He Is Ahead of
You!
The husband who was supposed to have come
before supper did not come, and the four of us—the woman, the old
man, the boy, and I—ate the evening meal without him. I had at
first thought his wife’s prediction a lie intended to deter me from
whatever criminality I might otherwise have committed; but as the
sullen afternoon wore on in that silence that presages a storm, it
became apparent that she had believed what she had said, and was
now sincerely worried.
Our supper was as simple, almost, as
such a meal can be; but my hunger was so great that it was one of
the most gratifying I recall. We had boiled vegetables without salt
or butter, coarse bread, and a little meat. No wine, no fruit,
nothing fresh and nothing sweet; yet I think I must have eaten more
than the other three together.
When our meal was over, the woman
(whose name, I had learned, was Casdoe) took a long, iron-shod
staff out of a corner and set off to look for her husband, first
assuring me that she required no escort and telling the old man,
who seemed not to hear her, that she would not go far and would
soon return. Seeing him remain as abstracted as ever before his
fire, I coaxed the boy to me, and after I had won his confidence by
showing him Terminus Est and permitting him
to hold her hilt and attempt to lift her blade, I asked him whether
Severa should not come down and take care of him now that his
mother was away.
“She came back last night,” he told
me.
I thought he was referring to his
mother and said, “I’m sure she’ll come back tonight too, but don’t
you think Severa ought to take care of you now, while she’s
gone?”
As children who are not sufficiently
confident of language to argue sometimes do, the boy shrugged and
tried to turn away.
I caught him by the shoulders. “I want
you to go upstairs now, little Severian, and tell her to come down.
I promise I won’t hurt her.”
He nodded and went to the ladder,
though slowly and reluctantly. “Bad woman,” he said.
Then, for the first time since I had
been in the house, the old man spoke. “Becan, come over here! I
want to tell you about Fechin.” It was a moment
before I understood that he was addressing me under the impression
that I was his son-in-law.
“He was the worst of us all, that
Fechin. A tall, wild boy with red hair on his hands, on his arms.
Like a monkey’s arms, so that if you saw them reaching around the
corner to take something, you’d think, except for the size, that it
was a monkey taking it. He took our copper pan once, the one Mother
used to make sausage in, and I saw his arm and didn’t tell who had
done it, because he was my friend. I never found it again, never
saw it again, though I was with him a thousand times. I used to
think he had made a boat of it and sailed it on the river, because
that was what I had always wanted to do with it myself. I walked
down the river trying to find it, and the night came before I ever
knew it, before I had even turned around to go home. Maybe he
polished the bottom to look in—sometimes he drew his own likeness.
Maybe he filled it with water to see his reflection.”
I had gone across the room to listen to
him, partly because he spoke indistinctly and partly out of
respect, for his aged face reminded me a little of Master
Palaemon’s, though he had his natural eyes. “I once met a man of
your age who had posed for Fechin,” I said.
The old man looked up at me; as quickly
as the shadow of a bird might cross some gray rag thrown out of the
house upon the grass, I saw the realization that I was not Becan
come and go. He did not stop speaking, however, or in any other way
acknowledge the fact. It was as if what he was saying were so
urgent that it had to be told to someone, poured into any ears
before it was lost forever.
“His face wasn’t a monkey’s face at
all. Fechin was handsome—the handsomest around. He could always get
food or money from a woman. He could get anything from women. I
remember once when we were walking down the trail that led to where
the old mill stood then. I had a piece of paper the schoolmaster
had given me. Real paper, not quite white, but with a touch of
brown to it, and little speckles here and there, so it looked like
a trout in milk. The schoolmaster gave it to me so I could write a
letter for Mother—at the school we always wrote on boards, then
washed them clean with a sponge when we had to write again, and
when nobody was looking we’d hit the sponge with the board and send
it flying against the wall, or somebody’s head. But Fechin loved to
draw, and while we walked I thought about that, and how his face
would look if he had paper to make a picture he could
keep.
“They were the only things he kept.
Everything else he lost, or gave away, or threw away, and I knew
what Mother wanted to tell pretty much, and I decided if I wrote
small I could get it on half the paper. Fechin didn’t know I had
it, but I took it out and showed it to him, then folded it and tore
it in two.”
Over our heads, I could hear the
fluting voice of the little boy, though I could not understand what
he was saying.
“That was the brightest day I’ve ever
seen. The sun had new life to him,
the way a man will when he was sick yesterday and will be sick
tomorrow, but today he walks around and laughs so that if a
stranger was to come he’d think there was nothing wrong, no
sickness at all, that the medicines and the bed were for somebody
else. They always say in prayers that the New Sun will be too
bright to look at, and I always up until that day had taken it to
be just the proper way of talking, the way you say a baby’s
beautiful, or praise whatever a good man has made for himself, that
even if there were two suns in the sky you could look at both. But
that day I learned it was all true, and the light of it on Fechin’s
face was more than I could stand. It made my eyes water. He said
thank you, and we went farther along and came to a house where a
girl lived. I can’t remember what her name was, but she was truly
beautiful, the way the quietest are sometimes. I never knew up till
then that Fechin knew her, but he asked me to wait, and I sat down
on the first step in front of the gate.”
Someone heavier than the boy was
walking overhead, toward the ladder.
“He wasn’t inside long, but when he
came out, with the girl looking out the window, I knew what they
had done. I looked at him, and he spread those long, thin, monkey
arms. How could he share what he’d had? In the end, he made the
girl give me half a loaf of bread and some fruit. He drew my
picture on one side of the paper and the girl’s on the other, but
he kept the pictures.”
The ladder creaked, and I turned to
look. As I had expected, a woman was descending it. She was not
tall, but full-figured and narrow-waisted; her gown was nearly as
ragged as the boy’s mother’s, and much dirtier. Rich brown hair
spilled down her back. I think I recognized her even before she
turned and I saw the high cheekbones and her long, brown eyes—it
was Agia. “So you knew I was here all along,” she
said.
“I might make the same remark to you.
You seem to have been here before me.”
“I only guessed that you would be
coming this way. As it happened, I arrived a little before you, and
I told the mistress of this house what you would do to me if she
did not hide me,” she said. (I supposed she wished me to know she
had an ally here, if only a feeble one.)
“You’ve been trying to kill me ever
since I glimpsed you in the crowd at Saltus.”
“Is that an accusation?
Yes.”
“You’re lying.”
It was one of the few times I have ever
seen Agia caught off balance. “What do you mean?”
“Only that you were trying to kill me
before Saltus.”
“With the avern. Yes, of
course.”
“And afterward. Agia, I know who Hethor
is.”
I waited for her to reply, but she said
nothing.
“On the day we met, you told me there
was an old sailor who wanted you to live with him. Old and ugly and
poor, you called him, and I could not
understand why you, a lovely young woman, should even consider his
offer when you were not actually starving. You had your twin to
protect you, and a little money coming in from the
shop.”
It was my turn to be surprised. She
said, “I should have gone to him and mastered him. I have mastered
him now.”
“I thought you had only promised
yourself to him, if he would kill me.”
“I have promised him that and many
other things, and so mastered him. He is ahead of you, Severian,
waiting word from me.”
“With more of his beasts? Thank you for
the warning. That was it, wasn’t it? He had threatened you and
Agilus with the pets he had brought from other
spheres.”
She nodded. “He came to sell his
clothes, and they were the kind worn on the old ships that sailed
beyond the world’s rim long ago, and they weren’t costumes or
forgeries or even tomb-tender old garments that had lain for
centuries in the dark, but clothes not far from new. He said his
ships—all those ships—became lost in the blackness between the
suns, where the years do not turn. Lost so that even Time cannot
find them.”
“I know,” I said. “Jonas told
me.”
“After I learned that you would kill
Agilus, I went to him. He is ironstrong in some ways, weak in many
others. If I had withheld my body I could have done nothing with
him, but I did all the queer things he wished me to, and made him
believe I love him. Now he will do anything I ask. He followed you
for me after you killed Agilus; with his silver I hired the men you
killed at the old mine, and the creatures he commands will kill you
for me yet, if I don’t do it here myself.”
“You meant to wait until I slept, and
then come down and murder me, I suppose.”
“I would have waked you first, when I
had my knife at your throat. But the child told me you knew I was
here, and I thought this might be more pleasant. Tell me though—how
did you guess about Hethor?”
A breath of wind stirred through the
narrow windows. It made the fire smoke, and I heard the old man,
who sat there in silence once more, cough, and spit onto the coals.
The little boy, who had climbed down from the loft while Agia and I
talked, watched us with large, uncomprehending eyes.
“I should have known it long before,” I
said. “My friend Jonas had been just such a sailor. You will
remember him, I think—you glimpsed him at the mine mouth, and you
must have known of him.”
“We did.”
“Perhaps they were from the same ship.
Or perhaps it was only that each would have known the other by some
sign, or that Hethor at least feared they would. However that may
be, he seldom came near me when I was traveling with Jonas, though
he had been so eager to be in my company before. I saw him in the
crowd when I executed a woman and a man at Saltus, but he did not
try to join me there. On the way to the House Absolute, Jonas and I
saw him behind us, but he did not come running up until Jonas had
ridden off, though he must have been desperate to get back his
notule. When he was thrown into the antechamber of the House
Absolute, he made no attempt to sit with us, even though Jonas was
nearly dead; but something that left a trail of slime was searching
the place when we left it.”
Agia said nothing, and in her silence
she might have been the young woman I had seen on the morning of
the day after I left our tower unfastening the gratings that had
guarded the windows of a dusty shop.
“You two must have lost my trail on the
way to Thrax,” I continued, “or been delayed by some accident. Even
after you discovered we were in the city, you must not have known
that I had charge of the Vincula, because Hethor sent his creature
of fire prowling the streets to find me. Then, somehow, you found
Dorcas at the Duck’s Nest—”
“We were lodging there ourselves,” Agia
said. “We had only arrived a few days before, and we were out
looking for you when you came. Afterward when I realized that the
woman in the little garret room was the mad girl you had found in
the Botanic Gardens, we still didn’t guess it was you who had put
her there, because that hag at the inn said the man had worn common
clothes. But we thought she might know where you were, and that she
would be more apt to talk to Hethor. His name isn’t really Hethor,
by the way. He says it’s a much older one, that hardly anyone has
heard of now.”
“He told Dorcas about the fire
creature,” I said, “and she told me. I had heard of the thing
before, but Hethor had a name for it—he called it a salamander. I
didn’t think anything of it when Dorcas mentioned it, but later I
remembered that Jonas had a name for the black thing that flew
after us outside the House Absolute. He called it a notule, and
said the people on the ships had named them that because they
betrayed themselves with a gust of warmth. If Hethor had a name for
the fire creature, it seemed likely that it was a sailor’s name
too, and that he had something to do with the creature
itself.”
Agia smiled thinly. “So now you know
all, and you have me where you want me—provided you can swing that
big blade of yours in here.”
“I have you without it. I had you
beneath my foot at the mine mouth, for that matter.”
“But I still have my
knife.”
At that moment the boy’s mother came
through the doorway, and both of us paused. She looked in
astonishment from Agia to me; then, as though no surprise could
pierce her sorrow or alter what she had to do, she closed the door
and lifted the heavy bar into place.
Agia said, “He heard me upstairs,
Casdoe, and made me come down. He intends to kill me.”
“And how am I to prevent that?” the
woman answered wearily. She turned to me. “I hid her because she
said you meant her harm. Will you kill me too?”
“No. Nor will I kill her, as she
knows.”
Agia’s face distorted with rage, as the
face of another lovely woman, molded by Fechin himself perhaps in
colored wax, might have been transformed
with a gout of flame, so that it simultaneously melted and burned.
“You killed Agilus, and you gloried in it! Aren’t I as fit to die
as he was? We were the same flesh!” I had not fully believed her
when she said she was armed with a knife, but without my having
seen her draw it, it was out now—one of the crooked daggers of
Thrax.
For some time the air had been heavy
with an impending storm. Now the thunder rolled, booming among the
peaks above us. When its echoings and reechoings had almost died
away, something answered them. I cannot describe that voice; it was
not quite a human shout, nor was it the mere bellow of a
beast.
All her weariness left the woman
Casdoe, replaced by the most desperate haste. Heavy wooden shutters
stood against the wall beneath each of the narrow windows; she
seized the nearest, and lifting it as if it weighed no more than a
pie pan sent it crashing into place. Outside, the dog barked
frantically then fell silent, leaving no sound but the pattering of
the first rain.
“So soon,” Casdoe cried. “So soon!” To
her son: “Severian, get out of the way.”
Through one of the still open windows,
I heard a child’s voice call, “Father, can’t you
help me?”