Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,22

tell me you’re not hairy yet.”

At last I understood what he meant, and I told him that I had not realized it would be permissible, since I was still an apprentice; but that if he gave the order, I would certainly obey.

“I imagine you would. She’s not bad, you know. But tall, and I don’t like them tall. There’s an exultant’s bastard in that family a generation or so back, you may be sure. Blood will confess itself, as they say, though only we know all that means. Want to do it?”

He held out his cup and I poured. “If you wish me to, Master.” The truth was that I was excited at the thought. I had never possessed a woman.

“You can’t. I must. What if I were to be questioned? Then too, I must certify it’sign the papers. A master of the guild for twenty years, and I’ve never falsified papers. I suppose you think I can’t do it.”

The thought had never crossed my mind, just as the opposite thought (that he might still retain some potency) had never occurred to me with regard to Master Palaemon, whose white hair, stooped shoulders, and peering lens made him seem like one who had been decrepit always.

“Well, look here,” Master Gurloes said, and heaved himself out of his chair.

He was one of those who can walk well and speak clearly even when they are very drunk, and he strode over to a cabinet quite confidently, though I thought for a moment that he was going to drop the blue porcelain jar he took down.

“This is a rare and potent drug.” He took the lid off and showed me a dark brown powder. “It never fails. You’ll have to use it someday, so you ought to know about it. Just take as much as you could get under your fingernail on the end of a knife, you follow me? If you take too much, you won’t be able to appear in public for a couple of days.”

I said, “I’ll remember, Master.”

“Of course it’s a poison. They all are, and this is the best—a little more than that would kill you. And you mustn’t take it again until the moon changes, understand?”

“Perhaps you’d better have Brother Corbinian weigh the dose, Master.” Corbinian was our apothecary; I was terrified that Master Gurloes might swallow a spoonful before my eyes.

“Me? I don’t need it.” Contemptuously, he put the lid on the jar again and banged it down on its shelf in the cabinet.

“That’s well, Master.”

“Besides” (he winked at me), “I’ll have this.” From his sabretache he took an iron phallus. It was about a span and a half long and had a leather thong through the end opposite the tip.

It must seem idiotic to you who read this, but for an instant I could not imagine what the thing was for, despite the somewhat exaggerated realism of its design. I had a wild notion that the wine had rendered him childish, as a little boy is who supposes there is no essential difference between his wooden mount and a real animal. I wanted to laugh.

“‘Abuse,’ that’s their word. That, you see, is where they’ve left us an out.” He had slapped the iron phallus against his palm—the same gesture, now that I think of it, that the man-ape who had threatened me had made with his mace. Then I had understood and had been gripped by revulsion.

But even that revulsion was not the emotion I would feel now in the same situation. I did not sympathize with the client, because I did not think of her at all; it was only a sort of repugnance for Master Gurloes, who with all his bulk and great strength was forced to rely on the brown powder, and still worse, on the iron phallus I had seen, an object that might have been sawed from a statue, and perhaps had been. Yet I saw him on another occasion, when the thing had to be done immediately for fear the order could not otherwise be carried out before the client died, act at once, and without powder or phallus, and without difficulty.

Master Gurloes was a coward then. Still, perhaps his cowardice was better than the courage I would have possessed in his position, for courage is not always a virtue. I had been courageous (as such things are counted) when I had fought the man-apes, but my courage was no more than a mixture of foolhardiness, surprise, and desperation;