The gates at Lungan were the narrow spot, Shoka had figured all the way. In the long peace, towns had spilled past their gates if they had them at all; but Lungan with its bridge was the gateway to Pan'tei and to Cheng'di, the very heart of the Empire, and the old Emperor, acting as chief of engineers in his father's time, had ordered the gates refurbished and thickened, the walls heightened, built the walled market that was also the bridge garrison at need, built the gatehouse on the Anogi road in case it ever needed to be manned.
It was now. Absolutely.
They adjusted their pace and picked their company going in the narrow gate—a pig-seller with two animals done up in slings and a returning slops cart all in the same general area, and Shoka reined around the slops cart, hoping to clear the questions of the gate-guards.
But a guard shoved a spear in his horse's path and shied him up. "Where?" the man asked. Fittha, taking them for Oghin, likely, and willing to give them grief.
Shoka had the courier chit. He stopped his little column in the gateway, creating a deliberate roadblock, with a flock of goats not far behind them. "Captain's business, coming up from Anogi."
The man examined the chit. Damned if he could read it, Shoka thought. He took it over to his officer, as bleating goats began to leak around the nervous horses. The officer came back, and the company, on previous orders, backed and shifted in what could be restlessness on the horses' part, but contrived to block the gate. Goats bleated, dogs barked, and the slops cart was probably in it somewhere.
"Clear the gate!" the officer yelled. And a stream of something foreign.
"Aghi!" Shoka yelled back and pointed at the chit, maintaining his company right where it was.
"Pig!" the Fittha yelled at him. "Report to the camp, second on your left, straight on, move your ass, pig!"
And shoved the chit at him.
Shoka took it and sent his horse off fast. His company followed. Stay to the background, he had warned Taizu. You're too much question as it is.
But she came up beside him as they clattered along the street and around the second corner, by a tea-shop with shattered screens and a crowd of customers that got hastily back to the walls and out of their way.
Used to dodging soldiers, apparently. A squad was coming from the other direction, and they went single-file for a moment.
Get in, he had listed the points for Taizu and all the others, find out whether soldiers come and go on the street, see if there's a way to sink into the city without reporting through Ghita's command or getting shut into that camp.
So when they got further down the street that led to the bridge and found soldiers no uncommon sight anywhere along the way, Shoka slowed the pace and finally took them around a corner, on a row of cheap restaurants. The air stank of cheap beer, overloaded sewers and the wind off the stockyards.
"Good as anywhere," Shoka said, and stopped and got down. Taizu dropped to her feet beside him, a spatter of something noxious, as the rest dismounted and gathered around. "Food and drink, someplace for the horses—" He looked up at the advertisement of lodgings and looked further up at a rickety stairs.
Not the most prosperous place in town. Officers would lodge in finer places. Common soldiers would set up in tents, off in the camp they were supposed to go to. But mercenaries being mercenaries, they came and they went, and officers counted on payday to get them on the rolls where they could be accounted for and assigned: that had been the system ten years ago, not the official procedure, but the actual one.
And tent space being limited, if some mercenary squads put up in hostels, that had been winked at, so long as the town magistrate sent no complaints to the higher-ups.
He hoped, as he led the way into the dingy restaurant, that that was the way Ghita's officers ran the army.
* * *
Trail-cooking was better than the garlicky, oily mess the Peony dished up. They picked at it, picked out the edible bits, ate the rice, drank the cheap wine and took a collective breath.
Three rooms, stables, meals for the lot of them. "The innkeeper's going to be damn happy," Shoka said. "He was scared when I asked for rooms. I said we were real quiet, I didn't let my company get drunk, and I pointed out with all the soldiers in town he might be glad to have us laying claim to the room down here, we were a real asset—keep the place safe and all."
"What about the camp?" Taizu said.
"We'll take a walk about. I had a talk with the innkeeper—got a little sense where things are—being new in town. Ghita's here, all right, quartered in one of the big houses. The camp's where the line-troops stay, but there's a lot of billets about town, those that can afford it, mostly cavalrymen, a lot of damage—damn loose discipline. I asked him if he ever got soldiers in here, he said not usually, it used to be a lot of workers from the slaughterhouses and the tannery down the street, they were used to the smell and a lot of the other teahouses didn't like the air about them—"
The men had never understood his levity, all this ride long. This time they seemed to, slight, shy humor, down-glancing.
Only Taizu—by the line between her brows—was not smiling. She ate, pulling the bandages with the fingers of one hand to get food into her mouth, drinking and soaking the filthy cloth while she did.
Impatient. Worried. Eyes darting to every movement in the room. He reached out and nudged her leg. "Easy."
She drew an audible breath. "Time," she said in that guttural mutter that was her public voice.
"We're doing fine."
A dart of worried eyes. He imagined the rest of the expression, the thrust of the lip. You're lying, master Shoka.
He put a leg over the back side of the bench. "Come on, boy. Let's take a walk. —You fellows stay close here. Finish your lunch. Get some sleep."
* * *
"Where are we going?" Taizu asked as they walked the twisting stone street, past tea-shops and pepper-vendors and shops with hanging poultry and strings of garlic. People jostled past. War was in the offing, but business went on. Wives were stocking larders. Men were carrying past sacks of rice. The prices whitewashed on the boards outside shops were predictably outrageous.
"The camp—take a—" He saw her eyes dart to a passing cart. "For gods' sake, what's the matter with you? Stop jumping at everything!"
"I'm not jumping!"
"You're nervous as a—" Virgin in a whorehouse, the expression ran. "Calm down,dammit."
Another dart of the eyes, a man with a load of lumber. "I'm sorry."
"Just take it easy. You want questions? I don't."
"There's too damn many people!"
He looked her way, grabbed her by the shoulder and hurried her across the street, dodging the yellow streams that ran between the pavings. "That's what makes a city. Doesn't it?" The panic was infectious. It was a weakness in her he had never reckoned on. Damn, she had never been in a town larger than Ygotai; they had touched no more than the edge of Anogi, ahorse and bound out of it as fast as they dared. On the road she had watched the people with that kind of attention, eyes checking every movement. Crazy-dangerous, people would think.
It was everything he had taught her in the forest, tracking every move and every sound that came strange to her, but everything was strange here and there was too much of it, too fast, all at once.
"Shut your ears," he said. "Be blind. Trust my eyes. You're watching too much, too hard. Just wait for my cues, all right? Like in practice. Don't react."
"Yes," she'said quietly. Her stride changed, became easier.
"Just a lot of people. Civilized people. They don't jump at you. Not in broad daylight. Just a lot of racket on these damn cobbles, covers a lot of sound. Echoes off the walls, plays hell with your sense of where things are. New place, new senses. You'll get used to it."
You'd better, he thought. Damn fast.
Take her back to the tea-house, leave her with Chun and the rest—
She can't handle this. She's going to make a mistake. First man who startles her, she II jump—
; Berserker. That's what she gives off.
Taizu in the dark, naked shape among the bandits, blade flashing—
Everyone's her enemy but me. All the way from Hua—hiding and running—and two years learning to hear a leaf drop—learning my footstep in the dark, on the dirt, on the porch—
Anyone else—anyone she can't identify—dead. She's that fast. And react is all I've taught her.
This is a mistake, her being here is a mistake, we ought to turn around now and go back—
Horsemen were coming down the street at their backs. She did not turn and look. She was settling, he thought. Of course she was settling, she had never failed, not in any move he had taught her.
Walk her around, let her see the bridge, get the feel of the town, ask a few questions, go back to the teahouse for a drink and have a talk with her in the room. That was the sensible thing to do.
* * *
The air smelled of the river before they got as far as the market, and the masts of river-craft, sparse as they were, stood against the pale gray of the water.
A girl from Hua had to stop and stare when she saw it. A boy from Yiungei had done the same thing, contemplating riding that great span on horseback.
Later the youth, learning the marvels of its building, how many workers had died, swept away in the current, how many attempts had failed, how often the footings had given way and wrecked the effort, and how the Imperial Engineers under the then-prince's direction had spanned the treacherous currents first with a pontoon bridge and then with stone carried by barge, to the one favor nature gave them, the subsurface island in the center, and across again, building the stone sections and filling them with rubble—until the great Hisei flowed docilely through stone arches, whole boats able to pass beneath.
"The old Emperor wanted to bridge all the rivers," Shoka said, "but in these times—gods know if it's wise."
"Two carts can pass on that thing!"
"That they can. With room between."
"What are we going to do?" There was an edge of panic in her voice.
"Don't worry about the bridge right now. It's not the important thing. It can't be, yet. Just stay calm." He walked her on, where the bridge street gave out on the old market, familiar enough ground ahead for a farmer-girl, he thought. The camp was on their left, towering walls of buff stone that closed off the esplanade as far as the river-edge. Not yet for that, he thought, looking down the aisles of tents, dislodged from those grounds, rilled the paved esplanade where jugglers and trinket-sellers and artists had made carnivals in peacetime, amid a host of sit-down drink-sellers and pastry-makers. Not nowadays. The whole bazaar had been displaced. Best just wander around a little, get the temperature of the place.
If there was anyone desperately worried these days, it was surely the merchants with bored, off-duty foreign mercenaries walking among their displays. He and Taizu got looks—rough-looking, the dust washed off while they had been up surveying the rooms, but even a washing-down had failed to get the cracks between the plates and weavings of the armor; and the armor-robes had gone to a kind of dim patina of dirt and grease.
—"Better we clean up a little," he had said to the company. "Get a little trail dust off."
Which the company had known how to understand. Only Taizu's bandages had escaped washing—and Taizu with her filthy sheepskin coat, her topknot and her bandages was easily the worst, the latter by now stained with food, trail dirt, an appalling amount of old blood and a small circle of new—Eidi had contributed that this morning as they were setting out, to make the wound seem recent, for fear someone might question it otherwise.
But the looks it drew here gave him second thoughts —a ghastly wound, a soldier from off a fighting front. People shied from it and stared for more than fear of pilferage, and doubtless whispered after they had passed.
War-jitters here too, the same as on tannery row. And a lot of soldiers on guard by the bridge.
What are we going to do? he imagined Taizu's question. She felt steadier, as if her focus had come back. There was noise and confusion on all sides as they walked the quayside. Someone chopped a chicken close by them and Taizu glanced that way—but any soldier might. At the next aisle a whore importuned them. Taizu stared.
"No," Shoka snarled, and the whore yelled out something about boy-lovers as he pulled Taizu past.
A sweetmeat at a booth in mid-market, a cup of wine in an area that smelled less of the fish and poultry-sellers. Taizu sipped through her bandages, returned the cup to the vendor.
Horsemen came through, not mercenaries. Banner of Angen, red circle on black.
Gitu.
Taizu went completely still. Not a twitch. Then she moved again naturally, put the cup up.
"Through?" A male hand reached for it, four, five soldiers moving up to the drink-vendor. Shoka drew in his breath, heart speeding, but Taizu nodded calmly, and before he could get her out:
"Where you in from?" one asked.
"South," Shoka said, edging in, trying to catch Taizu's expression past the bandages, with the panic feeling that she might just, if he got tied down in the first chance they had had to find out vital information—walk off down the row and vanish in the crowd. He put his hand on her shoulder, and felt the tension. "Up from Taiyi."
The mercenaries were all attention. "Bad down there?"
"Damn bloody awful." With a shrug. "Lost half the company."
"Buy you a drink," the one said, and threw out half the contents of his cup, put it back, and indicated the edge of the market square, the sit-down wine-shops. Meaning he and his wanted the rumors.
* * *
"Lost all our money," he said over a cup of hot wine, too worried to feel the alcohol he had at lunch and after, thank the gods he had had the lunch. It was Taizu he was worried about; but if worry burned it out of him, Taizu had enough going in her, he reckoned, to burn off twice her capacity, and she was steady as he could ask—not a tremor in the hand that carried the cup, no gulping down the wine, just measured sips.
"I've been twenty years hereabouts," Shoka said. "Not this recent stuff. I hired on to a lord, personal. I was just a kid, Juni's age, here. Traveled with a caravan, got to Ygotai, I thought I'd seen a city." Not too much confidence too fast. He spilled the bits and pieces he had cobbled together, reason for a mercenary to speak the language and forget his own. "Hell, Lungan in those days—I came up looking for hire, I mean, in those days, there weren't that many places you could get, but I got a post with this old gentleman—just watch his horses. And pretty soon I was in the house guard. Ten years with that old gentleman. Then this. Captain killed, no damn pay—So I get up here, hell, I report what I know. Do I get any damn pay for risking my ass? I should've cut out down to Mandi, get the hell out, before this whole damn thing comes down—"
"What's the story down there?"
Shoka took a breath, shook his head. "I know too much."
"Like what?"
"I can't. Can't talk." He put a leg over the bench, gathered up his sword. "Come on, Juni. We'd better get back."
"You're drinking our money, you sit down. What've you heard?"
"It's not heard, man, it's seen." He settled back again, leaned confidentially across the table. "That's what they don't want spread. . . . And not a damn copper for it!"
Heads leaned forward. Shoka looked around him.
"The whole south's coming up here. Every damn province has come in with the rebels, and they're moving, they've gathered up more men than you'd think was in the south—I've seen them. I've seen things—" He dropped his voice and looked around, as a waiter passed. "We're sitting in the middle of this damn city—you know who this Saukendar is?"
"Warleader. On the outs with the Regent."
"He was damn popular. These aren't happy people. I'm telling you, twenty years in this country, and I know something, I know something scares hell out of me, sitting here in this town. This whole damn country's boiling up around us—that's what I'm feeling, all these damn
streets and every window just watching—I was in the riots back in P'eng. ..."
They shifted on the benches.
"It started over a cart in the street. The people up in P'eng, I saw them kill this poor sod of a regular with pitchforks—"
* * *
They were weaving when they walked away. Shoka kept a hand on Taizu's shoulders, but two drunks could hold each other up.
"You did fine," he said, squeezing hard. "You did fine, boy."
"I didn't do anything—"
"That was the fine part." A second squeeze of her shoulders. "Good. I'm proud of you."
"I'm all right."
"I know you are. We're going back to quarters, try not to get picked up for drunk and disorderly."
"Do we get him tonight?"
"Ill have a look at it after dark."
"We."
"No 'we.' You're too damn easy to spot. I'll handle it, I'll map everything out for you. You'll be along when it's the real thing."
"I don't trust you!"
"What kind of talk is that?"
"You're the best liar I know of."
He was still thinking about that, along the row of booths and along by the back way, among the restaurants, decidedly the best way for two drunken soldiers to slip back into the city streets.
Straight on down the row and around the corner, face to face with a foreign-looking man in a fur-trimmed cap. Whose eyes widened.
"No, you don't!" Shoka grabbed the man and shoved him up against the wall, holding him by a fistful of expensive Shin brocade, thinking about murder, just a dagger in the gut and silence thereafter—no matter he had drunk this man's tea and shared his fire.
Master Yi was evidently thinking about that too. He was shaking, his teeth chattering. "I don't know you," he said, "I swear, I don't know you!"
He was a fool not to kill the man. He knew that. A damned fool with thousands of lives riding on him. But it was an old man, a scared man, who pried weakly at his hands and looked as if he was going to die of shock.
He jerked the trader into the shadow of a wagon, less in the way of witnesses. Master Yi was gasping for air, and it was not even a close grip he had on him.
The Paladin Page 30