that's where the market is. The outside's Shore Street. If you want to go out on a boat, Dock Street's the place, and I can give you a couple good names. If you want to eat, try the Catfish or the Full Sail. The Rusty Lantern's pretty good, too, if you got deep pockets. Stayin' overnight?'
Silk shook his head. 'We'd like to get back to the city before dark, if we can.'
'You'll want the six o'clock wagon, then,' the driver said as he turned away.
When he had gone, Chenille said, 'You didn't ask him where the councillors live.'
'If neither you nor I nor Auk knew, it can't be common knowledge,' Silk told her. 'Crane will have had to discover that for himself, and the best thing for us to learn today may well be whom he asked. I doubt that he'll have ridden down on one of the wagons as we did. On Scylsday he had a hired litter.'
She nodded. 'It might be better if we split up, Patera. You high, and me low.'
'I'm not sure what you mean by that.'
'You talk to the respectable people in the respectable places. I'll ask around in the drinking kens. When did . . . Auk? Say he'd meet us here?'
'Four o'clock,' Silk told her.
'Then I'll meet you right here at four. We can have a bite to eat. With Auk? And tell each other whatever we've learned.'
'You were very skillful with that woman on the wagon,' Silk said. 'I hope that I can do half as well.'
'But it didn't get us anything? Stick with the truth, Patera. Silk? Or close to it.... I don't think you'll be terribly good with the . . . other thing? What're you going to say?'
Silk stroked his cheek. 'I was thinking about that on the wagon, and it seemed to me that it will have to depend upon the circumstances. I might say, for example, that such a man witnessed an exorcism I performed, and since I haven't returned to the house that had been afflicted, I was hoping he could tell me whether it had been effective.'
Chenille nodded. 'Perfectly true. . . . Every bit of it. You're going to be all right. I can see that. Silk?' She had been standing close to him already, forced there by the press of traffic in the street; she stepped closer still, so that the nipples of her jutting breasts pressed the front of his tunic. 'You don't love me, Patera. You wouldn't, even if you didn't think I belonged to ... Auk? But you love Hy? Don't you? Tell me. ...'
He said miserably, 'I shouldn't. It isn't right, and a man in my position-an augur-has so little to offer any woman. No money. No real home. It's just that she's like the- There are things I can't seem to stop thinking about, no matter how hard I try. Hyacinth is one of them.'
'Well, I'm her, too.' Swift and burning, Chenille's lips touched his. By the time he had recovered, she was lost among porters and vendors, hurrying visitors and strolling, rolling fishermen.
'Bye, girl!' With his uninjured wing, Oreb was waving farewell. 'Watch out! Good luck!'
Silk took a deep breath and looked around. Here at the end nearest Viron, Lake Limna had nurtured a town of its own, subject to the city while curiously detached from it.
Or rather (his first two fingers inscribed slow circles on his cheek), Lake Limna, in its retreat, had drawn a fleck of Viron with it. Once the Orilla had been the lakeshore-or Dock Street, as it was called here. To judge from its name, Shore Street had been the same in its day, a paved prelude to wharves, with buildings on its landward side that overlooked the water. As the lake had continued to shrink, Water Street, on which he stood, had come into being. Still later, twenty or thirty years ago, possibly, Water Street had been left behind like the rest.
And yet the lake was still immense. He tried to imagine it as it must have been when the first settlers occupied the empty city built for them at what was then its northern end, and concluded that the lake must have been twice its present size. Would there come a time, in another three centuries or so, when there was no lake at all? It seemed more likely that the lake would then be half its present size-and yet the time must surely come, whether in six hundred years or a thousand, when it would vanish altogether.
He began to walk, wondering vaguely what the respectable places the goddess wished him to visit were. Or at least which such places would be most apt to yield information of value.
Drawn by boyhood recollections of cool water and endless vistas, he followed a block-long alley to Dock Street. Here half a dozen fishing boats landed silver floods of trout, shad, pike, and bass; here cookshops supplied fish as fresh as the finest eating houses in the city at a tenth the price; and top-lofty inns with gaily painted shutters displayed signboards for those anxious to exchange the conveniences of Viron for zephyrs at the height of summer, and those who, in whatever season, delighted in swimming, fishing, or sailing.
Here, too, as Silk soon discovered, was the fresh poster that he and Chenille had seen before their holobit wagon had left the city, offering 'strong young men' an opportunity to become part-time Guardsmen and holding out the promise of eventual full-time employment. As he read it through again, Silk recalled the darkly threatening entrails of the ewe. No one spoke as yet of war-except the gods. Or rather, he reflected, only the gods and this poster spoke of war to those who would listen.
The next-to-final line of the poster had been crossed out with black ink, and the phrase at the Juzgado in Limna had been substituted; the new reserve brigade would station a company or two here at the lake, presumably perhaps an entire battalion, if enough fishermen could be persuaded to enlist.
For the first time it struck him that Limna would make an excellent base or staging area for an army moving against the city, offering shelter for many if not all of the enemy troops, assurance against surprise from the south, a ready source of food, and unlimited water for men and animals. No wonder, then, that Crane had been interested to learn that the councillors were here, and that a commissioner had come to confer with them.
'Fish heads!' Oreb fluttered from Silk's shoulder to the ground, then ran with unexpected speed three- quarters the length of a nearby jetty to peck at them.
'Yes,' Silk murmured to himself, 'fish heads at last, and fish guts, too.'
As he strolled down the jetty, admiring the broad blue purity of the lake and the scores of bobbing, heeling craft whose snowy sails dotted it, he meditated upon Oreb's meal.
Those fish belonged to Scylla. Just as serpents belonged to her mother, Echidna, and cats of all kinds to her younger sister, Sphigx. Surging Scylla, the patroness of the city, graciously permitted her worshipers to catch such fish as they required, subject to certain age-old restrictions and prohibitions. Yet the fish-even those scraps that Oreb ate-were hers, and the lake her palace. If devotion to Scylla was still strong in the Viron, as it was though two generations had passed since she had manifested her divinity in a Sacred Window, what must it be here?
Joining Oreb, he sat down upon the head of a convenient piling, removed Crane's almost miraculous wrapping from his fractured ankle, and whipped the warped planks of the jetty with it.
What if Crane wished to erect a shrine to Scylla on the lakeshore in fulfillment of some vow? If Crane could hand out azoths as gifts to favored informers, he could certainly afford a shrine. Silk knew little of building, but he felt certain that a modest yet appropriate and wholly acceptable shrine could be built at the edge of the lake for a thousand cards or less. Crane might well have asked his spiritual advisor-himself-to select a suitable site.
Better still, suppose that Chenille's commissioner were the grateful builder-no one would question the ability of a commissioner to underwrite the entire cost of even a very elaborate structure. It would not be a manteion, since it could have no Sacred Window, but sacrifice might take place there. Fostered by a commissioner, it might well support a resident augur-someone like himself.
And Crane would have gone where Chenille's commissioner had gone, assuming that he had learned where that was.
'Good! Good!' Oreb had completed his repast; balanced upon one splayed crimson foot, he was scraping his bill with the other.
'Don't soil my robe,' Silk told him. 'I warn you, I'll be angry.'
As he replaced Crane's wrapping, Silk tried to imagine himself the commissioner. Two councillors had summoned him to the lake for a conference, presumably a confidential one, possibly concerned with military matters. He would (Silk decided) almost certainly travel to Limna by floater; but he would-again, almost certainly- leave his floater and its driver there in favor of a mode of transportation less likely to attract attention.
To focus his thoughts as he often did in the palaestra, Silk pointed his forefinger at his pet. 'He might hire a donkey, for example, like Auk and I did the other night.'
A small boat was gliding toward the lakeward end of the jetty, a gray-haired man minding its tiller while a couple of boys hastily furled its single sail.
'That's it!'
The night chough eyed him quizzically.
