Страница 44 из 104
“My wife visits a woman who professes to reveal the future to her.” Oosik tugged his mustache again. “She says she does not believe this, but she does. I have upbraided her without effect. A man without a wife is spared a full half of life’s unpleasantness.”
“We augurs,” Silk said carefully, “profess to reveal the future, too. That is to say, we profess to read the will of the gods in the entrails of their sacrifices. I admit that the intestines of a sheep seem like an unlikely tablet even for a god, but history records many striking instances of accurate predictions.”
A slight smile elevated Oosik’s mustache. “My change of topic did not discomfit you, Calde.”
“Not at all.”
“Good. I mentioned this woman because she and many like her are false, and I do not wish you to think me a false prophet like them. If I predict, with success, the next event of the war, will that increase my credit with you?”
“It can go no higher, Generalissimo.”
“Then this will demonstrate that I deserve the confidence you repose in me. Siyuf will send a force of substance into the tu
Silk nodded thoughtfully.
“Once more in the Juzgado, you will insist that the force be withdrawn, those gallant young girls. Soon it will be, and after that, Siyuf will fight in the tu
“You are a false prophet, Generalissimo,” Silk told him. “Having heard your prophesy, I won’t permit that to happen.”
“In which case we must fight there, and because they are narrow, a hundred or two at a time. One by one we will lose our floaters and taluses, and with them scores of troopers. It will be slow work, and while it is done our numbers will grow less each day. These thousands and thousands of troopers of General Mint’s, who constitute so formidable a force. Can you afford to pay them?”
Silk shook his head.
“Then what will there be to hold them, if there is little fighting for them? A trooper fights for honor, Calde, whether he is General Skate’s trooper or hers. Or from loyalty. Or for loot sometimes. But he waits for pay. He will not wait without it, because when there is no fighting there is no honor to win, no flag to die for, no loot to gain.”
“The Trivigauntis are stronger than we are already,” Silk said pensively. “I think so at least, after what I saw today.”
Oosik shook his head. “Not yet, Calde, though Mint’s ranks have begun to thin, perhaps. By the end of the winter—” Oosik was interrupted by climes, and Horn’s hurrying footsteps.
The three augurs had agreed that Jerboa would offer the first victim and the largest. The rest — eight had been led through the chill dusk into the old manteion on Brick Street, and more were expected momentarily — would be divided between Incus and Shell, with Incus offering the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth, and each choosing freely from those available, as long as he did not choose the largest.
Auk, who had been a silent witness to their discussion, watched with interest as Jerboa tottered to the ambion; this feeble frame, this snowy-haired, half-naked skull, contained a tiny fragment of Great Pas, Lord of the Whorl and Father of the Seven. Did it know it was about to be reclaimed?
Shag yes, Auk told himself, it was bound to. He, Auk, had explained the whole thing to old Jerboa, hadn’t he? How gods could tear chunks off themselves without getting smaller, and how they could slip those into a cull. The chunk could be jefe then if it wanted to, but it didn’t have to. It could, as he had been at pains to make clear, just go along. It was like a buck on a donkey. Sure, he could order it around, make it trot or stop, turn one way or the other — only he didn’t have to. Maybe he’d just let go of the reins, hook a leg over the pommel, and snoodge, letting his donkey graze or look for water, or whatever it wanted to. That was what Pas had done for years and years, but how long would he keep it up?
“My very dear new friends,” Jerboa began, “I know you have not, any of you—” He coughed and clearly wished to spit, but swallowed. “That you haven’t come out here and brought the gods more fine offerings than we’ve seen since… I don’t know.”
Benevolently, he looked toward the sibyls gathered about the fire that the youngest was kindling on the altar. “Maytera Wood, you’ve a better memory. They just brought another calf. That makes three. No, four. Four nice calves and four lambs, and a colt. We’ll have a bull before we’re done, I declare… What was I going to ask you about, Maytera?”
“When we’d had better animals,” the oldest sibyl told him. “It was when you came from the schola, Patera. Your parents and your aunt bought a bullock and a peacock, and — oh, dear. It was Maytera Salvia who told me. What else did she say?”
“A monkey,” Jerboa informed her. “I recollect the monkey, Maytera.” He had not liked offering the monkey, and something of that showed in his face after sixty-one years. “It doesn’t matter. There were nine, one for each of the Nine.”
As if they were a backward class, he fixed his eyes on Auk and Hammerstone, and those of Auk’s followers who had returned. “There are nine great gods, as all you young people should know. That’s Pas and Echidna, and their children. What my father and my aunt did was to buy a gift for each, for me to give them the first time I sacrificed. On that altar right over there it was. Most were small. Some kind of a singing bird for Molpe, and a mole for Tartaros, and the monkey. I recollect those.”
Incus, waiting with Shell, stirred impatiently.
If Jerboa noticed, he did not betray it. “What they were doing was a very important thing. They were starting a young man off—” He coughed again. “Excuse it. The gods’ will, I’m sure. I just want to say it’s a more important thing that we’re doing tonight. A god, not just any god but Lord Pas himself, they say, has told these new gentlemen and Patera — Patera — ?”
“Incus,” Hammerstone prompted from a front seat.
“What’s an incus anyway? I don’t think I’ve offered an incus in all my years. Well, never mind. One of those little things that live in trees and eat the birds’ eggs, I imagine.” Another cough. “Told them if they’d find me… Is that right?”
Incus, who had been on the point of objecting violently a moment before, exerted self-control. “You are indeed the augur whom Pas himself designated, Patera, if you are that Jerboa whom he intended.”
Shell added encouragingly, “I’m sure you are, Patera.”
“If they’d find me and sacrifice, he’d come again, he said. Have I got that right?”
Hammerstone, Incus, and even Shell nodded confirmation, as did most of those assembled; there was a stir at the back of the manteion as an immensely tall worshipper led in a tame baboon.
“What I wanted to say while our good sibyls get the fire going is that it’s not a little thing. Not a little thing at all. Theophanies over on Sun Street lately, and this you’ve come from makes three. But I’m no stranger to them, not what you could call a stranger at all.”
He turned, shuffling around behind his ambion to address Incus. “You talked to Pas, did you?”
“I did.” Incus swelled with pride.
Jerboa faced about again. “He said he was going to come. Well, we’ll see. It’ll be a great thing, a tremendous thing. If it happens.”
Maytera Wood presented him with the knife of sacrifice, the signal that the sacred fire was burning satisfactorily. “I’ll have that black calf with the white face,” he decided.
“Bird back!”
Bison halted before Silk’s table and saluted at the very moment that Oreb, who had been riding on Horn’s shoulder, landed upon Silk’s head; no slightest twitching of Bison’s thick black beard betrayed amusement, although it seemed to Silk that there had been the briefest possible flicker of hilarity in Bison’s dark and darting eyes. “I’m early, Calde,” Bison confessed. “I came beforehand because I want to talk to you. If you object, I understand. Go ahead and tell me. But I have to talk to you, and I hope you’ll let me when you’re through.”