The Eagle And The Nightingales

Those stabilizer-things must be broken again. Much of the Deliambren's equipment had a tendency to break fairly often; Harperus spent as much time fixing the wagon as he did driving it. Most of the time the things that broke merely meant a little inconvenience; once or twice the Deliambren had actually needed to secure the wagon in a place that could be readily defended at need and call his people for someone to bring him a new part.

Still, this was a marvelous contraption. T'fyrr had, out of purest curiosity, poked his beak into the wagons of other travelers, and this behemoth was to those little horse-drawn rigs as he was to a scarcely fledged starling.

The wagon was divided into four parts: an eating and sitting part, where he was now; a sleeping part; a bathing and eliminating part; and a mysterious part that the Deliambren would allow no one into but himself. T'fyrr suspected that this final part was where the controls for the wagon were, and where Harperus kept some of the 'technical' and 'scientific' instruments that he used. Not that it mattered. T'fyrr was supremely incurious where all that nonsense was concerned.

The wagon could propel itself down a road without any outside pulling by horses or other draft-beasts. Right at the moment it was doing just that, although up until this point the Deliambren had taken exacting pains to keep humans from knowing it could move of itself. On the hottest days, it remained cool within_on the coldest, it was as warm as the Haspur could have wished. There were mystical compartments where fresh food was kept, remaining fresh until one wished to eat it. There was another kind of seat for elimination of bodily waste, and a tube wherein one could stand to be sluiced clean with fresh water. The whole of the wagon was most marvelously appointed; shiny beige wall and ceiling surfaces, leather-covered seating, rough, heavy rugs fastened down on the floor that one could dig one's talons into to avoid being flung about while the wagon was moving. Even the beds were acceptable, and it had been difficult for T'fyrr to find an acceptable bed_much less a comfortable one_since he had come down out of the mountains.

The very windows of this contrivance were remarkable. He could see out, but no one could see in. T'fyrr still did not understand how that was possible.

Unfortunately, the view displayed by those windows at the moment was hardly savory.

And Harperus claims that this is not the vilest part of this city! It is difficult to believe.

The Haspur lived among the tallest mountains on Alanda; while they were not very territorial by nature, they were also not colony-breeders. Each Haspur kept a respectable distance between his aerie and those of his neighbors. No enclave of Haspur ever numbered above a thousand_and there were at least that many humans just in the area visible from the window of the wagon!

They crammed themselves together in dwellings that were two and three stories tall, with the upper floors extended out over the street in such a way that very little sunlight penetrated to the street below. There must have been four or five families in each of the buildings, and each family seemed to have a half dozen children at absolute minimum. T'fyrr could not imagine what it must sound like with all of them meeping and crying at once. And how did their parents manage to feed them all? A young Haspur ate its own weight in food every day during the first six years of its growth; after that, he ate about half his own weight each day until he was full-grown. That was one reason why Haspur tended to limit their families to no more than two_T'fyrr could not even begin to imagine the amount of food consumed by six children!

This was not even a good place in which to raise young. In addition to the lack of sun, there was a profound lack of fresh air in this quarter. The buildings restricted breezes most cruelly. T'fyrr did not want to think about how hot it must be, out there in the street; why these people weren't running mad with the heat was a mystery. And the noise must be deafening, a jarring cacophony also likely to drive one mad.

Perhaps they are all mad; perhaps that is why they have so many offspring.

Haspur did not have a particularly good sense of smell, which he suspected was just as well, for he was certain that so many people crowded together_like starlings!_must create an environment as filthy as a starling roost.

The crowds seemed to be thinning, though, and the standard of construction in the residences rising the farther they went. He was not imagining it_there definitely was more room between the buildings; there were even spots of green, though the greenery was imprisoned away behind high walls, as if the owners of the property were disinclined to share even the sight of a tree or a flower with the unworthy.

There were fewer children in the street, too, and those few were not playing; they were with adults, supervised. Some even seemed to be working under adult supervision, sweeping the gutters, scrubbing walls, polishing gates.

They paused for a moment; T'fyrr couldn't see what was going on at the front of the coach, but a moment later they were on the move again and he saw why they had stopped. There was a simple wooden gate meant to bar the road, now pulled aside, and several armed guards to make certain no one passed it without authorization. They watched the coach pass by stoically enough, but T'fyrr noted that they did seem_impressed? puzzled?

Well, Harperus is Deliambren, and he was bent on displaying Deliambren wonders to the court of the High King... I suppose he must have decided to begin with everyone in the city.

Harperus had insisted that here in Lyonarie it was of utmost importance to display as much power as one could, conveniently. Abstractly, T'fyrr understood this; the powerful were never impressed by anyone with less power than they, after all. But this business of going out of their way to look strange and different, including operating the coach without horses_