taking his blue tunic, and leave him advice that would be of help in
the troubles to come.
Yet he could not settle upon the right words, and he knew that the
boy would soon wake. It was shadeup, and he would be late at his
palaestra; already Mother approached the bed.
What could he say that would have meaning for this boy? That
this boy might recall more than a decade later?
Mother shook his shoulder, and Silk felt his own shoulder
touched; it was strange she could not see him.
_Fear no love_, he wrote; and then: _Carry out the Plan of Pus_.
But Mother's hand was shaking him so hard that the final words were
practically unreadable; _of Pas_ faded from the soft, blue-lined paper
as he watched. Pas was, after all, a thing of the past. Like the boy.
Xiphias and the Prolocutor were standing at the foot of the boy's
bed, which had become his own.
He blinked.
As if to preside over a sacrifice at the Grand Manteion, the
Prolocutor wore mulberry vestments crusted with diamonds and
sapphires, and held the gold baculus that symbolized his authority;
Xiphias had what appeared to be an augur's black robe folded over
his arm. It seemed the wildest of dreams.
His blankets were pushed away; and the surgeon, standing next to
his bed beside Hyacinth, rolled him onto his side and bent to pull off
the bandages he had applied earlier. Silk managed to smile up at
Hyacinth, and she smiled in return--a shy, frightened smile that was
like a kiss.
From the other side of the bed, Colonel Oosik inquired, 'Can you
speak, Calde?'
He could not, though it was his emotions that kept him silent.
'He talked to me last night before he went to sleep,' Hyacinth told Oosik.
'Silk talk!' Oreb confirmed from the top of a bedpost.
'Please don't sit up.' The surgeon laid his hand--a much larger
and stronger one than the hand that had awakened him--upon Silk's
shoulder to prevent it.
'I can speak.' he told them. 'Your Cognizance. I very much regret
having subjected you to this.'
Quetzal shook his head and told Hyacinth, 'Perhaps you'd better
get him dressed.'
'No time to dawdle, lad!' Xiphias exclaimed. 'Shadeup in an hour!
Want them to start shooting again?'
Then the surgeon who had held him down was helping him to rise,
and Hyacinth (who smelled better than an entire garden of flowers)
was helping him into a tunic. 'I did this for you last Phaesday night,
remember?'
'Do I still have your azoth?' he asked her. And then, 'What in the
Whorl's going on?'
'They sent Oosie to kill you. He just came back and he doesn't
want to.'
Silk was looking, or trying to look, into the corners of the room.
Gods and others who were not gods waited there, he felt certain.
watching and nearly visible, their shining heads turned toward him.
He remembered climbing onto Blood's roof and his desperate
struggle with the whiteheaded one, Hyacinth snatching his hatchet
from his waistband. He groped for it, but hatchet and waistband had
vanished alike.
Quetzal muttered, 'Somebody will have to tell him what to tell
them. How to make peace.'
'I don't expect you to believe me, Your Cognizance--' Hyacinth began.
'Whether I believe you or not, my child, will depend on what you say.'
'We didn't! I swear to you by Thelxiepeia and Scalding Scylla--'
'For example. If you were to say that Patera Calde Silk had
violated his oath and disgraced his vocation, I would not believe you.'
Standing upon the arm of his mother's reading chair, he had
studied the calde's head, carved by a skillful hand from hard brown
wood. 'Is this my father?' Mother's smile as she lifted him down,
warning him not to touch it. 'No, no, that's my friend the calde.'
Then the calde was dead and buried, and his head buried, too--buried
in the darkest reaches of her closet, although she spoke at
times of burning it in the big black kitchen stove and perhaps
believed eventually that she had. It was not well to have been a
friend of the calde's.
'I know our Patera Calde Silk too well for that,' Quetral was
telling Hyacinth. 'On the other hand, if you were to say that nothing
of the kind had taken place, I would believe you implicitly, my child.'
Xiphias helped Silk to his feet, and Hyacinth pulled up a pair of
unbicached linen drawers that had somehow appeared around his
ankles and were new and clean and not his at all, and tied the cord
for him.
'Calde--'
At that moment, the title sounded like a death sentence. He said,
'I'm only Patera--Only Silk. Nobody's calde now.'
Oosik stroked his drooping, white-tipped mustache. 'You fear
that because my men and I are loyal to the Ayuntamiento, we will
kill you. I understand. It is undoubtedly true, as this young woman
has said--'
In the presence of the Prolocutor, Oosik was pretending he did
not know Hyacinth, exactly as he himself had tried to pretend he
was not calde;; Silk found wry amusement in that.
'--and already you have almost perished in this foolish fighting,'
Oosik was saying. 'Another dies now, even as we speak. On our side
or yours, it does not matter. If it was one of us, we will kill one of
you soon. If one of you, you will kill one of us. Perhaps it will be me.
Perhaps my son, though he has already--'
Xiphias interrupted him. 'Couldn't get home, lad! Tried to! Big
night attack! Still fighting! Didn't think they'd try that. You don't
mind my coming back to look out for you?'
Kneeling with his trousers, Hyacinth nodded confirmation. 'If
you listen at the window, you can still hear shooting.'
Silk sat on the rumpled bed again and pushed his feet into the
