They moved on, and for a time Farrari obediently kept his eyes at street level.
A wagon loaded with the cloth-covered bread baskets that now were sickeningly familiar to Farrari passed them on its way to one of Borgley’s retail connections. Bakers were the only craftsmen who distributed their products wholesale, this because the bakeries were concentrated in the suburb at the foot of the hill—which meant that the tons of quarm wood, flour and other ingredients that they consumed did not have to he hauled up to the city. The bread did, but bread was light.
Apprentices saluted Gayne with averted eyes. Other journeymen greeted him politely, and he conducted himself humbly when he met a master craftsman, whatever his trade. None of them paid any attention to Farrari, though he noticed that apprentices greeted each other with animation when not inhibited by-the presence of a journeyman or master. Women, shopping for the day’s viands, stepped aside for them, as did the daughters, or servants, who followed them with crocks and baskets.
At an intersection Gayne slowed his pace again. “I haven’t seen a nobleman this morning,” he muttered. “The servants aren’t out, either, which is stranger. But we can’t stop now—too many people have seen us.”
They overtook a string of narmpfz being led to a butcher’s establishment; the gate to the courtyard stood open and the lead narmpf was being coaxed past it with a handful of leaves. These were range animals, unaccustomed either to people or to cities, and the-powerful bodies were tensed, the small heads wagging in terror as though they sensed their fate.
Farrari assimilated a bewildering melange of impressions: a master and his wife in deep meditation over a silver ornament that a smith displayed in a cushioned box; an apprentice standing in a sidestreet wistfully gazing at an upstairs window where a girl’s head jerked from sight as Gayne and Farrari approached; a potter gleefully giving his infant son, or grandson, a lesson at the wheel. Farrari’s thought of the previous evening returned to him, and he whispered, “They aren’t monsters!”
They were approaching the square of the Life Temple and the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes. The temple’s creamy marble glowed dazzlingly under the high late-morning sun, and even the foreboding black of the tower glistened resplendently all the way to its blunt dome where the once-burnished metal had long-since weathered and corroded. Farrari stared at the distant tapestry, trying to make out scenes, until Gayne’s scowl told him that he was gawking again.
Where the street debouched into the enormous square the way was barred; a line of the kru’s soldiers stood slouched at attention while behind them a troop of cavalry tried to hold its grilz in formation. They had to detour widely in order to reach the kru’s palace, and they made their turning, reached a narrow cross street, and turned again. Then the trumpets sounded.
No clarion calls these, but deep, nasal, sputtering honks. Gayne came to an abrupt halt and looked about wildly, muttering involved Rasczian profanities. People poured—erupted—exploded from the buildings. Farrari blankly looked at Gayne, looked about him, looked at Gayne again, and the street was filled. The rascz dropped what they were doing, whatever they were doing, and rushed to the street. Here a mother carried a half-dressed child hastily wrapped in a blanket, there a servant absently held a long stirring paddle on which liquid glistened. A cobbler carried a shoe, a metal smith an unfinished goblet, a tailor a long, threaded needle.
It was a silent crowd. Farrari had no difficulty in hearing Gayne’s whisper. “We’re in for it. Whatever happens, stay close to me.”
The trumpets continued to sound, and from remote parts of the city came sputtering replies. With the surging crowd Farrari and Gayne moved back to the street they had just left and into the temple square. The guard had retired; as far as Farrari could see in my direction the streets were filled with silent, purposeful citizens, all moving toward the Life Temple. Farrari shifted the cake to a vertical position, where he could better protect it from the crush of the crowd, and concentrated on following Gayne.
Then he noticed the temple.
Before the entrance was a broad, elevated terrace, and on the terrace were the massed ranks of Rasczian nobility, their garments a dazzling white with vivid splashes of color. The old kru’s tapestry still hung over the facade. The odd, protruding stone facings of the tower that had long puzzled him he suddenly identified as balconies, and on one of them, high above the tapestry, stood the imposing figure of a priest flanked by trumpeters.
Engrossed by the glittering pag eantry into which he had been plummeted, Farrari kept his eyes on the temple and drifted with the crowd. He stared only for a moment, he thought, and when he wrenched his gaze away Gayne had disappeared. He stood on tiptoe, searching for a glimpse of Gayne’s journeyman’s hat, but journeyman’s hats were everywhere. He tried to force his way back toward the entrance to the square and abandoned the idea after one frantic attempt.
He was alone among the massed, silent population of the city of Scorv, and to his surprise he felt no alarm. The crush of the multitude was its own guarantee of safety. The soldiers massed at the sides of the square were as comfortably remote as the priest on the balcony, and on this day no one had eyes for an humble apprentice.
He continued to drift with the crowd. Small eddies set up in it, as though the citizens were jockeying for position and at the same time pressing to get as close to the temple as possible before they collided with those entering the square from the opposite side. Farrari suddenly became aware that his neighbors were exerting themselves to make room for him. The cake, with the kru’s flamboyant crests, had caught their attention. His impulse was to drop it the moment something happened to catch the crowd’s attention, but he did not dare.
The trumpeters on the balcony lowered their instruments; those in the distance played on, sounding like faint, long drawn out multiple echoes, but finally one by one they went silent. The hushed suspense, the mutely swelling expectation, became so tense that Farrari feared to breathe. Then the priest on the balcony leaned forward, arms upraised, and began to speak. His first words were a subdued murmur; suddenly he screamed a rhythmic chant, let his voice sink to a murmur, screamed again. Farrari strained to recognize an occasional word and understood none.
The harangue ceased; the tapestry was lowered and folded reverently. An unadorned white cloth was drawn over the blank facade. At this point, according to Prochnow, the ceremony should have, been adjourned to give the Holy Ancestors time to deliberate, but the priest, in a dramatic change of delivery, raised a bellowing supplication. During his frequent pauses the crowd occasionally muttered a half-remembered response but more often it seemed to miss its cues, and the priest’s bellowing took on overtones of anger.
The cloth was lowered and raised again; the facade was still blank. The priest resumed his bellowing. Five times this happened, and after the fifth time the cloth bulged and rippled as priests struggled behind it with the heavy carving.
The sun had become insufferably hot. Farrari’s body was soaked with perspiration under his leather jacket, perspiration ran down his face from the tight-fitting cap, and there were widening damp patches where his hands clutched the kru’s cake. He began to feel faint, and he marveled that the rascz seemed so unaffected by the heat.
The priest’s final supplication terminated in a reverberating shriek. The cloth was lowered, the Holy Ancestors had spoken, the portrait of the new kru stood unveiled to his worshipful subjects. The crowd’s response was the up-welling of a thunderous murmur—more an expression of relief that the long ordeal had at last ended, Farrari thought, than of homage to the new ruler. The nobility and the priests surged toward the temple, and in the crowd people turned away and there were faint stirrings indicating that somewhere far to the rear the movement of dispersal had begun.