She was going very slowly now, puffing hard, sweating; also cursing the chaffing of the damnable ropes. She had not expected to climb so far. She thought she must be drawing nigh to the palace, but the high buildings cut off any glimpse of it. The harbor, also, was invisible, andmust be very far below her now. An absurd fear of failure was niggling at the back of her mind. She had been told to turn left at the minstrel, but suppose she had missed the minstrel in the crowd? Suppose he had taken his fee and gone elsewhere, or just grown tired of waiting for her?
Suppose—worse—that Rasha had detected the conspiracy and was now playing cat to Azak’s mouse? All those mysterious, taciturn guides might have been agents of—or even guises of the sorceress herself, and she might tease and torment Inos for hours, making her trek to and fro, up and down, until she collapsed from sheer exhaustion, or until the fiendish torment of the ropes cut off her arms and they fell to the ground at her feet.
Where an ancient building abutted an even older one, the angle of a doorway provided a small refuge, and there Inos stepped aside to rest while a string of panier-bearing mules minced by. As the clop of their feet died away, she heard a cithern twanging faintly up ahead. Hoping that this signified the missing minstrel, she gave her sagging meal sack a surreptitious heave and stepped back into the throng to begin climbing again, feeling every muscle in her legs ache.
She had almost gone by another of the sinister dark archways when a familiar voice said, “God of Pilgrims.”
The two men standing there were indistinct in the shadow and muffled in robes, but one was very tall. She stepped out of the crowd and smiled up at him before remembering that he could see little of her face.
“And may the God of Childbirth grant you safe labor,” he added.
“And you also, Cubslayer. What minstrel?”
“Just another mirage to divert pursuit.” Azak flashed one of his rare smiles, and it seemed less tinged than usual with mockery. “Come in and relax, then. Here you will be secure, and safe even from the power of the sorceress.”
Beset the road:
Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round Enmesh,
and then impute my Fall to Sin!
— Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam (§80, 1879)
SEVEN
Dawn of nothing
1
Morning had come at last, and Rap was still alive, or at least he thought he probably was. He had been conscious a few times in the night, but more often not, which was better. His head felt as if it had split into two unequal halves; there was a lot of dried blood in his hair. His left ankle was swollen even bigger than the larger side of his head.
He had fallen down a steep slope at the bottom of the hill. There was a very narrow gap there, in back of a house, where the rock had been quarried away to make more room. It was cluttered. with roots and branches and old rubbish. Overhead a patch of sky now showed through a chimney, a hole he must have made as he came down on his way to a pit that seemed to be part of an abandoned cesspool or tank of some sort, lined with rotted bricks. Whatever it might have held in its prime, it was now stuffed with mud and sodden leaves and Rap.
There was some stinking water, too, and around dawn he’d been desperate enough to drink from it. Walking was going to be the problem. He had never noticed how many bones there were in a man’s ankle, and now he could count two more in his left one than he could in his right.
After throwing off the layers of debris that had followed him down and more or less buried him, Rap hauled himself to his feet. He whimpered aloud at the pain, leaned against the wall until his giddiness passed, and then fumbled in the muck to retrieve a missing sandal. Forcing his limbs to move against pain was much harder than he had expected; he cursed his own faintheartedness. With maddening slowness, he clambered along the narrow canyon that separated the back of the building on one side from crumbly rock on the other. Both of them seemed to lean to the left, but that was just his farsight a little mixed up, that was all.
He reached a corner and a gap between two buildings, so narrow that he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The planks were rough, but he was able to reach overhead and find handholds in them, and thus keep most of his weight off his ankle. Then he came to the road, and those acrobatics wouldn’t take him any farther.
He should have brought along a stick or a branch, to use as a cane, and he had been too stupid to think of it.
He stood on one foot, wiping mud off himself as he contemplated the harborfront of Milflor. It was already bustling, but less busy than the market had been. The sun was up, although still hidden by the high ground of the cape, where the proconsul’s palace lurked behind its occult shielding. He wished he had more control over his farsight, for it kept trying to snoop among the fishing boats at the jetties, or the taverns and merchants’ establishments along the landward side of the road. It still gave everything a marked tilt to the left.
Soon he began to realize that there was something sadly wrong with his eyes, also, a foggy jumpiness. Partly they were full of tears because he was in pain, but there was more to it than that. Everywhere he looked he saw a glare of sunlight, as if the whole world was made of water, and reflecting. He let his fingers investigate the bump on his head. They came away red, so the gash was still oozing. Bad! Nothing would be more conspicuous than blood.
A road with only two directions to run was not a healthy place for a fugitive, but he couldn’t run anyway. To his right was the palace and the sorcerer’s tower, and the headland would be a dead end for him, so he should probably head left. If the cape was an arm and the mainland a body, then he was in the armpit, alongside the small-craft jetties. He’d find it easier to hide if he went left, landward, but the big ships were moored off to the right, just about at the giant’s elbow, and directly below the sorcerer’s tower, which Thinal had called the Gazebo. The only way out of Faerie was in one of those big ships. God of Pity, he was hungry! His headache was getting worse, and he suspected he was confused.
When his good leg began to complain that it couldn’t hold him up all by itself forever, he decided to start by getting himself cleaned up. There was a whole ocean of water right across the road from him, and it must be warm, because he could see kids playing in it. Right!
He took a deep breath and lurched forward, intending to limp across to the waterfront itself. He must have made it because in a little while he discovered he was sitting on a stone bench there. Someone was hammering red-hot nails into his ankle all the time, though, and he was sweating hard enough to wash the mud off without any water at all. He did not remember arriving. Could a man walk in a faint?
The sun was above the palace ridge now, and already the sea was a richer color than he had ever seen it at Krasnegar; but the fishing boats looked much the same, as did the sea gulls just as cheeky and noisy and graceful in flight. The smell of salt and weed and fish was not too different, but there were a lot more barrows and carts and wagons rattling and clanking along the road at his back.
Feeling homesick was not going to help at all.
The tide was in. The road stood about a span above the water, built of massive blocks of white stone. They looked old and worn, but of course the docks at Milflor could well be just as sorcerous in origin as Inisso’s castle and causeway in Krasnegar. Fishing boats were tied to some slimy old wooden jetties.
Just to his right a stone staircase ran down to the sea. Five or six boys were playing there, jumping headfirst into the water, then running up the steps to do it again. It looked like good fun for rich kids; at their age Rap had been mucking out stables. That thought took his gaze to the white beach and big houses on the landward side of the bay. Children and some adults were splashing in the water there and playing in little sailboats.