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

Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) Page 7

Just now I said that the sergeant was nearly hit by Oreb, who had, I believe, been pecking at the shutter for some time, although I had failed to hear him above the crackling of the fire. I must add that it was snowing hard, myriads of tiny flakes flying before a whistling west wind. "Them at sea Scylla help," said Azijin.

I got a fine fresh fish and a cup of clean water for Oreb. He ate and flew into a corner near the chimney-there is a wooden brace for it there on which he perches-and has not moved from it since. Azijin and Legerman Vlug were dumbfounded, and asked more questions about him than I was able to answer. I expected them to demand the ring; so I suggested they might hold it for me until we reached Dorp, when I would explain the circumstances under which I had received it to the judge and ask that it be returned to me. They examined it very curiously but showed no desire to keep it for me.

It is too large for my fingers, so I put it in my pocket, thinking I would look through the jewelry when I could do so at leisure, find a chain, and wear it around my neck. I was afraid I would lose it, however; it is on the thumb of my left hand as I write this, which answers well.

There is a picture cut into the black stone. I took it to the window, and although the day is far from bright I was able to see that there are lines graven on it, a picture or writing. I suppose it is a seal ring, and the thing to do is to imprint it on wax so the seal may be read.

I talked about Oreb for some time, explaining that he is a pet, that he can speak after a fashion, and that he often goes away for purposes of his own. Before I could get to bed, I had to tell them a bit about Silk and the original Oreb, saying I supposed he must be dead. "On that you must not count, mysire," Azijin told me. "A parrot older than her my great aunt had, and ninety-one she was when on the lander we went. About the old bird often my mother tells." So perhaps this Oreb is the very Oreb that Silk owned after all. It is such an interesting idea that I am glad there is no way in which it can be tested. How disappointed I would be if I found it were not true!

After that I went to bed, as did the sergeant and Vlug. I can only guess how long I slept before I was awakened by a soft hand stroking my forehead-an hour, perhaps.

It was Jahlee. "My fire's dying, Rajan, and the room's getting colder and colder. Can't I come into bed so you can warm me for a minute? I don't dare get in with Hide, he's sound asleep and would kill me when he woke, and you wouldn't want me to get into the troopers' beds would you? But I'm freezing, and I'm afraid I'll freeze to death. Please, Rajan? I'm begging for my life!"

I consented, and it was a remarkable experience even before we went to Green. I put an arm over her and held her so that she could warm her back against my belly; and it was exactly as though I embraced an actual woman, one more slender than Nettle and less voluptuous than Hyacinth, but beyond question a young and attractive woman, soft, clean, and perfumed.

I have been trying to recall what it was like to sleep with Fava, there amid the stones and snow; and I was very conscious then that she was not at all what she pretended to be, that I was in fact embracing a reptile capable of changing its shape in the same way that the little lizards I caught in the borage outside my window or the honeysuckle along our fence could change color-that my position was not much different from that of a snake-charmer sleeping in a ditch, with his serpent coiled under his tunic.

I woke and sat up, determined to dress, wake Jahlee, and tell her she had to go. As I got to my feet, yawning and blinking, the room was transformed in a way I would have said was quite impossible. The shutters became a circular opening through which showed a sky of the most ethereal blue. The knife-scarred wooden walls mended themselves and petrified to soft gray stone. Jahlee rose and wrapped herself in one of the blankets, being careful to let me see that she was beyond doubt a slim human woman with flawless white skin, a slender waist, and hemispherical pink-tipped breasts I longed to caress from the moment I glimpsed them. She embraced me and I her, while within two steps of us Azijin and Viug slumbered on, sleeping on the same beds they use in this inn, and under the same rough blankets.

When we parted, I asked where we were.

"On Green. Can't you feel the warmth, and the dampness of the air? If I were the way I was the last time you saw me, they would feel wonderful to me. Here I am as I am." She paused to smile and let the blanket slip a trifle. "And they still feel wonderful. I exult in them!" Azijin's eyes opened. He blinked and seemed to stare about him in a dazed fashion; then he shut them again and slept once more.

I crossed the room to the window and looked out, expecting to see Green's jungles. Clouds such as I had not seen since Saba lowered us from her airship spread below me, not the black-tinged rain clouds that had oppressed us through unending months on Green, but pearlescent clouds shining in the sun, a sea greater and purer than the keels of men have ever parted, and a new whorl fairer even than Blue and more turbulent.

To drink it in, I leaned as far from the window as I could, and at last stood barefoot upon its gray stone sill, and grasping the inner edge of the opening with the fingers of one hand looked out and down, then up, and left, and right.

We were in a slender tower, standing in a niche in the face of an immense cliff of the dark red stone. Above, the red stone rose until it was lost in the glory of the sky, an infinite wall of congealed blood. To my left and right, it extended without limit, lined and eroded. Below stretched the tower, taller than the tallest I have seen on any of the three whorls, a sickening height that made me shut my eyes and step down again into the room in which Jahlee and I had awakened-but not before I had glimpsed its mighty base and the cliff below it falling away into the restless sea of cloud, sheer, black with damp, and dotted with splotches of the most brilliant green.

"I wanted to be a real woman again," Jahlee said softly, "a real woman for you and Hide, and for everyone else who wants me to be what I really am. It was why I joined you. You must have known that."

"I should have driven you away, but the bandits would have killed us both if I had."

"You foresaw that?"

I shook my head.

"Our bodies are asleep in that wretched little inn on your frozen whorl. If I were to die there... I've overheard you and your son talking about the other one, a woman like me he meets in dreams. He's afraid of her, but he wouldn't have to be afraid of me."

"Do you want me to kill you? I can't. My own body is sleeping, just as yours is. If I were to kill you here, you know what would happen. You saw Duko Rigoglio."

She went to the window and stood upon the sill as I had, and a wind rose that stirred her blanket and set her sorrel hair fluttering behind her. "If I could be like this forever, I would jump," she told the sky.

"Before you do, will you answer a question? You've been a good friend to my son and me, and I hesitate to put us further in debt to you; but I'm curious, and it may be important."

She stepped down and turned to face me.

"We've been to various places on Green, and to the Red Sun Whorl, to the very spot on which the Duko's house once stood."

"Yes." Her eyes were bright blue now, as though they were holes bored through her skull and I were seeing the sky behind her; for a moment I wondered whether she could control their color, and then if they had drunk so much of that sky that they had taken on its very hue.

"Most of the places to which I've gone have been places where I've already been, and the street of ruins in the city they called Nessus was certainly the street on which Rigoglio had lived. I very much doubt that either Azijin or Vlug have been to Green at all, and I have certainly never been to this strange tower in this mighty cliff. Have you?"

She nodded without speaking, and I asked her when.

"When I was very young. When I'd just learned to fly, and before I'd decided to hunt your frigid, hostile Blue."

"Before you came the first time?"

She did not answer. "I was not at all sure I could make the Crossing. We heard stories. How much strength was required, how much endurance. If you're not strong enough, not a strong enough flier, you fall back to Green a failure. If you lack endurance..." She shrugged. "Only your frozen corpse gets to Blue. It crosses the sky there, a little scratch of fire. No doubt you've seen them. I have."

I nodded.

"That little scratch of fire, and you're gone forever. I wanted to try just the same. We all do, even if some want it more than others and many never actually try. It's something we get from you, a need to become more and more like you, until we're as human as we can possibly be."

"We feel it too," I told her, "though not always as strongly as we should."

"So I was wondering whether I could, and whether I'd be brave enough to try. I wasn't flying all that well yet, and I knew I'd have to get a lot better to fly fast enough to leave Green. One day there was a break in the clouds. You've lived on Green, you said. You must know it happens now and then."

I nodded again.

"Burning light from the sun came streaming through, but I looked up anyway and saw this little streak of gray against the cliff, and I told myself I'd fly up to it someday to see what it was, and when I did I'd be a strong enough flier to Cross."

"You did, clearly."

"Yes. I tried to for years, and there were days when I couldn't even get up above the clouds. There are strong winds at this level, and the air is thin."

I filled my lungs with it, and said, "It certainly seems better to me than the sopping air down there."

"I suppose it would. Are you waiting for the end of my story? It's ended. The day came when I was able to fly up here. I knew by then that I had much more to learn, and that I had to be stronger before I tried Crossing. But I felt I'd come more than halfway, too, and I was right. There was a corroded metal hatch over that window then. I tore it off and let it fall. When I'd explored all the rooms on all the levels, I decided to clean this one out and make it a private place just for myself, my own room in my own tower in the sky. There were bones in here and some other things, but I threw them out that window and swept this floor with my hands. When everything was tidy, I told myself I'd come back and spend hours up here after I'd made the Return Crossing, just thinking about who I was and what I had done for my children. But I never did, till now."

"I'll try to leave you here," I promised her, "and take the troopers back with me. I don't know if it can be done, but I'll try." I shut my eyes, gathering the thoughts that had fled my mind soon after we arrived. "Whose bones were they?"

"You know. They were your friends. I doubt that you want to talk about it."

Blindly, I sat down again upon the bed that been hers and mine. I hated Green then as I have hated it so often, the whorl of teeming unclean life, of violent death and universal decay. In my heart I rejected it, I hope once and for all. "Were they the Neighbors'?" I asked. "The Vanished People's?"

Perhaps she nodded. "I think that when we'd destroyed them everywhere else, they held the tablelands against us. As places of final refuge, they must have built these towers in the cliffs, with windows like this one so that-"

She was gone.

I had recalled my body as she spoke, with all its well-remembered knobs and insufficiencies, the sagging face behind my beard and the ankle that ached in rainy weather, and ached abominably in any weather whenever I had to walk far... And realized with a sort of shock that I was no longer sitting on the bed, but lying in it. I opened my eyes and saw the smoke-blackened timbers that supported the roof of the inn.

"Master Incanto? Awake you are?"

It was Azijin; I asked him who had told him to call me that.

"Your son, mysire. Where he was, and you, of Master Incanto they speak, he says. About dreams you know? That also he says, Mysire Horn."

"Much less than he believes." I sat up, very conscious that Jahlee lay beside me still sound asleep.

Vlug sat up too. "Wah! Good Mysire Pas!"

I got out of bed and went to the fire. "I know what you must be thinking, Sergeant, seeing my daughter in bed with me. I can only say that nothing of the kind took place. She became frightened, as women sometimes do at night in strange places, and sought reassurance from her father."

Azijin joined me at the fire. He sleeps naked and was naked still, hairy and muscular. "Such things I never think, mysire. But me it was that the door barred. If anyone the bar took down, I would hear, I thought."

"We tried not to wake you, Sergeant. I suggest that we try not to wake my daughter as well."

"Right, mysire. Loud I will not speak."

Vlug came over wrapped in a blanket, and Azijin told him to get something for us to sit on. There are no chairs, but he carried over the mattress from his bed. He is a tall, fresh-faced boy with unhappy hair that is neither truly red nor truly yellow but brighter than either. "Morning now it is, I think," he said. "The pig who this inn keeps we wake, Sergeant?"

"Not yet," Azijin told him. "For Mysire Horn to unriddle a dream I wish."

"I too!"

"Always in my dreams I am awake, Master Horn," Azijin began. "Not like that it is, this dream of last night. Like real it is," he tapped the hearth before him. "Most real. Not like a dream at all it is."

"With me, the same it is!" Vlug exclaimed.

"In this dream asleep I am, in my bed lying. You and your daughter not sleeping like me are, but walking past, talking and talking while on I sleep. Wake I must, I think. What if you escape? Hard with me it will go when Judge Hamer hears! To wake I try, but I cannot. My eyes open. The room bright is, sunshine everywhere there is, and my bed on the wall like a picture hangs. There I sleep and do not fall, so all right it is. Here no one but me there is, so all right too that is. Only in a dream it is that the old magician, and the strange girl his daughter, and the boy who calls him Father I must guard. No one to escape there is."