Gene Wolfe: Lake of the Long Sun

His finger was closing on the trigger of the needler; recalling Auk's warning, he put his fingertip on the trigger guard. "Mucor? I don't want to hurt you. I just want to talk to you. Are you up there?"

No voice, no footfall, from the upper floor. He went up a few more steps. He had shown Auk the azoth, and that had been most imprudent; an azoth was worth thousands of cards. Auk broke into larger and better defended houses than this whenever he chose. Now Auk had come for the azoth or sent an accomplice, seen his opportunity when the kitchen lights kindled.

"Auk? It's me, Patera Silk."

There came no answering voice.

"I've got a needler, but I don't want to have to shoot. If you raise your hands and offer no resistance, I won't. I won't turn you over to the Guard, either."

His voice had energized the single dim light above the landing. Ten steps remained, and Silk climbed them slowly, his progress retarded by fear as much as pain, seeing first the black-clad legs in the doorway of his bedroom, then the hem of the black robe, and at last the aged augur's smiling face.

Patera Pike waved and melted into silver mist; his blue-trimmed black calot dropping softly onto the uneven boards of the landing.

Neither Silk nor Maytera Marble had remembered mutes, yet mutes appeared an hour before Orpine's rites were to begin, alerted by the vendor who had supplied the rue. Promised two cards, they had already gashed their arms, chests, and cheeks with flints by the time the first worshipers arrived, and were the very skiagraph of misery, their long hair fluttering in the wind as they rent their sooty garments, howled aloud, or knelt to smear their bleeding faces with dust.

Five long benches had been set aside in the front of the manteion for the mourners, who began to arrive by twos and threes some while after the unrestricted portion of the old manteion on Sun Street was full. For the most part they were the young women whom Silk had seen the previous afternoon at Orchid's yellow house on Lamp Street, though there were a few tradesmen as well (dragooned, Silk did not doubt, by Orchid), and a leaven of rough-looking men who could easily have been friends of Auk's.

Auk himself was there as well, and he had brought the ram he had pledged. Maytera Mint had seated him among the mourners, her face aglow with happiness; Silk assumed that Auk had explained to her that he had been a friend of the deceased. Silk accepted the ram's tether, thanked Auk with formal courtesy (receiving an abashed smile in return), and led the ram out the side door into the garden, where Maytera Marble presided over what was very nearly a menagerie. "That heifer's stolen several mouthfuls of my parsley," she told Silk, "and trampled my grass a bit. But she's left me a present, too, so that I'll have a much nicer garden next year. And those rabbits-oh, Patera, isn't it grand? Just look at all of them.' Silk did, stroking his right cheek while he deliberated the sacred sequence of sacrifice. Some augurs preferred to take the largest beast first, some to begin with a general sacrifice to the entire Nine; that would be the white heifer in either case today. On the other hand, . . .

"The wood hasn't arrived yet. Maytera insisted on going herself. I wanted to send some of the boys. If she doesn't ride back on the cart ..."

That was Maytera Rose, of course, and Maytera Rose could scarcely walk. "People are still coming," Silk told Maytera Marble absently, "and I can stand up there and talk awhile, if necessary." He would (as he admitted after a moment of merciless self-scrutiny) have welcomed an excuse to begin Orpine's rites without Maytera Rose-and to complete them without her. for that matter. But until the cedar came and the sacred fire had been laid, there could be no sacrifices.

He reentered the manteion just in time to witness the arrival of Orchid, overdressed in puce velvet and sable in spite of the heat, and somewhat drunk. Tears streamed down her cheeks as he conducted her to the aisle seat in the first row that had been marked off for her; and though he felt that he ought to be amused by her unsteady gait and clattering jet beads, he discovered that he pitied her with all his heart. Her daughter, shielded by a nearly invisible polymer sheet from the dampness of her sparkling couch of ice, appeared by comparison contented and composed.

"The black ewe first," Silk found himself muttering, and could not have explained how he had reached his decision. He informed Maytera Marble, then stepped through the garden gate and out into Sun Street to look for Maytera Rose's cartload of cedar.

Worshipers were still trickling in, faces familiar from scores of Scylsdays, and unfamiliar ones who were presumably connected in some fashion to Orpine or Orchid, or had merely heard (as the whole quarter appeared to have heard) that rich and plentiful sacrifices would be offered to the gods today on Sun Street, in what was perhaps the poorest manteion in all Viron.

"Can't I get in, Patera?" inquired a voice at his elbow. "They won't let me."

Startled, Silk looked down into the almost circular face of Scleroderma, the butcher's wife, nearly as wide as she was high. "Of course you can," he said.

"There's some men at the door."

Silk nodded. "I know. I put them there. If I hadn't, there would have been no places for the mourners, and a riot before the first sacrifice, as likely as not. We'll let some of them stand in the side aisles once the wood arrives."

He took her through the garden gate and locked it behind them.

"I come every Scylsday."

"I know you do," Silk told her.

"And I put something in whenever I can. Pretty often, too. I almost always put in at least a bit."

Silk nodded. "I know that, too. That's why I'm going to take you in through the side door, quietly. We'll pretend that you brought a sacrifice. Hurriedly he added, "Although we won't say that."

"And I'm sorry about the cats' meat, that time. Dumping it all over you like that. It was a terrible thing to do. I was just mad." She had waddled ahead of him, perhaps because she did not want to meet his eyes; now she stopped to admire the white heifer. "Look at the meat on her!"

He could not help smiling. "I wish I had some of your cats' meat now. I'd give it to my bird."

"Have you got a bird? Lots of people buy my meat for their dogs. I'll bring you some."

He took her in through the side door as he had promised, and turned her over to Horn.

By the time that he had mounted the steps to the ambion, the first shoulderload of cedar was coming down the center aisle. Maytera Rose seemed to materialize beside the altar to supervise the laying of the fire, and the trope restored Patera Pike-almost forgotten in the bustle of preparations that morning-to the forefront of Silk's mind.

Or rather, as Silk told himself firmly, Patera's ghost. There was nothing to be gained by denial, by not calling the thing by its proper name. He had championed the spiritual and the supernatural since boyhood. Was he to fly in terror now from the mere mention of a supernatural spirit?

The Charismatic Writings lay on the ambion, placed there by Maytera Marble over an hour ago. On Phaesday he had told the children from the palaestra that they could always find guidance there. He would begin with a reading, then; perhaps there would be something there for him as well, as there had been on that afternoon two days ago. He .opened the book at random and silenced the assembled worshipers with his eyes.

"We know that death is the door to life-even as the life we know is the door to death. Let us discover what counsel the wisdom of the past will provide to our departed sibling, and to us."

Silk paused. Chenille (her fiery hair, illuminated from behind by the hot sunshine of the entrance, identified her at once) had just stepped inside the manteion. He had told her to attend, he recalled-had demanded that she attend, in fact. Very well, here she was. He smiled at her, but her eyes, larger and darker than he remembered them, were fixed on Orpine's body.