The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters XVI-XVIII

The Rag Shop, The Challenge, & The Destruction of the Altar

It was on that walk through the streets of still slumbering Nessus that my grief, which was to obsess me so often, first gripped me with all its force.

The first time I read Book of the New Sun I felt much like Severian myself. I had abandoned my life and felt often overwhelmed by sorrow and grief for a great many things, great and small. But perhaps more significant and important than my emotions, I was living in temporary places often.

Part of living abroad and traveling abroad as a young person is that you stay in a great number of hostels where you share rooms with strangers of various ages, languages, and countries of origin, which means that you often make many transient friends who you won’t see again after the night or day or week you spent in their company.

I had lived such a life for months at a time, bouncing from place to place, from country to country, from people to people. A life of impermanence where the person I loved that morning would be exchanged with some new temporary love.

There are, I think, a few things worth keeping in mind for what happens during these three chapters and on through the rest of The Shadow of the Torturer, and even beyond. And one of them is revealed in that quote above.

Severian is heartbroken doubly. He loved Thecla and assisted in her suicide. He loved his guild and betrayed it, became an outcast. Along with all that, he’s still quite young. It’s unclear but I’ve always seen him as being about 20, but he may be anywhere from 16 to 22, honestly.

So when he falls into some obvious entrapment, remember: he’s a young idiot. When he falls in love with Agia, remember: he’s a young man who has lived his life among men. When he causes a parade of destruction through the city, remember: he’s a young idiot.

This was something that I don’t think properly clicked in my head the first time I read this, perhaps because the narration comes from an older version of Severian. It’s unclear how many years have passed between the moments he’s describing and the moment when he’s describing them. I’ve always thought of Severian as being much older when he sets down to tell his tale, but who knows. He is, at any rate, older than he is when these things happened.

Severian has slept with the giant Baldanders and then, after they take him to breakfast, he just agrees to meet up with them later with no intention of ever seeing them again. Also, this scene is just so funny to me. Baldanders, Dr Talos, and Severian go to breakfast with no intention of paying and so Dr Talos convinces the waitress to become an actress instead and perform with them later. And when she balks at this, he tells her that she ate his pastry so she can pay for it herself. Which, of course, causes her to get up and leave with them, abandoning her job and freeing all of them from payment.

But there’s also this curious moment that happens when Dr Talos begins this seduction.

Dr Talos leaned toward her as he said this, and it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox (a comparison that was perhaps too easy to make because his bristling reddish eyebrows and sharp nose suggested it at once) but that of a stuffed fox. I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. If layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr Talos’s face was a fox’s mask on a wall, and I marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity. “Would you refuse it?” he asked again, and I shook myself as though waking.

This moment fascinates me. Seeing Dr Talos in motion makes him think of layers of history, of the impenetrable depths of time and how what we understand as one thing is indeed something else entirely.

Perhaps such a strange juxtaposition is worth jotting down if you’re the type to take notes.

Near penniless and lost, Severian doesn’t really know what to do with himself except to head to Thrax, which he knows is north. And so north he heads, which he chooses in part because Dr Talos and Baldanders separate and go east and west.

This young, poor, dummy meets a pretty girl who he describes as the least of those he’s loved and she takes notice of his cloak and sword, commenting on the quality of both. Never once does he think that maybe, just maybe, she’s marked him as someone worth swindling.

She leads him into a shop that her brother seems to own or at least manage and, still, he never takes a moment to wonder why this man needles him about buying his cloak and sword, offering an amount which we can only assume is very little while telling Severian that it’s more than they’re worth.

Someone more worldly or with more life experience may notice that all of this seems quite odd, that he came in as a customer but they’re only interested in buying what he wears.

Then, without warning or reason, a soldier comes in an challenges Severian to some kind of duel fought, apparently, with some kind of flower.

Still, Severian thinks nothing strange of this and, in fact, believes the Autarch or Father Inire must have heard of him and what he did with Thecla.

Why not!

Now I begin again. It has been a long time (twice I have heard the guard changed outside my study door) since I wrote the lines you read only a moment before. I am not certain it is right to record these scenes, which perhaps are important only to me, in so much detail.

Severian interrupts his own narrative to address us and wonder at the construction of his own narrative for us. He then trails off into philosophy and the story of Ymar.

Ymar is the name of a 9th century monk and martyr, killed by Danes, but also sounds and looks a lot like Ymir, the primordial giant whose body became the world in Norse mythology.

Out of Ymir's flesh was fashioned the earth,
And the mountains were made of his bones;
The sky from the frost cold giant's skull,
And the ocean out of his blood.

But the story Severian tells is almost Buddhist in nature. He seems to consider the story relevant because of how baffling he finds his own actions with Agia:

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, “I will,” and “I will not,” and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.

Some useful bits of definitions that may as well go here:

• Armiger - a person entitled to use heraldic arms

• Optimate - a member of the patrician order of Rome

• Fiacre - a carriage

Agia is meant to train Severian to fight in this flower battle to the death, which, again, maybe should be ringing alarm bells. But Severian is smitten, and he goes on to describe the story of an angel dying and Gabriel, the archangel, being surprised that an angel can die. It’s kind of a funny story and an interesting connection to the Catholicism of our present day. This is not the first such connection, mind, which may also be worth writing down to take note of.

He tells the story to Agia but she’s not paying attention to him, which is also pretty funny. But she does say this:

Do you know you are a frightening man? When you entered our shop, I thought you only another young armiger in motley. Then when I found you really were a torturer, I thought it couldn’t really be so bad after all—that you were only a young man like other young men.

Then Severian wonders idly and hornily about her sexual experience.

Agia continues:

But there is something more to you after all. You have the face of someone who stands to inherit two palatinates and an isle somewhere I never heard of, and the manners of a shoemaker, and when you say you’re not afraid to die, you think you mean it, and under that you believe you don’t. But you do, at the very bottom. It wouldn’t bother you a bit to chop off my heard either, would it?

Is there anything more frightening that someone who neither fears dying or killing?

I imagine not.

Agia is not the first to mistake Severian for a noble, which ties back to the boyish dreams he had in his private mausoleum as a child among the other orphans cast to the torturers. Perhaps Severian is the child of an exultant.

After the race ends disastrously with them flying into an empty cathedral and shattering its altar, they’re approached by the Pelerines, a religious sect, who are looking for something that they believe Agia and Severian may have stolen.

The Claw.

We have heard mention of such an item before, though its meaning remains obscure. What we can take from this moment is that the Claw is something sacred to the Pelerines. Sacred enough that this cathedral housed it and only it.

Now it seems to be missing.

And Agia and Severian are off, with Agia especially desperate to leave.

And I ask you, now, if you’ve ever been dragged through an unfamiliar place because of a beautiful person? If their smile didn’t carry you away, giving little thought to the surroundings, to the things you two were doing?

Next week, we’ll read up to Chapter XXII.

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• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King