by Gene Wolfe
“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!”
Chapter 12 — I’m Auk
It 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 Calde’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.”
&
nbsp; 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.”
Shale asked, “How’s Pas supposed to get his part back if he’s dead?”
Without answering, Auk carried the body into the chapel of Hierax and laid it on the altar there.
Slate inquired, “You goin’ back to sleep?”
“Shag, I don’t know.” Auk discovered that he was wiping his hands again and made himself stop. “I think maybe I’ll fetch my boots and walk around outside a little.”
“I thought maybe you could wake the rest of ’em up.” Slate waited longer for his reply than a bio would have, then asked, “What you lookin’ at over there? Must be shaggy interesting.”
“Him.”
Slowly, Slate clambered to his feet. “Who?”
“Him.” Auk turned away impatiendy, striding toward the Sacred Window. “This soldier. He got it in the autofunction coprocessor, see?” Auk knelt beside Sergeant Sand. “Only his central could handle that stuff if it had to. There’s lots of redundancy there. His voluntary coprocessor could, even.”
He fumbled for his boot knife, discovered that he was not wearing his boots, and got it. “Look alive, Patera!” He shook Incus’s shoulder. “I need that gadget you got.”
“Up!” A boot prodded the captive Flier’s ribs. “Reveille an hour ago. Didn’t you hear it?”
Blinking and shivering, Sciathan sat up.
“You speak the Common Tongue well,” the uniformed woman looming over him said. “Answer me!”
“Better than most of us, yes.” Sciathan paused, struggling to clear his brain of sleep. “I did not hear it, that word you used. I know I did not since I heard nothing. But if I heard it, I would not know what it was.”
The woman nodded. “I did that to establish a point. Any question I ask, you are to answer. If you do, and I like your answer, you may get clothes or something to eat. If you don’t, or I don’t, you’ll wish you’d been killed, too.” She clapped. “Sentry!”
A younger and even taller woman ducked through the door of the tent and stood stiffly erect, her gun held vertically before her left shoulder. “Sir!”
The first woman gestured. “Get him off that pole and lock the chain again. I’m taking him to the city.” As the younger woman slung her gun to fumble for the key, the older asked, “Do you know my name? What is it?”
He shook his head; a smlle might have helped, but he could not summon one. “My name is Sciathan. I am a Flier.”
“Who questioned you yesterday, Sciathan?”
“First Sirka.” His hands were free. He held them out so that the younger woman could refasten his manacles.
“After that.”
“Generalissimo.”
“Generalissimo Siyuf,” the older woman corrected him. “I was there. Do you remember me?”
He nodded. “You did not speak to me. Sometimes to her.”
“Why did your people attack Major Sirka’s troopers?”
Here it was again. “We did not.”
She struck his ear with her fist. “You tried to take their weapons. One escaped, three were killed, and you were captured. Why did you break your wings?”
“It is what we do.”
“How did you disable your propulsion module?”
He shrugged, and she struck him on the mouth. He said, “We cannot do it. Mechanisms have been proposed, but would increase weight.”
She smiled, surprising him. “Aren’t you going to lick that? My rings tore your lip.”
He shrugged again. “If you want me to.”
“Get him a rag he can tie around his waist,” she ordered the taller, younger woman. Turning back to him, she said, “I’m Colonel Abanja. Why did you attack Sirka’s troopers?”
“Because they were shooting at us.” He could not actually remember that, but it seemed plausible. “I made a face. I do not know why.”
“Did you now?” For a fraction of a second Abanja’s eyes widened. “What kind of face?”
He was able to smile when he reflected that this was vastly preferable to talking about the propulsion modules. “With lips back.”
“You don’t know why you did that. Perhaps I do. Are you saying we shot your people because you grimaced? You yourself weren’t shot at all.”
“Aer saw it and screamed. They shot her then. We tried to take their guns so they could not shoot.”
Abanja stepped closer, peering down at him. “She screamed because you made a face? Most people wouldn’t believe that, but I might, and perhaps Generalissimo Siyuf might. Let’s see you make a face like that for me.”
“I will try,” he said, and did.
The click of booted heels announced the younger woman’s return. When Abanja turned toward her, she held up a scrap of cotton sheeting that had been used to clean something greasy. “Will this do, sir?”
Abanja shook her head. “Get the coveralls he was wearing. Bring a winter undershirt and a blanket, and tell the cooks to give you something he can eat on horseback.”
She returned to Sciathan. “Stop grinning, it’s making your lip bleed. You came here looking for a Vironese, a man. That’s what Sirka told us. You gave his name, and it was one I think I heard last night. Say it again for me.”
“Auk,” Sciathan said. “His name is Auk.”
Sergeant Sand’s arm stirred, then struck the floor of the Grand Manteion hard enough to crack it. Chenille shouted a warning. “Don’t worry,” Auk told her, “just a little static, like. I got it fixed already.”
Behind him, a voice he did not recognize said, “I only wish Patera Shell could watch. He’ll be so disheartened when we tell him what he missed.”
“So will His Eminence,” Maytera Mint murmured. “But it’s his fault for going back to the Palace, if that can be called a fault. We’re certainly not going to wait to carry out Pas’s instructions, nor would His Eminence want us to. You didn’t see Pas, Auk? Are you certain?”
“No, Maytera, I ain’t.” Auk squinted, still bent over his work. “Cause he must’ve showed me this stuff some way, after I talked to you, probably.” Inspiration struck. “Want to know what I think, Maytera?”
“Yes! Very much!”
“I think it was you keeping your promise the way you did that swung it. I think he was asking himself if we were worth all the trouble he was taking, till then. Wait a minute, I got to tie in his voluntary.”
Auk made the last connection and leaned back, easing aching muscles. “Think you could fetch one of those holy lamps over here, Patera? I’m going to need more light.”
Incus scurried away.
“Patera Shell is hoping to engage a deadcoach to return Patera’s body to our manteion.” The owner of the unknown voice proved to be a young and pretty sibyl. “Maytera said nothing would be open, but he said they would be by the time he got there, or if they weren’t he’d wait. It was a great temptation, Maytera admitted this to me, to ask His Cognizance to permit Patera’s final sacrifice to take place right here in the Grand Manteion,
since he ascended to Mainframe from here. But the faithful of our quarter would never—”
Incus, returning, knelt beside Auk. “Is this sufficient? I can pull up the wick, should more light be needed.” He held up a flame-topped globe of cut crystal.
“That’s dimber,” Auk told him. “I can see the place and the register, and that’s all I got to see.” Delicately, he eased the point of his knife into Sand’s cranium. “Muzzle it, everybody. I got to think.” He counted under his breath.
And Sand spoke, making Maytera Mint start. “V-fifty-eight, zero. V-fifty-eight, one. V-fifty-nine, zero. V-fifty-nine, one.
“Those are voluntary coprocessor inputs,” Incus explained in an awed whisper. “He’s enabling them.”
When Auk showed no sign of having heard, the young sibyl from Brick Street whispered, “I simply can’t believe that your Maytera — she was, I mean. That Molybdenum and that soldier are going to do all this, and where are they going to buy these coprocessor things?”
“They must make them, Maytera,” Incus explained, “and I shall assist them.” Maytera Mint shushed him.
Auk returned his knife to his boot. “Don’t froth, Maytera. He’s all right. He just don’t know it yet.”
As if on cue, Sand raised his head and stared around him.
“Hold that right there,” Auk told him. “I got to put your skull plate back. How was Mainframe?”
The crack-crack-crack of a needler was followed by a savage snarl, more shots, and the boom of a slug gun. In the choir high above them, a nephrite image of Tartaros fell with a crash.
“Is that warm?” Abanja asked as she watched Sciathan pull on his flight suit.
Smiling was easy now. “Not as warm as I wish, sometimes.”
“Then you better put the undershirt over it. It’s wool and should be a lot warmer than that thing. Once you’re on your horse you can wrap the blanket around you.” She fingered the needler in her holster. “Can you ride?”
“I never have.”
“That’s good,” Abanja told him. “It may save your life.”