I think back on it, it feels as if we went from palms to pines in a week, though I know that can't be true.
“I was going to take final vows, and the year before you're to be invested they make the investiture so you can try it on and get the fit right, and then so that you'll see it among your ordinary clothes each time you unpack. It's like a girl's looking at her mother's wedding dress, when it was her grandmother's too and she knows she'll be married in it, if she is ever married. Only I never wore my investiture, and when I went home, after a long time of waiting until we passed close by since there would be no one to escort me, I took it with me.
“I hadn't thought of it for a long time. Then when I got the archon's invitation I got it out again and decided to wear it tonight. I'm proud of my figure, and we only had to let it out a little here and there. It becomes me, I think, and I have the face for a Pelerine, though I don't have their eyes. Actually I never had the eyes, though I used to think I'd get them when I took my vows, or afterward. Our director of postulants had that look. She could sit sewing, and to look at her eyes you would believe they were seeing to the ends of Urth where the perischu live, staring right through the old, torn skirt and the walls of the tent, staring through everything. No, I don't know where the Pelerines are now — I doubt if they do themselves, though perhaps the Mother does.”
I said, “You must have had some friends among them. Didn't some of your fellow postulants stay?”
Cyriaca shrugged. “None of them ever wrote to me. I really don't know.”
“Do you feel well enough to go back to the dance?” Music was beginning to filter into our alcove.
Her head did not move, but I saw her eyes, which had been tracing the corridors of the years when she talked of the Pelerines, swing around to look at me sidelong. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I suppose not. I'm never completely at ease among crowds, unless the people are my friends.”
“You have some, then?” She seemed genuinely astonished.
“Not here — well, one friend here. In Nessus I used to have the brothers of our guild.”
“I understand.” She hesitated. “There's no reason we have to go. This affair will wear out the night, and at dawn, if the archon is still enjoying himself, they'll let down the curtains to exclude the light, and perhaps even raise the celure over the garden. We can sit here as long as we wish, and every time one of the servers comes around we'll get what we like to eat and drink. When someone we want to talk with goes by, we'll make him stop and entertain us.”
“I'm afraid I would begin to bore you before the night was much worn,” I said.
“Not at all, because I have no intention of allowing you to talk much. I'm going to talk myself, and make you listen to me. To begin — do you know you are very handsome?”
“I know that I am not. But since you've never seen me without this mask, you can't possibly know what I look like.”
“On the contrary.”
She leaned forward as though to examine my face through the eyeholes. Her own mask, which was the color of her gown, was so small that it was hardly more than a convention, two almond-shaped loops of fabric about her eyes; yet it lent her an exotic air she would not otherwise have possessed, and lent her too, I think, a feeling of mystery, of a concealment that lifted from her the weight of responsibility.
“You are a very intelligent man I am sure, but you haven't been to as many of these things as I have, or you would have learned the art of judging faces without seeing them. It's hardest, of course, when the person you're looking at has on a wooden vizard that doesn't conform to the face, but even then you can tell a great deal. You have a sharp chin, don't you? With a little cleft.”
“Yes to the sharp chin,” I said. “No to the cleft.”
“You're lying to throw me off, or else you've never noticed it. I can judge chins by looking at waists, particularly in men, which is where my chief interest lies. A narrow waist means a sharp chin, and that leather mask leaves just enough showing to confirm it. Even though your eyes are deeply set, they're large and mobile, and that means a cleft chin in a man, particularly when the face is thin. You have high cheekbones — their outlines show a trifle through the mask, and your flat cheeks will make them look higher. Black hair, because I can see it on the backs of your hands, and thin lips that show through the mouth of the mask. Since I can't see all of them, they curve and curl about, which is a most desirable thing in a man's lips.”
I did not know what to say, and to tell the truth I would have given a great deal to leave her just then; at last I asked, “Do you want me to take my mask off so you can check the accuracy of your assessments?”
“Oh, no, you mustn't. Not until they play the aubade. Besides, you should consider my feelings. If you did and I found you weren't handsome after all, I should be deprived of an interesting night.” She had been sitting up. Now she smiled and leaned back on the divan again, her hair spreading about her in a dark aureole. “No, Severian, instead of unmasking your face, you must unmask your spirit. Later you will do that by showing me everything you would do were you free to do whatever you wished, and now by telling me everything I want to know about you. You come from Nessus — I've learned that much. Why are you so eager to find the Pelerines?”
The Library of the Citadel
As I was about to answer her question, a couple strolled by our alcove, the man robed in a sanbenito, the woman dressed as a midinette. They only glanced at us as they passed, but something — the inclination, perhaps, of the two heads together, or some expression of the eyes — told me that they knew, or at least suspected, I was not in masquerade. I pretended I had noticed nothing, however, and said, “Something that belongs to the Pelerines came into my hands by accident. I want to return it to them.”
“You're not going to do them harm then?” Cyriaca asked. “Can you tell me what it is?”
I did not dare to tell the truth, and I knew I would be asked to produce whatever object I named, and so I said, “A book — an old book, beautifully illustrated. I don't pretend to know anything about books, but I feel sure it's of religious importance and quite valuable,” and from my sabretache I drew the brown book from Master Ultan's library that I had carried away when I left Thecla's cell.
“Old, yes,” Cyriaca said. “And more than a little water-stained, I see. May I look at it?”
I handed it to her and she fanned the pages, then stopped at a picture of the sikinnis, holding it up until it caught the gleam of a lamp burning in a niche above our divan. The homed men seemed to leap in the flickering light, the sylphs to writhe.
