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“Where are you?” I whispered, but there was no reply. A fish jumped with a silver splash, and all was silent again.
“Severian.”
However deep, it was a woman’s voice, throbbing with passion, moist with need; I remembered Agia and did not sheathe my sword.
“The sandbar…”
Though I feared it was merely a trick to make me turn my back on the trees, I let my eyes search the river until I saw it, about two hundred paces from our fire.
“Come to me.”
It was no trick, or at least not the trick I had at first feared. It was from downstream that the voice spoke.
“Come. Please. I ca
I said, “I did not speak,” but there was no reply. I waited, reluctant to leave Dorcas and Jolenta alone.
“Please. When the sun reaches this water, I must go. There may be no other chance.”
The little river was wider at the sandbar than below or above it, and I could walk upon the yellow sand itself, dry-shod, nearly to the center. To my left the greenish water gradually narrowed and deepened. To my right lay a deep pool perhaps twenty paces wide, from which water flowed swiftly yet smoothly. I stood on the sand with Terminus Est gripped in both hands, her square point buried between my feet. “I’m here,” I said. “Where are you? Can you hear me now?” As though the river itself were replying, three fish leaped at once, then leaped again, making a series of soft explosions on the surface. A moccasin, his brown back marked with linked rings of gold and black, glided up almost at my boot toes, turned as if to menace the jumping fish and hissed, then entered the ford on the upper side of the bar and swam away in long undulations. Through the body, he had been as thick as my forearm.
“Do not fear. Look. See me. Know that I will not harm you.”
Green though the water had been, it grew greener still. A thousand jade tentacles writhed there, never breaking the surface. As I watched, too fascinated to be afraid, a disc of white three paces across appeared among them, rising slowly toward the surface.
It was not until it was within a few spans of the ripples that I understood what it was — and then only because it opened eyes. A face looked through the water at me, the face of a woman who might have dandled Baldanders like a toy. Her eyes were scarlet, and her mouth was bordered by full lips so darkly crimson I had not at first thought them lips at all. Behind them stood an army of pointed teeth; the green tendrils that framed her face were her floating hair.
“I have come for you, Severian,” she said. “No, you are not dreaming.”
Chapter 28
THE ODALISQUE OF ABAIA
I said, “Once before I dreamed of you.” Dimly, I could see her naked body in the water, immense and gleaming.
“We watched the giant, and so found you. Alas, we lost sight of you too soon, when you and he separated. You believed then that you were hated, and did not know how much you were loved. The seas of the whole world shook with our mourning for you, and the waves wept salt tears and threw themselves despairing upon the rocks.”
“And what is it you want of me?”
“Only your love. Only your love.”
Her right hand came to the surface as she spoke, and floated there like a raft of five white logs. Here, truly, was the hand of the ogre, whose fingertip held the map of his domain.
“Am I not fair? Where have you beheld skin clearer than mine, or redder lips?”
“You are breathtaking,” I said truthfully. “But may I ask why you were observing Baldanders when I met him? And why you were not observing me, though it seems you wished to?”
“We watch the giant because he grows. In that he is like us, and like our father-husband, Abaia. Eventually he must come to the water, when the land can bear him no longer. But you may come now, if you will. You will breathe — by our gift — as easily as you breathe the thin, weak wind here, and whenever you wish you shall return to the land and take up your crown. This river Cephissus flows to Gyoll, and Gyoll to the peaceful sea. There you may ride dolphin-back through current-swept fields of coral and pearl. My sisters and I will show you the forgotten cities built of old, where a hundred trapped generations of your kin bred and died when they had been forgotten by you above.”
“I have no crown to take up,” I said. “You mistake me for someone else.”
“All of us will be yours there, in the red and white parks where the lionfish school.”
As the undine spoke, she slowly lifted her chin, allowing her head to fall back until the whole plane of face lay at an equal depth, and only just submerged. Her white throat followed, and crimson-tipped breasts broke the surface, so that little lapping waves caressed their sides. A thousand bubbles sparkled in the water. In the space of a few breaths she lay at full length upon the current, forty cubits at least from alabaster feet to twining hair.
No one who reads this, perhaps, will understand how I could be drawn to so monstrous a thing; yet I wanted to believe her, to go with her, as a drowning man wants to gasp air. If I had fully credited her promises, I would have plunged into the pool at that moment, forgetting everything else.
“You have a crown, though you know not of it yet. Do you think that we, who swim in so many waters — even between the stars — are confined to a single instant? We have seen what you will become, and what you have been. Only yesterday you lay in the hollow of my palm, and I lifted you above the clotted weed lest you die in Gyoll, saving you for this moment.”
“Give me the power to breathe water,” I said, “and let me test it on the other side of the sandbar. If I find you have told the truth, I will go with you.” I watched those huge lips part. I ca
“It is not so easily done as that. You must come with me, trusting, though it is only a moment. Come.”
She extended her hand toward me, and at the same moment I heard Dorcas’s agonized voice crying for help.
I turned to run to her. Yet if the undine had waited, I think I might have turned back. She did not. The river itself seemed to heave from its bed with a roar like breaking surf. It was as though a lake had been flung at my head, and it struck me like a stone and tumbled me in its wash like a stick. A moment later, when it receded, I found myself far up the bank, soaked and bruised and swordless. Fifty paces away the undine’s white body rose half out of the river. Without the support of the water her flesh sagged on bones that seemed ready to snap under its weight, and her hair hung lank to the soaking sand. Even as I watched, water mingled with blood ran from her nostrils.
I fled, and by the time I reached Dorcas at our fire, the undine was gone save for a swirl of silt that darkened the river below the sandbar.
Dorcas’s face was nearly as white. “What was that?” she whispered. “Where were you?”
“You saw her then. I was afraid…”
“How horrible.” Dorcas had thrown herself into my arms, pressing her body to mine. “Horrible.”
“That wasn’t why you called, though, was it? You couldn’t have seen her from here until she rose out of the pool.”
Dorcas pointed mutely toward the farther side of the fire, and I saw the ground was soaked with blood where Jolenta lay.
There were two narrow cuts in her left wrist, each about the length of my thumb; and though I touched them with the Claw, it seemed the blood that welled from them would not clot. When we had soaked several bandages torn from Dorcas’s scant store of clothing, I boiled thread and needle in a little pan she had and sewed the edges of the wounds shut. Through all this Jolenta seemed less than half conscious; from time to time her eyes opened, but they closed again almost immediately, and there was no recognition in them. She spoke only once, saying, “Now you see that he, whom you have esteemed your divinity, would countenance and advise all I have proposed to you. Before the New Sun rises, let us make a new begi