Gene Wolfe - Exodus from the Long Sun

The outer door swung toward him before he could open it, and Hossaan stepped inside with Oreb perched on his shoulder. “Your bird was out there, Calde. I guess he couldn’t find a window open, so I brought him in.”

“Girls fly,” Oreb aoaked, fluttering. “Bird see.”

“Yes, and just in time, silly bird. Come here.”

Oreb hopped to Silk’s wrist. “Men perch!”

“He’s been flying up to the airship,” Silk explained. “By now he probably understands it a great deal better than I do. They lower people from it in a thing like an oversized birdcage, and bring people and supplies up; that seems to interest him.” He hesitated, then waved toward a long divan. “Let’s sit down for a moment. There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Sure thing, Calde.”

“We could do this in your floater, but I have the feeling there’d be somebody wanting to talk to me, and I don’t want to be interrupted. Did you see the parade?”

Hossaan nodded. “I was keeping an eye on you up on that stand, Calde, in case you wanted me.”

“Good. Then you saw me talking to Generalissimo Siyuf and General Saba. Do you know either of them, by the way?”

“Personally, you mean, Calde? No, I don’t. I know what they look like.”

“You haven’t spoken to them.”

Hossaan shook his head.

“But you’ve traveled. You’re from Trivigaunte originally?”

“Yes, Calde. I was born there. You’d be a fool to take anything I tell you at face value. You realize that, I’m sure.”

“Good man!” Oreb defended him. “Men fly. Perch!”

“Of course. I understand that your primary loyalty must be to your native city.”

“It is. And you’re right. I’ve traveled more than most men ever do. I can tell you about some of the places I’ve been, if you like, but I can’t always tell you what I was doing there.”

Silk nodded thoughtfully. “Here in Viron, we sometimes say that someone speaks Vironese, as if it were a separate language. It isn’t, of course. It’s just that we have certain idiomatic expressions that aren’t used, as far as I know, in other cities. There are words we pronounce differently as well. I know very little about other cities, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they have peculiarities of their own.”

“That’s right. I think I know what you’re going to ask me, but go on.”

“Is there any reason you shouldn’t tell me about it?”

“Not a one.”

“All right. I was going to say that there actually are other languages, languages quite different from ours. Latin, for example, and French. We have French and Latin books, and there are passages in the Writings in those languages, which makes them of interest to scholars and even to ordinary augurs like me. Presumably there are cities in which those languages are spoken just as we speak Vironese here.”

“The Common Tongue,” Hossaan said. “That’s what travelers generally call it, and it’s what we call it in Trivigaunte.”

“I see.” Silk’s forefinger traced small circles on his cheek. “In that case you, from your foreign perspective, would say that both Viron and Palustria, for instance, speak the Common Tongue? Palustrian is similar enough to Vironese that one might have to listen to a speaker for several minutes to determine his native city. Or so I was taught at the schola.”

“You’ve got it, Calde.”

“Very well then. I can imagine a foreign city in which another language is spoken, Latin let us say. And I can easily imagine one like Palustria, where the Common Tongue is spoken; I can’t prove it, but I suspect that there may be more differences between the speech of a Vironese of the upper class and a beggar or a bricklayer than there are between an ordinary merchant from Viron and a like merchant from Palustria. What I cannot imagine is a city in which some citizens speak the Common Tongue, as you call it, and others Latin or another language.”

Hossaan nodded, but said nothing.

“Men fly!” Oreb announced, having lost patience with his owner. He launched himself from Silk’s shoulder and flapped around the room spiraling higher. “Fly! Fly! Girls! Men!” He extended his wings in a long glide. “Perch!”

“Great Pas guide us!” Maytera Marble was coming down the staircase with Chenille and Mucor. “What’s gotten into your bird, Patera?”

“I don’t know,” said Silk — who thought, however, that he did. “Hossaan, he came to you while you were waiting in the floater, is that right?”

“He landed on the back of the seat, Calde, and started tailing. I couldn’t understand him at first.”

“Yet another language, or at least another way of speaking the Common Tongue.” Silk smiled wryly. “What did he say?”

“’Bird out, bird out, Silk in.’ Like that, Calde.”

Silk nodded. “Go out and wait for us. Put the canopy up. I don’t know how long the wait will be, and there’s no point in your freezing.”

As Hossaan left, Chenille asked, “Aren’t we going, Patera?”

“In a moment. Step into the library, please, everybody. Oreb, where are the flying men and flying girls who perched?”

Oreb hopped to a corner occupied by a fat-bellied vase and rapped it sharply with his beak.

“Northeast, Mucor,” Silk muttered. “Did you see that?”

Her skull-like face turned toward him as a pale funeral lily lifts its blossom to the sun. “Flying, Silk?”

“Fliers, I believe. The people who fly on wings made of something that looks like gauze.”

Chenille added, “Like the Trivigaunti pterotroopers, only their wings are longer and look like they’d be lighter.”

The night chough flew to Silk’s shoulder.

“One more question, Oreb. Were there houses where the flying people landed?”

“House now! Quick house!”

Silk took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it out, and draped it over his spread fingers. “Like this?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Sit down, please,” Silk told the three women. “Mucor, as a great favor to me, and your grandmother, too, do you think you could find out what these Fliers are doing?”

When she did not answer, he said, “Search the grazing land north and east of the city, where the Rani’s men are putting up their tents. I believe that may be what he means when he says quick houses. The Fliers will have taken off their wings when they landed, I imagine, and they’ll probably leave at least one of their number to guard them.”

“As Patera says, this is for both of us, Mucor.” Maytera Marble patted her knee. “I don’t know why it’s important, but I’m sure it must be.”

Chenille remarked, “You know, I’ve been wanting to have a look at this ever since that Trivigaunti saw her in the mirror, only now I can’t even tell if she’s doing it. You ought to be chanting and sprinkling perfume on Thelxiepeia’s picture.”

“The miracle — or magic, if that’s what you wish to call it — is in Mucor,” Silk told her.

“Auk believes in the gods, Patera. He’s really religious in his way, and he knows I had Scylla inside running things. But what I’m seeing wouldn’t make him believe in this.”

“Auk,” Mucor repeated suddenly.

Oreb cocked his head like Maytera Marble. “Where Auk?”

Mucor’s toneless voice seemed to emanate from a forsaken place beyond the universe. “Where Auk is… Silk? Chain my hands. Feet smash strong-wings.”

“Are we truly, um, abandoned, Maytera? Solitary? Or are there other ears, eh? In this dark and — er — noisome. That’s the question, hum?”

“I don’t know. I have no way of telling. Do you?” The question Maytera Mint herself was debating was whether it would be disrespectful to lie down before Remora did.