by Gene Wolfe
a door. Its tessera is known to me, though I may not reveal it."
"Thetis sounds like a god's name. Is it? I don't really know very
much about any of the gods except the Nine. And the Outsider.
Patera Silk told me a little about him."
"It is _indeed_." Incus glowed with satisfaction. "In the _Writings_, my
daughter, the mechanism by which we augurs are chosen is
described in _beautiful_ though _picturesque_ terms. It is there said..."
He paused. "I regret that I cannot _quote_ the passage. I must
paraphrase it, I'm afraid. But it is written there that _each_ new year
Pas brings is like a _fleet_. You are familiar with boats, my daughter.
You were upon that _wretched_ little fishing boat with _me_, after all."
"Sure."
"Each year, as I have indicated, is likened to a fleet of boats that
are its days, _gallant_ craft loaded with the _young men_ of that year.
Each of these day-boats is _obliged_ to pass _Scylla_ on its voyage to
_infinity_. Some sail very near to her, while others remain at a greater
_distance_, their youthful crews crowding the side _most distant_ from
her loving embrace. None of which _signifies_. From each of these
boats, she selects the young men who most _please_ her."
"I don't see--"
"_But_," Incus continued impressively, "how is it that these _boats_
pass her at all? Why do they not remain safe in harbor? Or sail
_someplace else?_ It is because there is a minor goddess whose
function it is to direct them to her. _Thetis_ is that goddess, and thus a
most suitable _tessera_ for us. A _key_, as you said. A _ticket_ or _inscribed
tile_ that will admit _us_ to the Juzgado, and incidentally _release_ us from
the cold and dark of these _horrid_ tunnels."
"You think we might be close to the Juzgado now, Patera?"
Incus shook his head. "I do not know, my daughter. We traveled
_some distance_ on that _unfortunate_ talus, and he went
_very_ fast. I dare _hope_ we are beneath the city now."
"I doubt if we're much past Limna," Chenille told him.
Auk's head ached. Sometimes it seemed to him that a wedge had
been pounded into it, sometimes it felt more like a spike; in either
case, it hurt so much at times that he could think of nothing else,
forcing himself to take one step forward like an automaton, one
more weary step in a progression of weary steps that would never be
over. When the ache subsided, as it did now and then, he became
aware that he was as sick as he had ever been in his life and might
vomit at any moment.
Hammerstone stalked beside him, his big, rubber-shod feet
making less noise than Auk's boots as they padded over the damp
shiprock of the tunnel floor. Hammerstone had his needler, and
when the pain in his head subsided, Auk schemed to recover it,
illusory schemes that were more like nightmares. He would push
Hammerstone from a cliff into the lake, snatching his needler as
Hammerstone fell, trip him as they scaled a roof, break into
Hammerstone's house, find him asleep, and take his needler from
Hammerstone's strong room... Hammerstone falling headlong,
somersaulting, rolling down the roof as he, Auk, fired needle after
needle at him, viscous black fluid spurting from every wound to
paint the snowy sheets and turn the water of the lake to black blood
in which they drowned.
No, Incus had his needler, had it under his black robe; but
Hammerstone had a slug gun, and even soldiers could be killed with
slugs, which could and often did penetrate the mud-brick walls of
houses, the thick bodies of horses and oxen as well as men, slugs
that left horrible wounds.
Oreb fluttered on his shoulders, climbing with talon and crimson
beak from one to the other. Peering though his ears Oreb glimpsed
his thoughts; but Oreb could not know, no more than he himself
knew, what those thoughts portended. Oreb was only a bird, and
Incus could not take him from him, no more than his hanger, no
more than his knife.
Dace had a knife as well. Under his tunic Dace had the old
thick-bladed spear-pointed knife he had used to gut and fillet the
fish they had caught from his boat, the knife that had worked so
quickly, so surely, though it looked so unsuited to its task. Dace was
not an old man at all, but a flunky and a toady to that old knife, a
thing that carried it as Dace's old boat had carried them all when
there was nothing inside it to make it go, carrying them as they
might have been carried by a child's toy, toys that can shoot or fly
because they are the right shape though hollow and empty as Dace's
boat, as crank as the boat or solid as a potato; but Bustard would see
to Dace.
His brother Bustard had taken his sling because he had slung
stones at cats with it, and had refused to give it back. Nothing about
Bustard had ever been fair, not his being born first though his name
began with _B_ and Auk's with _A_, not his dying first either. Bustard
had cheated to the end and past the end, cheating Auk as he always
did and cheating himself of himself. That was the way life was, the
way death was. A man lived as long as you hated him and died on
you as soon as you began to like him. No one but Bustard had been
able to hurt him when Bustard was around; it was a privilege that
Bustard reserved for himself, and Bustard was back and carrying
him, carrying him in his arms again, though he had forgotten that
Bastard had ever carried him. Bustard was only three years older,
four in winter. Had Bustard himself been the mother that he,
Bustard, professed to remember, that he, Auk, could not? Never
could, never quite, Bustard with this big black bird bobbing on his
head like a bird upon a woman's hat, its eyes jet beads, twitching
and bobbing with every movement of his head, a stuffed bird
mocking life and cheating death.
Bustards were birds, but bustards could fly--that was the Lily
truth, for Bustard's mother had been Auk's mother had been Lily
whose name had meant truth, Lily who had in truth flown away with
Hierax and left them both; therefore he never prayed to Hierax, to
Death or the God of Death, or anyhow very seldom and never in his
heart, though Dace had said that he belonged to Hierax and
therefore Hierax had snatched Bustard, the brother who had been a
father to him, who had cheated him of his sling and of nothing else
that he could remember.
"How you feelin', big feller?"
"Fine. I'm fine," he told Dace. And then, "I'm afraid I'm going to
puke."
"Figure you might walk some?"
"It's all right, I'll carry him," Bustard declared, and by the timbre
of his harsh baritone revealed Hammerstone the soldier. "Patera
said I could."
"I don't want to get it on your clothes," Auk said, and Hammerstone
laughed, his big metal body shaking hardly at all, the slug gun
slung behind his shoulder rattling just a little against his metal back.
"Where's Jugs?"
"Up there. Up ahead with Patera."
Auk raised his head an
d tried to see, but saw only a flash of fire, a
thread of red fire through the green distance, and the flare of the
exploding rocket.
The white bull fell, scarlet arterial blood spilling from its immaculate
neck to spatter its gilded hooves. Now, Silk thought, watching
the garlands of hothouse orchids slide from the gold leaf that
covered its horns.
He knelt beside its fallen head. Now if at all.
She came with the thought. The point of his knife had begun the
first cut around the bull's right eye when his own glimpsed the Holy
Hues in the Sacred Window: vivid tawny yellow iridescent with
scales, now azure, now dove gray, now rose and red and thunderous
black. And words, words that at first he could not quite distinguish,
words in a voice that might almost have been a crone's, had it been
less resonant, less vibrant, less young.
"Hear me. You who are pure."
He had assumed that if any god favored them it would be Kypris.
This goddess's unfamiliar features overfilled the Window, her
burning eyes just below its top, her meager lower lip disappearing
into its base when she spoke.
"Whose city is this, augur?" There was a rustle as all who heard her
knelt.
Already on his knees beside the bull, Silk contrived to bow. "Your
eldest daughter's, Great Queen." The serpents around her face--thicker
than a man's wrist but scarcely larger than hairs in proportion
to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and pallid, hollow cheeks--identified
her at once. "Viron is Scalding Scylla's city."
"Remember, all of you. You most of all, Prolocutor."
Silk was so startled that he nearly turned his head. Was it possible
that the Prolocutor was in fact here, somewhere in this crowd of
thousands?
"I have watched you," Echidna said. "I have listened."
Even the few remaining animals were silent.
"This city must remain my daughter's. Such was the will of her
father. I speak everywhere for him. Such is my will. Your remaining
sacrifices must be for her. For no one else. Disobedience invites
destruction."
Silk bowed again. "It shall be as you have said, Great Queen."
Momentarily he felt that he was not so much honoring a deity as
surrendering to the threat of force; but there was no time to analyze
the feeling.
"There is one here fit to lead. She shall be your leader. Let her
step forth."
Echidna's eyes, hard and black as opals, had fastened on Maytera
Mint. She rose and walked with small, almost mincing steps toward
the awful presence in the Window, her head bowed. When she
stood beside Silk, that head was scarcely higher than his own,
though he was on his knees.
"You long for a sword."
If Maytera Mint nodded, her nod was too slight to be seen.
"You are a sword. Mine. Scylla's. You are the sword of the Eight
Great Gods."
Of the thousands present, it was doubtful if five hundred had
been able to hear most of what Maytera Marble, or Patera Gulo, or
Silk himself had said; but everyone--from men so near the canted
altar that their trouser legs were speckled with blood, to children
held up by mothers themselves scarcely taller than children--could
hear the goddess, could hear the peal of her voice and to a limited
degree understand her, Great Echidna, the Queen of the Gods, the
highest and most proximal representative of Twice-Headed Pas. As
she spoke they stirred like a wheatfield that feels the coming storm.
"The allegiance of this city must be restored. Those who have
suborned it must be cast out. This ruling council. Kill them. Restore
my daughter's Charter. The strongest place in the city. The prison
you call the Alambrera. Pull it down."
Maytera Mint knelt, and again the silver trumpet sounded. "I will,
Great Queen!" Silk could hardly believe that it had emanated from
the small, shy sibyl he had known.
At her reply the theophany was complete. The white bull lay dead
beside him, one ear touching his hand; the Window was empty
again, though Sun Street was still filled with kneeling worshippers,
their faces blank or dazed or ecstatic. Far away--so distant that he,
standing, could not see her--a woman screamed in an agony of rapture.
He raised his hands as he had when he had stood upon the
floater's deck. "People of Viron!"
Half, perhaps, showed some sign of having heard.
"We have been honored by the Queen of the Whorl! Echidna
herself--"
The words he had planned died in his throat as a searing
incandescence smashed down upon the city like a ruinous wall. His
shadow, blurred and diffused as shadows had always been under the
beneficent radiance of the long sun, solidified to a pitch-black
silhouette as sharp as one cut from paper.
He blinked and staggered beneath the weight of the white-hot
glare; and when he opened his eyes again, it was no more. The dying
fig (whose upper branches could be seen above the garden wall) was
on fire, its dry leaves snapping and crackling and sending up a
column of sooty smoke.
A gust fanned the flames, twisting and dissolving their smoke
column. Nothing else seemed to have changed. A brutal-looking
man, still on his knees by the casket before the altar, inquired,
"W-was that more word from the gods, Patera?"
Silk took a deep breath. "Yes, it was. That was word from a god
who is not Echidna, and I understand him."
Maytera Mint sprang to her feet--and with her a hundred or
more; Silk recognized Gayfeather, Cavy, Quill, Aloe, Zoril, Horn
and Nettle, Holly, Hart, Oont, Aster, Macaque, and scores of
others. The silver trumpet that Maytera Mint's voice had become
summoned all to battle. "Echidna has spoken! We have felt the
wrath of Pas! To the Alambrera!"
The congregation became a mob.
Everyone was standing now, and it seemed that everyone was
talking and shouting. The floater's engine roared. Guardsmen,
some mounted, most on foot, called, "To me, everyone!" "To me!"
"To the Alambrera!" One fired his slug gun into the air.
Silk looked for Gulo, intending to send him to put out the burning
tree; he was already some distance away, at the head of a hundred
or more. Others led the white stallion to Maytera Mint; a man
bowed with clasped hands, and she sprang onto its back in a way
Silk would not have thought possible. It reared, pawing the wind, at
the touch of her heels.
And he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. "Maytera! _Maytera!_"
Shifting the sacrificial knife to his left hand and forsaking the dignity
augurs were expected to exhibit, he ran to her, his black robe
billowing in the wind. "Take this!"
Silver, spring-green, and blood-red, the azoth Crane had given
him flashed through the air as he flung it over the heads of the mob.
The throw was high and two cubits to her left--yet she caught it, as
he had somehow known she would.
"Press the bloodstone," he shouted, "when you want the blade!"
A moment later that e
ndless aching blade tore reality as it swept
the sky. She called, "Join us, Patera! As soon as you've completed
the sacrifices!"
He nodded, and forced himself to smile.
The right eye first. It seemed to Silk that a lifetime had passed
between the moment he had first knelt to extract the eye from its
socket and the moment that he laid it in the fire, murmuring Scylla's
short litany. By the time he had completed it, the congregation had
dwindled to a few old men and a gaggle of small children watched by
elderly women, perhaps a hundred persons in all.
In a low and toneless voice, Maytera Marble announced, "The
tongue for Echidna. Echidna has spoken to us."
Echidna herself had indicated that the remaining victims were to
be Scylla's, but Silk complied. "Behold us, Great Echidna, Mother
of the Gods, Incomparable Echidna, Queen of this Whorl--" (Were
there others, where Echidna was not Queen? All that he had
learned in the schola argued against it, yet he had altered her
conventional compliment because he felt that it might be so.)
"Nurture us, Echidna. By fire set us free."
The bull's head was so heavy that he could lift it only with
difficulty; he had expected Maytera Marble to help, but she did not.
Vaguely he wondered whether the gold leaf on the horns would
merely melt, or be destroyed by the flames in some way. It did not
seem likely, and he made a mental note to make certain it was
salvaged; thin though gold leaf was, it would be worth something. A
few days before, he had been planning to have Horn and some of
the others repaint the front of the palaestra, and that would mean
buying paint and brushes.
Now Horn, the captain, and the toughs and decent family men of
the quarter were assaulting the Alambrera with Maytera Mint,
together with boys whose beards had not yet sprouted, girls no
older, and young mothers who had never held a weapon; but if they
lived...
He amended the thought to: if some lived.
"Behold us, lovely Scylla, wonderful of waters, behold our love
and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla. By fire set us free."
Every god claimed that final line, even Tartaros, the god of
night, and Scylla, the goddess of water. While he heaved the
bull's head onto the altar and positioned it securely, he reflected