“You’ve said something like this before. Truly, I understand.”
“And I could do it well. Dorcas, that’s what you don’t understand. Excruciation and execution are arts, and I have the feel, the gift, the blessing. This sword — all the tools we use live when they’re in my hands. If I had remained at the Citadel, I might have been a master. Dorcas, are you listening? Does this mean anything at all to you?”
“Yes,” she said., “A bit, yes. I’m thirsty, though. If you’re through drinking, pour me a little of that wine now, please.”
I did as she asked, filling the glass no more than a quarter full because I was afraid she might spill it on her bedclothes.
She sat up to drink, something I had not been certain until then that she was capable of, and when she had swallowed the last scarlet drop hurled the glass out the window. I heard it shatter on the street below.
“I don’t want you to drink after me,” she told me. “And I knew that if I didn’t do that you would.”
“You think whatever is wrong with you is contagious, then?”
She laughed again. “Yes, but you have it already. You caught it from your mother. Death. Severian, you never asked me what it was I saw today.”
XI
The Hand of the Past
AS SOON AS Dorcas said, “You never asked me what I saw today,” I realized that I had been trying to steer the conversation away from it. I had a premonition that it would be something quite meaningless to me, to which Dorcas would attach great meaning, as madmen do who believe the tracks of worms beneath the bark of fallen trees to be a supernatural script. I said, “I thought it might be better to keep your mind off it, whatever it was.”
“No doubt it would, if only we could do it. It was a chair.”
“A chair?”
“An old chair. And a table, and several other things. It seems that there is a shop in the Turners’ Street that sells old furniture to the eclectics, and to those among the autochthons who have absorbed enough of our culture to want it. There is no source here to supply the demand, and so two or three times a year the owner and his sons go to Nessus — to the abandoned quarters of the south — and fill their boat. I talked to him, you see; I know all about it. There are tens of thousands of empty houses there. Some have fallen in long ago, but some are still standing as their owners left them. Most have been looted, yet they still find silver and bits of jewelry now and then. And though most have lost most of their furniture, the owners who moved almost always left some things behind.”
I felt that she was about to weep, and I leaned forward to stroke her forehead. She showed me by a glance that she did not wish me to, and laid herself on the bed again as she had been before.
“In some of those houses, all the furnishings are still there. Those are the best, he said. He thinks that a few families, or perhaps only a few people living alone, remained behind when the quarter died. They were too old to move, or too stubborn. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure some of them must have had something there they could not bear to leave. A grave, perhaps. They boarded their windows against the marauders, and they kept dogs, and worse things, to protect them. Eventually they left — or they came to the end of life, and their animals devoured their bodies and broke free; but by that time there was no one there, not even looters or scavengers, not until this man and his sons.”
“There must be a great many old chairs,” I said.
“Not like that one. I knew everything about it — the carving on the legs and even the pattern in the grain of the arms. So much came back then. And then here, when I vomited those pieces of lead, things like hard, heavy seeds, then I knew. Do you remember, Severian, how it was when we left the Botanic Garden? You, Agia, and I came out of that great, glass vivarium, and you hired a boat to take us from the island to the shore, and the river was full of nenuphars with blue flowers and shining green leaves. Their seeds are like that, hard and heavy and dark, and I have heard that they sink to the bottom of Gyoll and remain there for whole ages of the world. But when chance brings them near the surface they sprout no matter how old they may be, so that the flowers of a chiliad past are seen to bloom again.”
“I have heard that too,” I said. “But it means nothing to you or me.”
Dorcas lay still, but her voice trembled. “What is the power that calls them back? Can you explain it?”
“The sunshine, I suppose — but no, I cannot explain it.”
“And is there no source of sunlight except the sun?”
I knew then what it was she meant, though something in me could not accept it.
“When that man — Hildegrin, the man we met a second time on top of the tomb in the ruined stone town — was ferrying us across the Lake of Birds, he talked of millions of dead people, people whose bodies had been sunk in that water. How were they made to sink, Severian? Bodies float. How do they weight them? I don’t know. Do you?”
I did. “They force lead shot down the throats.”
“I thought so.” Her voice was so weak now that I could scarcely hear her, even in that silent little room. “No, I knew so. I knew it when I saw them.”
“You think that the Claw brought you back.”
Dorcas nodded.
“It has acted, sometimes, I’ll admit that. But only when I took it out, and not always then. When you pulled me out of the water in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it was in my sabretache and I didn’t even know I had it.”
“Severian, you allowed me to hold it once before. Could I see it again now?”
I pulled it from its soft pouch and held it up. The blue fires seemed sleepy, but I could see the cruel-looking hook at the center of the gem that had given it its name. Dorcas extended her hand, but I shook my head, remembering the wineglass.
“You think I will do it some harm, don’t you? I won’t. It would be a sacrilege.”
“If you believe what you say, and I think you do, then you must hate it for drawing you back…”
“From death.” She was watching the ceiling again, now smiling as if she shared some deep and ludicrous secret with it. “Go ahead and say it. It won’t hurt you.”
“From sleep,” I said. “Since if one can be recalled from it, it is not death — not death as we have always understood it, the death that is in our minds when we say death. Although I have to confess it is still almost impossible for me to believe that the Conciliator, dead now for so many thousands of years, should act through this stone to raise others.”
Dorcas made no reply. I could not even be sure she was listening.
“You mentioned Hildegrin,” I said, “and the time he rowed us across the lake in his boat, to pick the avern. Do you remember what he said of death? It was that she was a good friend to the birds. Perhaps we ought to have known then that such a death could not be death as we imagine it.”
“If I say I believe all that, will you let me hold the Claw?”
I shook my head again.
Dorcas was not looking at me, but she must have seen the motion of my shadow; or perhaps it was only that her mental Severian on the ceiling shook his head as well. “You are right, then — I was going to destroy it if I could. Shall I tell you what I really believe? I believe I have been dead — not sleeping, but dead. That all my life took place a long, long time ago when I lived with my husband above a little shop, and took care of our child. That this Conciliator of yours who came so long ago was an adventurer from one of the ancient races who outlived the universal death.” Her hands clutched the blanket. “I ask you, Severian, when he comes again, isn’t he to be called the New Sun? Doesn’t that sound like it? And I believe that when he came he brought with him something that had the same power over time that Father Inire’s mirrors are said to have over distance. It is that gem of yours.”