Exodus from the Long Sun

Jerboa’s trembling hand motioned him to silence. “It was I, Calde. I—” his thin old voice trembled and broke, “have an aversion to offering them. Just an old fool.”

“It isn’t, Patera,” said a sibyl who seemed at least as old. “Calde, they remind him of children. I don’t feel that way, but I know how he feels. We’ve talked about it.”

Patera Shell stepped forward. “Someone brought one once for Thelxiepeia, Calde, a little black monkey with a white head. Patera had me offer it.”

Silk cleared his throat. “In your youth — I understand, Patera Jerboa. Or at least I believe I do. Let us say that I understand as much as I need to. You dissuaded Gib.”

“While we were walking—” Jerboa coughed. “It’s a long, long way. He helped me along. He’s a kind man, Calde. A good man, though he doesn’t look it. I asked him to refrain for my sake. He said he would, and left us to buy a ram. I offered it for him tonight.”

Gib said, “Only I think that’s why Pas won’t come. They kill stuff at weddin’s, don’t they? So you—”

“Auk!” Silk recognized Chenille’s voice before he saw her. “Auk, is this a wedding?” Holding up her skirt, she sprinted down an aisle. “Hello, Putera! Hi, Hy! Congrats! Are you going to marry them, Your Cognizance?”

Quetzal did not reply, smiling at Hammerstone and Maytera Marble as they emerged from Echidna’s chapel. She knelt before him. “I begged your predecessor, Your Cognizance…”

Quetzal’s hairless head bobbed upon his long, wrinkled neck. “My predecessor no longer holds the baculus, Maytera.”

“I begged him to. I implored him, but he wouldn’t. I should tell you that.”

Maytera Mint looked down at her in amazement.

“Your Eminence, you said a moment ago, I overheard you, that not even His Cognizance can unmake an augur. It’s true, I know. But — but…”

“Their vow, eh?” Remora spoke to Silk. “Not indelible, hey? Not as — ah — serious.”

Quetzal inquired, “Do you want me to free you from your vow, Maytera? Yes or no will suffice.”

“Yes, but I really ought—”

“To explain. You’re right. For your own peace of mind, you must. You’ve good sense, Maytera, I’ve seen that. Doesn’t your good sense tell you I’m not the one to whom you owe your explanation? Stand, please. Tell your sib Maytera Mint. Also Maytera Wood and her sibs. Be brief.”

As Maytera Marble got to her feet, Hammerstone said, “We knew each other a long time ago. You remember, Calde? I told you before you gave me the slip. Her name was Moly then.”

Maytera Marble spoke to Maytera Mint and the other sibyls in a voice so soft that Silk could scarcely hear her. “I was the maid, the sibyls’ maid, when the first bios moved into the city. I got our cenoby ready for them, and in those days I used to look like — like Dahlia, I nearly said, sib, but you never knew Dahlia. Like Teasel, a little.” She laughed nervously. “Can you imagine me looking like Teasel? But I did, then.”

Still staring, Maytera Mint managed to nod.

“There were six then. Six sibyls on Sun Street. I didn’t have a room, you see. I don’t really need one. But there were never more than six, and as time went on, fewer. Five and then four, then three. And then — and then only two, as it was with us, dear, dear sib, after I died.”

The youngest sibyl from Brick Street started to object, glanced around at the others, and thought better of it.

Maytera Marble displayed a string of yellowed prayer beads. “Just Maytera Betel and I. These were hers. They’re ivory.” She lifted her head, a smile and a plea. “The chain is silver. She was a fine, fine woman.”

“Girl cry,” Oreb informed Silk, although no tears streaked Maytera Marble’s smooth metal face.

“We couldn’t do it all. There was just the two of us and young Patera Pike. And ever so many children, and so Maytera called — called upon…”

Hammerstone explained, “She drafted Moly.”

“Upon me. I knew arithmetic. You’ve got to, to keep any sort of house. How much to buy for so many, and how much you can spend, that sort of thing. I kept a — a diary, I suppose you call it, to practice my hand, which was really quite good. So I could teach the youngest their sums and letters, and I did. Some parents complained, and There wasn’t any reason not to. I put my hand on the Writings and promised, and Maytera and Maytera Rose witnessed it and kissed me, and — and then I got new clothes.”

She looked at Hammerstone, begging his understanding. “A new name, too. I couldn’t be Moly any more once I was a sibyl, or even Maytera Molybdenum. We all take new names, and you were gone. I hadn’t seen you in years and years.”

“He slept,” Incus told her. “He was so ordered.”

“Yeah, I did,” Hammerstone confirmed. “For me a order’s a order. Always has been. Only now Patera says it’s all right. If he’d of said no—” Slate slapped him on the backplate, the clang of his hand startingly loud in the religious hush of the Grand Manteion.

Xiphias nudged Silk. “Double wedding, lad!”

“Your Cognizance must think this terribly strange,” Maytera Marble ventured.

“Perfectly natural,” Quetzal assured her.

“We — we’re not like bios about this. It matters terribly to you how old somebody is. I know, I’ve seen it.”

“Her and me are really about the same age,” Hammerstone confided. “Only I slept so much.”

“What matters to us is — is whether we can.” Maytera Marble raised her right hand to show Quetzal the weld that had reattached it, and moved her fingers. “My hand’s well again, and I’ve got a lot of replacement parts, and I can. So we’re going to. Or at least we want to, if — if Your Cognizance—”

“You are released,” Quetzal told her. “You are a laywoman again, Molybdenum.”

“Like a story, right, lass?” Xiphias edged toward Hyacinth and spoke in a tone he intended as confidential. “Must be the end! Everybody getting married! Need another ring!”

Chapter 12 — I’m Auk

It was, Silk thought, no time to be wakeful.

Or more persuasively, no time to sleep. Careful not to awaken Hyacinth, he rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. How many times had he daydreamed of a night like this, and thrust the dream away, telling himself that its reality could never be his? Now…

No, it was no time to sleep. As quietly as he could, he slipped from their bed to bathe and relieve himself. Hyacinth, who wept before sleep, had wept that night; he had wept too — had wept in joy and pain, and in joy at his pain. When tears were done and their heads rested on one pillow, she had said that no man had ever wept with her before.

Two floors below them, their reflected images knelt in the fishpond at Thelxiepeia’s feet, subsistent but invisible. There she would weep for him longer than they lived. He lowered his naked body into a rising pool, warm and scarcely less romantic.

Ermine’s, Silk discovered when he rose from it, provided everything. Not merely soap, water, towels, and an array of perfumes and scented powders, but thick, woolly robes: one pale and possibly cream or pale yellow, and a longer, darker one that might have been blue had he dared clap and rouse the dim sparks that circled one another on the ceiling.

After drying himself, he put on the longer robe and tied its belt, returned to their bedroom, and covered Hyacinth’s perfect, naked body with infinite gentleness. Then, standing outside upon air, watched himself do it, a darker shadow with tousled hair pulling up sheet and blanket to veil his sleeping wife’s long, softly rounded legs and swelling hips — Horn and Nettle huddled in a musty bed in a small, chill room in the Calde’s Palace.

— Patera Pike cutting the throat of a speckled rabbit he himself had bought.

— a ragged child weeping on a mattress of straw.

— a blind god metamorphosed from a blind man who remained a blind man still, and was struck.