followed me. I noticed a dark splatter in the dust and bent to touch it.
It was clotted blood. 'We are on the right road,' I told him. 'They have been bringing the wounded here.'
IV
Fever
I cannot say how far we walked, or how far worn the night was before we reached our destination. I know that I began to stumble some time after we turned aside from the main road, and that it became a sort of disease to me; just as some sick men cannot stop coughing and others cannot keep their hands from shaking, so I tripped, and a few steps farther on tripped again, and then again. Unless I thought of nothing else, the toe of my left boot caught at my right heel, and I could not concentrate my mind my thoughts ran off with every step I took.
Fireflies glimmered in the trees to either side of the path, and for a long time 1 supposed that the lights ahead of us were only more such insects and did not hurry my pace. Then, very suddenly as it seemed to me, we were beneath some shadowy roof where men and women with yellow lamps moved up and down between long rows of shrouded cots. A woman in clothes I supposed were black took charge of us and led us to another place where there were chairs of leather and horn, and a fire burned in a brazier. There I saw that her gown was scarlet, and she wore a scarlet hood, and for a moment I thought that she was Cyriaca.
'Your friend is very ill, isn't he?' she said. 'Do you know what is the matter with him?'
And the soldier shook his head and answered, 'No. I'm not even sure who he is.'
I was too stunned to speak. She took my hand, then released it and took the soldier's. 'He has a fever. So do you. Now that the heat of summer is come, we see more disease each day. You should have boiled your water and kept yourselves as clean of lice as you could.'
She turned to me. 'You have a great many shallow cuts too, and some them are infected. Rock shards?'
I managed to say, 'I'm not the one who is ill. I brought my friend here.'
'You are both ill, and I suspect you brought each other. I doubt that either of you would have reached us without the other. Was it rock shards? Some weapon of the enemy's?'
'Rock shards, yes. A weapon of a friend's.'
'That is the worst thing, I am told to be fired upon by your own side. But the fever is the chief concern.' She hesitated, looking from the soldier to me and back. 'I'd like to put you both in bed now, but you'll have to go to the bath first.'
She clapped her hands to summon a burly man with a shaven head. He took our arms and began to lead us away, then stopped and picked me up, carrying me as I had once carried little Severian. In a few moments we were naked and sitting in a pool of water heated by stones. The burly man splashed more water over us, then made us get out one at a time so he could crop our hair with a pair of shears.
After that we were left to soak awhile.
'You can speak now,' I said to the soldier.
I saw him nod in the lamplight.
'Why didn't you, then, when we were coming here?'
He hesitated, and his shoulders moved a trifle. 'I was thinking of many things, and you didn't talk yourself. You seemed so tired. Once I asked if we shouldn't stop, but you didn't answer.'
I said, 'It seemed to me otherwise, but perhaps we are both correct. Do you recall what happened to you before you met me?'
Again there was a pause. 'I don't even remember meeting you. We were walking down a dark path, and you were beside me.'
'And before that?'
'I don't know. Music, perhaps, and walking a long way. In sunshine at first but later through the dark.'
'That walking was while you were with me,' I said. 'Don't you recall anything else?'
'Flying through the dark. Yes, I was with you, and we came to a place where the sun hung just above our heads. There was a light before us, but when I stepped into it, it became a kind of darkness.'
I nodded. 'You weren't wholly rational, you see. On a warm day it can seem that the sun's just overhead, and when it is down behind the mountains it seems the light becomes darkness. Do you recall your name?'
At that he thought for several moments, and at last smiled ruefully. 'I lost it somewhere along the way. That's what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat.'
The burly man with the shaven head had come back without either of us noticing.
He helped me out of the pool and gave me a towel with which to dry myself, a robe to wear, and a canvas sack containing my possessions, which now smelled strongly of the smoke of fumigation. A day earlier it would have tormented me nearly to frenzy to have the Claw out of my possession for an instant. That night I had hardly realized it was gone until it was returned to me, and I did not verify that it had indeed been returned until I lay on one of the cots under a veil of netting. The Claw shone in my hand then, softly as the moon; and it was shaped as the moon sometimes is. I smiled to think that its flooding light of pale green is the reflection of the sun.
On the first night I slept in Saltus, I had awakened thinking I was in the apprentices' dormitory in our tower. Now I had the same experience in reverse: I slept and found in sleep that the shadowy lazaret with its silent figures and moving lamps had been no more than a hallucination of the day.
I sat up and looked around. I felt well better, in fact, than I had ever felt before; but I was warm. I seemed to glow from within. Roche was sleeping on his side, his red hair tousled and his mouth slightly open, his face relaxed and boyish without the energy of his mind behind it. Through the port I could see snow drifts in the Old Court, new- fallen snow that showed no tracks of men or their animals; but it occurred to me that in the necropolis there would be hundreds of footprints already as the small creatures who found shelter there, the pets and the playmates of the dead, came out to search for food and to disport themselves in the new landscape Nature had bestowed on them. I dressed quickly and silently, holding my finger to my own lips when one of the other apprentices stirred, and hurried down the steep stair that wound through the center of the tower.
