Epiphany of the Long Sun (19 page)

"I have two," Silk told him. "I hesitate to pose the first, which verges upon blasphemy."

"Many necessary questions do." Quetzal cocked his head. "This isn't one, but do you hear horses?"

"Horses, Your Cognizance? No."

"I must be imagining it. What are your questions?"

Silk walked on in silence for a few seconds to collect his thoughts. At length he said, "My original two questions have become three, Your Cognizance. The first, for which I apologize in advance, is, isn't it true that Echidna and the Seven love us just as Pas did? I've always felt, somehow, that Pas loved them, while they love us; and if that is so, will his death-terrible though it is-make a great deal of difference to us?"

"You have a pet bird, Patera Caldé. I've never seen it, but so I've been told."

"I had one, Your Cognizance, a night chough. I've lost him, I'm afraid, although it may be that he's with a friend. I'm hoping he'll return to me eventually."

"You should have caged him, Patera Caldé. Then you'd still have him."

"I liked him too much for that, Your Cognizance."

Quetzal's small head bobbed upon its long neck. "Just so. There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them. Pas's love of us was of the first kind. Echidna's and the Seven's is of the other. Were you going to ask why they killed Pas? Is that one of your questions?"

Silk nodded, "My second, Your Cognizance."

"I've answered it. What's the third?"

"You indicated that you wished to discuss the Plan of Pas with me, Your Cognizance. If Pas is dead, what's the point of discussing his plan?"

Hoofbeats sounded faintly behind them.

"A god's plans do not die with him, Patera Caldé. He is dead, as Serpentine Echidna told us. We are not. We were to carry Pas's plan out. You said he ruled us as a father. Do a father's plans benefit him? Or his children?"

"Your Cognizance, I just remembered something? Another god, the Outsider-"

"Pateras!"
The horseman, a lieutenant of the Civil Guard in mottled green conflict armor, pushed up his visor. "Are you-you there, Patera. The young one. Aren't you Patera Silk?"

"Yes, my son," Silk said. "I am."

The lieutenant dropped the reins. His hand appeared slow as it jerked his needler from the holster, yet it was much too quick to permit Silk to draw Musk's needler. The flat crack of the shot sounded an instant after the needle's stinging blow.

Mail

T
hey had insisted she not look for herself, that she send one of them to do it, but she felt she had already sent too many others. This time she would see the enemy for herself, and she had forbidden them to attend her. She straightened her snowy coif as she walked, and held down the wind-tossed skirt of her habit-a sibyl smaller and younger than most, gowned (like all sibyls) in black to the tops of her worn black shoes, out upon some holy errand, and remarkable only for being alone.

The azoth was in one capacious pocket, her beads in the other; she got them out as she went around the corner onto Cage Street, wooden beads twice the size of those Quetzal fingered, smoothed and oiled by her touch to glossy chestnut.

First, Pas's gammadion: "
Great Pas, Designer and Creator of the Whorl, Lord Guardian of the Aureate Path, we
-"

The pronoun should have been
I,
but she was used to saying them with Maytera Rose and Maytera Marble; and they, praying together in the sellaria of the cenoby, had quite properly said "we." She thought: But I'm praying for all of us. For all who may die this afternoon, for Bison and Patera Gulo and Bream and that man who 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 herself at all-wielding a scourge whose lashes cut and tore the gray 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 Caldé!"

She jammed her sharp little heels in the stallion's sides. Fear was gone, replaced by soaring joy. "
Silk is Caldé!
" At her right the giant was firing two needlers as fast as he could pull their triggers.

"
Down the Ayuntamiento! Silk is Caldé!
"

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."