The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page B

table then and fetched her little glass and touched her lips with the red liquid it contained.
    "No," she said weakly. "I don't want it… It's sangaree and I hate it—
    I—I only chose it because the color matches my costume."
    "Why did you faint? Was it because I thought you were a real conventual?"
    "No, because I guessed who you are," she said, and we were silent for a moment, she still half-reclining on the divan to which I had helped carry her, I sitting at her feet.
    I brought the moment when I had knelt before her to life again in my mind; I have, as I have said, the power to so reconstruct every instant of my life. And at last I had to say, "How did you know?"
    "Anyone else in those clothes, asked if he were Death, would have said he was… because he would be in costume. I sat in the archon's court a week ago, when my husband charged one of our peons with theft. That day I saw you standing to one side, with your arms folded on the guard of the sword you carry now, and when I heard Wolfe,_Gene_-_Book_of_the_New_Sun_3_-_The_Sword_of_the_Lictor you say what you did, when you had just kissed my fingers, I recognized you, and I thought… Oh, I don't know what I thought! I suppose I thought you had knelt to me because you intended to kill me. Just from the way you stood, you always looked, when I saw you in court, like someone who would be gallant to the poor people whose heads he was going to lop off, and particularly to women."
    "I only knelt to you because I am anxious to locate the Pelerines, and your costume, like my own, did not seem to be a costume."
    "It isn't. That is to say, I'm not entitled to wear it, but it isn't just something I had my maids run up for me. It's a real investiture." She paused. "Do you know I don't even know your name?"
    "Severian. Yours is Cyriaca—one of the women mentioned it while we were taking care of you. May I ask how you came to have those clothes, and if you know where the Pelerines are now?"
    "This isn't a part of your duty, is it?" For a moment she stared into my eyes, then she shook her head. "Something private. I was nurtured by them. I was a postulant, you know. We traveled up and down the continent, and I used to have wonderful botany lessons just looking at the trees and flowers as we passed. Sometimes when I think back on it, it feels as if we went from palms to pines in a week, though I know that can't be true.
    "I was going to take final vows, and the year before you're to be invested they make the investiture so you can try it on and get the fit right, and then so that you'll see it among your ordinary clothes each time you unpack. It's like a girl's looking at her mother's wedding dress, when it was her grandmother's too and she knows she'll be married in it, if she is ever married. Only I never wore my Wolfe,_Gene_-_Book_of_the_New_Sun_3_-_The_Sword_of_the_Lictor investiture, and when I went home, after a long time of waiting until we passed close by since there would be no one to escort me, I took it with me.
    "I hadn't thought of it for a long time. Then when I got the archon's invitation I got it out again and decided to wear it tonight. I'm proud of my figure, and we only had to let it out a little here and there. It becomes me, I think, and I have the face for a Pelerine, though I don't have their eyes. Actually I never had the eyes, though I used to think I'd get them when I took my vows, or afterward. Our director of postulants had that look. She could sit sewing, and to look at her eyes you would believe they were seeing to the ends of Urth where the perischü live, staring right through the old, torn skirt and the walls of the tent, staring through everything. No, I don't know where the Pelerines are now—I doubt if they do themselves, though perhaps the Mother does."
    I said, "You must have had some friends among them. Didn't some of your fellow postulants stay?"
    Cyriaca shrugged. "None of them ever wrote to me. I really don't know."
    "Do you feel well