by Gene Wolfe
Silk paused once more, both hands braced upon the old, cracked stone ambion. The tarnished sunlight that streamed through the lofty window above the wide Sun Street door was perceptibly less brilliant now. “Thus the Writings have made it abundantly clear that your palaestra will not be sold—not for taxes, or any other reason. I’ve heard that there is a rumor that it will be, and that many of you believe it. I repeat, that is not the case.”
For a moment he basked in their smiles.
“Now I’ll tell you about the meaning that this passage holds for me. It was I who opened the Writings, you see, and so there was a message for me as well as for all of us here. Today, while you were studying, I went to market. There I purchased a fine speaking bird, a night chough, for a private sacrifice—one that I shall make when you have gone home.
“I’ve already told you how, when I bought the lambs you enjoyed so much, I hoped that a god, pleased with us, would come to this Window, as gods appeared here in the past. And I tried to show you how foolish that was. Another gift, a far greater gift, was given me instead—a gift that all the lambs in the market could not buy. I’ve said that I’m not going to tell you about it today, but I will tell you that it wasn’t because of my prayers, or the sacrifices, or any other good work of mine that I received it. But receive it I did.”
Old Maytera Rose coughed, a dry, sceptical sound from the mechanism that had replaced her larynx before Silk had spoken his first word.
“I knew that I, and I alone, must offer a sacrifice of thanks for that, though I had already spent all of the money that I had on the lambs. I would like very much to explain to you now that I had some wise plan for dealing with my dilemma—with my problem—but I didn’t. Knowing only that a victim was necessary, I dashed off to the market, trusting in the merciful gods. Nor did they fail me. On the way I met a stranger who provided me with the price of an excellent victim, the speaking night chough I told you about earlier, a bird very like a raven.
“I found out, you see, that birds are not sold for a song. And I was given a sign—such is the generosity of the gracious gods to those who petition them—that a god will indeed come to this Sacred Window when I have made my sacrifice. It may be a long time, as I told Kit, so we must not be impatient. We must have faith, and remember always that the gods have other ways of speaking to us, and that if our Windows have fallen silent, these others have not. In omens and dreams and visions, the gods speak to us as they did when our parents and grandparents were young. Whenever we are willing to provide a victim, they speak to us plainly through augury, and the Writings are always here for us, to be consulted in a moment whenever we have need of them. We should be ashamed to say, as some people sometimes do, that in this age we are like boats without rudders.”
Thunder rumbled through the windows, louder even than the bawlings of the beggars and vendors on Sun Street; the children stirred uneasily at the sound. After leading them in a brief prayer, Silk dismissed them.
Already the first hot, heavy drops of the storm were turning the yellow dust to mud beyond the manteion’s doors. Children scurried off up or down Sun Street, none lingering this afternoon, as they sometimes did, to gossip or play.
The three sibyls had remained inside to assist at his sacrifice. Silk jogged from the manteion back to the manse, pulled on leather sacrificial gauntlets, and took the night chough from its cage. It struck at his eyes like an adder, its long, crimson beak missing by a finger’s width.
He caught its head in one gauntleted hand, reminding himself grimly that many an augur had been killed by the victim he had intended to sacrifice, that scarcely a year passed without some unlucky augur, somewhere in the city, being gored by a bull or a stag.
“Don’t try that again, you bad bird.” He spoke half to himself. “Don’t you know you’ll be accursed forever if you harm me? You’ll be stoned to death, and your spirit handed over to devils.”
The night chough’s bill clacked; its wings beat vainly until he trapped its struggling body beneath his left arm.
* * *
Back in the dim and airless heat of the manteion, the sibyls had kindled the sacrificial fire on the altar. When Silk entered, a solemn procession of one down the central aisle, they began their slow dance, their wide black skirts flapping, their tuneless voices lifted in an eerie, ritual wail that was as old as the whorl itself.
The fire was a small one, and its fragrant split cedar was already burning fast; Silk told himself that he would have to act quickly if his sacrifice were not to take place when the flames were dying, always a bad omen.
Passing the bird quickly over the fire, he pronounced the shortest invocation and gave his instructions in a rush of uncadenced words: “Bird, you must speak to every god and goddess you encounter, telling them of our faith and of our great love and loyalty. Say too how grateful I am for the immense and undeserved condescension accorded me, and tell them how earnestly we desire their divine presence at this, our Sacred Window.
“Bird, you must speak thus to Great Pas, the Father of the Gods.
“Bird, you must speak thus also to Sinuous Echidna, Great Pas’s consort. You must speak so to Scalding Scylla, to Marvelous Molpe, to Black Tartaros, to Mute Hierax, to Enchanting Thelxiepeia, to Ever-feasting Phaea, to Desert Sphigx, and to any other god that you may encounter in Mainframe—but particularly to the Outsider, who has greatly favored me, saying that for the remainder of my days I will do his will. That I abase myself before him.”
“No, no,” the night chough muttered, as it had in the market. And then, “Please, no.”
Silk pronounced the final words: “Have no speech with devils, bird. Neither are you to linger in any place where devils are.”
Grasping the frantic night chough firmly by the neck, he extended his gauntleted right hand to Maytera Rose, the senior among the sibyls. Into it she laid the bone-hilted knife of sacrifice that Patera Pike had inherited from his own predecessor. Its long, oddly crooked blade was dull with years and the ineradicable stains of blood, but both edges were bright and keen.
The night chough’s beak gaped. It struggled furiously. A last strangled half-human cry echoed from the distempered walls of the manteion, and the wretched night chough went limp in Silk’s grasp. Interrupting the ritual, he held the flaccid body to his ear, then brushed open one blood-red eye with his thumb.
“It’s dead,” he told the wailing women. For a moment he was at a loss for words. Helplessly he muttered, “I’ve never had this happen before. Dead already, before I could sacrifice it.”
They halted their shuffling dance. Maytera Marble said diplomatically, “No doubt it has already carried your thanks to the gods, Patera.”
Maytera Rose sniffed loudly and reclaimed the sacrificial knife.
Little Maytera Mint inquired timidly, “Aren’t you going to burn it, Patera?”
Silk shook his head. “Mishaps of this kind are covered in the rubrics, Maytera, although I admit I never thought I’d have to apply those particular strictures. They state unequivocally that unless another victim can be produced without delay, the sacrifice must not proceed. In other words, we can’t just throw this dead bird into the sacred fire. This could just as well be something that one of the children picked up in the street.”
He wanted to rid himself of it as he spoke—to fling it among the benches or drop it down the chute into which Maytera Marble and Maytera Mint would eventually shovel the still-sacred ashes of the altar fire. Controlling himself with an effort, he added, “All of you have seen more of life than I. Haven’t you ever assisted at a profaned sacrifice before?”
Maytera Rose sniffed again. Like her earlier sniff, it reeked of condemnation; what had happened was unquestionably Patera Silk’s fault, and his alone. It had been he and none other (as the sniff made exquisitely plain), who had chosen this contemptible bird. If only he had been a little more careful, a little more knowledgeable, and above all a great deal more pious—in short, much, much more like poor dear Patera Pik
e—nothing of this shameful kind could possibly have occurred.
Maytera Marble said, “No, Patera, never. May I speak with you when we’re through here, on another topic? In my room in the palaestra, perhaps?”
Silk nodded. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I’ve disposed of this, Maytera.” The temptation to berate himself proved too strong. “I ought to have known better. The Writings warned me; but they left me foolish enough to suppose that my sacrifice might yet be acceptable, even if our Sacred Window remained empty. This will be a salutary lesson for me, Maytera. At least I certainly hope it will be, and it had better be. Thank Phaea that the children weren’t here to see it.”
By this time Maytera Mint had nerved herself to speak. “No one can ever know the mind of the Outsider, Patera. He isn’t like the other gods, who take counsel with one another in Mainframe.”
“But when the gods have spoken so clearly—” Realizing that what he was saying was not to the point, Silk left the thought incomplete. “You’re right, of course, Maytera. His desires have been made plain to me, and this sacrifice was not included among them. In the future I’ll try to confine myself to doing what he’s told me to do. I know I can rely upon all of you to assist me in that, as in everything.”
Maytera Rose did not sniff a third time, mercifully contenting herself with scratching her nose instead. Her nose, her mouth, and her right eye were the most presentable parts of her face; and though they had been molded of some tough polymer, they appeared almost normal. Her left eye, with which she had been born, seemed at once mad and blind, bleared and festering.
While trying to avoid that eye, and wishing (as he so often had since coming to the manteion) that replacements were still available, Silk shifted the night chough from his left hand to his right. “Thank you, Maytera Rose, Maytera Marble, Maytera Mint. Thank you. We’ll do much better next time, I feel certain.” He had slipped off his sacrificial gauntlets; the hated bird felt warm and somehow dusty in his perspiring hands. “In the palaestra, in five minutes or so, Maytera Marble.”
Chapter 3
TWILIGHT
“In here, Patera!”
Silk halted abruptly, nearly slipping as the wet gravel rolled beneath his shoes.
“In the arbor,” Maytera Marble added. She waved, her black-clad arm and gleaming hand just visible through the screening grape leaves.
The first fury of the storm had passed off quickly, but it was still raining, a gentle pattering that settled like a benediction upon her struggling beds of kitchen herbs.
We meet like lovers, Silk thought as he regained his balance and pushed aside the dripping foliage, and wondered for an instant whether she did not think the same.
No. As lovers, he admitted to himself. For he loved her as he had loved his mother, as he might have loved the older sister he had never had, striving to draw forth the shy smile she achieved by an inclination of her head—to win her approval, the approbation of an old sibyl, of a worn-out chem at whom nobody, when he had been small and there had been a lot more chems around, would ever have troubled to glance twice, whom no one but the youngest children ever thought interesting. How lonely he would have been in the midst of the brawling congestion of this quarter, if it had not been for her!
She rose as he entered the arbor and sat again as he sat. He said, “You really don’t have to do that when we’re alone, sib. I’ve told you.”
Maytera Marble tilted her head in such a way that her rigid, metal face appeared contrite. “Sometimes I forget. I apologize, Patera.”
“And I forget that I should never correct you, because I always find out, as soon as it’s too late, that you were right after all. What is it you want to talk to me about, Maytera?”
“You don’t mind the rain?” Maytera Marble looked up at the overarching thatch of vines.
“Of course not. But you must. If you don’t feel like walking all the way to the palaestra, we could go into the manteion. I want to see if the roof still leaks, anyway.”
She shook her head. “Maytera Rose would be upset. She knows that it’s perfectly innocent, but she doesn’t want us meeting in the palaestra, with no one else present. People might talk, you know—the kind of people who never attend sacrifices anyway, and are looking for an excuse. And she didn’t want to come herself, and Maytera Mint’s watching the fire. So I thought out here. It’s not quite so private—Maytera can see us through the windows of the cenoby—and we still have a bit of shelter from the rain.”
Silk nodded. “I understand.”
“You said the rain must make me uncomfortable. That was very kind of you, but I don’t feel it and my clothes will dry. I’ve had no trouble drying the wash lately, but it takes a great deal of pumping to get enough water to do it in. Is the manse’s well still good?”
“Yes, of course.” Seeing her expression, Silk shook his head. “No, not of course. It’s comforting to believe as children do that Pas won’t resist his daughter’s pleas in our behalf much longer, and that he’ll always provide for us. But one never knows, really; we can only hope. If we must have new wells dug, the Church will have to lend us the money, that’s all. If we can’t keep this manteion going without new wells, it will have to.”
Maytera Marble said nothing, but sat with head bowed as though unable to meet his eyes.
“Does it worry you so much, Maytera? Listen, and I’ll tell you a secret. The Outsider has enlightened me.”
Motionless, she might have been a time-smoothed statue, decked for some eccentric commemorative purpose in a sibyl’s black robe.
“It’s true, Maytera! Don’t you believe me?”
Looking up she said, “I believe that you believe you’ve been enlightened, Patera. I know you well, or at least I think I do, and you wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”
“And he told me why—to save our manteion. That’s my task.” Silk stumbled after words. “You can’t imagine how good it feels to be given a task by a god, Maytera. It’s wonderful! You know it’s what you were made for, and your whole heart points toward that one thing.”
He rose, unable to sit still any longer. “If I’m to save our manteion, doesn’t that tell us something? I ask you.”
“I don’t know, Patera. Does it?”
“Yes! Yes, it does. We can apply logic even to the instructions of the gods, can’t we? To their acts and to their words, and we can certainly apply logic to this. It tells us two things, both of major importance. First, that the manteion’s in danger. He wouldn’t have ordered me to save it if it weren’t, would he? So there’s a threat of some sort, and that’s vital for us to know.” Silk strode out into the warm rain to stare east toward Mainframe, the home of the gods.
“The second is even more important, Maytera. It’s that our manteion can be saved. It’s endangered, not doomed, in other words. He wouldn’t have ordered me to save it if that couldn’t be done, would he?”
“Please come in and sit down, Patera,” Maytera Marble pleaded. “I don’t want you to catch cold.”
Silk re-entered the arbor, and she stood.
“You don’t have—” he began, then grinned sheepishly. “Forgive me, Maytera. Forgive me, please. I grow older, learning nothing at all.”
She swung her head from side to side, her silent laugh. “You’re not old, Patera. I watched you play a while today, and none of the boys are as quick as you are.”
“That’s only because I’ve been playing longer,” he said, and they sat down together.
Smiling she clasped his hand in hers, surprising him. The soft skin had worn from the tips of her fingers long ago, leaving bare steel darkened like her thoughts by time, and polished by unending toil. “You and the children are the only things at this manteion that aren’t old. You don’t belong here, neither of you.”
“Maytera Mint’s not old. Not really, Maytera, though I know she’s a good deal older than I am.”
Maytera Marble sighed, a soft hish like the weary sweep of a mop across a terrazzo floor.
“Poor Maytera Mint was born old, I fear. Or taught to be old before she could talk, perhaps. However that may be, she has always belonged here. As you never have, Patera.”
“You believe it’s going to be torn down, too, don’t you? No matter what the Outsider may have told me.”
Reluctantly, Maytera Marble nodded. “Yes, I do. Or as I ought to say, the buildings themselves may remain, although even that appears to be in doubt. But your manteion will no longer bring the gods to the people of this quarter, and our palaestra will no longer teach their children.”
Silk snapped, “What chance would these sprats have—without your palaestra?”
“What chance do children of their class have now?”
He shook his head angrily, and would have liked to paw the ground.
“Such things have happened before, Patera. The Chapter will find new manteions for us. Better manteions, I think, because it would be difficult to find worse ones. I’ll go on teaching and assisting, and you’ll go on sacrificing and shriving. It will be all right.”
“I received enlightenment today,” Silk said. “I’ve told no one except a man I met in the street on my way to the market and you, and neither of you have believed me.”
“Patera—”
“So it’s clear that I’m not telling it very well, isn’t it? Let me see if I can’t do better.” He was silent for a moment, rubbing his cheek.
“I’d been praying and praying for help. Praying mostly to the Nine, of course, but praying to every god and goddess in the Writings at one time or another; and about noon today my prayers were answered by the Outsider, as I’ve told you. Maytera, do you…” His voice quavered, and he found that he could not control it. “Do you know what he said to me, Maytera? What he told me?”
