antics. There was something curious, I thought, in the way that a fool could play to the heart of people's foibles and fears, and get away with things that no one else could.
Toward the end of our show, Estrella and I took up our flutes and Kane his mandolet, even as liljana opened the painted door of our cart for Alphanderry to make a mysterious appearance. Maram announced that Thierraval was too shy to mingle with the crowd, but had consented to sing for everyone. The single song that Alphanderry gave to the people was sorrowful and yet full of brilliant hope, and made many of the men, women and children weep. After Alphanderry had finished and gone back inside the cart — and Atara began telling fortunes while Liljana sold potions — Tristan's mother came forward to thank us. She tried to give us a few coins for our efforts, but I told her that she should save them to buy candles to bum for her sons. Others, however, dropped into Maram's fool's cap many copper coins and even a few pieces of silver. They wished us well on our journey, and asked when we might return.
When Maram hefted the jingling silver in his cap, he looked at me and said, 'Well, we failed at being princes, but it seems we might have a future as players.'
In the days following that, after we had left Yosun miles behind us, we gave other performances in other towns. Liljana insisted that we needed the money to replenish our dwindling stores, if not our purse that we had emptied of gold in Nubur and Ramlan. But we had even deeper desires. We played, I thought, to encourage the nearly-enslaved Haralanders, and more, to inspirit ourselves. It was as if we needed to know there remained one small part of the world that we could still command and make beautiful. The cross holding up Tristan was only the first of many that we passed by. We never became inured to their sight. The cruel wasting of so many lives cut at something sacred inside all of us, but seemed to wound Estrella the most deeply. Although she had borne the torments of the Red Desert, and much else, without complaining thought she might not be able to go on much longer. And then one day, on a rainy forest road outside of Lachun, we came upon a solitary cross. The very small body it bore was that of a child. We could not tell its sex, for the sun had baked its bloated flesh black, and the crows had long since gone to work on it, pecking the corpse nearly to the bone. We could find no one about to tell us what this child's error could possibly have been. After we had cut down the remains and buried them, Estrella stood weeping over the grave in her strange, silent way that was so much worse than another person's sobbing. Crucifixion, the Hesperuks say, is a mercy, for it gives the crucified nearly infinite time to go down into the soul and correct one's errors. It might truly have been a mercy, I thought, if Estrella had died at so young an age in Argattha so as to spare her the anguish that now tore through her like a torturer's skive opening up her insides. I felt her fighting this terrible pain with all her will and every breath; and more, she seemed to beat back in fury the black, bitter thing that had been working at her heart since our passage of the Skadarak. I wept with her because it seemed that in the end, evil must always win.
The following morning, however, the rain stopped and rays of brilliant sunshine drove down through the spaces between the clouds. Estrella insisted on leading us west, toward the Iona River. Whether the previous day's suffering had opened up some secret part of her or whether she merely followed on instinct, she could not tell us. But she led us straight to a town full of swordmakers and armorers. It was from a blacksmith there, in a seemingly chance conversation, that we learned of a village not very far away whose name was Jhamrul.
Chapter 34
The place that we had been seeking for so many days lay fifty miles to the northwest, across the Iona River — and somewhere below the mountains, to the east of Ghurlan but west of the Rhul River. Although this fit Master Matai's prediction, Maram objected to our new course, saying, 'But what if we find nothing there? We can't just go tramping from town to town forever on the basis of some horoscope that
He complained further that first we would have to cross the Iona and the road that King Arsu and his army were coming down.
'That's true,' I told him. 'And so the sooner we set out, the better our chance of avoiding them.'
We turned our cart onto a dirt track leading to the city of Assul. There, if the blacksmith was right, we would find a road running east to west, over the Black Bridge spanning the Iona and then on to Ghurlan. Jhamrul lay just to the north of this road, in the hills some forty miles before Ghurlan — or so we hoped.
We all, I thought, chafed at the slowness of our pace, set by our cart's grinding wheels. We considered unhitching Altaru from the cart for a wild dash to Jhamrul, and then out of Hesperu altogether, but this seemed too great a risk. And so we worked our way to Assul, a neat, quiet, little city. The road that the blacksmith had told of proved to be a ribbon of broken paving stones and patches of mud. My father never would have tolerated such dilapidation of a major road, but then he had never imagined that rebellion might tear his kingdom apart. As we moved across the rich bottomland closer to the Iona River, we encountered gangs of corvee laborers hard at work repairing the road. They swung their picks and lifted their shovels with a rare enthusiasm, as if taking great pride that they had been chosen to restore King Arsu's realm to greatness. One of these gangs struggled mightily, with ropes and teams of snorting mules, to erect a giant marble carving of Morjin off to the side of the road. I heard someone say that this statue would stand for ten thousand years; I prayed that it would sink into the soft, black loam as into quicksand, and vanish overnight into the bowels of the earth.
Other laborers, however, did not seem so happy. Close to the river, the Haralanders cultivated cotton and rice, and we passed swarms of men stripped nearly naked as sweat poured off their bodies and they bent down in the bog-like fields hoeing and pulling up weeds. Many were slaves, and quite a few of these had been brought down from Surrapam, branded and bound in chains. The hot Hesperu sun burnt their fair skins raw and bloody. More than a lew serfs worked spreading dung in these fields, too. Their masters seemed to whip them as ferociously as they did their slaves.
It seemed to me that nearly everyone in Hesperu, from the lowliest gong farmer to the King, was a slave of some sort, for they all made obeisance to Morjin — and to each other. In Ramlan, I had heard a saying: 'Every man has a master.' It seemed a perfect expression of the degradation of people all through the Dragon Kingdoms. In this land of crosses and carvings of monsters, everyone in principle was bound to someone else. And now, according to King Arsu's edicts, many of them had to bow to a new class of masters. The Haralanders called them 'New Lords', and these were mostly common men such as the bookseller and cooper in Nubur who had enriched themselves on the dragongild, and with the Kallimun's blessing, purchased their titles from the King. It was one of these New Lords, a Lord Rodas, who stopped us on the rundown Ghurlan road just as we were about to cross the Black Bridge over the turbid waters of the Iona River.
Lord Rodas was a small, thin-faced man whose scraggly beard did not make up for his lack of chin. He wore silk pantaloons and a blue silk doublet embroidered with gold. The six hirelings accompanying him were richly attired in a purple and yellow livery, and they bore lances and swords but no armor. They waited on horseback as Lord Rodas positioned his gray gelding in the middle of the road, blocking our cart.
'Greetings,
As he informed us in a voice as smooth as safflower oil, all traveling troupes in the Haraland between the Iona River and the Rhul had come under his command.
'And it is my command,' he informed us, 'that you are
I glanced at Kane, on top of the packhorse we had converted to a mount. His eyes were pools of fire. I did not think that either Lord Rodas or his six hirelings had any idea how close they were to death.
Despite Lord Rodas' weak appearance, he had a great strength of stubbornness, and Liljana was able to bargain him down only a little, to a squeeze of thirty silver pieces — the last of our money.
'I can only think,' he told us, 'that it will go harder for you in the west. There, Lord Olum has taken charge of all troupes. You'll only have to pay him another levy, and a stiffer one at that. Well, be on your way then, before I change my mind — the mercy of the Dragon be with you!'
He moved his horse aside and rudely waved us by. As we rolled past him, I overheard him complaining to one of his hirelings about this Lord Olum; it seemed that Lord Rodas and his men planned to intercept King Arsu and his army when they came down the Iona road so as to denounce Lord Olum for making the grave error of holding back
