'Let me go,' Maytera Marble insisted Phaesday morning. 'They
won't shoot me.'
Generalissimo Oosik regarded her through his left eye alone; his
right was concealed by a patch of surgical gauze. He shrugged.
General Saba, the commander from Trivigaunte, pursed pendulous
lips. 'We've wasted a shaggy hole too much time on this country
house already, when nobody can say--'
'You're quite wrong, my daughter,' Maytera Marble told her
firmly. 'Mucor can and does. Our Patera Silk is a prisoner in there,
just as the Ayuntamiento claims.'
'Spirits!'
'Only hers, really. I'd never seen anyone possessed until she
began doing it to our students. I find it very upsetting.' She
beckoned Horn. 'You've made me a white flag? Wonderful! Such a
nice long stick, too. Thank you!'
General Saba snorted.
'You don't like my bringing our boys and girls.'
'Children shouldn't have to fight.'
'Certainly not.' Maytera Marble nodded solemn agreement. 'But
they were, and some have been killed. They'd run off with General
Mint, you see, almost all of them. I tried to think who might help me
after Mucor left, and our students were the only ones I could think
of. Horn and a few others are really mature enough already, more
grown up than a great many adults. It got them away from the city,
too, where the worst fighting was.' She looked to Oosik for support,
but found none.
'Where it still is,' General Saba snapped. 'Where the troops we've
got out here are badly needed.'
'They were fighting your girls, some of them, as well as our Army,
and some are dead. Have I told you that? Some are dead, some hurt
very badly. Ginger's had her hand blown off, I'm told. No doubt
some of your girls are hurt as well.'
'Which is why--'
'You said we're wasting time.' Maytera Marble sniffed; she had
acquired a devastating sniff. 'I couldn't agree more. It will only
take a minute to shoot me, if they do. Then you can attack at
once. But if they don't, I may be able to talk to the councillors in
there. They can order the Army and the Guards who are still
fighting you--'
'The Second,' Oosik supplied.
'Yes, the Second Brigade and our Army.' Maytera Marble bowed
in humble appreciation of his information. 'Thank you, my son. The
councillors could order them to give up, but no one knows whether
there are really councillors in the Juzgado.' Without waiting for a
reply, she accepted the flag from Horn.
'I'm coming with you, Sib.'
'You are not!'
He followed her nearly as far as the shattered gate just the same,
ignoring a pterotrooper who shouted for him to stay back, and
watched unhappily as she picked her way through its tumbled stones
and twisted bars, somberly clad but conveniently short-skirted in
Maytera Rose's best habit.
Two dead taluses smoked and guttered on the close-mown
grassway between the gate and the villa. A few steps past the first,
General Saba's adjutant sprawled face down beside her own flag of
truce. Disregarding all three, Maytera Marble cut across the lush
lawn toward the porticoed entrance, keeping well clear of the
fountain to avoid its windblown spray.
This was Bloody's house, she reminded herself, this grand place.
This was where the little man with oily hair had come from, the one
she and Echidna had offered to her. It had been practically
impossible, for a time, for her to remember being Echidna; now the
image of the little man's agonized face had returned, framed by
flame as she forced him down onto the altar fire. Would Divine
Echidna help her now, in gratitude for that sacrifice? The Echidna
she had pictured at prayer over so many years might have condemned
her because of it.
But there had been no shot yet.
No missile. No sounds at all, save the soughing of the wind and
the snapping of the rag on the stick she held. How young she felt,
and how strong!
If she stopped here, if she looked back at Horn, would they shoot,
killing her and waking the children? The children were asleep, most
of them. Or at least they were supposed to be, back there beneath
the leafless mulberries. The summer's unrelenting heat, the desert
heat that she had hated so much, had deserted just when the
children needed it, leaving them to sleep in the deepening chill of an
autumn already half spent, to shiver huddled together like piglets or
puppies in unroofed houses with broken windows and slug-pocked,
fire-scarred walls, though most of them had liked that better than
their studies, they said: had preferred killing Ayuntamientados and
pillaging their dead.
A mottled green face appeared at the window next to the big
door. Only the face, Maytera Marble noted with a little shiver of
relief. No slug gun, and no launcher.
'I've come to see my son, my son,' she called. 'My son Bloody.
Tell him his mother's here.'
Shallow stone steps led up to a wide veranda. Before she put her
foot on the last, the door swung back. Through it she saw soldiers,
and bios in silvered armor. (Bios got up like chems, as she put it to
herself, because chems were braver.) Behind them stood another
bio, tall and red-faced.
'Good morning, Bloody,' she said. 'Thank you for bringing those
white bunnies. May Kypris smile upon you.'
Blood grinned. 'You've changed a little, Mama.' Some of the
armored men laughed.
'Yes, I have. When we can talk in private, I'll tell you all about it.'
'We thought you wanted to cut a deal for Hoppy.'
