Litany of the Long Sun (42 page)

"Orpine lies here before us, yet we know that she is not here. We will not see her again in this life. She was kind, beautiful, and generous. Her happiness she shared with us. What her sorrows were we cannot now learn, for she did not trouble others with them but bore their burden alone. That she was favored by Molpe we know, for she died in youth. If you wonder why a goddess should favor her, consider what I have just said. Riches cannot buy the favor of the gods-everything in the whorl is already theirs. Nor can authority command it; we are subject to them, not they to us, and so it shall forever be. We of this sacred city of Viron did not greatly value Orpine, perhaps; certainly we did not value her as her merits deserved. But in the eyes of the all-knowing gods, our valuations mean nothing. In the eyes of the all-knowing gods she was precious."

Silk turned to address the grayish glow of the Sacred Window behind him. "Accept, all you gods, the sacrifice of this fair young woman. Though our hearts are torn, we- her mother" (there was a sudden hum of whispered questions among the mourners) "and her friends-consent."

The mutes, who had remained silent while Silk spoke, shrieked in chorus.

"But speak to us, we beg, of the times to come. Others as well as ours. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, clioose otherwise…" He waited silently, his arms outstretched. As always, there was no sound from the window, no flicker of color.

He let his arms fall to his sides. "We consent still. Speak to us, we beg, through our other sacrifices."

Maytera Marble, who had been waiting just inside the Sun Street door, entered leading the black ewe.

"This fine black ewe is presented to High Hierax, Lord of Death and Orpine's lord hereafter, by Orchid, her mother." Silk drew his sacrificial gauntlets and accepted the bone-hilted knife of sacrifice from Maytera Rose.

Maytera Marble whispered, "The lamb?" and he nodded.

A stab and slash almost too quick to be seen dispatched the ewe. Maytera Mint knelt to catch some of the blood in an earthenware chalice. A moment later she splashed it upon the fire, producing an impressive hiss and a plume of steam. The point of Silk's knife found the joint between two vertebrae, and the black ewe's head came off cleanly, still streaming blood. He held it up, then laid it on the fire. All four of the hoofs followed in quick succession.

Knife in hand, he turned again toward the Sacred Window. "Accept, O High Hierax, the sacrifice of this fine ewe. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…"

He let his arms fall to his sides. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."

Lifting the ewe's carcass to the edge of the altar, he opened the paunch. The science of augury proceeded from certain fixed rules, though there was room for individual interpretation as well. Studying the tight convolutions of the ewe's entrails and the blood-red liver, Silk shuddered. Maytera Mint, who knew something of augury too, as all the sibyls did, had turned her face away.

"Hierax warns us that many more are to walk the path that Orpine has walked." Silk struggled to keep his voice expressionless. "Plague, war, or famine await us. Let us not say that the immortal gods have permitted these evils to strike us without warning." There was an uneasy stir among the worshipers, "That being so, let us be doubly thankful to the gods, who graciously share their meal with us.

"Orchid, you have presented this gift, and so have first claim upon the sacred meal it provides. Do you want it? Or a part of it?"

Orchid shook her head.

"In that case, the sacred meal will be shared among us. Let all those among us who wish to do so come forward and claim a portion." Silk pitched his voice to the laymen at the Sun Street entrance, although their continued presence went far to answer his question. "Are there more outside? Many more?"

A man replied, "Hundreds, Patera!"

"Then I must ask those who share in the sacred meal to leave at once. One additional person will be admitted for each who leaves."

At every sacrifice that Silk had previously performed, those who came to the altar had gotten no more than a single thin slice. This was his chance to indulge his charitable nature, and he did-an entire leg to one, half the loin to another, and the whole breast to a third; the neck he passed to one of the women who cooked for the palaestra, a rack to an elderly widow whose house was not fifty strides from the manse. The twinges in his ankle were a small price to pay for the smiles and thanks of the recipients.

"This black lamb I myself offer to Tenebrous Tartaros, in fulfillment of a vow."

The lamb dispatched, Silk addressed the Sacred Window. "Accept, O Tenebrous Tartaros, the sacrifice of this lamb. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…"

He let his arms fall to his sides. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."

The black lamb's entrails were somewhat more favorable. "Tartaros, Lord of Darkness, warns us that many of us must soon go into a realm he rules, though we shall emerge again into the light. Those of you who will are welcome to come forward and claim a portion of this sacred meal."

The black cock struggled in Maytera Marble's grasp, freeing and flapping its wings, always a bad sign. Silk offered it entire, filling the manteion with the stink of burning feathers.

"This gray ram is offered by Auk. Since it is neither black nor white, it cannot be offered to the Nine, singly or collectively. It can, however, be offered to all the gods or to some specific minor god. To whom are we to offer it, Auk? You'll have to speak loudly, I'm afraid."

Auk rose. "To that one you're always talking about, Patera."

"To the Outsider. May he speak to us through augury!" Suddenly and inexplicably Silk was overjoyed. At his signal, Maytera Rose and Maytera Mint heaped the altar with fragrant cedar until its flames reached beyond the god gate and leaped above the roof.

"Accept, O Obscure Outsider, the sacrifice of this fine ram. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…"

He let his arms fall to his sides. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."

The ram's head burst in the fire as he knelt to examine the entrails. "This god speaks to us freely," he announced after a protracted study. "I do not believe I have ever seen so much written in a single beast. There is a message here for you personally, Auk, by which I mean that it carries the sign of the giver. May I pronounce it now? Or would you prefer that I impart it to you in private? I would call it good news."

From his place on a front bench. Auk rumbled, "Whatever you think best, Patera."

"Very well then. The Outsider indicates that in the past you have acted alone, but that time is nearly over. You will stand at the head of a host of brave men. They and you will triumph."

Auk's mouth pursed in a silent whistle.

"There is a message here for me as well. Since Auk has been so forthright, I can do no less. I am to do the will of the god who speaks, and the will of Pas as well. Certainly I will strive to do both, and from the manner in which they are written here, I believe that they are one." Silk hesitated, his teeth scraping his lower lip; the joy that he had felt a moment before had melted like the ice around Orpine's body. "There is a weapon here as well, a weapon aimed at my heart. I will try to prepare." He drew a deep breath, fearful, yet ashamed of his fear.

"Lastly, there is a message for all of us: When danger threatens, we are to find safety between narrow walls. Does anyone know what that may mean?"

Though his legs felt weak, Silk rose and scanned the sea of faces before him. "The man sitting near Tartaros's image. Have you a suggestion, my son?" The man in question spoke, inaudibly to Silk.

"Would you stand, please? Let us hear you."

"There's old tunnels underneath of the city, Patera. Fallin' down in places, an' some's full of water. My bunch hit one last week, diggin' for the new fisc. Only they had us to fill it in so nobody'd get hurt. Pretty narrow down there, an' everything shiprock."

Silk nodded. "I've heard of them before. They could be a place of refuge, I suppose, and they may well be what is meant."

A woman said, "In our houses. There's nobody here that has a big house."

Orchid turned in her seat to glare at her.

"In a boat," suggested a man on the other side of the aisle.

"Those are all possibilities as well. Let us keep the Outsider's message in mind. I feel certain that its meaning will be made apparent to us when the time comes."

Maytera Marble was standing at the back of the manteion with a pair of doves. Silk said, "Auk has first claim on the sacred meal. Auk? Do you wish to claim all or a portion of it, my son?"

Auk shook his head, and Silk swiftly divided the ram's carcass, casting its heart, lungs and intestines into the altar fire when everything else was gone.

Maytera Marble held one dove while Silk presented the other to the Sacred Window. "Accept, O Comely Kypris, the sacrifice of these fine white doves. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…"

He let his arms fall to his sides. "We consent. Speak to us, we beg, through this sacrifice."

A single deft motion severed the head of the first dove. Silk consigned it to the flames, then held the fluttering, crimson and white body so that the blazing cedar was sprayed with blood. At first he thought the staring eyes and open mouths of the mourners and the throng who had come to worship or in hope of sharing Orpine's mortuary sacrifices no more than a reaction to something that had happened at the altar. Perhaps his gauntlets or his robe had taken fire, or old Maytera Rose had fallen.

MAYTERA MARBLE SAW the Sacred Window blaze with color, and heard an indistinct voice. A god spoke, as Pas had in Patera Pike's time. She fell to her knees, and in so doing involuntarily freed the dove she had been holding. It shot toward the roof, and then, seeming almost to ride the sacred flames, rose through the god gate and was gone. An unshaven man in the second row, seeing her upon her knees, knelt too. In a moment more, the bespangled, brilliantly dressed young women who had come with Orchid were kneeling, too, nudging one another and tugging at the skirts of those who still sat transfixed. When Maytera Marble raised her head at last to see, for what would almost certainly be the final time in her life, the swirling colors of present divinity, Patera Silk was beside her, his hands lifted in supplication.

"Come back!" Silk implored the dancing colors and that gentle thunder. "Oh, come back!"

MAYTERA MINT SAW the goddess's face dearly and heard her voice, and even Maytera Mint, who knew so little of the world and wished to know less, knew that both exceeded in beauty any mortal woman's. They were also very much like her own, and seemed to become more so as she looked, until at last, moved by reverence and superabundant modesty, she closed her eyes. It was the greatest sacrifice that she had ever made, though she had made thousands, of which five at least had been very great indeed.

MAYTERA ROSE WAS the last of the three sibyls to kneel, out of no lack of reverence, but because kneeling involved certain body parts with which she had been born-parts that were now in a strict sense dead, though they still functioned and would continue to function for years to come. Echidna had blinded her to the gods, the goddess's just punishment, and so she saw and heard nothing, though the holy hues danced again and again across and down the Sacred Window. In the deep tones of the divine voice, tones that she found herself comparing to those of a cello, she occasionally caught a word or a phrase. Young Patera Silk (who was always so careless, and never more careless than when dealing with matters of the greatest importance) had dropped the knife of sacrifice, the knife that Maytera Rose had cleaned and oiled and sharpened now for almost a century, still dyed with the dove's blood. Stretching, Maytera Rose retrieved it. Its bone handle had not cracked; its blade did not even seem to have been soiled by its brief contact with the floor, though she wiped it on her sleeve as a precaution. Absently, she tested the point against the tip of her thumb as she listened and sometimes made out, or nearly made out, a short sentence played by an orchestra too wonderful for this poor whorl, this whorl which was, like Maytera Rose herself, worn out and worn away, past its time which had never come, too old, though it was not even as old as Maytera Marble and though it was so much nearer to death. Cellos of the woods of Mainframe, flutes of diamond. Maytera herself, old Maytera Rose who was so tired that she no longer knew that she was tired, had once played the flute. She had not thought other flute since the shame of blood. Pain's eaten it away, she thought, tortured it to silence, though once it sounded sweetly, oh, so sweetly, at evening.

Somehow old Maytera Rose sensed that this goddess was not Echidna. Thelxiepeia, maybe, or even Scalding Scylla. Scylla was another favorite of hers, and this was Scylsday, after all.

THE VOICE WAS stilled. Slowly, the colors faded like the beautiful and complex tinctures of river-washed stones, which fade to nothing as the stones dry in the sunshine. Still on his knees, Silk bowed, his forehead touching the floor of the sanctuary. A murmur rose from the mourners and worshipers and soared until it was like the roaring of a storm. Silk glanced over his shoulder at them. One of the rough-looking men sitting with Orchid appeared to be shouting as he shook his fist at the Sacred Window, his eyes bulging and his face purple with some emotion at which Silk could only guess. A lovely young woman with curls as black as Orchid's beads was dancing in the center aisle to a music played for her alone.

Silk stood and limped slowly to the ambion. "All of you are entitled to hear-"