(IN OUR LAST INSTALLMENT, PROSATIO SILBAN arrived in Cold Wall with a flat tire. Now, he finds a repairman.)
The first thing Prosatio Silban noticed after his galleywagon wobbled through the gate and into the settlement proper were two great square towers tapering stark-red into the late-afternoon sky. Between them and from either side stretched the fortress-village’s namesake — a hundred-mile fence across the only corridor between “civilization and its opposite.” The lowering sun painted the massive sandstone blocks a warm gold, limned with winking glints from the spears of roving sentinels. Against this backdrop a dozen or so cooking-fires sketched scattered streamers of smoke, with here and there a silk banner or carved skull proclaiming the pride and place of one or another nation.
The snickering Soharin guard — who had been introduced by his commander as Filipid Ilgor — was leading the “zebras” and ‘wagon straight along a broad street. To Prosatio Silban’s left, the grey circular huts of Xao sprawled in groups of six centered around a common fire; to his right were the white lines of poured-stone Huuan dwellings. Narrow perpendicular lanes branched off at regular intervals. The scene was alive with pre-twilight shufflings: soldiers hurrying home from watch; shopkeepers calling out end-of-day specials; housewomen rattling dinner pots and pans; a passing chorus of greetings. On one corner was a small tavern with outside tables, at one of which a handful of Huuan soldiers played an animated game of dice with two young Xao men. Two Delvers, those squat masters of the mountain highlands, stood nearby cheering them on; one caught sight of Filipid Ilgor and waved.
“You see? We have everyone here,” said Filipid Ilgor, waving in turn. He looked back at Prosatio Silban. “How much do you know about this place?”
Prosatio Silban shook his head. “Only what everyone knows — that if it weren’t for Cold Wall, relations between the Xao and ourselves would still be in a pitiable state.”
“Pitiable?” snorted Filipid Ilgor. “Laughable. Our sainted ancestors flee the sinking ruins of Eldhome, seeking a prophesied deliverance in the Land Beyond the Sunrise — only to find the indigenes expecting sea-born saviors to clean the so-called Land of Exile their own sainted ancestors anciently destroyed. And then leave. As if we would.”
Prosatio Silban frowned. “That’s not laughable at all. It’s tragic. Centuries of distrust, resentment and war. If not for the Thruin trying to kill both of us, what — a century ago? We’d still be fighting each other.”
“Exactly! But now we have this,” Filipid Ilgor said. “A rotating guard between the Land of Two Names and the Cold of Waste. The perfect place to temper our young men to hardness. Too bad we don’t leave like we — Ah, here we are.”
He stopped the galleywagon in the southwest corner of a sparsely populated square; empty but for a few people filling pitchers at the square’s central fountain. Bordering the square were a shuttered inn, neglected-looking shrine, and a well-maintained barracks and public bath, all of painted Huuan build. The barracks were connected to the Cold Wall itself by a poured-stone causeway, crossing a wide open space which ran the wall’s length. In the corner between barracks and shrine stood a rickety stall, next to which a middle-aged male Xao wearing a grey leather apron was scrubbing out a large black cauldron.
A brief conference ensued, after which Filipid Ilgor departed for his post, Prosatio Silban retrieved two bundles from his galleywagon, and Tharch — for such was the name of the Xao rubberwright — placed a large wood-and-iron device under the injured wheel. Soon, the galleywagon had been stabilized, its wheel removed, the zebras seen to, and Prosatio Silban busied with a portable grill he had unslung from beneath the galleywagon. Xao palates were simple but satisfying — chunks of pack-lizard and marsh-root skewered and roasted over a peat fire was one of their staples. Prosatio Silban rubbed the meat vigorously with stinkbulb, sprinkled it with cave-salt and pepper, and rolled the chunks in a small dish of golden sesame seeds. He lit the grill and noticed Tharch looking away from him again; the burly Xao had mounted the wheel in a wooden stand and, between furtive glances, stripped most of the rubber shreds from the rim with a curved metal knife.
“Yes?” Prosatio Silban said, thinking vaguely of native superstition. “Did you change your mind about the lizard?”
Tharch looked down, then back at Prosatio Silban. “I am wondering,” he said slowly. “Why are you here?”
Prosatio Silban looked reflexively round. “Why do you say that?”
“Those are not your eyebrows,” Tharch said. “You are a Huuan godsman, yes?”
Prosatio Silban grinned; the Xao were renowned for their perceptive acuity. “Secrets are a necessary inconvenience in civilized lands, the more so at their borders,” he said. “Suffice to say that I once was a … godsman, but I was on better terms with the Flickering Gods than with the other godsmen.”
Tharch nodded. “I am hearing this from many of your people, but many things I am not understanding.” He stepped closer, lowered his voice. “Why are the people of Huua still here?”
Prosatio Silban paused. He knew the answer to that question, or part of it. The Huuan prophecies of the Land Beyond the Sunset did not concern a permanent settlement, but one which depended on the people’s “integritation” — the successful ritualized acknowledgment of mistakes and shortcomings as the particular unfolding of an individual’s life. Integritation was central to Huuan religious thought; it was said that once a sufficient number of the Huuan faithful had integritated, the Huuans would be allowed to cross the Rimless Sea to Eldhome renewed — and the Flickering Gods would proclaim the “Year of the Folded Sword.” For the Huuans did not number their years, designating them instead by whatever their gods revealed of its nature to the Sacreants, and thence to the throngs of Huuan faithful huddled each Year Day in the vast square surrounding Pormaris’ Great Fane. That is, if such names as “Year of the Parted Robe” or “Fifteenth Year of the Lurking Jest” could be said to reveal anything.
(What was not revealed, but which Prosatio Silban accidentally discovered, was that the Year of the Folded Sword had arrived not long after the Huuans. But since the Sacreants who received the news were keen students of human nature and logistics, who had profited well in the current arrangement and in whose opinion a countermigration would cause more problems than it solved, decided to put off for a time their people’s final salvation. And yet, Prosatio Silban was not half so undone by his discovery as by his superior’s cynical, “So what? Be my guest and start a new war between Huuan and Xao.”)
He looked at Tharch with genuine sympathy. “I truly do not know why we’re still here,” he said. “What do your people say about it?”
Tharch frowned. “Many things. Some are saying our gods are punishing us. Some are saying your gods are stronger. And some say we must wait and see. I am born here, am not knowing my grandfather’s grandfather’s land. But my grandfather is fighting when this Thruin war begins, and the stories of what he tells bring too much fear even to daylight. Even on the other side of the Wall — for we are making raids when needed — they kill. They are only killing. Unlike Huuans they do not speak.”
Prosatio Silban started. “Do you mean that no one has ever talked to the Thruin?”
“No.”
“Not even in the early years of the war, or before?”
“I am not knowing of it,” Tharch said, irritated curiosity shading his voice. “Why?”
“Why?” Well … how do we know what they want, or why we are fighting?”
Tharch smiled, but not with his eyes. “To your question a Thruin is answering an axe in your head. Why ask your killer why he kills you?”
“Because perhaps you can get him to stop.”
Tharch’s laughter turned heads, and as he turned back to the wheelstand Prosatio Silban felt a sudden pain in his left shoulder. One end of an arrow was sticking in it; the other was tipped with three dark brown feathers. He cried out.
“Thruin!” shouted Tharch, shoving Prosatio Silban to the ground with one massive hand.
Neal @ February 5, 2010
HERE READS ANOTHER TALE (OR one-third thereof) of Prosatio Silban, the Cook For Any Price, who wanders the Lands Beyond the Sunset in his …. we’ll, I’ll let him tell it. All comments welcome.
War Prints
by Neal Ross Attinson
The tire’s fragments softened and flowed under Prosatio Silban’s kneading fingers, but he soon realized that his repairs were little stronger than the god which powered them.
O Tersten, Dispenser of Temporary Redemptions, the beefy cook prayed, trying not to wish for a different supplicatee. May a Cold Wall rubberwright be happy to improve my repair for a pot of something delicious.
He was midway up the Long Walk: twenty miles of straight pitted road slashed up the face of a mile-high sandstone cliff like an ancient dueling scar. Mountains pierced the clouds to the northeast and south. On the western horizon, the green hills of the Huuan Commonwell undulated toward him from the Misty River; a half-mile below him flowed the marshy Hidden River on its way to the Rimless Sea. Between the two, the green faded into a tumbled black — wounds of a war which had finished when Prosatio Silban was too young to understand it.
“All right, boy,” he said, wiping his hands on his blue cotton kneebreeches to conceal his annoyance. “Let her down and we can be on our way.”
The honeywood galleywagon, roughly the size of a caravan-tent, settled with a creak and a clatter onto its four great wheels as a smooth chatoyant bulk rippled out from underneath. It extruded something like a dainty-toothed elephant’s trunk and accepted a dark red fatberry cake proffered from the embroidered bag at Prosatio Silban’s waist, then flowed into the galleywagon’s double harness to become a sturdy pair of swamp-zebras. Prosatio Silban stroked the necks of both zebras, told them what a good helper it was, and climbed into the driver’s seat. The tire would hold, or it wouldn’t. Just like his faith.
Prosatio Silban had been traveling thus for slightly longer than he cared to remember — longer anyway than his time as a Sacreant, one of that legion of Huuan priests who tend the shadowy Flickering Gods. He removed from a pocket of his travel-stained white silk tunic a pair of artificial eyebrows, applying them simultaneously and by reflex.
The depilatory bath which marks a Sacreant’s initiation was not reversible. Happily, neither were some of its other effects.
Two hours later, the road had curved south then leveled off and widened into a vast semicircular court before a high sandstone-block wall curving away from a broad, three-story gate tower whose roof-edge bristed with mastodon-tusks. From a pole above the gate flew three wide pennants of gold, grey and blue edged with dark red; at the end hung a mastodon skull inscribed with cryptic runes. Six Xao archers eyed him dispassionately from the roof: four men and two women, tall and bronzely nude above their grey leather kilts.
Prosatio Silban halted his wobbling galleywagon before the tower’s tall gate, which was open and flanked by four solid figures in the blued mail of Soharis, First City of the Commonwell. Long ribbons of the same color fluttered from beneath the curved blades of their tall spears. An official-looking man approached, draped in a gold, grey and blue tabard and bearing a large wax-tablet and stylus.
“Welcome to the border of the Land Beyond The Sunrise, as it is known in the Huuan Commonwell, and the Land of Two Exiles, so-called among the Xao. Long may they be free and free of fear of the Cold Waste,” said the official-looking man, and coughed. He raised his stylus. “Name?”
“Quite a climb to get here,” Prosatio Silban said. “Not many visitors come up this way?”
The official peered at him. “Name?”
“Prosatio Silban, the Cook for Any Price.”
“Business?”
“I hope so, or else this long journey has been for naught.”
One of the guards snickered. “If that passes for your wit, it will be,” he said.
The official raised a supercilious hand. “You are a visitor,” he told Prosatio Silban. “Tell me your business or you’ll practice it elsewhere.”
Prosatio Silban wanted to say his business was that of any free Huuan on any public thoroughfare and therefore no one else’s. But he noted the man’s laconic tone, the guards’ studied ease, the Xaos’ incurious faces. Sophisticate and savage, yet both have the same eyes, he thought, and smiled.
“I am but a humble cook-errant, lately come from epicurean Pormaris in search of new recipes and palates,” he said, hands out at his sides. “I have never visited this part of the Commonwell, which seemed reason enough. But the road was unkind to my vehicle and I seek now also a rubberwright.”
The official raised his eyebrows. “We are far from the City of Gourmands — far enough to be forgotten by the gods, or at least their servants. Do Pormaris’ cooks have the zeal her Sacreants lack?”
“So it is said,” said Prosatio Silban, idly rubbing an eyebrow. “Who knows? The Flickering Gods let me look after the belly; I let them look after the soul.”
“That is what they’re for.” The official poked at the wax tablet with his stylus, handed both to Prosatio Silban. “Sign.”
Underneath a stylized griffon were a half-dozen names and dates, all old, some scratched out. Prosatio Silban’s was at the bottom. He frowned in curiosity. “What is this?”
“You are entering the line between civilization and its opposite,” he said. “Such events are historic. Besides — if you are killed, we must know that you were here of your own volition.”
Prosatio Silban signed. The Soharin guard snickered.
Neal @ February 4, 2010
