“I can’t do that,” the old woman said. “Will you baptize my son?”
She pushed a face to the window. The boy looked too young to be her son, and too old at the same time. He was bald and his wrinkled forehead was blue. A glep.
“I can’t do that,” Blacktooth said. “I’m not a real priest.”
“He’s not my real son,” the old woman cackled. “I bought him.”
“Bought me!” said the glep boy. “I commensurate the deception. Am.”
“What?” A bell was ringing somewhere, faster and faster. Then Blacktooth heard the spray of shots. It was being rung with bullets.
“He’s very strong,” said the woman.
“Strong,” said the glep. “Accurate am I the exception.”
“He says all you have to do is move this brick.”
“What brick?”
The woman stood up and made a scraping noise with her stick. With a fierce demented grin, the boy pulled a bar loose, then another. “Strong!” He threw both bars into the cell at Blacktooth, who ducked. They rang on the floor with the sound of bells.
“Hey!”
Blacktooth flattened himself against the wall. Had the bars been loose all along? The jail was like the abbey; all he had to do was walk out and he was free.
He waited until he was sure the old woman and the glep boy were gone; then he pushed his zucchetto and the jail blanket through the bars, and climbed after them into the alley.
The air was thick with smoke, and he held his sleeve over his nose. It had been easier to breathe in the basement jail. At one end of the street he saw the woman and the boy, poking through garbage unconcernedly, as if the world were not on fire. They seemed to have forgotten him. “Bless you, my son,” he whispered—and walked quickly the other way.
CHAPTER 31
On the day they return, let them
lie prostrate on the floor of the oratory
and beg the prayers of all on account
of any faults that may have surprised
them on the road.
BLACKTOOTH HAD SEEN ONLY TWO CITIES IN HIS day: Valana, built of wood and stone, and Hannegan City, made of wood and mud. The Holy City, New Rome, was a city built of old pieces of old cities; it was a mixture of old and new, more like an abbey than a city, with piles of brick and stone built upon piles of brick and stone, all mixed and leavened with wood and grass and straw. All flammable, all tinder, and, it seemed to Blacktooth, all burning.
He was on a wide, straight street with mounds of rubble and stumps of towers, the “great houses,” on both sides. At first he was alone, but as he walked farther east, into the rising sun and away from the fire, the street became more and more crowded with frightened, silent people. Blacktooth felt an unexpected, unwanted kinship with these frightened grass-eaters who were suddenly emerging from basements and the stumps of buildings (just as he had), dragging their pitiful rags and remnants and pots and animals and children with them. Everyone was leaving the city.
In the distance behind him, he heard shots, rare and ragged. If there were any fighting Nomads in the city, they didn’t show themselves. No fighting horses, only mules and old nags. Only stray dogs.
The fleeing people were weirdly silent. Shouts or cries would have been welcome, but Blacktooth heard neither; it was as if the window from his basement cell had led him into a world where only children cried or complained. The adults were glumly silent, stumbling forward. Perhaps they thought their accents would give them away, or perhaps there was just nothing left to say.
New Rome was burning.
Blacktooth had prepared himself for execution, and now even his hunger was gone. A hand plucked at his sleeve—a child’s hand—and he found himself, through some process he neither understood nor fully noted, part of a small group dragging a frightened mule up the steps from a basement room. How it had gotten there, who it belonged to, and who wanted it—these were questions that belonged to another reality. All that was present was the need to help coax the terrified, braying beast up the narrow steps.
Then it was gone into the gathering, streaming crowd, its owner—and the child—chasing it; and Blacktooth was half walking, half running after them. The wind had risen and now there was a wall of flame directly behind, to the west.
Four men and four women, all naked and holding hands, snaked through the crowd, singing hysterically. Blacktooth tried to look away from the women’s breasts but couldn’t It wasn’t desire he felt but some other, almost forgotten feeling: hunger, or hope. Two men in uniform with repeating rifles ran past, then two more, all running in step. It was almost comical. Blacktooth pulled off his zucchetto and hid it under his habit. A fallen mule in the traces of a cart was screaming pitifully, trying to rise. One haunch was smeared with blood.
The fire was either closer, or hotter, or both. At the end of the street it was a wall of flame, taller than the “great houses.” Blacktooth now had two shadows, one that walked before him and one behind.
“I set fires,” thought Blacktooth, remembering the blue and gold inscription on the Grasshopper sharf’s carriage.
A farmer leaned over the injured mule and drew his knife. Blacktooth stopped him, with a hand on his arm. “Let him live,” he said in Churchspeak.
“Huh?” The farmer stared at Blacktooth’s robes, and then cut the traces. The mule limped off, whickering, and the farmer stuck the knife back into his belt.
“I will help with the wagon,” said Blacktooth, in Grasshopper. He put his hat back on and pushed.
It was a two-wheeled cart of vaguely Grasshopper design, loaded with household goods and junk—including an ancient, tiny black-skinned old woman with two kittens, which she was kissing, first one and then the other. Blacktooth pushed and the farmer pulled, then two more men joined in, throwing their possessions in the back along with the old grandmother. They all spoke Grasshopper, mixed with a little Churchspeak and smatterings of Ol’zark. They fled on east, toward the Great River.
Blacktooth stayed with the farmer with the cart all day. Hair-Puller was his name; or it might have been a description, or even a confession. The man was bald. He was so solicitous, sharing his food and water, that Blacktooth assumed he was a Christian; until he realized that the farmer thought Blacktooth’s red zucchetto meant that he was a soldier. Though he lived in the Holy City, he had never heard of the Church. To the farmer there were only two types of people, farmers and Texark soldiers. Though he was of them by blood, the Grasshopper Nomads, “the people,” coming in from the plain “where the trees do not go,” were less than human, or more, perhaps. An elemental like a herd or a storm.
Even after escaping from his basement jail, Blacktooth still felt imprisoned, between the fire to the west and the still unseen river to the east. By noon the smoke had eaten the sun itself, and a terrifying red darkness fell over the streets like a pall. The stream of refugees grew to a flood, all heading east. The streets grew wider, and at the same time more choked with refugees, all farmers. The “greathouses” to the east were even greater, and there were no trees; Blacktooth had never imagined he would miss them.
It was late afternoon when they reached the river. Blacktooth didn’t know what it was at first. The crowd piled up on itself, then started milling, turning. There was fire to the west, and fire to the north as well. There was a scuffle, a swift panic, and Hair-Puller was lost in the crowd. Once Blacktooth thought he heard the familiar creak of the wagon, then lost it again. Luckily he had managed to save his jail blanket.