CALDE OF THE LONG SUN botls-3
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prodded their animals. The cable tightened, a slithering monster of
steel and silence, Echidna's greatest serpent.
The soldiers halted and faced about at a loud command, their
officer having seen Rook's force and detected the trap. They would
have to attack in earnest now, but her own voice (she told herself)
was incapable of launching troops against the enemy. Her voice
would not inspire anyone, so her person must. She neck-reined the
stallion, and the silver trumpet that was her voice in fact echoed
from every wall.
Five chains away, the blade of the azoth wrecked a fusion
generator, and the soldier whose heart it had been died.
Forward! Past her own disorderly line. Another soldier down,
and another! Forward!
The stallion stumbled, crying out like a man in pain.
A half-dozen soldiers dashed forward. The stallion fell, too weak
to stand; it seemed to her that the street itself had struck her, casting
all its clods and ridges at her at once. Steel hands laid hold of her,
and bios wrestled with chems in a desperate foolish fight. A woman
three times her size swung a wrecking bar. The soldier she struck,
struck her with the butt of his slug gun; she fell backward and did
not rise.
Maytera Mint struggled in a soldier's grasp. The azoth was gone--
No! Was under her shoe. He lifted her, his arms clamping her like
tongs; she stamped on the azoth with all her strength, and its lancing
point sheared off his foot. Smoking black fluid spurted from the
stump of his leg, slippery as so much grease. They fell, and his grip
weakened.
She tore herself away, stooping for the azoth, and ran, nearly
falling again, pursued with terrifying speed until the facade of the
Corn Exchange frowned above her and she whirled to cut down a
soldier whose blazing, arcing halves tumbled at her feet. "Run! Run!
Save yourselves!"
Her people streamed past in full flight, though to her, her voice
was a powerless wail.
"Hierax, accept my spirit." The azoth blade struck the first pillar,
and it shattered like glass. Another, and the facade seemed to hang
in air, an ominous cloud of grimy brick.
A soldier leveled his slug gun, firing an instant before her blade
split his skullplate. She felt the slug tear her habit, smelled the
powder smoke, and fled, slashing wildly at a third pillar without
breaking stride--stopped and turned back, hot tears streaming.
"You gods, for _twenty years!_ Now let me go!"
The weightless, endless blade came up. The weightless, endless
blade came down. And the facade of the Corn Exchange was
coming down too, falling like a picture, nearly whole and almost
maintaining its graceless design as it fell, its stone sills falling neither
faster nor slower than its tons of brick and timber. Her right hand,
still clutching the azoth, had begun the sign of addition when Rock
grabbed her from behind and dashed away with her.
Chapter 10 -- Calde Silk
"Let me go," Maytera Marble insisted Phaesday morning. "They
won't shoot me."
Generalissimo Oosik regarded her through his left eye alone; his
right was concealed by a patch of surgical gauze. He shrugged.
General Saba, the commander from Trivigaunte, pursed pendulous
lips. "We've wasted a shaggy hole too much time on this country
house already, when nobody can say--"
"You're quite wrong, my daughter," Maytera Marble told her
firmly. "Mucor can and does. Our Patera Silk is a prisoner in there,
just as the Ayuntamiento claims."
"Spirits!"
"Only hers, really. I'd never seen anyone possessed until she
began doing it to our students. I find it very upsetting." She
beckoned Horn. "You've made me a white flag? Wonderful! Such a
nice long stick, too. Thank you!"
General Saba snorted.
"You don't like my bringing our boys and girls."
"Children shouldn't have to fight."
"Certainly not." Maytera Marble nodded solemn agreement. "But
they were, and some have been killed. They'd run off with General
Mint, you see, almost all of them. I tried to think who might help me
after Mucor left, and our students were the only ones I could think
of. Horn and a few others are really mature enough already, more
grown up than a great many adults. It got them away from the city,
too, where the worst fighting was." She looked to Oosik for support,
but found none.
"Where it still is," General Saba snapped. "Where the troops we've
got out here are badly needed."
"They were fighting your girls, some of them, as well as our Army,
and some are dead. Have I told you that? Some are dead, some hurt
very badly. Ginger's had her hand blown off, I'm told. No doubt
some of your girls are hurt as well."
"Which is why--"
"You said we're wasting time." Maytera Marble sniffed; she had
acquired a devastating sniff. "I couldn't agree more. It will only
take a minute to shoot me, if they do. Then you can attack at
once. But if they don't, I may be able to talk to the councillors in
there. They can order the Army and the Guards who are still
fighting you--"
"The Second," Oosik supplied.
"Yes, the Second Brigade and our Army." Maytera Marble bowed
in humble appreciation of his information. "Thank you, my son. The
councillors could order them to give up, but no one knows whether
there are really councillors in the Juzgado." Without waiting for a
reply, she accepted the flag from Horn.
"I'm coming with you, Sib."
"You are not!"
He followed her nearly as far as the shattered gate just the same,
ignoring a pterotrooper who shouted for him to stay back, and
watched unhappily as she picked her way through its tumbled stones
and twisted bars, somberly clad but conveniently short-skirted in
Maytera Rose's best habit.
Two dead taluses smoked and guttered on the close-mown
grassway between the gate and the villa. A few steps past the first,
General Saba's adjutant sprawled face down beside her own flag of
truce. Disregarding all three, Maytera Marble cut across the lush
lawn toward the porticoed entrance, keeping well clear of the
fountain to avoid its windblown spray.
This was Bloody's house, she reminded herself, this grand place.
This was where the little man with oily hair had come from, the one
she and Echidna had offered to her. It had been practically
impossible, for a time, for her to remember being Echidna; now the
image of the little man's agonized face had returned, framed by
flame as she forced him down onto the altar fire. Would Divine
Echidna help her now, in gratitude for that sacrifice? The Echidna
she had pictured at prayer over so many years might have condemned
her because of it.
But there had been no shot yet.
No missile. No sounds at all, save the soughing of the wind and
the snapping of the rag on the stick she held. How young she felt,
and how strong!
If she stopped her
e, if she looked back at Horn, would they shoot,
killing her and waking the children? The children were asleep, most
of them. Or at least they were supposed to be, back there beneath
the leafless mulberries. The summer's unrelenting heat, the desert
heat that she had hated so much, had deserted just when the
children needed it, leaving them to sleep in the deepening chill of an
autumn already half spent, to shiver huddled together like piglets or
puppies in unroofed houses with broken windows and slug-pocked,
fire-scarred walls, though most of them had liked that better than
their studies, they said: had preferred killing Ayuntamientados and
pillaging their dead.
A mottled green face appeared at the window next to the big
door. Only the face, Maytera Marble noted with a little shiver of
relief. No slug gun, and no launcher.
"I've come to see my son, my son," she called. "My son Bloody.
Tell him his mother's here."
Shallow stone steps led up to a wide veranda. Before she put her
foot on the last, the door swung back. Through it she saw soldiers,
and bios in silvered armor. (Bios got up like chems, as she put it to
herself, because chems were braver.) Behind them stood another
bio, tall and red-faced.
"Good morning, Bloody," she said. "Thank you for bringing those
white bunnies. May Kypris smile upon you."
Blood grinned. "You've changed a little, Mama." Some of the
armored men laughed.
"Yes, I have. When we can talk in private, I'll tell you all about it."
"We thought you wanted to cut a deal for Hoppy."
"I do." Maytera Marble surveyed the hall; though she knew little
about art, she suspected that the misty landscape facing her was a
Murtagon. "I want to talk about that. We've knocked down a good
deal of your wall, I'm afraid, Bloody, and I'd like to see your
beautiful house spared."
Two soldiers stood aside, and Blood came to meet her. "So would
I, Mama. I'd like to see us spared, too."
"Is that why you didn't shoot? You killed that poor woman
General Saba sent, so why not me? Perhaps I shouldn't ask."
Blood glanced to his right. "A shag-up over there. _We_ didn't shoot
the fussock with the flag, and I want that settled right now. If there's
a question about it, there's no point in talking. I didn't shoot her,
and didn't tell anybody to. None of the boys did, either, and they
didn't get anybody to do it. Is that clear? Will you say Pas to that,
nothing back?"
Maytera Marble cocked and lifted her head, thus raising an
eyebrow. "Someone shot her from a window of your house, Bloody.
I saw it."
"All right, you saw it, and Trivigaunte's going to make somebody
pay. I don't blame them. What I'm saying is that it shouldn't be me
or the boys. We didn't do it, and that's not open to argument. I want
that settled before the cut."
Maytera Marble put a hand on his shoulder. "I understand,
Bloody. Do you know who did? Will you point them out to us?"
Blood hesitated, his apoplectic face growing redder than ever.
"If..." His eyes shifted toward a soldier almost too swiftly to be
seen. "Yes, absolutely." Several of the armored men muttered agreement.
"In that case it's accepted by our side," Maytera Marble told him.
"I'll report to my principals, Generalissimo Oosik and General
Saba, that you had nothing to do with it and are anxious to testify
against the guilty parties. Who are they?"
Blood ignored the question. "Good. Fine. They won't attack
while I'm talking to you?"
"Of course not." Silently, Maytera Marble prayed that she was
being truthful.
"You'd probably like to sit. I know I would. Come in here, and I
think we can settle this."
He showed her into a paneled drawing room and shut the door
firmly. "My boys are getting edgy," he explained, "and that gets me
edgy around them."
"They're my grandchildren?" Maytera Marble sank into a tapestry
chair too deep and too soft for her. "Your sons?"
"I don't have any. You said you were my mother. I guess you
meant you came to talk for her."
"I am your mother, Bloody." Maytera Marble studied him, finding
traces of her earlier self in his heavy, cunning face, as well as far too
many of his father. "I suppose you've seen me since you found out
who I was or had somebody look at me and describe me, and now
you don't recognize me. I understand. You're my son, just the same."
He grasped the advantage by reflex. "Then you wouldn't want to
see me killed, or would you?"
"No. No, I wouldn't." She let her stick and white flag fall to the
carpet. "If I had been willing to have you die, everything would have
been a great deal easier. Don't you see that? You should. You, of
all people."
She paused, considering. "I was an old woman before you found
out who I was, and I think I must have looked older. I was already
forty when you were born. That's terribly old for a bio mother."
"She came a few times when I was little. I remember her."
"Every three months, Bloody. Once in each season, if I could get
away alone that often. We were supposed to go out out in pairs. and
usually we had to."
"She's dead? My mother?"
"Your foster mother? I don't know. I lost track of her when you
were nine."
"I mean y--! Rose. Maytera Rose, my real mother."
"Me." Maytera Marble tapped her chest, a soft click.
"It was her funeral sacrifice. The other sibyl said so."
"We burned parts of her," Maytera Marble conceded. "But mostly
those were parts of me in her coffin. Of Marble, I mean, though I've
kept her name. It makes things easier, with the children particularly.
And there's still a great deal of my personality left."
Blood rose and went to the window. The dull green turret of a
Guard floater showed above a half-ruined section of wall. "You
mind if I open this?"
"Certainly not. I'd prefer it."
"I want to hear if they start shooting, so I can stop it."
She nodded. "My thought exactly, Bloody. Some of the children
have slug guns, and nearly all the rest have needlers. Perhaps I
should have taken them, but I was afraid we'd need them on the
walk out." She sighed, the weary _hish_ of a mop across a terazzo
floor. "The worst would have hidden theirs anyway, though none of
the children are really bad."
"I remember when she lost her arm," Blood told her. "She used to
pat me on the head and say, you know, my, he's getting big. One
day it was a hand like your--"
"It was this one." Maytera Marble displayed it.
"So I asked her what happened. I didn't know she was my mother
then. She was just a sibyl that came sometimes. My mother would
have tea and cookies."
"Or sandwiches." Maytera Marble supplemented his account.
"Very good sandwiches, too, though I was always careful not to eat
more than a fourth of one. Bacon in the fall, cheese in winter,
pickled burbot and chives on toast in spring, and curds and
&n
bsp; watercress in summer. Do you remember, Bloody? We always gave
you one."
"Sometimes it was all I got," Blood said bitterly
"I know. That's why I never ate more than a founh."
"Is that really the same hand?" Blood eyed it curiously.
"Yes, it is, It's hard to change hands yourself, Bloody, because
you have to do it one-handed. It was particularly hard for me,
because by then I already had a great many new parts. Or rather, I
had reclaimed a great many old ones. They worked better, that was
why I wanted them, but I wasn't used to the new assembly yet,
which made changing hands harder. It would have been wasteful to
burn them, though. They were in much better condition than my old
ones."
"Even if it is, I'm not going to call you Mother."
Maytera Marble smiled, lifting her head and inclining it to the
right as she always did. "You have already, Bloody. Out there. You
called me Mama. It sounded wonderful."
When he said nothing, she added, "You said you were going to
open that window. Why don't you?"
He nodded and raised the sash. "That's why I bought your
manteion, do you know about that? I wasn't just a sprat nobody
wanted any more. I had money and influence, and I got word my
mother was dying. I hadn't spoken to her in fifteen, twenty years,
but I asked Musk, and he said if I really wanted to get even it might
be my last chance. I saw the sense in that, so we went, both of us."
"To get even, Bloody?" Maytera Marble lifted an eyebrow.
"It doesn't matter. I was sitting with her, see, and she needed
something, so I sent Musk. Then I said something and called her
Mom, and she said your mother's still alive, I tried to be a mother to
you, Blood, and I swore I wouldn't tell."
Turning from the window to face Maytera Marble, he added, "She
wouldn't, either. But I found out."
"And bought our manteion to torment me, Bloody?"
"Yeah. The taxes were in arrears. I'm real close to the Ayuntamiento.
I guess you know that already or you wouldn't have come
out here shooting."
"You have councillors here, staying with you. Loris, Tarsier, and
Potto. That was one reason I wanted to talk."
Blood shook his head. "Tarsier's gone. Who told you?"
"Like your foster mother, I've sworn not to tell."
"One of my people? Somebody in this house?"
"My lips are sealed, Bloody."