by Gene Wolfe
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, Calde. 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, Calde!”
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, Calde. 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, Calde. 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, Calde.”
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 ev
en 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, Calde? 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, Calde?”
“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, Calde?”
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.”
Silk nodded. “But we will not be numerous enough to keep the Trivigauntis we have on board from reclaiming their airship, even so. Had you thought of that, Horn? Not unless a great many of Auk’s followers desert him at the last moment. It had just occurred to me when you laid hold of my shoulders.”
Horn frowned. “Can we leave the Trivigauntis in Mainframe, Calde? I can’t think of anything else we can do.”
“I can. Or at least, I believe I have, which gave me a very good reason not to step off the edge. Perhaps I needed one more than I knew.” Noticing Horn’s expression, he added, “I’m sorry if I distress you.”
Horn swallowed. “I want to tell you something, sort of a secret. I haven’t told anybody yet except Nettle. I know you won’t laugh, but please don’t tell anybody else.”
“I won’t, unless I believe it absolutely necessary.”
“You know the cats’ meat woman? She comes to sacrifice just about every Scylsday.”
Silk nodded. “Very well.”
“She likes Maytera. Moly, I mean. She came to see her one time at the palace. I wouldn’t have thought she’d walk all the way up the hill, but she did. They were sitting in the kitchen, and the cats’ meat woman—”
“Scleroderma,” Silk murmured. His eyes were on the purple slopes of far-away mountains. “It’s a puffball — it grows in forests.”
“She was the one that held General Mint’s horse for her before she charged the floaters in Cage Street,” Horn continued. “She told Moly, and naturally Moly wanted to know all about it, so they talked about that and the fighting, and how Kypris came to our manteion for the funeral. Then she said she was writing all about it, writing down everything that had happened and how she’d been right in the middle of all the most important parts.”
Silk tried not to smile, but failed.
“So she wants her grandchildren to be able to read about everything, and how she met you when you were just out of the schola, and how she walked up to the Calde’s Palace and they let her right in. I thought it was pretty funny too.”
“I think it heart-warming,” Silk told him. “We may laugh — I wouldn’t be surprised if she laughed herself — and yet she’s right. Her grandchildren are still small, I imagine, and though they’ve lived in these unsettled times themselves, they won’t remember much about them. When they’re older, they’ll be delighted to have a history written by their own grandmother from the perspective of their family. I applaud her.”
“Well, maybe I should of thought like that too, Calde, but I didn’t. To tell the truth, I got kind of mad.”
“You didn’t play some trick on her, I hope.”
“No, but I started thinking about what had happened and if she’d really been in the middle like she said. Pretty soon I saw she hadn’t at all, but you’d been there more than anybody, more even than General Mint. And what Scleroderma said about meeting you when you got out of the schola? Well, I met you then too. You used to come into our class and talk to us, and naturally I’d see you helping Patera Pike at sacrifice. So I decided I’m going to write down everything I can remember as soon as I get some paper. I’ll call it Patera Silk’s Book, or something like that.”
“I’m flattered.” This time Silk succeeded in suppressing his smile. “Are you going to write about this, too? Sitting up here talking to me?”
“Yes, I am.” Horn filled his lungs with the still, pure air. “And that’s another reason for you not to jump off. If you did, I’d have to end it right here.” He rapped the deck with his knuckles. “Right up here, and then maybe I’d wonder a little about why you did, and then it would be over. I don’t think that would be a very good ending.”
“Nor would it be,” Silk agreed.
“But that’s the way you were thinking of ending it. You were standing too close to the edge to of been thinking about anything else. Whats the trouble, Calde? Something’s — I don’t know. Hurt you somehow, hurt you a lot. If I knew what it was, maybe I could help, or Nettle could.”
Without rising, Silk turned away; after a moment, he slid across the varnished wood so that he could let his legs dangle over the edge. “Come here, Horn.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“You aren’t going to fall. Feel how smooth the motion of the airship is. Nor am I going to push you off. Did you think I might? I won’t, I promise.”
Face down, Horn crept forward.
“That’s the way. It’s such a magnificent view, perhaps the most magnificent that either of us will ever see. When you mentioned your class, you reminded me that I’m supposed to be teaching you — it’s one of my many duties, and one that I’ve neglected shamefully since you and I talked in the manse. As your teacher, it’s my pleasure as well as my duty to show you things like this whenever I can — and to make you look at them as well, if I must. Look! Isn’t it magnificent?”
“It’s like the skylands,” Horn ventured, “except we’re a little closer and it’s daytime.”
“A great deal closer, and the sun has already begun to narrow. We haven’t much time left in which to look at this. A few hours at most.”
“We could again tomorrow. We could look out of one of those windows. All the gondolas have them.”
“This airship may crash tonight,” Silk told him, “or it may be forced to land for some reason. Or the whorl below us might be hidden by clouds, as it was when I looked out of one of the windows earlier today. Let’s look while we can.”
Horn crept a finger’s width nearer the edge.
“Down there’s a city bigger than Viron, and those tiny pale dots are its people. See them? They look like that, I believe, because they’re staring up at us. In all probability, they’ve never seen an airship, or seen anything larger than the Fliers that can fly. They’ll spe
culate about us for months, perhaps for years.”
“Is it Palustria, Calde?”
Silk shook his head. “Palustria doesn’t even lie in this direction, so it’s certainly not Palustria. Besides, I think we’ve gone farther than that already. We were hoisted up early this morning, and we’ve been flying south or east ever since. A well-mounted man can ride there in less than a week.”
“I’ve never seen off-center buildings like those,” Horn ventured. “Besides, there aren’t any swamps. Everybody says Palustria’s in the middle of swamps.”
“They’ve turned them into rice fields, or so I’m told — if not all of them at least a large part of them, no doubt the part closest to their city. Their rice crop’s failed this year because of the drought. They say it’s the first time the rice crop’s failed in the entire history of Palustria.” For a while Silk sat in silence, staring down at the foreign city below.
“Can I ask you something, Calde?”
“Certainly. What is it?”
“Why isn’t it windier up here? I’ve never been up on a mountain, but Maytera read something about that to us one time, and it said it was real windy just about all the time. Looking down, it seems like we’re going fast. It’s not taking us very long at all to go over this, and it’s big. So the wind ought to be in our faces.”
“I asked our pilot the same thing,” Silk told him, “and I was ready to kick myself for stupidity when she told me. Look there, up and out, and you can see one of the engines that’s still running. Notice how slowly it’s turning? You can almost make out the wooden arms; but when the engines were going fast, those were just a blur, a shimmer in front of each engine.”
“Like a mill.”
“Somewhat; but while the arms of a windmill are turned by the wind, these are turned by their engines to create a wind that will blow us wherever we wish. They’re making very little wind at present — just enough to keep us from tumbling about. We’re being carried by a natural wind; but because we’re blown along by it, like a dry leaf or one of those paper streamers the wind tore off our victory arch, it seems to us that the air is scarcely moving.”