by Gene Wolfe
Then I made a second speech, resolved to do better than I had in my first. The guns had to be pulled back to Blanko, I explained, and since we had eaten our oxen, they would have to be pulled by human muscles, unless more oxen or mules could be found. On the other hand, Inclito would surely need every possible assistance in cementing the victory that we had won yesterday. Those who wished to return to Blanko were free to do so. They would remain with Major Adatta – whom I was promoting on the spot-and Captain Rimando, help pull the guns, bring back our prisoners and wounded, and defend the town should the enemy defeat Inclito in the hills. "As for Colonel Sfido and me, we are returning to the hills to prevent any such defeat. Those who wish to come with us may do so."
All of the men who had come out from the town after the battle joined us, with about a third of the women and the boys Inclito had left behind, and two-thirds of the veterans. I can only say that all three groups surprised me. On the second day we overtook Inclito, and I have already recorded the rest. Or at least, recorded those events which matter most.
Here is my good news: We have captured the Duko, General Morello, and Colonel Terzo. All three were uniformed as ordinary troopers of the Ducal Bodyguard, but the behavior of the other prisoners toward them-one spat in the Duko's face-called Sfido's attention to them. He and I are taking them back to Blanko, escorted by four men on horseback. We are camped in the open tonight, but tomorrow I hope to return to the site of the battle; I would like to conduct an experiment.
* * *
I have been talking to the Duko. What an extraordinary man he is, and what a dunce I am not to have guessed that he must be long ago!
He was a sleeper, like Mamelta. I asked whether he had known her, but he explained what I would have realized without prompting if I had my wits about me. "I may have known your friend under that name or some other," he said, "but I have no way of telling. It was a long time, years in fact, before I understood that I did not remember everything, and that not everything I remembered had actually taken place."
"We had a great many of you with us when we left the whorl," I told him. "So many that we had to take two landers, and could barely fit everybody into those two. Those of us who had grown up in Viron wanted to stay together, so all of us got on the same lander. We filled the remaining places with sleepers like you, and the rest boarded the other lander. Our sleepers-I don't quite know how to say this…"
"They have come to resemble you, dressing and talking as you do. Believing whatever it is you believe in your town of New Viron."
It was not what I had nearly said, but I seized upon it eagerly.
"I have seen it myself, and in fact I have done it myself," the Duko declared. "Our memories are less trustworthy even than yours. At first we try to live in accordance with them, but sooner or later we learn very painfully that they lead us astray." He paused to look at his fellow prisoners, General Morello and Colonel Terzo, who certainly appeared to be asleep and probably were.
"I wouldn't want them to hear this," he said. "There is no good reason for it. All such things have ceased to matter. Yet I retain my pride, though I'd like to rid myself of it once and for all."
Oreb sympathized. "Poor man!"
The Duko pointed to him. "There is the chief reason that everyone thinks you're a powerful magician, Master Incanto. That, and your power to appear in dreams as you did in mine, and to take him with you. They had no such talking birds on the Whorl, and there cannot be many here."
I explained that Oreb had come from there, exactly as I had myself.
"All right, but they can't have been known in Grandecitta. Before your bird entertained us, I was about to say that the false memories Pas gave me had one final defeat stored up for me. But it's time that I stopped laying my own shortcomings at his door."
He sat in silence for some while after that, rubbing his big chin. With his noble head and broad shoulders, and the pronounced ridge of bone beneath his thick, black brows, he seems the last person in the whorl to try to shift the blame for his own failures to an external cause.
"I trusted Morello. He'd been here all the time I'd been pacifying Olmo. He said he knew you people, that he understood your capabilities. They have clever leaders, he told me, and if we try to out-maneuver them, we'll be doing what they want. Fence with them, and you fence all day. But if we go straight at them, hammer and tongs and the anvil, they'll break, he said." The Duko laughed bitterly. "You didn't break, and I should've known better."
I pointed out that General Morello had tried to outflank us.
"But openly. He let you watch us do it, thinking it would frighten you. Pas alone knows what he thought when your troopers met our horse in a long thin line that stood its ground shooting. That you'd put a spell on them." He laughed again. "Terzo's terrified of you. He's in agony of every time you speak to him. You must have noticed it."
"Poor man!" Oreb muttered sympathetically.
"There. Did you hear that?" For a moment I thought that Duko Rigoglio was about to smile. "You have a percipient bird, Master Incanto. Someone always wins, so someone else always loses. He repeats poor man, and doesn't need to bother his head about our conversation. Say poor man again, bird."
"No, no."
"More words of universal utility. What were we talking about?"
I said that I would be delighted to talk about any subject he wished to discuss, that the privilege of conversing with him was more than enough for me.
"Then let us consider the desirability of adding a few more sticks to our fire. I would do it if you compelled me. I would have to. But with my hands and feet hobbled like this, well, you comprehend my difficulty, I'm sure."
"Poor man!"
When I had added firewood, I held the wine bottle to his mouth again, and he drank deeply, contriving to wipe his mouth upon the shoulder of his coat. "Thank you. You've been decent. You don't have to address me as Your Grandeur anymore, you know. Your brother didn't."
"Inclito prides himself on his incivility," I explained, "and I think he might very well have called you Rigoglio while you sat your throne; it would be quite in character. If he were to call you 'Your Grandeur' now, he would intend it as an insult."
"He has enough common decency not to insult a man about to die? That's rarer than you might think. He could simply have had me shot. I realize that."
"No cut," Oreb cautioned.
"You'll be tried by the Corpo, I suppose. I doubt that they'll sentence you to death."
"They'll have to." The Duko shook his head gloomily. "Not that I could return to power after this. And Pas knows-" He paused in the midst of his thought. "It is Pas, isn't it, here? Our god-in-chief?"
"No, it isn't, Your Grandeur. Or at least I do not believe so."
"Poor man!"
"I probed a nerve, didn't I? Let's talk about something else. You speak of me as Duko Rigoglio, I've heard you. It must have struck you by now that Rigoglio can't have been my name originally."
It had not, and I said so.
"My name was Roger. That's what was printed on my tube, anyway. Roger. I'd like it on my stone, if they let me have one."
I said again that Blanko had no compelling reason to take his life.
"Just the same, I want it, if you can manage it.
They'll put Duko Rigoglio on there, and that's all right. But I'd like for it to say Roger someplace, too, if that's possible." The Duko sat silent again for a time, clearly lost in thought.
He shook himself. "A woman I knew called me Rigoglio, and other people took it up. Do you know how I made myself Duko?"
I said, "I've been assuming that you were chosen by your people in some fashion, Your Grandeur."
"They'd gotten used to having a Duko back on the Whorl, the Duko of Grandecitta. They were glad to get out from under his thumb here, or said they were. The facts were that they didn't know how to run things for themselves, or even how to try. I didn't like being called Rigoglio, so I started calling myself Duko. A man objected, and I kn
ocked him down. In a day or so, I had half a dozen young fellows hanging around me, anxious to do the knocking down for me."
"I see."
"After that I settled quarrels. If you were a friend of mine, you won. If you weren't, I gave the nod to the weaker party, and chopped off your head if I could find an excuse. A couple of months of that, and everybody in town was a loyal supporter."
I nodded while making a mental note.
"I remembered Pas, or whatever his name was. It was pretty much what he'd done, only on a larger scale. He came in on the side of his friends, and when there was a war with one country stronger than the other, he was generally for the weak one, and you only lost a war to him once."
The Duko rubbed his eyes. "What did you put in your wine, Master Incanto?"
"Nothing, Your Grandeur," I said, "and I've been drinking it myself."
"It's not down in the fire-"
"Watch out!" Oreb spread his wings in alarm.
"It's up over it."
I looked where he had indicated, and saw Mucor's shadowy figure coalesce there as if seated upon the smoke. "Babbie's come back," she told me matter-of-factly. "I wondered if you still wanted him."
"Why, yes. Yes, I do, if I may have him."
"That's good, he misses you. I'll send him."
The smoke swirled as she vanished; and just as it had been in the old days beneath the Long Sun, I thought-too late-of a dozen things I ought to have asked her.
"Girl gone?" Oreb inquired. He clacked his bill and rustled his feathers. "Ghost girl?"
I told him she was, and made the mistake of adding that I wished she would come back.
"Bird gone!" He took wing and vanished into the night.
"He's a night chough," I explained to the Duko. "Don't worry about him, He can see in the dark much better than you and I can at noon."
"I wasn't worried about him," the Duko muttered.
19
Say Father
I wrote late last night (too late, to admit the truth) and still did not set down everything I had intended. Now here I sit, writing once more while everyone else is asleep; and even though I have not gotten to make my little experiment, I have far more to write about than patience to write it.
Or paper, for that matter.
Oreb came back this morning, and remembering how I had boasted to the Duko about his acuity of vision I told him to find me a stone table.
Soon he was back, quite elated by his success.
"Big table! Stone table. White table. Bird find! On hill. Watch bird!" With much more. I promised to watch, and off he flew due north.
I told Duko Sfido that I was going to retrace our journey for an hour's ride or about that, and instructed him to continue toward Blanko. "This is a good horse," I said, "and I should be able to catch up to you tonight."
Certainly there was nothing to worry about; but whether he was really worried or not, he seemed very worried indeed. "If this is absolutely necessary, I'd like to send a couple of troopers with you."
Oreb returned, flying in circles overhead and calling, "See god! Watch bird! See god!"
I said, "Its necessity is not the question, Your Grandeur. I am going to do it. It is a private matter, a matter of my private devotions, and I am not going to take away two of the troopers Inclito gave us to help guard his prisoners. Or one, or any other number." With that, I turned and rode away before Sfido could stop me.
I had said an hour's ride, because I had told
Oreb that I was interested only in tables not far from us. To give him his due, the altar he found for me would have been less than an hour distant if the ride had been over level ground. In the event, my horse was forced to pick his way across rocky little gullies and up and down the barren, windswept hills, which made my ride closer to three hours than one. With Hyacinth's azoth virtually out of reach under my greatcoat, robe, and tunic, my mind dwelt apprehensively on wild beasts and stragglers from the Horde of Soldo, without my actually seeing the smallest sign of either.
The cold and the wind were more immediate enemies. I pulled my looted greatcoat tight about me and muffled my face against the wind, just as I had when I rode with Sfido, but it seemed colder than it had ever been before, perhaps merely because I was facing into the wind, or perhaps merely because winter had advanced another step that morning. Those who live largely in houses or in warm climates, as I have, do not know cold. On my long, lonely ride today, cold and I at last shook hands- mine, of course-and exchanged unpleasantries that left me with the cough that is keeping me awake tonight. When I rode, my feet froze. Dismounting and leading my horse warmed me somewhat, but slowed our progress.
The altar Oreb had found was on a hilltop, as I expected, and the climb was difficult: up the side of a flat-topped hill whose gentlest slope was practically straight up, until at last, perspiring in spite of the cold, I was able to pull myself over the edge, and stand upright on smooth rock more level than your kitchen floor.
I had expected that the altar would be a mere flat stone not much different from the one beneath which I had laid Fava to rest, a rough slab of fire-blacked slate resting on three or four boulders. What I found instead was a wide rectangle of some white mineral so fine in grain it might almost have been a kind of glass, supported by twelve graceful pillars of a metal that I am going to call bronze until we can speak face-to-face. The Neighbors had danced around it once; I knew that as soon as I saw it and the floor of living rock that they had leveled and smoothed with so much care. They had danced, and their watching gods, with their feet upon the stars, had smiled and bent in honest friendship to accept a morsel from a table fit for gods.
Sinew had found an altar of the Vanished People in a wood, and had tried to persuade me to visit it without exposing himself to the humiliation of my refusal. Now I wonder what wonders I missed by my surly rejection of his implied invitation. Was it an altar like the one to which Oreb guided me today? If not, in what respects did it differ, and why? Did Sinew himself worship there? If he did, did he experience what I experienced today, or anything of the kind? Have you visited the place, Nettle? I am eager to talk to you about all this.
Sinew is still on Green, assuming that he is (unlike his father) still alive. On Green and so unreachable, as Sfido's friend Gagliardo would doubtless tell us. But I and others will visit Green's jungles tomorrow night if my experiment succeeds. If I can locate Sinew, I will ask him about the altar he found in order that we can find it ourselves, assuming that Hide and I succeed in returning to the Lizard; if it is as remarkable as the altar to which Oreb led me, it will be well worth visiting more than once.
Ever since my boyhood, it has seemed to me that it is a species of insult to the immortal gods to pray at their altars without sacrificing, provided that sacrifice is possible. If I still had the long, straight, single-edged knife I used to carry when I was Rajan of Gaon, I would have thought seriously about sacrificing Oreb. I do not believe that I could have nerved myself to do it, but I cannot help wondering what the result would have been. My horse would have made a sacrifice worthy of the Grand Manteion, to be sure; but I could not spare him, and I had no knife other than the azoth (as I said), and no means of getting him onto the hilltop.
There will be a barn for him tomorrow, poor creature. A barn and hay-corn or oats if I can find them, though I have little hope of that.
When I had rejected both sacrifices, my next thought was to pray as I would have at a shrine. I tried, kneeling on the level living rock with my head swathed in my scarf, and mumbling a few of the prayers I have not yet forgotten. When I have failed in prayer in the past, I have generally felt myself ludicrous, like the little boy in the story who prayed that Hierax would fly off with the larger boy next door and drop him on the head of some evildoer.
Not so today-my prayers were beneath even Comus's good-natured raillery. When I was in the schola, I once asked why those spirits who had been thrust from the Aureate Path could not save themselves by prayer; and I was told th
at they could not pray-that although we, the living, might pray for them, they themselves could only mouth the words of prayers, words that left their lips without effecting any interior change. So it was with me, as I knelt before that cold altar and felt its hunger. I was like a barren woman who longs to conceive, but cannot conceive although she lies with three-score men.
At last I rose and lifted my face to the dark winter sky. "I have no knife for a sacrifice," I said, and I spoke aloud as one man does to another. "Even if I had my old knife back, I would not give you Oreb, who has led me here to you. You will reclaim us both quickly enough. But you did not condemn me-or at least I dare to hope that you did not-when I sacrificed for Olivine."
I opened the leather burse that Volanta gave me when we left Blanko, found the piece of Soldese flatbread I had put there before setting out, and struck by the idea of sharing the simple meal we shared with our prisoners at midday, climbed down and fetched the last of my wine from my saddlebag. The second climb should have been worse than the first, yet it was not. I was tired, my ankle pained me; and my fingers, which had been cold from the beginning, were colder than ever. But all the emptiness I had felt when I had tried to pray, had vanished so completely I could almost believe they had never been. I was happy and more, and if an old instructor had appeared and demanded to know the reason for my joy, I would only have laughed at him for needing causes and explanations in so simple a matter. I was alive, and the Outsider-who knows very well what sort of creature I am-cared about me in spite of all.
"This is what I have," I told him, and raised my bread and my bottle, displaying them to the low, gray clouds. "I beseech you to share them with me, and I pray that you will not object to me and my animals sharing them with you." Then I broke the bread in two, laid half of it upon his altar, and poured wine over it, cautioning Oreb not to touch it. After that, I wet a bit with a little wine and gave it to Oreb, ate a bite myself, drank deeply from the bottle and recorked it, and put away what remained of the bread.