Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

"I'm not an augur. You're thinking of somebody else."

"You've forgotten… You've forgotten me." The muffled sound that followed might or might not have been a sob. "Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine… Have you forgotten unhappy Olivine, Patera?"

There was something amiss in the angle of her head, and the high, hunched shoulders. Pity almost choked him. "No," he said, "I haven't forgotten you, Olivine." It was not a lie, he told himself fiercely; one could not forget what one had not known.

"You'll bless… You'll bless me?" There was joy in the voice from the sackcloth. "Sacrifice, the way you used… Sacrifice, the way you used to? Father's gone… Father's gone away. He's been gone a long, long time… He's been gone a long, long time, Patera." She was drawing him after her, back toward the Calde's Palace. "There's a… There's a woman? In the north… In the north, Patera."

Someone who might help her, obviously. Someone who might be able to cure whatever disease afflicted the pathetic figure before him. "A wise woman," he hazarded.

"Oh… Oh, yes! Oh, I hope… Oh, I hope so!"

They dodged down a side street. The wall of the Calde's Palace, elegantly varied with high narrow windows in elaborate stone frames, gave way to the almost equally imposing, windowless wall of the Calde's Garden, a wall of heroic stones, rough and misshapen yet fitted like the pieces of a puzzle.

The diminutive, limping figure drew him on far faster than he would willingly have walked. Leprosy? It had been only a word in the Writings to him. There were running sores, or pus oozing from the skin-something disgusting. Good people in the Writings, theodidacts such as Patera Silk particularly, were exceedingly kind to those who suffered this dread disease, which he had heard was rare-had heard from an augur, probably. From someone such as Patera Remora, who had attended the schola.

Abruptly they stopped. A door of iron so low that he would almost have to crawl through like Pig was deeply set between mammoth stones, in a dark little recess that also held an empty bottle and brown, wind-blown leaves. From some recess equally dark within her sackcloth, Olivine produced a brass key bruised with verdigris; there was a dim flash, as of polished steel. Thrust into the iron door, the key rattled and squealed. A bolt thumped solidly, and Olivine whispered, "Quadrifons…

The iron door swung back.

Ducking through the doorway, he had to bend lower still to pass beneath the massive limbs of an ancient oak. Beyond was a bed of bright chrysanthemums, glorious in the last flickering sunshine. Somewhere a fountain played. "I didn't know there were doors like that," he said, sounding inane even to himself. "I mean doors that had to have a word, and a key as well." And then, "That is a sacred name. So sacred that it's hardly ever used. I'm surprised you know it."

She stopped and looked back him. He thought he caught the gleam of thick spectacles between the rough cloth that covered her head and the fold of rough cloth that masked her face. "It's just a… It's just a word. The one for the… The one for the door. My… My mother." (Something deeply pathetic had entered her voice.) "I don't remember… I don't remember her. She was a… She was a sibyl? That's what my father… That's what my father says. She was a… She was a sibyl."

"Would you like to me to tell you about Quadrifons?"

Olivine nodded, the motion almost imperceptible beneath the shadowing oak limbs and the folds of cloth. "Would you… Would you, Patera?"

"I'm not Patera Silk," he said. "You're wrong about that. But I'll tell you what I know, which isn't much."

His back felt as though it might break; kneeling was a great relief. "Quadrifons is the most holy of the minor gods. I mean, he's called that in the Chrasmologic Writings. If it were left to me-as plainly it is not-I'd say that the Outsider is the most holy god, and indeed that he's the only god, major or minor, who's really holy at all." He laughed, a trifle nervously. "So you see why I'm not an augur, Olivine. But the Writings say it's Quadrifons, and the Chapter says that his name is so holy that it should hardly ever be used, so it won't be profaned."

"Go… Go on."

"I don't know you, so I really don't know whether you would be inclined to profane the name of a god-"

She shook her head.

"But I'm inclined to doubt it. You don't strike me as a fortunate person, and it's commonly the fortunate among us who do that. On the chance that I'm wrong, however, I must tell you that we don't harm the gods when we mingle their names with our curses and obscenities. We harm ourselves. I said that I didn't regard most gods as holy, but they don't have to be for our malice and mockery to recoil upon ourselves." He looked up at her shrouded face, hoping to see he had made his point, but learned nothing. "There is much more I might say, Olivine-things I may say to you another time, when we know each other better. But you wanted to know about Quadrifons."

She nodded.

"I really know very little about him, however, and I doubt that anyone knows much more than I. Just as Pas is said to be a twoheaded god-do you know about that?"

"Oh… Oh, yes." She sounded despondent.

"Quadrifons is a four-faced one. That is to say, he has only one head, but there is a face on every side of it, so that he looks east and west, and north and south, all at the same time. He's the god of bridges, passageways, and intersections, although he's clearly more important than those few and simple things would appear to imply. I told you he had four faces."

There was no sound but the tinkling of the fountain; then she said, "I've got a little statue with the two… I've got a little statue with the two heads."

"I'd like to see it. You do realize, don't you, that it's only a conventional representation? We need to picture Pas to ourselves during our private devotions sometimes, and statuettes and colored prints help us do it. I should tell you that just as Pas is depicted occasionally as a whirlwind, Quadrifons is sometimes shown as a sort of monster, combining Pas's eagle with Sphigx's lion. May I talk about Sphigx for a moment? It will seem to you that I've left the subject, but I assure you that what I want to say bears upon it."

"Go… Go ahead." By a sort of controlled collapse, she sat down opposite him, hugging her knees to her chest. Even through several thicknesses of sackcloth, it was apparent that she had sharp knees.

"This morning two friends and I were discussing Sphigx. She's the patroness of Trivigaunte, but she won't let the Trivigauntis make pictures or statues representing her, and we talked about that."

"Uh… Uh-huh."

"That's what I used to say to Patera Silk." He smiled at the memory. "He'd tell me to think of the honor of our Sun Street Palaestra, and say yes instead."

"I remember when… I remember when you were calde."

"When Patera Silk was, you mean. My own name is Horn."

She nodded again.

"In that case, Calde Bison must have let you stay on when he attained to the office. That was good of him."

"I don't think… I don't think he knows I'm here. Were you going to say Sphigx was like Quadrifons, keeping his name… Were you going to say Sphigx was like Quadrifons, keeping his name secret?"

"That's very perceptive of you. Yes, I was. You see, Olivine, there used to be a woman with a table in the market who sold images of Sphigx. They would have been quite similar to your image of Pas, I suppose."

"Mine's ivory… Mine's ivory, Patera."

He nodded thoughtfully. "These were wood. Or at least, they appeared to be wood. This woman was a Trivigaunti spy, and what she was doing-using the little wooden images to send informationwas really very clever, because no one who knew the customs of her city would associate images of Sphigx with Trivigaunte. Later on Blue, I learned that Trivigauntis who go abroad often buy images of Sphigx, which they carry home with them and hide."