way I do, you pay more attention than when you're feeling good.
I'm a dimberdamber nanny nipper.' He nudged Chenille with the
toe of his boot. 'Look alive, Jugs. Time for breakfast!'
'What's the matter with _you?_' Incus sat up as though it had been
he and not Chenille who had been thus nudged.
'Not a thing,' Auk told him. 'I'm right as rain.' He considered the
matter. 'If it does, I'll go to the Cock. If it don't, I'll do some
business on the hill. Slept with my boots on.' He seated himself
beside Chenille. 'You too? You shouldn't do that, Patera. Bad on
the feet.'
Untying their laces, he tugged off his boots, then pulled off his
stockings. 'Feel how wet these are. Still wet from the boat. Wake
up, old man! From the boat and the rain. If we had that tall ass
again, I'd make him squirt fire for me so I could dry 'em. Phew!' He
hung the stockings over the tops of his boots and pushed them away.
Chenille sat up and began to take off her jade earrings. 'Ooh, did
I dream!' She shuddered. 'I was lost, see? All alone down here, and
this tunnel I was in kept going deeper both ways. I'd walk one way
for a long, long while, and it would just keep going down. So I'd
turn around and walk the other way, only that way went down, too,
deeper and deeper all the time.'
'Recollect that the _immortal gods_ are always with you, my
daughter,' Incus told her.
'Uh-huh. Hackum, I've got to get hold of some clothes. My
sunburn's better. I could wear them, and it's too cold down here
without any.' She grinned. 'A bunch of new clothes, and a double
red ribbon. After that, I'll be ready for ham and half a dozen eggs
scrambled with peppers.'
'Watch out,' Hammerstone warned her, 'I don't think your
friend's ready for inspection.'
Auk rose, laughing. 'Look at this,' he told Hammerstone, and
kicked Urus expertly, bending up his bare toes so that Urus's ribs
received the ball of his foot.
Urus blinked and rubbed his eyes just as Auk had, and Auk
realized that he himself was the long sun. He had awakened himself
with his own light, light that filled the whole tunnel, too dazzlingly
bright for Urus's weak eyes.
'The way you been carrying the old man,' he told Urus, 'I don't
like it.' He wondered whether his hands were hot enough to burn
Urus. It seemed possible; they were ordinary when he wasn't
looking at them, but when he did they glowed like molten gold.
Stooping, he flicked Urus's nose with a forefinger, and when Urus
did not cry out, jerked him to his feet.
'When you carry the old man,' Auk told him, 'you got to do it like
you love him. Like you were going to kiss him.' It might be a good
idea to make Urus really kiss him, but Auk was afraid Dace might
not like it.
'All right,' Urus said. 'All right.'
Bustard inquired, How you feelin', sprat?
Auk pondered. 'There's parts of me that work all right,' he
declared at length, 'and parts that don't. A couple I'm not set about.
Remember old Marble?'
Sure.
'She told us she could pull out these lists. Out of her sleeve, like.
What was right and what wasn't. With me, it's one thing at a time.'
'I can do that,' Hammerstone put in. 'It's perfectly natural.'
Chenille had both earrings off, and was rubbing her ears. 'Can
you put these in your pocket, Hackum? I got no place to carry them.'
'Sure,' Auk said. He did not turn to look at her.
'I could get a couple cards for them at Sard's. I could buy a good
worsted gown and shoes, and eat at the pastry cook's till I was ready
to split.'
'Like, there's this dimber punch,' Auk explained to Urus. 'I
learned it when I wasn't no bigger than a cobbler's goose, and I
always did like it a lot. You don't swing, see? Culls always talk
about swinging at you, and they do. Only this is better. I'm not sure
it still works, though.'
His right fist caught Urus square in the mouth, knocking him
backward into the shiprock wall. Incus gasped.
'You sort of draw your arm up and straighten it out,' Auk
explained. Urus slumped to the tunnel floor. 'Only with your weight
behind it, and your knuckles level. Look at them.' He held them
out. 'If your knuckles go up and down, that's all right, too. Only it's
a different punch, see?' Not as good, Bustard said. 'Only not as
good,' Auk confirmed.
I kin walk, big feller, he don't have to carry me, nor kiss me
neither.
The dead body at his feet, Auk decided, must be somebody else.
Urus, maybe, or Gelada.
Maytera Marble tried to decide how long it had been since she had
done this, entering _roof_ and when that evoked only a flood of
dripping ceilings and soaked carpets, _attic_.
A hundred and eighty-four years ago.
She could scarcely believe it--did not wish to believe it. A
graceful girl with laughing eyes and industrious hands had climbed
this same stair, as she still did a score of times every day, walked
along this hall, and halted beneath this odd-looking door overhead,
reaching up with a tool that had been lost now for more than a century.
She snapped her new fingers in annoyance, producing a loud and
eminently satisfactory clack, then returned to one of the rooms that
had been hers and rummaged through her odds-and-ends drawer
until she found the big wooden crochet hook that she had sometimes
plied before disease had deprived her of her fingers. Not these
fingers, to be sure.
Back in the hall, she reached up as the girl who had been herself
had and hooked the ring, wondering whimsically whether it had
forgotten how to drop down on its chain.
It had not. She tugged. Puffs of dust emerged from the edges of
