Страница 98 из 102
There was not much inside, just some dirt and hair and old bones, and a little jewelry. Not much. I thought the boy would take the rings and so forth, but he did not. After I had seen the inside I looked back up at the girl to see what she thought of it, and she said, "I died young. It can't have been long after I was sca
He opened his hand all the way. It got so bright it hurt my eyes. The bird has this thin filmy sort of eyelid he uses in bright sun, and next time I looked at him he had it.
Then Father said, "I imagine so, Cilinia." From the way he said it, you knew it was the last thing he would ever say to her. I wish I knew how to do that with my voice. I have tried it, but for me it never sounds right.
Father had gotten a lot solider-looking when the light got bright. I do not know about me and the bird, I was not paying much attention to us just then, but the girl got all wispy.
After that, she went. It was like she was water in a bowl, and the dirt in the lead casket was the ground, and somebody we could not see was pouring her out. Maybe the light was.
When she was gone, Father closed his hand again. The boy wanted to know if he should put the lid back. Father said yes, and, "I can't say what may happen if you open it again. Probably nothing. Still, I advise you not to."
The boy said he would not. He screwed the lid back down, which did not take nearly as long as it had to get it off, and we shoved it back in the corner again.
When it was done, the bird said, "Bad thing. Bad girl." You could tell it was not quite sure she was gone.
I thought that was fu
After that we went back outside. It was practically night, what old people call shadelow, the time when there are shadows everyplace. There was a great big rosebush growing right by the door of the stone building with about a hundred purple roses on it. I had not noticed the smell when we came in, or anyway I do not think I did. But when we went out I noticed it a lot. The night seemed to bring it out, and it was almost like it followed us. Maybe we got it on our clothes. It was sweet but heavy, the kind of smell you like at first, but after a little while it makes you tired. Now, just about anytime I smell anything like that I think about the girl, and the dirt that was inside the lead box. She was right at the mean stage a lot of girls get in, but she would probably have gotten over it when she got older. She might have turned out to be a pretty nice person after all.
While we were walking, the boy told Father he wanted him to see his dog. He said he had wanted to show it to him the last time Father was here, but Father had not gotten to see it, so could he show him now? Father said sure.
That got me to thinking about what we were doing now instead of the girl and whether she had really gone away. I mean died, because that is what it was, I know. So I asked if we were just going back to the tower to see this dog, and I said that if that was all it was maybe it would be better for us to go home.
Father said, "We've accomplished the task we set out to do, but the most difficult part of our trip remains, my son. We must persuade-or force-Juganu to return with us."
I wanted to say, "Don't you think Juganu will want to go?" but that would have been dumb because I could see from what he had said that he did not. So I said, "You told him what would happen if he didn't."
Father did not say anything. If you asked him a question that really was a question he just about always answered some way, I think because he was so polite. But if you just said something like that to show you would like to know something, pretty often he did not say anything back. By that time I knew all about that so I did not do it very often anymore.
The boy said, "Do you want to look for your friend first, or see Triskele?"
"Both," Father told him.
After that, nobody said anything until we got to the little gate. Then the boy knocked and called out, "We are returning, Brother Porter!"
That was the torturer at the gate, a big fat man with a big sword. He stared at us through the little window, and it was the first time it soaked through to me that I should have had a black robe and a sword too, like Father had helped Juganu make.
So I made them as fast as I could while he was looking at me, and it was probably a mistake. The sword was not sharp, for one thing, and the robe was really just kind of a black sheet tied around my neck, and I still had on the tunic that Mother had made for me back home. Brother Porter opened the gate for us anyway, but he was trembling so bad that Father stayed behind to talk to him and sort of tell him it was all right.
The boy and I went on. Father made a little motion to say we ought to, and I think that was right, because the boy helped me with my robe and I found out I could make my sword sharp by pinching my fingers together and ru
Pretty soon we heard Juganu's voice. It was noisy down there, with somebody yelling or screaming all the time. But in a way it was quiet, too, because nobody was listening. When somebody talked the way Juganu did, just the way a person usually does so that somebody else will hear him and understand what he said, it sort of stood out. We went to the room he was in and looked through a little window pretty much like the one in the gate, and he was in there with a nicelooking woman.
She had big eyes that looked like they cried a lot, only she did not look like she was going to cry any more ever just then, if you know what I mean. She looked like life was just so wonderful there in her little room that she loved the whole whorl and nothing could ever make her unhappy again. She looked up at me when I tapped on the door with my sword, but then she looked back at Juganu like looking at anything else was just a big waste of time.
When we had gone out to the cemetery that they called the necropolis, Father and I had just walked though the wall, the bird and the girl flew over, and the boy had climbed it where it had fallen down. And I had been thinking it would probably have been better if we had come back the same way and not gotten the fat man all upset. So right then I tried to see if I could just walk through that door, too, without Father there to tell me how. I tried, and I did it. It worked fine.
There was something fu
Juganu wanted to know what I wanted, but I think he knew. I said it was time to go, and she cried and held on to him. He said, "Are you saying that we're going to leave this moment? Where's the Raj an?"