Hart's Hope

11

Piss Gate

Among Thieves

The nearest portman tied their line to a post at the slip, and Orem was all for jumping ashore. But Glasin glared at him and ordered him to stay. They waited, and soon several men in gaudy southern trousers came to eye them and their raft. "A weaky ship," said one.

Glasin turned away from that man, and faced another. "All oak," he said defiantly.

"Bound with spit and catgut?" the man retorted.

"Good only for lumber," said a third. "And three days' drying to boot. A cart in trade."

"Cart and twenty coppers," said another.

Glasin snorted and turned his back.

"Cart and donkey," said the man who had called it a weaky ship.

Glasin turned around with a frown. "That and four silvers gives you raft and tent."

"Silvers! And what do I want with a tent?"

Glasin shrugged.

Another man nodded. The third turned away, shaking his head. The first man, who had the eye of a hawk, staring open always even when the other was closed, he raised his hands. "God sends thieves downriver disguised in grocers' shirts," he said. "Two silvers, a donkey and cart, but by God you keep the tent."

Glasin glanced at the other bidder, but he was through. The sale was set then.

Or almost set. Hawkeye looked at Orem. "Boy for sale?" he asked.

For sale? Orem was appalled—how could anyone take him for a slave? He had no rings in his

face, had he? He had no branding! But there was the man asking, and the grocer not saying no, but standing, thinking.

"I'm a freeman," Orem said hotly, but Hawkeye made no sign of having heard, just kept watching Glasin. The grocer at last shook his head. "I'm a God's man, and this boy is free." The buyer said nothing more, just tossed two gleaming coins to Glasin, who caught them deftly so they didn't slip down between the logs to get lost in the river. The buyer waved, and four men came up, one leading a sad-looking donkey and cart while the others quickly unloaded the raft and put all that would fit into the cart, piling the rest on the dock. When all was done, the portman nodded, drove a red nail into the post, and walked away.

"They takes it to Boat Island," said the grocer. "They trims it into boards and builds sea ships with it. From Boat Island on out to the sea, the big ships comes and goes. Half my profits is from the raft—the donkey alone would bring me twice that lumber in the north, and the cart is worth all my cargo when I'm buying at the country markets. Now, boy, what is our business?"

Orem didn't understand.

"If you stays and watches my things, if you doesn't let anything get taken whatever they offers you, I give you five coppers when I get back."

"Where are you going?"

"To the market, to get a stall. If I go now, while all the other morning grocers is loading their carts, I get a better place, see. But can I trust you?"

Orem only looked at him angrily. Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.

"All right then," said the grocer. "I'll be back. You talks to no man."

Orem nodded, and immediately the grocer was off, trotting heavily among the crowd.

Around him Orem watched the other grocers as they quarreled and traded and disparaged each other's goods. Here and there were portmen standing guard as Orem stood; he suspected that they were being paid a good deal more than a few coppers. It didn't matter. He had learned the abstract values of coins at the House of God, but never in his life had he been forced to learn just how much living could be done on how much money. And even if he had learned, at Inwit all values were changed. Six coppers would keep a good-sized family for a month at Banningside. It was different here.

There were other differences. Orem was not so naive he didn't know what was happening when a golden-trousered man gave a small heavy bag to a man standing guard. The guard turned his back as two wagons were drawn to the absent grocer's pile and the goods were loaded on. Orem listened for the cry of thief to arise, waited to see the crowd giving alarm; but there was no sound. Neither did Orem make a sound, for he was afraid to raise the cry of thief in a place where a crime could be committed in the open. He guessed that the bribe was only half the transaction. There was a hint of violence in the rough-looking men who did the loading; he wondered if the man who resisted might end up swimming for his life.

"I have a bag of coppers here," the man said softly, "which I'll pay to a boy with a wandering eye who stands and watches the river. Twenty coppers have I, my boy."

Orem did not know what to say. It was a fine offer indeed, and gave him some notion of how ungenerous Glasin had been in his payment. It occurred to him that Glasin trusted him rather much—or else was convinced that Orem was a fool who had no notion of money.

The man drew conclusions from Orem's silence. "I'll go to fifty coppers, then. Fifty coppers, but I tell you, boy, the fishes of the river can be hungry, and we try to keep them fed on stubborn flesh."

There it was—the bribe and the threat, and he only a boy of fifteen. The rough-looking loaders, there they were waiting at the empty wagons. What chance would Orem have if they threw him into the river? They'd have the grocer's goods whether he wanted them to or not; so why not have the coppers in the bargain?

But there was no poem in a hundred coppers, none at all, and no name or place in that, either.

"What, are you deaf? Well, do you know what this means?" And there was a dagger in the man's hands. For a moment Orem was tempted to try a trick the sergeant had taught him long ago; but no, it was too long ago, when he was little, and Orem did not know if he had the strength or quickness to do it against such a man as this. Who could say what a man with trousers might do? But there was an idea in the man's words about deafness.

"Oh you are generous sir!" Orem bellowed. "Oh you are kind and wise!" He hadn't the lungs of old Yizzer at the gate of the House of God, but his voice was strong enough from his years of canting at the prayers. "Oh your face is a kind one sir, and God knows your inmost hidden name. God and I know your inmost names and we shall name them!" And with that Orem reached out his hand and drew his palm lightly across the dagger's point. It drew his blood and hurt with a sharp sting, but Orem knew from the magics observed on his father's farm what such a thing would mean. He held up his hand and let the blood trickle down his arm into his sleeve. "I will name your names!"

It was enough, oh, yes, see the man run, hear the hissing of his trousers as his legs brush against each other. Orem did not know, however, whether he had done right; it was a terrible thing to pretend to have magic. A terrible thing to spill blood without purpose, to pay a price without petition; but it was all that he had thought of at the moment, and there, the man was leaving, he was glaring back at Orem sure enough, but he and his rough servants were fleeing. It was enlightening to Orem. Yes, he said to himself again and again, Yes, this is a deep and high place, but they are still afraid of magics here, in Queen Beauty's own city they cannot tell a deaf wizard from a desperate wandering boy.

More than the would-be thief had been frightened, too; the other grocers eyed him suspiciously. Only the nearest portman seemed to understand—he winked and drew a circle on his trousers. But was the circle to congratulate him or to fend his pretended power? Orem guessed the first; and also realized that the portmen must charge high fees indeed, for no thief bothered to approach the ones of them that stood on guard. A hundred coppers wouldn't tempt them, and with hundreds of the green-bloused men around, Orem guessed that even the most desperate men wouldn't dare to drop one in the river, punctured or not. Life in Inwit was more openly criminal, but there were protections, and a good one was the protection of being in a company of loyal men. Orem wondered vaguely how he would look in the portmen's green.

By now Orem had come to understand how much the grocer was gaining by his services. Glasin had not had to pay a portman, nor had he had to give pick of stall in the Great Market to some other grocer for watching his goods on the wharf. And it occurred to Orem that Glasin had considered claiming that he was a slave and selling him. Glasin might have been the Corthy Price, but he was too shrewd by half. What if he only left behind on the dock the things he didn't need to sell? What if Orem waited all day for him to come back, and he never came?

"First my five coppers," said Orem.

It was a calculated risk; an honest man might have dismissed him on the spot, for sheer rage. But Glasin only laughed. "Six coppers, then, for waiting again."

So he did mean to cheat him. "First the five I earned."

It was only now that Glasin's eyes went narrow. "What, so I can return and find you gone with my five coppers and my goods as well? I pay you only when your work is done."

Orem could not bear the accusation of thief when he had taken risk already to save Glasin's goods. "A man offered me fifty coppers and would have killed me! I frightened him off for you, and all for five coppers!"

Glasin plainly didn't believe him. "What sort of man could you frighten off? You won't cheat me by such a silly lie as that!"

By habit Orem turned to the nearby guards and grocers for confirmation of his tale. "I did, you saw me!" he called out. But no one gave a sign of hearing.

"Why should anyone witness for you?" Glasin asked. "What could you possibly pay them?"

"I could pay them my five coppers," Orem said.

"Off with you, then! I have no use for you! Trying to cheat me! After I let such a useless boy as you ride my boat for free! Here's the five coppers, which you didn't earn. Now away, before I call the guards and name you a thief! Off! You gets away!"

And now, to Orem's surprise, the other grocers began to take notice. "Is the boy cheating you?" one called. "Into the river with him," cried another. "Get rid of a boy like that!" What could he do, then, but leave? He was furious at the unfairness of it, but it was plain enough that just as portmen found safety with each other's company, so the grocers were a band together, and they'd stand up for another grocer however much the right might be with a wandering boy like Orem. It was a weakish, undependable company, for they had said and done nothing when a thief took the goods of one of their number—but it was a company, all the same. Where was Orem's company? Who would protect him? It was the House of God again, and his enemies able to throw him into the fire because he had no friends.

Orem Sees the Forbidden Gate

Where now? In all his talk on the downriver trip, Glasin had said much about ways into the city. Now Orem felt little desire to follow Glasin's advice—but in this place what other guide did he have? Glasin would have had little to gain by lying to him in his tales of the city. Orem had no choice but to trust his hints. What had Glasin said? Piss Gate, of course, and three days to find work before they thrust him out. Well, nowhere to go but there, for the ways into the Hole were dangerous, Glasin had said; and what would those dangers be, if the open dock was full of such traps?

"Don't buy anything outside the gate," the grocer had said. "And don't buy anything from anyone who offers to sell. They'll spot you as a farmer from the first second, and they'll up their price by tens." It was all the wisdom Orem had right now; it was his only armor as he found himself on Butcher Street, where four great lines of carts and animals and men waited to get past the guards at Swine Gate.

The guards wore skirts of plated metal, and breastplates of brass; plainly they were not the soldiers who defended the city, for Palicrovol's men wore steel mail shirts and carried swords that would bite such brass as a candle bit through paper. And though the walls of the city were high, the huge wooden gates stout, Orem wondered why it was that King Palicrovol, with an army that they said was the strongest ever known in all the world, had never been able to mine or breach the walls, or even, they said, slay a single one of Queen Beauty's soldiers. Surely the Queen had some terrible army hidden away, and these antiquely costumed guards were all for show.

All for show, except that they were as good a bar to Orem's entry into the city as any men in steel mail with steel swords might have been. He watched, and they did not let the huge press of cursing grocers and butchers hurry them; every pass was checked thoroughly, and more than one man was made to stand aside while others went ahead of him. And over all were the archers perched on the tops of the gate towers, alert always to what was happening below them. There would be no way for Orem to slip in unnoticed even if he had wanted to.

"No use looking, farmer," said a voice behind him. Orem turned and saw a weasely looking man near four inches shorter than he, smiling at him. Smiles like that, Orem thought, are worn by dogs who have cornered their squirrel.

"Then you'll not get through Swine Gate, will you?"

"I'm looking for Piss Gate."

The man nodded. "They all are, boy, they all are. Well, when you're done with Piss Gate, you find old Braisy here, and he'll get you through. He'll get you into Inwit for the very small fee of five coppers and a favor, he will." And then Braisy was gone, and because he was so short, Orem quickly lost him in the sea of heads moving in every direction on Butcher Street.

Unfriendly as the city might be, Orem had to find his way. He asked questions, and among the surly replies was information enough to get him to Shit Street, which led between the reeking stockyards and north into Beggarstown. "You'll find the towers of Piss Gate easy enough, if you just look up and keep the wall on your right," said a man with a bloody butcher's apron. But Shit Street quickly became narrow and kept turning away from the main path of traffic. There were fewer and fewer signs the farther he went; who could read, after all, in such a place as this? For Beggarstown was made up of people who had not found work on their pauper's passes and could not stay inside the city walls; it was a poor place, with seedy wooden shops gradually making way for boarded-up buildings that were lived in despite their sag and filth, and even these began to look fine as hovels sprouted up in every space the rickety old structures left between them. The shacks grew out into the road; the people squatting in the shadows of the east side of the street looked hungry; Orem began to be afraid of thieves, for in this place even five pennies might be worth taking another man's life.

Soon he was lost. Only the wall remained constant, high and grey, looming over the filthy town that was already three times as large as all of Banningside. Orem dared not ask directions of any of the people along the way. He kept as far as possible from the buildings. And the farther he walked, the fewer people he saw, until there was no one about when he spotted the twin high towers of a gate.

The streets were utterly empty near the gate. The buildings were boarded up or, even more haunting, left to hang open, roofless and shutterless, as if they were half-completed. Not a person was in sight; there was not even the banging of an open door to break the silence. He knew that this could not be Piss Gate, where paupers passed into the city of Inwit. But that did not deter him, for he knew then what this gate must be, and he wanted all the more to see it.

He stood at the foot of the gate towers, looking up. The street had widened to a plaza and then disappeared. Where the vast wooden gates should have stood open, houses rose steeply to lean against the towers, covering the space where only at the top was there any of the lumber of the gate visible. There was an odd shifting of the view: at one moment it seemed the gate was holding up the buildings; at the next it seemed the buildings were holding up the walls, keeping them from falling outward to crush Orem where he stood and looked.

"Ho, boy!"

Orem was startled, for he had thought he was alone. "Ho, what are you doing here?"

"I'm looking for Piss Gate," Orem said. "I'm here for the first time. Have they closed the gate, then?"

The guards glanced at each other, then smiled. There was derision in their mirth, and Orem felt uncomfortable.

"Not Piss Gate, that's sure, you can tell Piss Gate by the stink of thieves and farmers who come down the river hoping to get rich in the city." The guards approached him, and now Orem saw that there were more than a dozen of them; they had been concealed in shadows or, he suspected, inside the shells of the buildings that were not totally boarded up.

"I'm not hoping to get rich," Orem said, trying to sound frightened and succeeding better than he had expected.

"Where you from, boy?"

"A farm. My father's farm. Upriver, near Banningside."

Now the guards were more alert, and Orem noticed that hands were on hilts and fingers had closed around ax-hafts. "An illegal person is near Banningside," said a guard.

"Illegal person?" The King, of course. And for a terrible moment Orem feared they would suppose him a spy. Spies, he knew, were skinned alive and forced to eat their own hearts. Should he pretend that he didn't know Palicrovol had been in the area? No, they'd never believe it. It was impossible not to know when that vast army came foraging in a countryside. "All I know is the sergeants were out pressing soldiers. I didn't want to go in the army."

The guard who seemed to be in command looked him up and down pointedly, then laughed. "If you were in danger of pressing then the rebels must be more desperate than anyone thought."

At the laughter, Orem tried a smile, hoping to join in the camaraderie. His mirth offended them. The commander did not take him by the shirt; he took him painfully by the skin at his waist, a crushing grip that brought an unwilling cry from Orem. "Do you know how close you are to death?"

"No, sir."

A guard had opened Orem's bag. In it was only his flask, still full of his father's spring water, and the last bit of bread that now was like rock. His coppers were in a better place.

"A rich one, that's plain," said the guard as he tossed the bag back to Orem.

Orem dared to ask a question. "Why is this gate closed?" he asked. "You're better off if you never learn the answer to that question."

"I say question him," said another.

The white-haired guard spoke even more softly. "I say eat shit. The spies all know their way into the city, and it isn't the Hole in midafternoon."

The commander pushed Orem from him, hurting his side again even as he released him. "Get away from here, boy, and don't come back. If you want Piss Gate, follow the north wall and stay close to the wall always."

"Or go home," said the white-haired guard. "There's nothing in Inwit for you. Don't you know this city devours children and flays strong men alive?"

Orem smiled uncomprehendingly and backed away from them. "Thank you, sirs. Good day to you. I'll never come here again."

"Your name, boy!" called the commander. "And don't lie!"

"Orem ap Avonap!"

The white-haired guard laughed aloud. "What a name! Only a farmer would think of that!"

The other guards nudged each other and laughed also. But they watched him out of sight all the same, and he suspected that one was following him much of his way north.

It made Orem angry that they laughed at him, but what made him angriest was that he had earned their laughter. A fool, that's what he had been, and it had not been a pose, no, not half.

The Beggars' Way of Death in Life

The farther north he got, the less dead the place appeared; a child played in the street, and then a beggar sprawled in sleep, and at last litter began appearing at the sides of the road and the sewer down the middle of the street began to be fetid with decomposing filth. Beggarstown was alive again, now that he was away from the Hole, and the faces that had seemed frightening to him before were a welcome sight now. Orem began to see, not their strangeness, not their darkness and filth, but their weakness and grief. They wore elegant clothes, most of them, but so tattered and soiled that the color that had once been bright was now a dull brown or grey. There was a dullness in the eyes, too, as if something in Beggarstown took the mind out of the head, as if the people could go through their days without ever quite awakening.

Orem began to pity them, and almost lost his fear, until a man with just such an empty face walked up to a man near Orem and calmly stabbed him deep in the eye with a dagger. His victim fell without a sound, blood pouring up and out of his face onto the road. Orem felt more anguish than fear, for if a man with such a dead face could kill, when the dead could reach out and drag the living into their graves, then what chance had he to hold onto his life here?

The knife stood upright from the victim's eye. On impulse Orem strode to the body and reached down to take the knife; at that same moment a long thin hand also reached to the corpse. For a moment Orem thought someone was challenging him for possession of the weapon, but no; it was an old woman, and she was holding a cup, catching the last of the flowing blood. A witch, then, who could make use even of unearned blood. Orem wondered what sort of filthy magic could be made of found death even as he backed off and let her take what she wanted.

She finished. She looked up and smiled at him. She bent and kissed the knife. For a moment Orem thought not to take it after all; who knew what the kiss might mean? But then he thought better of it. Even a boy trained as a priest could make use of a dagger if need were, and in this place he had no intention of passively submitting to what the walking corpses might decide for him. So he stepped forward again and drew the knife upward, drawing one last bubble from the man's eye. He cleaned the knife, for lack of a better place, on the man's clothing; then he put the knife in his bag.

The woman spoke, her voice hissing like the last breath of a butchered sow. "There are three things in nature that know no moderation, in goodness or in foulness." She cocked her head and waited.

Orem shuddered. He knew the litany, and knew as well that it could not be left incomplete. If she chose to stop and wait, he had to go on for her. "When they are governed by goodness," he said softly, "they are most excellent in virtue."

"The tongue," said the woman. "And a priestly man."

"But when they are corrupted, there is no bottom to stay their hellward plunge." Is that enough, or must I name the third name?

"And a woman." She smiled and nodded wisely at him, as if they had shared something lovely; then she took her cup of cooling blood and carried it away.

Orem felt the knife in his bag like a small fire, burning his skin though it could not touch him directly. What had she meant by making him chant the Ambivalence? Was she warning him to curb his own evil desires? But I have no truly unspeakable desires, he thought, and besides, I'm not a priestly man anymore. Why should I worry about the warnings of a woman already so corrupt as to use found blood? Yet still he shuddered. Still the knife burned his back. Still the knife froze his back until he had walked far enough and thought enough of other things and inwardly sung songs enough that the litany of the three boundless friends and enemies of God fled his mind and he forgot even the knife he carried.

Piss Gate at last. From a distance it looked like Swine Gate and the Hole; close up it had a character all its own. This place did not belong to the permanent residents. It was not silent and despairing. The line was long and jostled rudely, and only the presence of many guards kept quarrels from erupting into fights. As for the guards, they were grim and busy, and six of them were ahorse, patrolling up and down the line. There were no dead looks among the people in the line. They might be angry or stupid or frightened or awestruck or jocular, but they were not dead. Orem recognized himself in many places along the line, at once ashamed at the plain naivete of the others his age and relieved that it was indeed possible to stay hopeful here. People from the farms; people with dreams of finding some treasure in the city; Orem took his place in the line and felt smaller—but safer than he had in the streets of Beggarstown.

No sooner was he in line than the queue was a hundred people long behind him. The guards had let the grocers in three or four abreast, but here the guards were in no such rush. The huge gates did not stand open. Only a narrow door in the gate served for the paupers to pass. Yet the people themselves had the same sense of urgency that the grocers and butchers had. The belief was strong that if you could just get through the line ahead of someone, then you would get the job that that man might have had. Within that gate was the answer to everything, if you could just get through and ask your questions first. A job; a workingman's pass; the right to stay within the city; this was the gate of heaven and the angels in their bronze breastplates held the chains of salvation. Orem could not help seeing the world as the priests saw it; he also could not help being amused at the thought of these foul-faced soldiers being angels. Are these the silver bridge and the golden gate and the chains of steel? Try that for doctrine, Halfpriest Dobbick.

"First time?"

It was the man ahead of him, who bore three thin scars on his cheek, two of them old and white, the other just a little pink. He did not look friendly, but at least he had spoken.

"Yes," Orem said.

"Well, take a word. Accept no jobs from the men just inside the gate."

"I want a job."

The man's mouth twisted. "They promise to take you for a year, but in three days they turn you over to the Guard without your permanent pass. How's that? And they don't pay you, either. They just get three days' work out of you for free and turn you out. The real jobs are farther in."

"Where?" "If I knew, would I be in this line again?"

"Still red, Rainer, dammit, are you blind?"

"Got no mirror," Rainer answered. "Woman told me it was white."

"Like I thought, only a blind woman would have you. Get out and come back when the time's done."

And now Orem was at the front of the line, only vaguely aware that Rainer Carpenter was still standing nearby. "Name?"

"Orem."

The guard waited, then said impatiently, "Your whole name!"

Orem remembered the laughter at the Hole over his patronymic. Rainer had used his trade as a surname, as Glasin had. Well, Orem had no trade. Why had they laughed? Perhaps they didn't admit their fathers' names here. "Don't have more. Just Orem."

The guard was amused. "From a village so small, eh?" He looked at Orem's body and his smirk grew. Orem cursed his thinness and lack of height. "We'll just put you down as Orem Scanthips, eh? Scanthips!" He said it loudly, and the other guards laughed. "Business?"

"Looking for work."

"What kind of work?"

"Any kind, I guess."

"Any kind? No one hires a man who can't do anything. What, do you think there's farms in there needing another ass to bear dead burdens?"

Wouldn't they let him in without a trade? What did he know? I can say all the open prayers by heart. I can name the letters capital, the letters corporal, the letters spiritual, the numbers real, the numbers whole, the numbers variable. "I can read and write."

The guard made a face of mock surprise. "A scholar, eh?" But the amusement was over. The guard reached out and took away Orem's bag and opened it. A flask of water, a lump of bread, and a dagger with a little blood still clinging to it. Not the safe little dinner knife Orem wore at his waist—that was for slicing cheese. This was obviously a killing knife, long and sharp pointed. The guard held it up. "Read and write. Oh, I've heard that before. And what is this, your pen?" Orem didn't know what to say. The dagger had seemed desirable as he walked through Beggarstown; now it might be what blocked him from the city, or worse than that.

"Yours!" said the guard.

"Last time in here I was robbed and I damn well wasn't going to do it again. I didn't think you'd look at the boy's bag. He didn't know it was in there."

The guard looked back and forth between Orem and Rainer. The look of bewilderment on Orem's face was sincere enough, and nothing could be read in Rainer's eyes. Finally the guard shrugged. "Rainer, you're a fool. You know we'd have you whipped with a glass pipe for that, if you once got it inside."

"Glass pipe or a crackhead's leaden rod, tell me the difference," said Rainer. And the guard wrote again on Orem's pass. "Citizenship?"

"Banningside, in High Waterswatch."

The guard looked at him suspiciously again. Again Orem was forced to claim that he ran from the pressmen of Palicrovol's army. Again his body was laughed at, and he wanted to strike out at the guards and break their brittle, mocking smiles. But at least he would get inside, at least he held the pass in his hand; and all thanks to Rainer Carpenter, a man he didn't know. Just when Orem had concluded there was no kindness in this place, a stranger lied to let him into the city. Orem dared not turn and thank him—that would undo it all. But part of his name and poem would be repayment of such debts. Rainer would find it was not unprofitable to help Orem ap Avonap.

He was guided into the gate by the careless, efficient hands of the guards. And they were not through with him once he had passed inside. There was a guard with a short razor, and before Orem could be sure what was happening, two guards had seized him. They held his head still while the cutter sliced his cheek. The cut was thin and not deep, but still the blood dripped quickly from the stinging wound and stained his shirt.

A mouth spoke at his ear. "Mind you, we know from experience when this wound is healed enough that you ought to be back outside. Any guard who sees this scar will check your pass, and if you're overstayed he'll have your ear. Understand? Get caught twice, and it's your balls. You have three days. Sundown, clear? And once you're out, the scar has to be plain white before we let you in again. And stay off Stone Road. Go on." With a push at his back, Orem stumbled forward into Inwit.