Epiphany of the Long Sun (80 page)

Tick said, "Ale rat, nod rung." And Hyacinth, "You always blame yourself. Do you really think you're the only one in the whorl that makes mistakes?"

"I tagged along after Auk when he went to your place over on Sun," Gib explained. "Me an' him's a old knot. I'd got Bongo here when I broke my flipper, see, Caldé? I can't pluck proper. He'll do for anybody I say. I figured to sell him when it was fixed."

"I believe I'm beginning to understand," Silk said.

"Then Auk says to fetch animals, so I fetched him. Bongo here, that is. Then comin' up here I thought maybe-"

Jerboa's trembling hand motioned him to silence. "It was I, Caldé. I-" his thin old voice trembled and broke, "have an aversion to offering them. Just an old fool."

"It isn't, Patera," said a sibyl who seemed at least as old. "Caldé, they remind him of children. I don't feel that way, but I know how he feels. We've talked about it."

Patera Shell stepped forward. "Someone brought one once for Thelxiepeia, Caldé, a little black monkey with a white head. Patera had me offer it."

Silk cleared his throat. "In your youth-I understand, Patera Jerboa. Or at least I believe I do. Let us say that I understand as much as I need to. You dissuaded Gib."

"While we were walking-" Jerboa coughed. "It's a long, long way. He helped me along. He's a kind man, Caldé. A good man, though he doesn't look it. I asked him to refrain for my sake. He said he would, and left us to buy a ram. I offered it for him tonight."

Gib said, "Only I think that's why Pas won't come. They kill stuff at weddin's, don't they? So you-"

"Auk!"
Silk recognized Chenille's voice before he saw her. "Auk, is this a wedding?" Holding up her skirt, she sprinted down an aisle. "Hello, Putera! Hi, Hy! Congrats! Are you going to marry them, Your Cognizance?"

Quetzal did not reply, smiling at Hammerstone and Maytera Marble as they emerged from Echidna's chapel. She knelt before him. "I begged your predecessor, Your Cognizance…"

Quetzal's hairless head bobbed upon his long, wrinkled neck. "My predecessor no longer holds the baculus, Maytera."

"I begged him to. I implored him, but he wouldn't. I should tell you that."

Maytera Mint looked down at her in amazement.

"Your Eminence, you said a moment ago, I overheard you, that not even His Cognizance can unmake an augur. It's true, I know. But-but…"

"Their vow, eh?" Remora spoke to Silk. "Not indelible, hey? Not as-ah-serious."

Quetzal inquired, "Do you want me to free you from your vow, Maytera? Yes or no will suffice."

"Yes, but I really ought-"

"To explain. You're right. For your own peace of mind, you must. You've good sense, Maytera, I've seen that. Doesn't your good sense tell you I'm not the one to whom you owe your explanation? Stand, please. Tell your sib Maytera Mint. Also Maytera Wood and her sibs. Be brief."

As Maytera Marble got to her feet, Hammerstone said, "We knew each other a long time ago. You remember, Caldé? I told you before you gave me the slip. Her name was Moly then."

Maytera Marble spoke to Maytera Mint and the other sibyls in a voice so soft that Silk could scarcely hear her. "I was the maid, the sibyls' maid, when the first bios moved into the city. I got our cenoby ready for them, and in those days I used to look like-like Dahlia, I nearly said, sib, but you never knew Dahlia. Like Teasel, a little." She laughed nervously. "Can you imagine me looking like Teasel? But I did, then."

Still staring, Maytera Mint managed to nod.

"There were six then. Six sibyls on Sun Street. I didn't have a room, you see. I don't really need one. But there were never more than six, and as time went on, fewer. Five and then four, then three. And then-and then only two, as it was with us, dear, dear sib, after I died."

The youngest sibyl from Brick Street started to object, glanced around at the others, and thought better of it.

Maytera Marble displayed a string of yellowed prayer beads. "Just Maytera Betel and I. These were hers. They're ivory." She lifted her head, a smile and a plea. "The chain is silver. She was a fine, fine woman."

"Girl cry," Oreb informed Silk, although no tears streaked Maytera Marble's smooth metal face.

"We couldn't do it all. There was just the two of us and young Patera Pike. And ever so many children, and so Maytera called-called upon…"

Hammerstone explained, "She drafted Moly."

"Upon me. I knew arithmetic. You've got to, to keep any sort of house. How much to buy for so many, and how much you can spend, that sort of thing. I kept a-a diary, I suppose you call it, to practice my hand, which was really quite good. So I could teach the youngest their sums and letters, and I did. Some parents complained, and There wasn't any reason not to. I put my hand on the Writings and promised, and Maytera and Maytera Rose witnessed it and kissed me, and-and then I got new clothes."

She looked at Hammerstone, begging his understanding. "A new name, too. I couldn't be Moly any more once I was a sibyl, or even Maytera Molybdenum. We all take new names, and you were gone. I hadn't seen you in years and years."

"He
slept,"
Incus told her. "He was so
ordered.
"

"Yeah, I did," Hammerstone confirmed. "For me a order's a order. Always has been. Only now Patera says it's all right. If he'd of said no-" Slate slapped him on the backplate, the clang of his hand startingly loud in the religious hush of the Grand Manteion.

Xiphias nudged Silk. "Double wedding, lad!"

"Your Cognizance must think this terribly strange," Maytera Marble ventured.

"Perfectly natural," Quetzal assured her.

"We-we're not like bios about this. It matters terribly to you how old somebody is. I know, I've seen it."

"Her and me are really about the same age," Hammerstone confided. "Only I slept so much."

"What matters to us is-is whether we can." Maytera Marble raised her right hand to show Quetzal the weld that had reattached it, and moved her fingers. "My hand's well again, and I've got a lot of replacement parts, and I can. So we're going to. Or at least we want to, if-if Your Cognizance-"

"You are released," Quetzal told her. "You are a laywoman again, Molybdenum."

"Like a story, right, lass?" Xiphias edged toward Hyacinth and spoke in a tone he intended as confidential. "Must be the end! Everybody getting married! Need another ring!"

I'm Auk

I
t was, Silk thought, no time to be wakeful.

Or more persuasively, no time to sleep. Careful not to awaken Hyacinth, he rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. How many times had he daydreamed of a night like this, and thrust the dream away, telling himself that its reality could never be his? Now…

No, it was no time to sleep. As quietly as he could, he slipped from their bed to bathe and relieve himself. Hyacinth, who wept before sleep, had wept that night; he had wept too-had wept in joy and pain, and in joy at his pain. When tears were done and their heads rested on one pillow, she had said that no man had ever wept with her before.

Two floors below them, their reflected images knelt in the fishpond at Thelxiepeia's feet, subsistent but invisible. There she would weep for him longer than they lived. He lowered his naked body into a rising pool, warm and scarcely less romantic.

Ermine's, Silk discovered when he rose from it, provided everything. Not merely soap, water, towels, and an array of perfumes and scented powders, but thick, woolly robes: one pale and possibly cream or pale yellow, and a longer, darker one that might have been blue had he dared clap and rouse the dim sparks that circled one another on the ceiling.

After drying himself, he put on the longer robe and tied its belt, returned to their bedroom, and covered Hyacinth's perfect, naked body with infinite gentleness. Then, standing outside upon air, watched himself do it, a darker shadow with tousled hair pulling up sheet and blanket to veil his sleeping wife's long, softly rounded legs and swelling hips-Horn and Nettle huddled in a musty bed in a small, chill room in the Caldé's Palace.

- Patera Pike cutting the throat of a speckled rabbit he himself had bought.

- a ragged child weeping on a mattress of straw.

- a blind god metamorphosed from a blind man who remained a blind man still, and was struck.

- a man scarcely larger than the child lying naked on the ground, his stark ribs and emaciated face black with bruises, his arms chained around a tent pole.

- a madman among tombs, howling that the sun would die.

- Violet embraced by Siyuf in the room below.

- Auk asleep on his back before the smoking, unpurified altar of the Grand Manteion.

"
Auk? Auk?
"

He sat up blinking, and rubbed his eyes. Chenille slept at his side, her head pillowed on muscular arms, her skirt hiked to her knees. Sergeant Sand slept in death at the foot of the Sacred Window; about him lay Pateras Jerboa, Incus, and Shell, Incus face up and snoring.

On the farther side of the lofty marble ambion, Spider and Eland slept as well, watched by three soldiers; Slate nodded in friendly fashion and touched his forehead. In the third row of pews, Maytera Mint knelt in prayer.

"Somebody call me?" Auk asked Slate softly.

Slate's big steel head swung from side to side. "I'd of heard. Must of been a dream."

"I guess." Auk lay down again; he was as tired as he could ever remember being, and it was good not to have been called.

Sciathan soared above a leafless plain at sunset. Far ahead, Aer flew a little higher and a little faster. He called to her aloud, knowing somehow that her helmcom was out or had been turned off. She looked back, and he glimpsed her smile, the roses in her cheeks, and a tendril of flaxen hair that had escaped her helmet.
Aer!
he called.
Aer, come back!
But she did not look back at him again, and his PM was overheating. Moment by moment, over a long hour of flight, he watched her dwindle into the dark sky ahead.

***

"
Auk? Auk!
"

He sat up stiffly, conscious that he had slept for hours. The great arched windows of the Grand Manteion, which had been featureless sheets of black by night, showed vague tracings now-gods, animals, and past Prolocutors half visible.

He stood, and Maytera Mint looked up from her vigil at the scrape of his boots on the floor. Leaving the sanctuary, he knelt beside her. "Did you call me? I thought I heard you."

"No, Auk."

He considered that, rubbing his chin. "You been awake all this time, Mother?"

"Yes, Auk." (A tiny spark of happiness appeared in her red-rimmed eyes; it warmed him like a blaze.) "You see, Auk, I swore I would wait here in prayer until Pas came, or shade up. I'm keeping that vow."

"You've kept it already, Mother. Look at those windows." He gestured. "I was so tired I lay down with my boots on, see? I bet you were just as tired, but you haven't slept a wink. You know what I'm going to do?"

"No, Auk, how could I?"

"I'm going to lay down again and sleep some more. Only first I'm going to take off my boots. Now you lay down and sleep too, or I'm going to make a fuss and wake up everybody. The job's done. You did it just like you promised."

Hyacinth woke and went to the open window to examine her ring in the faint gray light of morning-a tarnished silver ring like a rose with a woman's tiny face at its heart, framed by petals. She had bought it because a clerk at Sard's had said it resembled her, never guessing that she was buying her own wedding ring. She had worn it once or twice, tossed it into a drawer, and forgotten it.

It didn't really look like her at all, she decided. The woman in the rose was older, at once more come-on and more… She groped for a word. Not just pretty.

Though Silk thought her beautiful, or said he did.

She kissed him as he slept, went into the dressing room, and tapped the glass.

"Yes, madame."

"Show me exactly the way I look right now. Oh, gods!"

Her own face, puffy-eyed and retaining traces of smeared cosmetics, said, "You are actually quite attractive, madame. If I might suggest-"

She waved the suggestion away. "Now look at this face in my ring. See it? Make me look just a tiny little like that."

For a few seconds she studied the result, turning her head left, then right. "Yes, that's good. Hold that." She picked up the hairbrush and began a process that Tick the catachrest watched approvingly.

"
Auk? Auk!
"

He sat up and stared at the Sacred Window. The voice had come from there-this time he was certain of it. He got up, grasping his hanger to keep the brass fip of the scabbard from rattling on the floor, and padded across the sanctuary. Shell and Incus were clearly sound asleep, but Jerboa's eyes were not quite closed. Old people didn't need much sleep, Auk reminded himself.

He squatted beside Jerboa. "It's all right, I wasn't going to nip your case or anything, Patera. Is that what you thought? Anything you got you can keep."

Jerboa did not reply.

"Only somebody over here's been calling me. Was that you? Like when you were dreaming, maybe?"

Shell grunted something unintelligible and turned his head away, but Jerboa did not stir. Suddenly suspicious, Auk picked up Jerboa's left hand, then slid his own under Jerboa's tunic.

He rose, wiping his hands absently on his thighs; it would be well, certainly, to move the old man's body to some private spot. The sibyls were sleeping in the sacristy; that, at least, was where Maytera Mint had gone when he had persuaded her to lie down for an hour or two, and Auk thought he recalled old Maytera Wood and the others-sibyls whose names he had not learned-going in there at about the time he had stretched himself on the terrazzo floor.

Squatting again, he picked up the old augur's body and carried it to the ambulatory. Schist straightened up as they came into view. "He dead?"

"Yeah," Auk whispered. "How'd you know?"

Schist's steel shoulders rose and fell with a soft clank. "He looks dead, that's all."