SUNS SUNS SUNS: The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapters 21 - 25

Has Severian yet received a shock as great as this? Entrusted with a vital message from his "hero"* Vodalus to the rebels' inside man at the House Absolute, he finds the Autarch himself in possession of the password!

As Chapter 21 opens, before Severian can decide what to do about this -- has the Autarch found the true contact and gotten the password out of him or her as a trap, maybe? -- Appian goes on to pretty much prove that he's the true contact and has taken the message, which Severian has kind of involuntarily pulled out of his murse, to read, saying that he had a feeling Severian was the one he'd been waiting for.

He doesn't let Severian see what the message contains as he puts the weird little piece of metal Vodalus encoded it onto, onto a sort of microfiche reader or something to read, but on reading it decides to entrust Severian with a singular sight. He has Severian fetch a gigantic "book" with "mirror" pages -- this is some kind of computer communications device with hologram technology, as is made clear when, as Severian looks at it, it projects a singular sight: a humanoid female form with butterfly wings, bright and glowing and obviously of a size that dwarfs anything on Urth, so that a flap of her wings disturbs the very substance of the universe itself.**

This sight, which is Severian's first of Tzadkiel, it's pretty generally understood by BotNS wonks, is so profound and shattering that it causes the blood vessels in Severian's forehead to burst, and prompts him to ask if the message from Vodalus told the recipient to kill the messenger. Appian kind of laughs this off, but then...

But then he's on about Severian's future plans. After his blood-sweating look at Tzadkiel, Severian has declared that he will henceforth be Appian's man, and reminds us that he wasn't really all that interested in serving Vodalus and...

But so, what's going on with Appian and Vodalus? It's pretty apparent that Vodalus doesn't know his contact in the palace is (now) Appian, but really -- is this Appian subverting the rebel movement? Or did he, like Wilford in Snowpiercer, somehow conspire in the rebellion's very creation? Possibly just as a delaying tactic to stave off what he knows is coming?

Rumble rumble, rattle, rattle, I don't wanna die

Dude, is my forehead still bleeding?

Dude, don't ask me; I'm way too old to be Vodalus

Appian alludes to this directly next, when he orders Severian to proceed with his original mission to Thrax (remember Thrax?), but to also strongly consider a side-quest to return the Claw to the Pelerines.

Well, of course the Autarch of the Commonwealth knows that Severian has the Claw.

Not that he's admitting to being the Autarch at this point. He apparently does not know that Severian has Head-Thecla, who recognized him immediately. No, he's still talking like he's just some schmoe with access to the Secret House (because I'm sure there are just dozens of those, right?) when he says "The Autarch is here, but long before you reach Thrax he will be in the north too, with the army. If he comes near Thrax, you are able to go to him. In time you will discover the way in which you must take his life."

Whoa!

But that remark of his barely has time to land before a hooded figure appears on the scene -- clues and patterns of presentation strongly hint that this is Father Inire himself in one of his many disguises -- and Appian has him escort Severian out of the House Absolute and off to rejoin the theatrical troupe.

On the way out, Severian has his first encounter with the Vatic Fountain, a water feature that foretells, somewhat obliquely, the querent's future if he or she chucks in a coin. What Severian sees is thus:

A sword. That seemed clear enough. I would continue a torturer. A rose then, and beneath it a river. I would climb Gyoll as I had planned, since that was the road to Thrax. Now angry waves, becoming soon a long, sullen swell. The sea, perhaps, but one could not reach the sea, I thought, by climbing toward the source of the river. A rod, a chair, a multitude of towers, and I began to think the oracular powers of the fountain, in which I had never greatly believed, to be wholly false. I turned away, but as I turned, I glimpsed a many pointed star, growing ever larger.

I'll buy the sword as signalling he'll keep on being a torturer for a while, sure, but what about all the other stuff? The rose is a symbol of the Conciliator, so that tracks; Severian carrying around a thorn from an ancient rose bush that is known in his day as the Claw of the Conciliator (and of course, through the timey-wimeyness of Tzadkiel's ship, he's got a destiny in the distant past of becoming the Conciliator). The river might as well be Gyoll, but he's got a date with Juturna soon on a sandbar in a tributary of Gyoll, too. The "long, sullen swell" of the sea is doubtless the great deluge that will swamp Urth and turn it into Ushas when Severian succeeds in re-igniting the sun. The rod and the chair probably allude to his future as the Autarch (and the Vatic Fountain once told Thecla she would one day seat a throne, which she certainly didn't do in her actual lifetime but totes does as Head-Thecla). The multitude of towers could just be a vision of the Citadel/Nessus, but might also be a vision of Tzadkiel's incredible ship. As for the star, well, duh.

So everything tracks pretty simply. For once. I'm sure there's more but not even Robert Borski has devoted too much time to puzzling out what that more might be, so I'm certainly not going to, because it's reunion time!

Dr. Talos, Jolenta, Baldanders and Dorcas are camped out in a pleasant clearing within the garden, awaiting the time when they are supposed to perform Talos' now-infamous play, "Eschatology and Genesis" for the House Absolute crowd (this time minus the "scare away the rubes and collect the dropsies bit" one might presume, but, uh, yeah, about that...).

Severian has a curious interaction with Baldanders straight off. We've understood to this point that only Jonas had managed to stick with Severian in the chaos at the Piteous Gate at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, but here's Severian asking him “why he had left me in the forest beyond the Piteous Gate.” So, um, yeah. Baldanders was along for a bit of the post-Gate adventure, but not much. And Baldanders isn't too forthcoming about this, saying “I was not with you. I was with my Dr. Talos.”***

But of course, for a little while, he wasn't, if Talos/Jolenta/Dorcas were separated from Severian/Jonas/Baldanders. And presumably there was some time when Baldanders wasn't with either, for an unknown length of time. This lacuna Robert Borski argues was spent getting it on with Juturna and her sisters, still searching for their Max to help them get free of Immortan Joe Abaia.

Hey, do we know for sure that Baldanders *doesn't* eat people?

I see nothing particularly compelling about his argument for this, but don't see anything wrong with it, either. The Brides are systematically interviewing candidates for the New Sun and Baldanders is one of them, and they've got to have seen him some time. Why not now?

Meanwhile, Dorcas. Dorcas is more interested in telling Severian what's been going on since Gate-gate, which chiefly involves her horrible, horrible dreams. In them, she has what seems like normal interactions with townspeople, shopping, eating, etc., but has a powerful sense that they regard her as unclean and horrifying. Severian tries to reassure her over and over again that she is none of those things, and they fall to conversing about how Dr. Talos calls them “Death and Innocence”, which Dorcas says she doesn't like because it feels like Talos is accusing Severian of something when he calls him “Death.”

But what about my little joke a couple of entries ago that it could be the reverse that is meant, that Dorcas is Death and Severian is Innocence? Dorcas is the one who's come back from the dead, after all, and Severian, at least as he portrays himself in his narration to us, is kind of blunderingly clueless most of the time.

Furthermore, I'd refer the really interested to this thread on Urth.net, in which members speculate about how Dorcas might actually be a vampire, or at least associated with them. She might have been an undead, unclean monster long before her original death back when she was young and married to the unnamed boatman who was searching the Lake of Birds for her corpse, which, the Lake of Birds is a somewhat unusual place to stash a corpse in this culture, which generally buries bodies in a cemetery, hence the first scenes of BotNS. Whether you buy this particular set of arguments or not, there's something a bit weird and uncanny about Dorcas, quite apart from the notion that she's actually Severian's grandmother.

And then there's Jolenta. Beautiful, sexy, voluptuous Jolenta, who draws hordes of admirers wherever she goes, and the gardens of the House Absolute are no exception. Surrounded by a bunch of performers from other shows, she is unceremoniously dragged away by Dr. Talos, who beats her. Severian points out that this is hardly her fault, but Talos doesn't care. He's just interested in order, I guess.

Poor Jolenta. As Severian observes, she's kind of all alone even within their troupe: “Dorcas and I had each other, Baldanders and the doctor their crooked friendship, and we came together in the performance of the play. Jolenta had only herself, the incessant performance whose sole goal was to garner admiration.”

This is a pretty crappy projection onto her on Severian's part, but it's going to get much worse. Jolenta, tired of all the hounding admirers and uninterested in/unable to (much is made of how her voluptuous fleshiness makes her unsuitable for any kind of actual work; her breasts are too big, her hips too wide, her round thighs chafe, etc.) help with setting up the stage and scenes for the performance, she talks Severian into going for a walk with her. She complains to him a lot about how it's not just men, but women, too, who hound her (the women usually offering her advice and protection from the men in suffocating ways, but they really, too, just want to sleep with her), and Severian just sort of clucks his tongue at her and then they wind up in a boat, with Severian rowing and Jolenta just kind of going to sleep because all that walking and complaining is fatiguing, and then... Yeah. One of the ickiest scenes in the whole series is this boat ride, because even as Severian muses about all of the nicer feelings he has for all of the other women in his life, his impulse towards Jolenta is to treat her like crap.

Jolenta's desire was no more than the desire to be desired, so that I wished, not to comfort her loneliness as I had wished to comfort Valeria's, nor to find expression for an aching love like the love I had for felt for Thecla, nor to protect her as I wished to protect Dorcas, but to shame and punish her, to destroy her self-possession, to fill her eyes with tears and tear her hair as one burns the hair of corpses to torment the ghosts that have fled them.

Yuck. There is just so much wrong with that passage. So much. More than any other bit of this whole series, that passage makes me doubt every single relationship Severian claims to have had with women, whom, let's recall, he pretty much always portrays as throwing themselves at him.

Believe me, I have the best memory. Really infallible memory. 
I remember everything. And I'm going to sue Jolenta. She's so fat, she's yuge.

Anyway, the question of whether it is or is not rape is not addressed by Severian, but I can't imagine this was exactly what Jolenta, who is actually in love with Dr. Talos, wanted out of this little excursion. Yuck.****

And of course, depending on how one is choosing to perceive Dorcas (and I must confess I kind of like the vampire theory), this interlude likely has even worse implications for Jolenta's future, for Dorcas, upon Severian's and Jolenta's rejoining the group, perceives what has happens and weeps with jealousy (according to Severian).

Then it's play time. Chapter 24 finally presents the text of “Eschatology and Genesis,” which is basically a hologram/puzzle of Severian's mission as the New Sun and its consequences. I skip it a lot, when re-reading, because I find it tiresome, its few illuminating bits just as well illuminated by other things in the novels, and I'm just not interested in going over it here. Besides, there's this bit, which feels an awful lot like Wolfe making fun of enterprises like mine:

There were conversations in the audience, and I could here those as well -- one about the play, which discovered in it significances I had never guessed and which Dr. Talos, I would say, had never intended.

Suffice it to say that it's performed, and performed pretty much the way they've been doing it for the rubes in the countryside, even to Baldanders' feigned psychotic break and attack on the audience, which wasn't supposed to happen this time; there's a whole fifth act to the play that they were going to do here. But nope.

The punters of the House Absolute, however, don't scare so easily. Many are armed, and fight back as Baldanders rampages through the audience. And someone “possessed that rarest of all weapons, a dream” which is flung at Baldanders, and envelops him, putting on a peculiar show as he stands there. “It seemed then that he stood wrapped in all that was past and much that had never been: a gray-haired woman sprouted from his side, a fishing boat hovered just over his head, and a cold wind whipped the flames that wreathed him.”

It's largely this imagery that convinces Borski that Baldanders has recently had a tryst with one or more of the Brides, under the sea, or at least deep in a river, about which, more next time.

The dream doesn't faze Baldanders a bit, though, and he keeps on smashing his way through the audience, some of whom are revealed to be – not human! Yes indeed, here there be some aliens, very likely ones we're going to get to know later on, namely the hierodules Famulimus, Barbatus and Ossipago, and Severian's first glimpse of them grosses him out but good. And in the chaos, he loses track of Dorcas, whom he takes off to locate while burdening us with his profound thoughts about the nature of men's love for women and the actual extent of the House Absolute as he blunders around in the dark overnight, encountering nature (including a monkey that some think is, somehow, yet another guise of Father Inire, because his face is described as “simian” and he sometimes carries a staff with a mummified monkey head on it) and finally giving up and going to sleep, where we shall leave him for now.

*I put "hero" in scare quotes because, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Severian's hero-worship of Vodalus makes no sense. I re-read the first chapter of Shadow of the Torturer a few times recently (because I'm still puzzling over who Vodalus and Thea were digging up when Severian came to their rescue), and Severian's explanation for how Vodalus captured his loyalty is circular and silly, even for a Severian explanation. First he says that Thea appears precious to him because of how fierce Vodalus is about protecting her, then he says that he finds Vodalus admirable for so fiercely protecting Thea. Bah. But when you factor in the presence of Head-Thecla (though yes, she wasn't there in his head at the time of his first meeting with Vodalus), whose influence is at times overt and at times quite subtle, a reason for becoming devoted to Vodalus emerges. Thecla's emotions and memories and loyalties are coloring Severian's memories of this first encounter, so he tells it as though he was instantly thunderstruck by the rebel leader. More likely, in Severian's usual way, he allowed himself passively to be maneuvered into a situation in which he sort of had to give Vodalus his loyalty, as he'd hit a point of no return in saving the man's life.

**Insert your own lame butterfly effect joke here.

***I love how he says “my Dr. Talos” here, as though Talos were his dog or something. The implication, of course, is not far wrong; we'll learn later on (and the idea has already been presented to us in “The Tale of the Student and His Son”) that Baldanders, far from being just a big dumb lump of muscle and bone, is a master of some weird knowledge, including the making of homunculi (models of humans that can be animated “magically”), and that Dr. Talos is, in fact, one of his creations – which is why Talos never takes a share of the money the troupe earns, and, presumably, why he is the only being on Urth who doesn't want to bone Jolenta.

****And if that's not yuck enough for you yet, this might also have been twincest, as Jolenta is a favorite candidate for Severian's missing twin sister, if such a sister actually exists.

SUNS SUNS SUNS: The Claw of the Conciliator, 16 - 20

We rejoin Severian, Jonas and the resident/visitors in the Antechamber as they are recovering from the strange attack of blue "lightning" (how Severian interprets electricity throughout these books), green flashes, giant saucer-eyed faces, and laughing women. As we learn going into Chapter 16, this is rather a common occurrence, more or less, in the Antechamber, because like privileged young jerks throughout time and space, there's a bunch of young Exultants who think it's fun to go into the Antechamber late at night and whack away at its denizens with electrical whips. Head-Thecla reveals that she was once part of such parties, and doesn't seem particularly remorseful about it.

But more importantly, Jonas. This section of the novel is mostly concerned with Jonas, who was already having a rough time of it once he realized that it's very likely that lots of the people in the Antechamber are descended from a shipmate of his, if not of Jonas himself -- and that they're up to about nine generations removed from said shipmate. Timey wimey, yo. I'd wig, too.

So Jonas is now in full-on fugue state, and his dialogue makes much more sense to us than it does to Severian. "We must get power to the compressors before the air goes bad." "I feel weight!" "It must be only the lights." He's flashing back to his time as the crew of a spaceship, most likely from way, way, way back in Urth's past, at the beginning of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, as it were, but maybe somewhat also on Tzadkiel's ship (which we'll get to when we get to Urth of the New Sun, of course, but it's the main reason for all the timey-wimey-ness of this here story).

Severian, meanwhile, is taking this opportunity to discover a thing or two about how Jonas is put together, as he tries, surreptitiously, to heal him with the Claw, which only helps a little bit because, well, because Jonas. Severian has long realized that Jonas has metal parts, most notably an entire hand of metal, and I've been referring to Jonas as a cyborg, but here we finally see that Jonas is mostly metal, and, once he's calmed down a bit, he tells Severian about the spaceship crash that landed him on Urth, in which at least one Urthbound human died, and Jonas was badly damaged. There weren't any spare parts to fix him, so he, uh, had to use the biological parts at hand. There's a great bit later in this section when Severian, watching Jonas working with one "regular" and one "prosthetic" hand, realizes that the flesh and blood hand is the prosthetic hand. That always just makes me chuckle.

Jonas more or less seen to for now, Severian starts looking around, and finds a peach-colored scarf with a very lovely scent, and is stashing it away to keep when a little girl (we learn three novels later that her name is most likely Oringa*) tells him that not only is it bad luck to keep what one finds (says who?), but that probably the Exultant jerk force is going to come back for it at some point and it wouldn't be much fun for the guy who has it. In the way of little girls, she quickly changes the subject and wants to know about Severian's own clothes, and he is very frank with her about who he is and why he wears black. She then describes to him an old-fashioned funeral scene that is a story told and retold in the Antechamber, and that Robert Borski et al have decided must be a description of John F. Kennedy's funeral, because Baby Boomer narratives are the most important ever, as well we know, and so of course they'd still be told millennia later.**

Anyway, then Jonas wakes up and finally figures out where and when he actually is, and, furthermore, that he may have pieced together more about the where than anyone has for a long time. This big room used to be lots of little rooms, and has a dropped ceiling, and ok, this is as good a time as any for me to play around with an idea I've had about what Nessus, or at least the Citadel, actually is.

It's elementary Wolfeiana to notice that the Matachin Tower that houses the Guild of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence was originally a spaceship. But perhaps the entire Citadel is, too? The way it's partly underground, the way it seems to be so many spaces at the same time (kind of like China Mieville's two conurbations in the same space in The City & The City), the Archives that melt into the House Absolute (as we discover a bit later in this section, when Severian is blundering around looking for his sword and meets the curator/painting cleaner Rudesind again) that connect to the Matachin Tower and might at least be partially beneath the city of Nessus... Being the Alastair Reynolds fan I am, I always love the idea of a giant spaceship crashing onto a planet and being repurposed into a human habitat. What if the Citadel is a repurposed future/past/whatever version of Tzadkiel's ship? Or, if not Tzadkiel's, then whatever ship Jonas crashed in, and/or whatever vessel brought the enormous aliens, Abaia and Erebus and Scylla, to Urth?

Anyway.

Jonas is quickly on to other topics, like feudal politics as he learned about them from a book on one of the ships he's traveled on. At first the reader might think it was some kind of dry history, but then he more or less directly quotes a line from very early on in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's second Alice book. "The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly, as the king's notebook told him." In Through the Looking Glass, Alice wrote this, counterfeiting the White King's handwriting, in his little memorandum book, just for fun, her way of maybe imposing her will, for a moment, on the narrative? Recall, too, that the White Knight is depicted as having a big and bushy white mustache, kind of, maybe, like Gene Wolfe's own... is this maybe a reference to the storyteller maybe not always being who we think it is? Possibly as a way of reminding us that some of the narrative we're getting is from Thecla's point of view, buried in Severian's? But meanwhile, Jonas has moved on to babbling about the founding of the Hapsburg dynasty and then we're interrupted for mealtime!

As the Antechamber residents are gobbling their pastries and coffee (that's the kind of fare they get, because this isn't a prison, but a waiting room, Nicarete reminds us), the guards shove in a new "guest" and it's Hethor. The Antechamberians soon carry him off to get his life story out of him, and Severian and Jonas sit down to eat... and Jonas starts wigging out again. This time, to calm him, Severian pulls out the Brown Book (I think this is Tales of Urth and Sky), which he kept from the collection he'd fetched for Thecla back when she was a living prisoner, and picks a story from it "at random" to read from.

This, "The Tale of the Student and His Son" is a mash-up of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Circular Ruins" and the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. The monster is a narrative stand-in for Abaia, and triples the roles of King Minos, Daedalus and the Minotaur. A princess, his rebelling daughter, plays the Ariadne role and probably is meant to point us to Juturna and the rebel undines.*** Anyway, the story does the job of calming everybody down, and everybody decides to get some shut eye, except for Severian, who starts thinking about insomnia in various ways and eventually Thecla's thoughts on the subject surface but then "she" realizes where they are and next thing we know, hey, Severian knows where the Exultant Jerk Squad's secret door is and "soon" Severian and Jonas are off to explore other bits of the House Absolute.

After lots of wandering and discussion of Jonas' nature, which I've already talked about above, they find a strange room, which proves to be Father Inire's chamber of "mirrors" (though, as Severian observes, they reflect and bend, not just light, but reality) and Jonas uses it to disappear, perhaps never to return, though I'm going to be looking for him among the chems on the Long Sun Whorl, and a sort of amalgamated version of him is going to rejoin Severian later on in the form of the resurrected solider, Miles. But that's later.

Severian then wanders around some more, alone, hoping to find Dr. Talos et al (whom he saw in passing just as he and Jonas were being captured, so he knows there here at the House Absolute somewhere!) encountering the khabit version of Thea (last seen in the brothel "The House Azure" where prostitutes "resembling" (or maybe sometimes "being") famous exultant women are there for paying customers' entertainment, spends quite a lot of time (with the "help" of Odilo the Steward) searching for the disused closet where the praetorians stashed Terminus Est when he was captured, and then blunders into Rudesind, still cleaning paintings and insisting he's doing so in the same place where Severian first met him long, long ago. Severian protests it was in the archives, this is the House Absolute. To-may-to, to-mah-to, Rudesind basically says, and while he goes back to work, Severian blunders into a painting! Sort of!

See, it turns out that when the House Absolute was built, Father Inire had the walls cunningly fashioned to hold and hide very shallow, dimensionally weird extra rooms, amounting to a whole "Second House," as a strange, androgynous and weirdly familiar person he encounters in the shallow side-room explains to him. Who is this person? Why, it's the pimp from the House Azure! And thus, Severian has met Autarch Appian for a third time.

And Appian has a doozy of a segue. When Severian asks the way back to the garden where he is pretty sure Dr. Talos et al are, "Even supposing that I knew the way, why would I reveal it to you? Many will seek to flee by that road if the pelagic argosy sights land."

DRAMA BUTTON!

*The saint she's named for was a traveling miracle worker in 14th century Italy. She doesn't work any miracles here, unless you consider getting Severian to explain himself a little to be a miracle, or somehow seeing Thecla in his place for a moment to be a miracle, so this is one of those characters that I'm always wondering maybe turns up "in disguise" somewhere else later on? Or that we've already met? Kind of like the dark haired woman in the pale gown whom Vodalus and Thea were harvesting from the graveyard the night Severian saved them. Too early to be Thecla, who at that point was still at large and not even a prisoner of the Torturers, but... are they just pulling random bodies out to have for their alzabo-feasts, or is that someone important? No one seems to have any good suggestions for who that is, either. This kind of stuff just drives me nuts.

**Though as these people are likely descended from the survivors of a timey-wimey spaceship crash, this funeral cortege might not be quite so old a story for them; those original survivors might have been members of my own generation, say, or Millennials -- kids who grew up with Boomer parents who imposed these narratives on them first hand.

***Which, speaking of the rebel undines, I've developed a new theory about them, too. They aren't necessarily interested in the larger issues of the New Sun and the redemption of humanity or any of that nonsense; what if instead they are simply sick of Abaia's shit, don't want their babies to be warlords, and just want to go do their own thing? That's right: Undines: Fury Road, bitches.

Hey, Abaia, looking for this?

But of course, oh shit, that means that...

Max is Severian -- he starts off his adventure in a big ugly mask! -- and Furiosa is Jonas the cyborg. I just blew my own mind.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Claw of the Conciliator 1-5

After leaving  us with a bit of a cliffhanger in the chaos at the Gate of Nessus at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe engages in a bit of torturing of his own now by starting us off with a scene involving someone named Morwenna, which who the Snape is this and why do we care? What happened at the Gate, dammit!

We get bits and pieces but Severian is grudging with this information and insists on mixing it in with his dreams and his "perfect" memories, claiming that sometimes he just trips out on those memories like when someone says the name Vodalus. And someone said Vodalus to him on his arrival, post Gate Chaos, in the town of Saltus, where we're taking up his story, so as far as  he's concerned, his perfect memory is crowded by... his perfect memory of his cemetery encounter with Vodalus at the beginning of the first book?

Aww, man!

But soon Wolfe is making it up to us, because Saltus is serving  up a variety of delights, partly just because Severian is there. The aforementioned Morwenna needs killing, for one thing, and so does another guy, who everyone has decided is a dirty spy for Vodalus (hence the Memory Lane), and so does yet another guy, a cattle thief. And if there's gonna be an execution, there needs to be a fair! And if there are gonna be three executions, it needs to be a really great fair!

And the first attraction is, a very special attraction! Saltus, it seems, has a tradition of sealing up malefactors in their houses (after removing all of the food and valuables) to starve in the dark! And then, when said malefactor is good and dead, they break open the house and remove the corpse (or thing the malefactor has, uh, become*) and sell the house off! And Severian and Jonas (the only member of the Gate Gang who managed to stick with Severian) are just in time to watch the fun! And so, onward, the battering ram, let's get this guy Barnoch out.** Barnoch being, of course, the aforementioned dirty spy. Who might not be dead yet because hey, if they'd have known Severian was coming, they would have baked a cake. Or at least not tried baking a Barnoch?***

And of course Severian, who still considers himself a follower of Vodalus, starts fretting about having to kill one of his fellows. This doesn't stop him from following the battering ram into the foul-smelling house once they break through, though! And yes, what they find is kind of a tall Gollum, except instead of muttering about The Precious he insists that "I will be free... Vodalus will come!"

Oh, and in the resulting hullabulloo, whom does Severian glimpse in the crowd but Agia? Man, that chick is a bit of a stalker, no? But then Severian can't locate her! But soon something more important happens because GREEN MAN.

He was apparently captured a little while ago, and is going to be exhibited at the fair. He might even grant you three... oh wait, wrong green man. Or is it?

And also, Severian learns, someone brought a cathedral to the fair! And yes, it's that cathedral! Well, a replacement for that cathedral because of course the one Severian accidentally pillaged burned down! And supposedly rose up into the air on the updrafts it created because the cathedral is a big tent! Maybe that's what Severian and Dorcas saw! But, you know, only on the most pathetic level of reality.

But then, monomaniac that Severian sometimes is, he gets the idea that the Green Man might know where Agia is, since green men know everything and all. And so soon Severian is alone with said green man, whom he finds a prisoner and possibly a slave, which is contrary to his ethics. But he is also quite a fascinating specimen who claims to be from the far future, his green hue being due to his people's having established a symbiotic relationship with some algae so that the green man can basically keep himself going via photosynthesis instead of food, as long as his captors don't get mad at him and cut off his sunlight. Finally, though the green man can only tell Severian that Agia is "above ground" Severian hands him half of his whetstone -- in other words, giving the green man the means to free himself from the chain that binds him to this place and time. This act of kindness will resonate very subtly through the rest of the Book of the New Sun, and possibly through the entire rest of the Solar Cycle, but Severian pretends to be unaware of this at this point in his narrative and just mentions watching comprehension dawn on the Green Man's face as he realizes he's being freed.

Then comes the time for Severian to do his job again, this time with Jonas as a sort of assistant. This turns out to be even more of a production than when he executed Agilus near the end of Shadow of the Torturer. This is not only because there are three victims, but also because the alcade of Saltus is a bit of a showman, though a nervous one. First he leads everyone in a prayer to the Increate/Conciliator/God that is pretty amusing considering that Severian is standing right next to him as he intones:

"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 whither 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 that no one sees."

I've always paid more attention to the first part of this prayer than the second, but since I've come to align myself with those who argue that the Whorl system in which Book of the Short Sun takes place and that of Urth (which is our own good old familiar system in the unbelievably distant past or future, depending on how you choose to look at this whole Cycle) are one and the same, I find myself entertaining thoughts of Severian  somehow carrying on through Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun, perhaps via the Green Man, who might be himself in a later state of being just as some suggest that Severian himself might be Typhon in a new guise/incarnation; perhaps in some more mundane form in the person of Patera Silk, or something? I need to think longer on this. My brain is wanting to make a logical narrative connection in which Severian winds up in Green's jungles, wherever they "really" turn out to be, but I'll confess to feeling a little defeated in this, just now.

At any rate, it's killing time. First up is Morwenna, accused of poisoning her husband and child, chiefly on the word of one Eusebia, who we learn was in love with said husband and considered Morwenna a hussy who stole him away. Eusebia's successful prosecution/persecution of the beautiful Morwenna is her revenge, but Morwenna manages to avenge herself before she dies by poisoning a bouquet of purple roses Eusebia brought to taunt her with ("die before these fade") on her way up to the scaffold. As Severian ends Morwenna's life, he tries to comfort her with another unintentionally amusing observation "Try to remember that almost everyone who has ever lived has died, even the Conciliator, who will rise as the New Sun."****

From here we move briskly along to the aftermath in which Severian and Jonas enjoy a brief spell of being treated like rock stars. We don't get any description of the man's execution, because Severian tells us he doesn't really feel like talking about every single one he performed on his way to his post at Thrax. "When I describe my travels, you are to understand that I practiced the mystery of our guild where it was profitable to do so, though I do not mention the specific occasions."

Over dinner, Severian finds himself the recipient of a note! And what a note it is, for it is purportedly from none other than his beloved Thecla, who claims that Father Inire interceded on her behalf and she just faked her suicide. "Did you look? I lay as still as death... I seemed to feel your pain when  you saw me there." And Severian is given instructions to proceed to a rendezvous with her that she might impart to him "a grave secret." Snickerhoot.

Not one to wait around when a girl calls for him, Severian asks to borrow Jonas' horse-thing but winds up stealing a destrier (some kind of alien-horse hybrid that serves as the mount of the very important) and following a brook to its origin in a cliff face "flooding out like saliva from the lips of a petrified titan."****** This is how to get to the mine shaft where he is supposed to meet Thecla. Cue Admiral Ackbar? At any rate, Severian would utterly fail at text adventures, for he never bothered to Get Lamp.

And thus, in the dark, we leave him for now.

*As the alcalde (the mayor, more or less) tells Severian: "A woman sealed in the dark long enough can become something very strange, just like the strange things you find in rotten wood, back among the big trees. We're miners, mostly, here in Saltus, and used to things found  underground, but we took to our heels and came back with torches. It didn't like the light, or the fire, either." Heh heh. Sounds like at some point they accidentally cooked themselves a Gollum, eh? But of course, what they sealed in the house might have only appeared human to start with. This is Urth, not Middle Earth, after all.

**When people fret that Gene Wolfe doesn't seem to have a sense of humor, I always want to trot out Barnoch. As far as I can tell, and I'm no hagiographer, not even Catholic, but as far as I can tell, this guy's namesake saint is Barrog, who is famous for being... hee hee hee... a hermit. A hermit whose chapel became a famous pilgrimage site. Come on. That's funny!

***Hee  hee.

****Tee hee.

******Our first hint that all of these mountains have been turned into a giant Mount Rushmore, really, no? Or at least a foreshadowing of same.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 31-35

We now find Severian poised to do his job for the first time in public. Step One: stand there and look menacing to "symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice" and intimidate the crowd. Step Two (apparently) muse to himself about the nature of crowds and mobs and make socioeconomic assumptions about this particular crowd-mob who is gathered to watch him execute Agilus. Step Three: Off with his head (with graphic descriptions of how it feels and smells to cut off someone's head). Step Four: Profit. So at least Severian has this over the Underpants Gnomes. Step Five: Sing an XTC song* to your [REDACTED] new girlfriend. And reflect on what a dirty liar Agia was for saying, among many, many other things, that the avern's leaves alone could kill people. Ha.

And while Severian and Dorcas are somewhat cattily recounting their adventure together so far, talk turns to the note left for them at the Inn of Lost Loves. Severian goes fishing in his murse for the copy of it he made but pulls out... oh noes! The Claw of the Conciliator! Which  he and Dorcas figure out must have been slipped into the murse during the scuffle at the Pelerines' Cathedral Tent by Agia, making Severian into a dirty liar in that encounter.

And of course, though this won't occur to Severian until later (supposedly), the presence of the Claw on his person when he fell into the Lake of Birds is probably what brought Dorcas** back to life. For of course she was not only a corpse in the lake, but the very same Cas for whom the Boatman was searching, suddenly in vain. Poor Boatman.

Anyway, then they see something over which I still tend to scratch my head a bit: "Hanging over the city like a flying mountain in a dream was an enormous building -- a building with towers and buttresses and an arched roof." Severian's jaw barely has time to drop before it disappears, though. Of course, this is probably our first look at Tzadkiel's spaceship, and maybe Tzadkiel getting His/Her first direct look at Severian, but why here, why now? Is it really just because he found the Claw at this point?

Oh, the Claw. The Claw and the vision of the City In The Sky Thing touch off a long philosophical discussion between Severian and Dorcas about metaphor and meaning and The Wonders of Urth and Sky that is basically just Gene Wolfe making sure we understand that this is not just another Dying Earth adventure story we're getting into, here. We know, sir. We know.

And while they puzzle over this stuff, they encounter, well what do you know? Dr. Talos and Baldanders' Traveling Show! Performing right now! And Severian is just in time to play his part, and hey, there's a part for Dorcas, too! Severian is Death and  Dorcas is Innocence!*** And though they don't know their parts at all, Talos is such a great director that they manage to play them anyway!

Oh, and by the way, there is a new member of the troupe, though it turns out Severian met her once before, for she was the bedraggled waitress whom Dr. Talos convinced to let him make her into a beautiful actress. Which Talos did, boy howdy. Helloooooooooo Nurse! Jolenta**** is one Marilyn Munroe caliber bombshell (and Wolfe has said in interviews that this was a resemblance he intended, but, you know, Wolfe in interviews. Heh). But meanwhile, the play. The play! We don't get to read the text of the drama until the end of Claw of the Conciliator because Severian has chosen at this point to convey only his confusion and first impressions of it. Baldanders is Big and Scary. Talos is Wily and Foxy. Speaking of Foxy, Jolenta is Purty. Did he mention that Jolenta is Purty? Jolenta is Purty. And the play is Weird and Metaphorical and he gets to tie everybody down at some point or other, like a good little Torturer. And then at the end of the play, when Baldanders scares off the audience real good, the party combs the field for "dropsies" -- valuables that audience members happened to leave behind in their haste to get away from the Maddened Giant. How droll.

Really, I kind of love this interlude. Can you tell?

Then it's time to sleep under the stars, and, for Severian, to secretly ogle the Claw some more. And, um, reminisce about his first teacher, Master Malrubius (who was possibly Father Inire in disguise before Master Paleamon was Father Inire in disguise? Maybe?), and then dream (or maybe not?) about a visit from Triskele, possibly following up on the Tzadkiel fly-over? Perhaps summoned by Severian's thoughts of Triskele's fellow aquastor? And then Severian, now lying happily back-to-back with his (resurrected?) dead dog, dreams of Master Malrubius quizzing him on the seven systems of government. How much of this is a dream and how much a visitation from his aquastors? Are they testing his fitness for his eventual role this early? But if not, why else would these two appear in the story at this point? And does Baldanders get a similar visitation in the night?

The next morning, Severian shares a bit of an account of his experience with Talos, who assures him that out here in the real world, he noticed no such thing, and since he doesn't really ever seem to sleep, he would notice if there was something to notice.

Then over breakfast, Severian lets fall the news that he's not going to travel along with the troupe; he has "business" with the Order of Pelerines, i.e., he wants to return the Claw to them. So then comes time to divvy up the money, and Talos shocks everyone by not taking a share at all.

And then they are interrupted by the coming of Hethor, he of the unprepossessing yet familiar appearance and stuttering, riddling talk of a sailing ship among the stars. It all sounds, again, very like a hologram-view of Severian's larger story arc. Turns out he is quoting from the play, the text of which we readers have not yet had the benefit of getting, which is itself basically a hologram of Severian's story. Ow, my brain. At any rate, he comes across as just a deranged fanboi at first, and Severian dismisses him as such (once Talos establishes that he isn't one of those lunatics who thinks the play is real): "There are a good many of them... They find pleasure in pain, and want to associate with us [Torturers] just as a normal man might want to be around Dorcas and Jolenta." And all Hethor wants is to come along with them, just for the love of... them.

Oh yeah, that's going to end well.

Next thing  you know, Dorcas is talking again about how much she didn't like and actually was kind of afraid of Agia and Hethor is offering to carry Severian's sword! Of course Severian politely refuses, and while he's yes, thinking of Agia's plot to part him from Terminus Est, he thinks it's just a coincidence.

And then CHAOS. Because they've finally come to the enormous Wall (so tall that only big powerful birds like eagles fly over it, made of the same strange black metal that the spaceship-that-became-the-Citadel was made of, etc.) that surrounds the city of Nessus*****, and there are crowds. And from the crowd emerges a man on a merychip (basically, an archaic name for what might well be an archaic horse. At any rate, I've always pictured a near ancestor of the good old horse we know, possibly one with toes), Jonas(Hooray Jonas!) who claims that he's heading to meet the Pelerines on business himself! But actually, they've left the city; he saw their mournful procession (doubtless mourning the loss of the Claw?).

So through the Gate they go. Or rather, into the Gate, which Severian compares to entering a mine, but a mine with windows in its walls through which passersby can observe men and women and "cacogens" (aliens) and "beasts with too much of men about them, so that horned heads watched us with eyes too wise, and mouths that appeared to speak showed teeth like nails or hooks." Talos explains that these, all of these, are soldiers who live in the wall "like mice" in honeycomb-like passages and tunnels all through it; they are Nessus' real defense.

As they proceed, Jonas ingratiates himself further to the party by telling them a myth he knows about the Wall, which of course also gives  us some hints about the origins on Urth of Abaia and his Brides in the tale of a woman returned from the stars with a handful of black beans and told the "lords of men" that if she were not obeyed she would throw them into the sea and thus end the world. Which, guess what happened there.

Meanwhile, chaos. A wagoneer accidentally-on-purpose hits Jolenta's face, then Dorcas', with his whip. Severian attacks the wagoneer, everybody else freaks out, and... the story shall continue in The Claw of the Conciliator. Where we can immediately start off by wondering WTS is Morwenna, and what does this have to do with this mad scene at the Gate?

*This one. And yes, I have it playing on the jukebox in my head every time I come to this conversation.

**And here is as good a time as any to talk about Dorcas and death. As far as I can tell, this character's namesake saint was a disciple (mentioned in the Book of Acts) basically famous for dying and "being mourned by all the widows." So merely by her name, Wolfe is telling us that she was dead until Severian came along.

***Though I suppose a case could be made for it being the other way around, eh?

****I guess she's named for Yolanda (aka Jolenta) of Poland? Beatified for her kindness to the poor while married to Duke Boleslaw the Pious (she herself was the daughter of the King and Queen of Poland), she is otherwise only known for being the daughter, wife or sister of famous and important good people. In addition, the BotNS character is described by Severian in the same kind of terms with which he described the woman who portrays Holy Katharine for the Guild's ceremonies: Jolenta's face is "pure and perfect as the curve of a rainbow" (earlier in Shadow of the Torturer, Severian described Catherine/Katharine's face as "a pool of pure water found in the midst of a wood").  This all kind of argues for her maybe being Severian's imagined twin sister in addition to all of Borski's claims. But like I said, the sister hunt is not that big a deal for me.

*****I want to take a closer look at the name of the city here, because it is here that we learn a bit about why it has that name. Jonas tells us that Nessus was not the original name, for back when the Autarch first established his dominion there and built the Wall (not to defend his city from outsiders, but to defend himself from his subjects), "the river was unpoisoned." In Greek mythology, Nessus was a centaur whom Heracles defeated, and whose tainted blood in turn killed Heracles. Nessus' blood, of course, was tainted by a poisoned arrow Heracles fired at him when he tried to make off with Heracles' wife; whom the centaur tricked into dosing her husband with his blood later on in the mistaken belief that it would keep him faithful to her. I'm still sorting out how all this relates to the relationship between the Autarch and his city. I suspect it has something to do with a bad bargain the exultants struck with the Autarch to come and suppress dissent and class war. Old King Log vs. Old King Stork and all. I'm also interested in how this river gets the name of a creature from mythology, which, according to the naming scheme pretty much everyone has accepted for these books, means that, somehow, the river itself is somehow an alien? Or perhaps it was just altered to make it more hospitable to the aliens like Abaia and his Brides?

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 21-25

We left Severian and Agia touring Father Inire's bizarre masterpiece, the Botanic Gardens of Nessus. Severian did not want to leave the Sand Garden, feeling strangely drawn there (since these gardens are pretty much just an extension of Father Inire's optical time machine, I maintain that it's entirely possible that he got sucked into the life of Apu-Punchau then; who wouldn't want to stick around and be a Mu'ad Dib-ish desert god?), but now blundered into the Jungle Garden to have one of the strangest encounters in this entire novel: the Jungle Hut.

Lots is written all over the web about this scene, in which Severian and Agia both do and do not interact with some inhabitants of the Garden in their hut. Robert and the Zulu shaman Isangoma (his name literally means "shaman" in the Zulu language) can see Severian and Agia, but Marie cannot. We learn that, per Isangoma, it's because Robert is an artist and has trained himself to observe what is actually there, while Marie just sees what she expects to see, but only Robert seems prepared to treat Severian and Agia as actual visitors to his hut; Isangoma regards them as "tokoloshe" -- spirit creatures that occur "when man think bad thought or woman do bad thing" and then remain until the end of the world. Or, as Robert says, kind of agreeing with Isangoma but pulling his punches a bit "They are the spirits of the future, and we make them ourselves."

From all the clues strewn about, including a plane that appears, readers generally conclude that Marie and Robert are 20th Century missionaries who, either accidentally or by Father Inire's design, happened across the corresponding geographical location of one of Inire's mirror-access-point-things and wound up in the Jungle Garden. Possibly Isangoma and his tribe did as well, and might be from a yet different point in time, though how they got from Africa to South America...? I don't even.

Anyway, Isangoma recites an interesting bit of rhyme, that may or may not be another hologram of Severian's story and eventual role in the universe:

In the night when all is silent,
Hear him screaming in the treetops!
See him dancing in the fire!
He lives in the arrow poison,
Tiny as a yellow firefly!
Brighter than a falling star!
Hairy men walk in the forest.*
He comes when the sun is setting,
See his feet upon the water!
Tracks of flame across the water!"

There is apparently more to this rhyme, but this is what we get. Note that while Severian's world features a dying red sun, but all of this sun imagery is yellow. Either Isangoma in his little diorama only knows the good old yellow sun that we enjoy, or this is a reference to the New Sun. Hmm.

Even more curiously, Isangoma basically uses this celebration of Severian (wink) as a banishing charm against Severian and Agia. Coincidentally, his poetry slam coincides with Agia getting bored and wanting to leave. "If you want to stay... you'll have to get your avern yourself, and find your way to the Sanguinary Fields." And if he doesn't show up, "the snake called yellowbeard" will be sic'd on Severian's family and friends, including her.

Insert your favorite joke about Graham Chapman's snake here.

They argue some more about the nature of the Gardens and their effect on certain people. Like Severian. No Garden of Delectation for him. Not that there's time anyway. Macht schnell! Off to get the damn avern.

Severian is not expecting a lake, and neither are we. I talked a little bit last time about the Lake of Birds, and the popular reader theory that this is a reference to Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake that may once have emitted poisonous, bird-killing fumes. It all fits very nicely.

I'm kind of surprised my good friend EssJay didn't jump up and down and yell "Dead Marshes" at me when she got to this part, actually. There are some major similarities: the tea-colored water "has the property of preserving corpses" for instance. But here, the corpses are sunk into it deliberately, with weights, their positions mapped so they can be fished out later if anyone wants to, Agia explains.

But someone begs to differ. OK, I'm not going to get too into this whole thing with the Boatman and who he probably is, and Dorcas and who she probably is here, because my first time read-alongers will just throw things at me, but it's pretty common knowledge. Anyway, here's  the Boatman , doing his Charon bit, on a boat on the Lake of Birds, and he's having a hell of a time finding his beloved Cas, because the Map of Corpses sucks. Or the corpses move around because there is a pipeline to Gyoll that keeps the Lake of Birds from drying out** and manatees (or undines, wink) come and go as they please and mess things up. It is because of the manatundines that the averns were planted on Father Inire's orders, furthermore. Anyway, five years  the Boatman  has been doing this! Severian is sympathetic, though he suspects  the Boatman is "spell-caught" and his kindness earns him a "wish I could help you, but my boat is too small" from the old man. Fortunately, there's another, proper ferryman nearby.

But first Severian has to catch Agia, who is tear-assing along as fast as her messed-up leg*** can take her, so he has to sort-of-run to catch up to her. So of course he falls into the water. He sure does like almost drowning, that Severian. Is he really just crying out to be baptized? While in the water, he drops his sword, which he now has to frantically search for in the stems of the reeds growing in the lake. And while he's doing so, he makes contact with what feels like a human hand. And it feels like that hand is returning his sword to him, Lady of the Lake style. Juturna again?

Or maybe it's the woman with "streaming yellow hair" who helps Severian back onto land. What? Where did she come from? Oh, and Agia and another man, who proves to be one Hildegrin and is the other ferryman, are there now, too. But who's the blonde, covered in mud, wearing little but rags? Introductions all around, including a contemptuous reference to Severian as Agia's fish that seems pretty interesting (see my immediate prior Suns Suns Suns post for a refresher on Father Inire's fish) but nobody notices.

The blonde is Dorcas. And she doesn't remember how she got there. Maybe she just wandered in? Maybe someone sank her under the waters because she was in a "com'er" and they thought she was dead? But who's this ferryman, then?

Well, for starters, he's not a ferryman, but a "badger"**** -- basically, an excavator of things -- but he has a big boat, and when Severian tells him about meeting  the Boatman, Hildegrin says he feels sorry for the old guy and will do this favor for  the Boatman's sake.

But first, Agia really wants to get rid of Dorcas, who is still pretty out of it. Severian makes lots of suggestions, trying, basically, to get her to go to a better, warmer part of the Gardens, like maybe the Sand Garden? Because it's dry and sunny there? "Yes. Sun." (!) But finally they give up on ditching her and she gets to come in the boat. And hear Hildegrin's lecture about the Lake of Birds, most of the substance of which I've already shared, except for the bit about the Cave of the Cumaean (as in the Cumaean Sibyl, who may or may not be the same person as the historical Cumaean Sibyl), whom the Autarch wants there "so he can come and talk without travelin' to the other side of the world" (Italy?). We'll have more about her later, though.

This is my favorite Cumaean image. That is one butch sibyl, Michaelangelo!

Oh, and during some more of Severian's pseudo-philosophical ruminations, Dorcas maneuvers him into grabbing her breast. "Now what are your thoughts? If I have made the external world sweet to you, aren't they less than they were?"

I'm pretty sure that would be a big 10-4, granny.

And finally, it's avern time.

Freaky weird things, averns. Basically, I guess they're weaponized mutant sunflowers. "Each leaf was like a dagger blade, stiff and pointed, with edges sharp enough to satisfy even Master Gurloes." And poisoned. It even kills off the birds and the bees 8o But the flowers are very pretty. Almost hypnotically pretty: "their petals curled in a way that... formed a complex swirling pattern that drew the eye like a spiral limned on a revolving disk." Oh yeah, combat with this will be interesting. Who the Snape thought of that, anyway?

And the actual method of combat-by-avern is totally the Quidditch of BotNS. Instead of swinging it like a mace, like Severian expects, instead one twists off the leaves one by one and chucks them at one's opponent. OK, half Quidditch, half Oriza. While being careful to make sure the opponent can't grab the bare patch you leave by twisting off leaves, and wrestle your flower away from you. And not pricking yourself with the poisoned leaves. Or being hypnotized by  your or your opponent's blossom.

I don't even.

But so, it's almost combat time for real, so at last we leave the Gardens and head to the Inn of Lost Loves (all good duels start at a picturesque inn. It's the law), which is right near the huge and (in Dorcas' opinion) terrifying City Wall, which "goes halfway to the sky" (but what wall doesn't, really? What is the height of the sky, again? Exactly). I must confess, this inn sounds like my kind of place. No buildings are permitted so close to the wall, so it has neither walls nor roof, and is basically a series of platforms surrounded by greenery.

And Severian gets ready to fight. He has explained earlier that he believed the challenge was the Guild's round-about way of finally executing him for the crime of assisting Thecla in her "escape" and so he is letting himself be led to the slaughter, but I call bullshytt on this: if he didn't care if he survived, why bother practicing with the avern? Surely not just because Agia is sexy. Surely. Right? And yet here Agia is, offering to do, uh, something, behind the screen...

But no! Because NOTE DRAMA! After the innkeeper lays down the law on how much and when he is going to get paid (snickerhoot at the deposit for dinner, with the rest paid when you eat, and if you don't survive your duel, well, that's why his prices are so darn reasonable!), he is discovered to have left a scrap of folded paper beneath a tray. Severian jokes about the melodramatic possibilities of getting a secret note before a duel, but Agia takes it so seriously that she gets naked and say's she'll schtup him then and there if he promises not to read the note. But Severian is more interested in the note, for all of his protestations to us of how she made him "stupid with desire."

The note is interesting. "The woman with you has been here before. Do not trust her. Trudo says the man is a torturer. You are my mother come again."

*Here Isangoma is interrupted by Agia, so this may be a lacuna.

**I stumbled across a delightful theory on Urth.net, the gyst of which is that the Lake of Birds is Lake Avernus in Italy at the time of its fume-belching worst, but that the pipeline the Boatman mentions is to the Gyoll of Urth. Which would mean that Gyoll, untold thousands of years in our future, is keeping a volcanic lake from hundreds of years in our past, full of water. Oh, and it also allows undines to go back and forth between the river and the lake as they need to. Possibly to switch the corpses around?

***Another reason folks like Borski posit Agia as a relative of Severian's: she's lame like he will be, for a while. OK.

****And, Severian susses out from his familiar voice when he says something about getting the females to safety, Hildegrin is probably the guy who was hanging out with Vodalus the night Severian saved Vodalus' life. THICK PLOT IS THICK!

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 16-20

"Do you think there are answers to everything here? Is that true in the place where you come from?"

This question, posed by the relatively newly-met Agia to Severian as they tour the mysterious Botanical Gardens of Nessus, stands out to me on this reading as one of the most blatant cases of direct authorial taunting Gene Wolfe -- or perhaps any author -- has indulged in. It also feels like the central question of his Solar Cycle.

But first, let us backtrack to where we left off last time. Severian has met Dr. Talos and Baldanders, and has more or less agreed to be part of their traveling show, or at least to travel alongside them for a while. And he will do this, eventually. But not just now. As Chapter 16 opens and the trio sit down to breakfast at a cafe, Severian is already pretty much making plans to ditch the pair as soon as he can.

But first, they meet someone. Someone who will also be joining the troupe, though she won't be recognizable when Severian next sees her: the Waitress!* But all she does here is serve some mocha and gruel and let herself be sweet-talked by Talos into letting him make her into a beautiful actress. Well, what girl can resist an offer like that?

And then they all part ways, supposedly for a time; Severian agrees to meet them at a place called Ctesiphon's Cross**, does Severian know where that is? Uh, sure he does (no he doesn't). Aaaaaand skeedaddle. Because...

It's time for Severian to go shopping. That's right. SHOPPING. He took those law enforcement buffoons from last time seriously when their boss advised him to get something to cover up that fulgin cloak, badass sword and, oh yes, naked chest. So first, he does the Dying Earth/Faux Medieval equivalent of window shopping, and then, because he's Severian and nothing happens without this vital element, he sees a pretty girl, whom he ogles:

She wore a pavonine brocade gown of amazing richness and raggedness, and as I watched her, the sun touched a rent just below her waist, turning the skin there to palest gold.*** I cannot explain the desire I felt for her, then and afterward. Of the many women I have known, she was, perhaps, the least beautiful - less graceful than her I have loved most, less voluptuous than another, less reginal far than Thecla... I loved her with a love that was deadly and yet not serious.

And this is Agia, she of the provocative question with which I opened this post. She's in a rich dress that's seen better days because she and her twin brother, Agilus, own a used clothing stall. When Severian approaches her, she checks him out and seems to like what she sees (namely his amazing and expensive sword, and his darker-than-black cloak) and talks him into going into her shop, though she neglects to inform him that it's her shop. She does not go in with him.

Behind the counter is her brother, Agilus, wearing a strange mask "more frightening than any torturer. His face was a skeleton's or nearly so." Like any good shopkeeper, he immediately goes into dickering mode, but Severian is hung up on his mask and comments on it, so finally Agilus removes it. The dickering continues; Agilus is hell bent on buying the cloak and sword, but Severian is interested in parting with neither. Then he notices that "the ribbons that held your mask... they're still there."**** Before this interesting point can be discussed further, though, they are interrupted by an armored and helmeted hipparch (a cavalry officer, basically), who doesn't speak, but forces a black avern***** seed on Severian and leaves. As Agilus explains, Severian has just been ordered to fight a duel, not with swords (Agilus tries to get Severian to leave Terminus Est with him, har har) but with averns. Severian has no idea how this has come to pass, and is kind of in shock, so Agilus takes him in hand, sells him a mantle to cover his torturer garb, and says since Severian is his customer, and he's never abandoned a customer, he'll help by sending his sister to help Severian get his avern. What a nice guy, that Agilus!

Of course, Severian, who seems awfully insistent on convincing us that he was in love with Agia, even though he had just met her, is more than happy to have her company on this weird adventure, and burdens us with a bit of Ishmaelian philosophizing to justify and enlarge his decision to play along with this scheme the twins have cooked up. He evokes, for instance, a simple story of an Autarch from the long, long ago, Ymar, and how there are so many different interpretations of that little story. "Of me it might be asked why I accepted the shopkeeper's sister as my companion." Yeah, it might.

Step One: Cut an avern. No wait. Step One: get to the Botanic Gardens so they can cut an avern. No wait. Step One: Hire a fiacre to carry them to the Botanic Gardens in style. Okay, got that? So. Step Two: Get to the Botanic Gardens so they can cut an avern. No wait. Step Two: get into a stupid race with another fiacre, piss off everyone in the marketplace, go crashing into the Cathedral of the Pelerines and "accidentally" trash their altar, where is kept that super valuable gem we keep hearing about, the Claw of the Concilator. In the chaos, Terminus Est gets misplaced, and the straw on the floor catches fire, and it is in that setting that an exultant-tall woman, angry in scarlet, comes marching up with Severian's sword. Is there, perhaps, something of value of theirs that Severian might return, also?

Uh, no?

Very well, the Pelerines conclude. "The  Claw has not vanished in living memory, but it does so at will and it would be neither possible nor permissible for us to stop it." Which is a strange thing to say about a gem, even a gem called a Claw.

So yeah, about the Claw. Finally we learn some more about it, courtesy of Agia as she and Severian now walk to the Botanic Gardens. Remember the Botanic Gardens? But anyway, the Claw. It is understood to have had "some real association" with a quasi-messianic figure from ancient-ish history called The Conciliator, whom Agia, and by association/extension the Pelerines who keep this figure's memory, can't quite refer to as historical or dead because maybe he never lived, or maybe he's still alive? This will all, of course, be sorted out for us in a later novel, but for now, he is supposed to have been the Master of Power "Which means the transcendence of reality, and includes the negation of time." And so this artifact, which may or may not be actually his, is believed to have certain powers. It "forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust"... no word on the julienne fries, but come on, it's a Claw, right?

Severian (paraphrased): huh huh. You said lust. I lust you.
Agia (paraphrased): I don't lust you back, because you might get killed.
Severian (paraphrased): Yeah, about that. You sure this isn't just you and your brother trying to trick me?
Agia: (shakes her ass)

And they kiss.

So now, let's talk about this a bit. What do we think is really going on in all of this? Is Severian onto the Twins' real plan now, and just going along with it for his own ends? Was the crash into the Cathedral Tent really an accident? The Pelerines saw no deception in Severian when he claimed not to have stolen the Claw: is that because he didn't steal it, or because you can't steal what's already yours? Or rather, something that you might have stolen a really, really long time ago but then substituted something else for that you sort of found along the way but then that became the real thing and...

Ow, my brain.

But so here's what I think this time. I think Severian is telling porkies. Here. I think he played dumb with the Twins because he saw a way to "blunder" into the Cathedral to get the Claw and that getting the Claw was the whole point of his little detour through this part of Nessus. Because he was going to need the Claw's powers very soon, because Dorcas (whom I think of as the one he loved most, and never mind who else she is, just now). I realize this is going to make no sense at all to first-time readers who don't yet understand just how much mucking about with time and space is really going on here. But that's how I'm reading it. The priorities here are Claw and Dorcas.

So okay, back to the story. It's time to visit the Botanical Gardens, a place we are soon led to conflate with Father Inire's mirrors, the Corridors of Time, and Tzadkiel's spaceship because this is not just any hothouse. It's a hothouse of many ecosystems, each supposedly just cunningly designed so they feel bigger on the inside on the outside, but every once in a while, things happen to betray the Gardens' dual/treble/OMGble nature. Like the roar of a smilodon Severian hears in the Jungle Garden.

And then there's the Jungle. Oh, the Jungle. Tell me this doesn't feel like a little slice the planet Green from Book of the Short Sun. But anyway.

Severian and Agia meet some of the staff, who are members of the Curators' Guild and brag about, among other things, the Garden of Antiquities, which features "Hundreds and hundreds of extinct plants, including some that have not been seen for tens of millions of years."****** Now, how do you suppose they got those?

As for Agia, she really wants to get Severian into the Garden of Delectation, for reasons that are never made totally clear to us, but might be prurient (in his dreams). They explore for what doesn't seem to be much time at all but which Agia insists was too long; they've missed out on a chance to do anything now but cut his avern. Wait, what? "The gardens affect some people like that," Agia explains. The Autarch has decided having some people kind of stuck in each scene will make them more realistic, and so Father Inire has "invested them with a conjuration" so that people will want to. Severian says he felt as if he belonged there, and that there was a woman waiting for him just out of sight. Well, of course he did.

Me? I wonder if this isn't a point where he suddenly ducks into the life of Apu-Pinchau for a while.

Oh, Father Inire. Just the mention of his name in conjunction with places that mess with your head leads Severian to his another big delve into memories of storytelling, this time, Thecla's (wink). And whether Agia is listening or not, he tells her the story, all about a young girl whom Father Inire caught posing in front of his giant twinned mirrors in the House Absolute and summoned to his sanctum to "see the fish." No, this is not a euphemism for anything tawdry. It is both an extended metaphor/hologram of/for Severian's story and a real encounter with a partly real fish, which Father Inire conjures via a dazzling array of bright lights and otherworldly mirrors: "In the center, the fish flickered to and fro, a thing formed, as it seemed, by the convergence of the light." As the child watches the light-fish, Father Inire discourses on how light travels, and how things might travel faster than light, and how the image of a thing can, in time, become a thing.

And how much do we really, really know about where Severian came from, anyway?

*And of course, lots of people will cough and say "that will not be the first time he didn't recognize her" because this woman, the waitress-who-will-be-Jolenta, is a leading candidate for Severian's-lost-twin-sister-if-in-fact-he-has-one. Borski certainly thinks so, based on his essential criteria of hair color and other criteria I'm avoiding mentioning because of spoilers.

**Unusual name for a place that's supposedly in a far-future Buenos Aires, no? Ctesiphon was the capital city of the Parthian empire in Persia, a great city of ancient Mesopotamia. It was the winter seat of the Parthian kings, and was later captured a stunning five times by the Romans -- Emperor Julian died trying to take it once -- and was the site of a major battle of World War I as well. I can't find anything about anything called Stesiphon's Cross as such, but there is this:

The Taq-i-Kisra, which was a sort of imperial audience hall. This is all that remains today of the ancient city. It looks like the sort of place where the kinds of plays that Talos et al perform might go over rather nicely. One problem, of course, Ctesiphon is geographically nowhere near Nessus/Buenos Aires, at least as we conventionally understand geography in the 20th/21st centuries. However, as we'll see in the next few chapters and, hell, the next few novels, where -- and when -- are kind of plastic.

***The gold and some other things, of course, leading Borski to conclude that Agia and her brother are Severian's cousins.

****Something else has just occurred to me, guys. Guys. The MASK thing. Who else wears masks alla time in BotNS? I mean besides Severian? Barbatus and Famulimus! Screw this Agia and Agilus are Severians cousins hoo-ha. Agia and Agilus are the first appearance of the Hierodules. And if you think about it, Ossipago is maybe here too. Wink.

*****This is a bizarre and poisonous giant flower we'll hear more about later. The term may come from the Latin "avernus" with more or less means "without birds" and often referred to a lake or other body of water that emits poisonous fumes or steams and over which birds were believed to die if they flew. Keep this in mind in the immediate future, when we get to the Lake of Birds. I'm pretty sure there are no coincidences in Gene Wolfe.

*****And some of which have escaped the confines of the Botanical Gardens and are growing out in the world again. D'oh.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 11-15

So, Severian has ended his apprenticeship and is on the cusp of becoming a Journeyman Torturer. He has lost his virginity to a Thecla-look-alike, become the special companion of Thecla herself, fallen in love with her, and started talking quite elegiacally about his Guild. One gets, does one not, a feeling that not much more of this story is going to take place in the Matachin Tower, among the torturers.

But things don't unfold quite as they've seemed like they would. If this were any other writer, well of course Severian would try to help Thecla escape and run away with her, perhaps to join Vodalus and Thecla's half-sister, Thea, in hiding somewhere. But this is Gene Wolfe, and things just aren't that simple. Starting with the relationship that is still developing, as we start this next section of Shadow of the Torturer, between Severian and Thecla.

I'm terribly interested in a passage early in Chapter Ten, which I left alone last time, where he speaks of being "drawn to the world of ancient knowledge and privilege she represented." Severian is very careful here about how he words things: "If educated men have sometimes thought me, if not their equal, at least one whose company did not shame them, that is owing solely to Thecla," he says immediately after saying the books he brought her were his university and she his oracle. The implication here, to a first-time reader, is that Thecla acted as Severian's tutor, in some fashion, during the winter of her captivity. We will later learn just how much of a mis-characterization that is, though it is true that Thecla's is the (original) education on which Severian will draw. Wink.

The Feast Day of Holy Katharine* comes around, and it's all about Severian; the ritual by which he becomes a journeyman is quite a strange one. After a huge feast, Severian is given a fancy looking fake sword and symbolically kills a woman from the city who impersonates the martyr, the same woman every year. Now, Robert Borski thinks this woman is even more special than she already seems, because Borski is pretty much positive that this woman is Severian's mother. The theory goes that she was originally a Pelerine (a sort of holy order for women in BotNS-verse) who broke her vows, ran off and got pregnant, and thus fell afoul of the Autarch's law and became a "client" of the Guild. Her crimes weren't severe enough for her to be killed, but she would have always had a special relationship with the Guild ever after. Furthermore, she bears some resemblance to Severian, having like him dark hair and a straight nose. Severian compares her face to "a pool of pure water found in the midst of a wood" but is otherwise pretty much unmoved by his encounter with her, though it all feels a little weird when she intones the ritual phrase "Strike and fear not." If Severian really is symbolically killing his own mother, this is a heavy scene. If.

Severian and the Torturers (there's your next band name) then party like rock stars, and the next morning Severian wakes up with his very first hangover. As he struggles in his new little room, he hears footsteps outside it that wig him out a little bit. "I knew I had recognized them, though I could not just then recall whose steps they were. Struggling, I brought back the sound; it was no human tread, only the padding of soft feet, and an almost imperceptible scampering." Is this maybe Triskele (who will turn out to be a bit more than an ordinary dog in Urth of the New Sun)? Or is there a certain Man whose hue rhymes with "lean" padding about certain Corridors? Or is it just apprentices randomly scampering around where they shouldn't be?

Anyway... It's not only for Severian that things have changed, as he soon discovers. For Thecla, despite her certainty that the Autarch would change his mind and order her release and thus has been fantasizing about her future as a cult leader, is about to become more than just a prisoner of the Scare Club for Men, but also a client. She makes a big show of being brave and curious and cynical as Severian escorts her to the machine where she is going to be "excruciated" but when the time comes... it doesn't seem like much, at first, the "Revolutionary," does it? Especially compared to some of the nasty things they walked past to get to it. It seems  most like a mild dose of electro-convulsive therapy, but, as we learn, the treatment itself is not really the excruciation, for all that Thecla does scream.

No, it's afterwards, in the hours and days and weeks that follow the treatment, that are the problem. The revolutionary awakens the Jungian shadow of a person, it would seem, and endows it with tremendous strength and malevolence. The machine turns the self against the self.

Thecla's descriptions of its effects have haunted me since my first reading:

"I thought I saw my worst enemy, a kind of demon. And it was me," she says as Severian bandages her up right after the treatment. And then...

"Since then, I can't control my hands... I can if I think about it, if I know what they're doing. But it is so hard, and I'm getting tired... I bite myself. Bite the lining of my cheeks, and my tongue and lips. Once my hands tried to strangle me, and I thought oh good, I will die now. But I only lost consciousness... My hands are trying to blind me now, to tear my eyelids away."

Egads. It made me shudder again just typing it. And then, because he can't lie to her, Severian answers her bleak questions. Will I be blind? Yes. How long before I die? A month, perhaps. "The thing in you that hates you will weaken as you weaken," and in the end they will die together. DUDE.

And then Severian confesses that he had had thoughts of rescuing her before her excruciation. He even stole a bread knife. But he chickened out. This gives Thecla the idea that pretty much seals Severian's fate as a torturer. She asks for the knife. And he gives it to her. And the thing that hates her gets a helping hand.

So see, he does sort of help her escape.

Then there is nothing for it to go fess up. He expects to be executed for this, but it turns out that would not be lawful. But he's put his Guild in a bind, until the Masters come up with another idea. Turns out, the Guild also used to provide executioners or "lictors" to some of the larger communities outside of Nessus, and one such community has asked for one again. Perfect! Before Severian has really had time to think about anything, he's in Master Palaemon's room, being inspected by via the Master's weird lens contraption that hides his face**, being told of his new job and how to get there, and receiving a magnificently badass sword, Terminus Est ("the line is drawn") that Palaemon just happened to have lying around. Severian is to use it to behead condemned men in the city of Thrax, but meanwhile, he gets to carry it around in a beautiful manskin (!!!) scabbard and hope no one lays too covetous an eye on it, because it is one beautiful sword, fancily decorated and balanced with a core of liquid mercury (okay, "hydrogyrum") so that its killing stroke is extra powerful. Curiously, it has a "man edge" and a "woman edge." But they're both, you know, sharp. Oh, and it doesn't have a sharp point, because it's for cutting, not stabbing.

Image source: Telophase at Deviant Art

It's interesting how Palaemon almost directs Severian to head "down" Gyoll to the sea rather than up Gyoll towards Thrax, as they part. The sea is where the big enemies are, of course, but Severian is nowhere near ready to deal with that crap yet, not even in the backwards-ass way he's going to, eventually.

And so Severian leaves his Guild, but not entirely, for he takes it with him in a fashion. He wears a fulgin cape, carries a distinctive sword, and has an unusual job waiting for him at his destination -- to which he must walk, because the Guild is certainly not going to pay to send him off in style, not after he left them on the hook for Thecla the way he did (shades of the Blackadder II episode "Heads" there, no? Heh). And sure enough, as he sets out on his way, he's held up by the local law enforcement buffoons before he's even to the city's outskirts. They think he's a faker, and want to charge him, but the bossman is cautious, and, moreover, observes that Severian smells like a torturer (blood and metal) and not like some schlub off the streets, and just cautions him to get some different clothes and find a place to spend the night until he can.

And this, this is how he meets his gonnabe-traveling companions, Baldanders*** and Dr. Talos, whose room he winds up sharing at an inn. Severian winds up sleeping through the night next to Baldanders, and has a very peculiar dream, in which he meets a familiar giant underwater face, because he is underwater (after plummeting from the sky, wherein he rode a giant, leather-winged beast that flew so high he saw all of Ocean, only not surrounding the land like it should, but having engulfed it entirely. Prophetic???), only this time he gets to tour her city and meet her sisters and hear them talk about what it's like to be the Brides of Abaia, Abaia being the giant only-sort-of-Lovecraftian alien who will "devour the continents" when this Dying Earth finally Dies. Again he remarks on being underwater but not breathing, which echoes his experience almost drowning in Gyoll in Chapter One.

Baldanders, too, is found to have dreamed, but of something very different: "Of caverns below, where stone teeth dripped blood... Of arms dismembered found on shattered paths, and things that shook chains in the dark." Robert Borski suggests that both dreams were "sendings" from Tzadkiel (whom we'll meet in UotNS) and/or Abaia, but got switched around, with Severian getting Baldanders' dream and vice versa. I do not scoff at this notion, as Baldanders is an alternate candidate for Severian's ultimate job, and his dream sounds more like an ordinary dream for a guy who was "nurtured by the torturers" but, you know.

As for Dr. Talos, right now he acts very much like Baldanders' boss, but things are not always as they seem, of course. But for now, well, it is he who invites Severian to come along with them and their performing troupe, whose path is also taking them up the Gyoll, maybe even to the House Absolute!

And thus endeth Chapter 15...

*This is, of course, BotNS's version of St. Catherine of Alexandria, aka Catherine the Martyr, she of the Wheel, another virgin saint. Catherine was a princess, the daughter of a pagan king, who converted to Christianity only at the age of 14, and went on to convert many others -- possibly even thousands of others. She also took on the Roman emperor Maxentius, trying to make him see the error of his Christian-persecuting ways. She won a debate he set up between her and a passel of scholars, and, from prison, converted Maxentius' own wife. Naturally, she had to be tortured until she gave up her stubborn ways. When that didn't work, the emperor proposed to her, only to be told her spouse was Jesus and she had consecrated her virginity to him. What else was there left to do but put her to the Wheel? Which miraculously broke. So finally, she was beheaded. So, you know, who else would be the Patron of Torturers, right?

**And thus, per Borski, makes him a candidate for Father Inire in disguise. But there's more reason than that to suspect Palaemon of being even odder than he appears; per the generally accepted scheme of how Wolfe named characters in this most occult of series, if this Master were merely human, he would get a saint's name like pretty much everybody else did. But there is no St. Palaeomon. There is a Roman grammarian and teacher by that name, but he was a pagan. But there is another Palaemon, actually two of them. And they are mythological: Palaemon is an epithet for Hercules/Heracles, and Palaemon is also the name of one of that Hero's sons. Who gets mythological names in BotNS? Oh, that's right, ALIENS. Like Erebus and Abaia and some others we'll meet later. HMMMMMM. (Oh, and btw, Inire is a Latin infinitive. The verb means "to enter or begin" which is an interesting name for "the oldest living man" isn't it?).

***Ahh, Baldanders. When we first meet him, he is just a dude asleep. A very big dude. When he gets out of bed the next morning, he turns out to be a really, really big dude, like three times taller than a man big. And then there's the name, which is, TA-DAA, mythological. Baldanders is a Germanic version of the ever-transforming Greek god Proteus, and, yes, is a transformer. His name literally means "soon another." Most of my friends will recognize the name from Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, where he is described as having a human head and torso, the tail of a fish except for one leg, which is the leg of a goat, and the wings and claws of a bird. Perhaps this Baldanders is just that in larval form? As we'll learn in later books, he does get bigger...