“Four hundred lousy bushels,” Esmond said, shaking his head. “By the way, you’d better not do that when we get to Vanbert.”
“Why not?”
“Because only pansies wear flowers in their hair, among the Confeds,” Esmond grinned. “Pansies and girls. So unless you want to attract the attention of some rich old Councillor—other than as a teacher of rhetoric, I mean—”
Adrian laughed and punched his brother on the arm; it was like striking a tree. “You’re the pretty one in the family,” he said.
They passed the field, and rode under the arches of an aqueduct that ran over the road as it dipped into a shallow valley. Esmond’s mouth tightened again as they glanced back along the length of it, where it disappeared into the heat-haze.
“Arrogant bastards,” he muttered.
“And you’d better learn to control your tongue, or you may lose it, in Vanbert,” Adrian said. “They don’t take kindly to Emeralds who don’t keep their place.”
Traffic grew steadily thicker; by the time they were within a day’s travel of Vanbert itself, they rarely managed more than a trot. Everything comes to Vanbert, Adrian quoted to himself. Most of it prosaic: long wagon trains of grain and jerked meat, herds on the hoof stopping traffic—one memorable half-day spent behind a flock of waddling geese ten thousand strong—salt fish, smoked sausage, vegetables, cheeses and butter and giant tuns of wine. Once a fast two-wheeled carriage, with snow packed inside its sawdust-insulated box chassis, passed in a clatter and clangor and cracking of whips. More whips over the shuffling coffles of slaves, walking chained neck and neck with hard-eyed mounted guards, most of those barbarians from the Southron territories. Wagons and pack trains and wheelbarrows and porters, salt and iron and copper, gold and reed-paper and spices, and more races and tongues than he’d thought existed. Once he even saw a man whose skin was black, striding along in an ankle-length robe of cotton, ignoring pointing and whispering and daring small boys who darted in to touch his skin to see if it was real.
“I keep expecting to see the city over the next rise,” Esmond said, on the fifth week of their journey.
Adrian grinned. “We’re in the city,” he said. “Have been for hours.”
Esmond gaped, then looked around. The truck-gardens of yesterday had given way to elegant suburban estates; most of the road was lined with high walls of brick and concrete, usually whitewashed, broken here and there by an elaborate gate of wrought iron and brass. Each gate had at least two direbeasts on chains guarding it, their heads all mouth and the great overlapping pairs of canines often tipped with bronze or steel. The human guardians in the gatehouses were sometimes chained to the walls by their ankles as well; it made the slogans set in tiles by the entrances—Welcome or Hail Hospitality—seem a little hollow.
Of course, that means hospitality for their own kind, Adrian thought.
“What can you expect,” he said, “from a people who have a word in their language that means ‘kill every tenth person’? And who think their first ancestors were nursed by a direbeast.”
There was no edge to Vanbert of the type they were familiar with, no wall marking the place where city gave way to country. Not even the fringe of grave-memorials that ringed an Emerald city, since Confederates burned their dead and kept the ashes with the living in little pots under their wax masks—something he’d always considered rather gruesome, but then as Bestmun said, “Custom was king in every land.” The suburbs grew thicker, the traffic denser, and above them rose the famous eight hills; and those were only higher places among the buildings that carpeted the land for more than a day’s journey in every direction. Virtually the only breaks in the spread of buildings were the small groves that surrounded temples—usually round with pointed roofs here, or domes on some of the more recent—or the courtyards of the very wealthy; even the drained swamplands that had once helped feed an earlier Vanbert were built over.
“Dull, though,” Esmond said critically, as they led their velipads aside to let a wagon loaded with column drums pass. “Brick, little shops—nothing really magnificent.”