We ate our lunch sitting close together on the edge of the podium overlooking the old ornamental lake, which Calla referred to, with contemporary accuracy, as "the slough." I could not remember ever being happier, which was in itself curious; a greater curiosity was that Calla was happy too. It also occurred to me that she seemed rather more like a girl than usual, and was warm towards me to an extent that another man might have found encouraging, even seductive. Fortunately, however, I had the voice in the back of my head to tell me not to be a fool; no woman, especially a woman of Calla's spine and fibre, could possibly feel anything for me except tolerance, or friendship at best.
And so I enjoyed the warmth of the illusion, and was happy with her company, and instructed myself very firmly that whatever hopeless nonsense was starting to stir in the depths of my own heart must on no account be allowed to expose itself. I was just starting to realize that I would accept any kindness Calla was prepared to offer me, no matter how small, and be humbly grateful for it.
We finished our lunch and lay flat on our backs on the soft moss, looking up at the sky. After some desultory talk and a long drowsy silence, Calla said, "Tig?"
"Mmm?" I yawned.
"You've not had much to do with women, have you." This was a statement, not a question.
"Only my mother and my cousin Callefiya," I answered truthfully, "and you, in a way. Oh, I was supposed to be affianced a few years ago, some minor peeress in Sathelforn, but she didn't like the look of me, or didn't think a memorian was much of a match, even if I was a Scion of Oballef. If it had been Arko, now—but never mind that. No, I don't know much about women, except what I've read."
"You should have read less and done more," she said, rather sharply.
I turned over on my side to see her face. "Are you angry about something?"
"No. Not at all," she said. "Idiot," she added. She jerked herself upright. "There are clouds moving in—rain before evening, I shouldn't wonder. Come on, Lord of Gil, we'd better be going back."
We retraced our path in silence. Her gaiety had evaporated; mine had been smothered in bafflement. These sudden turnabouts of hers were intriguing, but you could hardly call them restful. I put a hand on her arm as we pushed through the thicket into the settlement, where the hovels were already casting long shadows across the mud. "There is something wrong, isn't there, Calla? Tell me what I said that upset you."
"It's nothing you said," she began impatiently. Then her eyes moved past my shoulder and widened with horror. I spun around.
A Sherkin patrol, at least ten-strong, had emerged from between two cottages. Trailing after them was a long queue of ragged Gilmen, linked together with chains and wooden neck-braces. They were silent, but their mouths were open with the strain of breathing; they stumbled corporately along like a wounded and many-legged beast.
"The levy!" Calla gasped. "Run, Tig!" She grabbed my hand, but an iron arm locked itself suddenly around my throat from behind and hoisted me almost off my feet. Calla clawed ineffectually at the gauntlet, then raised her talons higher, aiming no doubt to knock off the helmet and go for the eyes; but another trooper appeared behind her, lifted her bodily and threw her off to the side. I saw her land hard, very hard, and roll under the thicket, a limp bundle of clothing. Then the arm released me and I fell to my knees, gasping; something hard and cold snapped into place around my neck.
"Twenty-seven," said one of the troopers in Sheranik. "Another three, and we can go home. Get him on to the string." Then, in bad Gillish, "Move on, you lazy louse-ridden sons of cockroaches. In Iklankish they'll teach you how to work."
* * *
15
"MARCH!" IS WHAT they bellowed at us, but I would hardly call it marching. We staggered, mainly, jerked almost off our feet by the stumbles of our neighbours in the string, the collection of fetters around our necks half-throttling us with every tortured step. The braces were special agony, each being a thin hardwood plank about an arm's-length long with a hinged neck-hole at each end; we wore two, locking each of us into helpless partnership with the wretch ahead and the wretch behind. As well, there was a narrow iron neck-band linked to a chain that ran the length of the queue, which was used rather light-heartedly by the troopers to control our movements.
We were led like cattle all the way to the Gilgard, into something like a stockpen erected in the courtyard just inside the main gate of the castle; there were at least a dozen strings of Gilmen already there and others trailed us in. Our guards allowed us to slump down on to the hard pavement, but the neck-braces linking us were left in place, which forced us to sit as upright as if we were proud and healthy men. Impassive Gilwomen passed along the lines, handing out lumps of bread and ladling tepid water into our mouths.
"I won't go. I won't go. I won't go," the Gilman ahead of me was droning. He knocked away the bread and water when it was offered to him. The woman glanced around hastily, then bent and whispered in his ear. He turned his face away; his chant gained slightly in volume. She shook her head sadly and passed on.
"He's right," muttered the man behind me. "He won't go. He won't live long enough. Brislo, shut up!" His voice was more disgusted than pitying. I snapped my fingers over my shoulder to get his attention.
"What's happening? Where are we being taken?" I whispered.
"What's happening? It's the slave levy, you pocketing fool, what did you think? They'll march us to Malvi tonight, we'll be well on the way to Sher this time tomorrow. That's where we're going."
My heart turned into a kind of cold pudding behind my ribs. I had been hoping that I'd misunderstood that reference to Iklankish, or that the Sherkin had been speaking figuratively. It was a stupid thing to hope—the Sherank were notoriously literal-minded.
And so, we were being carried off to Iklankish: the quest was ending before it had even begun, my life would end in the salt pans of Sher, or deep in the killing mines near Iklankish, or high in the scaffolding of some pretentious new tower in the imperial warcourt. Lords Kekashr and Shree would win this battle without even knowing it. Despairing, I put my head in my hands.
"I won't go. I won't go, I won't go." The monotonous chant in front of me went on and on.
"Hark at Brislo," hissed the man behind me. "No wife, no children, two brothers to make sure his mam doesn't starve—what's he complaining about? What's he got to lose? He'll die before Malvi, and they'll hoick him out and pull some other poor sod off the street to make up the levy, maybe some poor sod with a wife and three children and ailing old folks and not another soul in the world to take care of them—"
I understood. "Like you, you mean?"
"Yes, damn you, like me." His voice broke on the final word.
We sat without speaking for what seemed like a long time. The last of the light bled out of the sky; the rain Calla had predicted was still holding off. A group of Sherkin troopers moved up and down the lines of prisoners, escorting a fat man in a long healer's robe, who prodded and kneaded and pulled back unresisting lips to inspect teeth as he went along. I don't know why he bothered; although a good third of this miserable company looked too frail for hard labour, and the others none too healthy either, not one Gilman was released as being unfit. They approached us from the rear of the line—the healer gave me a cursory glance and walked on, paused by mindless chanting Brislo in front, walked on again. One of the troopers stopped long enough to deliver the threnodist a kick in the teeth, which had only a temporary effect. Immediately the Sherkin was gone, the chant picked up again, slightly slurred. "I won't go. I won't go. I won't go." By this time I wanted to kick the poor fool myself.
When the inspection party was out of earshot, the man behind me hissed again. "You. You ahead. What about you?"
"What?"
"Who are you leaving behind? Who's going to starve without you?"
"Nobody in particular," I said. Perhaps everybody in general, I thought, although there was no cast-iron guarantee I'd have found the Lady anyway. I thought of Calla: was she still u
nder that hedge? Had they broken her neck, like a twig on a branch that just happened to get in their way? You'll never know, I told myself—and the spasm of pain at that realization was so sharp through the dull ache of my despair as to astonish even me.
"Nobody," I repeated out loud.
"Then you're one of the lucky ones," he said bitterly.
We waited. The moon rose from behind the Gilgard and was blotted again by clouds; the rain arrived, dripped morosely on to us for a wretched half hour or so, and then wandered off. Brislo continued to sing his doleful song, the man behind cursed or coaxed him now and then, but eventually lapsed into silence. We were counted several times and inspected once more, this time by a hard-faced Sherkin in civilian dress who made no comment beyond the look of distaste on his face. For an assemblage of perhaps four or five hundred men, we were strangely quiet: apathy, I suppose, resignation to the inescapable. Plus, of course, the fact that anyone who spoke above a whisper was promptly sought out and kicked in the face by one of the guards, all except my tireless chain-mate. "I won't go. I won't go. I won't go." Him, they left alone.
The levy, I found out later, was enforced at irregular intervals and never announced beforetimes. It was like one of those seasonal floods that erupts without warning down the dry watercourses of the desert, sweeping everything before it into oblivion. One moment, a man could be walking innocently down the street with his mind on his own business; the next, staggering under the weight of his chains and gasping for breath, cut off forever from home and friends, destined to be worked to death in Sher with no right of appeal, no hope of escape or rescue. We had heard of it in Exile—the Sherank used the levy system to recruit labour throughout the empire—but I had always imagined that some sort of selection was carried out, based on more than simply being in the wrong place at the moment the levy gangs passed by. It was, I now think, one of the crueller of the many cruelties of Iklankish, and I had walked straight into it.
The thought of rescue did cross my mind, but I discounted it at once. The Web's strength was in its deviousness, not its muscles. And I suspected, rightly, that it had been a very long time since any man had escaped the levy's neck-brace. Anyway, how would any potential rescuers know what had happened to me? Calla was dead, I was becoming surer of it. If I closed my eyes, I could see again with what terrible force she was tossed aside, the awkward angles of the bundle under the hedge. I ached for Bekri, for Gil, for the Web, for crazy Brislo, for Callefiya's and Arko's children who would someday follow me into this desperate madness; I even ached a little on my own account. Above all, I ached for Calla.
At last something seemed to be happening at the gate. I could not turn my head to see, but I could hear the jingle-and-swish of horse trappings and the thunder of many booted feet. A couple of troopers appeared at the head of each string and hauled mightily on the chains. Perforce, we staggered to our feet, most of us. Brislo did not.
"I won't go. I won't go."
The chain tautened with a jerk that nearly took our heads off and yanked us forwards a pace or two. I stumbled on something soft, but the neck-brace, now pulling downwards at a choking angle, prevented me from seeing what it was. I could guess. The chanting had stopped abruptly with the last pull on the chain; I suppose Brislo's neck had been broken instantly. I was being strangled by the weight on my neck-brace, and couldn't even cry out.
"Easy, now," whispered the man behind me, sounding a little strangled himself. "Hang on till they come. Keep breathing."
Why bother? It was friendly of him to suggest it, I told myself, but why bother? It seemed that bales of fleecy cotton lint were packing themselves around my head, muffling his voice, working into my nostrils and mouth and down my throat, not unpleasantly. I started to float—and then, with a monstrous click, the pressure fell away, air scalded into my lungs, the bales lifted off. "This one's still breathing," said a rough voice in Sheranik. "Hook him up again, we're wasting time."
Gasping, I stumbled forward with the rest. The archway of the great castle gate passed overhead. "You're lucky," said my friend behind me. "The poor bugger on the other side of Brislo was dead before they reached him."
Lucky, I thought. Some luck.
The streets were deep with mud, dark and deserted. There was nobody to watch us go by, unless the black squares of the tenement windows held covert eyes; nobody to hear our groans, the varied and imaginative threats of the guards, the maddening chorus of the chains. The rain returned as a steady cold drizzle.
Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot—there was no feeling left in either, but my legs kept on labouring to shift them. I believe I even fell asleep without breaking the corrosive rhythm of that march, for I seemed at one time to be flying free of my body and soaring high above the tenement roofs, watching a long, blind black worm coil its way through the rain-glossed labyrinth of the city. I tried to pick out the dark head that was myself, but the procession was too long, there were too many to choose from.
"Wake up, son. If you fall over, you'll throttle us both."
I blinked and was back again in my raw-necked, leaden-chested body, wet to the skin. "Thank you," I said ungratefully to the man behind me; right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot.
At a bend in the road, the troopers stopped each string in turn and mercifully struck off the long chain. It was a token, I suppose, that they wanted us to survive at least as far as Malvi. Lightened by that much, I was able to look around—and recognized the Swan's Neck, where Calla and I had left the road only that morning. Behind those hovels, I told myself, Calla's body might still be lying. The rain on my face turned salty.
They marched us all the way to Malvi that night. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. The last stretch was done in a dream, not so pleasant as the flying one, wherein the houses rising on the outskirts of Malvi became pitchy maws opened on some sort of terrifying chaos—the details were hazy. I wakened fully only when the road ended at a broad fortified square, already striped with the queues that had arrived before us. The air was fresh and tangy; I raised my eyes and saw the ship that would take us to Iklankish.
Great Lady in Gil, I said to myself. My mission in ruins, Calla probably dead, failure behind me, slavery and death ahead of me, and now they wanted to put me on a ship. Dire memories arose of my journey to Gil: the wretchedness, the tempestuous gut, the inexhaustible supply of vomit. It was finally too much. I rested my chin on the neck-brace and began to laugh.
"Oh, damn. You're not going mad too, are you?" Through my whoops, I barely heard the man behind me. "Quick, son, tell me your name."
I laughed harder. "My name? I'm Lord Tigrallef of Gil," I bubbled, "Son of Cirallef, Scion of Oballef, second in line to the throne of Gil."
"And I'm the Queen of Callon," he said acidly. "What is your name?"
I sobered a little. "Call me Tig."
"Tig, then. Stop laughing. They'll beat you bloody if they notice you, but they'll never let you go. Get that through your thick skull. Now tell me about yourself."
His tone was commanding enough to clear my head. I stopped laughing. "I have a brother named Arko," I said, "who lost one leg in an accident. My father died long ago, but my mother refuses to believe it. There was a woman I was very fond of, but I think she's dead too. I'm not a hero, and I get terribly seasick."
I felt his hand on my forearm. "An infusion of calfgrass is good for that—too bad we haven't got any." He was quiet for a moment and then began to talk in a low voice: home, wife and children, old parents, a brother taken in the last levy, three years ago. Tragic, but listening to him was oddly calming, and I have no doubt that he saved my mind that morning, although at the time it hardly seemed like a favour. We talked on in murmurs until a sudden horn-blast brought a hush to the concourse. The next moment, the guards were among us, beating us to our feet.
"Here we go," muttered my friend.
Our string was the fifth to be herded towards the quay. The ship was a big wind-galley, black and forbidding
in the sickly moonlight, two banks of oars, masts like towers. At the foot of the gangplank stood a Gillish clerk with a writing palette, an officer with a squad of troopers and, off to the side, a tall still figure enveloped in a hooded cloak. Right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot; the gangplank approached. I looked up and saw the ship's black mouth swallowing the last men of another string. Our turn next.
"Tig!"
A trick of the ears, surely, but very clear. Startled, I snapped my head around in the neck-brace. The officer by the gangplank caught the movement and pointed at me. "That one!"
He approached with the clerk. Both of them peered dubiously into my face. I lifted my eyes and looked at them squarely with the last of my strength.
The clerk said in Sheranik, "He fits the description well enough, sir. And it's a string that was levied near the slough."
"Well, all right, they all look the same to me, the buggers, but if he fits the description—"
They turned to look behind them at the hooded figure. It nodded.
Rough gauntlets on my shoulders; a wrench, and the neck-braces fell away, one after the other. I staggered, unaware until that second how much I had depended on their support. Hands seized me from behind and dragged me out of the string, shoved me towards the cloaked figure. The string moved on. I could see the back of my friend's head as he stumbled away from me up the gangplank. I never saw his face. I never knew his name.
"Wait," I cried, but I was spun around by the hooded man and frogmarched through a small gate at the near end of the compound. We came out into the narrow streets of Malvi, still deserted at that hour; my companion, whose fingers dug into my arm, said nothing. A fresh terror took me—why was I, alone of five hundred, excused from the levy? They knew my name, they knew who I was, that was the only possible explanation: Lord Kekashr was claiming another Scion. Suddenly I knew I would far rather be on that ship, anonymous and puking my belly up, than back in the Gilgard in the governor's personal care.
Gil Trilogy 1: Lady in Gil Page 11