“Is your speech ready for tonight, Haplo?” She paused in the act of drafting a reply to an attack that the church had made on them—an attack so simpleminded that to answer it was to give it more credence than it deserved.
“I will say what I always say, if that is agreeable to you, madam,” he replied with the quiet respect that marked all his dealings with the Gegs.
“Yes,” said Jarre, brushing her chin with the end of the feather quill. “I think that will be most satisfactory. You know that we are likely to draw our biggest crowd yet. They say that some scrifts are even talking of walking off the job—a thing absolutely unprecedented in the history of Drevlin!” Limbeck was startled enough by the tone of her voice to lift his myopic gaze from his paper and stare vaguely in her general direction. In reality, all he could see of her was a squarish blur surmounted by a lump that was her head. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew her well enough to envision them sparkling with pleasure.
“My dear, is that wise?” he said, holding his pen poised above the paper and unconsciously allowing a large drop of ink to splat right in the center of his text. “It’s certain to anger the High Froman and the clarks—”
“I hope it does!” Jarre stated emphatically, much to Limbeck’s consternation. Nervously he set his elbow in the ink splot.
“Let him send his coppers to break up our meeting,” Jarre continued. “We’ll gain hundreds more followers!”
“But there could be trouble!” Limbeck was aghast. “Someone could get hurt!”
“All in the name of the cause.” Jarre shrugged and returned to her work. Limbeck dropped another ink blot. “But my cause has always been peace. I never meant for people to get hurt!”
Rising to her feet, Jarre cast a swift meaningful glance at Haplo, reminding Limbeck that the god-who-wasn’t was listening. Limbeck flushed and bit his lip, but shook his head stubbornly, and Jarre moved over to his side. Lifting up a rag, she wiped away a particularly large ink spot on the end of his nose.
“My dear,” she said, not unkindly, “you’ve always talked about the need for change. How did you think it would happen?”
“Gradually,” said Limbeck. “Gradually and slowly, so that everyone has time to get used to it and comes to see that it is for the best.”
“That is so like you!” sighed Jarre.
A WUPPer stuck his head through the hole in the wall, seeking to attract Jarre’s attention. She frowned at him severely and the Geg appeared slightly daunted but held his ground, waiting. Turning her back on the WUPPer, Jarre smoothed Limbeck’s wrinkled brow with a hand rough and callused from hard work.
“You want change to come about nicely and pleasantly. You want to see it just sort of slip up on people so that they don’t notice it until they wake up one morning and realize that they’re happier than they were before. Isn’t that true, Limbeck?”
Jarre answered her own question. “Of course it is. And it’s very wonderful and very thoughtful of you and it’s also very naive and very stupid.” Leaning down, she kissed him on the crown of the head, to rob her words of their sting. “And it’s just what I love about you, my dear. But haven’t you been listening to Haplo, Limbeck? Give part of your speech now, Haplo.” The WUPPer who had been waiting to see Jarre turned to shout to the crowd, “Haplo’s going to give his speech!”
The Gegs standing in the street broke into rousing cheers and as many as could possibly fit squeezed heads, arms, legs, and other body parts in through the hole in the wall. This somewhat alarming sight caused the dog to leap to its feet. Haplo patted the dog down and obligingly began to orate, speaking loudly in order to be heard above the crunch, whiz, bang of the Kicksey-Winsey.
“You Gegs know your history. You were brought here by those you call the ‘Mangers.’ In my world, they are known as the Sartan and they treated us as they did you. They enslaved you, forced you to work on this thing that you know as the Kicksey-Winsey. You consider it to be a living entity, but I tell you that it’s a machine! Nothing more! A machine kept running by your brains, your brawn, your blood!
“And where are the Sartan? Where are these so-called gods who claimed that they brought you—a gentle, peaceful people—here to protect you from the Welves? They brought you here because they knew they could take advantage of you!
“Where are the Sartan? Where are the Mangers? That is the question we must ask! No one, it seems, knows the answer. They were here and now they’re gone and they’ve left you to the mercy of the minions of the Sartan, those Welves you were taught to believe were gods! But they’re not gods, either, any more than I am a god—except for the fact that they live like gods. Live like gods because you are their slaves! And that’s how the Welves think of you!
“It’s time to rise up, throw off your chains, and take what is rightfully yours! Take what has been denied you for centuries!”
Wild applause from the Gegs peering through the hole cut off. Jarre, eyes shining, stood with clasped hands, her lips moving to the sound of the words, which she had memorized. Limbeck listened, but his eyes were downcast, his expression troubled. Though he, too, had heard Haplo’s speech often, it seemed that only now was he really hearing it for the first time. Words such as “blood,”
“rise up,”
“throw off,”
“take,” leapt up, growling, like the dog at Haplo’s feet. He had heard them, perhaps even said them himself, but they had been only words. Now he saw them as sticks and clubs and rocks, he saw Gegs lying in the streets or being herded off to prison or being made to walk the Steps of Terrel Fen.
“I never meant this!” he cried. “Any of this!” Jarre, her lips pressed tightly together, strode over and, with a vicious jerk, flung down the blanket that had been hung up over the hole in the wall. There were disappointed murmurings from the crowd whose view inside was cut off.
“Whether you did or you didn’t, Limbeck, it’s gone too far now for you to stop it!” she snapped. Seeing the harried expression on her beloved’s face, she softened her voice. “There are pain and blood and tears at every birth, my dear. The baby always cries when it leaves its safe, quiet prison. Yet if it stayed in the womb, it would never grow, never mature. It would be a parasite, feeding off another body. That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve become! Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?”
“No, my dear,” said Limbeck. The hand holding the pen was shaking. Ink drops were flying everywhere. He laid it down across the paper on which he’d been writing and slowly rose to his feet. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Jarre. “The crowds—” Limbeck blinked. “Oh, yes. Of course. You’re right.”
“You’re exhausted. All this traveling and excitement. Go lie down and take a nap. I’ll finish your speech. Here are your spectacles,” Jarre said briskly, plucking them from the top of Limbeck’s head and popping them onto his nose. “Up the stairs and into bed with you.”
“Yes, my dear,” said Limbeck, adjusting the spectacles that Jarre had, with well-meaning kindness, stuck on lopsided. Looking through them that way—with one eyeglass up and the other down—made him nauseous. “I ... think that would be a good idea. I do feel . . . tired.” He sighed and hung his head. “Very tired.”