Gene Wolfe: Lake of the Long Sun

A soft snarl came from the crowd that had been clustered about Gulo. Gulo was not an imaginative man, yet it seemed to him that an unseen lion was awakening; and the prayers he had chanted each Sphigxday were not nonsensical after all.

"Don't fight!" Maytera Mint returned the officer's sword and raised her hands. "Please! There's no need."

A stone flew, striking the helmet of one of the troopers. A second whizzed past Maytera Marble's head to thump the door, and the trooper who had been hit fired, his shot followed by a scream. Maytera Mint dashed down the steps into the crowd.

The trooper fired again, and his officer slapped down the muzzle of his slug gun. "Open these," the officer told Gulo. "We had better go inside." More stones flew as they fled into the manteion. The trooper who had been hit fired twice more as Maytera Marble and the other trooper swung its heavy door shut, his shots so closely spaced that they might almost have been one. There was an answering rattle of stones.

"It is the heat." The officer spoke confidently and even smiled. "They will forget now that we are out of sight." He sheathed his sword. "This Patera Silk is popular."

Maytera Marble nodded. And then, "Patera!" "I have to go." Gulo was sliding back the bolt. "I-I shouldn't have gone in here at all." He struggled to re- member the other sibyl's name, failed, and concluded lamely, "She was right."

The officer snatched at his robe an instant too late as Gulo slipped out; angry yells invaded the manteion, then muted as the troopers shut the door and bolted it again. Faintly, the officer could hear Gulo shouting, "People! People!"

"They won't hurt him, Maytera." He paused to listen, his head cocked. "I do not like arresting . . ."

He let the apology trail away, having realized that he no longer had her attention. Her metal face mirrored faint hues: lemon, pink, and sorrel. Following the direction of her gaze, he saw the swirling color of the Sacred Window and knelt. The dancing hues created patterns he could not quite distinguish, glyphs, figures, and landscapes half formed, a face that swam, melted, and coalesced before the goddess spoke in a tongue he almost understood, a language that he too had known in a long-past life in an unimaginable place at an inconceivable time. In this, he was a maggot; her utterance proclaimed that he had once been a man, though the memories she woke were perhaps no more than the dead thoughts of the man he devoured. I will, Great Goddess. I will. He will be safe with us. Behind and above him he heard the chem talking to the fat augur. "A god came while you were outside, Patera. Honored us without a sacrifice. There was no one to inter- pret. I'm so terribly sony you missed it-" And the augur, "I didn't, Maytera. Not all of it."

The officer willed them to be quiet. Her divine voice still strummed in his ears, far and sweet; and he knew what she desired him to do.

To breach the surface of the lake as Silk did, to rise from suffocation and see afresh the thin, bright streak of the sun and draw one's first breath, was to be reborn. He was not a strong swimmer, and indeed was hardly a swimmer at all; yet exhausted as he was, he managed to stay afloat on the long, slow swell, kicking spasmodically, dimly fearful that each kick might draw the attention of the huge fish.

There was a distant shout, followed by the clamor of a pan wildly beaten; he ignored both until the swell heaved him high enough to see the worn brown sails.

Three half-naked fishermen pulled him onto their boat. "There's someone else," he gasped. "We've got to find him."

"They already have!" And Crane was grinning at him.

The tallest and most grizzled of the fishermen slapped him on the back. "Gods look out for augurs. That's what my paw used to tell, Patera."

Crane nodded sagely. "Augurs and fools."

"Yes, sir. Them, too. Next time you go sailin', you take a sailor. Let's hope we can find your woman."

The thought of the great fish filled Silk's mind, and he shuddered. "It's good of you to look, but I'm afraid . . ."

"Couldn't reach her, Patera?"

"No, but- No."

"Well, we'll haul her out if we see her."

Silk stood; at once the rolling of the boat cost him his footing, and he found himself sitting on piled nets.

"Stay where you are and rest," Crane muttered. "You've been through a lot. So've I. But we've gotten a thorough washing, and that's good. Lots of isotopes released when a chem blows." He held up a gleaming card. "Captain, could you find us something to eat? Or a little wine?"

"Let me put her about, sir, and I'll see what's left."

"Money belt," Crane whispered, noticing Silk's puzzled look. "Lemur made me turn out my pockets but never patted me down. I promised them a card to take us back to Limna."

"That poor woman," Silk said to no one in particular, "three hundred years, for that." A black bird was perched in the rigging of a distant boat; seeing it, Silk recalled Oreb, smiled, and reproached himself for smiling.

Guiltily he glanced about him, hoping that his unseemly levity had passed unnoticed. Crane was watching the captain, and the captain, the largest sail. One sailor stood in the bow with a foot upon the bowsprit. The other, grasping a rope connected to the long stick (Silk could not recall its name, if he had ever known it) that spread the sail, appeared to be waiting for a signal from the captain-the back of his head seemed uncannily familiar. As Silk altered his position to get a better view of it, he realized that the nets on which he sat were dry.

Crane had bought Silk a red tunic, brown trousers, and brown shoes to replace the black ones he had kicked off in the lake. He changed in a deserted alley, throwing his robe, his torn tunic, and his old trousers behind a pile of refuse. "I got Hyacinth's needler back," he said, "and my gammadion and my beads; but not my glasses or any of my other possessions. Perhaps that's a sign."

Crane shrugged. "They were probably in Lemur's pocket." He had a new tunic and new trousers, too, and he had bought a razor. Glancing toward the mouth of the alley, he added, "Keep your voice down."

"What did you see?"

"Couple of Guardsmen."

"The Ayuntamiento will surely think we're dead," Silk objected. "Until they leam otherwise, we have no reason to fear the Guard."

Crane shook his head.

"If they thought we might have survived, they could have come to the surface and looked for us, couldn't they?"

"Not without telling everybody on the lake abouttheir underwater boat. How do those fit?"

"They're a trifle large." Silk looked down at himself, wishing that he had a mirror. "Their boat must have come to the surface to collect poor lolar."

"You're thin," Crane told him. "No, they sent up that little one we saw. They couldn't send it after us because that compartment down in the keel would've flooded again as soon as they undogged the hatch."

"It flooded when we opened the one in the floor," Silk murmured.

"That's right. I'd opened the air valve as far as it would go, but it hadn't had much time to build up pressure after you and the woman vented it coming down. Naturally a lot of water came in. It cut down the air space and pushed the pressure up to the water pressure, so the water flowed out again almost right away."

Silk hesitated, then nodded. "But if they open the upper hatch-the one in the corridor-the compartment will flood again, won't it?" "Sure. Water would rise into the rest of the boat, too. Which is why they couldn't send their little boat after us. I can't imagine how they'll shut the boat door when they can't get into the compartment to do it, but no doubt they'll figure out something."

Silk leaned against a wall and removed Crane's wrapping from his ankle. "I'm not a sailor, but if it were up to me, I'd go far out in the lake, where there wasn't much chance of being seen-or perhaps into the cave Lemur mentioned when you asked how he had gotten your bag."