The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters XXIII and XXIV

Hildegrin and The Flower of Dissolution

I’m going to focus on two moments in these chapters.

With what must surely have been the last strength I possessed, I managed to throw Terminus Est onto the floating track of sedge and grasp its ragged margin before I sank again.

Someone caught me by the wrist. I looked up expecting Agia; it was not she but a woman younger still, with streaming yellow hair. I strove to thank her, but water, not words, poured from my mouth. She tugged and I struggled, and at last I lay wholly supported on the sedge, so weak I could do nothing more.

The same hand that seemed to be pulling him down to drown a moment before became the hand that pulled him free from drowning.

There’s something to this, I believe, though I cannot tell you what exactly.

Perhaps, in a way, this is a baptism. And perhaps that seems like an insane reach or perhaps his first baptism was way back in Chapter II when he nearly drowned in the Gyoll as an apprentice or perhaps it’s none of these things, but Severian has performed a miracle, though one that seems common, at least to the boatman from last week.

The corpses move, after all, and some rise from the dead as easily as waking from a nap. However frequent such an occurrence may be, Severian doesn’t really comment on the fact that a corpse nearly drowned him and then, a moment later, saved him from drowning.

Dorcas.

I’ve said before, in many places across this newsletter, that I’m a dummy. I don’t put pieces together until the author is yelling it in my face. And so I never once connected Dorcas to the boatman’s dead wife, Cas.

So if you didn’t put these two together, don’t feel bad. I’m sure we’re not the only ones who missed something like this. Especially since Severian never once connects the two, despite his perfect memory. Yet, he does tell us the story the boatman tells him in minute detail.

There’s something here, in the cracks between these two things. Him not telling us directly but also giving us a blinking arrow sign a moment before.

Like I said, though, I may be alone in not recognizing this right away (honestly, I don’t even think I put it together on my second read), and I think it’s because of the way Wolfe, and by extension Severian, doles out information.

Information is given in a seemingly scattered way and rarely to the right person at the most relevant time. Rather, we get a bunch of information given to us at seemingly irrelevant moments only for that information to become very important much later or in such a way that it recontextualizes a scene or moment we thought we understood.

I do want to return briefly to the Catholicism of it all.

Severian is a member of a despised class. He wears the mark of this upon him always. The sword he carries has, like all swords, a cruciform shape to it. He spends time with hustlers and vagrants. He smashes an altar and brings someone back from the dead.

There’s something Christlike about Severian, in a broad sense.

This isn’t a novel observation and it’s not even one that I think is the best way to understand him, but I do believe there’s something quite Catholic about this world, about this story.

And like the New Testament, we have entered a strange transition where we’re essentially just following around some guy who does things for reasons that are difficult to discern. The people around him don’t really understand him or what he’s doing, yet they’re drawn to him.

There’s a texture to this novel and it comes from this sort of patchworking of disparate influences. There’s a Catholic scent to it, a Lovecraftian mouthfeel, a fairytale’s bemused horror, and a picaresque kind of ramble like sandpaper against your palm.

They had a stiffness, a geometrical precision, surely born under some other sun. The color of their leaves was that of a scarab’s back, but infused with tints at once deeper and more translucent. It seemed to imply the existence of light somewhere, some inconceivable distance away, of a spectrum that would have withered or perhaps ennobled the world.

After Columbus connected the western hemisphere to the eastern, the world began to churn. Spanish silver from the New World destabilized the coinage in China. Europeans brought animals and diseases to the western hemisphere, which decimated the population.

Four centuries later, some have referred to the modern earth as the New Pangaea. For those unaware, Pangaea was a supercontinent some millions of years ago that drifted apart through tectonic shifts until they assembled into the seven continents as we now know them. At one point in earth’s history, long before humanity, the landmasses were mostly all connected. And so fossils continents apart may have originated only a few miles apart.

We are in such a state again, due to the availability and speed of international travel. We saw this most clearly in the recent pandemic. If a disease highly communicable disease finds its way to a major international airport, like Hong Kong or New York, it can spread to every corner of the earth in a matter of hours. This has led to invasive species running amok across the globe, on every continent. We’ve seen US bat populations demolished by diseases that Eurasian bats are immune to. For those living in the central US, you’ve probably seen the forests around you killed by beetles.

At some point in the distant past of Severian’s Urth, it was not simply the world that was connected, but many worlds. The avern, at least by Severian’s description and reckoning, must have been native to some distant planet. And that distant planet may have been terraformed by the people of Urth, which means they brought plants and species from their homeworld first to the stars.

It returns, millennia later, as an alien thing. Dangerous. Deadly. Beautiful.

All of this history exists in that paragraph, though you may not see it. May not even know to look for it. But Wolfe gives us hints and clues along with the riddles.

Humanity spread over the stars. The seat of power on Urth fell into decline, but those other worlds continue on. The gardens hold their plants, their animals, perhaps even their peoples, along with the strange structure that allows for people from the past and/or future to comingle in a place that seemingly exists in all times and planes simultaneously.

What magic or science is this?

Is there a difference between the two when we are so ignorant and uncomprehending of their powers?

This world grows stranger the more we live in it, yet it’s possible to ignore all this and just follow Severian, let the strength of his voice and misadventures carry you along. Because he is on his way to fight a stranger in a duel to the death and they’re going to be fighting with these strange, unearthly flowers.

Next week, we’ll read Chapter XXV and XXVI.

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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