Nightside the Long Sun (11 page)

Auk shook his head. “It ain't there. I been there a time or two, and that gets us to one of those meritorious acts that you just now promised me about. You got to let me take you there.”

“If it isn't inconvenient—”

“It's shaggy—excuse me, Patera. Yeah, it's going to put me out by a dog's right, only you got to let me do it anyhow, if you really go to Blood's. If you don't, you'll get lost sure trying to find it. Or somebody'll know you, and that'll be worse. But first you're going to give Blood a whistle on my glass over there, see? Maybe he'll talk to you, or if he wants to see you he might even send somebody.”

Auk strode across the room and clapped his hands; the monitor's colorless face rose from the depths of the glass.

“I want Blood,” Auk told it. “That's the buck that's got the big place off the old Palustria Road.” He turned to Silk. “Come over here, Patera. You stand in front of it. I don't want 'em to see me.”

Silk did as he was told. He had talked through glasses before (there had been one in the Prelate's chambers at the schola), though not often. Now he discovered that his mouth was dry. He licked his lips.

“Blood is not available, sir,” the monitor told him imperturbably. “Would someone else do?”

“Musk, perhaps,” Silk said, recalling the name Auk had mentioned.

“It will be a few minutes, I fear, sir.”

“I'll wait for him,” Silk said. The glass faded to an opalescent gray.

“You want to sit, Patera?” Auk was pushing a chair against the backs of his calves.

Silk sat down, murmuring his thanks.

“I don't think that was too smart, asking for Musk. Maybe you know what you're doing.”

Still watching the glass, Silk shook his head. “You had said he worked for Blood, that's all.”

“Don't tell him you're with me. All right?”

“I won't.”

Auk did not speak again, and the silence wrapped itself about them. Like the silence of the Windows, Silk thought, the silence of the gods: pendant, waiting. This glass of Auk's was rather like a Window; all glasses were, although they were so much smaller. Like the Windows, glasses were miraculous creations of the Short-Sun days, after all. What was it Maytera Marble had said about them?

Maytera herself, the countless quiescent soldiers that the Outsider had revealed, and in fact all similar persons—all chems of whatever kind—were directly or otherwise marvels of the inconceivably inspired Short-Sun Whorl, and in time (soon, perhaps) would be gone. Their women rarely conceived children, and in Maytera's case it was quite …

Silk shook his shoulders, reminding himself severely that in all likelihood Maytera Marble would long outlive him—that he might be dead before shadeup, unless he chose to ignore the Outsider's instructions.

The monitor reappeared. “Would you like me to provide a few suggestions while you're waiting, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

“I might straighten your nose just a trifle, sir, and do something regarding a coiffeur. You would find that of interest, I believe.”

“No,” Silk said again; and added, as much to himself as to the monitor, “I must think.”

Swiftly the monitor's gray face darkened. The entire glass seemed to fall away. Black, oily-looking hair curled above flashing eyes from which Silk tore his own in horror.

As a swimmer bursts from a wave and discovers himself staring at an object he has not chosen—at the summer sun, perhaps, or a cloud or the top of a tree—Silk found that he was looking at Musk's mouth, lips as feverishly red and fully as delicate as any girl's.

To damp his fear, he told himself that he was waiting for Musk to speak; and when Musk did not, he forced himself to speak instead. “My name is Patera Silk, my son.” His chin was trembling; before he spoke again, he clenched his teeth. “Mine is the Sun Street manteion. Or I should say it isn't, which is what I must see Blood about.”

The handsome boy in the glass said nothing and gave no sign of having heard. In order that he might not be snared by that bright and savage stare again, Silk inventoried the room in which Musk stood. He could glimpse a tapestry and a painting, a table covered with bottles, and two elaborately inlaid chairs with padded crimson backs and contorted legs.

“Blood has purchased our manteion,” he found himself explaining to one of the chairs. “By that I mean he's paid the taxes, I suppose, and they have turned the deed over to him. It will be very hard on the children. On all of us, to be sure, but particularly on the children, unless some other arrangement can be made. I have several suggestions to offer, and I'd like—”

A trooper in silvered conflict armor had appeared at the edge of the glass. As he spoke to Musk, Silk realized with a slight shock that Musk hardly reached the trooper's shoulder. “A new bunch at the gate,” the trooper said.

Hurriedly, Silk began, “I'm certain for your sake—or for Blood's, I mean—that an accommodation of some sort is still possible. A god, you see—”

The handsome boy in the glass laughed and snapped his fingers, and the glass went dark.

Chapter 4

N
IGHTSIDE

It had been late already when they had left the city. Beyond the black streak of the shade, the skylands had been as clear and as bright as Silk (who normally retired early and rose at shadeup) had ever seen them; he stared at them as he rode, his thoughts drowned in wonder. Here were nameless mountains filling inviolate valleys to the rim with their vast, black shadows. Here were savannah and steppe, and a coastal plain ringing a lake that he judged must certainly be larger than Lake Limna—all these doming the gloomy sky of night while they themselves were bathed in sunlight.

As they had walked the dirty and dangerous streets of the Orilla, Auk had remarked, “There's strange things happen nightside, Patera. I don't suppose you know it, but that's the lily word anyhow.”

“I do know,” Silk had assured him. “I shrive, don't forget, so I hear about them. Or at least I've heard a few very strange stories that I can't relate. You must have seen the things as they occurred, and that must be stranger still.”

“What I was going to say,” Auk had continued, “was that I never heard about any that was any stranger than this, what you're going to do, or try to do. Or seen anything stranger, either.”

Silk had sighed. “May I speak as an augur, Auk? I realize that a great many people are offended by that, and Our Gracious Phaea knows I don't want to offend you. But this once may I speak?”

“If you're going to say something you wouldn't want anybody to hear, why, I wouldn't.”

“Quite the contrary,” Silk had declared, perhaps a bit too fervently. “It's something that I wish I could tell the whole city.”

“Keep your voice down, Patera, or you will.”

“I told you a god had spoken to me. Do you remember that?”

Auk had nodded.

“I've been thinking about it as we walked along. To tell the truth, it's not easy to think about anything else. Before I spoke to—to that unfortunate Musk. Well, before I spoke to him, for example, I ought to have been thinking over everything that I wanted to say to him. But I wasn't, or not very much. Mostly I was thinking about the Outsider; not so much what he had said to me as what it had been like to have him speaking to me at all, and how it had felt.”

“You did fine, Patera.” Auk had, to Silk's surprise, laid a hand on his shoulder. “You did all right.”

“I don't agree, though I won't argue with you now. What I wanted to say was that there is really nothing strange at all about what I'm doing, or about your helping me to do it. Does the sun ever go out, Auk? Does it ever wink out as you or I might snuff out a lamp?”

“I don't know, Patera. I never thought about it. Does it?”

Silk had not replied, continuing in silence down the muddy street, matching Auk stride for stride.

“I guess it don't. You couldn't see them skylands up there nightside, if it did.”

“So it is with the gods, Auk. They speak to us all the time, exactly as the sun shines all the time. When the dark cloud that we call the shade gets between us and the sun, we say it's night, or nightside, a term I never heard until I came to Sun Street.”

“It don't really mean night, Patera. Not exactly. It means … All right, look at it like this. There's a day way of doing, see? That's the regular way. And then there's the other way, and nightside's when you do this other way—when everything's on the night side of the shade.”

“We're on the night side of the shade for only half the day,” Silk had told him. “But we are on the night side of whatever it is that bars us from the gods almost constantly, throughout our whole lives. And we really shouldn't be. We weren't meant to be. I got that one small ray of sunshine, you see, and it shouldn't be strange at all. It should be the most ordinary thing in the whorl.”

He had expected Auk to laugh, and was surprised and pleased when he did not.

*   *   *

They had rented donkeys from a man Auk knew, a big gray for Auk and a smaller black for Silk. “Because I'll have to lead him back,” Auk had said. “We got to get that straight right now. He don't stay with you.”

Silk had nodded.

“You're going to get caught, like I told you, Patera. You'll talk to Blood, maybe, like you want. But it'll be after they get you. I don't like it, but there it is. So you're not going to need him to ride back on, and I'm not going to lose what I'm giving this donkey man to hold, which is double what he'd cost in the market.”

“I understand,” Silk had assured him.

Now, as they trotted along a narrow track that to him at least was largely invisible, with the toes of his only decent shoes intermittently intimidated by the stony soil, Auk's words returned to trouble him. Tearing his eyes from the skylands, he called, “You warned me that Blood was going to catch me, back there in the city while you were renting these donkeys for us. What do you think he'll do to me if he does?”

Auk twisted about to look at him, his face a pale blur in the shadow of the crowding trees. “I don't know, Patera. But you're not going to like it.”

“You may not know,” Silk said, “but you can guess much better than I can. You know Blood better than I do. You've been in his house, and I'm sure you must know several people who know him well. You've done business with him.”

“Tried to, Patera.”

“All right, tried to. Still you know what kind of man he is. Would he kill me, for breaking into his house? Or for threatening him? I fully intend to threaten his life if he won't return our manteion to the Chapter, assuming that I get that far.”

“I hope not, Patera.”

Unbidden and unwanted, Musk's features rose from Silk's memory, perfect—yet corrupt, like the face of a devil. So softly that he was surprised that Auk heard it, Silk said, “I have been wondering whether I shouldn't take my own life if I am caught. If I am, I say, although I hope not to be, and am determined not to be. It's seriously wrong to take one's own life, and yet—”

A chain or more ahead, Auk chuckled. “Kill yourself, Patera? Yeah, it could be a good idea. Keep it in mind, depending. You won't tell Blood about me?”

“I've sworn,” Silk reminded him. “I would never break that oath.”

“Good.” Auk turned away again, his posture intent as his eyes sought to penetrate the shadows.

Clearly Auk had been less than impressed by his mention of suicide, and for a moment Silk resented it. But Auk was right. How could he serve any god if he set out determined to resign his task if it became too difficult? Auk had been correct to laugh; he was no better than a child, sallying forth with a wooden sword to conquor the whorl—something that he had in fact done not too many years ago.

Yet it was easy for Auk to remain calm, easy for Auk to mock his fears. Auk, who had no doubt broken into scores of these country villas, was not going to break into this one, or even to assist him in doing it. And yet, Silk reminded himself, Auk's own position was by no means impregnable.

“I would never violate my solemn oath, sworn to all the gods,” Silk said aloud. “And besides, if Blood were to find out about you and have you killed—he didn't strike me as the type who kill men themselves—there would be no one to help me escape him.”

Auk cleared his throat and spat, the sound unnaturally loud in the airless stillness of the forest. “I'm not going to do a shaggy thing for you, Patera. You can forget about that. You're working for the gods, right? Let them get you out.”

Almost whispering, because he was saddened by the knowledge, Silk said, “Yes, you will, Auk.”

“Sneeze it!”

“Because you couldn't ever be certain that I wouldn't tell, eventually. I won't, but you don't trust me. Or at least not that much.”

Auk snorted.

“And since you're a better man than you pretend to be, the knowlege that I—not I particularly perhaps, but an augur who had been a companion of sorts, if only for this one night—required your help would devour you, even if you denied it a hundred times or more, as you very probably would. Thus you'll help me if you can, Auk, eventually and possibly quite quickly. I know you will. And because you will, it will go much better for me if Blood doesn't know about you.”

“I'd crawl a long way in for a while, maybe, but that's all. Maybe go see Palustria for a year or three till Blood was gone or he'd forgotten about me. People ain't like you think, Patera. Maybe you studied a long time, but there's a lot that you don't know.”

Which was true enough, Silk admitted to himself. For whatever inscrutable reasons, the gods thrust bios into the whorl knowing nothing of it; and if they waited until they were so wise as to make no mistakes before they acted, they waited forever. With sudden poignancy Silk wished that he might indeed wait forever, as some men did.