Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,7
are? Yes.” The tea was mate, spicy and a trifle bitter.
“Does she know you’re looking for her?”
“I don’t think so. Even if she saw me, she wouldn’t have recognized me. I … am not dressed as I usually am.”
The old woman snorted and pushed a straggling lock of gray hair back under her kerchief. “At Saltus Fair? Of course not! Everybody wears his best to a fair, and any girl with sense would know that. How about down by the water where they’ve got the prisoner chained?”
I shook my head. “She seems to have disappeared.”
“But you haven’t given up. I can tell from the way you look at the people going past instead of me. Well, good for you. You’ll find her yet, though they do say all manner of strange things have been happening round and about of late. They caught a green man, do you know that? Got him right over there where you see the tent. Green men know everything, people say, if you can but make them talk. Then there’s the cathedral. I suppose you’ve heard about that?”
“The cathedral?”
“I’ve heard tell it wasn’t what cityfolk call a real one—I know you’re from the city by the way you drink your tea—but it’s the only cathedral most of us around Saltus ever saw, and pretty too, with all the hanging lamps and the windows in the sides made of colored silk. Myself, I don’t believe—or rather, I think that if the Pancreator don’t care nothing for me, I won’t care nothing for him, and why should I? Still, it’s a shame what they did, if they did what’s told against them. Set fire to it, you know.”
“Are you talking about the Cathedral of the Pelerines?”
The old woman nodded sagely. “There, you said it yourself. You’re making the same mistake they did. It wasn’t the Cathedral of the Pelerines, it was the Cathedral of the Claw. Which is to say, it wasn’t theirs to burn.”
To myself I muttered, “They rekindled the fire.”
“I beg pardon.” The old woman cocked an ear. “I didn’t hear that.”
“I said they burned it. They must have set fire to the straw floor.”
“That’s what I heard too. They just stood back and watched it burn. It went up to the Infinite Meadows of the New Sun, you know.”
A man on the opposite side of the alleyway began to pound a drum. When he paused I said, “I know that certain persons have claimed to have seen it rise into the air.”
“Oh, it rose all right. When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool—it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can’t see the Hand in nature.”
“He didn’t see it himself?” I asked. “The cathedral, I mean.”
She failed to understand. “Oh, he’s seen it when they’ve been through here, at least a dozen times.”
The chant of the man with the drum, similar to that I had once heard Dr. Talos use, but more hoarsely delivered and bereft of the doctor’s malicious intelligence, cut through our talk. “Knows everything! Knows everybody! Green as a gooseberry! See for yourself!”
(The insistent voice of the drum: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)
“Do you think the green man would know where Agia is?”
The old woman smiled. “So that’s her name, is it? Now I’ll know, if anybody should mention her. He might. You’ve money, why not try him?”
Why not indeed, I thought.
“Brought from the jun-gles of the North! Never eats! A-kin to the bush-es and the grass-es!” BOOM! BOOM! “The fu-ture and the re-mote past are one to him!”
When he saw me approaching the door of his tent, the drummer stopped his clamor. “Only an aes to see him. Two to speak with him. Three to be alone with him.”
“Alone for how long?” I asked as I selected three copper aes. A wry grin crossed the drummer’s face. “For as long as you wish.” I handed him his money and stepped inside.
It had been plain he had not thought I would want to stay long, and I expected a stench or something equally unpleasant. There was nothing beyond a slight odor as of hay curing. In