"I cannot see . . ."
And her lips came against his, and he tasted salt upon them, the salt of tears . . .
Stark woke, and was in the hollow with Tuchvar and the hounds, and Ged Darod out on the plain. He wondered if the knife waited for him somewhere in those streets. Then he shrugged the thought aside. Knives were no new thing to him. Nor was being wary.
While the boy took food from the saddlebags, Stark went through the trees to where the wood ended above a cliff and he could look out over the plain, green and lush, with Ged Darod in the middle of it like a dream. Golden roofs, roofs tiled and lacquered in scarlet and green and cobalt blue, flashed and glittered in the sunlight. The upper city was built on a slight rise, natural or artificial, and the massive buildings there, with their soaring towers, were of a pure whiteness unrelieved by any color. Roads crossed the plain from all directions, converging upon the city, and the roads were thronged with pilgrims, indistinct masses of tiny figures moving in a haze of dust He went back to the hollow and said to Tuchvar, "Tell me again where I will find Pedrallon."
"If he's still kept there . . ."
"I understand that. Tell me."
Tuchvar told him, while he ate and drank, and washed in the running stream, and the sunlight slanted lower. Then the boy watched while Stark opened a bundle and took out the things he had brought from Tregad. Tuchvar had a special interest because Stark had consulted with him on what habit might pass without notice among the mass of pilgrims.
A cloak to conceal somewhat his height and his manner of walking. A hood to cover his head, and a mask or veil, after the manner of the Hooded Men, to hide his face. Stark had considered borrowing a cloak from one of his troopers. He decided against it; any member of any one of the Seven Hearths of Kheb would be a matter of interest to the Wandsmen on sight, and the Farers who had seen the troop at Tregad would pose too much of a threat. So he had chosen a cloak of coarse gray homespun, with a deep hood of a different cut and a cloth of faded blue to wrap about his face. Tuchvar had seen pilgrims in every sort of garb; and some hid this, and some that, and some nothing; he thought Stark's choice of garments would not draw notice.
But when Stark turned to him and asked, "Will I pass," Tuchvar sighed and shook his head.
"You are too much you," he said. "Let your shoulders hang, and don't look at anyone straight . . . you have not a pilgrim's eyes."
Stark smiled. He spoke to the hounds, ordering them to stay with the boy and wait for his return. The young hounds were not concerned. The five whined, Gerd and Grith protesting. In the end they obeyed, though not happily.
Guard Tuchvar, Stark said, until I come. He went away between the trees, in the deepening dusk.
21
By the time Stark reached the nearest road, far out across the green plain, it was full night. The Three Ladies rode the sky, serene and splendid, shedding a sweeter light than that of Old Sun, a light almost as bright. He was able to see that the number of pilgrims had not diminished. Half of Skaith, it seemed, was on the way to Ged Darod.
He moved through a thin scatter of stragglers dropped out beside the road and slipped into the stream.
His nose twitched, under the veil, to a variety of smells. Warm dust. Bodies washed and scented, bodies unwashed and stinking. Beast-flesh, sweaty, pungent. An underlying heavy sweetness of potent substances smoked or chewed.
The stream was irregular, moving at different speeds within itself. It clotted up around a huge teetering construction like a wheeled temple, drawn and pushed by scores of naked men and women painted the holy brown of Skaith-Mother. It thinned again to a mere trickle of slow-footed walkers. Everyone moved at his own speed. Close to Stark, completely preoccupied, a man in a dirty shift was dancing his way to Ged Darod, three steps forward, leap, whirl, stamp, then three more steps and whirl again. Beyond him, a woman with hair hanging to her heels, all twined with flowers, moved like a somnambulist, arms held stiffly in front of her; she sang as she went in a high clear voice as sweet as a lark's.
A lank holy man, tattooed from crown to foot with sun symbols, cried out ecstatically to Stark, "Rejoice, for we shall be cleansed of evil!"
Stark muttered, "I rejoice," and passed him by, wondering.
There were others in the stream wearing hooded cloaks, others with their faces hidden. No one gave Stark any special notice. Remembering Tuchvar's caution, he tried not to stride too fast, with too much purpose—a purpose which, he knew all too well, might be completely futile.
It was only a guess, based on the incoherent sobbings of a terrified man, that Pedrallon and his people had ever had a transceiver, let along that they still had it and were in a position to use it. Pedrallon himself might now be dead or incarcerated too deeply for anyone to find. He might have repented his sins and put himself back in the good graces of the Twelve, in which case even to ask about him would be dangerous. Simply entering Ged Darod was a gigantic risk.
Yet it had to be taken. Otherwise he and Simon Ashton could resign themselves to living out such lives as might be left to them on Mother Skaith, and the Irnanese could forget about emigrating. Short of a miracle. True, shutting down the starport and banishing the ships might lead to scattered landings by avaricious star-captains looking for gain. Some of them, or one of them, might land near Irnan or Tregad and might even accept passengers. But it was too much of a gamble to be taken if there was even a slight chance of communicating with Skeg in time.
Tuchvar had told him that the number of folk on the road was not unusual for this season of the year, and perhaps that was so. Yet Stark felt a strange mood among them. Anticipation. The excitement of great events occurring or about to occur; the excitement of being a part of them. He had no idea if some specific word had been spread among them or if he was witnessing one of those mystic hysterias that sweep over the less stable elements of a population from time to time like an air borne plague. Whichever it was, there were curious echoes in the cries he heard.
From a kind of bower at the top of the great creaking temple thing, a priestess, done up with artificial attributes that would have shocked Skaith-Daughter, kept shouting at the night that all blasphemies would be expunged and all blasphemers punished. A carriage of gilded wood went by, carrying a party of folk from the tropic south, slender men and women in bright silks, their rapt small faces cameos cut in amber. They too cried out about punishments and the feeding of Old Sun. Stark went on, and the distant roofs of Ged Darod glistened ahead, in the light of the Three Ladies.
It was strange that there were no folk going the other way, no pilgrims leaving the city.
He passed a group of men all in yellow robes. Pod-masters, seeking more sanctity before they took on another mindless and happy group to lead to communal oblivion and the ultimate fulfillment, death.
He passed more dancers, three women this time, holding hands. Their hair covered their faces. Their white limbs gleamed through flowing garments. There was music for them to dance to, a plucking and twanging of strings, a swelling and fading of pipes, where here and there a pilgrim beguiled his way. But the women did not hear that music. They were listening to a secret melody of their own, measured and solemn.
A large band of Farers grabbed at Stark's cloak and cried, "Words, pilgrim! We will hear words tonight. Are you ready for the truth?" Their eyes were glassy, their breathing heavy with sweet drugs. "The truth that casts out lies and castrates evil?"
"I am ready," Stark answered in a voice of thunder. "Are you? Embrace each other! Love!"
They laughed and did as he told them. One of the women flung her arms about him and kissed him, her lips hot through the veil.
"Stay a while, at the side of the road. I'll show you love." She nuzzled at the veil, catching at it with her teeth. "Why do you hide yourself?"
"I've taken a vow," said Stark, and thrust her gently away.
There was a clear space on the road, where only one man walked alone, eyes fixed on the white towers of Ged Darod.
&nb
sp; "They succor the weak, they feed the hungry, they shelter the homeless. They are our fathers, the Lords Protector. They give us all we need."
The man repeated this like a litany. Stark looked into his face and knew that he was on his way to die.
Behind him along the road he began to hear a disturbance. He turned. A party of mounted men moved toward him at a businesslike pace, threading their way through the people, sometimes getting off the road entirely to bypass an obstacle. They were not pilgrims.
Stark melted into the nearest group, which drew aside to make room. The hard-ridden beasts came shouldering by, with six riders. Four of them were Wandsmen. The other two were wrapped and hooded in black cloaks.
Glancing up from under his own hood, Stark caught a glimpse of a face, furred, snow-white, with the great shining eyes of a creature who dwells away from the sun.
For a fleeting second he thought those eyes met his, in the gentle light of the Three Ladies.
A stab of alarm shot through him. But the riders went on; there was no outcry, and if the person in the black cloak had indeed noticed him, there had been no recognition. Stark pulled his veil higher and his hood lower and continued on, not happy with what he had seen.
These were Children of Skaith-Our-Mother. Kell à Marg's folk from the catacombs under the Witchfires. He even thought that he knew the one and could make a guess at the other. Fenn and Ferdic, who had come at him with daggers in the Hall of the Diviners.
He didn't know what they were doing at Ged Darod, so far to the south, out in the open world under the sky they had forsaken so long ago. He did know that he had enough enemies already in the city. He did not need any more.
The walls of Ged Darod rose out of the plain, and there was light above them like a glowing dome. The gates stood open, always open. There were a dozen gates, and each gate served a road. The streams of pilgrims poured through them into the City of the Wandsmen.
It was a city of sound as well as light, and the sound was bells. They hung from the edges of the tiered roofs. They climbed the spires and girdled the golden domes. Thousands of them, swinging free to greet with their clapper tongues each passing breeze, so that the air was full of a sweet soft chiming.
Down in the streets was a fragrance of incense and a jostling of crowds that seemed to lack all rancor, in spite of the numbers of pilgrims that continued to be absorbed into them. People squatted or lay against the walls of the buildings. Balconies overhead held more. Runnels of water went everywhere in stone channels, by way of sanitation, and there was a reason for the incense. It was impossible to provide accommodation for everyone, and the Farers preferred the streets in any case.
Stark was only interested in one hostel, and that was the Refuge, where the Farer girls went to have their babes and leave them for the Wandsmen to rear.
He took his bearings, by Tuchvar's instructions, on a scarlet roof with ten tiers and plunged into the teeming streets.
22
As he walked, he became increasingly aware of the mood of the city.
It waited. It waited with held breath. It waited, like a nerve stretched and rasped beyond endurance, for relief. Each fresh incursion of pilgrims seemed to heighten and exacerbate the tension. The city was a catchbasin, filled to overflowing, with everything coming in and nothing going out.
Yet the people were aimless. They wandered through the streets, thronged into the temples, spilled into squares and gardens. They danced and sang and made love. They prayed and chanted. There were many hostels and places where food and drink were dispensed at all hours. The Wandsmen provided everything their children desired, and Wandsmen of the lesser ranks moved about the city seeing that all was in order.
In the quiet enclaves of Ged Darod, between the temple complex and the upper city, were hospitals for the sick and aged, crèches for the orphaned and unwanted, homes for the disabled. No one was turned away, though most of the adult inmates were Farers gone in years who had long ago abandoned home and family and so had nowhere else to go when their Faring days were over.
The temples were magnificent. The ones with the golden roofs were sacred to Old Sun. The others, no less beautiful, belonged to Skaith-Mother, Sea-Mother, Sky-Father and several aspects of the Dark Goddess of the high north and Antarctic south. Pilgrims eddied slowly through these vast and solemn spaces, staring at richnesses and beauties such as they had never seen. Awed into silence, they made their offerings and did their worship and went away feeling that they had helped their world to live a little bit longer. The true ecstatics remained until they were gently carried away by the temple custodians.
These were the great temples, the powerful deities. There was a multitude of smaller ones. Even Tuchvar could not say who and what all these deities were or how they were worshipped. There were tales told in the apprentice dormitories at night that might or might not be true. Stark doubted nothing. On Skaith, anything at all was possible.
He came to the Great House of Old Sun, the largest of all the temples, a stunning splendor with its golden roofs and white pillars, all reflected in the huge tank that fronted it. A wall surrounded the tank, a stony lacework of tiny niches, and in each niche a candle burned, so that the water gleamed with a million tiny points of fire. People were bathing in the holy water, in the holy candlefire that symbolized the light of Old Sun, who drives away death and darkness.
Stark went along the right-hand side of the tank, past the temple, and into a street where souvenir sellers offered sun symbols in every size and substance. At the end of this street, Tuchvar had told him, he would see the walls surrounding the Refuge.
Purest white in the light of the Three Ladies, the buildings of the upper city stood above the jumbled roofs like a cliff. Rows and rows of small windows, identical in size, betokened the myriad chambers that lay behind that pale facade. There was much more hidden behind it: a vast complex of living quarters, schools, seminaries and administrative offices, forbidden to the public. Crowning it all was the palace of the Twelve, second only to the Citadel in its importance to the Wandsmen.
The street was clogged, like all the others, with far too many people. Stark moved snail-like, not daring to push and shove, keeping his head down whenever one of the Wandsmen appeared. He strained for a sight of the Refuge, hoping that some way would be apparent for him to approach the building without attracting attention.
He never saw it.
A deep-toned bell pealed out from somewhere high up in the white towers. The sweet chiming of the smaller bells was drowned instantly in that mighty tolling, the prattle of cherubs overborne by the voice of God.
It was the summons for which the city had been waiting, and all over Ged Darod people roused from their aimlessness and began to move.
Trapped in that irresistible tide, Stark moved with them.
He was carried by side streets away from the Refuge, into a vast square below the Wandsmen's city, where an arched gateway pierced the white and many-windowed cliff. The gateway was a tunnel, stepped, rising out of sight. At the nearer end above the square there was a platform thrusting out, a kind of stage.
The bell boomed out its call over the shining roofs, steady, mesmeric, echoed in throbbing eardrums and the beating of the blood. The faithful poured into the square until it could hold no more, and the surrounding streets were blocked by solid masses of humanity. Stuck fast, Stark could do no more than try to work his way by slow degrees toward a place at the edge of the square where there were no buildings. The press was so great that he could not see what was hemming in the crowd there. Whatever it might be, that was the direction in which he wanted to go, for it offered the only hope of openness and possible escape from this heaving, breathing, muttering, stinking trap of bodies.
The bell fell silent.
For a moment the sound continued in Stark's ears—then stillness again, and gradually the sweet small tinkling that seemed very far away now, a mere backdrop for the silence.
A company of Wandsmen in blue tunics c
ame down the steps of the gate, bearing torches. They set the torches in standards around the platform. They drew back and waited.
A company of Wandsmen dressed in green paced down the steps and took up places.
A wait, interminable, bringing a whimper as of pain from the crowd.
The red Wandsmen came, a moving patch of dark crimson in the torchlight. They came in procession, four by four, down the steps and onto the platform, some before and some behind; and in their midst were the Lords Protector, spotless white.
A gasp of indrawn breath from the crowd as the seven men in their white robes moved forward, and then the puzzled whispers began, tossing like surf across the square.
"Who are they? What Wandsmen wear white?"
And of course, Stark thought, they didn't know. They couldn't know. Never in the world before this minute had they seen a Lord Protector.
He began to have a cold premonition of what was coming.
A red Wandsman stepped to the front of the platform and lifted his wand of office like a baton.
"My children!"
His harsh and sonorous voice carried clearly for an amazing distance, and when it reached its limits, other voices took up the message and passed it back through the far ranks of the crowd.
"My children, this is a night of great tidings. A night of joy, a night of hope. The messengers of the Lords Protector have come out of the high north to speak | to you. Be silent, then, and listen!"
He stepped, giving place to one of the white robes.
Ferdias. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the ramrod stance and the noble head.
The crowd snuffled and panted in its intense effort to be absolutely still.
"My children," said Ferdias, and his voice was a benison, an outpouring of love. "This has been a time of trial. You have heard many things that were difficult to understand—prophecies of doom, news of revolt and disobedience and the slaying of Wandsmen . . ."
The crowd growled like a monstrous beast.
The Hounds of Skaith-Volume II of The Book of Skaith Page 14
