Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,13

severed her neck with the smooth, horizontal stroke that is so much more difficult to master than the downward.

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

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

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

“Innocent! She was innocent!”

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

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

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

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

I called down to her: “If you like!”

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

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

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

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

“But she stole my Stachys, and now she’s gone.” Louder than ever: “Oh, wonderful! She’s gone!” With that, Eusebia plunged her face into the bouquet as though to fill her lungs to bursting with the roses’ cloying perfume. I dropped Morwenna’s head into the basket that awaited it and wiped my sword blade with the piece of scarlet flannel Jonas handed me. When I noticed Eusebia again she was lifeless, sprawled among a circle of onlookers.

At the time I thought little of it, only supposing that her heart had failed in her excess of joy. Later that afternoon the alcalde had her bouquet examined by an apothecary, who found among the petals a strong but subtle poison he could not identify. Morwenna must, I suppose, have had it in her hand when she mounted the steps, and must have cast it into the blossoms when I led her around the scaffold after the branding.

Allow me to pause here and speak to you as one mind to another, though we are separated, perhaps, by the abyss of eons. Though what I have already written—from the locked gate to the fair at Saltus—embraces most of my adult life, and what remains to be recorded concerns a few months only, I feel I am less than half concluded with my narrative. In order that it shall not fill a library as great as old Ultan’s, I will (I tell you now plainly) pass over many things. I have recounted the execution of Agia’s twin brother Agilus because of its importance to my story, and that of Morwenna because of the unusual circumstances surrounding it. I will not recount others unless they hold some special interest. If you delight in another’s pain and death, you will gain little satisfaction from me. Let it be sufficient to say that I performed the prescribed operations on the cattle thief, which terminated in his execution; in the future, 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