“How can you use it without having it reviewed first?” Farrari asked.
“We can’t, except when time is a critical factor—as very fortunately it is. The procedure is always the same: I have to file a statement of intent with the sector supervisor, and if he doesn’t reject it out of hand it moves up the chain of command until someone disapproves. In the meantime, since the opportunity would be lost if we didn’t act at once, I can use my own judgment until I receive specific orders. With luck we could have your phony carving on display before we were told that we mustn’t do it.”
Jorrul said sourly, “The only reason there isn’t a regulation about technography is because no one has thought of using it.”
“I wouldn’t consider it now if it were merely a question of substituting another aristrocrat’s portrait,” the coordinator said. “At best that could only forment dissension among the aristocracy and the winner might be sufficiently angry, or frightened, to destroy the little progress that’s been made. But a portrait of the olz—” He paused. “Now that has potentialities. I don’t know what they are, but I’ll put all the teams to work looking for them, and I’ll get Graan started on that casting. Then we’ll see. Anything else, Farrari?”
“No, sir.”
“Peter?”
Jorrul looked at Farrari for a moment, started to speak, and then shrugged and shook his head.
“All right, Farrari. I’ll let you know how we make nut.”
The screen went blank. Farrari thanked Inez and returned to his crock of scum.
“Does this go on all night?” he asked Gayne.
“It’ll seem that way,” Gayne said grimly.
“Isn’t there another job that I can do?”
“No.”
Farrari renewed his assault on the scum and at the same time began to examine critically the tasks the others were performing. Measuring out the ingredients? The apprentice had no recipe to follow, he had to know. Mixing the dough? It had to be stirred vigorously until it was ready—whatever that meant. Shaping it into loaves? All the baked loaves had to have approximately the same diameter. A thick loaf was wasteful; a thin one was cheating and would bring the kru’s justice down on them. Stoking the fires? The heat had to be precise and even; Farrari would probably burn the place down. He did not even consider slicing the bread.
The only job that required neither skill nor knowledge was beating the scum.
Inez called Gayne to the communications room; Jorrul wished to speak with him. She took his place while he was gone and cut the bread just as expertly. He returned looking glum and spoke into an apprehensive silence.
“They want us to bake a ceremonial cake for the kru.”
The apprentices groaned; Inez looked sympathetic. “And—present it?” she asked.
Gayne nodded. “Take it to the palace in the morning. As if getting the bread out shorthanded wasn’t enough.”
“You could take Farrari,” Inez suggested.
“So I could. All right—I’ll take Farrari.”
“Take me where?” Farrari demanded.
“To the palace. To present a cake to the kru. When you’ve finished with that stuff Inez will give you a haircut. She’s on watch, she’s got nothing better to do anyway. Then she’ll give you a lesson in how an apprentice behaves while his master presents a cake to the kru. If you can learn to walk and to bow in one lesson—especially to bow—I’ll take you with me.”
Farrari said bewilderedly, “A ceremonial cake—”
“It’s something every good rasc does from time to time,” Gayne said. “It’s a kind of voluntary, token tribute. When the kru is in Scorv he has a daily audience at which he permits his subjects to honor him with gifts.”
“The kru is dead!”
Gayne grinned. “That’s why they’re sending me. It should be a very interesting audience.”
Farrari walked dutifully at Gayne’s heels and performed the short, gliding steps he’d practiced for an hour the night before. Cradled in his arms he carried the kru’s ceremonial cake, a pastry baked to a secret recipe that some time in the remote past had pleased a kru and that owners of Borgley’s bakery had guarded and reserved for kruz forever after. It looked nothing at all like the other cakes the bakery had turned out early that morning. It looked, in fact, like a segment of bread, round, of the standard diameter, and trimmed to the Rasczian unit of measurement.
But it was a highly special cake. Using a small hand mill Inez had reground the flour over and over and the resultant pastry was usually fine-grained. It was also cloyingly sweet. It was wrapped in a white cloth on which Inez had drawn meticulously several black crests of the kru, and Farrari was ordered to carry it just so, and to walk thusly, and to bow properly and remain bowed while Gayne presented the cake.
As he followed Gayne he should have been mentally rehearsing the presentation scene, but instead he thought about architecture.
He postulated an old, old city, built by master builders who laid down the massive paving stones and erected the tallest buildings, ponderous structures fashioned of enormous blocks of stone, each surrounded by its own spacious, poetically landscaped grounds. They built both high and low: the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes but not the Life Temple that surrounded it—and the bubbling conduits through which the city’s wastes were washed to the river. At intervals along the main thoroughfares stood water houses, each with a lumbering narmpf turning the wheel that pulled the scoops of water from a deep well shaft. These emptied into a stone trough, from which women filled their crocks. The overflow poured into the underground conduit system. It was a clean city, and those master builders had built for the ages.
Under the pressure of a growing population, the later builders added another type of structure. Smaller builders of a gracefully decadent style crowded all of the old city’s vacant land. The spacious gardens vanished, the wide avenues were reduced to cramped streets laced by narrow alleys. The original, massive structures stood like the lonely surviving giants of a decimated primeval forest, crowded by inferior second-growth trees.
A troop of cavalry passed them, the second since they started the climb to the hilltop. The soldiers rode in their parade formation staring haughtily straight ahead, each with one bare, muscular arm poised with a spear from the bundle on his saddle. They swept past, the spirited grilz prancing and braying and tossing their horns.
Gayne slowed his pace. “Things are building up,” he muttered. “That’s ten troops in less than two days. Perhaps this isn’t a good time to visit the inner city. On the other hand, if we don’t go now, we won’t know how they handle gifts to a dead kru until the next one dies. And it was an order.”
Farrari paid no attention to him. Ahead of them stretched the one majestic old thoroughfare that had survived. The huge paving slabs were badly worn, but the street ran straight to the center of the city, where the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes loomed starkly above the huddled mass of the Life Temple.
Gayne muttered, “Come on. Stop gawking like a tourist.”
Which was unfair. Farrari was a new baker’s apprentice from Baft, the town that stood at the edge of the lilorr where the river plunged into its canyon, and any young man newly arrived in Scory would be expected to gawk. He had been told that.