The City (36 page)

She thought he was mocking her, and she looked at him narrowly and did not reply. She resolved to speak no more.

As if he knew what was in her mind he stood and picked up the stool. ‘We have started off badly today. I shall go away and come back tomorrow.’

As a soldier she had cursed the City daily, as was her right, but she would not listen to an enemy criticize her home or belittle the sacrifice of so many of her comrades. She grew angry thinking about it, yet when Mason next visited she found it impossible to harness that anger to her cause.

When he had settled himself on his wooden stool, he said, ‘You call your enemy Blues, or Blueskins, yet in fact there are a dozen nations and cities allied against the City. The Odrysian alliance alone includes Buldekki, Fkeni, Panjali, even some remaining Garians.’

She said, ‘The first great battle we fought was against the Tanaree tribesmen who painted their faces with blue dye. When others joined their fight we just kept calling them Blueskins. You call us Rats. It is a convenient way to speak of the enemy. It has no significance.’

‘Dunghill Rats. Yes, we do call you that. Do you know when that first battle was?’

‘Long ago. Before the City came under siege.’

‘It was many centuries ago. The City had encroached on tribal lands over the centuries, arrogantly taking minerals for its furnaces, and livestock for the citizens’ bellies. The Tanaree were a harsh people with unforgiving ways. They practised vendetta even among themselves. Then they chose a leader who declared that for each tribesman killed they would kill ten City warriors. So the City poured more soldiers into the area. The Tanaree are all dead now, long since wiped out.’

‘It is a foolish thing, to take on the City,’ said Indaro proudly.

Mason shook his head. ‘A millennium ago the City lived in harmony with its neighbours. Now it is a great bloated spider which has killed most of them and sits in the midst of a wasteland. For hundreds of leagues around it the land has been fought over so many times that it is quite barren, home only to the dead and dying. This is what you are fighting for, Indaro.’

‘The City wants peace, but peace with honour.’ It was a well-worn phrase. But she thought of the generals, and the contempt in which they were held by the common soldier, for the way they threw thousands of troops away on hare-brained schemes and doomed ventures. And she knew it was a lie.

‘There can never be peace while Araeon is emperor,’ Mason replied.

Indaro was offended by an enemy’s casual use of the emperor’s name. ‘You speak of peace yet you attack us on all sides. Most of my friends and comrades, most of the people I have ever known, have died at your hands. You will only be content when the City has fallen and all its people are dead.’

He shook his head again. ‘We do not want that. Many of us respect the City and its history. But Araeon places himself behind the walls of the Keep, in the centre of the Red Palace, deep in the heart of the City. He hides behind his people. They die for him in their thousands. And we will not rest until
he
is dead.’

‘We?’ she repeated. ‘Who is “we”? Do you claim to represent the Blues, Mason? Here in this abandoned fortress at the arse-end of nowhere? Are you speaking for the allied Blueskin armies?’

He answered her gravely. ‘Yes, I do represent the Blues, some of
them anyway, some men who still have power and influence. And this old fort was chosen deliberately. It might not look impressive now, but it was once the centre of a great kingdom. Perhaps it will be again. If our plans to end the war are successful.’

What plans, she wanted to ask. But she would not give him the satisfaction. Instead she said, ‘The Immortal craves peace, but not on his enemy’s terms.’

He laughed. ‘Have you met the Immortal? You are so certain you know what is in his mind.’ He leaned forward. ‘Would you even know the emperor if you saw him?’

Indaro thought back to the ill-fated day when she and Broglanh had joined the Thousand. It seemed like years ago. She remembered a fair man, bearded, tall. A man who was certainly dead now, whoever he was.

‘I saw him recently,’ she said.

Mason looked at her thoughtfully. He was quiet for a while. Then he said, slowly, as if choosing his words carefully, ‘I know people, people who are now very old, who told me of the City when it was at its peak, a beacon of civilization in a barbaric time. All its people were literate and its schools and libraries educated the world. The City’s parks were legendary, stocked with rare and endangered animals. Its buildings were roofed with bronze and copper. The great river flowed through the centre, not underground as a sewer, as it is now. It was a thoroughfare for great ships from cities beyond the seas.’

She shook her head. ‘You are speaking of a place which never existed, except in children’s story books, or in someone’s hopes and dreams.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he admitted. ‘But it
is
in decline. You cannot deny that. And all the while Araeon lives the City will continue that decline.’

She leaned forward and spat out, ‘
You
are the reason for the City’s decline, our enemy, the Blueskins. The Immortal wants only peace for his people.’

Mason smiled thinly. ‘Then why did he start the war?’

‘The war had been going on for centuries. You cannot blame the emperor for that.’

‘How long
has
he ruled, Indaro?’

‘I don’t know. A very long time. He was emperor when I was small. I saw him once at my father’s house.’

‘How old was he then?’

She thought about it. ‘Perhaps in his thirties, forties. I was a child and my mind’s eye is probably unreliable.’

‘And when you saw him recently?’

‘A man in his fifties,’ she said, remembering the Immortal climbing into the black carriage, his hair golden, or was it silver? ‘Sixty maybe.’

‘Yet you told me this emperor is the only ruler your father has ever known. How old is your father?’

Had she said that? Her father was very old, by far the oldest man she knew. She didn’t like to admit she didn’t know.

Mason said, ‘He is an old man. He had a wife before your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘More than one?’

‘Yes.’

‘And children?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know them, these children of former wives?’

‘They are all dead, I believe.’

She was uncertain. The emperor must be older than her father, yet the man she saw was only half his age. She remembered a phrase used by the old wives who gossiped in the kitchens of the Salient – ‘back when the Immortal was a boy’. It always meant time out of mind, unknown ages ago. But it was just an expression.

She recalled a conversation with Fell. She said to Mason, trying to sound authoritative, ‘The emperor has decoys, proxies, maybe many of them. The chances are the man I saw was
not
the emperor.’

‘You are missing the point. Your father is, what, eighty or more? So the emperor must be older than that. Yet these decoys are younger men. A baffling royal policy.’

‘Perhaps the emperor is vain and he prefers to wear a younger public face. It would be surprising if he did not. Men have their vanities.’

‘But by that thinking he can never afford to be seen in public, if he is in his dotage and his proxies are men in their prime.’

‘Perhaps that is the case,’ she replied, feeling uneasy. She wondered again why Mason came to the cell every day, spending time with her, trying to change her perception of the City and its emperor. What did it matter to him what she believed?

‘What is your argument?’ she asked him. ‘That the Immortal has been emperor for longer than the ages of men? Perhaps,’ she smiled, joking, ‘he
is
immortal?’

When Mason made no reply, raising his eyebrows, she said impatiently, ‘Only the weak-minded and superstitious believe he cannot die. It is merely a tale. He is a man, like you.’

‘No, Indaro, I’m not saying the emperor is immortal. But he is
not
a man like me.’

Fell’s cell was built of cold stone, and its small barred window looked out on to the central courtyard of the keep at ground level. When it rained hard, and it rained a lot in Old Mountain, water ran in through the window, flowed across the floor and out under the heavy wooden door. The room was too small for the three soldiers, and it was cold, and the damp sank into their bones as the days cooled further. Garret had developed a racking cough. Stalker had not recovered as well after his surgery as Fell had hoped, and the northlander spent most of his days lying on his bed staring at the low ceiling. Each of them had a thin mattress, raised on a pallet above the damp floor, and they were fed regularly if frugally.

No one spoke to them, and their food came in and their bucket went out through a sliding grille contraption in the metal door. On one chill day in autumn several blankets were pushed in. Handing them out, Fell decided it would be a long winter.

It was the next day when the cell door was thrown open and two armed guards walked in. One of them pointed to Fell and gestured at the door with his head. Fell glanced past them at other armed men outside, then he went with them. The other two prisoners watched him wordlessly.

As he walked in the centre of the group of guards, a mixture of feelings swirled in his chest. He was glad the long wait was over, and he hoped to find out what had happened to Indaro, and why they were being kept there. He did not fear interrogation. A captive for more than three months, he could tell the enemy nothing about troop deployments or strategies – not that he could have revealed much before. But he was a cautious man, and it was with concern that he contemplated his future at the hands of a group of armed men who were his enemy.

He was led across the wide stone square in front of the keep. He
looked up at it. It was built of massive stones carved precisely to fit together without mortar. They were green with lichen and moss, and he guessed the keep was very old. There were no windows on the side he could see, just a featureless wall with a single door, high but narrow, up a steep flight of steps.

As he was about to enter the door, guards in front of him and behind, he paused as if to look round. The guard at his back bumped into him, cursed in his own tongue and shoved Fell through the doorway. Poorly trained, Fell realized with interest. Big bearded men bristling with weaponry, but without the basic knowledge to keep clear of their prisoner. I could have killed him then, and one or two others, he thought. His spirits rose, and for the first time in weeks he started to plan.

He was taken up several flights into a bare room furnished with just a table and two hard chairs. A clean-shaven man was seated at the desk.

‘Please sit down,’ he said politely. ‘My name is Mason.’

Fell nodded with equal politeness. ‘I am Fell Aron Lee.’

Mason offered, ‘And you command, I should say commanded, the company of the Third Maritime who called themselves the Wildcats.’

Fell nodded.

‘Under General Flavius Randell Kerr.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is your opinion of Randell Kerr as a soldier?’

‘He is a general, not a soldier.’

Fell had decided not to restrict himself only to name and rank. If he escaped,
when
he escaped, he wanted it to be with as much information as possible. He could not win information by staying silent.

Mason smiled. ‘I am not interrogating you.’

‘You are asking me questions.’

Mason spread his hands. ‘I am merely making small talk.’

‘I am sure you have more interesting things to do than make small talk. I know I have. The lice won’t pick themselves from my clothes.’

Mason wrote something on the paper in front of him and looked up.

‘I have an obsession with the past, I admit it,’ he told Fell confidingly. ‘When I first arrived at Old Mountain, more than a year ago, I had always dreamed of coming to this place. I had an important role here and outwardly, I hope, I appeared confident and efficient. But
in my heart was the glee of a five-year-old opening a birthday gift. Each day I listened to the silence, for there is a great deal of silence here, you will have noticed it. It must be very different from the life you are used to, in battle and in the confines of the City, which we call the dunghill, or the Rats’ nest, as I’m sure you know. Each day I revelled in the silence of this fortress and thought that I could hear in its depths the footfalls of the people who built it, thousands of years ago.’

He gazed at Fell, who watched him expressionlessly.

‘They were great builders and mathematicians,’ Mason went on, ‘and they have left us many marvels carved in the eternal rock. They worshipped the stars, and believed the sun and the moon were also stars, whose eternal paths happened to pass close by our world. They communicated with each other in a language that has been lost to us, but we have thousands of examples of their script, which is elegant and beautiful, and which our scholars still struggle to decipher. People throughout the world admire the Tuomi. Except the people of the City, for they have not heard of them. They know of nothing beyond their walls. Do they?’

Fell made no reply.

‘It is my hope,’ Mason added pleasantly, ‘that when this war is over, or perhaps while it is still continuing, I will visit your City and walk in its streets and hear the footsteps of its past. Perhaps you will join me.’

Fell smiled to himself. Better and better, he thought. A man who likes to hear himself talk. I have already won two valuable pieces of information today.

When Doon came awake on the third morning after her escape from Old Mountain, it was long after sunrise. She opened her eyes to see watery daylight filtering through the gaps between the mouldy planks of her shelter. She sat up, groaning at the ache in her back, then shuddered as she felt the scuttling of insects which had worked their way into her clothes as she slept. She leaped up and brushed herself down convulsively; then, feeling something crawling across her back, she dragged off Indaro’s red jerkin and shook it out. A centipede as fat as her finger fell and scuttled away. She took the rest of her clothes off and shook each piece out, then put them back on swiftly as the cold damp air started soaking into her bones. Last of all Doon shook
out her boots. She glanced with concern at the soles before she put them on. They were badly worn and would not last her much longer. She could not survive in this unforgiving country without boots.