you remember
that time at the House Absolute so well, perhaps you … I can’t say
it. The Conciliator, or the Claw, or the Increate, has done this to
me. Not you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Dr. Talos gave us both money
afterward, in the clearing. The money he had got from some court
official for our play. When we were traveling, I gave everything to
you. May I have it back? I’ll need it. If not all of it, at least
some of it.”
I emptied the money in my sabretache
onto the table. It was as much as I had received from her, or a
trifle more.
“Thank you,” she said. “You won’t need
it?”
“Not as badly as you will. Besides, it
is yours.”
“I’m going to leave tomorrow, if I feel
strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not.
I don’t suppose you know how often the boats put out, going
downriver?”
“As often as you want them to. You push
them in, and the river does the rest.”
“That’s not like you, Severian, or at
least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have
said, from what you’ve told me. Which reminds me that you’re not
the first visitor I’ve had today. Our friend—your friend, at
least—Hethor was here. That’s not funny to you, is it? I’m sorry, I
just wanted to change the subject.”
“He enjoys it. Enjoys watching
me.”
“Thousands of people do when you
perform in public, and you enjoy doing it yourself.”
“They come to be horrified, so they can
congratulate themselves later on being alive. And because they like
the excitement, and the suspense of not knowing whether the
condemned will break down, or if some macabre accident will occur.
I enjoy exercising my skill, the only real skill I have—enjoy
making things go perfectly. Hethor wants something
else.”
“The pain?”
“Yes, the pain, but something more
too.”
Dorcas said, “He worships you, you
know. He talked with me for some time, and I think he would walk
into a fire if you told him to.” I must have winced at that,
because she continued, “All this about Hethor is making you ill,
isn’t it? One sick person is enough. Let’s speak of something
else.”
“Not ill as you are, no. But I can’t
think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with
his mouth open and his eyes …”
She stirred uncomfortably. “Yes, those
eyes—I saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldn’t be
the one to say that. A corpse’s eyes. You have the feeling that if
you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move
under your finger.”
“That isn’t it at all. When I was on
the scaffold in Saltus and looked down and saw him, his eyes
danced. You said, though, that the dull eyes he has at most times
reminded you of a corpse’s. Haven’t you ever looked into the glass?
Your own eyes are not the eyes of a dead woman.”
“Perhaps not.” Dorcas paused. “You used
to say they were beautiful.”
“Aren’t you glad to live? Even if your
husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once
lived in is a ruin—if all those things are true—aren’t you full of
joy because you are here again? You’re not a ghost, not a revenant
like those we saw in the ruined town. Look in the glass as I told
you. Or if you won’t, look into my face or any man’s and see what
you are.”
Dorcas sat up even more slowly and
painfully than she had risen to drink the wine, but this time she
swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and I saw that she was
naked under the thin blanket. Before her illness Jolenta’s skin had
been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery.
Dorcas’s was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so
slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more
desirable in her imperfection than Jolenta had ever been in the
lushness of her flesh. Conscious of how culpable it would be to
force myself on her or even to persuade her to open to me now, when
she was ill and I was on the point of leaving her, I still felt
desire for her stir in me. However much I love a woman—or however
little—I find I want her most when I can no longer have her. But
what I felt for Dorcas was stronger than that, and more complex.
She had been, though only for so brief a time, the closest friend I
had known, and our possession of each other, from the frantic
desire in our converted storeroom in Nessus to the long and lazy
playing in the bedchamber of the Vincula, was the characteristic
act of our friendship as well as our love.
“You’re crying,” I said. “Do you want
me to leave?”
She shook her head, and then, as though
she could no longer contain the words that seemed to force
themselves out, she whispered, “Oh, won’t you go too, Severian? I
didn’t mean it. Won’t you come? Won’t you come with
me?”
“I can’t.”
She sank back into the narrow bed,
smaller now and more childlike. “I know. You have your duty to your
guild. You can’t betray it again and face yourself, and I won’t ask
you. It’s only that I never quite gave up hoping you
might.”
I shook my head as I had before. “I
have to flee the city—”
“Severian!”
“And to the north. You’ll be going
south, and if I were with you, we would have courier boats full of
soldiers after us.”
“Severian, what happened?” Dorcas’s
face was very calm, but her eyes were wide.
“I freed a woman. I was supposed to
strangle her and throw her body into the Acis, and I could have
done it—I didn’t feel anything for her, not really, and it should
have been easy. But when I was alone with her, I thought of Thecla.
We were in a little summerhouse screened with shrubbery, that stood
at the edge of the water. I had my hands around her neck, and I
thought of Thecla and how I had wanted to free her. I couldn’t find
a way to do it. Have I ever told you?”
Almost imperceptibly, Dorcas shook her
head.
“There were brothers everywhere, five
to pass by the shortest route, and all of them knew me and knew of
her.” (Thecla was shrieking now in some corner of my mind.) “All I
really would have had to do would have been to tell them Master
Gurloes had ordered me to bring her to him. But I would have had to
go with her then, and I was still trying to devise some way by
which I could stay in the guild. I did not love her
enough.”
“It’s past now,” Dorcas said. “And,
Severian, death is not the terrible thing you think it.” We had
reversed our roles, like lost children who comfort each other
alternately.
I shrugged. The ghost I had eaten at
Vodalus’s banquet was nearly calm again; I could feel her long,
cool fingers on my brain, and though I could not turn inside my own
skull to see her, I knew her deep and violet eyes were behind my
own. It required an effort not to speak with her voice. “At any
rate, I was there with the woman, in the summerhouse, and we were
alone. Her name was Cyriaca. I knew or at least suspected that she
knew where the Pelerines were—she had been one of them for a time.
There are silent means of excruciation that require no equipment,
and although they are not spectacular, they are quite effective.
One reaches into the body, as it were, and manipulates the client’s
nerves directly. I was going to use what we call Humbaba’s Stick,
but before I had touched her she told me. The Pelerines are near
the pass of Orithyia caring for the wounded. This woman had a
letter, she said, only a week ago, from someone she had known in
the order …”