let me borrow his sword. For the volunteers who'll ride with me in a
minute, and Patera Silk and Lime and Zoril and the children.
Particularly for the children. For all of us, Great Pas.
"_We acknowledge you the supreme and sovereign_..."
And there it was, an armored floater with all its hatches down
turning onto Cage Street. Then another, and a third. A good big
space between the third and the first rank of marching Guardsmen
because of the dust. A mounted officer riding beside his troopers.
The soldiers would be in back (that was what the messenger had
reported) but there was no time to wait until they came into view,
though the soldiers would be the worst of all, worse even than the
floaters.
Beads forgotten, she hurried back the way she had come.
Scleroderma was still there, holding the white stallion's reins. "I'm
coming too, Maytera. On these two legs since you won't let me have
a horse, but I'm coming. You're going, and I'm bigger than you."
Which was true. Scleroderma was no taller, but twice as wide.
"Shout," she told her. "You're blessed with a good, loud voice. Shout
and make all the noise you can. If you can keep them from seeing
Bison's people for one second more, that may decide it."
A giant with a gape-toothed grin knelt, hands clasped to help her
mount; she put her left foot in them and swung into the saddle, and
although she sat a tall horse, the giant's head was level with her
own. She had chosen him for his size and ferocious appearance.
(Distraction--distraction would be everything). Now it struck her
that she did not know his name. "Can you ride?" she asked. "If you
can't, say so."
"Sure can, Maytera."
He was probably lying; but it was too late, too late to quiz him or
get somebody else. She rose in her stirrups to consider the five
riders behind her, and the giant's riderless horse. "Most of us will be
killed, and it's quite likely that all of us will be."
The first floater would be well along Cage Street already, halted
perhaps before the doors of the Alambrera; but if they were to
succeed, their diversion would have to wait until the marching men
behind the third floater had closed the gap. It might be best to fill
the time.
"Should one of us live, however, it would be well for him--or her--to
know the names of those who gave their lives. Scleroderma, I
can't count you among us, but you are the most likely to live. Listen
carefully."
Scleroderma nodded, her pudgy face pale.
"All of you. Listen, and try to remember."
The fear she had shut out so effectively was seeping back now.
She bit her lip; her voice must not quaver. "I'm Maytera Mint, from
the Sun Street manteion. But you know that. You," she pointed to
the rearmost rider. "Give us your name, and say it loudly."
"Babirousa!"
"Good. And you?"
"Goral!"
"Kingcup!" The woman who had supplied horses for the rest.
"Yapok!"
"Marmot!"
"Gib from the Cock," the giant grunted, and mounted in a way
that showed he was more accustomed to riding donkeys.
"I wish we had horns and war drums," Maytera Mint told them.
"We'll have to use our voices and our weapons instead. Remember,
the idea is to keep them, the crews of the floaters especially, looking
and shooting at us for as long as we can."
The fear filled her mind, horrible and colder than ice; she felt sure
her trembling fingers would drop Patera Silk's azoth if she tried to
take it from her pocket; but she got it out anyway, telling herself
that it would be preferable to drop it here, where Scleroderma could
hand it back to her.
Scleroderma handed her the reins instead.
"You have all volunteered, and there is no disgrace in reconsidering.
Those who wish may leave." Deliberately she faced forward, so
that she would not see who dismounted.
At once she felt that there was no one behind her at all. She
groped for something that would drive out the fear, and came upon
a naked woman with yellow hair--a wild-eyed fury who was not
sickness until it fled her mind.
Perhaps because she had urged him forward with her heels,
perhaps only because she had loosed his reins, the stallion was
rounding the corner at an easy canter. There, still streets ahead
though not so far as they had been, were the floaters, the third
settling onto the rutted street, with the marching troopers closing
behind it.
"For Echidna!" she shouted. "The gods will it!" Still she wished for
war drums and horns, unaware that the drumming hooves echoed
and re-echoed from each shiprock wall, that her trumpet had shaken
the street. "Silk is Calde!"
She jammed her sharp little heels in the stallion's sides. Fear was gone,
replaced by soaring joy. "_Silk is Calde!_" At her right the giant
was firing two needlers as fast as he could pull their triggers.
"_Down the Ayuntamiento! Silk is Calde!_"
The shimmering horror that was the azoth's blade could not be
held on the foremost floater. Not by her, certainly not at this
headlong gallop. Slashed twice across, the floater wept silvery metal
as the street before it erupted in boiling dust and stones exploded
from the gray walls of the Alambrera.
Abruptly, Yapok was on her right. To her left, Kingcup flailed a
leggy bay with a long brown whip, Yapok bellowing obscenities,
Kingcup shrieking curses, a nightmare witch, her loosed black hair
streaming behind her.
The blade again, and the foremost floater burst in a ball of orange
flame. Behind it, the buzz guns of the second were firing, the flashes
from their muzzle mere sparks, the rattle of their shots lost in
pandemonium. "Form up," she shouted, not knowing what she
meant by it. Then, "_Forward! Forward!_"
Thousands of armed men and women were pouring from the
buildings, crowding through doorways and leaping from windows.
Yapok was gone, Kingcup somehow in front of her by half a length.
Unseen hands snatched off her coif and plucked one flapping black sleeve.
The shimmering blade brought a gush of silver from the second
floater, and there were no more flashes from its guns, only an
explosion that blew off the turret--and a rain of stones upon the
second floater, the third, and the Guardsmen behind it, and lines of
slug guns booming from rooftops and high windows. But not
enough, she thought. Not nearly enough, we must have more.
The azoth was almost too hot to hold. She took her thumb off the
demon and was abruptly skyborn as the white stallion cleared a slab
of twisted, smoking metal at a bound. The guns of the third floater
were firing, the turret gun not at her but at the men and women
pouring out of the buildings, the floater rising with a roar and a
cloud of dust and sooty smoke that the wind snatched away, until
the blade of her azoth impaled it and the floater crashed on its side,
at once pathetic and comic.
To Silk's bewilderment, his captors had treated him with consideration,
bandaging his wound and letting him lie unbound in an
outsized bed with four towering posts which only that morning had
belonged to some blameless citizen.
He had not lost consciousness so much as will. With mild surprise,
he discovered that he no longer cared whether the Alambrera had
surrendered, whether the Ayuntamiento remained in power, or
whether the long sun would nourish Viron for ages to come or burn
it to cinders. Those things had mattered. They no longer did. He
was aware that he might die, but that did not matter either; he
would surely die, whatever happened. If eventually, why not now?
It would be over--over and done forever.
He imagined himself mingling with the gods, their humblest
servitor and worshipper, yet beholding them face-to-face; and found
that there was only one whom he desired to see, a god who was not
among them.
"Well, well, well!" the surgeon exclaimed in a brisk, professional
voice. "So you're Silk!"
He rolled his head on the pillow. "I don't think so."
"That's what they tell me. Somebody shoot you in the arm, too?"
"No. Something else. It doesn't matter." He spat blood.
"It does to me: that's an old dressing. It ought to be changed." The
surgeon left, returning at once (it seemed) with a basin of water and
a sponge. "I'm taking that ultrasonic diathermic wrapping on your
ankle. We've got men who need it a lot more than you do."
"Then take it, please," Silk told him.
The surgeon looked surprised.
"What I mean is that 'Silk' has become someone a great deal
bigger than I am--that I'm not what is meant when people say,
'Silk.'"
"You ought to be dead," the surgeon informed him somewhat
later. "Your lung's collapsed. Probably better to enlarge the exit
wound instead of going in this way. I'm going to roll you over. Did
you hear that? I'm going to turn you over. Keep your nose and
mouth to the side so you can breathe."
He did not, but the surgeon moved his head for him.
Abruptly he was sitting almost upright with a quilt around him,
while the surgeon stabbed him with another needle. "It's not as bad
as I thought, but you need blood. You'll feel a lot better with more
blood in you."
A dark flask dangled from the bedpost like a ripe fruit.
Someone he could not see was sitting beside his bed. He turned his
head and craned his neck to no avail. At last he extended a hand
toward the visitor; and the visitor took it between his own, which
were large and hard and warm. As soon as their hands touched, he
knew.
You said you weren't going to help, he told the visitor. You said I
wasn't to expect help from you, yet here you are
The visitor did not reply, but his hands were clean and gentle and
full of healing.
* * *
"Are you awake, Patera?"
Silk wiped his eyes. "Yes."
"I thought you were. Your eyes were closed, but you were crying."
"Yes," Silk said again.
"I brought a chair. I thought we might talk for a minute. You
don't mind?" The man with the chair was robed in black.
"No. You're an augur, like me."
"We were at the schola together, Patera. I'm Shell--Patera Shell
now. You sat behind me in canonics. Remember?"
"Yes. Yes, I do. It's been a long time."
Shell nodded. "Nearly two years." He was thin and pale, but his
small shy smile made his face shine.
"It was good of you to come and see me, Patera--very good." Silk
paused for a moment to think. "You're on the other side, the
Ayuntamiento's side. You must be. You're taking a risk by talking
to me. I'm afraid."
"I was." Shell coughed apologetically. "Perhaps--I don't know,
Patera. I--I haven't been fighting, you know. Not at all."
"Of course not."
"I brought the Pardon of Pas to our dying. To your dying, too,
Patera, when I could. When that was done, I helped nurse a little.
There aren't enough doctors and nurses, not nearly enough, and
there was a big battle on Cage Street. Do you know about it? I'll tell
you if you like. Nearly a thousand dead."
Silk shut his eyes.
"Don't cry, Patera. Please don't. They've gone to the gods. All of
them, from both sides, and it wasn't your fault, I'm sure. I didn't see
the battle, but I heard a great deal about it. From the wounded, you
know. If you'd rather talk about something else--"
"No. Tell me, please."
"I thought you'd want to know, that I could describe it to you and
it would be something that I could do for you. I thought you might
want me to shrive you, too. We can close the door. I talked to the
captain, and he said that as long as I didn't give you a weapon it
would be all right."
Silk nodded. "I should have thought of it myself. I've been
involved with so many secular concerns lately that I've been getting
lax, I'm afraid." There was a bow window behind Shell; noticing that
it displayed only black night and their own reflected images, Silk
asked, "Is this still Hieraxday, Patera?"
"Yes, but its after shadelow. It's about seven thirty, I think.
There's a clock in the captain's room, and it was seven twenty-five
when I went in. Seven twenty-five by that clock, I mean, and I
wasn't there long. He's very busy."
"Then I haven't neglected Thelxiepeia's morning prayers."
Briefly, he wondered whether he could bring himself to say them
when morning came, and whether he should. "I won't have to ask
forgiveness for that when you shrive me. But first, tell me about the
battle."
"Your forces have been trying to capture the Alambrera, Patera.
Do you know about that?"
"I knew they had gone to attack it. Nothing more."
"They were trying to break down the doors and so on. But they
didn't, and everybody inside thought they had gone away, probably
to try to take over the Juzgado."
Silk nodded again.
"But before that, the government--the Ayuntamiento, I mean--had
sent a lot of troopers, with floaters and so on and a company of
soldiers, to drive them away and help the Guards in the Alambrera."
"Three companies of soldiers," Silk said, "and the Second Brigade
of the Guard. That's what I was told, at any rate."
Shell nearly bowed. "Your information will be much more accurate
than mine, I'm sure, Patera. They had trouble getting through
the city, even with soldiers and floaters, although not as much as
they expected. Do you know about that?"
Silk rolled his head from side to side.
"They did. People were throwing things. One man told me he was
hit by a slop jar thrown out of a fourth-floor window." Shell
ventured an apologetic laugh. "Can you imagine? What will the
people who live up there do tonight I wonder? But there wasn't
much serious resistance, if you know what I mean. They expected
barricades in the street, but there was nothing like tha
t. They
marched through the city and stopped in front of the Alambrera.
The troopers were supposed to go in while the soldiers searched the
buildings along Cage Street."
Silk allowed his eyes to close again, visualizing the column
described by the monitor in Maytera Rose's glass.
"Then," Shell paused for emphasis, "General Mint herself charged
them down Cage Street, riding like a devil on a big white horse.
From the other way, you see. From the direction of the market."
Surprised, Silk opened his eyes. "_General_ Mint?"
"That's what they call her. The rebels--your people, I mean."
Shell cleared his throat. "The fighters loyal to the Calde. To you."
"You're not offending me, Patera."
"They call her General Mint and she's got an azoth. Just imagine!
She chopped up the Guard's floaters horribly with it. This trooper I
talked to had been the driver of one, and he'd seen everything. Do
you know how the Guard's floaters are on the inside, Patera?"
"I rode in one this morning." Silk shut his eyes again, striving to
remember, "I rode inside until the rain stopped. Later I rode on it,
sitting on the... Up on that round part that has the highest buzz
gun. It was crowded inside, not at all comfortable, and we'd put the
bodies in there--but it was better than being out in the rain, perhaps."
Shell nodded eagerly, happy to agree. "There are two men and an
officer. One of the men drives the floater. He was the one I talked
to. The officer's in charge. He sits beside the driver, and there's a
glass for the officer, though some don't work any more, he said. The
officer has a buzz gun, too, the one that points ahead. There's
another man, the gunner, up in the round thing you sat on. It's
called the turret."
"That's right. I remember now."
"General Mint's azoth cut right into their floater and killed their
officer, and stopped one of the rotors. That's what this driver said.
It had seemed to me that if an azoth could do that, it could cut right
through the doors of the Alambrera and kill everyone in there, but
he said they won't. That's because the doors are steel and three
fingers thick, but a floater's armor is aluminum because it couldn't
lift that much. It couldn't float at all, if it were made out of iron or
steel."
"I see. I didn't know that."
"There was cavalry following General Mint. About a troop is what