Return to the Whorl

by Gene Wolfe

Page 29

 

  `Because they didnt belong to me. And because they wereare-art, and to wantonly destroy art is always evil. But, Pig. . . " He halted.

  "Auld Pigs 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 Im going to ask it just the same. I brought you here. I know that. You wouldnt be in this ruined quarter if it were not for me. You might not be in Viron at all. "

  "Hout wi hit, 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 fathers 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 Pigs face. "Instead, Im 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 Ermines, and its 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 hall, bucky?"

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

  Pigs long arms groped for him, one big hand still grasping the sheathed sword. " Tis hall right, bucky. Needed me hon ther roads. Noo yer need me ter be gone. Dinna fash yerself. Ter much hurtin hin they whorl halready, an sae guid-bye. " Pig turned away.

  "Ill rejoin you, I promise," he repeated. "Tell Hound Im 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 mans 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 Mayteras 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 cenobys 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.

  The stone wall that had separated the garden from the street was largely intact, though the gate and rusted padlock were gone. Inside, weeds and blackberry brambles, and-yes-a straggling grape vine climbing the blackened stump of the fig tree. Enough of their arbor remained to sit on. He sat, leaned back, and shut his eyes; and in time a youthful sibyl sat down across from him, extracted a recorder from one of the voluminous pockets of her black bombazine habit, and began to play.

  Sun Street had taken him to the market, and Manteion Street to the Palatine. Here was the Caldes Palace, its fallen wall repaired with new mortar and stones that almost matched.

  "Patera. . . Patera?" The voice was soft yet thick-oddly wrong. He looked around, not so much to find the woman who spoke as to locate the augur she addressed.

  "Patera. . . Patera Silk?"

  He stepped back and scanned the windows. The shadow of a head and shoulders showed at one on the topmost floor. "Mucor?" He tried to keep his voice low, while making it loud enough to be heard fifty or sixty cubits overhead.

  "Shes not here. . . Shes not here, Patera. "

  Its the bird, he thought. The bird makes her think Im Silk. He realized even as he formed the thought that Oreb was gone, that he had sent Oreb away with Pig.

  "Please. . . "

  He had not heard the rest, yet he knew what he had been asked to do. The massive doors were locked. He banged them with the heavy brass knocker, each blow as loud as the report of a slug gun.

  There was no answering sound from within the palace; and at last he turned away, tramping wearily down the balustraded steps to the street. The high window was empty now, and the thick, soft voice (female but not feminine) silent. He squinted up at the motionless sun. The shade was almost down; the market would be closing. He had told-had promised-Pig that he would rejoin him in Ermines before evening, but Ermines was only two or three streets away.

  He had just crossed the first when fingers, thin but hard and strong, closed on his elbow. He turned to see a slight, stooped figure no larger than a child, muffled in what appeared to be sacking. "Please. . . Please, Patera. Please, wont you talk to. . . Please wont you talk to me?"

  "Im not an augur. Youre thinking of somebody else. "

  "Youve forgotten. . . Youve forgotten me. " The muffled sound that followed might or might not have been a sob. "Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine. . . Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine, Patera?"

  There was something amiss in the angle of her head, and the high, hunched shoulders. Pity almost choked him. "No," he said, "I havent forgotten you, Olivine. " It was not a lie, he told himself fiercely; one could not forget what one had not known.

  "Youll bless. . . Youll bless me?" There was joy in the voice from the sackcloth. "Sacrifice, the way you used. . . Sacrifice, the way you used to? Fathers gone. . . Fathers gone away. Hes been gone a long, long time. . . Hes been gone a long, long time, Patera. " She was drawing him after her, back toward the Caldes Palace. "Theres a. . . Theres a woman? In the north. . . In the north, Patera. "

  Someone who might help her, obviously. Someone who might be able to cure whatever disease afflicted the pathetic figure before him. "A wise woman," he hazarded.

  "Oh. . . Oh, yes! Oh, I hope. . . Oh, I hope so!"

  They dodged down a side street. The wall of the Caldes Palace, elegantly varied with high narrow windows in elaborate stone frames, gave way to the almost equally imposing, windowless wall of the Caldes Garden, a wall of heroic stones, rough and misshapen yet fitted like the pieces of a puzzle.

  The diminutive, limping figure drew him on far faster than he would willingly have walked. Leprosy? It had been only a word in the Writings to him. There were running sores, or pus oozing from the skin-something disgusting. Good people in the Writings, theodidacts su
ch as Patera Silk particularly, were exceedingly kind to those who suffered this dread disease, which he had heard was rare-had heard from an augur, probably. From someone such as Patera Remora, who had attended the schola.

  Abruptly they stopped. A door of iron so low that he would almost have to crawl through like Pig was deeply set between mammoth stones, in a dark little recess that also held an empty bottle and brown, wind-blown leaves. From some recess equally dark within her sackcloth, Olivine produced a brass key bruised with verdigris; there was a dim flash, as of polished steel. Thrust into the iron door, the key rattled and squealed. A bolt thumped solidly, and Olivine whispered, "Quadrifons. . .

  The iron door swung back.

  Ducking through the doorway, he had to bend lower still to pass beneath the massive limbs of an ancient oak. Beyond was a bed of bright chrysanthemums, glorious in the last flickering sunshine. Somewhere a fountain played. "I didnt know there were doors like that," he said, sounding inane even to himself. "I mean doors that had to have a word, and a key as well. " And then, "That is a sacred name. So sacred that its hardly ever used. Im surprised you know it. "

  She stopped and looked back him. He thought he caught the gleam of thick spectacles between the rough cloth that covered her head and the fold of rough cloth that masked her face. "Its just a. . . Its just a word. The one for the. . . The one for the door. My. . . My mother. " (Something deeply pathetic had entered her voice. ) "I dont remember. . . I dont remember her. She was a. . . She was a sibyl? Thats what my father. . . Thats what my father says. She was a. . . She was a sibyl. "

  "Would you like to me to tell you about Quadrifons?"

  Olivine nodded, the motion almost imperceptible beneath the shadowing oak limbs and the folds of cloth. "Would you. . . Would you, Patera?"

  "Im not Patera Silk," he said. "Youre wrong about that. But Ill tell you what I know, which isnt much. "

  His back felt as though it might break; kneeling was a great relief. "Quadrifons is the most holy of the minor gods. I mean, hes called that in the Chrasmologic Writings. If it were left to me-as plainly it is not-Id say that the Outsider is the most holy god, and indeed that hes the only god, major or minor, whos really holy at all. " He laughed, a trifle nervously. "So you see why Im not an augur, Olivine. But the Writings say its Quadrifons, and the Chapter says that his name is so holy that it should hardly ever be used, so it wont be profaned. "

  "Go. . . Go on. "

  "I dont know you, so I really dont know whether you would be inclined to profane the name of a god-"

  She shook her head.

  "But Im inclined to doubt it. You dont strike me as a fortunate person, and its commonly the fortunate among us who do that. On the chance that Im wrong, however, I must tell you that we dont harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didnt regard most gods as holy, but they dont have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves. " He looked up at her shrouded face, hoping to see he had made his point, but learned nothing. "There is much more I might say, Olivine-things I may say to you another time, when we know each other better. But you wanted to know about Quadrifons. "

  She nodded.

  "I really know very little about him, however, and I doubt that anyone knows much more than I. Just as Pas is said to be a twoheaded god-do you know about that?"

  "Oh. . . Oh, yes. " She sounded despondent.

  "Quadrifons is a four-faced one. That is to say, he has only one head, but there is a face on every side of it, so that he looks east and west, and north and south, all at the same time. Hes the god of bridges, passageways, and intersections, although hes clearly more important than those few and simple things would appear to imply. I told you he had four faces. "

  There was no sound but the tinkling of the fountain; then she said, "Ive got a little statue with the two. . . Ive got a little statue with the two heads. "

  "Id like to see it. You do realize, dont you, that its only a conventional representation? We need to picture Pas to ourselves during our private devotions sometimes, and statuettes and colored prints help us do it. I should tell you that just as Pas is depicted occasionally as a whirlwind, Quadrifons is sometimes shown as a sort of monster, combining Pass eagle with Sphigxs lion. May I talk about Sphigx for a moment? It will seem to you that Ive left the subject, but I assure you that what I want to say bears upon it. "

  "Go. . . Go ahead. " By a sort of controlled collapse, she sat down opposite him, hugging her knees to her chest. Even through several thicknesses of sackcloth, it was apparent that she had sharp knees.

  "This morning two friends and I were discussing Sphigx. Shes the patroness of Trivigaunte, but she wont let the Trivigauntis make pictures or statues representing her, and we talked about that. "

  "Uh. . . Uh-huh. "

  "Thats what I used to say to Patera Silk. " He smiled at the memory. "Hed tell me to think of the honor of our Sun Street Palaestra, and say yes instead. "

  "I remember when. . . I remember when you were calde. "

  "When Patera Silk was, you mean. My own name is Horn. "

  She nodded again.

  "In that case, Calde Bison must have let you stay on when he attained to the office. That was good of him. "

  "I dont think. . . I dont think he knows Im here. Were you going to say Sphigx was like Quadrifons, keeping his name. . . Were you going to say Sphigx was like Quadrifons, keeping his name secret?"

  "Thats very perceptive of you. Yes, I was. You see, Olivine, there used to be a woman with a table in the market who sold images of Sphigx. They would have been quite similar to your image of Pas, I suppose. "

  "Mines ivory. . . Mines ivory, Patera. "

  He nodded thoughtfully. "These were wood. Or at least, they appeared to be wood. This woman was a Trivigaunti spy, and what she was doing-using the little wooden images to send informationwas really very clever, because no one who knew the customs of her city would associate images of Sphigx with Trivigaunte. Later on Blue, I learned that Trivigauntis who go abroad often buy images of Sphigx, which they carry home with them and hide. "