by Jo Clayton
Cradled in a warm noisy crowded line family, always someone to pick him up and cuddle him when he stubbed a toe or stumbled into more serious trouble, he had acquired a sense of security that nothing since had more than dented (though he’d wandered in and out of danger a dozen times and come close to dying more than once from an excess of optimism); he’d learned to defend himself, more because of his internal need to push any skill he learned to the limits of his ability than because he felt any strong desire to stomp his enemies. It was easier not to make enemies. If a situation got out of hand and nothing he could do would defuse it, he generally slid away and left the argument to those who enjoyed arguing. One time a lover asked him, “Don’t you want to do something constructive with your life?” He thought about it for a while, then he said, “No.”
“You ought to,” she said, irritation sharpening her voice, “there’s more to living than just being alive.” He gazed at her, sighed, shook his head and not long after that shipped out on the Hairy Mule.
He swung along easily through a late afternoon where heat hung in a yellow haze over the land and the road was the only sign of habitation; he wasn’t in a hurry though he was starting to get thirsty. He searched through the dozens of pockets in his long leather overvest, found an ancient dusty peppermint, popped it into his mouth. A road led somewhere and he’d get there if he kept walking. The sun continued to decline and eventually set; he checked his pocketchron, did some calculations of angular shift and decided that the daylength was close to shipstandard, another way this world was like Rainbow’s End. He kept on after night closed about him; no point in camping unless he found water, besides the air was warm and a gibbous moon with a chunk bitten out of the top rose shortly after sunset and spread a pearly light across the land.
Sounds drifted to him on a strengthening breeze. A mule’s bray. Another. A chorus of mules. Ring of metal on metal. Assorted anonymous tunks and thuds. As he drew closer to the source, the sounds of laughter and voices, many of them children’s voices. He rounded a bend and found a large party camped beside a canal. Ten carts backed up under the trees. A crowd of mules (bay, roan and blue) wearing hobbles and herded inside rope corrals, chewing at hay and grain and each other, threatening, kicking and biting with an energy that made nothing of the day’s labors. Two hundred children seated around half a dozen fires. Fifteen adults visible. Eight women, dressed in voluminous trousers, tunics reaching to midcalf with long sleeves and wide cuffs, head-cloths that could double as veils. Seven men with shorter tunics and trousers that fit closer to the body, made from the same cloth the women used (a dark tan homespun, heavy and hot), leather hats with floppy brims and fancy bands, leather boots and gloves. They also had three bobtail spears slanted across their backs and what looked like cavalry sabers swinging from broad leather belts; several carried quarterstaffs. The last were prowling about the circumference of the camp, keeping a stern eye on the children while the women were finishing preparations for supper.
One of the men walked over to him. “Keep moving, friend. We don’t want company here.”
Daniel Akamarino blinked. Whatever or whoever had brought him here had operated on his head in the instant between worlds; he wasn’t sure he liked that though it was convenient. “Spare a bit of supper for a hungry man?”
Before the man could answer, a young boy left one of the circles carrying a metal mug full of water. “You thirsty, too?”
A woman came striding after the boy, fixing the end of her headcloth across her face, a big woman made bigger by her bulky clothing. She put a hand on the guard’s arm when he took a step toward Daniel. “He’s a wayfarer, Sinan. Since when do Owlyn folk turn away a hungry man?” She tapped the boy on the head. “Well done, Mi. Give him the water.”
Hoping his immunities were up to handling this world’s bugs, Daniel gulped down the cold clean water and gave the mug back with one of his best grins.
“Thanks. A hot dusty walk makes water more welcome than the finest of wines.”
“You’ll join us for supper?”
“With enthusiasm, Thine.” The epithet meant Woman of High Standing, and came to his lips automatically, triggered by the strength and dignity he saw in her; she rather reminded him of one of his favorite mothers and he brought out for her his sunniest smile.
She laughed and swept a hand toward the circle of fires. “Be welcome, then.”
They fed Daniel Akamarino and dug him out a spare blanket. The boy called Tre drifted over to sit by him while he ate, bringing an older girl with him that he introduced as his sister Kori. Ire said little, leaving the talking to Kori.
“This is one big bunch of kids,” Daniel said. “Going to school?”
She stared at him, eyes wide. “It’s the Lot. It’s Owlyn’s month.”
“I haven’t been here very long. What’s the Lot?”
“Settsimaksimin takes three kids each year from each Parika in Cheonea. The Lot’s to say which ones. Boys go to be trained for the army or for Servants of Amortis, girls go to the Yrons, those are the temples of Amortis, and the one that gets the gold lot goes to the high temple in Phras.”
“Hmm. Who’s Settsiwhatsisname and what gives him the right to take children from their families?”
Another startled look at him, a long gaze exchanged with her brother, a glance at the trees overhead. “We don’t want to talk about him,” Kori said, her voice a mutter he had to strain to hear. “He’s a sorceror and he owns Cheonea and he can hear if someone talks against him. Best leave things alone you don’t have to know.”
“Ah. I hear you. Sorceror? Mmf. Probably means some git stumbled on this world and used his tech to impress the hell out of the natives. “You’re heading for a city, how close is it?”
“Silagamatys. About three more days’ travel. It’s a sea port. Tres seven, so this is his first trip. He hasn’t seen the sea before.”
“You have?”
“Course I have. I’m thirteen going on fourteen. This is my last Lot; if I slide by this time, I won’t leave Owlyn Vale again, I’ll be betrothed and too busy weaving for the family that comes.” She sounded rather wistful, but resigned to the life fate and custom mapped out for her. “We’ve told you ‘bout us. AuntNurse says it’s impolite to pester wayfarers with questions. I think it’s impolite for them to not talk when they have to see we’re dying to know all about them.” She was tall and lanky, with a splatter of orange freckles across her nose; wisps of fine light-brown hair straggled from under a headcloth that swung precariously every time she moved her head; her eyes were huge in her thin face, a pale gray-green that shifted color with every thought that passed through her head. She grinned at him, opened those chatoyant eyes wide and waited for him to swallow the hook.
“Weeell,” he murmured, “I’m a traveling man from a long way off…”
Much later, rolled into the borrowed blanket beside one of the carts, Daniel Akamarino thought drowsily about what he’d learned. He was appalled but not surprised. This wasn’t the first tyrant who’d got the notion of building a power base in the minds of a nation’s children. Clever about how he managed it. If he’d tried taking children out of their homes, no matter how powerful he was, he would have faced a blistering resistance. By having the children brought to him, by arranging what seemed to be an impartial choice through the Lot, he saved himself a world of trouble, didn’t even have to send guards with the carttrains. Sorceror? Oh yeah. Seen that before, haven’t you… Vague speculation faded gradually into sleep.
Having got used to him by breakfast (he was an amiable guest, quick to offer his services to pull and haul, doing his tasks whistling a cheerful tune that made the work lighter for everyone), they let him ride one of the carts. Tre and Kori sat with him. The boy was silent, troubled about something, the trouble deepening as he got closer to the city. For a while Daniel thought it was having to face the Lot for the first time, but when he slipped a murmured question to Ire, the boy shook his head. He was nervous and unhappy,
he clung to Daniel for reasons of his own, but he wouldn’t talk about what frightened him. Kori knew, but she was as silent about it as her brother. She sat on the other side of Daniel, sliding him murmured information about Silagamatys and its waterfront that she had no business knowing if it was like most other such areas he’d moved through in his travels. She laughed at his unexpressed but evident disapproval of her nocturnal wanderings. He liked the mischievous twinkle in her eyes, the dry quality to her humor, the subtle rebellion in the way she carried her body and changed his mind about how resigned she was to the future laid out for her. Thinking about it, he was rather sorry for her; from everything he’d seen so far, this world wasn’t all that different from other agricultural societies he’d dipped into. Men and women both had their lives laid out for them from the moment they were born, which was fine if they fit into those roles, but hell on the rebels and the too-intelligent, especially if these last were women. Kori had a sharp practical mind; she must have realized years ago that there were things she couldn’t admit to doing or knowing and continue to live at peace with her people. Talking with him was taking a chance; what she said and what it meant. slipping out after dark to wander through dangerous streets, that could destroy her. He suspected her actions had something to do with her brother’s fretting, but he didn’t have enough data to judge what she was getting at.
After a while, he fished inside his vest and brought out the recorder he carried everywhere; he blew it out, played a few notes, then settled into a dance tune his older sisters had liked. The other children in the cart crowded about him; when he finished that tune he had them sing their own songs for him, then played these back with ornamental flourishes that made them giggle. Tre joined him with a liquid lilting whistle, putting flourishes on Daniel’s flourishes, the girls clapped their hands, the boys sang and the afternoon passed more quickly than most. After that, even Sinan stopped resenting him.
He caught glimpses of farmhouses and outbuildings, a village or two, no walls or fortifications in sight (obviously, invasions were scarce around here). They passed over a number of canals busy with barges and small sail boats; there was a lot more traffic on the water than there was on the road. He didn’t blame them, this world hadn’t got around to inventing effective springs and riding these ruts (even sitting on layers of blankets and quilts) was rather like a bastinado of the buttocks.
Midafternoon two days later, the carttrain topped a hill and looked down on Silagamatys.
Daniel Akamarino was playing his flute again, but broke off in surprise when his cart swung round a clump of tall trees at the crest of that hill and he saw for the first time the immense walls of the city and the gleaming white Keep soaring into the clouds.
“HIS Citadel,” Kori murmured, her voice dropping into the special tone she used when she spoke of Settsimaksimin but didn’t want to name him.”AuntNurse said her father’s brother Elias, the one who married into the Ankitierin of Prosyn Vale, was down to the city just after HE kicked out crazy old King Noshios; she said Elias said HE cleared the ground and had that thing built in two days and a night. And then HE built the Grand Yron just two weeks later and that only took a day.” Third in the line of ten, the cart tilted forward down the long undulating slope toward the city’s SouthGate. “We’re going to the Yron Hostel, it’s built in back of the main temple. They won’t let you in there, it’s just for people doing the Lot. Actually, you’d better get off soon’s we’re through the Gate. You don’t want HIM getting interested in you.” The city was built on a cluster of low wooded hills looking out into a sheltered blue bay. The usual hovels and clutter of the poor and outcast snugged against the wall, but most of the ugliness was concealed by trees that Settsimaksimin had planted and protected from depredation by poor folk hunting fuel. When Daniel wondered about this, Kori said, “HE said don’t touch the trees. HE said put iron to these trees and I’ll hang you in a cage three days without food or water and don’t think you can escape my eyes. And he did it too. HE said get your wood from the East Side Reserve. HE said Family Xilogonts will run the Wood Reserve for you. HE said you can buy a desma of wood for a copper, if you don’t have the copper you can earn a desma by cutting ten desmas, if there is no wood to cut, you can earn a desma by working for Family Xilogonts for one halfday, planting seedlings and looking after young trees. If anyone in Family Xilogonts cheats you in any way, tell me and I will see it doesn’t happen again.’
“Hmm. I didn’t expect that kind of thinking in a place like this. What do I mean? Ah Kori, just chatter, talking to myself.” He looked around at the brilliant colors of the fall foliage, smiled. “Seems to work.”
She scowled at him, unwilling to hear anything good about the man she called a sorceror, turned her shoulder to him and went into a brood over what he suspected was her vision of the perversity of man.
The cart bumped over the last humpbacked bridge and rumbled onto an avenue paved with granite flats, heading for the gaping arch of the gateway. He braced himself to withstand a major stench, if they couldn’t put springs on their rolling stock, clearly sewers were a lost cause, but as the carts rattled through the shadowy tunnel (the walls were at least ten meters thick at the base), there was little of the sour stink from open emunctories and offal rotting in the streets that he’d had to deal with when he was on a freetrader dropping in on neofeudal societies. The cart emerged into a narrow crooked street, paved with granite blocks set in tar, clean, even the legless beggar at the corner had a clean face and his gnarled knobby hands were scrubbed pale. The drivers of each of the carts tossed a coin in his bowl, got his blessings as they drove past.
A woman leaned from an upper window. “What Parika?”
The lead driver looked up. “Owlyn Vale,” she shouted.
The children in the carts jumped to their feet, stood cheering and whooping, swaying precariously as the iron-tired wheels jolted over the paving stones, until they were scolded back down by the chaperones. Followed by laughter, shouts of welcome, luck and remember this that and the other when they got settled in and were turned loose on the city, the carttrain wound on, rumbling past tall narrow houses, through increasingly crowded streets, past innumerable fountains where the houses were pushed back to leave a square free, moving gradually uphill into an area where houses were larger with scores of brilliant windowboxes and there were occasional small gardens and green spaces and the fountains were larger and more elaborate. Ahead, two hills on, a minareted white structure glittered like salt in sunlight.
Kori leaned closer to Daniel Akamarino, murmured, “We’ll be going slower when we start up the long slope ahead, you better get off then. If you want ships or work or something, keep going south, the Market is down that way and the waterfront.
“I hear you. Luck with the Lot, Kori.”
She gave him a nervous smile. “Um… She closed her hand over his wrist, her nails digging into the flesh; her voice came as a thread of sound. “Tre says we’ll be seeing you again.” She bit her lip, shook his hand when he started to speak. “Don’t say anything. It’s important. If it happens, I’ll explain then.”
“I wait on tiptoe.” He grinned at her and she pinched his wrist, then sat in silence until they started the long climb to the Yron.
He got to his feet, swung over the side of the cart, wide enough to miss the tall wheel. After a flourish and a caper and a swooping bow that drew giggles from the children and waves from the chaperones, he moved rapidly away along an alley whose curve hid the carts before he’d gone more than a few steps.
Though it was the middle of the afternoon, the Market was busy and noisy, the meat and vegetables were cleared off, their places filled with more durable goods. Daniel Akamarino drifted around it until he found the busiest lanes; he dropped into a squat beside the beggar seated at the corner of two of these. “Good pitch, this.”
The beggar blinked his single rheumy eye. “Aah.”
“Mind if I play my pipe a while? Your pitch, your coin.”
“You any good?”
“Don’t like it, stop me.”
“A will, don’t doubt, A will.”
Daniel fished out his recorder, shifted from the squat and sat cross-legged on the paving. He thought a moment, blew a tentative note or two, then began to improvise on one of the tunes the children had taught him. Several Matyssers stopped to listen and when he finished, snapped their fingers in approval and dropped coppers in the beggar’s bowl.
He shook out the recorder, slid it back into its pocket, watched as the beggar emptied his bowl into a pouch tucked deep inside the collection of rags he had wrapped about his meager body. “New in town.”
“A know it, an’t heard that way with a pipe ‘fore this. Wantin a pitch?”
“Buy it, fight for it, dice for it, what?”
A rusty chuckle. A pause while he blessed a Matysser who dropped a handful of coppers into the bowl. “Buy it, buy it, Hhn,” a jerk of a bony thumb at the Citadel looming like white doom over them, “He don’t like blood on the stones.”
