She was looking at the hackboard, Musk knew. She could see the hackboard more clearly from half a league away than he had ever seen the palms of his own hands. She would be ravenous by now, like a falcon (as Musk reminded himself) an eagle would have to learn to fly before it could learn to hunt. Apparently, she had not yet gone after lambs, though she might tomorrow—it was his greatest fear.
He circled the villa. The meat bound to the hackboard had been there all day; it was nearly dry now, and blanketed with flies. He kicked the board to dislodge them before he brought out the lure and a bag of cracked maize.
The lure whistled as he spun it on its five-cubit line.
“Ho, hawk! Ho, hawk!”
Once he imagined that he heard the faint jingle of her bells, though he knew it was impossible. He scattered maize nearly to the wall, then returned to the hackboard and swung the lure again while he waited. It was late— perhaps too late. It would be dark very soon, and when it was she would not fly.
“Ho! Ho, hawk!”
As well as Musk could judge, the eagle on the remote snag had not stirred so much as a feather; but a plump brown wood weaver was settling on the cropped grass near the wall to peck at the maize.
He dropped the lure and crouched, his needler gripped with both hands and his left elbow braced on his left knee. It would be a long shot, in poor light.
The wood weaver fell, fluttered up, cannoned into the wall, and fell again. Before it could fly a second time, he had it. Back at the hackboard, he loosened the nose in the lure line and let the red-and-white lure fall to the ground. With the noose tight about the wood weaver’s right leg, he twirled it, producing a fine and almost invisible shower of blood.
“Ha, hawk!”
The wide wings spread. For a moment Musk, watching the eagle, still twirling the dying wood weaver in its ten-cubit circle, felt that he more than possessed it.
Felt that he himself was the great bird, and was happy.
“You seen what they wrote on that wall, Patera.” Auk sat down, having chosen a chair from which he could watch the door. “Some sprat from the palaestra, like you say. But I’d talk to them about it, if I was you. Could be trouble.”
“I’m not responsible for every boy who finds a piece of chalk.” This eating house had seemed remote indeed to Silk, though it was almost in sight of his manteion. He lowered himself into the capacious armchair the host was holding for him and looked around him at the whitewashed shiprock walls. Their private dining room was smaller even than his bedroom in the manse, still crowded after a waiter had removed two superfluous chairs.
“All of them good and thick,” Auk said, answering the question Silk had not asked, “and so’s the door. This was the Alambrera back in the old days. What do you like?”
Silk scanned the neatly lettered slate. “I’ll have the chops, I think.” At eighteen cardbits, the chops were the least expensive meal; and even if there were in fact only a single chop, this dinner would be his most bountiful meal of the week.
“How’d you get over the wall?” Auk asked when the host had gone. “Have any trouble?”
And so Silk told the whole story, from the cutting of his horsehair rope by a spike to his ride back to the city in Blood’s floater. Auk was roaring with laughter when the waiter brought their dinners, but he had grown very serious by the time Silk reached his interview with Blood.
“You didn’t happen to mention me any time while you were talking to him?”
Silk swallowed a luscious mouthful of chop. “No. But I very foolishly tried to speak with you through the glass in Hyacinth’s boudoir, as I told you.”
“He may not find out about that.” Auk scratched his chin thoughtfully. “The monitors lose track after a while.”
“But he may,” Silk said. “You’ll have to be on guard.”
“Not as much as you will, Patera. He’ll want to know what you wanted to talk to me about, and since you didn’t, he can’t get it from me. What are you going to tell him?”
“If I tell him anything at all, I’ll tell him the truth.”
Auk laid down his fork. “That I helped you?”
“That I knew you were concerned about my safety. That you had warned me about going out so late at night, and that I wanted to let you know I had not come to harm.”
Auk considered the matter while Silk ate. “It might go, Patera, if he thinks you’re crazy enough.”
“If he thinks I’m honest enough, you mean. The best way to be thought honest is to be honest—or at any rate that’s the best that I’ve ever found. I try to be.”
“But you’re going to try to steal twenty-six thousand for him, too.”
“If that’s what I must do to save our manteion, and I can get it in no other way, yes. I’ll be forced to choose between evils, exactly as I was last night. I’ll try to see that no one is hurt, of course, and to take the money only from those who can well afford to lose it.”
“Blood will take your money, Patera. And have a good laugh over it.”
“I won’t let him take it until he furnishes safeguards. But there’s something else I ought to tell you about. Did I mention that Blood wanted me to exorcise the yellow house?”
“Orchid’s place? Sure. That’s where that girl Orpine lived, only I never knew she was Orchid’s daughter.”
