The Claw of the Conciliator Read online

Page 8

 

  He nodded without looking at me. "I know. "

  "Did you watch? You said you wouldnt. "

  "I heard her voice when you were practically standing beside me. Will she try again?"

  I waited, thinking, while he carried the little saddle into the tack room. When he came out, I said, "Yes, Im sure she will. I didnt exact a promise from her, if thats what you mean. She wouldnt have kept one in any case. "

  "I would have killed her then. "

  "Yes," I said. "That would have been the right thing to do. "

  We walked out of the stable together. There was light enough in the inn yard now for us to see the well, and the wide doors that led into the inn.

  "I dont think it would have been right - Im only saying that I would have done it. I would have imagined myself stabbed in my sleep, dying on a dirty bed somewhere, and I would have swung that thing. It wouldnt have been right. "

  Jonas lifted the mace the man-ape had left behind, and chopped with it in a parody, brutal and graceless, of a sword cut. The head caught the light and both of us gasped.

  It was of pounded gold.

  Neither of us felt any desire to join the festivities the fair still proffered to those who had caroused all night. We retired to the room we shared, and prepared for sleep. When Jonas offered to share his gold with me, I refused. Earlier, I had had money in plenty and the advance on my fee, and he had been living, as it were, upon my largess. Now I was happy that he would no longer feel himself in my debt. I was ashamed, too, when I saw how completely he trusted me with his gold, and remembered how carefully I had concealed (in fact, still concealed) the existence of the Claw from him. I felt bound to tell him of it; but I did not, and contrived instead to slip my foot from my wet boot in such a way that the Claw fell into the toe.

  I woke about noon, and after satisfying myself that the Claw was still there, roused Jonas as he had asked me. "There should be jewelers at the fair wholl give me some sort of price for this," he said. "At least, I can bargain with them. Want to come with me?"

  "We should have something to eat, and by the time were through, Ill be due at the scaffold. "

  "Back to work then. "

  "Yes. " I had picked up my cloak. It was sadly torn, and my boots were dull and still slightly damp.

  "One of the maids here can sew that for you. It wont be as good as new, but it will be a lot better than it is now. " Jonas swung open the door. "Come along, if youre hungry. What are you looking so thoughtful about?"

  In the inns parlor, with a good meal between us, and the innkeepers wife exercising her needle on my cloak in another room, I told him what had happened under the hill, ending with the steps I had heard far below ground.

  "Youre a strange man," was all he said.

  "You are stranger than I. You dont want people to know it, but youre a foreigner of some kind. "

  He smiled. "A cacogen?"

  "An outlander. "

  Jonas shook his head, then nodded. "Yes, I suppose I am. But you - you have this talisman that lets you command nightmares, and you have discovered a hoard of silver. Yet you talk about it to me as someone else might talk about the weather. "

  I took a bit of bread. "It is strange, I agree. But the strangeness resides in the Claw, the thing itself, and not in me. As for talking about it to you, why shouldnt I? If I were to steal your gold, I could sell it and spend the money, but I dont think things would go well for someone who stole the Claw. I dont know why I think that, but I do, and of course Agia stole it. As for the silver - "

  "And she put it in your pocket?"

  "In the sabretache that hangs from my belt. She thought her brother would kill me, remember. Then they were going to claim my body - they had planned that already, so theyd get Terminus Est and my habit. She would have had my sword and clothes and the gem too, and meanwhile, if it were found, I would be blamed and not she. I remember . . . "

  "What?"

  "The Pelerines. They stopped us as we were trying to get out. Jonas, do you think its true that some people can read the thoughts of others?"

  "Of course. "

  "Not everyone is so sure. Master Gurloes used to speak favorably of the idea, but Master Palaemon wouldnt hear of it. Still, I think the chief priestess of the Pelerines could, at least to some degree. She knew Agia had taken something, and that I had not. She made Agia strip so they could search her, but they didnt search me. Later they destroyed their cathedral, and I think that must have been because of the loss of the Claw - it was the Cathedral of the Claw, after all. "

  Jonas nodded thoughtfully.

  "But none of this is what I wanted to ask you about. Id like your opinion of the footsteps. Everyone knows about Erebus and Abaia and the other beings in the sea who will come to land someday. Nevertheless, I think you know more about them than most of the rest of us. "

  Jonass face, which had been so open before, was closed and guarded now. "And why do you think that?"

  "Because youve been a sailor, and because of the story about the beans - the story you told at the gate. You must have seen my brown book when I was reading it upstairs. It tells all the secrets of the world, or at least what various mages have said they were. I havent read it all or even half of it, though Thecla and I used to read an entry every few days and spend the time between readings arguing about it. But Ive noticed that all the explanations in that book are simple, and seemingly childish. "

  "Like my story. "

  I nodded. "Your story might have come out of the book. When I first carried it to Thecla, I supposed it was intended for children, or for adults who enjoyed childish things. But when we had talked about some of the thoughts in it, I understood that they had to be expressed in that way or they couldnt be expressed at all. If the writer had wanted to describe a new way to make wine or the best way to make love, he could have used complex and accurate language. But in the book he really wrote he had to say, In the beginning was only the hexaemeron, or It is not to see the icon standing still, but to see the still standing. The thing I heard underground . . . was that one of them?"

  "I didnt see it. " Jonas rose. "Im going out now to sell the mace, but before I go Im going to tell you what all housewives sooner or later tell their husbands: Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers. "

  "One last question," I said, "and then I promise I wont ask you anything more. When we were going through the Wall, you said the things we saw in there were soldiers, and you implied they had been stationed there to resist Abaia and the others. Are the man-apes soldiers of the same kind? And if they are, what good can human-sized fighters do when our opponents are as large as mountains? And why didnt the old autarchs use human soldiers?"

  Jonas had wrapped the mace in a rag and stood now shifting it from one hand to the other. "Thats three questions, and the only one I can answer for certain is the second. Ill guess at the other two, but Im going to hold you to your promise; this is the last time were going to speak of these things. "

  "The last question first. The old autarchs, who were not autarchs or called so, did use human soldiers. But the warriors they had created by humanizing animals, and perhaps, in secret by bestializing men, were more loyal. They had to be, since the populace - who hated their rulers - hated these inhuman servitors more still. Thus the servitors could be made to endure things that human soldiers would not. That may have been why they were used in the Wall. Or there may be some other explanation entirely. "

  Jonas paused and walked to the window, looking not into the street but up at the clouds. "I dont know whether your man-apes are the same kind of hybrid. The one I saw looked quite human to me except for his pelt, so I would be inclined to agree with you that they are human beings who have undergone some change in their essential nature as a result of their life in the mines and their contact with the relics of the city buried there. Urth is very old now. Its very old, and no doubt there have been many treasures hidden in b
ygone times. Gold and silver do not alter, but their guardians can suffer metamorphoses stranger than those that turn grapes to wine and sand to pearls. "

  I said, "But we outside endure the dark each night, and the treasures carried up from the mines are brought to us. Why havent we changed too?"

  Jonas did not answer, and I remembered my promise to ask him nothing more. Still, when he turned to face me there was something in his eyes that told me I was being a fool, that we had changed. He turned away again and stared out and up once more.

  "All right," I conceded, "you dont have to answer that. But what about the other question you pledged yourself to answer? How can human soldiers resist the monsters from the seas?"

  "You were correct when you said Erebus and Abaia are as great as mountains, and I admit that I was surprised you knew it. Most people lack the imagination to conceive of anything so large, and think them no bigger than houses or ships. Their actual size is so great that while they remain on this world they can never leave the water - their own weight would crush them. You mustnt think of them battering at the Wall with their fists, or tossing boulders about. But by their thoughts they enlist servants, and they fling them against all rules that rival their own. "

  Jonas opened the inns door then and slipped out into the bustle of the street; I remained where I was, resting an elbow on what had been our breakfast table, and recalled the dream I had experienced when I had shared Baldanderss bed. The land could not hold us, the monstrous women had said.

  Now I am come to a part of my story where I cannot help but write of something I have largely avoided mentioning before. You that read it cannot but have noticed that I have not scrupled to recount in great detail things that transpired years ago, and to give the very words of those who spoke to me, and the very words with which I replied; and you must have thought this only a conventional device I had adopted to make my story flow more smoothly. The truth is that I am one of those who are cursed with what is called perfect recollection. We cannot, as I have sometimes heard foolishly alleged, remember everything. I cannot recall the ordering of the books on the shelves in the library of Master Ultan, for example. But I can remember more than many would credit: the position of each object on a table I walked past when I was a child, and even that I have recalled some scene to mind previously, and how that remembered incident differed from the memory of it I have now.

  It was my power of recollection that made me the favorite pupil of Master Palaemon, and so I suppose it can be blamed for the existence of this narrative, for if he had not favored me, I would not have been sent to Thrax bearing his sword.

  Some say this power is linked to weak judgment - of that I am no judge. But it has another danger, one I have encountered many times. When I cast my mind into the past, as I am doing now and as I did then when I sought to recall my dream, I remember it so well that I seem to move again in the bygone day, a day old - new, and unchanged each time I draw it to the surface of my mind, its eidolons as real as I. I can even now close my eyes and walk into Theclas cell as I did one winter evening; and soon my fingers will feel the heat of her garment while the perfume of her person fills my nostrils like the perfume of lilies warmed before a fire. I lift her gown from her and embrace that ivory body, feeling her nipples pressed to my face . . .

  You see? It is very easy to waste hours and days in such rememberings, and sometimes I fall so deeply into them that I am drugged and drunken. So it was now. The footfalls I had heard in the man-apes cavern still echoed in my mind, and seeking some explanation I returned to my dream, certain now that I knew from whom it had come, and hoping it had revealed more than its shaper apprehended.

  Again I bestride the mitered, leather-winged steed. Pelicans fly below us with stiffly formal strokes, and gulls wheel and keen.

  Again I fall, tumbling through the abyss of air, whistling toward the sea, yet suspended, for a time, between wave and cloud. I arch my body, bring down my head, let my legs trail behind me like a banner, and so cleave the water and see floating in clear azure the head with hair of snakes and the many-headed beast, and then the swirling sand-garden far below. The giantesses lift arms like the trunks of sycamores, each finger tipped with an amaranthine talon. Then very suddenly, I who had been blind before understood why it was that Abaia had sent me this dream, and had sought to enlist me in the great and final war of Urth.

  But now the tyranny of memory overwhelmed my will. Though I could see the titan odalisques and their garden and knew them to be no more than dream-stuff recalled, I could not escape from their fascination and the memory of the dream. Hands grasped me like a doll, and as I dandled thus between the meretrices of Abaia, I was lifted from my broad-armed chair in the inn of Saltus; yet still, for perhaps a hundred heartbeats more, I could not rid my mind of the sea and its green-haired women.

  "He sleeps. "

  "His eyes are open. "

  A third voice: "Shall we bring the sword?"

  "Bring it - there may be work for it. "

  The titanesses faded. Men in deerskin and rough wool held me on either side, and one with a scarred face held the point of his dirk at my throat. The man on my right had picked up Terminus Est with his free hand; he was the black-bearded volunteer who had helped break open the sealed house.

  "Someones coming. "

  The man with the scarred face glided away. I heard the door rattle, and Jonass exclamation as he was drawn inside.

  "This is your master, isnt it? Well, dont move, my friend, or cry out. Well kill you both. "

  Chapter 9

  THE LIEGE OF LEAVES

  They forced us to stand with our faces to the wall while they bound our hands. Our cloaks were draped over our shoulders afterward to hide the thongs, so that we appeared to walk with our hands clasped behind us, and we were led out into the inn yard, where a huge baluchither shifted from foot to foot under a plain howdah of iron and horn. The man who held my left arm reached up and struck the beast at the hollow of the knee with the shaft of a goad to make him kneel, and we were driven onto his back.