Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,336

You shall dine well and sleep soundly tonight, and tomorrow I shall see to it that you be conducted up to the Temple, where you may view the glory of El’s Palace from afar, and see the magnificence of all that has been built there. Prim, you need not travel one step farther south if your purpose is to learn the art of writing. There is nothing taught in Toravithranax that is not to be learned here; and here you may learn it without all the rubbish that Pestle brought with her in the old days.”

Prim had no choice but to thank the lady most kindly and to go where she was taken next: an apartment in one of the watchtowers, guarded and looked after by Beedles, but reserved for Autochthons and their guests. This had a little balcony with a fine view out across the water toward the Campside shore, and it was equipped with certain conveniences, in the way of bath and toilet, the likes of which had never even crossed Prim’s mind. The house where she had grown up on Calla was reputed to be a rather good one, and she had never found it lacking in any respect, yet it came off poorly in comparison.

A less blanketlike garment was found for her: a white gown made after the same general pattern as that worn by Sooth. To Prim it seemed markedly impractical until she reflected that dressing in such a way might actually make sense as long as chamber pots were being emptied and other such chores being taken care of by Beedles.

She attended an Autochthons’ mess in a hall on the tower’s ground floor, where the officers who looked after the waterfront, and a few Sprung guests, sat at long tables and had dishes brought out to them by Beedle waiters in special uniforms. Prim listened carefully to the conversation but understood little. Oh, she understood their speech perfectly well. But the nature of what they were talking about—abstractions related to money, law, the management of Beedles, and the day-to-day operations of a city—did not always make sense to her. The unsophisticated Shatterberg girl she was pretending to be would have been able to follow almost none of it. So her role was an easy one to play: she ate, spoke when spoken to, stared at the pictures on the walls. She had been realizing that these depicted some of the same historical events as the tapestries that decorated the Hall of the Calladons; but she had not understood this at first, because the roles of the heroes and the villains had been reversed.

The next day she accompanied Sooth up to the Temple. No Autochthon would dream of making that ascent in any way other than astride a mount. It was possible for a big mount to carry two souls, but Prim expressed a willingness to give riding a try. Sooth said that a mount might be available, which was owned by a friend of hers but available to be borrowed.

Here Prim had to conceal the fact that she knew perfectly well how to handle a mount. She had been riding since she was little. But she had to feign ignorance as the Autochthon who supervised the stables explained things to her. She could not conceal the fact that she was confident and calm in the presence of such beasts. The mount she was borrowing—a very big and impressive black one—sensed as much and behaved so well Sooth expressed surprise. Prim tried to explain it away by claiming that her family back home used a few mounts as draft animals and that it had been her job to groom them.

The ride up the switchbacks looked long from below. Prim dreaded all of the fake conversation she would be obliged to make with her hostess en route. But once Sooth was satisfied that Prim would not fall off her mount, she made no great effort to stay close or to keep up a steady stream of words. And this left Prim alone to think about the unexpected turn that the Quest had taken during the last day.

By any reasonable standard it had gone gravely awry. Yet in a way, this ride through the forest and up the mountain felt less strange to her than the Quest per se. It was not terribly different from what she and her family did on Calla when they were in the mood for an outing.

That feeling came to an end