The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters XXV and XXVI

Hildegrin and The Flower of Dissolution

We come to the wall of Nessus which stands absurdly tall and seems to have some kind of force to it. Towering over the city but also looming over it like some sort of entity.

Nothing is allowed to be built near it, and yet there’s an inn beside the Sanguinary Fields.

“Under the tree. You ‘ve promised me a meal, and that’s where I want it. We should just have time to eat before you have to meet the Septentrion.”

“Not now,” I said. “I’ll be happy to feed you when my duel is over. I’ll make the arrangements now, if you like.” I could still find no building, but I had come to see that there was something strange about the tree: a stair of rustic wood twined up the trunk.

“Do so. If you’re killed, I’ll invite the Septentrion—or if he won’t come, that broken sailor who is forever inviting me. We’ll drink to you.”

A light kindled high in the branches of the tree, and now I saw that a path led up to the stair. Before it, a painted sign showed a weeping woman dragging a bloody sword. A monstrously fat man in an apron stepped out of the shadow and stood beside it, rubbing his hands while he waited our coming. Faintly now, I could hear the clinking of pots.

The inn is a living tree, and therefore skirts the law.

I love this weird little detail because of how true to life it is. When laws come up or when people are banned from doing something, they find little cracks between the words and turn it to their own end. This inn has served many who go to die at the Sanguinary Fields, killed by their enemy’s avern in the duel.

And he admits as much. He serves those who are about to die or win in the duel. He demands payment upon receipt because the dead don’t pay. He sells meals in advance and when those who pay never show up, he pockets the money, which subsidizes the meal prices.

It’s all so clever and real and true. Funny enough that there’s basically a restaurant and hotel right beside where duels routinely happen, but funnier still that everyone understands how it works and no one puts up much of a fuss.

And why would they?

If they die, what does it matter to them that their already paid for a meal?

They’re dead, after all.

But here Severian begins to catch onto Agia’s game. She and the innkeeper seem to know one another and share a meaningful glance. He sees this but also does nothing about it. Not even wondering what it may mean about Agia that she brings men here to die often enough that she’s recognized by the owner.

Dorcas clearly doesn’t trust her, refusing even to bathe in front of her. This seems normal enough that neither Agia nor Severian think it strange that Agia suggest it. But when she asks for privacy, Agia assumes she means from Severian, but I had the sense that she meant privacy primarily and maybe only from Agia.

There’s a hunger in Agia.

The hunger of despairing poverty. A hunger all too real, too vicious.

And so it has led Agia to pull the scheme she pulled when she saw Severian. Of course, she didn’t know Severian was dirt poor too. She thought she’d hooked and reeled in an armiger.

Pity the thieves, the schemers.

Also, it is funny that he considers buying Dorcas new clothes to replace her muddy rags but when Agia shows him her own rags that are falling off her, revealing her nakedness, he doesn’t consider buying her replacements.

But Severian also finds a note on the table clearly meant for him. He laughs because of how it reminds him of the pulpy books Thecla read while in the oubliette. So amused by it is he that he doesn’t even bother to look at it until Agia tries to keep him from looking.

She tries first with seduction, standing naked before him, and then with pleading and the threat of prophecy.

Severian handles her roughly and only then seems to understand the game being played against him.

We also get a feast of Severian’s horniness. Surrounded by the beautiful and the naked, but he’s able to control and master himself once he understands that this note is important and that Agia may be his enemy.

The note is simple:

The woman with you has been here before.
Do not trust her. Trudo says the man is
a torturer. You are my mother come again.

The note was meant for Dorcas.

After all, who would warn a torturer? They are despised and feared. Seeing a torturer with Agia, who has brought men here to their deaths before, probably felt like a lock clicking into place.

You are my mother come again.

How curious.

There are theories about who Dorcas is. I don’t really encourage looking them up because I cannot imagine how one could really conceive of it, but if you google it you’ll get some weird answer. I have no idea if it’s correct.

But if Dorcas is Cas, I think it’s safe to assume that she’s been dead for decades. Long enough that her children would be grown. Possibly even, now, much older than her.

Who left the note?

I mean, it seems like it must be the innkeeper since he was the only one there between the serving and the arrival of the note, but it could be one of the serving girls.

Strangely, Severian believes the note may have been for Agia. In fact, he never once considers that it may have been for Dorcas, despite the fact that Dorcas was in the corpse lake so recently, which means it would have been difficult for her to be there before.

Unless she was at the inn previously before she lost a duel.

Who can say!

Well, I can. The note is for Dorcas

This I believe, anyway.

Severian then tries to find Trudo only to discover he ran away. What fear?

Who knows.

We still don’t know who wrote the note or why, exactly, they wrote it for Dorcas. Or, I mean, we know only what the note said.

Which, in essence, was that she is with dangerous people. And the writer tells Dorcas this because of her resemblance to the writer’s mother.

Mysteries arise around young Severian! He’s in a tangled knot but seems barely even aware of it. He marches towards his death but treats the afternoon the way a lovesick puppy might, or the way many young men do when they meet a beautiful woman.

Especially if she flirts with you. And especially if you’ve seen her naked. And most of all, if she throws herself at you a bit.

Of course, Severian is not like other men, and we see the distance growing between them. For Severian is a torturer and his first love was someone he had complete power over. When he lost his virginity at a brothel, it came only after he asserted dominance, after threatening violence.

When we are talking to women, we talk as though love and desire are two separate entities and women, who often love us and sometimes desire us, maintain the same fiction. The fact is that they are aspects of the same thing, as I might have talked to the innkeeper of the north side of his tree and the south. If we desire a woman, we soon come to love her for her condescension in submitting to us (this, indeed, had been the original foundation of my love for Thecla), and since if we desire her she always submits in imagination at least, some element of love is ever present. On the other hand, if we love her, we soon come to desire her, since attraction is one of the attributes a woman should possess, and we cannot bear to think she is without any of them; in this way men come to desire even women whose legs are locked in paralysis, and women to desire those men who are impotent save with men like themselves.

But no one can say from what it is that what we call (almost at our pleasure) love or desire is born.

The sexual politics of this place and Severian as a subject fascinate.

What does this say about Severian? And, too, remember: Severian is the Autarch now, writing this for his people.

What is he trying to tell them about gender and even sexuality?

What can the torturer teach us of sex and love?

Well, I’ll leave that for you to decide how alienating or resonant you find this passage of love and desire. And then I’d tell you to read some Samuel R Delany. I imagine someone teaching a SFF course about sexuality would find much to talk about just using Chapter XXVI from Book of the New Sun and a few Delany essays about love and desire.

Next week, we’ll read Chapter XXVII and XXVIII.