Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,55

I think. She never considered it a strange place for a prison, I suppose because it was the only one she had seen before she was taken to our tower, but I find I do. Individual cells, or at least several separate rooms, seem more practical to me. Perhaps I’m only prejudiced.”

Jonas pulled himself up until he was sitting with his back to the wall. His face had gone pale under the brown, and it shone with perspiration as he said, “Can’t you imagine how this place came to be? Look around you.”

I did so, seeing no more than I had seen before: the sprawling room with its dim lamps.

“This used to be a suite’several suites, probably. The walls have been torn away, and a uniform floor laid over all the old ones. I’m sure that’s what we used to call a drop ceiling. If you were to lift one of those panels, you’d see the original structure above it.”

I stood and tried; but though the tips of my fingers brushed the rectangular panes, I was not tall enough to exert much force on them. The little girl, who had been watching us from a distance of ten paces or so, and listening, I feel sure, to every word, said, “Hold me up and I’ll do it.”

She ran toward us. I lifted her and found that with my hands around her waist I could easily raise her over my head. For a few seconds her small arms struggled with the square of ceiling above her. Then it went up, showering dust. Beyond it I saw a network of slender metal bars, and through them a vaulted ceiling with many moldings and a flaking painting of clouds and birds. The girl’s arms weakened, the panel sunk again, with more dust, and my view was cut off.

When she was safely down, I turned back to Jonas. “You’re right. There was an old ceiling above this one, for a room much smaller than this. How did you know?”

“Because I talked to those people. Yesterday.” He raised his hands, the hand of steel as well as the hand of flesh, and appeared to rub his face with both. “Send that child away, will you?”

I told the little girl to go to her mother, though I suspect she only crossed the room, then made her way back along the wall until she was within earshot of us.

“I feel as if I were waking up,” Jonas said. “I think I said yesterday that I was afraid I would go mad. I think perhaps I’m going sane, and that is as bad or worse.” He had been sitting on the canvas pad where we had slept. Now he slumped against the wall just as I have since seen a corpse sit with its back to a tree. “I used to read, aboard ship. Once I read a history. I don’t suppose you know anything about it. So many chiliads have elapsed here.”

I said, “I suppose not.”

“So different from this, but so much like it too. Queer little customs and usages … some that weren’t so little. Strange institutions. I asked the ship and she gave me another book.”

He was still perspiring, and I thought his mind was wandering. I used the square of flannel I carried to wipe my sword blade to dry his forehead.

“Hereditary rulers and hereditary subordinates, and all sorts of strange officials. Lancers with long, white mustaches.” For an instant the ghost of his old humorous smile appeared. “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly, as the King’s notebook told him.”

There was a disturbance at the farther end of the room. Prisoners who had been sleeping, or talking quietly in small groups, were rising and walking toward it. Jonas seemed to assume that I would go as well, and gripped my shoulder with his left hand; it felt as weak as a woman’s. “None of it began so.” There was a sudden intensity in his quavering voice. “Severian, the king was elected at the Marchfield. Counts were appointed by the kings. That was what they called the dark ages. A baron was only a freeman of Lombardy.”

The little girl I had lifted to the ceiling appeared as if from nowhere and called to us, “There’s food. Aren’t you coming?” and I stood up and said, “I’ll get us something. It might make you feel better.”

“It became ingrained. It all endured too long.” As I walked toward the crowd, I