As he wiped his forehead with his sleeve, he tried to recall whether it had been equally hot two or three months before, when Simuliid has made his pilgrimage, and decided that it had not. It had been hot-indeed it had been so hot that everyone had complained incessantly. But not as hot as it was now.
"This is the peak," he told Oreb. "This is the hottest that it will get all day. It might have been wiser to wait until evening, as Chervil suggested; but we're supposed to meet Auk this evening for dinner. We can comfort ourselves with the thought that if we can stand this-and we can-we can stand the worst that this sun can do and that from this moment on things can only get better. Not only will the way back be downhill, but it will be cooler then."
Oreb clacked his bill nervously but said nothing.
"Did you see the look on Coypu's face when I limped away from our table?" Silk slapped the wrapping against the side of the white-painted boulder one final time.
"When I told him I had a broken ankle, I was afraid he might try to keep me in Limna by main force."
As Silk stood up, he reflected that Simuliid's age and weight had probably been handicaps as great or greater than his ankle. Had he, like Crane, encountered pilgrims on the path? And if so, what had he told them?
For that matter, what should he himself, Patera Silk, from Sun Street, tell those he met; and what should he ask them? As he walked, he tried to contrive some reasonably truthful account that would permit him to ask whether they, too, had ever talked with Crane on the Pilgrims' Way, and what Crane had said to them, all without revealing his own purpose.
There was no occasion for it. Though well marked (as the woman in theJuzgado had said), the path was deserted, steep, and stony, its loneliness and blazing heat relieved only by a succession of views of the steel blue lake that were increasingly breathtaking, breathtaken, and hazardous.
"If an augur were to make this pilgrimage every day of his life," Silk asked Oreb, "in all weathers and whether he was well or ill, don't you believe that eventually, perhaps on the final day of his whorldly existence, Surging Scylla would reveal herself to him, rising from the lake? I do, and if I didn't have the manteion to take care of-if the people of our quarter didn't have need of me and it, and if the Outsider hadn't ordered me to save it-I'd be tempted to try the experiment. Even if it failed, one might live a far worse life."
Oreb croaked and muttered in reply, peering this way and that.
"It's Scylla, Pas's eldest child, who selects us to be augurs, after all. Each year arrives like a flotilla laden with young men and women-this is what they tell you at the schola, you understand."
A beetling rock provided a few square cubits of shade; Silk squatted in it, fanning his dripping face with the wide hat he had bought in Limha.
"Some, drawn to the ideal of holiness, sail very near Scylla indeed; and from those she plucks a number that is neither great nor small, but the necessary number for that year. Others, repelled by the augurial ideals of simplicity and chastity, sail as far from her as they dare; from them, also, she takes a number that is neither great nor small but the necessary number for the year. That is why artists show her with many long arms like whips. She snatched me up with one, you see. It may even be that she snatched you as well, Oreb."
"No see!"
"Nor I," Silk confessed. "I didn't see her either. But I felt her pull. Do you know, I believe all this walking's doing my ankle good? It must've reached the stage at which it needs exercise more than rest. We're coming to another point. What do you say, shall I sacrifice Blood's stick to Lady Scylla?"
"No hit?"
"No hit, I swear."
"Keep it."
"Because someone else might find it and hit you? Don't worry. I'll stand out there and throw it as far as I can."
Silk rose and walked to the point, advancing ever more cautiously until he stood at the very edge of the projecting rock, above a drop of five hundred cubits, jumbled slabs of stone, and breaking waves. "How about it, Oreb? Should we make the offering? An informal sacrifice to Surging Scylla? It must surely have been Scylla who sent that nice couple to us. They told me where they live quite willingly, and some of the questions Doctor Crane had asked them were certainly suggestive."
He paused. Like a gift from the goddess, a sudden gust of cool wind from the lake set his black robe flapping behind him, and dried the sweat that had soaked his tunic.
"Auk and Chenille-and I, too-talked about turning him over to the Guard, Oreb, after we'd taken his money; it bothered me at the time, and it's been bothering me more and more ever since. I'd almost prefer failing the Outsider to doing that."
"Good man."
"Yes." Silk lowered the walking stick, discovered that he had nowhere to rest its ferrule, and took a step backward. "That's precisely the trouble. If I were to find out that someone I knew had gone to a foreign city to spy for Viron, I'd consider him a brave man and a patriot. Doctor Crane is clearly a spy for some other city-his home, whether it's Ur, Urbs, Trivigaunte, Sedes, or Palustria. Well, isn't he a brave man and a patriot, too?"
"Walk now?"
"You're right, I suppose. We ought to be on about our business." Silk remained where he was, nevertheless, gazing down at the lake. "I could say, I suppose, that if Scylla accepted my sacrifice-that is to say, if this stick fell into the water-it would be all right to let Crane go free once the manteion had been saved; he'd have to leave Viron, of course; but we wouldn't hand him and our evidence over to the Guard-roll him over to Hoppy, as Auk would say." He tapped the rock with the tip of the stick. "But it would be pure superstition, unworthy of an augur. What we need is a regular sacrifice, preferably on a Scylsday, with all of the forms strictly observed, before a Sacred Window."
"No cut!"
"Not you. How many times do I have to say that? A ram or something. You know, Oreb, there really is-or was-a science of hydromancy, by which the officiating augur read Scylla's will in the patterns of waves. I suggested it to that nice woman in the Juzgado by purest chance-seeing the lake before we went in probably brought it to mind-but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what Councillor Lemur had in mind when he built this shrine we're going to. It was practiced up until about a hundred years ago, so when the shrine was built there must still have been thousands of people who remembered it. Perhaps Councillor Lemur hoped to revive it."
The bird did not reply. For another two minutes or more Silk stood staring at the surging waters below him before shifting his attention to the rugged cliffs on his right. "Look, you can see the shrine from here." He pointed with the walking stick. "I believe they've actually shaped the pillars that support the dome like Scylla's arms. See how wavy they are?"
"Man there."
A dim figure moved back and forth in the bluish twilight beneath Scylla's airy chalcedony shell, then vanished as he (presumably) knelt.
"You're quite right," Silk told the bird, "so there is. Someone must have been on the path ahead of us all that time. I wish we'd caught up with him."
He contemplated the otherwhorldly purity of the distant shrine for some time longer, then turned away. "I suppose we'll meet him on the path. But if we don't, we probably ought to wait until he's completed his own devotions. Now what about the stick? Should I go back and throw it?"
"No throw." Oreb unfolded his wings and seemed minded to fly. "Keep it."
"All right. I suppose my leg may be worse before we get back, so you're probably wise."
"Silk fight."
"With this, Oreb?" He twirled it. "I've got Hyacinth's azoth and her little needler, and either would be a much more effective weapon."