A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  By the time Inos had restored her internal calm, Charak was asleep on her shoulder, snoring, and the dhow had almost reached the wharfs. She had missed her chance to admire the many great vessels moored in the harbor. Some sightseeing trip this was turning out to be!

  Then the boat jostled against a high wall, whose ancient stones were greasy and coated with brown weed. Hands steadied it, but no lines were thrown. Clutching Charak so tightly that he awoke and began yelling in an echo of her own terror, wobbling off-balance because of the meal sack, Inos was roughly disembarked, like baggage, onto a slippery stone staircase. Even before she had properly found her footing, open water was showing between her and the departing boat.

  A few rusty spikes protruding from the slimy coating on the wall showed where once there might have been a handrail. If so, it had vanished long since and not been replaced. Unbalanced by the ridiculous padding she wore, clumsy in her long gown, she hung on tightly to one of the sharp-prickled spikes until the world steadied. Water surged and splashed just below her. Charak went back to sleep.

  Slowly and with great care, Inos climbed to the noisy road above. She peered back and forth, shocked and dismayed. Now what? Zana had explained nothing, saying only that she would be taken care of. Despite the early hour, crowds bustled: porters and sailors, mules and horses, wagons and even strings of camels, all wound back and forth between bales and crates and racks of nets. A hundred voices clamored in orders and oaths and the rhythmic chant of work gangs.

  Inos felt absurdly unsafe, teetering on the edge of the seawall and in danger of being knocked off, yet to go forward was to risk being trampled under a caravan of camels. The meal sack was an absurdity—she must look as if she were in the eighteenth month of pregnancy at least, although perhaps nothing smaller would have shown under the accursed tent she wore. The hood restricted her vision horribly, and if she fell back one step she would drown. For her own sake, as well as that of the pestilential Charak, she must move to safety, yet if she left this spot she might miss whomever she was supposed to meet. Then she would be hopelessly lost, with no option but a walk to the palace and a humiliating surrender. She decided to take refuge beside a high rack of smelly nets, but before she could move a voice spoke the password: “God of Pilgrims!”

  With a gasp of relief, Inos spun around and found herself facing a pair of long, gray ears. Beyond them, holding a bridle, stood a short, dirty, and ragged man she had never seen before. His weatherbeaten face wore a coating of mahogany stubble and an unfriendly scowl.

  Inos and the donkey regarded each other with mutual disapproval. She dislodged Charak’s grip and held him out for the man to hold. The scowl became a glare—in Zark babies were strictly women’s problems. Wishing that she were at liberty to express her opinions, Inos somehow contrived to hoist herself up, sidesaddle, with baby and meal sack still in place. The man hit the little beast with a stick and set off along the road, tugging repeatedly at the rope.

  In a few minutes she had managed to adjust her seating, adapting to the sway of the bony little back under the blanket. She began to take stock, peering around under her hood, being careful not to look at nearby faces, lest the owners glimpse her alien green eyes.

  The ships were unlike any she had ever seen in Krasnegar, the crews more varied. Most common were the ruddy-hued djinns, but she saw swarthy imps and some diminutive men with grayish coloring, whom she thought must be gnomes; dwarves would be thicker and wider. Here and there, tall and flaxen and inevitable in any large harbor in Pandemia, were undoubted jotnar. She heard much shouting, both humor and invective, and just to have identified all the odors could have kept her busy for hours: fish and spices, the livestock and the people, hot coffee and the strong salt tang of the sea; plus many less agreeable things. Had her mind not been largely occupied with the baby and with not falling off the wretched donkey, she would probably have been enthralled.

  Her guide began edging into and through the traffic, finally reaching the buildings that flanked the landward side of the dock. He stopped beside a grubby and tattered little coffee stall, tended by a woman as anonymously garbed as Inos herself. “God of Pilgrims?” she said, and held out her hands for Charak. Apparently Charak did not know her, and had come to trust Inos, for the last she heard of him was a long, despairing howl. Served the little monster right!

  Now her guide reversed direction, heading back the way they had come, still tugging the rope and periodically whacking the imperturbably ambling donkey. At a mysteriously dark doorway smelling strongly of spices, he handed the tether to a larger, bearded man and disappeared. The newcomer did not even glance at Inos. He set off at a slower pace, in the same direction.

  Ten minutes later, a third man took his place. Slumped impassively on the donkey, Inos did not look at him. She wondered what her father would have said about all this.

  Sudden insight whispered that she had never really known her father. At their last meeting he had been dying; at their farewell in the spring she had been a mere child. They had never spoken as adult to adult. A child could not comprehend a parent as a real person. So she had no way of knowing what her father would have thought and she never would have. She might try to behave in ways she believed would have pleased him, but she could never be truly certain. That was a crushing sorrow, and she wondered why she had not seen it before.

  Another five minutes, and the third man stopped the donkey at the bottom of a public staircase that wound off up a narrow canyon between buildings. He leaned close to Inos and breathed fish at her. “Climb. Turn left at the minstrel.”

  With great relief, Inos slid from the saddle, wincing as the ropes bit into her shoulders. The meal sack had taken on a definite sag to the left. Triplets, maybe. Keeping her head down, she set off up the steps, staying close to the wall as a gang of boys came pelting down, waving their arms for balance and shouting noisily.

  The alleyway bent; stairway became a steep slope, and then steps again, more gently pitched. Obviously all this deception had been planned in advance. Azak must not only have laid plans for his own escape, he must have been confident that Inos would want to accompany him. She wondered whether she should be flattered by that tribute to her courage or insulted that he thought so little of her brains, for all these precautions were merely emphasizing what a very long shot this escapade really was.

  Hiding from a mundane was a fairly straightforward matter. Everyone knew how to do that, avoiding movements where they might be seen and sounds when they might be heard. Earshot and line of sight were easily comprehended; but no one knew how to avoid a sorceress, nor what the limits of her range might be. Her powers could well make all this subterfuge completely useless. Perhaps all she need do would be exclaim “Inosolan” to her looking glass and it might, perhaps, show the fugitive at once. All these changes of guide and appearance—baby and then no baby, donkey and no donkey—would make the task more difficult only if Rasha must somehow scan for her prey, or follow its trail. Obviously none of these accomplices was in on the plot; none would know any of the others, and each had been hired to perform one small task only. The organization was impressive. It might well be totally useless, and Rasha might well be screaming with laughter as she watched the mummery.

  At first the walls of the alley held alcoves where artisans and merchants displayed their wares. Weavers wove and tailors stitched; goldsmiths tapped and potters threw; all of them at the same time chattering and arguing with the onlookers. Face averted, angry that she dared not linger, Inos pushed by the knots of haggling bystanders. One of the stalls was a bakery, and her stomach informed her there that it had repented and was ready for business again; she shuffled past with her mouth watering.

  The steps grew steeper, the alley narrower. The little stores disappeared, and only forbiddingly massive doors broke the sweep of lime-washed masonry walls. All the windows were stoutly barred. Porters and veiled women, children in rags and laden donkeys—Inos was jostled repeatedly, and at times forced to stop and
wait until the way had cleared. Krasnegar was steeper, but she had never carried a sack of meal up the hill there, and the ropes were cutting into her skin.

  Even the ever-present Arakkaranian breeze could not penetrate the canyon; the air was stuffy and yesterday’s heat still radiated from the walls. Krasnegar had many passageways such as this, but most of them were roofed, and none was so filthy or so thickly inhabited by insects. Every crevice in the walls and every crack between the cobbles seemed to form part of a separate subsystem of alleys for the use of ants and beetles.

  From time to time the way divided or crossed over other ways, but always her instructions to climb gave her one obvious choice of route. Strange noises and smells drifted in from the side streets: the hammering of coppersmiths, the odor of boiling goat, or onions, the crowing of poultry, or the scent of the inevitable coffee. Dark, sinister archways led off into mysterious courtyards, which she had no desire to explore. And there were many little alcoves and nooks fitted with benches or seats where a line of men would be taking their ease and gossiping—never women. They sometimes exchanged loud comments on her size and shape.

  She was going very slowly now, puffing hard, sweating; also cursing the chafing of the damnable ropes. She had not expected to climb so far. She thought she must be drawing nigh to the palace, but the high buildings cut off any glimpse of it. The harbor, also, was invisible, and must be very far below her now. An absurd fear of failure was niggling at the back of her mind. She had been told to turn left at the minstrel, but suppose she had missed the minstrel in the crowd? Suppose he had taken his fee and gone elsewhere, or just grown tired of waiting for her?

  Suppose—worse—that Rasha had detected the conspiracy and was now playing cat to Azak’s mouse? All those mysterious, taciturn guides might have been agents of—or even guises of—the sorceress herself, and she might tease and torment Inos for hours, making her trek to and fro, up and down, until she collapsed from sheer exhaustion, or until the fiendish torment of the ropes cut off her arms and they fell to the ground at her feet.

  Where an ancient building abutted an even older one, the angle of a doorway provided a small refuge, and there Inos stepped aside to rest while a string of panier-bearing mules minced by. As the clop of their feet died away, she heard a cithern twanging faintly up ahead. Hoping that this signified the missing minstrel, she gave her sagging meal sack a surreptitious heave and stepped back into the throng to begin climbing again, feeling every muscle in her legs ache.

  She had almost gone by another of the sinister dark archways when a familiar voice said, “God of Pilgrims.”

  The two men standing there were indistinct in the shadow and muffled in robes, but one was very tall. She stepped out of the crowd and smiled up at him before remembering that he could see little of her face.

  “And may the God of Childbirth grant you safe labor,” he added.

  “And you also, Cubslayer. What minstrel?”

  “Just another mirage to divert pursuit.” Azak flashed one of his rare smiles, and it seemed less tinged than usual with mockery. “Come in and relax, then. Here you will be secure, and safe even from the power of the sorceress.”

  Beset the road:

  Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin

  Beset the Road I was to wander in,

  Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round

  Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

  Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (§80, 1879)

  SEVEN

  Dawn of nothing

  1

  Morning had come at last, and Rap was still alive, or at least he thought he probably was. He had been conscious a few times in the night, but more often not, which was better. His head felt as if it had split into two unequal halves; there was a lot of dried blood in his hair. His left ankle was swollen even bigger than the larger side of his head.

  He had fallen down a steep slope at the bottom of the hill. There was a very narrow gap there, in back of a house, where the rock had been quarried away to make more room. It was cluttered with roots and branches and old rubbish. Overhead a patch of sky now showed through a chimney, a hole he must have made as he came down on his way to a pit that seemed to be part of an abandoned cesspool or tank of some sort, lined with rotted bricks. Whatever it might have held in its prime, it was now stuffed with mud and sodden leaves and Rap.

  There was some stinking water, too, and around dawn he’d been desperate enough to drink from it. Walking was going to be the problem. He had never noticed how many bones there were in a man’s ankle, and now he could count two more in his left one than he could in his right.

  After throwing off the layers of debris that had followed him down and more or less buried him, Rap hauled himself to his feet. He whimpered aloud at the pain, leaned against the wall until his giddiness passed, and then fumbled in the muck to retrieve a missing sandal. Forcing his limbs to move against pain was much harder than he had expected; he cursed his own faint-heartedness. With maddening slowness, he clambered along the narrow canyon that separated the back of the building on one side from crumbly rock on the other. Both of them seemed to lean to the left, but that was just his farsight a little mixed up, that was all.

  He reached a corner and a gap between two buildings, so narrow that he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The planks were rough, but he was able to reach overhead and find handholds in them, and thus keep most of his weight off his ankle. Then he came to the road, and those acrobatics wouldn’t take him any farther.

  He should have brought along a stick or a branch, to use as a cane, and he had been too stupid to think of it.

  He stood on one foot, wiping mud off himself as he contemplated the harborfront of Milflor. It was already bustling, but less busy than the market had been. The sun was up, although still hidden by the high ground of the cape, where the proconsul’s palace lurked behind its occult shielding. He wished he had more control over his farsight, for it kept trying to snoop among the fishing boats at the jetties, or the taverns and merchants’ establishments along the landward side of the road. It still gave everything a marked tilt to the left.

  Soon he began to realize that there was something sadly wrong with his eyes, also, a foggy jumpiness. Partly they were full of tears because he was in pain, but there was more to it than that. Everywhere he looked he saw a glare of sunlight, as if the whole world was made of water, and reflecting. He let his fingers investigate the bump on his head. They came away red, so the gash was still oozing. Bad! Nothing would be more conspicuous than blood.

  A road with only two directions to run was not a healthy place for a fugitive, but he couldn’t run anyway. To his right was the palace and the sorcerer’s tower, and the headland would be a dead end for him, so he should probably head left. If the cape was an arm and the mainland a body, then he was in the armpit, alongside the small-craft jetties. He’d find it easier to hide if he went left, landward, but the big ships were moored off to the right, just about at the giant’s elbow, and directly below the sorcerer’s tower, which Thinal had called the Gazebo. The only way out of Faerie was in one of those big ships. God of Pity, he was hungry! His headache was getting worse, and he suspected he was confused.

  When his good leg began to complain that it couldn’t hold him up all by itself forever, he decided to start by getting himself cleaned up. There was a whole ocean of water right across the road from him, and it must be warm, because he could see kids playing in it. Right!

  He took a deep breath and lurched forward, intending to limp across to the waterfront itself. He must have made it because in a little while he discovered he was sitting on a stone bench there. Someone was hammering red-hot nails into his ankle all the time, though, and he was sweating hard enough to wash the mud off without any water at all. He did not remember arriving. Could a man walk in a faint?

  The sun was above the palace ridge now, and already the sea was a richer color than he had ever seen it at Krasnegar; but the fishing b
oats looked much the same, as did the sea gulls—just as cheeky and noisy and graceful in flight. The smell of salt and weed and fish was not too different, but there were a lot more barrows and carts and wagons rattling and clanking along the road at his back.

  Feeling homesick was not going to help at all.

  The tide was in. The road stood about a fathom above the water, built of massive blocks of white stone. They looked old and worn, but of course the docks at Milflor could well be just as sorcerous in origin as Inisso’s castle and causeway in Krasnegar. Fishing boats were tied to some slimy old wooden jetties.

  Just to his right a stone staircase ran down to the sea. Five or six boys were playing there, jumping headfirst into the water, then running up the steps to do it again. It looked like good fun for rich kids; at their age Rap had been mucking out stables. That thought took his gaze to the white beach and big houses on the landward side of the bay. Children and some adults were splashing in the water there and playing in little sailboats.

  This sea was not the Winter Ocean! Rap rose and hopped to the top of the stair. Leaning on the handrail, he worked his way down, step by step, to the water. The boys gave him startled looks, and soon afterward he realized that they had departed. Without removing his clothing he went down far enough to sit in water up to his neck, and it was marvelously refreshing, soothing his scrapes and scratches. He ducked his head, wincing at the sting of salt on his cut, but soon that stopped. Easing himself up and down on his arms while the little waves went by, he watched the barnacles and floating weed and wished his head would not throb quite so hard, and that his eyes would attend to their duties. His farsight still said that the sea had a tilt to the left.