Ava
While I was ill I had never paid much
attention to the people who brought our food, though when I
reflected on it I was able to recall them clearly, as I recall
everything. Once our server had been a Pelerine—she who had talked
to me the night before. At other times they had been the
shaven-headed male slaves, or postulants in brown. This evening,
the evening of the day on which Melito had told his story, our
suppers were carried in by a postulant I had not seen before, a
slender, gray-eyed girl. I got up and helped her to pass around the
trays.
When we were finished, she thanked me
and said, “You will not be here much longer.”
I told her I had something to do here,
and nowhere else to go.
“You have your legion. If it has been
destroyed, you will be assigned to a new one.”
“I am not a soldier. I came north with
some thought of enlisting, but I fell sick before I got the
opportunity.”
“You could have waited in your native
town. I’m told that recruiting parties go to all the towns, twice a
year at least.”
“My native town is Nessus, I’m afraid.”
I saw her smile. “But I left it some time ago, and I wouldn’t have
wanted to sit around someplace else for half a year waiting.
Anyway, I never thought of it. Are you from Nessus
too?”
“You’re having trouble standing
up.”
“No, I’m fine.”
She touched my arm, a timid gesture
that somehow reminded me of the tame deer in the Autarch’s garden.
“You’re swaying. Even if your fever is gone, you’re no longer used
to being on your feet. You have to realize that. You’ve been abed
for several days. I want you to lie down again now.”
“If I do that, there’ll be no one to
talk to except the people I’ve been talking with all day. The man
on my right is an Ascian prisoner, and the man on my left comes
from some village neither you nor I ever heard of.”
“All right, if you’ll lie down I’ll sit
and talk to you for a while. I’ve nothing more to do until the
nocturne must be played anyway. What quarter of Nessus do you come
from?”
As she escorted me to my cot, I told
her that I did not want to talk, but to listen; and I asked her
what quarter she herself called home.
“When you’re with the Pelerines, that’s
your home—wherever the tents are set up. The order becomes your
family and your friends, just as if all your friends had suddenly
become your sisters too. But before I came here, I lived in the far
northwestern part of the city, within easy sight of the
Wall.”
“Near the Sanguinary
Field?”
“Yes, very near it. Do you know the
place?”
“I fought there once.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you, really? We
used to go there and watch. We weren’t supposed to, but we did
anyway. Did you win?”
I had never thought about that and had
to consider it. “No,” I said after a moment. “I lost.”
“But you lived. It’s better, surely, to
lose and live than to take another man’s life.”
I opened my robe and showed her the
scar on my chest that Agilus’s avern leaf had made.
“You were very lucky. Often they bring
in soldiers with chest wounds like that, but we are seldom able to
save them.” Hesitantly she touched my chest. There was a sweetness
in her face that I have not seen in the faces of other women. For a
moment she stroked my skin, then she jerked her hand away. “It
could not have been very deep.”
“It wasn’t,” I told her.
“Once I saw a combat between an officer
and an exultant in masquerade. They used poisoned plants for
weapons—I suppose because the officer would have had an unfair
advantage with the sword. The exultant was killed and I left, but
afterward there was a great hullabaloo because the officer had run
amok. He came dashing by me, striking out with his plant, but
someone threw a cudgel at his legs and knocked him down. I think
that was the most exciting fight I ever saw.”
“Did they fight bravely?”
“Not really. There was a lot of
argument about legalities—you know how men do when they don’t want
to begin.”
“‘I shall be honored to the end of my
days to have been thought worthy of such a challenge, which no
other bird has ever received before. It is with the most profound
regret that I must tell you I cannot accept, and that for three
reasons, the first of which is that though you have feathers on
your wings, as you say, it is not against your wings that I would
fight.’ Do you know that story?”
Smiling, she shook her
head.
“It’s a good one. I’ll tell it to you
some time. If you lived so near the Sanguinary Field, your family
must have been an important one. Are you an
armigette?”
“Practically all of us are armigettes
or exultants. It’s a rather aristocratic order, I’m afraid.
Occasionally an optimate’s daughter like me is admitted,
when the optimate has been a longtime friend of the order, but
there are ‘only three of us. I’m told some optimates think all they
have to do is make a large gift and their girls will be accepted,
but it really isn’t so—they have to help out in various ways, not
just with money, and they have to have done it for a long time. The
world, you see, is not really as corrupt as people like to
believe.”
I asked, “Do you think it is right to
limit your order in that way? You serve the Conciliator. Did he ask
the people he lifted out of death if they were armigers or
exultants?”
She smiled again. “That’s a question
that has been debated many times in the order. But there are other
orders that are quite open to optimates, and to the lower classes
too, and by remaining as we are we get a great deal of money to use
in our work and have a great deal of influence. If we nursed and
fed only certain kinds of people, I would say you were right. But
we don’t; we even help animals when we can. Conexa Epicharis used
to say we stopped at insects, but then she found one of us—I mean a
postulant—trying to mend a butterfly’s wing.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that these
soldiers have been doing their best to kill Ascians?”
Her answer was very far from what I had
expected. “Ascians are not human.”
“I’ve already told you that the patient
next to me is an Ascian. You’re taking care of him, and as well as
you take care of us, from what I’ve seen.”
“And I’ve already told you that we take in animals when we can. Don’t you know
that human beings can lose their humanity?”
“You mean the zoanthropes. I’ve met
some.”
“Them, of course. They give up their
humanity deliberately. There are others who lose theirs without
intending to, often when they think they are enhancing it, or
rising to some state higher than that to which we are born. Still
others, like the Ascians, have it stripped from them.”
I thought of Baldanders, plunging from
his castle wall into Lake Diuturna. “Surely these … things deserve
our sympathy.”
“Animals deserve our sympathy. That is
why we of the order care for them. But it isn’t murder for a man to
kill one.”
I sat up and gripped her arm, feeling
an excitement I could scarcely contain. “Do you think that if
something—some arm of the Conciliator, let us say—could cure human
beings, it might nevertheless fail with those who are not
human?”
“You mean the Claw. Close your mouth,
please—you make me want to laugh when you leave it open like that,
and we’re not supposed to when people outside the order are
around.”
“You know!”
“Your nurse told me. She said you were
mad, but in a nice way, and that she didn’t think you would ever
hurt anyone. Then I asked her about it, and she told. You have the
Claw, and sometimes you can cure the sick and even raise the
dead.”
“Do you believe I’m mad?”
Still smiling, she nodded.
“Why? Never mind what the Pelerine told
you. Have I said anything to you tonight to make you think
so?”
“Or spellbound, perhaps. It isn’t
anything you’ve said at all. Or at least, not much. But you are not
just one man.”
She paused after saying that. I think
she was waiting for me to deny it, but I said nothing.
“It is in your face and the way you
move—do you know that I don’t even know your name? She didn’t tell
me.”
“Severian.”
“I’m Ava. Severian is one of those
brother—sister names, isn’t it? Severian and Severa. Do you have a
sister?”
“I don’t know. If I do, she’s a
witch.”
Ava let that pass. “The other one. Does
she have a name?”
“You know she’s a woman
then.”
“Uh huh. When I was serving the food, I
thought for a moment that one of the exultant sisters had come to
help me. Then I looked around and it was you. At first it seemed
that it was just when I saw you from the corner of my eye, but
sometimes, while we’ve been sitting here, I see her even when I’m
looking right at you. When you glance to one side sometimes you
vanish, and there’s a tall, pale woman using your face. Please
don’t tell me I fast overmuch. That’s what they all tell me, and it
isn’t true, and even if it were, this isn’t that.”
“Her name is Thecla. Do you remember
what you were just saying about losing humanity? Were you trying to
tell me about her?”
Ava shook her head. “I don’t think so.
But I wanted to ask you something. There was another patient here
like you, and they told me he came with you.”
“Miles, you mean. No, my case and his
are quite different. I won’t tell you about him. He should do it
himself, or no one should. But I will tell you about myself. Do you
know of the corpse-eaters?”
“You’re not one of them. A few weeks
ago we had three insurgent captives. I know what they’re
like.”
“How do we differ?”
“With them …” She groped for words.
“With them it’s out of control. They talk to themselves—of course a
lot of people do—and they look at things that aren’t there. There’s
something lonely about it, and something selfish. You aren’t one of
them.”
“But I am,” I said. And I told her,
without going into much detail, of Vodalus’s banquet.
“They made you,” she said when I was
through. “If you had shown what you felt, they would have killed
you.”
“That doesn’t matter. I drank the
alzabo. I ate her flesh. And at first it was filthy, as you say,
though I had loved her. She was in me, and I shared the life that
had been hers, and yet she was dead. I could feel her rotting
there. I had a wonderful dream of her on the first night; when I go
back among my memories it is one of the things I treasure most.
Afterward, there was something horrible, and sometimes I seemed to
be dreaming while I was awake—that was the talking and staring you
mentioned, I think. Now, and for a long time, she seems alive
again, but inside me.”
“I don’t think the others are like
that.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “At least,
not from what I’ve heard of them. There are a great many things I
do not understand. What I have told you is one of the chief
ones.”
Ava was quiet for the space of two or
three breaths, then her eyes opened wide. “The Claw, the thing you
believe in. Did you have it then?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know what it could
do. It had not acted—or rather, it had acted, it had raised a woman
called Dorcas, but I didn’t know what had happened, where she had
come from. If I had known, I might have saved Thecla, brought her
back.”
“But you had it? You had it with
you?”
I nodded.
“Then don’t you see? It did bring her back. You just said it could act without
your even knowing it. You had it, and you had her, rotting, as you
say, inside you.”
“Without the body …”
“You’re a materialist, like all
ignorant people. But your materialism doesn’t make materialism
true. Don’t you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit
and dream, thought and love and act that matter.”
I was so stunned by the ideas that had
come crowding in on me that I did not speak again for some time,
but sat wrapped in my own speculations. When I came to myself again
at last, I was surprised that Ava had not gone and tried to thank
her.
“It was peaceful, sitting here with
you, and if one of the sisters had come, I could have said I was
waiting in case one of the sick should cry out.”
“I haven’t decided yet about what you
said about Thecla. I’ll have to think about it a long time,
probably for many days. People tell me I am a rather stupid
man.”
She smiled, and the truth was that I
had said what I had (though it was true) at least in part to make
her smile. “I don’t think so. A thorough man, rather.”
“Anyway, I have another question. Often
when I tried to sleep, or when I woke in the night, I have tried to
connect my failures and my successes. I mean the times when I used
the Claw and revived someone, and the times when I tried to but
life did not return. It seems to me that it should be more than
mere chance, though perhaps the link is something I cannot
know.”
“Do you think you’ve found it
now?”
“What you said about people losing
their humanity—that might be a part of it. There was a woman … I
think she may have been like that, though she was very beautiful.
And a man, my friend, who was only partly cured, only helped. If
it’s possible for someone to lose his humanity, surely
it must be possible for something that once had none to find it.
What one loses another finds, everywhere. He, I think, was like
that. Then too, the effect always seems less when the deaths come
by violence …”
“I would expect that,” Ava said
softly.
“It cured the man-ape whose hand I had
cut away. Perhaps that was because I had done it myself. And it
helped Jonas, but I—Thecla—had used those whips.”
“The powers of healing protect us from
Nature. Why should the Increate protect us from ourselves? We might
protect ourselves from ourselves. It may be that he will help us
only when we come to regret what we have done.”
Still thinking, I nodded.
“I am going to the chapel now. You’re
well enough to walk a short distance. Will you come with
me?”
While I had been beneath that wide
canvas roof, it had seemed the whole of the lazaret to me. Now I
saw, though only dimly and by night, that there were many tents and
pavilions. Most, like ours, had their walls gathered up for
coolness, furled like the sails of a ship at anchor. We entered
none of them but walked between them by winding paths that seemed
long to me, until we reached one whose walls were down. It was of
silk, not canvas, and shone scarlet because of the lights
within.
“Once,” Ava told me, “we had a great
cathedral. It could hold ten thousand, yet be packed into a single
wagon. Our Domnicellae had it burned just before I came to the
order.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw
it.”
Inside the silken tent, we knelt before
a simple altar heaped with flowers. Ava prayed. I, knowing no
prayers, spoke without sound to someone who seemed at times within
me and at times, as the angel had said, infinitely
remote.