The androgyne closed the book with a crash, like a door slammed shut. “What did you see?” he asked.
I could think only that I no longer had to look into the pages, and said, “Thank you, sieur. Whoever you may be, I am your servant from this time forward.”
He nodded. “Perhaps sometime I may remind you of that. But I will not ask you again what it was you saw. Here, wipe your forehead. The sight has marked you.” He handed me a clean cloth as he spoke, and I wiped my brow with it as he told me, because I could feel the moisture running down my face. When I looked at the cloth, it was crimson with blood.
As though he had read my thoughts, he said, “You are not wounded. The physicians’ term is haematidrosis, I believe. Under the stress of strong emotion, minute veins in the skin of the afflicted part… of the skin everywhere, sometimes… rupture during a profuse sweating. You will have a nasty bruise there, I’m afraid.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked. “I thought you were going to show me a map. I only want to find the Green Room, as old Rudesind out there says it’s called, where the players are quartered. Did Vodalus’s message say you were to kill the bearer?” I was fumbling for my sword as I spoke, but when my hands gripped the familiar hilt, I found I was too weak to draw the blade.
The androgyne laughed. It was pleasant laughter at first, wavering somewhere between a woman’s and a boy’s, but it trailed off into tittering, as a drunken man’s sometimes does. Thecla’s memories stirred in me; almost, they woke. “Was that all you wished?” he said when he had control of himself again. “You asked me for a light for your candle, and I tried to give you the sun, and now you are burned. The fault was mine… I sought, perhaps, to postpone my time, yet even so I would not have let you travel so far had I not read in the message that you have carried the Claw. And now I am most truly sorry, but I cannot help but laugh. Where will you go, when you have found the Green Room, Severian?”
“Where you send me. As you remind me, I have sworn service to Vodalus.” (In fact, I feared him, and feared that the androgyne would inform him if I professed disobedience.)
“But if I have no orders for you? Have you already disposed of the Claw?”
“I could not,” I said.
There was a pause. He did not speak.
“I’ll go to Thrax,” I said. “I have a letter to the archon there; he’s supposed to have work for me. For the honor of my guild, I would like to go.”
“That is well. How great, in truth, is your love of Vodalus?”
Again I felt the haft of the ax in my hand. For you others, as I am told, memory dies; mine scarcely dims. The mist that shrouded the necropolis that night blew against my face again, and everything I had felt when I received the coin from Vodalus and watched him walk away to a place where I could not follow returned to me. “I saved him once,” I said.
The androgyne added. “Then here is what you are to do. You must go to Thrax as you planned, telling everyone… even yourself… that you are going to fill the position that waits you there. The Claw is perilous. Are you aware of it?”
“Yes. Vodalus told me that if it became known we possess it, we might lose the support of the populace.”
For a moment the androgyne stood silent again. Then he said, “The Pelerines are in the north. If you are given the opportunity, you must restore the Claw to them.”
“That is what I had hoped to do.”
“Good. There is something else you must do as well. The Autarch is here, but long before you reach Thrax he will be in the north too, with the army. If he comes near Thrax, you are able to go to him. In time you will discover the way in which you must take his life.”
His tone betrayed him as much as Thecla’s thoughts. I wanted to kneel, but he clapped his hands, and a bent little man slipped silently into the room. He wore a cowled habit like a cenobite’s. The Autarch spoke to him, something I was too distracted to understand.
In all the world, there can be few sights more beautiful than that of the sun at dawn seen through the thousand sparkling waters of the Vatic Fountain. I am no esthete, but my first sight of its dance (of which I had so often heard), must have acted as a restorative. I still recall it for my pleasure, just as I saw it when the cowled servitor opened a door for me — after so many leagues of the contrived corridors of the Second House — and I watched the silver streams trace ideographs across the solar disc.
“Straight ahead,” the cowled figure murmured. “Follow the path through the Gate of Trees. You will be safe among the players.” The door shut behind me and became the grassy slope of a hillock.
I stumbled toward the fountain, which refreshed me with windblown spray. I was surrounded by a pavement of serpentine; for a time I stood there, seeking to read my fortune in the dancing shapes, and at last I fumbled in my sabretache for an offering. The praetorians had taken all my money, but while I felt among the few possessions I yet carried there (a flannel, the fragment of whetstone, and a flask of oil for Terminus Est; a comb and the brown book for myself) I spied a coin wedged between the green blocks at my feet. After only a little effort I was able to draw it out — a single asimi, worn so thin that hardly a trace of the imprint remained. With a whispered wish, I threw it into the very center of the fountain. A jet caught it there and tossed it skyward, so that it flashed for a moment before it fell. I began to read the symbols the water made against the sun.
A sword. That seemed clear enough. I would continue a torturer.
A rose then, and beneath it a river. I would climb Gyoll as I had planned, since that was the road to Thrax.
Now angry waves, becoming soon a long, sullen swell. The sea, perhaps; but one could not reach the sea, I thought, by climbing toward the source of the river. A rod, a chair, a multitude of towers, and I began to think the oracular powers of the fountain, in which I had never greatly believed, to be wholly false. I turned away; but as I turned, I glimpsed a many-pointed star, growing ever larger.
Since I have returned to the House Absolute, I have twice revisited the Vatic Fountain. Once I came at the first light, approaching it through the same door through which I first glimpsed it. But I have never again dared to ask it questions.
My servants, who confess one and all that they have dropped their orichalks into it when the garden was clear of guests, tell me one and all that they have received no true prophecy for their money. Yet I am unsure, recalling the green man, who drove off his visitors with his accounts of their futures. May it not be that these servants of mine, seeing only a lifetime of trays and brooms and ringing bells, reject it? I have asked my ministers as well, who doubtless cast in chrisos by the handful, but their answers are doubtful and mixed. It was hard indeed to keep my back to the fountain and its lovely, cryptic messages and walk toward the old sun. Huge as a giant’s face and darkly red it showed as the horizon dropped away. The poplars of the grounds were silhouetted against it, making me think of the figure of Night atop the khan on this western bank of Gyoll, which I had so often seen with the sun behind it at the close of one of our swimming parties.
Not realizing that I was now deep within the bounds of the House Absolute and well away from the patrols about the periphery, I feared I might be stopped at any moment, and perhaps cast back into the antechamber — whose secret door, I felt sure, would have been discovered and sealed by now. Nothing of the kind occurred. So far as I could see, no one stirred in all the leagues of hedge and velvet lawn, flower and trickling water, except myself. Lilies far taller than I, their star-shaped faces spangled with unshaken dew, overhung the path; its perfect surface showed behind me only the disturbance of my own feet. Nightingales, some free, some suspended from the branches of trees in golden cages, were singing still.