'It is always dark where I stand, Auk. I am blind.'
'I didn't know that.' Black rams and lambs, the gray ram when
Patera Silk got home safely, once a black goat, first of all the pair of
bats he'd caught himself, surprised by day in the dark, dusty attic of
the palaestra and brought to Patera Pike, all for this blind god.
'You're a god. Can't you make yourself see?'
'No.' The hopeless negative seemed to fill the tunnel, hanging in
the blackness long after its sound had faded. 'I am an unwilling god,
Auk. The only unwilling god. My father made me do this. If, as a
god, I might have healed myself, I would have obeyed very
willingly, I believe.'
'I asked my mother... Asked Maytera to bring a god down here
to walk with us. I guess she brought you.'
'No,' Tartaros said again; then, 'I come here often, Auk. It is the
oldest altar we have.'
'This I'm sitting on? I'll get off.'
(Again the woman's voice: '_Auk? Auk?_')
'You may remain. I am also the sole humble god, Auk, or nearly.'
'If it's sacred...'
'Wood was heaped upon it, and the carcasses of animals. You
profane it no more than they. When the first people came, Auk,
they were shown how we desired to be worshiped. Soon, they were
made to forget. They did, but because they had seen what they had
seen, a part of them remembered, and when they found our altars
on the inner surface, they sacrificed as we had taught them. First of
all, here.'
'I haven't got anything,' Auk explained. 'I used to have a bird,
but he's gone. I thought I heard a bat a little while ago. I'll try to
catch one, if you'd like that.'
'You think me thirsty for blood, like my sister Scylla.'
'I guess. I was with her awhile.' Auk tried to remember when that
had been; although he recalled incidents--seeing her naked on a
white stone and cooking fish for her--the days and the minutes
slipped and slid.
'What is it you wish, Auk?'
Suddenly he was frightened. 'Nothing really, Terrible Tartaros.'
'Those who offer us sacrifice always wish something, Auk. Often,
many things. Rain, in your city and many others.'
'It's raining down here already, Terrible Tartaros.'
'I know, Auk.'
'If you're blind...'
'Can you see it, Auk?'
He shook his head. 'It's too shaggy dark.'
'But you hear it. Hear the slow splash of the falling drops kissing
the drops that fell.'
'I feel it, too,' Auk told the god. 'Every once in a while one goes
down the back of my neck.'
'What is it you wish, Auk?'
'Nothing, Terrible Tartaros.' Shivering, Auk wrapped himself in
his own arms.
'All men wish for something, Auk. Most of all, those who say
they wish for nothing.'
'I don't, Terrible Tartaros. Only if you want me to, I'll wish for
something for you. I'd like something to eat.'
Silence answered him.
'Tartaros? Listen, if this's a altar I'm sitting on and you're here
talking to me, shouldn't there be a Sacred Window around here
someplace?'
'There is, Auk. You are addressing it. I am here.'
Auk took off his left boot. 'I got to think about that.'
Maytera Mint had taught him all about the gods, but it seemed to
him that there were really two kinds, the ones she had told about,
the gods in his copybook, and the real ones like Scylla when she'd
been inside Chenille, and this Tartaros. The real kind were a lot
bigger, but the ones in his copybook had been better, and stronger
somehow, even if they were not real.
'Terrible Tartaros?'
'Yes, Auk, my noctolater, what is it you wish?'
'The answers to a couple questions, if that's all right. Lots of times
you gods answer questions for augurs. I know I'm not no augur. So
is it all right for me to ask you, 'cause we haven't got one here?'
Silence, save for the ever-present splashings, and the woman's
voice, sad and hoarse and very far away.
'How come I can't see your Window, Terrible Tartaros? That's
my first one, if that's all right. I mean, usually they're sort of gray,
but they shine in the dark. So am I blind, too?'
Silence fell again. Auk chafed his freezing feet with his hands.
Those hands had glowed like molten gold, not long ago; now they
were not even warm.
'I guess you're waiting for the other question? Well, what I
wanted to know is how come I hear words and everything? At this
palaestra I went to, Maytera said when we got bigger we wouldn't
be able to make sense out of the words if a god ever came to our
Sacred Window, just sort of know what he meant and maybe catch a
couple of words once in a while. Then when Kypris came, it was just
like what Maytera'd said it was going to be. Sometimes I felt like I
could practically see her, and there was a couple words she said that
I heard just as clear as I ever heard anybody, Terrible Tartaros. She said
_love_ and _robbery_, and I knew it. I knew both those words. And
I knew she was telling us it was all right, she loved us and she'd
protect us, only we had to believe in her. But when you talk, it's like
you were a man just like me or Bustard, standing right here with me.'
No voice replied. Auk let out his breath with a whoosh, and put
his freezing fingers in armpits for a moment or two, and then began
to wring out his stockings.
'You yourself have never seen a god in a Window, Auk my noctolater?'
Auk shook his head. 'Not real clear, Terrible Tartaros. I sort of
saw Kindly Kypris just a little, though, and that's good enough for me.'
'Your humility becomes you, Auk.'
