speak to this captain for me. There were two letters in a pocket of
my robe. They were on the mantel this morning; my acolyte must
have put them there yesterday. I haven't read them, and your giving
me this one has reminded me of them." Somewhat tardily, he thrust
the letter under his quilt. "One had the seal of the Chapter. It may
have been another copy of this, though that doesn't seem very
likely, since this one has today's date. Besides, they wouldn't have
sent this to Patera Jerboa this evening, in that case."
"I suppose not, Patera."
"Don't mention them to the captain. Just say I'd like to have my
robe--all of my clothes. Ask for my clothes and see what he gives
you. Bring them to me, my robe particularly. If he mentions the
letters, say that I'd like to see them. If he won't give them to you, try
to find out what was in them. If he won't tell you, return to your
manteion. Tell Patera Jerboa that I, the calde, order him to get
himself and you--are there sibyls, too?"
Shell nodded. "There's Maytera Wood--"
"Never mind their names. That you and he and they are to lock up
the manteion and leave as quickly as possible."
"Yes, Patera." Shell stood, very erect. "But I won't go back to our
manteion straight away, no matter what the captain says. I--I'm
coming back. Back here to see you and tell you what he said, and try
to do something more for you, if I can. Don't tell me not to, please,
Patera. I'll only disobey."
To his surprise, Silk found that he was smiling. "Your disobedience
is better than the obedience of many people I've known,
Patera Shell. Do what you think right; you will anyway, I feel
certain."
Shell left, and the room seemed empty as soon as he was out the
door. Silk's wound began to throb, and he made himself think of
something else. How proudly Shell had announced his intention to
disobey, while his lip trembled! It reminded Silk of his mother, her
eyes shining with team of joy at some only too ordinary childhood
feat. _Oh, Silk! My son, my son!_ That was how he felt now. These
boys!
Yet Shell was no younger. They had entered the schola together,
and Shell had sat at the desk in front of his own when an instructor
insisted on alphabetical seating; they had been anointed on the same
day, and both had been assigned to assist venerable augurs who
were no longer able to attend to all the demands of their manteions.
Shell, however, had not been enlightened by the Outsider--or
had not had a vein burst in his head, as Doctor Crane would have
had it. Shell had not been enlightened, had not hurried to the
market, had not encountered Blood...
He had been as young as Shell when he had talked to Blood and
plucked three cards out of Blood's hand, not knowing that somewhere
below a monitor was mad and howling for want of those cards--as young
or nearly, because Shell might have done it, too. Again
Silk smelled the dead dog in the gutter and the stifling dust raised by
Blood's floater, saw Blood wave his stick, tall, red faced, and
perspiring. Silk coughed, and felt that a poker had been plunged
into his chest.
Somewhat unsteadily, he crossed the room to the window and raised
the sash to let in the night wind, then surveyed his naked torso in the
minor over the bureau, a much larger one than his shaving mirror
back at the manse.
A dressing half concealed the multicolored bruise left by Musk's
hilt. From what little anatomy he had picked up from the victims he
had sacrificed, he decided that the needle had missed his heart by
four fingers. Still, it must have been good shooting by a mounted man.
With his back to the mirror, he craned his neck to see as much as
possible of the dressing on his back; it was larger, and his back hurt
more. He was conscious of a weak wrongness deep in his chest, and
of the effort he had to make to breathe.
Clothing in the drawers of the bureau: underwear, tunics, and
carelessly folded trousers--under these last, a woman's perfumed
scarf. This was a young man's room, a son's; the couple who owned
the house would have a bedroom on the ground floor, a corner
room with several windows.
had left without packing, otherwise the drawers would be half
empty. Perhaps he was fighting in Maytera Mint's army.
Some part of Kypris had entered her, and that fragment had made
the shy sibyl a general--that, and Echidna's command. For a
moment he wondered what fragment it had been, and whether
Kypris herself had known she possessed it. It was the element that
had freed Chenille from rust, presumably; they would be part and
parcel of the same thing. Kypris had told him she was hunted, and
His Cognizance had called it a wonder that she had not been killed
long ago. Echidna and her children, hunting the goddess of love,
must soon have learned that love is more than perfumed scarves and
thrown flowers. That there is steel in love.
A young woman had thrown that scarf from a balcony, no doubt.
Silk tried to visualize her, found she wore Hyacinth's face, and
thrust the vision back. Blood had wiped his face with a peach-colored
handkerchief, a handkerchief more heavily perfumed than
the scarf. And Blood had said...
Had said there were people who could put on a man like a tunic.
He had been referring to Mucor, though he, Silk, had not known it
then--had not known that Mucor existed, a girl who could dress her
spirit in the flesh of others just as he, a few moments before, had
been considering putting on the clothes of the son whose room this
was.
Softly he called, "Mucor? Mucor?" and listened; but there was no
phantom voice, no face but his own in the mirror above the bureau.
Closing his eyes, he composed a long formal prayer to the Outsider,
thanking him for his life, and for the absence of Blood's daughter.
When it was complete, he began a similar prayer to Kypris.
Beyond the bedroom door, a sentry sprang to attention with an
audible clash of his weapon and click of his heels.
Shadeup woke Auk, brilliant beams of the long sun piercing his
tasseled awnings, his gauze curtains, his rich draperies of puce
velvet, and the grimed glass of every window in the place, slipping
past his lowered blinds of split bamboo, the warped old boards
someone else had nailed up, his colored Scylla, and his shut and
bolted shutters; through wood, paper, and stone.
He blinked twice and sat up, rubbing his eyes. "I feel better," he
announced, then saw that Chenille was still asleep, Incus and Urus
both sleeping, Dace and Bustard sound asleep as well, and only big
Hammerstone the soldier already up, sitting crosslegged with Oreb
on his shoulder and his back against the tunnel wall. "That's good,
trooper," Hammerstone said.
"Not good," Auk explained. "I don't mean that. Better. Better
than I did, see? That feels better than good, 'cause when you're
feeling good you
don't even think about it. But when you feel the
way I do, you pay more attention than when you're feeling good.
I'm a dimberdamber nanny nipper." He nudged Chenille with the
toe of his boot. "Look alive, Jugs. Time for breakfast!"
"What's the matter with _you?_" Incus sat up as though it had been
he and not Chenille who had been thus nudged.
"Not a thing," Auk told him. "I'm right as rain." He considered the
matter. "If it does, I'll go to the Cock. If it don't, I'll do some
business on the hill. Slept with my boots on." He seated himself
beside Chenille. "You too? You shouldn't do that, Patera. Bad on
the feet."
Untying their laces, he tugged off his boots, then pulled off his
stockings. "Feel how wet these are. Still wet from the boat. Wake
up, old man! From the boat and the rain. If we had that tall ass
again, I'd make him squirt fire for me so I could dry 'em. Phew!" He
hung the stockings over the tops of his boots and pushed them away.
Chenille sat up and began to take off her jade earrings. "Ooh, did
I dream!" She shuddered. "I was lost, see? All alone down here, and
this tunnel I was in kept going deeper both ways. I'd walk one way
for a long, long while, and it would just keep going down. So I'd
turn around and walk the other way, only that way went down, too,
deeper and deeper all the time."
"Recollect that the _immortal gods_ are always with you, my
"Uh-huh. Hackum, I've got to get hold of some clothes. My
sunburn's better. I could wear them, and it's too cold down here
without any." She grinned. "A bunch of new clothes, and a double
red ribbon. After that, I'll be ready for ham and half a dozen eggs
scrambled with peppers."
"Watch out," Hammerstone warned her, "I don't think your
friend's ready for inspection."
Auk rose, laughing. "Look at this," he told Hammerstone, and
kicked Urus expertly, bending up his bare toes so that Urus's ribs
received the ball of his foot.
Urus blinked and rubbed his eyes just as Auk had, and Auk
realized that he himself was the long sun. He had awakened himself
with his own light, light that filled the whole tunnel, too dazzlingly
bright for Urus's weak eyes.
"The way you been carrying the old man," he told Urus, "I don't
like it." He wondered whether his hands were hot enough to burn
Urus. It seemed possible; they were ordinary when he wasn't
looking at them, but when he did they glowed like molten gold.
Stooping, he flicked Urus's nose with a forefinger, and when Urus
did not cry out, jerked him to his feet.
"When you carry the old man," Auk told him, "you got to do it like
you love him. Like you were going to kiss him." It might be a good
idea to make Urus really kiss him, but Auk was afraid Dace might
not like it.
"All right," Urus said. "All right."
Bustard inquired, How you feelin', sprat?
Auk pondered. "There's parts of me that work all right," he
declared at length, "and parts that don't. A couple I'm not set about.
Remember old Marble?"
Sure.
"She told us she could pull out these lists. Out of her sleeve, like.
What was right and what wasn't. With me, it's one thing at a time."
"I can do that," Hammerstone put in. "It's perfectly natural."
Chenille had both earrings off, and was rubbing her ears. "Can
you put these in your pocket, Hackum? I got no place to carry them."
"Sure," Auk said. He did not turn to look at her.
"I could get a couple cards for them at Sard's. I could buy a good
worsted gown and shoes, and eat at the pastry cook's till I was ready
to split."
"Like, there's this dimber punch," Auk explained to Urus. "I
learned it when I wasn't no bigger than a cobbler's goose, and I
always did like it a lot. You don't swing, see? Culls always talk
about swinging at you, and they do. Only this is better. I'm not sure
it still works, though."
His right fist caught Urus square in the mouth, knocking him
backward into the shiprock wall. Incus gasped.
"You sort of draw your arm up and straighten it out," Auk
explained. Urus slumped to the tunnel floor. "Only with your weight
behind it, and your knuckles level. Look at them." He held them
out. "If your knuckles go up and down, that's all right, too. Only it's
a different punch, see?" Not as good, Bustard said. "Only not as
good," Auk confirmed.
I kin walk, big feller, he don't have to carry me, nor kiss me
neither.
The dead body at his feet, Auk decided, must be somebody else.
Urus, maybe, or Gelada.
Maytera Marble tried to decide how long it had been since she had
done this, entering _roof_ and when that evoked only a flood of
dripping ceilings and soaked carpets, _attic_.
A hundred and eighty-four years ago.
She could scarcely believe it--did not wish to believe it. A
graceful girl with laughing eyes and industrious hands had climbed
this same stair, as she still did a score of times every day, walked
along this hall, and halted beneath this odd-looking door overhead,
reaching up with a tool that had been lost now for more than a century.
She snapped her new fingers in annoyance, producing a loud and
eminently satisfactory clack, then returned to one of the rooms that
had been hers and rummaged through her odds-and-ends drawer
until she found the big wooden crochet hook that she had sometimes
plied before disease had deprived her of her fingers. Not these
fingers, to be sure.
Back in the hall, she reached up as the girl who had been herself
had and hooked the ring, wondering whimsically whether it had
forgotten how to drop down on its chain.
It had not. She tugged. Puffs of dust emerged from the edges of
the door above her head. The hall would have to be swept again.
She hadn't been up there, no one had--
A harder tug, and the door inclined reluctantly downward,
exposing a band of darkness. "Am I going to have to swing on you?"
she asked. Her voice echoed through all the empty rooms, leaving
her sorry she had spoken aloud.
Another tug evoked squeals of protest, but brought the bottom of
the door low enough for her to grasp it and pull it down; the folding
stair that was supposed to slide out when she did yielded to a hard pull.
I'll oil this, she resolved. I don't care if there isn't any oil. I'll cut
up some fat from that bull and boil it, and skim off the grease and strain
it, and use that. Because this _isn't_ the last time. It is _not_.
She trotted up the folding steps in an energetic flurry of black bombazine.
Just look how good my leg is! Praise to you, Great Pas!
The attic was nearly empty. There was never much left when a
sibyl died; what there was, was shared among the rest in accordance
with her wishes, or returned to her family. For half a minute,
Maytera Marble tried to recall who had owned the rusted trunk next
to the chimney, eventually running down the whole list--every sibyl
who had ever
lived in the cenoby--without finding a single tin trunk
arnong the associated facts.
The little gable window was closed and locked. She told herself
that she was being foolish even as she wrestled its stubborn catch.
Whatever it was that she had glimpsed in the sky while crossing the
playground was gone, must certainly be gone by this time if it had
ever existed.
Probably it had been nothing but a cloud.
She had expected the window to stick, but the dry heat of the last
eight months had shrunk its ancient wood. She heaved at it with all
her strength, and it shot up so violently that she thought the glass
must break.
Silence followed, with a pleasantly chill wind through the window.
She listened, then leaned out to peer up at the sky, and at last
(as she had planned the whole time, having a lively appreciation of
the difficulty of proving a negative after so many years of teaching
small boys and girls) she stepped over the sill and out onto the thin
old shingles of the cenoby roof.
Was it necessary to climb to the peak? She decided that it was,
necessary for her peace of mind at least, though she wondered what
the quarter would say if somebody saw her there. Not that it
mattered, and most were off fighting anyhow. It wasn't as noisy as it
had been during the day, but you could still hear shots now and
then, like big doors shutting hard far away. Doors shutting on the
past, she thought. The cold wind flattened her skirt against her legs
as she climbed, and would have snatched off her coif had not one
hand clamped it to her smooth metal head.
There were fires, as she could see easily from the peak, one just a
few streets away. Saddle Street or String Street, she decided,
probably Saddle Street, because that was where the pawnbrokers
were. More fires beyond it, right up to the market and on the other
side, as was to be expected. Darkness except for a few lighted
windows up on Palatine Hill.
Which meant, more surely than any rumor or announcement, that
Maytera Mint had not won. Hadn't won yet. Because the Hill would
burn, would be looted and burned as predictably as the sixth term in
a Fibonacci series of ten was an eleventh of the whole. With the
Civil Guard beaten, nothing--
Before she could complete the thought, she caught sight of it, way
to the south. She had been looking west toward the market and