Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

"The old man looked up, and seeing him pointed to the carts, wagons, and litters that passed them every few seconds. `If the wrongs I have done the gods were visible,' he said, `there would be more than those, and four men would not be enough to weep for them all.' "

They walked on in silence after that. Occasionally they passed hovels built of salvaged timbers, so that they appeared (until they were examined closely) to have been painted black. A game among children was in progress in the next street over; the shrill cries of the participants reached them like the twittering of sparrows in a distant tree.

At last Pig asked, "That ther h'end, bucky?"

He swallowed and forced himself to speak. "It is."

"Somethin' fashin' yer?"

"Boy home?" Oreb demanded. "Find home?"

"Yes, he did." He wiped his eyes. "But he was not the same boy." Under his breath he added, "And that is not the same home."

Soft though the words had been, Pig had overheard them. "See yer house, dinna yer?"

Unable to speak, he nodded; Oreb translated: "Say yes."

"This is Silver Street. We-we were walking along Silver Street, and I didn't know it. I couldn't be sure. Pig?"

"Aye?"

"Pig, I spoke of offenses against the gods. I don't really care whether Sphigx and Scylla and the rest like what I do."

"Said yer would nae break ther statues."

`Because they didn't belong to me. And because they wereare-art, and to wantonly destroy art is always evil. But, Pig…" He halted.

"Auld Pig's yer pal, bucky."

"I know. That is what makes this so very hard. You were blind when you left your home in the Mountains That Look at Mountains. So you told me."

"When he left na braithrean. Aye."

"You came all this way on foot, though you are blind."

"Aye, bucky. Ho, he had some tumbles."

"Then, Pig, I am going to ask a favor, one I have no right to ask. It is something I will always reproach myself-"

"No talk!"

"For. But I'm going to ask it just the same. I brought you here. I know that. You wouldn't be in this ruined quarter if it were not for me. You might not be in Viron at all."

"H'out wi' h'it, bucky."

"I thought I was going to-to show you where I used to live. The manse, and the house where I grew up. My father's shop. Where those things once stood. I would tell you something about them, what they-those places meant to me."

He wanted to shut his eyes, but made himself watch Pig's face. "Instead, I'm asking this. Hound is getting a room in an inn, and would welcome either of us-both of us, I ought to say, together or separately. The inn is Ermine's, and it's on a hill, the Palatine, in the center of the city. Would you be willing to make your way there alone? Please?"

Pig smiled. "That h'all, bucky?"

"I'll join you there, I swear, before shadelow. But I want to-I must be alone here. I simply have to."

Pig's long arms groped for him, one big hand still grasping the sheathed sword. " 'Tis h'all right, bucky. Needed me h'on ther roads. Noo yer need me ter be gone. Dinna fash yerself. Ter much hurtin' h'in they whorl h'already, an' sae guid-bye." Pig turned away.

"I'll rejoin you, I promise," he repeated. "Tell Hound I'm coming, please, but tell him that he is not to wait supper for me.

"Go with Pig, Oreb. Help him."

Oreb croaked unhappily, but flew.

His master stood in the street, leaning on the knobbed staff, and watched them go, unable to take a single step until they were out of sight, the big man moving so slowly while towering over the few badly dressed men and women he passed, the black bird seeming unwontedly small and vulnerable upon the big man's shoulder, its dabs of scarlet the only spots of color in the ruined landscape of blacks and grays.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the tap-tap-tapping of the brass-tipped scabbard faded. The big man stopped a passerby and spoke, too distant already to be overheard. The passerby answered, pointing up Silver Street toward the market, pointing, it seemed likely, to inform the blind man who had stopped him, possibly for the bird. Their slow progress resumed until at last they were gone, faded into the black, the gray.

He himself turned then and strode rapidly away, the bare wooden tip of his staff striking at the rutted surface of the street with every step, rapping stones and splattering mud over his shoes and the cuffs of his ragged brown trousers.

Here the children had played, taking Maytera's clotheslines for jump ropes. They had jumped to Blue some time ago, the sad, halfstarved little girls with the black bangs, with the long black pigtails braided with scraps of bright yarn. To Blue, and some to Green; and those would be, largely, dead.

This fire-blackened shiprock wall, these empty, staring windows, had been the cenoby's once. While the whorl slept Maytera had knelt, not to pray but to scrub this stone step so black with ash indistinguishable from mud. Maytera Mint had dressed and undressed in there, in a darkened room behind a locked door and drawn blinds, had mended worn underclothes and covered her virginal bed with an old oilcloth tablecloth, knowing that the merest shower would lend new waters to the sagging belly of her ceiling.

That ceiling would sag no more; the leaking roof on which Maytera had climbed to watch the Trivigaunti airship was all leak now, and the broad, dark door of sturdy oak that Maytera Rose had barred each night before the last thread of sun vanished had been burned long ago-whether for firewood or in the fire that had swept the quarter when the war with Trivigaunte began scarcely mattered. Anyone might go into the cenoby now, and no one wanted to.

The stone wall that had separated the garden from the street was largely intact, though the gate and rusted padlock were gone. Inside, weeds and blackberry brambles, and-yes-a straggling grape vine climbing the blackened stump of the fig tree. Enough of their arbor remained to sit on. He sat, leaned back, and shut his eyes; and in time a youthful sibyl sat down across from him, extracted a recorder from one of the voluminous pockets of her black bombazine habit, and began to play.

Sun Street had taken him to the market, and Manteion Street to the Palatine. Here was the Calde's Palace, its fallen wall repaired with new mortar and stones that almost matched.

"Patera… Patera?" The voice was soft yet thick-oddly wrong. He looked around, not so much to find the woman who spoke as to locate the augur she addressed.

"Patera… Patera Silk?"

He stepped back and scanned the windows. The shadow of a head and shoulders showed at one on the topmost floor. "Mucor?" He tried to keep his voice low, while making it loud enough to be heard fifty or sixty cubits overhead.

"She's not here… She's not here, Patera."

It's the bird, he thought. The bird makes her think I'm Silk. He realized even as he formed the thought that Oreb was gone, that he had sent Oreb away with Pig.

"Please… "

He had not heard the rest, yet he knew what he had been asked to do. The massive doors were locked. He banged them with the heavy brass knocker, each blow as loud as the report of a slug gun.

There was no answering sound from within the palace; and at last he turned away, tramping wearily down the balustraded steps to the street. The high window was empty now, and the thick, soft voice (female but not feminine) silent. He squinted up at the motionless sun. The shade was almost down; the market would be closing. He had told-had promised-Pig that he would rejoin him in Ermine's before evening, but Ermine's was only two or three streets away.

He had just crossed the first when fingers, thin but hard and strong, closed on his elbow. He turned to see a slight, stooped figure no larger than a child, muffled in what appeared to be sacking. "Please… Please, Patera. Please, won't you talk to… Please won't you talk to me?"