The Claw of the Conciliator

Chapter 3 THE SHOWMAN’S TENT

The instant was frozen as though we two, and all those about us, stood in a painting. Agia’s uptilted face, my own wide eyes; so we remained amid the cloud of country folk with their bright clothes and bundles. Then I moved, and she was gone. I would have run to her if I could; but I could only push my way through the onlookers, taking perhaps a hundred poundings of my heart to reach the spot where she had stood.

By then she had vanished utterly, and the crowd was swirling and changing like the water under the bow of a boat. Barnoch had been led forth, screaming at the sun. I took a miner by the shoulder and shouted a question to him, but he had paid no attention to the young woman beside him and had no notion of where she might have gone. I followed the throng who followed the prisoner until I was sure she was not among them, then, knowing nothing better to do, began to search the fair, peering into tents and booths, and making inquiries of the farmwives who had come to sell their fragrant cardamom-bread, and of the hot-meat vendors. All this, as I write it, slowly convoluting a thread of the vermilion ink of the House Absolute, sounds calm and even methodical. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was gasping and sweating as I did these things, shouting questions to which I hardly stayed for an answer. Like a face seen in dream, Agia’s floated before my imagination: wide, flat cheeks and softly rounded chin, freckled, sun-browned skin and long, laughing, mocking eyes. Why she had come, I could not imagine; I only knew she had, and that my glimpse of her had reawakened the anguish of my memory of her scream.

“Have you seen a woman so tall, with chestnut hair?” I repeated it again and again, like the duelist who had called out “Cadroe of Seventeen Stones,” until the phrase was as meaningless as the song of the cicada.

“Yes. Every country maid who comes here.”

“Do you know her name?”

“A woman? Certainly I can get you a woman.”

“Where did you lose her?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll soon find her again. The fair’s not big enough for anybody to stay lost long. Didn’t the two of you arrange a place to meet? Have some of my tea — you look so tired.”

I fumbled for a coin.

“You don’t have to pay, I sell enough as it is. Well, if you insist. It’s only an aes. Here.”

The old woman rummaged in her apron pocket and produced a flood of little coins, then splashed the tea, hissing-hot, from her kettle into an earthenware cup and offered me a straw of some dimly silver metal. I waved it away.

“It’s clean. I rinse everything after each customer.”

“I’m not used to them.”

“Watch the rim then — it’ll be hot. Have you looked by the judging? There’ll be a lot of people there.”

“Where the cattle are? Yes.” The tea was maté, spicy and a trifle bitter.

“Does she know you’re looking for her?”

“I don’t think so. Even if she saw me, she wouldn’t have recognized me. I… am not dressed as I usually am.”

The old woman snorted and pushed a straggling lock of gray hair back under her kerchief. “At Saltus Fair? Of course not! Everybody wears his best to a fair, and any girl with sense would know that. How about down by the water where they’ve got the prisoner chained?”

I shook my head. “She seems to have disappeared.”

“But you haven’t given up. I can tell from the way you look at the people going past instead of me. Well, good for you. You’ll find her yet, though they do say all manner of strange things have been happening round and about of late. They caught a green man, do you know that? Got him right over there where you see the tent. Green men know everything, people say, if you can but make them talk. Then there’s the cathedral. I suppose you’ve heard about that?”

“The cathedral?”

“I’ve heard tell it wasn’t what city folk call a real one — I know you’re from the city by the way you drink your tea — but it’s the only cathedral most of us around Saltus ever saw, and pretty too, with all the hanging lamps and the windows in the sides made of colored silk. Myself, I don’t believe — or rather, I think that if the Pancreator don’t care nothing for me, I won’t care nothing for him, and why should I? Still, it’s a shame what they did, if they did what’s told against them. Set fire to it, you know.”

“Are you talking about the Cathedral of the Pelerines?”

The old woman nodded sagely. “There, you said it yourself. You’re making the same mistake they did. It wasn’t the Cathedral of the Pelerines, it was the Cathedral of the Claw. Which is to say, it wasn’t theirs to burn.”

To myself I muttered, “They rekindled the fire.”

“I beg pardon.” The old woman cocked an ear. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I said they burned it. They must have set fire to the straw floor.”

“That’s what I heard too. They just stood back and watched it burn. It went up to the Infinite Meadows of the New Sun, you know.”

A man on the opposite side of the alleyway began to pound a drum. When he paused I said, “I know that certain persons have claimed to have seen it rise into the air.”

“Oh, it rose all right. When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool — it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can’t see the Hand in nature.”

“He didn’t see it himself?” I asked. “The cathedral, I mean.”

She failed to understand. “Oh, he’s seen it when they’ve been through here, at least a dozen times.”

The chant of the man with the drum, similar to that I had once heard Dr. Talos use, but more hoarsely delivered and bereft of the doctor’s malicious intelligence, cut through our talk. “Knows everything! Knows everybody! Green as a gooseberry! See for yourself!”

(The insistent voice of the drum: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)

“Do you think the green man would know where Agia is?”

The old woman smiled. “So that’s her name, is it? Now I’ll know, if anybody should mention her. He might. You’ve money, why not try him?”

Why not indeed, I thought.

“Brought from the jun-gles of the North! Never eats! A-kin to the bush-es and the grass-es!” BOOM! BOOM! “The fu-ture and the re-mote past are one to him!” When he saw me approaching the door of his tent, the drummer stopped his clamor. “Only an aes to see him. Two to speak with him. Three to be alone with him.”

“Alone for how long?” I asked as I selected three copper aes.

A wry grin crossed the drummer’s face. “For as long as you wish.” I handed him his money and stepped inside.

It had been plain he had not thought I would want to stay long, and I expected a stench or something equally unpleasant. There was nothing beyond a slight odor as of hay curing. In the center of the tent, in a dust-spangled shaft of sunlight admitted by a vent in the canvas roof, was chained a man the color of pale jade. He wore a kilt of leaves, now fading; beside him stood a clay pot filled to the brim with clear water.

For a moment we were silent. I stood looking at him. He sat looking at the ground. “That’s not paint,” I said. “Nor do I think it dye. And you have no more hair than the man I saw dragged from the sealed house.”

He looked up at me, then down again. Even the whites of his eyes held a greenish tint.

I tried to bait him. “If you are truly vegetable, I would think your hair should be grass.”

“No.” He had a soft voice, saved from womanishness only by its depth.

“You are vegetable then? A speaking plant?”

“You are no countryman.”

“I left Nessus a few days ago.”

“With some education.”

I thought of Master Palaemon, then of Master Malrubius and my poor Thecla, and I shrugged. “I can read and write.”

“Yet you know nothing about me. I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being.”

“The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues.” For all his aspect of despair (and his was a sadder face by far than my friend Jonas’s), something tugged at the corners of his lips.

“That is well put. You have no scientific training, but you are better taught than you realize.”

“On the contrary, all my training has been scientific — although it had nothing to do with these fantastic speculations. What are you?”

“A great seer. A great liar, like every man whose foot is in a trap.”

“If you’ll tell me what you are, I’ll endeavor to help you.”

He looked at me, and it was as if some tall herb had opened eyes and shown a human face. “I believe you,” he said. “Why is it that you, of all the hundreds who come to this tent, know pity?”

“I know nothing of pity, but I have been imbued with a respect for justice, and I am well acquainted with the alcalde of this village. A green man is still a man; and if he is a slave, his master must show how he came to that state, and how he himself came into possession of him.”

The green man said, “I’m a fool, I suppose, to put any confidence in you. And yet I do. I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age.”

“That is impossible.”

“The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankind’s long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended.”

“But you must have sun.”

“Yes,” the green man said. “And I have not enough here. Day is brighter in my age.”

That simple remark thrilled me in a way that nothing had since I had first glimpsed the unroofed chapel in the Broken Court of our Citadel. “Then the New Sun comes as prophesied,” I said, “and there is indeed a second life for Urth — if what you say is the truth.”

The green man threw back his head and laughed. Much later I was to hear the sound the alzabo makes as it ranges the snow-swept tablelands of the high country; its laughter is horrible, but the green man’s was more terrible, and I drew away from him. “You’re not a human being,” I said. “Not now, if you ever were.”

He laughed again. “And to think I hoped in you. What a poor creature I am. I thought I had resigned myself to dying here among a people who are no more than walking dust; but at the tiniest gleam, all my resignation fell from me. I am a true man, friend. You are not, and in a few months I will be dead.”

I remembered his kin. How often I had seen the frozen stalks of summer flowers dashed by the wind against the sides of the mausoleums in our necropolis. “I understand you. The warm days of sun are coming, but when they are gone, you will go with them. Grow seed while you can.”

He sobered. “You do not believe me or even understand that I am a man like yourself, yet you still pity me. Perhaps you are right, and for us a new sun has come, and because it has come we have forgotten it. If I am ever able to return to my own time, I will tell them there of you.”

“If you are indeed of the future, why cannot you go forward to your home, and so escape?”

“Because I am chained, as you see.” He held out his leg so that I could examine the shackle about his ankle. His beryline flesh was swollen about it, as I have seen the bark of a tree swollen that had grown through an iron ring.

The tent flap opened, and the drummer thrust his head through. “Are you still here? I have others outside.” He looked significantly at the green man and withdrew.

“He means that I must drive you off, or he will close the vent through which my sunlight falls. I drive away those who pay to see me by foretelling their futures, and I will foretell yours. You are young now, and strong. But before this world has wound itself ten times more about the sun you shall be less strong, and you shall never regain the strength that is yours now. If you breed sons, you will engender enemies against yourself. If—”

“Enough!” I said. “What you are telling me is only the fortune of all men. Answer one question truthfully for me, and I will go. I am looking for a woman called Agia. Where will I find her?”

For a moment his eyes rolled upward until only a narrow crescent of pale green showed beneath their lids. A faint tremor seized him; he stood and extended his arms, his fingers splayed like twigs. Slowly he said, “Above ground.”

The tremor ceased, and he sat again, older-looking and paler than before. “You are only a fraud then,” I told him as I turned away. “And I was a simpleton to believe in you even by so little.”

“No,” the green man whispered. “Listen. In coming here, I have passed through all your future. Some parts of it remain with me, no matter how clouded. I told you only the truth — and if you are indeed a friend of the alcalde of this place, I will tell you something further that you may tell him, something I have learned from the questions of those who have come to question me. Armed men are seeking to free a man called Barnoch.”

I took my whetstone from the sabretache at my belt, broke it on the top of the chain-stake, and gave half to him. For a moment he did not comprehend what it was he held. Then I saw the knowledge growing in him, so that he seemed to unfold in his great joy, as though he were already basking in the brighter light of his own day.