It was all quite different from the prolonged twilights, the sky-capped plains of golden moss over which the antlered herds drifted like dark clouds, the night-welkin covered with the quivering mantle of the boreal witch-lights; but the ancestors had told him in dreams both dark and clear that he must serve the King: and serve he did, although scarcely the King knew that he was being served — and how he was being served, and how well, the King did not know at all.
And certainly the King did not know, as he idly sought his casual pleasure in this strange city, that the least of his servants sought the King, tirelessly shadowing him from street to street, concealment easy in this forest of buildings to one who had concealed himself in and on the unforested moors of Skraeland.
“But would republicans and other anarchists come here to Bella for to hurt the youngling king?” one of the “witches” asked.
“The Mamma wouldn’t let,” said Emma Katterina, firmly. Then — “That big dump there, is for us, not?”
“Royal and Imperial Bureau of Parks, Forests, and Lands, ah-hah,” said the Chaplain. Marble and granite and an entire range of mansarded turrets; they turned towards it.
The Mamma’s lips moved; she had no need of notebooks. “In Ritchli, eleven paddocks, grazing rights, commuted: cash. In Georgiou, firewood rights, gathering of, commuted: cash. In Apollograd, that’s in Hyper- borea, twelve fields for geese and goats, which they made a park of, ah how the Pappa, now in Paradise, enjoyed for breakfast the goose-grease therefrom: the fees therefor, commuted: cash. Three deer-parks in Pan- nonia and a Hunt-the-Hare there also, commuted: cash. All due this quarter fortnight past, uccage, soccage, copy-hold, frankpledge, assigned Turkish Tributes, mum-mum-, what? One hundred and thirty-five ducats, eleven skilling, thirteen pennies, one half-penny — plus interest — from the big dump, here.” She ignored the vast front steps and headed for a side door at street level.
Inside, one clerk-bookkeeper looking up through the glass half of his office door groaned, “Oh God, here she comes!”
“Her Fatness! What! Have you computed her interest? Do it at once!”
“Too late, too late — besides, she will do it herself anyway — Rise! All rise! Your Titular Majesty! Humbly welcoming, and kissing the hands and feet!”
The Titular Queen of Carinthia (Big Mamma, etc., etc.) paid no attention. To her suite she said, sinking with some relief into an immense and heavy chair kept there for just that purpose, “This quarter, the pensions from this big dump for the lepers are going, to pay for supplying loaves, they shouldn’t their bleeding gums to bruise upon the hard and stale — Writer!” this to the clerk-bookkeeper, “The abacus!” There were at that time in the secluded Hospital of Saint Lazarus, less than one hundred patients; most people in the Triune Monarchy (“. . . fourth- largest Empire in Europe . ..”) scarcely knew there were any, anymore: but the Titular Queen of Carinthia knew every one of them by name, and with each click of the abacus-beads, she baked for them a loaf of bread.
Not feudal dues alone had been commuted; galley-slavery in punishment for crime had been commuted: into forced labor at the Royal and Imperial Shipyards (a courtesy plural, there was only one). Indeed, the term “ships’ carpenter” had so much come to mean a convict, that genuine ships’ carpenters termed themselves “maritime woodworkers.” There was indeed talk, emanating no doubt from such sophisticated sources as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and the American city of Philadelphiapennsylwania; talk that such forced labor was terribly old- fashioned, and that those convicted of offenses against society should be held in special institutions where they might learn to be penitent, and thus, to reform. But for the present, such advanced ideas had yet to penetrate into the legal system of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania; and burglars and forgers and manslayers not hanged continued to haul and hew and saw and scrape and caulk and paint: and if they declined to do, they were flogged until they ceased to decline. Bruto Alarits had declined . . . for a while . . . but not for a very long while.
It had been two years since he had finished his sentence. For a while he had found employ as a maritime woodworker in a private yard, but his employers had been finicky, objecting to the disappearance of tools and nails, and that had been that. Bruto was by then rather too mature to enter an apprenticeship in the pickpocket line and so had alternated casual labor with casual theft — smash and grab, grab and run — the lot. He was clever enough not to be caught again, but... perhaps he was not so clever as he thought... not enough to be prosperous. Finally he had drifted into a sort of padroneship over lesser, weaker, more stupid thugs, enforcing a sort of organization and system, maintaining a sort of terror over those who did not appreciate the advantages of the system but perforce went along with it. Sometimes he strolled through factory and warehouse districts, accompanied often by his second-in-command, one Pishto-the- Avar, eye cocked for stealables. He would not himself steal; he would assign others. He would find a fence. He would exact commissions. Sometimes he would lounge around the streets.
Sometimes he lounged around the Sunken Square.
To call Pie-Petro’s place “a low dive” was to be not judgemental but exact. The place was not only low in a social sense, it was low in a topographical sense as well, having originally been built at the bottom of a ravine and the ravine largely filled in and another storey built onto the original building ... but the entrance remained where it had first been, and down the several pairs of stairs Bruto now walked in a thoughtful manner. Inside the dive it was dim — what else — and the sole gas-lamp emitted as much smell as light. Petro, sallow, squat, silent, had discovered a trick of business from which he had never seen any reason to depart: when you came into his joint, you had to buy a pie. You could also, if you wished, (and most wished) take your choice of bad beer, bad wine, bad brandy, bad vodka, bad rum — whiskey or gin was not available — the pie was not so bad — not so bad as the other items, anyway. Y ou had your choice of meat or fruit — though not what kind of meat or what kind of fruit. The pies were small and so, for that matter, were the drinks, but as most of Petro* s customers were apt to be greeted elsewhere with the words, “Outside, you,” few of them ever complained. Petro was believed to have done rather well, and to own the leaseholds on several tenement-courts.