It seemed as if some unknown force was grimly determined to keep Egert going around in circles. Overcome, he leaned against the wide stone railing; somewhere over his head a shutter smacked loudly against a wall and a window swept open. Egert looked up.
A girl stood in the small, dark window. Egert’s vision darkened as he saw cheeks, pale as if carved from marble, dark hair, a constellation of beauty marks on her neck. He winced, and then in the next instant he realized that this was not Toria, that the face, gazing indifferently out the window, was round and pockmarked, and that the hair was the color of rotten straw.
He turned and laboriously walked away. At an intersection he asked directions in turn of two passersby: affable and wishing him well, they each pointed him in exactly opposite directions.
Gritting his teeth, he started walking, deciding to rely only on instinct and luck. Having passed by a few blocks, he suddenly noticed a pair of street urchins who were obviously following him, though still at a safe distance.
He looked back with increasing frequency. The grubby, determined faces of the urchins flickered in the crowd, all the time getting closer and closer. Cowering inwardly, Egert swerved once, and then again and again, but the urchins kept pace with him, walking ever faster, their hungry mouths widely and insolently grinning. By now an entire horde was merrily following Egert.
Egert kept increasing his pace. The usual terror had already blossomed within him: it squeezed his throat with cold jaws; it stuffed his rebellious legs with cotton padding. Egert was keenly aware that he was a victim, and it was as if this awareness had been imparted to his juvenile pursuers. It impelled them to chase him.
The hunt had begun.
Egert was not at all surprised when the first stone hit him in the shoulder blade. Quite the contrary: he was relieved that he no longer had to wait for that blow because it was already inflicted. But the first stone was followed by a second and a third.
“Yoo-hoo!” They merrily mocked as they jogged along the street. The passersby looked around, displeased, and then went about their business.
“Yoo-hoo! Hey, Uncle, give us a bit of smoke, just a pinch. Hey, Uncle, over here!”
Egert was almost running. Only a small remnant of his pride prevented him from simply taking to his heels.
“Hey, Uncle! You, with the hole in your pants. Look over here!”
A few small pebbles accurately pecked at his legs, his back, and the back of his head. A minute passed and his pursuers had caught up to him; one of their dirty hands grabbed his sleeve, and the shabby threads holding it together ripped.
“Hey, you! What, you don’t want to talk to us?”
Egert stopped. They surrounded him. Most of the boys were around eight years old, but there were a few who were a bit older and two or three who might have been as old as fourteen. Grinning expansively, showing black pits in the place where some of their teeth should have been, wiping snotty noses on their sleeves, staring with hostile, narrowed eyes, the gang of hunters took pleasure in Egert’s bewilderment, which was all the more sweet since the eldest of these hunters barely stood as tall as their prey’s armpit.
“Uncle, buy us a loaf. Give us some money, eh?”
Something sharp pricked him from behind, either a pin or a needle. Egert jerked, and the horde broke out into merry laughter.
“See that? See how he jumped?”
They pricked him again. Tears of pain welled up in Egert’s eyes.
A strong man, an adult, was standing in a circle of urchins who were young and weak but reveling in the sense of their ability to act with impunity. Who knows how, but these little beasts had unerringly exposed Egert as a coward, as a victim, as prey, and they were inspired to carry out the unwritten law by which every victim is tried and found guilty.
“Do it again! Make him hop! Silly uncle! Hey, where are you going?”
The last prick of the needle had been intolerable. Egert plunged straight though the gang, knocking one of them from his feet. As he ran away, stones, clumps of mud, and taunts flew after him.
“Oi-oi-oi-oi! Get him! Go on, get him!”
The long-legged Egert could run faster than even the most brazen urchin in the city, but the street wound about, turning into blind alleys that teemed with closed gates. The hunters dashed in front of Egert, cutting across his path from the routes known only to them, flinging stones and mud, screaming incessantly, chirruping and hallooing. At some point it began to seem to Egert that all of this was not really happening to him, that he was watching someone else’s abominable nightmare through thick, cloudy glass, but then a stone struck him painfully in the knee, and a different, bitter, overwhelming emotion surged through him, replacing his detachment: This is how it is now, this is his life, his fate, his being.
Finally, he somehow pried himself away from his pursuers.
He found himself in a blighted slum, where a wizened, toothless old crone, holding an enormous snuffbox under her nose, pointed her crooked finger farther into the labyrinth of muddy alleyways. As he traversed them he felt a blunt, apathetic weariness that also dulled his fear, and then he felt fleeting joy at the sight of a square and the city gates.
The gates were closing.
The doors were slowly crawling toward each other. At the bottom of each door he could plainly see three guards, flushed from the strain of pushing them closed. A small shred of sky and the ribbon of the road were visible through the swiftly contracting opening.
What is going on? Egert thought.
With his last strength he ran across the square, but the gap was still narrowing, and then the gates closed with a crash. A chain clinked, threaded through the steel rings of the doors, and as solemnly as a flag, an enormous black lock was raised up onto the chain.
Egert stood in front of the magnificent steel gates decorated with figures of dragons and snakes. Their raised snouts were turned toward him; they watched him morosely and vacantly. Only now did Egert fully comprehend that the doors had been pushed shut, that night was approaching, and that the gates usually remained closed until morning.
“You, there!” The stern bark compelled him to cringe. “What do you want?”
“I must go out,” he mumbled inaudibly.
“What?”
“I need to go through, out of the city.”
The guard—a sweaty, round-cheeked man who did not seem malicious—smirked. “In the morning, my friend. You were late; that’s the way it is. And really, when you really think about it, why would you want to go out there at night? You never know what might happen. So, my boy, you’ll just have to wait. We’ll open the gates at dawn.”
Without saying another word, Egert walked away. It no longer mattered to him.
In the morning the gates would get stuck, or the sun would not rise, or something else would happen. If the unknown and hostile force, the force that had been toying with him all day from the time of his fateful meeting with Toria, if that force did not want Egert to leave the city, then he was not going to be able to leave of his own free wilclass="underline" he would die a beggarly death here, the death of a coward.
The square in front of the gates had emptied. Egert urgently wanted to lie down; it did not matter where, just so long as he could lie down, close his eyes, and not think about anything.