Gene Wolfe - Lake of the Long Sun

"No go!" Fluttering frenziedly, Oreb half flew and half fell from Horn's shoulder to the lofty back of the tapestried chair. "Bird stay!"

Horn's hand was already on the latch. "I'll tell them we were just talking, Patera. I'll say you were teaching me about the Outsider and a lot of other things. It'll be the truth."

Oreb croaked, "Good-bye! Bye, boy!"

"You foolish bird," Silk said as the door closed behind Horn, "what have you learned from all this? A few new words, perhaps, which you will misapply."

"Gods' ways!"

"Oh, yes. You're very wise now." Although it was still warm, Silk unwound the wrapping. After beating the hassock with it, he wrapped it around his forearm over the bandage.

"Man god. My god."

"Shut up," his god told him wearily.

He had thrust his arm into the glass, where Kypris was kissing it. Her lips were as chill as death, but it was a death he welcomed at first. In time he grew frightened and struggled to withdraw it, but Kypris would not release it. When he shouted for Horn, no sound issued from his mouth. Orchid's sellaria was in the manse, which did not seem odd at all; a wild wind moaned in the chimney. He remembered that Auk had foretold such a wind, and tried to recall what Auk had said would happen when it blew.

Without relinquishing her grip on his arm, the goddess revolved, her own arms upraised; she wore a clinging gown of liquid spring. He was acutely conscious of the roundness of her thighs, the double' globosity of her hips. As he stared, Blood's orchestra played "First Romance" and Kypris became Hyacinth (though Kypris still) and lovelier than ever. He kicked and tumbled, his feet above his head, but his hand clasped hers and would not be torn from it.

He woke gasping for breath. The lights had extinguished themselves. In the faint skylight from a curtained window, he saw Oreb hop out and flap away. Mucor stood beside his bed, naked in the darkness and skeletally thin; he blinked; she faded to mist and was gone.

He rubbed his eyes.

A warm wind moaned as it had in his dream, dancing with his ragged, pale curtains. The wrapping on his arm was pale too, white with frost that melted at a touch. He unwound it and whipped the damp sheet with it, then wound it about his newly painful ankle, telling himself that he should not have climbed the stairs without it. What would Doctor Crane say when he told him?

The whipping had evoked a spectral glow from the lights, enough for him to distinguish the hands of the busy little clock beside his triptych. It was after midnight.

Leaving his bed, he lowered the sash. Not until it was down did he realize that he could not have seen Oreb fly out-Oreb had a dislocated wing.

Downstairs, he found Oreb poking about the kitchen in search of something to eat. He put out the last slice of bread and refilled the bird's cup with clean water.

"Meat?" Oreb cocked his head and clacked his beak.

"You'll have to find some for yourself if you want it," Silk told him. "I haven't any." After a moment's thought he added, "Perhaps I'll buy a little tomorrow, if Maytera cashed Orchid's draft, or I can myself. Or at least a fish-a live one I could keep in the washtub until whatever's left over from the sacrifices runs out, and then share with Maytera Rose. And Maytera Mint, of course. Wouldn't you like some nice, fresh fish, Oreb?"

"Like fish!"

"All right, I'll see what I can do. But you have to be forthcoming with me now. No fish if you're not. Were you in my bedroom?"

"No steal!"

"I didn't say that you stole," Silk explained patiently. "Were you there?"

"Where?"

"Up there." Silk pointed. "I know you were. I woke up and saw you."

"No, no!"

"Of course you were, Oreb. I saw you myself. I watched you fly out the window."

"No fly!"

"I'm not going to punish you. I simply want to know one thing. Listen carefully now. When you were upstairs, did you see a woman? Or a girl? A thin young woman; unclothed, in my bedroom?"

"No fly," the bird repeated stubbornly. "Wing hurt."

Silk ran his fingers through his strawstack hair. "All right, you can't fly. I concede that. Were you upstairs?"

"No steal." Oreb clacked his beak again.

"Nor did you steal. That is understood as well."

"Fish heads?"

Silk threw caution to the winds. "Yes, several. Big ones, I promise you."

Oreb hopped onto the window ledge. "No see."

"Look at me, please. Did you see her?"

"No see."

"You were frightened by something," Silk mused, "though it may have been my waking. Perhaps you were afraid that I'd punish you for looking around my bedroom. Was that it?"

"No, no!"

"This window is just below that one. I thought I saw you fly, but I really saw you hop out the window and drop down into the blackberries. From there it would have been easy for you to get back here into the kitchen through the window. Isn't that what happened?"

"No hop!"

"I don't believe you, because-" Silk paused. Faintly, he had heard the creak of Patera Pike's bed; he felt a pang of guilt at having awakened the old man, who always labored so hard and slept so badly-although he had dreamed (only dreamed, he told himself firmly) that Pike was dead, as he had dreamed, also, that Hyacinth had kissed his arm, that he had talked to Kypris in an old yellow house on Lamp Street: to Lady Kypris, the Goddess of Love, the whores' goddess.

Shaken by doubt, he went back to the pump and worked its handle again until clear icy water gushed into the stoppered sink, splashed His sweating face again and again, and soaked and resoaked his untidy hair until he was actually shivering despite the heat of the night.

"Patera Pike is dead," he told Oreb, who cocked his head sympathetically.

Silk filled the kettle and set it on the stove, starting the fire with an extravagant expenditure of wastepaper; when flames licked the sides of the kettle, he seated himself in the unsteady wooden chair in which he sat to eat and pointed a finger at Oreb. "Patera Pike left us last spring; that's practically a year ago. I performed his rites myself, and even without a headstone, his grave cost more than we could scrape together. So what I heard was the wind or something of that sort. Rats, perhaps. Am I making myself clear?"

"Eat now?"

"No." Silk shook his head. "There's nothing left but a little mate and a very small lump of sugar. I plan to brew myself a cup of mate and drink it, and go back to bed. If you can sleep too, I advise it."

Overhead (above the sellaria, Silk felt quite certain) Patera Pike's old bed creaked again.

He rose. Hyacinth's engraved needler was still in his pocket, and before he had entered the manse that evening be had charged it with needles from the packet Auk had bought for him. He pulled back the loading knob to assure himself that there was a needle ready to fire, and pressed down the safety catch. Crossing the kitchen to the stair, he called, "Mucor? Is that you?"

There was no reply.

"If it is, cover yourself. I'm coming up to talk to you."

The first step brought a twinge of pain from his ankle. He wished for Blood's stick, but it was leaning against the head of his bed.

Another step, and the floor above creaked. He mounted three more steps, then stopped to listen. The night wind still sighed about the manse, moaning in the chimney as it had in his dream. It had been that wind, surely, that had made the old structure groan, that had caused him-fool that he was-to think that he had heard the old augur's bed creak, squeak, and readjust its old sticks and straps as Patera rolled his old body, sitting up for a moment to pray or peer out through the empty, open windows before lying down again on his back, on his side.

A door shut softly upstairs.

It had been his own, surely-the door to his bedroom. He had paid it no attention when he had put on his trousers and hurried downstairs to look for Oreb. All the doors in the manse swung of their own accord unless they were kept latched, opening or shutting in walls that were no longer plumb, cracked old doors in warped frames that had perhaps never been quite right, and certainly were not square now.