Exiled: Keeper of the City

by Peter Morwood

  They ran. Reswen had forgotten how out of breath one could get, running; it was something he didn’t do much these days. But Laas kept up with him with no problem, and shortly it turned into sort of a race, each of them grimly determined not to have to stop before the other one did. They laughed a great deal, and mrem in the streets stared at them with some surprise as they went by. Reswen was relieved that it was night; at least he was spared being widely recognized.

  They took shortcuts Reswen knew, dodged through alleys where the reek made them both laugh and spit in disgust. Then suddenly they were there, and both of them stopped and put their clothes to rights and strolled into the crowd outside the Play House as if a litter had just let them out. Only their gasping gave them away, making the mrem standing about turn to stare at them again. Reswen glanced at Laas, who was playing the high-society she-mrem for the moment, her head high and haughty for all that her chest was heaving like a sprinter’s.

  “Very fine,” Reswen said, under his breath, in her ear.

  “If these good people want to think—” she said, smoothing her soft robes, “that my handsome escort has been pawing me in a back alley somewhere—then let them—” She gave him another of those wicked smiles.

  He gave her one back, and said, more softly if possible, “Do you think we made it here quickly enough to have lost whoever was following us?”

  “Entirely possible,” she said. “Why? Do you mean us to go somewhere else before they arrive?”

  “Only if you want. But I thought you wanted to see the play—”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Then in we go.”

  They went up to the ticket kiosk together. The Play House was a rude old joint, originally a travelers’ tavern. It had been expanded when plays had begun to be performed there, a couple of hundred years earlier. Galleries had been built onto the tavern and around the big courtyard, and the stables for the burden-beasts had been turned into dressing rooms for those more interesting beasts, actors. A big stage had been built in the middle of the courtyard, more or less backed up against the main tavern building. People staying in the tavern sometimes got to see the plays whether they wanted to or not; some of the windows had players’ galleries running right outside them. The mrem staying on the second or third floors might look out from an early nap to see Girul and Oviah from the old story falling into one another’s arms, half mad with passion, or Lishawi and Neahan of The Poor Mrem’s Tragedie raging up and down the balcony with swords drawn, trying to cut one another into collops. Occasionally, particularly dozy or drunken patrons got into the play themselves, hollering in surprise or outrage at the lovers or fighters, sometimes climbing out the windows to try their own hands at loving or fighting. The crowds took it all in good part, and the management of the tavern usually remitted a little of the patrons’ lodging-fee, especially if the actors had had to beat them up.

  Reswen bought them tickets and also a couple of billets for chairs. “You needn’t go to the expense,” Laas said, at that: “I don’t need to sit, really.”

  “Sit? We may want them to stand on. Or hide under. The crowds can get pretty rough.”

  She chuckled as he ushered her past the barrier which was lifted for them to enter the courtyard. There were about three hundred mrem jostling about in there, drinking, laughing, and shouting excerpts from the play at one another. Reswen found a good spot far enough away from the stage to make sure that they would see all the action, took possession of it by standing on it, then waved for one of the courtyard’s servers and gave the seat-billets to the mrem when he came over.

  “And two wines,” he said, and the mrem nodded and hurried off. To Laas, Reswen said, “You’ve got to try this wine.”

  “Is it that good?”

  “Good’s not exactly the word, I suspect,” Reswen said, “but you have to try it anyway. Your experience of this place would be incomplete without it.”

  “Oh dear,” Laas said, and looked around her with fascination. She glanced up at the galleries on either side of the courtyard, where numerous fashionably dressed mrem were sitting and chattering to one another.

  “You wouldn’t want to sit up there,” Reswen said. “It’s all rich mrem, slumming; they don’t want to mingle with us groundlings. They’re going to sit up there and gossip all night about who’s biting whose neck and whose clothes cost more. You can hear what’s happening much better down here, believe me.”

  “And besides that,” Laas said, “someone up there might recognize you.”

  Reswen smiled. “The odds are actually about the same down here as they are up there,” he said. “But I have more on the mrem down here ... so that if they do recognize me, they’re more likely to keep their mouths shut.”

  Laas looked around her with renewed interest. “There are really criminals in here?”

  “I’m standing next to one. Oof! I could have you arrested for that, you know.”

  “Go ahead. Brute. Oh look, here are the chairs—”

  The name was more a courtesy than anything else; they were actually stools, and desperately well-worn ones, in Reswen’s opinion long overdue to be fuel for someone’s fire. The stools were made of hard woven reed, rather than wood, on the principle that it was harder to do someone serious damage with a reed-and-cane chair during a brawl than with a wooden one. Laas sat down on one; it creaked ominously. “Wonderful,” she said, as a second server arrived with two wooden cups of wine.

  Reswen sat down beside her and drank, surreptitiously watching her expression. Her eyes went wide. She lowered the cup and actually stared into it. “Oh come now,” she said, “you said this was wine.”

  Reswen smiled gently. “That’s what they call it,” he said. “Rather a lot of water, though. Oh, they don’t want their patrons getting too drunk. Disturbances start that way.”

  “I wonder that there aren’t disturbances over the way the wine tastes!”

  “Yes, there are,” Reswen said a bit ruefully, having policed some of them in his time, “but mostly the groundlings avoid that problem by bringing their own. It’s illegal, of course.” There was a sudden burst of noise, of clapping and mrem shouting unlikely suggestions. “Look there,” he said.

  He pointed toward the back of the stage. Something could dimly be seen moving upwards through the roped-together beams of a somewhat rickety-looking tower. “What is it?” Laas said. “Looks like a pulley—they’re hauling something up—”

  “They’re arming the thunder,” Reswen said. “What? Don’t you have stage thunder at your plays?”

  She looked at him with cockeyed bemusement. “Usually we leave that to the gods.”

  “That’s the Niauhu for you,” said Reswen. “Wait for gods to send thunder during a play, and you’ll be sitting and waiting for weeks. And who wants to wait for the rainy season to have plays? Not that we have much rain at the best of times.”

  Laas nodded at that, looking briefly thoughtful. Then a gong sounded: Tezhrue’s Bell, in the old temple down the road from the Play House. The audience in the courtyard got louder, if anything, with more clapping and yowling and cups being thrown. A group of cheerfully drunken mrem in front of the stage began reciting, rather raggedly, and at the top of their lungs:

  “Come all good Mrem who seek to hear a Tale

  of citties in the West, for bliss or bale,

  Of how the land of Ythun lost its weal,

  for lack of anymrem who knew to steal;

  And how a mrem by gold did set great store,

  and how his ladie made him so no moare—”

  Laas laughed softly. “They seem to know the play pretty well already,” she said. “Why do they come then?”

  “Because they know it well, I think,” Reswen said. “I don’t know. Why do people in the East go to the plays? Since they’re religious, they must know the stories.”

  “They go
because they have to,” Laas said, with a wry look. “The ‘donation’ to the temple is required.”

  “And what if you don’t go?”

  “There’s a fine.” She looked resigned. “They get you one way or another, I’m afraid.”

  Reswen had his own thoughts about that kind of religion, but for the moment he kept them to himself. A lone mrem, impressively dressed in clothing of a hundred years before, stepped up onto the stage and began reciting the same prologue that the overeager groundlings had been. “Who’s he?” said Laas.

  “The Chorus.”

  “But there’s only one of him.”

  Reswen shrugged and grinned. “You did want to see a comedy....”

  Laas eyed him with mild perplexity, then shrugged too and drank her wine, and listened. It had been a long time since Reswen had seen the Claw: probably one of the silliest plays in the Niauhu repertoire, full of sly village “idiots,” ludicrously mercenary merchants, amorous servingmrem, clever thieves, philandering ladies, a Hero-Thief who robbed “according to his conscience” (which changed hourly), wastrel lords gaming their livings away, crooked gamblers only too willing to help them do it, country bumpkins, drunks, fools, raunch-dancers, and a Chief of Police who Reswen was secretly delighted to find had been patterned on him, and who was portrayed as a buffoon in fancy clothes with an overfondness for the table and the couch.

  He settled back to enjoy himself, and tried hard not to stare at Laas and wonder when she would start laughing, She started soon enough, around the time the two Village Idiots find the burden-beast and dress it up as the Lady of the Castle, intending to put it in the rich Lord’s bed, “for sure he’ll never know the difference,” and their efforts to get the two actors dressed as the uxan up into the second level of the proscenium left her weak with laughter. Reswen was no good for much of anything himself, for the Police Chief had been on stage just before, lying in a welter of splendid overindulgence on his couch, being fed choice tidbits by fawning raunch-dancers, while pontificating about the Public Good—he was nervous that someone might try to steal it, like other kinds of goods.... The play itself was in the commonest kind of rhyme, but it was fiercely topical, and had been rewritten, as usual (probably that day), to include themes involving unwelcome visitors with spears, and more welcome ones, with money that the alert and honest citizens of a city might inveigle or steal, and never get caught. Laas fell sideways onto Reswen, snorting with laughter at something that looked dangerously like Hiriv wearing a cross between a priest’s robes and an uxan-harness with bells all over it.

  Reswen put an arm around her, purely to keep her from falling down and being trampled by one of the wineservers, and glanced up, then down again, quickly. He had had a flash-image of someone in the galleries: a large mrem, burly, brown-striped, cream front and paws—

  He put his head down beside Laas’s, “It is funny, isn’t it?” he said, having to raise his voice a bit over the happy yowls all around them, as the She-Thief made her overly sultry entrance. “Laas, we have company.”

  She was still gasping with laughter, but she managed to get it under control, or at least reduce it to shaking shoulders and a grin. “What? Who?”

  “Someone in the galleries. I’m not sure who it is, or who he works for, but I don’t think he means us well. We have to get out of here when the act is over, and lose him.”

  She kept laughing, more for effect than anything else, Reswen suspected. “All right. How long do we have?”

  “About another twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll manage to enjoy myself somehow,” she said, turned her attention back to the stage, and went off into more peals of laughter at the She-Thief s attempts to pretend to be a courtesan.

  Reswen had a little more trouble relaxing, but another glance upward, stolen during the general hysteria attendant on the line “You mean she’s not your sister?” showed him the mrem leaning on a railing, scanning the crowd with the air of someone who has not seen what they’re looking for. He might not have seen us, Reswen thought, but I don’t want to take the chance. Who knows whom he may have paid to do a little murder tonight— It was annoying; Reswen’s chances of finding a constable to follow the man home seemed slight, at least combined with the problem of needing to get out of the Play House without being seen.

  He breathed out, then; there was nothing to be done about it. He would just have to trust Krruth and his people to be on the mrem’s trail already. Meanwhile, there was at least the happy sight of Laas enjoying herself, laughing so hard the tears were rolling down her face. Reswen smiled a bit at the sight, then heard someone say, “But you dropped your—,” and looking up, lost himself in the action as someone dropped an uxan out of the second level onto a bag of gold and the Priest bent over to pick it up. I don’t remember that being in there, he thought, wiping his own tears of laughter away a few moments later.

  And then the Chorus came out, and the groundlings started to get restless at the prospect of getting out to the tavern across the street during intermission, for some better drink than they had been getting, and Reswen glanced up and saw the mrem in the gallery watching the crowd with great care. “Here we go,” he said, not bending his head down, for fear it might attract attention when everyone else was looking up. “You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  The Chorus spoke his last words. The crowd got up before they were done, and there was the usual rough-and-tumble rush for the gates out to the street. Reswen and Laas ducked low and let it take them, Reswen being careful to keep the tallest people he could between them and the keen-eyed figure in the gallery. He dared not look up again to see whether they had been seen or not, but once out the barrier, he put an arm around Laas and hustled her off to one side of the Play House and down a small, ill-lit street on which the back of the original tavern gave.

  Laas was still laughing; Reswen joined her, and they made something of a play of being drunk together, swaggering down the little street; swaying, half-supporting one another. “ ‘You mean she’s not your sister—’!” Laas gasped, and laughed again.

  Reswen chuckled, and in the spirit of the thing, began to sing the song about the mrem with the crooked tail, and what the gods left him in his watering-trough. The choruses were simple enough that Laas was able to join in after the first one, and together they staggered out of the alley behind the tavern and back up toward the high town, the exclusive district where Haven and the various embassies lay.

  After several blocks Reswen thought it was safe to stop staggering, and besides, he was running out of verses for the song. He guided Laas over to a sheltered spot, a wall of someone’s garden, and they paused there to get their breath back.

  “Oh, oh my,” Laas said, leaning against the wall. “I never saw anything like that. You mrem are mad. How often do you do that?”

  “Every night.”

  “Oh, surely not!”

  “Sometimes twice a day, on market days and feasts when people come in from the townlands.”

  Laas was speechless for a moment. Then she said, “How do they manage it, the actors? Where do they get the energy?”

  “From the other mrem appreciating them, I suppose. You can do a lot if you’re appreciated.”

  She looked at him quietly. “They don’t, much, do they?”

  “Don’t what? Appreciate me?” Reswen shrugged his tail. They stepped away from the wall and began to walk down the quiet street, into a neighborhood where lamps hung from the trees again and not everything smelt of sweat and spilt beer. “I’m the establishment, after all,” he said. “Enemy to many of them who feel that the only way to succeed is to cheat. I’m the one who catches them … the symbol of all the people who stand in their way. No reason I should be popular.”

  Laas nodded reflectively as they went. After a moment she looked up. “Now what?” she said.

  Reswen looked at her. “I was going to show you
something,” he said. “Come on.”

  It was a longish walk, but a peaceful one, and pleasant this time of night. The moons were up again, and their light slipped silverly onto the paving through trees and past the surrounding buildings. More moonlight began to fall on the paving, after a bit, as they started to climb, and buildings got less in the way, being fewer. The city had only one hill; it was mostly left as parkland, with some few prey-beasts in it, living reminders of the earlier days of Niauhu history, when anymrem might have needed to catch one with his own claws rather than let the paid hunters do it for him, rather than buy it in the market. Reswen pointed and showed Laas, as they climbed, the old places where the wall had been built out, and built out again, as the city grew too large for it: a set of lopsided circles, one offset this way, one that, and scattered within the circles, lamplight, torches, here and there a single burning oil-soaked reed in a window in its little iron holder—a scatter of mellow lights, as if stars tired from too much rising and setting had come to rest.

  Before them the hill bulked black, and on top of it, something rose up that refused the moonlight and lay under it obstinately darker than the night overhead. “No one comes here any more,” Reswen said, “at least I don’t think so. Tourists, perhaps, in the daytime. Not that we have that many tourists. But I thought I would show the one that I have with me what the best thing in the city is.”

  “Not the Green Square?” .

  Reswen laughed softly. “Much better than that.” They walked up a path so rough it wasn’t even paved, merely a scatter of gravel winding around the top of the hill. “I used to come here a lot,” Reswen said, “when I first got to Niau and was trying to understand this place.... Sometimes I got in trouble with my superiors for being late on post ... when I had been here and had forgotten the time.”