Epiphany of the Long Sun (34 page)

"Was-somebody-else here?" She gasped for breath and smiled, giving him sweeter pain than he had ever known.

"His Eminence and a fencing master." Silk felt that he should look around him, but would not take his eyes from hers.

"They must have done the polite thing," she kissed him again, "and left quietly."

He nodded, unable to speak.

"So should we. I've got a room here. Did I tell you?"

He shook his head.

"A suite, really. They're all suites, but they call them rooms. It's a game they play, being simple, pretending to be a country inn." She sank to her knees with a dancer's grace, her hand still upon his arm. "Will you kneel by the pool here with me? I want to look at myself, and I want to look at you, too, at the same time." Abruptly. the tears overflowed. "I want to look at
us.
"

He knelt beside her.

"I knew you couldn't come," a tear fell. creating a tiny ripple, "so I have to see us both. See you beside me."

As in the ball court (though perhaps only because he had experienced it there) it seemed that he stood outside time.

And when they breathed again and turned to kiss, it seemed to him that their reflections remained as they had been in the quiet water of the pool, invisible but forever present. "We-I have to go," he told her. It had taken an enormous effort to say it. "They know I'm here, or they soon will if they don't already. They'll send troopers to kill me, and if you're with me, they'll kill you, too."

She laughed, and her soft laughter was sweeter than any music. "Do you know what I went through to get here? What Blood will do to me if he finds out I took a floater? By the time I got onto the hill, past the checkpoints and sentries-Are you sick? You don't look at all well."

"I'm only tired." Silk sat back on his heels. "When I thought about having to run again, I felt… It will pass." He believed it as soon as he had said it, himself persuaded by the effort he had made to compel her belief.

She rose, and gave him her hand. "By the time I got to Ermine's, I thought I'd been abram to come at all, drowning in a glass of water. I didn't even look in here," happy again, she smiled, "because I didn't want to see there wasn't anyone waiting. I didn't want to be reminded of what a putt I'd been. I got my room and started getting ready for bed, and then I thought-I thought-"

He embraced her; from a perch over the filigree lamp, Oreb croaked, "Poor Silk!"

"What if he's there? What if he's
really down there
, and I'm up here? I'd unpinned my hair and taken off my makeup, but I dived down the stairs and ran through the sellaria, and you were here, and it's only a dream but it's the best dream that ever was."

He coughed. This time the blood was fresh and red. He turned aside and spat it into a bush with lavender flowers and emerald leaves and felt himself falling, unable to stop.

He lay on moss beside the pool. She was gone; but their reflections remained in the water, fixed forever.

When he opened his eyes again, she was back with an old man whose name he had forgotten, the waiter who had offered him wine in the sellaria, the one who had told him of Remora, the footman who had opened the door, and others. They rolled him onto something and picked him up, so that he seemed to float somewhere below the level of their waists, looking up at the belly of the vast dark thing that had come between the bright skylands and the glass roof. His hand found hers. She smiled down at him and he smiled too, so that they journeyed together, as they had on the deadcoach in his dream, in the companionable silence of two who have overcome obstacles to be together, and have no need of noisy words, but rest-each in the other.

Peace

M
aytera Marble smiled to herself, lifting her head and cocking it to the right. Her sheets were clean at last, and so was everything else-Maytera Mint's things, a workskirt that had been badly soiled at the knees, and the smelly cottons she had dropped into the hamper before dying.

After strenuous pumping, she rinsed them in the sink and wrung them out. Her dipper transferred most of the sink water to the wash boiler before she took out the old wooden stopper and let the rest drain away; when it had cooled, the water in the wash boiler could be given to her suffering garden.

With her clever new fingers, she scooped the white bull's congealing fat from the saucepan. A rag served for a strainer; a chipped cup received the semiliquid grease. Wiping her hands on another rag, she considered the tasks that still confronted her: grease the folding steps first, or hang out this wash?

The wash, to be sure; it could be drying while she greased the steps. Very likely, it would be dry or nearly dry by the time she finished.

Beyond the doorway, the garden was black with storm. That wouldn't do! Rain (though Pas knew how badly they needed it) would spot her clean sheets. Fuming, she put aside the wicker clothes-basket and stepped out into the night. a hand extended to catch the first drops.

At least it wasn't raining yet; and the wind (now that she came to think of it, it had been windier earlier) had fallen. Peering up at the storm cloud, she realized with a start that it was not a real cloud at all-that what she had taken for a cloud was in fact the uncanny flying thing she had glimpsed above the wall, and even stared at from the roof.

A memory so remote that it seemed to have lain behind her curved metal skull stirred at this, her third view. Dust flew, as dust always does when something that has remained motionless for a long time moves at last.

"
Why don't you dust it?" (Laughter.)

She would have blinked had she been so built. She looked down again, down at her dark garden, then up (but reasonably and prudently up only) at the pale streaks of her clotheslines. They were still in place, though sometimes the children took them for drover's whips and jump ropes. Started upward thus prudently and reasonably, her gaze continued to climb of its own volition.

"
Why don't you dust it?
"

Laughter filled her as the summer sunshine of a year long past descends gurgling to fill a wineglass, then died away.

Shaking her head, she went back inside. It was a trifle windy yet to hang out wash, and still dark anyway. Sunshine always made the wash smell better; she would wait till daylight and hang it out before morning prayer. It would be dry after.

When had it been, that sun-drenched field? The jokes and the laughter, and the overhanging, overawing shadow that had made them fall silent?

Grease the steps now, and scrub them, too; then it would be light out and time to hang the wash, the first thin thread of the long sun cutting the skylands in two.

She mounted the stair to the second floor. Here was that picture again, the old woman with her doves, blessed by Molpe. A chubby postulant whose name she could not recall had admired it; and she, thin, faceless, old Maytera Marble, flattered, had said that she had posed for Molpe. It was almost the only lie she had ever told, and she could still see the incredulity in that girl's eyes, and the shock. Shriven of that lie again and again, she nevertheless told Maytera Betel at each shriving-Maytera Betel, who was dead now.

She ought to have brought something, an old paintbrush, perhaps, to dab on her grease with. Racking her brain, she recalled her toothbrush, retained for decades after the last tooth had failed. (She wouldn't be needing
that
any more!) Opening the broken door to her room… She should fix this, if she could. Should try to, anyhow. They might not be able to afford a carpenter.

Yet it seemed tonight that she remembered the painter, the little garden at the center of his house, and the stone bench upon which the old woman (his mother, really) had sat earlier. Posing gowned and jeweled as the goddess with a stephane, the dead butterfly pinned in her hair.

It had been embarrassing, but the painter had wonderful brushes, not in the least like this worn toothbrush of hers, whose wooden handle had cracked so badly, whose genuine boar bristles, once so proudly black, had faded to gray.

She pushed the old toothbrush down into the bull's soft, white fat, then ran it energetically along the sliding track.

She could not have been a sibyl then, only the sibyls' maid; but the artist had been a relative of the Senior Sibyl's, who had agreed to let her pose. Chems could hold a pose much longer than bios. All artists, he had said, used chems when they could, although he had used his mother for the old woman because chems never looked old…

She smiled at that, tilting her head far back and to the right. The hinges, then the other track.

He had given them the picture when it was done.

She had a gray smear on one black sleeve. Dust from the steps, most likely. Filthy. She beat the sleeve until the dust was gone, then started downstairs to fetch her bucket and scrub brush. Had the bull's grease done what it was supposed to? Perhaps she should have paid for real oil. She lifted the folding steps tentatively. The grease had certainly helped. All the way up!

Grafifyingly smooth, so she had saved three cardbits at least, perhaps more. How had she gotten them down? With the crochet hook, that was it. But if she did not push the ring up she would not need it. The steps would have to come down again anyway when she scrubbed them, and she itched to see them work as they should. An easy tug on the ring, and down they slid with a puff of dust that was hardly noticeable.

"
Why don't you dust it?
"

Everyone had laughed, and she had too, though she had been so shy. He had been tall and-what was it? Five-point-two-five times stronger than she, with handsome steel features that faded when she tried to see them again.

All nonsense, really.

Like believing she had posed, after she had told Maytera over and over that she had lied. She would never have taken these new parts if… Though they were hers, to be sure.

One more time up the steps. One final time, and here was her old trunk.

She opened the gable window and climbed out onto the roof. If the neighbors spied her, they would be shocked out of their wits.
Trunk
evoked only her earlier search for its owner.

Footlocker,
that was it. Here was a list of the dresses she had worn before they had voted to admit her. Her perfume. The commonplace book that she had kept for the mere pleasure of writing in it, of practicing her hand. Perhaps if she went back into the attic and opened her footlocker, she would find them all, and would never have to look at the thrumming thing overhead again.

Yet she did.

Enormous, though not so big you couldn't see the skylands on each side of it. Higher up and farther west now, over the market certainly and nosing toward the Palatine, its long axis bisected by Cage Street, where convicts were no longer exposed in cages. Its noise was almost below her threshold of hearing, the purr of a mountain lion as big as a mountain.

She should go back down now. Get busy. Wash or cook-though she was dead, and Maytera Betel and the rest dead, too, and Maytera Mint gone only Pas knew where, and nobody left to cook for unless the children came.

Enormous darkness high overhead, blotting the sun-drenched field, the straggling line of servants in which she had stood, and the soldiers' precise column. She had seen it descend from the sky, at first a fleck of black that had seemed no bigger than a flake of soot; had said, "It looks so dirty." A soldier had overheard her and called, "Why don't you dust it?"

Everyone had laughed, and she had laughed, too, though she had been humiliated to tears, had tears been possible for her. Angry and defiant, she had met his eyes and sensed the longing there.

And longed.

How tall he had been! How big and strong! So much steel!

Winged figures the size of gnats sailed this way and that below the vast, dark bulk; something streaked up toward them as she watched-flared yellow, like bacon grease dripping into the stove. Some fell.

"Here we are," Auk told Chenille. It was a break in the tunnel wall.

"This leads into the pit?"

"That's what he says. Let me go first, and listen awhile. Beat the hoof if it sounds a queer lay."

She nodded, resolving that she and her launcher would have something to say about any queer lay, watched him worm his way through (a tight squeeze for shoulders as big as his), listened for minutes that seemed like ten, then heard his booming laugh, faint and far away.

It was a tight squeeze for her as well, and it seemed her hips would not go through. She wriggled and swore, recalling Orchid's dire warnings and that Orchid's were twice-at least twice!-the size of hers.

The place she was trying so hard to get into was a pit in the pit, apparently-as deep as a cistern, with no way to go higher, though Auk must have found one since he was not there.

Her hips scraped through at last. Panting as she knelt on the uneven soil, she reached back in and got her launcher.

"You coming, Jugs?" He was leaning over the edge, almost invisible in the darkness.

"Sure. How do I get out of here?"

"There's a little path around the sides." He vanished.

There was indeed-a path a scant cubit wide, as steep as a stair. She climbed cautiously, careful not to look down, with Gelada's lantern rattling on the barrel of her launcher. Above, she heard Auk say, "All right, maybe I will, but not till she gets here. I want her to see him."

Then her head was above the top and she was looking at the pit. a stade across, its reaches mere looming darkness, its sheer sides faced with what looked like shiprock. A wall rose above it on the side nearest her. She stared up at it without comprehension. turned her head to look at the shadowy figures around Auk, and looked up at it again before she recognized it as the familiar, frowning wall of the Alambrera, which she was now seeing from the other side for the first time.

Auk called, "C'mere, Jugs. Still got that darkee?"

A vaguely familiar voice ventured, "Might be better not to light it, Auk."