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“Now you must serve me, Pia. I’m going to sit over here at the fire, where I was before you came in, and you can bring me the food. Have you served at table before?”
“Oh, yes, Grand Master. I serve at every meal.”
“Then you should know what you’re doing. What do you recommend first — the fish?”
She nodded.
“Then bring that over, and the wine, and some of your cakes. Have you eaten?”
She shook her head until the black hair danced. “Oh, no, but it would not be right for me to eat with you.”
“Still I notice I can count a good many ribs.”
“I would be beaten for it, Grand Master.”
“Not while I am here, at least. But I won’t force you. Just the same, I would like to assure myself that they haven’t put anything in any of this that I wouldn’t give my dog, if I still had him. The wine would be the most likely place, I think. It will be rough but sweet, if it’s like most country wines.” I poured the stone goblet half full and handed it to her. “You drink that, and if you don’t fall to the floor in fits, I’ll try a drop too.”
She had some difficulty in getting it down, but she did so at last and, with watering eyes, handed the goblet back to me. I poured some wine for myself and sipped it, finding it every bit as bad as I expected.
I made her sit beside me then, and fed her one of the fish she herself had fried in oil. When she had finished it, I ate a couple too. They were so much superior to the wine as her own delicate face was to the old hetman’s — caught that day, I felt sure, and in water much colder and cleaner than the muddy lower reaches of Gyoll, from which the fish I had been accustomed to in the Citadel had come.
“Do they always chain slaves here?” I asked her as we divided the cakes. “Or have you been particularly unruly, Pia?”
She said, “I am of the lake people,” as though that answered my question, as no doubt it would have if I had been familiar with the local situation.
“I would think these are the lake people.” I gestured to indicate the hetman’s house and the village in general.
“Oh, no. These are the shore people. Our people live in the lake, on the islands. But sometimes the wind blows our islands here, and Zambdas is afraid I will see my home then and swim to it. The chain is heavy — you can see how long it is — and I can’t take it off. And so the weight would drown me.”
“Unless you found a piece of wood to bear the weight while you paddled with your feet.”
She pretended not to have heard me. “Would you like some duck, Grand Master?”
“Yes, but not until you eat some of it first, and before you have any, I want you to tell me more about those islands. Did you say the wind blew them here? I confess I have never heard of islands that were blown by the wind.”
Pia was looking longingly toward the duck, which must have been a delicacy in that part of the world. “I have heard that there are islands that do not move. That must be very inconvenient, I suppose, and I have never seen any. Our islands travel from one place to another, and sometimes we put sails in their trees to make them go faster. But they will not sail across the wind very well, because they do not have wise bottoms like the bottoms of boats, but foolish bottoms like the bottoms of tubs, and sometimes they turn over.”
“I want to see your islands sometime, Pia,” I told her. “I also want to get you back to them, since that seems to be where you want to go. I owe something to a man with a name much like yours, and so I’ll try to do that before I leave this place. Meanwhile, you had better build up your strength with some of that duck.”
She took a piece, and after she had swallowed a few mouthfuls began to peel off slivers for me that she fed me with her fingers. It was very good, still hot enough to steam and imbued with a delicate flavor suggestive of parsley, which perhaps came from some water plant on which these ducks fed; but it was also rich and somewhat greasy, and when I had eaten the better part of one thigh, I took a few bites of salad to clear my palate.
I think I ate some more of the duck after that, then a movement in the fire caught my eye. A fragment of almost-consumed wood glowing with heat had fallen from one of the logs into the ashes under the grate, but instead of lying there and becoming dim and eventually black, it seemed to straighten up, and in doing so became Roche, Roche with his fiery red hair turned to real flames, Roche holding a torch as he used to when we were boys and went to swim in the cistern beneath the Bell Keep.
It seemed so extraordinary to see him there, reduced to a glowing micromorph, that I turned to Pia to point him out to her. She appeared to have seen nothing; but Drotte, no taller than my thumb, was standing on her shoulder, half concealed in her flowing black hair. When I tried to tell her he was there, I heard myself speaking in a new tongue, hissing, grunting, and clicking. I felt no fear at any of this, only a detached wonder. I could tell that what I was saying was not human speech, and observe the horrified expression on Pia’s face as though I were contemplating some ancient painting in old Rudisind’s gallery in the Citadel; yet I could not turn my noises into words, or even halt them. Pia screamed.
The door flew open. It had been closed for so long that I had almost forgotten it could not be locked; but it was open now, and two figures stood there. When the door opened they were men, men whose faces had been replaced by smooth pelts of fur like the backs of two otters, but men still. An instant later they had become plants, tall stalks of viridian from which protruded the razor-sharp, oddly angled leaves of the avern. Spiders, black and soft and many-legged, had been hiding there. I tried to rise from my chair, and they leaped at me trailing webs of gossamer that shone in the firelight. I had only time to see and remember Pia’s face, with its wide eyes and its delicate mouth frozen in a circle of horror before a peregrine with a beak of steel stooped to tear the Claw from my neck.
XXIX
The Hetman’s Boat
AFTER THAT I was locked in the dark for what I later found had been the night and the greater part of the following morning. Yet though it was dark where I lay, it was not at first dark to me, for my hallucinations needed no candle. I can recall them still, as I can recall everything; but I will not bore you, my ultimate reader, with the entire catalog of phantoms, though it would be easy enough for me to describe them here. What is not easy is the task of expressing my feelings concerning them.
It would have been a great relief for me to believe that they were all in some way contained in the drug I had swallowed (which was, as I guessed then and learned later, when I could question those who treated the wounded of the Autarch’s army, nothing more than the mushrooms that had been chopped into my salad) just as Thecla’s thoughts and Thecla’s personality, comforting at times and troubling at others, had been contained in the fragment of her flesh I had eaten at Vodalus’s banquet. Yet I knew it could not be so, and that all the things I saw, some amusing, some horrible and terrifying, some merely grotesque, were the product of my own mind. Or of Thecla’s, which was now a part of my own.
Or rather, as I first began to realize there in the dark as I watched a parade of women from the court — exultants immensely tall and imbued with the stiff grace of costly porcelains, their complexions powdered with the dust of pearls or diamonds and their eyes made large as Thecla’s had been by the application of minute amounts of certain poisons in childhood — products of the mind that now existed in the combination of the minds that had been hers and mine.
Severian, the apprentice I had been, the young man who had swum beneath the Bell Keep, who had once nearly drowned in Gyoll, who had idled alone on summer days in the ruined necropolis, who had handed the Chatelaine Thecla, in the nadir of his despair, the stolen knife, was gone.