“Another,” said the President. “Another must also speak.”
There was only silence. Then the Black Killer strode from the back of the hall. Everyone fears the Black Killer, for though his cloak is as soft as the fur of the youngest cub, his eyes burn in the night. “Two who are no wolves have spoken here already,” he said. “May I not speak also? I have gold.” He held up a purse.
“Speak! Speak!” called a hundred voices.
“The law says also that a cub’s life may be bought,” said the Black Killer, and he poured gold into his hand, and so ransomed an empire.
Part IV
The Plowing of the Fish
IF ALL THE adventures of Frog were told — how he lived among the wolves, and learned to hunt and fight, it would fill many books. But those who bear the blood of the people of the mountaintop beyond Urth always feel its call at last; and the time came when he carried fire into the Senate of Wolves and said, “Here is the Red Flower. In his name I rule.” And when no one opposed him he led forth the wolves and called them the people of his kingdom, and soon men came to him as well as wolves, and though he was still only a boy, he seemed always taller than the men about him, for he bore the blood of Early Summer.
One night when the wild roses were opening, she came to him in a dream and told him of his mother, Bird of the Wood, and of her father and her uncle, and of his brother. He found his brother, who had become a herdsman, and with the wolves and the Black Killer and many men they went to the king and demanded their heritage. He was old and his sons had died without sons, and he gave it to them, and of it Fish took the city and the farmlands, and Frog the wild hills.
But the number of the men who followed him grew. They stole women from other peoples, and bred children, and when the wolves were no longer needed and returned to the wilds, Frog judged his people should have a city to dwell in, with walls to protect them when the men were at war. He went to the herds of Fish and took a white cow and a white bull therefrom and harnessed them to a plow, and with them plowed a furrow that should mark the wall. Fish came to seek the return of his cattle while the people were preparing to build. When Frog’s people showed him the furrow and told him it was to be their wall, he laughed and jumped over it; and they, knowing that small things mocked can never grow large, slew him. But he was then a man grown, so the prophecy made at the birth of Spring Wind was fulfilled.
When Frog saw the dead Fish, he buried him in the furrow to assure the fertility of the land. For so he had been taught by the Naked One, who was also called the Savage, or Squanto.
XX
The Circle of the Sorcerers
BY THE FIRST light of morning we entered the mountain jungle as one enters a house. Behind us the sunlight played on grass and bushes and stones; we passed through a curtain of tangled vines so thick I had to cut it with my sword and saw before us only shadow and the towering boles of the trees. No insect buzzed within, and no bird chirped. No wind stirred. At first the. bare soil we trod was almost as stony as the mountain slopes, but before we had walked a league it grew smoother, and at last we came to a short stair that had surely been carved with the spade. “Look,” said the boy, and he pointed to something red and strangely shaped that lay upon the uppermost step.
I stopped to look at it. It was a cock’s head; needles of some dark metal had been run through its eyes, and it held a strip of cast snakeskin in its bill. “What is it?” The boy’s eyes were wide. “A charm, I think.”
“Left here by a witch? What does it mean?” I tried to recall what little I knew of the false art. As a child, Thecla had been in the care of a nursemaid who tied and untied knots to speed childbirth and claimed to see the face of Thecla’s future husband (was it mine,, I wonder?) at midnight, reflected in a platter that had held bridal cake. “The cock,” I told the boy, “is the herald of day, and in a magical sense his crow at dawn can be said to bring the sun. He has been blinded, perhaps, so that he will not know when dawn appears. A snake’s casting of his skin means cleansing or rejuvenation. The blinded cock holds onto the old skin.”
“But what does it mean?” the boy asked again.
I said I did not know; but in my heart I felt sure it was a charm against the coming of the New Sun, and it somehow pained me to find that renewal, for which I had hoped so fervently when I was a boy myself, but in which I hardly believed, should be opposed by anyone. At the same time, I was conscious that I bore the Claw. Enemies of the New Sun would surely destroy the Claw, should it fall into their hands.
Before we had gone another hundred paces, there were strips of red cloth suspended from the trees; some of these were plain, but others had been written over in black in a character I did not understand — or as seemed more likely, with symbols and ideographs of the sort those who pretend to more knowledge than they possess use in imitation of the writing of the astronomers.
“We had better go back,” I said. “Or go around.”
I had no sooner spoken than I heard a rustling behind me. For a moment I truly thought the figures that stepped onto the path were devils, huge-eyed and striped with black, white, and scarlet; then I saw that they were only naked men with painted bodies. Their hands were fitted with steel talons, which they held up to show me. I drew Terminus Est.
“We will not hinder you,” one said. “Go. Leave us, if you wish.” It seemed to me that beneath the paint he had the pale skin and fair hair of the south.
“You would be well advised not to. With this long blade I could kill you both before you touched me.”
“Go, then,” the blond man told me. “If you have no objection to leaving the child with us.”
At that I looked around for little Severian. He had somehow vanished from my side.
“If you wish him returned to you, however, you will surrender your sword to me and come with us.” Showing no sign of fear, the painted man walked up to me and extended his hands. The steel talons emerged from between his fingers, being fastened to a narrow bar of iron he held in his palm. “I will not ask again,” he said.
I sheathed the blade, then took off the baldric that held the sheath and handed the whole to him.
He closed his eyes. Their lids had been painted with dark dots rimmed with white, like the markings of certain caterpillars that would have the birds think them snakes. “This has drunk much blood.”
“Yes,” I said.
His eyes opened again, and he regarded me with an unblinking stare. His painted face-like that of the other, who stood just behind him — was as expressionless as a mask. “A newly forged sword would have little power here, but this might do harm.”
“I trust it will be returned to me when my son and I leave. What have you done with him?”
There was no reply. The two walked around me, one to either side, and went down the path in the direction the boy and I had been going. After a moment I followed them.
I might call the place to which they led me a village, but it was not a village in the ordinary sense, not such a village as Saltus, or even a place like the clusters of autochthon huts that are sometimes called villages. Here the trees were greater, and farther separated, than I had ever seen forest trees before, and the canopy of their leaves formed an impenetrable roof several hundred cubits overhead. So great indeed were these trees that they seemed to have been growing for whole ages; a stair led to a door in the trunk of one, which had been pierced for windows. There was a house of several stories built upon the branches of another, and a thing like a great oriole’s nest swung from the limbs of a third. Open hatches showed that the ground at our feet was mined.