He stared at me, reminding me of a certain mason I had once encountered. “Herena says you came from a ship that fell from the sky”
“What does it matter where we came from? We’re peaceful travelers. We ask nothing more than that you let us pass.”
“It matters to me. Herena is my daughter. If she lies, I must know of it.”
I told Burgundofara, “You see, I don’t know everything.” She smiled, though I could see she was frightened.
“Hetman, if you would trust a stranger’s word and not your daughter’s, you’re a fool.” By then the girl had edged near enough the door for me to see her eyes. “Come out, Herena,” I said. “We won’t hurt you.”
She stepped forward, a tall girl of fifteen with long brown hair and a withered arm no larger than an infant’s.
“Why were you spying on us, Herena?”
She spoke, but I could not hear her.
“She wasn’t spying,” her father said. “She was gathering nuts. She’s a good girl.”
Sometimes, though only rarely, a man looks at something he has seen a score of times and sees it in a new way. When I, sulky Thecla, used to set up my easel beside some cataract, my teacher always told me to see it new; I never understood what he meant and soon convinced myself he meant nothing. Now I saw Herena’s withered arm not as a permanent deformity (as I had always seen such things before), but as an error to be righted with a few strokes of the brush.
Burgundofara ventured, “It must be hard…” Realizing she might give offense, she concluded, “Going out so early.”
I said, “I’ll correct your daughter’s arm, if you wish it.”
The hetman opened his lips to speak, then shut them again. Nothing in his face seemed to have changed, but there was fear there.
“Do you wish it?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
His eyes, and the unseen stares of all the other villagers, oppressed me. I said, “She must come with me. We won’t go far, and it won’t take long.”
He nodded slowly. “Herena, you must go with the sieur.” (I suddenly realized how rich the clothes I had taken from the stateroom must have looked to these people.) “Be a good girl, and remember that your mother and I will always…” He turned away.
She walked before me, back along the path until the village was out of sight. The place where her withered arm joined her shoulder was concealed under her tattered smock. I told her to take it off; she did so, drawlng it over her head.
I was conscious of the crimson-and-gold leaves, the pink-tinged brown of her skin, as I might have been of the jeweled colors of some microcosm at which I peered through an aperture. Birdsong and water-music were as remote and as sweet as the tinkling of an orchestrion in a courtyard far below.
I touched Herena’s shoulder, and reality itself was clay to be smoothed and stretched. With a pass or two I molded her a new arm, the mirror image of the other. A tear that struck my fingers as I worked felt hot enough to scald them; the girl trembled.
“I’m finished,” I said. “Put on your smock.” I was in the microcosm again, and again it seemed the world to me.
She turned to face me. She was smiling, though her cheeks were streaked with tears. “I love you, my lord,” she said, and at once knelt and kissed the toe of my boot.
I asked, “May I see your hands?” I myself could no longer believe what I had done.
She held them out. “They’ll take me now to be a slave far away. I don’t care. No, they won’t — I’ll go to the mountains and hide.”
I was looking at her hands, which seemed perfect to me in every detail, even when I pressed them together. It is rare for a person to have hands as precisely the same size, the hand used most being always the largest; yet hers were. I muttered, “Who’ll take you, Herena? Is your village raided by cultellarii?”
“The assessors, of course.”
“Just because you have two good arms now?”
“Because I haven’t anything wrong now.” She stopped, stricken by a new possibility, eyes wide. “I don’t, do I?”
It was no time for philosophy. “No, you’re perfect — a very attractive young woman.”
“Then they’ll take me. Are you all right?”
“A little weak, that’s all. I’ll be better in a moment.” I used the hem of my cloak to wipe my forehead, just as I had when I was a torturer.
“You don’t look all nght.”
“It was mostly Urth’s energies that corrected your arm, I think. But they had to come through me. I suppose they must have carried off some of my own with them.”
“You know my name, my lord. What’s yours?”
“Severian.”
“I’ll get you food at my father’s house, Lord Severian. There’s still some left.”
A wind sprang up that sent the brightly colored leaves swirling about our faces as we walked back.
Chapter XXIX — Among the Villagers
MY LIFE HAS held many sorrows and triumphs, but few pleasures outside the simple ones of love and sleep, clean air and good food, the things anyone may know. Among the greatest I count the village hetman’s expression when he saw his daughter’s arm. Such a mixture of wonder, fear, and delight it was that I would have shaved his face for him in order to see it better. Herena, I think, enjoyed it as much as I; but when she had feasted upon it to the full, she hugged him and told him she had promised us refreshment and ducked through the doorway to embrace her mother.
As soon as we were inside too, the villagers’ fear turned to curiosity. A few of the boldest men pushed their way in and squatted silently behind us as we sat on mattings around the little table where the hetman’s wife — weeping and biting her lips all the while — spread our feast. The rest merely peered through the doorway and peeped through chinks in the windowless walls.
There were fried cakes of pounded maize, apples somewhat damaged by frost, water, and (as a great delicacy, and one at which some of the silent onlookers slavered openly) the haunches of two hares, boiled, pickled, salted, and served cold. The hetman and his family did not partake of these. I have called it a feast, for so these people thought it; but the simple sailor’s dinner we had eaten on the tender a few watches before had been a banquet compared with it. I found I was not hungry, though I felt tired and very thirsty. I ate one of the cakes and picked at the meat while drinking copious draughts of water, tben decided that the higher courtesy might consist in leaving the hetman’s family some of their food, since they plainly had so little, and began to crack nuts.
This, it appeared, was the signal that my host might speak. He said, “I am Bregwyn. Our village is called Vici. My wife is Cinnia. Our daughter is Herena. This woman” — he nodded to indicate Burgundofara — “says that you are a good man.”
“My name is Severian. This woman is Burgundofara. I am a bad man trying to be a good one.”
“We of Vici hear little of the far world. Perhaps you will tell us what chance has brought you to our village.”
He said this with an expression of polite interest and no more, yet it gave me pause. It would have been easy enough to put off these villagers with some tale of trade or pilgrimage; and indeed, if I had told him we hoped to return Burgundofara to her home beside the Ocean, it would not have been wholly a lie. But had I the right to say such things? I had told Burgundofara earlier that these were the people I had gone to the end of the universe to rescue. I glanced at the hetman’s toil-worn, tearful wife and at the men, with their grizzled beards and hard hands. What right did I have to treat them like children?
“This woman,” I said, “is from Liti. Perhaps you know of it?”
The hetman shook his head.
“The people there are fishers. She hopes to find her way back.” I drew a deep breath. “I…” The hetman leaned forward ever so slightly as I groped for words. “I have been able to help Herena. To make her more whole. You know that.”