The fetters were secured round the ankles of what had once been two men. The dried bodies, hanging motionless in the still heat, were indescribably ghastly, so dreadful as to seem unreal, like spectres encountered in nightmare or some drug-induced trance. The expressions of agony and despair in their crumbled, lip-retracted faces were no less appalling for being inverted, eyeless and half-flayed by insects and birds. Their lank hair was bleached almost white by the sun. The three arms still hanging below the heads were nothing but bundles of gray sticks, to which, here and there, adhered rags and fragments of flesh. One still ended in a fist of tight-clutched fingers: below the others, small, white bones lay scattered on the turf.
Maia, with an inarticulate cry, buried her face in her hands. At this moment, as though the abomination had power to pursue her and pierce whatever feeble barrier she could raise against it, the ghost of a breeze stole down the slope, bringing with it a vile, carrion odor.
Occula, after one brief glance, turned back to Maia, shaking her gently by the shoulder.
"Never seen a crows' picnic before, banzi? Come on, they woan' bite you, poor bastards. They might have once."
"Oh--" Maia lay retching and shuddering in the grass. "I never--"
"Gives you a turn the first time, doan' it?" said the black girl. "That's why they do it, of course. 'Come all you jolly highway rogues, this warnin' take by me. The crows have pecked my bollocks off, as you can plainly see. But once when I was young and gay, I used to--' "
"Oh, Occula, can't we go away from here?" Maia was weeping. "Whatever can they have done?"
"How the hell d'you expect me to know?" replied Occula. "Dropped a plate on a Leopard's toe, I expect, or made Queen Fornis's bath too hot."
"Or possibly even made indiscreet jokes about the Sacred Queen," cut in Zuno from the jekzha. "But," he resumed after a few moments, "if all of us were to repeat everything we heard, it would give rise to too much awkwardness altogether, wouldn't it?"
Occula, who, as soon as he spoke, had stood up and turned toward him, made no reply, merely standing acquiescently as though awaiting an order. Unexpectedly, it was one of the Deelguy who next spoke, jerking his thumb towards the gallows.
"Make--onnemies. No good. Too monny, finish."
"Certainly there is seldom anything to be gained by making enemies," said Zuno. "We'll stop here for a few minutes," he added, extending a hand to show that he wished to be helped down from the jekzha.
"Since there is no shade for miles, this place will do as well as anywhere else."
Having alighted, he sauntered away in the opposite direction from the gallows, while the Deelguy crawled under the wheels and began playing some game with tossed sticks in the dust.
"They're a nasty, cruel lot, these Leopards, by all I ever heard," said Occula, as soon as she was sure that Zuno was out of hearing. "Never mind, banzi; we'll take bastin' good care they never hang us up, woan' we?"
None the less, despite her indifferent manner and air of flippancy, she appeared by no means unaffected by the spectacle on the slope. Her smile, as Maia pulled her to her feet, seemed forced and unnatural, as did the four or five little dancing steps she took across the grass by way of beginning their stroll. When Maia caught up with her she was biting her lip and staring pensively at the ground.
"Yes, a nasty lot," she repeated. "And if you go to bed with a murderer, banzi, how sound can you sleep?"
"What?" asked Maia, frowning. "I don't understand."
"No; I'm the one who understands; may all the gods help me!" But thereupon she broke off and, drawing Maia round, pointed towards the purple-rimmed horizon.
"Look, banzi! Take a damn' good look! We've come far enough to see it, doan' you reckon?"
Half-closing her eyes against the glare, Maia gazed westward across the plain. Four miles away, a high, irregular mass cutting the skyline, stood the solitary peak of Mount Crandor, the mid-day brilliance throwing its ridges and gullies into sharp contrasts of sunlight and purple shadow. Encircling it, she could just make out a thin, darker streak-- the line of the city walls, broken at intervals by the points of the watch-turrets.
To Crandor's right, immediately below the heat-hazed slopes, lay Bekla itself. Maia, who had never seen even Kabin or Thettit-Tonilda, stared incredulously at the mile-wide drift of smoke above the tilted roofs, through which rose the slender columns of towers taller than any trees; clustered together, as it seemed from this distance, like reeds in a pool. Above the city, between it and the lower slopes of Crandor itself, the Palace of the Barons crowned the Leopard Hill, its ranges of polished marble balconies catching the noonday sun and flashing gleams of light across the intervening plain. Even at this distance--or so, at all events, she thought--Maia's ears could catch, far-off and faint, a hum and murmur like that of bees about a hive.
"Turn Bekla upside-down?" she breathed at last. "Why, we'll just be goin' in there like--like coal to the blacksmith's, no danger!"
"Now stop it, banzi!" said the black girl quickly. "All right, I admit it's enough to poke your eyes out, sure enough; but stands to reason, doan' it, it's got to be like anywhere else--bung-full of randy sods with standin' rods? Get that into your head and keep on rememberin' it. You're not like a confectioner or a silk-merchant--someone people can do without at a pinch. You're like a baker or a midwife: life just can't go on without the likes of us. Whoever they are, they've got to be born, they've got to eat, they've got to baste and they've got to die."
"But I never imagined; it's so big!" Maia stared once more at the distant city with its array of tapering spires.
"Well, that's what the priestess said to the drover, but she found she could manage it all right after a bit. Look, there's old Puss-arse coming, see? Let's get back down before he starts calling us. And for Cran's sake doan' let him think you've got the wind-up about the mighty city of Bekla. You've got to learn to shrug-your shoulders and spit, banzi. Go on, do it now."
Smiling in spite of herself, Maia obeyed; whereupon Occula took her hand and ran with her down the slope.
Maia noticed, however, that she still kept her eyes averted from the opposite rise.
14: BEKLA
A little less than two hours later they found themselves on the northeastern outskirts of Bekla and approaching the Blue Gate. The mid-day heat was beginning to lessen. Behind its walls the city, stirring like some great, prostrate animal, was awakening from its sun-drenched torpor. Yawning shopkeepers with poles were pushing up the heavy, top-hung shutters they had let fall at noon. A few street cries could be heard, and here and there women, with baskets on their arms, were venturing forth from doors and passage-ways. The cripples and beggars sleeping along the alleys woke, brushed the flies from their suppurating eyelids and once more set about the task of keeping alive. As the Deelguy slaves joined other carts and wayfarers jostling between the walls of the outer precinct leading to the gate itself, the city's two water-clocks struck the third hour of the afternoon, first one and then the other releasing an iron ball to fall into a resonant copper basin. The nearer clock tower stood a bare
two hundred yards from the Blue Gate and at the sudden, reverberant clang Maia started, looking up quickly towards the gold-painted grilles below the tapering spire.
Although their journey had been only half as long as those of the two previous days, both girls were spent with the heat. Maia's left ankle was swollen and she winced at every step. As they followed the jekzha under the arch of the gate she suddenly stumbled and clutched at Occula's arm, leaning her head against the wall and panting.
Five or six passers-by, attracted by the sight of such a pretty girl in obvious distress, formed a small crowd, chattering to one another and proffering advice, until a respectable-looking, elderly woman, attended by a slave carrying her basket, stepped forward and helped Maia to a stone bench recessed in the wall.
Whether Zuno felt some slight twinge of conscience; whether he thought that it might look better if the girls did not arrive at Lalloc's in a state of sweating and bedraggled exhaustion; or whether he simply wished to avoid a street-row (for some of the crowd were beginning to mutter and point at him), there can be no telling.
At all events he got down from the jekzha, went across to one of the soldiers on guard-duty and asked to see the tryzatt in the guard-room (which was also situated in the thickness of the wall). Here, having shown Lalloc's token (which was stamped with the Leopard seal), he obtained leave to bring his property into the guard-room. Then he dispatched one of the Deelguy to hire a second jekzha, while he himself, having told the other to come and let him know as soon as it arrived, went across the street to the nearest wine-shop.
The soldiers off-duty were sympathetic to the girls, as most common people, themselves all-too-familiar with hardship and adversity, usually are towards anyone whom they perceive to be in genuine distress.
When Occula had explained the reason for Maia's exhaustion there was a good deal of indignation.
"Made 'em walk from Naksh, tryze, since this morning," said one of the soldiers to the guard-commander, who had just returned from a quick and illicit drink with Zuno across the road. "And that fancy bastard of Lalloc's riding along in the shade."