by Mary Gentle
"A Sign’s passed, but I won’t give up. Tell me one thing," she persisted doggedly, "before you return to the university."
The old woman in the neat cotton dress turned smoky- blue eyes on the Archdeacon.
"I have honest work teaching at the University of Crime," Heurodis said, her thin voice firm. "Why should I jeopardize it by becoming concerned in the dubious activities of the Church of the Trees?"
The Archdeacon stepped into the shadow of a eucalyptus tree, hearing its leaves rustle above her head. A rush of water from a shop-front wet her bare foot, and made Heurodis step aside with an irritated mutter. She made to take the old lady by the elbow and guide her.
"Ah! I didn’t mean—" She shook her wrist, rubbed her elbow and stepped back from the Reverend Mistress. The white-haired woman smiled.
"What is it you have to ask me, girlie?"
The Archdeacon brushed the shoulder of her green cotton dress, and touched the scrolling bark of the eucalyptus for comfort. She cinched her belt in another notch. The dappled shadow and light of leaves fell across her black skin. She pointed down the avenue, to one of the bars that, open all night in the heart of the world, now began to close its doors.
"Is that Reverend Master Candia?" she asked.
Heurodis brushed tendrils of silver hair away from her face, and shaded her eyes with a brown-spotted hand. The Archdeacon followed her gaze into the open frontage of the cafe. Broken mirrors lined the walls. Among tables and shattered bottles and the fumes of hemp, a heavily built caf�-owner stood arguing with a man slumped into a chair.
"Yes." Heurodis rubbed her bare corded arms, as if with a sudden chill.
The Archdeacon slipped her sandal back on her bare foot and strode towards the caf�. The Reverend Mistress hurried after her.
"We’ll take over here."
The burly man turned a scarred face on the Archdeacon and the Reverend Mistress. He nodded his head to Heurodis.
"If this bastard’s a friend of yours, he’s got a score to settle . . ."
Heurodis looked around, and slapped her hand down on Candia’s table. The burly man’s voice died as she lifted her palm. Sue or seven silver coins gleamed on the scarred wood. Snake-swift, he brushed the money over the table-edge into his hand, fisted it, and glared at the old woman.
"You’re mad! Using coin! The Rat-Lords will hang all four of us."
"Then you’d better not tell them."
The bar-owner met Heurodis’s occluded gaze for a second, turned, and stomped to the back of the caf� to oversee the haphazard cleaning.
"Candia!"
The blond man sat slumped down so that his head was below the back of the chair, his booted legs sprawled widely. His uncut beard straggled to his collar. The buff- colored doublet, open to show filthy linen, had more slashes than sufficed to show the crimson lining. He twitched at Heurodis’s sharp tone.
"Reverend Master!"
The Archdeacon leaned forward. His warm foul breath hit her in the face. She reached out, wound a dark hand in his hair and jerked his head upright. Blond hair flopped across a face all pallor but for sepia-bruised eyes.
The man muttered something inaudible.
Heurodis folded her hands neatly in front of her. "It takes more than days to get into this state."
The Archdeacon straightened, looking around. Morning light showed unkind on upturned tables and the deserted bar. Dark wood scarred with knife-cuts and slogans reflected in shards of mirrors. She reached out and took a pail from one of the cleaners as he passed, and up-ended dirty water over the slumped man.
"Where’s Theodoret? Where’s my Bishop?"
The blond man reared up from the chair. Swearing, he threw out dripping arms for balance, opened his eyes and turned an uncomprehending gaze on the cafe and Heurodis and the Archdeacon. He stooped. One filthy hand went out to the nearest wall for support. An expression of amazement and embarrassment crossed his pale features.
Candia bent forward and vomited on the floor.
Broken mirrors at the back of the bar reflected the owner in conversation with two men. Both newcomers wore gold-and-white sashes; both wore clumsily adjusted rapiers and sword-belts.
Over the noise of retching, Heurodis said: "Those are Salomon-men . . . We should move him from here, before they begin to question us."
Gritting her teeth against the stink of vomit, alcohol and urine, the Archdeacon pulled one of the blond man’s arms across her shoulder and guided (not being tall enough to support) him out into the avenue. A few yards on he fell against her, and she let him slide down to sit with his back against one of the eucalyptus trees.
Candia frowned, lifting a drooping head. He opened his mouth to speak and vomited into his lap, covering his doublet and breeches.
"It would be better, for his sake, not to take him back to the university." Heurodis blinked in the sunlight.
The Archdeacon stepped back to join her. The blond man lay against the tree-trunk, head back, legs widely apart; moaning.
"Where did you go with the Bishop?"
She squatted down a yard from Candia.
"The novices saw you leave together. Where did you take him?"
A ragged band of crimson cloth had been tied about one of his wrists; days ago, judging by the dirt. A halfhealed scar showed under the edge of it.
"He’s been missing for nearly thirty days," the Archdeacon persisted. "Where did you leave him?"
A light tap on her shoulder got her attention. She stood and faced Heurodis. Carts clattered past on the rough avenue. A few early passers-by turned to look at Candia.
"It’s been nearly thirty days since the Reverend Master attended at the university," Heurodis confirmed. "I have not the least idea what he would be doing in the cathedral with low-life, but it seems a strong possibility that he was."
The small old woman showed no disgust when she looked at the blond man sprawled on the pavement.
"He will need treatment, I’m afraid, before he can walk; and we can hardly carry him." Heurodis’s smoky gaze found its way to the Archdeacon’s face. "I have a basic grounding in medicine. And I, too, can remember drinking to drive away pain."
"I can help him temporarily."
Heurodis sniffed. Without a crack in her facade of disapproval, she nodded. "Very well, then, but be quick. To be seen with one of you is bad enough, but to be present in public while you actually . . . Get on with it, girlie."
The Archdeacon knelt down in front of Candia, one hand on his shoulder, one on the trunk of the eucalyptus.
Dawn mist cleared now, over roofs and alleys, and carts passed every few minutes, jolting over the broken paving-stones. All the drivers were human; no Rats visible. Heat began to soak up from the pavement, ripen the smells of the gutter.
Leaves rustled, rattled together.
A faint green color rippled across the Archdeacon’s black fingers. She brushed Candia’s dirt-ringed neck. He stirred, straightening; his eyes opened and blinked against the sunlight. A smell of green leaves and leaf-mold momentarily overpowered city odors.
Water brimmed in his eyes. A tear runneled the dirt on his face. She saw him focus into himself; the loose- limbed sprawl tensing. She let a little more of the power of green growing things clear his sodden head and veins.
"Can you understand me?"
His thin dirty hand came up and touched hers. As if the faint green color of spring leaves pained him, another rush of water brimmed over his eyes.
"He . . . did that, and it didn’t save him . . ."
The Archdeacon glanced up at Heurodis. Healing momentarily forgotten, she tightened her grip on Candia’s shoulder and shook him.
"Who did? I talked to builders, some of the builders on the Fane–they say they saw my Bishop there. Was that you? Were you with him? What happened to him?"
He groaned. Sweat broke out on his forehead, plastering blond hair down. His other hand came up and gripped her wrist.
"Ask–why did they let me go . . . and
not Theo . . ."
"He’s at the Fane? Is he alive and well?"
"Yes . . . no . . ."
His breath stank. The effort it took him to speak made the Archdeacon shake her head in self-disgust.
She reverently touched the eucalyptus-trunk, centering patterns of veins in leaf and flesh, letting energy rise. After a moment she let the color fade from her hands, and pulled Candia’s arm across her shoulder again, and lifted. He came up on to his feet with difficulty, weight heavy on her.
Heurodis’s chin rose, looking up at him, flesh losing creases momentarily. "Take him to my house."
Trying not to breathe in his stink, the Archdeacon put her arm around Candia’s body to support him. Under his shirt her fingers felt each rib prominent. His pelvic bone jabbed into her side. Heurodis, irritable at the increasing number of people on the avenue, moved to hook the Reverend Master’s other arm in hers and push him into uncertain steps. He swayed as they walked, slow yard by yard.
"If I do anything, it’s what the Thirty-Six want me to do . . . what they let me go loose for . . ." His voice slurred. "People talk when they think you’re drunk . . . I’m not drunk. I’ve heard things. Not as drunk as I’d have to be . . ."
His arms flopped loosely over the two women’s supporting shoulders. His head dipped. His eyes shifted to the sky, watching under wary brows, afraid. The Archdeacon shifted her grip. His head turned, and he focused on the hawthorn pinned to her full bodice.
"Fuck your church! Fuck your arrogant beggarly church—"
He lurched free of the Archdeacon, ignoring Heurodis. His hair flew as he turned his face to the sky, to the Fane that blackened the south-aust horizon.
"Put my head on a spike like his, why don’t you! Ask me why we betrayed the House of Salomon!"
A pulse of shock chilled her.
"Drunken hallucination," Heurodis whispered.
"If one of the Salomon-men hears him . . ." The Archdeacon wiped vomit-stained hands down her dress. Bright, rising over roof-tops, morning sun dawned on the Day of the Feast of Misrule, warming the sandstone streets.
"Ask me. I know." Candia sank to his knees on the paving. Tears slid down his filthy skin. He rubbed helplessly at his ripped doublet and breeches, and wiped his nose on the back of his bandaged wrist.
The Archdeacon steeled herself to walk forward and grip his arm. Head down, he muttered at the broken paving. She only just understood what he said.
"Heurodis, Heurodis, I don’t have the courage–no, I don’t have the talent to do what we should do now."
Dawn sunlight slid across the dial of Clock-mill as the loaded mules passed by its waterwheel. The balding man in the darned jerkin mopped his brow in the early heat and tugged the lead mule’s rein.
Above, the blue-and-gold dial showed three hundred and sixty Degrees marked with the signs of the Thirty- Six Decans. The clock-hands stood at five-and-twenty to six.
Mayor Tannakin Spatchet turned the corner out of Carver Street in an odor of mule dung. Two apprentices in silk and satin stopped and jeered. He stiffened his spine. A third girl, the gold-cross sash tied about her waist, shouted, and they ran off down the cobbles, bawling insults, late for their site. He drove the four mules around another corner as far as a narrow door, where he knocked.
One of the mules clattered its hoof against the cobbles, loud in the quiet street. The Mayor gazed up past the black wooden frieze of skulls and gold-chests and ivy to a window that stood an inch open.
"Lady! White Crow!"
He hammered his plump fist against the street-door. Distantly, above, he heard footsteps.
"Unh?"
A thin girl of fifteen or so opened the narrow door. Her yellow hair straggled up into a bun, and her blue satin overalls appeared to have a coating of orange fur and damp spots down the front.
"Unh?" she repeated.
Tannakin Spatchet, displeased at seeing the widow’s daughter, drew in a breath that expanded his chest, showing off the verdigris-green Mayor’s chain. "Sharlevian, I wish to see the White Crow. Immediately. Fetch her."
"Ain’t here."
"When will she—?"
"Ain’t living here," the girl snapped.
A voice from the darkness up the stairwell called: "Sharlevian, who is it?"
"Aw, Mother . . . it isn’t anybody. Only the Mayor."
"Come back up here and finish feeding these blasted animals!"
Tannakin Spatchet heard Evelian’s irritated voice grow louder coming down the stairs, and glimpsed her blue-and-yellow satin dress. The buxom woman thrust a halfgrown fox-cub and a feeding-bottle into Sharlevian’s hands, ignoring both their whines, and nodded briskly to him.
"Tannakin."
He raised a finger, pointing at the upstairs window. "Is she coming back?"
The buxom woman stepped down into the street, closing the door behind her. Her gaze took in the four mules and the roped tarpaulin loads that stood almost as high again as the animals’ backs. One fair brow quirked up.
"I don’t know that she isn’t. What’s all this lot? You’ve come for more talismans?"
"It’s taken us thirty days to collect this to pay for the last ones, and now you say she’s gone . . . Is there another philosopher in the quarter who can make protective talismans?"
"You’re joking! Magus’ Row is bare as a Tree priest’s larder, and no wonder, after the last Sign."
Evelian prodded the packing, and spoke without turning:
"Sharlevian’s talking of nothing but this House of Salomon. All the apprentices are the same, and she–it’s all these fool boys she hangs around with. A bitch on heat, if I say it who’s her mother. I wish I didn’t think that I’d be better off with friends among the Salomon-men, but I do."
Tannakin let her vent the heat-bitterness of high summer.
"I’ve lost three lodgers in the last thirty days. I’m told the little Katayan’s alive, but I’ve seen nothing of her. As for the White Crow . . . this is all hers?"
Tannakin Spatchet sighed. With his own bitter resentment, he said: "It’s little enough. Brass pans, some shelving, an old clock, some lenses, four cheeses–"
"I can smell the cheeses."
"–a dozen tallow candles, and a ream of paper. The other loads are much the same. Mistress Evelian, in no way do I support the Salomon movement, in no way at all, but there are times when I would give my Mayor’s chain not to have to barter, to be able to carry money and do with it what the Rat-Lords do."
He saw her smile, but did not entirely understand why.
"We’ll have to lug it all up these stairs and store it in her room. Sharlevian! If the White Crow doesn’t come back," the yellow-haired woman said, "it can stand as my back rent."
"Always the businesswoman—"
Tannakin Spatchet broke off, staring down the sunlit street into morning haze. Dark specks buzzed about the aust-west horizon: acolytes swarming about the angled Fane.
Evelian shaded her eyes. "How often do you see that? Master Mayor, we’re all going to need more than talismans to get through the next Calendar Sign."
"Hear me!" The Hyena’s voice crackled through the loudspeakers. The din of the crowd momentarily drowned out her words.
Zar-bettu-zekigal sat down on the step and unbuttoned her new greatcoat, cautiously letting the sun’s early radiance warm her. She rested her chin on her fists.
The greatcoat, as matt black as her hacked-short hair, spread out on the marble step and the thrown-down yellow carpet. She curled her tail tightly to her body. The wash-faded black cloth of her dress began to grow hot in the morning sun, and she smiled and shrugged a stretch without moving from her sitting position. She kept one bare foot firmly on the stock of her musket that lay on the step below.
"We will build the Temple again, our temple, the House of Salomon: with just rule and line, for the Imperial dynasty to rule justly over our own people! We will build for ourselves, and never again for the Thirty-Six!"
Zar-bettu-zekigal yawned
into her fists. Memory tracking automatically, she shifted an inch closer to the Hyena’s plate-clad legs to watch every word. She gazed up, murmuring under her breath: "Oh, you’re beautiful! But see you, you’re a child; just a baby!"
The Hyena stood on woven carpets, under gold silk canopies held by ragged silk-clad soldiers.
"We have been the servants of servants, the slaves of slaves, forbidden the least right, hidden in darkness, condemned to toil only for others! Now our buried birthright is uncovered, is come into the light; our day dawns, this day!"
She walked forward to the edge of the steps. Against the milk-blue sky, the armored shoulders of the woman glittered silver; her scrubbed young face shone in the morning light. Zari watched the movement of her mobile mouth, the passion of her face; chopped-short brown hair flying, slanting red-brown eyes narrowed against the light.
"For them, now, nothing! We cut no more stone. We lay no more bricks. We dig no foundations. We draw no plans! Oh, they can force us to work–who denies it? But, if we’re strong, who can force us to sleep or to eat?"
Behind the Hyena, gold-cross banners of the Sun shone: ranks of ragged soldiers crowding onto the steps of the Thirty-Second District square. The stink of gunpowder still hung in the air from a few enthusiastic musket-shots. Sword and sword-harness chinked.
"And when we die and are carried again on the Boat through the Night–who will they have then to build their power? Oh, who? None. For when we come again we will act as we do now: we will not spend all our lives digging our graves and building our tombs!"
‘We cut no more stone. We lay no more bricks. We dig no foundations.’ Frontispiece to Sphinx Mystagoga, Athanasius Kircher, Amsterdam, 1676
The crowd’s roar bounced back from the marble walls of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls, empty of their Rat-Lords now; together with the echoes of the Hyena’s loudspeaker. Zari swiveled back on the step and faced forward, looking out across the heads of ten or fifteen thousand civilian men and women. In silk, in satin; their callused hands still carrying rule, trowel, wrench, or hod.