Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski

various parts of the square; apparently some minstrels and musicians were performing. To cap it all, someone hidden in the crowd was blowing a brass trumpet incessantly. That someone was clearly not a musician.
    Dodging a pig that trotted past with a piercing squeal, Ciri fell against a cage of chickens. A moment later, she was jostled by a passer-by and trod on something soft that meowed. She jumped back and barely avoided being trampled on by a huge, smelly, revolting, fearsome-looking beast, shoving people aside with its shaggy flanks.
    ‘What was that?’ she groaned, trying to regain her balance. ‘Fabio?’
    ‘A camel. Don’t be afraid.’
    ‘I’m not afraid! The thought of it!’
    Ciri looked around curiously. She watched halflings at work creating ornate wineskins from goat’s hide in full view of the public, and she was delighted by the beautiful dolls on display at a stall run by a pair of half-elves. She looked at wares made of malachite and jasper, which a gruff, gloomy gnome was offering for sale. She inspected the swords in a swordsmith’s workshop with interest and the eye of an expert. She watched girls weaving wicker baskets and concluded that there was nothing worse than work.
    The horn blower stopped blowing. Someone had probably killed him.
    ‘What smells so delicious round here?’
    ‘Doughnuts,’ said Fabio, feeling the pouch. ‘Do you wish to eat one?’
    ‘I wish to eat two.’
    The vendor handed them three doughnuts, took the five-groat piece and gave them four coppers in change, one of which he broke in half. Ciri, slowly regaining her poise, watched the operation of the coin being broken while voraciously devouring the first doughnut.
    ‘Is that,’ she asked, getting started on the second, ‘where the expression “not worth a broken groat” comes from?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Fabio, swallowing his doughnut. ‘There aren’t any smaller coins than groats. Don’t people use half-groats where you come from?’
    ‘No.’ Ciri licked her fingers. ‘Where I come from we used gold ducats. And anyway all that breaking business was stupid and pointless.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because I wish to eat a third doughnut.’
    The plum-jam-filled doughnuts acted like the most miraculous elixir. Ciri was now in a good mood, and the teeming square had stopped terrifying her and had even begun to please her. Now she didn’t let Fabio drag her behind him, but pulled him into the biggest crowd herself, towards a place where someone on a makeshift rostrum built of barrels was addressing the crowd. The speaker was fat and a bit past it. Ciri recognised him as a wandering priest by his shaved head and greyish-brown robes. She had seen his kind before, as they would occasionally visit the Temple of Melitele in Ellander. Mother Nenneke never referred to them as anything other than ‘fanatical chumps’.
    ‘There is but one law in the world!’ roared the podgy priest. ‘Divine law! The whole of nature is subject to that law, the whole of earth and everything that lives on the earth! And spells and magic are contrary to that law! Thus are sorcerers damned, and close is the day of wrath when fire will pour from the heavens and destroy their vile island! Then down will come the walls of Loxia, Aretuza and Garstang, where those pagans are gathering to hatch their intrigues! Those walls will tumble down . . .’
    ‘And we’ll have to build the sodding things again,’ muttered a journeyman bricklayer in a lime-spattered smock standing next to Ciri.
    ‘I admonish you all, good and pious people,’ yelled the priest. ‘Don’t believe the sorcerers, don’t turn to them for advice or aid! Be beguiled neither by their beautiful looks nor their clever speech, for verily I do say to you that those magicians are like whitened graves, beautiful on the outside but full of putrefaction and rotten bones on the inside!’
    ‘See what a powerful gob ’e ’as on ’im?’ remarked a young woman with a basket