Chapter 10. ON THE BELLY OF THE WHORL
Auk leaned across the squat balustrade of Scylla's shrine to study the jagged slabs of gray rock at the foot of the cliff. Their disordered, acutely angled surfaces gleamed ghostly pale in the skylight, but the clefts and fissures between them were as black as pitch.
'Here, here!' Oreb pecked enthusiastically at Scylla's lips. 'Shrine eat!'
'I'm not going back with you,' Chenille told Auk. 'You made me walk all the way out here in my good wool dress for nothing. All right. You hit me and kicked me-all right, too. But if you want me to go back with you, you're going to have to carry me. Try it. Smack me a couple more times and give me a good hard kick. See if I get up.'
'You can't stay here all night,' Auk growled.
'I can't? Watch me.'
Oreb pecked again. 'Here Auk!'
'Here yourself.' Auk caught him. 'Now you listen up. I'm going to pitch you over like I pitched you off the path back there. You look for Patera, Silk like you did before. If you find him, sing out.'
With weary indifference, Chenille warned, 'He won't come back this time.'
'Sure he will. Get set, bird. Here you go.' He tossed Oreb over the balustrade and watched as he glided down.
Chenille said, 'There's a hundred places where that long butcher could have fallen.'
'Eight or ten, maybe. I was looking.'
She stretched out on the stone floor. 'Oh, Moipe, I'm so tired!'
Auk turned to face her. 'You really going to stay here all night?'
If she nodded, it was too dark beneath the dome of the shrine for him to see her.
'Somebody could come out here.'
'Somebody worse than you?'
He grunted.
'That's so funny. I'd bet everything I've got that if you checked out every last cull in that godforsaken little town you couldn't find a single-'
'Shut up!'
For a time she did, whether from fear or sheer fatigue she could not herself have said. In the silence, she could hear the lapping of the waves at the foot of the cliff, the sob of the wind through the strangely twisted pillars of the shrine, the surge of blood in her own ears, and the rhythmic thumping of her heart.
Rust would have made everything all right. Recalling the empty vial she had left on her bed at Orchid's, she imagined one twenty times larger, a vial bigger than a bottle, filled with rust. She would sniff a pinch, and drop a big one in her lip, and walk back with Auk till they reached that bit where you felt like you were hanging in air, then push him off, down and down, until he fell into the lake below.
But there was no such vial, there never would be, and the half bottle of red she had drunk had died in her long ago; she pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples.
Auk bawled, 'Bird! You down there? Sing out!'
If Oreb heard him, he did not reply.
Argumentatively, Auk inquired, 'Why would he come way out here?'
Chenille rolled her head from side to side. 'You asked me that before. I don't know. I remember us riding in some kind of cart or something, all right? Horses. Only somebody else was in charge then, and I wish she'd come back.' She bit her knuckle, herself astonished by what she had said. Wearily she added, 'She did a better job of it than I do. A better job than you're doing, too.'
'Shut up. Listen, I'm going to climb down a ways. As far as I can go without falling. You rest. I should be back pretty soon.'
'We'll have a parade,' Chenille told him. Some minutes afterward she added, 'A big one, right up the Alameda. With bands.'
Then she slept and entered a great, shining room full of men in black-and-white and jeweled women. A three-sun admiral in full dress walked beside her holding her arm and did not count in the least. She walked proudly, smiling, and her wide collar was entirely of diamonds, and diamonds cascaded from her ears and flashed like the lights in the night sky from her wrists; and every eye was on her.
Then Auk was shaking her shoulder. 'I'm going. You want to come or not?'
'No.'
'There's good places to eat in Limna. I'll buy dinner and rent a room, and we can head back to the city tomorrow. You want to come?'
By now she was awake enough to say, 'You don't listen, do you? No. Go away.'
'All right. If some cull gets to you out here, don't blame me. I did the best I could for you.'
She closed her eyes again. 'If some cully wants to rape me, that's dimber with me, just as long as he's not you and he doesn't want me to wiggle around while he's doing it. If he'd like to vent my pipe, that'll be dimber, too.' She sighed. 'Long as he doesn't want me to help.'
Distinctly, she heard the scraping of Auk's boots as he left the shrine, and after what seemed to her a very short time she struggled to her feet. The night was clear; eerie skylight glimmered on the rolling lake and illuminated every harsh, bare point of rock. On the horizon, distant cities wrapped with Viron in the night appeared as tiny smears of fox fire, not half so desirable as the icy sparkles that had deserted her wrists.
'Hackum?' she called, lifting her voice. 'Hackum?'
Almost at once he emerged from the shadows of the rocks to stand upon that very outthrust point of rock from which Silk had watched the spy vanish from the shrine, and from which she had imagined herself pushing him. 'Jugs? Are you all right?'
Something invisible tightened around her throat. 'No. But I will be. Hackum?'
'What is it?' The flooding skylight that rendered every bush and outcrop far and fey prevented her from reading his posture (she was good at that, although she was unaware of it), even while it revealed it; and his tone was flat and devoid of emotion, though perhaps it was only made to sound so by distance.
'I'd like to start over. I thought maybe you'd like to start over, too.'
He was silent while she counted seven thuddings of her pulse. At last: 'You want me to come back?'
'No,' she called, and he seemed to have become minutely smaller. 'What I mean is ... I want you to come to Orchid's some night. All right?'
'All right.' It was not the echo.
'Maybe next week. And I don't know you. And you don't know me. Start over.'
'All right,' he called again. And then, 'Sometime I'd like to meet you.'
She intended to say we will, but the words stuck in her throat; she waved instead, and then, realizing that he could not see her, stepped from under the dome so that she too was in the clear, soft skylight and waved again, and watched him disappear where the Pilgrims' Way bent inland.
That was it, she thought.
She was tired and her feet hurt, and for some reason she did not want to step back under the dome again; she sat down on the smooth, flat rock outside the entrance to the shrine instead, kicked off her shoes, and comforted her blisters.
It was funny how you knew. That was it, and this's him, and I never knew till he said that: Someday I'd like to meet you. He'd want her to leave Orchid's, and quite unexpectedly she realized she'd be glad to leave shaggy Orchid's to live anywhere, even under a bridge, with him.
Funny.
There was a brass plate thing let into the smooth stone of the shrine; she fingered its letters idly, naming the ones she knew. The plate seemed to move, ever so slightly, as if it was not. solidly fastened but hinged at the top. She got her nails under it, lifted it, and saw swirling colors: reds and blues and pinks and yellows and golden browns and greens and greenish blacks and others for which she had no names.
'Immediately, Your Eminence,' Incus said, bowing again. 'I understand entirely, Your Eminence, and I shall
