Part 8 (2/2)
”I found out, you see, that birds are not sold for a song. And I was given a sign-such is the generosity of the gracious G.o.ds to those who pet.i.tion them-that a G.o.d will indeed come to this Sacred Window when I have made my sacrifice. It may be a long time, as I told Kit, so we must not be impatient. We must have faith, and remember always
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that the G.o.ds have other ways of speaking to us, and that if our Windows have fallen silent, these others have not In omens and dreams and visions, the G.o.ds speak to us as they did when our parents and grandparents were young. Whenever we are willing to provide a victim, they speak to us plainly through augury, and die Writings are always here for us, to be consulted in a moment whenever we have need of them. We should be ashamed to say, as some people sometimes do, that in this age we are like boats without rudders.”
Thunder rumbled through die windows, louder even dian the bawlings of the beggars and vendors on Sun Street; the children stirred uneasily at the sound. After leading them in a brief prayer, Silk dismissed them.
Already the first hot, heavy drops of the storm were turning the yellow dust to mud beyond the manteion's doors. Children scurried off up or down Sun Street, none lingering this afternoon, as they sometimes did, to gossip or play.
The three sibyls had remained inside to a.s.sist at his sacrifice. Silk jogged from the manteion back to the manse, pulled on leather sacrificial gauntlets, and took die night chough from its cage. It struck at his eyes like an adder, its long, crimson beak missing by a finger's width.
He caught its head in one gauntleted hand, reminding himself grimly that many an augur had been killed by the victim he had intended to sacrifice, that scarcely a year pa.s.sed without some unlucky augur, somewhere in die city, being gored by a bull or a stag.
”Don't try that again, you bad bird.” He spoke half to himself. ”Don't you know you'll be accursed forever if you harm me? You'll be stoned to death, and your spirit handed over to devils.”
The night chough's bill clacked; its wings beat vainly until he trapped its struggling body beneath his left arm.
NlGHTSIDE THE LONG SuN
53.
Back in the dim and airless heat of the manteion, the sibyls had kindled the sacrificial fire on the altar. When Silk entered, a solemn procession of one down the central aisle, they began their slow dance, their wide black skirts flapping, their tuneless voices lifted in an eerie, ritual wail Uiat was as old as the whorl itself.
The fire was a small one, and its fragrant split cedar was already burning fast; Silk told himself that he would have to act quickly if his sacrifice were not to take place when the flames were dying, always a bad omen.
Pa.s.sing the bird quickly over the fire, he p.r.o.nounced the shortest invocation and gave his instructions in a rush of uncadenced words: ”Bird, you must speak to every G.o.d and G.o.ddess you encounter, telling them of our faith and of our great love and loyalty. Say too how grateful I am for the immense and undeserved condescension accorded me, and tell them how earnestly we desire their divine presence at this, our Sacred Window.
”Bird, you must speak thus to Great Pas, the Father of the G.o.ds.
”Bird, you must speak thus also to Sinuous Echidna, Great Pas's consort. You must speak so to Scalding Scylla, to Marvelous Molpe, to Black Tartaros, to Mute Hierax, to Enchanting Thelxiepeia, to Ever-feasting Phaea, to Desert Sphigx, and to any other G.o.d that you may encounter in Mainframe-but particularly to the Outsider, who has greatly favored me, saying that for the remainder of my days I will do his will. That I abase myself before him.”
”No, no,” the night chough muttered, as it had in the market. And then, ”Please, no.”
Silk p.r.o.nounced the final words: ”Have no speech with devils, bird. Neither are you to linger in any place where devils are.”
Grasping the frantic night chough firmly by the neck, he
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extended his gauntleted right hand to Maytera Rose, the senior among the sibyls. Into it she laid the bone-hilted knife of sacrifice that Patera Pike had inherited from his own predecessor. Its long, oddly crooked blade was dull with years and the ineradicable stains of blood, but both edges were bright and keen.
The night chough's beak gaped. It struggled furiously. A last strangled half-human cry echoed from the distempered walls of the manteion, and the wretched night chough went limp in Silk's grasp. Interrupting the ritual, he held the flaccid body to his ear, then brushed open one blood-red eye with his thumb.
”It's dead,” he told the wailing women. For a moment he was at a loss for words. Helplessly he muttered, ”I've never had this happen before. Dead already, before I could sacrifice it”
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