Nightside the Long Sun tbotls-1

by Gene Wolfe

  He slapped his pockets until he found Blood’s two cards in the one that held the ball. He took them out to look at, then replaced them. They had been below the ball when he had been searched, and the ball had saved them. For what?

  Hyacinth’s needler had fallen to the floater’s carpeted floor. He retrieved it and put it into his pocket with the cards, then sat squeezing the ball between his fingers. It was said to strengthen the hands. Minute lights he could not see burned on, burning beyond the skylands, burning beneath his feet, unwinking and remote, illuminating something bigger than the whorl.

  Doctor Crane’s mystery gouged his back. He leaned forward. “What time is it, driver?”

  “Quarter past three, Patera.”

  He had done what the Outsider had wanted. Or at least he had tried—perhaps he had failed. As though a hand had drawn aside a veil, he realized that his manteion would live for another month now—a month at least, because anything might happen in a month. Was it possible that he had in fact accomplished what the Outsider had desired? His mind filled with a rollicking joy.

  The floater leaned to the left as it rounded a bend in the road. Here were farms and fields and houses, all liquid, all swirling past as they breasted the phantom current. A hill rose in a great, brown-green wave, already breaking into a skylit froth of fence rails and fruit trees. The floater plunged down the other side and shot across a ford.

  * * *

  Musk adjusted the shutter of his dark lantern until the eight-sided spot of light remaining was smaller than its wick and oddly misshapen. His key turned softly in the well-oiled padlock; the door opened with a nearly inaudible creak.

  The tiercel nearest the door stirred upon its perch, turning its hooded head to look at the intruder it could not see. On the farther side of a partition of cotton netting, the merlin that had been Musk’s first hawk, unhooded, blinked and roused. There was a tinkle of tiny bells—gold bells that Blood had given Musk to mark some now-forgotten occasion three years ago. Beyond the merlin, the gray-blue peregrine might have been a painted carving.

  The end of the mews was walled off with netting. The big bird sat its roweled perch there, immobile as the falcon, still immature but showing in every line a stength that made the falcon seem a toy.

  Musk untied the netting and stepped in. He could not have said how he knew that the big bird was awake, and yet he did. Softly he said, “Ha, hawk.”

  The big bird lifted its hooded head, its grotesque crown of scarlet plumes swaying with the motion.

  “Ha, hawk,” Must repeated as he stroked it with a turkey feather.

  THE BOARDER ON THE LARDER

  As they sped across a field of stubble the driver inquired, “Ever ridden in one of these before, Patera?”

  Drowsily, Silk shook his head before he realized that the driver could not see him. He yawned and attempted to stretch, brought up sharply by pain from his right arm and the gouged flesh of his chest and belly. “No, never. But I rode in a boat once. Out on the lake, you know, fishing all day with a friend and his father. This reminds me of that. This machine of yours is about as wide as the boat was, and only a little bit shorter.”

  “I like it better—boats rock too much for me. Where are we going, Patera?”

  “You mean…?” The road (or perhaps another road) had appeared again. Seeming to gather its strength like a horse, the floater soared over the wall of dry-laid stones that had barred them from it.

  “Where should I drop you? Musk said to take you back to the city.”

  Silk edged forward on the seat, knowing himself stupid with fatigue and struggling against it. “They didn’t tell you?”

  “No, Patera.”

  Where was it he wanted to go? He recalled his mother’s house, and the wide, deep windows of his bedroom, with borage growing just beyond the sills. “At my manteion, please. On Sun Street. Do you know where it is?”

  “I know where Sun Street is, Patera. I’ll find it.”

  Here was a cartload of firewood bound for the market. The floater dipped and swerved, and it was behind them. The man on the cart would be first at the market, Silk thought; but what was the point of being first at the market with a load of firewood? Surely there would be wood there already, wood that had not sold the day before. Perhaps the man on the cart wanted to do a little buying of his own when he had disposed of his cargo.

  “Going to be another hot one, Patera.”

  That was it, of course. The man on the cart—Silk turned to look back at him, but he was gone already; there was only a boy leading a mule, a laden mule and a small boy whom he had never noticed at all. The man on the cart had wanted to avoid the heat. He would sell what he had brought and sit drinking till twilight in the Cock or someplace like it. In the coolest tavern he could find, no doubt, and spend most of the money his wood had brought him, sleep on the seat of his cart as it made its slow way home. What if he, Silk, slept now on this capacious seat, which was so tantalizingly soft? Would not the driver, would not this old half-magical floater take him where he wanted to go in any event? Would the driver rob him while he slept, find Blood’s two cards, Hyacinth’s golden needler, and the thing that he still did not dare to look at, the thing—he felt he had guessed its identity while he still sat in that jewel box of a room to one side of Blood’s reception hall. Would he not be robbed? Had the man upstairs, the man asleep in the chair near the stair ever gotten home, and had he gotten home safely? Many men must have slept in this floater, men who had drunk too heavily.

  Silk felt that he himself had drunk too heavily; he had sipped from both drinks.

  Blood was certainly a thief; he had admitted as much himself. But would Blood employ a driver who would rob his guests? It seemed unlikely. He, Silk, could sleep here—sleep now in safety, if he wished. But he was very hungry.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Patera?”

  “Go to Sun Street. I’ll direct you from there. I know the way.”

  The driver glanced over his shoulder, a burly young man whose beard was beginning to show. “Where it crosses Trade. Will that be all right, Patera?”

  “Yes.” Silk felt his own chin, rough as the driver’s looked. “Fine.” He settled back in the soft seat, almost oblivious of the object beneath his tunic but determined not to sleep until he had washed, eaten, and wrung any advantage that might be gained from his present position. The driver had not been told he was Blood’s prisoner; that was clear from everything he said, and it presented an opportunity that might not come again.

  But in point of fact he was a prisoner no longer. He had been freed, though no fuss had been made about it, when Blood and Musk had taken him to this floater. Now, whether he liked it or not, he was a sort of factor of Blood’s—an agent through whom Blood would obtain money. Silk weighed the term in his mind and decided it was the correct one. He had given himself wholly to the gods, with a holy oath; now his allegiance was inescapably divided, whether he liked it or not. He would give the twenty-six thousand cards he got (if indeed he got them) not to the gods but to Blood, though he would be acting in the gods’ behalf. Certainly he would be Blood’s factor in the eyes of the Chapter and the whorl, should either the Chapter or the whorl learn of whatever he would do.

  Blood had made him his factor, creating this situation for his own profit. (Thoughtfully, Silk stroked his cheek, feeling the roughness of his newly grown beard again.) For Blood’s own personal profit, as was only to be expected; but their relationship bound them both, like all relationships. He was Blood’s factor whether he liked it or not, but also Blood’s factor whether Blood liked it or not. He had made good use of the relationship already when he had demanded the return of Hyacinth’s needler. Indeed, Blood had acknowledged it still earlier when he had told Doctor Crane to look in at the manteion.

  Further use might be made of it as well.

  A factor, but not a trusted factor to be sure; Blood might conceivably plan to kill him once he had turned over the entire twenty-si
x thousand, if he could find no further use for him; thus it would be wise to employ this temporary relationship to gain some sort of hold on Blood before it was ended. That was something more to keep in mind.

  And the driver, who no doubt knew so many things that might be of value, did not know that.

  “Driver,” Silk called, “are you familiar with a certain house on Lamp Street? It’s yellow, I believe, and there’s a pastry cook’s across the street.”

  “Sure am, Patera.”

  “Could we go past it, please? I don’t think it will be very much out of our way.”

  The floater slowed for a trader with a string of pack mules. “I can’t wait, Patera, if you’re going to be inside very long.”

  “I’m not even going to get out,” Silk assured him. “I merely wish to see it.”

  Still watching the broadening road, the driver nodded his satisfaction. “Then I’ll be happy to oblige you, Patera. No trouble.”

  The countryside seemed to flow past. No wonder, Silk thought, that the rich rode in floaters when distances were too great for their litters. Why, on donkeys this had taken hours!

  “Have a good time, Patera? You stayed awfully late.”

  “No,” Silk said, then reconsidered. “In a way I did, I suppose. It was certainly very different from everything I’m accustomed to.”

  The driver chuckled politely.

  “I did have a good time, in a sense,” Silk decided. “I enjoyed certain parts of my visit enormously, and I ought to be honest enough to admit it.”

  The driver nodded again. “Only not everything. Yeah, I know just what you mean.”

  “My view is colored, no doubt, by the fact that I fell and injured my ankle. It was really quite painful, and it’s still something of a discomfort. A Doctor Crane very kindly set the bone for me and applied this cast, free of charge. I imagine you must know him. Your master told me that Doctor Crane has been with him for the past four years.”

  “Do I! The old pill-pounder and me have floated over a whorl of ground together. Don’t make much sense sometimes, but he’ll talk you deaf if you don’t watch out, and ask more questions than the hoppies.”

  Silk nodded, conscious again of the object Crane had slipped into his waistband. “I found him friendly.”

  “I bet you did. You didn’t ride out with me, did you, Patera?”

  Blood had several floaters, obviously, just as he had implied. Silk said, “No, not with you. I came with another man, but he left before I did.”

  “I didn’t think so. See, I tell them about Doc Crane on the way out. Sometimes they get worried about the girls and boys. Know what I mean, Patera?”

  “I think so.”

  “So I tell them forget it. We got a doctor right there to check everybody over, and if they got some kind of little problem of their own … I’m talking about the older bucks, Patera, you know? Why, maybe he could help them out. It’s good for Doc, because sometimes they give him something. And it’s good for me, too. I’ve had quite a few of them thank me for telling them, after the party.”

  “I fear I have nothing to give you, my son,” Silk said stiffly. It was perfectly true, he assured himself; the two cards in his pocket were already spent, or as good as spent. They would buy a fine victim for Scylsday, less than two days off.

  “That’s all right, Patera. I didn’t figure you did. It’s a gift to the Chapter. That’s how I look at it.”

  “I can give you my blessing, however, when we separate. And I will.”

  “That’s all right, Patera,” the driver said. “I’m not much for sacrifice and all that.”

  “All the more reason you may require it, my son,” Silk told him, and could not keep from smiling at the sepulchral tones of his own voice. It was a good thing the driver could not see him! With Blood’s villa far behind them, the burglar was fading and the augur returning; he had sounded exactly like Patera Pike.

  Which was he, really? He pushed aside the thought.

  “Now this here, this feels just like a boat, and no mistake. Don’t it, Patera?”

  Their floater was rolling like a barrel as it dodged pedestrians and rattling, mule-drawn wagons. The road had become a street in which narrow houses vied for space.

  Silk found it necessary to grasp the leather-covered bar on the back of the driver’s seat, a contrivance he had previously assumed was intended only to facilitate boarding and departure. “How high will these go?” he asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Four cubits empty, Patera. Or that’s what this one’ll do, anyhow. That’s how you test them—run them up as high as they’ll go and measure. The higher she floats, the better shape everything’s in.”

  Silk nodded to himself. “You couldn’t go over one of these wagons, then, instead of around it?”

  “No, Patera. We got to have ground underneath to push against, see? And we’d be getting too far away from it. You remember that wall we cleared when I took the shortcut?”

  “Certainly.” Silk tightened his grip on the bar. “It must have been three cubits at least.”

  “Not quite, Patera. It’s a little lower than that at the place where I went over. But what I was going to say was we couldn’t have done it if we’d been full of passengers like we were coming out. We’d have had to stay on the road then.”

  “I understand. Or at any rate, I think I do.”

  “But look up ahead, Patera.” The floater slowed. “See him lying in the road?”

  Silk sat up straight to peer over the driver’s liveried shoulder. “I do now. By Phaea’s fair face, I hope he’s not dead.”

  “Drunk more likely. Watch now, and we’ll float right across him. You won’t even feel him, Patera. Not no more than he’ll feel you.”

  Silk clenched his teeth, but as promised felt nothing. When the prostrate man was behind them, he said, “I’ve seen floaters go over childen like that. Children playing in the street. Once a child was hit in the forehead by the cowling, right in front of our palaestra.”

  “I’d never do that, Patera,” the driver assured Silk virtuously. “A child might hold up his arm and get it in the blowers.”

  Silk hardly heard him. He attempted to stand, bumped his head painfully against the floater’s transparent canopy, and compromised on a crouch. “Wait! Not so fast, please. Do you see that man with the two donkeys? Stop for a moment and let me out. I want a word with him.”

  “I’ll just put down the canopy, Patera. That’ll be a little safer.”

  Auk glanced sourly at the floater when it settled onto the roadway beside him. His eyes widened when he saw Silk.

  “May every god bless you tonight,” Silk began. “I want to remind you of what you promised in the tavern.”

  Auk opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.

  “You gave me your word that you’d come to manteion next Scylsday, remember? I want to make certain you’ll keep that promise, not only for your sake but for mine. I must talk to you again.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Auk nodded. “Maybe tomorrow if I’m not too busy. Scylsday for sure. Did you…?”

  “It went precisely as you had predicted,” Silk told him. “However, our manteion’s safe for the time being, I believe. Good night, and Phaea bless you. Knock at the manse if you don’t find me in the manteion.”

  Auk said something more; but the driver had overheard Silk’s farewell, and the transparent dome of the canopy had risen between them; it latched, and Auk’s voice was drowned by the roar of the blowers.

  “You better watch your step, talking to characters like that, Patera,” the driver remarked with a shake of his head. “That sword’s just for show, and there’s a needier underneath that dirty tunic. Want to bet?”

  “You would win such a bet, I’m certain,” Silk admitted, “but no needier can turn a good man to evil. Not even devils can do that.”

  “That why you want to see Orchid’s place, Patera? I kind of wondered.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understa
nd you.” Crane’s mystery had just given Silk a particularly painful job. He wiggled it into a new position as he spoke. Deciding that it would be harmless to reveal plans Blood knew of already, he added, “I’m to meet your master there tomorrow afternoon, and I want to be certain I go to the correct house. That’s the yellow house, isn’t it? Orchid’s? I believe he mentioned a woman named Orchid.”

  “That’s right, Patera. She owns it. Only he owns it, really, or maybe he owns her. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so. Yes, of course.” Silk recalled that it was Musk, not Blood, whose name appeared on the deed to his manteion. “Possibly Blood holds a mortgage upon this house, which is in arrears.” Clearly Blood would have to protect his interest in some fashion against the death of the owner of record.

  “I guess so, Patera. Anyhow, you talked about devils, so I thought maybe that was it.”

  The hair at the back of Silk’s neck prickled. It was ridiculous (as if I were a dog, he said to himself later) but there it was; he tried to smooth it with one hand. “It might be useful if you would tell me whatever you know about this business, my son—useful to your master, as well as to me.” How sternly his instructors at the schola had enjoined him, and all the acolytes, never to laugh when someone mentioned ghosts (he had anticipated the usual wide-eyed accounts of phantom footsteps and shrouded figures after Blood’s mention of exorcism) or devils. Perhaps it was only because he was so very tired, but he discovered that there was not the least danger of his laughing now.

  “I never seen anything myself,” the driver admitted. “I hardly ever been inside. You hear this and that. Know what I mean, Patera?”

  “Of course.”

  “Things get messed up. Like, a girl will go to get her best dress, only the sleeves are torn off and it’s all ripped down the front. Sometimes people just, like, go crazy. You know? Then it goes away.”