Litany of the Long Sun (78 page)
THE FIRST GRAY light of shadeup had filled the streets of Limna before they were ready to leave. Silk was still murmuring the morning prayer to High Hierax as he mounted the young white donkey one of the troopers held for him, and put his hands behind his back for the other to tie.
"I'll make this real loose, Caldé," the trooper told him apologetically. "Loose enough so it won't hurt, and you can shake it off whenever you want to."
Silk nodded without interrupting his prayer. It seemed strange to pray now in a red tunic, though he had frequently prayed in colored clothes before he entered the schola. He would change at the manse, he told himself; he would put on a clean tunic and his best robe. He was a poor speaker (in his own estimation), and people would make fun of him if he wasn't habited like an augur. There would have to be a lot of people, too\As many as he and the three sibyls-and, yes, of course, the students from the palaestra-could get together. When he spoke… In the manteicm or outside? When he spoke, he The captain had mounted his prancing charger. "If you are ready, My Caldé?"
Silk nodded. "It's occurred to me that you might easily turn this pretended arrest into a real one, Captain. If you do, you'll have nothing to fear from me-or from the gods, I believe."
"Hierax have my bones if I intend any such treachery, My Caldé. You may take the reins whenever you wish." Though Silk could not recall kicking it, his donkey was ambling forward. After a moment's reflection, he concluded that the trooper who had tied his hands had probably prodded it from behind.
Crane was studying the black cloud banks rolling across the lake. "Going to be a dark day." He urged his donkey forward to keep up with Silk's. "The first one in quite a while. At least we won't have to fry on these things in the sun."
Silk asked how long he thought the ride would take. "On these? Four hours, minimum. Don't donkeys ever run?"
"I saw one run across a meadow when I was a boy," Silk said. "Of course it had no man on its back."
"That fellow just finished tying my hands, and my nose itches already."
They trotted up Shore Street, past theJuzgado in which the helpful woman who had admired Oreb had mentioned Scylla's shrine and the Pilgrims' Way, past Advocate Vulpes's gaudy signboard with its scarlet fox. Vulpes would wonder why he had not given the captain his card, Silk thought-assuming that Vulpes saw him and recognized him in his new clothes. Vulpes would protest that criminals arrested in Limna should not be returned to the city to deprive them of his services.
Vulpes's card had been lost with so many other things when he had been searched-with his keys to the mante- ion, now that he came to think of them. Possibly Lemur, who had gotten Hyacinth's needler, the azoth, and his gammadion and beads from Councillor Potto, had taken Vulpes's card as well, though it would do Lemur no good in the court to which he had gone…
Silk looked up, and Limna had vanished behind them. The road wound among low, sandy hills that must have been islets and shallows even when the lake was much larger. He turned in his saddle for a final glimpse of the village, but behind the captain and the two troopers on their horses saw only the steely blue waters of the lake.
"This must be about the time Chenille used to arrive as a child," he told Crane. "She used to look for the water at shadeup. Did she ever tell you about it?"
"That would have been earlier than this."
A falling drop of water darkened the hair of the white donkey's neck; another splashed Silk's own rather less tidy hair, wet but astonishingly warm.
"Good thing this didn't come a little earlier," Crane said, "not that I like it anytime."
Silk heard the rattle of shots an instant after he saw Crane stiffen. Behind him, the captain shouted, "Get down!" and something else, words drowned by the boom of a trooper's slug gun.
The rope about Silk's wrists, which had been about to fall off a moment before, seemed to tighten as soon as he tried to free his hands from it.
"Caldé! Get down!"
He dove from the saddle into the dust of'the road. By a seeming miracle, one hand was free. The roar of a floater was followed by a longer coarse, dry rattles, the sound of an immense child hurrying a lath along the bars of a cage.
He scrambled to his feet. Crane's hands were free, too; he put them about Silk's neck as Silk helped him off his donkey. More shots. The captain's charger screamed-a horrible sound-reared and plunged into them, knocking them both into the ditch.
"My left lung," Crane muttered. Blood trickled from his mouth.
"All right." Silk pushed up Crane's tunic and tore it in a single motion.
"Azoth."
The booms of slug guns were followed by the greater boom of thunder, as if the gods were firing and dying too. Pale drops the size of pigeons' eggs splattered the dust.
"I'm going to bandage you," Silk said. "I don't think it's fatal. You're going to be all right."
"No good." Crane spat blood. And then, "Pretend you're my father." A torrent of rain engulfed them like a wave.
"I am your father, Doctor." Silk pushed a wadded rag into the hot and pulsing cavity that was Crane's wound and tore a long strip from Crane's tunic to hold it in place.
"Caldé. Take the azoth." Crane put it into his hands, and died. "All right."
Bent above him, the useless strip of rag in his hands, Silk watched him go, saw the shudder that convulsed him and the upward rolling of his eyes, felt the final stiffening of his limbs and the relaxation that followed, and knew that life had gone, that the great and invisible vulture that was Hierax at such moments had swooped through the driving rain to sei/.e Crane's spirit and tear it free from Crane's body-that he himself, kneeling in the mud, knelt in the divine substance of the unseen god. As he watched, Crane's wound ceased to throb with blood; in a second or two, the rain had washed it white.
He put Crane's azoth into his own waistband and took out his beads. "I convey to you, Doctor Crane, the forgiveness of all the gods. Recall now the words of Pas, who said, 'Do my will, live in peace, multiply, and do not disturb my seal. Thus you shall escape my wrath.' "
Yet Pas's seal had been disturbed many times; he him- self had scraped up the remains of one such seal. Embryos, mere flecks of rotten flesh, had lain among the remains of another. Was Pas's seal to be valued more than the things it had been intended to protect? (Thunder crashed.) Pas's wrath had been loosed upon the whorl.
" 'Go willingly,' " (Where?) " 'and any wrong that you have ever done shall be forgiven.' "
The floater was nearer, the roar of its blowers audible above the roaring of the storm.
"O Doctor Crane, my son, know that this Pas and all the lesser gods have empowered me to forgive you in their names. And I do forgive you, remitting every crime and wrong. They are expunged." Streaming water, Silk's beads traced the sign of subtraction. "You are blessed."
There was no more shooting. Presumably the captain and both troopers were dead. Would the Guard let him bring them the Pardon of Pas before he was taken away?
"I pray you to forgive us, the living." Silk spoke as quickly as he could, racing words his teachers at the schola would never have approved. "I and many another have wronged you often, Doctor, committing terrible crimes against you. Do not hold them in your heart, but begin the life that follows life in all innocence, all these\wrongs forgiven."
A slug gun boomed three times in rapid succession, very near. The buzz gun rattled again, and mud erupted a hand's breadth from Crane's head.
The effectual point: "In the name of all the gods you are forgiven forever, Doctor Crane. I speak here for Great Pas-" So many in the Nine, each with an honorific. Silk was seized by the feeling that none of them really mattered, not even Hierax, though Hierax was surely present. "And for the Outsider and all lesser gods."
He stood.
A muddy figure crouching behind a dead horse shouted, "Run, My Caldé! Save yourself!" then turned to fire again at the Guard floater bearing down on them.
Silk raised his hands, the rope that had not bound him still dangling from one wrist. "I surrender!" The azoth in his waistband seemed a lump of lead. He limped forward as fast as he could, slipping and sliding in the mud while rain pelted his face. "I'm Caldé Silk!" Lightning flared across the sky, and for an instant the advancing floater seemed a talus with tusks and staring, painted eyes. "If you have to shoot someone, shoot me!"
The mud-smeared figure dropped its slug gun and raised its hands as well.
The floater halted, the air blasting from its blowers raising a secondary rain of muddy water.
"They fired upon us from ambush, My Caldé." As though by a trick, the muddy figure spoke with the captain's voice. "We die for you and for Viron."
A hatch below the turret opened, and an officer whose uniform was instantly soaked with rain vaulted out.
"I know," Silk said. "I'll never forget you." He tried to recall the captain's name, but if he had ever heard it, it was gone, like the name of the trooper with the long, serious brown face, the one whose father's pond had gone dry.
The officer strode toward them, halted, and drew his sword with a flourish. Heels together and head erect, he saluted with it as though upon the drill field, holding it vertically before his face. "Caldé! Thank Hierax and all the gods that I was able to rescue you!"
THE END OF BOOK TWO
Table of Contents
Book One
Chapter 1 THE MANTEION ON SUN STREET
Chapter 5 THE WHITE-HEADED ONE
Chapter 8 THE BOARDER ON THE LARDER
Chapter 10 THE CAT WITH THE RED-HOT TAIL
Book Two
GODS, PERSONS, AND ANIMALS MENTIONED IN THE TEXT
Chapter 9 IN DREAMS LIKE DEATH
