Time of Contempt

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  The wall was high and the steps steep. Fabio was sweating and panting, and no small wonder, because he never stopped talking while they climbed. Ciri learned that the wall surrounding the city of Gors Velen was a recent construction, much more recent than the city itself, which had been built long before by the elves. She also found out it was thirty-five feet high and that it was a so-called case-mate wall, made of hewn stones and unfired brick, because that type of construction was the most resistant to blows from battering rams.

  At the top they were greeted and fanned by a fresh sea wind. Ciri breathed it in joyfully after the heavy, stagnant stuffiness of the city. She rested her elbows on the top of the wall, looking down over the harbour dotted with colourful sails.

  ‘What’s that, Fabio? That mountain?’

  ‘That’s the Isle of Thanedd.’

  The island seemed very close, and it didn’t resemble an island. It looked like the base of a gigantic stone column stuck into the seabed, a huge ziggurat encircled by a spirally twisting road and zigzagging steps and terraces. The terraces were green with groves and gardens, and protruding from the greenery – which clung to the rocks like swallows’ nests – rose soaring white towers and the ornate domes of groups of buildings framed by cloisters. The buildings gave no clue at all that they had been constructed from stone. They seemed to have been carved directly from the mountain’s rocky slopes.

  ‘All of this was built by elves,’ explained Fabio. ‘It’s said they did it with the help of magic. However, for as long as anyone can remember, Thanedd has belonged to sorcerers. Near the summit, where you can see those gleaming domes, is Garstang Palace. The great Conclave of Mages will begin there in a few days. And there, look, on the very top. That solitary tower with battlements is Tor Lara, the Tower of Gulls . . .’

  ‘Can you get there overland? I can see it’s very close.’

  ‘Yes, you can. There’s a bridge connecting the bay to the island. We can’t see it because the trees are in the way. Do you see those red roofs at the foot of the mountain? That’s Loxia Palace. The bridge ends there. You have to pass through Loxia to reach the road to the upper terraces . . .’

  ‘And those lovely cloisters and little bridges? And those gardens? How do they stay on the rock without falling off . . . ? What is that palace?’

  ‘That’s Aretuza, the place you were asking about. The famous school for young enchantresses is there.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ciri, moistening her lips, ‘it’s there . . . Fabio?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you ever see the young enchantresses who attend the school? The school at Aretuza?’

  The boy looked at her, clearly astonished.

  ‘No, never! No one sees them! They aren’t allowed to leave the island or visit the city. And no one has access to the school. Even the burgrave and the bailiff can only travel as far as Loxia if they have business for the enchantresses. It’s on the lowest level.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Ciri nodded, staring at Aretuza’s shimmering roofs. ‘It’s not a school. It’s a prison. On an island, on a rock, above a cliff. Quite simply: a prison.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ admitted Fabio after a moment’s thought. ‘It’s pretty difficult to get out of there . . . But no, it’s not like being in prison. The novices are girls, after all. They need protecting—’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Er . . .’ the boy stammered. ‘I mean, you know what . . .’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Oh . . . I think . . . Look, Ciri, no one locks them up in the school by force. They must want to be there . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ smiled Ciri mischievously. ‘If they want to, they can stay in that prison. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be locked up there. There’s nothing to it. You’d just have to choose the right moment to make a break for it. But you’d have to do it before you end up there, because once you went in it would be too late . . .’

  ‘What? Run away? Where would they run to—?’

  ‘They,’ she interrupted, ‘probably wouldn’t have anywhere to go, the poor things. Fabio? Where’s that town . . . Hirundum?’

  The boy looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Hirundum’s not a city,’ he said. ‘It’s a huge farm. There are orchards and gardens there which supply vegetables and fruit to all the towns and cities in the area. There are also fishponds where they breed carp and other fish.’

  ‘How far is it from here to Hirundum? Which way is it? Show me.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Just show me, will you?’

  ‘Do you see that road leading westwards? Where those wagons are? That’s the road to Hirundum. It’s about fifteen miles away, through forests all the way.’

  ‘Fifteen miles,’ repeated Ciri. ‘Not far, if you’ve got a good horse . . . Thank you, Fabio.’

  ‘What are you thanking me for?’

  ‘Never mind. Now take me to the town square. You promised.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Ciri had never before seen such a crush and hubbub as there was in the market square in Gors Velen. The noisy fish market they’d walked through a little earlier seemed like a quiet temple compared to this place. It was absolutely huge, but still so crowded that Ciri assumed they would only be able to look at it from a distance. There would be no chance of actually getting into it. Fabio, however, bravely forced his way into the seething crowd, pulling her along by the hand. Ciri felt dizzy at once.

  The market traders bellowed, the customers bellowed even louder, and children lost in the crowd howled and wailed. Cattle lowed, sheep bleated, and poultry clucked and quacked. Dwarven craftsmen doggedly banged their hammers onto sheets of metal, cursing foully whenever they interrupted their hammering to take a drink. Pipes, fiddles and dulcimers could be heard from various parts of the square; apparently some minstrels and musicians were performing. To cap it all, someone hidden in the crowd was blowing a brass trumpet incessantly. That someone was clearly not a musician.

  Dodging a pig that trotted past with a piercing squeal, Ciri fell against a cage of chickens. A moment later, she was jostled by a passer-by and trod on something soft that meowed. She jumped back and barely avoided being trampled on by a huge, smelly, revolting, fearsome-looking beast, shoving people aside with its shaggy flanks.

  ‘What was that?’ she groaned, trying to regain her balance. ‘Fabio?’

  ‘A camel. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid! The thought of it!’

  Ciri looked around curiously. She watched halflings at work creating ornate wineskins from goat’s hide in full view of the public, and she was delighted by the beautiful dolls on display at a stall run by a pair of half-elves. She looked at wares made of malachite and jasper, which a gruff, gloomy gnome was offering for sale. She inspected the swords in a swordsmith’s workshop with interest and the eye of an expert. She watched girls weaving wicker baskets and concluded that there was nothing worse than work.

  The horn blower stopped blowing. Someone had probably killed him.

  ‘What smells so delicious round here?’

  ‘Doughnuts,’ said Fabio, feeling the pouch. ‘Do you wish to eat one?’

  ‘I wish to eat two.’

  The vendor handed them three doughnuts, took the five-groat piece and gave them four coppers in change, one of which he broke in half. Ciri, slowly regaining her poise, watched the operation of the coin being broken while voraciously devouring the first doughnut.

  ‘Is that,’ she asked, getting started on the second, ‘where the expression “not worth a broken groat” comes from?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Fabio, swallowing his doughnut. ‘There aren’t any smaller coins than groats. Don’t people use half-groats where you come from?’

  ‘No.’ Ciri licked her fingers. ‘Where I come from we used gold ducats. And anyway all that breaking business was stupid and pointless.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Be
cause I wish to eat a third doughnut.’

  The plum-jam-filled doughnuts acted like the most miraculous elixir. Ciri was now in a good mood, and the teeming square had stopped terrifying her and had even begun to please her. Now she didn’t let Fabio drag her behind him, but pulled him into the biggest crowd herself, towards a place where someone on a makeshift rostrum built of barrels was addressing the crowd. The speaker was fat and a bit past it. Ciri recognised him as a wandering priest by his shaved head and greyish-brown robes. She had seen his kind before, as they would occasionally visit the Temple of Melitele in Ellander. Mother Nenneke never referred to them as anything other than ‘fanatical chumps’.

  ‘There is but one law in the world!’ roared the podgy priest. ‘Divine law! The whole of nature is subject to that law, the whole of earth and everything that lives on the earth! And spells and magic are contrary to that law! Thus are sorcerers damned, and close is the day of wrath when fire will pour from the heavens and destroy their vile island! Then down will come the walls of Loxia, Aretuza and Garstang, where those pagans are gathering to hatch their intrigues! Those walls will tumble down . . .’

  ‘And we’ll have to build the sodding things again,’ muttered a journeyman bricklayer in a lime-spattered smock standing next to Ciri.

  ‘I admonish you all, good and pious people,’ yelled the priest. ‘Don’t believe the sorcerers, don’t turn to them for advice or aid! Be beguiled neither by their beautiful looks nor their clever speech, for verily I do say to you that those magicians are like whitened graves, beautiful on the outside but full of putrefaction and rotten bones on the inside!’

  ‘See what a powerful gob ’e ’as on ’im?’ remarked a young woman with a basket full of carrots. ’E’s ’aving a go at the magicians, coz ’e’s jealous of ’em and that’s that.’

  ‘Course he is,’ said the bricklayer. ‘Look at his noggin, he’s bald as an egg, and that belly hangs down to his knees. On the other hand, sorcerers are handsome; they don’t get fat or bald . . . And sorceresses, well, they’re just gorgeous . . .’

  ‘Only because they’ve sold their souls to the devil for their beauty!’ yelled a short individual with a shoemaker’s hammer stuck into his belt.

  ‘Fool of a cobbler! Were it not for the ladies of Aretuza, you’d long since have gone begging! Thanks to them you’ve got food in your belly!’

  Fabio pulled Ciri by the sleeve, and they plunged once more into the crowd, which carried them towards the middle of the square. They heard the pounding of a drum and loud shouting, calling for silence. The crowd had no intention of being quiet, but it didn’t bother the town crier on the wooden platform in the least. He had a powerful, trained voice and knew how to use it.

  ‘Let it be known,’ he bellowed, unfurling a roll of parchment, ‘that Hugo Ansbach of halfling stock is outlawed, for he gave lodgings and victuals to those villainous elves called Squirrels. The same applies to Justin Ingvar, a blacksmith of dwarven stock, who forged arrowheads for those wrongdoers. Thus does the burgrave announce that both are wanted and orders them to be hunted down. Whosoever seizes them will earn a reward of fifty crowns. Any who gives them victuals or shelter shall be considered an accomplice to their crime and shall suffer the same punishment. And should they be apprehended in a village or hamlet, the entire village or hamlet will pay a fine—’

  ‘But who,’ shouted someone in the crowd, ‘would give a halfling shelter? They should be hunted on their farms, and when they’re found, all those non-humans should be slung into the dungeons!’

  ‘To the gallows, not the dungeons!’

  The town crier began to read further announcements issued by the burgrave and town council, and Ciri lost interest. She was just about to extricate herself from the crowd when she suddenly felt a hand on her bottom. A totally non-accidental, brazen and extremely skilled hand.

  The crush ought to have prevented her from turning around to look, but in Kaer Morhen Ciri had learned how to manoeuvre in places that were difficult to move around in. She turned around, causing something of a disturbance. The young priest with the shaved head standing right behind her smiled an arrogant, rehearsed smile. ‘Right, then,’ said that smile, ‘what are we going to do now? You’ll blush sweetly and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?’

  It was clear the priest had never had to deal with one of Yennefer’s pupils.

  ‘Keep your hands to yourself, baldy!’ yelled Ciri, white with rage. ‘Grab your own arse, you . . . You whitewashed tomb!’

  Taking advantage of the fact that the priest was pinned in by the crowd and couldn’t move, she intended to kick him, but Fabio prevented that, hurriedly pulling her well away from the priest and the site of the incident. Seeing that she was trembling with rage, he treated her to a few fritters dusted with caster sugar, at the sight of which Ciri immediately calmed down and forgot about the incident. From where they were standing by the stall they had a view of a scaffold with a pillory, but with no criminal in it. The scaffold itself was decorated with garlands of flowers and was being used by a group of wandering minstrels, dressed up like parrots, sawing away vigorously at violins and playing flutes and bagpipes. A young black-haired woman in a sequined waistcoat sang and danced, shaking a tambourine and merrily stamping tiny slippers.

  To bite a witch beside a path,

  Some vipers did contrive.

  The snakes all perished one by one,

  The witch is still alive.

  The crowd gathered around the scaffold laughed heartily and clapped along. The fritter seller threw another batch into the hot oil. Fabio licked his fingers and tugged Ciri away by the sleeve.

  There were innumerable stalls and delicious foods were being offered everywhere. They each ate a cream bun, then shared a smoked eel, which they followed with something very strange, which had been fried and impaled on a skewer. After that, they stopped by some barrels of sauerkraut and pretended to be tasting it, as if intending to buy a large quantity. When they had eaten their fill but then didn’t buy anything the stallholder called them ‘a pair of little shits’.

  They walked on. Fabio bought a small basket of bergamot pears with the rest of the money. Ciri looked up at the sky but decided it still wasn’t noon.

  ‘Fabio? What are those tents and booths over there, by the wall?’

  ‘Sideshows. Want to see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a crowd of men in front of the first tent, shuffling about excitedly. The sounds of a flute floated out from inside.

  ‘The black-skinned Leila . . .’ read Ciri, struggling to decipher the lopsided, crooked writing on the flap, ‘reveals all the secrets of her body in the dance . . . What nonsense! What kind of secrets . . . ?’

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Fabio, urging her on and blushing slightly. ‘Oh, look, this is more interesting. There’s a clairvoyant here who’ll tell your fortune. I’ve still got two groats. That should be enough—’

  ‘Waste of money,’ snorted Ciri. ‘Some prophecy it’ll be, for two groats! To predict the future you have to be a prophetess. Divination is a great gift. Even among enchantresses, no more than one in a hundred has that kind of ability—’

  ‘A fortune-teller predicted,’ interrupted the boy, ‘that my eldest sister would get married and it came true. Don’t make faces, Ciri. Come on, let’s have our fortunes told . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to get married. I don’t want my fortune told. It’s hot and that tent stinks of incense. I’m not going in. Go in yourself, if you want, and I’ll wait. I just don’t understand why you want a prophecy. What would you like to know?’

  ‘Well . . .’ stammered Fabio. ‘Mostly, it’s . . . it’s if I’m going to travel. I’d like to travel. And see the whole world . . .’

  He will, thought Ciri suddenly, feeling dizzy. He’ll sail on great white sailing ships . . . He’ll sail to countries no one has seen before him . . . Fabio Sachs, explorer. He’ll give his name to a cape, to the very furthest point of an as-ye
t unnamed continent. When he’s fifty-four, married with a son and three daughters, he’ll die far from his home and his loved ones . . . of an as-yet unnamed disease . . .

  ‘Ciri! What’s the matter with you?’

  She rubbed her face. She felt as though she were coming up through water, rising to the surface from the bottom of a deep, ice-cold lake.

  ‘It’s nothing . . .’ she mumbled, looking around and coming back to herself. ‘I felt dizzy . . . It’s because of this heat. And because of that incense from the tent . . .’

  ‘Because of that cabbage, more like,’ said Fabio seriously. ‘We oughtn’t to have eaten so much. My belly’s gurgling too.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ snapped Ciri, lifting her head briskly and actually feeling better. The thoughts that had flown through her mind like a whirlwind dissipated and were lost in oblivion. ‘Come on, Fabio. Let’s go.’

  ‘Do you want a pear?’

  ‘Course I do.’

  A group of teenage boys were playing spinning tops for money. The top, carefully wound up with string, had to be set spinning with a deft tug, like cracking a whip, to make it follow a circular path around a course drawn with chalk. Ciri had beaten most of the boys in Skellige and all the novices at the Temple of Melitele at spinning tops. So she was toying with the thought of joining the game and relieving the urchins not only of their coppers, but also of their patched britches, when her attention was suddenly caught by some loud cheering.

  At the very end of a row of tents and booths stood a curious semicircular enclosure squeezed between the foot of the wall and some stone steps. It was formed from sheets of canvas stretched over six-foot poles. There was an entrance between two of the poles, blocked by a tall, pockmarked man wearing a jerkin and striped trousers tucked into sailor’s boots. A small group of people milled around in front of him, and folk would throw a few coppers into the pockmarked man’s hand and then disappear behind the canvas. The pockmarked man was dropping the money into a large sack, which he jingled as he shouted hoarsely.

  ‘Roll up, roll up! Over here! You will see, with your own eyes, the most frightful creature the gods ever created! Horror of horrors! A live basilisk, the venomous terror of the Zerrikan deserts, the devil incarnate, an insatiable man-eater! You’ve never seen such a monster, folks. Freshly caught, brought from beyond the seas in a coracle. Come and see this vicious, live basilisk with your own eyes, because you’ll never see one again. Not never, not nowhere! Last chance! Here, behind me, for a mere fifteen groats. Just ten groats for women with children!’