It was the life from which Pandaras had run, first becoming a pot boy, and then self-appointed squire to Yama. He was as restless as Tibor and knew he could not make the money he needed by busking. That was only a stopgap until he came up with a plan. Amazingly, it was not possible to join the army here, or even become a cateran, as Yama had once wanted to do, although there were plenty of caterans roaming the city. Nor was it possible to hitch a ride downriver on the troopships; it was necessary to bribe one of the crew for passage, as did the gamblers, whores and other camp followers. Pandaras was confident that he could think of some way of making the money quickly. This was a place where someone with wit and cunning could make a great deal of money, as long as no one killed him first.
One of the sons of the family who ran the rickshaws, for instance, came and went at odd hours, always dressed in a sharply creased kilt and a clean white short-sleeved shirt. He had an arrogant air which humbled his parents and his grandfather. His eyes were masked by orange plastic wraparound shades, and a cigarette was always dangling from his lips. A gang member if ever there was one. Pandaras tried to follow him a couple of times, but the boy quickly and easily lost him in the crowded, noisy maze of alleys and passages behind the buildings which fronted the canal, and if he knew that he was being followed he gave no sign of it. But if there was any money to be made quickly, Pandaras thought, the boy or someone like him would be the key to it.
Two bravos had already tried to shake down Pandaras and Tibor, ambushing them one night outside the café where they had finished their final set and demanding all their money in return for a license to perform in this part of the city. Pandaras, who knew that showing any sign of weakness would mark you forever as prey, whipped out his poniard and cut one of the bravos on the arm and chased him away. Tibor grabbed the other around the neck and lifted him off the ground and gently took his butterfly knife and handed it to Pandaras, who flipped it open and closed in front of the bravo’s face and asked pleasantly why innocent entertainers should be worthy of the consideration of two fine brave gentlemen.
The man spat a long stream of yellow phlegm. Like his friend, he was very tall and very thin, wrapped from top to toe in overlapping spirals of gray rags. The little skin that showed was granular and hard and bone-white. The joints of his sticklike arms and legs were swollen; his head was small and flat, like a plate set on a corded neck, with a triangular mouth and a pair of black, mobile, wide-spaced eyes.
Pandaras wiped sticky phlegm from his face and put the blade of the butterfly knife against one of the man’s eyestalks. It shrank to a little bobble and the other eye bent around and stared anxiously at the blade. The man said, “You wouldn’t dare.”
Tibor said, “I will let him go, little master. I am sure he will not bother us again after this mistake.”
“First he’ll tell us who he works for.”
The man’s triangular mouthparts flexed and he spat again, this time at Pandaras’s feet. He said, “You’ve made the mistake. I’m Pyr’s. So are you and all street trash like you, except you don’t know it.”
“This Pyr runs things, eh? And I thought that the Department of Indigenous Affairs had charge of the city.”
“You mean the army?” The man’s mouthparts chattered: laughter. He said, “How long have you been here? The army looks toward the war, not the streets. We keep out of its way and it doesn’t trouble us. Let me give you some advice. We’re not like the army. We like things tidy. People who don’t fit in with the way things are run are removed. You’re handy with a blade, but maybe next time we come back with pistols.”
“Maybe I should speak with Pyr. I have a great deal he might want to know.” Pandaras signaled to Tibor, who released the man.
“If Pyr wants to speak with you, she’ll send for you. Pray she doesn’t, though.” The man adjusted his disarranged winding cloths, spat a third time, and stalked off.
Despite this threat, Pandaras and Tibor were not troubled again on their nightly rounds of the cafés, but Pandaras knew that sooner or later there would be a comeback. There always was. He just had to be ahead of it, to think of what they might do and be ready.
Pandaras became friendly with the grandfather of the rickshaw family. Memoth was a distinguished old man who spent his days at one of the major intersections of the city, pumping up the pneumatic tires of rickshaws or tok-toks for a penny a time. It was hard work, and Pandaras massaged Memoth’s aching shoulders with clove oil in the evenings and listened to the gossip the old man brought back from the rickshaw drivers, who were the eyes and ears of the city.
Memoth’s family was one of three bloodlines which had inhabited Ophir before the war. They were a spidery people with short bodies and long arms and legs, given to abrupt, jerky movements. Memoth’s skull was bony, with a pronounced crest and a jutting shelf of a brow from which his lively brown eyes peered. He wore only an oil-stained kilt and a belt hung with little tools. Like all his people, many of whom worked at the docks, assembling or repairing weapons, he was handy with machines. His coarse pelt was striped yellow and brown, and his plaited mane was white. That would have been a sign of his status in the days before the war, but now he had to humble himself before his arrogant gangster grandson and accept his charity.
Memoth had once owned several houses, but they had all been requisitioned by the army, and now his family made their living as best they could. But he was not bitter; indeed, he was the most patient and good-natured man Pandaras had ever met. He told Pandaras stories about his bloodline, of how before they were changed they had lived in a wide plain of tall grasses along the edge of the foothills of the Rim Mountains, the men hunting small game, the women gathering roots and fruit. At the end of each summer, when the Eye of the Preservers set for the last time, the wild grasses ripened and the women threshed the grain and ground it into coarse flour to make bread, and brewed a kind of beer from the husks. It was only thirty generations ago, Memoth said, but only now did they realize how rich they had been.
“We worked only a few hours a day. The rest of the time we sang or told stories, or made pictures on flat rocks or made patterns with the rocks themselves to please the Preservers. But now we must work all the hours we are awake, and still go hungry. What profits a bloodline to change?”
“Because unless they are changed, men are not free.” His master would have a better answer, Pandaras thought, for Yama was always thinking about these matters.
It did not satisfy Memoth. He said, “Free, yes. Free to starve. Free to become the slaves of other men.”
“We say in Ys that people like us are the strength of the city.”
“So I have heard,” Memoth said, “but I think the ordinary populace of Ys are as oppressed as we are here. The Preservers lay a heavy burden upon us. Perhaps men like us are unworthy of their gifts.”
“We must always hope our children may do better,” Pandaras said, but Memoth did not answer this. Few in the city believed this fundamental creed. In their despair, they had forgotten the charity of the Preservers.
As usual, they were sitting outside the door of the partitioned room, Memoth on a plastic chair, Pandaras at his feet. On the other side of the canal, which was choked with the dark green leaves of water hyacinth, women of the same bloodline as the bravos who had ambushed Yama and Tibor were washing clothes, squatting by the water’s edge and gossiping as they beat dirt from wet cloth with smooth stones. Someone was playing a cassette of prayers very loudly in one of the buildings that loomed above, and someone else was shouting angrily. It had just rained and the air was still fresh. The webs of electrical cables that sagged high above the canal crackled and spat as water dripped from them. All this reminded Pandaras of his childhood home in Ys, except that it was hotter and more humid.