Nightside the Long Sun

“It does,” Silk continued. “The gifts we receive on Scylsday, and at other times, aren’t enough to offset the very small salaries paid to our sibyls and me. Our taxes are in arrears—that means we owe money to the Juzgado, and we have various other debts. Occasionally animals are presented by benefactors, people who hope for the favor of the merciful gods. Perhaps your own parents are among them, and if they are we are very grateful to them. When no such victims are presented, our sibyls and I pool our salaries to buy a victim for Scylsday, generally a pigeon.

“But the lambs, as I said, I bought myself. Why do you think I did that, Addax?”

Addax, as old as Horn and with coloring nearly as light as Silk’s own, stood. “To foretell the future, Patera.”

Silk nodded as Addax resumed his seat. “Yes, to know the future of our manteion. The entrails of those lambs told me that it is bright, as you know. But mostly because I sought the favor of various gods and hoped to win it by gifts.” Silk glanced at the Sacred Window behind him. “I offered the first lamb to Pas and the second to Scylla, the patroness of our city. Those, so I thought, were all that I had funds for—a single white lamb for All-powerful Pas, and another for Scylla. And I asked, as I should tell you, for a particular favor—I asked that they appear to us again, as they did of old. I longed for assurances of their love, not thinking how needless they would be when ample assurances are found throughout the Chrasmologic Writings.” He tapped the worn book before him on the ambion.

“Late one evening, as I read the Writings, I came to understand that. I’d read them from boyhood—and never learned in all that time how much the gods love us, though they had told me over and over. Of what use was it, in that case, for me to have a copy of my own? I sold it, but the twenty bits it brought would not have bought another white lamb, or even a black lamb for Phaea, whose day this is. I bought a gray lamb instead, and offered it to all the gods, and the entrails of the gray lamb held the same messages of hope that I had read in the white lambs. Then I should have known, though I did not, that it was not one of the Nine who was speaking to us through the lambs. Today I learned the identity of that god, but I won’t tell you that today; there is still too much I have not understood.” Silk picked up the Writings and stared at the binding for a moment before he spoke again.

“This is the manteion’s copy. It’s the one that I read now, and it’s a better one—a better printed copy, with more extensive notes—than my old one, the one I sold so that I might make a gift to all the gods. There are lessons there, and I hope that every one of you will master them. Wrestle with them a while, if they seem too difficult for you at first, and never forget that it was to teach you these wrestlings that our palaestra was founded long ago.

“Yes, Kit? What is it?”

“Patera, is a god really going to come.”

Some of the older students laughed. Silk waited until they were quiet again before he replied. “Yes, Kit. A god will come to our Sacred Window, though we may have to wait a very long time. But we need not wait—we have their love and their wisdom here. Open these Writings at any point, Kit, and you’ll find a passage applicable to your present condition—to the problems you have today, or to the ones you’ll have to deal with tomorrow. How is this possible? Who will tell me?” Silk studied the blank faces before him before calling on one of the girls who had laughed loudest. “Answer, Ginger.”

She rose reluctantly, smoothing her skirt. “Because everything’s connected to everything else, Patera?” It was one of his own favorite sayings.

“Don’t you know, Ginger?”

“Because everything’s connected.”

Silk shook his head. “That everything in the whorl is dependent on every other thing is unquestionably true. But if that were the answer to my question, we ought to find any passage from any book as appropriate to our condition as one from the Chrasmologic Writings. You need only look into any other book at random to prove that it isn’t so. But,” he tapped the shabby cover again, “when I open this book, what will we find?”

He did so, dramatically, and read the line at the top of the page aloud: “‘Are ten birds to be had for a song?’”

The clarity of this reference to his recent transaction in the market stunned him, afrighting his thoughts like so many birds. He swallowed and continued. “‘You have daubed Oreb the raven, but can you make him sing?’