Epiphany of the Long Sun (95 page)

Auk rubbed his chin. "Don't sound like it."

"For my conscience's sake, I should tell you that I lied to Major Hadale-or anyway, I came very close to lying. She asked whether I could repair the engines; and I said, quite honestly I believe, that I could not. One speaks of repairs when a thing is broken. To the best of my knowledge, the engines we've lost aren't; but if they were, I wouldn't have the faintest notion how they might be repaired-thus I told her truthfully that repairing them was beyond my power. It was not a lie, though I certainly intended it to deceive her. If I'd said I might be able to set them in motion again, she would have had me beaten, I imagine, to compel me to do it."

Without turning toward them, Sciathan nodded vigorously.

"I'll ask Patera Incus to shrive me later today. Will you excuse me now? I… I would like very much to be alone."

As he left the cockpit, Auk told his back, "Get him to tell you how he charmed the slug gun."

A flimsy door of canvas stretched over a bamboo frame was all that separated the cockpit from a narrow aisle lined with green-curtained cubicles. Hearing a familiar voice, Silk pushed aside the curtain on his right.

The cubicle seemed overfilled by a bunk, a small table, and a stool; Nettle occupied the stool, holding a needler, and Saba smiled in a way that Silk found painful from the bunk.

"Poor girl," Oreb muttered.

Silk traced the sign of addition in the air. "Blessed be you, General Saba, in the Sacred Name of Pas, Father of the Gods, in that of Gracious Echidna, His Consort, in those of their Sons and their Daughters alike, in that of the Overseeing Outsider, and in the names of all other gods whatsoever, this day and forever. So say I, Silk, in the name of their youngest, fairest child, Steely Sphigx, Goddess of Hardihood and Courage, Sabered Sphigx, the glad and glorious patroness of General Saba and General Saba's native city."

"Gracious of you, Caldé. I thought you'd come to gloat."

Nettle shook her head. "You don't know him."

"I came-or at least. I left the cockpit-to escape my friends," Silk told Saba. "I had no more than stepped out when I heard you and looked in. 'When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves.' I read that when I was a boy, and I've learned since how very true it is."

Nettle said, "She was telling me about Trivigaunte, Caldé. I don't think I'd want to live there, but I'd like to see it."

"We go in for towers." Saba smiled. "We say it's because we build such good ones, but maybe we build good ones because we build so many of them. Towers and whitewash, and wide, clean streets. Your city looks," she paused, searching for a telling word, "squatty, like a camp. Squatty and dirty. I know you love it, but that's how it looks to us."

Silk nodded. "I understand. The interiors of our houses are clean, I believe, for the most part; but our streets are filthy, as you say. I was trying to do something about it, and a great many other things, when I was arrested."

"Not by me," Saba told him. "I didn't order it."

"I never thought you did."

"But you were talking to the enemy without telling us. If-" Saba's voice broke, and Oreb croaked in sympathy.

"We each have our sorrows." Silk let the green curtain fall behind him. "I won't ask you to palliate mine, but I may be able to ease yours. I'll try. What were you about to say?"

"I started to say I'd put in a word for you back home, that's all. Because we'll get you again when we get back this airship. If Siyuf's not running your city yet, she soon will be." Saba chuckled wryly. "Then I remembered where I stand. I'd forgotten, talking to this girl. I'm the general who went crazy and turned the airship east when it ought to have been headed home. That's what Hadale told them at the Palace, that I'd gone crazy. They'll think it was treachery and she was covering for me."

"You weren't insane," Silk told her. "You were possessed by Mucor, at my urging. You were possessed in the same way at my dinner. Others must have told you about it-Major Hadale, particularly, since she is your subordinate."

"I didn't want to hear it. Is Hadale your prisoner too?"

Silk shook his head. "She left the airship with most of your pterotroopers to capture a caravan. That let Auk and Gib and their friends overcome the rest."

Nettle held up her needler. "We fought too, Horn and me both. We'd fought hoppies already for General Mint, but a lot of Auk's people had never fought before. Hardly any of the women." To Saba she added, "Your pterotroopers were good, but our hoppies were better. You couldn't panic them."

"I'm sure you acquited yourself creditably," Silk told her. "I, unfortunately, did not. Hyacinth knocked a needler from the pilot's hand and subdued her. I picked it up and held it, feeling an utter fool. I couldn't fire for fear of hitting Hyacinth, and with the needler in my hand I couldn't think of anything else to do. Then someone back here started shooting. Slugs came into the cockpit, and it was only by the favor of a god that all three of us weren't killed."

Silk paused, reflecting. "Have I thanked you, General, for your obvious goodwill? I should, and I do. I'll see to it that you're not mistreated, of course."

Saba shrugged. "That man Auk said I could stay in here, which was nice of him. Those were my jailers that almost shot you. I like this girl better."

She fell silent, and Silk found himself listening to the hum of the engines.

"My pterotroopers fought alongside Mint's when we were the only Trivigauntis in Viron, Caldé. We fought beside your Guard to get you out of that place outside the city, too. If I said I was planning to put in a good word for you already when we left Viron, would you believe it?"

"Of course."

"I wasn't, but I should have been. I was thinking about covering my own arse, as if that mattered."

"Don't torment yourself, General, I beg you." Silk pushed back the curtain that served the cubicle as a door. "In the second gondola there was a hatch toward the rear that opened onto the roof. Is there a similar hatch here?"

"Sure. I'll show you, if it's all right with her."

"That won't be necessary." Silk stepped back and let the curtain fall.

A rope ladder rolled and tied at the ceiling marked the hatch. Pulling a cord released the ladder. The light wooden hatch was held shut by a simple peg-and-cord retainer. Silk removed the peg, threw back the hatch, and climbed out onto the open, empty deck.

With a glad cry Oreb left his shoulder, racing the length of the gondola, shooting ahead of the airship until he was nearly lost to Silk's myopic vision, wheeling and soaring.

More circumspectly, Silk followed until he stood at the gondola's semicircular prow, the toes of the scuffed old shoes he had never found time to replace hanging over the aching void. He looked down at them, seeing them as if he had never seen them before, noting as items new and strange small cracks in their leather, and the ways in which the shoes had shaped themselves to his feet. Beside his left shoe there was a brass socket set into the deck. Presumably a flagpole would be put in it when the airship took part in military ceremonies in Trivigaunte.

Even more probably, similar sockets ringed the entire deck. Light poles would support railings of rope, used perhaps when dignitaries stood where he was standing now, bemedaled women in gorgeous uniforms waving to the populace below. It was even possible that the Rani herself had stood upon this very spot.

He recalled then that he had wished for flags to be raised on this airship to signal the approach of Siyuf's horde. The signalmen (who would more plausibly have been signalwomen) would have kept watch from here with telescopes, would have run their flags up one of the immense cables from which the gondola hung. Below them-

Some minute motion of the gondola, some response to a tiny variation in the wind, nearly caused him to lose his balance; he came very close to putting his right foot forward to regain it, and would have fallen if he had, ending the persistent pain in its ankle.

It would not have been such a bad thing, perhaps, to have fallen. If one did not dread death, it would be an experience of unparalleled interest; to fall from such a height as this, a height greater than that of the loftiest mountain, would provide ample time for observation, prayer, and reflection, surely.

Eventually his body would strike the ground, probably in some unpeopled spot. His spirit would return to the Aureate Path, where once he had encountered his mothers and fathers; his bones would not be found-if they were found at all-until Nettle's children were grown. To the living he would not die but disappear, a source of wonder rather than sorrow. All men died, and all died very quickly in the eyes of the Outsider. Few died so well as that.

He peered upward to study the Aureate Path as it stretched before the airship's blunt nose, and again felt himself-very slightly-lose balance. If his parents waited there for him, they were not to be seen by the eyes of life.

One father had been Chenille's father as well. He, Silk, who had possessed no family save his mother, had gained a sister now. Although neither Chenille nor Hyacinth nor any other woman could take his mother's place. No one could.

Recalling the unmarked razor he had puzzled over so often, he fingered his stubbled cheeks. He had not shaved in well over a day; no doubt his beard was apparent to everyone. It was better, though, to know to whom the razor had belonged.

He looked down at his shoes again. Beneath them, Sciathan sat at the controls, steering a structure a hundred times larger than the Grand Manteion with the touch of a finger. There was no Sacred Window on the airship-that would have been almost impossible-but there was a glass somewhere. Idly Silk found himself wondering where it was. Not in the cockpit, certainly, nor in Saba's cubicle. Yet it would almost have to be in this gondola, in which the Rani's officers ate and slept, and from which they steered her airship. Perhaps in the chartroom; he had climbed to this deck from that chartroom without seeing it-but then he had been occupied with his thoughts.

Too much so to do anything to relieve Saba's depression. Yes, too self-centered for that. Saba and her pterotroopers might be outnumbered at present, but-

Hands upon his shoulders. "
Don't jump, Caldé!
"

He took a cautious step backward. "I hadn't intended to," he said, and wondered whether he lied.

He turned. Horn's pale face showed very clearly what Horn thought. "I'm sorry I frightened you," Silk told him, "I didn't know you were there."

"Just come away from the edge, please, Caldé. For me?"

To soothe Horn, he took a step. "You can't have been up here when I came-I would have seen you. You weren't on the roof of our old gondola either, because I looked back at it. Nettle told you I asked about a hatch, of course."

"A little farther, Caldé. Please?"

"No. This is foolish; but to reassure you, I'll sit down." He did, spreading his robe over his crossed legs. "You see? I can't possibly fall from here, and neither can you, if you sit. I need someone to talk to."

Horn sat, his relief apparent.

"When I was in the cockpit, I wanted to leave it in order to pray-that was what I told myself, at least. But when I was up here alone and might have prayed to my heart's content, I did not. I contemplated my shoes instead, and thought about certain things. They weren't foolish things for the most part, but I feel very foolish for having thought so much about them. Are you going with Auk when he leaves the whorl? That's what he's going to do, you know. The Crew, as Sciathan calls the people of his city, have some of the underground towers Mamelta showed me-intact underground towers-and they're going to give Auk one. I forget what Mamelta called them."

"You never told me about towers, Caldé."

Silk did, striving unsuccessfully to make his description concise. "That isn't all I can recall, but that's all that's of importance, I believe, and now that you mention it, I don't think I've ever told anyone, except for Doctor Crane while we were fellow-captives, and Doctor Crane is dead."

"I never even got to see him," Horn said. "I wish I had because of the way you talk about him. Is the underwater boat like this airship?"

"Not at all. It's all metal-practically all iron, I'm certain. There's a hole at the bottom, too, through which the Ayuntamiento can launch a smaller boat. You'd think that would sink the big one, wouldn't you? But it didn't, and we got away through that hole, Doctor Crane and I." Silk paused, lost in thought. "There are monstrous fish in the lake, Horn, fish bigger than you can imagine. Chenille told me that once, and she's quite correct."

"You wanted to know if I was going with Auk. Nettle and me, because either way we'd do it together."

"Yes, of course."

"I don't think so. He hasn't asked us, but I don't think Nettle would want to if he did. There's my father and mother back home, and my brothers and sisters, and Nettle's family."

"Of course," Silk repeated.

"I like Chenille. I like her a lot. But Auk's not what I call a good man, even if Tartaros did choose him to enlighten. You remember what I told you about him that time? He's still the same, I think. The people he's got with him aren't much better, either. He calls them the best thieves in the whorl, did you know that, Caldé? Because of stealing this airship."

"They're not all thieves," Silk said, "though Auk may like to pretend they are. Most are just poor people from the Orilla and our own quarter. I doubt that many real thieves have the sort of faith something like this requires." He fell silent, by no means sure that he should say more.

"What is it, Caldé?"

"I doubt that all of them will go. Chenille will, I think, though she would be a wealthy woman in Viron; but I wouldn't be in the least surprised to see more than a few of the others hold back."

"You're not going, are you, Caldé?"

Silk shook his head. "I would like to. I don't believe Hyacinth would, however; and these are Auk's people when all is said and done. Not mine."

"Then Nettle and me will come home with you and Hyacinth. Moly wants to go back, too. She wants to find her husband and get back to building their daughter. And there's Patera Incus and Patera Remora."