The Claw of the Conciliator

Chapter 30 THE BADGER AGAIN

Despite what the herdsman had told me, I hoped for some place like Saltus, where we might find pure water and a few aes would buy us food and rest. What we found instead was scarcely the remnant of a town. Coarse grass grew between the enduring stones that had been its pavements, so that from a distance it seemed hardly different from the surrounding pampa. Fallen columns lay among this grass like the trunks of trees in a forest devastated by some frenzied storm; a few others still stood, broken and achingly white beneath the sun. Lizards with bright, black eyes and serrated backs lay frozen in the light. The buildings were mere hillocks from which more grass sprouted in soil caught from the wind.

There was no reason I could see to turn from our course, and so we continued northwest, urging our destriers forward. For the first time I became conscious of the mountains ahead. Framed in a ruined arch, they were no more than a faint line of blue on the horizon; yet they were a presence, as the mad clients on the third level of our oubliette were a presence though they were never taken up a single step, or even out of their cells. Lake Diuturna lay somewhere in those mountains. So did Thrax; the Pelerines, so far as I had been able to discover, wandered somewhere among their peaks and chasms, nursing the wounded of the endless war against the Ascians. That too lay in the mountains. There hundreds of thousands perished for the sake of a pass.

But now we had come to a town where no voice sounded but the raven’s. Although we had carried water in skin bags from the herdsman’s house, it was nearly gone. Jolenta was weaker, and Dorcas and I agreed that if we did not find more by nightfall, it was likely she would die. Just as Urth began to roll across the sun, we came upon a broken sacrificial table whose basin still caught rain. The water was stagnant and stinking, but in our desperation we allowed Jolenta to drink a few swallows, which she immediately vomited. Urth’s turning revealed the moon, now well past the full, so that we gained her weak greenish gleam as we lost the sunlight.

To have come upon a simple campfire would have seemed a miracle. What we actually saw was stranger but less startling. Dorcas pointed to the left. I looked, and a moment later beheld, as I thought, a meteor. “It’s a falling star,” I said. “Did you see one before? They come in showers sometimes.”

“No! That’s a building — can’t you see it? Look for the dark place against the sky. It must have a flat roof, and someone’s up there with flint and steel.”

I was about to tell her that she imagined too much, when a dull red glow no bigger, it seemed, than the head of a pin, appeared where the sparks had fallen. Two breaths more, and there was a tiny tongue of flame.

It was not far, but the dark and the broken stones we rode over made it seem so, and by the time we reached the building the fire was bright enough for us to see that three figures crouched about it. “We need your help,” I called. “This woman is dying.”

All three raised their heads, and a crone’s screech asked, “Who speaks? I hear a man’s voice, but I see no man. Who are you?”

“Here,” I called, and threw back my fuligin cloak and hood. “On your left. I’ve dark clothes, that’s all.”

“So you do… so you do. Who’s dying? Not little pale hair… big red-gold. We’ve wine here and a fire, but no other physic. Go around, that’s where the stair is.”

I led our animals around the corner of the building as she had indicated. The stone walls cut off the low moon and left us in blind darkness, but I stumbled on rough steps that must have been made by piling stones from fallen structures against the side of the building. After hobbling the two destriers, I carried Jolenta up, Dorcas going before us to feel the way and warn me of danger.

The roof, when we reached it, was not flat; and the pitch was great enough for me to fear falling at every step. Its hard, uneven surface seemed to be of tiles — once one loosened, and I heard it grating and clattering against the others until it fell over the edge and smashed on the uneven slabs below.

When I was an apprentice and too young to be entrusted with any but the most elementary tasks, I was given a letter to take to the witches’ tower, across the Old Court from our own. (I learned much later that there was a good reason for selecting only boys well below the age of puberty to carry the messages our proximity to the witches required.) Now, when I know of the horror our own tower inspired not only in the people of the quarter but to an equal or greater degree in the other residents of the Citadel itself, I find a flavor of quaint naiveté in the recollection of my own fear; yet to the small and unattractive boy I was, it was very real. I had heard terrible stories from the older apprentices, and I had seen that boys unquestionably braver than I were afraid. In that most gaunt of all the Citadel’s myriad towers, strangely colored lights burned by night. The screams we heard through the ports of our dormitory came not from some underground examination room like our own, but from the highest levels; and we knew that it was the witches themselves who screamed thus and not their clients, for in the sense we used that word, they had none. Nor were those screams the howlings of lunacy and the shrieks of agony, as ours were.

I had been made to wash my hands so they would not soil the envelope, and I was very conscious of their dampness and their redness as I picked my way among the puddles of freezing water that dotted the courtyard. My mind conjured up a witch who should be immensely dignified and humiliating, who would not shrink from punishing me in some particularly repulsive way for daring to carry a letter to her in red hands and would send me back with a scornful report to Master Malrubius as well.

I must have been very small indeed: I had to jump to reach the knocker. The smack of the witches’ deeply worn doorstep against the thin soles of my shoes remains with me still.

“Yes?” The face that looked into mine was hardly higher than my own. It was one of those — outstanding of its kind among all the hundreds of thousands of faces I have seen — that are at once suggestive of beauty and disease. The witch to whom it belonged seemed old to me and must actually have been about twenty or a little less; but she was not tall, and she carried herself in the bent-backed posture of extreme age. Her face was so lovely and so bloodless that it might have been a mask carved in ivory by some master sculptor.

Mutely, I held up my letter.

“Come with me,” she said. Those were the words I had feared, and now that they had actually been given voice, they seemed as inevitable as the procession of the seasons.

I entered a tower very different from our own. Ours was oppressively solid, of plates of metal so closely fitted that they had, ages ago, diffused into one another to become one mass, and the lower floors of our tower were warm and dripping. Nothing seemed solid in the witches’ tower, and few things were. Much later, Master Palaemon explained to me that it was far older than most other parts of the Citadel, and had been built when the design of towers was still little more than the imitation in inanimate materials of human physiology, so that skeletons of steel were used to support a fabric of flimsier substances. With the passing of the centuries, that skeleton had largely corroded away — until at last the structure it had once stiffened was held up only by the piecemeal repairs of past generations. Oversized rooms were separated by walls not much thicker than draperies; no floor was level, and no stair straight; each banister and railing I touched seemed ready to come off in my hand. Gnostic designs in white, green, and purple had been chalked on the walls, but there was little furniture, and the air seemed colder than that outside.

After climbing several stairs and a ladder lashed together from the unpeeled saplings of some fragrant tree, I was ushered into the presence of an old woman who sat in the only chair I had yet seen there, staring through a glass tabletop at what appeared to be an artificial landscape inhabited by hairless, crippled animals. I gave her my letter and was led away; but for a moment she had glanced at me, and her face, like the face of the young-old woman who had brought me to her, has of course remained graven in my mind.

I mention all this now because it seemed to me, as I laid Jolenta on the tiles beside the fire, that the women who crouched over it were the same. It was impossible; the old woman to whom I had handed my letter was almost certainly dead, and the young one (if she were still living) would be changed beyond recognition, as I was myself. Yet the faces that turned toward me were the faces I recalled. Perhaps there are but two witches in the world, who are born into it again and again.

“What is the matter with her?” the younger woman asked, and Dorcas and I explained as well as we could.

Long before we finished, the older one had Jolenta’s head in her lap and was forcing wine from a clay bottle into her throat. “It would harm her if it were strong to harm,” she said. “But this is three parts pure water. Since you do not wish to see her die, you are fortunate, possibly, to have come across us so. Whether she is also fortunate, I cannot say.”

I thanked her, and inquired where the third person who had been at their fire had gone.

The old woman sighed, and stared at me for a moment before returning her attention to Jolenta.

“There were only the two of us,” the younger woman said. “You saw three?”

“Very clearly, in the firelight. Your grandmother — if that is who she is — looked up and spoke to me. You and whoever was with you lifted your heads, then bowed them again.”

“She is the Cumaean.”

I had heard the word before, but for a moment I could not remember where, and the younger woman’s face, immobile as an oread’s in a picture, gave me no clue.

“The seeress,” Dorcas supplied. “And who are you?”

“Her acolyte, My name is Merryn. It is significant, possibly, that you, who are three, saw three of us at the fire, while we who are two at first saw but two of you.” She looked to the Cumaean as if for confirmation, and then, as if she had received it, back to us, though I saw no glance pass between them.

“I’m quite sure I saw a third person who was larger than either of you,” I said.

“This is a strange evening, and there are those who ride the night air who sometimes choose to borrow a human seeming. The question is why such a power would wish to show itself to you.”

The effect of her dark eyes and serene face was so great that I think I might have believed her if it had not been for Dorcas, who suggested with an almost imperceptible movement of her head that the third member of the group about the fire might have escaped our observation by crossing the roof and hiding on the farther side of the ridge.

“She may live,” the Cumaean said without lifting her gaze from Jolenta’s face. “Though she does not wish it.”

“It’s a good thing for her that the two of you had so much wine,” I said.

The old woman did not rise to the bait, saying only, “Yes, it is. For you and possibly even for her.”

Merryn picked up a stick and stirred the fire. “There is no death.”

I laughed a little, mostly, I think, because I was no longer quite so worried about Jolenta. “Those of my trade think otherwise.”

“Those of your trade are mistaken.”

Jolenta murmured, “Doctor?” It was the first time she had spoken since morning.

“You do not need a physician now,” Merryn said. “Someone better is here.”

The Cumaean muttered, “She seeks her lover.”

“Who is not this man in fuligin then, Mother? I thought he seemed too common for her.”

“He is but a torturer. She seeks a worse man.”

Merryn nodded to herself, then said to us, “You will not wish to move her farther tonight, but we must ask that you do. You will find a hundred better camping places on the other side of the ruins, and it would be dangerous for you to stay here.”

“A danger of death?” I asked. “But you tell me there is none — so if I believe you, why should I fear? And if I cannot believe you, why should I believe you now?” Nevertheless, I rose to go.

The Cumaean looked up. “She’s right,” she croaked. “Though she does not know it, and only speaks by rote like a starling in a cage. Death is nothing, and for that reason you must fear it. What is more to be feared?”

I laughed again. “I can’t argue with someone as wise as you. And because you gave us what help you could, we will go now because you wish it.”

The Cumaean permitted me to take Jolenta from her, but said, “I do not wish it. My acolyte still believes the universe hers to command, a board where she can move counters to form whatever patterns suit her. The Magi see fit to number me among themselves when they write their short roll, and I should lose my place on it if I did not know that people like ourselves are only little fish, who must swim with unseen tides if we are not to exhaust ourselves without finding sustenance. Now you must wrap this poor creature in your cloak and lay her by my fire. When this place passes out of the shadow of Urth, I will look to her wound again.”

I remained standing, holding Jolenta, uncertain whether we should go or stay. The Cumaean’s intentions seemed friendly enough, but her metaphor had carried an unpleasant reminder of the undine; and as I studied her face I had come to doubt that she was an old woman at all, and to recall only too clearly the hideous faces of the cacogens who had removed their masks when Baldanders had rushed among them.

“You shame me, Mother,” Merryn said. “Shall I call to him?”

“He has heard us. He will come without your call.”

She was right. I already detected the scrape of boots on the tiles of the other side of the roof.

“You are alarmed. Would it not be better to put down the woman as I instructed you, so you might take up your sword to defend your paramour? But there will be no need.”

By the time she had finished speaking, I could see a tall hat and a big head and broad shoulders silhouetted against the night sky. I laid Jolenta near Dorcas and drew Terminus Est.

“No need of that,” a deep voice said. “No need at all, young fellow. I’d have come out sooner to renew our acquaintance, but I didn’t know the Chatelaine here wanted it. My master — and yours — sends his greetings.” It was Hildegrin.