the mountains, and Brawny’s bandits rushed happily forth from their stone houses and catacombs and killed the foremen and the workmen and robbed them of the little they had. Drauwdo congratulated his men and divided the loot equally among them. You see now why I called him stupid.
The emperor said, “Bandits?”
And a little captain, not particularly brave but not at all stupid, having received orders from a colonel who had received them from a general who had received them from a minister who had them from the emperor’s own lips, readied an ambush and, in three hours, without wrinkling his uniform or losing a man, disposed of Drauwdo and his assassins, his followers, his cavemen, and his smugglers—every last one of them, as he believed, and as he informed his superior officers; which accelerated his rise in the shock troops and also considerably hastened the hour of his death.
But in fact one of Drauwdo’s men had escaped, fleeing in time to hide himself in the deepest caves. Oh, well, he wasn’t even a man, he was a kid they called Foxy, a prentice bandit, an insignificant leech, born and raised in the sewers of some city. Under Drauwdo he’d had nothing but dirty jobs to do and got slapped around and laughed at. But when the heads of Drauwdo and the other outlaws appeared along the road under construction, stuck on pikes, rotting in the sun, crawling with green-gold flies, there was Foxy’s head still stuck on his own neck, thinking the kind of thoughts such a head has learned to think.
The road went round the mountains, crossed the plain, and cut across the marshes, which were drained and made fertile. The port was built, ships arrived, loaded wagons rolled along the way, and Foxy sat in the mouth of a cave and waited.
By the time the illustrious emperor died and was succeeded by his even more illustrious son, the cave was empty and nobody sat waiting in its dark mouth. But just below, on the roadside, were inns, eating-houses, hostelries, and shops that sold axles, wheels, reins, fodder, cloaks, everything a wagon-driver might need. The owner of all this was a thin, dark, close-mouthed man with a foxy face, who had begun by selling wild fruit to the road-workers and had quickly made a fortune. He was called Nilkamm, a Southern name, but a name all the same, and he sat behind the desk of the principal inn watching his guests come and go, keeping an eye on his employees, calculating whether it would pay to build another hotel a bit farther on, maybe on the hillside, one with a lot of rooms and a terrace on the flat, and bring in some women from the capital.
And when the young empress bore her second child, a daughter, Princess Hilfa of the unlucky name and unlucky life, Mr. Nilkamm’Dau was president of the Chamber of Commerce of his city, married to the widow of a magistrate from the capital, living in a big house built on foundations of stones from the misshapen houses of Drauwdo the Brawny’s followers; and the bawdy houses, the gambling houses, and the dubious hostelries had, nominally, another owner.
It was now, by the way, a city: a city with wide but crooked streets that led to no port, no beach, no viewpoint, only to other crooked streets that ended in a dilapidated wall or an empty lot strewn with rubbish. There were more starving cats than there were glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness; there were more suicides than schoolmasters, more drunks than mathematicians, more cardsharps than musicians, more travelling salesmen than storytellers, more snake-charmers than architects, more quacks than poets. And yet, ah yet! it was a restless city, a city that was looking for something and didn’t know quite what, like all adolescents.
It found what it was looking for, of course, found it with interest, as it got it all and lost it all and got it back and was the Jewel of the North and the Mother of the Arts and the Travellers’ Lighthouse and the Cradle of Fortune; as the legends grew of the
The emperor said, “Bandits?”
And a little captain, not particularly brave but not at all stupid, having received orders from a colonel who had received them from a general who had received them from a minister who had them from the emperor’s own lips, readied an ambush and, in three hours, without wrinkling his uniform or losing a man, disposed of Drauwdo and his assassins, his followers, his cavemen, and his smugglers—every last one of them, as he believed, and as he informed his superior officers; which accelerated his rise in the shock troops and also considerably hastened the hour of his death.
But in fact one of Drauwdo’s men had escaped, fleeing in time to hide himself in the deepest caves. Oh, well, he wasn’t even a man, he was a kid they called Foxy, a prentice bandit, an insignificant leech, born and raised in the sewers of some city. Under Drauwdo he’d had nothing but dirty jobs to do and got slapped around and laughed at. But when the heads of Drauwdo and the other outlaws appeared along the road under construction, stuck on pikes, rotting in the sun, crawling with green-gold flies, there was Foxy’s head still stuck on his own neck, thinking the kind of thoughts such a head has learned to think.
The road went round the mountains, crossed the plain, and cut across the marshes, which were drained and made fertile. The port was built, ships arrived, loaded wagons rolled along the way, and Foxy sat in the mouth of a cave and waited.
By the time the illustrious emperor died and was succeeded by his even more illustrious son, the cave was empty and nobody sat waiting in its dark mouth. But just below, on the roadside, were inns, eating-houses, hostelries, and shops that sold axles, wheels, reins, fodder, cloaks, everything a wagon-driver might need. The owner of all this was a thin, dark, close-mouthed man with a foxy face, who had begun by selling wild fruit to the road-workers and had quickly made a fortune. He was called Nilkamm, a Southern name, but a name all the same, and he sat behind the desk of the principal inn watching his guests come and go, keeping an eye on his employees, calculating whether it would pay to build another hotel a bit farther on, maybe on the hillside, one with a lot of rooms and a terrace on the flat, and bring in some women from the capital.
And when the young empress bore her second child, a daughter, Princess Hilfa of the unlucky name and unlucky life, Mr. Nilkamm’Dau was president of the Chamber of Commerce of his city, married to the widow of a magistrate from the capital, living in a big house built on foundations of stones from the misshapen houses of Drauwdo the Brawny’s followers; and the bawdy houses, the gambling houses, and the dubious hostelries had, nominally, another owner.
It was now, by the way, a city: a city with wide but crooked streets that led to no port, no beach, no viewpoint, only to other crooked streets that ended in a dilapidated wall or an empty lot strewn with rubbish. There were more starving cats than there were glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness; there were more suicides than schoolmasters, more drunks than mathematicians, more cardsharps than musicians, more travelling salesmen than storytellers, more snake-charmers than architects, more quacks than poets. And yet, ah yet! it was a restless city, a city that was looking for something and didn’t know quite what, like all adolescents.
It found what it was looking for, of course, found it with interest, as it got it all and lost it all and got it back and was the Jewel of the North and the Mother of the Arts and the Travellers’ Lighthouse and the Cradle of Fortune; as the legends grew of the
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