The cost of this establishment worried me, but we had a good amount of your silver left, and tomorrow we would reach our goal. If the sanaur killed us or threw us into a dungeon, we would have no more use for the coins.
Now my bath had been drained through a pluggable hole as clever as the rest of its design, the tub had been scrubbed by a hostel servant, and it was refilled for Arlin, who was spending even more time than I at shedding her skin. When she was done we would order a dinner, and I had great hopes of that, but for now I was spread out on a mess of cushions, limp as a weed on the beach, listening to the magician.
“It is not even the first time I have been in the City in the company of a snowman,” he added. “Though it has been many years.
“That fellow…”—the magician showed a reminiscent smile—“… had a great deal of balls.” (And here I must interject that in many Rezhmian dialects, the word for testicles and the word for courage have been confused. They will even speak of a mother cat having balls when she throws herself at a mastiff in defense of her kits.)
“Because it was not long after the crazy war you made, when the old sanaur turned you back and left the Naiish to butcher you in the plains at our convenience…” The magician’s smile grew even sweeter. “So you know what kind of risk the man was running. He picked up Rayzhia with a baby’s ease and had better profanity than I, who have studied all my life. We were thieves together.”
He raised one of his half-moon eyebrows and his eyes glinted at me. “You must tell no one this—that I was a thief. Among my people it would never be forgiven.”
I was silenced in astonishment by this: one more evidence that I did not yet understand this man or his culture. Before I could think of a proper response, Arlin emerged, clean and glossy, from the bath, and supper took all our serious concentration.
The next morning was magnificent, clear and breezy, with the birds twittering on every branch as though it were spring and the horses as high as kites, whinnying and skittering over the road in a manner that makes only Arlin happy.
After worrying the matter from Norwess to here, I had determined to use no subterfuge in my attempt to speak to the sanaur, or in the interview I hoped to gain. I might have equally well made this decision in the beginning, since I am hopeless at subterfuge, but worrying must have been necessary to me.
Now I was through with worry. This morning we would reach the fortress itself, Rezhmia’s famed citadel of red stone.
Perhaps the sanaur would not be at home. Perhaps he would not be receiving beggars. Perhaps the world would fall down, but the autumn morning was very bright.
Here the streets were narrower and the buildings taller. Our misbehaving horses stood and sweated as the way was blocked by a misbehaving donkey. The magician led us down a still-narrower street where no sunlight reached, except for a splash that squeezed between rooftops and landed on one of the usual hanging signs, giving it unusual brilliance.
I remember it. The picture was of a man on a horse, holding (with difficulty, I imagine) a viol in one hand and a sword in the other. The sign was old, and what must have been royal purple in the man’s garb had faded beyond color, and the rich brown of both his moustache and his horse had gone entirely yellow. The name, in huge black letters, quite unfaded, read NAZHURET, and, under it for the sake of foreign visitors, in smaller letters, king of the dead.
I sat under that sign for a very long time with no feeling and very little sense, save for a small buzzing in my ears. It was only through the coldness of the wind against my face that I perceived that I was weeping. I was cold all over, despite the balmy weather, and at last the sounds of hooves scuffling at some distance distracted me from my trance, and I twisted on my horse to find Arlin’s mare lodged sideways in the street and her, with dowhee glittering in her hand, holding back by threat the progress of six Rezhmian cavalry.
The picture is still fresh in my mind: Arlin in black on a black horse in the shadows, the whole cut only by the white of her face and the nickel of the bridlework and the light of her blade. Even the worn patches of her sleeves and elbows shone with more an effect of dread than of comedy. It is the peculiar, original gallantry of my lady that she would risk her life to allow me room to cry in public. You taught her much about life and death, Powl, but you never succeeded in giving her common sense.
I swung my yellow horse around with all speed and let her know she might release the flood, and Arlin pressed her horse sideways out of the center of the street, weapons still at ready. When she reached the brick wall of the nearest shop, she bowed to the men she had just defied, with a great flourish and an expression set in stone. I echoed her gesture with less theater, and the cavalrymen passed, their eyes and those of their horses rolling at us. In a small alcove across the street, the Naiish magician and his pack horses waited, observing all.
“You got away with that because they had no corporal or sergeant to unite them,” I felt it necessary to mention.
“I got away with it,” she echoed, and put her dowhee back into her pack.
The magician joined us again, in a street that remained bare of traffic as long as we loitered. He glanced at the sign, at me, at Arlin, and at nothing. “Today,” he announced to us and to every head poking through the windows above, “something very large is going to happen.” Having said this, he trotted down the street, leaving us to trot behind.
Arlin caught up to him, thereby blocking the street again. “A little bird told you that?”
He was wearing his eagle glove, which he spread and closed again before answering. “Yes. And my pony told me.” He gave a large sigh that jangled the little bells on his lady’s headdress. “Also, today I am going to leave your company.”
Arlin was silent a few moments and then said, “I am sorry to hear that,” although from her tone it was impossible for me to tell whether she really was sorry or not.
“When I came this road with the snowman, it was early springtime, after the Velonyan War. I met him in a tavern in the City. He said he had become the fifth wheel of a carriage and didn’t want to go home with the crowd he’d come with.”
We were climbing again, and the golden fields dropped away through the houses at our left. Here the buildings had triangular basements, giving a flat base to the living quarters above, and I had to wonder if the trunks and boxes stored in the basements were triangular to fit. The basements might have been dug out, of course, but if the road we traveled was any sign of the firmness of the earth, it would not be worth the effort.
Travelers approached behind us, and I recognized in the sound of hooves those same cavalry that had accompanied us—driven us, to be precise—the day before. The old magician seemed to ignore their dust and bustle, but he had to raise his voice to continue.
“I remember he was cleaning copper off the table, taking bets: odd bets. Unheard-of bets, such as being able to hold an orange and a knife in the same hand and skin the thing. Another was to dance a shofaghee with an ale mug on his head. Not the sort of thing one would expect of a snowman, since you people are known for having neither grace nor humor.”
“Thank you,” said Arlin tartly. I did not reply to the magician (if there is any appropriate reply to such an accusation) for I had gotten a scent of something salty and cold, and in the context of this city I could not place it.
I turned my head to the right and I felt my yellow horse pulling upon his bit with the same idea. At that moment we crested the long, long hill we had been climbing and found ourselves riding past a public garden, where all planted things were low and the view was vast.
I caught my breath.
“Look! Nazhuret!” called Arlin, and I answered that I saw it, and the blue glimmer and white sparkle of the sea in the harbor overwhelmed me.
“No, no. Look this way,” she insisted, and I let my glance slide back from the cliffs and the harbor to where she sat pointing at the City.
Here was the circular wall of the pictures: a city buried within a city, and
it was as beautiful and rose-colored, with the four towers of direction rising up.
It looked small, but then it was ancient, so what need had it had to be big, those centuries ago? Around the walls were vines, and the pink of the walls showed through only occasionally, dotting the surface as though with blossoms. After a good minute’s stare, I began to think the pink dots were blossoms and nothing of the walls was visible after all. Surely the towers were a different color of rose.
“Ah yes.” The old magician nodded as though he had ordered the decoration himself. “We have arrived at the good hour, when the roses have their autumn bloom. Of course in the spring the flower is so thick one cannot see the leaves at all, but still it is better than midsummer. Or midwinter, for that matter.” He spanked his ponies forward.
As a city it was tiny, the sort of place that could stand as a symbol from generation to generation. It was a place one could love; I loved it, though I came as a stranger and most certainly as an enemy, and my eyes wove back and forth from the bright ocean to the walls that lay like a wreath of roses over the land.
Our horses, immune to the effects of art, had plodded steadily on while we wondered, and now began the last, slight ascent toward the city gates.
The cavalry now began to intrude around us, and there was no chance Arlin could threaten this many away. To the right and to the left they came, and their tall bay horses, so different from our plains ponies, enclosed us in a fog of dust. Their tackle and the garb of their riders were trimmed in purple. Arlin pressed her horse close against mine, while before us the magician continued as though he had heard nothing happen.
“Another thing the man did was to challenge anyone in the bar to come at him, hand to hand, for a wager of three ’naurs. He put them all down, this snowman, and there was not a chair broken at the end.”
By now we were on a causeway that led nowhere except to those black gates in the pink and green wall, gates that rose impossibly high as we drew in, gates that were certainly closed. We could turn neither left nor right, for the crowd of riders around us and the much larger crowd coming up behind.
Suddenly from ahead came an astonishing shout of brass, as six cornets at the head of the troop announced themselves to the City. Arlin’s black mare reared and one of the magician’s two pack ponies tried to turn donkey for him, but even the horses could not resist the inexorable procession.
I tried to catch the attention of any of the men riding beside us, but they had no more than to meet my glance before shying like horses themselves and darting away. I feared we would be dragged around the walls or through them, ending lost in some enormous cavalry stable where we had no right to be at all.
The black gates of wood and iron opened with no more noise than a sighing of wind. They stood thirty feet high, I believe, and yet what I most clearly remember is a twig of rose not far above my head that had grown into the crack of stone and iron and then changed its mind and grown outward along its own length again. It had a broken rose blossom at the nether end and a perfect bloom at the hither end. Both blossoms bobbed in the wind that escaped from the City, through the open doors.
Under the gateway, my yellow horse walked heavily into the hind end of the magician’s horse, for he had stopped still and I was forced to precede him into the fortress. Arlin had to push through on his far side, around all his ponies. She reached out her hand to me, as though to keep me from being swept away by events, and then her hand found mine and we were inside the City of Rezhmia.
I saw that the buildings were as pink as the walls, and I noted that the streets were surprisingly wide. The roads were all paved, and not in cobblestone but in brick, like parts of old Vestinglon where the winters are impossible. Certain of these roads had been worn for so long that the centers of them were hollowed out and contained water.
All visible dirt, too, was in containers and doing valuable labor with fruit trees and assorted flowers. The buildings themselves, albeit pink, were not so different from buildings in the West.
These things I saw in snatches among the legs of the cavalry horses, and glimpses stolen above. What impressed me more immediately were the glimpses of people, for these were few and mostly in uniform. Regardless of manners, I pushed my horse forward and left, toward the lieutenant of the column.
He watched me come with the same rolling eye a horse will show when nervous, but then cavalry often begin to look like their horses. “Sir,” I shouted over the noise of the hooves, “you must tell me: is there any objection to our being here within the walls? You have brought us with you by your very numbers and through no desire of our own!”
He hit the heel of his hand against his forehead in the most respectful of Rezhmian military salutes, and I knew then that we were in deep trouble. “Most gracious lord, the fault is mine,” he said.
Which explained nothing.
The street along which we were herded opened into the sunlight of a neat square, and the front file pulled their mounts in abruptly, while the riders behind had less warning and served only to spill the three of us out before them.
I saw the base of a tower of pink sandstone heavily inlaid and more heavily still grown over with roses: these not only pink but in colors of white and red. I remember that the white roses were almost all past their bloom while the red were just opening, and that the clothing of the people who lounged before that wall of roses put the blossoms to shame.
There were ladies in sky blue and ladies in silver and there were gentlemen in all shades of purple and gold, making a clash of color as flowers will, if the gardener has not been thoughtful. There were pillows and hassocks strewn everywhere and one white goat, engorged with milk, which was being restrained with difficulty from eating the roses.
In the middle of this, surrounded by the emptiness of awe, stood a very short, bent old man in faded purple, holding a wooden basket and a little pair of shears. He was deadheading the roses.
He looked over his shoulder at the milling horses as a householder will notice boys scrimmaging in the yard. “This is the season for pruning, not manuring, lad. I prefer it delivered in barrows, anyway.”
I looked at his face. He looked like someone I ought to know, and had no business not knowing. He did not look like his portrait. He glanced past all the tall horses and grand riders directly at me. “This is a new trick, Reingish,” he said, with great familiarity and not much warmth. “Whom did you hope to catch in misbehavior? These cavalry?”
“Sanaur Mynauzet, I am not who you think I am,” I said to him, and as he still stared, I tore off my kerchief and revealed my yellow hair.
The old man stood up at this. He dropped his basket of spent flowers. “Then who are you?” he asked me.
There was a sudden silence. By this I don’t mean that the men all waited for my answer. I mean the doves on the flagstones stopped pecking, the horses froze with their heads up and even the wind seemed to stop itself. The only sound was of the hooves of a squat pony as the magician forced his horse to the front. He spread his eagle hand as a herald unfurls a banner.
“This is he who was born on the edge of a knife, who is free past comfort, past judgment. Who was dead and lives again. This is Nazhuret: King of the Dead.”
I was torn between astonishment that the old Naiish had remembered our “bit of theater” from our first encounter with him, and that he would have the poor taste to try it out in the sophistication of a court. I expected to hear hoots but instead heard more silence. Terrible silence.
The Sanaur of Rezhmia took a step toward us, his pruning nippers in his hand. My horse, I noticed, was shiny with sweat.
The earth then exploded.
Every image I think to write, describing how this happened, only insults the horror. But I must say something.
The flagstones bucked, throwing my horse into the air with me on his back, in one piece like the statue in a town square. I saw the pavement shatter crazily and raise a cloud of pink, as though the sandstone were only talc.
All of us, human and equine, were in the air and then all down again on the ferocious earth, which sought to throw us into the sky forever. The growl of the beast overwhelmed me, and I saw horses skidding on their sides over the rubble of the court, and horses skidding over people and already the pink stone was smeared with blood.
My round, yellow horse was of the sort that shies by starting in place, making no motion but emitting a noise like a beaten drum. He is also so four-square that he is difficult to knock down. This is no credit upon me; his maker designed him so. We came down standing, and I felt his drum-heart beat between my legs. He plunged one step forward and the earth roared again, sending his hindhooves and forehooves in different directions. I heard a sound that I later recognized as a wall coming down behind us. If there was screaming it was drowned in the shrieking of the earth.
Before us was the wall of roses, closer every moment, though whether it was still upright I could not tell. The little old man was hanging from the vines; his hands were badly scratched.
How can a pavement of stone, underlain by stony earth, thrash like a broken-backed snake? I know of no way to study the matter. Again we were thrown, and we landed on the face of a horse, but still my terrified Daffodil was on his feet. There was a man under his hooves also, though the horse was trying desperately to avoid stepping on flesh. I heard something much larger than the wall come down nearby, and only then did I hear an echo of a single human scream. One more whip of the pavement threw us against the wall of roses, and without much thought for the matter, I plucked up the Sanaur of Rezhmia by his shirt back and threw him over the pommel of my saddle.
Portions of the tower fell on the broken stones behind us, exploding like bombs, and more fell to one side, and somewhere I heard a boom like a continent giving way and falling into an abyss, but the thrashing snake was dying, and in another ten seconds it was dead.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 40