Celebrant (45 page)

For a distance.
Then you will curve toward the right.

So I must ‘curve?’

Not right away, or you will miss it.

I must know when to ‘curve.’

Where the road curves off to the right.

The road is split, and I must know when to ‘follow the curve.’

Where the road curves.

Follow the ‘right road.’

Naturally.

Naturally.

As he is leaving, going back to the house, to look for Phryne, deKlend turns toward Goose Goes Back again.
The being he sees, for all its formidable size and power, looks preposterous at a distance.

How long will it last?
(he asks, thinking of the condition Goose Goes Back finds himself in)

Some time longer.
I feel that.

The voice is very distinct, even this far away;
and deKlend is suddenly unsure whether or not he spoke his questioning thought aloud.

Then who will you be?
(he asks
—
aloud, but almost not aloud)

Perhaps you (Goose Goes Back says)
I don’t know.

In Votu:

Long ago, pilgrims from all over the world would descend on the city in large numbers.
They tended to arrive in homogeneous masses, and the citizens would watch them come from atop the walls with dread.
Any attempt to deny them entry was cause for a blockade and the destruction of the trees and farms outside the walls.
Admit them, and the pilgrims would trash the town, billeting themselves on people like it or not, molesting everybody, devouring everything, chipping and chopping the shrines up for holy souvenirs, rioting and fistfighting among themselves, bellowing unintelligible demands in languages no one knew, leaving behind whole neighborhoods in flames or ransacked and looking like the aftermath of an earthquake.
They would bring swords as offerings, with lamentable consequences for each other and the town.
There were also those pilgrims who flattered themselves they were different from their brawlier counterparts, and came on meek and fawning, but these pilgrims corrupted everything they touched because they were wealthy and came away each year loaded down with irreplaceable treasures.
These quiet ones could always wheedle out which sacred guardian or devoted student was secretly in desperate need of money, and then that would be it.

But when anemone came to Votu, all this was changed.
The natural robots respond to people in their own inscrutable ways, but their behavior in response to certain kinds of human activity is consistent, though it varies from one to another.
All of them, for example, are musical, but where urchin seems to be most excited by uptempo dance music, groper gives no indication of interest in rhythm but swings to and fro transfixed by human voices singing multi-part harmonies.
Urn has an affinity for elderly men.
Anemone seemed to bear an innate antipathy towards pilgrims in groups of greater than two or three, and stampeded any of them who came within the vicinity of the metronome.

Anemone is a rhombus with a deformed, half-crushed-looking lower section.
The upper section has an angular top that is canted forward like a ramp;
in that ramp there is a large circular hole surrounded by a thick fringe of dense fur matted together into flame-like locks.
The mass is dark and rocky, with some faceted surfaces, especially toward the top, smooth as glass, and it is banded by heavy, yoke-like rings which are roughly parallel to the ground.
It looks a little as if it had been used as a gigantic peg in a ring-toss.
These rings are studded with globular jets of bright metal, and tinted all different colors.
Some are brilliant and some gleam as though they’d been enamelled.
Each ring seems laden with steel grapes.
Still more jets blister the tapering underside.
These jets are in constant operation, so that anemone never touches the ground.
They don’t blast air continuously, but they go off in short bursts on all sides, making a sound like rapidly popping popcorn.
The yawning black hole in its mantle of fur seems to be the intake for them all, and the exhaust has a sharp, biting, sliced grapefruit odor.

The jets are fixed in position, so anemone fires only those which, pointing down, keep it airborne, and those which point in the direction opposite to the one it goes.
Swift, agile, uncannily smooth is its flight, at any altitude.
Anemone weighs several tons, is about half the size of a small house, and the friction it produces as it zips over the ground causes a nimbus of static electricity to form around it.
Never hovering in one place for very long, anemone only pays occasional visits to the shrine its mathetes have built for it, with a high towering pagoda growing from the spacious main apartment, and numerous large openings to permit its ingress.

There is no telling how it senses the world around it, but anemone would respond to the approach of a group of pilgrims without fail, swooping down on them and chasing them to and fro like a dog herding sheep.
No pack or riding animal could be kept from bolting at anemone’s approach.
As with any other natural robot, anemone’s person was inviolate, but even if this didn’t dissuade the pilgrims, as it seldom did, anemone was hard to hit with anything and too sternly constituted to be damaged.
Anemone’s vibrating invisible mane of intense static electricity made mere proximity to it unbearable, nor did anemone wait for the pilgrims to draw within running distance of the city walls before it struck.
The city would be there, less than a mile away, visible across the plains and seeming to beckon the pilgrim to take refuge, but entirely too far off to reach under anemone’s inexhaustible, bullish onslaught.
There were a few deaths, only two could certainly be attributed to anemone directly, and in both cases the pilgrim involved had tried to tilt at anemone like an equal.

Their petitions for relief ignored, the pilgrims stopped coming in numbers, and stopped coming openly, for, since they were now arriving in twos and threes instead of hundreds and dozens, this made them vulnerable to the just resentment of the citizens, who, from this epoch, began attacking pilgrims, on sight, with whatever came to hand.
Pilgrims learned to come to Votu secretly, separately, to rendezvous only under certain circumstances, and to practice their devotions inconspicuously.

Swords are no longer brought to Votu, but the pilgrims will bring, for example, elaborate drawings of swords, or swordless sword dances, or even materials for making swords in the city once they arrive.
Modern sword offerings are made in a variety of ways.
Most often the celebrant thrusts a sword into a wall.
There are places in the older sections of Votu that bristle with swords;
the swords stuck into a square named for Thwitharq Osxtier-Ponqus are so numerous they look like a rusty field of reeds.
The walls of the buildings are like hedgehog faces and the equestrian statue is an invisible, formless swordcushion.
Plumbers carry gauntlets
—
one would reach down a drain to clear an obstruction only to wrap hands around the blade of a sword stuck in the pipes.
Swords would turn up caught in mouse traps, get tangled in people’s hair as they slept, rain down from long-disused attic hatchways.
Whole buildings would rupture slopping swords out into the street.
These places are swept aside as the city rolls down the slope, though, and now one sees very few swords, and these usually solitary, and usually with a bird perched on the hilt and gaily adorning it with white shit and song.

The citizens of Votu don’t talk to people who carry weapons because it isn’t done.
Plumbers carrying dripping swords festooned with crap are exempt.
As a rule, a sword in Votu not stuck into a building is a cheap souvenir, an article of historical significance, or the kind of thing that crops up underneath other stuff in what once were known as rag and bone shops.
There’s a word for them, useless old swords, “holbleins,” that means something like placebo and is derived from a term for a kind of spectre or goblin that appears as only a white brow.

*

Rabbit girls call to each other
—

Kunty’s better!

She’s running again!

Kunty has recovered completely
—
her frenzied impatience to get back on her feet, which made her appear to rant and storm even when she lay still, finally breaks out and she begins to tear around the streets, wincing and sometimes buckling onto her side.
Having nothing else but her body she would rather suffer pain than the loss of even a small fraction of her strength, through inaction.
From time to time the idea that exerting herself she might be causing some lasting harm, which might diminish her strength permanently, would shoot through her, and she drops as if she’s been shot, curling into what she believes is the best posture for her back.
From those moments her impatience would again begin rebuilding.

The day she feels herself truly well and fit again she tears through town rejoicing in herself, feeling if anything stronger and more crazily alive than before in her muscles rigging on the masts and stays of her skeleton, churning with ebullience that brims over into a vicious sportiveness without malice
—
she knocks people out of her way, leaps from men’s shoulders and swipes at dogs and cats, plunges into a neat procession of schoolchildren scattering them.
Down in the chaos of her mind there is a thought something like can’t keep me down
—
Kunty rages through the city beaming with fury and delight and every time she listens to her lower back, there’s no pain.

The pain lances her in the ears
—
she stops in her tracks and claps her hands over them in alarm a shrill, steady high pitch piercing and clear as the note of a wine glass.
Kunty’s ears are not long for rabbit girls but longer and keener than normal ears.
The noise seems to impale her through her head with a slender needle.
Glancing around after she recovers from the initial surprise she sees other people in the street with their hands over their ears.
The sound comes from the city factory.

Well after it stops, Kunty continues to hear it.
The ordeal took some of her vim away, but it is gradually returning, and she sets herself unobtrusively to one side of things to wait for it.
She doesn’t wonder about it.
Her attention seizes and drops things quickly and decisively like someone rifling a drawer.

That woman and her reflection don’t agree.

She notices that at once, her eyes directed that way by chance.
The reflection shows a portly man with a stringy moustache.
The woman is a voluptuous beauty, Kunty can’t take her eyes off her.
She wears so much antimony around her eyes she looks like she has on a bandit’s mask, her hair sticks up like snakes, and her reflection doesn’t look like herself.
Kunty shadows her carefully, hypnotized by the grand sway of the woman’s enormous caboose, the swinging pace of her smooth, heavily muscled legs.
Kunty follows her into a narrow lane with a gutter in the middle, into a little roundish space like a small yard heaped with boxes.
There are marble ducts criss-crossing directly overhead, and apertures all over the smooth granite face of the building.

The woman walks directly up to a wall with an elevated doorway.
She lifts her right leg and, placing the pad of her right foot on the threshold, which is about at the level of her head, she raises herself up, and vanishes into the doorway as if it were like any other door.
The action flashes through Kunty’s mind repeatedly as she goes over to the wall.
She sees in these flashes details that she hadn’t taken in at the time, the dimples in the woman’s shoulders, the arms at the sides and a little out from the body, the rippling of her white hem.