Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) - Gene Wolfe Page 0,2
that had brought them were needed elsewhere, or because they were destined for some area remote from Gyoll, I had no way of knowing. I heard the shouted order to sing as they came into the thickening crowd, and almost together with it the thwacks of the vingtners’ rods and the howls of the unfortunates who had been hit.
The men were kelau, each armed with a sling with a two-cubit handle and each carrying a painted leather pouch of incendiary bullets. Few looked older than I and most seemed younger, but their gilded brigandines and the rich belts and scabbards of their long daggers proclaimed them members of an elite corps of the erentarii. Their song was not of battle or women as most soldiers’ songs are, but a true slingers’ song. Insofar as I heard it that day, it ran thus:
“When I was a lad, my mother said,
‘You dry your tears and go to bed;
I know my son will travel far,
Born beneath a shooting star.’
“In after years, my father said,
As he pulled my hair and knocked my head,
‘They mustn’t whimper at a scar,
Who’re born beneath a shooting star.’
“A mage I met, and the mage he said,
‘I see for you a future red,
Fire and riot, raid and war,
O born beneath a shooting star.’
“A shepherd I met, and the shepherd said,
‘We sheep must go where we are led,
To Dawn-Gate where the angels are,
Following the shooting star.’”
And so on, verse after verse, some cryptic (as it seemed to me), some merely comic, some clearly assembled purely for the sake of the rhymes, which were repeated again and again.
“A fine sight, aren’t they?” It was the innkeeper, his bald head at my shoulder. “Southerners—notice how many have yellow hair and dotted hides? They’re used to cold down there, and they’ll need to be in the mountains. Still, the singing almost makes you want to join’em. How many, would you say?”
The baggage mules were just coming into view, laden with rations and prodded forward with the points of swords. “Two thousand. Perhaps twenty-five hundred.”
“Thank you, sieur. I like to keep track of them. You wouldn’t believe how many I’ve seen coming up our road here. But precious few going back. Well, that’s what war is, I believe. I always try to tell myself they’re still there—I mean, wherever it was they went—but you know and I know there’s a lot that have gone to stay. Still, the singing makes a man want to go with ’em.”
I asked if he had news of the war.
“Oh, yes, sieur. I’ve followed it for years and years now, though the battles they fight never seem to make much difference, if you understand me. It never seems to get much closer to us, or much farther off either. What I’ve always supposed was that our Autarch and theirs appoints a spot to fight in, and when it’s over they both go home. My wife, fool that she is, don’t believe there’s a real war at all.”
The crowd had closed behind the last mule driver, and it thickened with every word that passed between us. Bustling men set up stalls and pavilions, narrowing the street and making the press of people greater still; bristling masks on tall poles seemed to have sprouted from the ground like trees.
“Where does your wife think the soldiers are going, then?” I asked the innkeeper.
“Looking for Vodalus, that’s what she says. As if the Autarch—whose hands run with gold and whose enemies kiss his heel—would send his whole army to fetch a bandit!”
I scarcely heard a word beyond Vodalus.
Whatever I possess I would give to become one of you, who complain every day of memories fading. My own do not. They remain always, and always as vivid as at their first impression, so that once summoned they carry me off spellbound.
I think I turned from the innkeeper and wandered into the crowd of pushing rustics and chattering vendors, but I saw neither them nor him. Instead I felt the bone-strewn paths of the necropolis under my feet, and saw through the drifting river fog the slender figure of Vodalus as he gave his pistol to his mistress and drew his sword. Now (it is a sad thing to have become a man) I was struck by the extravagance of the gesture. He who had professed in a hundred clandestine placards to be fighting for the old ways, for the ancient high civilization Urth has now lost, has discarded the effectual weapon of that civilization.