The lawns rose in four levels, flecked with pink magnolia shade and dotted with pools. A fine spice of dust smoked from the winding paths where the merchants and their like went up and down.
There were few women on display. It was basic to Hessek morality that the female is a jewel best kept in a box. Ladies
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might venture out with their husbands only under cover of darkness, and then veiled from the nose to the ankle. Even the poorer women, of necessity abroad, covered half their faces and all their forms in this manner; only the Masrian girls went bare-faced, but they were mostly over in the Palm Quarter. Commercial Bar-Ibithni was a hotbed of mixed blood, Old and New, and though the men put on the draped breeches and the airs of Masrians, they preferred their women in the old style, safely tethered. But there was a predominance of masculine courtesans of Thei’s ilk. More than once, before I grew accustomed to it, my eye was caught by something too much a girl to be one.
On the second lawn a red tiger was pacing about its post in an open enclosure above the path, staring with practiced hatred at the crowd of fools who patronized it. A single weak link in its alcum shackle would have meant a different game.
Kochus said, “She’s coming, the old woman. Over there. I’ve seen her before, Lellih the crook-back.”
I turned and looked for her. She would recognize me, from some description Lyo would have given her. Her hair was uncovered, gray and sparse, and her eyes sewed up in snarls of skin, but she also had hidden her lower face with a bit of a veil. She was tiny, shrunk little even for a Hessek, and her back rested over her like a small broken mountain. The wicker tray that she wheeled before her on a solitary wooden wheel was loaded with delicate confectionery that seemed to mock her unsightliness.
She got within a couple of yards of me, calling in a thin wail for custom. Then I realized why she had demanded money, for part of her act was to be that all her trade of sweets be spilled, for dramatic effect, at my feet. As the sugar gems rolled, Lellih swung herself awkwardly down, flopped over in the grass, and began to shrill with a ghastly, damaged anguish.
The idling crowd drew aside, alarmed by the proximity of this distress. Kochus, unable to restrain his mirth at the play, had begun to chuckle, till I warned him to be silent.
A figure ran over, somebody’s drab, thin female servant, who presumably knew the old woman. She crouched down by her, trying to take her arm.
I walked to where Lellih was folded on the lawn, screaming, and the servant girl stared up from dull eyes, and cried, “Don’t harm her, sir. She can’t help herself. She’ll be better in a moment, see if she isn’t.” She spoke in faulty Masrian
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for my special benefit, I supposed. I was of Masrian height and tanned very dark, and in my fashionable gear I probably seemed to be of pure conqueror-blood.
“I don’t intend to harm her, girl. If this is Lellih the sweet-seller, I mean to heal her.”
The servant gaped; the crowd around us hovered. Only one man laughed, catching my words. Lellih of the crooked back, meanwhile, turned her bird’s head and squinted at me with an eldritch wickedness.
“How can you heal me?” she asked, having got it pat from Lyo, and managing besides to make her squeaking heard a fair distance. “All my years I have carried the gods’ curse on my shoulders.”
I bent and lifted her up. She was like a wisp of brittle-dry straw, ready to flare alight in the heat of the day. Her head came no higher than my belt.
“Don’t mock me, my fine lovely lad,” she shrilled out. “How can you heal a cripple who has been bent in a hoop since she was birthed?” Under her breath she maliciously added for me alone, “And just let’s see you do it, for all your boasting, you devil out of Hessu’s sea.”
“Hush, granny,” I said softly. I put my right hand flat on her spine and my left under her chin, and I straightened her, as I might straighten a stick of green wood.
I had felt little or nothing the other times. This time I felt a surge come out of my palms, and she screamed aloud once, in earnest, and her twisted spine crackled like cinders underfoot. Then she was upright, her burden gone and her rags hanging hollow on her back, and now her head reached to my rib cage.
The crowd made its sound.
The servant girl hid her already three-quarters-hidden face.
It was Lellih who turned up her predatory eyes and said, “Is it as it seems? Is it? The pain went through me like redhot whips, but now I am straight as a maid. Say, handsome priest-fellow, will you make me young, too?” She glinted at me, sly as a gray fox. “I was a fair sight when I was young, saving my hump, truly fair I was. Will you do it?”
My flesh crept, as it had for a moment when Lyo first told me her words. If I could do that, pare off age, remake youth, that was a vision indeed to catch fame. But I was not sure. It seemed a thing no man, magician or priest, should aim at half unholy. It got me superstitious, where I was not, to think of it I said, nevertheless, and very quietly, “You’ve had your
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medicine for today; besides, I work no miracles without ultimate profit, granny-girl. If I did what you ask, you’d be my tame monkey thereafter, part of my sorcerer’s credentials, a peepshow; I waste nothing of my work.”
“Make me a girl, and you can have me for whatever purpose you like,” and she plucked my sleeve and cackled and said, “Make me a virgin, too; seal me up again. And then break the seal yourself. Will you, will you, eh, handsome?”
Kochus took her sticklike wrist and began to move her on. I said, “Gently.” She looked sufficiently fragile to break in his paws. She flashed her eyes at me for that, turned suddenly and started off over the lawn, trampling her sweets, leaving the wheeled tray and the servant who had run to help her, and the whole crowd gazing, crying out like a child as she went by, “See me, how straight I am, and how tall!”
I had considered that the blind boy and his prostitute might prove reticent, having taken the money and disbelieved the promise, but they bad come to taste the water, and finding it sweet, were ready to drink. Two or three seconds after, Lellih was gone, Kecham’s son was pulled forward by his doxy-not female, despite Lyo’s use of “she,” but another Thei, and not so winning. Kecham’s son had a conjunctival disease a good doctor could have cured, if he had been set to it in time, but I guess the girl-boy did not have the riches that buy physicians. It was an easy matter for me, nevertheless, and with no particular sense of passage. Yet when, the boy found himself blind no longer, he started to weep, and his lover fell on his neck and wept too, which made a pleasant show.
However, if I expected next some sight of the wealthy Phoonlin, with his kidney stone, I was to be disappointed. In fact, I had no need of him. The idlers in the Grove of a Hundred Magnolias, whispering and screeching, had bethought themselves of their own personal ailments, and were rushing on me from every side, kissing my boots and kneeling in Lellih’s ruined confectionery.
I stood my ground and worked my magic. I must have saved three score lives at least in those hours, and stemmed a host of minor troubles, and still the crowd swelled and implored me. Word had spread thoroughly at last. Men came running, the well-to-do with the poverty-stricken, up Amber Road, through Winged Horse Square, and into the Grove.
Kochus stood in a static green-faced panic at my side, protesting that we should be mashed beneath a berserk mob.
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My strength, greater it seemed than at any moment in my life before, buoyed me with a kind of cold exhilaration that had little to connect it with the marvels I was performing. I had no unease at the size of my clamoring audience, nor any compassion. If anything, it was a variety of scorn that kept me there to lay my hands on them. Their miseries were like black worms wriggling at the bottom of some enormous depth, clearly perceived, far removed, valueless. Till I grew bored with the phenomena, I should remain.