Nightside the Long Sun

He led Silk to the back of the dim cellar room, and up a ladder into a cavernous night varied here and there by pyramids of barrels and bales; and at last, when they had followed an alley paved with refuse for several streets, into the back of what appeared to be an empty shop. The sound of their feet summoned a weak green glow from one corner of the overlong room. Silk saw a cot with rumpled, soiled sheets; a chamber pot; a table that might have come from the tavern they had left; two plain wooden chairs; and, on the opposite wall, what appeared to be a still-summonable glass. Planks had been nailed across the windows on either side of the street door; a cheap colored picture of Scylla, eight-armed and smiling, was tacked to the planks. “Is this where you live?” he asked.

“I don’t exactly live anywhere, Patera. I’ve got a lot of places, and this is the closest. Have a seat. You still want me to shrive you?”

Silk nodded.

“Then you’re going to have to shrive me first so I can do it right. I guess you knew that. I’ll try to think of everything.”

Silk nodded again. “Do, please.”

With speed and economy of motion surprising in so large a man, Auk knelt beside him. “Cleanse me, Patera, for I have given offense to Pas and to other gods.”

His gaze upon the smiling picture of Scylla—and so well away from Auk’s heavy, brutal face—Silk murmured, as the ritual required, “Tell me, my son, and I will bring you his forgiveness from the well of his boundless mercy.”

“I killed a man tonight, Patera. You saw it. Kalan’s his name. Gurnard was set to stick Gib, but he got him…”

“With his skittlepin,” Silk prompted softly.

“That’s lily, Patera. That’s when Kalan come out with his needler, only I had mine out.”

“He intended to shoot Gib, didn’t he?”

“I think so, Patera. He works with Gurnard off and on. Or anyway he used to.”

“Then there was no guilt in what you did, Auk.”

“Thanks, Patera.”

After that, Auk remained silent for a long time. Silk prayed silently while he waited, listening with half an ear to angry voices in the street and the thunderous wheels of a passing cart, his thoughts flitting from and returning to the calm, amused and somehow melancholy voices he had heard in the ball court as he had reached for the ball he carried in a pocket still, and to the innumerable things the owner of those voices had sought to teach him.

“I robbed a few houses up on the Palatine. I was trying to remember how many. Twenty I can think of for sure. Maybe more. And I beat a woman, a girl called—”

“You needn’t tell me her name, Auk.”

“Pretty bad, too. She was trying to get more out of me after I’d already given her a real nice brooch. I’d had too much, and I hit her. Cut her mouth. She yelled, and I hit her again and floored her. She couldn’t work for a week, she says. I shouldn’t have done that, Patera.”

“No,” Silk agreed.

“She’s better than most, and high, wide and handsome, too. Know what I mean, Patera? That’s why I gave her the brooch. When she wanted more…”

“I understand.”

“I was going to kick her. I didn’t, but if I had I’d probably have killed her. I kicked a man to death, once. That was part of what I told Patera Pike.”

Silk nodded, forcing his eyes away from Auk’s boots. “If Patera brought you pardon, you need not repeat that to me; and if you refrained from kicking the unfortunate woman, you have earned the favor of the gods—of Scylla and her sisters particularly—by your self-restraint.”

Auk sighed. “Then that’s all I’ve done, Patera, since last time. Solved those houses and beat on Chenille. And I wouldn’t have, Patera, if I hadn’t of seen she wanted it for rust. Or anyhow I don’t think I would have.”

“You understand that it’s wrong to break into houses, Auk. You must, or you wouldn’t have told me about it. It is wrong, and when you enter a house to rob it, you might easily be killed, in which case you would die with the guilt upon you. That would be very bad. I want you to promise me that you will look for some better way to live. Will you do that, Auk? Will you give me your word?”

“Yes, Patera, I swear I will. I’ve already been doing it. You know, buying things and selling them. Like that.”

Silk decided it would be wiser not to ask what sorts of things these were, or how the sellers had gotten them. “The woman you beat, Auk. You said she used rust. Am I to take it that she was an immoral woman?”

“She’s not any worse than a lot of others, Patera. She’s at Orchid’s place.”

Silk nodded to himself. “Is that the sort of place I imagine?”

“No, Patera, it’s about the best. They don’t allow any fighting or anything like that, and everything’s real clean. Some of Orchid’s girls have even gone uphill.”

“Nevertheless, Auk, you shouldn’t go to places of that kind. You’re not bad looking, you’re strong, and you have some education. You’d have no difficulty finding a decent girl, and a decent girl might do you a great deal of good.”