The Luck of Brin's Five (23 page)

“Whew . . . I would rather keep out of that place!” exclaimed the Harper.

“It is a dull place, so I hear,” said the scribe. “Tiath is not even his family head . . . Old Av still dodders about, and there are various high-bred old females . . . a tangle of the old threads.”

“What is their Luck?” I chipped in to the conversation.

“I can tell you that,” said Old Gwin. “It is the dwarf Urnat, that was born of a poor Five on Gurth Mountain, west of Hingstull.”

“Clan gossip!” said Mamor. “Vel Ragan, what do you fear for your friend the Deputy?”

“I do not know,” said Vel Ragan, “but the Strangler's hand is in it. Tsorl hoped always for more freedom for the Fire-Town, but this is a dream.”

Then the talk went another way, but I sat by Vel Ragan and Onnar and said to them, “Tsorl-U-Tsorl. . . . That is a very proud name.”

“The Deputy is a proud man,” said Onnar.

Vel Ragan laid a hand on the hand of his Witness. “I last heard his voice from Onnar,” he said, “when she brought a certain message. I pray we find him again.”

Then we all took advantage of the wind and sailed straight on, through the Wentroy lands, with Vel and Onnar out-running our keel boat. We lay over sometimes, and our friends came aboard and Vel Ragan instructed Diver in all sorts of practical matters: the government in Rintoul, the Council of One Hundred, the City Council, the inner Council of the Five Elders, and their laws and formalities. He told old tales of the Fire-Town and the last clan war and the more distant history of Torin.

We kept up our discreet inquiries about the barge carrying the air ship, with the help of the captain and the crew who knew the river. They knew something of our business, and Diver's identity was an open secret, as it had become at the Bird Clan. Ablo had been taken into our counsel, and he was the one who finally made the discovery. We lay over at a small hamlet on the eastern bank, close to the rich delta lands, and he went to buy flowers. He came panting back with a great load of yellow twin-suns and a strange story. A barge had moored at this place, Pelle, and the crew were taken in the night with sleeping sickness.

At the same time, there were comings and goings of strangers up the tiny stream, the Pel, that flows into the Troon at this point. A net and hoist were seen, said to be of metal, and a tall personage supervising the operation; the farmers in the village had been paid to see nothing. The crew on the barge and certain passengers woke cursing after a sleep of a whole day and made haste towards Rintoul. This told us enough: Nantgeeb had stolen the air ship at this point, by the use of mind powers or simple sleeping herbs. If Tsorl-U-Tsorl were on the barge examining the ship, then he slept with the rest. Perhaps the anger of the Great Elder had been vented on those who lost his prize.

Diver called to us one day, about two hours before the setting of Esder, and we found him standing in the bow with the captain. The land around us was particularly fine, with huge river meadows of reeds, where the water-fowl are bred. Not far away the Troon divided and divided again, for we had come to the delta. Diver pointed ahead and stared, like one in a dream; we all stared, and the dream took hold of us. A tracery of fine lines grew and wavered in the sky at the horizon, fading before our sight, then becoming solid; floating, then reaching firmly to the earth. It might have been a huge grove of white trees or the high columns and ridges of a mountain range; then the light changed and it was a net, a network of pure gold—the towers, the bastions, the spires, the skywalks, the sky-houses of the great city of Rintoul.

Rintoul has been raised up and cast down, even in my own time, but the dream remains; the habit of perfection and grace inspires those who build there, those who live in the city, so that it regenerates and grows more beautiful from age to age. It has had blood spilled in the broad white streets, but they have been washed clean by letting in the sea; towers have toppled and been replaced by more resilient towers. There is no seamy underside to Rintoul, it is all well-made, smoothly plastered, cleverly woven, with winding basket ways to the higher levels, and the curtain walls of former times gently folding into the skyhouses of glass and stone where the grandees live.

Rintoul is surrounded by beauty; as we sailed on through the delta lands, I gazed at the fields and trees and waterways and wondered how it would be to live there. The land was tamed and farmed but full of good places to fish or swim; Old Gwin was taken by the flower fields; Brin and Roy looked closely at the bird farms. Mamor was restless, standing in the bow with Diver's glass as we sailed on the eastern channel, which is called Curweth. The city rode up on our right hand, covering the world high and low, but Mamor looked to the east and on the next evening he gave a shout and called me to his side.

“There now!” he said, handing me the glass. I stared east and saw a line of light; it heaved and shifted, as if the sky had fallen to the earth, clouds and all.

“But what
is
it?” I asked, unable to look away. The line had turned to a flat plain, unbelievably vast, stretching further than the plain of Torin itself and shot with queer pale colors.

“Ah,” said Mamor, “that is the North Wind's own sib, that quenches every fire. That is the Great Ocean Sea . . .”

That day Vel Ragan and Onnar took the sailboat ahead of us through another channel into the city. We sailed on and came in Esder light to the gardens and granaries and round, low store houses on the outskirts of Rintoul. The city lies between the sea and the land on the very edge of the estuary; we sailed through the eastern gate, Curweth-Ma, where the captain tied up the keel boat. Then we crossed through the wharves to the city canal and sailed in one of the painted pay-boats through miles of quiet streets. I sat with Tomar and Narneen, and we counted ten fountains, some still, some playing, in the dawn before Esto, until we came to a landing stage near our street. We walked a short distance and were received at the wig-maker's house, which seemed as grand as the citadel at Otolor. The lower level was a shop, full of wigs on stands, like so many grandees' heads; we were shown by a servant up a winding basket corridor to the third level and settled into a large room, with a view of the ocean on one side and the city on the other.

These two windows, glazed in many panes of white and colored glass, with stiffened rope between the panes, are something I remember whenever I think of those first days in Rintoul. We sat before them a great deal, watching and pointing; Old Gwin, who did not go out much, sat beside the city window for hours at a time, watching and laughing and shaking her head in a kind of bewilderment.

“Rintoul . . .” she would say in disbelief. “We've come to the city!”

The streets were never thronged with people; there was never such a crush as there had been on the fairground at Otolor, but we felt the presence of more, many more people, all around us. I could not wait to go out and explore, but at the same time I was nervous.

The Harper took me on a first expedition, and we became lost; we looked through a marvellous street of shops containing leatherwork and bought some presents. Then we read signs for the Fish Garden and set out for it but missed our turning and came to a most beautiful street full of paper garlands and pink windows. There were carrying chairs with their curtains drawn, coming and going, and the inhabitants of the street leaned from first floor windows with their arms bare. The Harper whistled and grinned.

“Truly,” he said, “this is no place for one so young.” I did not understand and we wandered on, taking in the exquisite little shops for eating and drinking and gaming. A pretty painted creature leaned from a window and threw a credit to the Harper.

“Play us a folk song, dear Weaver!” it said.

“You must excuse us, Friend!” he replied and threw the credit back again. The painted one caught it nimbly and stuck out its tongue at us.

“But what do they do here?” I asked.

“Let me put it this way,” said Harper Roy. “For these folk it is Springtime all the year round!” So he bustled me along to the end of the street, and there we found a member of the Town Watch, an omor in a white robe, with the insignia City Friend.

The Harper greeted her and asked for directions. The omor was kind and cheerful; she told us the way to the Fish Garden.

“From the North?” she asked.

“Truly,” I said, “from Cullin.”

“I have kin still in Nedlor,” said the omor. “When you have seen the Fish Garden go down the long steps to the Friends' Round. It is an open place where you can hear the news and meet other visitors. You can buy a map of the city.”

“And it's more respectable than this place . . .” said the Harper. He pointed to the street sign waving about above our heads: it said Honey Dream Crescent, which sounded to me more like the name of a sweetmeat.

“City ways!” shrugged the omor. “Not many folk come here by accident.”

The omor walked with us then, as far as the Fish Garden, and left us standing on a bridge looking at the clouds of green finger-fish and the big striped Sea Bear. Another City Friend turned up in the Fish Garden with a throng of tourists; there were townees, who might have come from Otolor or Linlor, a few bush weavers from further north, and a group I did not recognize at all.

“Who are they?” I asked Harper Roy.

“What? The ones in flax kilts? Oh they are real outlanders . . . from the far west, I should say, beyond the Fire-Town at the edge of the world.”

We hung about at the edge of the group as they went up to the top of the promenade at the end of the garden and the guide began to point out the sights of the city. We saw the Old Breakwater—now on dry land—and the beautiful Corr Pavilion, where the Hundred meet, both buildings from the time of the Torlogan. We saw the clustered skyhouses of the grandees, rising from the third or fourth level; in this part of the city they seemed especially tall, cliffs of stone.

Figures could be seen moving about on the skywalks, like birds on the highest branches of a tree. On every skyhouse, clustered among the beams like strange fruit, were golden globes, painted with the gold paint the grandees use for their outdoor wickerwork. “Those are sleep-cells,” explained the guide. “Little basket rooms where the grandees are rocked to sleep. The clansfolk in this city have a strange malady . . . they find sleeping difficult.”

This made us all laugh; yet there were times I remembered when it
was
difficult to sleep.

We could look down on the Friends' Round, a pleasant place with trees and benches and cook-shops and a large mosaic pavement reaching out into the lagoon.

“What's that, Friend?” called a townee, pointing.

“That island?” asked the guide. “Why that is the glass island . . . ‘halfway to Itsik,' if you know what I mean.”

We could see the tall heaps of sand glistening in the suns' light and high-domed buildings with smoke coming from their spouts. As we broke off from the group and ran down the steps to the Friends' Round, the Harper said, “This city runs on fire-metal-magic. What more could they have in the Fire-Town?”

“Moving staircases,” I said. “My feet are tired.”

“Diver has been telling you Earth yarns!”

This was our first and one of our longest expeditions into the city. We all went together to the Friends' Round one morning and Vel Ragan met us there, with Onnar. It was a pleasant place indeed and one where we felt safe and comfortable. Old Gwin settled under a tree with Tomar, and the Harper had many requests for his folk songs. Brin took me to the message trees, which are wooden racks where skeins of news and other messages are posted; they stand at every street corner, and there are certain scribes who replenish them. Diver and Mamor stood at the balustrade looking out over the lagoon to the sea, marking the ships that sailed in and out to the wharves. Ablo took Narneen to buy a sunshade, and she came running back to Brin with another new thing . . . a carved wooden figure, dressed just like a grandee, in a long silk robe and a furry tippet.

“It is a doll,” said Brin. “Ablo is wasting his credits on you, child.” But Narneen hugged the thing and called it her dear little clan creature, her poppet, her pouch-child.

“What is it for?” I asked.

“It is a toy . . . a thing to play with, like the bow Mamor made you,” said Brin. “The city children play with dolls, and I expect we might have found a stall of them at Otolor.”

I looked at shops full of toys after that and wondered what kind of a toy I might like, but I saw none. Yet the city was full of things I did crave . . . writing sets, leather boots, pouches, wheeled carts; there was even a place on the city canal where small sailboats were made and sold.

Vel Ragan took the Five one day to wait upon Orn Dohtroy—called Margan, the Peacemaker—in his sky house. They were gone all day, and we stayed indoors with Ablo at our lodgings. When they returned, they were disappointed but full of talk about the grandeur of the place. They had waited in the antechamber on the eighth level with many petitioners for the Peacemaker and had gazed into the sun room. This enormous golden room led onto a water garden, the Harper said, where there were tamed flatbills. But Orn Margan had been absent, so his servants gave out, or at least he saw no petitioners that day. Vel Ragan sent in his name, but not the nature of his business, and the skein came back with a polite addition asking him to call again in three days.

The scribe was worried and irritable because the Five had not been seen.

“Do not fret,” said Diver. “I am sure it is chance that the Peacemaker did not see us.”

“He is cautious,” said the scribe. “Peacemaker is not altogether a grand title. Orn Margan is ready to compromise. I wonder if he thinks I am seeking Tsorl-U-Tsorl.”

“You have no word?”

“None. And I must ask most discreetly. But this is another matter. I must get you seen, Garl Brinroyan, for your safety.”