Then the camp itself started to move. The prisoners were fed on porridge and they were off. Before she was taken away, Riba whispered excitedly that in two days they would be in Memphis. The three of them were unable to share her enthusiasm, given the uncertainty of the welcome that awaited them.
“The old guy,” said Kleist to Riba, “the one we were about to rescue. Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Try to do something useful and find out,” said Kleist.
Her eyes opened wide at this rebuke and started to mist.
“Leave her alone,” said Vague Henri.
“Why?” said Kleist. “They’re going to hang us if he dies-so I don’t see how she can be riding to Memphis on her fat arse and not finding out what we need to know.”
The mistiness was instantly replaced by indignation.
“Why do you keep saying that I’m fat? I’m supposed to be like this.”
“No more arguments,” said Cale irritably. “Kleist-leave her alone. You-find out what’s happened to the old man.”
Riba looked at Cale, shocked and angry, but said nothing.
“March or die! March or die!” The corporals cried out, the threat no longer significant, because this was called every time they struck camp and moved on. The cart to which the boys were tied lurched and moved on, and they left Riba behind, staring at them furiously. Later that day, however, she walked by them, nose still clearly out of joint, and said as if it were a matter of no possible consequence:
“He’s still alive.”
The Scablands came to an end quite suddenly within a hundred meters. They moved from grit, ash, stones and scruffy hillocks to a green and fertile plain already spotted with farms, houses and the huts of workers. People emerged from behind hedges and clumping barrows to take a look at them. Not for long, though-the sight of the soldiers, baggage and prisoners was enough to make them curious, but after a gawp of twenty seconds or so everyone but the children went back to what he was doing.
For the rest of the day and all the next the number of houses and people grew denser. First villages, then towns, then the suburbs of Memphis itself. But it was still two hours more before they saw its great citadel.
They had stopped because of traffic jams, and one of the corporals, seeing them stare, amazed, at the city, moved his horse forward.
“Those walls are the greatest in the world-fifty foot thick at the weakest and twice five miles around.” The boys looked at him.
“That’d be ten miles, then,” said Kleist.
The corporal’s face fell and he spurred the horse onward.
11
The last two miles up to the great gates of the Citadel of Memphis consisted entirely of markets of one kind or another. The noise and the smells and the colors left the boys wide-eyed and almost overwhelmed with delight. Any traveler would have considered it an experience to take with him until the Day of the Dead-but for three boys whose staple food was something called dead men’s feet, varied by an occasional rat, this was heaven itself, only a heaven rich and strange beyond imagining. Each drawn-in breath came with the smell of cumin and rosemary and along with it the sweat of a herder selling goats, a housewife dashed with oil of tangerine, a whiff of urine and the smell of roses. There were calls and cries from every direction: the squawk of cooking parrots, the miaow of the gourmet’s favorite-the Memphis boiling cat-the cooing of sacrificial doves, the bark of dogs raised in the hills around the city for roasting on holidays; pigs squealed, cows groaned, and a huge shout went up as a pike about to be gutted flapped its way loose from a fishmonger and flailed its way to freedom in a sewer. A cry of tragic loss from the monger, derisive laughter from the crowd.
On they moved through the traders’ incomprehensible cries, “Widdee, Widdee, Wee!” called out a man who seemed to be selling bright pink cow tails from a casket, shaved of skin and the color of candy floss. “Etchy-Gudda-Munda,” shouted another, displaying his vegetables with a hand swept out with all the smugness of a magician who had just made them appear from thin air. “Buyee myah vegetables ah! Rhyup tommies. Deliciosa pinnapules. Buy ah my herbage, my gorgheous botany.”
Some stalls were on sites filling half an acre-and on one corner an old man, half-naked, held out a ragged cloth, trying to sell the two speckled eggs it contained and hopping from foot to foot.
Gawping around to his left, Vague Henri saw a train of boys of around nine years, linked by chain round their necks, being led toward a gate watched over by huge men in leather jackets, who nodded them through. The boys seemed unconcerned, but what truly alarmed Vague Henri was that the lips of the boys were painted red and their eyelids powdered in a delicate blue.
Vague Henri called over to one of the soldiers next to him. He nodded at the boys and the building through the gate, gaudily painted and even more crowded than the market.
“What’s going on there?”
The solider looked at the boys and his face paled over with disgust.
“That’s Kitty Town. Never go there.” He paused and looked sadly at Vague Henri. “Not if you have a choice.”
“Why is it called Kitty Town?”
“Because it’s run by Kitty the Hare. And so you don’t ask any more questions, he ain’t no woman and he ain’t no hare. Stay away.”
As they entered past the guards into the city of Memphis proper, the change was instant: from the crush and noise and smell of the market into the deep cool of the tunnel. Within thirty yards of near darkness under the walls they were out in the light again. And then again it was another world. Unlike the Sanctuary, where brownness and uniformity made everywhere look like everywhere else, in the citadel there was endless variety: a palace with spiky copper minarets blooming with green stood next to a manor house of yellow and purple brick. There were tailor-perfect boulevards with trees whose trunks were painted white with chalk, and leading off them warped and ancient lanes so narrow even a cat would think twice before entering. Hardly anyone looked at the boys: it was as if they were not so much ignored as unseen. Except by the younger children, who ogled them from behind the delicate iron railings of the garden squares, all curls and golden hair.
Then there was a burst of activity from one of the roads above them, and twenty household cavalry in red and gold uniforms clattered into the square escorting a decorated carriage. They headed urgently toward the caravan and pulled up around the covered wagon in which Lord Vipond lay unconscious. The carriage opened its two wide doors and three important-looking men rushed toward the wagon and disappeared inside. The boys all stood for five minutes and waited in the cool breeze and the shadows of the trees that lined the square.
A small girl, perhaps five years old, walked unseen by her gossiping mother up to the rail nearest the three acolytes.
“Hey, you, boy.”
Cale looked at her with all the considerable unfriendliness he could muster.
“Yes, boy, you.”
“What?” said Cale.
“You have a face like a pig.”
“Go away.”
“Where have you come from, boy?”
He looked at her again.
“From hell, to take you away in the night and eat you.”