City of Illusions (12 page)

This curious reality, this singular validity of the Prince's domain, so fascinated and absorbed him that for days he scarcely thought of the world outside, that scattered, violent, incoherent world he had been traveling through so long. But talking on the thirteenth day with Estrel and having spoken of going, he began to wonder at the relation of the Enclave with all the rest, and said, "I thought the Shing suffered no lordship among men. Why should they let him guard his boundaries here, calling himself Prince and King?"

"Why should they not let him rave? This Enclave of Kansas is a great territory, but barren and without people. Why should the Lords of Es Toch interfere with him? I suppose to them he is like a silly child, boasting and babbling.

"Is he that to you?"

"Well—did you see when the ship came over, yesterday?"

"Yes, I saw."

An aircar—the first Falk had ever seen, though he had recognized its throbbing drone—had crossed directly over the house, up very high so that it was in sight for some minutes. The people of the Prince's household had run out into the gardens beating pans and clappers, the dogs and children had howled, the Prince on an upper balcony had solemnly fired off a series of deafening firecrackers, until the ship had vanished in the murky west. "They are as foolish as the Basnasska, and the old man is mad."

Though the Prince would not see her, his people had been very kind to her; the undertone of bitterness in her soft voice surprised Falk. "The Basnasska have forgotten the old way of man," he said; "these people maybe remember it too well." He laughed. "Anyway, the ship did go on over."

"Not because they scared it away with firecrackers, Falk," she said seriously, as if trying to warn him of something.

He looked at her a moment. She evidently saw nothing of the lunatic, poetic dignity of those firecrackers, which ennobled even a Shing aircar with the quality of a solar eclipse. In the shadow of total calamity why not set off a firecracker? But since her illness and the loss of her jade talisman she had been anxious and joyless, and the sojourn here which pleased Falk so was a trial to her. It was time they left. "I shall go speak to the Prince of our going," he told her gently, and leaving her there under the willows, now beaded yellowgreen with leaf-buds, he walked up through the gardens to the great house. Five of the long-legged, heavy-shouldered black dogs trotted along with him, an honor guard he would miss when he left this place.

The Prince of Kansas was in his throne-room, reading. The disk that covered the east wall of the room by day shone cool mottled silver, a domestic moon; only at night did it glow with soft solar warmth and light. The throne, of polished petrified wood from the southern deserts, stood in front of it. Only on the first night had Falk seen the Prince seated on the throne. He sat now in one of the chairs near the patterning-frame, and at his back the twenty-foot-high windows looking to the west were uncurtained. There the far, dark mountains stood, tipped with ice.

The Prince raised his swordblade face and heard what Falk had to say. Instead of answering he touched the book he had been reading, not one of the beautiful decorated projector-scrolls of his extraordinary library but a little handwritten book of bound paper. "Do you know this Canon?"

Falk looked where he pointed and saw the verse,

What men fear

must be feared.

O desolation!

It has not yet not yet

reached its limit!

"I know it, Prince. I set out on this journey of mine with it in my pack. But I cannot read the page to the left, in your copy."

"Those are the symbols it was first written in, five or six thousand years ago: the tongue of the Yellow Emperor—my ancestor. You lost yours along the way? Take this one, then. But you'll lose it too, I expect; in following the Way the way is lost. O desolation! Why do you always speak the truth, Opalstone?"

"I'm not sure." In fact, though Falk had gradually determined that he would not lie no matter whom he spoke to or how chancy the truth might seem, he did not know why he had come to this decision. "To—to use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game…"

"Oh, they won their game long ago.—So you're off? Go on, then; no doubt it's time. But I shall keep your companion here a while."

"I told her I would help her find her people, Prince."

"Her people?" The hard, shadowy face turned to him. "What do you take her for?"

"She is a Wanderer."

"And I am a green walnut, and you a fish, and those mountains are made of roasted sheepshit! Have it your way. Speak the truth and hear the truth. Gather the fruits of my flowery orchards as you walk westward, Opalstone, and drink the milk of my thousand wells in the shade of giant ferntrees. Do I not rule a pleasant kingdom? Mirages and dust straight west to the dark. Is it lust or loyalty that makes you hold to her?"

"We have come a long way together."

"Mistrust her!"

"She has given me help, and hope; we are companions. There is trust between us—how can I break it?"

"Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I'll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!"

"I cannot."

"Go as you please. The game here's done." The Prince rose, went to the throne beneath the moon-circle, and seated himself. He never turned his head when Falk tried to say farewell.

VI

WITH HIS lone memory of a lone peak to embody the word "mountain," Falk had imagined that as soon as they reached the mountains they would have reached Es Toch; he had not realized they would have to clamber over the roof-tree of a continent. Range behind range the mountains rose; day after day the two crept upward into the world of the heights, and still their goal lay farther up and farther on to the southwest. Among the forests and torrents and the cloud-conversant slopes of snow and granite there was every now and then a little camp or village along the way. Often they could not avoid these as there was but one path to take. They rode past on their mules, the Prince's princely gift at their going, and were not hindered. Estrel said that the mountain people, living here on the doorstep of the Shing, were a wary lot who would neither molest nor welcome a stranger, and were best left alone.

Camping was a cold business, in April in the mountains, and the once they stopped at a village was a welcome relief. It was a tiny place, four wooden houses by a noisy stream in a canyon shadowed by great storm-wreathed peaks; but it had a name, Besdio, and Estrel had stayed there once years ago, she told him, when she had been a girl. The people of Besdio, a couple of whom were light-skinned and tawny-haired like Estrel herself, spoke with her briefly. They talked in the language which the Wanderers used; Falk had always spoken Galaktika with Estrel and had not learned this Western tongue. Estrel explained, pointing east and west; the mountain people nodded coolly, studying Estrel carefully, glancing at Falk only out of the corner of their eyes. They asked few questions, and gave food and a night's shelter ungrudgingly but with a cool, incurious manner that made Falk vaguely uneasy.

The cowshed where they were to sleep was warm, however, with the live heat of the cattle and goats and poultry crowded there in sighing, odorous, peaceable companionship. While Estrel talked a little longer with their hosts in the main hut, Falk betook himself to the cowshed and made himself at home. In the hayloft above the stalls he made a luxurious double bed of hay and spread their bedrolls on it. When Estrel came he was already half asleep, but he roused himself enough to remark, "I'm glad you came…I smell something kept hidden here, but I don't know what."

"It's not all I smell."

This was as close as Estrel had ever come to making a joke, and Falk looked at her with a bit of surprise. "You are happy to be getting close to the City, aren't you?" he asked. "I wish I were."

"Why shouldn't I be? There I hope to find my kinsfolk; if I do not, the Lords will help me. And there you will find what you seek too, and be restored into your heritage."

"My heritage? I thought you thought me a Raze."

"You? Never! Surely you don't believe, Falk, that it was the Shing that meddled with your mind? You said that once, down on the plains, and I did not understand you then. How could you think yourself a Raze, or any common man? You are not Earthborn!"

Seldom had she spoken so positively. What she said heartened him, concurring with his own hope, but her saying it puzzled him a little, for she had been silent and troubled for a long time now. Then he saw something swing from a leather cord around her neck: "They gave you an amulet." That was the source of her hopefulness.

"Yes," she said, looking down at the pendant with satisfaction. "We are of the same faith. Now all will go well for us."

He smiled a little at her superstition, but was glad it gave her comfort. As he went to sleep he knew she was awake, lying looking into the darkness full of the stink and the gentle breath and presence of the animals. When the cock crowed before daylight he half-roused and heard her whispering prayers to her amulet in the tongue he did not know.

They went on, taking a path that wound south of the stormy peaks. One great mountain bulwark remained to cross, and for four days they climbed, till the air grew thin and icy, the sky dark blue, and the sun of April shone dazzling on the fleecy backs of clouds that grazed the meadows far beneath their way. Then, the summit of the pass attained, the sky darkened and snow fell on the naked rocks and blanked out the great bare slopes of red and gray. There was a hut for wayfarers in the pass, and they and their mules huddled in it till the snow stopped and they could begin the descent.

"Now the way is easy," Estrel said, turning to look at Falk over her mule's jogging rump and his mule's nodding ears; and he smiled, but there was a dread in him that only grew as they went on and down, towards Es Toch.

Closer and closer they came, and the path widened into a road; they saw huts, farms, houses. They saw few people, for it was cold and rainy, keeping people indoors under a roof. The two wayfarers jogged on down the lonely road through the rain. The third morning from the summit dawned bright, and after they had ridden a couple of hours Falk halted his mule, looking questioningly at Estrel.

"What is it, Falk?"

"We have come—this is Es Toch, isn't it?"

The land had leveled out all about them, though distant peaks closed the horizon all around, and the pastures and plowlands they had been riding through had given way to houses, houses and still more houses. There were huts, cabins, shanties, tenements, inns, shops where goods were made and bartered for, children everywhere, people on the highway, people on side-roads, people, afoot, on horses and mules and sliders, coming and going: it was crowded yet scanty, slack and busy, dirty, dreary and vivid under the bright dark sky of morning in the mountains.

"It is a mile or more yet to Es Toch."

Then what is this city?"

"This is the outskirts of the city."

Falk stared about him, dismayed and excited. The road he had followed so far from the house in the Eastern Forest had become a street, leading only too quickly to its end. As they sat their mules in the middle of the street people glanced at them, but none stayed and none spoke. The women kept their faces averted. Only some of the ragged children stared, or pointed shouting and then ran, vanishing up a filth-encumbered alley or behind a shack. It was not what Falk had expected; yet what had he expected? "I did not know there were so many people in the world," he said at last. "They swarm about the Shing like flies on dung."

"Fly-maggots flourish in dung," Estrel said dryly. Then, glancing at him, she reached across and put her hand lightly on his. "These are the outcasts and the hangers-on, the rabble outside the walls. Let us go on to the city, the true City. We have come a long way to see it…"

They rode on; and soon they saw, jutting up over the shanty roofs, the walls of windowless green towers, bright in the sunlight.

Falk's heart beat hard; and he noticed that Estrel spoke a moment to the amulet she had been given in Besdio.

"We cannot ride the mules inside the city," she said. "We can leave them here." They stopped at a ramshackle public stable; Estrel talked persuasively a while in the Western tongue with the man who kept the place, and when Falk asked what she had been asking him she said, "To keep our mules as surety."

"Surety?"

"If we don't pay for their keep, he will keep them. You have no money, have you?"

"No," Falk said humbly. Not only did he have no money, he had never seen money; and though Galaktika had a word for the thing, his Forest dialect did not.

The stable was the last building on the edge of a field of rubble and refuse which separated the shantytown from a high, long wall of granite blocks. There was one entrance to Es Toch for people on foot. Great conical pillars marked the gate. On the left-hand pillar an inscription in Galaktika was carved: REVERENCE FOR LIFE. On the right was a longer sentence in characters Falk had never seen. There was no traffic through the gate, and no guard.

"The pillar of the Lie and the pillar of the Secret," he said aloud as he walked between them, refusing to let himself be overawed; but then he entered Es Toch, and saw it, and stood still saying nothing.

The City of the Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon, a tremendous cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls striped with green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel strip of a river in the shadowy depths. On the very edges of the facing cliffs the towers of the city jutted up, hardly based on earth at all, linked across the chasm by delicate bridgespans. Towers, roadways and bridges ceased and the wall closed the city off again just before a vertiginous bend of the canyon. Helicopters with diaphanous vanes skimmed the abyss, and sliders flickered along the half-glimpsed streets and slender bridges. The sun, still not far above the massive peaks to eastward, seemed scarcely to cast shadows here; the great green towers shone as if translucent to the light.