Epiphany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  He had not been on Gold Street often; but he was certain that it had never been this long, or half this wide.

  Here a trooper of the Guard and a tough-looking man who might have been the one who had questioned him after Kypris's theophany lay side-by-side, their knives in each other's ribs.

  "Patera!" It was the rasping voice that had answered Liana's hail.

  "What is it, my son?"

  "Hurry up, will you!"

  He broke into a trot, though not without protest from his ankle. When he had feared a shot at any moment, this lowest slope of the Palatine had been very steep; now he was scarcely conscious of its grade.

  "Here. Grab my hand."

  The Guard's redoubt was only half the height of the rebel barricade, although it was (as Silk saw when he had scrambled to the top) rather thicker. Its front was nearly sheer, its back stepped for the troopers who would fire over it.

  The one who had helped him up said, "Come on. I don't know how long he'll last."

  Silk nodded, out of breath from his climb and afraid he had torn the stitches in his lung. "Take me to him."

  The trooper jumped from the sandbag step; Silk followed more circumspectly. There were sleepers here as well, a score of armored Guardsmen lying in the street wrapped in blankets that were probably green but looked black in the skylight.

  "They going to rush us, over there?" the trooper asked.

  "No. Not tonight, I'd say-tomorrow morning, perhaps."

  The trooper grunted. "Slugs'll go right through a lot of that stuff in their fieldwork. I been lookin' it over, and there's a lot of furniture in there. Boards no thicker than your thumb in junk like that. I'm Sergeant Eft."

  They shook hands, and Silk said, "I was thinking the same thing as I climbed over it, Sergeant. There are heavier things as well, though, and even the chairs and so forth must obstruct your view."

  Eft snorted. "They got nothin' I want to see."

  That could not be said of the Guard, as Silk realized as soon as he looked past the floater. A talus had been posted at an intersection a hundred paces uphill, its great, tusked head (so like that of the one he had killed beneath Scylla's shrine that he could have believed them brothers) swiveling to peer down each street in turn. Liana would have been interested in it, he thought, if she did not know about it already.

  "In here." Eft opened the door of one of the dark shops; his voice and the thump of the door brightened lights inside, where troopers stripped of parts of their armor and more or less bandaged lay on blankets on a terrazzo floor. One moaned, awakened by the noise or the lights; two, it seemed, were not breathing. Silk knelt by the nearest, feeling for a pulse.

  "Not him. Over here."

  "All of them," Silk said. "I'm going to bring the Pardon of Pas to all of them, and I won't do it en masse. There's no justification for that."

  "Most's already had it. He has."

  Silk looked up at the sergeant, but there was no judging his truthfulness from his hard, ill-favored face. Silk rose. "This man's dead, I believe."

  "All right, we'll get him out of here. Come over here. He's not." Eft was standing beside the man who had moaned.

  Silk knelt again. The injured man's skin was cold to his touch. "You're not keeping him warm enough, Sergeant."

  "You a doctor, too?"

  "No, but I know something about caring for the sick. An augur must."

  "No hurt." Oreb hopped from Silk's shoulder to the injured man's chest. "No blood."

  "Leave him alone, you silly bird."

  "No hurt!" Oreb whistled. "No blood!"

  A bald man no taller than Liana stepped from behind one of the empty showcases. Although he held a slug gun, he was not in armor or even in uniform. "He-he isn't, Patera. Isn't wounded. At least he doesn't-I couldn't find a thing. I think it must be his heart."

  "Get a blanket," Silk told Eft. "Two blankets. Now!"

  "I don't take orders from any shaggy butcher."

  "Then his death will be on your head, Sergeant." Silk took his beads from his pocket. "Bring two blankets. Three wouldn't be too many. The men watching the rebels can spare theirs, surely. Three blankets and clean water."

  He bent over the injured man, his prayer beads dangling in the approved fashion from his right hand. "In the names of all the gods you are forgiven forever, my son. I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla, for Marvelous Molpe…"

  The names rolled from his tongue, each with its sonorous honorific, names empty or freighted with horror. Pas, whose Plan the Outsider had endorsed, was dead; Echidna a monster. The ghost that haunted Silk's mind now, as he spoke and swung his beads, was not Doctor Crane's but that of the handsome, brutal chem who had believed himself Councillor Lemur.

  "The monarch wanted a son to succeed him," the false Lemur had said. "Scylla was as strong-willed as the monarch himself but female. Her father allowed her to found our city, however, and many others. She founded your Chapter as well, a parody of the state religion of her own whorl. His queen bore the monarch another child, but she was worse yet, a fine dancer and a skilled musician, but female, too, and subject to fits of insanity. We call her Molpe. The third was male, but no better than the first two because he was born blind. He became that Tartaros to whom you were recommending yourself, Patera. You believe he can see without light. The truth is that he cannot see by daylight. Echidna conceived again, and bore another male, a healthy boy who inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania. We call him Hierax now-"

  And this boy over whom he bent and traced sign after sign of addition was nearly dead. Possibly-just possibly-he might derive comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone's; but the worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some scales somewhere, surely. It had to, or else the Whorl was mad.

  "The Outsider likewise forgives you, my son, for I speak here for him, too." A final sign of addition and it was over. Silk sighed, shivered, and put away his beads.

  "The other one didn't say that," the civilian with the slug gun told him. "That last."

  He had waited so long in fear of some such remark that it came now as an anticlimax. "Many augurs include the Outsider among the minor gods," he explained, "but I don't. His heart? Is that what you said? He's very young for heart problems."

  "His name's Cornet Mattak. His father's a customer of mine." The little jeweler leaned closer. "That sergeant, he killed the other one."

  "The other-?"

  "Patera Moray. He told me his name. We chatted awhile when he'd said the prayers of the Pardon, and I-I- And I-" Tears flooded the jeweler's eyes, abrupt and unexpected as the gush from a broken jar. He took out a blue handkerchief and blew his nose.

  Silk bent over the cornet again, searching for a wound.

  "I said I'd give him a chalice. To catch the blood, you know what I mean?"

  "Yes," Silk said absently. "I know what they're for."

  "He said theirs was yellow pottery, and I said-said-"

  Silk rose and picked up the small traveling bag. "Where is his body? Are you certain he's dead?" Oreb fluttered back to his shoulder.

  The jeweler wiped his eyes and nose. "Is he dead? Holy Hierax! If you'd seen him, you wouldn't ask. He's out in the alley. That sergeant came in while we were talking and shot him. In my own store! He dragged him out there afterward."

  "Show him to me, please. He brought the Pardon of Pas to all these others? Is that correct?"

  Leading Silk past empty display cases toward the back of the shop, the jeweler nodded.

  "Cornet Mattak hadn't been wounded then?"

  "That's right." The jeweler pushed aside a black velvet curtain, revealing a narrow hallway. They passed a padlocked iron door and stopped before a similar door that was heavily barred. "I said when all this is over and things have settled down, I'll give you a gold one. I was still emptying out my cases, you see, whil
e he was bringing them the Pardon. He said he'd never seen so much gold, and they were saving for a real gold chalice. They had one at his manteion, he said, before he came, but they'd had to sell it."

  "I understand."

  The jeweler took down the second bar and stood it against the wall. "So I said, when this is over I'll give you one to remember tonight by. I've got a nice one that I've had about a year, plain gold but not plain looking, you know what I mean? He smiled when I said that."

  The iron door swung open with a creak of dry hinges that reminded Silk painfully of the garden gate at the manse.

  "I said, you come into the strong room with me, Patera, and I'll show it to you. He put his hand on my shoulder then and said, my son, don't consider yourself bound by this. You haven't sworn by a god, and-and-"

  "Let me see him." Silk stepped outside into the alley.

  "And then the sergeant came in and shot him," the jeweler finished. "So don't you go back inside, Patera."

  In the chill evil-smelling darkness, someone was murmuring the prayer that Silk himself had just completed. He caught the names of Phaea and Sphigx, followed by the conventional closing phrase. The voice was an old man's; for an eerie moment, Silk felt that it was Patera Pike's.

  His eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the alley by the time the kneeling figure stood. "You're in terrible danger here," Silk said, and bit back the stooped figure's title just in time.

  "So are you, Patera," Quetzal told him.

  Silk turned to the jeweler. "Go inside and bar the door, please. I must speak to the-to my fellow augur. Warn him."

  The jeweler nodded, and the iron door closed with a crash, leaving the alley darker than ever.

  For a few seconds, Silk assumed that he had simply lost sight of Quetzal in the darkness; but he was no longer there. Patera Moray-of an age, height, and weight indeterminable without more light-lay on his back in the filthy mud of the alley, his beads in his hands and his arms neatly folded across his torn chest, alone in the final solitude of death.

  Chapter 7

  Where Thelx Holds Up a Mirror

  Silk stopped to look at Ermine's imposing facade. Ermine's had been built as a private house, or so it appeared-built for someone with a bottomless cardcase and a deep appreciation of pillars, arches, friezes, and cornices and the like; features he had previously seen only as fading designs painted on the otherwise stark fronts of shiprock buildings were real here in a jungle of stone that towered fully five stories. A polished brass plaque of ostentatiously modest proportions on the wide green front door announced: "Ermine's Hotel."

  Who, Silk wondered almost idly, had Ermine been? Or was he still alive? If so, might Linsang be a poor relation-or even a rich one who had turned against the Ayuntamiento? And what about Patera Gulo? Stranger things had happened.

  Though he felt cold, his hands were clammy; he groped for his robe before remembering that it was back in the borrowed traveling bag with the borrowed blue tunic, and wiped his hands on the yellow one he was wearing instead.

  "Go in?" Oreb inquired.

  "In a minute." He was procrastinating and knew it. This was Ermine's, the end of dreams, the shadeup of waking. If he was lucky, he would be recognized and shot. If he was not, he would find Thelxiepeia's image and wait until Ermine's closed, for even Ermine's must close sometime. An immensely superior servant would inform him icily that he would have to leave. He would stand, and look about him one last time, and try to hold the servant in conversation to gain a few moments more.

  After that, he would have to go. The street would be gray with morning and very cold. He would hear Ermine's door shut firmly behind him, the snick of the bolt and the rattle of the bar. He would look up and down the street and see no Hyacinth, and no one who could be carrying a message from her.

  Then it would be over. Over and dead and done with, never to live again. He would recall his longing as something that had once occupied an augur whose name chanced to be his, Silk, a name not common but by no means outlandish. (The old Caldé, whose bust his mother had kept at the back of her closet, had been-what? Had he been Silk, too? No, Tussah; but tussah was another costly fabric.) He would try to bring peace and to save his manteion, fail at both, and die.

  "Go in?"

  He wanted to say that they were indeed going in, but found himself too dismayed to speak. A man with a pheasant's feather in his hat and a fur cape muttered, "Pardon me," and shouldered past. A footman in livery (presumably the supercilious servant envisioned a few seconds before) opened the door from inside.

  Now. Or not at all. Leave or send a message. Preserve the illusion.

  "Are you coming in, sir?"

  "Yes," Silk said. "Yes, I am. I was wondering about my pet, though. If there are objections, I'll leave him outside."

  "None, sir," A faint, white smile touched the footman's narrow lips like the tracery of frost upon a windowpane. "The ladies not infrequently bring animals, sir. Boarhounds, sir. Monkeys. Your bird cannot be worse. But, sir, the door…"

  It was open, of course. The night was chill, and Ermine's would be comfortably warm, rebellion or no rebellion. Silk climbed the steps to the green door, discovering that Liana's barricade had been neither higher nor steeper.

  "This is your first visit to Ermine's, I take it, sir?"

  Silk nodded. "I'm to meet a lady here."

  "I quite understand, sir. This is our anteroom, sir." There were sofas and stiff-looking chairs. "It is principally for the removal of one's outer garments, sir. They are left in the cloakroom. You may check your bag there, if you so desire. There is no hospitality here in the anteroom, sir, but one can observe all the guests who enter or depart."

  "Good man?" Oreb studied the footman through one bright, black eye. "Like bird?"

  "Tonight, sir," the footman leaned nearer Silk, and his voice became confidential, "I might be able to fetch you some refreshment myself, however. We've little patronage tonight. The unrest."

  "Thank you," Silk said. "Thank you very much. But no."

  "Beyond the anteroom, sir, is our sellaria. The chairs are rather more comfonable, sir, and there is hospitality as well. Some gentlemen read."

  "Suppose I go into your seilaria and turn to the right," Silk inquired, "where would I be then?"

  "In the Club, sir. Or if one turns less abruptly, in the Glasshouse, sir. There are nooks, sir. Benches and settees. There is hospitality, sir, but it is infrequent."

  "Thank you," Silk said, and hurried away.

  Strange to think that this enormous room, a room that held fifty chairs or more, with half that many diminutive tables and scores of potted plants, statues, and fat-bellied urns, should be called by the same name as his musty little sitting room at the manse. Swerving to his right he wound among them, worrying that he had turned too abruptly and feeling that he walked in a dream through a house of giants-while politely declining the tray proffered by a deferential waiter. All the chairs he saw were empty; a table with a glass top scarcely bigger than the seat of a milking stool held wads of crumpled paper and a sheet half covered with script, the only signs of human habitation.

  A wall loomed before him like the face of a mountain, or more accurately, like a fog bank through rents in which might be glimpsed scenes of unrelated luxury that were in truth its pictures. He veered left, and after another twenty strides caught sight of a marble arch framing a curtain of leaves.

  It had been as warm as he had expected in the sellaria; passing through the arch he entered an atmosphere warmer still, humid, and freighted with exotic perfumes. A moth with mauve-and-gray wings larger than his palms fluttered before his face to light on a purple flower the size of a soup tureen. A path surfaced with what seemed precious stones, narrower even than the graveled path through the garden of his manteion, vanished after a step or two among vines and dwarfish trees. The music of falling water was everywhere.

  "Good place," Oreb approved.

  It was, Silk thought. It was stranger and more dream-like
than the sellaria, but more friendly and more human, too. The sellaria had been a vision of opulence bordering on nightmare; this was a gentler one of warmth and water, sunshine and lush fertility, and though this glass-roofed garden might be used for vicious purposes, sunshine and fertility, water and warmth were things in themselves good; their desirability could only be illustrated more clearly by the proximity of evil. "I like it," he whispered to Oreb. "Hyacinth must too, or she wouldn't have told me to meet her here, where all this would surely dim the beauty of a woman less lovely."

  The sparkling path divided. He hesitated, then turned to his right. A few steps more, and there was no light save that from the skylands floating above the whorl. "His Cognizance would like this as much as we do, I believe, Oreb. I've been in his garden at the Palace, and this reminds me of it, though that's an open-air garden, and this can't be nearly as large."

  Here was a seat for two, masterfully carved from a single block of myrtle. He halted to stare at it, longing to sit but restrained by the fear that he would be unable to stand again. "We have to find this image of Thelxiepeia," he muttered, "and there must be places to sit there. Hyacinth won't come. She's at Blood's in the country, she's bound to be. But we can rest there awhile."

  A new voice, obsequious and affected, murmured, "I beg your pardon, sir."

  "Yes, what is it?" Silk turned.

  A waiter had come up behind him. "I'm rather embarrassed, sir. I really don't know quite how to phrase it."

  "Am I not supposed to be in here now?" As Silk asked, he resolved not to leave without a fight; they might overwhelm him with a mob of waiters and footmen, but they would have to-no mere order or argument would suffice.