The Claw Of The Conciliator Read Online Free Page A

I said, “I know that certain persons have claimed to have seen it rise into the air.”
    “Oh, it rose all right. When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool—it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can’t see the Hand in nature.”
    “He didn’t see it himself?” I asked. “The cathedral, I mean.”
    She failed to understand. “Oh, he’s seen it when they’ve been through here, at least a dozen times.”
    The chant of the man with the drum, similar to that I had once heard Dr. Talos use, but more hoarsely delivered and bereft of the doctor’s malicious intelligence, cut through our talk. “Knows everything! Knows everybody! Green as a gooseberry! See for yourself!”
    (The insistent voice of the drum: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)
    “Do you think the green man would know where Agia is?”
    The old woman smiled. “So that’s her name, is it? Now I’ll know, if anybody should mention her. He might. You’ve money, why not try him?”
    Why not indeed, I thought.
    “Brought from the jun-gles of the North! Never eats! A-kin to the bush-es and the grass-es!” BOOM! BOOM! “The fu-ture and the re-mote past are one to him!” When he saw me approaching the door of his tent, the drummer stopped his clamor. “Only an aes to see him. Two to speak with him. Three to be alone with him.”
    “Alone for how long?” I asked as I selected three copper aes.
    A wry grin crossed the drummer’s face. “For as long as you wish.” I handed him his money and stepped inside.
    It had been plain he had not thought I would want to stay long, and I expected a stench or something equally unpleasant. There was nothing beyond a slight odor as of hay curing. In the center of the tent, in a dust-spangled shaft of sunlight admitted by a vent in the canvas roof, was chained a man the color of pale jade. He wore a kilt of leaves, now fading; beside him stood a clay pot filled to the brim with clear water.
    For a moment we were silent. I stood looking at him. He sat looking at the ground. “That’s not paint,” I said. “Nor do I think it dye. And you have no more hair than the man I saw dragged from the sealed house.”
    He looked up at me, then down again. Even the whites of his eyes held a greenish tint.
    I tried to bait him. “If you are truly vegetable, I would think your hair should be grass.”
    “No.” He had a soft voice, saved from womanishness only by its depth.
    “You are vegetable then? A speaking plant?”
    “You are no countryman.”
    “I left Nessus a few days ago.”
    “With some education.”
    I thought of Master Palaemon, then of Master Malrubius and my poor Thecla, and I shrugged. “I can read and write.”
    “Yet you know nothing about me. I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being.”
    “The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues.” For all his aspect of despair (and his was a sadder face by far than my friend Jonas’s), something tugged at the corners of his lips.
    “That is well put. You have no scientific training, but you are better taught than you realize.”
    “On the contrary, all my training has been scientific—although it had nothing to do with these fantastic speculations. What are you?”
    “A great seer. A great liar, like every man whose foot is in a trap.”
    “If you’ll tell me what you are, I’ll endeavor to help you.”
    He looked at me, and it was as if some tall herb had opened eyes and shown a human face. “I believe you,” he said. “Why is it