If Orrec couldn’t tell us what he had said to the crowd, there were plenty of people who could: “He said, ‘Let them beg for alliance and we’ll grant them alliance!’’’ one old man shouted out. “By the Harrow of Sampa, let ’em beg! Let ’em crawl! And we’ll give or not give in our own good time!”
That was the mood of the city, that day: fiercely joyous, belligerent, barely restrained from vengeance.
Ioratth had ordered his soldiers to keep off the streets and stay within the barracks area south and east of the Council House, which they surrounded with a cordon of guards. Wanting access to the Council stables where their horses and some of their men were, the soldiers tried to cordon off a passage between the barracks and the stables, but the crowd in the square got ugly; stones were thrown; and the Gand ordered his men to stay where they were, whether in the barracks or the stableyards.
The Alds were taking care to offer no provocation and show no fear. Their position could too easily become, perhaps already was, a state of siege. Once the habit of fear was broken, the citizens would realise that the conquerors who had mastered them for so long were dependent on them for supplies—and were, however formidable and well armed, vastly outnumbered. If the restraint Iorarth imposed on his men was mistaken for weakness, for unwillingness to fight, there could yet be a massacre.
They talked about that in the reception hall. And they talked about Desac and his group, what their plan had been and how it had gone wrong. The man who had taken refuge with us, Cader Antro, was there, and his story was confirmed and enlarged by others. The arsonists were Ansul slaves, used as servants and sweepers by Ald courtiers; the idea of burning the great tent had come from one of them to begin with. They had secretly admitted to the tent other conspirators dressed as slaves, but armed, and with them had prepared so that fires would start up in several places at once, engulfing the tent in flame, while Desac’s men, rushing into the square from two directions, would attack the soldiers on guard. All that was to take place at the sunset ceremony; so that Iddor and Ioratth and many officers and courtiers would be in the tent when the fire broke out.
But, because Iddor wanted to disturb Orrec’s recitation, the priests began the ceremony earlier than planned, and so the time of the assault had to be changed, and word of the change didn’t get to all the conspirators. The ceremony was already ending when the fires were set. Ioratth came late and was still there praying, but Iddor and the chief priests had just left the tent. The fire spread with terrible quickness, and all of Desacs people who were there attacked, but the soldiers were quick to rally and seemed fearless of the fire, the promised embrace of their Burning God. In the fighting and the smoke and contusion, evidently only Iddor and the priests saw Ioratth stagger free of the flames. They seized and carried him to the Council House, while the soldiers drove the conspirators, those who tried to flee and those who tried to attack, into the furnace of the fire to be burned alive. Desac was one of them.
I could only think of that black foul dust of ash and cinder Orrec had told us of, kicked up by the feet of the crowds.
The people hearing the story were silent for a while before they began to talk again.
“So Iddor saw his chance,” one man said, “with the old Gand as good as dead.”
“Why did he put him in prison? Why not finish him off?”
“It’s his father, after all,”
“What’s that to an Ald?”
I thought of Simme, how proud he was of his father, even of his father’s horse.
“He was going to get his own back on the old man. Seventeen years he’s been waiting!”
“And the old man’s Ansul mistress.”
“Torture them for the pleasure of it.”
That brought a silence. People glanced uneasily at the Waylord.
“So where’s he got to, that one, with his redhats?” a woman asked. People hated the Ald priests worse than they hated the soldiers. “I say they’ll find him hiding. They’d never get through the streets alive, that lot.”
She was right. We heard about it later that day, as news was constantly brought down the street to us by dusty, excited, exhausted people coming from the square. The citizens swarming through the Council House, retaking it for the city, throwing out all the goods and furniture of the Ald courtiers and officers who had used it for their quarters, came on Iddor and three priests hiding in a tiny attic room in the base of the dome. They were taken down and locked in the basement room, the torture chamber, where Ioratth and Tirio had been locked for a night. Where Sulter Galva had been locked for a year.
That news relieved our hearts. We had suffered much from Iddor’s belief that he had been divinely sent to drive out demons and destroy evil, and we all felt now that with him imprisoned, disgraced, the power of that belief was broken. We had to deal with an enemy still, but a human enemy, not a demented god.
And it was a relief also to know that the wild crowd going through the Council House hadn’t torn the priests to pieces when they found them, but had locked them away to wait for some kind of justice-whether ours or the Alds’.
“We may treat Iddor better than his father would,” said Sulsem Cam.
“I doubt he’d be gentle with him,” Orrec said wryly.
“No gentler than your lady and her lion,” said Per Actamo, who had rejoined Orrec here and helped him retell their exploits and adventures to newcomers wanting to hear it all over again all afternoon. “That was the beginning of the end of Iddor—when he flinched and drew back in front of all the crowd! Where is your lion, Lady Gry? She should be here to be praised.”
“She’s in a very bad temper,” Gry said. “It’s her fasting day, and I’ve had to keep her indoors. I’m afraid she’s eaten part of the carpet.”
“Give her a feast, not a fast!” said Per, and people laughed and called for the lion—“The only Ald on our side!” So Gry went and fetched Shetar, who was indeed in a sullen mood. She had not appreciated the swimming and boating of the night before, or the crowd scenes of the morning; she sensed the continuing tension in the city, and like all cats she detested uproar, excitement, change. She paced into the reception hall with a singsong snarling warrawarrawarra and a yellow glare. Everyone made her plenty of room. Gry led her up to the Waylord and had her do her stretching bow; and people laughed again and praised her. They asked for her to do her obeisance again, for Orrec, for Per, for a little boy of three who was there with his parents; and so Shetar got a good many treats, and began to cheer up.
It was evening. The big room was growing shadowy. Ista, along with Ialba, Tirio’s companion who had brought us such important word at daybreak, came with lighted lamps. Ista had told me that that was always the signal for guests to leave, in the old days. And as if the ways and customs of our people had been given back to us today, all the visitors rose, one after another, and took their leave of the Waylord. They spoke to Orrec and Gry, and to me, and as they passed through the door they spoke to the souls and shadows of the house. As they passed the fountain leaping up into the evening air they blessed the Lord of the Springs and Waters, and as they crossed the Sill Stone they bent down to touch it.
♦ 14 ♦
Lying in bed that night, sleep seemed as far from me as the moon, and I relived all the long day. I saw again Gry and her lion stand facing the priests and soldiers and the gold-cloaked man. I saw the leap of the fountain into the sunlight. I saw the Waylord stride out and down the steps beside me, saw him hold up a book before Iddor and us all, and heard that strange piercing voice, Let them set free… The cry echoed in my mind with the other words I myself had cried out or that had been said through me, Broken mend broken, and for a moment I thought I understood.