The Claw Of The Conciliator (4 page)

But her poor hand could hardly show the rockets rising higher than her towering head, for the ceiling was not much taller than she.

“But I’m boring you. A moment ago, when you brought me these peaches, you looked so happy, and now you won’t smile. It’s just that it does me good, here, to remember those things. How I’ll enjoy them when I see them again.”

I was not bored, of course. It was only that it saddened me to see her, a woman still young and endowed with a terrible beauty, so confined …

Jonas was uncovering Terminus Est for me when I came into our room. I poured myself a cup of wine. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“What of you? It’s your first time, after all.”

He shrugged. “I only have to fetch and carry. You’ve done it before? I wondered, because you look so young.”

“Yes, I’ve done it before. Never to a woman.”

“You think she’s innocent?”

I was taking off my shirt; when I had my arms freed I mopped my face with it and shook my head. “I’m sure she’s not. I went down and talked to her last night—they have her chained at the edge of the water, where the midges are bad. I told you about it.”

Jonas reached for the wine himself, his metal hand clinking when it met the cup. “You told me that she was beautiful, and that she had black hair like—”

“Thecla. But Morwenna’s is straight. Thecla’s curled.”

“Like Thecla, whom you seem to have loved as I love your friend Jolenta. I confess you had a great deal more time to fall in love than I did. And you told me she said her husband and child had died of some sickness, probably from bad water. The husband had been quite a bit older than she.”

I said, “About your age, I think.”

“And there was an older woman there who had wanted him too, and now she was tormenting the prisoner.”

“Only with words.” Among the guild, apprentices alone wear shirts. I drew on my trousers and put my cloak (which was of fuligin, the color darker than black) around my bare shoulders. “Clients who have been exposed by the authorities like that have usually been stoned. When we see them they’re bruised, and often they’ve lost a few teeth. Sometimes they have broken bones. The women have been raped.”

“You say she’s beautiful. Perhaps people think she’s innocent. Perhaps they took pity on her.”

I picked up Terminus Est, drew her, and let the soft sheath fall away. “The innocent have enemies. They are afraid of her.”

We went out together.

When I had entered the inn, I had to push my way through the mob of drinkers. Now it opened before me. I wore my mask and carried Terminus Est unsheathed across my shoulder. Outside, the sounds of the fair stilled as we went forward until nothing remained but a whispering, as though we strode through a wilderness of leaves.

The executions were to take place at the very center of the festivities, and a dense crowd had already gathered there. A caloyer in red stood beside the scaffold clutching his little formulary; he was an old man, as most of them are.

The two prisoners waited beside him, surrounded by the men who had taken forth Barnoch. The alcalde wore his yellow gown of office and his gold chain. By ancient custom, we must not use the steps (although I have seen Master Gurloes assist his vault to the scaffold with his sword, in the court before the Bell Tower). I was, very possibly, the only person present who knew of the tradition; but I did not break it, and a great roar, like the voice of some beast, escaped the crowd as I leaped up with my cloak billowing about me.

“Increate,” read the caloyer, “it is known to us that those who will perish here are no more evil in your sight than we. Their hands run with blood. Ours also.”

I examined the block. Those used outside the immediate supervision of the guild are notoriously bad: “Wide as a stool, dense as a fool, and dished, as a rule.” This one fulfilled the first two specifications in the proverbial description only too well, but by the mercy of Holy Katharine it was actually slightly convex, and though the idiotically hard wood would be sure to dull the male side of my blade, I was in the fortunate position of having before me one subject of either sex, so that I could use a fresh edge on each.

“… by thy will they may, in that hour, have so purified their spirits as to gain thy favor. We who must confront them then, though we spill their blood today …”

I posed, legs wide as I leaned upon my sword as if I were in complete control of the ceremony, though the truth was that I did not know which of them had drawn the short ribbon.

“You, the hero who will destroy the black worm that devours the sun; you for whom the sky parts as a curtain; you whose breath shall wither vast Erebus, Abaia, and Scylla who wallow beneath the wave; you that equally live in the shell of the smallest seed in the farthest forest, the seed that hath rolled into the dark where no man sees.”

The woman Morwenna was coming up the steps, preceded by the alcalde and followed by a man with an iron spit who used it to prod her. Someone in the crowd shouted an obscene suggestion.

“… have mercy on those who had no mercy. Have mercy on us, who shall have none now.”

The caloyer was finished, and the alcalde began. “Most hatefully and unnaturally …”

His voice was high, quite different both from his normal speaking voice and the rhetorical tone he had adopted for the speech outside Barnoch’s house. After listening absently for a few moments (I was looking for Agia in the crowd), it struck me that he was frightened. He would have to witness everything that was done to both prisoners at close range. I smiled, though my mask concealed it.

“… of respect for your sex. But you shall be branded on the right cheek and the left, your legs broken, and your head struck from your body.” (I hoped they had had sense enough to remember that a brazier of coals would be required.)

“Through the power of the high justice laid upon my unworthy arm by the condescension of the Autarch—whose thoughts are the music of his subjects—I do now declare … I do now declare …”

He had forgotten it. I whispered the words: “That your moment has come upon you.”

“I do now declare that your moment has come on you, Morwenna.”

“If you have pleas for the Conciliator, speak them in your heart.”

“If you have pleas for the Conciliator, speak them.”

“If you have counsels for the children of women, there will be no voice for them after this.”

The alcalde’s self-possession was returning, and he got it all: “If you have counsels for the children of women, there will be no voice for them after this.”

Clearly but not loudly, Morwenna said, “I know that most of you think me guilty. I am innocent. I would never do the horrible things you have accused me of.” The crowd drew closer to hear her.

“Many of you are my witnesses that I loved Stachys. I loved the child Stachys gave me.”

A patch of color caught my eye, purple-black in the strong spring sunshine. It was such a bouquet of threnodic roses as a mute might carry at a funeral. The woman who held them was Eusebia, whom I had met when she tormented Morwenna at the riverside. As I watched her, she inhaled their perfume rapturously, then employed their thorny stems to open a path for herself through the crowd, so that she stood just at the base of the scaffold. “These are for you, Morwenna. Die before they fade.”

I hammered the planks with the blunt tip of my blade for silence. Morwenna said, “The good man who read the prayers for me, and who has talked to me before I was brought here, prayed that I would forgive you if I achieved bliss before you. I have never until now had it in my power to grant a prayer, but I grant his. I forgive you now.”

Eusebia was about to speak again, but I silenced her with a look. The gap-toothed, grinning man beside her waved, and with something of a start I recognized Hethor.

“Are you ready?” Morwenna asked me.

“I am.”

Jonas had just set a bucket of glowing charcoal on the scaffold. From it thrust what was presumably the handle of a suitable inscribed iron; but there was no chair. I gave the alcalde a glance I intended to be significant. I might have been looking at a post. At last I said, “Have we a chair, Your Worship?”

“I sent two men to fetch one. And some rope.”

“When?” (The crowd was beginning to stir and murmur.)

“A few moments ago.”

The evening before he had assured me that everything would be in readiness, but there was no point in reminding him of that now. There is no one, as I have since found, so liable to fluster on the scaffold as the average rural official. He is torn between an ardent desire to be the center of attention (a position closed to him at an execution) and the quite justified fear that he lacks the ability and training that might enable him to comport himself well. The most cowardly client, mounting the steps in the full knowledge that his eyes are to be plucked out, will in nineteen cases from a score conduct himself better. Even a shy cenobite, unused to the sounds of men and diffident to the point of tears, can be better relied on.

Someone called, “Get it over with!”

I looked at Morwenna. With her famished face and clear complexion, her pensive smile and large, dark eyes, she was a prisoner likely to arouse quite undesirable feelings of sympathy in the crowd.

“We could seat her on the block,” I told the alcalde. I could not resist adding, “It’s more suited to that anyway.”

“There’s nothing to tie her with.”

I had permitted myself a remark too many already, so I forbore giving my opinion of those who require their prisoners bound.

Instead, I laid Terminus Est flat behind the block, made Morwenna sit down, lifted my arms in the ancient salute, took the iron in my right hand, and, gripping her wrists with my left, administered the brand to either cheek, then held up the iron still glowing almost white. The scream had silenced the crowd for an instant; now they roared.

The alcalde straightened himself and seemed to become a new man. “Let them see her,” he said.

I had been hoping to avoid that, but I helped Morwenna to rise. With her right hand in mine, as though we were taking part in a country dance, we made a slow, formal circuit of the platform. Hethor was beside himself with delight, and though I tried to shut out the sound of his voice, I could hear him boasting of his acquaintance with me to the people around him.

Eusebia held up her bouquet to Morwenna, calling, “Here, you’ll need these soon enough.”

When we had gone once around, I looked at the alcalde, and after the pause necessitated by his wondering at the occasion for the delay, received the signal to proceed.

Morwenna whispered, “Will it be over soon?”

“It is almost over now.” I had seated her on the block again, and was picking up my sword. “Close your eyes. Try to remember that almost everyone who has ever lived has died, even the Conciliator, who will rise as the New Sun.”

Her pale, long-lashed eyelids fell, and she did not see the upraised sword. The flash of steel silenced the crowd again, and when the full hush had come, I brought the flat of the blade down upon her thighs; over the smack of it on flesh, the sound of the femurs breaking came as clear as the crack, crack of a winning boxer’s left-hand, right-hand blows. For an instant Morwenna remained poised on the block, fainted but not fallen; in that instant I took a backward step and severed her neck with the smooth, horizontal stroke that is so much more difficult to master than the downward.

To be candid, it was not until I saw the up-jetting fountain of blood and heard the thud of the head striking the platform that I knew I had carried it off. Without realizing it, I had been as nervous as the alcalde.

That is the moment when, again by ancient tradition, the customary dignity of the guild is relaxed. I wanted to laugh and caper. The alcalde was shaking my shoulder and babbling as I wished to myself; I could not hear what he said—some happy nonsense. I held up my sword, and taking the head by the hair held it up too, and paraded the scaffold. Not a single circuit this time, but again and again, three times, four times. A breeze had sprung up; it dotted my mask and arm and bare chest with scarlet. The crowd was shouting the inevitable jests: “Will you cut my wife’s (husband’s) hair too?”

“Half a measure of sausage when you’re done with that.”

“Can I have her hat?”

I laughed at them all and was feigning to toss the head to them when someone plucked at my ankle. It was Eusebia, and I knew before her first word that she was under that compulsion to speak I had often observed among the clients in our tower. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement, and her face was twisted by her attempt to get my attention, so that she looked simultaneously older and younger than she had appeared before. I could not make out what she was shouting and bent to listen.

“Innocent! She was innocent!”

This was no time to explain that I had not been Morwenna’s judge. I only nodded.

“She took Stachys—from me! Now she’s dead. Do you understand? She was innocent after all, but I am so glad!”

I nodded again and made another circuit of the scaffold, holding up the head.

“I killed her!” Eusebia screamed. “Not you—!”

I called down to her: “If you like!”

“Innocent! I knew her—so careful. She would have kept something back—poison for herself! She would have died before you got her.”

Hethor grasped her arm and pointed to me. “My master! Mine! My own!”

“So it was somebody else. Or sickness after all—”

I shouted: “To the Demiurge alone belongs all justice!” The crowd was still noisy, though it had quieted a trifle by this time.

“But she stole my Stachys, and now she’s gone.” Louder than ever: “Oh, wonderful! She’s gone!” With that, Eusebia plunged her face into the bouquet as though to fill her lungs to bursting with the roses’ cloying perfume. I dropped Morwenna’s head into the basket that awaited it and wiped my sword blade with the piece of scarlet flannel Jonas handed me. When I noticed Eusebia again she was lifeless, sprawled among a circle of onlookers. At the time I thought little of it, only supposing that her heart had failed in her excess of joy. Later that afternoon the alcalde had her bouquet examined by an apothecary, who found among the petals a strong but subtle poison he could not identify. Morwenna must, I suppose, have had it in her hand when she mounted the steps, and must have cast it into the blossoms when I led her around the scaffold after the branding.