by Dave Duncan
“The gods be with you, my lady,” said a Joalian voice.
She spun around. Piol Poet sat on a bench outside the inn door, legs outstretched, back against the wall. He was munching on a roll.
“And with you, my lord.” She smiled at him and joined him. The journey had done wonders for Piol, but whether it was rest, food, or just a sense of purpose that deserved the credit, she did not know. His eyes were brighter, his skin less jaundiced. A clean new robe certainly helped, and his turban was neatly bound.
He tore the doughy bread in two and gave her half. “Lots more where this came from. Be off with you!” he snapped at the beggars.
She bit, eying him thoughtfully. “You’ve got news.”
He pouted. “Am I so horribly transparent?”
“No, I am excessively perceptive. Tell me.”
He finished a mouthful with the patience of the toothless. “I have ascertained that the Tion Champions are in town, and there is to be a festival next fortnight in commemoration of—”
“Never mind all that! What have you learned about the Liberator?”
He raised a silvery eyebrow. “I thought you wanted me to be your manager in the furtherance of your artistic career?”
“Later. First, what news of D’ward?”
He sighed. “Eleal, why are you so concerned about him?”
“He’s an old friend! I mean, those days in Suss were the most exciting time of my life. There’s nothing wrong in wanting to meet up with an old friend, is there? Now, what’s the news?”
He frowned at her doubtfully. “It makes sense now. The winds of truth have winnowed the chaff of rumor.”
“Spare me the poetry.” She caught his hand as he moved to take another bite. “Talk first.”
He chuckled at her impatience. “He’s been here, in Niol! He was seen in the temple. He’s also been reported in the queen’s palace, but that story seems altogether too farfetched. It does sound as if he came into the city three nights ago, went to the temple, and pulled the priests’ noses. Then he ran away before they could catch him. The next night he was at Shuujooby.”
“Doing what?”
“Preaching heresy.”
“Oh!”
Piol shook his head sadly. “Can’t say I’m surprised, not really. He was never a strong supporter of the gods, you know. Remember, he wouldn’t go to the temple with you when you went to give thanks to Tion for your safe deliverance?”
That’s right, she thought, he didn’t. And when the high priest summoned him to the temple, he ran away altogether, so her leg didn’t get cured. But to support those awful heretics! T’lin Dragontrader had joined them, too, she remembered. The last time she had met him, they had quarreled over that.
“Well, I certainly will have nothing to do with heresy!” she said firmly. “I believe in the gods!” After all, her father was one.
“So we can forget about D’ward?” Piol beamed with relief.
“No!” Again she waylaid the bread on its way to the old pest’s mouth. “If he’s a heretic, why isn’t he being thrown in jail?”
“Well, that is an interesting question! The queen sent her household cavalry to arrest him at Shuujooby. Apparently there was some fighting, just as the Testament predicts, but the accounts vary from hangnail to hangman, as they say here. In the end the guard failed to obey orders and most of them threw in their lot with the man they were supposed to apprehend.”
“That doesn’t sound likely.”
Piol shrugged his thin shoulders. “It sounds like a miracle. There are rumors of other miracles, too.” He hesitated, then added softly, “They say he is healing sick people, Eleal—and cripples.”
With professional skill, she suppressed an impending shiver and laughed scornfully. “But you don’t believe such tales, do you?”
“I don’t know.” Piol frowned and bit on his roll. Mouth full, he mumbled, “We have seen miracles of healing in Tion’s temple…. All these stories are incredible, yet they seem to hang together too well to be completely wrong.”
She nibbled at her own hunk of bread. “So where is he now?”
“Yesterday he left Shuujooby on the road to Mamaby…. If he keeps up his progress, then today he’ll be going on to Joobiskby, and tomorrow he’ll head over Lospass to Jurgvale.”
If Piol Poet wasn’t adding that he’d advised her just to wait in Jurgvale until the Liberator arrived, that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it. Bother! It had taken them days to come from Joobiskby. If D’ward ever got ahead of her, she would have to chase after him, and he was obviously covering the ground much faster than a sloth did. Almost anything would, of course, and she did not own a sloth anymore anyway.
Eleal sighed. “Speak up, old man. You’re my strategist. Advise me.”
Piol chewed for a long time. She curbed her impatience until he was ready.
“My advice to you, Eleal Singer, would be to go on to Joal, as you said you would, or else let me arrange some auditions here. In some of the temples, perhaps. Niol also has many fine pleasure gardens where an artist may earn a good living with her art, not with—”
“Forget that. How do I catch the Liberator now?”
He sighed deeply. “You always were a wayward child, you know. Follow the crowds, I suppose. And they are heading for Lospass.”
“Crowds?”
“Hundreds of people are going to hear the Liberator. They’re leaving their jobs, their friends, their families….”
“You have been busy, old man! How long have you been up and about? Never mind that. We can’t go on foot, either of us. How?”
With his mouth full, Piol mumbled, “There are people organizing wagon trains. One silver star there. Two for a return ticket.”
“That’s daylight robbery!”
He chuckled wheezily. “I’d pay the two, I think. The return price may be a lot more when they’ve got you there.”
“We’ll pay for one-way trips,” Eleal said firmly, “and worry about the future when it comes.”
35
A tusk ox walked faster than a sloth, but not as fast as a man. All day Eleal watched in frustration as people on foot caught up with the wagon, passed it, and eventually disappeared into the distance ahead. Were it not for her deformed leg, she would be out there too, striding along with the best of them. It was all D’ward’s fault.
Piol had been well-informed when he reported that hundreds were going to see the Liberator, for the southbound traffic was much greater than the northbound—and not merely foot traffic, either. The wealthy swept by on moas or rabbits or in coaches pulled by them, spraying dust or mud. For the first time Eleal wondered if this legendary crowd-drawer might not be the same boy she had known. D’ward had always tried to avoid attention, not attract it. He had been retiring, almost shy—although a wonderful actor, of course. Among all these people, how was she ever going to get close to him for a private little chat about old times?
Having been queried to death by the mob ahead, the meager wayfarers heading back toward the city were mostly uninformative, responding to shouted questions with oaths or angry silence. A few reported that the Liberator had reached Mamaby yesterday and might either be still there or have gone on to Joobiskby and Lospass. One or two spoke briefly of miracles, but none claimed to have actually witnessed one.
The ox’s name was Tawny. Its owner, shuffling along at its ear, was a grubby, somewhat battered-looking man named Podoorstak Carter. Eleal had seen his like around the Cherry
Blossom House often enough to be very glad she had not prepaid her return journey. The lumbering, bone-rattling wagon had been smelly even when it set out. After a day of baking sunshine, packed to suffocation with fourteen people, it reeked. Its cargo included two elderly nuns, who spoke only to each other in whispers. A very loud matronly lady, whose son had been slain by a reaper, wanted to give the Liberator her blessings and wise counsel on his campaign to slay Death. An addlepated, hunchbacked young man babbled nonsense about prophecies,
rolling his eyes and slobbering. A girl of thirteen who had seen a vision she must describe to the Liberator was accompanied by her proud mother. There was a very sick baby, clutched by an underfed, worried-to-death woman who hoped that the Liberator might bring death to Death before her child died. The baby coughed a lot and threw up everything the woman fed it. There were two overweight, green-robed priests of Padlopan, the Niolian aspect of Karzon, who indicated grimly that they were going to beat the heretical manure out of the Liberator as soon as they got their hands on him. Unfortunately, their neighbors were an elderly couple wearing the gold ear circle of the Undivided. Their conversation with the priests was strained.
Healthy, wholesome people had gone on foot or stayed home.
The priests and the nuns, of course, were intent on stamping out heresy, and therefore traveling on the gods’ business. They regarded their companions as wastrels, sensation seekers, and potential heretics. When Eleal explained that she hoped to use her former friendship with the Liberator to recall him to the true faith, their manners improved a little. But not much. She did not mention that she was the Eleal of the Filoby Testament.
Lubberly lot though they all were, they were a potential audience, and no true artist could resist an audience. So Eleal sang for them from time to time. They all seemed to enjoy that, excepting the baby and the straitlaced nuns. Later, she and Piol performed brief excerpts from some of his plays, and everyone enjoyed those except the priests, the baby, and the girl with the vision, who had an epileptic seizure halfway through Hollaga’s Farewell.
The wagon rolled ever more slowly as the tusk ox tired, but evening came at last, bringing them to Joobiskby. It had been a sleepy, peaceful little place when Eleal and Piol had slothed their way through it a few days ago, but now the only thing she could recognize was the spire of the temple. The inhabitants, male and female both, had built a barricade across the road and manned it, brandishing forks and mattocks to repel the intruders. It was fortunate that the harvest had been gathered in and the paddies, which in spring and summer had been thigh-deep in water, had dried to mere mud at this time of year, for the horde of visitors had trampled over everything, knocking down hedges and dykes, leaving a wasteland.
Podoorstak halted the wagon a cautious quarter mile or so away from the ramparts, at the end of a long line of parked carts and coaches. The bored drivers and servants left to guard them ignored these latest arrivals.
“Ain’t going no nearer,” Podoorstak announced. “We’ll leave from here at dawn, them as wants to come. Fend for yourselves till then.”
His passengers burst into complaint, but to no avail. Obviously the village was sealed and his ox could not drag the wagon through the soupy morass that surrounded it. Sighing, Eleal scrambled down and offered a hand to Piol. It was good to be out of the wagon at last, but she was not looking forward to the last stage of the journey. Her ultimate destination was obviously a small hillock to the north, for there the crowds had gathered. That must be where the Liberator was.
Piol wanted to carry their little pack; she insisted on taking it. Side by side, they clambered over the remains of a ditch and set off across the fields. They moved more slowly than most, faster than some, and still pilgrims were arriving behind them. The going was hard—red mud sucking at her boots with every step.
An old refrain was going around and around in her head: Woeful maiden, handsome lad…. She had not heard that song in years.
“How many?” She puffed.
“Thousands! Can’t see them all from here.” Piol chuckled wheezily. “Trong never drew a house like this one. We should have kept D’ward in the troupe!”
His good humor shamed her. “But are these people the audience or the extras, old man? Even Trong couldn’t have directed so many.”
The situation seemed more and more hopeless the closer she came to the hillock. There was a building on the crest of it, perhaps an old shrine. The flanks supported a few scattered trees, but whatever else they might have borne—grass or fences or berry bushes—had vanished under the human tide.
“This is madness! What do they all want? Just to see him or touch him?”
“The madness of multitudes,” Piol murmured. His eyes were bright with a faraway look she could recall from her childhood, a sign of inspiration at work. “It will pass. Nectar-ants swarm so in spring. The Liberator is their queen and they must be as near him as they can.”
“If he speaks, most of them won’t even be able to hear.”
“But he is something new in their lives. They will go home and tell all their friends. And when the world doesn’t turn upside down in a fortnight, they will forget him. It will pass.”
As they reached the trampled lower slopes of the knoll, and then the edge of the horde, Piol took hold of Eleal’s hand. There they stopped, seeing that any attempt to push into the throng would be not only fruitless but dangerous. She could hear a menacing rumble mixed in with the normal crowd buzz as those higher on the hillock resisted efforts to displace them or pack them tighter. Already more people were jostling in at her back. She exchanged rueful glances with the old man—neither of them was exactly tall. They would not even see the Liberator, let alone hear him. She assumed that he would speak. He would have to do something or the crowd would riot.
“Sh!” said a few hundred voices all around her. Someone was making an announcement. She could not make out the words, but she sensed that the crowd was breaking up, somewhere off to the right.
A moment later, she heard the speaker again, and this time he was closer.
“There is food available around the other side. The Liberator will speak now, and later he will speak again for those of you who did not hear. Go and eat now, and come back.”
Eleal and Piol exchanged questioning glances. They had thought to bring food, so they were not hungry. How many would be tempted away?
Then the speaker came in sight, walking around the outside of the gathering. He was a short, fair-haired youth, wearing only a loincloth, burdened with a leather satchel and a large round shield slung on his back. Slight though he was, he projected well. He made his proclamation yet again.
The crowd began to roil, some fighting their way out to go in search of the promised meal, others pushing in to take their places higher on the hillock. Dragging Piol behind her, Eleal lurched over to the herald. She banged a hand on his shield just before he disappeared.
“You!”
He turned around and regarded her with soft blue eyes. His face was drawn with fatigue and reddened by the day’s sun; he was spattered with mud. She expected annoyance, but he spoke with surprising patience. “Sister? How may I help?”
“I need to speak with the Liberator.”
He even managed a smile, although her request was obviously insane, and raked fingers through curls that might be pure gold on a better day. “We all do. I have been trying to get a word with him myself for three days. I wish I could be more helpful.”
Eleal was impressed. He was really very cute. He would make an excellent Tion in the right sort of play.
“I am Eleal.”
A guarded expression fell over his face like a visor. “Sister, I am very honored—”
“Really I am. The Eleal of the Filoby Testament. I cared for him and washed him…almost five years ago. I want to see him again.”
A faint smile of doubt. “Do you know his name? Can you describe him?”
“His name is D’ward. He is tall. He has black hair, quite wavy, and the bluest eyes I have ever seen. When I knew him, he was very—lean, I suppose is the nice way of describing it. I expect he will have put on weight since then.”
The boy clicked his teeth shut. “No, he hasn’t. You are Eleal!” He fell on his knees in the mud.
“Er…” Eleal looked to Piol for guidance. He seemed equally astounded. The milling bystanders had noticed, and a ring of the curious was solidifying around them.
“Don’t kneel to me!” she said firmly. She found that strang
ely disturbing. “Get up, please! But I would like to see my old friend.”
The boy stood up, having trouble managing the big shield. He glanced around at the audience. “A moment!” He made his proclamation again, and again the people within earshot began stirring like vegetables in a boiling stew pot.
He turned back to Eleal, biting his lip. “I cannot get you to him now. After he has spoken the second time, he will bid the crowd disperse or sleep. Then we have a—” He smiled a rueful smile. “Well, usually we have a meeting. The numbers are becoming so great that I can’t even count on that today. But look for me, or for people carrying shields like this. Tell any of them what you have told me, or tell them I said so. My name is Dosh Envoy. I am sure that they will get you to the Liberator then.”
It was as much as she could have hoped for. “I thank you, Dosh Envoy.”
He nodded. “The blessings of the Undivided upon you, sister.” Then he eased his way off through the crowd.
She would have to be content with that, and she supposed she would not die of impatience. Her craving to meet D’ward again seemed to be growing stronger all the time. The closer she came to him, the more eager she felt.
36
Some of the places D’ward chose to pitch camp were bizarre, but Dosh could not have faulted the knoll at Joobiskby. It was a natural theater, for the little ruin at the top made an excellent stage and the slopes could have held even more thousands than had turned up. The problem was not the campsite but the wind and the size of the multitude. Loud as D’ward could be, he could not make his voice carry upwind. Those who had heard the first sermon—a necessarily brief one—were reluctant to move away and make room for others who had not. The lower slopes were muddier than the top, an unsavory place to sleep.
Patience. Understanding. Tact. Above all, patience.
Even with a manageable crowd, the shield-bearers would have had trouble, for they were all new at the job, other than Dosh himself and the two surviving Nagians. D’ward had appointed the shield-bearers the previous evening to replace the Warband, naming four women and six men, promising to add more soon. He had chosen well, Dosh believed, but dedication was no substitute for experience. Even Prat’han and his brothers would have been out of their depth shepherding this multitude. In retrospect, the band that had followed the Liberator through Nosokvale and Rinoovale seemed like a family on an outing—already those were the good old days, fond memories shining through golden haze. Now the greater burden had fallen on shoulders unprepared to take it. Dosh had not been off his feet since dawn; Tielan Trader and Doggan Herder were doing their best, but they were still numb with grief and shame at being alive.