by Gene Wolfe
"Yes. I believe that should be sufficient."
"I'm going to give you twelve. Six ain't enough." Butter-yellow lantern light revealed dry ears hanging in bunches.
"This is very, very kind of you."
"See here? This black kind?" The husband had detached an ear.
"Yes. I thought at first that it only looked black because it's so dark; but it really is black, isn't it?"
"You take it and pull off six. Not no more. I need it."
The ear was small and rough, the seeds small too, but smooth and hard. He rubbed and tugged six free.
The husband retrieved the black ear. "See this?" It was a second ear, slightly bigger and much lighter in color. "This's the other kind I got. Red and white. You see that?"
He nodded.
"The red ones and the white ones are both the same. Don't matter what color you take."
"I understand."
"You can have three red and three white, if you want 'em. Make you feel better. Color don't make no difference though."
"I will, just to be on the safe side."
"Figured. You plant 'em in the same hill so they'll cross. You don't feed that or grind it either. Plant it. Corn'll be yellow or white. Not never red nor black."
He nodded, struggling to detach the first grain.
"Plant it, and next year you'll have a real good crop."
"Thank you. I pray that I can get this seed you're giving me back to Blue safely."
"Your lookout. Thing is, every year you got to grow some black and some red-and-white off by themselves. Got to keep 'em apart and don't let no other corn near 'em. Do like that, and you can grow more seed next year for the year after."
"I understand." He held his hand closer to the lantern, seeing in the mingled grains waving green fields, sleek horses both black and white, and fat red cattle.
The husband retrieved the seed ear. "We're goin' out now."
"All right." Carefully depositing the twelve grains of corn in a pocket, he helped the husband close the big door.
"Wolves come in closer, darkdays," the husband said almost conversationally. "Kill my sheep. Not many left."
He said, "I'm sorry to hear that," and meant it.
"Got two dogs watchin' them. Good dogs. Kick up a fuss if there's wolves around, but I don't hear 'em. Now this Silk."
It had come too suddenly. "Yes. Yes-Silk."
"He was their head man down in the city."
"Calde. Yes, he was."
"He was good out here. Got my slug gun off him. Years ago it was. Still got it, and three shells I'm savin'. He's not there no more. City people run him out."
"I see. Do you know where he went? Please-this is very important to me."
"Nope." The husband set the lantern on the ground between them. "He was head man a long time. Had a wife. Pretty woman's what I heard."
"Yes, she was. Beautiful."
"Whore, too. That's what they said. That why you want to find him?"
"No, I want him. I want to take him to New Viron, as I saidand Hyacinth too, if she'll come. Don't you have any idea where they are?"
The husband shook his head.
"I'm sure you'd tell me if you knew. You and your wife have been extremely kind to me. Is there anything that I can for you in return? Some sort of work I could do?"
The husband said nothing, standing in silence with legs slightly separated. His heavy, knobbed staff, grasped in his right hand at the balance, tapped the thickly callused palm of his left. The odors of coffee and frying bacon diffused from the open window of the kitchen, tantalizing them both.
"You want me to leave."
The husband nodded. "Go. Go or fight, old man. You got your stick. I got mine, and I'm tellin' you. You goin'?"
"Yes, I am." He held up the dead branch he had picked up the night before and flexed it between his hands. "I certainly won't fight you-it would be the height of ingratitude, and I've offered to leave several times already. I would greatly prefer to leave in friendship."
"Get!"
"I see. Then I must tell you something. I could defeat you with this, and beat you with it afterward if I chose. I won't-but I could."
The husband took a measured step toward him. "It'd break, and you're older than me."
"Yes, I suppose I am. But this stick wouldn't break, not the way I'd use it. And if you really believe the difference in our ages would give me an insurmountable handicap, it is base-very base-of you to threaten me."
When the better part of a minute had passed, he took a step backward. "Thank your wife for me, please; she was kind to a stranger in need. So were you. Tell her, if you will, that I left of my own accord, having no wish to deplete your meager store of food."
He turned to go.
He could not have said afterward whether he had heard the blow or merely known that it would come. He swayed to his right. Whistling down, the knobbed head scraped his arm and bruised the side of his knee. He pivoted as it struck the ground beside his left foot, pinned it with his foot, thrust his bloodstained stick into the husband's face and threw it aside. Half a second and the knobbed staff was in his hands. A quick, measured blow knocked the husband flat. Another put out the lantern.
Once he turned back to look at the lighted windows of the farmhouse he was leaving; but only once.
"Need practice!" exclaimed a man older than himself who popped unbidden into his mind. "Ruins you, fighting! Spoils your technique!"
He had white whiskers and jumped about in an alarming way, but his thrusts and cuts were as precise as a surgeon's with lancet and scalpel, and incomparably faster.
I can't practice now, Master Xiphias. I need this to feel my way along.
That had been the old man's name. He repeated it under his breath, then said more loudly, "Xiphias. Master Xiphias."
Some distance away, a bird called, "Silk? Silk?"-its hoarse cry shaped by chance or, as was more probable, his own mind, into the familiar name.
"Yes," he said aloud. "Silk. Patera Silk. And old Patera Pike, who must have been eighty. Also the sibyls, Maytera Rose, Maytera Marble, and General Mint."
The whorl had turned upside down, and suddenly-ever so suddenly-there had been Patera Quetzal, Patera Gulo, and Patera Incus; and Auk and Chenille, Hammerstone, Mucor, Willet, the lovely Hyacinth, and dozens of others. Running and shooting for Maytera Mint, who had continued to wear her sibyl's black bombazine gown, with a needler and an azoth in the big side pockets in which she had carried chalk.
Ginger's hand blown off, and Maytera Marble's cut off. "My mind's slipping," he confided aloud; it was comforting to hear a human voice, even if it was only his own. This rutted, grassless ground on which he walked was probably a road, a road going whoknew-where.
"It's like that first book Nettle tried to sew, the thread has broken and the pages have fallen out. They are gone now-all gone, except for Nettle and me. And Maytera, out there on her rock with Mucor, Marrow, and a few others. Old classmates. Sisters and brothers."
Calf, Tongue, and Tallow had wanted help from him, a great deal of help that his mother had urged him to provide, when he and Nettle had nothing to eat. It was a bitter memory, one that he counseled himself to forget.
"Got to practice!" That was Xiphias in the Blue Room.
How can I get to be a good swordsman, sir? I don't have anybody to practice with.
The sword out at once and pushed into his hand. Xiphias's old, veined hands (still astonishingly strong) positioning him before a pier glass. "See him? Fight him! Good as you are, every bit! Up point, and guard! Parry! Hilt, boy! Use the hilt! Think you've got it?"
He had said yes and thought no. Now he halted, making quartering cuts with the lighter end of the knobbed staff and parrying each the moment that he made it.
"Not so bad," he muttered. "Better than I did down on Green, though that sword was a better weapon."
"No cut," a harsh voice overhead advised. Startled, he terminated his practice; and something large, light, and swift l
it upon his shoulder. "Bird back!"
"Oreb, is that you?"
"Good Silk."
"It can't be! By Bright Pas's four eyes, I wish I could see you."
"Bird see."
"I know you do, but that's not much help to me. Not unless something's lying in wait for us like the convicts did for Auk. Is there anything of that kind?"
"No, no."
"Armed men? Or wolves?"
"No man. No wolf."
He recalled the new word that the husband had used. "What about godlings, Oreb? Can you see any of those?"
The bird fluttered, his beak clacking nervously.
"You see those. You must. Are they close by?"
"No close."
"I'd ask you what they are, if I thought there was any hope of getting a sensible answer out of you."
"No talk."
"It's unlucky to speak of them? Is that what you mean?"
A hoarse croak.
"I'll take that for a yes, and take your advice, too-for the time being at least. Are you really Oreb? The Oreb who used to belong to Patera Silk?"
"Good bird!"
"You're a good talker at any rate, just as Oreb was. Did he teach you? That's what I heard long ago about you night choughs, that when one of you learns a new word he teaches the rest."
"Man come."
"Toward us?" He sought to peer ahead into the darkness, but might as effectively have peered into a barrel of tar. Recalling the husband's slug gun and three remaining shells, he turned to look behind him; the darkness there was equally impenetrable.
He faced about again. "Now, Oreb, I want to keep going the way I was before I turned around. Am I headed right?" He tapped the ground before him with the staff as he spoke.
"Good. Good."
"There isn't a pit at my feet, by any chance? Or a tree that I'm about to knock my head against?"
"Road go."
"And so will I." He stepped forward confidently, cutting and thrusting as he walked-and seemed to hear the staff that slashed the air tapping the roadway still. Stopping, he called, "Hello!"
A distant voice answered, "Heard me, did yer?"
"Yes. Yes, I did. I heard your stick."
The methodical tapping continued, but there was no further reply.
Under his breath he asked, "Can you see him, Oreb?"
"Bird see."
"That's the way. Keep your voice down. One man alone?"
"Big man. No men."
"Does he have a slug gun, or anything of that nature?"
"No see."
Deep and rough and somewhat nearer now, the distant voice said, "Dinna have such. Yer neither, bucky."
"You're right," he said. There was a faint, metallic rattle, and he added, "What was that?"
"Yer got gude h'ears."
"Tolerably so."
Nearer still. "How's yer een, bucky?"
"My eyes?"
Oreb muttered, "Man big. Watch out."
"Ho! Won't hurt him." The roughness of the approaching voice suggested a second night chough hopping along the road, its depth a huge bird as tall as a man.
"I heard something that sounded almost like the sling swivels of slug gun."
"Did yet, bucky?" A second rattle followed the final word.
"Yes," he said. "What is it?"
"How's yer een?"
"My vision, is that what you mean? Good enough." Recalling the spectacles he had found in his pocket, he added, "A little worse than most, perhaps, for reading."
"For readin', bucky?" The rough voice was close now. "Yer can read." A deep chuckle. "H'only ther wind's blowed yer candle h'out." Wind rhymed with fiend in the stranger's mouth.
"You're not from Viron, I take it."
"Nae from naewhere." The chuckle came again, followed by the rattle.
"I believe I recognized that sound this time-a sword blade in a brass scabbard. Am I correct?"
"Smack h'on, bucky."
Something-hard leather-touched his fingers, and he was reminded again of Xiphias's pressing the sword upon him, although the hand that gripped his arm was far larger than Xiphias's had been.
"Want ter feel a' her?"
"Yes, I do. May I draw it?" His hands had found the throat of the scabbard, a throat that was covered with leather too, like the rudimentary guard and the rest of the hilt.
"Canna see me whin, can yet, bucky?"
"No. But I'll be able to-to weigh it in my hand, without the scabbard. I needn't, if you'd prefer I wouldn't."
"Yer a h'officer, bucky?"
"A military officer, you mean? No. Nothing of the sort."
"Yer talks like such. Aye, pluck."
The blade hissed from the scabbard, heavier than the knobbed staff and nearly as long. He made a few cuts, ran his fingers gingerly over the flat, then wiped it on the sleeve of his tunic.
"Got h'it h'off a dead coof," the rough voice confided. "He dinna want h'it nae mair."
"But you do, I'm sure." He sheathed it again and held it out, touching something large and solid: leather again, soft old canvas, and cool metal that seemed to be a belt buckle nearly as high as his chin.
" 'Tis me." Taking back the sword, the stranger's outsized hands brushed his. "Want ter feel a' me clock?"
"Watch out!" Oreb fidgeted apprehensively on his shoulder.
"No," he told the stranger. "Certainly not."
"Craw, ain't h'it? Thought 'twas a man. H'on me hunkers sae yer can reach. Have yer feel, bucky." His left wrist was caught between fingers as thick and hard as the staff, and guided toward a mat of coarse hair. He was conscious of a faint reek of sour sweat.
"You have a beard," he said. "So do I." The nose was wide and prominent, the cheekbones high and gaunt, framed in shaggy hair that fell to the stranger's shoulders.
"Took me rag h'off." His hand was freed, then caught again. "Here's me e'e. Stick in yer finger."
"I'd rather not," he said; two fingers were forced into the empty socket nevertheless.
"H'other's ther same. Feel a' her?"
He was forced to. "You're blind," he said. "I-I know how banal it sounds, but I'm sorry."
"Wait till me rag's back h'on," the stranger rumbled. "Want ter feel a' yern. Got ter, an' yer ken why. Yer get a notion a' me clock?"
"Yes," he said, afraid that he would be forced to touch the stranger's face again. "I should warn you, though, that Oreb doesn't like being held. He'll probably fly if you attempt it."
Oreb contradicted him. "Touch bird!"
"Dinna think he never did, not nae live 'un."
"Touch bird!"
"Seen lots, 'fore me een was took. H'oreb's his name?"
"It's what I call him, at least. A friend I had long ago-the friend for whom I'm searching-had a pet night chough he called that. I'm afraid I've given this one the same name to save the trouble of thinking of a new one." He felt Oreb leave his shoulder and added, "He's going to you, I think."
"Lit h'on me whin. A fin'er, H'oreb, an' speak h'up h'if h'it pains yer."
"No hurt."
He felt a pang of jealousy that he quickly suppressed. "I've already introduced Oreb, so I ought to introduce myself as well. My name is Horn."
"Horn. An' H'oreb."
"Yes," he said, and felt Oreb return to his shoulder.
"What would yer say me h'own name might be, bucky?"
"Your name? I just met you. I have no idea."
The tapping resumed. "We might's well walk Was talk. Never heard nae name like Horn. Nor H'oreb neither."
"It means raven," he explained as he strode after the steady tapping of the stranger's sword. "It's from the Chrasmologic Writings. Calde Silk, the friend I spoke of, was an augur."
"H'oreb. Horn. Silk. Common names, like? Maybe me h'own might be Cotton, here."
"Why no, that's a woman's name." He felt vague frustration. "Surely it would be better if we called you as your mother did."
" 'Twas Freak, mostly."
"I see-understand, I mean. No doubt you
're right; it would be better if you had a new name among us."
"Aye."
"You asked whether Oreb, Horn, and Silk were common names. Oreb is very unusual-I've never known a man with that name. Silk is fairly unusual, too, although certainly not unheard-of. Horn is common enough."
"Huh!"
"Here in Viron, men are named after animals or parts of animals. Silk is a male name, just as Milk is, because Silk comes from an animal, the silkworm. Addax, Alpaca, and Antbear are all common names. Do you like any of those?"
"H'ox fer me, maybe. Might do. H'or Bull. What h'about 'em, bucky?"
He smiled. "People would think we were related, but I've no objection to that."
"Gie me some mair."
"Well, let me see. Silk had a friend named Auk. An auk is a kind of water bird, as you probably know."
"Me h'own could be H'owl, maybe. Blind Was a h'owl by daylight, dinna they say?"
"Yes, it could, if you wish it; also there are the various kinds of owls-Hawkowl, for example. I was about to say that Auk had a friend named Gib. A gib is a tomcat, so that's a male name, too. Gib was a large and powerful man, as you are."
"Pig," the stranger rumbled.
"Good name!"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Said me name's Pig, bucky. H'oreb, he likes h'it. Dinna yer, H'oreb?"
"Like Pig!"
Pig laughed deep in his chest, clearly pleased. "Never heard a' nae blind pig, bucky?"
"I don't think so, but I suppose there must be some."
"Have ter have a new name when me een's found. H'eagle, h'it could be, h'or Hawk."
"Did you say something about finding eyes?" He was startled.
"Aye. Why Pig come, bucky, doon h'out a' ther light lands. Have een ter gie h'in this Viron, bucky? Een fer me? 'Tis ther muckle place hereabouts? Yer talk like h'it."
"Yes, Viron's the city. It owns, or at least it controls, this land, and all the farms and villages for fifty leagues and more. But as to whether there is any physician in Viron skillful enough to restore your sight, I really have no way of knowing. I doubt that there was when I was here last, but that was about twenty years ago."
Pig seemed not to have heard. "Dinna drink nae mair."
"I seldom do myself. A little wine, occasionally. But I wanted to say that this is an extraordinary coincidence. You're looking for eyes, as you put it. Because I'm looking for eyes also. For one at-"