“Wine, may it please your honor,” he told the boy. “The chalk marks on the bottles say that they are bound for my master’s palace, not for sale.” Writing might impress the guard, although he would not be able to read it any more than Cavotti could.
“Open the stinking cover, you diseased, ditch-borne progeny of a toad.”
Cavotti obeyed, rain-chilled fingers fumbling with waterlogged ropes, but as he pulled back a corner, he could turn enough to take surreptitious note of the ice devils. They were just standing there, staring at him, arms folded, backs to the wind. Wearing only those wet wisps of cotton, they ought to be freezing in this deluge, but Vigaelians felt the cold less. The warriors Stralg had brought over the Edge fifteen years ago had worn massive garments called palls. Florengia’s climate had taught them to wear as little as possible.
Stralg maintained a small garrison in Celebre, but his men normally left routine guard duty to the doge’s Florengians. Why were these two on the gate today, and why would they bother coming out in the year’s worst weather to stare at a solitary peasant?
“All of it!” shouted the boy, adding some salacious imperatives.
Cavotti unlaced more rope and the wind threw the cover up in his face, revealing that the wagon held only sealed clay jugs. But he had to fight the cover with one hand and control the guanaco with the other as Misery stamped feet and flicked ears.
“Don’t go away.” The swordsman helped himself to an amphora and staggered back into the guard room with it.
The Vigaelians said nothing, did nothing, just studied the imposter carter with colorless eyes. Their brown sashes denoted mere front-fang warriors. Surely their flankleader would have come in person if he thought there was the faintest chance of apprehending the infamous Mutineer? But Celebre had other gates to watch.
Very large Florengian male, twenty-eight years old, dark-skinned and dangerous — his description must be too vague to be useful. His size might give him away, but his face would not. Holy Weru had been kind to him-in ten years of battle, Cavotti had taken no serious wounds and consequently showed none of the bestial “battle hardening” most older Werists did. If the ice devils had any doubts about him, they need only demand to see his neck.
The guard emerged with another man, older and not so wet. They grabbed two more amphorae. “All right, you can go,” the second man said. They departed with their prizes.
“Wait!” said the larger Werist, in a harsh accent. Leaving his companion, he began wandering around the wagon, ghostly eyes inspecting the rig. His stripes were hard to read in the gloom, but they seemed to be black, brown, and green-which meant nothing, because the invaders’ horde was being so badly mauled these days that half their units were makeshift collections of survivors. His fair skin was scarred and peeling from sunburn, meaning he had only recently come over the Edge.
Cavotti suppressed mad thoughts of making conversation, professional small talk: Pardon my curiosity, swine, but have you heard about Napora yet? Me and my men butchered three sixty of your buddies there not two thirties ago. We did to your wounded what you used to do to ours.
The big Vigaelian came close, still silent. He probably did not speak or understand much Florengian; few of them did, no matter how long they had been here. Carefully watching Cavotti, he reached out and hooked a finger through the handle of yet another amphora. He lifted the bottle out at arm’s length, a feat few men would be inclined to try. Cavotti displayed humble admiration, as any sensible peasant would. He would give five teeth to know what the one at his back was doing.
The big Vigaelian smiled and deliberately threw the bottle to the paving. Cavotti jumped back with a cry, clothes soaked by wine. Black eyes met pale blue. The next step in this sort of harassment was for the Vigaelian overlord to order the subhuman Florengian serf down on his knees to start licking up the wine. That would not only put him at an impossible disadvantage, it would expose the back of his neck to view. There were limits; he would rather die on his feet.
The final, fatal challenge did not come. The other Werist laughed and said something in guttural Vigaelian. The big one shrugged, spat contemptuously at the Florengian, and then they went back into the guard room, slamming the door.
Cavotti’s hands were shaking as he wrestled the cover back in place, but apparently he had merely been a victim of Vigaelian humor, two bored young thugs having some fun with the oversized native. Probably they were being punished for some minor offense, required to go outside and inspect every traveler in person. So the test had been good news in disguise. If the Vigaelians had the slightest suspicion that the army of liberation was starting to move in on Celebre, these two would have made sure they saw his neck.
He was home for the first time in fifteen years, and there was no one to see him. The inhabitants had fled the storm, leaving the streets to thrashing trees, leaping torrents, and a steady sleet of roof tiles, which exploded like thunderbolts as they landed. It would be a jest of holy Cienu if the war of liberation failed now because the partisan leader got brained by falling terra cotta.
Home at last! Incredible! In all the long years of war and struggle, he had clung bitterly to the hope that one day he would return, but only recently had he truly believed it would ever happen. His dream had been to return victorious, of course, to drive a chariot along this avenue waving to tumultuous crowds cheering Cavotti the Mutineer, Cavotti the Liberator. This skulking in dark corners was a poor substitute, but it was probably what he would have to settle for. If Stralg did not destroy Celebre before the end, the Freedom Fighters might have to.
Celebre deserved its fame; it truly was the finest of them all, the Admirable City. Cavotti had been everywhere on the Florengian Face in the last ten years. He had been hunted twice around the Fertile Circle, had swum in the warm waves of Ocean, and nearly frozen to death in the airless wastes of the Altiplano. He had visited cities so ancient that they had sunk beneath the waves, and others left high and dry when the sea withdrew or rivers changed course, but most of those he had seen had recently been sacked-usually by Stralg and his horde, but every once in a while by his own side. Neither group left much more in their wake than bones and stinking ashes.
Celebre, however, was still unscathed. Celebre was still wide avenues and stately facades, shapely towers and temples, spacious colonnades, piazzas, and gardens. It had weaknesses, yes. Some of the grandiose mercantile palaces were known to be barns inside. Conversely, the central piazza was an ugly, ill-shaped hole, and the Ducal Palace looked like a gigantic outhouse because Celebrians had never approved of ostentatious rulers. Its interior, though, Cavotti remembered as a feast of beauty, a treasury of resplendent art spanning a dozen generations.
It would be a nice place to die in if things went wrong tonight.
Marno was not a sentimental man. Any romantic tendencies he might have once possessed had been beaten out of him eons ago, yet he felt pangs of nostalgia as he headed inward from Meadow Gate up Goldbeater Street. The last time he had run down this same avenue in the company of his childhood gang had been on the day the city fell.