warm. These were probably let down then.'
Silk nodded. 'It's always cold underground. I suppose that the night that surrounds the whorl must be a winter's night.'
Coypu shot him a startled glance as he opened his wife's orange juice.
'Haven't you ever thought of what lies beyond the whorl, my son?'
'You mean if you keep digging down? Isn't it just dirt, no matter how far down you go?'
Silk shook his head as he opened his own bottle. 'The most ignorant miner knows better than that, my son. Even a grave digger-I talked with several of them yesterday, and they were by no means unintelligent-would tell you that the soil our plows till is scarcely thicker than the height of a man. Clay and gravel lie beneath it, and below them, stone or shiprock.'
Silk poured cool water into a glass for Oreb while he collected his thoughts. 'Beneath that stone and shiprock, which is not as thick as you might imagine, the whorl spins in emptiness-in a night that extends in every direction without limit,' He paused, remembering, as he filled his own glass. 'It is spangled everywhere with colored sparks, however. I was told what they were, though at the moment I cannot recall it.'
'I thought it was just that the heat didn't reach down there.'
'It does,' Silk told him. 'It reaches beyond the depths of this cistern, and deeper than the wells at my manteion, which always yield cold water with sufficient pumping. It extends, in fact, to the outermost stone of the whorl, and there it is lost in the frigid night. If it weren't for the sun, the first as well as the greatest gift Pas gave to the whorl, we would all freeze.' For a moment Silk watched Oreb drinking from his glass, then he drank deeply from his own. 'Thank you both. It's very good.'
Chervil said, 'I wouldn't argue with Pas or you about the value of the sun, Patera, but it can be dangerous, too. If you really want to see the shrine, I wish you'd consider making your pilgrimage in the evening, when it's not so hot. Remember last time, Coypu?'
Pier husband nodded. 'We'd gone out last fall, Patera. We enjoyed the hike, and there's a magnificent view from the shrine, so we decided we'd do it again this year. When we finally got around to it the figs were getting ripe, but it wasn't as hot as it is now.'
'Not nearly,' Chervil put in.
'So off we went, and it got hotter and hotter. You tell him, sweetheart.'
'He left the path,' Chervil told Silk. 'The Pilgrims' Way, or whatever you call it. I could see the next couple of stones ahead of us, but he was veering off to the right down this little-I don't know what they call it. This rocky little valley between two hills.'
'Ravine?' Silk suggested.
'Yes, that's it. This ravine. And I said, 'Where are you going? That's not the way.' And he said, 'Come on, come along or we'll never get there.' So I ran after him and caught up with him.'
They'll have a child in another year, Silk thought. He pictured the three of them at supper in a little courtyard, talking and laughing; Chervil was neither as beautiful nor as charming as Hyacinth, yet he found that he envied Coypu with all his heart.
'And it ended. The ravine. It just stopped at a slope too steep to climb, and he didn't know what to do. Finally I said, 'Where do you think you're going?' And he said, 'To my aunt's.' '
'I see.' Silk had drained his glass; he poured the rest of the bottle into it.
'It took me a long time to get him back to the path, but when I did I saw this man coming toward us, coming back from the shrine. I screamed for him to help me, and he stopped and asked what the matter was and made Coypu go along a little bit farther to where there was some shade, and we got him to lie down.'
'It was the heat, of course,' Silk said.
'Yes! Exactly.'
Coypu nodded. 'I was all mixed up, and somehow I got the idea we were in the city, walking to my aunt's house; I kept wondering what had happened to the street. Why it had changed so much.'
'Anyway, this man stayed there with us until Coypu felt better. He said it was the early stages of heat stroke, and that the thing to do was to get out of the sun and lie down, and eat salty food and drink cold water, if you could. Only we couldn't because we hadn't brought anything, and it was way too high up for us to climb down to the lake. He was a doctor.'
Silk stared at her. 'Oh, you gods!' 'What's the matter, Patera?'
'And yet some people will not believe.' He finished his water. 'I-even I, who ought to know better if anyone does-often behave as though there were no forces in the whorl beyond my own feeble strength. I suppose I ought to ask you this doctor's name, for form's sake; but I don't have to. I know it.'
'I've forgotten it,' Coypu admitted, 'although he stayed there talking to us for a couple of hours, I guess.'
Chervil said, 'He had a beard, and he was only a little taller than I am.'
'His name is Crane,' Silk told them, and signaled to the waiter.
Chervil nodded. 'That was it. Is he a friend of yours, Patera?'
'Not exactly. An acquaintance. Would you like another, both of you? I'm going to get one.'
They nodded, and Silk told the waiter, 'I'm paying for everything-for our first drinks and these, too.'
'Five bits if you want to pay now, Patera. You know anything about this Patera Silk, in the city?' 'A little,' Silk told him. 'Not as much as I should, certainly.'
'Had a goddess in his Window? Supposed to be some sort of wonder worker?'
'The first is true,' Silk said, 'the second is not.' He turned back to Coypu and Chervil. 'You said Doctor Crane talked with you for some time. If I'm not presuming on our brief acquaintance, may I ask what he talked about?'
'He is Patera Silk,' Chervil told the waiter. 'Don't you see his bird?'
Silk laid six cardbits on the table. Coypu said, 'He wanted to know if my mother and father were in good health, and he kept feeling my skin. And what my grandmother'd died of. I remember that.'
'He asked a lot of questions,' Chervil said. 'And he made me keep fanning him-fanning Coypu, I mean.'
Oreb, who had been listening intently, demonstrated with his sound wing.
'That's right, birdie. Exactly like that, only I used my hat.'
'I must get one,' Silk muttered. 'Get another, I should say. Fortunately I have funds.'
'A hat?' Coypu asked.
'Yes. Even the commissioner was wearing-it doesn't matter. I don't know the man, and I don't wish to make you believe I do. I've done enough of that. What I should say is that before I start for the shrine, I want to buy a straw hat with a broad brim. I saw some in a shop window here, I know.'
The waiter brought three more sweating bottles and three clean glasses.
Coypu told Silk, 'Half the shops here sell them. You can get an ugly sunburn out on a boat on the lake.'
'Or even swimming, because people mostly just sit on the rocks.' Chervil laughed; she had an attractive laugh, and Silk sensed that she knew it. 'They come here from the city because the lake's nice and cold, and they think they want that. But once they get into it they jump out pretty fast, most of them.'
Silk nodded and smiled. 'I'll have to try it myself one of these days. Do you remember any of Doctor Crane's other questions?'
'Who built the shrine,' Coypu said. 'It was Councillor Lemur, about twenty-five years ago. There's a bronze plate on it that says so, but the doctor must not have noticed it when he was out there.' Chervil said, 'He wanted to know if Coypu was related. I don't think he knew what a coypu is. And whether we knew him, or any of them, and about how old they were. He said most of them became our councillors more than forty years ago, so they must have been pretty young then.'
'I'm not sure that's right,' Coypu told her.
'And if we knew how badly off some of the other cities were, and didn't we think we ought to help. I said that the first thing we ought to do was make sure everyone there got a fair share of their own food, because a lot of the trouble was because of people there buying up corn and waiting for higher prices. I said prices in Viron were high enough for me already without our sending rice to Palustria.'
She laughed again, and Silk laughed with her as he put his unopened bottle of spring water into the front pocket of his robe; but his thoughts were already following the trail of white stones, the Pilgrims' Way stretching from Limna to Scylla's shrine-the holy place that both Doctor Crane and Commissioner Simuliid had visited-on the
