by Gene Wolfe
The altar fire was out, the interior of the manteion lit only by the silver sheen of the Sacred Window and the hidden flame of the fat, blue-glass lamp between Echidna’s feet—Maytera Rose’s lamp, burning some costly scented oil whose fragrance stirred his memory.
He clapped his hands to kindle the few lights still in working order, then fumbled among the shadows for the long-hafted, narrow-bladed hatchet with which he split shingles and drove roofing nails. Finding it, he tested its edge (so painstakingly sharpened that very morning) before slipping its handle into his waistband.
That, he decided after walking up and down and twice pretending to sit, would not do. There was a rusty saw in the palaestra’s supply closet; it would be simple to shorten the handle, but the hatchet would be a less useful tool, and a much less serviceable weapon, afterward.
Stooping again, he found the rope that had prevented his bundle of shingles from sliding off the roof, a thin braided cord of black horsehair, old and pliant but still strong. Laying aside robe and tunic, he wound it about his waist, tied the ends, and slid the handle of the hatchet through several of the coils.
Dressed again, he emerged once more into the garden, where a vagrant breeze sported with the delectable odor of cooking from the cenoby, reminding him that he ought to be preparing his own supper at this very moment. He shrugged, promising himself a celebratory one when he returned. The tomatoes that had dropped green from his vines were still not ripe, but he would slice them and fry them in a little oil. There was bread, too, he reminded himself, and the hot oil might be poured over it afterward to flavor and soften it. His mouth watered. He would scrape out the grounds he had reused so long, scrub the pot, and brew fresh coffee. Finish with an apple and the last of the cheese. A feast! He wiped his lips on his sleeve, ashamed of his greed.
After closing and carefully locking the side door of the manteion, he made a wary study of the cenoby windows. It would probably not matter if Maytera Marble or Maytera Mint saw him leave, but Maytera Rose would not hesitate to subject him to a searching cross-examination.
The rain had ended, there could be no doubt of that; there had been an hour of rain at most, when the farmers needed whole days of it. As he hurried along Sun Street once more, east this time and thus away from the market, Silk studied the sky.
The thinnest possible threads of gold still shone here and there among scudding clouds, threads snapped already by the rising margin of the ink-black shade. While he watched, the threads winked out; and the skylands, which had hovered behind the long sun like so many ghosts, shone forth in all their beauty and wonder: flashing pools and rolling forests, checkered fields and gleaming cities.
Lamp Street brought him to the Orilla, where the lake waters had begun when Viron was young. This crumbling wall half buried in hovels had been a busy quay, these dark and hulking old buildings, warehouses. No doubt there had been salting sheds, too, and rope walks, and many other things; but all such lightly built structures had disappeared before the last caldé, rotted, tumbled, and at last cannibalized for firewood. The very weeds that had sprouted from their sites had withered, and the cellar of every shiprock ruin left standing was occupied by a tavern.
Listening to the angry voices that issued from the one he approached, Silk wondered why anyone went there. What sorts of lives could they be to which fifty or a hundred men and women preferred this? It was a terrifying thought.
He paused at the head of the stair to puzzle out the drawing chalked on the grimy wall beside it, a fierce bird with outstretched wings. An eagle? Not with those spurs. A gamecock, surely; and the Cock had been one of the places suggested by Maytera Mint, a tavern (so Maytera Marble had said) she recalled Auk’s mentioning.
The steep and broken stairs stank of urine; Silk held his breath as he groped down them, not much helped by the faint yellow radiance from the open door. Stepping to one side just beyond the doorway, he stood with his back to the wall and surveyed the low room. No one appeared to pay the least attention to him.
It was larger than he had expected, and less furnished. Mismatched deal tables stood here and there, isolated, but surrounded by chairs, stools, and benches equally heterodox on which a few silent figures lounged. Odious candles fumed and dribbled a sooty wax upon some (though by no means all) of these tables, and a green and orange lampion with a torn shade swung in the center of the room, seeming to tremble at the high-pitched anger of the voices below it. The backs of jostling onlookers obscured what was taking place there.
“Hornbus, you whore!” a woman shrieked.
A man’s voice, slurred by beer yet hissing swift with the ocher powder called rust, suggested, “Stick it out your skirt, sweetheart, an’ maybe she will.” There was a roar of laughter. Someone kicked over a table, its thud accompanied by the crash of breaking glass.
“Here! Here now!” Quickly but without the appearance of haste, a big man with a hideously scarred face pushed through the crowd, an old skittlepin in one hand. “OUTside now! OUTside with this!” The onlookers parted to let two women with dirty gowns and disheveled hair through.
“Outside with her!” One woman pointed.
“OUTside with both.” The big man caught the speaker expertly by the collar, tapped her head almost gently with the skittlepin, and shoved her toward the door.
One of the watching men stepped forward, held up his hand, and gestured in the direction of the other woman, who seemed to Silk almost too drunk to stand.
“Her, too,” the big man with the skittlepin told her advocate firmly.
He shook his head.
“Her too! And you!” The big man loomed above him, a head the taller. “OUTside!”
Steel gleamed and the skittlepin flashed down. For the first time in his life, Silk heard the sickening crepitation of breaking bone; it was followed at once by the high, sharp report of a needier, a sound like the crack of a child’s toy whip. A needier (momentarily, Silk thought it the needier that had fired) flew into the air, and one of the onlookers pitched forward.
Silk was on his knees beside him before he himself knew what he had done, his beads swinging half their length in sign after sign of addition. “I convey to you, my son, the forgiveness of all the gods. Recall now the words of Pas—”
“He’s not dead, cully. You an augur?” It was the big man with the scarred face. His right arm was bleeding, dark blood oozing through a soiled rag he pressed tightly against the cut.
“In the name of all the gods you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for—”
“Get him out of here,” someone snapped; Silk could not tell whether he meant the dead man or himself. The dead man was bleeding less than the big man, a steady, unspectacular welling from his right temple. Yet he was surely dead; as Silk chanted the Final Formula and swung his beads, his left hand sought a pulse, finding none.
“His friends’ll take care of him, Patera. He’ll be all right.”
Two of the dead man’s friends had already picked up his feet.
“… and for Strong Sphigx. Also for all lesser gods.” Silk hesitated; it had no place in the Formula, but would these people know? Or care? Before rising, he finished in a whisper: “The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, no matter what evil you did in life.”
The tavern was nearly empty. The man who had been hit with the skittlepin groaned and stirred. The drunken woman was kneeling beside him just as Silk had knelt beside the dead man, swaying even on her knees, one hand braced on the filthy floor. There was no sign of the needier that had flown into the air, nor of the knife that the injured man had drawn.
“You want a red ribbon, Patera?”
Silk shook his head.
“Sure you do. On me, for what you done.” The big man wound the rag about his arm, knotted it dexterously with his left hand, and pulled the knot tight with his left hand and his teeth.
“I need to know something,” Silk said, returning his beads to his pocket, �
�and I’d much rather learn it than get a free drink. I’m looking for a man called Auk. Was he in here? Can you tell me where I might find him?”
The big man grinned, the gap left by two missing teeth a little cavern in his mirth. “Auk, you say, Patera? Auk? There’s quite a few with that name. Owe him money? How’d you know I’m not Auk myself?”
“Because I know him, my son. Know him by sight, I should have said. He’s nearly as tall as you are, with small eyes, a heavy jaw, and large ears. I would guess he’s five or six years younger than you are. He attends our Scylsday sacrifices regularly.”
“Does he now.” The big man appeared to be staring off into the dimness of the darkest corner of the room; abruptly he said, “Why, Auk’s still here, Patera. Didn’t you tell me you’d seen him go?”
“No,” Silk began. “I—”
“Over there.” The big man pointed toward the corner, where a solitary figure sat at a table not much larger than his chair.
“Thank you, my son,” Silk called. He crossed the room, detouring around a long and dirty table. “Auk? I’m Patera Silk, from the manteion on Sun Street.”
“Thanks for what?” the man called Auk inquired.
“For agreeing to talk with me. You signaled to him somehow—waved or something, I suppose. I didn’t see it, but it’s obvious you must have.”
“Sit down, Patera.”
There was no other chair. Silk brought a stool from the long table and sat.
“Somebody send you?”
Silk nodded. “Maytera Mint, my son. But I don’t wish to give you the wrong impression. I haven’t come as a favor to her, or as a favor to you, either. Maytera was doing me a favor by telling me where to find you, and I’ve come to ask you for another one, shriving.”
“Figure I need it, Patera?” There was no trace of humor in Auk’s voice.
“I have no way of knowing, my son. Do you?”
Auk appeared to consider. “Maybe so. Maybe not.”
Silk nodded—understandingly, he hoped. He found it unnerving to talk with this burly ruffian in the gloom, unable to see his expression.
The big man with the wounded arm set an astonishingly delicate glass before Silk. “The best we got, Patera.” He backed away.
“Thank you, my son.” Turning on his stool, Silk looked behind him; the injured man and the drunken woman were no longer beneath the lampion, though he had not heard them go.
“Maytera Mint likes you, Patera,” Auk remarked. “She tells me things about you sometimes. Like the time you got the cats’ meat woman mad at you.”
“You mean Scleroderma?” Silk felt himself flush, and was suddenly glad that Auk could not see him better. “She’s a fine woman—a kind and quite genuinely religious woman. I was hasty and tactless, I’m afraid.”
“She really empty her bucket over you?”
Silk nodded ruefully. “The odd thing was that I found a scrap of—of cats’ meat, I suppose you’d call it, down my neck afterward. It stank.”
Auk laughed softly, a deep, pleasant laugh that made Silk like him.
“I thought it an awful humiliation at the time,” Silk continued. “It happened on a Thelxday, and I thanked her on my knees that my poor mother wasn’t alive to hear about it. I thought, you know, that she would have been terribly hurt, just as I was myself at the time. Now I realize that she would only have teased me about it.” He sipped from the graceful little glass before him; it was probably brandy, he decided, and good brandy, too. “I’d let Scleroderma paint me blue and drag me the whole length of the Alameda, if it would bring my mother back.”
“Maytera Mint was the nearest to a real mother I ever had,” Auk said. “I used to call her that—she let me—when we were alone. For a couple of years I pretended like that. She tell you?”
Silk shook his head, then added, “Maytera Marble said something of the sort. I’m afraid I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it.”
“The Old One brought up us boys, and he raised us hard. It’s the best way. I’ve seen a lot that didn’t get it, and I know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Every so often I tell myself I ought to stick my knife in her, just to get her and her talk out of my head. Know what I mean?”
Silk nodded, although he could not be certain that the burly man across the table could see it. “Better than you do yourself, I think. I also know that you’ll never actually harm her. Or if you do, it won’t be for that reason. I’m not half as old as Patera Pike was, and not a tenth as wise; but I do know that.”
“I wouldn’t take the long end of that bet.”
Silk said nothing, his eyes upon the pale blur that was Auk’s face, where for a moment it seemed to him that he had glimpsed the shadow of a muzzle, as though the unseen face were that of a wolf or bear.
Surely, he thought, this man can’t have been called Auk from birth. Surely “Auk” is a name he’s assumed.
He pictured Maytera Mint leading the boy Auk into class on a chain, then Maytera Mint warned by Maytera Rose that Auk would turn on her when he was grown. He sipped again to rid himself of the fancy. Auk’s mother had presumably named him; the small auks of Lake Limna were flightless, thus it was a name given by mothers who hoped their sons would never leave them. But Auk’s mother must have died while he was still very young.
“But not here.” Auk’s fist struck the table, nearly upsetting it. “I’ll come Scylsday, day after tomorrow, and you can shrive me then. All right?”
“No, my son,” Silk said. “It must be tonight.”
“Don’t you trust—”
“I’m afraid I haven’t made myself entirely clear,” Silk interposed. “I haven’t come here to shrive you, though I’d be delighted to do it if you wish, and I’m certain it would make Maytera Mint very happy when I told her I had. But you must shrive me, Auk, and you must do it tonight. That is what I’ve come for. Not here, however, as you say. In some more private place.”
“I can’t do that!”
“You can, my son,” Silk insisted softly. “And I hope you will. Maytera Mint taught you, and she must have taught you that anyone who is himself free of deep stain can bring the pardon of the gods to one who is in immediate danger of death.”
“If you think I’m going to kill you, Patera, or Gib over there—”
Silk shook his head. “I’ll explain everything to you in that more private place.”
“Patera Pike shrove me one time. Maytera got after me about it, so I finally said all right. I told him a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”
“And now you’re wondering whether he told me something of what you told him,” Silk said, “and you think that I’m afraid you’ll kill me when I tell you that I told someone else. No, Auk. Patera told me nothing about it, not even that it took place. I learned that from Maytera Marble, who learned it from Maytera Mint, who learned of it from you.”
Silk tasted his brandy again, finding it difficult to continue. “Tonight I intend to commit a major crime, or try to. I may be killed, in fact I rather expect it. Maytera Marble or Maytera Mint could have shriven me, of course; but I didn’t want either of them to know. Then Maytera Marble mentioned you, and I realized you’d be perfect. Will you shrive me, Auk? I beg it.”
Slowly, Auk relaxed; after a moment he laid his right hand on the table again. “You don’t go the nose, Patera, do you?”
Silk shook his head.
“If this’s a shave, it’s a close one.”
“It’s not a shave. I mean exactly what I say.”
Auk nodded and stood. “Then we’d better go somewhere else, like you want. Too bad, I was hoping to do a little business tonight.”
He led Silk to the back of the dim cellar room, and up a ladder into a cavernous night varied here and there by pyramids of barrels and bales; and at last, when they had followed an alley paved with refuse for several streets, into the back of what appeared to be an empty shop. The sound of their feet summoned a weak green glow from one cor
ner of the overlong room. Silk saw a cot with rumpled, soiled sheets; a chamber pot; a table that might have come from the tavern they had left; two plain wooden chairs; and, on the opposite wall, what appeared to be a still-summonable glass. Planks had been nailed across the windows on either side of the street door; a cheap colored picture of Scylla, eight-armed and smiling, was tacked to the planks. “Is this where you live?” he asked.
“I don’t exactly live anywhere, Patera. I’ve got a lot of places, and this is the closest. Have a seat. You still want me to shrive you?”
Silk nodded.
“Then you’re going to have to shrive me first so I can do it right. I guess you knew that. I’ll try to think of everything.”
Silk nodded again. “Do, please.”
With speed and economy of motion surprising in so large a man, Auk knelt beside him. “Cleanse me, Patera, for I have given offense to Pas and to other gods.”
His gaze upon the smiling picture of Scylla—and so well away from Auk’s heavy, brutal face—Silk murmured, as the ritual required, “Tell me, my son, and I will bring you his forgiveness from the well of his boundless mercy.”
“I killed a man tonight, Patera. You saw it. Kalan’s his name. Gurnard was set to stick Gib, but he got him…”
“With his skittlepin,” Silk prompted softly.
“That’s lily, Patera. That’s when Kalan come out with his needler, only I had mine out.”
“He intended to shoot Gib, didn’t he?”
“I think so, Patera. He works with Gurnard off and on. Or anyway he used to.”
“Then there was no guilt in what you did, Auk.”
“Thanks, Patera.”
After that, Auk remained silent for a long time. Silk prayed silently while he waited, listening with half an ear to angry voices in the street and the thunderous wheels of a passing cart, his thoughts flitting from and returning to the calm, amused and somehow melancholy voices he had heard in the ball court as he had reached for the ball he carried in a pocket still, and to the innumerable things the owner of those voices had sought to teach him.