The Hetman’s
Dinner
It was nearly evening before I reached the
first houses. The sun spread a path of red gold across the lake, a
path that appeared to extend the village street to the margin of
the world, so that a man might have walked down it and out into the
larger universe. But the village itself, small and poor though I
saw it to be when I reached it, was good enough for me, who had
been walking so long in high and remote places.
There was no inn, and since none of the
people who peered at me over the sills of their windows seemed at
all eager to admit me, I asked for the hetman’s house, pushed aside
the fat woman who answered the door, and made myself comfortable.
By the time the hetman arrived to see who had appointed himself his
guest, I had my broken stone and my oil out and was leaning over
the blade of Terminus Est as I warmed myself
before his fire. He began by bowing, but he was so curious about me
that he could not resist looking up as he bowed; so that I had
difficulty in refraining from laughing at him, which would have
been fatal to my plans.
“The optimate is welcome,” the hetman
said, blowing out his wrinkled cheeks. “Most welcome. My poor
house—all our poor little settlement—is at his
disposal.”
“I am not an optimate,” I told him. “I
am the Grand Master Severian, of the Order of the Seekers for Truth
and Penitence, commonly called the guild of torturers. You, Hetman,
will address me as Master. I have had a
difficult journey, and if you will provide me with a good dinner
and a tolerable bed, it is not likely I will have to trouble you or
your people for much else before morning.”
“You will have my own bed,” he said
quickly. “And such food as we can provide.”
“You must have fresh fish here, and
waterfowl. I’ll have both. Wild rice, too.” I remembered that once,
when Master Gurloes was discussing our guild’s relations with the
others in the Citadel, he had told me that one of the easiest ways
to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply. “Honey,
new bread, and butter should do it, except for the vegetable and
the salad, and since I’m not particular about those, I will let you
surprise
me. Something good, and something I haven’t had before, so that
I’ll have a tale to carry back to the House Absolute.”
The hetman’s eyes had been growing
rounder and rounder as I spoke, and at the mention of the House
Absolute, which was doubtless no more than the most distant of
rumors in his village, they seemed about to pop out of his skull.
He tried to murmur something about cattle (presumably that they
could not live to supply butter at these altitudes) but I waved him
out, then caught him by the scruff of the neck for not closing the
door behind him.
When he was gone, I risked taking off
my boots. It never pays to appear relaxed around prisoners (and he
and his village were mine now, I thought, though they were not
confined), but I felt sure no one would dare enter the room until
some sort of meal was ready. I finished cleaning and oiling
Terminus Est, and gave her enough strokes
with the whetstone to restore her edges.
That done, I withdrew my other treasure
(though it was not in fact mine) from its bag and examined it in
the light of the hetman’s pungent fire. Since I had left Thrax it
no longer pressed against my chest like a finger of iron—indeed,
while I tramped in the mountains I had sometimes forgotten for half
a day that I wore it, and once or twice I had clasped it in panic,
thinking, when I recalled it at last, that I had lost it. In this
low-ceilinged, square room of the hetman’s, where the rounded
stones in the walls seemed to warm their bellies like burgesses, it
did not flash as it had in the one-eyed boy’s jacal; but neither
was it so lifeless as it had been when I showed it to Typhon. Now,
rather, it seemed to glow, and I could almost have imagined that
its energies played upon my face. The crescent-shaped mark in its
heart had never appeared more distinct, and though it was dark, a
star-point of light emanated from it.
I put away the gem at last, a little
ashamed of having toyed with so entheal a thing as if it were a
bauble. I took out the brown book and would have read from it if I
could; but though my fever seemed to have left me, I was still very
fatigued, and the flickering firelight made the cramped,
oldfashioned letters dance on the page and soon defeated my eyes,
so that the story I was reading appeared at some times to be no
more than nonsense, and at others to deal with my own
concerns—endless journeyings, the cruelty of crowds, streams
running with blood. Once I thought I saw Agia’s name, but when I
looked a second time it had become the word again: “Agia she leaped, and twisting round the columns
of the carapace …”
The page seemed luminous yet
indecipherable, like the reflection of a looking glass seen in a
quiet pool. I closed the book and put it back in my sabretache, not
certain I had in fact seen any of the words I had thought an
instant ago I had read. Agia must indeed have leaped from the
thatched roof of Casdoe’s house. Certainly she twisted, for she had
twisted the execution of Agilus into murder. The great tortoise
that in myth is said to support the world and is thus an embodiment
of the galaxy, without whose swirling order we would be a lonely
wanderer in space, is supposed to have revealed
in ancient times the Universal Rule, since lost, by which one might
always be sure of acting rightly. Its carapace represented the bowl
of heaven, its plastron the plains of all the worlds. The columns
of the carapace would then be the armies of the Theologoumenon,
terrible and gleaming …
Yet I was not sure I had read any of
this, and when I took out the book again and tried to find the
page, I could not. Though I knew my confusion was only the result
of fatigue, hunger, and the light, I felt the fear that has always
come upon me on the many occasions of my life when some small
incident has made me aware of an incipient insanity. As I stared
into the fire, it seemed more possible than I would have liked to
believe that someday, perhaps after a blow on the head, perhaps for
no discernible cause, my imagination and my reason might reverse
their places—just as two friends who come every day to the same
seats in some public garden might at last decide for novelty’s sake
to exchange them. Then I would see as if in actuality all the
phantoms of my mind, and only perceive in that tenuous way in which
we behold our fears and ambitions the people and things of the real
world. These thoughts, occurring at this point in my narrative,
must seem prescient; I can only excuse them by saying that
tormented as I am by my memories, I have meditated in the same way
very often.
A faint knock at the door ended my
morbid revery. I pulled on my boots and called, “Come
in!”
A person who took care to remain out of
my sight, though I am fairly sure it was the hetman, pushed back
the door; and a young woman entered carrying a brass tray heaped
with dishes. It was not until she set it down that I realized she
was quite naked except for what I at first took to be rude jewelry,
and not until she bowed, lifting her hands to her head in the
northern fashion, that I saw that the dully shining bands about her
wrists, which I had taken for bracelets, were in fact gyves of
watered steel joined by a long chain.
“Your supper, Grand Master,” she said,
and backed toward the door until I could see the flesh of her
rounded hips flattened where they pressed against it. With one hand
she attempted to lift the latch; but though I heard its faint
rattle, the door did not give. No doubt the person who had admitted
her was holding it closed from the outside.
“It smells delicious,” I told her. “Did
you cook it yourself?”
“A few things. The fish, and the fried
cakes.”
I stood, and leaning Terminus Est against the rough masonry of the wall so as
not to frighten her, went over to examine the meal: a young duck,
quartered and grilled, the fish she had mentioned, the cakes (which
later proved to be of cattail flour mixed with minced clams),
potatoes baked in the embers of a fire, and a salad of mushrooms
and greens.
“No bread,” I said. “No butter and no
honey. They will hear of this.”
“We hoped, Grand Master, that the cakes
would be acceptable.”
“I realize it isn’t your
fault.”
It had been a long time since I had
lain with Cyriaca, and I had been trying not to look at this slave
girl, but I did so now. Her long, black hair
hung to her waist and her skin was nearly the color of the tray she
held, yet she had a slender waist, a thing seldom found in
autochthon women, and her face was piquant and even a trifle sharp.
Agia, for all her fair skin and freckles, had broader cheeks by
far.
“Thank you, Grand Master. He wants me
to stay here to serve you while you eat. If you do not want that,
you must tell him to open the door and let me out.”
“I will tell him,” I said, raising my
voice, “to go away from the door and cease eavesdropping on my
conversation. You are speaking of your owner, I suppose? Of the
hetman of this place?”
“Yes, of Zambdas.”
“And what is your own
name?”
“Pia, Grand Master.”
“And how old are you,
Pia?”
She told me, and I smiled to find her
precisely the same age as myself.
“Now you must serve me, Pia. I’m going
to sit over here at the fire, where I was before you came in, and
you can bring me the food. Have you served at table
before?”
“Oh, yes, Grand Master. I serve at
every meal.”
“Then you should know what you’re
doing. What do you recommend first—the fish?”
She nodded.
“Then bring that over, and the wine,
and some of your cakes. Have you eaten?”
She shook her head until the black hair
danced. “Oh, no, but it would not be right for me to eat with
you.”
“Still I notice I can count a good many
ribs.”
“I would be beaten for it, Grand
Master.”
“Not while I am here, at least. But I
won’t force you. Just the same, I would like to assure myself that
they haven’t put anything in any of this that I wouldn’t give my
dog, if I still had him. The wine would be the most likely place, I
think. It will be rough but sweet, if it’s like most country
wines.” I poured the stone goblet half full and handed it to her.
“You drink that, and if you don’t fall to the floor in fits, I’ll
try a drop too.”
She had some difficulty in getting it
down, but she did so at last and, with watering eyes, handed the
goblet back to me. I poured some wine for myself and sipped it,
finding it every bit as bad as I expected.
I made her sit beside me then, and fed
her one of the fish she herself had fried in oil. When she had
finished it, I ate a couple too. They were so much superior to the
wine as her own delicate face was to the old hetman’s—caught that
day, I felt sure, and in water much colder and cleaner than the
muddy lower reaches of Gyoll, from which the fish I had been
accustomed to in the Citadel had come.
“Do they always chain slaves here?” I
asked her as we divided the cakes. “Or have you been particularly
unruly, Pia?”
She said, “I am of the lake people,” as
though that answered my question,
as no doubt it would have if I had been familiar with the local
situation.
“I would think these are the lake
people.” I gestured to indicate the hetman’s house and the village
in general.
“Oh, no. These are the shore people.
Our people live in the lake, on the islands. But sometimes the wind
blows our islands here, and Zambdas is afraid I will see my home
then and swim to it. The chain is heavy—you can see how long it
is—and I can’t take it off. And so the weight would drown
me.”
“Unless you found a piece of wood to
bear the weight while you paddled with your feet.”
She pretended not to have heard me.
“Would you like some duck, Grand Master?”
“Yes, but not until you eat some of it
first, and before you have any, I want you to tell me more about
those islands. Did you say the wind blew them here? I confess I
have never heard of islands that were blown by the
wind.”
Pia was looking longingly toward the
duck, which must have been a delicacy in that part of the world. “I
have heard that there are islands that do not move. That must be
very inconvenient, I suppose, and I have never seen any. Our
islands travel from one place to another, and sometimes we put
sails in their trees to make them go faster. But they will not sail
across the wind very well, because they do not have wise bottoms
like the bottoms of boats, but foolish bottoms like the bottoms of
tubs, and sometimes they turn over.”
“I want to see your islands sometime,
Pia,” I told her. “I also want to get you back to them, since that
seems to be where you want to go. I owe something to a man with a
name much like yours, and so I’ll try to do that before I leave
this place. Meanwhile, you had better build up your strength with
some of that duck.”
She took a piece, and after she had
swallowed a few mouthfuls began to peel off slivers for me that she
fed me with her fingers. It was very good, still hot enough to
steam and imbued with a delicate flavor suggestive of parsley,
which perhaps came from some water plant on which these ducks fed;
but it was also rich and somewhat greasy, and when I had eaten the
better part of one thigh, I took a few bites of salad to clear my
palate.
I think I ate some more of the duck
after that, then a movement in the fire caught my eye. A fragment
of almost-consumed wood glowing with heat had fallen from one of
the logs into the ashes under the grate, but instead of lying there
and becoming dim and eventually black, it seemed to straighten up,
and in doing so became Roche, Roche with his fiery red hair turned
to real flames, Roche holding a torch as he used to when we were
boys and went to swim in the cistern beneath the Bell
Keep.
It seemed so extraordinary to see him
there, reduced to a glowing micromorph, that I turned to Pia to
point him out to her. She appeared to have seen nothing; but
Drotte, no taller than my thumb, was standing on her
shoulder, half concealed in her flowing black hair. When I tried to
tell her he was there, I heard myself speaking in a new tongue,
hissing, grunting, and clicking. I felt no fear at any of this,
only a detached wonder. I could tell that what I was saying was not
human speech, and observe the horrified expression on Pia’s face as
though I were contemplating some ancient painting in old Rudisind’s
gallery in the Citadel; yet I could not turn my noises into words,
or even halt them. Pia screamed.
The door flew open. It had been closed
for so long that I had almost forgotten it could not be locked; but
it was open now, and two figures stood there. When the door opened
they were men, men whose faces had been replaced by smooth pelts of
fur like the backs of two otters, but men still. An instant later
they had become plants, tall stalks of viridian from which
protruded the razor-sharp, oddly angled leaves of the avern.
Spiders, black and soft and many-legged, had been hiding there. I
tried to rise from my chair, and they leaped at me trailing webs of
gossamer that shone in the firelight. I had only time to see and
remember Pia’s face, with its wide eyes and its delicate mouth
frozen in a circle of horror before a peregrine with a beak of
steel stooped to tear the Claw from my neck.