Epiphany of the Long Sun

by Gene Wolfe

  Auk was so surprised he turned to look. "What the shaggy-I mean yeah, dimber, Terrible Tartaros. Anything." Passing both sacks to Hammerstone, he cupped his hands around his mouth. "I'll sacrifice. You got it!"

  "When?" Four men lifted a terrified brown kid over their heads; its unhappy bleats were visible, although inaudible.

  "Now, Auk my noctolater."

  "Now!" Auk repeated.

  A thin man whose coat and hat had once been costly asked, "You say you're doing the gods' will. Will a god appear?"

  Auk waited for assurance from the blind god at his side, but none was forthcoming.

  Others took up the question. "Will a god come?"

  "What do you think?" Auk challenged them, and a hundred arguments broke out at once.

  From behind Hammerstone's green bulk, Hyacinth inquired, "Where're we going to do it?"

  "I thought you were eating."

  "She is," Hammerstone rumbled. "I can hear her."

  The noise grew as fifty men and a dozen loud-voiced women shouted demands. Auk muttered, "Terrible Tartaros, you better tell me what to tell 'em or we could have a problem here."

  "Have I not, Auk my noctolater? You are to sacrifice, to me or to whatever god you wish."

  Auk turned to Hammerstone. "Get out of the door. I got to tell both of you, and I ain't going to talk to her through you."

  The soldier emerged into the street, evoking another awed silence. Revealed, Hyacinth chewed and gulped, wiping her hands on her soiled gown. "That was a nectarine, I think, and I think I swallowed the pit. I can't remember spitting it out. Maybe I chewed it up. Thelx, was it good!"

  "You take care of this stuff," Auk told her, "I got to go to Sun Street."

  "I'm coming!"

  Auk shook his head. "I ain't no augur-"

  Tattaros whispered, "Bring the soldier and the woman."

  "But I got to sacrifice. Scalding Scylla wanted me to, too. She was going to make me give her Dace, probably."

  "I'll need a coat and a bath, makeup-don't you hit me! if you hit me again I'll-I'll-"

  "You're coming all right," Auk told her, "and we're going now." He strode into the crowd. "Listen here! Slap a muzzle on it, you culls. Listen up!"

  Hammerstone fired his slug gun into the air.

  "No god's coming! You want me to sacrifice, we'll go over to Sun Street and do it right. Only no god!" Under his breath he added, "You couldn't see one anyhow, you cank cullys."

  They followed him through the narrow street nonetheless, cowed by him more than by the menacing soldier beside him who never relaxed his hold on the shivering, disheveled young woman in the red silk gown.

  From the highest step of Silk's manteion, Auk addressed them again. "I told you there ain't going to be a god. You jerk me around, don't you? Sacrifice right this minute! Show us a god, Auk! All your clatter. You think you could jerk me around like you do if I could jerk the gods around? I can't. Neither can you. What I'm telling you is, it's time."

  He drew his brass-mounted hanger. "I can cut your goats with this. That's nothing. Can I cut myself out of the whorl? That's what matters. Think about it. Nobody but you can make you think, not even gods."

  "Sacrifice!" someone shouted.

  "Not even the gods!" Auk bellowed. "Only they can snuff you if you don't, see? Or just leave you to die, 'cause this whorl's finished! Tartaros told me!"

  The crowd stirred.

  "Ever see a dead bitch in the street? And her pups still trying to suck? That's you! And that's me!" Over his shoulder Auk added, "Open these doors, Hammerstone."

  The soldier hooked a finger as thick as a crowbar through one wrought iron handle and rattled the door until it seemed it must leave its hinges. "It's locked."

  "Then bust it down. We'll use the wood."

  Hammerstone released the door and drew back his fist, but Hyacinth exclalined, "Wait! Somebody's coming!"

  In a moment Auk heard the rattle and squeak of the old iron lock, and the solid thunk as the bolt slid back. He grasped the handle and pulled.

  "Patera!" Hammerstone knelt as a father does to embrace a boy who does not like being lifted, and hugged Incus in arms that could have splintered the ribs of a bull.

  Even Auk smiled. "Hi, Patera. Where you been?"

  Hyacinth, torn between the opportunity for flight and the deliverance she sensed was almost at hand, nudged Auk. "Is this him? The one Hammerstone talks about all the time?"

  "Yeah. You want to argue with him? Me neither."

  Pointing to Incus he announced, "This's the augur I asked you about. Now we can have a regular augur, and maybe he'll let me help. We'll need wood for the altar, you scavy? Some of you got to go get us some. Cedar if you can find any, any kind if you can't."

  From Hammerstone's embrace, Incus protested, "Auk, my son!"

  "We got to, Patera. You like for lots of people to see you sacrifice? I got you three or four hundred here. Hammerstone, loosen up or you'll chill him."

  Speaking so quickly her racing words flashed past like frightened linnets, Hyacinth gabbled, "Patera, I know what I look like, I know how awful, but I'm not the sort that would ever set her cap for a cully like this or even let him, you know, talk to her even if he just wanted to talk, you know how they do, and that's not me, and I've got money and good clothes even if you wouldn't think it to look at me and jewelry, and I know people, I've got, you know, bucks that would do me favors any time, commissioners and brigadiers, and I know the Caldé, I really do, he's a particular friend of mine and this man and the soldier have been making me stay in a dirty freezing place with rats, and you've got to help me, Patera, you've got to tell-"

  Auk clapped a hand over her month. "She goes on like that quite a bit, Patera, and we ain't got time for it all. Let him go, Hammerstone. Get him inside there and up to the altar. You can carry him, I guess, if it makes you feel better."

  "I've prayed," Incus managed to gasp as Hammerstone hoisted him, "all morning, prayed upon my knees with tears and bitterest groans-don't drop me, Hammerstone my son, your shoulders are slippery-for a sign of favor from Surging Scylla or any other god, the smallest morsel of assistance, the most humble crumb of succor in my divinely ordained mission."

  "I'd say maybe you got it," Auk told him. "What do you think, Terrible Tartaros?"

  Briefly, the blind god's hand tightened on his. "Release the woman, Auk my noctolater. I am about to leave you. I have mended your mind, insofar as I am able."

  Auk turned, although he knew he could not see the god.

  "It will heal itself soon of the damage that remains. I have explained your task, and you have learned better than I could have hoped. Direct your gaze to the Sacred Window, Auk my noctolater."

  "This's the Plan, Terrible Tartaros. Emptying the whole whorl. I can't do that by myself!"

  "Look at the screen, Auk. At the Sacred Window. This is the last instruction I shall give you."

  Auk sank to his knees. Faintly, through the open door, the silver glow shone from the far end of the manteion. "Get out of my way, Hammerstone! I got to see the Window."

  "Farewell, Auk. May neither of us forget the prayers you offered nightside, while I hearkened invisible in your glass."

  Auk stood up, alone.

  "You're crying." Hyacinth stepped closer to peer at him. "Auk, you're crying."

  "Yeah. I guess I am." He wiped his streaming eyes with his fingers. "I never had any father."

  "I do, and he's a pig's arse." Worshippers pushed past them caryying armloads of wood; some paused to stare.

  "I got to get up there and do it. You want to go, go on. I won't stop you."

  "I can leave anytime I want to?"

  "Yeah, Hy. Beat the hoof."

  "Then I'm going to-no, that's abram. G'bye, Bruiser." Her lips brushed his.

  "Auk my son!" Incus stood beside the altar, directing the laying of the fire. "We've more wood than we require. Tell them to desist."

  He did, happy to have something to do.

  At
Silk's ambion, Incus drew himself up beyond his full height, rising on his toes. "A holy augur's blessing upon each and every one of you, my children. Silence, back there! This is a manteion, a house sacred to the immortal gods." It was the hour he had dreamed of since childhood.

  "Hammerstone, my son. It is best to offer our pious gifts upon a fire kindled directly from the beneficent rays. This is not accorded us on this day of darkness. If you will look in the sacristy, behind the Sacred Window, you may discover a fire-keeper, a vessel of metal or even lowly terra cotta safeguarding the holy spark against such an hour as this."

  "I'm on it, Patera."

  Incus returned his attention to the congregation. "At this point, my children, I am severely tempted to discover to you my own identity, and the multifarious vicissitudes and tribulations through which I come to you today. I refrain, however. I am an augur, as you see. I am that augur whom Surfeiting Scylla has designated Prolocutor-to-be, charged with the utter destruction of the Ayunta-"

  For half a minute, their cheers silenced him.

  "I am in addition-might I say comrade, Auk? A fellow sufferer at least of Auk's."

  From the manteion floor Auk shouted, "A dimber mate!"

  "Thank you. Beset, as you should know, by woe and eager for a situation of venerational tranquility, I bethought me of this manteion, the new Caldé's own, as a place to which I might retire, pray and contemplate the inscrutable ways of the gods. I had not seen it and had heard much of it during the brief days since Auk, my dear friend Hammerstone-"

  "I got it right here, Patera." Hammerstone displayed a pierced clay pot from which a feeble crimson glow proceeded.

  "Auk, are you to assist me? Is that to be our procedure?"

  A seemingly disembodied voice called, "He has to kill 'em!"

  "Then he shall, and with my blessing. What of the liturgy, however? Auk?"

  Auk had climbed the steps to the altar. "I don't know the words, Patera. You'll have to do it."

  "I shall. And if Auk is to assist, why need my dear friend Hammerstone be excluded? Put the sacred flame to this fuel, if you will, Hammerstone.

  "I obtained the key, journeyed hence, and locked myself in, counting the lock's blessed squeakings among the treasures of my spirit. I came, I say, in search of quiet, resolved upon prayer and suppication. I found it, as I had hoped, and spent hours upon my knees, the least supplicant of the immortal gods. It is a practice I recommend to you without reservation."

  A tongue of fire had sprung up where Hammerstone fanned the wood piled on the altar.

  "I was safe from all interruption. Or so I thought. Then you arrived, a tumultuous throng, elevating me to this sacred ambion. How clearly the gods speak! Surmounting Scylla had lifted me to the Prolocutorship. Now was I cautioned that the Prolocutor-I-can be no holy recluse, however he may long for peace. Pray for me, my children, as I pray for myself. Let me not forget my lesson!

  "Auk, my son. Have you the knife of sacrifice?"

  Auk drew his boot knife. "This's all I got, Patera."

  "Then it must suffice. Bring it to me and I shall bless it." Incus did so, tracing the sign of addition over the blade. Before he finished, Hammerstone had been forced to step back from the leaping flames.

  "In a sacred ceremony more regular, I should now ask their presenters to which of the Nine, or other immortal gods, they wished to offer the fair victims. Today, however-"

  Someone shouted, "To Tartaros! He's always on him!"

  "They ain't black," Auk told the speaker.

  Incus nodded solemnly. "In the present instance that must be dispensed with. None are white. Nor are any black, as my erstwhile comrade has rightly said. Therefore each shall be offered to all the gods."

  After glancing at the first victim, Incus faced the Sacred Window, his arms and his voice raised dramatically. "Accept all you gods, the sacrifice of this fine piglet. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will-will-"

  He got no further.

  The silver radiance showed flecks of color, faded pastels that might have been shadows or phantoms, the visual illusions of disordered sight, dabs of rose and azure that blossomed and withered, shot with pearl and ebony.

  Poised beside the young pig, Auk dropped his knife and fell to his knees. Momentarily it seemed that he could make out a face on the left. Then another, wholly different, on the right. A voice spoke, such a voice as Auk had never heard, filled with the roar of mighty engines. It praised him and urged him to seek something or someone. Now and again, though only now and again, he heard or at least believed he heard, a term he knew: ghost, augur, plan. Then silence.

  Incus, too, was on his knees; his hands were clasped, his face that of a child.

  The piglet had vanished, drawn perhaps into the Window, or perhaps merely fled through the dim manteion and out into the windy winter morning.

  Hammerstone stood at rigid attention, his right hand raised in a salute.

  For a time that might have been long or short, after the voice spoke no more and the half-formed colors had gone, all was silence; the congregation might have been so many statues, there in the old manteion on Sun Street, statues with starting eyes and gaping mouths.

  Then the noise began. Men who had been sitting sprang to their feet; men who had been kneeling jumped up to dance upon the pews. Some howled as though in agony. Some shrieked as if in ecstasy. A woman fell in a fit, thrashing, contorted as a swatted fly, belching bloody foam as her teeth tore her tongue and lips; no one noticed her, or cared.

  "He's gone." Auk rose slowly, still staring at the now-empty Window. More loudly, loudly enough to make himself heard by Hammerstone, he said, "He ain't here, not any more. That was him, wasn't it? That was Pas."

  Hammerstone's steel arm crashed to his steel side, a sound like the clash of swords.

  "Did anybody… You understand him, Patera? It sounded like he was talking about-about-" A man Auk did not know reached out and touched Auk's coat as he might have touched the Sacred Window.

  "He liked me," Auk concluded weakly. "Kind of like he liked me, that was what it sounded like." No one heard him.

  Incus was on his feet. He tottered to the ambion; although his mouth opened and shut and his lips appeared to shape words, no words could be heard above the din. At last he motioned to Hammerstone, and Hammerstone thundered for silence.

  "It is my task-" Incus's voice had risen to a squeak; he cleared his throat. "My task to explicate for you the utterance of the god." The recurrence of something near his accustomed singsong restored his confidence. "To gloss upon his message and relay his commands."

  A man in the second row shouted, "It was Pas, wasn't it?"

  Incus nodded, his cheeks trembling. "It was. Lord Pas, the Father of the whorl and the Builder of the Gods." Neither he nor his hearers noticed his mistake.

  "He talked to me," Hammerstone told Auk. His voice held a dawning joy. "I seen him once, way off, reviewing the parade. This time he talked to me. Like I'm talking to you, and he gave me a order."

  Auk nodded numbly.

  "Patera will have heard, won't he? Sure he will. We'll talk about this years from now, how Pas talked to us and gave me the order. Me and Patera."

  "Ere I commence my exegesis," his voice was stronger, and carried an authority that stilled the congregation, "I shall confide to you something not generally known, which I myself learned only today. There has been no announcement, but I was not sworn to secrecy. On Molpsday Great Pas granted a theophany to the-the aged worthy augur who has for innumerable decades served us as Prolocutor. His office has been attorned to me by Saving Scylla, who would doubtless see his protracted devotion rewarded with that freedom from concerns which is the perfumed ointment of superannuity. It was that, I confess, which sent me in search of tranquility, as I have related. The disquieting intelligence that the Father of the Seven had manifested himself to one whom I have been only too ready to reckon a rival."

  "Did he say som
ething about me?" Half pleading and half threatening, Auk closed upon the ambion. "He said something, didn't he? What was it?" Hammerstone interposed himself.

  "I prayed to Pas," Incus continued, wondering. "I urged the justice of my cause with tears. Now how clearly do I see this lesser plan, the plan that is to set in motion his greater Plan! First he bestowed his benefaction upon the Prolocutor that was, then upon the new." Incus indicated his own stomach. "It is the hallmark of the actions of the gods that, however unanticipated they may be, once done they are seen to be both perfect and inevitable.

  "And now I confide the divine utterance that Great Pas has vouchsafed to us."

  High above the mummy-colored bead that was General Saba's airship, but five hundred cubits below the low winter clouds, Fliers whom Caldé Silk was just then likening to a flight of storks rode the blustering north wind.

  From their center, Sciathan studied his companions. Their eyes were on the clouds, as he had expected, or else the sere brown fields, the silver threads of streams, or the shrinking lake; no mere emergency could overcome the habits of years, no urging-not even a god's-bring them to consider the teeming Cargo below relevant.

  Sciathan himself glanced up at the clouds and scanned his instruments before abandoning both. A long yellow-brown column of marchers was approaching the city from the south. He had glimpsed similar parades often, giving little thought to them and what they might portend; soldiers and troopers could be halted by avalanches, turned aside by floods and forest fires, and dispersed by storms not much less readily than flotillas. No host had ever succeeded in crossing the Mountains That Look At Mountains; and in all likelihood, none ever would. Here in the hold, hordes like the one below would be a different matter.

  Chapter 4

  Swords of Sphigx

  Standing stiffly in his official cloak of tea-colored velvet, Caldé Silk cursed himself mentally for not providing chairs-or rather, for not seeing to it that chairs were provided. He had supposed (such, he told himself, had been his lamentable innocence, his utter unfitness for the position thrust upon him) that he, with Quetzal, Oosik, and Saba-and Maytera Mint, if she could be found-would take their places on this platform, at which the force dispatched by Trivigaunte to the aid of Viron would appear.