Hammerfall

“There is no scarcity,” he said to the potter. “Are you a man at all, or not?”

The potter’s profane answer proved he was a fool, at least, and Marak showed his contempt for the water of the Ila’s Mercy by dumping the potter bodily into the beast’s trough, perhaps the first water bath the potter had had since his birth. The guards laughed, in far better humor with their bellies full of water, and no one rebuked him for the act.

With that act, he had waked somewhat from the drug in the food they fed him. He felt his heart beating and the blood moving in his veins. Beyond the immediate noise of the beasts, he heard the noise of the curious of the city and the passersby, heard the jeers of a gathering crowd while the potter clawed his way out of more water than he had ever sat in, and dripped onto the pavings. Marak heard young voices squealing as a besha snapped at a tormenting child, and heard the ting and clash of belled harnesses, the sound of a caravan all about them. All the bystanders laughed, having gathered to watch the potter’s bath, and had no idea, perhaps, that they were entertained by the mad.

Marak stretched his back and arched it and looked up and up at the threat of the walls, the high barricade that had thwarted Tain’s rebellion after all their plans and their ambitions.

He saw from this vantage the glass-edged defenses he and Tain had once tried to breach, and with a soldier’s cold eye, too, looked up at the scars he and Tain had left on the limestone walls of the holy city, the jewel of the Lakht. They were no few scars, and lasting ones, but not mortal, no, far from mortal wounds against this city.

They had not known, then, about the guns, or the launchers.

He imagined there were things about the city he did not guess yet. The very reason for this summons was one.

Did the Ila in her power shrug off the war out of the west, and yet seek out the mad on a whim? Was it mere curiosity?

So now the damned and the mad gathered at the Ila’s request, to live or to die, and the son of the Ila’s enemy was here, one among many, and yet not unknown, he was sure. He was in the records these men had made, and he was sure someone would inform the Ila what a prize her men had gathered in the west. He wondered if the Ila’s men would single him out before the Ila knew; would they make his name known in the streets? And he wondered if that happened what the people would do, who had lived through the years of the attack?

Would they resent him?

Attack him, if he shouted out, I am Marak Trin Tain?

He was tempted to do it, if only to die with a name and to make the most trouble possible in his dying. But he had another purpose yet to accomplish.

The guards moved the other prisoners on, and he bowed his head like the rest and walked with them, led like the beasts.

“Walk!” the Ila’s men shouted at them. For the first time in a day they used their quirts, set afoot, moving among the mad to set them on their way through the gates.

The journey was over. The caravan masters would seek their pay of the offices, most likely, as in every town, when cargo was offloaded. The Ila’s men had assumed all command now: the beasts and their masters they left behind with the tents and the baggage, all except the beast that carried the old man. The boy, Pogi, stopped to stare at their parting; but the guards whipped him on.

A prudent man might be ready for whatever whim moved the Ila, and the sergeant in charge of the caravan was, over all, a prudent man. He shouted out curses at men who whipped the boy too hard; he shouted encouragement at the mad to walk. “Not so far now,” the sergeant said. “You’ll sit up there! Move!”

Marak walked behind the beast carrying the dead man, with a view of its legs and underbelly, mostly, as the stone-paved street rose up and up the city’s broad terracing, up between the frontages of craft shops and warehouses and the better dwellings.

In a turn more the sunlight dimmed with dusk and colors lost their brilliancy. The day was over. And Marak walked in the wake of the beast, which, watered, stopped a moment to do what beshti rarely did, and moved on. Those afoot got the worst of it.

In their war here, his father’s war, not only had they never breached these walls, they had never imagined the teeming mass of people that lived inside the holy city. He walked now within deep shadow of tall buildings and dusk, within a stench of smoke and rot and urine. He felt the slight coolth of perpetually shadowed stone as well as the cooling of the air that followed the sun’s descent. Noon could hardly reach this place. He had not appreciated his last view of the sun outside. If he saw it rise again, he was sure now it would be his great misfortune.

High, high up the winding turns of the street they passed now with little curiosity from the people, until the word must have passed, and the residents of the holy city came out to jeer at the madmen, and to pelt them with rotten fruit—with the incredible luxury of the holy city, where there was food discarded, where the middens were richer than villages. Precious moisture ran with common waste down the sides of the streets, and fruit pulp slicked the stones underfoot.

The boy picked up a half-rotten fruit and ate it. The wife fell and soiled her knees in the muddy pulp. Marak pulled her up in the next stride: it was no place to die, in such filth, after so long struggle to come here. She sang to herself as they walked, as water ran between the stones, as better food than many villages ever knew pelted them as common refuse.

“The devils will come down!” the potter yelled at their tormentors. “The devils live on the high hill, in the tower, and they will come down and dance at your funerals!”

At that defiance, the crowd flung more serious missiles. Marak fended a potsherd with his arm, but one of the mad went down: a barber, the man was, and a broken brick struck him in the head, toppling him in his blood.

At that the Ila’s men shoved at the crowd and hauled the attacker out, bringing him along, too, beating him with their sticks.

Marak sheltered the wife from Tarsa against his side, away from the more accurate stone-throwers. “Where is love?” she sang unevenly, faintly, as she climbed. “Where is shade in the desert? Where is my love gone?”

They suddenly passed a gate, into a large square, before those who flung stares, not stones; and those were better behaved, but more chilling.

After that they came through a second gate, into the shadow of i

He bore up the wife, who staggered against him. “Please,” she said, “let me rest. Let me rest.”

“Soon,” he said. He could wish she had died quietly, as the old man had died. She was a gentle soul. She had no imagining of the possibilities in this place.

“What is that sound?” she asked when the gates groaned and gave a tortured sound, iron on iron.

“Machines,” he said. “The machines of the Beykaskh.”

She seemed not to understand him. Perhaps she had never heard how the Beykaskh made gates of iron and boiled water to make them move, or how the Ila, displeased, flung deposed ministers into the works of those machines. The wife from Tarsa wavered in her steps, and looked numb, exhausted as they passed through the last gates, through the heart of the machines.

They were within the i

“This is the one,” the captain of the Ila’s men said suddenly, and seized Marak’s arm, and drew him and the wife apart.

The wife fell to her knees, crying out for his help, and for someone named Lelie. No one noticed. She lay on the pavings and the besha that bore the dead old man walked sedately past her defenseless arm, scarcely missing her, stepping delicately over her. Marak saw it, held his breath, but walked obediently where the men bade him go.