Mercedes Lackey - The Eagle And The Nightingales

The reek of the slaughterhouses and holding pens was not all that came drifting by on the breeze. There were other, equally unsavory smells_the stench of the leather-workers' vats, the effluvium of the glue-makers' pots, the pong of garbage- and dung-collectors' heaps. Fortunately there was something of a real current of moving air here, and it ran crossways to the road; as soon as they were out of the immediate area, the worst of the smell faded, diluted by distance.

But now the slaughterhouse odor gave way to new odors, or rather, older ones. Nightingale winced and tried to barricade herself against a stench that was both physical and mental. Her stomach heaved, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

Mighty God. Even animals wouldn't live like this. Even flies wouldn't live like this! And why does the Church allow this? There is a question for you!

Only the poorest would live here, so near the slaughterhouses and the dreadful stench, the flies, and the disease_and the tenement houses lining the road bore ample testament to the poverty, both monetary and spiritual, of those living within. The houses themselves leaned against each other, dilapidated constructions that a good wind would surely send tumbling to the street. Drunken men and women both, wrapped in so many layers of rags and dirt it was hard to tell what sex they were, lay in the alleys and leaned against the houses. Filthy children crowded the front stoops, big bellies scarcely covered by the rags they wore, scrawny limbs showing that those bellies were the sign of malnourishment and not of overeating. They, too, lay about listlessly on the steps, or sat and watched the passing traffic, too tired from lack of food to play. The scream of hungry babies joined the sound of commerce on the road; Nightingale resolutely closed her ears to other sounds, of quarrels and blows, of weeping and hopelessness. This was new; poverty was always part of a city, but never starvation, not like this. It was one more evidence of King Theovere's neglect, even here, in the heart of his own land and city.

I can't do anything about this_at least, I can't do more than I'm already planning to do. I can recruit some of my children from these_I can feed as many as my purse will permit . She salved her conscience with that; there was too much here for even every Gypsy of every clan to correct.

She sighed with relief as more and sturdier buildings took the place of the tenements. More warehouses, mills for cloth, flour and lumber_and something that Nightingale had never seen at firsthand among humans before, although she was familiar enough with the Deliambren version, which they called "manufactories."

Here, in enormous buildings, people made things_but not in the way they were accustomed to make them in villages and towns elsewhere. People made things together; each person performed a single task in the many stages of building something, then passed the object on to the next person, who performed another task, and so on until the object was completed. Every example was like every other example; every chair looked like every other chair, for instance, and every pair of trews like every other pair of trews.The system worked very well for the Deliambrens, but Nightingale was of two minds about it. It did mean made-goods were much cheaper; no one needed to be an expert in everything, and almost anyone could afford well-made trews or chairs or tea-mugs. But it felt like there was no heart in such goods, and nothing to show that a tea-mug was special....

Ah, what do I know? I am a crafter of music, not of mugs_and I am sure there is still a demand for trews and chairs and mugs made by individuals . The system did the Deliambrens no harm; they took as much pleasure in life and crafting as any other being. Still_

I would not like to work in such a place, but that does not mean that other folk would feel the same. Stop making judgments for others, Nightingale .

The donkey relaxed as they entered this district; she let go her tight hold on his lead-rope, and let him have his head again. The shape of this area was determined by the river that ran through it; there was scarcely a bit of bank that did not have a mill wheel on it to make use of the swiftly-flowing current. The buildings here were old_and Nightingale suspected that few of the people traveling beside her had any idea how very old they were. The mill wheels and millraces were recent additions to buildings that had been standing beside this river since before the Cataclysm.

The buildings were not pretty; they were simple, brute boxes with square window-holes where there might, once, have been glass. Now they were covered with whatever might let in light and exclude weather; glass in some places, oiled paper or sheets of parchment in others, but mostly sheets of white opaque stuff the Deliambrens used for packing crates and padding. The base color of these dull boxes was an equally dull grey; where in the past people had tried to apply paint, either to cover the entire building or as crude advertisements, the paint remained only in patches, as if the buildings had some kind of scabrous disease. But the irony was that these places were solid still; they had stood for centuries and likely would stand for centuries more. Nightingale had been inside the Deliambren Fortress-City; she had seen buildings like these being erected. One actually poured the walls, using wood to make the molds to give the walls their form, as if they were huge ceramics. Once the grey stuff set, it was stronger than granite and less likely to age due to weathering.

So the irony, lost to those beside the Gypsy, was that these buildings which seemed relatively new were actually much, much older than the tenements that had been falling down.

The road crossed the river on a bridge that also dated back to the Cataclysm; Nightingale privately doubted that anyone could bridge the Lyon River in these days_except, perhaps, Deliambrens. It was a narrow and fierce stream, with a current so swift and deep that "to swim the Lyon" was a common euphemism for suicide.

For a moment, there was relief from the heat; the waters of the Lyon were as cold as they were swift, and a second river flowed above it_a river of fresh, cool air. Nightingale moved as slowly on the bridge as she could, stretching out her moment of relief.

On the other side, the manufactories gave way again to housing, but fortunately for Nightingale's peace of mind the people here lived in better conditions than those near the slaughterhouses.

There were more of those pre-Cataclysm buildings, in fact, given over to living quarters rather than manufactories. These had more windows, and from the look of things, the ceilings were not as high, granting more levels in the same amount of space. In between these older buildings, newer ones rose, not quite as dilapidated as the tenements on the other side of the river, but by no means in excellent repair. These newer buildings huddled around the old as if for support, as if without those grey bulwarks they could not stand against wind and weather.

Nightingale tried to imagine what this area might have looked like before the wooden tenements were built, but had to give up. She just could not picture it in her mind. Why would people have put so much open space between the buildings, then build the buildings so very tall? Wouldn't it have made more sense to lay everything out flat, the way a small village was built? That way everyone could have his own separate dwelling, and one would not be forced to hear ones neighbors through walls that were never thick enough for privacy....

Ask anyone who has ever spent the night in an inn with newlyweds in the next room .

Well, there was no telling what the ancestors had been thinking; their world was as alien to the Twenty Kingdoms now as that of any of the nonhumans. Nightingale certainly was not going to try to second-guess them.