Durakkon, thinking it only fitting that the High Baron as well as the Lord General should be present at their departure, had decided against coming to Caravan Market (where he could only appear second in importance) and taken up his position outside the Blue Gate. Notwithstanding the dust and discomfort, it had proved worthwhile. Several of the companies had cheered him as they passed and he had spoken personally with eight or nine senior officers.
Although it was common knowledge that as High Baron he lacked force and domination, Durakkon had a fine presence and a name for honesty and benevolence at least. The feeling of most of the men, as they recognized him standing on the platform, had been that although it was
not going to make any difference either to their comfort or their success, he had nevertheless done the decent thing in turning out to see them off, and accordingly they cheered him sincerely.
There was another good reason for the regiments' early departure. This was the day fixed for the spring festival. Kembri had originally intended to get them out the morning before, but had been unable, owing to the late delivery of certain supplies. It was now vital that they should be gone before the festival began, for otherwise they-or even the city itself-might very well get out of control. During the past three days crowds from all over the provinces had been pouring into Bekla. The lower city, even without the soldiers, was already thronged to overflowing, and the householders on whom they had been billeted were impatient to see the back of them and attract paying lodgers instead. From the point of view of law and order they were probably leaving in the nick of time.
During their departure all incoming traffic through the Blue Gate had been stopped. As the last company of the Tonildan regiment came out from between the walls, turning north and then west in the rear of the column, hundreds of wayfarers, who had been waiting beside the road as the soldiers went by, came surging down the outer precinct towards the Blue Gate.
Durakkon, not having foreseen this, found himself cut off on the rostrum and unable to take his departure, for clearly the High Baron could not jostle his way back into the city among pilgrims and drovers. His entourage was insufficient for an escort and in any case the crowd was too dense. So on the platform Durakkon remained, coughing in the dust raised by the sweating, shoving tide below. He had dispatched one of his aides for an officer and thirty men to accompany him back to the upper city. He could do no more.
Durakkon had always had a sincere feeling for the common people. That, indeed, was what had seduced him into the seizure of power and the predicament of rule. Now, not ill-humoredly despite his discomfort, he stood looking here and there about the precinct below, observing this person and that among the multitude pushing on towards the gate. Here, if anywhere, he could see, almost as though depicted on a great scroll, the range of his subjects-men
and women from every part of the empire, as well as some from beyond its borders.
A gang of thirty or forty market women, typical of those who regularly tramped the twenty-odd miles to the big commercial gardens along the banks of the upper Zhairgen to buy fruit and vegetables for sale in Bekla, went past together, each carrying on her head a full pannier. Close behind came a Kabin bird-catcher, capped and belted with bright feathers and hung about with wicker cages containing his prisoners for sale. Two, Durakkon noticed, were already dead. Three solemn-looking, gray-bearded men, each wearing the corn-sheaves emblem of Sarkid-by their bearing, persons of standing back home-looked up as they passed and saluted him by raising their staves. Following them, singing raucously and waving leather bottles as they rallied those around them in the crowd, came a troop of long-whiskered Deelguy with silver rings in their ears and at least four knives to each man's belt. Among these, and apparently accepted by them as companions, were a lank, tough-looking young man in the uniform of a licensed pedlar, and a pretty, dark-haired girl-Belish-ban, by her appearance-who was limping and plainly very tired. Probably, thought Durakkon, she had been walking all night. For a moment he had a vague notion that he had seen her somewhere before. However, he could not remember where, and next moment she was gone, leaning heavily on her pedlar-lad's arm.
But now the High Baron recognized a wealthy Gelt ironmaster, one Bodrin, carried in a chair on the shoulders of four slaves. Calling down to him by name, he invited him to join him on the rostrum. The man climbed up, and after the usual courtesies Durakkon began questioning him about the supplies of iron to be expected from Gelt now that the rains were over. (Although a paved road ran sixty miles from Bekla to the Gelt foothills, consignments of iron were suspended during Melekril.) Below, the festival crowds surged on-pilgrims from as far as Ortelga and Chalcon, craftsmen and merchants up from Ikat, from Thettit, from the upper Zhairgen valley, from Cran alone knew where; some with their women and some without; and all manner of strange earners of livings-piemen and itinerant confectioners, quack-doctors, traveling actors and their wenches, professional letter-writers, hinnarists, cloth-sellers, vendors of knives, of glass, of bone needles and cheap
jewelry; and along with these, plain sight-seers and folk up for a frolic; people who had come to see the Tamarrik Gate and people who already knew it well. Many of these, unable to obtain lodgings, would sleep on the streets.
At length Bodrin, palm to forehead, took his leave, descended from the rostrum and continued on his way. Durakkon, still aloft above the crowd, felt suddenly old and tired, a prisoner cut off from all the energy and vibrant life below. Wearier than the poor lass with the pedlar, he thought, for he had been tramping for seven years to stay in the same place. Once he had been full of confidence and determination to be a just ruler, to put down oppression and champion ordinary folk against those who cheated and exploited them. He had even had some idea of an end to slavery. But his vision, like the charitable bequest of some stupid, kindly old lady, had never reached its intended recipients. Somewhere along the way it had been intercepted, pilfered, nullified; by Kembri, by Sencho, by Fornis, by men like Lalloc. Was there, he wondered, one single peasant-man, woman or child-whose life was any the easier for his rule?
He thought of his wife, the daughter of a baron of Sar-kid, whom he had married twenty-eight years ago, loyally fulfilling her role as High Baron's consort in a society where many now regarded the very concept of marriage as obsolete foolishness; of his sons, one on the Valderra, the other an officer in the new fortress at Dari-Paltesh. He called to mind, too, the pretty, golden-haired girl, with her soft Tonildan burr, whom he had watched Kembri question and browbeat the other night; a child enslaved, snatched from her home, eager to make her fortune by whoring, spying and delation. Whatever good she might contrive to dredge up for herself from the mud into which she had been pitched, he had conferred none on her.
He wondered how much longer he would have to go on living. At his age he could not realistically seek service- and death-in the field. Already he was showing signs of infirmity and it would look merely foolish. The prospect of something like another twenty years of increasing inability to hold his own against Kembri and Sencho seemed to him like slow death in a dungeon. Yet at all costs he must try to keep his dignity for the remainder of his life- whatever that might be.