Epiphany of the Long Sun (23 page)

Moles?

Suddenly and unpleasantly it struck Auk that Tartaros was the underground god, the god for mines and caves. So this was his place, only Tartaros was supposed to be a special friend of his and look what had happened to him down here, he had made Tartaros shaggy mad at him somehow because his head hurt, his head wasn't right, something kept sliding and slipping up there like a needler that wouldn't chamber right no matter how much you oiled it and made sure every last needle was as straight as the sun. He reached under his tunic for his, but it wasn't right at all-was so wrong, in fact, that it wasn't there, though Maytera Mint was his mother and in need of him and it.

"Poor Auk! Poor Auk!" Oreb circled above his head. The wind from his laboring wings stirred Auk's hair, but Oreb would not settle on his shoulder, and soon flew back to Chenille.

It wasn't there any more and neither was she. Auk wept.

The captain's salute was much smarter than his torn and soiled green uniform. "My men are in position, My General. My floater is patrolling. To reinforce the garrison by stealth is no longer possible. Nor will reinforcement at the point of the sword be possible, until we are dead."

Bison snorted, tilting back the heavy oak chair that was temporarily his.

Maytera Mint smiled. "Very good, Captain. Thank you. Perhaps you had better get some rest now."

"I have slept, My General, though not long. I have eaten as well, as you, I am told, have not. Now I inspect my men at their posts. When my inspection is complete, perhaps I shall sleep another hour, with my sergeant to wake me."

"I'd like to go with you," Maytera Mint told him. "Can you wait five minutes?"

"Certainly, My General. I am honored. But…"

She looked at him sharply. "What is it, Captain? Tell me, please."

"You yourself must sleep, My General, and eat as well. Or you will be fit for nothing tomorrow."

"I will, later. Please sit down. We're tired, all of us, and you must be exhausted." She turned back to Bison. "We have a principle in the Chapter, for sibyls like me and augurs like Patera Silk. Discipline, it's called, and it comes from an old word for pupil or student. If you're a teacher, as I am, you must have discipline in the classroom before you can teach anything. If you don't, they'll be so busy talking among themselves that they won't hear a thing that you say, and draw pictures instead of doing the assignment."

Bison nodded.

Recalling an incident from the year before, Maytera Mint smiled again. "Unless you've
told
them to draw pictures. If you've told them to draw, they'll write each other notes."

The captain smoothed his small mustache. "My General. We have discipline also, we officers and men of the Civil Guard. The word is the same. The practice, I dare say, not entirely different."

"I know, but I can't use you to patrol the streets and stop the looting. I wish I could, Captain. It would be very convenient, and no doubt effective. But to many people the Guard is the enemy. There would be a rebellion against our rebellion, and that's exactly what we cannot afford."

She turned back to Bison. "You understand why this is needed, don't you? Tell me."

"We're robbing ourselves," he said.

His beard made it difficult to read his expression, but she tried and decided he was uncomfortable. "What you say is true. The people whose houses and shops are being looted are our people, too, and if they have to stay there to defend them, they can't fight for us. But that isn't all, is it? What else did you want to say?"

"Nothing, General."

"You must tell me everything." She wanted to touch him, as she would have touched one of the children at that moment, but decided it might be misconstrued. "Telling me everything when I ask you to is discipline as well, if you like. Are we going to let the Guard be better than we are?"

Bison did not reply.

"But it's really more important than discipline. Nothing is more important to us now than my knowing what you think is important. You and the captain here, and Zoril, and Kingcup, and all the rest."

When he still said nothing, she added, "Do you want us to fail, so you won't be embarrassed, Bison? That is what is going to happen if we won't share concerns and information: we will fail the gods and die. All of us, probably. Certainly I will, because I will fight until they kill me. What is it?"

"They're burning, too," he blurted. "The burning's worse than the looting, a lot worse. With this wind, they'll burn down the city if we don't stop them. And-and…"

"And what?" Maytera Mint nibbled her underlip. "And put out the fires that are raging all around the city already, of course. You're right, Bison. You always are." She glanced at the door. "Teasel? Are you still out there? Come in, please. I need you."

"Yes, Maytera."

"We're telling one another we should rest, Teasel. It seems to be the convention of this night. You're not exempt. You were quite ill only a few days ago. Didn't Patera Silk bring you the Peace of Pas?"

Teasel nodded solemnly; she was a slender, pale girl of thirteen, with delicate features and lustrous black hair. "On Sphixday, Maytera, and I started getting better right away."

"Sphixday, and this is Hieraxday." Maytera Mint glanced at the blue china clock on the sideboard. "Thelxday in a few hours, so we'll call it Thelxday. Even so, less than a week ago you were in imminent danger of death, and tonight you're running errands for me when you ought to be in bed. Can you run one more?"

"I'm fine, Maytera."

"Then find Lime. Tell her where I am, and that I want to see her just as soon as she can get away. Then go home and go to bed.
Home,
I said. Will you do that, Teasel?"

Teasel curtsied, whirled, and was gone.

"She's a good, sensible girl," Maytera Mint told Bison and the captain. "Not one of mine. Mine are older, and they're off fighting or nursing, or they were. Teasel's one of Maytera Marble's, very likely the best of them."

Both men nodded.

"Captain, I won't keep you waiting much longer. Bison, I had begun to talk about discipline. I was interrupted, which served me right for being so long-winded. I was going to say that out of twenty boys and girls, you can make eighteen good students with discipline. I can, and you could too. In fact you would probably be better at it than I am, with a little practice." She sighed, then forced herself to sit up straight with her shoulders back.

"Of the remaining, two one will never be a good student. He doesn't have it in him, and all you can do is stop him from unsettling the others. The other one doesn't need discipline at all, or at least that's how it seems. Pas's own truth is that he's already disciplined himself before you ever called the class to order. Do you understand me?"

Bison nodded.

"You're one of those. If you weren't, you wouldn't be my surrogate now. which you are, you know. If I am killed, you must take charge of everything."

Bison grinned, big white teeth flashing in the thicket of his black beard. "The gods love you, General. Your getting killed's one thing I don't have to worry about."

She waited for a better answer.

"Hierax forbid," Bison said at last. "I'll do my best if it happens."

"I know you will, because you always do. What you have to do is find others like yourself. We don't have enough time to establish real discipline, though I wish very much that we did. Choose men with needlers, won't need slug guns for this-older men, who won't loot themselves when they're sent to stop looters. Organize them in groups of four, designate a leader for each group, and have to tell-

"Don't forget this, it's extremely important. Have them tell everyone they meet that the looting and burning have to stop, and they'll shoot anyone they find doing either."

She rose. "We'll go Captain. I want to see how you've arranged this. I've a great deal to learn and very little time to learn it in."

Horn and Nettle, he with a captured slug gun and she with a needler, had stationed themselves outside the street door.

"Horn, go in the house and find yourself a bed," Maytera Mint told him. "That is an order. When you wake up, come back here and relieve Nettle if she's still here. Nettle, I'm going around the Alambrera with the captain. I'll be back soon."

The wind that chilled her face seemed almost supernatural after so many months of heat; she murmured thanks to Molpe, then recalled that the wind was fanning the fires Bison feared, and that it might-that in some cases it most certainly would-spread fire from shop to stable to manufactory. That there was a good chance the whole city would burn while she fought the Ayuntamiento for it.

"The Ayuntamiento. They aren't divine, Captain."

"I assure you, I have never imagined that they were, My General." He guided her down a crooked street whose name she had forgotten, if she had ever known it; around its shuttered store fronts, the wind whispered of snow.

"Since they aren't," she continued, "they can't possibly resist the will of the gods for long. It is Echidna's will, certainly. I think we can be sure it's Scylla's too."

"Also that of Kypris," he reminded her. "Kypris spoke to me, My General, saying that Patera Silk must be Caldé. I serve you because you serve him, him because he serves her."

She had scarcely heard him. "Five old men. Four, if His Cognizance is right, and no doubt he is. What gives them the courage?"

"I cannot guess, My General. Here is our first post. Do you see it?"

She shook her head.

"Corporal!" the captain called. Hands clapped, and lights kindled across the street; a gleaming gun barrel protruded from a second-floor window. The captain pointed. "We have a buzz gun for this post, as you see, My General. A buzz gun because the street offers the most direct route to the entrance. The angle affords us a longitudinal field of fire. Down there," he pointed again, "a step or two more, and we could be fired upon from an upper window of the Alambrera."

"They could come down this street, straight across Cage, and go into the Alambrera?"

"That is correct, My General. Therefore we will not go farther. This way, please. You do not object to the alley?"

"Certainly not."

How strange the service of the gods was! When she was only a girl, Maytera Mockorange had told her that the gods' service meant missing sleep and meals, and had made her give that response each time she was asked. Now here she was; she hadn't eaten since breakfast, but by Thelxiepeia's grace she was too tired to be hungry.

"The boy you sent off to bed." The captain chuckled. "He will sleep all night. Did you foresee that, My General? The poor girl will have to remain at her post until morning."

"Horn? No more than three hours, Captain, if that."

The alley ended at a wider steet. Mill Street, Maytera Mint told herself, seeing the forlorn sign of a dark coffee shop called the Mill. Mill Street was where you could buy odd lengths of serge and tweed cheaply.

"Here we are out of sight, though not hidden from sentries on the wall. Look." He pointed again. "Do you recognize it, My General?"

"I recognize the wall of the Alambrera, certainly. And I can see a floater. Is it yours? No, it can't be, or they'd be shooting at it, and the turret's missing."

"It is one of those you destroyed, My General. But it is mine now. I have two men in it." He halted. "Here I leave you for perhaps three minutes. It is too dangerous for us to proceed, but I must see that all is well with them."

She let him trot away, waiting until he had almost reached the disabled floater before she began to run herself, running as she had so often pictured herself running in games with the children at the palaestra, her skirt hiked to her knees and her feet flying, the fear of impropriety gone who could say where.

He jumped, caught the edge of the hole where the turret had been, pulled himself up and rolled over, vanishing into the disabled floater. Seeing him, she felt less confident that she could do it too.

Fortunately she did not have to; when she was still half a dozen strides away, a door opened in its side. "I did not think you would remain behind, My General," the captain told her, "though I dared hope. You must not risk yourself in this fashion."

She nodded, too breathless to speak, and ducked into the floater. It was cramped yet strangely roofless, the crouching Guardsmen clearly ill at ease, trained to snap to attention but compressed by circumstance. "Sit down," she ordered them, "all of you. We can't stand on formality in here."

That word
stand
had been unwisely chosen, she reflected. They sat anyway, with muttered thanks.

"This buzz gun, you see, My General," the captain patted it, "once it belonged to the commander of this floater. He missed you, so it is yours."

She knew nothing about buzz guns and was curious despite her fatigue. "Does it still operate? And do you have," at a loss, she waved a vague hand, "whatever it shoots?"

"Cartridges, My General. Yes, there are enough. It was the fuel that exploded in this floater, you see. They are not like soldiers, these floaters. They are like taluses and must have fish oil or palm-nut oil for their engines. Fish oil is not so nice, but we employ it because it is less costly. This floater carried sufficient ammunition for both guns, and there is sufficient still."

"I want to sit there." She was looking at the officer's seat. "May I?"

"Certainly, My General." The captain scrambled out of her way.

The seat was astonishingly comfortable, deeper and softer than her bed in the cenoby, although its scorched upholstery smelled of smoke. Not astonishing, Maytera Mint told herself, not really. To be expected, because it had been an officer's seat, and the Ayuntamiento treated officers well, knowing that its power rested on them; that was something to keep in mind, one more thing she must not forget.

"Do not touch the trigger, My General. The safety catch is disengaged." The captain reached over her shoulder to push a small lever. "Now it is engaged. The gun will not fire."

"This spider web thing." She touched it instead. "Is it what you call the sight?"