Ancients of Days

Chapter Three The Day Market

As soon as the inner door of the Gate of Double Glory had sunk into its slot in the roadway, the thrall who had been waiting in front of it walked beneath the round portal into the darkness of the tunnel. Yama left the doorway of the Basilica and, with Pandaras trotting at his heels, crossed the plaza. He hailed the gatekeeper and asked for the name of the man who had just gone through.

“You mean Brabant?” the gatekeeper said. “Why would you want him, dominie? He done something wrong?”

Yama hid a yawn behind his hand. It was just after dawn, and he had had only a little sleep. He had lain awake a long time on the narrow bunk in his little cell, thinking about everything Syle had said. It was as if his mind had split in two factions, and their armies of thought had gone to war inside his skull.

After he had inadvertently called down one feral machine and woken and defeated another, after he had murdered Gorgo in a fit of anger, he had sworn not to use his powers again. At least, not until he understood them. And as yet he did not know if he could do what Syle wanted him to do. He did not know if he could successfully defend the Department of Vaticination by warping the minds of machines to serve his own ends. Besides, if his powers came from the Preservers, then it was obvious that he should not use them for his own gain.

But in exchange for defending the Department of Vaticination, he might learn much more about his bloodline.

And if he knew where he came from, then he might better understand his powers and what the Preservers wanted of him. And if he could master his powers, why then he might be able to do anything.

With this thought came a tumble of images. Yama flying on the back of a metal dragon, driving hordes of defeated heretics into the Glass Desert beyond the midpoint of the world. Yama clad in a buzzing weave of bright motes, preaching to a multitude on some high place, with the world spread beyond. Yama on a rolling ship, waking ancient machines from the depths of the Great River.

Yama striking with a golden staff a rock in the icy wastes at the head of the Great River, and calling forth new waters to renew the world. And many more images, bright and compelling, as if his mind was trying to master all the futures into which he might walk. The visions possessed him, wonderful and terrifying. When he was woken by Pandaras it seemed that he had not rested at all.

And now, not half an hour later, he stood beneath the intricately carved portal of the Gate of Double Glory. The tunnel beyond it slanted downward, curving as it descended. The thrall, Brabant, had already passed out of sight.

“Brabant never did anything bad I heard about,” the gatekeeper said. “And I know all about what comes and goes.”

Yama said, “Did Brabant tell you what his business might be?”

The gatekeeper was an ancient but muscular and vigorous thrall, with a humped back and a white mane. He looked at Yama slyly. “It would be his usual business,” he said.

“And what’s that?” Pandaras said. “Speak civilly to my master, fellow. He has the safety of your department in his hands.”

The thrall said, “Why, it’s well known Brabant has the keys of the kitchens of the household of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms. He’s often out this early. The day markets open when the main gates open, and bidding is fierce these days. Things aren’t what they were. There are shortages because of the war. You here to protect Brabant, dominie? He in danger?”

“It is a matter of security,” Pandaras told the old thrall.

This seemed to satisfy the gatekeeper. “Aye, I suppose we’re in danger even now. They’re not to start fighting the quit claim for more than a decad, but you can’t trust Indigenous Affairs. It’s a grower, see. Wants to get control wherever it can, however it can. But I do a good job. Don’t worry about the gate. Nothing has ever passed me by without proper authority.”

For once, this was no idle boast. Tamora had surveyed the Department of Vaticination on the first day, and said that once the triple doors were lowered, the gate could not be forced without destroying most of the cavern.

“We should hurry, master,” Pandaras said. “We will lose him.”

“You will stay here, Pandaras. Stay here, and do your duty.”

“I’d do better going with you. I see you’ve taken off your bandage, but your wound won’t have healed, not yet. And I’ve a fancy to seeing more of this place.”

“As you will, when we are done here. I promise it.”

Yama turned to the gatekeeper and said, “How do you open the doors? There are three, I believe.”

The gatekeeper nodded. “One here, dominie, another a hundred paces further down, and the last a hundred paces beyond that. To keep the air in, see. In the old days, the cavern was sealed around the House of the Twelve Front Rooms, but the bulkheads were sold for scrap years ago. Well, in the old days there was a word you’d speak and the doors would obey. But they’re just metal now. The vital parts died long ago. So now we do it by water. You saw me haul on that wheel?”

It stood on a strong post inside the glass booth that clung to the right-hand side of the gate’s round mouth. It was as tall as the gatekeeper, and spoked like the wheel of a wagon.

The gatekeeper said, “It controls the sluices. Water is what does the job. It flows out of the counterweights and the doors sink down with it, and then it’s pumped into a reservoir above our heads, ready to fill the counterweights to close up the gate as need be.”

“You keep watch on the gate all day?”

“My little house is up above the gate—see the stair? It winds right up to it. I’m cozy as a swallow in a godown roof up there.”

“Then when Brabant comes back, you will make a note of it.”

“I will keep watch,” Pandaras said, “although I’d rather come with you, master.”

“Your boy there needn’t trouble himself,” the old thrall said. “I see everything that goes in and out. Our secretary Syle likes to know what’s going on.”

The tunnel was lined with a slick, white material that diffused the light of Yama’s solitary firefly; it was as if he moved at the center of a flowing nimbus. The tunnel turned a full circle as it descended, then opened on to a shaft ten times as wide, one of the main throughways that ran from top to bottom of the Palace. Like all the throughways, its gravity was localized; the tunnel met its roof at right angles. Yama stood at the beginning of a corkscrew ramp, looking straight across the throughway at the tops of sleds and carts and wagons that, spangled with lanterns, streamed past as if clinging to a sheer wall. But as he went down the ramp, the throughway seemed to turn around him, until at last he was standing on a walkway beside the traffic and the mouth of the tunnel he had left was a hole in the curved roof above his head.

There were few pedestrians, and Yama had no trouble following Brabant. The thrall was a sturdy fellow with a thick black mane done up in braids. He walked at a slow but steady pace along the walkway into the lower part of the Palace, where he took a ramp that spiraled up into the roof. It led to a short, narrow tunnel which suddenly opened on to a huge cavern filled with stalls and people.

It was one of the day markets. People from the hundred departments of the Palace of the Memory of the People were wrangling with merchants, gossiping, strolling about, or eating breakfast. The smoke of hundreds of cooking braziers and hotplates mingled beneath a low ceiling of stained concrete, a blue haze which defined a pale wedge of early sunlight above the flat roofs of godowns that stood shoulder to shoulder at the cavern’s wide mouth.

Machines twinkled through the smoky air; thousands of fireflies spun above the heads of the people who crowded the aisles between the stalls. The noise was tremendous.

The bawling of animals and the chatter of thousands of conversations echoed and re-echoed from the bare rock walls. In one part of the market, shoals of fish were laid on banks of smoking ice, and bubbling tanks held mussels and oysters and slate-blue crayfish; in another, tethered goats grazed on straw, placidly awaiting the knife. There were stalls selling erasable paper, inks and pigments, sandals, spices, every kind of fruit and vegetable, cigarettes, edible plastic, confectionery, tea bark, and much more, and at every one spielers praised the quality and cheapness of their wares. Here and there, soldiers of the Department of Internal Harmony stood on discs floating in the air, watching the crowds that surged beneath their feet.

Most of the people who had come to the market were clerks, low-grade administrators or record keepers dressed in crisp white shirts with high collars and baggy black trousers. Everywhere he looked, Yama saw a reflection of the fate his stepfather had wished on him. Most people made way for him as he followed Brabant through the crowded aisles, and some even touched the inky tips of their fingers together; Yama realized that they were deferring not to him but to the spurious rank lent him by his single bright firefly.

The whole brawling tumult, lit only by the restless sparks of the fireflies and the smoky wedge of sunlight, reminded Yama of the emmet nest Telmon had once kept pressed between two panes of glass. He suddenly felt a suffocating sense of the vast size of the Palace of the Memory of the People, its mazes of corridors, the stacks of offices and chambers and apartments of its hundred Departments, its thousands of temples and chapels and shrines, all silted with a hundred thousand years of history.

Mendicants were preaching here and there, but few in the crowds stopped to listen. A line of nearly naked men danced down an aisle, lashing their shoulders with leather thongs; at an intersection, a group of men in red robes whirled on the spot to the frenzied beat of a tambour. The hems of their robes were weighted, and spun out in smooth bells as they whirled around and around; their faces glistened with sweat and their eyes had rolled back so that only the whites showed. They would dance until they dropped, believing themselves to be possessed by avatars of the Preservers.

Amongst the stalls were shrines and altars where men paused to dab a spot of ochre powder on their foreheads and mumble a prayer or turn the crank of a prayer wheel.

Brabant stopped at one of the shrines, a glossy black circle framed by an arbor of paper flowers, and lit a candle and wafted its scented smoke toward his bowed face. Praying for the success of his traitorous errand, perhaps… or simply pausing for a moment’s devotion amidst his ordinary duties.

After Brabant had moved on, Yama stopped at the shrine and touched the coin hung from the thong around his neck, but the shrine did not light. The Palace of the Memory of the People was littered with shrines—Yama had found more than a hundred in the cavern of the Department of Vaticination—but he had not yet found one that would show him the garden where the woman in white waited for him. Perhaps it was just as well. He was not yet ready to confront his enemy again.

Yama pushed on until once more he glimpsed Brabant’s braided mane amongst the press of clerks and record keepers. The thrall seemed to know every other person in the market, and stopped at stalls to shake hands and exchange a few words with the merchants, or taste a sample of food.

He sat a while with a spice seller amongst aromatic sacks, and chatted amiably while sipping tea from a copper bowl.

Yama, watching from the other side of the wide crowded aisle, ate sugary fried almonds from a paper bag translucent with grease and wondered if the plot might be one of assassination by poison, or if Brabant was simply negotiating a good price for turmeric and mace.

Brabant shook the spice seller’s hand and got up and moved on through the market, saluting merchants, tasting samples and exclaiming fulsomely over their freshness, shouting greetings to passersby. If he was on a clandestine errand, he seemed to want everyone to know where he was; Yama’s initial small doubt grew stronger.

At last, Brabant reached the far end of the huge market and entered a corridor with three- or four-story houses on either side, like an ordinary street under a concrete sky.

There was more light here, pouring through a big curved window let into the ceiling at the far end, where palm trees rose from clumps of sawgrass. A flock of parrots chased from tree to tree, calling raucously.

A woman sat at a second-floor window of one of the houses, sleepily combing her long black hair. Below her, a man in a linen burnoose sat on a high stool outside the door. Brabant stopped to talk with the man, then shook his hand and went inside.

Yama walked past, suddenly feeling foolish and out of place. It seemed clear that Brabant had done no more than go about his business in the market before visiting a bawdy house for relaxation. Perhaps the thralls were one of those bloodlines which could mate at will, rather than on a particular day in a cycle or a season. Yet Yama was reluctant to leave. He felt that he should see this through to the end.

He drifted toward the edge of a crowd which had gathered under the palm trees at the end of the street, where a gambler restlessly switched three half shells around each other on a little table. Men in white shirts threw coins on the table, pointing at one or another of the shells, and when the betting was finished the gambler lifted the shells one by one, revealing a black pearl under the middle one.

He scooped up the coins, pressed a few into the outstretched hands of two of the spectators and pocketed the rest, then covered the black pearl and began to switch the shells back and forth again.

While the spectators made more bets, the gambler caught Yama’s eye and said, “I can’t allow you a wager, dominie. A man like you could ruin me in a single game.”

Yama smiled, and said that in any case he did not gamble.

“Then you may try your luck for the fun of it,” the gambler said. He had an engaging smile, and eyes as blue as cornflowers in a pale face. A single firefly crouched in his crest of red hair, as faint as the one which had followed the rat in the old entrance hall of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms.

The gambler took his hands away from the shells, and Yama, gripped by a sudden impulse, pointed to the middle one. The gambler raised an eyebrow and lifted the shell to reveal the black pearl. The white-shirted clerks around Yama groaned. The gambler took in their money, winked at Yama, and started shuffling the shells again. Yama watched closely this time, and it seemed that the shell hiding the pearl was again in the center—yet at the same time he knew it was under the shell on the right. The clerks finished laying their bets, and again Yama pointed, this time meeting the gambler’s smile with his own when the pearl was revealed.

The clerks murmured amongst themselves and the gambler said, “You see through my little illusion, dominie. Maybe you’d like to try your skill on something a little harder.”

“Perhaps another time.”

The gambler looked around at the spectators, as if calling upon them to witness his bravado. He said, “I’d only ask you to risk a copper rial on your skill. To a man like you that’s nothing, and you’d stand to win much more from me. I’ll give you odds of ten to one.”

Yama remembered the fierce leathery nomads who in summer came into Aeolis with their horses and hunting cats and tents of stitched hides to sell the pelts of fitchets, marmots, and hares they had trapped in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. The nomads’ dice games went on for days, drawing those who joined them deeper and deeper, until, from beginning with small wagers, they emerged as from a dream, dazed and penniless, sometimes without even their shoes and shirts.

“Your odds are too much in my favor,” he told the gambler, and some of the clerks laughed.

“They are in it together,” someone said. He was a tall boy not much older than Yama, flanked by two others as he pushed to the front of the crowd. All three wore enameled badges of a fist closed around a lightning bolt pinned to the high collars of their white shirts.

“I assure you,” the gambler told the boy, “that I have never seen this good fellow before.”

“Cheats and swindlers,” the tall boy said. “You rig the game and let your friend win to make others think that they have a chance.”

The gambler started to protest again, but his mild manner enraged the boy, who leaned on the little table and shouted into his face. One of the other boys swept the shells on to the floor and his leader shouted that there was no pearl and it was no game at all, but a sharpy’s trick.

Yama hardly heard him. He had just seen a man come out of the bawdy house. He wore a tunic of plain homespun girdled with a red cord, and his face was covered in a glossy black pelt, with a white stripe down the left side.

He carried a staff taller than himself, and Yama knew that it was shod with iron. For he recognized the man at once, and with a shock knew that Brabant must be involved in a conspiracy after all.

The man was Prefect Corin.