The man drew conclusions from Orem’s silence. “I’ll go to fifty coppers, then. Fifty coppers, but I tell you, boy, the fishes of the river can be hungry, and we try to keep them fed on stubborn flesh.”
There it was—the bribe and the threat, and he only a boy of fifteen. The rough-looking loaders, there they were waiting at the empty wagons. What chance would Orem have if they threw him into the river? They’d have the grocer’s goods whether he wanted them to or not; so why not have the coppers in the bargain?
But there was no poem in a hundred coppers, none at all, and no name or place in that, either.
“What, are you deaf? Well, do you know what this means?” And there was a dagger in the man’s hands. For a moment Orem was tempted to try a trick the sergeant had taught him long ago; but no, it was too long ago, when he was little, and Orem did not know if he had the strength or quickness to do it against such a man as this. Who could say what a man with trousers might do? But there was an idea in the man’s words about deafness.
“Oh you are generous sir!” Orem bellowed. “Oh you are kind and wise!” He hadn’t the lungs of old Yizzer at the gate of the House of God, but his voice was strong enough from his years of canting at the prayers. “Oh your face is a kind one sir, and God knows your inmost hidden name. God and I know your inmost names and we shall name them!” And with that Orem reached out his hand and drew his palm lightly across the dagger’s point. It drew his blood and hurt with a sharp sting, but Orem knew from the magics observed on his father’s farm what such a thing would mean. He held up his hand and let the blood trickle down his arm into his sleeve. “I will name your names!”
It was enough, oh, yes, see the man run, hear the hissing of his trousers as his legs brush against each other. Orem did not know, however, whether he had done right; it was a terrible thing to pretend to have magic. A terrible thing to spill blood without purpose, to pay a price without petition; but it was all that he had thought of at the moment, and there, the man was leaving, he was glaring back at Orem sure enough, but he and his rough servants were fleeing. It was enlightening to Orem. Yes, he said to himself again and again, Yes, this is a deep and high place, but they are still afraid of magics here, in Queen Beauty’s own city they cannot tell a deaf wizard from a desperate wandering boy.
More than the would-be thief had been frightened, too; the other grocers eyed him suspiciously. Only the nearest portman seemed to understand—he winked and drew a circle on his trousers. But was the circle to congratulate him or to fend his pretended power? Orem guessed the first; and also realized that the portmen must charge high fees indeed, for no thief bothered to approach the ones of them that stood on guard. A hundred coppers wouldn’t tempt them, and with hundreds of the green-bloused men around, Orem guessed that even the most desperate men wouldn’t dare to drop one in the river, punctured or not. Life in Inwit was more openly criminal, but there were protections, and a good one was the protection of being in a company of loyal men. Orem wondered vaguely how he would look in the portmen’s green.
It was near noon when Glasin returned, smiling broadly. “Got a place in the Great Market,” he said, “and I don’t have to give the pick to anybody.” Orem could smell beer on his breath. The grocer had trusted him indeed, to have paused before coming back to his goods on the wharf. “And now I have too much to fit in one load of the cart. You waits another hour for three more coppers.” The grocer looked at him with an eyebrow raised.
By now Orem had come to understand how much the grocer was gaining by his services. Glasin had not had to pay a portman, nor had he had to give pick of stall in the Great Market to some other grocer for watching his goods on the wharf. And it occurred to Orem that Glasin had considered claiming that he was a slave and selling him. Glasin might have been the Corthy Price, but he was too shrewd by half. What if he only left behind on the dock the things he didn’t need to sell? What if Orem waited all day for him to come back, and he never came?
“First my five coppers,” said Orem.
It was a calculated risk; an honest man might have dismissed him on the spot, for sheer rage. But Glasin only laughed. “Six coppers, then, for waiting again.”
So he did mean to cheat him. “First the five I earned.”
It was only now that Glasin’s eyes went narrow. “What, so I can return and find you gone with my five coppers and my goods as well? I pay you only when your work is done.”
Orem could not bear the accusation of thief when he had taken risk already to save Glasin’s goods. “A man offered me fifty coppers and would have killed me! I frightened him off for you, and all for five coppers!”
Glasin plainly didn’t believe him. “What sort of man could you frighten off? You won’t cheat me by such a silly lie as that!”
By habit Orem turned to the nearby guards and grocers for confirmation of his tale. “I did, you saw me!” he called out. But no one gave a sign of hearing.
“Why should anyone witness for you?” Glasin asked. “What could you possibly pay them?”
“I could pay them my five coppers,” Orem said.
“Off with you, then! I have no use for you! Trying to cheat me! After I let such a useless boy as you ride my boat for free! Here’s the five coppers, which you didn’t earn. Now away, before I call the guards and name you a thief! Off! You gets away!”
And now, to Orem’s surprise, the other grocers began to take notice. “Is the boy cheating you?” one called. “Into the river with him,” cried another. “Get rid of a boy like that!”
What could he do, then, but leave? He was furious at the unfairness of it, but it was plain enough that just as portmen found safety with each other’s company, so the grocers were a band together, and they’d stand up for another grocer however much the right might be with a wandering boy like Orem. It was a weakish, undependable company, for they had said and done nothing when a thief took the goods of one of their number—but it was a company, all the same. Where was Orem’s company? Who would protect him? It was the House of God again, and his enemies able to throw him into the fire because he had no friends.
He fled from the grocer then, holding his few coppers in his hand. But fear or not, he had to know for sure; so he stayed and watched, and sure enough, Glasin was able to put all his load of goods into the single cart, saving only the rotted stuff. To protect rotten foodstuff Orem would have waited all day, and had no payment at all. There was no honor in Inwit, none at all, and it made him more afraid than even the thief’s dagger pointed at his belly. A dagger has only a single point, but a traitor cuts from anywhere, that’s what they said, and only now did Orem understand that it was true.
OREM SEES THE FORBIDDEN GATE
Where now? In all his talk on the downriver trip, Glasin had said much about ways into the city. Now Orem felt little desire to follow Glasin’s advice—but in this place what other guide did he have? Glasin would have had little to gain by lying to him in his tales of the city. Orem had no choice but to trust his hints. What had Glasin said? Piss Gate, of course, and three days to find work before they thrust him out. Well, nowhere to go but there, for the ways into the Hole were dangerous, Glasin had said; and what would those dangers be, if the open dock was full of such traps?
“Don’t buy anything outside the gate,” the grocer had said. “And don’t buy anything from anyone who offers to sell. They’ll spot you as a farmer from the first second, and they’ll up their price by tens.” It was all the wisdom Orem had right now; it was his only armor as he found himself on Butcher Street, where four great lines of carts and animals and men waited to get past the guards at Swine Gate.
The guards wore skirts of plated metal, and breastplates of brass; plainly they were not the soldiers who defended the city, for Palicrovol’s men wore steel mail shirts and carried swords that would bite such brass as a candle bit through paper. And though the walls of the city were high, the huge wooden gates stout, Orem wondered why it was that King Palicrovol, with an army that they sa
id was the strongest ever known in all the world, had never been able to mine or breach the walls, or even, they said, slay a single one of Queen Beauty’s soldiers. Surely the Queen had some terrible army hidden away, and these antiquely costumed guards were all for show.
All for show, except that they were as good a bar to Orem’s entry into the city as any men in steel mail with steel swords might have been. He watched, and they did not let the huge press of cursing grocers and butchers hurry them; every pass was checked thoroughly, and more than one man was made to stand aside while others went ahead of him. And over all were the archers perched on the tops of the gate towers, alert always to what was happening below them. There would be no way for Orem to slip in unnoticed even if he had wanted to.
“No use looking, farmer,” said a voice behind him.
Orem turned and saw a weasely looking man near four inches shorter than he, smiling at him. Smiles like that, Orem thought, are worn by dogs who have cornered their squirrel.
“I’m not a farmer,” Orem said.
“Then you’ll not get through Swine Gate, will you?”
“I’m looking for Piss Gate.”
The man nodded. “They all are, boy, they all are. Well, when you’re done with Piss Gate, you find old Braisy here, and he’ll get you through. He’ll get you into Inwit for the very small fee of five coppers and a favor, he will.” And then Braisy was gone, and because he was so short, Orem quickly lost him in the sea of heads moving in every direction on Butcher Street.
Unfriendly as the city might be, Orem had to find his way. He asked questions, and among the surly replies was information enough to get him to Shit Street, which led between the reeking stockyards and north into Beggarstown. “You’ll find the towers of Piss Gate easy enough, if you just look up and keep the wall on your right,” said a man with a bloody butcher’s apron. But Shit Street quickly became narrow and kept turning away from the main path of traffic. There were fewer and fewer signs the farther he went; who could read, after all, in such a place as this? For Beggarstown was made up of people who had not found work on their pauper’s passes and could not stay inside the city walls; it was a poor place, with seedy wooden shops gradually making way for boarded-up buildings that were lived in despite their sag and filth, and even these began to look fine as hovels sprouted up in every space the rickety old structures left between them. The shacks grew out into the road; the people squatting in the shadows of the east side of the street looked hungry; Orem began to be afraid of thieves, for in this place even five pennies might be worth taking another man’s life.
Soon he was lost. Only the wall remained constant, high and grey, looming over the filthy town that was already three times as large as all of Banningside. Orem dared not ask directions of any of the people along the way. He kept as far as possible from the buildings. And the farther he walked, the fewer people he saw, until there was no one about when he spotted the twin high towers of a gate.
The streets were utterly empty near the gate. The buildings were boarded up or, even more haunting, left to hang open, roofless and shutterless, as if they were half-completed. Not a person was in sight; there was not even the banging of an open door to break the silence. He knew that this could not be Piss Gate, where paupers passed into the city of Inwit. But that did not deter him, for he knew then what this gate must be, and he wanted all the more to see it.
He stood at the foot of the gate towers, looking up. The street had widened to a plaza and then disappeared. Where the vast wooden gates should have stood open, houses rose steeply to lean against the towers, covering the space where only at the top was there any of the lumber of the gate visible. There was an odd shifting of the view: at one moment it seemed the gate was holding up the buildings; at the next it seemed the buildings were holding up the walls, keeping them from falling outward to crush Orem where he stood and looked.
“Ho, boy!”
Orem was startled, for he had thought he was alone.
“Ho, what are you doing here?”
There, in the shade of one of the boarded-up buildings, two guards. Their bronze looked less polished than the breastplates of the guards at Swine Gate. But it served to make them more menacing, not less. Without thinking, Orem decided that this was certainly the time to seem to be what in fact he was—a farmer’s boy lost in the slums of the city.
“I’m looking for Piss Gate,” Orem said. “I’m here for the first time. Have they closed the gate, then?”
The guards glanced at each other, then smiled. There was derision in their mirth, and Orem felt uncomfortable.
“Not Piss Gate, that’s sure, you can tell Piss Gate by the stink of thieves and farmers who come down the river hoping to ger rich in the city.” The guards approached him, and now Orem saw that there were more than a dozen of them; they had been concealed in shadows or, he suspected, inside the shells of the buildings that were not totally boarded up.
“I’m not hoping to get rich,” Orem said, trying to sound frightened and succeeding better than he had expected.
“Where you from, boy?”
“A farm. My father’s farm. Upriver, near Banningside.”
Now the guards were more alert, and Orem noticed that hands were on hilts and fingers had closed around ax-hafts. “An illegal person is near Banningside,” said a guard.
“Illegal person?” The King, of course. And for a terrible moment Orem feared they would suppose him a spy. Spies, he knew, were skinned alive and forced to eat their own hearts. Should he pretend that he didn’t know Palicrovol had been in the area? No, they’d never believe it. It was impossible not to know when that vast army came foraging in a countryside. “All I know is the sergeants were out pressing soldiers. I didn’t want to go in the army.”
The guard who seemed to be in command looked him up and down pointedly, then laughed. “If you were in danger of pressing then the rebels must be more desperate than anyone thought.”
At the laughter, Orem tried a smile, hoping to join in the camaraderie. His mirth offended them. The commander did not take him by the shirt; he took him painfully by the skin at his waist, a crushing grip that brought an unwilling cry from Orem. “Do you know how close you are to death?”
“No, sir.”
A guard had opened Orem’s bag. In it was only his flask, still full of his father’s spring water, and the last bit of bread that now was like rock. His coppers were in a better place.
“A rich one, that’s plain,” said the guard as he tossed the bag back to Orem.
Orem dared to ask a question. “Why is this gate closed?” he asked.
“You’re better off if you never learn the answer to that question.”
A guard with white hair who looked like he had committed all sins and was still unsatisfied spoke softly. “He’s a country fool. It’s broad daylight.”
“I say question him,” said another.
The white-haired guard spoke even more softly. “I say eat shit. The spies all know their way into the city, and it isn’t the Hole in midafternoon.”
The commander pushed Orem from him, hurting his side again even as he released him. “Get away from here, boy, and don’t come back. If you want Piss Gate, follow the north wall and stay close to the wall always.”
“Or go home,” said the white-haired guard. “There’s nothing in Inwit for you. Don’t you know this city devours children and flays strong men alive?”
Orem smiled uncomprehendingly and backed away from them. “Thank you, sirs. Good day to you. I’ll never come here again.”
“Your name, boy!” called the commander. “And don’t lie!”
“Orem ap Avonap!”
The white-haired guard laughed aloud. “What a name! Only a farmer would think of that!”
The other guards nudged each other and laughed also. But they watched him out of sight all the same, and he suspected that one was following him much of his way north.
It made Orem angry that they laughed at him, but what made
him angriest was that he had earned their laughter. A fool, that’s what he had been, and it had not been a pose, no, not half.
THE BEGGARS’ WAY OF DEATH IN LIFE
The farther north he got, the less dead the place appeared; a child played in the street, and then a beggar sprawled in sleep, and at last litter began appearing at the sides of the road and the sewer down the middle of the street began to be fetid with decomposing filth. Beggarstown was alive again, now that he was away from the Hole, and the faces that had seemed frightening to him before were a welcome sight now. Orem began to see, not their strangeness, not their darkness and filth, but their weakness and grief. They wore elegant clothes, most of them, but so tattered and soiled that the color that had once been bright was now a dull brown or grey. There was a dullness in the eyes, too, as if something in Beggarstown took the mind out of the head, as if the people could go through their days without ever quite awakening.
Orem began to pity them, and almost lost his fear, until a man with just such an empty face walked up to a man near Orem and calmly stabbed him deep in the eye with a dagger. His victim fell without a sound, blood pouring up and out of his face onto the road. Orem felt more anguish than fear, for if a man with such a dead face could kill, when the dead could reach out and drag the living into their graves, then what chance had he to hold onto his life here?
On the dock a thief had been left alone by the witnesses of his crime, but here there was another code. While the murderer was stripping his victim, five or six men calmly gathered around and began throwing stones at the thief. The thief dodged desultorily and finally gave up trying to get the dying man’s shirt. As he stumbled away from his victim, the men caught him, kicked him, threw him to the ground, beat him silently, wordlessly. The thief at first tried to cover himself, but at last lay open to the blows. He was not unconscious, Orem saw; nor were the men who kicked him driven by hate. They simply kicked and stamped on him, until a man leapt into the air and landed with both feet on the murderer’s neck and head. The neck broke; the mouth went slack as the jaw crumbled; yet the eyes looked no deader than before. The men who had killed the murderer left him to lie on the street by his victim. The rats were already gathering, and no one moved to cover the bodies. Orem felt that he had seen all there was of the whole wheel of life in this place. There was no birth here; only death, only the rats gnawing.
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