Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The World Menders

The apprentices groaned; Inez looked sympathetic. “And—present it?” she asked.

Gayne nodded. “Take it to the palace in the morning. As if getting the bread out shorthanded wasn’t enough.”

“You could take Farrari,” Inez suggested.

“So I could. All right—I’ll take Farrari.”

“Take me where?” Farrari demanded.

“To the palace. To present a cake to the kru. When you’ve finished with that stuff Inez will give you a haircut. She’s on watch, she’s got nothing better to do anyway. Then she’ll give you a lesson in how an apprentice behaves while his master presents a cake to the kru. If you can learn to walk and to bow in one lesson—especially to bow—I’ll take you with me.”

Farrari said bewilderedly, “A ceremonial cake—”

“It’s something every good rasc does from time to time,” Gayne said. “It’s a kind of voluntary, token tribute. When the kru is in Scorv he has a daily audience at which he permits his subjects to honor him with gifts.”

“The kru is dead!”

Gayne grinned. “That’s why they’re sending me. It should be a very interesting audience.”

Farrari walked dutifully at Gayne’s heels and performed the short, gliding steps he’d practiced for an hour the night before. Cradled in his arms he carried the kru’s ceremonial cake, a pastry baked to a secret recipe that some time in the remote past had pleased a kru and that owners of Borgley’s bakery had guarded and reserved for kruz forever after. It looked nothing at all like the other cakes the bakery had turned out early that morning. It looked, in fact, like a segment of bread, round, of the standard diameter, and trimmed to the Rasczian unit of measurement.

But it was a highly special cake. Using a small hand mill Inez had reground the flour over and over and the resultant pastry was usually fine-grained. It was also cloyingly sweet. It was wrapped in a white cloth on which Inez had drawn meticulously several black crests of the kru, and Farrari was ordered to carry it just so, and to walk thusly, and to bow properly and remain bowed while Gayne presented the cake.

As he followed Gayne he should have been mentally rehearsing the presentation scene, but instead he thought about architecture.

He postulated an old, old city, built by master builders who laid down the massive paving stones and erected the tallest buildings, ponderous structures fashioned of enormous blocks of stone, each surrounded by its own spacious, poetically landscaped grounds. They built both high and low: the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes but not the Life Temple that surrounded it—and the bubbling conduits through which the city’s wastes were washed to the river. At intervals along the main thoroughfares stood water houses, each with a lumbering narmpf turning the wheel that pulled the scoops of water from a deep well shaft. These emptied into a stone trough, from which women filled their crocks. The overflow poured into the underground conduit system. It was a clean city, and those master builders had built for the ages.

Under the pressure of a growing population, the later builders added another type of structure. Smaller builders of a gracefully decadent style crowded all of the old city’s vacant land. The spacious gardens vanished, the wide avenues were reduced to cramped streets laced by narrow alleys. The original, massive structures stood like the lonely surviving giants of a decimated primeval forest, crowded by inferior second-growth trees.

A troop of cavalry passed them, the second since they started the climb to the hilltop. The soldiers rode in their parade formation staring haughtily straight ahead, each with one bare, muscular arm poised with a spear from the bundle on his saddle. They swept past, the spirited grilz prancing and braying and tossing their horns.

Gayne slowed his pace. “Things are building up,” he muttered. “That’s ten troops in less than two days. Perhaps this isn’t a good time to visit the inner city. On the other hand, if we don’t go now, we won’t know how they handle gifts to a dead kru until the next one dies. And it was an order.”

Farrari paid no attention to him. Ahead of them stretched the one majestic old thoroughfare that had survived. The huge paving slabs were badly worn, but the street ran straight to the center of the city, where the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes loomed starkly above the huddled mass of the Life Temple.

Gayne muttered, “Come on. Stop gawking like a tourist.”

Which was unfair. Farrari was a new baker’s apprentice from Baft, the town that stood at the edge of the lilorr where the river plunged into its canyon, and any young man newly arrived in Scory would be expected to gawk. He had been told that.

They moved on, and for a time Farrari obediently kept his eyes at street level.

A wagon loaded with the cloth-covered bread baskets that now were sickeningly familiar to Farrari passed them on its way to one of Borgley’s retail connections. Bakers were the only craftsmen who distributed their products wholesale, this because the bakeries were concentrated in the suburb at the foot of the hill—which meant that the tons of quarm wood, flour and other ingredients that they consumed did not have to he hauled up to the city. The bread did, but bread was light.

Apprentices saluted Gayne with averted eyes. Other journeymen greeted him politely, and he conducted himself humbly when he met a master craftsman, whatever his trade. None of them paid any attention to Farrari, though he noticed that apprentices greeted each other with animation when not inhibited by -the presence of a journeyman or master. Women, shopping for the day’s viands, stepped aside for them, as did the daughters, or servants, who followed them with crocks and baskets.

At an intersection Gayne slowed his pace again. “I haven’t seen a nobleman this morning,” he muttered. “The servants aren’t out, either, which is stranger. But we can’t stop now—too many people have seen us.”

They overtook a string of narmpfz being led to a butcher’s establishment; the gate to the courtyard stood open and the lead narmpf was being coaxed past it with a handful of leaves. These were range animals, unaccustomed either to people or to cities, and the-powerful bodies were tensed, the small heads wagging in terror as though they sensed their fate.

Farrari assimilated a bewildering melange of impressions: a master and his wife in deep meditation over a silver ornament that a smith displayed in a cushioned box; an apprentice standing in a sidestreet wistfully gazing at an upstairs window where a girl’s head jerked from sight as Gayne and Farrari approached; a potter gleefully giving his infant son, or grandson, a lesson at the wheel. Farrari’s thought of the previous evening returned to him, and he whispered, “They aren’t monsters!”

They were approaching the square of the Life Temple and the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes. The temple’s creamy marble glowed dazzlingly under the high late-morning sun, and even the foreboding black of the tower glistened resplendently all the way to its blunt dome where the once-burnished metal had long-since weathered and corroded. Farrari stared at the distant tapestry, trying to make out scenes, until Gayne’s scowl told him that he was gawking again.

Where the street debouched into the enormous square the way was barred; a line of the kru’s soldiers stood slouched at attention while behind them a troop of cavalry tried to hold its grilz in formation. They had to detour widely in order to reach the kru’s palace, and they made their turning, reached a narrow cross street, and turned again. Then the trumpets sounded.