At first I thought it merely the noise of the Market. Some new attraction must have arrived, I thought dully: dancers or a wagon full of clowns. Then, as the woman was helping me stand up, a figure burst into the tent, his dark face wild and sweating. “Fly, fly!” he shrieked. “It’s the Guard!”
Stains on his robe—earth or blood. “The Guard, I tell you!” he shouted, waving hands like claws as if threatening to tear us apart. A moment his shadow chased itself over the walls, and then he fled. As the tent flap opened and fell, I caught a glimpse of fire.
Then we moved. We ran as one. Not for long—the moment I stepped outside, a rushing figure slammed into me, and I fell. A taste of Olondrian soil in my mouth. When I scrambled to my feet the people who had been with me were gone and the earth was on fire.
Heat blew toward me, crackling, lifting my hair.
The booths were burning. People writhed on the ground, flame-laced, and the dry grass turned to smoke.
Against the firelight, horses. They reared and plunged in the air, screaming with fear and rage. Their riders wore helmets and wielded clubs and did not fall. Their huge silhouettes struck grimly, without hesitation, again and again. Near me a girl rolled senseless, firelit blood in her hair.
Screams wracked the night.
The horseman who had struck the girl turned his beast, whirling his club above his head. “E drom!” he shouted. The Stone. His stallion’s hooves knives in the air, his weapon a blur. I ducked, lifted my robe to the level of my knees, and ran.
We were all running, scattered like mice in flood time. We ran for the fields, the nearby woods, and they chased us, exchanging cries like hunters. The history books would tell of the burning of the Night Market of Nuillen, but they would erase the terror, the stench of blood and soot. And the noise—the noise. Running, I struck my foot on a stone and fell with a splash, up to my chin in an irrigation ditch. The sides were steep enough to provide a chance that a horse would not tread on me if I stayed close. I lay flat in the mud, screams in my ears.
I turned myself sideways, wriggled into the side of the ditch, and plastered my body with mud. A little water flowed past me sluggishly, red with fire. Horses flew over like eagles. My eyelids shuddered, stung by smoke. Toward dawn the fire leapt over me, singeing the field, and was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
This Happy Land
I emerged from the bank, like Leilin the first woman, the Olondrian goddess of clay. The Book of Mysteries tells how she rose, “a speaking clod.” She awoke in a world new-formed, but the world I entered was old already, incalculably old, smoke-stained, silent. Its hair had gone gray.
Ashes blew on the breeze. In the fog that rolled from the commons, figures moved, bent over like reapers, searching, sobbing names.
I knelt and scooped up a little muddy water from the ditch. My throat was sore, and the water had a charred taste. Then I stood and set out over the field, barefoot, my slippers lost in my flight. I was going back to the commons.
The great tent where the angel had spoken was gone. Its poles still smoldered on the ground.
I walked among the survivors, crying a name, like them. Miros. My throat shut up, my voice a whisper. Every effort to shout, every breath, striped my lungs and throat with pain.
I thought I would never find him. I thought he was dead. I could not see the shape of the carriage anywhere. In the center of the commons, where the Night Market had been most crowded, the burned bodies were unrecognizable.
Somewhere near the center I sat down. A booth had collapsed nearby, festooned with long streamers of blackened lace. Coins lay in the ashes on the ground, dark triangles secretive as letters. Beads had fallen from a wrist.
I put my head down on my knees and wept. I wept for those who had died in the fire, who had come to buy and sell, to make merry, to speak with an avneanyi. I wept for those whose loved ones were lost on the other side of the trembling door, who would not come again from the land of the dead. I wept for myself. I wept because I was haunted, hounded into the Valley—the cause, against my will, of a great sorrow. When I looked up I saw a rough youth with a dirty rag tied about his head, and in his pale profile I recognized my friend.
I stood up. “Miros,” I shouted. My voice a creak.
He did not know me at first. His gaze slipped over me, anxious and hurried, searching among the ruins. Then I took a step forward and his eyes returned to my face and he ran toward me and caught me in a fierce embrace.
“Jevick!” he croaked.
“Miros!”
“I thought you were dead—”
“Your uncle—”
“Alive, in the carriage, hard by the wood. Come.” He seized my arm and began to run. I was slower than he, gasping, my lungs tight. He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he panted. “You’ve got to run. The Guard will be back before long.”
“Back,” I wheezed.
“They’ll have to get rid of the bodies,” he said shortly. “Clean the commons.”
We ran, the silence broken only by our breath. The carriage stood at the edge of the forest, spared like the trees by the slant of the wind. Its sides were sooty, and there was only one horse.
“Where are we going to go?” I whispered.
Miros looked up from checking the harness. “East. My uncle’s servants are coming downriver with—what you wanted. We’ll cross on the ferry and meet them in Klah-ne-Wiy.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded, looking bleakly across the burnt commons. “Let’s go.”
I opened the door of the carriage to receive another shock. There on the seat lay a bald old man, unconscious, wrapped in a blanket. “Miros!” I said, and he answered from the coachman’s perch: “Get in, there isn’t time.” And I obeyed him, and pulled the door shut with a shaking hand. I sat on the seat across from the old man and looked at him. His face was a mass of stains, as if he had been pilloried in some brutal ritual. I recognized in that withered face, that flat head and pointed chin, the ravaged features of Auram, High Priest of Avalei.
The hair. The hair was a wig. I pressed back against the seat, my heart thudding. The eyebrows were painted on, the eyes enhanced with black paint and belladonna, the wrinkles disguised with unguents, embalmed in powder. The whole man was a creation, re-created every day. The lips, of course, had always been too red. The hands must be treated too: I shuddered at the thought of their touch, their white, elastic fingers. And everything clarified as if a veil had been ripped asunder: the priest’s hooded cloak, his unusual, querulous voice. I realized that I had never seen his face in daylight till now. And the thought, coming suddenly, made my hair stand up. I felt my skin shrink, prickling all along my arms as if I had seen Dit-Peta, the island demon “Old Man of Youth.”
He did not wake. As we drew away from the fire, into clearer air, the sun shone through the window onto his creased expanse of forehead. For the first time his face had definition. It was human now: touching and impressive as a skull.
He did not wake for five days. Miros cradled the ancient head in his lap and forced a trickle of water between the dry lips. We bought cured meat at a peasant house and built a fire in a meadow and Miros boiled the meat in a metal bowl to make soup. His eyes bright in the firelight, his face drawn. “I told him to die,” he said. “The night of the Market. We had a quarrel… I told him I wished he was dead.”