There was a long pause. "I'm not sure."
"Because her father and I talked about physicians, among many other things. He has a resident physician, and he told me that an earlier one had been a brain surgeon." Silk waited for Mamelta's reaction, but there was none.
"That seemed strange to me until it occurred to me that the brain surgeon might have been employed to meet a specific need. Suppose that Mucor had been a normal child in every respect except for her ability to possess others. She would have possessed those closest to her, or so I'd think, and they can hardly have enjoyed it. Blood probably consulted several physicians-treating her phenomenal ability as a disease, since he is by no means religious. Eventually he must have found one who told him that he could 'cure' her by removing a tumor or something of that kind from her brain. Or perhaps even by removing a part of the brain itself, though that is such a horrible thought that I wish there were some way to avoid it."
Mamelta nodded.
Encouraged, Silk continued, "Blood must have believed that the operation had been a complete success. He didn't suspect it was his own daughter who was possessing the women because he firmly believed, as he presumably had for years, that she was no longer able to possess anyone. I think it's probable that the operation did in fact interfere with her ability until she was older, just as it seems to have damaged her thought processes. But in time, as that part of her brain regenerated, her ability returned; and having been granted a second chance, she was prudent enough to go farther afield, and in general to conceal her restored ability; although it would seem that she followed her father or some other member of the household to the place where the women lived, as she undoubtedly followed me later. Does any of this sound at all familiar to you, Mamelta? Can you tell me anything about it?"
"The operation was before I went on the ship,"
"I see," Silk said, although he did not. "And then .. . ?"
"It came. I remember now. They strapped us in."
"Was it a slave boat? We don't have them in Viron, but I know that some other cities do, and that there are slave boats on the Amnis that raid the fishing villages. I would be sorry to learn that there are slave boats beyond the whorl as well."
"Yes," Mamelta said.
Silk rose and pressed the center of the door as Mamelta had, but the door did not open.
"Not yet. It will open automatically, soon."
He sat down again, feeling unaccountably that the whole room was slipping left and falling too. "The boat came?"
"We had to volunteer. They were-you couldn't say no."
"Do you recall being outside, Mamelta? Grass and trees and sky and so on?"
"Yes." A smile lifted the comers of her mouth. "Yes, with my brothers." Her face became animated. "Playing ball in the patio. Mama wouldn't let me go out in the street the way they did. There was a fountain, and we'd throw the ball through the water so that whoever caught it would get wet."
"Could you see the sun? Was it long or short?"
"I don't understand."
Silk searched his memory for everything Maytera Marble had ever said relating to the Short Sun. "Here," he began carefully, "our sun is long and straight, a line of burning gold fencing our lands from the skylands. Was it like that for you? Or was it a disk in the center of the sky?"
Her face crumpled, while tears overflowed her eyes. "And never come back. Hold me. Oh, hold me!"
He did so, awkward as a boy and acutely conscious of the soft, warm flesh beneath the worn black twill of the robe he had lent her.
Chapter 10. ON THE BELLY OF THE WHORL
Auk leaned across the squat balustrade of Scylla's shrine to study the jagged slabs of gray rock at the foot of the cliff. Their disordered, acutely angled surfaces gleamed ghostly pale in the skylight, but the clefts and fissures between them were as black as pitch.
"Here, here!" Oreb pecked enthusiastically at Scylla's lips. "Shrine eat!"
"I'm not going back with you," Chenille told Auk. "You made me walk all the way out here in my good wool dress for nothing. All right. You hit me and kicked me-all right, too. But if you want me to go back with you, you're going to have to carry me. Try it. Smack me a couple more times and give me a good hard kick. See if I get up."
"You can't stay here all night," Auk growled.
"I can't? Watch me."
Oreb pecked again. "Here Auk!"
"Here yourself." Auk caught him. "Now you listen up. I'm going to pitch you over like I pitched you off the path back there. You look for Patera, Silk like you did before. If you find him, sing out."
With weary indifference, Chenille warned, "He won't come back this time."
"Sure he will. Get set, bird. Here you go." He tossed Oreb over the balustrade and watched as he glided down.
Chenille said, "There's a hundred places where that long butcher could have fallen."
"Eight or ten, maybe. I was looking."
She stretched out on the stone floor. "Oh, Moipe, I'm so tired!"
Auk turned to face her. "You really going to stay here all night?"
If she nodded, it was too dark beneath the dome of the shrine for him to see her.
"Somebody could come out here."
"Somebody worse than you?"
He grunted.
"That's so funny. I'd bet everything I've got that if you checked out every last cull in that godforsaken little town you couldn't find a single-"
"Shut up!"
For a time she did, whether from fear or sheer fatigue she could not herself have said. In the silence, she could hear the lapping of the waves at the foot of the cliff, the sob of the wind through the strangely twisted pillars of the shrine, the surge of blood in her own ears, and the rhythmic thumping of her heart.
Rust would have made everything all right. Recalling the empty vial she had left on her bed at Orchid's, she imagined one twenty times larger, a vial bigger than a bottle, filled with rust. She would sniff a pinch, and drop a big one in her lip, and walk back with Auk till they reached that bit where you felt like you were hanging in air, then push him off, down and down, until he fell into the lake below.
But there was no such vial, there never would be, and the half bottle of red she had drunk had died in her long ago; she pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples.
Auk bawled, "Bird! You down there? Sing out!"
If Oreb heard him, he did not reply.
Argumentatively, Auk inquired, "Why would he come way out here?"
Chenille rolled her head from side to side. "You asked me that before. I don't know. I remember us riding in some kind of cart or something, all right? Horses. Only somebody else was in charge then, and I wish she'd come back." She bit her knuckle, herself astonished by what she had said. Wearily she added, "She did a better job of it than I do. A better job than you're doing, too."
"Shut up. Listen, I'm going to climb down a ways. As far as I can go without falling. You rest. I should be back pretty soon."
"We'll have a parade," Chenille told him. Some minutes afterward she added, "A big one, right up the Alameda. With bands."
Then she slept and entered a great, shining room full of men in black-and-white and jeweled women. A three-sun admiral in full dress walked beside her holding her arm and did not count in the least. She walked proudly, smiling, and her wide collar was entirely of diamonds, and diamonds cascaded from her ears and flashed like the lights in the night sky from her wrists; and every eye was on her.
Then Auk was shaking her shoulder. "I'm going. You want to come or not?"
"No."
"There's good places to eat in Limna. I'll buy dinner and rent a room, and we can head back to the city tomorrow. You want to come?"
By now she was awake enough to say, "You don't listen, do you? No. Go away."
"All right. If some cull gets to you out here, don't blame me. I did the best I could for you."