by Gene Wolfe
The wash, to be sure; it could be drying while she greased the steps. Very likely, it would be dry or nearly dry by the time she finished.
Beyond the doorway, the garden was black with storm. That wouldn't do! Rain (though Pas knew how badly they needed it) would spot her clean sheets. Fuming, she put aside the wicker clothes-basket and stepped out into the night. a hand extended to catch the first drops.
At least it wasn't raining yet; and the wind (now that she came to think of it, it had been windier earlier) had fallen. Peering up at the storm cloud, she realized with a start that it was not a real cloud at all-that what she had taken for a cloud was in fact the uncanny flying thing she had glimpsed above the wall, and even stared at from the roof.
A memory so remote that it seemed to have lain behind her curved metal skull stirred at this, her third view. Dust flew, as dust always does when something that has remained motionless for a long time moves at last.
"Why don't you dust it?" (Laughter.)
She would have blinked had she been so built. She looked down again, down at her dark garden, then up (but reasonably and prudently up only) at the pale streaks of her clotheslines. They were still in place, though sometimes the children took them for drover's whips and jump ropes. Started upward thus prudently and reasonably, her gaze continued to climb of its own volition.
"Why don't you dust it?"
Laughter filled her as the summer sunshine of a year long past descends gurgling to fill a wineglass, then died away.
Shaking her head, she went back inside. It was a trifle windy yet to hang out wash, and still dark anyway. Sunshine always made the wash smell better; she would wait till daylight and hang it out before morning prayer. It would be dry after.
When had it been, that sun-drenched field? The jokes and the laughter, and the overhanging, overawing shadow that had made them fall silent?
Grease the steps now, and scrub them, too; then it would be light out and time to hang the wash, the first thin thread of the long sun cutting the skylands in two.
She mounted the stair to the second floor. Here was that picture again, the old woman with her doves, blessed by Molpe. A chubby postulant whose name she could not recall had admired it; and she, thin, faceless, old Maytera Marble, flattered, had said that she had posed for Molpe. It was almost the only lie she had ever told, and she could still see the incredulity in that girl's eyes, and the shock. Shriven of that lie again and again, she nevertheless told Maytera Betel at each shriving-Maytera Betel, who was dead now.
She ought to have brought something, an old paintbrush, perhaps, to dab on her grease with. Racking her brain, she recalled her toothbrush, retained for decades after the last tooth had failed. (She wouldn't be needing that any more!) Opening the broken door to her room… She should fix this, if she could. Should try to, anyhow. They might not be able to afford a carpenter.
Yet it seemed tonight that she remembered the painter, the little garden at the center of his house, and the stone bench upon which the old woman (his mother, really) had sat earlier. Posing gowned and jeweled as the goddess with a stephane, the dead butterfly pinned in her hair.
It had been embarrassing, but the painter had wonderful brushes, not in the least like this worn toothbrush of hers, whose wooden handle had cracked so badly, whose genuine boar bristles, once so proudly black, had faded to gray.
She pushed the old toothbrush down into the bull's soft, white fat, then ran it energetically along the sliding track.
She could not have been a sibyl then, only the sibyls' maid; but the artist had been a relative of the Senior Sibyl's, who had agreed to let her pose. Chems could hold a pose much longer than bios. All artists, he had said, used chems when they could, although he had used his mother for the old woman because chems never looked old…
She smiled at that, tilting her head far back and to the right. The hinges, then the other track.
He had given them the picture when it was done.
She had a gray smear on one black sleeve. Dust from the steps, most likely. Filthy. She beat the sleeve until the dust was gone, then started downstairs to fetch her bucket and scrub brush. Had the bull's grease done what it was supposed to? Perhaps she should have paid for real oil. She lifted the folding steps tentatively. The grease had certainly helped. All the way up!
Grafifyingly smooth, so she had saved three cardbits at least, perhaps more. How had she gotten them down? With the crochet hook, that was it. But if she did not push the ring up she would not need it. The steps would have to come down again anyway when she scrubbed them, and she itched to see them work as they should. An easy tug on the ring, and down they slid with a puff of dust that was hardly noticeable.
"Why don't you dust it?"
Everyone had laughed, and she had too, though she had been so shy. He had been tall and-what was it? Five-point-two-five times stronger than she, with handsome steel features that faded when she tried to see them again.
All nonsense, really.
Like believing she had posed, after she had told Maytera over and over that she had lied. She would never have taken these new parts if… Though they were hers, to be sure.
One more time up the steps. One final time, and here was her old trunk.
She opened the gable window and climbed out onto the roof. If the neighbors spied her, they would be shocked out of their wits. Trunk evoked only her earlier search for its owner.
Footlocker, that was it. Here was a list of the dresses she had worn before they had voted to admit her. Her perfume. The commonplace book that she had kept for the mere pleasure of writing in it, of practicing her hand. Perhaps if she went back into the attic and opened her footlocker, she would find them all, and would never have to look at the thrumming thing overhead again.
Yet she did.
Enormous, though not so big you couldn't see the skylands on each side of it. Higher up and farther west now, over the market certainly and nosing toward the Palatine, its long axis bisected by Cage Street, where convicts were no longer exposed in cages. Its noise was almost below her threshold of hearing, the purr of a mountain lion as big as a mountain.
She should go back down now. Get busy. Wash or cook-though she was dead, and Maytera Betel and the rest dead, too, and Maytera Mint gone only Pas knew where, and nobody left to cook for unless the children came.
Enormous darkness high overhead, blotting the sun-drenched field, the straggling line of servants in which she had stood, and the soldiers' precise column. She had seen it descend from the sky, at first a fleck of black that had seemed no bigger than a flake of soot; had said, "It looks so dirty." A soldier had overheard her and called, "Why don't you dust it?"
Everyone had laughed, and she had laughed, too, though she had been humiliated to tears, had tears been possible for her. Angry and defiant, she had met his eyes and sensed the longing there.
And longed.
How tall he had been! How big and strong! So much steel!
Winged figures the size of gnats sailed this way and that below the vast, dark bulk; something streaked up toward them as she watched-flared yellow, like bacon grease dripping into the stove. Some fell.
"Here we are," Auk told Chenille. It was a break in the tunnel wall.
"This leads into the pit?"
"That's what he says. Let me go first, and listen awhile. Beat the hoof if it sounds a queer lay."
She nodded, resolving that she and her launcher would have something to say about any queer lay, watched him worm his way through (a tight squeeze for shoulders as big as his), listened for minutes that seemed like ten, then heard his booming laugh, faint and far away.
It was a tight squeeze for her as well, and it seemed her hips would not go through. She wriggled and swore, recalling Orchid's dire warnings and that Orchid's were twice-at least twice!-the size of hers.
The place she was trying so hard to get into was a pit in the pit, apparently-as deep as a cistern, with no way to go higher, though Auk must have found one
since he was not there.
Her hips scraped through at last. Panting as she knelt on the uneven soil, she reached back in and got her launcher.
"You coming, Jugs?" He was leaning over the edge, almost invisible in the darkness.
"Sure. How do I get out of here?"
"There's a little path around the sides." He vanished.
There was indeed-a path a scant cubit wide, as steep as a stair. She climbed cautiously, careful not to look down, with Gelada's lantern rattling on the barrel of her launcher. Above, she heard Auk say, "All right, maybe I will, but not till she gets here. I want her to see him."
Then her head was above the top and she was looking at the pit. a stade across, its reaches mere looming darkness, its sheer sides faced with what looked like shiprock. A wall rose above it on the side nearest her. She stared up at it without comprehension. turned her head to look at the shadowy figures around Auk, and looked up at it again before she recognized it as the familiar, frowning wall of the Alambrera, which she was now seeing from the other side for the first time.
Auk called, "C'mere, Jugs. Still got that darkee?"
A vaguely familiar voice ventured, "Might be better not to light it, Auk."
"Shut up."
She took Gelada's lantern off the barrel of her launcher and advanced hesitantly toward Auk, nearly falling when she tripped over a roll of rags in the darkness.
Auk said, "You do it, Urus. Keep it pretty near shut," and one of the men accepted the lantern from her.
The acrid smell of smoke cut through the prevailing reek of excrement and unwashed bodies; a bearded man with eyes like the sockets in a skull had removed the lid of a firebox. He puffed the coals it held until their crimson glow lit his face-a face she quickly decided she would rather not have seen. A wisp of flame appeared. Urus held the lantern to it, then closed the shutter, narrowing the yellow light to a beam no thicker than her forefinger.
"You want it, Auk?"
"I got no place to put it," Auk told him; and Chenille, edging nearer, saw that he had his hanger in his right hand and a slug gun in his left. The blade of the hanger was dark with blood. "Show her Patera first," he said.
On legs as thin as sticks, the shadowy figures parted; a pencil of light settled on a dark bundle that stared up at her with Incus's agonized eyes. A rag covered his mouth.
"Looks cute, don't he?" Auk chuckled.
She ventured, "He really is an augur…"
"He shot a couple of 'em with my needler, Jugs. It got 'em mad, and they jumped him. We'll cut him loose in a minute, maybe. Urus, show her the soldier."
Hammerstone was bound as well, though no rag had been tied over his mouth; she wondered whether it would work on a chem anyway, and decided that it might not. "I'm sorry, Stony," she said. "I'll get you out of this. Patera, too."
"They were going to stab him in the throat," Hammerstone told her. "They'd grabbed him from behind." He spoke slowly and without rancor, but there was a whorl of self-loathing in his voice, "I got careless."
"Those ropes are made out of that muscle in the back of your leg," Auk told her conversationally. "That's what they got him tied up with. They're pretty strong, I guess."
Neither she nor Hammerstone replied.
"Only I don't think they'd hold him. Not if he really tried. It'd take chains. Big ones, if you ask me."
"Hackum, maybe I shouldn't say this-"
"Go ahead."
"What if they jump you and me like they did Patera?"
"I was going to tell you why Hammerstone here don't break loose. Maybe I ought to do that first."
"Because you've got his slug gun?"
"Uh-huh. Only they had it then, see? They got hold of Incus, and they made Hammerstone give it to 'em. It takes a lot to kill a soldier, but a slug gun'll do it. So'll that launcher you got."
She scarcely heard him. When she had struggled through the narrow opening in the side of the tunnel, the deep humming from above had so merged with the rush of blood in her ears that she had assumed it was one with it; now she realized that it actually proceeded from the dark bulk in the sky that she (like Maytera Marble) had thought a cloud. She peered up at it, astonished.
"We'll get to that in a minute," Auk told her, looking upward too. "Terrible Tartaros says it's a airship. That's a thing kind of like the old man's boat, see? Only it sails through the air instead of water. The Rani of Trivigaunte's invaded Viron. That's another reason for us to do like he showed us down there-"
Hammerstone heaved himself upright, throwing aside four stick-limbed men who tried to hold him down. The sinews that bound his wrists and ankles broke in a rattattoo of poppings, like the burning of a string of firecrackers.
Almost casually, Auk thrust his hanger into the ground at his feet and leveled the slug gun. "Don't try it."
"We got to fight," Hammerstone told him. "Patera and me. We got to defend the city."
Reluctantly, Chenille trained the launcher Hammerstone had taught her to load and fire at his broad metal chest. He knelt to tear off Incus's gag, snapping the cords that had secured Incus's hands and feet between his fingers.
"Look! Look!" Urus shouted and pointed, then futilely directed the beam of Gelada's lantern upward. Others around him shouted and pointed, too.
Another voice, remote but louder than the loudest merely human voice silenced them, filling the pit with its thunder: "Convicts, you are free! Viron has need of every one of you. In the name of all the-in the Outsider's name, forget your quarrel with the Civil Guard, which now supports our Charter. Forget any quarrel you may have with your fellow citizens. Most of all, forget every quarrel among yourselves!"
Chenille grasped Auk's elbow. "That's Patera Silk! I recognize his voice!"
Auk could only shake his head, unbelieving. Something-a tumbling, flying thing that appeared, incredibly, to have a turret and a buzz gun-had cleared the parapet on the wall and was drifting into the pit, dropping lower and lower, an armed floater blown upwind by a wind that was none, hundreds of cubits above the Alambrera.
Chenille's launcher was snatched from her hands and fired as soon as it had left them, Hammerstone aiming at the immense shape far above the floater, directing a single missile at it (or perhaps at the winged figures that streamed from it like smoke), and watching it expectantly to observe the strike and correct his aim.
"There Auk!" thundered a hoarse voice from the floater tumbling slowly overhead. "Here girl!"
A second missile, and Auk was firing the slug gun that had been Hammerstone's, too, shooting winged troopers who swooped and soared above the pit firing slug guns of their own.
A minute dot of black fell from the vast flying thing Auk had called an airship. She saw it streak through the milling cloud of winged troopers. An instant later, the dark wall of the Alambrera exploded with a force that rocked the Whorl.
Silk stood in his boyhood bedroom, looking down at the boy who had been himself. The boy's face was buried in his pillow; by an effort of will he made it look toward him; each time it turned, its features dissolved in mist.
He sat down on the sill of the open window, conscious of the borage growing under it and of lilacs and violets beyond it. A copybook lay open, waiting, on the sleeping boy's small table; there were quills beside it, their ends more or less chewed. He ought to write, he knew-tell this boy who had been himself that he was taking his blue tunic, and leave him advice that would be of help in the troubles to come.
Yet he could not settle upon the right words, and he knew that the boy would soon wake. It was shadeup, and he would be late at his palaestra; already Mother approached the bed.
What could he say that would have meaning for this boy? That this boy might recall more than a decade later?
Mother shook his shoulder, and Silk felt his own shoulder touched; it was strange she could not see him.
Fear no love, he wrote; and then: Carry out the Plan of Pus. But Mother's hand was shaking him so hard that the final words were practically unreadabl
e; of Pas faded from the soft, blue-lined paper as he watched. Pas was, after all, a thing of the past. Like the boy.
Xiphias and the Prolocutor were standing at the foot of the boy's bed, which had become his own.
He blinked.
As if to preside over a sacrifice at the Grand Manteion, the Prolocutor wore mulberry vestments crusted with diamonds and sapphires, and held the gold baculus that symbolized his authority; Xiphias had what appeared to be an augur's black robe folded over his arm. It seemed the wildest of dreams.
His blankets were pushed away; and the surgeon, standing next to his bed beside Hyacinth, rolled him onto his side and bent to pull off the bandages he had applied earlier. Silk managed to smile up at Hyacinth, and she smiled in return-a shy, frightened smile that was like a kiss.
From the other side of the bed, Colonel Oosik inquired, "Can you speak, Caldé?"
He could not, though it was his emotions that kept him silent.
"He talked to me last night before he went to sleep," Hyacinth told Oosik.
"Silk talk!" Oreb confirmed from the top of a bedpost.
"Please don't sit up." The surgeon laid his hand-a much larger and stronger one than the hand that had awakened him-upon Silk's shoulder to prevent it.
"I can speak." he told them. "Your Cognizance. I very much regret having subjected you to this."
Quetzal shook his head and told Hyacinth, "Perhaps you'd better get him dressed."
"No time to dawdle, lad!" Xiphias exclaimed. "Shadeup in an hour! Want them to start shooting again?"
Then the surgeon who had held him down was helping him to rise, and Hyacinth (who smelled better than an entire garden of flowers) was helping him into a tunic. "I did this for you last Phaesday night, remember?"
"Do I still have your azoth?" he asked her. And then, "What in the Whorl's going on?"
"They sent Oosie to kill you. He just came back and he doesn't want to."
Silk was looking, or trying to look, into the corners of the room. Gods and others who were not gods waited there, he felt certain. watching and nearly visible, their shining heads turned toward him. He remembered climbing onto Blood's roof and his desperate struggle with the whiteheaded one, Hyacinth snatching his hatchet from his waistband. He groped for it, but hatchet and waistband had vanished alike. Quetzal muttered, "Somebody will have to tell him what to tell them. How to make peace."