A huge party of Hessek slaves, got free of their masters in the confusion or else sent out voluntarily for news, had congregated here to intercept the passage of the Imperial Guard. Probably they had expected more soldiers. No one had numbered the slaves. They were in rags or the futile pretty clothes their owners hung on them, but they had snatched up kitchen knives, stones, or concealed barbaric weapons they themselves had constructed, knowing this night was imminent.
A thousand men in full armor, equipped with swords and bows and mounted on pure-bred Masrian horses, caught lazy, dreaming, and stupid by wild animals who fought with teeth
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and claws when other tools were gone and seemed possessed by devils. Those soldiers who escaped told stories of the bellies of screaming horses ripped open by bare hands, of girls of twelve years or less with blood-red hair pulling down shrieking jerdiers, and covering them as bees cover spilled syrup. Those who witnessed the evidence later, what remained there in Fountain Garden, coined a fresh name for the avenue: the Beasts’ Run.
Till this incident there had been no noise from the Hesseks.
Now, the Commercial City awash with them as they cascaded like black ink into the Market of the World, and appeared abrupt as death itself on the wide streets of the Palm Quarter, they began to call a single thing, over and over.
“Shaythun-Kem! Shaythun-Kem!” And after it, that other howling, “Ei ulloo y’ei S’ullo-Kem!”
I heard it, borne to the Citadel, even above the din of the bells, and my skin crept on my bones. I needed every iota of my former resolve to keep me sane.
Then, in the midst of their wailing, a more mundane racket made itself noticed, a hammering on the Fox Gate, and the hoarse blustering of rich men in fright.
Sorem stood in the room that led from the colonnade of the Ax Court, rubbing the head of the gray bitch hound, his face the face of a man who, fettered, hears his woman tortured in an adjoining chamber.
Bailgar and Dushum stood by him, relating how seventyodd dignitaries had arrived to plead the garrison gate for the help of Sorem, which was, of all signals, the surest.
Sorem straightened from his dog and gazed about at us.
“So you permit me to go out now, you five kings of BarIbithni? Now that the city is on its knees, I may put my lesson books away. School is over.”
“My lord Sorem,” Bailgar protested. “This was agreed between us, for your own sake-”
“I never agreed this,” he shouted. “Never, do you hear me?”
“Then, Sorem, you should have countermanded their orders, and done what you thought fit,” I said from the door. “We are pledged your vassals. We offer our advice; if you take it or not is your choice.”
He spun around to me, and I thought he would come to me and strike me in the face, as a girl would have done, but he collected himself in time.
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“Your advice,” he said, “your advice is excellent, but it takes no account of human life. The dead, they tell me, are piled in the streets.”
“Then now is the moment to finish it.”
“Why now? It could have been seen to two hours back.”
“I will remind you of the itinerary. The purpose of the wait was to gauge the proportion of the Hessek rabble and the direction of their attack, to show the indifference and weakness of the Emperor, while at the same moment lessening what power he has. Last, to bring the city to your door, Sorem, to beg your help in spite of Hragon-Dat. These things achieved end the waiting.”
He looked at me. He said, very quietly, “You began it, Vazkor. You end it.”
I thought, Where did this start? Was it Basnurmon’s gift, the statuette from the brothel, fit only to laugh at? Or does he guess I lust for his mother, and has the eternal boy’s dislike of me for that? Or is it that he has never truly seen blood and fire all around him, those toy campaigns of the Empire too tender meat to wean him to this night?
I had put on the full gear of a jerdier since my return to Pillar Hill; now I took up the helmet with its brass ringlets and set it on my head, and went up and back to the wall.
The rich lords of the Palm Quarter were massing beneath, the track glittering with them and their lamps, their wealth piled about them, everything they could drag here, in bundles, in carriages, in the arms of menials. There were even a few Hessek slaves, looking as frightened as their masters. Perhaps they were mixes, or irreligious, but I would not risk them.
“The Citadel will give shelter to Masrians,” I shouted down. “I speak for Prince Sorem Hragon-Dat when I say no Hessek will be admitted.”
“And what of the city?” bawled the spokesman of the throng, a portly man with much gold on him, and some eloquent rubies besides.
“The Emperor has charge of it. The jerds of the Crimson Palace are even now, so we hear, laboring in your defense.”
“One jerd!” yelled the rich man. Others parroted the yell. “And that, sir Captain,” he screeched, “that one destroyed by slaves!”
“Incredible,” I said.
The multitude assured me it was not.
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The scene brought on an urge to humor. Though clearly they did not know me in my unfamiliar soldier’s garb, I had recognized, here and there, former patients of mine, men I had rescued from sure death of toothache and indigestion, and even, beneath the fringed parasol-roof of a lady’s traveling chariot, my overdressed lover of the white pavilion.
A man of Denades’ jerd approached, and told me quickly that fire had been spotted southward among the suburbs, which pointed the whereabouts of a third portion of Hesseks like a sign post.
The Fox Gate was being opened, and the jeweled escapees grumbling and thrusting their way inside.
The man with the rubies got himself up the wall-stair and planted himself before me.
“Where is Prince Sorem? Is the city to be burned to cinders? Surely the Emperor has instructed him to lead the jerds of the Citadel to our defense?”
“My lord,” I said, slowly, so he should not miss any, “Prince Sorem does not enjoy his Imperial father’s confidence. You may have heard talk of a plot against the life of the prince, engineered by the heir Basnurmon, and winked at by the Emperor.” I certainly trusted he had heard it. We had taken some pains to spread this truth around the city the past two days, using the paid gossips of the metropolis, who will put any rumor to seed, honest or otherwise. “However, moved by the plight of Bar-Ibithni, and not at one with his royal father’s sloth, the prince is gathering his forces to quash the Hessek rabble.”
Rubies swallowed my speech whole, and made fish-eyes at me. I bowed and went down the stair. The jerds were forming up through the gate yard and the adjacent courts, glad to be employed at last. I made out Bailgar, Dushum, and the rest riding up with their captains around them. I thought, // Sorem does not come now, he will lose everything. Then he came.
He rode into the yard, fully dressed for battle, and on the white stallion with its trappings of white, that old Masrian illusion, a man-horse in the dark red torch glare. He looked a king if he was not yet an emperor. One would not entertain the notion that some minutes back he had raved like an angry baby, and as well one would not.
It had been agreed from the beginning that I go with them, my own part an essential one, something I had determined to
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do, yet which made my mouth go dry, realizing I had reached it. A jerdier led over my horse, the white Arrow that Sorem had given me this very afternoon, which seemed years in my past. I swung up and found Sorem had set his mount in front of mine.
“Vazkor,” he said, “will you forgive my foolishness? I spoke in haste to a man whose advice I value and whose judgment I have no quarrel with. You will understand, my grandfather built this city. I did not like to see it destroyed all about me while I hid in a bolt-hole.”
It seemed to me he forever begged my pardon, or I his.
“You said nothing to me that I will recall with rancor, Sorem Hragon-Dat.”
The rich citizens were crowding up on the wall to watch us go forth, the saviors of their city, and their gold. The gates stood wide, and from the parapets above brass horns were sounding. A jerd is a fine sight, five jerds, by deductive reasoning, one supposes must be five times finer. I rode with Sorem at the head of his jerd and my pulse was slow as sleep.