I was a child again… a girl… Thecla. I stood in a magnificent chamber whose windows were mirrors, mirrors that at once illuminated and reflected. Around me were beautiful women twice my height or more, in various stages of undress. The air was thick with scent. I was searching for someone, but as I looked at the painted faces of the tall women, lovely and indeed perfect, I began to doubt if I should know her. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Three women ran to me and I stared from one to another. As I did, their eyes narrowed to points of light, and a heart-shaped patch beside the lips of the nearest spread web-fingered wings.
“Severian.”
I sat up, uncertain of the point at which memory had become dream. This voice was sweet, yet very deep, and though I was conscious of having heard it before, I could not at once recall where. The moon was nearly behind the western horizon now, and our fire was dying a second death. Dorcas had thrown aside her ragged bedding, so that she slept with her sprite’s body exposed to the night air. Seeing her thus, her pale skin rendered more pale still by the waning moonlight, save where the glow of the embers flushed it with red, I felt such desire as I had never known — not when I had clasped Agia to me on the Adamnian Steps, not when I had first seen Jolenta on Dr. Talos’s stage, not even on the innumerable occasions when I had hastened to Thecla in her cell. Yet it was not Dorcas I desired; I had enjoyed her only a short time ago, and though I fully believed she loved me, I could not be certain she would have given herself so readily if she had not more than suspected I had entered Jolenta on the afternoon before the play, and if she had not believed Jolenta to be watching us across the fire. Nor did I desire Jolenta, who lay upon her side and snored. Instead I wanted them both, and Thecla, and the nameless meretrix who had feigned to be Thecla in the House Azure, and her friend who had taken the part of Thea, the woman I had seen on the stair in the House Absolute. And Agia, Valeria, Morwenna, and a thousand more. I recalled the witches, their madness and their wild dancing in the Old Court on nights of rain; the cool, virginal beauty of the red-robed Pelerines.
“Severian.”
It was no dream. Sleepy birds, perched on branches at the margin of the forest, had stirred at the sound. I drew Terminus Est and let her blade catch the cold dawn light, so that whoever had spoken should know me armed. All was quiet again — quieter now than it had ever been by night. I waited, turning my head slowly in my attempt to locate the one who had called my name, though I was conscious it would have been better if I could have appeared to know the correct direction already. Dorcas stirred and moaned, but neither she nor Jolenta woke; there was no other sound but the crackling of the fire, the dawn wind among the leaves, and the lapping water.
“Where are you?” I whispered, but there was no reply. A fish jumped with a silver splash, and all was silent again.
“Severian.”
However deep, it was a woman’s voice, throbbing with passion, moist with need; I remembered Agia and did not sheathe my sword.
“The sandbar…”
Though I feared it was merely a trick to make me turn my back on the trees, I let my eyes search the river until I saw it, about two hundred paces from our fire.
“Come to me.”
It was no trick, or at least not the trick I had at first feared. It was from downstream that the voice spoke.
“Come. Please. I cannot hear you where you stand.”
I said, “I did not speak,” but there was no reply. I waited, reluctant to leave Dorcas and Jolenta alone.
“Please. When the sun reaches this water, I must go. There may be no other chance.”
The little river was wider at the sandbar than below or above it, and I could walk upon the yellow sand itself, dry-shod, nearly to the center. To my left the greenish water gradually narrowed and deepened. To my right lay a deep pool perhaps twenty paces wide, from which water flowed swiftly yet smoothly. I stood on the sand with Terminus Est gripped in both hands, her square point buried between my feet. “I’m here,” I said. “Where are you? Can you hear me now?” As though the river itself were replying, three fish leaped at once, then leaped again, making a series of soft explosions on the surface. A moccasin, his brown back marked with linked rings of gold and black, glided up almost at my boot toes, turned as if to menace the jumping fish and hissed, then entered the ford on the upper side of the bar and swam away in long undulations. Through the body, he had been as thick as my forearm.
“Do not fear. Look. See me. Know that I will not harm you.”
Green though the water had been, it grew greener still. A thousand jade tentacles writhed there, never breaking the surface. As I watched, too fascinated to be afraid, a disc of white three paces across appeared among them, rising slowly toward the surface.
It was not until it was within a few spans of the ripples that I understood what it was — and then only because it opened eyes. A face looked through the water at me, the face of a woman who might have dandled Baldanders like a toy. Her eyes were scarlet, and her mouth was bordered by full lips so darkly crimson I had not at first thought them lips at all. Behind them stood an army of pointed teeth; the green tendrils that framed her face were her floating hair.
“I have come for you, Severian,” she said. “No, you are not dreaming.”
Chapter 28
THE ODALISQUE OF ABAIA
I said, “Once before I dreamed of you.” Dimly, I could see her naked body in the water, immense and gleaming.
“We watched the giant, and so found you. Alas, we lost sight of you too soon, when you and he separated. You believed then that you were hated, and did not know how much you were loved. The seas of the whole world shook with our mourning for you, and the waves wept salt tears and threw themselves despairing upon the rocks.”
“And what is it you want of me?”
“Only your love. Only your love.”
Her right hand came to the surface as she spoke, and floated there like a raft of five white logs. Here, truly, was the hand of the ogre, whose fingertip held the map of his domain.
“Am I not fair? Where have you beheld skin clearer than mine, or redder lips?”
“You are breathtaking,” I said truthfully. “But may I ask why you were observing Baldanders when I met him? And why you were not observing me, though it seems you wished to?”
“We watch the giant because he grows. In that he is like us, and like our father-husband, Abaia. Eventually he must come to the water, when the land can bear him no longer. But you may come now, if you will. You will breathe — by our gift — as easily as you breathe the thin, weak wind here, and whenever you wish you shall return to the land and take up your crown. This river Cephissus flows to Gyoll, and Gyoll to the peaceful sea. There you may ride dolphin-back through current-swept fields of coral and pearl. My sisters and I will show you the forgotten cities built of old, where a hundred trapped generations of your kin bred and died when they had been forgotten by you above.”
“I have no crown to take up,” I said. “You mistake me for someone else.”
“All of us will be yours there, in the red and white parks where the lionfish school.”
As the undine spoke, she slowly lifted her chin, allowing her head to fall back until the whole plane of face lay at an equal depth, and only just submerged. Her white throat followed, and crimson-tipped breasts broke the surface, so that little lapping waves caressed their sides. A thousand bubbles sparkled in the water. In the space of a few breaths she lay at full length upon the current, forty cubits at least from alabaster feet to twining hair.