James Enge: Blood of Ambrose

Choosing a direction at random, he walked along the tunnel to its end. There he found a flight of shallow stairs leading upward. He climbed them tentatively, holding the lamp high. At the top of the stairs was a small bare room with one door. The King turned the handle and looked out.

Outside was a city street. It was long after dark, and wagon traffic was thick in the streets, in preparation for the next day's market. (Cartage into the city was forbidden during the day, to prevent traffic jams.)

The King closed the door and sat down on the floor next to his guttering lamp. But presently it occurred to him that sooner or later the Protector's Men would discover the tunnel and draw the obvious conclusion. No matter how dangerous the city was at night (he had heard it was; he had never set foot in the city unattended, day or night), he knew he should leave this place.

He stood impulsively and, leaving the lamp behind him, stepped out into the street.

Night to the King meant a dark room and the slow steps of sentries in the hallway outside. Night was an empty windowcase, a breath of cold air, the three moons, wrapped in a smattering of dim stars, peering through his windows, and the sullen smoky glow of Ontil-the Imperial city-to the east. Night was quiet, and the kind of fear that comes with quiet, the fear of stealth: the poisoned cup, the strangler's rope, the assassin's knife.

This night was different: a chorus of shouting voices, the roar of wooden wheels on the cobbled street, the startled cries of cart-horses. It was like a parody of a court procession, with the peasants in their high carts moving in stately progress-when they moved at all. The King, who had never been in a traffic jam (though he had caused many), wondered why they were moving so slowly, when they were all so obviously impatient. Then he saw that they all had to negotiate a sort of obstacle at the end of the street: a row of stone slabs stretching across the way, so that each cart had to slow to fit its wheels through the gaps in the stone causeway, and all the carts behind it perforce slowed as well. When the stones were higher than a cart's axles, or when no gap in the stones corresponded to the width of a cart's wheels, the delay was longer; the cart had to be pulled over, or unloaded and lifted over, or shunted aside.

Above the chaos of lamps the stars were almost invisible, but the King could see Trumpeter, the third moon, standing bright beneath the sky's dim zenith. The major moons, Horseman and great Chariot, were down-this was the month of Remembering, the King remembered. (He didn't have to bother much with days or months; he just did as he was told when someone told him to do it.)

Fascinated, the King crept along the narrow stone walkway toward this center of activity. Before reaching it he saw that, beyond the relatively narrow street, there was a great square or intersection into which several other streets emptied out. All of the traffic converged on one very large way that seemed to lead to the great marketplace or market district. (The King was hazy about the geography of the Imperial city, one of the two that he, in law, ruled.)

It was horrible, with the noise and the dust and the reek of the horsessweat and manure-and the shouts of the peasants and the glare of the cart lamps (dazzling in the darkness of the otherwise lampless street). Horrible but fascinating. The King believed that the noise, the dirt, the confusion would drive anyone mad. But the peasants did not seem mad, only annoyed. The King had no idea where they were coming from, and only the vaguest as to where they were going, but did not doubt there was backbreaking drudgery at either end. The King was not exactly sure what "backbreaking drudgery" entailed, but it was something (he had been told many times) that was not expected of him. This relieved him greatly, as he considered his life hard enough as it was. Surely none of these peasants had a Grandmother like the Lady Ambrosia, or an uncle like Lord Urdhven.

On the far side of the street he saw three figures, cloaked, masked, booted, gloved, all in red. They carried something between them …he saw an arm trailing on the ground and realized it was a dead body. So the red figures must be members of the Company of Mercy, the secret order that tended to the sick and buried the bodies of the city's poor-no one knew where. There were strange stories about the red Companions; no one ever saw their faces, or knew where they came from. There were bound to be stories.

One of the red-masked faces turned toward him as he stood on the sidewalk, open-mouthed, watching the traffic pass, and it occurred to him again that the Protector's Men would be coming for him soon. At the moment he was just another mousey-haired, underdeveloped, twelve-year-old boy in dark clothes wandering the city streets. But when the Protector's Men started asking questions, some of the people passing by might remember that they had seen him. He had to get on his way, and immediately.

But where should he go in the dark city before him? What was he to do? To find Grandmother's brother, of course. But he would have to ask someone. There were many people here, many of them from outside the city, some of them, perhaps, from very far away. This was the place to begin.

The King shrank from the thought of what he was about to do. But the memory of the lamp in the dark tunnel returned to him, renewing his hope and his strength. And there was a trembling exultation in the thought that if he succeeded, he would bring hope to his Grandmother as she had brought hope to him. He had never done anything like that before.

Not allowing himself to think, he leapt away from the wall and hopped from stone to stone across the intersection, as if they were the stepping-stones in his garden stream in the palace. A cart was slowly being pulled through the gap in the stones.

"The Strange Gods eat these roadblocks," the driver was cursing. "They should make them all the same size. How's a man supposed to bring his goods to market?"

"We could market at Twelve Stones," the driver's shadowy companion observed.

"They won't pay city prices, my lad. When you-Hey! What do you want?"

This last was addressed to the King, who had leapt over to cling to the side of the cart.

"Help me!" the King said.

The driver turned to look at him. He was a heavy-shouldered peasant in a dark smock. His face was sun-darkened; it had flat features and flat black eyes like stones, and a flat gray beard. "Help you what?" he asked reasonably. Beyond him the King could see his companion, a gaping young man with straw-colored hair and the barest beginnings of a beard.

"Help me find…" the King began, then stopped. Who? Grandmother's brother. But she wasn't really his grandmother-he just called her that because it was shorter than "great-great-great-great-etc. grandmother." And what did you call the brother of your great-great-who-knows-how-manygreats grandmother? He didn't think there was a word for that.

"My…she…I'm…my…my…my-"

"Get your story straight," advised the driver as the cart surged forward into the open; with dispassionate skill, he lifted his whip and cut the King across the face.

Too shocked even to scream, the King felt, as from a great distance, his nerveless fingers let the cart go; he fell to the filthy cobbles of the open square. Dazedly he watched the lamplit cart roll away in the dark toward the other lights clustering at the thoroughfare entrance.

Slowly the King rose to his feet. The whipcut was a red lightning-stroke of pain across his face, and other dark fires were burning on the side of his head, his right side and limbs where he had fallen. He did not fully understand why the driver had done what he did. But he guessed that the same thing would happen unless he did as the driver had advised, and got his story straight.