The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter II

The Man in the Dark

“Welcome visitors and fellow villagers! In the time it takes to draw breath thrice, you will see us smash this barrier and drag out the bandit Barnoch. Whether he be dead, or, as we have good reason to believe—for he hasn’t been in there that long—alive. You know what he has done. He has collaborated with the traitor Vodalus’ cultellarii, informing them of the arrivals and departures of those who might become their victims! All of you are thinking now, and rightly!, that such a vile crime deserves no mercy. Yes, I say! Yes, we all say! Hundreds and maybe thousands lie in unmarked graves because of this Barnoch. Hundreds and maybe thousands have met a fate far worse!

“Yes for a moment, before these stones come down, I ask you to reflect. Vodalus has lost a spy. He will be seeking another. On some still night not long, I think, from now, a stranger will come to one of you. It is certain he will have much talk—”

“Like you!” someone shouted, to general laughter.

“Better talk than mine—I’m only a rough miner, as many of you know. Much smooth, persuasive talk, I ought to have said, and possibly some money. Before you nod your head at him, I want you to remember the house of Barnoch’s the way it looks now, with those ashlars where the door should be. Think about your own house with no doors and no windows, bur with you inside it."

“Then think about what you’re going to see done to Barnoch when we take him out. Because I’m telling you—strangers particularly—what you’re about to see here is only the beginning of what you’ll be seeing at our fair in Saltus! For the events of the next few days will see at least two persons executed here in the formal style, with the head struck off at a single blow. One’s a woman, so we’ll be using the chair! That’s something a lot of people who boast of their sophistication and the cosmopolitan tincture of their educations have never seen. And you will see this man,” pausing, the alcalde struck the sunlit door-stones with the flat of his hand, “this Barnoch, led to Death by an expert guide! It may be that he has made some sort of small hole in the wall by now. Frequently they do, and if so he may be able to hear me.”

He lifted his voice to a shout. “If you can, Barnoch, cut your throat now! Because if you don’t, you’re going to wish you had starved long ago!”

There’s a lot packed in here. The world beyond Nessus is filled out immensely here, as is the changing shape of the conflict behind and beneath Severian’s story. But I also think the style of this information being given out is interesting.

Wolfe is a reluctant discloser of information, and so we rarely get worldbuilding directly through him and only sparingly through Severian. Rather, he has collections of characters dole out information the reader needs to make sense of what’s going on.

These circumstances are much changed for Severian and we’ll document them briefly here. As a reminder, Severian tells us quickly in The Shadow of the Torturer that torturers are despised.

1. Torture and execution are celebratory affairs outside Nessus.

2. The higher class, better educated, more worldly of those beyond Nessus are those who would have some interaction with the State.

3. Torturers are a respected class.

4. Vodalus is hated much more beyond Nessus than within.

5. Even being suspected of collaborating with Vodalus is enough for not only ostracization but execution.

6. The people of Saltus believe Vodalus is leading to the death of soldiers and the loss of the war in the north.

7. This connects with what the innkeeper’s wife believed from the previous chapter: that the armies march north in search of Vodalus.

Wolfe or Severian could have told us that. Could have laid it out simply, but instead they deliver us to a fair, to a public execution.

And it’s worth considering why Severian shows us this exactly. He feels regret at killing a fellow follower of Vodalus, even though we were meant to doubt, just a few pages ago, that Vodalus could have anything to do with anything happening in the north of Nessus. More than that, we have only seen two other times when Severian has done his work.

Thecla’s torture and Agilus’ execution.

So why does Barnoch, this random man from Saltus—somewhere we had never heard of until last chapter—play a role in this narrative at all?

I suppose Severian gives an answer, of sorts.

How I wished then that I had never been imprisoned myself, for his voice brought back to me all those airless days when I waited in the oubliette beneath our Matachin Tower. I too had dreamed of rescue by Vodalus, of a revolution that would sweep away the animal stench and degeneracy of the present age and restore the high and gleaming culture that was once Urth’s.

He goes on to remind us that Vodalus did not save him. It was shame and disgrace that made his guild brush it under the rug and give him a new position in exile, away from the Matachin Tower.

There’s a lesson, too, in imperial bureaucracies, in crumbling institutions where even failures simply get moved around rather than punished or dealt with.

And so rather than save Barnoch, who would be his comrade, he instead tortures and executes him.

Curiously, I have no memory of this portion of the novel. But I think this, here, is actually quite important. Perhaps one of the more important moments in the series, though by the time you understand why, you may have forgotten this scene as well.

But I think the absence of Vodalus here and when Severian and Thecla needed him are a seed for much of what follows.

And then, even more curiously, Severian sees Agia’s face in the crowd.

Can we outrun our pasts? Can we outrun the people who have wronged us, who we have wronged?

With news of an execution and fair to accompany it, Agia probably knew who she would meet in Saltus. For she too fled Nessus after her brother’s death. And what does she want with Severian?

Severian who now holds the Claw of the Conciliator, who now stands honored by a village.

How cruel life and fate must seem to someone like Agia.

But let’s take a step back and just bask in the strange world Wolfe is giving us. Even in this small town, rituals exist. Rituals wholly their own. When someone commits a serious crime, the village plunders their home, then blocks the windows and doors with stones, but leaving the criminal inside.

No food or anything. No belongings. Just them and the dark and the space of their house, now turned into their tomb.

It is vile and cruel and spectacularly weird! And then the village knocks the door back in sometime later to collect the corpse or the not yet dead inhabitant and resells the house to someone new.

There’s something so medieval about it all, which is part of what makes Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun so playful. It is the impossibly far future of earth yet it feels like a world we already grew out of, just full of the ruins and remnants of futuristic technologies.

I love it.

While we’re taking a slow start back into this book, we’ll gradually pick things up and move along at a speedier clip.