Return To The Whorl Part 28

Later, when they had left Hound at Gold Street and were making their way to the Sun Street Quarter, Pig asked, "Nae folk h'in these hooses, bucky?"

Oreb answered for him. "No man! No girl!"

His master sighed. "After we had gone through the house in which Hound and Tansy used to live, I asked Hound when we would reach the inhabited parts of the city. I spoke softly, I suppose, and perhaps you were too preoccupied to hear us; but he said that we were already there, that the street down which we walked was one of those that had not yet been abandoned. I began counting houses then, and it seemed to me that there were five empty ones for each in which someone appeared to be living."

Pig did not reply.

"Of course someone may have been living in some of those that looked empty to me. That's entirely possible, and I hope it is true."

"Yer said ther h'empty place was ther H'outsider's."

"A cheering thought--thank you. To answer your question, a few of these houses are clearly occupied, though not many."

Pig c.o.c.ked his head. "Cartwheels, bucky!"

"I can't hear them. Your ears are more acute than mine, as I have observed before. I'm glad you do, however, and I don't doubt in the least that you do. May I tell a story, Pig? You reminded me of it, and even if you have no particular pleasure in hearing it, it will give me pleasure to recount it."

"Does he mind? He does nae!"

"Thank you again. I should say at the outset that I'm not sure the manteions are the same, though I suspect they are. Hound said he couldn't recall the name of the augur who'd been in charge when he and Tansy attended sacrifice occasionally. This would have been his predecessor, I expect, if it really was the same manteion. His name was Patera Ray."

"Good man?"

"Ah, that's the point of my story, Oreb. A boy--I've forgotten his name, but it doesn't matter--and his mother were returning to the city after living for a year or so in the country. You'll recall, Pig, that Hound and Tansy moved from Endroad to the city after they were married, because there was no work for Hound in Endroad. Later, they returned.

"In much the same way, this boy and his mother had moved to the country, living in a remote farmhouse where the boy, who was still quite small, was happy in the possession of a wood and a stream too wide to jump; but lonely all the same. Now they had decided to return to the city. It was a long journey as the boy measured journeys then, though he had ridden most of the way in a sort of cart pushed by his mother that carried their belongings.

"She was very tired, and they stopped on the outskirts to spend the night with a friend before going into the city to the neat little house that another kind friend--a male friend who I suppose must have slept there from time to time, since he kept a razor there--had arranged for them to occupy some years earlier. After dinner, the poor woman went to bed and to sleep almost at once, but the boy did not."

"Good boy?"

"Not particularly, Oreb, though he thought he was, because his mother loved him. He was not old enough to understand that she would always love him, whether he behaved well or badly."

They were pa.s.sing empty cellar-holes, rectangular pits edged with charred wood and filled with black water. "This quarter burned twenty years ago," he told Pig. "I'm sorry that more of it has not been rebuilt. I've been in the City of the Inhumi on Green, and it's not much more desolate than this. Here's String Street, I believe. I'm sorry to see that the fire got this far."

"Wi' yer, bucky."

"I want to finish my little tale. I'll interrupt it if I see anything worth commenting on."

He paused, collecting his thoughts. "The boy decided to take a short walk. He was hoping to find another child; but he was very conscious of the danger of becoming lost, so he walked only along the road upon which the house in which he and his mother were staying stood, reasoning that he could always retrace his steps and return to her. You will have guessed what happened already. Distracted by something or other, he became confused about the direction in which he had been walking. Thinking that he was returning to his mother and the house in which they were staying, he walked a long way until he saw an old man in black weeping upon the steps of a manteion. Until that time, the boy had been afraid to ask for help; but the old man looked so good and kind that the boy approached him and, after a minute or two of silent squirming, and taking deep breaths and letting them out, and deciding on one beginning after another and abandoning each before it was begun, he said, 'Why are you crying?'

"The old man looked up, and seeing him pointed to the carts, wagons, and litters that pa.s.sed them every few seconds. 'If the wrongs I have done the G.o.ds were visible,' he said, 'there would be more than those, and four men would not be enough to weep for them all.' "

They walked on in silence after that. Occasionally they pa.s.sed hovels built of salvaged timbers, so that they appeared (until they were examined closely) to have been painted black. A game among children was in progress in the next street over; the shrill cries of the partic.i.p.ants reached them like the twittering of sparrows in a distant tree.

At last Pig asked, "That ther h'end, bucky?"

He swallowed and forced himself to speak. "It is."

"Somethin' fas.h.i.+n' yer?"

"Boy home?" Oreb demanded. "Find home?"

"Yes, he did." He wiped his eyes. "But he was not the same boy." Under his breath he added, "And that is not the same home."

Soft though the words had been, Pig had overheard them. "See yer house, dinna yer?"

Unable to speak, he nodded; Oreb translated: "Say yes."

"This is Silver Street. We--we were walking along Silver Street, and I didn't know it. I couldn't be sure. Pig?"

"Aye?"

"Pig, I spoke of offenses against the G.o.ds. I don't really care whether Sphigx and Scylla and the rest like what I do."

"Said yer would nae break ther statues."

"Because they didn't belong to me. And because they were-- are--art, and to wantonly destroy art is always evil. But, Pig . . ." He halted.

"Auld Pig's yer pal, bucky."

"I know. That is what makes this so very hard. You were blind when you left your home in the Mountains That Look at Mountains. So you told me."

"When he left na braithrean. Aye."

"You came all this way on foot, though you are blind."

"Aye, bucky. Ho, he had some tumbles."

"Then, Pig, I am going to ask a favor, one I have no right to ask. It is something I will always reproach myself--"

"No talk!"

"For. But I'm going to ask it just the same. I brought you here. I know that. You wouldn't be in this ruined quarter if it were not for me. You might not be in Viron at all."

"H'out wi' h'it, bucky."

"I thought I was going to--to show you where I used to live. The manse, and the house where I grew up. My father's shop. Where those things once stood. I would tell you something about them, what they--those places meant to me."

He wanted to shut his eyes, but made himself watch Pig's face. "Instead, I'm asking this. Hound is getting a room in an inn, and would welcome either of us--both of us, I ought to say, together or separately. The inn is Ermine's, and it's on a hill, the Palatine, in the center of the city. Would you be willing to make your way there alone? Please?"

Pig smiled. "That h'all, bucky?"

"I'll join you there, I swear, before shadelow. But I want to--I must be alone here. I simply have to."

Pig's long arms groped for him, one big hand still grasping the sheathed sword. " 'Tis h'all right, bucky. Needed me h'on ther roads. Noo yer need me ter be gone. Dinna fash yerself. Ter much hurtin' h'in ther whorl h'already, an' sae guid-bye." Pig turned away.

"I'll rejoin you, I promise," he repeated. "Tell Hound I'm coming, please, but tell him that he is not to wait supper for me.

"Go with Pig, Oreb. Help him."

Oreb croaked unhappily, but flew.

His master stood in the street, leaning on the k.n.o.bbed staff, and watched them go, unable to take a single step until they were out of sight, the big man moving so slowly while towering over the few badly dressed men and women he pa.s.sed, the black bird seeming unwontedly small and vulnerable upon the big man's shoulder, its dabs of scarlet the only spots of color in the ruined landscape of blacks and grays.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the tap-tap-tapping of the bra.s.s-tipped scabbard faded. The big man stopped a pa.s.serby and spoke, too distant already to be overheard. The pa.s.serby answered, pointing up Silver Street toward the market, pointing, it seemed likely, to inform the blind man who had stopped him, possibly for the bird. Their slow progress resumed until at last they were gone, faded into the black, the gray.

He himself turned then and strode rapidly away, the bare wooden tip of his staff striking at the rutted surface of the street with every step, rapping stones and splattering mud over his shoes and the cuffs of his ragged brown trousers.

Here the children had played, taking Maytera's clotheslines for jump ropes. They had jumped to Blue some time ago, the sad, half-starved little girls with the black bangs, with the long black pigtails braided with sc.r.a.ps of bright yarn. To Blue, and some to Green; and those would be, largely, dead.

This fire-blackened s.h.i.+prock wall, these empty, staring windows, had been the cen.o.by's once. While the whorl slept Maytera had knelt, not to pray but to scrub this stone step so black with ash indistinguishable from mud. Maytera Mint had dressed and undressed in there, in a darkened room behind a locked door and drawn blinds, had mended worn underclothes and covered her virginal bed with an old oilcloth tablecloth, knowing that the merest shower would lend new waters to the sagging belly of her ceiling.

That ceiling would sag no more; the leaking roof on which Maytera had climbed to watch the Trivigaunti airs.h.i.+p was all leak now, and the broad, dark door of st.u.r.dy oak that Maytera Rose had barred each night before the last thread of sun vanished had been burned long ago--whether for firewood or in the fire that had swept the quarter when the war with Trivigaunte began scarcely mattered. Anyone might go into the cen.o.by now, and no one wanted to.

The stone wall that had separated the garden from the street was largely intact, though the gate and rusted padlock were gone. Inside, weeds and blackberry brambles, and--yes--a straggling grape vine climbing the blackened stump of the fig tree. Enough of their arbor remained to sit on. He sat, leaned back, and shut his eyes; and in time a youthful sibyl sat down across from him, extracted a recorder from one of the voluminous pockets of her black bombazine habit, and began to play.

Sun Street had taken him to the market, and Manteion Street to the Palatine. Here was the Calde's Palace, its fallen wall repaired with new mortar and stones that almost matched.

"Patera . . . Patera?" The voice was soft yet thick--oddly wrong. He looked around, not so much to find the woman who spoke as to locate the augur she addressed. The voice was soft yet thick--oddly wrong. He looked around, not so much to find the woman who spoke as to locate the augur she addressed.

"Patera . . . Patera Silk?"

He stepped back and scanned the windows. The shadow of a head and shoulders showed at one on the topmost floor. "Mucor?" He tried to keep his voice low, while making it loud enough to be heard fifty or sixty cubits overhead.

"She's not here . . . She's not here, Patera."

It's the bird, he thought. The bird makes her think I'm Silk. He realized even as he formed the thought that Oreb was gone, that he had sent Oreb away with Pig.

"Please . . ."

He had not heard the rest, yet he knew what he had been asked to do. The ma.s.sive doors were locked. He banged them with the heavy bra.s.s knocker, each blow as loud as the report of a slug gun.

There was no answering sound from within the palace; and at last he turned away, tramping wearily down the bal.u.s.traded steps to the street. The high window was empty now, and the thick, soft voice (female but not feminine) silent. He squinted up at the motionless sun. The shade was almost down; the market would be closing. He had told--had promised--Pig that he would rejoin him in Ermine's before evening, but Ermine's was only two or three streets away.

He had just crossed the first when fingers, thin but hard and strong, closed on his elbow. He turned to see a slight, stooped figure no larger than a child, m.u.f.fled in what appeared to be sacking. "Please . . . Please, Patera. Please, won't you talk to . . . Please won't you talk to me?"

"I'm not an augur. You're thinking of somebody else."

"You've forgotten . . . You'veforgotten me." The m.u.f.fled sound that followed might or might not have been a sob. "Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine . . . Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine, Patera?"

There was something amiss in the angle of her head, and the high, hunched shoulders. Pity almost choked him. "No," he said, "I haven't forgotten you, Olivine." It was not a lie, he told himself fiercely; one could not forget what one had not known.

"You'll bless . . . You'll bless me?" There was joy in the voice from the sackcloth. "Sacrifice, the way you used . . . Sacrifice, the way you used to? Father's gone . . . Father's gone away. He's been gone a long, long time . . . He's been gone a long, long time, Patera." She was drawing him after her, back toward the Calde's Palace. "There's a . . . There's a woman? In the north . . . In the north, Patera."

Someone who might help her, obviously. Someone who might be able to cure whatever disease afflicted the pathetic figure before him. "A wise woman," he hazarded.

"Oh . . . Oh, yes! Oh, I hope . . . Oh, I hope so!"

They dodged down a side street. The wall of the Calde's Palace, elegantly varied with high narrow windows in elaborate stone frames, gave way to the almost equally imposing, windowless wall of the Calde's Garden, a wall of heroic stones, rough and misshapen yet fitted like the pieces of a puzzle.

The diminutive, limping figure drew him on far faster than he would willingly have walked. Leprosy? It had been only a word in the Writings to him. There were running sores, or pus oozing from the skin--something disgusting. Good people in the Writings, theodidacts such as Patera Silk particularly, were exceedingly kind to those who suffered this dread disease, which he had heard was rare--had heard from an augur, probably. From someone such as Patera Remora, who had attended the schola.

Abruptly they stopped. A door of iron so low that he would almost have to crawl through like Pig was deeply set between mammoth stones, in a dark little recess that also held an empty bottle and brown, wind-blown leaves. From some recess equally dark within her sackcloth, Olivine produced a bra.s.s key bruised with verdigris; there was a dim flash, as of polished steel. Thrust into the iron door, the key rattled and squealed. A bolt thumped solidly, and Olivine whispered, "Quadrifons . . ." "Quadrifons . . ."

The iron door swung back.

Ducking through the doorway, he had to bend lower still to pa.s.s beneath the ma.s.sive limbs of an ancient oak. Beyond was a bed of bright chrysanthemums, glorious in the last flickering suns.h.i.+ne. Somewhere a fountain played. "I didn't know there were doors like that," he said, sounding inane even to himself. "I mean doors that had to have a word, and a key as well." And then, "That is a sacred name. So sacred that it's hardly ever used. I'm surprised you know it."

She stopped and looked back him. He thought he caught the gleam of thick spectacles between the rough cloth that covered her head and the fold of rough cloth that masked her face. "It's just a . . . It's just a word. The one for the . . . The one for the door. My . . . My mother." (Something deeply pathetic had entered her voice.) "I don't remember . . . Idon't remember her. She was a . . . Shewasa sibyl? That's what my father . . . That's what my father says. She was a . . . She was a sibyl."

"Would you like to me to tell you about Quadrifons?"

Olivine nodded, the motion almost imperceptible beneath the shadowing oak limbs and the folds of cloth. "Would you . . . Would you, Patera?"

"I'm not Patera Silk," he said. "You're wrong about that. But I'll tell you what I know, which isn't much."

His back felt as though it might break; kneeling was a great relief. "Quadrifons is the most holy of the minor G.o.ds. I mean, he's called that in the Chrasmologic Writings. If it were left to me--as plainly it is not--I'd say that the Outsider is the most holy G.o.d, and indeed that he's the only G.o.d, major or minor, who's really holy at all." He laughed, a trifle nervously. "So you see why I'm not an augur, Olivine. But the Writings say it's Quadrifons, and the Chapter says that his name is so holy that it should hardly ever be used, so it won't be profaned."

"Go . . . Go on."

"I don't know you, so I really don't know whether you would be inclined to profane the name of a G.o.d--"

She shook her head.

"But I'm inclined to doubt it. You don't strike me as a fortunate person, and it's commonly the fortunate among us who do that. On the chance that I'm wrong, however, I must tell you that we don't harm the G.o.ds when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most G.o.ds as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves." He looked up at her shrouded face, hoping to see he had made his point, but learned nothing. "There is much more I might say, Olivine--things I may say to you another time, when we know each other better. But you wanted to know about Quadrifons."

She nodded.

"I really know very little about him, however, and I doubt that anyone knows much more than I. Just as Pas is said to be a two-headed G.o.d--do you know about that?"

"Oh . . . Oh, yes." She sounded despondent.

"Quadrifons is a four-faced one. That is to say, he has only one head, but there is a face on every side of it, so that he looks east and west, and north and south, all at the same time. He's the G.o.d of bridges, pa.s.sageways, and intersections, although he's clearly more important than those few and simple things would appear to imply. I told you he had four faces."

There was no sound but the tinkling of the fountain; then she said, "I've got a little statue with the two . . . I've got a little statue with the two heads."

"I'd like to see it. You do realize, don't you, that it's only a conventional representation? We need to picture Pas to ourselves during our private devotions sometimes, and statuettes and colored prints help us do it. I should tell you that just as Pas is depicted occasionally as a whirlwind, Quadrifons is sometimes shown as a sort of monster, combining Pas's eagle with Sphigx's lion. May I talk about Sphigx for a moment? It will seem to you that I've left the subject, but I a.s.sure you that what I want to say bears upon it."

"Go . . . Go ahead." By a sort of controlled collapse, she sat down opposite him, hugging her knees to her chest. Even through several thicknesses of sackcloth, it was apparent that she had sharp knees.

"This morning two friends and I were discussing Sphigx. She's the patroness of Trivigaunte, but she won't let the Trivigauntis make pictures or statues representing her, and we talked about that."