Mannea
That night there was much talk of Foila’s
story, and this time it was I who postponed making any judgment
among the tales. Indeed, I had formed a sort of horror of judging,
the residue, perhaps, of my education among the torturers, who
teach their apprentices from boyhood to execute the instructions of
the judges appointed (as they themselves are not) by the officials
of our Commonwealth.
In addition, I had something more
pressing on my mind. I had hoped that our evening meal would be
served by Ava, but when it was not, I rose anyway, dressed myself
in my own clothes, and slipped off in the gathering
dark.
It was a surprise—a very pleasant
one—to find that my legs were strong again. I had been free of
fever for several days, yet I had grown accustomed to thinking
myself ill (just as I had earlier been accustomed to thinking
myself well) and had lain in my cot without complaint. No doubt
many a man who walks about and does his work is dying and ignorant
of it, and many who lie abed all day are healthier than those who
bring their food and wash them.
I tried to recall, as I followed the
winding paths between the tents, when I had felt so well before.
Not in the mountains or upon the lake—the hardships I had suffered
there had gradually reduced my vitality until I fell prey to the
fever. Not when I fled Thrax, for I was already worn out from my
duties as lictor. Not when I had arrived at Thrax; Dorcas and I had
undergone privations in the roadless country nearly as severe as I
was to bear alone in the mountains. Not even when I had been at the
House Absolute (a period that now seemed as remote as the reign of
Ymar), because I had still been suffering the aftereffects of the
alzabo and my ingestion of Thecla’s dead memories.
At last it came to me: I felt now as I
had on that memorable morning when Agia and I had set out for the
Botanic Gardens, the first morning after I had left the Citadel.
That morning, though I had not known it, I had acquired the Claw.
For the first time I wondered if it had not been cursed as well as
blessed. Or perhaps it was only that all the past months had been
needed for me to recover fully from the leaf of the avern that had
pierced me
that same evening. I took out the Claw and stared at its silvery
gleam, and when I raised my eyes, I saw the glowing scarlet of the
Pelerines’ chapel.
I could hear the chanting, and I knew
it would be some time before the chapel would be empty, but I
proceeded anyway, and at last slipped through the door and took a
place in the back. Of the liturgy of the Pelerines, I will say
nothing. Such things cannot always be well described, and even when
they can, it is less than proper to do so. The guild called the
Seekers for Truth and Penitence, to which I at one time belonged,
has its own ceremonies, one of which I have described in some
detail in another place. Certainly those ceremonies are peculiar to
it, and perhaps those of the Pelerines were peculiar to them as
well, though they may once have been universal.
Speaking in so far as I can as an
unprejudiced observer, I would say that they were more beautiful
than ours but less theatrical, and thus in the long run perhaps
less moving. The costumes of the participants were ancient, I am
sure, and striking. The chants possessed a queer attraction I have
not encountered in other music. Our ceremonies were intended
chiefly to impress the role of the guild upon the minds of our
younger members. Possibly those of the Pelerines had a similar
function. If not, then they were designed to engage the particular
attention of the All-Seeing, and whether they did so I cannot say.
In the event, the order received no special
protection.
When the ceremony was over and the
scarlet-clad priestesses filed out, I bowed my head and feigned to
be deep in prayer. Very readily, I found, the pretense became the
thing itself. I remained conscious of my kneeling body, but only as
a peripheral burden. My mind was among the starry wastes, far from
Urth and indeed far from Urth’s archipelago of island worlds, and
it seemed to me that that to which I spoke was farther still—I had
come, as it were, to the walls of the universe, and now shouted
through the walls to one who waited outside.
“Shouted,” I said, but perhaps that is
the wrong word. Rather I whispered, as Barnoch, perhaps, walled up
in his house, might have whispered through some chink to a
sympathetic passerby. I spoke of what I had been when I wore a
ragged shirt and watched the beasts and birds through the narrow
window of the mausoleum, and what I had become. I spoke too, not of
Vodalus and his struggle against the Autarch, but of the motives I
had once foolishly attributed to him. I did not deceive myself with
the thought that I had it in me to lead millions. I asked only that
I might lead myself; and as I did so, I seemed to see, with a
vision increasingly clear, through the chink in the universe to a
new universe bathed in golden light, where my listener knelt to
hear me. What had seemed a crevice in the world had expanded until
I could see a face and folded hands, and the opening, like a
tunnel, running deep into a human head that for a time seemed
larger than the head of Typhon carved upon the mountain. I was
whispering into my own ear, and when I realized it I flew into it
like a bee and stood up.
Everyone was gone, and a silence as
profound as any I have ever heard seemed to hang in the air with
the incense. The altar rose before me, humble
in comparison to that Agia and I had destroyed, yet beautiful with
its lights and purity of line and panels of sunstone and lapis
lazuli.
Now I came forward and knelt before it.
I needed no scholar to tell me the Theologoumenon was no nearer
now. Yet he seemed nearer, and I was able—for the final time—to
take out the Claw, something I had feared I could not do. Forming
the syllables only in my mind, I said, “I have carried you over
many mountains, across rivers, and across the pampas. You have
given Thecla life in me. You have given me Dorcas, and you have
restored Jonas to this world. Surely I have no complaint of you,
though you must have many of me. One I shall not deserve. It shall
not be said that I did not do what I might to undo the harm I have
done.”
I knew the Claw would be swept away if
I were to leave it openly on the altar. Mounting the dais, I
searched among its furnishings for a place of concealment that
should be secure and permanent, and at last noticed that the
altar-stone itself was held from below with four clamps that had
surely never been loosed since the altar was constructed, and
seemed likely to remain in place so long as it stood. I have strong
hands, and I was able to free them, though I do not think most men
could. Beneath the stone some wood had been chiseled away so that
it should be supported at the edges only and would not rock—it was
more than I had dared to hope for. With Jonas’s razor I cut a small
square of cloth from the edge of my now-tattered guild cloak. In it
I wrapped the Claw, then I laid it under the stone and retightened
the clamps, bloodying my fingers in my effort to make sure they
would not come loose by accident.
As I stepped away from the altar I felt a
profound sorrow, but I had not gone halfway to the door of the
chapel before I was seized with wild joy. The burden of life and
death had been lifted from me. Now I was only a man again, and I
was delirious with delight. I felt as I had felt as a child when
the long lessons with Master Malrubius were over and I was free to
play in the Old Yard or clamber across the broken curtain wall to
run among the trees and mausoleums of our necropolis. I was
disgraced and outcast and homeless, without friend and without
money, and I had just given up the most valuable object in the
world, which was, perhaps, in the end the only valuable object in
the world. And yet I knew that all would be well. I had climbed to
the bottom of existence and felt it with my hands, and I knew that
there was a bottom, and that from this point
onward I could only rise. I swirled my cloak about me as I had when
I was an actor, for I knew that I was an actor and no torturer,
though I had been a torturer. I leaped into the air and capered as
the goats do on the mountainside, for I knew that I was a child,
and that no man can be a man who is not.
Outside, the cool air seemed expressly
made for me, a new creation and not the ancient atmosphere of Urth.
I bathed in it, first spreading my cloak then raising my arms to
the stars, filled my lungs as does one who has just escaped
drowning in the fluids of birth.
All this took less time than it has
required to describe it, and I was about
to start back to the lazaret tent from which I had come when I
became aware of a motionless figure watching me from the shadows of
another tent some distance off. Ever since the boy and I had
escaped the blindly questing creature that had destroyed the
village of the magicians, I had been afraid that some of Hethor’s
servants might search me out again. I was about to flee when the
figure stepped into the moonlight, and I saw it was only a
Pelerine.
“Wait,” she called. Then, coming
nearer, “I am afraid I frightened you.”
Her face was a smooth oval that seemed
almost sexless. She was young, I thought, though not so young as
Ava and a good two heads taller—a true exultant, as tall as Thecla
had been.
I said, “When one has lived long with
danger …”
“I understand. I know nothing of war,
but much of the men and women who have seen it.”
“And now how may I serve you,
Chatelaine?”
“First I must know if you are well. Are
you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will leave this place
tomorrow.”
“You were in the chapel giving thanks,
then, for your recovery.”
I hesitated. “I had much to say,
Chatelaine. That was a part of it, yes.”
“May I walk with you?”
“Of course, Chatelaine.”
I have heard it said that a tall woman
seems taller than any man, and perhaps it is true. This woman was
far less in stature than Baldanders had been, yet walking beside
her made me feel almost dwarfish. I recalled too how Thecla had
bent over me when we embraced, and how I had kissed her
breasts.
When we had taken two score steps or
so, the Pelerine said, “You walk well. Your legs are long, and I
think they have covered many leagues. You are not a cavalry
trooper?”
“I have ridden a bit, but not with the
cavalry. I came through the mountains on foot, if that’s what you
mean, Chatelaine.”
“That is well, for I have no mount for
you. But I do not believe I have told you my name. I am Mannea,
mistress of the postulants of our order. Our Domnicellae is away,
and so for the moment I am in charge of our people
here.”
“I am Severian of Nessus, a wanderer. I
wish that I could give you a thousand chrisos to help carry out
your good work, but I can only thank you for the kindness I have
received here.”
“When I spoke of a mount, Severian of
Nessus, I was neither offering to sell you one nor offering to give
you one in the hope of thus earning your gratitude. If we do not
have your gratitude now, we shall not get it.”
“You have it,” I told her, “as I’ve
said. As I’ve also said, I will not linger here presuming on your
kindness.”
Mannea looked down at me. “I did not
think you would. This morning a postulant told me how one of the
sick had gone to the chapel with her two nights ago and described
him. This evening, when you remained behind
after the rest left, I knew you were he. I have a task, you see,
and no one to perform it. In calmer days I would send a party of
our slaves, but they are trained in the care of the sick, and we
have need of every one of them and more. Yet it is said, ‘He sends
the beggar a stick and to the hunter a spear.’”
“I have no wish to insult you,
Chatelaine, but I think that if you trust me because I went to your
chapel you trust me for a bad reason. For all you know, I could
have been stealing gems from the altar.”
“You mean that thieves and liars often
come to pray. By the blessing of the Conciliator they do. Believe
me, Severian, wanderer from Nessus, no one else does—in the order
or out of it. But you molested nothing. We have not half the power
ignorant people suppose—nevertheless, those who think us without
power are more ignorant still. Will you go on an errand for me?
I’ll give you a safe-conduct so you will not be taken up as a
deserter.”
“If the errand is within my powers,
Chatelaine.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. It was
the first time she had touched me, and I felt a slight shock, as
though I had been brushed unexpectedly by the wing of a
bird.
“About twenty leagues from here,” she
said, “is the hermitage of a certain wise and holy anchorite. Until
now he has been safe, but all this summer the Autarch has been
driven back, and soon the fury of the war will roll over that
place. Someone must go to him and persuade him to come to us—or if
he cannot be persuaded, force him to come. I believe the
Conciliator has indicated that you are to be the messenger. Can you
do it?”
“I’m no diplomatist,” I told her. “But
for the other business, I can honestly say I have received long
training.”