The Scar (16 page)

However complex, unnatural, and winding the man’s path was, his goal appeared to be the university. Slowly but surely, the stranger came ever closer and closer, until she was finally able to make out his face.

Her heart beat painfully, violently; it stopped, and then it leapt wildly as if it were a hammer muffled in rags, beating against a wooden anvil. Toria did not yet understand what was happening, but the warm, spring day suddenly felt bleakly cold.

She recognized the face of the strange man, or so it seemed to her in that first second. In the next moment, chewing the scar on her lower lip, she was already telling herself silently, It’s not him.

It was not him. He did not have a scar on his cheek, but more important: his eyes could never contain such grief, or such a hunted look. It could not be him: this man was dirty, scruffy, and atrophied, while he shone with self-satisfaction and good fortune; he fairly burst with the sense of his own attractiveness and irresistibility and was, indeed, handsome—Toria twisted her lips in disgust—he was handsome, while this one …

The tramp came even closer. The spring wind tousled his disheveled blond hair. He stood irresolute and tense in front of the university building as if he could not decide whether or not to approach the doors.

It is not him, said Toria to herself. Not him, she repeated fiercely, but her heart was beating ever faster and wilder. That shrunken, sallow face with that horrible scar running along the entire cheek, that uncertainty in every movement, those foul rags …

Toria leaned forward, peering at the stranger intensely, as though desiring to encompass him with just a single look. The stranger sensed her gaze. He shuddered and raised his head.

Egert Soll was standing under the window: in the blink of an eye, no doubt whatsoever remained in Toria. Her fingers gripped the windowsill, driving a splinter under one of her fingernails, but she did not feel the pain. The man standing below the window blanched deathly pale beneath his layer of dust and his sunburn.

It seemed as though nothing could appear more terrible to his eyes than the sight of this young woman in a high window; it was so terrible that it compelled him to shake, as if an abyss had suddenly opened right in front of him, and from that abyss the jaws, dripping with bile, of the mother of all monsters had reached out for him. For several seconds he stood as if frozen in place, and then he suddenly turned and dashed off. Disturbed flower girls yelled after him in the crowd. An instant, and he was no longer even in the square, which continued to spin festively like a carousel.

Toria stood by the window for a long time, thoughtlessly sucking on her wounded finger. Then, abandoning the cart laden with books, she turned around and slowly walked out of the library.

*   *   *

Egert had entered the city at dawn, just as the city gates were being raised. His defensive rituals, invented by him in droves, somehow helped him cope with his terror: gripping a button that had escaped from his shirt in his sweaty fist, he planned out his route in advance, moving from landmark to landmark, from beacon to beacon; by this method, of course, his route was significantly lengthened, but it also secured a hope in his soul that he would manage to avoid any danger.

Kavarren—massive, splendid Kavarren—was, in truth, a tiny, quiet little provincial town: Egert understood this now as he wandered through the noisy streets, dense with people and carts. Egert had been living in solitude for so long that the mass of people caused his head to spin; he kept having to lean against walls and lampposts so that he could rest a bit, squeezing shut his bloodshot eyes.

The hermit showed him the best way to the city, and gave him cheese and griddle cakes for his journey. The road to the city had been long and full of apprehension and fear. The cakes had been finished the day before yesterday, and Egert was now suffering from hunger as well as fear.

The goal of his agonizing pilgrimage was the university: Egert had been told that he could find a genuine archmage there. Unfortunately, Egert had not been able to discover either his name or his title. The kindhearted passersby, whom Egert finally resolved to question, unanimously directed him to the main square: there, they said, was the university and also other curiosities that might appeal to a traveler. Squeezing his button and scurrying from landmark to landmark, Egert moved on.

The main square was like a seething cauldron; trying as hard as he could to fight his dizziness, Egert weaved his way through the crowd. Details detached themselves from the throng and penetrated his eyes: an enormous mouth smeared with cream, a lost horseshoe, the wide-open eyes of a mule, a stunted scrub of grass in the crack between cobblestones … Then he stumbled into a round black pedestal, raised his head, and to his horror discovered that he was standing beneath a miniature gallows, where an executed dummy with glassy eyes was gazing down at him apathetically.

Recoiling, he nearly ran into a man in a gray hood. The man turned around in surprise, but Egert could not make out his face, hidden by the hood. He struggled through the crowd once again, and this time the crooked path from marker to marker deposited Egert in the middle of a patrol: five well-armed men in red-and-white uniforms, disagreeable and menacing, who were just waiting for the chance to seize a helpless tramp. Egert darted away, his mind full of a vision of prison, the whip, and hard labor.

Five or six men in gray hooded robes were standing in a huddled circle, conversing about something. Egert noticed that the crowd split around them, like a seething river breaks away from a rocky island. The faces of the robed men were lost in the shadows of their hoods, and this gave the gray figures a very sinister appearance. Egert was far more terrified of them than of the guards and adjusted his path so that he stayed at least ten feet away from the group.

There, finally, was the university building. Egert stopped to catch his breath. By the entrance to this sanctuary of learning, frozen in majestic poses, were an iron snake and a wooden monkey. Egert marveled at the sight; he did not know that these images symbolized wisdom and the pursuit of knowledge.

He simply had to ascend the steps and take hold of the brightly finished copper door handle, but Egert stood, unable to take even a step. The building oppressed him with its grandeur: there, beyond the door, secrets were hidden; there, the “archmage” awaited Egert, and who knew what the forthcoming meeting might have in store for this miserable vagabond. The gossip that all students were castrated for the glory of knowledge suddenly came to mind; it seemed to the dazed Egert that the iron snake was looking at him keenly and wickedly, and that the monkey was grinning obscenely.

Covered in clammy sweat, Egert was still standing in the same place when a new, even more disquieting feeling compelled him to shiver and raise his head.

A pale, dark-haired woman was steadily and intently staring down at Egert from a high, wide window.

*   *   *

“What is this?”

The fat-cheeked student turned even more pale: “This … I brought it for you. That’s what you … requested.”

“I requested the books, my friend.”

It was dark in the room, and only one bright spot—a ray of sunlight from the sole narrow window—was on the table. A heap of paper wrapped by a ribbon lay on the table under the sun’s ray, and dust specks were flying above the yellow pages.

“Mr. Fagirra,” mumbled the student, “there was no way to carry the books out. Even the smallest … magic book cannot be taken out.”

“Brother Fagirra.”

“What? But … Excuse me, Brother Fagirra, I … honestly, I have done everything. The dean is suspicious, Mr.… Brother Fagirra. I brought … here is what I managed to get. Here are the notes.”

“Well.”

“One of the students made notes … made notes of what was in the books in the library that you wanted me to get.”

“This is not enough, my friend.”

“This all that I could get, Brother Fagirra.”

“I fear that the End of Time will bring much sorrow to you.”

The cheeks of the young fellow, recently so round, became sunken: “No. Please. Just give me another chance!”

The man with the tattoo on his wrist only raised the corners of his lips: “It is good. From this day, you will report to me about everything that happens at the university.”

*   *   *

Egert dashed through the crowd, deaf to the curses of the upset hawkers, insensible to the fingers snatching at his tattered shirt or the irritated pokes he received while running past. He ran away from the square, from the university with its wide window where the face of Toria remained, still white as a ghost: Toria, the fiancée of the student he had killed. Flee! This was an evil, unlucky portent; he should never have come to this city. He had to get to the gates as quickly as possible; he had to escape from the net of these narrow, winding, overcrowded streets.

But the world of this enormous city, indifferent, satisfied, and lazily festive, had already possessed Egert as if he were its own rightful victim. It seemed to Egert that the city was gradually digesting him like a massive stomach, desiring to dissolve, destroy, and absorb him into itself.

“You, tramp, step aside!”

Huge wheels roared along the cobbled pavement; an arrogant face in the velvet semidarkness of a carriage sailed over Egert’s head, and lowering his eyes, he saw an opalescent beetle flattened into a disk in the furrow left by the wheels.

“You, vagrant, get out of the road! Out of the road!”

Housewives joyfully called out to one another from windows, and from time to time a cascade of slops descended onto the pavement: then the exchanges turned into bickering.

The merchants were slaving away.

“Here, I’ve got combs, bone combs, turtle shell combs! And look at this miraculous potion: Smear it on your head and your hair will grow; dab it on your armpits and the hair will fall out!”

“Barbers! Jars, leeches, bloodletting! Razors! We’ll shave you!”

A mob of street urchins were taunting a modest young lad who was dressed as neat as a pin. Beggars were huddled along walls covered with bas-relief sculptures; the wind played with the tattered ends of their rags, and their motionless, outstretched palms seemed like the dark leaves of an outlandish shrub. Penetrating calls of “Alms, alms…” hovered over the street, although the parched lips of the beggars hardly moved at all; only their eyes, dreary and yet at the same time covetous, caught the glances of the passersby: “Alms, alms…”

Away, away, off to the gate! Egert swerved onto a street that seemed familiar to him, but it betrayed him; it deposited him at a stone-dressed canal that ran straight away to either side. An odor of fungus and mold rose up from the green water. A wide bridge bulged over the canal. Egert had no memory of this place; he had never been here; he had definitely gone astray.

He decided to ask the way to the city gates. The first person to whom he dared to turn was a dignified, amiable housewife in a starched cap; with delight and in detail, she described the route to the city gates to him. Following her instructions, he passed through two or three alleyways, diligently walked through a populated intersection, turned where he had been ordered and suddenly came out near the very same humpbacked bridge that ran over the very same canal. Water striders were gliding along the surface of the stale water.

Remembering the misleading words of the woman in the starched cap, Egert again gathered his courage and asked a lean, poorly dressed young maidservant for help. She blushed, and by the furtive pleasure in her modestly lowered little eyes, Egert suddenly realized that for this pitiful creature he was not at all a filthy beggar, but a presentable young man, even a handsome man, potentially a lover. For some reason this realization brought Egert not pleasure, but pain; the girl, in the interim, had seriously and painstakingly explained to him how to get to the gates, and her explanation was completely contrary to the instructions of the housewife in the cap.

Hurriedly thanking the somewhat disappointed serving girl, Egert once again set out on his way. Looking around intently, he walked past a chandler and a pub, past an apothecary with live leeches in jars and bottled tonics, and past a button manufacturer with a shop window that dazzled the eye: hundreds of silver, mother-of-pearl, and bone circles ogled him from the display. He walked through a gloomy alleyway, sided by the looming, blank walls of houses. It turned out to be the territory of a procuress: in the semidarkness, first one then another sweet-eyed face approached Egert and, unerringly identifying him as a bum and not a prospective client, indifferently turned away.

The alleyway led Egert onto a circus; in its center was a statue on a low pedestal. The head of the statue was covered by a stone hood. Recalling the people in gray, who had terrified him in the main square, Egert hesitated to walk closer to the statue and read the inscription carved in the stone:

The Sacred Spirit Lash

He had heard about the Sacred Spirit when he was a child, but he had imagined him to be more majestic than this. Regardless, he did not have any time for reflection at the moment. Drawing a deep breath, he once again asked for directions, this time from a young, mild-mannered lemonade vendor. According to the lad, the city gates were but a stone’s throw away. Inspired, Egert walked on along a wide but not very busy street. He passed by the house of a bonesetter, which had a pair of crutches of considerable size pegged to the door; past the house of a horse doctor, which had a sign decorated with three horsetails; and past a bakery. Finally, bewildered, he walked out at the very same arched bridge over the musty canal.

It seemed as if some unknown force was grimly determined to keep Egert going around in circles. Overcome, he leaned against the wide stone railing; somewhere over his head a shutter smacked loudly against a wall and a window swept open. Egert looked up.

A girl stood in the small, dark window. Egert’s vision darkened as he saw cheeks, pale as if carved from marble, dark hair, a constellation of beauty marks on her neck. He winced, and then in the next instant he realized that this was not Toria, that the face, gazing indifferently out the window, was round and pockmarked, and that the hair was the color of rotten straw.