Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3)

Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) Page 32

"I am not, but a man of my own race."

"Many men, however, you have known, mysire? Men such as I am and as Mysire Rechtor is?"

"Yes. I was one of those who boarded your whorl when it neared our sun. In the Whorl, I made the acquaintance of many of your race, and I have known others since, on both the whorls we once called ours."

"Of these, my client Mysire Horn one is?"

"Yes. We became better acquainted when he was living in my house, some distance from here. I have found him to be an honorable man, devoted to your kind."

"If to our kind devoted he is, to yours a foe he must be, mysire. That do you deny?"

"I do. You spoke of your breed. You breed your own foes, who are our foes as well, those who would destroy others for gain and rob them for power." Here Windcloud paused-I shall never forget it, and I doubt that anyone who was present will-and turned his shadowed face, very slowly, toward Hamer.

"Your guest Mysire Horn was. This you have said. Invite him you did?"

"No. Another `man' who was living in my house brought him. He was not afraid of me, as the others were."

"This you did, though living in your house without your permission he was?"

"Soon it will be spring. The white fishcatchers will return, booming, and darkening your sky which was ours in their mating flight. Two will nest upon your chimney, though you will not invite them."

Windcloud's shadowed gaze had been upon Hamer, although he had addressed Taal; at this point he directed it to Nat. "You say he has harmed you, yet I see you whole, fat, and free, while another stands beside him with a sword."

To his everlasting credit, Nat rose and tried to withdraw his accusation; but Hamer would not permit it, asking whether the statements he had made were false and warning him that he would be prosecuted for lying under oath if he acknowledged that they were.

It was only then that I truly understood what had gone wrong in Dorp. It was not that its judges took bribes or that they used their power to enrich themselves, although they certainly did. It was that they had created a system that slowly but surely destroyed all who came in contact with it. Left to work it would destroy me, as Nat had desired; but it would destroy Nat as well, and Dorp itself.

Vadsig came to talk to me. "Here you sit, Mysire Horn, writing and writing. To us you do not speak."

"Poor man!" Oreb confirmed; and I protested that I talked to him, if only to tell him to be quiet, and that I had talked to Captain Wijzer.

"You we miss. Hide and Hoof it is. Me, also, mysire. Angry with us you are?"

"Not at all. But, Vadsig, I'd much rather have you young people desirous of my company than longing for my absence."

"Me to go you want?" She jumped up, shaking her full skirt and pretending to be deeply offended. "Tell me you must! Say back to the kitchen you go, dirty Vadsig!"

I protested that no man could possibly object to the company of such a woman as she.

She sat again. "When your town we reach, married Mysire Hide and I will be. His mother's blessing he wishes. To her a good son he is.,,

"I know, Vadsig, and he's a good son to me as well. I couldn't be happier for you both."

"The blessing she gives, mysire? This you think?"

"Good girl?" Oreb inquired. Knowing that he meant you, dear Nettle, I nodded.

"Not she gives, I think." Vadsig eyed me sidelong to gauge my reaction.

"You're mistaken," I said, and my thoughts were full of you.

"No cards I have, mysire."

I dropped five or six into her lap, not real cards such as we used in Viron, but the shining gold and silver imitations that we see more and more here on Blue.

She would not touch them. "To Hide already so much you give, mysire."

"But I have given nothing to you, Vadsig, and I owe you a great deal."

"Mora and Fava you owe."

"I do indeed, and I'll try to repay them if I ever get the opportunity. At this moment I have the opportunity to repay you, to a small degree; and I intend to grab it. I won't detail all you did for us-you know it best. But I know it well enough, and those cards are merely a token."

"Also your son you give?" Her upper lip trembled, its minute motion piteously revealed by the brilliant sunlight.

"Are you asking whether I'll bless your union? Of course I will. I do. I'll perform the ceremony myself if you wish it, though it would be better to have His Cognizance Patera Remora. I can assist him, if he will permit it."

"A poor wife I will make." She smoothed her gown, pressing it against her body to show that she was slender to the point of emaciation.

"Before I returned here I met a young woman named Olivine, Vadsig. If she were here with us-and in a sense she is, for I have a part of her-she would point out to you that you can give a man your love and bear children. She could do neither, and she would gladly trade every one of the centuries the gods may allow her for your next year."

Vadsig's eyes melted. "Could not you help her, mysire?"

"No. She helped me."

Oreb picked up the first word, joining it to his favorite predicate. "No cut!"

I nodded. "I tried not to harm her, Oreb. It was the best that I could manage."

"Her hair?" Vadsig plunged thin fingers into her short orange tresses. "Ugly as mine it was?"

"She had none. As for yours, it is clean and straight and strongall admirable things."

"A bad color it is, mysire."

"A good woman's hair is never of a bad color," I told her.

We talked more, she expressing her fears of you and your rejection, and I assuring her that all were groundless, as indeed I feel certain they are. Let her fear childbirth, poor child, and murderous rape in lawless New Viron; she has more than enough to worry about without fantasies.

Then, "Sometime back like you I go, mysire?"

"Back to Viron, you mean, Vadsig?"

"To Viron, yes, mysire. Also to Grotestad. To go to the Long Sun Whorl I would like. Always of it you talk, and cook, and my old master and mistress. In Grotestad they were born, mysire, but never it I have seen."

I told her it was possible she would.

"There the Vanished People went?"

I nodded.

"To greet us it was?"

"You might put it so, though they were sensible enough to find out a good deal about us-and infect us with inhumi-"

"Bad thing!"

"Before they ventured to greet even a few of us."

"Bad it was," Vadsig agreed with Oreb.

"To leave inhumi among us?" I shook my head. "It was a small price to pay for two whorls, and it enabled the Neighbors to gauge much more accurately the differences between our race and their own."

"Because our blood they drink, mysire?"

For a moment I considered how I might explain without violating my promise. "You can't see yourself, Vadsig."

"In the mirror I see."

I shook my head. "Has anyone told you that you have wonderful eyes?"

She flushed, shrugging. "Hide it says."

"But you do not believe him, because you know he loves you. You are still very young. When you are older, perhaps you will come to understand that of all the emotions-and indifference, too, because even indifference is an emotion of a sort-only love sees the unveiled truth."

"See good!"

"Yes, love sees well, and it is well to see. No matter how wonder ful your eyes are, however, Vadsig, they cannot look back upon themselves. You see yourself, when you see yourself at all, in silvered glass. I used to know a very clever person who inspected his appearance in the side of a silver teapot every morning."

She smiled, as I had hoped she would. "A spoon in his pocket he might have carried, mysire."

"He knew, of course, that his image was distorted. You compare your own to that of other women you see in reality; but if you were wiser, you might compare their reflections to yours. That is what the Neighbors did. Knowing what their own inhumi were like, they gave us ours so they might compare the two. I wish I knew what they concluded, though I know what they did."

"The whorls they gave?" She looked around her as she spoke, at the beamy brown boat in which we sat, and the broad blue sea, the blue sky dotted with clouds and white birds, and the distant shore; and I dared to hope, as I do still, that she was seeing them a little differently.

"Yes. The inhumi had effectively ruined their entire race, Vadsig. I don't mean that all of them were dead, but that the civilization they had built had failed them when the shock came. Many had left these whorls already, fleeing the inhumi but taking inhumi with them."

"Their blood to drink?" She shuddered, and there was nothing feigned about it. "Not I understand, mysire."

"I said that we could not see ourselves directly, Vadsig. We need mirrors for that. We cannot run away from ourselves, either."

I heard the clicking of Babbie's claws over the creaking of the rigging as I spoke, and looked around to see Jahlee's head emerging from the little hatch. I motioned for her to join us, and Vadsig whispered, "So beautiful she is!"

We three talked together then for an hour or more. But it will soon be too dark to write, and I smell supper. I will write about all that some other time, perhaps.

Chapter 12. PALACES

"You should not come in here, Olivine!" A glance showed that the tepid water was reassuringly obscured by suds and clouded with soap.

"You don't have to duck down like that... You don't have to duck down like that, Patera..."

He snorted. "Nor do you have to look in on me every five minutes. I'm not going to drown."

"I just wanted to tell you your new clothes are out... I just wanted to tell you your new clothes are out here."

The door shut softly, and he stood up. The towel, like everything else in the tiny room, was within easy reach. As he dried himself, he realized that his old clothing was gone, save for his shoes. She had taken his tunic, his trousers, his filthy stockings, and his underdrawers the first time she had opened the door, beyond a doubt; he had been too busy hiding to notice. His corn, the precious seed corn he had obtained so easily, had been in a trousers pocket; but presumably his old clothes were in the bedroom. He stepped out of the tub, took the plug from the drain, and sat on the necessary stool to dry his feet.

That done, he wrapped his loins in his towel. "Are you out there, Olivine?" He followed the words with three sharp raps on the door, but there was no reply. Cautiously, he opened it.

Clean drawers, black trousers, and a black tunic waited on the bed. Beside them lay what appeared to be an augur's black robe, neatly folded; his seed corn was on that, with a clean handkerchief, new stockings, his spectacles, two cards, and his newly found pen case, the whole surrounded by his prayer beads. His old clothes and the enameled lantern were nowhere to be seen. Sighing, he dressed.

The bedroom door opened as he was tying his shoes. "Can we go up now... Can we go up now, Patera?"

"You were watching me, weren't you, Olivine? You came in much too promptly."

She said nothing, shifting from one foot to the other; for the first time he realized that she herself had no shoes, only strips of the coarse cloth tied around her feet.

"Through the keyhole? That was very wrong of you."

Wordlessly, she showed him a chink in the paneling that separated the room in which they stood from the next.

"To see when I was finished? Was that it?"

"If you'd put them... If you'd put them on. And..."

"And what? I promise not to get angry with you." It was an easy promise to make when he knew that pity would overwhelm whatever anger he might feel.

"And I'd never seen a bio... And I'd never seen a bio man. Only... Only father."

"Who is not a bio. I didn't think so. You're a chem yourself, aren't you, Olivine?"

She nodded.

"Hold out your hands, please. I wish to examine them both, here at the window."

"I took our bread... I took our bread up? While you were... While you were washing?"

"And got me clean clothing. Also you disposed of my old ones, no doubt. You must have been very busy."

"You took a long... You took a long time."

"Perhaps I did." He glanced out, thinking to gauge the distance between the setting sun and horizon, then recalled that the Long Sun never set. How profoundly unnatural a sun that moved had seemed when they reached Blue!

"I'll wash them for... I'll wash them for you?"

"Thank you. Now hold out your hands as I asked. I will not ask again."

One hand was an assembly of blocks and rods, the otherapparently-living flesh. He said, "Since you spied on me while I was dressing, Olivine, it wouldn't be inappropriate for me to ask you to strip, now would it?"

She cowered.

"It would be fair, and it might even be an eminently just punishment for what you did; but I won't demand it. I only ask that you take off the cloth you've wrapped around your head and face. Do it, please. At once."

She did, and he embraced her for a time, feeling her deep sobs and stroking her smooth metal skull.

When ten minutes or more had passed, he said, "You look like your mother. Doesn't Hammerstone-doesn't your father-tell you that? Surely he must."

"Sometimes..."

He sat down upon the bed. "Do you imagine that you're so ugly, Olivine? You're not ugly to me, I assure you. Your mother is an old and dear friend. No one who resembled her as much as you do could ever seem ugly to me."

"I don't move... I don't move right."

Reluctantly, he nodded.

"I can't do what a woman... I can't do what a woman does. She went... She went away."

"She was captured by the Trivigauntis, Olivine, just as I was myself. When she got back here she went to Blue, because it was her duty to do so-the service she owed Great Pas. Do you understand?"

Slowly the shining metal head turned from side to side.