She stopped and turned her head to look at me defiantly; when I said nothing, she continued. “Severian, when you brought the uhlan back to life it was because the Claw twisted time for him to the point at which he still lived. When you half healed your friend’s wounds, it was because it bent the moment to one when they would be nearly healed. And when you fell into the fen in the Garden of Endless Sleep, it must have touched me or nearly touched me, and for me it became the time in which I had lived, so that I lived again. But I have been dead. For a long, long time I was dead, a shrunken corpse preserved in the brown water. And there is something in me that is dead still.”
“There is something in all of us that has always been dead,” I said. “If only because we know that eventually we will die. All of us except the smallest children.”
“I’m going to go back, Severian. I know that now, and that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I have to go back and find out who I was and where I lived and what happened to’ me. I know you can’t go with me…” I nodded.
“And I’m not asking you to. I don’t even want you to. I love you, but you are another death, a death that has stayed with me and befriended me as the old death in the lake did, but death all the same. I don’t want to take death with me when I go to look for my life.”
“I understand,” I said.
“My child may still be alive — an old man, perhaps, but still alive. I have to know.”
“Yes,” I said. But I could not help adding, “There was a time when you told me I was not death. That I must not let others persuade me to think of myself in that way. It was behind the orchard on the grounds of the House Absolute. Do you remember?”
“You have been death to me,” she said. “I have succumbed to the trap I warned you of, if you like. Perhaps you are not death, but you will remain what you are, a torturer and a carnifex, and your hands will run with blood. Since you remember that time at the House Absolute so well, perhaps you… I can’t say it. The Conciliator, or the Claw, or the Increate, has done this to me. Not you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Dr. Talos gave us both money afterward, in the clearing. The money he had got from some court official for our play. When we were traveling, I gave everything to you. May I have it back? I’ll need it. If not all of it, at least some of it.”
I emptied the money in my sabretache onto the table. It was as much as I had received from her, or a trifle more.
“Thank you,” she said. “You won’t need it?”
“Not as badly as you will. Besides, it is yours.”
“I’m going to leave tomorrow, if I feel strong enough. The day after tomorrow whether I feel strong or not. I don’t suppose you know how often the boats put out, going downriver?”
“As often as you want them to. You push them in, and the river does the rest.”
“That’s not like you, Severian, or at least not much. More the sort of thing your friend Jonas would have said, from what you’ve told me. Which reminds me that you’re not the first visitor I’ve had today. Our friend — your friend, at least — Hethor was here. That’s not funny to you, is it? I’m sorry, I just wanted to change the subject.”
“He enjoys it. Enjoys watching me.”
“Thousands of people do when you perform in public, and you enjoy doing it yourself.”
“They come to be horrified, so they can congratulate themselves later on being alive. And because they like the excitement, and the suspense of not knowing whether the condemned will break down, or if some macabre accident will occur. I enjoy exercising my skill, the only real skill I have — enjoy making things go perfectly. Hethor wants something else.”
“The pain?”
“Yes, the pain, but something more too.”
Dorcas said, “He worships you, you know. He talked with me for some time, and I think he would walk into a fire if you told him to.” I must have winced at that, because she continued, “All this about Hethor is making you ill, isn’t it? One sick person is enough. Let’s speak of something else.”
“Not ill as you are, no. But I can’t think of Hethor except as I saw him once from the scaffold, with his mouth open and his eyes…”
She stirred uncomfortably. “Yes, those eyes — I saw them tonight. Dead eyes, though I suppose I shouldn’t be the one to say that. A corpse’s eyes. You have the feeling that if you touched them they would be as dry as stones, and never move under your finger.”
“That isn’t it at all. When I was on the scaffold in Saltus and looked down and saw him, his eyes danced. You said, though, that the dull eyes he has at most times reminded you of a corpse’s. Haven’t you ever looked into the glass? Your own eyes are not the eyes of a dead woman.”
“Perhaps not.” Dorcas paused. “You used to say they were beautiful.”
“Aren’t you glad to live? Even if your husband is dead, and your child is dead, and the house you once lived in is a ruin — if all those things are true — aren’t you full of joy because you are here again? You’re not a ghost, not a revenant like those we saw in the ruined town. Look in the glass as I told you. Or if you won’t, look into my face or any man’s and see what you are.”
Dorcas sat up even more slowly and painfully than she had risen to drink the wine, but this time she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and I saw that she was naked under the thin blanket. Before her illness Jolenta’s skin had been perfect, with the smoothness and softness of confectionery. Dorcas’s was flecked with little golden freckles, and she was so slender that I was always aware of her bones; yet she was more desirable in her imperfection than Jolenta had ever been in the lushness of her flesh. Conscious of how culpable it would be to force myself on her or even to persuade her to open to me now, when she was ill and I was on the point of leaving her, I still felt desire for her stir in me. However much I love a woman — or however little — I find I want her most when I can no longer have her. But what I felt for Dorcas was stronger than that, and more complex. She had been, though only for so brief a time, the closest friend I had known, and our possession of each other, from the frantic desire in our converted storeroom in Nessus to the long and lazy playing in the bedchamber of the Vincula, was the characteristic act of our friendship as well as our love. “You’re crying,” I said. “Do you want me to leave?” She shook her head, and then, as though she could no longer contain the words that seemed to force themselves out, she whispered, “Oh, won’t you go too, Severian? I didn’t mean it. Won’t you come? Won’t you come with me?”
“I can’t.”
She sank back into the narrow bed, smaller now and more childlike. “I know. You have your duty to your guild. You can’t betray it again and face yourself, and I won’t ask you. It’s only that I never quite gave up hoping you might.” I shook my head as I had before. “I have to flee the city—”
“Severian!”
“And to the north. You’ll be going south, and if I were with you, we would have courier boats full of soldiers after us.”
“Severian, what happened?” Dorcas’s face was very calm, but her eyes were wide.
“I freed a woman. I was supposed to strangle her and throw her body into the Acis, and I could have done it — I didn’t feel anything for her, not really, and it should have been easy. But when I was alone with her, I thought of Thecla. We were in a little summerhouse screened with shrubbery, that stood at the edge of the water. I had my hands around her neck, and I thought of Thecla and how I had wanted to free her. I couldn’t find a way to do it. Have I ever told you?” Almost imperceptibly, Dorcas shook her head. “There were brothers everywhere, five to pass by the shortest route, and all of them knew me and knew of her.” (Thecla was shrieking now in some corner of my mind.) “All I really would have had to do would have been to tell them Master Gurloes had ordered me to bring her to him. But I would have had to go with her then, and I was still trying to devise some way by which I could stay in the guild. I did not love her enough.”