by Gene Wolfe
By some prodigy of good luck he caught it by its downy neck; but the carpels of its wings were as hard as any man’s knuckles, and were driven by muscles more powerful than the strongest’s. They battered him mercilessly as both tumbled.
The edge of the crenel between two merlons was like a wedge driven into his back. Still struggling to keep the bird’s cruel, hooked beak from his face and eyes, he jerked the hatchet free; a carpal struck his forearm like a hammer, and the hatchet fell to the stone pavement of the terrace below.
The white-headed one’s other carpal struck his temple and the illusory nature of the world of the senses was made manifest: it narrowed to a miniature, artificially bright which Silk endeavored to push away until it winked out.
Chapter 6
NEW WEAPONS
A whole whorl swam beneath Silk’s flying, beclouded eyes—highland and tableland, jungle and dry scrub, savannah and pampa. The plaything of a hundred idle winds, buffeted yet at peace, he sailed over them all, dizzy with his own height and speed, his shoulder nudged by storm cloud, the solitary Flier three score leagues below him a darting dragonfly with wings of lace.
A black dragonfly that vanished into blacker cloud, into distant voices and the odor of carrion …
Silk choked on his own spew and spat; terror rose from the wheeling scene to foot him like a falcon, its icy talons in his vitals. He had blinked, and in that single blink the whorl had rolled over like a wind-tumbled basket or a wave-tossed barrel. The drifting skylands were up and the uneven, unyielding surface on which he lay, down. His head throbbed and spun, and an arm and both legs burned.
He sat up.
His mouth was wet with slime, his black robe discolored and stinking. He wiped them clumsily with numbed hands, then wiped his hand on his robe and spat again. The gray stone of the battlement had been crowding his left shoulder. The bird he had fought, the “white-headed one” of Mucor’s warning, was nowhere to be seen.
Or perhaps, he thought, he had only dreamed of a terrible bird. He stood, staggered, and fell to his knees.
His eyes closed of themselves. He had dreamed it all, his tortured mind writhing among nightmares—the horrible bird, the horned beasts with their incandescent stares, the miserable mad girl, his dark rope reaching blindly again and again for new heights, the silent forest, the burly burglar with his hired donkeys, and the dead man sprawled beneath the swinging, hanging lamp. But he was awake now, awake at last, and the night was spent—awake and kneeling beside his own bed in the manse on Sun Street. It was shadeup and today was Sphigxday; already he should be chanting Stabbing Sphigx’s morning prayer.
“O divine lady of the swords, of the gathering armies, of the swords…”
He fell forward, retching, his hands on the still-warm, rounded tiles.
The second time he was wiser, not attempting to stand until he was confident that he could do so without falling. Before he gained his feet, while he lay trembling beside the battlement, dawn faded and winked out. It was night again, Phaesday night once more—an endless night that had not yet ended and might never end. Rain, he thought, might wash him clean and clear his head, and so he prayed for rain, mostly to Phaea and Pas, but to Scylla as well, remembering all the while how many men (men better than himself) were imploring the gods as he did, and for better reasons: how long had they been praying, offering such small sacrifices as they could, washing Great Pas’s images in orchards of dying trees and in fields of stunted corn?
It did not rain, or even thunder.
Excited voices drifted to him from somewhere far away; he caught the name Hierax repeated over and over. Someone or something had died.
“Hierax,” Feather had replied at the palaestra a week or two before, fumbling after some fact associated with the familiar name of the God of Death. “Hierax is right in the middle.”
“In the middle of Pas and Echidna’s sons, Feather? Or of all their children?”
“Of their whole family, Patera. There’s only the two boys in it.” Feather, also, was one of a pair of brothers. “Hierax and Tartaros.”
Feather had waited fearfully for correction, but he, Patera Silk, had smiled and nodded.
“Tartaros is the oldest and Hierax is the youngest,”
Feather had continued, encouraged.
Maytera’s cubit stick tapped her lectern. “The older, Feather. And the younger. You said yourself that there were only two.”
“Hierax…” said someone far below the other side of the battlement.
Silk stood up. He head still throbbed, and his legs were stiff; but he did not feel as though he were about to gag again. The chimneys (they all looked the same now) and the beckoning trapdoor seemed an impossible distance away. Still reeling and dizzy, he embraced a merlon with both arms and peered over the battlement. As if it belonged to someone else, he noted that his right forearm was oozing blood onto the gray stones.
Forty cubits and more below, three men and two women were standing in a rough circle on the terrace, all of them looking down at something. For a slow half minute at least, Silk could not be certain what it was. A third woman pushed one of the others aside, then turned away as if in disgust. There was more talk until one of the armored guards arrived with a lamp.
The bird, Mucor’s white-headed one, lay dead upon the flagstones, appearing smaller than Silk could have imagined, its unequal wings half spread, its long white neck bent back at an unnatural angle. He had killed it. Or rather, it had killed itself.
One of the men around the dead bird glanced upward, saw Silk watching him, pointed, and shouted something Silk could not understand. Rather too late (or so he feared), he waved as though he were a member of the household and retreated up the steep slope of the roof.
The trapdoor opened upon the dim and lofty attic he had glimpsed earlier, a cobwebbed cavern more than half filled with musty furniture and splintering crates. Feeble lights kindled at the muted clank of his foot upon the first iron step; he had hardly descended to the second when one winked out. It was a promising place in which to conceal himself, but it would no doubt be the first to be searched should the man on the terrace raise the alarm. Silk had rejected it by the time he reached the bottom of the spiraling steps, and with a pang of regret hurried straight to the wider wooden stair and ran down them to the upper floor of the original villa.
Here a narrow, tapestry-covered door opened onto a wide and luxuriously furnished corridor not far from a balustraded staircase up which cultured voices floated. A fat, formally dressed man sat in an elaborate red velvet and gilt armchair a few steps from the top of the staircase. His arms rested on a rosewood table, and his head upon his folded arms; he snored softly as Silk passed, jerked to wakefulness, stared uncomprehendingly at Silk’s black robe, and lowered his head to his arms again.
The stair was thickly carpeted, its steps broad, and its slant gentle. It terminated in a palatial reception hall, in which five men dressed much like the sleeper stood deep in conversation. Several were holding tumblers, and none seemed alarmed. Some distance beyond them, the reception hall ended with wide double doors—doors that stood open at present, so that the soft autumn night itself appeared as a species of skylit hanging in Blood’s hall. Beyond any question, Silk decided, those doors represented the principal entrance to the villa; the portico he had studied from the wall would be on the other side; and indeed when he had surveyed the scene below him for a moment—not leaning across the balustrade as he had so unwisely leaned across the battlement to stare down at the flaccid form of the white-headed one, but from the opposite side of the corridor, with his back against the nude, half again life-sized statue of some minor goddess—he could just make out the ghostly outlines of the pillars.
Unbidden, the manteion’s familiar, fire-crowned altar rose before him as he stared at the open doors: the altar, the manse, the palaestra, and the shady arbor where he had sometimes chatted too long with Maytera Marble. Suppose that he were to walk down this staircase quite normally? Str
oll through that hall, nodding and smiling to anyone who glanced toward him. Would any of them stop him, or call for guards? It seemed unlikely.
His own hot blood trickling down his right arm wet his fingers and dripped onto Blood’s costly carpet. Shaking his head, Silk strode swiftly past the stair and seated himself in the matching red armchair on the other side. As long as his arm bled, he could be tracked by his blood: down the spiral stair from the roof, down the attic stair, and along this corridor.
Parting his robe, he started a tear above the hem of his tunic with his teeth and ripped away a strip.
Could not the blood trail be turned to his advantage? Silk rose and walked rapidly along the corridor, flexing his wrist and clenching his right hand to increase the bleeding, and entered the south wing by a short flight of steps; there he halted for a moment to wind the strip about his wound and knot it with his teeth just as Gib, the big man in the Cock, had. When he had satisfied himself that it would remain in place, he retraced his steps, passing the chair in which he had sat, the stairhead, the sleeper, and the narrow tapestry-covered door leading to the attic. Here, beyond paired icons of the minor deities Ganymedia and Catamitus, wide and widely spaced doors alternated with elaborately framed mirrors and amphorae overfilled with hothouse roses.
As Silk approached the entrance to the north wing, an officer in the uniform of the Guard emerged from an archway at the end of the corridor. The door nearest Silk stood half open; he stepped inside and shut it softly behind him.
He found himself facing a windowless pentagonal drawing room furnished in magnificent chryselephantine. For a moment he waited with his back to the corridor door, listening as he had listened so often that night. When he heard nothing, he crossed the thick carpet and opened one of the drawing room’s ivory-encrusted doors.
This was a boudoir, larger and even more oddly shaped. There were wardrobes, two chairs, a rather tawdry shrine of Kypris whose smoldering thurible filled the room with the sweetness of frankincense, and a white dressing table before a glass whose pearlescent glow appeared to intensify as he entered. When he shut the door behind him, a swirl of colors danced across the glass. He fell to his knees.
“Sir?”
Looking up, Silk saw that the glass held only the gray face of a monitor. He traced the sign of addition. “Wasn’t there a god? I saw…”
“I am no god, sir, merely the monitor of this terminal. What may I do to serve you, sir? Would you care to critique your digitally enhanced image?”
Disconcerted, Silk stood. “No. I—No, thank you.” He struggled to recall how Auk had addressed the monitor in his glass. “I’d like to speak to a friend, if it isn’t too much trouble, my son.” That had not been it, surely.
The floating face appeared to nod. “The friend’s name, please? I will attempt it.”
“Auk.”
“And this Auk lives where?”
“In the Orilla. Do you know where that is?”
“Indeed I do, sir. However, there are … fifty-four Auks resident there. Can you supply the street?”
“No, I’m afraid I have no idea.” Suddenly weary, Silk drew out the dressing table’s somewhat soiled little stool and sat down. “I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble. But if you’re—”
“There is an Auk in the Orilla with whom my master has spoken several times,” the monitor interrupted. “No doubt he is the Auk you want. I will attempt to locate him for you.”
“No,” Silk said. “This Auk lives in what used to be a shop. So it must be on a shopping street, I suppose, with a lot of other stores and so on. Or at least on a street that used to have them.” Remembering it, he recalled the thunder of the cartwheels. “A street paved with cobblestones. Does that help?”
“Yes. That is the Auk with whom my master speaks, sir. Let us see whether he is at home.”
The monitor’s face faded, replaced by Auk’s disordered bed and jar of slops. Soon the image swelled and distorted, becoming oddly rounded. Silk saw the heavy wooden chair from which he had shriven Auk and beside which he had knelt when Auk shrived him. He found it heartening, somehow, to know that the chair was still there.
“I fear that Auk is unavailable, sir. May I leave a message with my similitude?”
“I—yes.” Silk stroked his cheek. “Ask him, please, to tell Auk that I appreciate his help very, very much, and that if nothing happens to me it will be my great pleasure to tell Maytera Mint how kind he was. Tell him, too, that he’s specified only one meritorious act thus far, while the penance he laid upon me called for two or three—for two at least. Ask him to let me know what the others should be.” Too late, it occurred to Silk that Auk had asked that his name not be mentioned to the handsome boy who had spoken though Blood’s glass. “Now then, my son. You referred to your master. Who is that?”
“Blood, sir. Your host.”
“I see. Am I, by any chance, in Blood’s private quarters now?”
“No, sir. These are my mistress’s chambers.”
“Will you tell Blood about the message I left for—for that man who lives in the Orilla?”
The monitor nodded gravely. “Certainly, sir, if he inquires.”
“I see.” A sickening sense of failure decended upon Silk. “Then please tell Auk, also, where I was when I tried to speak to him, and warn him to be careful.”
“I shall, sir. Will that be all?”
Silk’s head was in his hands. “Yes. And thank you. No.” He straightened up. “I need a place to hide, a good place, and weapons.”
“If I may say so, sir,” remarked the monitor, “you require a proper dressing more than either. With respect, sir, you are dripping on our carpet.”
Lifting his right arm, Silk saw that it was true; blood had already soaked through the strip of black cloth he had torn from his tunic a few minutes earlier. Crimson rivulets trickled toward his elbow.
“You will observe, sir, that this room has two doors, in addition to that through which you entered. The one to your left opens upon the balneum. My mistress’s medicinal supplies are there, I believe. As to—”
Silk had risen so rapidly that he had knocked over the stool. Darting through the left-hand door, he heard nothing more.
The balneum was larger than he had anticipated, with a jade tub more than big enough for the naked goddess at the head of the staircase and a separate water closet. A sizable cabinet held a startling array of apothecary bottles, an olla of violet salve that Silk recognized as a popular aseptic, a roll of gauze, and gauze pads of various sizes. A small pair of scissors cut away the blood-soaked strip; he smeared the ragged wound that the white-headed one’s beak had left in his forearm with the violet salve, and at the second try managed to bandage it effectively. As he ruefully took stock of his ruined tunic, he discovered that the bird’s talons had raked his chest and abdomen. It was almost a relief to wash and salve the long, bloody scratches, on which he could employ both his hands.
Yellowish encrustations were forming on his robe where he had wiped away his spew. He took it off and washed it as thoroughly as he could in the lavabo, wrung it out, smoothed it as well as he could, pressed it between two dry towels, and put it back on. Inspecting his appearance in a mirror, he decided that he might well pass a casual examination in a dim light.
Returning to the boudoir, he strewed what he took to be face powder over the clotted blood on the carpet.
The monitor watched him, unperturbed. “That is most interesting, sir.”
“Thank you.” Silk shut the powder box and returned it to the dressing table.
“Does the powder possess cleansing properties? I was unaware of it.”
Silk shook his head. “Not that I know of. I’m only masking these, so visitors won’t be unsettled.”
“Very shrewd, sir.”
Silk shrugged. “If I could think of something better, I’d do it. When I came in, you said that you weren’t a god. I knew you weren’t. We had a glass in the—in a palaestra I attended.”
“Would you like to speak to someone there, sir?”
“Not now. But I was privileged to use that glass once, and it struck me then—I suppose it struck all of us, and I remember some of us talking about it one evening—that the glass looked a great deal like a Sacred Window. Except for its size, of course; all Sacred Windows are eight cubits by eight. Are you familiar with them?”
“No, sir.”
Silk righted the stool and sat down. “There’s another difference, too. Sacred Windows don’t have monitors.”
“That is unfortunate, sir.”
“Indeed.” Silk stroked his cheek with two fingers. “I should tell you, then, that the immortal gods appear at times in the Sacred Windows.”
“Ah!”
“Yes, my son. I’ve never seen one, and most people—those who aren’t augurs or sibyls, particularly—can’t see the gods at all. Although they frequently hear the voice of the god, they see only a swirl of color.”
The monitor’s face flushed brick red. “Like this, sir?”
“No. Not at all like that. I was going to say that as I understand it, those people who can see the gods first see the swirling colors as well. When the theophany begins, the colors are seen. Then the god appears. And then the colors reappear briefly as the god vanishes. All this was set down in circumstantial detail by the Devoted Caddis, nearly two centuries ago. In the course of a long life, he’d witnessed the theophanies of Echidna, Tartaros, and Scylla, and finally that of Pas. He called the colors he’d seen the Holy Hues.”
“Fascinating, sir. I fear, however, that it has little to do with me. May I show you what it is I do, sir? What I do most frequently, I should say. Observe.”
The monitor’s floating face vanished, replaced by the image of a remarkably handsome man in black. Although the tunic of the man in the glass was torn and white gauze showed beneath it, Silk did not recognize this man as himself until he moved and saw the image move with him.
“Is that…?” He leaned closer. “No. But…”
“Thank you, sir,” his image said, and bowed. “Only a first attempt, although I think it a rather successful one. I shall do better next time.”