The City

by Stella Gemmell

  The next day the six boys were arrested and charged with killing the emperor’s dogs, for which the penalty was death.

  Chapter 22

  It was just before dawn at Old Mountain and the sun still lingered below the jagged horizon. The sky above was the colour of opals but the land was dark. The mountains all around were painted in various shades of black, crowned or capped in wet grey mist. Between them the deep valleys, clothed in lush rainforest, lay waiting for the sun to adorn them in shining droplets of diamond and pearl.

  Indaro was dressed in leathers and furs, but the moisture from the low-hanging clouds had seeped through the gaps in her clothing, dripping from her hair down under her collar, trickling into her boots. Her feet were bare in the fur-lined boots, because she liked to feel the soft rabbit pelt between her toes, but she had been standing on the mountain for more than an hour and the coney was starting to feel clammy against her skin.

  She cleared her mind of thoughts of discomfort and closed her eyes. She could feel the sun’s growing light on her face and soon she would feel its warmth. This was the fifth morning in a row she had made the long climb in semi-darkness up to the top of the mountain, hoping to see the sunrise. Sheeting rain and heavy cloud had been her reward on four occasions. Mason had predicted she would be lucky today, and it appeared he was right. Indaro stretched her spine, lifting her face, ready for the touch of the sun’s rays. Nudged by the movement, a cold trickle of cloudwater ran down her back and she shuddered. She cleared her mind again and waited for the sun.

  She waited and waited then, rising impatience bursting through her practised calm, she opened her eyes. Out of nowhere the mist to the east had thickened. Ahead of her the Gate of the Sun—the deep cleft between the mountains where the new sun should appear—had completely vanished under a blanket of cold dark cloud. There would be no sunrise today. Again.

  Behind Indaro the two girls giggled and she turned and frowned down at them.

  “I don’t know why you think this is funny,” she said grumpily. “It means you’ll both have to climb up here again tomorrow.”

  They laughed out loud then, as though they could guess what she said. They both jumped up and, gesturing for her to follow, started bounding back down the mountain, confident and sure-footed in their hide boots despite the poor light. She trailed down more slowly, watching her feet, knowing they would have to wait for her to catch up. They were supposed to be her guards, after all.

  This morning marked the end of her hundredth day of captivity.

  At first she had tried to escape. In her small white cell there was a window, open and unbarred, high above her head, and she spent fruitless hours plotting how to reach it and wasted all her energy trying to do so. There was no furniture in the little room, only a clean mattress to sleep on and a bucket. Try as she might, she could find no way of fashioning an escape device with a soft mattress and a wooden bucket. But frustration led her to throw herself at the wall, leaping over and over again to reach the high sill. Twice she knocked herself out, and in compassion or perhaps irritation her captors finally moved her to a cell with no windows.

  She had spent the first days in the prison at Old Mountain fearing the horrors of torture and slow death, then, as these fears slowly faded, they were replaced by anxiety for Doon and Fell and the others. But it was more than a month before she was able to ask after her friends, for none of her captors spoke her tongue. The women were small and neat, with dark skin and eyes, dressed uniformly in wool shirts and skirts, and they smiled at her when they brought her food and emptied the bucket. After a while she started talking to them, telling them about her father and the grey house on the Salient, and her brother Rubin, and her friendship with Doon, but she did not speak of the war or the battles she had endured. They listened to her politely, and she watched their eyes as she spoke, occasionally saying something to shock or surprise, but their faces stayed polite but bland and she truly believed they did not understand her.

  On the first chill morning of autumn she had spent a sleepless night trying to keep warm under thin blankets when there was a knock at her cell door and, after a courteous delay, a man walked in carrying a pile of blankets and a second mattress.

  He placed them on the bed, saying, “You’ll need these. The nights will get colder.”

  Backed against the wall, she watched him, afraid for the first time in weeks. A man who spoke her language, and could understand her words. Would the interrogation start now? Was he what they were waiting for?

  He looked around. “I meant to bring a stool to sit on,” he told her, then shrugged and sat on the floor, his back to the closed door. He was beyond middle-age, burly, clean-shaven, with grey hair and a lantern jaw.

  “My name is Mason,” he said.

  She was silent, and he added, “And you are Indaro Kerr Guillaume.”

  A thousand times she had contemplated her interrogation, particularly in the dark hours at dead of night, and she had resolved to say nothing, ask nothing. But, lulled by her treatment thus far, she found herself asking, “What of my friends? Are they alive?”

  Mason nodded. “They are very much alive. Stalker had surgery on his ankle. He may be walking again soon, though he will always carry a limp, the surgeon tells me.”

  He watched her, waiting for another question, a comment, but she was silent and she remained wordless for many days.

  Climbing back down the mountain in the dawn light she broke out from the jumble of thick vegetation onto the lip of a path where her two guards waited for her before plunging down the final stretch to their mountain home. Indaro paused, as she always did. Old Mountain sat on a sloping saddle of rock slung between two mountain peaks. At the highest end of the saddle were low grey buildings huddled around a massive stone keep. Lower down, to the west, the land sloped more steeply and had been terraced to offer flat terrain for crops. Sheep and goats were brown and white dots. On either side of the saddle, the cliffs dropped vertically to deep green river valleys far below. There was only one way up to Old Mountain, she had been told, which is why it had never been conquered. Taken by treachery, besieged and starved out, but never conquered.

  Indaro looked around her at the jagged green and grey peaks stretching off into the distance on all sides. She could hear nothing but a distant bleating. She took a deep draught of morning air. Its cleanness and clarity fizzed through her veins like wine, and she wanted to laugh out loud. The two girls looked up at her.

  “Let’s go,” she told them, and together they walked back down to her prison.

  After that first visit Mason came to see her most days. She refused to speak to him and he seemed not to mind. He was happy to listen to his own voice, telling her stories of Old Mountain, tales of his childhood, musing on philosophy and history and the music of the stars. He seldom asked her questions, but when he did and she did not answer he would nod to himself, as if she had said something insightful, then carry on talking. She wondered who he was and why he was devoting so much time to a common soldier. He had been a warrior himself, she was sure, by the way he held himself and by his vocabulary. He spoke with no accent, and could have blended easily with the residents in the City. He was not dark-skinned like her little guards or the leader of the riders who had brought them here. But the enemy came in many skin shades. Mason was not a cruel man, she decided, but neither was he her friend.

  One day he stopped coming, and she missed his visits more than she would have expected. The subsequent days crept by with appalling slowness until one morning a guard, whom she called Gala, entered the cell with a pile of books in her arms. She squatted and placed them neatly in the corner of the cell and, gesturing to them, said, “Mase.” She tipped her head and Indaro nodded. “Mason,” she said. “From Mason.”

  They were all on the subject she had listened to him talk about so many times—the history of Old Mountain and its people. But their range was wider and deeper, and the books dealt with not only far-ago history but more recent days,
their allied neighbours, and politics. Reading for hours each day she absorbed the stories uncritically. And when she first read about the City she did not recognise it immediately, for it had another name. When she realised what she was reading about she threw the book down in disgust. On Gala’s next visit Indaro pressed the books into her arms and gestured for her to take them away. She was offended that Mason believed her so naïve, such an easy dupe.

  The next day he arrived at her cell at the usual time, the wooden stool in one hand.

  “You didn’t want the books I sent you?” he asked, seating himself against the door.

  “I am not a fool, Mason,” she said, although she knew it was pride talking and he had used it against her to make her speak.

  “I was not aware I had treated you like one.”

  She convinced herself she was justified in speaking in defence of the City.

  “I am not a child to be influenced by…fantasies of the tyrannical City and the peace-loving Blues.”

  He shrugged and spread his hands. “I thought you must be bored and I found some books for you. This is a fortress, not your Great Library. There were few books to be had, particularly in your tongue. I’m sure you are familiar with all the arguments for and against the war, and whether it can be prolonged without the deaths of all of us. I’m sure these are common currency among both our peoples, in inns and homes throughout the City as they are in our own. I did not seek to offend you by offering you such familiar arguments.”

  She thought he was mocking her, and she looked at him narrowly and did not reply. She resolved to speak no more.

  As if he knew what was in her mind he stood and picked up the stool. “We have started off badly today. I shall go away and come back tomorrow.”

  As a soldier she had cursed the City daily, as was her right, but she would not listen to an enemy criticise her home or belittle the sacrifice of so many of her comrades. She grew angry thinking about it, yet when Mason next visited she found it impossible to harness that anger to her cause.

  When he had settled himself on his wooden stool, he said, “You call your enemy Blues, or Blueskins, yet in fact there are a dozen nations and cities allied against the City. The Odrysian alliance alone includes Buldekki, Fkeni, Panjali, even some remaining Garians.”

  She said, “The first great battle we fought was against the Tanaree tribesmen who painted their faces with blue dye. When others joined their fight we just kept calling them Blueskins. You call us Rats. It is a convenient way to speak of the enemy. It has no significance.”

  “Dunghill Rats. Yes, we do call you that. Do you know when that first battle was?”

  “Long ago. Before the City came under siege.”

  “It was many centuries ago. The City had encroached on tribal lands over the centuries, arrogantly taking minerals for its furnaces, and livestock for the citizens’ bellies. The Tanaree were a harsh people with unforgiving ways. They practised vendetta even among themselves. Then they chose a leader who declared that for each tribesman killed they would kill ten City warriors. So the City poured more soldiers into the area. The Tanaree are all dead now, long since wiped out.”

  “It is a foolish thing, to take on the City,” said Indaro proudly.

  Mason shook his head. “A millennium ago the City lived in harmony with its neighbours. Now it is a great bloated spider which has killed most of them and sits in the midst of a wasteland. For hundreds of leagues around it the land has been fought over so many times that the land is barren, home only to the dead and dying. This is what you are fighting for, Indaro.”

  “The City wants peace, but peace with honour.” It was a well-worn phrase. But she thought of the generals, and the contempt in which they were held by the common soldier, for the way they threw thousands of troops away on hare-brained schemes and doomed ventures. And she knew it was a lie.

  “There can never be peace while Araeon is emperor,” Mason replied.

  Indaro was offended by an enemy’s casual use of the emperor’s name. “You speak of peace yet you attack us on all sides. Most of my friends and comrades, most of the people I have ever known, have died at your hands. You will only be content when the City has fallen and all its people are dead.”

  He shook his head again. “We do not want that. Many of us respect the City and its history. But Araeon places himself behind the walls of the Keep, in the centre of the Red Palace, deep in the heart of the City. He hides behind his people. They die for him in their thousands. And we will not rest until he is dead.”

  “We?” she repeated. “Who is ‘we’? Do you claim to represent the Blues, Mason? Here in this abandoned fortress at the arse-end of nowhere? Are you speaking for the allied Blueskin armies?” she asked mockingly.

  He answered her gravely. “Yes, I do represent the Blues, some of them anyway, some men who still have power and influence. And this old fort was chosen deliberately. It might not look impressive now, but it was once the centre of a great kingdom. Perhaps it will be again. If our plans to end the war are successful.”

  What plans, she wanted to ask. But she would not give him the satisfaction. Instead she said, “The Immortal craves peace, but not on his enemy’s terms.”

  He laughed. “Have you met the Immortal?” he asked. “You are so certain you know what is in his mind.” He leaned forward. “Would you even know the emperor if you saw him?”

  Indaro thought back to the ill-fated day when she and Broglanh had joined the Thousand. It seemed like years ago. She remembered a fair man, bearded, tall. A man who was certainly dead now, whoever he was.

  “I saw him recently,” she said.

  Mason looked at her thoughtfully. He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I know people, people who are now very old,” he said slowly, as if choosing his words carefully, “who told me of the City when it was at its peak, a beacon of civilisation in a barbaric time. All its people were literate and its schools and libraries educated the world. The City’s parks were legendary, stocked with rare and endangered animals. Its buildings were roofed with bronze and copper. The great river flowed through the centre, not underground as a sewer, as it is now. It was a thoroughfare for great ships from cities beyond the seas.”

  She shook her head. “You are speaking of a place which never existed, except in children’s storybooks, or in someone’s hopes and dreams.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted. “But it is in decline. You cannot deny that. And all the while Araeon lives the City will continue that decline.”

  She leaned forward and spat out, “You are the reason for the City’s decline, our enemy, the Blueskins. The Immortal wants only peace for his people.”

  Mason smiled thinly. “Then why did he start the war?”

  “The war had been going on for centuries. You cannot blame the emperor for that.”

  “How long has he ruled, Indaro?”

  “I don’t know. A very long time. He was emperor when I was small. I saw him once at my father’s house.”

  “How old was he then?”

  She thought about it. “Perhaps in his thirties, forties. I was a child and my mind’s eye is probably unreliable.”

  “And when you saw him recently?”

  “A man in his fifties,” she said, remembering the Immortal climbing into the black carriage, his hair golden, or was it silver? “Sixty maybe.”

  “Yet you told me this emperor is the only ruler your father has ever known. How old is your father?”

  Had she said that? Her father was very old, by far the oldest man she knew. She didn’t like to admit she didn’t know.

  Mason said, “He is an old man. He had a wife before your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than one?”

  “Yes.”

  “And children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know them, these children of former wives?”

  “They are all dead, I believe.”

  She was uncertain. The e
mperor must be older than her father, yet the man she saw was only half his age. She remembered a phrase used by the old wives who gossiped in the kitchens of the Salient—“back when the Immortal was a boy.” It always meant time out of mind, unknown ages ago. But it was just an expression.

  She recalled a conversation with Fell. She said to Mason, trying to sound authoritative, “The emperor has decoys, proxies, maybe many of them. The chances are the man I saw was not the emperor.”

  “You are missing the point. Your father is, what, eighty or more? So the emperor must be older than that. Yet these decoys are younger men. A baffling royal policy.”

  “Perhaps the emperor is vain and he prefers to wear a younger public face. It would be surprising if he did not. Men have their vanities.”

  “But by that thinking he can never afford to be seen in public, if he is in his dotage and his proxies are men in their prime.”

  “Perhaps that is the case,” she replied, feeling uneasy. She wondered again why Mason came to the cell every day, spending time with her, trying to change her perception of the City and its emperor. What did it matter to him what she believed?

  “What is your argument?” she asked him. “That the Immortal has been emperor for longer than the ages of men? Perhaps,” she smiled, joking, “he is immortal?”

  When he made no reply, simply raising his eyebrows, she said impatiently, “Only the weak-minded and superstitious believe he cannot die. It is merely a title. He is a man, like you.”

  “No, Indaro, I’m not saying the emperor is immortal. But he is not a man like me.”

  Fell’s cell was built of cold stone, and its small barred window looked out onto the central courtyard of the keep at ground level. When it rained hard, and it rained a lot in Old Mountain, water ran in through the window, flowed across the floor and out under the heavy wooden door. The room was too small for the three soldiers, and it was cold, and the damp sank into their bones as the days cooled further. Garret had developed a racking cough. Stalker had not recovered as well after his surgery as Fell had hoped, and the northlander spent most of his days lying on his bed staring at the low ceiling. Each of them had a thin mattress, raised on a pallet above the damp floor, and they were fed regularly if frugally.