"Of course," Bekri went on, "there will be others of the Web with you at all times. It may amuse you to try and work out who they are." He smiled horribly, but I was getting used to his face by now, and recognized the goodwill behind the scars. I signed a gracious farewell, and followed a silent, thundery-faced Calla out of the door, leaving a soft murmur of voices behind us.
Calla led me down the main staircase, the one that Bekri had led me up two nights previously. Observing it in the light, I was thankful I had not seen it properly before—I might have given up altogether on the idea of following Bekri. It was a souvenir of the old Gil, for it had once processed grandly around the sides of a large square stairwell, lined by an ornate banister. Only the carven stumps of a few newel posts remained, on the brink of an abyss carpeted with rubbish, a sheer drop of thirty-odd feet from the level of the landing. Calla flounced down the stairs with careless confidence; I went cautiously, hugging the wall. When she was halfway down, she turned to look up at me.
"Hurry yourself, Lord of Gil," she said. "Or am I not allowed to speak to you?"
"Of course you can speak, Calla. I'm sorry I was rude to you back there."
She humphed, and the corners of her mouth turned down. "You should be sorry—I was only trying to help you."
I sighed. It seemed to me suddenly that I had been apologizing all my life, and I was getting tired of it. "Let's forget it, then. But just stop trying to be my nursemaid, all right?" I'd have said more, but I was concentrating on my footing on the rotten treads.
"But a nursemaid is just what I feel like," Calla sniffed, hovering impatiently on the lower landing. I could see I was not forgiven, and her indignation was starting to break out. "Look at you, Lord of Gil, you can barely walk two steps on level ground without falling over." She turned and bounded lightly down the rest of the stairs, stopping at the bottom to watch my descent with critical eyes. "Why did they have to choose me?" she muttered, just audibly.
"Because you have so much to teach me," I answered bitterly over the groaning of the stairs, "and I have so much to learn. By the Lady, I'm sick of being a meal for teachers! It wasn't my idea to be a hero, and it's not what I'm good at, and you're not helping matters much—oof." I subsided into mutters while fishing my foot out of a brand new hole in the stairs.
Calla was quiet for a few moments. She did not even leap to take charge of rescue operations. Instead, when I had extricated myself and was stumping on downwards, I found a new and even more sceptical expression had appeared on her face.
"So you're telling me, my lord, that there is something you're good at?"
"Of course."
"And what's that?"
"I'm a memorian—or was, until I got pushed into this madness." I reached the bottom at last, and sighed with relief.
"Oh. Books." Her tone was contemptuous.
"Yes, books. Reading and writing, and remembering the past. Can you read?"
She lifted her chin. "Only as much as I need to. Anyway, what use is remembering the past? Look at the mess your Flamens-in-Exile made by remembering the Heroic Code. What good did the past ever do anybody?"
I sighed and sat down on the bottom step to pick the splinters out of my ankle. "You're wrong, except for one thing—simply remembering isn't enough. I've always thought the Flamens remembered too much and thought too little. But don't judge all learning by the Flamens-in-Exile, Calla."
"Shall I judge it by you, then?" she asked cruelly. I did not answer, did not even look up from my search for splinters. After a few moments of silence, Calla sat down beside me.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"It's only that—I'm worried."
I looked across at her, pleased. "About me?"
"No, I didn't say that. I mean, if you don't mind me saying so, I'm worried you're going to make some awful blunder that'll bring the Sherank howling down on us like a winter storm."
"Ah." I tried to keep my voice light. There was a brief pause while I calculated what line to take that might put our fellowship on a different footing. Apologies only seemed to annoy her—humility would make her despise me even more. Her anger might be easier to tolerate than her contempt. Maybe a bit of a shock? I thought it over, and at last I said, "Tell me, Calla, shall I go back upstairs and ask Bekri for a guide I can trust?"
"What?" Calla looked at me disbelievingly, then shot to her feet, her hands fisted. "What did you say?"
"You heard me. This mission is too important to be endangered by your arrogance."
It was the first time I'd seen anyone's nostrils actually quiver with rage. "Endangering your mission, am I? Arrogant, am I?" she spat. "How dare you, you miserable mutton-arsed—"
"Gilwoman, you are addressing a Scion of Oballef." I stood up to my full height, which was maybe half an inch greater than hers.
She stared at me, her lips turning down with scorn. "So? You're not the first Scion I've seen. Here in Gil, you're just another beggar, only less useful than most."
That was true enough to sting, but I let it pass. I waited long enough to put her slightly off balance, then lifted my hand in the most imperious admonitory gesture in the Scions' entire repertoire. Calla grimaced, but there was only one possible reply. Grudgingly, she signed respect. "I beg my lord Tigrallef's pardon," she said formally through stiff lips. Then her anger burst out again. "But how can you expect me to take you seriously when all I've seen you do is play the fool—"
"I'm not a fool." I said this with such conviction that Calla stopped again and looked at me with surprise. "I may be a coward, a clown and a weakling, but I'm no more a fool than I am a hero. A hero only knows how to behave as a hero, but I know how to learn like a memorian. Never call me a fool again."
She signed agreement with a twist of the hand. "I understand. I can call you coward, clown or weakling, but never fool. I shall remember that, my lord."
"Be sure that you do. Shall we go now?" I grinned at her angry back as she stomped through the door. What I had just said to her, I had never before put into words, even inside my own head, but suddenly I believed it. I was not a fool. Not a complete fool, anyway.
* * *
8
IN THE STREET, my elation died. A small boy sat picking at his sores in the portal across the way, wrapped, as far as I could tell, in nothing more than a length of filthy cloth. The sores were disturbing enough, especially on such a little body, but I was more upset by how strongly he resembled my cousin Callefiya's younger child, back in Exile. It was a poignant reminder that this was my country, these were my people. When he saw me looking at him, he scurried inside on all fours like a frightened beetle.
Calla caught my look. "It's unwise, my lord," she said flatly out of the side of her mouth, "to look too long or boldly at anyone, even a child."
"Was I staring? Is that why he ran away?"
"Naturally."
"But why was he frightened? I don't look like a Sherkin, do I?"
Under the dirt on her face, she grimaced. "In Gil, it's wise to be wary of everyone you don't know, Gilman or Sherkin. He's a wise child, that one. There, that's your first lesson. Come along, clown of Gil."
I grinned again at that, and caught up with her as she moved down the street in a sidling, creeping fashion that nevertheless carried her along at a spanking rate. I tried to imitate her, even though it hurt my back.
"Can't you slouch a little more?" she muttered, glancing sideways at me.
"I'm trying, I'm trying. Remember, I spent the last six months learning to stride like a hero. You'd have loved my scholar's stoop."
"Well, stoop like a scholar then. Now, keep a few steps ahead of me, and go straight towards the bread ovens at the corner of the market. See them? But don't look at anyone."
Resignedly, and trying to keep my shoulders hunched, I followed her orders. Our street was almost empty, but a score of paces before the market square, a larger street joined it at an angle, and this was full of people. I slopped miserably through the
thick of the crowd, heading for the bakery. Though the sun was shining, it was still the rump end of winter and the afternoon air was bitterly cold. My feet in the scurfy sandals had got wet through almost as soon as I stepped outside. I could hear Calla's sandals flapping behind me. When I reached the corner near the bakery, I stopped and looked around in horrified fascination.
I had been taken many times to the market on Sathelforn, the chief island of the Archipelago. Markets are chaotic almost by definition, but in Sathelforn it was also clean, well-swept, and laid out in a pleasant labyrinth of stalls and little eating compounds. The market of Gil was a cesspool scummed with garbage.
There was hardly a straight line in the whole stinking concourse. Gimcrack stalls of rotten greyish wood leaned against each other in clusters of four or five, ready to fall at the push of a breath, a few decorated in dubious taste with daubs of peeling paint. The sellers, hunched or squatting in the open mouths of their stalls, and the restless, ragged mob of customers regarded each other with deep mutual suspicion and haggled without dignity or good humour, the shrill voices of the women slicing through the gruff voices of the men. I recoiled as a tall thin creature, definitely a man but scarcely human, naked except for the coating of dirt that blackened him from crown to sole, danced to a stop in front of me and peered into my face, gibbering, the foam around his mouth flying in all directions. Suddenly, Calla was at my side.
"Here, little one," she cackled in a very old voice, tossing something into the air before the lunatic's eyes. He snatched it out of mid-air and vanished instantly into the crowd. No one else took any notice of him.
"Poor soul," I whispered to Calla. "He's mad, isn't he?"
"Actually," said Calla coldly, "he's my cousin. He looks better with clothes on. My lord, keep your face down—try to see through the top of your head."
I grumbled, but I knew what she meant. The technique was being demonstrated all around me. I pulled the horrible cloak up around my ears, as I saw others had done, but I lacked the knack of keeping it up. Calla sighed deeply.
"Just stay close to me," she said. "I'm going to show you proper market manners." She hobbled off obliquely towards the first cluster of stalls; I slogged unhappily in her wake. The first stall she stopped at, a weathered lean-to with crazy sloping sides, seemed at first to contain nothing but a sullen tradesman squatting on a hairy brown mat, picking at his toenails. Squinting into the shadows behind him, I saw a coarse sack filled with what looked like ordinary dirt. Calla hunkered down on the ground in front of the trader and began a long, sour dispute that ended with her contemptuously tossing a small cloth bag knotted at the top on to the ground at the trader's feet, and holding out a larger, empty bag of indescribable rottenness. The trader reluctantly stood up, fished a pottery beaker from the depths of his cloak and used it to transfer several measures of the dirt from the sack into Calla's bag. He flopped down again on his mat, sulking. Calla moved off, muttering. I was beginning to get the idea.
"What did you buy?" I asked curiously when we were clear of the stall. "It looked like ordinary dirt."
"Maggots," she said. "They last longer if they're stored in dirt. They taste like dirt, too, but they keep the children alive when there's nothing else to eat."
"Oh."
She rounded the corner of another cluster of stalls and moved across the trampled mud and dung surface to a large open-sided hut, really a thatched roof supported on a complex of rickety poles. If it were possible to say that any section of this pisspit market smelled worse than the rest, this was the place. Under the roof, a row of ten or twelve traders, perhaps a little less scrawny but no better dressed than anyone else, stood behind a long trestle table. In front of each was a brownish pyramid; as we got closer I saw, with a queasy stir of the belly, that each pyramid was a pile of small corpses, perhaps as big as my two fists together, covered with patchy brown fur matted with blood and excrement.
"Shulls," whispered Calla. "Quite tasty if you ignore what they feed on. You had some last night."
"Oh."
Shulls. Perhaps the only Sherkin contribution to the economy of Gil, vermin that travelled everywhere the Sherank did, swarming out of their ships, breeding in the grainbags of their caravans; in Gil, I knew, where there had been no indigenous vermin to compete with the newcomers, the shulls had flourished and happily bred famine and disease and lots of little shulls throughout the first decades after the catastrophe. I should have guessed that so desperate a people would find a use even for shulls, but my stomach was slow to appreciate the economic logic. Gagging, I hung far behind Calla as she negotiated her purchase.
"What other delicacies are you looking for?" I asked when she drifted back to me, tucking the late shull into a pocket of her cloak.
"Nothing in particular. Shall we just wander through the market, my lord? Perhaps you'll see something you like—a souvenir of your first visit to Gil." I detected a mocking note.
Of course my expectations could hardly have been lower; even so, the Gil market failed to rise to them. Most of the food stalls seemed to sell either maggots packed in dirt, sickly roots and vegetables, bluish milk, lumpy yogurt, or little malodorous cubes that Calla told me were pressed and salted fish. At one end of the square was the fuel section, untidily strewn with piles of dried dung, sacks of charcoal, a few stacks of logs chopped into short lengths and a great many bundles of faggots tied up with lengths of vine. Behind the crowded shull hut was another, smaller but similar in construction, where the fly-covered carcasses of a few goats and sheep dangled over rough cages filled with live, dour-looking chickens. There were fewer customers here than in the shull hut, and the tone of the bargaining was even more bitter.
One whole side of the market was taken up with dry-goods stalls and artisans' workshops. I fingered the rough cloth of ready-made cloaks and britches; discreetly watched one group of tinkers battering old pots into new shapes, and another of cobblers stitching the ubiquitous shull-leather sandals; and narrowly avoided bringing a display of exceptionally ugly clay cooking pots crashing around my feet. In one corner was what Calla sneeringly called the "fine goods"—two stalls of shoddy needles, misshapen candles, blunt metal knives, and other manufactured goods of a pitifully poor quality.
"The manufactories of Gil still turn out some of the finest work in the world," Calla commented in an undertone, "but of course we never see it after it leaves the workmen's hands. Just as we never see the best of the crops, the cream of the milk or the finest of the animals we're forced to raise. The Sherank take them all, and allow us only the leavings. Did you wonder why we feed on maggots and shulls?"
"No, I didn't wonder. I'd already figured it out." There were other things that I'd figured out, but it was hardly the right time to broach them with Calla. Covertly, I watched the action around me, certain I was right—there was much more going on than showed on the surface.
We were cutting diagonally across the market by now, towards some kind of tall soot-coloured monument standing in a clear space in the centre. Clouds had been gathering, blocking out the late afternoon sun. I looked up as the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight drifted across the square. Gasping, I grabbed Calla's arm.
The monument was not the broken pillar on a pedestal I had vaguely perceived it to be, but a figure: a stone woman, more than life-size, stretching towards the sky with a great stone bowl upheld in her hands. Flooded by the sun, she briefly managed to be beautiful, even through the filth that thickened and obscured her shape; then the sunlight moved on, and she was in shadow again.
Choking, I stumbled over to sit on the low stone parapet that ringed her pedestal. I recognized that statue, which meant that suddenly, for the first time since leaving the corniche two days before, I knew exactly where I was.
Calla sat down beside me a moment later. "What's wrong, my lord Tigrallef?" she whispered anxiously. "Are you ill? This isn't a clever place to sit."
My eyes were wet. I wiped my sleeve across them, taking some of the dirt off
along with the tears. "Oballef's Fountain," I murmured. "This is the Great Garden, isn't it?"
"No, my lord. It's the central market."
"But that's the statue of the Lady—"
"Yes, I knew that," said Calla, "and I really think we should be going now."
"In a minute—"
There was a long silence while I struggled for control and Calla sat nervously poised at my side. When I closed my eyes, I could see Marori's painting of the Great Garden as it used to be, in a Gil that had vanished utterly. In the foreground was the same statue of the Lady, rose-white marble quarried from the veins of the Gilgard, clear water cascading from the stone bowl in her hands. Children splashed in the pool within the parapet; graceful men and women strolled among flowering trees in the background. I did not want to open my eyes again, to see what had become of them all.
But at last Calla shook my arm urgently. "Come on, my lord Tigrallef," she whispered. "They can't hold the wrong eyes off us for long. But take another look at the Lady as we go, and you'll see why the Sherank left her standing."
I set my face and stood up. A few feet away, a small knot of Gilmen were squabbling over a dead chicken, effectively screening us from all other eyes. I followed Calla to the shelter of the nearest stalls, then turned to look back at Oballef's Fountain. The Lady's nose was a leprous hole; a lewd leer was painted on the perfect lips. The body had also been decorated—obscene, graphic additions incised into the marble and tricked out with paint. Around the pedestal, in the bold barbed Sheranik script, was written this legend: The Whore in Gil.
Calla was pulling at my arm. "You must come now. Wake up, my lord! Tigrallef, listen to me. If the Sherank saw your face now, they'd peel it off. Please, my lord!"
Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil Page 6
