by David Drake
“At any rate, they're just folks,” Cashel said, going on with his train of thought aloud. He was used to being alone except for sheep most of the tune. He'd gotten into the habit of talking to himself, because otherwise he mightn't hear a human voice between sunup and sundown.
“That's right,” said Tilphosa. “You can't blame them for being wary of strangers. And the city's right ahead, they say.”
She spoke with more enthusiasm than the Cashel guessed she felt, but they were both trying to put a bright face on a tiring day that didn't want to end. It was late in the afternoon. They could sleep rough in this dank landscape if they had to, but it wasn't something Cashel was going to do for choice.
The road was on top of a causeway, built up arm's length above the surrounding land. It was wide enough for a cart to travel it, but Cashel doubted that any did: there were no wheel ruts in the clay surface, anyhow. Mats woven from the osiers growing in waste patches everywhere about held the sides in place, and pilings rammed down at double-pace intervals on either side anchored the mats.
This wasn't a wasteland, though. The whole route was bordered by terraced fields where an unfamiliar sort of grain grew in neat rows from standing water. A heavy fog lay over the marshes, concealing the dwellings that Cashel was sure must lie on the other side of the fields. That probably didn't matter, because he guessed those folks would've been at least as disinterested in helping travellers as the ones living in the huts he and Tilphosa had stopped at. Like this one, for instance.
It was built up on bamboo stilts to the height of the road a double pace away. The only connection between the two was a tracery of cords anchored to a piling and supporting a bamboo "floor" with spaces wide enough for a foot to slip through between each pair of rods. The hut walls were matting, and the roof was thatch.
In the marsh nearby was a circle of cut bamboo as big around as the hut itself. Cashel had thought of a fish weir when he'd seen one by the first place they'd passed, and that was almost what it was. A shoal of carp came to the surface mouth first when he stopped, hoping that the presence of humans meant somebody was about to throw them a handful of grain.
You couldn't have chickens in a marsh like this: their feet would rot, and they'd die. But you could raise fish and train them to come to be slaughtered at need the same way farmwives back in the borough scattered grain to the hens at the dooryard.
“Hello the house!” Cashel called. Tilphosa waited beside him, balancing on one leg like a stork so she could rub the other foot some more. “We're travellers who need a bite of food. We've got money to pay, but if you'd rather—”
Money wasn't much used between local people in the borough. Many a time Cashel had taken his day's pay in fresh bread or shearings that his sister would turn into finished cloth.
“—we'd be happy to work for it instead.”
“Go away!” screamed a voice. It was probably female and certainly angry. “We don't have any work for you. Or food either!”
“Look, we need food!” Cashel said, changing tack from the dignified honesty he'd used before. That had gotten them nowhere in the past, and it obviously wasn't going to work here either. “I'll not harm anyone who treats me decent, but I won't be kicked around like a stray dog!”
He reached down and plucked one of the ropes that acted as bridge stringers; it moaned in response. Now that he'd touched it, he wondered whether the flimsy structure would even take his weight. The cords were of some unfamiliar material, maybe bamboo fibers twisted together.
“Look, you can't come in here!” the voice said. “Soong's just up ahead, and there's inns there. They'll feed you and take your money besides.”
“Let's go on, Cashel,” Tilphosa whispered. “I don't want a fight.”
Cashel sighed and turned to the road again. He let the girl take his left arm; for support, he supposed, but anyway he let her take it.
“There wasn't going to be a fight,” he muttered as they strode down the road at a faster pace than usual. Anger was prodding him. “All they had to do was cut the ropes from their side and then drop a storage jar on my head while I was trying to swim in mud.”
He cleared his throat, and added, “Besides, I guess it's their house. If they don't want visitors, well, there's plenty people in the borough who'd act just the same.”
The mist pooled and streaked. Sometimes it gave a clear view for as much as a bowshot, then went so solid that Cashel put his staff out to bump along the side of the causeway. He didn't suppose they'd drown if they fell in, but he'd been covered with muck often enough to know he didn't like the experience.
“I hear a river,” Cashel said. “Soong's on a river, the first fellow said when he ordered us away.”
Water has its own range of sounds, from the plink of drops falling from the eaves after a rain to the roar of a storm-driven surf. This was a sighing and slapping, slow but powerful. The evening air didn't taste of salt.
A breeze, the first they'd had since midday, swept a channel in the fog. Cashel had taken the glimmers ahead for will-o'-the-wisps. Now they came into focus as lanterns, bright flames haloed by the damp air. Buildings stood out as darker shadows, and sometimes a human figure silhouetted itself against lamplight.
“The city doesn't have walls,” Tilphosa noted. “That's a good sign, don't you think?”
Cashel blinked. He hadn't thought about it at all, to tell the truth; he hadn't grown up with fortifications. Since Cashel left Barca's Hamlet he'd lived in places with walls to keep out enemies, but that wasn't a part of the city he cared much about.
Sharina said mostly those walls dated from the very end of the Old Kingdom. She also said that they hadn't kept chaos from destroying the places they were meant to protect.
“I guess it's good,” he said. “Because it means that people here are peaceful, you think?”
“Yes, even if they aren't very friendly to strangers,” Tilphosa said. She hugged his arm close, then separated with only the tips of her fingers on Cashel's elbow to keep contact.
The road going down toward Soong wasn't steep, but it had more of a slope than they'd seen before all day. The last two furlongs into the city were covered with squared tree trunks, not really paving but better than mud. Some of the trunks had tilted on their bedding, one end higher and the other lower than the pair before and beyond. Once Cashel's weight squelched a raised trunk down like a sluggish teeter-totter, but there was no harm in that beyond his heart jumping in surprise.
A gust cleared the air, giving them a glimpse of a broad river which flowed so slowly that starlight could glimmer on its surface. There were quays along the near bank. On an island connected by a short causeway stood a temple whose short fat columns supported a tiled roof. Except for the façade, the building was as simple and unadorned as a stone barn.
Cashel looked at the sky; the constellations were unfamiliar. That was what he'd expected, but in his heart there'd been hope that he'd have at least the Byre or the seven blue stars of the Axletree to remind him of nights spent pasturing sheep.
They entered the city. The streets were muddy, but there were board sidewalks for pedestrians. A hunched man passed them, driving out of town in a wagon pulled by a single mule. The contents of the wagon bed rattled under a coarse mat.
“Excuse me, sir!” Cashel called. The man ignored him, except perhaps for touching the mule's ear with his long bamboo switch.
“It's quite a big city, isn't it?” Tilphosa said. She was trying to sound cheerful, but Cashel noticed that she picked at her tunic in concern to minimize the dirt and damage of the past many days. She touched the dagger hilt, then put her left hand over it—for concealment, not because she was afraid of being attacked. She felt a weapon was out of place in civilized surroundings.
“Big enough to have shops that sell clothes,” Cashel said. “In the morning we'll outfit ourselves and...”
He let his voice trail off. His mind had run to the planned end of the sentence, “... see if anybody can give us
directions...” The foolishness of those words froze his tongue.
The stars above Soong were new to him. Nobody here would know how to get to Valles. Nobody here had heard of Valles.
“And we'll decide where we want to go next,” Cashel concluded, but without the animation that he'd started the sentence with. He didn't see any path to a place he or Tilphosa wanted to be, and he knew those likely wouldn't be the same places anyway. The only reason he didn't give up was that, well, he wasn't the sort of person who gave up.
They were among the houses now, each of two or three stories. The vacant lots showed that the previous building had collapsed or been torn down. They were more substantial than the huts of the surrounding farms, but all were built of timber with shingle or thatched roofs. The temple out in the river was the only stone structure he'd seen.
Some of the sidewalk planks had rotted through; Cashel walked with a careful shuffle, the way he'd have done on a lake whose ice had begun to soften in the spring weather. Folk bustled by, dressed in baggy trousers and hooded capes. They looked sidelong at the strangers, but none of them spoke.
Cashel made up his mind with a sigh. A shopkeeper had set the bar across his shutters and was fastening it with a bronze padlock. Cashel touched him on the shoulder.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Can you direct us to an inn? We're strangers here.”
“What?” said the shopkeeper in a female voice. “An inn?”
She raised her head to look them over from beneath her cowl. Judging from her grimace, she didn't like what she saw. “Try the Hyacinth,” she said. “Down at the end of the street, where it meets the water.”
She wriggled away and disappeared into an alley. Cashel didn't try to hold her. He looked at Tilphosa, and smiled as he said, “I guess even strangers can find the river, huh.”
She patted his arm.
Cashel wasn't sure what the shopkeeper meant by "the street," since three roads joined at an intersection close enough to touch with his quarterstaff. He picked the one that headed most directly toward where he knew the river was. That didn't mean a lot in a place where the streets wandered like sheep paths across a pasture, but...
“If it doesn't work,” Tilphosa said, “we'll try another one. From the way the woman looked at us I'm not sure I'd regret missing the Hyacinth, but I suppose it'll do until we're dressed properly.”
She sounded cheerful again. Cashel looked at her and grinned. Tilphosa had adjusted her sash so that the brass hilt of the broken sword was out where anybody could see it. For a little while there she'd gone back to being Lady Tilphosa, concerned about her social position. Now she was Cashel's companion again, the girl who'd come through shipwreck, battle, and anything else the Gods chose to throw at her.
They were getting close to the river. Besides Cashel being able to smell the mudflats, several of the shuttered shops had coarse tunics or ship's stores of one sort and another on their signs.
Prostitutes waited in alley mouths, following Cashel with their eyes. He kept his gaze forward, but Tilphosa glared like a queen at each woman they passed.
Cashel kept his grin from reaching his lips. She was a queen, after all; or anyway she'd be the next thing to a queen after Cashel delivered her to Prince Thalemos.
Tilphosa pointed to the sign hanging from a building at the end of the street. “There it is,” she said. “The Hyacinth.”
Cashel glanced at her, wondering how she knew. Were her eyes that good? The wood was so warped and faded that he wasn't sure he'd have recognized a bunch of purple flowers painted on it even in daylight.
It was an inn, all right, though. During the day there'd even be a counter facing the road, though it was shuttered now. It was on the corner of the street they'd followed and the one fronting the river, so it was the right place beyond question.
He said, “I couldn't have told from the picture.”
“Oh, the name's drilled out of the wood below, Cashel," Tilphosa said. “See? Though it's backwards from this way.”
She pointed again. He'd taken the design for a cutwork border, not a word.
“I see, mistress,” he said. “But I can't read letters either way round.”
“I'll read for us, Cashel,” the girl said, squeezing his arm again. “You take care of all the other things. And Cashel?”
He met her eyes again.
“Remember that I'm Tilphosa, not mistress. All right?”
“Right,” he agreed, giving her a shy smile.
The inn had double doors, but the left panel was latched closed. A pair of men stood in the opening, watching the riverfront as they drank from elmwood masars.
Cashel shrugged, loosening his shoulder muscles as he considered how to tell the fellows that he planned to enter through where they were standing. He'd be polite, of course, and the chances were that they'd respond politely as well; but there was just the least chance that they wouldn't.
“Cashel!” Tilphosa said as she caught his arm.
For a moment Cashel thought she was telling him not to start a fight—which meant walk away from a fight that somebody else had started, and that wasn't going to happen to Cashel or-Kenset. Then he followed the line of her eyes out to the river road and saw what she and the men in the doorway both were looking at. Calm again, Cashel watched too.
A tall, hooded figure walked at the head of a procession of men rolling a two-wheeled hand-truck. The corpse on the truck was wrapped in coarse wool. The accompanying men wore peaked hats with black-dyed feathers standing up around the brims, apparently a sign of mourning; the pair of bareheaded females bringing up the rear stroked tambours with muffled sticks.
The figure in the lead was a good seven feet tall. It—Cashel wasn't going to guess sex, not after his mistake with the shopkeeper—wore a robe that was pale green in the glow of the lanterns carried by some of the mourners. The hem brushed the mud, and a veil covered as much of the face as the cowl itself didn't hide. The figure moved as smoothly as the images of the Great Gods brought from Carcosa to outlying boroughs in wheeled carts during the Tithe Processions.
The funeral turned onto the causeway leading to the temple in the river. Cashel saw the click of a spark from the hand-truck's iron tires: the causeway was paved with hard stone.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Tilphosa said unexpectedly to the men in the doorway. “We're strangers here. Who is that, please?”
The men turned to look at her; the fellow nearer to Cashel jumped back, much as he might have done if he'd glanced up from his drink and found a bull standing at his side.
“By the Shepherd!” he muttered, brushing with his free hand the beer he'd sloshed on the front of his tunic.
The procession reached the temple; its doors opened with only the faintest squeal. Somebody must keep them well greased in this soggy atmosphere. The men pushing the truck stepped back expectantly, and the female musicians redoubled their muted drumming.
“Well, I believe it's Tadbal Bessing's-son the cobbler, mistress,” the other man said. “Leastways I'd heard he'd died last night, so if it's not Tadbal, he'll be along shortly.”
“No,” said Tilphosa in a noticeably sharper tone. “I mean the tall fellow leading them, not the departed. Is he a priest?”
The men looked at each other. Partly to explain Tilphosa's ignorance, and partly to remind the locals to be polite when they spoke to a girl who had a friend Cashel's size, Cashel said, “We're strangers here, you see.”
“Right,” said the fellow who'd spilled his beer. “That's one of the Nine, you see. They take care of the dead.”
“It's the custom here in Soong,” the other man agreed.
A figure which could have been a mirror image of the leader came out of the temple. While the mourners stood back, the two of them lifted the corpse from the hand-truck and carried it inside. The temple doors closed behind them.
“There's nine priests?” Tilphosa said.
Cashel consciously kept from frowning. Local customs were no busines
s of his, unless they involved feeding him to a tree or the like. In Barca's Hamlet people buried their dead in the ground in winding sheets, if they could afford the wool, but every place Cashel had been since he left the borough had a different way of dealing with death. If the people of Soong wanted priests to slide corpses into the river for the catfish to eat, well, that was their business.
“I don't rightly know, mistress,” the first speaker said. “Nobody's seen more than three of them together, not that I've heard about. Maybe Nine's just a name.”
“Tilphosa, I think we ought to see about food and a place to sleep,” Cashel said firmly.
All three looked at him. The man leaning against the closed panel reached down and lifted a pin so that he could pull that half-open as well.
“There you go, master,” he said with a sweep of his hand and a friendly smile. “That'll save you having to turn sideways, I guess.”
“Yes, of course,” said Tilphosa. She stepped into the taproom with her head high; every inch a queen.
Sharina stood at the base of the flagship's forward fighting tower, looking toward the beach two furlongs away. The great quinquereme proceeded along the shore under the thrust of only one bank of oars, giving her just enough way on that she didn't wallow in the surf. The ballistae on the bow and stern towers were cocked and loaded with thick-shafted arrows whose square iron heads could smash a ship's hull at short range or an archer's scantlings half a mile inland.
Carus had transferred from The King of the Isles to one of the lightest warships in the fleet, an eighty-oared bireme that had been in service as a revenue cutter before Garric became regent of the kingdom. Earlier in the reign of Valence the Third, the Kingdom of the Isles had controlled little more than port duties and the fishing within dory-haul of Ornifal, but even that slight reach had required enforcement vessels.
The bireme swept toward the beach at a slight angle, watched by Sharina and every other person who could get a view of the proceedings. A score of triremes sculled along beside The King of the Isles—closer than safety permitted—each with its single ballista or catapult aimed shoreward against a threat as yet invisible.