The Claw Of The Conciliator (28 page)

The
FAMILIAR
turns and gapes at her, and she flees, laughing. He runs clumsily after her, and a moment later returns crestfallen.

FAMILIAR: (Panting.) She’s gone.

NOD: Yes. Free.

MESCHIANE: Free to pursue Meschia and ruin everything, as she did before.

FAMILIAR: You don’t realize what this means. My master will return soon, and I am a dead man.

NOD: The world is dead. So she has told you.

MESCHIANE: Torturer, you have one chance yet—listen to me. You must free the giant as well.

FAMILIAR: And he will kill me and release you. I will consider it. At least it will be a quick death.

MESCHIANE: He hates Jahi, and though he isn’t clever he knows her ways, and he is very strong. What’s more, I can tell you an oath that he will never break. Give him the key to his shackles, then stand by me with your sword at my neck. Make him swear to find Jahi, return her; and bind himself again.

The
FAMILIAR
hesitates.

MESCHIANE: You’ve nothing to lose. Your master doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be here. But if she’s gone when he returns …

FAMILIAR: I’ll do it! (He detaches a key from the ring at his belt.)

NOD: I swear as I hope to be linked by marriage to the family of Man, so that we giants may be called the Sons of the Father, that I will capture the succubus for you, and return her here, and hold her so that she shall not escape again, and bind myself as I am bound now.

FAMILIAR: Is that the oath?

MESCHIANE: Yes!

The
FAMILIAR
throws the key to
NOD
, then draws his sword and holds it ready to strike
MESCHIANE
.

FAMILIAR: Can he find her?

MESCHIANE: He must find her!

NOD: (Unlocking himself.) I will catch her. That body weakens as she said. She may whip it far, but she will never learn that whipping will not do everything.

(Exits.)

FAMILIAR: I must continue with you. I hope you understand …

The
FAMILIAR
tortures
MESCHIANE
, who screams.

FAMILIAR: (Sotto voce.) How fair she is! I wish that we were met when better things might be.

The stage darkens;
JAHI’S
running feet are heard. After a time, a faint light shows
NOD
loping through the corridors of the House Absolute. Moving images of urns, pictures, and furniture behind him show his progress.
JAHI
appears among them, and he exits stage right in pursuit.
JAHI
enters stage left, with
SECOND
DEMON
walking in lockstep behind her.

JAHI: Where can he have gone? The gardens are burned black. You have no flesh beyond a seeming—cannot you make yourself an owl and seek him out for me?

SECOND
DEMON: (Mocking.) Who-o-o?

JAHI: Meschia! Wait until the Father hears how you have treated me, and betrayed all our efforts.

SECOND
DEMON: From you? It was you who left Meschia, lured away by the woman. What will you say? “The woman tempted me?” We have done with that so long ago that no one remembers it save you and I, and now you have spoiled the lie by making it come true.

JAHI: (Turning on him.) You little foul sniveler! You scrabbler at windows!

SECOND
DEMON: (Jumping back.) And now you are exiled to the land of Nod, east of Paradise.

NOD’S
footfalls are heard offstage.
JAHI
hides behind a clepsydra, and
SECOND
DEMON
produces a pike and stands with it in the attitude of a soldier as
NOD
enters.

NOD: How long have you been standing there?

SECOND
DEMON: (Saluting.) As long as you want, sieur.

NOD: What news is there?

SECOND
DEMON: All you want, sieur. A giant as high as a steeple has killed the throne-guards, and the Autarch’s missing. We’ve searched the gardens so often that if only we’d been carrying dung instead of spears, the daisies’d be as big as umbrellas. Ducks’ clothes is down and hopes is up—so’s the turnips. Tomorrow should be fair, warm, and bright … (looks significantly toward the clepsydra) and a woman with no clothes on has been running through the halls.

NOD: What is that thing?

SECOND
DEMON: A water clock, sieur. See, you, knowing what time it is, can tell by that how much water’s flowed.

NOD: (Examining the clepsydra.) There is nothing like this in my land. Do these puppets move by water?

SECOND
DEMON: Not the big one, sieur.

JAHI
bolts offstage, pursued by
NOD
, but before he is fully out of sight of the audience, she dives between his legs, reentering. He continues off, giving her time to hide in a chest. Meanwhile,
SECOND
DEMON
has disappeared.

NOD: (Reentering.) Ho! Stop! (Runs to opposite side of stage and returns.) My fault! My fault! In the garden there—she passed close by me once. I could have reached out and crushed her like a cat—a worm—a mouse—a snake. (Turns on audience.) Don’t laugh at me! I could kill you all! The whole poisoned race of you! Oh, to strew the valleys with your white bones! But I am done—I am done! And Meschiane, who trusted in me, is undone!

NOD
strikes the clepsydra, sending brass pans and water flying across the stage.

NOD: What good is this gift of speech, except that I can curse myself. Good mother of all the beasts, take it from me. I would be as I was, and shout wordless among the hills. Reason shows reason can only bring pain—how wise to forget and be happy again!

NOD
seats himself on the chest in which
JAHI
hides, and buries his face in his hands. As the lights dim, the chest begins to splinter beneath his weight.

When the lights come up again, the scene is once more the
INQUISITOR’S
chamber.

MESCHIANE
is on the rack. The
FAMILIAR
is turning the wheel. She screams.

FAMILIAR: That made you feel better, didn’t it? I told you it would. Besides, it lets the neighbors know we’re awake in here. You wouldn’t believe it, but this whole wing is full of empty rooms and sinecures. Here the master and I do our business still. We do it still, and that’s why the Commonwealth stands. And we want them to know it.

Enter the
AUTARCH
. His robes are torn and stained with blood.

AUTARCH: What place is this? (He sits on the floor, his head in his hands in an attitude reminiscent of
NOD’S
.)

FAMILIAR: What place? Why, the Chambers of Mercy, you jackass. Can you come here without knowing where you are?

AUTARCH: I have been so hunted through my house this night that I might be anywhere. Bring me some wine—or water, if you’ve no wine here—and bar the door.

FAMILIAR: We have claret, but no wine. And I can hardly bar the door, since I expect my master back.

AUTARCH: (More forcefully.) Do as I tell you.

FAMILIAR: (Very softly.) You are drunk, friend. Go out.

AUTARCH: I am— What does it matter? The end is here. I am a man neither worse nor better than you.

NOD’S
heavy tread is heard in the distance.

FAMILIAR: He has failed—I know it!

MESCHIANE: He has succeeded! He would not come back so soon with empty hands. The world may yet be saved!

AUTARCH: What do you mean?

Enter
NOD
. The madness he prayed for is upon him, but he drags
JAHI
behind him.

The
FAMILIAR
runs forward with shackles.

MESCHIANE: Someone must hold her, or she will escape as she did before.

The
FAMILIAR
drapes chains on
NOD
and snaps closed the locks, then chains one of
NOD’S
arms across his body in such a way that he holds
JAHI
.

NOD
tightens the grip.

FAMILIAR: He’s killing her! Let go, you great booby!

The
FAMILIAR
snatches up the bar with which he has been tightening the rack and belabors
NOD
with it.
NOD
roars, tries to grasp him, and lets the unconscious
JAHI
slip down. The
FAMILIAR
seizes her by the foot and pulls her to where the
AUTARCH
sits.

FAMILIAR: Here, you, you’ll do.

He jerks the
AUTARCH
erect and swiftly imprisons him in such a way that one hand is clamped about
JAHI’S
wrist, then returns to torture
MESCHIANE
. Unseen behind him,
NOD
is freeing himself of his chains.

Though we were outdoors, where sounds are so easily lost against the immensity of the sky, I could hear the clatter Baldanders made as he feigned to struggle with his bonds. There were conversations in the audience, and I could hear 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; and another about some legal case that a speaker with the drawling intonation of an exultant seemed certain the Autarch was about to judge wrongly. As I turned the windlass of the rack, letting the pawl drop with a satisfying clack, I risked a sidelong look at those who watched us.

No more than ten chairs were in use, but lofty figures stood at the sides of the seating area, and behind it. There were a few women in court dresses much like the ones I had once seen in the House Azure, dresses with very low décolletages and full skirts that were often slit, or relieved with panels of lace. Their hair was simply dressed, but it was set off with flowers, jewels, or brilliantly luminous larvae.

Most of those in our audience seemed men, and more arrived momentarily. Many were as tall as or taller than Vodalus. They stood wrapped in their cloaks as though they were chilled by the soft spring air. Their faces were shadowed beneath broad-brimmed, low-crowned petasoses.

Baldanders’s chains fell with a crash, and Dorcas shrieked to let me know he was free. I turned toward him, then cowered away, wrenching the nearest flambeau from its socket to fend him off. It guttered as the oil in its bowl nearly drowned the flame, sputtering to renewed life when the brimstone and mineral salts Dr. Talos had gummed around the rim took fire.

The giant was feigning madness, as his role required. His coarse hair hung about his eyes; and they, behind its screen, blazed so wildly I could see them despite it. His mouth hung slack, drooling spittle and showing his yellowed teeth. Arms twice the length of my own groped toward me.

What frightened me—and I was frightened, I admit, and wished heartily I had Terminus Est in my hands instead of the iron flambeau—was what I can only call the expression beneath the lack of expression on his face. It was there like the black water we sometimes glimpse moving beneath the ice when the river freezes. Baldanders had found a terrible joy now in being as he was; and when I faced him I realized for the first time that he was not so much feigning madness on the stage as feigning sanity and his dim humility off it. I wondered then how much he had influenced the writing of the play, though it may be only that Dr. Talos had (as he surely had) understood his patient better than I.

We were not, of course, to terrify the Autarch’s courtiers as we had the country people. Baldanders would wrest the flambeau from me, pretend to break my back, and end the scene. He did not. Whether he was as mad as he pretended or was genuinely enraged at our growing audience, I cannot say. Perhaps both those explanations are correct.

However that might be, he jerked the flambeau from me and turned on them, flourishing it so the burning oil flew about him in a shower of fire. My sword, with which I had threatened Dorcas’s head a few moments before, lay near my feet, and I stooped for it instinctively. By the time I had straightened up again, Baldanders was in the midst of the audience. The flambeau had gone out, and he swung it like a mace.

Someone fired a pistol. The bolt set his costume afire, but must have missed his body. Several exultants had drawn their swords, and someone—I could not see who—possessed that rarest of all weapons, a dream. It moved like tyrian smoke, but very much faster, and in an instant it had enveloped the giant. 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.

Yet the visions, which are said to leave soldiers dazed and helpless, a burden to their cause, did not seem to affect Baldanders. He strode forward still, and the flambeau smashed clear a path for him.

Then, in the moment more that I watched (for I soon recovered enough self-command to flee that mad fight) I saw several figures throw aside their capes and—as it appeared—their faces too. Under those faces, which when they were no longer worn seemed of a tissue as insubstantial as that of the notules, were such monstrosities as I had not thought existence could support: a circular mouth rimmed with needle teeth; eyes that were themselves a thousand eyes, clustered like the scales of a pine cone jaws like tongs. These things have remained in my memory as everything remains, and I have stared again at them in the dark watches of the night. I am very glad, when at last I rouse myself to turn my face toward the stars and moon-drenched clouds instead, that I could see only those nearest our footlights.

I have already said that I fled. But that slight delay, during which I picked up Terminus Est and stood observing Baldanders’s mad attack, almost cost me dearly; by the time I turned to take Dorcas to safety, she was gone.

I ran then not so much from Baldanders’s fury, or from the cacogens in the audience, or from the Autarch’s praetorians (who I felt would surely arrive soon), but in pursuit of Dorcas. Searching for her and calling her name as I went, I found nothing but the groves and fountains and abrupt wells of that endless garden; and at last, winded and with aching legs, I slowed to a walk.