by Gene Wolfe
Oreb fluttered on his shoulders, climbing with talon and crimson beak from one to the other. Peering though his ears Oreb glimpsed his thoughts; but Oreb could not know, no more than he himself knew, what those thoughts portended. Oreb was only a bird, and Incus could not take him from him, no more than his hanger, no more than his knife.
Dace had a knife as well. Under his tunic Dace had the old thick-bladed spear-pointed knife he had used to gut and fillet the fish they had caught from his boat, the knife that had worked so quickly, so surely, though it looked so unsuited to its task. Dace was not an old man at all, but a flunky and a toady to that old knife, a thing that carried it as Dace's old boat had carried them all when there was nothing inside it to make it go, carrying them as they might have been carried by a child's toy, toys that can shoot or fly because they are the right shape though hollow and empty as Dace's boat, as crank as the boat or solid as a potato; but Bustard would see to Dace.
His brother Bustard had taken his sling because he had slung stones at cats with it, and had refused to give it back. Nothing about Bustard had ever been fair, not his being born first though his name began with B and Auk's with A, not his dying first either. Bustard had cheated to the end and past the end, cheating Auk as he always did and cheating himself of himself. That was the way life was, the way death was. A man lived as long as you hated him and died on you as soon as you began to like him. No one but Bustard had been able to hurt him when Bustard was around; it was a privilege that Bustard reserved for himself, and Bustard was back and carrying him, carrying him in his arms again, though he had forgotten that Bastard had ever carried him. Bustard was only three years older, four in winter. Had Bustard himself been the mother that he, Bustard, professed to remember, that he, Auk, could not? Never could, never quite, Bustard with this big black bird bobbing on his head like a bird upon a woman's hat, its eyes jet beads, twitching and bobbing with every movement of his head, a stuffed bird mocking life and cheating death.
Bustards were birds, but bustards could fly-that was the Lily truth, for Bustard's mother had been Auk's mother had been Lily whose name had meant truth, Lily who had in truth flown away with Hierax and left them both; therefore he never prayed to Hierax, to Death or the God of Death, or anyhow very seldom and never in his heart, though Dace had said that he belonged to Hierax and therefore Hierax had snatched Bustard, the brother who had been a father to him, who had cheated him of his sling and of nothing else that he could remember.
"How you feelin', big feller?"
"Fine. I'm fine," he told Dace. And then, "I'm afraid I'm going to puke."
"Figure you might walk some?"
"It's all right, I'll carry him," Bustard declared, and by the timbre of his harsh baritone revealed Hammerstone the soldier. "Patera said I could."
"I don't want to get it on your clothes," Auk said, and Hammerstone laughed, his big metal body shaking hardly at all, the slug gun slung behind his shoulder rattling just a little against his metal back.
"Where's Jugs?"
"Up there. Up ahead with Patera."
Auk raised his head and tried to see, but saw only a flash of fire, a thread of red fire through the green distance, and the flare of the exploding rocket.
The white bull fell, scarlet arterial blood spilling from its immaculate neck to spatter its gilded hooves. Now, Silk thought, watching the garlands of hothouse orchids slide from the gold leaf that covered its horns.
He knelt beside its fallen head. Now if at all.
She came with the thought. The point of his knife had begun the first cut around the bull's right eye when his own glimpsed the Holy Hues in the Sacred Window: vivid tawny yellow iridescent with scales, now azure, now dove gray, now rose and red and thunderous black. And words, words that at first he could not quite distinguish, words in a voice that might almost have been a crone's, had it been less resonant, less vibrant, less young.
"Hear me. You who are pure."
He had assumed that if any god favored them it would be Kypris. This goddess's unfamiliar features overfilled the Window, her burning eyes just below its top, her meager lower lip disappearing into its base when she spoke.
"Whose city is this, augur?" There was a rustle as all who heard her knelt.
Already on his knees beside the bull, Silk contrived to bow. "Your eldest daughter's, Great Queen." The serpents around her face-thicker than a man's wrist but scarcely larger than hairs in proportion to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and pallid, hollow cheeks-identified her at once. "Viron is Scalding Scylla's city."
"Remember, all of you. You most of all, Prolocutor."
Silk was so startled that he nearly turned his head. Was it possible that the Prolocutor was in fact here, somewhere in this crowd of thousands?
"I have watched you," Echidna said. "I have listened."
Even the few remaining animals were silent.
"This city must remain my daughter's. Such was the will of her father. I speak everywhere for him. Such is my will. Your remaining sacrifices must be for her. For no one else. Disobedience invites destruction."
Silk bowed again. "It shall be as you have said, Great Queen." Momentarily he felt that he was not so much honoring a deity as surrendering to the threat of force; but there was no time to analyze the feeling.
"There is one here fit to lead. She shall be your leader. Let her step forth."
Echidna's eyes, hard and black as opals, had fastened on Maytera Mint. She rose and walked with small, almost mincing steps toward the awful presence in the Window, her head bowed. When she stood beside Silk, that head was scarcely higher than his own, though he was on his knees.
"You long for a sword."
If Maytera Mint nodded, her nod was too slight to be seen.
"You are a sword. Mine. Scylla's. You are the sword of the Eight Great Gods."
Of the thousands present, it was doubtful if five hundred had been able to hear most of what Maytera Marble, or Patera Gulo, or Silk himself had said; but everyone-from men so near the canted altar that their trouser legs were speckled with blood, to children held up by mothers themselves scarcely taller than children-could hear the goddess, could hear the peal of her voice and to a limited degree understand her, Great Echidna, the Queen of the Gods, the highest and most proximal representative of Twice-Headed Pas. As she spoke they stirred like a wheatfield that feels the coming storm.
"The allegiance of this city must be restored. Those who have suborned it must be cast out. This ruling council. Kill them. Restore my daughter's Charter. The strongest place in the city. The prison you call the Alambrera. Pull it down."
Maytera Mint knelt, and again the silver trumpet sounded. "I will, Great Queen!" Silk could hardly believe that it had emanated from the small, shy sibyl he had known.
At her reply the theophany was complete. The white bull lay dead beside him, one ear touching his hand; the Window was empty again, though Sun Street was still filled with kneeling worshippers, their faces blank or dazed or ecstatic. Far away-so distant that he, standing, could not see her-a woman screamed in an agony of rapture.
He raised his hands as he had when he had stood upon the floater's deck. "People of Viron!"
Half, perhaps, showed some sign of having heard.
"We have been honored by the Queen of the Whorl! Echidna herself-"
The words he had planned died in his throat as a searing incandescence smashed down upon the city like a ruinous wall. His shadow, blurred and diffused as shadows had always been under the beneficent radiance of the long sun, solidified to a pitch-black silhouette as sharp as one cut from paper.
He blinked and staggered beneath the weight of the white-hot glare; and when he opened his eyes again, it was no more. The dying fig (whose upper branches could be seen above the garden wall) was on fire, its dry leaves snapping and crackling and sending up a column of sooty smoke.
A gust fanned the flames, twisting and dissolving their smoke column. Nothing else seemed to have changed. A brutal-looking ma
n, still on his knees by the casket before the altar, inquired, "W-was that more word from the gods, Patera?"
Silk took a deep breath. "Yes, it was. That was word from a god who is not Echidna, and I understand him."
Maytera Mint sprang to her feet-and with her a hundred or more; Silk recognized Gayfeather, Cavy, Quill, Aloe, Zoril, Horn and Nettle, Holly, Hart, Oont, Aster, Macaque, and scores of others. The silver trumpet that Maytera Mint's voice had become summoned all to battle. "Echidna has spoken! We have felt the wrath of Pas! To the Alambrera!"
The congregation became a mob.
Everyone was standing now, and it seemed that everyone was talking and shouting. The floater's engine roared. Guardsmen, some mounted, most on foot, called, "To me, everyone!" "To me!" "To the Alambrera!" One fired his slug gun into the air.
Silk looked for Gulo, intending to send him to put out the burning tree; he was already some distance away, at the head of a hundred or more. Others led the white stallion to Maytera Mint; a man bowed with clasped hands, and she sprang onto its back in a way Silk would not have thought possible. It reared, pawing the wind, at the touch of her heels.
And he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. "Maytera! Maytera!" Shifting the sacrificial knife to his left hand and forsaking the dignity augurs were expected to exhibit, he ran to her, his black robe billowing in the wind. "Take this!"
Silver, spring-green, and blood-red, the azoth Crane had given him flashed through the air as he flung it over the heads of the mob. The throw was high and two cubits to her left-yet she caught it, as he had somehow known she would.
"Press the bloodstone," he shouted, "when you want the blade!"
A moment later that endless aching blade tore reality as it swept the sky. She called, "Join us, Patera! As soon as you've completed the sacrifices!"
He nodded, and forced himself to smile.
The right eye first. It seemed to Silk that a lifetime had passed between the moment he had first knelt to extract the eye from its socket and the moment that he laid it in the fire, murmuring Scylla's short litany. By the time he had completed it, the congregation had dwindled to a few old men and a gaggle of small children watched by elderly women, perhaps a hundred persons in all.
In a low and toneless voice, Maytera Marble announced, "The tongue for Echidna. Echidna has spoken to us."
Echidna herself had indicated that the remaining victims were to be Scylla's, but Silk complied. "Behold us, Great Echidna, Mother of the Gods, Incomparable Echidna, Queen of this Whorl-" (Were there others, where Echidna was not Queen? All that he had learned in the schola argued against it, yet he had altered her conventional compliment because he felt that it might be so.) "Nurture us, Echidna. By fire set us free."
The bull's head was so heavy that he could lift it only with difficulty; he had expected Maytera Marble to help, but she did not. Vaguely he wondered whether the gold leaf on the horns would merely melt, or be destroyed by the flames in some way. It did not seem likely, and he made a mental note to make certain it was salvaged; thin though gold leaf was, it would be worth something. A few days before, he had been planning to have Horn and some of the others repaint the front of the palaestra, and that would mean buying paint and brushes.
Now Horn, the captain, and the toughs and decent family men of the quarter were assaulting the Alambrera with Maytera Mint, together with boys whose beards had not yet sprouted, girls no older, and young mothers who had never held a weapon; but if they lived…
He amended the thought to: if some lived.
"Behold us, lovely Scylla, wonderful of waters, behold our love and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla. By fire set us free."
Every god claimed that final line, even Tartaros, the god of night, and Scylla, the goddess of water. While he heaved the bull's head onto the altar and positioned it securely, he reflected that "by fire set us free" must once have belonged to Pas alone. Or perhaps to Kypris-love was a fire, and Kypris had possessed Chenille, whose hair was dyed flaming red. What of the fires that dotted the skylands beneath the barren stone plain that was the belly of the Whorl?
Maytera Marble, who should have heaped fresh cedar around the bull's head, did not. He did it himself, using as much as they would have used in a week before Kypris came.
The right front hoof. The left. The right rear and the left, this last freed only after a struggle. Doubtfully, he fingered the edges of his blade; they were still very sharp.
Not to read a victim as large as the bull would have been unthinkable, even after a theophany; he opened the great paunch and studied the entrails. "War, tyranny, and terrible fires." He pitched his voice as low as he dared, hoping that the old people would be unable to hear him. "It's possible I'm wrong I hope so. Echidna has just spoken to us directly, and surely she would have warned us if such calamities awaited us." In a corner of his mind, Doctor Crane's ghost snickered. Letters from the gods in the guts of a dead bull, Silk? You're getting in touch with your own subconscious, that's all.
"More than possible that I'm wrong-that I'm reading my own fears into this splendid victim." Silk elevated his voice. "Let me repeat that Echidna said nothing of the sort." Rather too late he realized that he had yet to transmit her precise words to the congregation. He did so, interspersing every fact he could recall about her place at Pas's side and her vital role in superintending chastity and fertility. "So you see that Great Echidna simply urged us to free our city. Since those who have left to fight have gone at her behest, we may confidently expect them to triumph."
He dedicated the heart and liver to Scylla.
A young man had joined the children, the old women, and the old men. There was something familiar about him, although Silk, nearsightedly peering at his bowed head, was unable to place him. A small man, his primrose silk tunic gorgeous with gold thread, his black curls gleaming in the sunshine.
The bull's heart sizzled and hissed, then burst loudly-fulminated was the euchologic term-projecting a shower of sparks. It was a sign of civil unrest, but a sign that came too late; riot had become revolution, and it seemed entirely possible that the first to fall in this revolution had fallen already.
Indeed, laughing Doctor Crane had fallen already, and the solemn young trooper. This morning (only this morning!) he had presumed to tell the captain that nonviolent means could be employed to oust the Ayuntamiento. He had envisioned refusals to pay taxes and refusals to work, possibly the Civil Guard arresting and detaining officials who remained obedient to the four remaining councillors. Instead he had helped unleash a whirlwind; he reminded himself gloomily that the whirlwind was the oldest of Pas's symbols, and strove to forget that Echidna had spoken of "the Eight Great Gods."
With a last skillful cut he freed the final flap of hide from the bull's haunch; he tossed it into the center of the altar fire. "The benevolent gods invite us to join in their feast. Freely, they return to us the food we offer them, having made it holy. I take it that the giver is no longer present? In that case, all those who honor the gods may come forward."
The young man in the primrose tunic started toward the bull's carcass; an old woman caught his sleeve, hissing, "Let the children go first!" Silk reflected that the young man had probably not attended sacrifice since he had been a child himself.
For each, he carved a slice of raw bull-beef, presenting it on the point of the sacrificial knife-the only meat many of these children would taste for some time, although all that remained would be cooked tomorrow for the fortunate pupils at the palaestra.
If there was a tomorrow for the palaestra and its pupils.
The last child was a small girl. Suddenly bold, Silk cut her a piece substantially thicker than the rest. If Kypris had chosen to possess Chenille because of her fiery hair, why had she chosen Maytera Mint as well, as she had confided to him beneath the arbor before they went to Limna? Had Maytera Mint loved? His mind rejected the notion, and yet… Had Chenille, who had stabbed Orpine in a nimiety of terror, loved something beyond herself? Or d
id self-love please Kypris as much as any other son? She had told Orchid flatly that it did not.
He gave the first old woman an even larger slice. These women, then the old men, then the lone young man, and finally, to Maytera Marble (the only sibyl present) whatever remained for the palaestra and the cenoby's kitchen. Where was Maytera Rose this morning?
The first old man mumbled thanks, thanking him and not the gods; he remembered then that others had done the same thing at Orpine's final rites, and resolved to talk to the congregation about that next Scylsday, if he remained free to talk.
Here was the last old man already. Silk cut him a thick slice, then glanced past him and the young man behind him to Maytera Marble, thinking she might disapprove-and abruptly recognized the young man.
For a moment that seemed very long, he was unable to move. Others were moving, but their motions seemed as labored as the struggles of so many flies in honey. Slowly, Maytera Marble inched toward him, her face back-tilted in a delicate smile; evidently she felt as he did: palaestra tomorrow was worse than problematical. Slowly, the last old man bobbed his head and turned away, gums bared in a toothless grin. Ardently, Silk's right hand longed to enter his trousers pocket, where the gold-plated needler Doctor Crane had given Hyacinth awaited it; but it would have to divest itself of the sacrificial knife first, and that would take weeks if not years.
The flash of oiled metal as Musk drew his needler blended with the duller gleam of Maytera Marble's wrists. The report was drowned by the screech of a wobbling needle, unbalanced by its passage through the sleeve of Silk's robe.
Maytera Marble's arms locked around Musk. Silk slashed at the hand that grasped the needler. The needler fell, and Musk shrieked. The old women were hurrying away (they would call it running), some herding children. A small boy dashed past Silk and darted around the casket, reappearing with Musk's needler precariously clutched in both hands and ridiculously trained upon Musk himself.