by Gene Wolfe
The head first, with its impotent horns. Find the joint between the skull and the spine, she reminded herself. Good though it was, the knife could not cut bone.
Next the hooves, gay with gold paint. Faster! Faster! They would be all afternoon at this rate; she wished that she had done more of the cooking, though they had seldom had much meat to cut up. She hissed, "You must take the next one, sib. Really, you must!"
"We can't change off now!"
She threw the last hoof into the fire, leaving the poor goat's legs ragged, bloody stumps. Still grasping the knife, she faced the Window as before. "Accept, O Kind Kypris, the sacrifice of this fine goat. And speak to us, we beg, of the days that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured." She offered a silent prayer to Kypris, a goddess who seemed to her since Scylsday almost a larger self. "Should you, however, choose otherwise…"
She let her arms fall. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."
On Scylsday, the sacrifices at Orpine's funeral had been ill-omened to say the least. Maytera Mint hoped fervently for better indicants today as she slit the belly of the he-goat.
"Kypris blesses…" Louder. They were straining to hear her. "Kypris blesses the spirit of our departed sib." She straightened up and threw back her shoulders. "She assures us that such evil as Maytera did has been forgiven her."
The goat's head bunt in the fire, scattering coals: a presage of violence. Maytera Mint bent over the carcass once more, struggling frantically to recall what litfie she knew of augury-remarks dropped at odd moments by Patera Pike and Patera Silk, half-hearted lessons at table from Maytera Rose, who had spoken as much to disgust as to teach her.
The right side of the beast concerned the presenter and the augur who presided, the giver and the performer of the sacrifice; the left the congregation and the whole city. This red liver foretold deeds of blood, and here among its tangled veins was a knife, indicating the augur-though she was no augur-and pointing to a square, the square stem of mint almost certainly, and the hilt of a sword. Was she to die by the sword? No, the blade was away from her. She was to hold the sword, but she had already done that, hadn't she?
In the entrails a fat little fish (a bream, presumably) and a jumble of circular objects, necklaces or rings, perhaps. Certainly that interpretation would be welcomed. They lay close to the bream, one actually on top of it, so the time was very near. She mounted the first two steps.
"For the presenter. The goddess favors you. She is well pleased with your sacrifice." The goat had been a fine one, and presumably Kypris would not have indicated wealth had she not been gratified. "You will gain riches, jewels and gold particularly. within a short time."
Grinning from ear to ear, Bream backed away.
"For all of us and for our city, violence and death, from which good will come." She glanced down at the carcass, eager to be certain of the sign of addition she had glimpsed there; but it had gone, if it had ever existed. "That is all that I can see in this victim, though a skilled augur such as Patera Silk could see much more, I'm sure."
Her eyes searched the crowd around the altar for Bream. "The presenter has first claim. If he wishes a share in this meal, let him come forward."
Already the poor were struggling to get nearer the altar. Maytera Marble whispered, "Burn the entrails and lungs, sib!"
It was wise and good and customary to cut small pieces when the congregation was large, and there were two thousand in this one at least; but there were scores of victims, too, and Maytera Mint had little confidence in her own skill. She distributed haunches and quarters, receiving delighted smiles in return.
Next a pair of white doves. Did you share out doves or burn them whole? They were edible, but she remembered that Silk had burned a black cock whole at Orpine's last sacrifice. Birds could be read, although they seldom were. Wouldn't the giver be offended, however, if she didn't read these?
"One shall be read and burned," she told him firmly. "The other we will share with the goddess. Remain here if you would like it for yourself."
He shook his head.
The doves fluttered desperately as their throats were cut.
A deep breath. "Accept, O Kind Kypris, the sacrifice of these fine doves. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured." Had she really killed those doves? She risked a peek at their lifeless bodies. "Should you, however, choose otherwise…"
She let her arms fall, conscious that she was getting more blood on her habit. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."
Scraping feathers, skin, and flesh from the first dove's right shoulder blade, she scanned the fine lines that covered it. A bird with outspread wings; no doubt the giver's name was Swan or something of the sort, though she had forgotten it already. Here was a fork on a platter. Would the goddess tell a man he was going to eat dinner? Impossible! A minute drop of blood seemed to have seeped out of the bone. "Plate gained by violence," she announced to the presenter, "but if the goddess has a second message for me, I am too ignorant to read it."
Maytera Marble whispered, "The next presenter will be my son, Bloody."
Who was Bloody? Maytera Mint felt certain that she should recognize the name. "The plate will be gained in conjunction with the next presenter," she told the giver of the doves. "I hope the goddess isn't saying you'll take from him."
Maytera Marble hissed, "He's bought this manteion, sib."
She nodded without comprehension. She felt hot and sick, crushed by the scorching sunlight and the heat from the blaze on the altar, and poisoned by the fumes of so much blood, as she bent to consider the dove's left shoulder blade.
Linked rings, frequently interrupted.
"Many who are chained in our city shall be set free," she announced, and threw the dove into the sacred fire, startling a little girl bringing more cedar. An old woman was overjoyed to receive the second dove.
The next presenter was a fleshy man nearing sixty; with him was a handsome younger one who hardly came to his shoulder; the younger man carried a cage containing two white rabbits. "For Maytera Rose," the older man said. "This Kypris is for love, right?" He wiped his sweating head with his handkerchief as he spoke, releasing a heavy fragrance.
"She is the goddess of love, yes."
The younger man smirked, pushing the cage at Maytera Mint.
"Well, roses stand for love," the older man said, "I think these should be all right.
Maytera Marble sniffed. "Victims in confinement cannot be accepted. Bloody, have him open that and hand one to me."
The older man appeared startled.
Maytera Marble held up the rabbit, pulling its head back to bare its throat. If there were a rule for rabbits, Maytera Mint had forgotten it; "We'll treat these as we did the doves," she said as firmly as she could.
The older man nodded.
Why, they do everything I tell them, she reflected. They accept anything I say! She struck off the first rabbit's head, cast it into the fire, and opened its belly.
Its entrails seemed to melt in the hot sunshine, becoming a surging line of ragged men with slug guns, swords, and crude pikes. The buzz gun rattled once more, somewhere at the edge of audibility, as one stepped over a burning rabbit.
She mounted the steps again, groping for a way to begin. "The message is very clear. Extraordinarily clear. Unusual."
A murmur from the crowd.
"We-mostly we find separate messages for the giver and the augur. For the congregation and our city, too, though often those are together. In this victim, it's all together."
The presenter shouted. "Does it say what my reward will be from the Ayuntamiento?"
"Death." She stared at his flushed face, feeling no pity and surprised that she did not. "You are to die quite soon, or at least the presenter will. Perhaps your son is meant."
She raised her voice, listening to the buzz gun; it seemed strange that no one else heard it. "
The presenter of this pair of rabbits has reminded me that the rose, our departed sib's nameflower, signifies love in what is called the language of flowers. He is right, and Comely Kypris, who has been so kind to us here on Sun Street, is the author of that language, by which lovers may converse with bouquets. My own nameflower, mint, signifies virtue. I have always chosen to think of it as directing me toward the virtues proper to a holy sibyl. I mean charity, humility, and-and all the rest. But virtue is an old word, and the Chrasmologic Writings tell us that it first meant strength and courage in the cause of right."
They stood in awed silence listening to her; she herself listened for the buzz gun, but it had ceased to sound if it had ever really sounded at all.
"I haven't much of either, but I will do the best I can in the fight to come." She looked for the presenter, intending to say something about courage in the face of death, but he had vanished into the crowd, and his son with him. The empty cage lay abandoned in the street.
"For all of us," she told them, "victory!" What silver voice was this, ringing above the crowd? "We must fight for the goddess! We will win with her help!"
How many remained. Sixty or more? Maytera Mint felt she had not strength enough for even one. "But I have sacrificed too long. I'm junior to my dear sib, and have presided only by her favor." She handed the sacrificial knife to Maytera Marble and took the second rabbit from her before she could object.
A black lamb for Hierax after the rabbit; and it was an indescribable relief to Maytera Mint to watch Maytera Marble receive it and offer it to the untenanted gray radiance of the Sacred Window; to wail and dance as she had so many times for Patera Pike and Patera Silk, to catch the lamb's blood and splash it on the altar-to watch Maytera cast the head into the fire, knowing that everyone was watching Maytera too, and that no one was watching her.
One by one, the lamb's delicate hoofs fed the gods. A swift stroke of the sacrificial knife laid open its belly, and Maytera Marble whispered, "Sib, come here."
Startled, Maytera Mint took a hesitant step toward her; Maytera Marble, seeing her confusion, crooked one of her new fingers. "Please!"
Maytera Mint joined her over the carcass, and Maytera Marble murmured, "You'll have to read it for me, sib."
Maytera Mint glanced up at the senior sibyl's metal face.
"I mean it. I know about the liver, and what tumors mean. But I can't see the pictures. I never could."
Closing her eyes, Maytera Mint shook her head.
"You must!"
"Maytera, I'm afraid."
Not so distant as it had been, the buzz gun spoke again, its rattle followed by the dull boom of slug guns.
Maytera Mint straightened up; this time it was clear that people on the edge of the crowd had heard the firing.
"Friends! I don't know who's fighting. But it would appear-"
A pudgy young man in black was pushing through the crowd, pracfically knocking down several people in his hurry. Seeing him, she knew the intense relief of passing responsibility to someone else. "Friends, neither my dear sib nor I will read this fine lamb for you. Nor need you endure the irregularity of sacrifice by sibyls any longer. Patera Gulo has returned!"
He was at her side before she pronounced the final word, disheveled and sweating in his wool robe, but transported with triumph. "You will, all you people-everybody in the city-have a real augur to sacrifice for you. Yes! But it won't be me. Patera Silk's back!"
They cheered and shouted until she covered her ears.
Gulo raised his arms for silence. "Maytera, I didn't want to tell you, didn't want to worry you or involve you. But I spent most of the night going around writing on walls. Talking to-to people. Anybody who'd listen, really, and getting them to do it, too. I took a box of chalk from the palaestra. Silk for Caldé! Silk for Caldé! Here he comes!"
Caps and scarves flew into the air. "SILK FOR CALDÉ!"
Then she caught sight of him, waving, head and shoulders emerging from the turret of a green Civil Guard floater-one that threw up dust as all floaters did, but seemed to operate in ghostly silence, so great was the noise.
"I am come?" the talus thundered again. "In the service of Scylla! Mightiest of goddesses! Let me pass! Or perish!" Both buzz guns spoke together, filling the tunnel with the wild shrieking of ricochets.
Auk, who had pulled Chenille flat when the shooting began, clasped her more tightly than ever. After a half minute or more the right buzz gun fell silent, then the left. He could hear no answering fire.
Rising, he peered over the talus's broad shoulder. Chems littered the tunnel as far as the creeping lights illuminated it. Several were on fire. "Soldiers," he reported.
"Men fight," Oreb amplified. He flapped his injured wing uneasily. "Iron men."
"The Ayuntamiento," Incus cleared his throat, "must have called out the Army." The talus rolled forward before he had finished, and a soldier cried out as its belts crushed him.
Auk sat down between Incus and Chenille. "I think it's time you and me had a talk, Patera. I couldn't say much while the goddess was around."
Incus did not reply or meet his eyes.
"I got pretty rough with you, and I don't like doing that to an augur. But you got me mad, and that's how I am."
"Good Auk!" Oreb maintained.
He smiled bitterly. "Sometimes. What I'm trying to say, Patera, is I don't want to have to pitch you off this tall ass. I don't want to have to leave you behind in this tunnel. But I will if I got to. Back there you said you went out to the lake looking for Chenille. If you knew about her, didn't you know about me and Silk too?"
Incus seemed to explode. "How can you sit here talking about nothing when men are dying down there!"
"Before I asked you, you looked pretty calm yourself."
Dace, the old fisherman, chuckled.
"I was praying for them!"
Auk got to his feet again. "Then you won't mind jumping off to bring 'em the Pardon of Pas."
Incus blinked.
"While you're thinking that over," Auk frowned for effect and felt himself grow genuinely angry, "maybe you could tell me what your jefe wanted with Chenille."
The talus fired, a deafening report from a big gun he had not realized it possessed; the concussion of the bursting shell followed without an interval.
"You're correct." Incus stood up. His hand trembled as he jerked a string of ranling jet prayer beads from a pocket of his robe. "You're right, because Hierax has prompted you to recall me to my duty. I-I go."
Something glanced off the talus's ear and ricocheted down the tunnel, keening like a grief-stricken spirit. Oreb, who had perched on the crest of its helmet to observe the battle, dropped into Auk's lap with a terrified squawk. "Bad fight!"
Auk ignored him, watching Incus, who with Dace's help was scrambling over the side of the talus. Behind it, the tunnel stretched to the end of sight, a narrowing whorl of spectral green varied by fires.
When he caught sight of Incus crouched beside a fallen soldier, Auk spat. "If I hadn't seen it… I didn't think he had the salt." A volley pelted the talus like rain, drowning Dace's reply.
The talus roared, and a gout of blue flame from its mouth lit the tunnel like lightning; a buzz gun supported its flamer with a long, staccato burst. Then the enormous head revolved, an eye emitting a pencil of light that picked out Incus's black robe. "Return to me!"
Still bent over the soldier, Incus replied, although Auk could not make out his words. Ever curious, Oreb fluttered up the tunnel toward them. The talus stopped and rolled backward, one of its extensile arms reaching for Incus.
This time his voice carried clearly. "I'll get back on if you take him, too."
There was a pause. Auk glanced behind him at the metal mask that was the talus's face.
"Can he speak!"
"Soon, I hope. I'm trying to repair him."
The huge hand descended, and Incus moved aside for it. Perched on the thumb, Oreb rode jauntily back to the talus's back. "Still live!"
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Dace grunted doubtfully.
The hand swept downward; Oreb fluttered to Auk's shoulder. "Bird homer'
With grotesque tenderness fingers as thick as the soldier's thighs deposited him between bent handholds.
"Still live?" Oreb repeated plaintively.
Certainly it did not seem so. The fallen soldier's arms and legs, of painted metal now scratched and lusterless, lay motionless, bent at angles that appeared unnatural; his metal face, designed as a model of valor, was filled with the pathos that attaches to all broken things. Singled out inquiringly by one of Oreb's bright, black eyes, Auk could only shrug.
The talus rolled forward again as Incus's head appeared above its side. "I'm going to-he's not dead," the little augur gasped. "Not completely."
Auk caught his hand and pulled him up.
"I was-was just reciting the liturgy you know. And I saw-The gods provide us such graces! I looked into his wound, there where the chest plate's sprung. They train us, you know, at the schola, to repair Sacred Windows."
Afraid to stand near the edge of the talus's back, he crawled across it to the motionless soldier, pointing. "I was quite good at it. And-And I've had occasion since to-to help various chems. Dying chems, you understand."
He took the gammadion from about his neck and held it up for Auk's inspection. "This is Pas's voided cross. You've seen it many times, I'm sure. But you can undo the catches and open up a chem with the pieces. Watch."
Deftly he removed the sprung plate. There was a ragged hole near its center, through which he thrust his forefinger. "Here's where a flechette went in."
Auk was peering at the mass of mechanisms the plate had concealed. "I see little specks of light."
"Certainly you do!" Incus was triumphant. "What you're seeing is what I saw under this plate when I was bringing him the Pardon of Pas. His primary cable had been severed, and those are the ends of the fibers. It's exactly as if your spinal cord were cut."
Dace asked, "Can't you splice her?"
"Indeed!" Incus positively glowed. "Such is the mercy of Pas! Such is his concern for us, his adopted sons, that here upon the back of this valiant talus is the one man who can in actual fact restore him to health and strength."