The summer came early to Bar-Ibithni; against the backdrop of an indigo sky, five hundred palaces let down their reflections in a sea of sapphire glass. West, where the great docks began, gold and green alligators of ships covered the water. At the innermost point of the bay stood a statue of gilded alcum, flashing like a fire some sixty feet high: the Masrimas of Bar-Ibithni: Hragon Masrianes, the first conqueror-king, who raised the city to its might, also raised up the statue. It had cost a thousand Hessek slave lives to do it, but slave life, as ever, came cheap. The god statue wore the pleated kilt, generous draped breeches, and knee boots of the conquerors, and also the massive collar and shoulder-pieces and the spiked helmet of a warrior. This gear-imposing on the tall Masrians, serving indeed to make them seem giants among flies-was but another symbol to the people under their sway that to dwarf a man is usually to best him.
A hundred years before, in the “Old Blood” days of the Hessek kings, only the embryo of a city had stood here, BitHessee, or Sea’s-Mouth. Inland lay three Hessek provinces, and over the water to the west, Hessek Seema and Tinsen. The Hessek kingdoms had contrived to persist some centuries,
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a culture ancient and sufficiently rotten that the thunder of war soon shattered it.
War came from the east in the form of a young people thrusting west and south. The old world crumbled where they passed. The little empires were consumed one by one, broken, annexed, and remade in the name of Masrimas, Flame-Lord.
The fire-worshipers were a formidable race, large in frame and huge in military numbers. Their legions, or jerds, were matchless. Disciplined to iron, clad in burnished bronze, and eauipned with horses, the like of which animal had never before been seen in the south, they poured across the map in their hunger for ground. Starved in their arid home of snowless crags and raw desert, the Masrians discovered the south with its rivers and alluvial plains, and the Hesseks, having withstood this change, as ever, stubbornly and ineptly, were thrown down and savaged with all the rest.
Seduced, however, by the bride they had forced, the warriors rebuilt the old world, dubbed it the “New,” and hung trinkets of architecture on the ruins. Bit-Hessee, a mere ocean port of the Hesseks, was razed and re-created, a model city for the Warrior-Emperor Hragon. Bar-Ibithni. as she became, instantly rivaled, then soon outshone, the Masrian cities of the east. Palaces were built by the sea, temples, monuments, theaters, which swiftly reduced the former capital to the artistic level of a cow-byre. The invaders had become occupants of a land of plenty, and were learning its wavs. Where the jerds marched now was in the drillvard and the court; they stacked their arms in taverns and bv the couches of women, till half Hessek was impregnated with Masrian seed. Presently the Masrians mellowed into that intellectual and sane enjoyment of life that heralds the decay of human strength.
The Hyacinth Vineyard paid her toll, and entered under the bar into the docks. Such quantities of shipping passed into and out of the harbor that the port and dock together ran for a mile or more. Behind lay the vast storehouses and Fish Market, landmarked by its two golden fish high on their pillar of granite. Here Amber Road began, which led in turn to the Market of the World, where was sold then anything that could be got in the empire, from transparent silk to green Tinsen tobacco to candied bees. Off from this colossal pool of commerce the lesser markets flooded away, the dealers in horses, cattle, and slaves, and here, too, the hostelries and wineshops and whore-palaces commenced.
I left Charpon with three of his seconds to sort the ship’s
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business as he would among the merchants’ offices about the quay. With a guard of ten Hesseks, Kochus, the remaining second, conducted me through the Fish Market and up Amber Road to the Dolphin’s Teeth. This place, named for the sea as city ships were named for the land, was a gaudy hospice, catering to wealthy brigands, and well supplied with such. Even Hessek pirates nocked there if they had silver money chains enough to pay for their board. Yet it was a Masrian house by inclination, aping conqueror ways, though I do not imagine a man of pure Masrian stock had ever entered it.
Kochus led me up the yellow marble steps of the Dolphin’s Teeth with the pride of the landowner returning to his estate. Thick pillars, painted a blue and red fit to spear the eyes, held up a roof of white stucco. The tiled walls bore pictures necessarily of dolphins.
Early drinkers, ships’ masters and sea bandits, were swaggering into and out of the vestibule with detachments of ruffians. Kochus, exhibiting the true sentimentality of the sadist, grinned black molars and embraced acquaintances. Seeing me stand modestly to one side, a scarred devil with an armful of gold, and missing the obligatory eye of the pirate, remarked on my out-city bumpkin appearance. Kochus flashed me a look of fear.
“This is a lord from foreign parts. The whole ship is in his debt.”
“What, Charpon in a man’s debt? Hey, you, girl-eyes, what did you do for him? I’d have said you were too tall for the master’s taste.”
I said offhandedly to Long-Eye, who stood behind me, “You see the noisy one there? Go over and strike him for me.”
Kochus cowered aside; the pirate stood nonplussed, not believing his ears, till Long-Eye, obeying me without expression and without a second’s delay, hit him hard in the mouth. Gold-Arm did not like this greeting and raised his meaty fist to flatten Long-Eye before coming on at me, while everywhere around the traffic through the hostelry halted and watched with interest. Thus I made my first impression on Bar-Ibithni. I loosed a white energy from my palm, clear as a lightning bolt. It connected with Gold-Arm in the region of his neck and felled him like an ox. He crashed on the floor of Masrian tiles and rolled a couple of yards, woundedly roaring, while over the crowd passed that simultaneous involun-
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tary gasping sound with which the magician comes to be familiar before he has got very far in his career.
To augment the proceedings, all our ten Hessek sailors dropped to their knees and groveled before me, and Kochus crept near, imploring I do nothing else.
Gold-Arm stopped rolling on the floor, and peered up in flinching amazement.
“I had hoped to spare you that,” I said to him. “You may remember in the future that it is better to let my servant strike you than I myself.”
A constrained hubbub broke out around the edges of the hall. Seeing I was not about to fling lightnings in indiscriminate directions, curiosity had outweighed panic. Such is the civilizing effect of city life upon men. It kills the instincts and replaces them with extended noses.
Just then a figure came floating along the vestibule.
Hessek by race, scented, creamed, and powdered with lips, cheeks, and earlobes tinted to the shade of fine pink coral, eyes shaped with blue kohl, hair curled and sprinkled with silver dusts. A trailing of gauze and green silk, and a pair of high-heeled slippers with tinkling disks to accompany a gliding gait like a smoothly oiled wheel running downhill. In two narrow white hands was the silver cup of welcome this pretty, mannered house offered to arrivals.
It was so unexpected, it took my brain a moment to come up with my perception. A beautiful girl. Without breasts. And she was close enough now, offering me the cup and looking under the butterfly lids, that I could see the cat’s jaw would need shaving before the paint was put on it, for they do not castrate their boy whores in Bar-Ibithni.
“Drink, my lord,” said the voice, carefully schooled into a softness that gave away nothing, except that no woman was speaking. “And you, Lord Kochus, welcome to the Dolphin once again. Is lord Charpon to come later?”
“How could he keep away?” flirted Kochus, putting his hand, with no preliminary, inside the loose draperies on the smooth, meticulously depilated flesh. “This is Thei,” he added to me, “highly recommended comfort of the inn. And this lord, Thei, is a foreigner, a sorcerer, as he has just demonstrated. Be careful the management doesn’t overcharge him, or he’ll tumble the house around your ears.” He still looked liverish with fright, despite his antics, striving to align himself with the earth-shaker, and fool the world and himself into believing his trembling was an integral part of the quake.
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Gold-Arm had scalded off among his friends like a bull into a thicket.
The hall hummed, and the curious Thei led us away.