Страница 71 из 84
“ Have they moved?” MaGee persisted.
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, MaGee, they’ve moved.”
“They’re coming here.”
Elai looked at her, and a strange sad sweetness came to her. O MaGee, she thought. She had waited for this thing all her life. Now that it was here there was someone it truly horrified. “MaGee, my friend.” She smiled then, not so distraught as she should have been. “You are simple.” But to make it lighter she laid a hand on MaGee’s shoulder, then turned and walked away to the downwards entry, ignoring the eyes of all the rest.
“ First,”she heard MaGee call after her. “ Elai!”
So she stopped, curiously tranquil in this day.
“I have to warn the Base,” MaGee said.
“No. No com.”
“Are they in danger?” MaGee asked.
She stared at MaGee. There were other things to think of. Other folk had begun to arrive from below. Din was one. Twostone was with him. Beside them all stood Dain and Branch, still waiting. “First,” said Dain, fretting at her. “Do what, First?”
Three of the elders had come up, their white hair blowing in the wind. There was Din, her son, who stood with his hands behind him, whose brown had its crest up and advanced stiffly on its legs, very near to Scar.
Whhhhhsssss!Scar moved, seized up the young caliban in his great jaws, and nothing moved on that rooftop for the space of a long‑held breath, until Scar decided to let Twostone go.
So much for juvenile ambition, borne on the moment’s possibilities. Wait your turn, Elai thought with a cold, cold stare at her son, and turned her shoulder in disdain, not even bothering to address her anger to the boy.
This was cruel. After a moment she heard him flee the daylight, a scraping of claws, a patter of naked boyish feet vanishing down into the tower, while Scar’s crest lowered in satisfaction. There was a second, slower retreat, Cloud with his nurses; but Taem, when she looked his way, had stayed, small, bare‑kneed boy, with a Weird’s cool observance of what had passed between her and Din. So she knew this morning that Taem was gone for good, and that hit her unpleasantly, and completed her anger at the world.
That was what it was to be First. From the time that she was small, when Scar had come to her and made her what she was; and now that pathetic brown of Din’s, young yet, and not likely to get older–
Wisest to kill the rivals, with such a wi
She walked and looked about her, and calibans and ariels shifted, a scaly wave, a refixing of gold and sea‑green eyes all set on her. She looked about her from the Tower rim, to the Patterns, the river, the towers, the bright sea to which the river ran. Go bring, she signed abruptly, facing Dain; aloud: “Paeia.” Dain started away in grim haste. “Taem,” she added, which command turned Dain about at the entry with bewilderment on his face.
“Bring him too,” she said. “Tell him mind his ma
She hoped he did. She seldom felt Taem active in the Patterns. The New Towers were isolate; and for Taem the Twelve Towers calibans made a whorl with a silent center. Paeia they made as sunward, full of activity; but Taem was silence, like his son.
“Bring them,” Dain echoed her, as if he could have mistaken it. “And if they won’t come?”
Taem, he meant. If Taem won’t come.
She gave Dain no answer. Dain went. Perhaps her son had read it all too; perhaps he read his death out there, patterned on the shore.
Violence, his caliban had signalled. Desperate, not comic, a young caliban, too young for such a challenge. Mother, I want to live.
She had waited for this all her life. So had her son. She wanted to be alone now, only with MaGee, and Scar, not under these staring eyes that looked on her now with estimations–whether she would die now, whether that was what she meant by calling in those most dangerous to her life. She was frail; she limped. She ached when it rained. And her heirs were under twelve.
Will you die? their stares asked her. Some might think that safest. But her riders had cause to dread it, having been too loyal, serving her too closely. Change seemed in the wind, hazardous to them.
Give me sand, she asked of the aged Weird; it was Taem that brought it, a small leather sack, and crouched beside her as she stooped and Patterned with it. Others gathered about her, shadowing her from the sun, cutting off the wind.
She made the river for them, recalling the great Pattern on the shore. She made the whorls and mounds with sand streaming from her hand, so, so quickly, and signified Paeia and Taem coming in; their unified advance. Ariels nosed in past human feet, interfering in her work, trying mindlessly to put it back the way it was Patterned on the shore. Futures distressed them: they were never ready to make the shift, being occupied with now. She picked up the most persistent; it went stiff as a stick and she set it roughly back. It came to life again, scuttled off to watch. A gray nosed in, thigh‑high to the watchers.
So she built it, with Taem crouched elbows‑on‑knees beside her; and the Weird who was her son would pattern it to the browns, and the ariel and the gray would spread it too. She returned the challenge Jin had made. She had just insulted him, remaking the pattern that was the Styx.
She stood up, dusting off her hands, rose without needing Branch’s offered hands. Someone added a handful of stones to what she had done, embellishing the insult. There was laughter at that.
But it was nervous laughter. And afterward, she thought, they would be whispering aloud within the Tower, talking with voices, not daring Pattern what they thought where calibans might read.
Elai is finished.
If she goes herself, she’ll not come back.
If Jin comes here, there’ll be revenge; only fishers might survive– only might.
But if she steps aside– we have no stability.
“Go away,” she said, and they went. Their going let the wind come at her pattern and blow the sand in streamers across the stone, as if the wind were patterning back at her and mocking her folly.
MaGee stayed. Only MaGee and Scar. Even Taem and the other Weird had gone. The solitary gray retreated with other calibans and ariels, a retreating skein of lithe bodies and tails flowing down the entry to the Tower.
Shall I go? MaGee signed.
“I want to ask you something.”
“Ask,” MaGee said.
“If we should fall–will the starfolk do anything?”
“No,” MaGee said slowly, “no, I don’t think they will. They only watch what happens.”
“Does this amuse them?”
“They want to see–they’ve waited all these years to see what Pattern you’ll make. You. The Styx. No. They won’t intervene.”
This was a thunderclap of understanding. She saw the look Magee had, like a caliban well‑fed and dreaming in the sun. MaGee knew what she had said, had meant to let that slip. Elai spread her fingers at MaGee like the lifting of a crest.
“Yes,” MaGee acknowledged the curse. “The absolute truth, old friend. That’s what they’ve been up to all these years.”
A wider spread of the fingers.
MaGee lifted her head, blinked lazily as Scar could do. Defiant, as Scar could be, defying her in a way that was silent and more subtle than her son. “You can’t keep much secret from Jin, can you?” MaGee asked.
“No.” Pattern‑blind starfolk could keep their movements secret from each other. Cloudsiders swam in the knowledge of patterns like a sea. What she had done this morning flowed across the river; and the word would flow back again to Jin like a rebounding wave. I’m coming, man‑who‑wants‑the‑world. I’m bringing all that ever escaped Green’s hands. I’ll take your towers, I’ll erase you and all you are.