Epiphany of the Long Sun (7 page)

Chenille strode out of the darkness carrying a long weapon with a cylindrical magazine. "Can you walk now, Hackum? We've been waiting for you."

From his perch on the barrel, Oreb added, "All right?"

"Pretty soon," Auk told them. "What's that you got?"

"A launcher gun." Chenille grounded it. "This is what did for our talus, or that's what we think. Stony showed me how to shoot it. You can look, but don't touch."

Although pain prevented Auk from enjoying the joke, he managed, "Not till I pay, huh?"

She grinned wickedly, making him feel better. "Maybe not even then. Listen here, Patera. You too, Stony. Can I tell all of you what I've been thinking?"

"Smart girl!" Oreb assured them.

Incus nodded; Auk shrugged and said, "I'm not getting up for a while yet. C'mere, bird."

Oreb hopped onto his shoulder. "Bad hole!"

Chenille nodded. "He's right. We heard some real funny noises while I was back there looking for something to shoot, and there's probably more soldiers farther on. There's more lights up that way too though, and that might help."

Hammerstone said, "Not if we want to dodge their patrols."

"I guess not. But the thing is, Oreb could say what he did about anyplace down here, and he wouldn't be wrong. Auk, what I was going to tell you is I used to have a cute little dagger that I strapped onto my leg. It had a blade about as long as my foot, and I thought it was just right. I thought your knife or your needler or whatever should fit you, like shoes. You know what I'm saying?"

He did not, but he nodded nevertheless.

"Remember when I was Scylla?"

"It's whether you remember. That's what I want to know."

"I do a little bit. I remember being Kypris, too, maybe a little better. You didn't know about that, did you, Patera? I was. I was them, but underneath I was still me. I think it's like a donkey feels when somebody rides him. He's still him, Snail or whatever his name is, but he's you, too, going where you want to and doing what you want to do. And ifhe doesn't want to, he gets kicked till he does it anyhow."

Oreb cocked his head sympathetically. "Poor girl!"

"So pretty soon he gives up. Kick him and he goes, pull up and he stops, not paying a lot of attention either way. It was like that with me. I wanted rust really bad, and I kept thinking about it and how shaggy tired I was. And all at once it was like I'd been dreaming. I was in a manteion in Limna, then up on an altar in a cave and fit for sod. And I didn't remember anything. or if I did I wouldn't think about it. But when I was bumping out to the shrine, up on those high rocks, stuff started coming back. About being Kypris, I mean."

Incus sighed.
"Scylla
mentioned it, my daughter, so I did know. Sharing your
body
with the
goddess of love!
How I
envy
you! It must have been
wonderful!
"

"I guess it was. It wasn't nice. It wasn't fun at all. But the more I think, the more I think it really was wonderful in a abram sort of way. I'm not exactly like I used to be, either. I think when they left, the goddesses must have left some crumbs behind, and maybe they took some with them, too."

She picked up the launcher, running her fingers along the pins protruding from its magazine. "What I started to say was that after the talus got hit I saw I'd been wrong about things fitting, my dagger and all that. This stuff isn't really like shoes at all. The smaller somebody is, the bigger a shiv she needs. Scylla left that behind, I think, or maybe something I could use to see it myself.

"Anyway, Auk here plucks a dimber needler, but I doubt he needs it much. If I lived the way he does, and I chose to do, I'd need it just about every day. So I found this launcher gun, and it's bigger. It was empty, but I found another one with the barrel flat where the talus had gone over it, and it was full. Stony showed me how you load and unload them."

Auk said, "I think I'll get something myself, a slug gun, anyhow. There's probably a bunch of 'em lying around."

Incus shook his head and reached for Auk's waist. "You'd better allow me to take your needler this time, my son."

At once Auk's arms were pinned from behind by a grip that was quite literally of steel.

With evident distaste, Incus lifted the front of Auk's tunic and took his needler from his waistband. "This wouldn't harm Corporal Hammerstone, but it would
kill
me, I suppose." He gave Auk a toothy smile. "Or
you,
my son."

"No shoot," Oreb muttered; it was a moment or two before Auk understood that he was addressing Chenille.

"If you see him with a
slug gun
, Corporal, you're to take it from him and break it
immediately
. A slug gun or any other such weapon."

"
Ahoy! Ahoy there!
" The old fisherman was shouting and waving, silhouetted by orange flames from the burning talus. "
He says he's dyin'! Wants to talk to us!
"

Silk lifted himself until he could sit almost comfortably upon the turret, then waved both hands. His face was smeared with the mud of the storm, mud that was cracking and falling away now; the gaudy tunic that Doctor Crane had brought him in Limna was daubed with mud as well, and he wondered how many of those who waved and cheered and jumped and shouted around the floater actually recognized him.

SILK FOR CALDÉ!

SILK FOR CALDÉ!

Was there really to be a Caldé again, and was this new Caldé to be himself? Caldé was a title that his mother had mentioned occasionally, a carved head in her closet.

He looked up Sun Street, then stared. That was, surely, the silver-gray of a Sacred Window, nearly lost in the bright sunshine-a Window in the middle of the street.

The wind carried the familiar odor of sacrifice-cedar smoke, burning fat, burning hair, and burning feathers, the mixture stronger than that of hot metal, hot fish-oil, and hot dust that wrapped the floater. Before the silver shimmer of the Window, a black sleeve slid down a thin arm of gray metal, and a moment later he caught sight of Maytera Marble's shining, beloved face below the waving, flesh-like hand. It seemed too good to be true.

"Maytera!"
In the tumult of the crowd he could scarcely hear his own voice; he silenced them with a gesture, arms out, palms down. "
Quiet! Quiet, please!
"

The noise diminished, replaced by the troubled bleating of sheep and the angry hissing of geese; as the crowd parted before the floater, he located the animals themselves.

"Maytera! You're holding a viaggiatory sacrifice?"

"Maytera Mint is! I'm helping!"

"Patera!" Gulo was back, trotting alongside the floater, his black robe fallow with dust. "There are dozens of victims, Patera! Scores!"

They would have to sacrifice alternately if the ceremony were not to be prolonged till shadelow-which was what Gulo wanted, of course; the glory of offering so many victims, of appearing before so large a congregation. Yet he was not (as Silk reminded himself sharply) asking for more than his due as acolyte. Furthermore, Gulo could begin immediately, while he, Silk, would have to wash and change. "Stop," he called to the driver. "Stop right here." The floater settled to the ground before the altar.

Silk swung his legs from the turret to stand at the edge of the deck before it, admonished by a twinge from his ankle.

"Friends!"
A voice he felt he should recognize at once, shrill yet thrilling, rang from the walls of every building on Sun Street. "This is Patera Silk! This is the man whose fame has brought you to the poorest manteion in the city. To the Window through which the gods look upon Viron again!"

The crowd roared approval.

"Hear him! Recall your holy errand, and his!"

Silk, who had identified the speaker at the fourth word, blinked and shook his head, and looked again. Then there was silence, and he had forgotten what he had been about to say.

An antlered stag among the waiting victims (an offering to Thelxiepeia, the patroness of divination, presumably) suggested an approach; his fingers groped for an ambion. "No doubt there are many questions you wish to ask the gods concerning these unsettled times. Certainly there are many questions I need to ask. Most of all, I wish to beg the favor of every god; and most of all to beg Stabbing Sphigx, at whose order armies march and fight, for peace. But before I ask the gods to speak to us, and before I beg their favor, I must wash and change into suitable clothes. I've been in a battle, you see-one in which good and brave men died; and before I return to our manse to scrub my face and hands and throw these clothes into the stove, I must tell you about it."

They listened with upturned faces, eyes wide.

"You must have wondered at seeing me in a Guard floater. Some of you surely thought, when you saw our floater, that the Guard intended to prevent your sacrifice. I know that, because I saw you drawing weapons and reaching for stones. But you see, these Guardsmen have endorsed a new government for Viron."

There were cheers and shouts.

"Or as I should have said, a return to the old one. They wish us to have a Caldé-"

"
Silk is Caldé!
" someone shouted.

"-and a return to the forms laid down in our Charter. I encountered some of these brave and devout Guardsmen in Limna, and because I was afraid we might be stopped by other units of the Guard, I foolishly suggested that they pretend I was their prisoner. Many of you will have anticipated what happened as a result. Other Guardsmen attacked us, thinking that they were rescuing me." He paused for breath.

"Remember that. Remember that you must not assume that every Guardsman you see is our enemy, and remember that even those who oppose us are Vironese." His eyes sought out Maytera Marble again. "I've lost my keys, Maytera. Is the garden gate unlocked? I should be able to get into the manse that way."

She cupped her hands (hands that might have belonged to a bio woman) around her mouth. "I'll open it for you, Patera!"

"Patera Gulo, proceed with the sacrifice, please. I'll join you as soon as I can."

Clumsily, Silk vaulted from the floater, trying to put as much weight as he could on his sound left leg; at once he found himself sunounded by well-wishers, some of them in green Civil Guard uniforms, some in mottled green conflict armor, most in bright tunics or flowing gowns, and more than a few in rags; they touched him as they might have touched the image of a god, in speeches blurted in a second or two declared themselves his disciples, partisans, and supporters forever, and carried him along like the rush of a rain-swollen river.

Then the garden wall was at his elbow, and Maytera Marble at the gate waving to him while the Guardsmen swung the butts of the slug guns to keep back the crowd. A voice at his ear said, "I shall come with you, My Caldé. Always now, you must have someone to protect you." It was the captain with whom he had breakfasted at four in the morning in Limna.

The garden gate banged shut behind them; on the other side Maytera Marble's key grated in the lock. "Stay here," the captain ordered a Guardsman in armor. "No one is to enter." He turned back to Silk, pointed toward the cenoby. "Is that your house, My Caldé?"

"No. It's over there. The triangular one." Belatedly. he realized that it did not appear triangular from the garden; the captain would think him mad. "The smaller one. Patera Gulo won't have locked the door. Potto got my keys."

"Councillor Potto, My Caldé?"

"Yes, Councillor Potto." Yesterday's pain rushed back: Potto's fists and electrodes, Sand's black box. Scrupulous answers that brought further blows and the electrodes at his groin. Silk pushed the memories away as he limped along the graveled path, the captain behind him and five troopers behind the captain, passing the dying fig in whose shadow the animals that were to die for Orpine's spirit had rested, the arbor in which he had spoken to Kypris and chatted with Maytera Marble, her garden and his own blackberries and wilting tomato vines, all in less time than his mind required to recognize and love them.

"Leave your men outside, Captain. They can rest in the shade of the tree beside the gate if they like." Were they doomed, too? From the deck of the floater he had talked of Sphigx; and those who perished in battle were accounted her sacrifices, just as those struck by lightning were said to have been offered to Pas.

The kitchen was exactly as he recalled it; if Gulo had eaten since moving into the manse, he had not done it here. Oreb's water cup still stood on the kitchen table beside the ball snatched from Horn. "If it hadn't happened, the big boys would have won," he murmured.

"I beg pardon, My Caldé?"

"Pay no attention-I was talking to myself." Refusing the captain's offer of help, he toiled at the pump handle until he could splash his face and disorderly yellow hair with cold water that he could not help imagining smelled of the tunnels, soap and rinse them, and rub them dry with a dish towel.

"You'll want to wash up a bit, too, Captain. Please do so while I change upstairs."

The stair was steeper than he remembered; the manse, which he had always thought small, smaller than ever. Seated on the bed that he had left unmade on Molpseday morning, he lashed its wrinkled sheets with Doctor Crane's wrapping.

He had told the crowd he would burn his tunic and loose brown trousers, but although soaked and muddy they were still practically new, and of excellent quality; washed, they might clothe some poor man for a year or more. He pulled the tunic off and tossed it into the hamper.

The azoth he had filched from Hyacinth's boudoir was in the waistband of the trousers. He pressed it to his lips and carried it to the window to examine it again. It had never been Hyacinth's, from what Crane had told him; Crane had merely had her keep it, feeling that her rooms were less likely to be searched than his own. Crane himself had received it from an unnamed Idlanum in Trivigaunte who had intended it as a gift for Blood. Was it Blood's, then? If so, it must be turned over to Blood without fail. There must be no more theft from Blood; he had gone too far in that direction on Phaesday.