Nightside the Long Sun (2 page)

“I was going to say…”

Silk nodded. “Your eyes have said it for you already. Thank you, Horn. Thank you. I know that whenever I'm in need I can call on you, and that you'll do all that you can without counting the cost. But, Horn—”

“Yes, Patera?”

“I knew all that before.”

The tall boy's head bobbed. “And all the other sprats, too, Patera. There are a couple of dozen that I know we can trust. Maybe more.”

Horn was standing as straight as a Guardsman on parade now. With a slight shock of insight, Silk realized that this unaccustomed perpendicularity was in imitation of his own, and that Horn's clear, dark eyes were very nearly level with his.

“And after that,” Horn continued, “there will be others, new boys. And men.”

Silk nodded again, gravely reflecting that Horn was already a grown man in every way that mattered, and a man far better educated than most.

“And I don't want you to think I'm mad about it—knocking me over like that, Patera. You hit me hard, but that's the fun of the game.”

Silk shook his head. “That's merely how the game is played. The fun comes when someone small knocks down someone larger.”

“You were their best player, Patera. It wouldn't have been fair to them if you hadn't played as well as you can.” Horn glanced over his shoulder at Maytera Rose's open door. “I have to go now. Thanks, Patera.”

There was a line in the Writings that applied to the game and its lessons—lessons more important, Silk felt, than any Maytera Rose might teach; but Horn was already almost to the doorway. To his back, Silk murmured, “‘Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan.'”

He sighed at the final word, knowing that the quotation had come a second too late, and that Horn, too, had been too late; that Horn would tell Maytera Rose that he, Patera Silk, had detained him, and that Maytera Rose would punish him nevertheless without bothering to find out whether it was true.

Silk turned away. There was no point in remaining to listen, and Horn would fare that much worse if he tried to intervene. How could the Outsider have chosen such a bungler? Was it possible that the very gods were ignorant of his weakness and stupidity?

Some of them?

*   *   *

The manteion's rusty cash box was bare, he knew; yet he must have a victim, and a fine one. The parents of one of the students might lend him five or even ten bits, and the humiliation of having to beg such poor people for a loan would certainly be beneficial. For as long as it took him to close the unwilling door of the palaestra and start for the market, his resolution held; then the only-too-well-imagined tears of small children deprived of their accustomed supper of milk and stale bread washed it away. No. The sellers would have to extend him credit.

The sellers must. When had he ever offered a single sacrifice, however small, to the Outsider? Never! Not one in his entire life. Yet the Outsider had extended infinite credit to him, for Patera Pike's sake. That was one way of looking at it, at least. And perhaps that was the best way. Certainly he would never be able to repay the Outsider for the knowledge and the honor, no matter how hard or how long he tried. Small wonder, then …

As Silk's thoughts raced, his long legs flashed faster and faster.

The sellers never extended a single bit's credit, true. They gave credit to no augur; and certainly they would not extend it to an augur whose manteion stood in the poorest quarter of the city. Yet the Outsider could not be denied, so they would have to. He would have to be firm with them, extremely firm. Remind them that the Outsider was known to esteem them last among men already—that according to the Writings he had once (having possessed and enlightened a fortunate man) beaten them severely in person. And though the Nine could rightly boast …

A black civilian floater was roaring down Sun Street, scattering men and women on foot and dodging ramshackle carts and patient gray donkeys, its blowers raising a choking cloud of hot yellow dust. Like everyone else, Silk turned his face away, covering his nose and mouth with the edge of his robe.

“You there! Augur!”

The floater had stopped, its roar fading to a plaintive whine as it settled onto the rutted street. A big, beefy, prosperous-looking man standing in its passenger compartment flourished a walking stick.

Silk called, “I take it you are addressing me, sir. Is that correct?”

The prosperous-looking man gestured impatiently. “Come over here.”

“I intend to,” Silk told him. A dead dog rotting in the gutter required a long stride that roused a cloud of fat blue-backed flies. “
Patera
would be better mannered, sir; but I'll overlook it. You may call me ‘augur' if you like. I have need of you, you see. Great need. A god has sent you to me.”

The prosperous-looking man looked at least as surprised as Horn had when Silk had knocked him down.

“I require two—no, three cards,” Silk continued. “Three cards or more. I require them at once, for a sacred purpose. You can provide them easily, and the gods will smile on you. Please do so.”

The prosperous-looking man mopped his streaming brow with a large peach-colored handkerchief that sent a cloying fragrance to war with the stenches of the street. “I didn't think that the Chapter let you augurs do this sort of thing, Patera.”

“Beg? Why, no. You're perfectly correct, sir. It's absolutely forbidden. But there's a beggar on every corner—you must know the kinds of things they say, and that's not what I'm telling you at all. I'm not hungry, and I have no starving children. I don't want your money for myself, but for a god, for the Outsider. It's a major error to restrict one's worship to the Nine, as I—Never mind. The Outsider must have a suitable offering from me before shadedown. It's absolutely imperative. You'll be certain to gain his favor by supplying it.”

“I wanted—” the prosperous-looking man began.

Silk raised his hand. “No! The money—three cards at least, at once. I've offered you a splendid opportunity to gain his favor. You've lost that now, but you may still escape his displeasure, if only you'll act without further delay. For your own sake, give me three cards immediately!” Silk stepped closer, scrutinizing the prosperous-looking man's ruddy, perspiring face. “Terrible things may befall you. Horrible things!”

Reaching for the card case at his waist, the prosperous-looking man said, “A respectable citizen shouldn't even stop his floater in this quarter. I simply—”

“If you own this floater, you can afford three cards easily. And I'll offer a prayer for you—many prayers that you may eventually attain to…” Silk shivered.

The driver rasped, “Shut your shaggy mouth and let Blood talk, you butcher.” Then to Blood, “You want me to bring him along, Jefe?”

Blood shook his head. He had counted out three cards, and now held them in a fan; half a dozen ragged men stopped to gawk at the gleaming gold. “Three cards you say you want, Patera. Here they are. Enlightenment? Was that what you were going to ask the gods to give me? You augurs are always squeaking about it. Well, I don't care about that. I want a little information instead. Tell me everything I want to know, and I'll hand over all three. See 'em? Then you can offer this wonderful sacrifice for yourself if you want to, or do whatever you want with the money. How about it?”

“You don't know what you're risking. If you did—”

Blood snorted. “I know that no god's come to any Window in this city since I was a young man, Patera, no matter how you butchers howl. And that's all I need to know. There's a manteion on this street, isn't there? Where Silver Street meets it at an angle? I've never been in that part of this quarter, but I asked, and that's what I was told.”

Silk nodded. “I'm augur there.”

“The old cull's dead, then?”

“Patera Pike?” Silk traced the sign of addition in the air. “Yes. Patera Pike has been with the gods for almost a year. Did you know him?”

Ignoring the question, Blood nodded to himself. “Gone to Mainframe, eh? All right, Patera. I'm not a religious man, and I don't pretend to be. But I promised my—well, I promised a certain person—that I'd go to this manteion of yours and say a few prayers for her. I'm going to make an offering, too, understand? Because I know she'll ask if I did. That's besides these cards here. So is there somebody there who'll let me in?”

Silk nodded again. “Maytera Marble or Maytera Mint would be delighted to, I'm sure. You'll find them both in the palaestra, on the other side of our ball court.” Silk paused, thinking. “Maytera Mint's rather shy, though she's wonderful with the children. Perhaps you'd better ask for Maytera Marble, in the first room to your right. She could leave one of the older girls in charge of her class for an hour or so, I would think.”

Blood closed his fan of cards as if about to hand them over to Silk. “I'm not too crazy about chemical people, Patera. Somebody told me you've got a Maytera Rose. Maybe I could get her, or isn't she there any more?”

“Oh, yes.” Silk hoped his voice did not reflect the dismay he felt whenever he thought of Maytera Rose. “But she's quite elderly, sir, and we try to spare her poor legs whenever we can. I feel sure that Maytera Marble would prove completely satisfactory.”

“No doubt she will.” Blood counted his cards again, his lips moving, his fat, beringed fingers reluctant to part from each wafer-thin, shining rectangle. “You were going to tell me about enlightenment a minute ago, Patera. You said you'd pray for me.”

“Yes,” Silk confirmed eagerly, “and I meant it. I will.”

Blood laughed. “Don't bother. But I'm curious, and I've never had such a good chance to ask one of you about it before. Isn't enlightenment really pretty much the same as possession?”

“Not exactly, sir.” Silk gnawed his lower lip. “You know, sir, at the schola they taught us simple, satisfying answers to all of these questions. We had to recite them to pass the examination, and I'm tempted to recite them again for you now. But the actualities—enlightenment, I mean, and possession—aren't really simple things at all. Or at least enlightenment isn't. I don't know a great deal about possession, and some of the most respected hierologists are of the opinion that it exists potentially but not actually.”

“A god's supposed to pull on a man just like a tunic—that's what they say. Well, some people can, so why not a god?” Watching Silk's expression, Blood laughed again. “You don't believe me, do you, Patera?”

Silk said, “I've never heard of such people, sir. I won't say they don't exist, since you assert that they do, although it seems impossible.”

“You're young yet, Patera. If you want to dodge a lot of mistakes, don't you forget that.” Blood glanced sidelong at his driver. “Get on these putts, Grison. Make them keep their paws off my floater.”

“Enlightenment…” Silk stroked his cheek, remembering.

“That ought to be easy, it seems to me. Don't you just know a lot of things you didn't know before?” Blood paused, his eyes upon Silk's face. “Things that you can't explain, or aren't allowed to?”

A patrol of Guardsmen passed, their slug guns slung and their left hands resting on the hilts of their swords. One touched the bill of his jaunty green cap to Blood.

“It's difficult to explain,” Silk said. “In possession there's always some teaching, for good or ill. Or at any rate that's what we're taught, though I don't believe—In enlightenment, there's much more. As much as the theodidact can bear, I would say.”

“It happened to you,” Blood said softly. “Lots of you say it did, but from you it's lily. You were enlightened, or you think you were. You think it's real.”

Silk took a step backward, bumping against one of the onlookers. “I didn't call myself enlightened, sir.”

“You didn't have to. I've been listening to you. Now you listen to me. I'm not giving you these cards, not for your holy sacrifice or for anything else. I'm paying you to answer my questions, and this is the last one. I want you to tell me—right now—what enlightenment is, when you got it, and why you got it. Here they are.” He held them up again. “Tell me, Patera, and they're yours.”

Silk considered, then plucked them from Blood's hand. “As you say. Enlightenment means understanding everything as the god who gives it understands it. Who you are and who everyone else is, really. Everything you used to think you understood, you see with complete clarity in that instant, and know that you didn't really understand it at all.”

The onlookers murmured, each to his neighbor. Several pointed toward Silk. One waved over the drawer of a passing handcart.

“Only for an instant,” Blood said.

“Yes, only for an instant. But the memory remains, so that you know that you knew.” The three cards were still in Silk's hand; suddenly afraid that they would be snatched away by one of the ragged throng around him, he slipped them into his pocket.

“And when did this happen to you? Last week? Last year?”

Silk shook his head, glancing up at the sun. The thin black line of the shade touched it as he watched. “Today. Not an hour ago. A ball—I was playing a game with the boys …

Blood waved the game away.

“And it happened. Everything seemed to stand still. I really can't say whether it was for an instant, or a day, or a year, or any other period of time—and I seriously doubt that any such period could be correct. Perhaps that's why we call him the Outsider: because he stands outside of time, all the time.”

“Uh-huh.” Blood favored Silk with a grudging smile. “I'm sure it's all smoke. Just some sort of daydream. But I've got to admit it's interesting smoke, the way you tell it. I've never heard of anything like this before.”