The World Menders

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.

Farrari had lost interest. The sudden realization that his splendid idea had not only come too late but wouldn’t have worked anyway had completely deflated him. There was no way to install the fraudulent relief so that it would be unveiled at the proper time. “So much for Cultural Survey ingenuity,” he thought bitterly.

He followed the still-silent crow and began to look for Gayne.

IPR agent would be aware that Farrari’s safety would diminish rapidly as the crowd thinned, and he would probably wait for him at the entrance to the square. If not, Farrari would wait there for him. As an apprentice accompanying a journeyman he had been ignored, but if he were to retrace their route alone he might attract a disastrous amount of attention to himself.

Just ahead of him the crowd’s movement halted and faces turned. A short distance to his left Farrari saw a priest mounted on a glistening black gril. He was forcing his way through the crowd, and he was looking directly at Farrari.

Farrari averted his eyes and sternly told himself not to panic. Novice he might be, but not even a novice could make himself so conspicuous that a priest would pick him out of a crowd with one glance.

But the priest had. He turned his gril toward Farrari, blocked his way, and leaned over to shout at him. Farrari did not understand the words, but there was no mistaking the tone of voice. It was a command.

He did not see the priests following on foot until they surrounded him. They led him toward the temple with the mounted priest riding ahead a them. He had no notion as to what could have gone wrong. He only knew that he was on his way to an inquisition in a language that he understood only slightly and did not dare try to speak.

He felt very much alone.

VIII

The broad sides of the Life Temple served as national annals and art gallery. The oldest reliefs, dating back more than a thousand years, were at ground level, and successive carvings followed row on row until the contemporary scenes were placed four-fifths of the way to the roof. Farrari knew every carving and had longed for an opportunity to see them in person. Now he passed them by with a fleeting glance and scarcely a thought. They entered the temple at the rear, with the mounted priest clomping up the ramp after them. Inside the vast portal he turned his gril over to an attendant and accompanied them on foot, and Farrari wryly meditated the fact that commoners were forbidden entrance to the Life Temple but a priest’s gril was not.

Commoners were forbidden… He asked himself, “Then what am I doing here?”

They had swept almost to the end of the long corridor when he thought to blame the cake for his plight. The priest had sighted the wrapping and crests, which explained how he was able to pick Farrari out of the crowd but not why he had wanted him. Commoners invariably presented their gifts at the kru’s palace.

Several boys were gathered before the massive doors at the end of the corridor, avidly peeking into the room beyond. They were apprentice priests of various specialities; their robes differed, but all had the broad black stripe of the priesthood at the bottom. They leaped aside, two adult priests hauled on the doors, and Farrari and his escort passed through into an enormous hall.

The black base of the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes protruded at one end of the room. Around it was a high