Litany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  Coypu fingered the brown bottle and smiled. "There's always a crowd on Scylsday, and everything's pretty warm. These were probably let down then."

  Silk nodded. "It's always cold underground. I suppose that the night that surrounds the whorl must be a winter's night."

  Coypu shot him a startled glance as he opened his wife's orange juice.

  "Haven't you ever thought of what lies beyond the whorl, my son?"

  "You mean if you keep digging down? Isn't it just dirt, no matter how far down you go?"

  Silk shook his head as he opened his own bottle. "The most ignorant miner knows better than that, my son. Even a grave digger-I talked with several of them yesterday, and they were by no means unintelligent-would tell you that the soil our plows till is scarcely thicker than the height of a man. Clay and gravel lie beneath it, and below them, stone or shiprock."

  Silk poured cool water into a glass for Oreb while he collected his thoughts. "Beneath that stone and shiprock, which is not as thick as you might imagine, the whorl spins in emptiness-in a night that extends in every direction without limit," He paused, remembering, as he filled his own glass. "It is spangled everywhere with colored sparks, however. I was told what they were, though at the moment I cannot recall it."

  "I thought it was just that the heat didn't reach down there."

  "It does," Silk told him. "It reaches beyond the depths of this cistern, and deeper than the wells at my manteion, which always yield cold water with sufficient pumping. It extends, in fact, to the outermost stone of the whorl, and there it is lost in the frigid night. If it weren't for the sun, the first as well as the greatest gift Pas gave to the whorl, we would all freeze." For a moment Silk watched Oreb drinking from his glass, then he drank deeply from his own. "Thank you both. It's very good."

  Chervil said, "I wouldn't argue with Pas or you about the value of the sun, Patera, but it can be dangerous, too. If you really want to see the shrine, I wish you'd consider making your pilgrimage in the evening, when it's not so hot. Remember last time, Coypu?"

  Pier husband nodded. "We'd gone out last fall, Patera. We enjoyed the hike, and there's a magnificent view from the shrine, so we decided we'd do it again this year. When we finally got around to it the figs were getting ripe, but it wasn't as hot as it is now."

  "Not nearly," Chervil put in.

  "So off we went, and it got hotter and hotter. You tell him, sweetheart."

  "He left the path," Chervil told Silk. "The Pilgrims' Way, or whatever you call it. I could see the next couple of stones ahead of us, but he was veering off to the right down this little-I don't know what they call it. This rocky little valley between two hills."

  "Ravine?" Silk suggested.

  "Yes, that's it. This ravine. And I said, 'Where are you going? That's not the way.' And he said, 'Come on, come along or we'll never get there.' So I ran after him and caught up with him."

  They'll have a child in another year, Silk thought. He pictured the three of them at supper in a little courtyard, talking and laughing; Chervil was neither as beautiful nor as charming as Hyacinth, yet he found that he envied Coypu with all his heart.

  "And it ended. The ravine. It just stopped at a slope too steep to climb, and he didn't know what to do. Finally I said, 'Where do you think you're going?' And he said, 'To my aunt's.' "

  "I see." Silk had drained his glass; he poured the rest of the bottle into it.

  "It took me a long time to get him back to the path, but when I did I saw this man coming toward us, coming back from the shrine. I screamed for him to help me, and he stopped and asked what the matter was and made Coypu go along a little bit farther to where there was some shade, and we got him to lie down."

  "It was the heat, of course," Silk said.

  "Yes! Exactly."

  Coypu nodded. "I was all mixed up, and somehow I got the idea we were in the city, walking to my aunt's house; I kept wondering what had happened to the street. Why it had changed so much."

  "Anyway, this man stayed there with us until Coypu felt better. He said it was the early stages of heat stroke, and that the thing to do was to get out of the sun and lie down, and eat salty food and drink cold water, if you could. Only we couldn't because we hadn't brought anything, and it was way too high up for us to climb down to the lake. He was a doctor."

  Silk stared at her. "Oh, you gods!" "What's the matter, Patera?"

  "And yet some people will not believe." He finished his water. "I-even I, who ought to know better if anyone does-often behave as though there were no forces in the whorl beyond my own feeble strength. I suppose I ought to ask you this doctor's name, for form's sake; but I don't have to. I know it."

  "I've forgotten it," Coypu admitted, "although he stayed there talking to us for a couple of hours, I guess."

  Chervil said, "He had a beard, and he was only a little taller than I am."

  "His name is Crane," Silk told them, and signaled to the waiter.

  Chervil nodded. "That was it. Is he a friend of yours, Patera?"

  "Not exactly. An acquaintance. Would you like another, both of you? I'm going to get one."

  They nodded, and Silk told the waiter, "I'm paying for everything-for our first drinks and these, too."

  "Five bits if you want to pay now, Patera. You know anything about this Patera Silk, in the city?" "A little," Silk told him. "Not as much as I should, certainly."

  "Had a goddess in his Window? Supposed to be some sort of wonder worker?"

  "The first is true," Silk said, "the second is not." He turned back to Coypu and Chervil. "You said Doctor Crane talked with you for some time. If I'm not presuming on our brief acquaintance, may I ask what he talked about?"

  "He is Patera Silk," Chervil told the waiter. "Don't you see his bird?"

  Silk laid six cardbits on the table.

  Coypu said, "He wanted to know if my mother and father were in good health, and he kept feeling my skin. And what my grandmother'd died of. I remember that."

  "He asked a lot of questions," Chervil said. "And he made me keep fanning him-fanning Coypu, I mean."

  Oreb, who had been listening intently, demonstrated with his sound wing.

  "That's right, birdie. Exactly like that, only I used my hat."

  "I must get one," Silk muttered. "Get another, I should say. Fortunately I have funds."

  "A hat?" Coypu asked.

  "Yes. Even the commissioner was wearing-it doesn't matter. I don't know the man, and I don't wish to make you believe I do. I've done enough of that. What I should say is that before I start for the shrine, I want to buy a straw hat with a broad brim. I saw some in a shop window here, I know."

  The waiter brought three more sweating bottles and three clean glasses.

  Coypu told Silk, "Half the shops here sell them. You can get an ugly sunburn out on a boat on the lake."

  "Or even swimming, because people mostly just sit on the rocks." Chervil laughed; she had an attractive laugh, and Silk sensed that she knew it. "They come here from the city because the lake's nice and cold, and they think they want that. But once they get into it they jump out pretty fast, most of them."

  Silk nodded and smiled. "I'll have to try it myself one of these days. Do you remember any of Doctor Crane's other questions?"

  "Who built the shrine," Coypu said. "It was Councillor Lemur, about twenty-five years ago. There's a bronze plate on it that says so, but the doctor must not have noticed it when he was out there." Chervil said, "He wanted to know if Coypu was related. I don't think he knew what a coypu is. And whether we knew him, or any of them, and about how old they were. He said most of them became our councillors more than forty years ago, so they must have been pretty young then."

  "I'm not sure that's right," Coypu told her.

  "And if we knew how badly off some of the other cities were, and didn't we think we ought to help. I said that the first thing we ought to do was make sure everyone there got a fair share of their own food, because a lot of the trouble was because
of people there buying up corn and waiting for higher prices. I said prices in Viron were high enough for me already without our sending rice to Palustria."

  She laughed again, and Silk laughed with her as he put his unopened bottle of spring water into the front pocket of his robe; but his thoughts were already following the trail of white stones, the Pilgrims' Way stretching from Limna to Scylla's shrine-the holy place that both Doctor Crane and Commissioner Simuliid had visited-on the cliffs above the lake.

  When he set off nearly an hour later, the sun seemed a living enemy, a serpent of fire across the sky, powerful, poisonous, and malign. The Pilgrims' Way shimmered in the heat, and the third white stone, upon which he sat in order to re-energize Crane's wrapping, felt as hot as the lid of a kettle on the stove.

  As he wiped his forehead with his sleeve, he tried to recall whether it had been equally hot two or three months before, when Simuliid has made his pilgrimage, and decided that it had not. It had been hot-indeed it had been so hot that everyone had complained incessantly. But not as hot as it was now.

  "This is the peak," he told Oreb. "This is the hottest that it will get all day. It might have been wiser to wait until evening, as Chervil suggested; but we're supposed to meet Auk this evening for dinner. We can comfort ourselves with the thought that if we can stand this-and we can-we can stand the worst that this sun can do and that from this moment on things can only get better. Not only will the way back be downhill, but it will be cooler then."

  Oreb clacked his bill nervously but said nothing.

  "Did you see the look on Coypu's face when I limped away from our table?" Silk slapped the wrapping against the side of the white-painted boulder one final time.

  "When I told him I had a broken ankle, I was afraid he might try to keep me in Limna by main force."

  As Silk stood up, he reflected that Simuliid's age and weight had probably been handicaps as great or greater than his ankle. Had he, like Crane, encountered pilgrims on the path? And if so, what had he told them?

  For that matter, what should he himself, Patera Silk, from Sun Street, tell those he met; and what should he ask them? As he walked, he tried to contrive some reasonably truthful account that would permit him to ask whether they, too, had ever talked with Crane on the Pilgrims' Way, and what Crane had said to them, all without revealing his own purpose.

  There was no occasion for it. Though well marked (as the woman in theJuzgado had said), the path was deserted, steep, and stony, its loneliness and blazing heat relieved only by a succession of views of the steel blue lake that were increasingly breathtaking, breathtaken, and hazardous.

  "If an augur were to make this pilgrimage every day of his life," Silk asked Oreb, "in all weathers and whether he was well or ill, don't you believe that eventually, perhaps on the final day of his whorldly existence, Surging Scylla would reveal herself to him, rising from the lake? I do, and if I didn't have the manteion to take care of-if the people of our quarter didn't have need of me and it, and if the Outsider hadn't ordered me to save it-I'd be tempted to try the experiment. Even if it failed, one might live a far worse life."

  Oreb croaked and muttered in reply, peering this way and that.

  "It's Scylla, Pas's eldest child, who selects us to be augurs, after all. Each year arrives like a flotilla laden with young men and women-this is what they tell you at the schola, you understand."

  A beetling rock provided a few square cubits of shade; Silk squatted in it, fanning his dripping face with the wide hat he had bought in Limha.

  "Some, drawn to the ideal of holiness, sail very near Scylla indeed; and from those she plucks a number that is neither great nor small, but the necessary number for that year. Others, repelled by the augurial ideals of simplicity and chastity, sail as far from her as they dare; from them, also, she takes a number that is neither great nor small but the necessary number for the year. That is why artists show her with many long arms like whips. She snatched me up with one, you see. It may even be that she snatched you as well, Oreb."

  "No see!"

  "Nor I," Silk confessed. "I didn't see her either. But I felt her pull. Do you know, I believe all this walking's doing my ankle good? It must've reached the stage at which it needs exercise more than rest. We're coming to another point. What do you say, shall I sacrifice Blood's stick to Lady Scylla?"

  "No hit?"

  "No hit, I swear."

  "Keep it."

  "Because someone else might find it and hit you? Don't worry. I'll stand out there and throw it as far as I can."

  Silk rose and walked to the point, advancing ever more cautiously until he stood at the very edge of the projecting rock, above a drop of five hundred cubits, jumbled slabs of stone, and breaking waves. "How about it, Oreb? Should we make the offering? An informal sacrifice to Surging Scylla? It must surely have been Scylla who sent that nice couple to us. They told me where they live quite willingly, and some of the questions Doctor Crane had asked them were certainly suggestive."

  He paused. Like a gift from the goddess, a sudden gust of cool wind from the lake set his black robe flapping behind him, and dried the sweat that had soaked his tunic.

  "Auk and Chenille-and I, too-talked about turning him over to the Guard, Oreb, after we'd taken his money; it bothered me at the time, and it's been bothering me more and more ever since. I'd almost prefer failing the Outsider to doing that."

  "Good man."

  "Yes." Silk lowered the walking stick, discovered that he had nowhere to rest its ferrule, and took a step backward. "That's precisely the trouble. If I were to find out that someone I knew had gone to a foreign city to spy for Viron, I'd consider him a brave man and a patriot. Doctor Crane is clearly a spy for some other city-his home, whether it's Ur, Urbs, Trivigaunte, Sedes, or Palustria. Well, isn't he a brave man and a patriot, too?"

  "Walk now?"

  "You're right, I suppose. We ought to be on about our business." Silk remained where he was, nevertheless, gazing down at the lake. "I could say, I suppose, that if Scylla accepted my sacrifice-that is to say, if this stick fell into the water-it would be all right to let Crane go free once the manteion had been saved; he'd have to leave Viron, of course; but we wouldn't hand him and our evidence over to the Guard-roll him over to Hoppy, as Auk would say." He tapped the rock with the tip of the stick. "But it would be pure superstition, unworthy of an augur. What we need is a regular sacrifice, preferably on a Scylsday, with all of the forms strictly observed, before a Sacred Window."

  "No cut!"

  "Not you. How many times do I have to say that? A ram or something. You know, Oreb, there really is-or was-a science of hydromancy, by which the officiating augur read Scylla's will in the patterns of waves. I suggested it to that nice woman in the Juzgado by purest chance-seeing the lake before we went in probably brought it to mind-but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what Councillor Lemur had in mind when he built this shrine we're going to. It was practiced up until about a hundred years ago, so when the shrine was built there must still have been thousands of people who remembered it. Perhaps Councillor Lemur hoped to revive it."

  The bird did not reply. For another two minutes or more Silk stood staring at the surging waters below him before shifting his attention to the rugged cliffs on his right. "Look, you can see the shrine from here." He pointed with the walking stick. "I believe they've actually shaped the pillars that support the dome like Scylla's arms. See how wavy they are?"

  "Man there."

  A dim figure moved back and forth in the bluish twilight beneath Scylla's airy chalcedony shell, then vanished as he (presumably) knelt.

  "You're quite right," Silk told the bird, "so there is. Someone must have been on the path ahead of us all that time. I wish we'd caught up with him."

  He contemplated the otherwhorldly purity of the distant shrine for some time longer, then turned away. "I suppose we'll meet him on the path. But if we don't, we probably ought to wait until he's completed his own devotions. Now what about the st
ick? Should I go back and throw it?"

  "No throw." Oreb unfolded his wings and seemed minded to fly. "Keep it."

  "All right. I suppose my leg may be worse before we get back, so you're probably wise."

  "Silk fight."

  "With this, Oreb?" He twirled it. "I've got Hyacinth's azoth and her little needler, and either would be a much more effective weapon."

  "Fight!" the night chough repeated.

  "Fight who? There's no one here."

  Oreb whistled, a low note followed by a slightly higher one.

  "Is that bird speech for 'who knows?' Well, I certainly don't. And neither do you, Oreb, if you ask me. I'm glad I brought the weapons, because my having them here means that Patera Gulo can't find them, and I'd be willing to bet that by now he's searched my room; but if they were mine instead of Hyacinth's, I'd be inclined to pitch them to the goddess after the stick, Gulo'd never find them then."

  "Bad man?"

  "Yes, I believe he is." Silk returned to the Pilgrims' Way. "I'm guessing, of course. But if I must guess-and it seems that I must-then my guess is that he's the sort of man who thinks himself good, and that's by far the most dangerous sort of man there is."

  "Watch out."

  "I'll try," Silk promised, though he was not sure whether the bird was referring to Patera Gulo or the path, which wound along the edge of the cliff here. "So-if I'm right-this Patera Gulo's the exact reverse of Auk, who's a good man who believes himself to be a bad one. You've noticed that, I take it."

  "Take it."

  "I felt sure you had. Auk's helped in a dozen different ways, without even counting that diamond trinket. Patera Gulo was scandalized sufficiently by that, and the bracelet some other thief gave him. I can't imagine what he'd have done, or said, if he'd found the azoth."

  "Man go."

  "Do you mean Patera Gulo? Well, I wish I had some means of arranging that, I really do; but for the moment it seems to be beyond my reach."

  "Man go," Oreb repeated testily. "No pray."

  "Gone from the shrine now, is that what you mean?"