The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Read online

  Something simple; the simpler, the less likely it will be that I’ll have to change it.

  Once past the guard, Nightingale pulled the donkey off to the side of the road, taking a moment to stand in the shade of one of the warehouses. She fanned herself with her hat, pretended to watch the traffic, and considered her next move on this little game board.

  It is a game, too—and I can only hope I’ve made myself less of a pawn than I would have been if I’d jumped into it without care and thought.

  People streamed by her as she stood on the baking pavement with her patient little beast; as she watched, she saw everything from farmers hauling wagonloads of cabbage to the carriages of prosperous merchants—from footsore travelers like herself to the occasional creature more alien than a Deliambren. They all apparently had places to go, and they were all in a dreadful hurry to get there. They paid no attention to her; their eyes were on the road and the traffic ahead of them.

  The buildings on either side of the road trapped the rays of the sun; the pavement beneath absorbed the heat and radiated it up again. Sweat ran down her face and back, and not even the most vigorous fanning helped cool her even a little. She licked her lips and tasted salt, wishing for the cooler clothing she’d worn at Kingsford Faire—the light skirt made of hundreds of multicolored ribbons sewn together from knee to waist, but left to flutter from knee to ankle, the wide laced belt of doeskin, the shirt of fabric just this side of see-through, and the sandals . . . The leather of her bodice and boots was hot, stilling hot. The soles of her boots were far too thin to cushion her feet in any way or deflect the heat of the pavement.

  What she really wanted right now was a cool place to sit, a cool drink, and a moment in semi-darkness to build up her mental defenses.

  Well, the sooner I join in this game, the sooner I can leave. If I’m both lucky and clever, I might even be able to get out of here before winter. At least I didn’t lose any time on the road.

  In fact, she had made such good time getting here that it was not quite Harvest Faire season. She had met with no obstacles, and her earlier good start had been typical of the whole journey. She’d been able to stop before dark every night, and hadn’t even been forced to spend much of her hard-earned Faire money.

  In fact, her purse was now a bit heavier than it had been when she had left Kingsford. She had made such good time that it had been possible to trade performances in the kind of small country inns she preferred in return for food, a bed, and whatever came into her hat. If she had just been making her rounds of the Faire circuit, she would have been pleased but not particularly surprised by this. She was a good harpist, a fine musician, and there was no reason why innkeepers should turn her away. Her hat usually had a few coppers in it at the end of the night, no matter how poor the audience.

  But the very smoothness of her travel had made her suspicious, or rather, apprehensive. It felt as if someone or something was making quite sure she would get to Lyonarie, and seeing to it that she would be ready for just about anything when she arrived there.

  A geas? The hand of God or the Gypsy’s Lady of the Night?

  Or just a string of unprecedented good luck? And did it matter?

  Not really. What did matter was coming up with a course of immediate action that would keep her inconspicuous. If I were truly in the “service” of any of my so-needful friends, what would I do first? she asked herself. The answer seemed obvious: find a tavern or an inn at the heart of the city and take up lodging there. If she was expected to gather information, that would be all that she would do; there would be no time for anything like taking on a regular job as a musician. And that would make her conspicuous—someone who carried musical instruments, yet did not try to find a position; someone who spent money but did nothing to earn more. It would be “logical” to devote all of her time and energy into collecting information, but it would not be wise.

  So, since that is what is predictable and logical, it is what I will not do.

  She considered her options further as she also pondered the question of High King Theovere. The two were inextricably linked. How to gain information on the High and Exalted without venturing out of her persona as Low and Insignificant?

  At least, now that she wasn’t moving, she didn’t seem to be quite as warm.

  As Talaysen had pointed out, the King should have been overseeing the business of his twenty vassals—but they had been left, more and more, at loose ends, without a guide or an overseer. As often as not, though the King of Birnam was an exception, they had been making use of this laxness to enrich themselves, or simply to amuse themselves.

  The King of Birnam thought more of his people and their lands than himself; he was a good ruler, and as a result, his kingdom prospered in good times and survived the bad in reasonable shape. But those lands whose rulers were not out of Rolend’s mold were showing all the signs of a careless hand on the reins. The signs were everywhere, and touching everything. In Rayden, for instance, there was little or no upkeep on the public roads: bridges were out, roads were rutted and full of potholes, signs were missing or illegible. In some remoter parts of Rayden and in other lands, the neglect was far more serious, as rivalry between sires and even dukes had been permitted to escalate into armed feuding.

  The High King was supposed to represent the central unifying power in the Twenty Kingdoms. Now the Church was well on the way to taking over that function.

  As if her thought of the Church had summoned a further reminder of its power, the tolling of bells rang out over the rumble of cart wheels on pavement and the babble of thousands of voices. Nightingale lifted her eyes from the road to see the spire of the Chapel housing those bells rising above the warehouse roofs.

  And that represented another interest in the dance. There were perhaps hundreds of chapels in Lyonarie, ranging in size from a single room to huge cathedrals. The Church was an all-pervasive presence here, and there was no way to escape it. The Church might also have an interest in keeping Theovere weak and ineffectual.

  She swallowed in sour distaste. There was no love lost between herself and most representatives of the Church. Too often of late she had been the subject of attempts by Churchmen to lay the blame for perfectly ordinary accidents at her door, because she was a Gypsy, a Free Bard, and presumably a wielder of arcane and darksome powers. In some places, at least, it seemed that the Church was trying to incite people against Gypsies, nonconformists, nonhumans—indeed, against anything that did not obviously and directly benefit the Church itself as much as a flock of sheep would benefit the herdsman.

  Well, one advantage of being in a large city was that there were too many people for the Church to play at the lands of games some Churchmen were able to foment in less populous places. It was harder to find an individual to use as a target and a scapegoat—harder to incite people against a stranger in a town when so many people were strangers, and in fact, people living on the same street might not even know or recognize each other.

  Still, it behooved her to find a venue that was not too near a Chapel, if she could. Not near the prosperous, either; they have the leisure to notice things. All things considered, although this was probably the worst part of town, this district would be a good one to try to find a tavern that might have need of a musician.

  Another good thing about a city this large—not all the Guild Bards in the world could take all the positions available here. Really, most of them are going to be positions no Guild Bard in his right mind would ever want!

  Now that she had gotten her mind moving, and had managed a little rest, she felt ready to rejoin the mob. She pulled the donkey into the stream of traffic again, and scanned the fronts of the buildings she passed for tavern signs. I’ll look for information from two sources, she decided as she walked, letting the traffic carry her along rather than trying to force a faster pace. Once I get established, I’ll build myself a little army of street-children and pay them to go listen for me. No one ever pays attention to them, and
they can get into the most amazing places . . .

  This would not be the first time she had built herself such a network. Children were never regarded as threatening by adults, but street-brats were wise beyond their years and knew how to listen for anything that might be of value. The nice thing about children was that they tended to stay loyal to the person who hired them. They might be wise beyond their years, but they lacked the experience that taught them double-dealing. Children still believed, in their heart of hearts, in playing fair.

  Servants, too—they’re the other invisibles. I’ll show up at the kitchen doors, clean but very shabby. I’ll ask to play in return for food. The Courts of Kings might boast the cream of entertainers, but the servants never saw it, and any chance for a little entertainment of their own usually was snatched at. Kitchen gossip often reflected the doings of the great and powerful long before many of their masters knew about it. So long as she pretended not to notice, she would probably get an earful.

  Raven never did learn that lesson, silly boy. He would always start asking questions rather than letting servants babble to each other.

  She would be just as invisible as a servant or a street urchin; just another common tavern-musician. There weren’t many Free Bards who traveled all the way to Lyonarie; it was a long way from Rayden, where the group first came to be organized, and Free Bards had their routines like anyone else. Likely no one would even recognize the knot of multicolored ribbons on her sleeves as anything other than decoration. Even if they did know her for what she was, well, the Guild had made it difficult for a Free Bard to work in Rayden, and the Church had done the same in Gradford, so it made sense for someone to come this far afield for work.

  I look like a Gypsy and there is no disguising that, but that might work for me rather than against me. People like things that are a bit exotic; it gives them a taste of places they’ll never see, a kind of life they’ll never lead.

  Gypsies didn’t like cities much, which also might mean she would not be recognized as one. Ah, well. It was always a case of playing odds being a Gypsy.

  And if she was recognized, and it caused her trouble—well, she would deal with that when she saw what cards were in her hand.

  The donkey suddenly gave a frightened bray and reared back against the lead-rope, trying to dig all four hooves into the pavement. The rope scraped her palm and she tightened her grip automatically as she looked around for what danger might have alarmed him—but a sudden whiff of powerful odor told her that he had simply reacted to another aspect of a city that she hated. There was no mistaking that charnel reek as it wafted into her face: blood and feces, urine and fear.

  She put her hat back on her head and soothed him with her free hand as she continued to pull his lead, gently but firmly, until he started walking again. His eyes rolled, but he obeyed her. She couldn’t blame him for balking; she’d have done the same in his place. He might even have scented a relative in that reek.

  Or rather, an ex-relative.

  The warehouses gave place to something else, and now she knew why she had seen so many carts laden with smaller beasts on this road. This was the district of slaughterhouses and all that depended on them.

  She held the donkey’s halter firmly under his chin as he fought to escape, shivered and rolled his eyes. There wasn’t anywhere he could go, and the press of traffic on all sides was enough to keep him moving. Nightingale wished she had taken thought to cover her mouth and nose with a neckcloth as so many around her were doing—she needed both hands to control the donkey, and her kerchief was in her pocket.

  The reek of the slaughterhouses and holding pens was not all that came drifting by on the breeze. There were other, equally unsavory smells—the stench of the leather-workers’ vats, the effluvium of the glue-makers’ pots, the pong of garbage- and dung-collectors’ heaps. Fortunately there was something of a real current of moving air here, and it ran crossways to the road; as soon as they were out of the immediate area, the worst of the smell faded, diluted by distance.

  But now the slaughterhouse odor gave way to new odors, or rather, older ones. Nightingale winced and tried to barricade herself against a stench that was both physical and mental. Her stomach heaved, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

  Mighty God. Even animals wouldn’t live like this. Even flies wouldn’t live like this! And why does the Church allow this? There is a question for you!

  Only the poorest would live here, so near the slaughterhouses and the dreadful stench, the flies, and the disease—and the tenement houses lining the road bore ample testament to the poverty, both monetary and spiritual, of those living within. The houses themselves leaned against each other, dilapidated constructions that a good wind would surely send tumbling to the street. Drunken men and women both, wrapped in so many layers of rags and dirt it was hard to tell what sex they were, lay in the alleys and leaned against the houses. Filthy children crowded the front stoops, big bellies scarcely covered by the rags they wore, scrawny limbs showing that those bellies were the sign of malnourishment and not of overeating. They, too, lay about listlessly on the steps, or sat and watched the passing traffic, too tired from lack of food to play. The scream of hungry babies joined the sound of commerce on the road; Nightingale resolutely closed her ears to other sounds, of quarrels and blows, of weeping and hopelessness. This was new; poverty was always part of a city, but never starvation, not like this. It was one more evidence of King Theovere’s neglect, even here, in the heart of his own land and city.

  I can’t do anything about this—at least, I can’t do more than I’m already planning to do. I can recruit some of my children from these—I can feed as many as my purse will permit. She salved her conscience with that; there was too much here for even every Gypsy of every clan to correct.

  She sighed with relief as more and sturdier buildings took the place of the tenements. More warehouses, mills for cloth, flour and lumber—and something that Nightingale had never seen at firsthand among humans before, although she was familiar enough with the Deliambren version, which they called “manufactories.”

  Here, in enormous buildings, people made things—but not in the way they were accustomed to make them in villages and towns elsewhere. People made things together; each person performed a single task in the many stages of building something, then passed the object on to the next person, who performed another task, and so on until the object was completed. Every example was like every other example; every chair looked like every other chair, for instance, and every pair of trews like every other pair of trews. The system worked very well for the Deliambrens, but Nightingale was of two minds about it. It did mean made-goods were much cheaper; no one needed to be an expert in everything, and almost anyone could afford well-made trews or chairs or tea mugs. But it felt like there was no heart in such goods, and nothing to show that a tea mug was special . . .

  Ah, what do I know? I am a crofter of music, not of mugs—and I am sure there is still a demand for trews and chairs and mugs made by individuals. The system did the Deliambrens no harm; they took as much pleasure in life and crafting as any other being. Still—

  I would not like to work in such a place, but that does not mean that other folk would feel the same. Stop making judgments for others, Nightingale.

  The donkey relaxed as they entered this district; she let go her tight hold on his lead-rope, and let him have his head again. The shape of this area was determined by the river that ran through it; there was scarcely a bit of bank that did not have a mill wheel on it to make use of the swiftly-flowing current. The buildings here were old—and Nightingale suspected that few of the people traveling beside her had any idea how very old they were. The mill wheels and millraces were recent additions to buildings that had been standing beside this river since before the Cataclysm.

  The buildings were not pretty; they were simple, brute boxes with square window-holes where there might once have been glass. Now they were covered with whatever might let in l
ight and exclude weather; glass in some places, oiled paper or sheets of parchment in others, but mostly sheets of white opaque stuff the Deliambrens used for packing crates and padding. The base color of these dull boxes was an equally dull grey; where in the past people had tried to apply paint, either to cover the entire building or as crude advertisements, the paint remained only in patches, as if the buildings had some kind of scabrous disease. But the irony was that these places were solid still; they had stood for centuries and likely would stand for centuries more. Nightingale had been inside the Deliambren Fortress-City; she had seen buildings like these being erected. One actually poured the walls, using wood to make the molds to give the walls their form, as if they were huge ceramics. Once the grey stuff set, it was stronger than granite and less likely to age due to weathering.

  So the irony, lost to those beside the Gypsy, was that these buildings which seemed relatively new were actually much, much older than the tenements that had been falling down.

  The road crossed the river on a bridge that also dated back to the Cataclysm; Nightingale privately doubted that anyone could bridge the Lyon River in these days—except, perhaps, Deliambrens. It was a narrow and fierce stream, with a current so swift and deep that “to swim the Lyon” was a common euphemism for suicide.

  For a moment, there was relief from the heat; the waters of the Lyon were as cold as they were swift, and a second river flowed above it—a river of fresh, cool air. Nightingale moved as slowly on the bridge as she could, stretching out her moment of relief.

  On the other side, the manufactories gave way again to housing, but fortunately for Nightingale’s peace of mind, the people here lived in better conditions than those near the slaughterhouses.

  There were more of those pre-Cataclysm buildings, in fact, given over to living quarters rather than manufactories. These had more windows, and from the look of things, the ceilings were not as high, granting more levels in the same amount of space. In between these older buildings, newer ones rose, not quite as dilapidated as the tenements on the other side of the river, but by no means in excellent repair. These newer buildings huddled around the old as if for support, as if without those grey bulwarks they could not stand against wind and weather.