The Bronze of Eddarta (9 page)

Harthim and six noble families had arrived in Eddarta after their flight from Kä with the greatest, least resistible power—the treasury of the Kingdom. The Eddartans had enjoyed an easy life, with water plentiful and the general level of wealth higher here than anywhere else in Gandalara. The last King had brought an example of an even higher standard of luxury and had taught the Eddartans to crave it, and one by one they had sold their independence for it. When the self-styled Lords had owned Eddarta, they had begun taxing it, winning a hundred-fold return on their initial investments.

The descendent of these seven families lived on in the upper city, called Lord City by the Eddartans. The eldest of each family usually became its Lord. The High Lord, as Gharlas had informed us, was chosen from the descendents of Harthim—his
legitimate
descendents, which left Gharlas hanging loose on the wrong side of the blanket—and was the individual who displayed the strongest mind-power in some sort of test.

I hadn’t been able to find an exact date for the building of Lord City, but I suspected that it had been built soon after Harthim’s arrival, to protect the Kä refugees from those Eddartans who were discontented with the transition from free enterprise to thinly disguised monopoly. I did learn that each of the seven families had an area of its own inside those massive walls, and that all those areas were linked through what Ricardo would have called a palace. It was a government building called Lord Hall, and it contained meeting rooms, an audience hall, a Council Chamber which had extra-special official significance and, according to the eager gossip of my drinking companions, the hidden entryway to the fabled treasure vault.

“Gharlas it well known here in the lower city,” I told Tarani. “Apparently, he’s played up his hatred for Pylomel to the point where he’s sort of a ‘regular guy’ to the common folk. Word is that Pylomel isn’t fond of him, either, but family rules require that he give Gharlas a place to stay when he’s in town.”

“Then Gharlas lives in Pylomel’s home?”

“If you could call it that. The family areas inside Lord City are huge, with a lot of separate dwellings. Pylomel has probably given Gharlas the cheapest quarters he could manage.”

Tarani worried one tusk with her tongue. “Do you remember what Gharlas said about Pylomel’s treasure?”

“You mean the secret way he’s found into the vault?”

“If we could find the vault, we could reach Gharlas secertly,” Tarani said. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “if Zefra knows how to enter the vault …”

I laughed. Tarani’s face darkened, and I touched her arm in apology.

“That’s the hard way,” I said. “At least, I think it is. Our first step has to be to find Zefra and get the two of you together. We can’t do much until we know for sure whether she can—or will—help us against Gharlas.”

“She will help if she can,” Tarani said.

Take this part easy
, I warned myself.

“Tarani, please remember that you don’t
know
Zefra yet. The woman who wrote that letter to Volitar lived twenty years ago. This Zefra may not be the same person. For one thing, she’s been married to the High Lord all this time.”

“You are saying that we should not trust her,” Tarani said. “Then why bother to seek her out?”

Her bitterness hurt me. I wanted to put my arms around her, but the scene of the night before told me I had no right to offer her comfort now.

“I believe she
will
want to help us,” I said. “But I’m not allowing myself to rely on her help until we know for sure.”

That wasn’t quite true. The fact of the matter was, everything I had learned about Lord City made me realize that we
needed
some kind of inside help, and I had no idea where else to find it.

“All I’m really saying,” I continued, “is that we should be cautious, even with Zefra. We can’t tell her the real reason we’re here.”

She was silent for a few seconds. “I see the wisdom in what you say, Rikardon. I will not speak to Zefra of the Ra’ira. She will help us because Gharlas killed Volitar.”

She set down her platter of fruit rinds and picked up the ledger again, the deliberateness of her movements revealing her tension.

“But there is a problem,” she added. “These records show appointments in Lord City only at the request of the buyer.”

“Something else I learned last night—there’s going to be some kind of fancy ceremony in a few days, and Lord City is really stirred up about it. Do you see a recent commission from Zefra?”

She examined the book. “No. There was an appointment scheduled two seven-days ago, but there is no notation of it having been kept. Yoman and Rassa must have left before then.” She looked up at me and smiled. “You are thinking that the High Lord’s wife should have a new dress for this occasion?” I nodded. “But
she
will have to send for Rassa. How will she know—?”

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “It seems that each Lord has his own private guard. Whether that’s traditional, or a defense against assassination by the next in line or another Lord, I don’t know. But I should be able to get inside Lord City to talk to somebody about hiring on.”

Her head tilted to one side. “That would leave you the entire city to search. Could Yoman and Rassa not simply present themselves at the gate with—say, a
gift
for Zefra or Pylomel?” Tarani suggested.

“They might. Do we
have
such a gift, or could you make one in less than a day?”

She shook her head.

“No, I didn’t think so, and if my calculations are right, Gharlas will be here tomorrow or the next day. It’s important that we get inside that city before he arrives.

“I’m going up this morning to try to get a job as one of Pylomel’s mercenaries. That will get me into the right area. I’ll just have to bet on having a chance to talk to Zefra, and I’ll ask her to send for you.”

“I could come with you, Rikardon. If I projected the image of a man—”

“You need to conserve your strength, Tarani.” I remembered how she had looked just after we arrived in Yoman’s shop—washed-out, haggard.

She remembered, too. She nodded, reluctantly. “What if the guards are watching for you?” she asked.

“They won’t be. That’s one thing I’m pretty sure of. Gharlas has no army of his own, and Pylomel wouldn’t do him any favors.”

I hoped I was right. As I stood up I felt the surge of tension and alertness that made Markasset the excellent fighter he was.

“The sooner we get free of Yoman and Rassa, the better I’ll like it,” I said. “I’ll go up to the gate. You just sit tight, and don’t open the shop. If customers come by, make the excuse that you’ve just returned from a long journey, and Yoman is still recuperating. Promise them you’ll be open tomorrow. If we aren’t both inside Lord City by tomorrow, we may have to take up tailoring for a living.”

She stared at me, then smiled a little, and finally chuckled, shaking her head. “There is surely no other like you in Gandalara,” she said. “This seems less a plan than merely the start of one—but it does seem to be our only choice. I will spend the day selecting fabric samples to take with me when I receive Zefra’s summons.”

“The one major hitch to this plan,” I said, “is that I may have to
take
that guard job, and I might get stuck inside the city. If I
don’t
return tonight, and you don’t hear from Zefra tomorrow, don’t panic. Just sit tight, play Rassa, and cover for Yoman. If you haven’t heard from me or Zefra by the time Thymas gets here, make whatever plans seem right. You’ll have to find another way to get inside, but I’ll be watching for you, and trying to get a line on Gharlas.”

She stood up, and for a second or two I thought—hoped—she would cross the few paces between us and let me hold her once more before we went our separate ways. But if that had been her impulse, she controlled it by stepping backward and hugging the ledger to her chest.

“Be cautious at every step, Rikardon,” she said. “Eddarta is an unhappy place, and full of treachery. I feel it.”

“Thank you for the warning,” I said.

“I give it for my own sake,” she said. “You … are important to me.”

A foolish happiness washed over me. I had thought I’d destroyed whatever feelings Tarani was beginning to have for me. But those few simple words, spoken from all the way across the room, were a promise of another chance.

“As you are, to me,” I said, and left the room.

I nearly ran down the stairs and out into the street. Then I paused to take a few deep breaths, and began to walk toward the boulevard that would take me up the hill to Lord City.

It’s a little-known fact of life that, now and then, the odds
have
to turn in your favor. It might have been the warm feeling I carried away from Tarani, or it might have been the adrenaline surge of finally, after all this time, reaching the point of action—but I felt good about that short-notice plan as I climbed the zigzag avenue toward Lord City. I had a feeling things were going to work out right, for a change.

It was still pretty early in the day, and I walked up with a column of burdened wagons, dragged along by unhappy vleks. I looked back once or twice and was impressed, again, by the advantage the walled city would have in battle. This place had been built by frightened men hundreds of generations ago, and they had legalized and bequeathed their paranoia to its present occupants.

It seemed odd that any such unbalanced system could have survived for so long, but Gandalara was a world that changed slowly. Innovations had been made—the Gandalarans had a remarkably efficient economy and a respectable technology, hampered as they were by their lack of elemental iron. But they had an extra weight entrenching the natural conservatism of people who always feel the tentative balance of their survival. The All-Mind.

It wasn’t just the “older generation” who set up the rules in Gandalara. It was the memory and experience of all previous generations—and that was a tough opponent to beat down. Gandalarans had struck a compromise between the need for change and the need for stability. Trades were family property, passed along from one generation to the next, so that improvements in irrigation techniques or the sand/ash mixture for glass were preserved each step of the way. Eddarta was the first place I had been in which each person was so strictly limited to his own trade; it reduced prideful occupations to the status of assembly-line construction.

Eddarta had another unique quality—the people of Eddarta used their river for transport of cargo and only cargo. There wasn’t even a Gandalaran word to imply a
person
floating on water. Tarani and I had seen miles and miles of thick rope stretched along the riverbanks on our way toward the city. Vleks were tied to that line, and small, shallow-draft barges were tied to the vleks and hauled along. There was usually one person on the riverbank with a rear guiderope, and sometimes two or three other people with poles to keep the barge from beaching itself in the reedy growth along the banks.

The traveled areas of the river had their banks trimmed of the whitish reeds that grew taller than men, and the reed harvest served the secondary function of providing building material for the rafts. Bundles of reeds were cut, then bound tightly together. The open ends of the reeds were sealed somehow to create a long, floating log. Several logs, lashed together, made a raft.

We had seen such rafts hauling stuff upstream and controlling speed downstream—only on the smoothest, slowest stretches of water. A few yards of rapids called for wagon transport beside the river until the current calmed down again.

A series of those rafts operated on the branch of the Tashal which flowed through Lord City. I saw two stone archways as I approached the high walls. One admitted only people; the other admitted cargo. The wagons which had toiled up the slope were unloaded onto rafts, and the goods were taken inside by Lord City boatmen, who were dealing with faster current, here, than I had seen out in the country—the cataracts above and below the city kept the water moving pretty fast. To counteract the speed of the current, the Lord City boatmen had contrived a pretty complicated two-bank system.

One vlek team did the primary work of hauling, while the team on the opposite bank kept the raft aligned properly. Both banks had two levels of pathways, so that while one set of vleks hauled a raft upstream on the higher paths, another set provided brakes for a raft going downstream. The downstream rafts were pulled toward the opposite bank, and the ropes were given plenty of slack. It looked to be a pretty tricky proposition, keeping the upstream raft from fouling itself on the downstream ropes—but I watched the operation go smoothly a couple of times.

“You got business here?” A voice at my elbow called me away from watching the river. I turned around to face a huge man with leather straps crisscrossing his bare chest. Bronze discs studded the leather. He was wearing desert-style trousers instead of a leather breechclout, but his muscles and stance and attitude reminded Ricardo of a badly researched movie about Roman gladiators.

I put a smile on my face. “I hope so,” I said. “I’m just in from Chizan. A fellow I met in a bar last night said the High Lord might be in need of another sword. I could use the job.”

The man looked me up and down. He was a brawny type, with very prominent supraorbital ridges, a low-slung jaw, and hair on his knuckles.

“Experience?” he snapped.

“Four years as a caravan guard, saw some action with the Sharith before the master gave in and paid the toll.”

The guard snorted. “Them turncoats.”

The subjects adopt the masters politics
, I thought.
The original Eddartans had no reason to hate the Sharith.

Or did they? After all, the Sharith more or less drove Harthim into settling here, which hasn’t done them much good.

Hey, pay attention!
I ordered myself.
Is he giving you advice?

That’s exactly what he was doing. I reached back into my short-term memory and recovered the words I had missed. “All the Lords are hiring,” he had said. He went on: “But the High Guard has the best pay and—” He smirked. On that face, it wasn’t a pretty sight. “—and the best extra benefits.”