Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) 7

"Good Silk!" Oreb assured His Cognizance.

"It is not misplaced, I feel certain." He opened the note, read it, glanced gravely at his visitor, and read it again.

"You needn't confide in me, of course. I realize-"

The Prolocutor had raised a plump hand to silence him. "It concerns yourself. I will not conceal that from you. I ask you now, openly and forthrightly, whether you repose trust in my judgment and discretion."

"Much more than in my own, Your Cognizance."

"Then I tell you now that this missive concerns you, but I dare not let you peruse it. Its substance I shall impart when I deem it appropriate. You will willingly assist me?"

"Very willingly, Your Cognizance."

"Exemplary." The Prolocutor looked toward a flower-decked porcelain clock. "Less than an hour remains, and we shall each desire to spend precious moments in private prayer. Let me be succinct."

"Please do, Your Cognizance."

"First, I shall make you do all the work, though I myself shall read the victims. Prepare yourself to address the devoted supplicants of the immortalgods."

The white-haired man nodded.

"Second, I must warn you that there are in this city certain strangers who are said to purpose to carry you off to Blue. I sent my coadjutor to you last night, to forewarn you concerning these outsiders. He miscarried, but-why are you looking like that?"

"No cut!"

"It's nothing, Your Cognizance," the white-haired man said. "Please continue."

"I was about to say that our solemn sacrifice may afford them an incomparable opportunity. You, more than plausibly, are unaccustomed to inserting oneself into the devious schemes of the ill intentioned. I invite you to believe it is quite otherwise with me. If it were my intent to thus abscond with you, I should consider the abovedesignated solemn sacrifice a golden opportunity."

"I'll be careful, Your Cognizance."

"Do so." The Prolocutor looked dubious. "You are of an adventurous and mettlesome disposition. Inculcate the innocence of the dove and the prudence of the turtle. You may need both."

"I'll strive to, Your Cognizance."

"I hope you do." The Prolocutor glanced at his clock again. "Lastly, that communication. General Mint desires to speak with you. You need fear no bootless delay. She is here in my Palace."

He was taken to a small but richly appointed room on the same floor by the prothonotary; a somber-faced Mint waited by the window, small hands clutching the armrests of her chair.

He bowed, Oreb fluttering on his shoulder. "This is a great honor, General. Can I be of help to you?"

She nodded and managed to smile. "Shut the door, please. We haven't time for propriety."

He did.

"The butchers may be listening, so keep your voice low." She glanced about her. "They may even be watching, but there's not much we can do about it. Sit close beside me, so that you can hear me and I can hear you. This..."

He waited.

"This is something I've wanted to do for a long time. And I'm going to do it right now. My husband-well, never mind. You're not Silk. We settled that."

"I hope so," he said.

"So I want to tell you something about him. That little augur kept telling me you were going to sacrifice at three. A grand affair, he said, and he wanted me to come."

"So do I."

Her eyes widened. "Do you really? Then perhaps I will. But I must tell you first." Her voice, already low, fell until it was scarcely audible. "And give you something."

He waited.

"Echidna ordered me to command the rebellion against the Ayuntamiento, I suppose because I could ride. Anyway, I did. There was a man there who had a wonderful horse, a big white stallion, and he let me have it. I jumped onto its back. In those days I could do such things."

"I remember."

"Thank you. I'm glad of that. I jumped onto its back, and it reared. I suppose that without a saddle it hadn't been expecting to be ridden. As it reared, Silk threw me his azoth." She paused. "You may have heard. It was one of the most famous incidents of the war."

"I have," he told her. "I've even written about it."

"Good, I'd like to read it sometime. I didn't stop to ask myself where Silk had gotten such a thing. I simply used it."

She reached under the shawl on her lap. "Later I learned that his wife had given it to him. Hyacinth, I mean, that woman who became his wife not long afterward. I would like to think it may have been because of the azoth."

He nodded.

Her pinched face was paler and more serious than ever; and he sensed, belatedly, that she was in pain. "That woman made him promise to, in return for the azoth. It must have been like that. He would've kept the promise and the secret. It was how he was."

"I know."

"Do you also know that I still have it? The great, the famous weapon from the Short Sun Whorl? I do."

He watched her in silence, praying for her in his heart.

"Aren't you going to ask what good an azoth is to a crippled woman in a wheelchair? Go ahead. I'm inviting the question."

He shook his head. "Legs are for running away."

She considered, her head cocked to one side. "Sometimes. Sometimes running away is the wisest thing one can do."

"You're right, I'm sure."

"I used to run away from you. From Silk, I mean. Not because I was afraid of Silk, but because I was afraid of humiliation. That was foolish."

He nodded. "Humiliation is a gift from the Outsider, I'm quite ce-tain."

"Really? Now you sound like Silk."

Oreb croaked, "Good Silk," and stirred upon his shoulder.

He said, "I'm flattered. If that's the sort of thing Silk says, we need him badly."

"Man come!"

"I was going to say that all humiliation comes down to exclusion. The humiliated person feels himself or herself no longer a member of the group-or at least, no longer a member in good standing. As he leaves the group, he approaches the Outsider, the god the gods have cast aside."

There was a perfunctory tap at the door, which opened at once. The prothonotary said, "You must be in the Grand Manteion in fifteen minutes."

"I'll do my best."

Mint motioned for the prothonotary to close the door, and he did. "We haven't long," she said, "or I'd ask you about that. There isn't time. You're in danger. My husband told you."

"There are strangers-His Cognizance calls them outsiders, which maybe significant-here looking for Silk. Is that what you mean?"

She nodded, and the hand that had been concealed by her shawl emerged holding an azoth with a watery, somewhat purplish stone in its hilt and a bloodstone near the guard. For a moment she seemed reluctant to surrender it.

Oreb whistled, adding, "Bad thing!"

"It's a dangerous thing, certainly. It's also a valuable thing. You could sell it for a great deal of money, General."

"I could, if it were mine to sell." She sighed. "It isn't. You would have made this much easier for me, Horn, if you had asked the question. I was going to say that though such a woman could not use an azoth, she might still have the pleasure of giving it to someone who had need of it. That pleasure is mine, and I claim it. Take it, please."

"If you no longer want it, you should return it to Silk," he told her.

"I do want it. I want it very badly, but I have no need of it and you may. As for giving it back, I've tried to. Silk accepted it once but soon returned it. Cover it with your hand."

In the sacristy of the Grand Manteion, Oreb eyed the ranked sacrificial knives. "Good Silk. No cut!"

"I won't," he said, "but you must help me by remaining here. If you fly out there, the people will see you and think I've brought you to offer you to the gods, and may very well demand I do it. Will you stay here?"

"Good bird!"

He had brushed the augur's robe Olivine had given him (half shamed by the clumsy stitches with which he had sewn his corn into its seam that morning), washed his hands, and smoothed his unruly hair. Now on impulse he shaved his beard, scraping it away with a well-tended razor inlaid with the Chapter's knife-and-chalice seal. "My father's was larger," he told Oreb, "but much plainer-an ordinary bone handle. This is ivory, unless I'm badly mistaken."

"No cut!"

"I'm trying not to. A little more lather, I believe."

He whisked the badger-hair brush against the scented soap in the Grand Manteion's porcelain mug, then applied the brush vigorously to his left cheek. "Here I confess I remind myself of Doctor Crane, shaving off his beard in our inn at Limna. He kept wanting to spare a little, and so do I. But no, it must all go, as his did. With it gone, my resemblance to Patera Silk will be much less marked, I imagine; besides, it-"

"Good Silk!"

"It may throw those outsiders-to use His Cognizance's suggestive term-off the track."

"Bad men?" Oreb flew from windowsill to washstand, from which he regarded his master through an eye like polished jet.

"I wish I knew. There are about a hundred things I wish I knew, Oreb. I'd like to know whether Pig and Hound are in the congregation, for example; and I'd like very much to know whether General Mint and Calde Bison are, to say nothing of these outsiders. I'd like to know where Silk is, why neither Bison nor His Cognizance will take me to him when it would appear to be so much to the advantage of both to have Silk out of the city." After giving his upper lip a final touch, he rinsed the razor under the tap.

"Good Silk!"

"He is, and for Calde Bison and His Cognizance that is just the problem. For His Cognizance, Silk is a second Prolocutor, able-even if unwilling-to countermand his direction of the Chapter. For Calde Bison, having Silk here is still worse."

Energetically applied, the washcloth dotted his black robe with dots darker still. He examined them and decided it could not be helped, and that they would dry in soon in any event. "He has General Mint, his lady wife, who's so careful not to call herself Calde Mint. She is a second calde, just the same."

"Good girl!"

"Of course. That's why so many people love and trust her. But behind her is yet another calde-Silk. I wouldn't want Bison's job on any terms, and most certainly not on the terms he has it."

An augur appeared in the doorway of the sacristy. "Ready for the procession, Patera? I'll show you where we're assembling."

By now it did not seem worthwhile to object to the honorific.

Whispers swept the throng that filled the Grand Manteion as a breeze sweeps a forest in leaf, soft as it left the narthex, gathering strength as it proceeded down the nave. He had no way of knowing (he told himself) that it was because he was walking with the Prolocutor, a step behind and a step to the right as he had been instructed to. Yet he knew it was, and was subtly, inexplicably embarrassed.

There were seats for them some distance from the Great Altar, seats sufficiently removed that they would not be troubled by the conflagration a full score of augurs and sibyls were preparing to kindle upon it-for the Prolocutor, a magnificent ebony throne austerely chased with gold, for him a chair beside and below it scarcely less imposing and likewise ebony.

A choir of... He tried to count the singers. Four hundred at least. On Blue they might have founded a little town of their own, called Song or Melody. Intermarried, and produced a sweet-voiced clean-faced race that would quickly become famous.

Their music rose, fell, then rose again, at once urgent and majestic. Glancing behind him at the gray shimmer of the Sacred Window, he wondered what gods listened, if in fact any did.

One did, surely, though not from the Sacred Window. Pig was in the audience. The memory of Silk and what Silk had told him in the ruined villa that had been Blood's returned, more vivid than ever.

Sunshine caught and concentrated in a wide reflector of bright gold did its work. A thread of smoke rose from the vast, ordered pile of cedar on the altar. (Wood enough to build a nice little house for some poor family, he thought rebelliously.) The white thread thickened. As the hymn reached crescendo, a tiny tongue of flame appeared.

"Rise," the Prolocutor whispered, "and receive my blessing."

He stood up, faced the throne, and bowed his head while the soft right hand of the Prolocutor traced and retraced the sign of addition over his head and the Prolocutor's plaintive voice recited the longest blessing in the Chrasmologic Writings, with extraordinary emphasis on every second or third word.

When it was over, he strode past the altar to the ambion. There was a great deal to say, and little time in which to say it; but it would be far less difficult if he could link it in some fashion to the Writings. Breathing, "Help me, O Obscure Outsider," he opened them at random.

"'A simple way would be to admit that myth is neither irresponsible fantasy, nor the object of weighty psychology, nor any other such thing. It is wholly other, and requires to be looked at with open eyes.'"

Sighing his thanks, he closed the magnificent gem-studded volume and laid it aside. "In a moment," he said, surveying the congregation, "we will offer our gifts to the immortal gods. We will implore them to speak to us through their Sacred Window-"

There was an audible buzz of talk. He stood silent and frowning until it ceased.

"And we shall ask them to speak through the entrails of the animals we give them as well. It is easy-far too easy-for us to forget that they have spoken to us already, long before the oldest person who hears me was born.

"What the gods are saying, I believe, is that there are various forms of knowledge, of which myth is one, and that we must not confound them. It is always a temptation to throw aside knowledge-it makes life so much easier. It may well be that the kind we are most tempted to cast away is exactly that which the gods warn us to preserve today: I mean the knowledge that a thing is itself, and not some other thing. A man says women are all alike, and a woman that men are all alike. One who fancies himself wise says that one can know only what one sees, or that no one can know anything at all, and thus saves himself much labor of thought, at the cost of being wrong."