Return to the Whorl tbotss-3

by Gene Wolfe

  "Yes," Hound said eagerly. "That's how I got it."

  "Then I ought to add that when the boar is absent Phaea is customarily shown holding a young pig, that when the piglet is omitted as well you may know her by her thick waist, and that she is the generous patroness of cooks and physicians. Is that sufficient?"

  Hound nodded. "I couldn't get this next one at all. Who is she?"

  "Let me ter feel a' her." Pig's thick fingers brushed the top and sides of the image and explored the area about its feet. "Wearin' a helmet, hain't she bucky?"

  "Yes, she is. A helmet with a low crest." He bent closer examining the statue. "I was about to say that the customary lion was absent, which was why you were unable to identify her, Hound-but that isn't actually the case. She wears a medallion with a lion's head, though it is too small to be distinguished at any distance. Pig, who has been a trooper, knew her by her helmet, of course; but I believe he feared-needlessly-that I might take offense if he named her before I did. She is Sphigx, the youngest of the Nine."

  Hound stepped nearer to look at the medallion. "I'm glad she's still here. A lot of her statures were smashed when we were fighting Trivigaunte."

  "This may be a replacement-it looks a little newer than the others. If so, that's very likely the reason her lion was reduced to a bit of jewelry. The augur here may have hoped that vandals would take her for a minor goddess."

  "Good god?" Oreb inquired.

  His master shrugged. "I wouldn't say so, but she's no worse than the Seven as a whole. She's reputed to be brave, at least, and in the course of my life I've found that people who possess one virtue usually have several. One can imagine an individual who's admirably brave, yet grasping, unscrupulous, drunken, envious, cruel, lewd, violent and all the rest of that sad catalogue; but one never actually meets with such a monster-or at least, I haven't."

  Pig said, "Thank yer kindly, bucky."

  He was taken aback. "You can't mean that seriously. I haven't known you long, but no one who's been in your company for an hour could suppose you were a mass of vices. You're generous, kind, and good-natured, Pig; and I could easily rattle off a dozen more virtues-patience and tenacity, for example."

  "Guid a' yer."

  Hound cleared his throat and seemed almost to choke. "I want to say that Horn speaks for me, too. I couldn't have said it as well as he did, but I feel the same way." There was an embarrassed silence.

  "Shall we go on to the next? I'm anxious to get to it, I admit."

  "The woman holding the snakes? I wanted to ask something else about Sphigx, but I've forgotten what it was."

  "She's actually a rather interesting figure. When I was a boy, I considered her the least attractive of the Nine, and there's some truth in that; but she's by no means the least complex. One can think of her as the mirror image of her sister Phaea. If that is the case, then Phaea is Sphigx's mirror image as well, which makes her the goddess of peace. The title suits her even though she doesn't get it, at least in Viron."

  Pig touched Sphigx's image again, finding the medallion. "They fight, bucky? Sounds like they Nought ter."

  "No." Leaning on his staff, he studied the image. "Despite the swords she holds, Sphigx is not merely the goddess of war, as I should have made clear. She also governs obedience, courage, watchfulness, and hardihood-all of the virtues that a trooper must have, even cleanliness and order. I mentioned that Phaea was the physicians' goddess, the goddess of healing. I used to know a Doctor Crane from Trivigaunte-this was before they went to war with us. He was a tough, brave little man; and he would tell us in no uncertain terms how much a good diet and clean hands have to do with health and healing. We have need of both Phaea and her sister, you see. One way to put that is that they need each other."

  Straightening up, he turned back to Hound, smiling. "Have you remembered what you wanted to ask?"

  Hound shook his head.

  "Then I have a question for you. When you said that many of Stabbing Sphigx's images had been smashed, I assumed you meant by angry Vironese who saw them as symbols of Trivigaunte. A moment ago, it occurred to me that the vandals might have been Trivigauntis themselves. Statues like this are prohibited in the City of Trivigaunte and its territories, supposedly by her order, as are pictures of her; and I suppose that a deeply religious Trivigaunti might be tempted to destroy them wherever she found them. Was that what happened?"

  "Mostly in the city, I think. In the Grand Manteion."

  Pig chuckled. "Both sides breakin' 'em?"

  Hound nodded with a rueful smile. "I'd heard that about the Trivigauntis, I suppose because they did it there. And I hoped Horn could tell us why they wanted to. That was what I was meaning to ask, what I forgot for a minute. Can you, Horn?"

  He stared off into the dimness of the shuttered manteion, where a single bar of sunlight had stabbed the dusty air.

  "Silk talk!"

  "Oreb means me, I'm afraid." He turned back to them. "Who am I to resist a bird's demands? They wanted to because they thought it was what their goddess wanted, of course; but you understand that, surely. The real questions are whether she did, and if so why she did." He fell silent again, his clear blue eyes lost in thought.

  "If she did not, then her supposed demand is presumably a lie put forth by the Chapter of Trivigaunte-whatever it's called-or the Rani's government. If that is the case, they probably say what they do to separate their people more firmly from those of other cities. Have I mentioned that there is a Trivigaunti town south of New Viron? There is."

  Hound said, "I didn't know that."

  "There's been a certain degree of mixing, which some on both sides have sought to prevent-Trivigaunti women marrying Vironese, and Vironese women marrying Trivigaunti men."

  "Feel sorry fer ther four," Pig said.

  "So do I, in a way; yet I doubt that they're much more-or much less-discontented than other couples.

  "At any rate, their custom of refusing to picture the gods clearly isolates the people of Trivigaunte. This manteion would appear blasphemous to them; more importantly, so would the home of any pious person in Viron. My friend Auk, who was what is called a common criminal though he was an uncommon man, had a picture of Scylla tacked to his wall. But I am drifting away from the subject.

  "If Sphigx herself issued the prohibition, I think it most likely she acted from pride or shame. She may have felt that no representation we could make could do her justice. I have seen Kypris-"

  Pig's hand closed upon his elbow, its thick, pointed nails almost painful.

  "Long ago, and I would defy any artist to picture a woman equally lovely. Silk's wife, Hyacinth, was dazzlingly beautiful as a young woman-but even she was not as beautiful as that."

  Pig's grip relaxed.

  "Or Sphigx may be ashamed of her followers, or of accepting worship at all. None of the other gods seems to feel like that, yet it would be much to their credit if they did."

  Hound stared at him. "But… "

  "But they are the gods. Is that what you would like to say? That's true. They are our gods-here, at least-and if they demand our worship, we must give it to them or perish. Do you see that niche over there?"

  "Yes," Hound said. "It's empty."

  Oreb croaked harshly, and his master went to it. "There is a sense in which you're wrong. In that sense, it is the Outsider's. Pig, do you want to put your hand in it? It will do you no harm."

  "Nae. "

  "Good. Hound, do you understand why this empty niche is the Outsider's? Why it is his now, although it may originally have been intended for one of the Nine? Possibly even for Pas?"

  "Because no one knows what he looks like? I think you said something about that once."

  "That's one reason, at least, though there are others. I don't mean that he is as the women of Trivigaunte believe Sphigx to be. There is no harm in our trying to make pictures of him, in showing him as a wise and noble man, for example, or as the night sky we see on Blue, a great darkness spangled with points of light. The
re's no harm, that is to say, unless we come to believe that he actually looks like the thing we've pictured. Then this representation is best."

  Hound drew a deep breath. "But this is the way they show Sphigx!"

  Later, when they had left Hound at Gold Street and were making their way to the Sun Street Quarter, Pig asked, "Nae folk h'in these hooses, bucky?"

  Oreb answered for him. "No man! No girl!"

  His master sighed. "After we had gone through the house in which Hound and Tansy used to live, I asked Hound when we would reach the inhabited parts of the city. I spoke softly, I suppose, and perhaps you were too preoccupied to hear us; but he said that we were already there, that the street down which we walked was one of those that had not yet been abandoned. I began counting houses then, and it seemed to me that there were five empty ones for each in which someone appeared to be living."

  Pig did not reply.

  "Of course someone may have been living in some of those that looked empty to me. That's entirely possible, and I hope it is true."

  "Yer said ther h'empty place was ther H'outsider's."

  "A cheering thought-thank you. To answer your question, a few of these houses are clearly occupied, though not many."

  Pig cocked his head. "Cartwheels, bucky!"

  "I can't hear them. Your ears are more acute than mine, as I have observed before. I'm glad you do, however, and I don't doubt in the least that you do. May I tell a story, Pig? You reminded me of it, and even if you have no particular pleasure in hearing it, it will give me pleasure to recount it."

  "Does he mind? He does nae!"

  "Thank you again. I should say at the outset that I'm not sure the manteions are the same, though I suspect they are. Hound said he couldn't recall the name of the augur who'd been in charge when he and Tansy attended sacrifice occasionally. This would have been his predecessor, I expect, if it really was the same manteion. His name was Patera Ray."

  "Good man?"

  "Ah, that's the point of my story, Oreb. A boy-I've forgotten his name, but it doesn't matter-and his mother were returning to the city after living for a year or so in the country. You'll recall, Pig, that Hound and Tansy moved from Endroad to the city after they were married, because there was no work for Hound in Endroad. Later, they returned.

  "In much the same way, this boy and his mother had moved to the country, living in a remote farmhouse where the boy, who was still quite small, was happy in the possession of a wood and a stream too wide to jump; but lonely all the same. Now they had decided to return to the city. It was a long journey as the boy measured journeys then, though he had ridden most of the way in a sort of cart pushed by his mother that carried their belongings.

  "She was very tired, and they stopped on the outskirts to spend the night with a friend before going into the city to the neat little house that another kind friend-a male friend who I suppose must have slept there from time to time, since he kept a razor there-had arranged for them to occupy some years earlier. After dinner, the poor woman went to bed and to sleep almost at once, but the boy did not."

  "Good boy?"

  "Not particularly, Oreb, though he thought he was, because his mother loved him. He was not old enough to understand that she would always love him, whether he behaved well or badly."

  They were passing empty cellar-holes, rectangular pits edged with charred wood and filled with black water. "This quarter burned twenty years ago," he told Pig. "I'm sorry that more of it has not been rebuilt. I've been in the City of the Inhumi on Green, and it's not much more desolate than this. Here's String Street, I believe. I'm sorry to see that the fire got this far."

  "Wi' yer, bucky."

  "I want to finish my little tale. I'll interrupt it if I see anything worth commenting on."

  He paused, collecting his thoughts. "The boy decided to take a short walk. He was hoping to find another child; but he was very conscious of the danger of becoming lost, so he walked only along the road upon which the house in which he and his mother were staying stood, reasoning that he could always retrace his steps and return to her. You will have guessed what happened already. Distracted by something or other, he became confused about the direction in which he had been walking. Thinking that he was returning to his mother and the house in which they were staying, he walked a long way until he saw an old man in black weeping upon the steps of a manteion. Until that time, the boy had been afraid to ask for help; but the old man looked so good and kind that the boy approached him and, after a minute or two of silent squirming, and taking deep breaths and letting them out, and deciding on one beginning after another and abandoning each before it was begun, he said, `Why are you crying?'

  "The old man looked up, and seeing him pointed to the carts, wagons, and litters that passed them every few seconds. `If the wrongs I have done the gods were visible,' he said, `there would be more than those, and four men would not be enough to weep for them all.' "

  They walked on in silence after that. Occasionally they passed hovels built of salvaged timbers, so that they appeared (until they were examined closely) to have been painted black. A game among children was in progress in the next street over; the shrill cries of the participants reached them like the twittering of sparrows in a distant tree.

  At last Pig asked, "That ther h'end, bucky?"

  He swallowed and forced himself to speak. "It is."

  "Somethin' fashin' yer?"

  "Boy home?" Oreb demanded. "Find home?"

  "Yes, he did." He wiped his eyes. "But he was not the same boy." Under his breath he added, "And that is not the same home."

  Soft though the words had been, Pig had overheard them. "See yer house, dinna yer?"

  Unable to speak, he nodded; Oreb translated: "Say yes."

  "This is Silver Street. We-we were walking along Silver Street, and I didn't know it. I couldn't be sure. Pig?"

  "Aye?"

  "Pig, I spoke of offenses against the gods. I don't really care whether Sphigx and Scylla and the rest like what I do."

  "Said yer would nae break ther statues."

  `Because they didn't belong to me. And because they wereare-art, and to wantonly destroy art is always evil. But, Pig…" He halted.

  "Auld Pig's yer pal, bucky."

  "I know. That is what makes this so very hard. You were blind when you left your home in the Mountains That Look at Mountains. So you told me."

  "When he left na braithrean. Aye."

  "You came all this way on foot, though you are blind."

  "Aye, bucky. Ho, he had some tumbles."

  "Then, Pig, I am going to ask a favor, one I have no right to ask. It is something I will always reproach myself-"

  "No talk!"

  "For. But I'm going to ask it just the same. I brought you here. I know that. You wouldn't be in this ruined quarter if it were not for me. You might not be in Viron at all."

  "H'out wi' h'it, bucky."

  "I thought I was going to-to show you where I used to live. The manse, and the house where I grew up. My father's shop. Where those things once stood. I would tell you something about them, what they-those places meant to me."

  He wanted to shut his eyes, but made himself watch Pig's face. "Instead, I'm asking this. Hound is getting a room in an inn, and would welcome either of us-both of us, I ought to say, together or separately. The inn is Ermine's, and it's on a hill, the Palatine, in the center of the city. Would you be willing to make your way there alone? Please?"

  Pig smiled. "That h'all, bucky?"

  "I'll join you there, I swear, before shadelow. But I want to-I must be alone here. I simply have to."

  Pig's long arms groped for him, one big hand still grasping the sheathed sword. " 'Tis h'all right, bucky. Needed me h'on ther roads. Noo yer need me ter be gone. Dinna fash yerself. Ter much hurtin' h'in they whorl h'already, an' sae guid-bye." Pig turned away.

  "I'll rejoin you, I promise," he repeated. "Tell Hound I'm coming, please, but tell him that he is not to wait supper for me.


  "Go with Pig, Oreb. Help him."

  Oreb croaked unhappily, but flew.

  His master stood in the street, leaning on the knobbed staff, and watched them go, unable to take a single step until they were out of sight, the big man moving so slowly while towering over the few badly dressed men and women he passed, the black bird seeming unwontedly small and vulnerable upon the big man's shoulder, its dabs of scarlet the only spots of color in the ruined landscape of blacks and grays.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, the tap-tap-tapping of the brass-tipped scabbard faded. The big man stopped a passerby and spoke, too distant already to be overheard. The passerby answered, pointing up Silver Street toward the market, pointing, it seemed likely, to inform the blind man who had stopped him, possibly for the bird. Their slow progress resumed until at last they were gone, faded into the black, the gray.

  He himself turned then and strode rapidly away, the bare wooden tip of his staff striking at the rutted surface of the street with every step, rapping stones and splattering mud over his shoes and the cuffs of his ragged brown trousers.

  Here the children had played, taking Maytera's clotheslines for jump ropes. They had jumped to Blue some time ago, the sad, halfstarved little girls with the black bangs, with the long black pigtails braided with scraps of bright yarn. To Blue, and some to Green; and those would be, largely, dead.

  This fire-blackened shiprock wall, these empty, staring windows, had been the cenoby's once. While the whorl slept Maytera had knelt, not to pray but to scrub this stone step so black with ash indistinguishable from mud. Maytera Mint had dressed and undressed in there, in a darkened room behind a locked door and drawn blinds, had mended worn underclothes and covered her virginal bed with an old oilcloth tablecloth, knowing that the merest shower would lend new waters to the sagging belly of her ceiling.

  That ceiling would sag no more; the leaking roof on which Maytera had climbed to watch the Trivigaunti airship was all leak now, and the broad, dark door of sturdy oak that Maytera Rose had barred each night before the last thread of sun vanished had been burned long ago-whether for firewood or in the fire that had swept the quarter when the war with Trivigaunte began scarcely mattered. Anyone might go into the cenoby now, and no one wanted to.