mean, I
“Nobody is two people.”
“I am. I'm two people already. Perhaps more people are two than we know. The first thing I want to tell you is much simpler, though. Now listen.” I gave him detailed directions for finding the wood again, and when I was certain he understood them, I said, “Your pack is probably still there, with the straps cut, so if you find the place you won't mistake it. There was a letter in your pack. I pulled it out and read a part of it. It didn't carry the name of the person you were writing to, but if you had finished it and were just waiting for a chance to send it off, it should have at least a part of your name at the end. I put it on the ground and it blew a little and caught against a tree. It may still be possible for you to find it.” His face had tightened. “You shouldn't have read it, and you shouldn't have thrown it away.”
“I thought you were dead, remember? Anyway, a good deal was going on at the time, mostly inside my head. Perhaps I was getting feverish — I don't know. Now here's the other part. You won't believe me, but it may be important that you listen. Will you hear me out?”
He nodded.
“Good. Have you heard of the mirrors of Father Inire? Do you know how they work?”
“I've heard of Father Inire's Mirror, but I couldn't tell you where I heard about it. You're supposed to be able to step into it, like you'd step into a doorway, and step out on a star. I don't think it's real.”
“The mirrors are real. I've seen them. Up until now I always thought of them in much the same way you did — as if they were a ship, but much faster. Now I'm not nearly so sure. Anyway, a certain friend of mine stepped between those mirrors and vanished. I was watching him. It was no trick and no superstition; he went wherever the mirrors take you. He went because he loved a certain woman, and he wasn't a whole man. Do you understand?”
“He'd had an accident?”
“An accident had had him, but never mind that. He told me he would come back. He said, ‘I will come back for her when I have been repaired, when I am sane and whole.’ I didn't quite know what to think when he said that, but now I believe he has come. It was I who revived you, and I had been wishing for his return — perhaps that had something to do with it.”
There was a pause. The soldier looked down at the trampled soil on which the cots had been set, then up again at me. “Possibly whenever a man loses his friend and gets another, he feels the old friend is with him again.”
“Jonas — that was his name — had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing what he said to some comic situation. The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said, ‘I lost it somewhere along the way. That's what the jaguar said, who had promised to guide the goat.’ Do you recall that?” He shook his head. “I say a lot of foolish things.”
“It struck me as strange; because it was the kind of thing Jonas said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to. I think he would have said, ‘That was the basket's story, that had been filled with water.’ Something like that.” I waited for him to speak, but he did not.
“The jaguar ate the goat, of course. Swallowed its flesh and cracked its bones, somewhere along the way.”
“Haven't you ever thought that it might be just the peculiarity of some town? Your friend might have come from the same place I do.”
I said, “It was a time, I think, and not a place. Long ago, someone had to disarm fear — the fear that men of flesh and blood might feel when looking into a face of steel and glass. Jonas, I know you're listening. I don't blame you. The man was dead, and you still alive. I understand that. But Jonas, Jolenta is gone — I watched her die, and I tried to bring her back with the Claw, but I failed. Perhaps she was too artificial, I don't know. You will have to find someone else.” The soldier rose. His face was no longer angry, but empty as a somnambulist's. He turned and left without another word. For perhaps a watch I lay on my cot with my hands behind my head, thinking of many things. Hallvard, Melito, and Foila were talking among themselves, but I did not attend to what they said. When one of the Pelerines brought the noon meal, Melito got my ear by rapping his platter with a fork and announced, “Severian, we have a favor to ask of you.”
I was eager to put my speculations behind me, and told him I would help them in any way I could.
Foila, who had one of those radiant smiles Nature grants to some women, smiled at me now. “It's like this. These two have been bickering over me all morning. If they were well they could fight it out, but it will be a long time before they are, and I don't think I could stand it so long. Today I was thinking of my mother and father, and how they used to sit before the fire on long winter nights. If Hallvard and I marry, or Melito and I, someday we'll be doing that too. So I have decided to marry the best storyteller. Don't look at me as if I were mad — it's the only sensible thing I've done in my life. Both of them want me, both are very handsome, neither has any property, and if we don't settle this they'll kill each other or I'll kill them both. You're an educated man — we can tell by the way you talk. You listen and judge. Hallvard first, and the stories have to be original, not out of books.”
Hallvard, who could walk a little, got up from his cot and came to sit on the foot of Melito's.
Hallvard's Story — The Two Sealers
“This is a true story. I know many stories. Some are made up, though perhaps the made up ones were true in times everyone has forgotten. I also know many true ones, because many strange things happen in the isles of the south that you northern people never dream of. I chose this one because I was there myself and saw and heard as much of it as anyone did.
“I come from the easternmost of the southern isles, which is called Glacies. On our isle lived a man and a woman, my grandparents, who had three sons. Their names were Anskar, Hallvard, and Gundulf. Hallvard was my father, and when I grew large enough to help him on his boat, he no longer hunted and fished with his brothers. Instead, we two went out so that all we caught could be brought home to my mother, and my sisters and younger brother.
“My uncles never married, and so they continued to share a boat. What they caught they ate themselves or gave to my grandparents, who were no longer strong. In the summer they farmed my grandfather's land. He had the best on our isle, the only valley that never felt the ice wind. You could grow things there that would not ripen anywhere else on Glacies, because the growing season in this valley was two weeks longer.
