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I cleaned and oiled the blade, and Dorcas and I discussed what we should do. I told her of my dream, the night before I met Baldanders and Dr. Talos, and then about hearing the undine’s voice while she and Jolenta slept, and what she had said.
“Is she still there, do you think? You were down there when you found your sword. Could you have seen her through the water if she were near the bottom?”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe she is. She injured herself in some way when she tried to leave the river to stop me, and from the pallor of her skin, I doubt she would stay long in any water shallower than Gyoll’s under the sun of a clear day. But no, if she had been there I don’t think I would have seen her — the water was too roiled.”
Dorcas, who had never looked more charming than at this moment, sitting on the ground with her chin propped on one knee, was silent for a time, and seemed to watch the eastern clouds, dyed cerise and flame by the eternal mysterious hope of dawn. At length she said, “She must have wanted you very badly.”
“To have come up out of the water like that? I think she must have been on land before she had become so large, and she forgot for a moment at least that she could no longer do it.”
“But before that she swam up filthy Gyoll, and then up this narrow little river. She must have been hoping to seize you when we crossed, but she found she could not get above the sandbar, and so she called you down. Altogether, it can’t have been a pleasant trip for someone accustomed to swimming between the stars.”
“You believe her, then?”
“When I was with Dr. Talos and you were gone, he and Jolenta used to tell me what a simple-minded person I was for believing people we met on the road, and things that Baldanders said, and things they said themselves, too. Just the same, I think that even the people who are called liars tell the truth much more often than they lie. It’s so much easier! If that story about saving you wasn’t true, why tell it? It could only frighten you when you thought back on it. And if she doesn’t swim between stars what a useless thing to say. Something’s bothering you, though. I can see it. What is it?”
I did not want to describe my meeting with the Autarch in detail, so I said, “Not long ago I saw a picture — in a book — of a being who lives in the gulf. She was winged. Not like birds’ wings, but enormous continuous planes of thin, pigmented material. Wings that could beat against the starlight.”
Dorcas looked interested. “Is it in your brown book?”
“No, another book. I don’t have it here.”
“Just the same, it reminds me that we were going to see what your brown book has to say about the Conciliator. Do you still have it?”
I did, and I drew it out. It was damp from my wetting, so I opened it and laid it where the sun would strike its leaves, and the breezes that had sprung up as Urth’s face looked on his again would play over them. After that, the pages turned gently as we talked, so that pictures of men and women and monsters took my eye between our words, and thus engraved themselves on my mind, so that they are there yet. Occasionally too, phrases, and even short passages, glowed and faded as the light caught, then released, the sheen of the metallic ink: “soulless warrior!” “lucid yellow,” “by noyade.” Later: “These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient.” And: “Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed; for where we are is Hell, and where Hell is, there we must be.”
“You don’t want to read it now?” Dorcas asked.
“No. I want to hear what happened to Jolenta.”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping and dreaming of… the kind of thing I always do. And I went into a toy shop. There were shelves along the wall with dolls on them, and a well in the center of the floor with dolls sitting on the coping. I remember thinking that my baby was too young for dolls, but they were so pretty, and I had not had one since I was a little girl, so I would buy one and keep it for the baby, and meanwhile I could take it out sometimes and look at it, and perhaps make it stand before the mirror in my room. I pointed to the most beautiful one, which was one of those on the coping, and when the shopman picked it up for me I saw it was Jolenta, and it slipped from his hands. I saw it falling down very far, toward the black water. Then I woke up. Naturally I looked to see if she was all right…”
“And you found her bleeding?”
Dorcas nodded, her pale golden hair glinting in the light. “So I called for you — twice — and then I saw you down by the sandbar, and that thing came out of the water after you.”
“There’s no reason for you to look so pale,” I told her. “Jolenta was bitten by an animal, that’s clear. I’ve no idea of what kind, but judging from the bite it was a fairly small one, and no more to be feared than any other little animal with sharp teeth and a bad disposition.”
“Severian, I remember being told that there were blood bats farther north. When I was just a child, someone used to frighten me by telling me about them. And then when I was older, once a common bat got into the house. Somebody killed it, and I asked my father if it were a blood bat, and if there were really any such things. He said there were, but they lived in the north, in the steaming forests at the center of the world. They bit sleeping people and grazing animals by night, and their spittle was poisoned so that the wounds of their teeth bled on.”
Dorcas paused, looking up into the trees. “My father said that the city had been creeping northward along the river for all of history, having begun as an autochthon village where Gyoll joins the sea, and how terrible it would be when it entered the region where the blood bats fly and they could roost in the derelict buildings. It must be terrible already for the people of the House Absolute. We ca
“The Autarch has my sympathy,” I said. “But I don’t think I have ever heard you talk so much about your past life before. Do you remember your father now, and the house where the bat was killed?”
She stood; though she tried to look brave, I could see that she was trembling. “I remember more each morning, after my dreams. But, Severian, we must go now. Jolenta will be weak. She must have food, and clean water to drink. We can’t stay here.”
I was ravenously hungry myself. I put the brown book back into my sabretache and sheathed Terminus Est’s freshly oiled blade. Dorcas packed her little bundle of belongings.
Then we set out, fording the river well above the sandbar. Jolenta was unable to walk alone; we had to support her on either side. Her face was drawn, and though she had regained consciousness when we lifted her, she seldom spoke. When she did it was only a word or two. For the first time, I noticed how thin her lips were, and now the lower lip had lost its firmness and hung away from her teeth, showing the livid gums. It seemed to me that her entire body, yesterday so opulent, had softened like wax, so that instead of appearing (as she once had) a woman to Dorcas’s child, she seemed a flower too long blown, the very end of summer to Dorcas’s spring.
As we walked thus along a narrow, dusty track with sugarcane already higher than my head to either side, I found myself thinking over and over of how I had desired her in the short time I had known her. Memory, so perfect and vivid as to be more compelling than any opiate, showed me the woman as I had believed I had seen her first, when Dorcas and I had come around a grove of trees by night to find Dr. Talos’s stage gleaming with lights in a pasture. How strange it had seemed to see her by daylight as perfect as she had appeared in the flattering glow of the flambeaux the night before, when we set off northward on the most glorious morning I can remember.
Love and desire are said to be no more than cousins, and I had found it so until I walked with Jolenta’s flaccid arm about my neck. But it is not really true. Rather, the love of women was the dark side of a feminine ideal I had nourished for myself on dreams of Valeria and Thecla and Agia, of Dorcas and Jolenta and Vodalus’s leman of the heart-shaped face and cooing voice, the woman I now knew to be Thecla’s half-sister Thea. So that as we trudged between the walls of cane, when desire had fled and I could only look at Jolenta with pity, I found that though I had believed I cared only for her importunate, rose-flushed flesh and the awkward grace of her movements, I loved her.