column. Nothing else seemed to have changed. A brutal-looking
man, still on his knees by the casket before the altar, inquired,
'W-was that more word from the gods, Patera?'
Silk took a deep breath. 'Yes, it was. That was word from a god
who is not Echidna, and I understand him.'
Maytera Mint sprang to her feet--and with her a hundred or
more; Silk recognized Gayfeather, Cavy, Quill, Aloe, Zoril, Horn
and Nettle, Holly, Hart, Oont, Aster, Macaque, and scores of
others. The silver trumpet that Maytera Mint's voice had become
summoned all to battle. 'Echidna has spoken! We have felt the
wrath of Pas! To the Alambrera!'
The congregation became a mob.
Everyone was standing now, and it seemed that everyone was
talking and shouting. The floater's engine roared. Guardsmen,
some mounted, most on foot, called, 'To me, everyone!' 'To me!'
'To the Alambrera!' One fired his slug gun into the air.
Silk looked for Gulo, intending to send him to put out the burning
tree; he was already some distance away, at the head of a hundred
or more. Others led the white stallion to Maytera Mint; a man
bowed with clasped hands, and she sprang onto its back in a way
Silk would not have thought possible. It reared, pawing the wind, at
the touch of her heels.
And he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. 'Maytera! _Maytera!_'
Shifting the sacrificial knife to his left hand and forsaking the dignity
augurs were expected to exhibit, he ran to her, his black robe
billowing in the wind. 'Take this!'
Silver, spring-green, and blood-red, the azoth Crane had given
him flashed through the air as he flung it over the heads of the mob.
The throw was high and two cubits to her left--yet she caught it, as
he had somehow known she would.
'Press the bloodstone,' he shouted, 'when you want the blade!'
A moment later that endless aching blade tore reality as it swept
the sky. She called, 'Join us, Patera! As soon as you've completed
the sacrifices!'
He nodded, and forced himself to smile.
The right eye first. It seemed to Silk that a lifetime had passed
between the moment he had first knelt to extract the eye from its
socket and the moment that he laid it in the fire, murmuring Scylla's
short litany. By the time he had completed it, the congregation had
dwindled to a few old men and a gaggle of small children watched by
elderly women, perhaps a hundred persons in all.
In a low and toneless voice, Maytera Marble announced, 'The
tongue for Echidna. Echidna has spoken to us.'
Echidna herself had indicated that the remaining victims were to
be Scylla's, but Silk complied. 'Behold us, Great Echidna, Mother
of the Gods, Incomparable Echidna, Queen of this Whorl--' (Were
there others, where Echidna was not Queen? All that he had
learned in the schola argued against it, yet he had altered her
conventional compliment because he felt that it might be so.)
'Nurture us, Echidna. By fire set us free.'
The bull's head was so heavy that he could lift it only with
difficulty; he had expected Maytera Marble to help, but she did not.
Vaguely he wondered whether the gold leaf on the horns would
merely melt, or be destroyed by the flames in some way. It did not
seem likely, and he made a mental note to make certain it was
salvaged; thin though gold leaf was, it would be worth something. A
few days before, he had been planning to have Horn and some of
the others repaint the front of the palaestra, and that would mean
buying paint and brushes.
Now Horn, the captain, and the toughs and decent family men of
the quarter were assaulting the Alambrera with Maytera Mint,
together with boys whose beards had not yet sprouted, girls no
older, and young mothers who had never held a weapon; but if they
lived...
He amended the thought to: if some lived.
'Behold us, lovely Scylla, wonderful of waters, behold our love
and our need for thee. Cleanse us, O Scylla. By fire set us free.'
Every god claimed that final line, even Tartaros, the god of
night, and Scylla, the goddess of water. While he heaved the
bull's head onto the altar and positioned it securely, he reflected
that 'by fire set us free' must once have belonged to Pas alone. Or
perhaps to Kypris--love was a fire, and Kypris had possessed
Chenille, whose hair was dyed flaming red. What of the fires that
dotted the skylands beneath the barren stone plain that was the
belly of the Whorl?
Maytera Marble, who should have heaped fresh cedar around the
bull's head, did not. He did it himself, using as much as they would
have used in a week before Kypris came.
The right front hoof. The left. The right rear and the left, this last
freed only after a struggle. Doubtfully, he fingered the edges of his
blade; they were still very sharp.
Not to read a victim as large as the bull would have been
unthinkable, even after a theophany; he opened the great paunch
and studied the entrails. 'War, tyranny, and terrible fires.' He
pitched his voice as low as he dared, hoping that the old people
would be unable to hear him. 'It's possible I'm wrong I hope so.
Echidna has just spoken to us directly, and surely she would have
warned us if such calamities awaited us.' In a corner of his mind,
Doctor Crane's ghost snickered. _Letters from the gods in the guts of
a dead bull, Silk? You're getting in touch with your own subconscious,
that's all_.
'More than possible that I'm wrong--that I'm reading my own
fears into this splendid victim.' Silk elevated his voice. 'Let me
repeat that Echidna said nothing of the sort.' Rather too late he
realized that he had yet to transmit her precise words to the
congregation. He did so, interspersing every fact he could recall
about her place at Pas's side and her vital role in superintending
chastity and fertility. 'So you see that Great Echidna simply urged
