Empire of Man Page 44

  “This scummy’s gabbling something, but the translator can’t make anything of it.”

  “Oh, great,” O’Casey sighed. “Dialect shift. Just what we needed.”

  “Get on it,” Pahner said. “We have to be able to communicate with these people.” The local was gesturing across the river at the distant city, obviously agitated about something. He either wanted the company to go there, or else he was warning them away. It could have been either, and Pahner nodded and gave him a closed-lip, Mardukan-style smile. “Yes, yes,” he said, “we’re going to Marshad.”

  Either the smile or the words seemed to calm the local. He gestured, as if offering to lead them, but Pahner shook his head.

  “We’ll be along,” he said soothingly. “Thank you. I’m sure we can find our own way.”

  He smiled again and started to wave the still-gabbling local politely away, then paused and looked at O’Casey.

  “Do you want to talk with him?”

  “Yes.” She sounded a bit absent, obviously because she was concentrating on the translation—or lack thereof—from her toot. “I’m starting to pick up a few words. Let him walk with us to the town, and I’m pretty sure I can have most of the language by the time we arrive.”

  “Okay,” Pahner agreed. “I think that’s about it. Questions? Comments? Concerns?”

  There were none, so the company reassembled and moved on up the road.

  The ancient high road became even more cracked and damaged-looking as it entered the planted areas, despite clear indications of repairs. Heavy deposits of silt had been thrown up to either side, obviously as the result of post-flood road clearing, which forced the company to move between low, brown walls. In places, the walls built up to true dikes to protect the barleyrice crops, and in places the dikes were planted with the tall kate trees.

  The peasants harvesting the kate fruit dangled from ropes or perched on tall, single-pole ladders that were unpleasantly reminiscent of scaling ladders, but they paused in their labors to gape at the human contingent as it headed toward the distant city-state. Whether because of the humans’ outlandish look, or the fact that they came on the road from dead Voitan, the locals’ reaction to them was far different from reactions in Q’Nkok.

  “You’d think they’d never seen a human before,” Denat snorted.

  “Buncha rubes,” Tratan agreed with a grunt. “Ripe for the plucking.” He looked down at the diminutive human striding along beside him under his huge rucksack. “What should we teach them first?”

  “Poker,” Poertena replied. “Always start wit’ poker. Den, I dunno. Maybe acey-deucy. If they really stupid, cribbage.”

  “They pocked,” Cranla said with a grunt of laughter. He waved at one of the harvesters. “Hello, you stupid peasants. We’re going to pluck your merchants for all they’re worth.”

  Julian pointed at the Mardukan tribesmen with his chin.

  “They’ve taken quite a shine to Poertena,” he said to Despreaux.

  “Birds of a feather,” the other squad leader responded absently. “Is it just me, or does this place look fairly run down?” she went on.

  The company was approaching a fork in the road, where the travelers had to choose between Marshad or Pasule. There was another official-looking building on a mound where the roads diverged, but although it was in better repair, it had obviously been converted into an agricultural outbuilding.

  “Yeah,” Julian said, glancing at the structure. “I think the loss of the Voitan trade must have hit them hard.”

  The company took the left fork and headed for the river. The solid stone bridge which crossed it was the only structure they’d so far seen which appeared to have been properly kept up. In fact, there’d been some obvious renovations—the well-fortified guard posts on either bank looked like fairly recent additions.

  The guards on the near bank gestured for the caravan to halt, and Julian looked around as the long train of flar-ta dragged to a stop. An outcropping of the underlying gneiss of the Hadur region rose steeply on the right side of the road, he noted. The oxbow river took a bend around it, and an extension of the outcropping acted as a firm base for the bridge.

  The hill was surmounted by trees and what appeared to have once been a small park. A well-made road in very poor repair wound to the summit, but it was obvious that the track was rarely used anymore. Only a thin path cut through the layered silt and entangling undergrowth on its lower sections. Despreaux followed his eye, and shook her head as Captain Pahner argued with the guards on the bridge. They obviously felt that the travelers ought to keep themselves—and the business they represented—on this side of the river.

  “This place has really been hammered,” she observed.

  “No shit,” Julian agreed. “It looks like it used to be a pretty nice place, though. Maybe it’ll get that way again with Voitan back in business.”

  “We’ll see,” Despreaux said. “The old Voitan wasn’t built in a day.”

  “No,” Julian acknowledged as the caravan lurched back into movement, “but that guy from T’an K’tass looked like he was going to try to do it pretty damned fast.”

  “That he did,” Despreaux said, but her tone was a bit distracted, and she nodded at the sour looking guards on the bridge as they passed. “Those guys don’t look happy.”

  “Probably pissed at all the money they’re losing,” Julian said. “We’re about to pump a lot of cash into the local economy . . . on the other side of their bridge.”

  “We hope,” she answered.

  The approaching city-state was huge, much larger than Q’Nkok, but it had a seedy air. Once past the bridge area, the road was once again rutted and cracked from traffic and ill repair. In fact, it was in worse shape than it had been on the other side of the river, and the peasants plowing the fields to either side of the roadbed also seemed less interested in the passage of the company.

  Flar-ta were useless as draft animals, because they were far too large to move effectively in the fields. That meant that the only way to plow was to use teams of Mardukans for traction, which was a remarkably inefficient method. It was also extremely hard work, but while the plowers on the far side of the river had taken the opportunity for a break while they watched the company march by, those on this side all kept their heads down, concentrating on their tasks. And while the majority crop had been barleyrice on the far side of the river, on this side most of the fields were being sown with legumes or a crop the humans didn’t recognize. The Marines had encountered the legumes before, and promptly christened them bullybeans, but they’d never seen the other crop, and the locals seemed to be planting a lot of it. At least two-thirds of the fields they could see seemed to be dedicated to producing whatever it was.

  “I wonder why there’s a difference,” Julian said, pointing it out to Despreaux, who shrugged and gestured across the wide expanse of fields. There was another hill barely visible in the distance, but it was apparent that the local city-state dominated a vast area.

  “They’ve got plenty of room,” she pointed out. “This is probably just their area for bullybeans and . . . whatever that other stuff is.”

  “I guess,” the intel NCO said. “But that much change just from one side of the river to the other?” He shrugged. “I’m no farmer, but it seems kinda strange to me.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out why they do it eventually,” Despreaux said with a shrug of her own. “But I wonder what that other plant is?”

  “Dianda,” the itinerant tinker said to the chief of staff. “It is . . . urdak into wosan . . . like that,” he finished, gesturing to the chameleon cloth uniform the civilian wore.

  The local was named Kheder Bijan. It was obvious he expected some sort of reward from the company for guiding them to the clearly evident city which the ignorant foreigners could never have found on their own, but the chief of staff was happy to have him along, anyway. He’d been a good way to update the language program, and he was a mine of information about conditio
ns around Pasule. He was strangely uninformative, however, about Marshad.

  “Ah!” Eleanora said. “Something like flax or cotton!” The software had updated the local dialect well enough for Pahner to talk their way across the bridge. She was puzzled by the fact that the officials of Pasule had been more trouble than Marshad’s. The local guards had simply stepped aside, almost as if the humans had been expected.

  “Yes,” the local said. He rubbed a horn in thought while he considered the best way to explain. “We make cloth from it for trade.”

  “A cash crop.” The chief of staff nodded. “Where are the subsistence crops?” she asked, looking around. “I’d think you’d be planting more barleyrice than this.”

  “Well,” Bijan said, fingering his horn again, “I don’t really understand farming. I fix things.” He gestured with his haversack. “I suppose there must be other farms around here somewhere.”

  “Who owns the land?” Eleanora had been pleasantly surprised to discover that in the Q’Nkok region the farmers owned their own land, for the most part. The farms were passed down through complicated cultural “rules” that moved them from generation to generation more or less intact. That denied inheritance to most of the “younger sons,” but that was a common problem for agrarian societies the galaxy over, and the important thing was that the farms weren’t broken into minuscule lots that were impossible to manage. Nor were they sold or lost in chunks to form giant latifundia. The Houses of Q’Nkok had been well on their way to the sort of backward agricultural “reform” which would strip the peasantry of land ownership, but hopefully the destruction of their power would stop that in its tracks. At this level of technology, small-scale “yeomanry” farming was as good as it got.

  “I’m not sure who owns it,” the tinker said, fingering his horn again. “I’ve never asked.”

  The chief of staff blinked, then smiled cheerfully. The “tinker” had blithely nattered on about the minutiae of the inner workings of the council of oligarchs who ruled Pasule, and the different groups of independents and sharecroppers who farmed the land on that side of the river. Now, on the side that he claimed he was from, he suddenly clammed up. She wouldn’t have survived a day in the imperial court if that hadn’t set off some alarm bells.

  “That’s interesting,” she said with complete honesty. “I suppose a tinker wouldn’t really care, would he?”

  “Not really,” Bijan said. “I just look forward to returning to my beautiful city!”

  “Nice city,” Kosutic said tugging at an earlobe.

  “It’s okay,” Pahner replied.

  Marshad was larger than Q’Nkok, but smaller than the former Voitan had been, with streets that wound up the hill from several gates in the curtain walls.

  The gates were unusual. They were constructed of thick wood, well joined and even caulked, and their bottoms were lined with copper, which must have cost a fortune. There was also a base upon which they were, apparently, supposed to seat, but it was shattered, and any metal which might once have sheathed it was long since gone.

  Much of the city appeared to be in the same dilapidated condition. The walls were higher than Voitan’s, but in even worse shape. Numerous parapets had fallen to lie in rubble at the base of the main wall, leaving gaps like broken teeth in the battlements, and in places the outer stones had worked out, exposing the rubble interior fill. One section was so badly damaged that it might as well have been called a breach, and they discovered even more signs of neglect once they entered the city proper.

  The area immediately inside the gate was clear, but beyond that the city reared up the hill in a maze of alleys and tunnels. The houses were mostly built of stone, pink granite and blinding white limestone, erected in a crazy quilt of warrens, with one house on top of another in a widely varying mixture of styles and quality.

  The main thoroughfare was wide enough for the passage of the company, but only barely, and the boulevard was lined with wide gutters which were joined by thin streams leading out of the alleyways. This lower section clearly wasn’t the best place to live: the noisome stew in the streams which obviously provided the entire city’s drainage was a noxious compound of fecal matter and rot that was practically explosive.

  As they continued inward, the road presented a graphic cross-section of the city. The lower slopes showed the best quality of work, with well cut blocks of feldspar and gneiss cunningly fitted, mostly without mortar. The surfaces had been coated in white plaster, and the lintels and trim still showed signs of colorful paints. But now the plaster was patched and fallen, with caved-in roofs and shattered corners, and the once bright paint was pathetically faded in the blazing gray light. There were signs of flooding, as well, with brown high-water marks well up the sides of the houses. Many of the buildings were deserted, but shadows moved in some of the wreckage—furtive inhabitants who clearly only showed their faces under the friendly cover of night.

  The quality of the stonework fell as the procession headed up the hill, but the upkeep improved. More houses were inhabited above the level of the floods, and the warren became truly mazelike, with houses piled on houses and built across alleyways which their floors turned into tunnels.

  Business was being conducted in this labyrinth, but with a definitely desultory air. A few vendors lined the road with sparse offerings of half-rotten fruits, moldy barleyrice, cheap and poorly-made jewelry, and assorted minor knickknacks. The obvious poverty of the area was crushing, and the stench of rotting garbage and uncleaned latrines hung in the air as young Mardukans sat in doorways, scratching listlessly at the dust in the street.

  The slums ended abruptly in a large square. Its downhill side was lined with tall townhouses which had apparently been carved out of the warren beyond at some time in the past. They fronted on a broad, flat, open area that was partially natural and partially Mardukan-made. The centerpiece of the square was a large fountain around the statue of an armed Mardukan, while the upper side of the square was occupied by a large ornamental building. The building seemed to climb—without a break, but in a myriad of differing styles—up to the citadel at the hill’s summit. It appeared to be one vast palace, and a ceremony was in progress at its entrance.

  It was apparently a public audience. The ruler of the city-state sat in a resplendent throne set up at the front door of the palace. As with the throne in Q’Nkok, this was made of many different inlaid woods, but the local monarch’s throne was also set with precious metals and gems. The entire edifice gleamed with gold and silver and the twinkle of the local sapphires and rubies in their rough “miner’s” cut.

  The king was the first Mardukan the company had seen wearing any significant clothing, and he was garbed in a light robe of lustrous saffron. The outfit was slit down the sides, gathering only at the ankles and trimmed in bright vermillion. Traceries of silver thread ran through it, and the collar was a lace of silver and gems.

  The monarch’s horns had also been inlaid with precious metals and gems and were joined by a complex web of jewel-strung gold chains that caught the gray light and refracted it in a dull rainbow. As if all of that weren’t enough, he also wore a heavy chain of jeweled gold around his neck, dangling far down his chest.

  Arrayed to either side of the king were persons who were probably advisers. They were unclothed, except for one obvious commander in armor, but their horns were also inlaid and gemmed. The display was an obvious indication of rank, for it grew less expensive and spectacular in direct proportion to the owner’s distance from the monarch.

  About six hundred guards lined the steps at the front of the palace, standing at parade rest in two ranks. They were more heavily armored than the guards in Q’Nkok, with metal thigh-guards and bracers in addition to breastplates shining gray-silver in the clouded light. They carried the same long spear as the Q’Nkok guards, but they also wore palmate swords, about a meter in length, and despite their carefully polished breastplates, their purpose was obviously more than merely ceremonial.


  The crowd before the monarch was a mixed bag. Most of them seemed to be from the Mardukan “middle class,” to the extent that the planet had one. They also had decorations on their horns, but the displays were generally simple and made of base metals or brass. A few of the poorest of the poor were mixed in here and there, and it was one of them who was currently making some plea to the refulgent monarch.

  The petitioner was in full prostration before the king, all six limbs splayed out as he abased himself. Whatever he was saying was unintelligible at this distance, but it didn’t really matter, since the king was sitting half across his throne and paying virtually no attention to him.

  As the company watched, the suppliant apparently finished whatever he was saying, and the monarch picked a kate fruit off a platter and nibbled on it. Then he threw the fruit at the petitioner and gestured to a guard.

  Before the first protest could leave the unfortunate Mardukan’s mouth, the guards had seized him and cut off his head. The head rolled to the edge of the crowd as the stump spurted a red spray and the body of the serf slumped into a twitching heap.

  There was not a sound from the gathered Marshadans.

  “We may have a problem here,” Pahner observed.

  “Oh, my,” O’Casey said. A few months earlier, she probably would have lost her breakfast, but after Voitan, she was going to have a hard time finding anything that truly shocked her. “I agree.”

  “Well, if we turn around and leave,” Roger said, “which is my first instinct, we will have a problem.”

  “Agreed,” the captain said. “Stick to the prepared speech, Your Highness. But I want the up squad right on you. Sergeant Major!”

  “Captain?”

  “Fall in the company in extended formation, Sergeant Major. I want a snappy movement. And drop the pig-stickers. Rifles and cannon front and center!”