The Burning City

by Jerry Pournelle

  No one did, of course.

  Arshur said. “Bear men are the worst. Not as much sense as a wolf, and when they want to—” He made motions with his hips.

  “Rut,” someone shouted.

  “Rut, yes. When they want to rut they rut anything. Anybody. They’re big and hard to kill, so when they want to rut, most people get rutted. Sea people are easier to deal with. They like people. Especially the girls. Great rutting. And the merfolk at Great Hawk Bay set the best table in the universe. There’s a restaurant in the harbor, an island with a bridge to it. Rordray, that’s his name—Rordray owns the place. Sometimes cooks himself but usually leaves that to others. He built the place to look like the top of a castle because that’s the way his last one looked, somewhere else where the sun rises out of the sea.”

  The sun rises out of the sea. Wanshig had seen that.

  “You spent all your money, Your Magnificence,” Shastern prompted. It wasn’t obvious to anyone but Whandall that Shastern was set to run if Arshur came after him.

  Arshur laughed instead. “It’s sad being in a place of magic with no money. Rordray didn’t need me! Neither did anyone else. If you steal—”

  “Gather.”

  “—gather, they have magic to catch you. Besides, I like the people at Great Hawk. I could steal—sure, I can steal from anyone—but they’d know who did it! Then Rordray said he’d pay me for hemp and sage leaves, and the best comes from a place he calls the Valley of Smokes. That’s here.”

  Whandall asked, “Don’t they have hemp and sage other places?”

  The barbarian looked at Whandall. “Other places they grow too strong. Something to do with magic. Wizards can change the taste, but Rordray says they never get it as good as grows here naturally.”

  “Hemp tea,” Alferth said. “I’ve been told that before—that you get good hemp tea here.”

  “You sure do,” Arshur said. “Wish I had a cup. Storytelling is thirsty work.”

  “Later,” someone shouted. “How’d you get here?”

  “Took ship,” Arshur said. “Fought off pirates, big canoes of them at the cape. They turned and ran after they saw what I did to the first canoe! More pirates out of Point Doom—fought them off too. So when we got here I figured I had some drinks coming. Only thing was, I hadn’t been paid yet, and the tavernkeeper wouldn’t give me any credit.”

  “Tavernkeeper?” someone asked.

  “Boy, don’t you know anything?” Arshur demanded. “But you know, I see how you wouldn’t. No taverns here! Just down at the docks. It’s a place where they sell hemp tea, ale, wine sometimes. Tables and benches. Good roaring fire at night, only not here; here, the fire’s always outside.

  “Anyway, I was drinking good ale in peace when the owner demanded his money. He called the watch when I couldn’t pay. By the time I explained to them, they’d beaten me upside of the head. The ship captain gave my pay to the tavernkeeper for damages and sailed on before I woke up! So here I am. I’ll ship out one day, but I thought I’d see the country.”

  “How do you like Tep’s Town?” Alferth asked.

  “Not so good. No magic. Not that I know much magic, but a little magic makes life slide by a little smoother. And the women! Down there by the harbor there’s a nice town—Lord’s Town, they call it. They sure didn’t want me there! Anyplace I’d go, they’d send for the watch. Chased me right out of town, they did. So I get here, and the women all run away when I try to talk to them! One of them pulled a knife on me! On me! I wasn’t going to hurt her. They tell me you can rut anytime you want to here, whether the women want to or not, but I sure didn’t find it that way.”

  “Burning,” Shastern said. “That’s during a Burning. You just missed it.”

  “Arse of Zoosh! I never have any luck. When do you do it again? Next year? Maybe I’ll stay a year.”

  “Maybe in a year,” Alferth said. “And maybe longer.”

  “It’ll be longer,” Hartanbath said. Tenderly he touched his remaining shred of ear, notched by Whandall and now torn by Arshur. “Maybe a lot longer. Seems like more years between Burnings than when I was a kid.”

  Alferth climbed unsteadily onto the wagon and stood on the seat. He swayed just a bit as he shouted to the crowd. “What say? Is Arshur a Lordkin?”

  “Yeah, who says I’m not?” Arshur demanded.

  There were shouts. “Not me!” “Lordkin he is!” “Hell, I don’t care.” “Hey, this could be fun!”

  Arshur was treated as a Lordkin from that day. Hartanbath disappeared for a season—healing?—then came back to pound the first fool who referred to his loss. He and Arshur were seen drinking together….

  It was an endless, pointless dance; but you had to keep track of who was on top. Arshur fitted into Lordkin society. For a few months he stole what he willed and carried his loot about, until he realized what older children knew almost by instinct: that a kinless might as well tend and carry property until a Lordkin needed it.

  And one day Arshur got in a fight with the town guard.

  His companions chose not to involve themselves. “They just kept hitting him and hitting him with those sticks,” Idreepuct told them later, with secondhand pride. “He never gave up. They had to knock him out; they never made him give up.”

  Idreepuct was speaking in an intersection of alleys, to people already angry. Voices thick with rage demanded, “What was he doing to make them do that?” and, “Are the Lords crazy, to give them those sticks?”

  Doing? It seemed almost irrelevant, but the tellers kept asking, and Idreepuct presently confessed. Ilsern—a tough, athletic woman who had never admired a man until Arshur came—had heard somehow of Alferth’s secret wine wagons. Of course she told Arshur and Idreepuct.

  They snatched a wagon. It was piled with fruit and it didn’t look much like Alferth’s wagons, but they took it anyway. They drove down Straight Street, whipping the ponies into a frenzy. Ilsern pelted passersby with fruit while Dree tried to pull the floorboards up and the kinless driver clung to the side and made mewling sounds.

  By now the town guard didn’t just have sticks and vivid blue tunics. They had built themselves small, fast wagons to put them where there was trouble. Wagons weren’t part of the Lords’ agreement, but they weren’t exactly weapons either.

  A guard wagon chased them. Then another. Kinless scattered out of the way. Dree got the floorboards up. “Nothing but road down here,” he told Arshur, and Arshur swore and drove the ponies even harder. They nicked a fat Lordkin lady carrying a heavy bag; she screamed curses as they sped away.

  They were fire on wheels until one pony fell dead, pulling the other down too.

  And that was the end. Idreepuct and Ilsern stayed where they had fallen in the road, kneeling in surrender, and that stopped the guard, of course. Rules were rules. You knelt, they had to freeze. It could be very funny to watch their frustration.

  But Arshur was still jittering with berserker joy.

  He broke one guard’s ribs and another’s shoulder, and a blow to his head left another unconscious for two days. When Whandall came on the scene, they were carrying Arshur away strapped to a plank, laughing and insulting the guards, with a broken leg and bruises beyond counting. “And one of ’em hit him in the head,” Idreepuct complained. “They can’t do that, can they?”

  Tarnisos said, “Big deal. Arshur’s got a head like a rock—” as Whandall strode briskly out of earshot, and then ran.

  There was Mother’s man Freethspat on a corner talking to Shangsler, the big-shouldered man who had moved in with Wess twenty days past. Whandall stopped to describe the situation. He ran on, gathering whatever Placehold men he recognized. All of them were near strangers. Some would defend the house; some would celebrate the Burning instead.

  The Lordkin believed they could feel it when Yangin-Atep stirred. Whandall felt that now. He intended to be guarding the house when the Burning began.

  Days later, nothing at all was burning, and the Placehold men were l
etting him know it.

  Whandall felt foolish. He might have noticed that Idreepuct had spilled the secret of the wine wagons to a score of loose tongues. Some had seen Alferth’s wagons moving regularly along the Deerpiss….

  The vineyard was said to be totally destroyed. Now the most excitable among the city’s Lordkin were out of action, nursing their first real hangovers. A gray drizzle had driven them indoors. The town guard had virtually disappeared, tactfully or prudently, carts and sticks and all.

  The Burning remained a smoldering potential. It was only a matter of time.

  PART FIVE

  The Last Burning

  CHAPTER

  32

  It had been raining hard for two days.

  The Placehold would have camped in the courtyard for safety, but you couldn’t have a Burning in the rain, could you? So the women and children were inside and the men were guarding the door in rotation.

  But twenty-year-old Whandall was elsewhere, dripping wet in a windless rain, surrounded by seven sullen Lordkin in their thirties. A very bitter Alferth described what followed Arshur’s beating:

  A gathering horde of Lordkin flowed upstream along the Deerpiss and through the meadow, the Wedge. They damaged the gatehouse but couldn’t be bothered to take the bricks apart. No mention was made of Toronexti guards: they must have joined the crowd.

  Laborers saw human figures straggling out of the forest. Ten; twenty. They alerted Alferth. All the vintners, Lordkin and kinless, prepared to protect their holding. Only Tarnisos on the roof noticed the dust plume as hundreds of invaders surged up from the gatehouse.

  They stomped the vines into mush. A few stopped to taste grapes for the first time. The rest stormed the wine house. It was deserted: Alferth and his people were fleeing through the forest, weaving a path among the deadly guardians of the redwoods, guided by what they had learned from Whandall Placehold.

  The invaders found the vats in the basement and drank everything that would flow.

  Alferth waited two days before he took his people back.

  In the woods they found corpses slashed and mottled and swollen. Many who took that shortcut never reached the vineyards. Two hands more of bodies lay among the vats, killed by bludgeons and Lordkin knives, by wine and each other. The living had returned to town.

  Whandall wasn’t sorry to have missed that! Still, he gave thought to his own status. Alferth had been important to Pelzed and Serpent’s Walk. Pelzed might see Whandall as more than Alferth’s man, but Pelzed might equally consider that Whandall had held the Placehold with Pelzed’s help, that all debts were paid.

  Alferth was in his midthirties. Most of the boys he’d grown up with must be dead by now. What would it take to put him back together?

  Whandall raised his voice above the rattle of raindrops. “Alferth, they didn’t take what you know. You’ve still got that.”

  Alferth only looked grim. He was thinking like a victim. Freethspat found that disgusting and was starting to show it. Tarnisos was ready to kill someone. Anyone.

  “You know how to make vines grow,” Whandall said. “Alferth, you know how to make juice turn into wine and the wine into… well, respect. I don’t know any of that. Almost nobody does.”

  “Kinless. They know it all,” Alferth said.

  “Find some land somewhere else.”

  “Time, you kinless fool. It takes time and work to make wine. A year before there’s anything to drink, and that’s after you have vines. Longer to grow vines. I’ll be forgotten by then. Without wine I’m nothing.”

  Alferth was thinking like a kinless. “That’s how we grew up,” Whandall pointed out. “We have nothing except what we gather.” He looked for support and saw smiles flicker. Not enough, and it wasn’t quite true either. The child Alferth had had nothing, but he hadn’t been old.

  It came to Whandall that he had done what he could. Leave now….

  A two-pony wagon came trotting up Straight Street.

  Alferth and his men watched from the curb. It came near, through several silent minutes. The little bone-headed ponies were pulling hard: the wagon was heavy, though the bed held only a few coils of rope.

  Whandall cursed in his mind. He smelled blood. They were next to a butcher shop, but Whandall could recognize an omen. Go home; get everyone into the courtyard. It’s still raining, but the Burning is on us, I feel it…. But he’d shouted of the Burning six days ago, and nothing.

  Tarnisos trotted a few paces west to an ash pit, a shop for farm gear five years ago. The rebuilding hadn’t touched it. He came back with an arm’s length of fence post charred at one end.

  Alferth stepped casually into the road. Freethspat followed, then the rest. Whandall hadn’t moved. Without willing it, he became the fixed end of an arc across Straight Street.

  The driver might have been dozing or hiding his face from the rain. He looked up far too late. Pulled on the reins, tried to turn the ponies. Far too late, as seven Lordkin swarmed over his wagon and wrestled his ponies to the ground.

  He fought. He shouldn’t have done that. Alferth took a solid blow to the head, and then the rest were on the driver, beating him.

  “Aye, enough!” Whandall said. Louder, “Enough!”

  Nobody chose to hear.

  Whandall couldn’t watch, couldn’t interfere, dared not show his anguish. He turned to the cart instead. The bed was high, maybe too high. It carried coils of tarred rope, but not a lot of that. Had someone else taken to driving wine? Wine would distract them. He felt for a loose board, found a corner and lifted.

  Eyes.

  Three small faces. One mouth opened to scream. A child’s hand covered the smaller child’s mouth. Whandall put a finger to his lips, then set back the board, having seen very little… but at least three children.

  Tarnisos set himself as if in a whackball game and swung his fence post at the driver’s head.

  They were killing him. He’d been curled around himself on the ground, but at Tarnisos’s blow he sprawled loose and sloppy. And Whandall felt a rage burning outward from his belly. Not since he’d cut Hartanbath had he felt like this… but he was helpless as Tarnisos wound up for another blow.

  Whandall raised his hand and set Tarnisos’s weapon afire.

  Tarnisos dropped the flaming beam with a yell and a backward leap.

  Yangin-Atep was real. Yangin-Atep was in Whandall as a jubilant rage. He pointed into the butcher shop and it caught with a flash and a roar. The men still kicking the wagoneer looked around at the sudden light, and knew.

  The Burning had begun.

  The butcher shop burned merrily in the rain, flames cradling the apartment above. Tarnisos picked up his torch and tried to set the shop next door alight. It was wet, and Whandall held his power back. The rest were kicking smoldering wooden walls into slats to make more torches.

  The kinless driver looked dead. Moving him might kill him if he wasn’t, but he wasn’t safe here. Whandall crossed the man’s arms and enclosed the man’s elbows and torso with his own arms. Resalet taught his boys to do that, to hold in damaged innards. He eased the man into the wagon, nesting him in a coil of rope.

  He got onto the seat, found the whip, and used it. The wagon lurched away.

  Tarnisos yelled and came pelting after him.

  The last Burning had happened in a drought. This time everyone had stored food. A handful of kinless children would not discommode the Placehold, Whandall thought. They could tend the house while the Burning lasted and then go home, if they still had a home.

  But four strangers were now pelting along behind Tarnisos, and Tarnisos had caught the wagon and was pulling himself aboard. What did the man think he was doing?

  Tarnisos pulled himself over the benchback and next to Whandall. “You felt it!” he crowed. “Yangin-Atep! Alferth thought I was crazy, but you feel it, right? Right?”

  With the weight in children the ponies were pulling, Whandall wasn’t going to outrun anything. He waved behind him. Six follo
wed now, and one had swept up an armful of faggots. “Who’re they?”

  Tarnisos looked back. “Nobody. They saw you start the Burning, maybe.”

  Maybe. Maybe they recognized a false-bottomed wagon. They thought they were chasing wine! Better distract them.

  It was like being drunk. Not words he never wanted to speak, but fire leaked from the joyful rage at his core. The bundle of sticks flamed at both ends, and the man carrying them whooped. He began passing them out in some haste.

  This next turn would take him home, but Whandall drove straight on. Behind the running men, fires were catching. He could not lead this merry mob to his own front door! Let Freethspat warn them of what was coming.

  “Why’d you take the—” Tarnisos rapped the probable corpse’s skull. “Him?”

  “Anything on him?” Best not to let Tarnisos know what he was hiding.

  Tarnisos inspected the man. “Nothing anyone would want. He’s dead. Why did you want the wagon?”

  “I’ve got something in mind,” Whandall said.

  A much easier turn came up. He could follow it west and north toward the Black Pit, then north along the Coldwater until it branched into the Deerpiss—a route Whandall knew well. Two of the runners dropped back, and then all of the rest in a clump, barring one. They’d stopped to gather at a store, it looked like. But the last runner was pumping hard. Monumentally ugly, he was, a barbarian. Whandall picked him for a teller just arrived.

  He kept driving.

  Markets and large stores attracted unwanted attention; they were looted too often. Feller’s Disenchanted Forest was big for Tep’s Town. Now, ahead of the Burning and first of the local looters, Whandall pulled up in front and got out.

  “Coming?”

  “Whandall, what is it you want?”

  “Dunno. I’ve never been in here before.”

  A squinting clerk approached them. Behind him, kinless customers were moving briskly out of the store. The nearsighted clerk lost his smile, turned, and ran.

  Whandall ignored them all. He selected two big axes, two long poles tipped with blades, blankets. Rope was already in the wagon. Thick leather sheets loosely bound by laces: one size fits all, adult or child. Wooden masks with slits for sight. He piled some into Tarnisos’s arms and some into his own and led the way out into the rain.