Grand Market – Confrontation
Sickness abounds within Mellivora following their return to Keeptown from exercises in Cera. Primarily affecting members of First and Second platoons, we have been diligently observing and sequestering the sick as they become symptomatic.
Currently, recovery is consistent across the population and absences from duty last no longer than 36-48 hours after administrations. This has been largely successful in keeping rumors at bay among the rest of the Company, the majority of which complain already of food sickness following the richer diets of Avium after so long afield.
Further actions at this time are neither needed nor recommended, though we await reports from Primula and elsewhere.
-Staff Memo, Gatekeep Hospital, Avium Citadel
Doc Pan
The central Grand Market of Avium was exemplary in its exhibition of wonderful colors and unusual sights; shades of cerulean, vermillion, turquoise, and saffron intermingled delightfully from rafters and shop windows for miles, displaying an array of goods both otherworldly and familiar for a hundred thousand of the wealthiest passersby and shoppers a day. The shops, it was said, were infinite in the vast space, any product procurable if one could only find the storefront specializing in your demands. As far as Pica could tell, that could well be true; every space that wasn’t a literal roadway taken by a shop or tradesperson and signs pointing inquisitive patrons deep into a labyrinthian network of alleyways that shifted as shops consumed one another one day to the next. Shouting young criers shelled the best deals and hottest news; buxom women plied the trade of their flesh down sepia-tinged alleyways; and poor laborers hustled to feed mewling babes or to keep a roof over their elders’ heads.
Where many saw baubles and trinkets peddled by beaming, straight smiles, Pica saw the creeping sadness behind their eyes, a reek of inclement desperation as shopkeepers and wagon-merchants looked over their too-plentiful supplies and the undernourished coin boxes they kept hidden under a loose fireplace brick or buried behind the privy. Despite the storied affluence of the market, competition was beyond fierce and there were more than a few here that could see the crabbing hand of moneylenders around every corner, who already felt that icy-damp wind flowing through the patchwork ‘repair’ in the roof that they had managed to afford with last summer’s long-since inadequate profits. Who would have to watch as their sickly young children or elderly parents were slowly smothered by the cold wet of spring setting into their weakened lungs.
Pica and Simen were grim. They looked on, maintaining a ‘guardly’ demeanor as memories from long before their time in Mellivora intruded their thoughts with intensifying urgency; images of frozen old men in the streets, maimed youths begging on the market’s edge, and long-abused young mothers hiding their scarred and torn faces in half-shadow as they traded everything for never enough food and in the hopes of producing even a little milk for a newborn tucked away safely nearby.
Those were a different, distant kind of horrible compared to the fresher brutalities that had occupied their time since escaping Heartwood: wailing children holding tight to the mutilated versions of their mothers, fathers, grandparents or siblings; animals rearing and shrieking in terror, flinging black gazes and flying kicks as they attempted to flee the smells of blood, vomit, and entrails surrounding them; broken men and women, walking grey-eyed and askance at the world with clothes torn to shreds or missing entirely, wandering eternally with no idea of what they were once looking for or where they may be going.
Pica was dazzled by gold thread across the insides of his eyes, a shock of velveteen lightning arcing through his brain and tearing him into the vibrant, boisterous present. He gasped and clutched his temple, holding steady as a foreign warmth flooded him.
Simen frowned as he caught a stumble from his friend in the corner of his eye, but pressed on as Pica assured his health with a shake of his head.
What was happening to him? Pica looked about, confused by the wrenching of his stomach and the depression of his mood. He was unable to shake the feeling of stepping from one bizarre reverie into another, the first a melodramatic monochrome and the other a kaleidoscope of spectacular color, and he was decreasingly able to recall any reason to feel such a way. He turned his thoughts outward, smiling into the dazzling display of flowers and sheets of gently swaying cloth that he suddenly found surrounding him.
The Grand Market was rumored to once have been a garden of such scale and extravagance that it was renowned across the entirety of world from the mythical steppes of the unmapped East to the wild bandit countries of the far, far west islands. There was a time, remembered only in the libraries of the Maesters’ Guild, when Satraps, Empresses, and Tsars would cross the merciless Grey Sea with their great fleets just to spend a few hours walking the twisting trails that permeated the lush gallery; Merchant-Kings, Duchesses, Caliphs, and Sultans crossed arid Ardenia or the placid Atra to offer treasures made of luminous metals and beautifully worked stones, their gifts offered freely for the communal display. It had been a place of astounding opulence, designed painstakingly to display the cultural prowess of an ancient people. But much like its builders, the days of the Peoples’ Garden were long-gone and if there had ever been such a place at the western edge of the citadel, it was almost beyond any memory. Today, it showed not the wealth of culture, but that of enduring consumption, a stretching mass of barter and trade that brought together goods and services from every corner of the Grove as well as beyond.
By all accounts, the marketplace at the foot of the Avium cliffs was second only to its counterpart in Alba, and solely because the Populan Citadel’s commercial quarter, swollen fat on exclusive trading contracts with the famously insular City-of-Three, had long ago consumed and integrated the eastern city’s ancient racing track into itself. Hearing the Triplets describe it, the ‘First Market’ of their home province exuded a carnivalesque atmosphere distinct from its Avium counterpart, providing the opportunity to watch chariots flying by with astonishing speed while you got those herbs for the wife or picked up a freshly patched strap for your mule’s harness. Rusa claimed to have seen a man gored by a golden, hump-backed bull while accompanying his father to sell some barn dogs gotten off an errant bitch. He spoke of it with a rose-tinted hindsight that made Pica somewhat uncomfortable but which he figured a simple matter of cultural differences.
The quadrennial Day of Good Faith races in particular were an extravagant affair that no city other than Alba Citadel could replicate, with every successive occurrence seeking to outshine the one before in both glamor and lavishness. The Protector themselves, known to mark the opening of the three-day event as being of special significance to the Grove, had made a habit of showing up unannounced in the high box, arriving to much clamor from the trans-imperial masses after smuggling themselves across the empire to attend the event. Whether they would show or not was among the most heavily wagered items in the scattered betting-houses and pubs of the flatlands and accordingly, vast sums were traded every four years to the benefit of many and the chagrin of undoubtedly countless more.
It was a wild energy that Sily missed dearly as she looked upon the placid-by-comparison Grand Market stretched out before them as if it didn’t merit the name. Long-ago, she had dreamed of competing in the unsaddled portion of the Good Faith race, becoming famous and finding her way to the vast palatial estates of Avium that even now looked down upon them from the northern cliffs.
Her father had refused it altogether, of course, and one parent was not to be budged on something which had already been flatly refused by the other. It didn’t stop her from training, and she would often run her father’s young sprinters through an improvised course on his lands while he was away at market or sleeping in the barn when Mama wouldn’t have him after a rowdy night in town.
He had about beat her to death-and may have if not for the brothers’ timely intervention-when he had caught her running a particularly promising young stallion at frightening speeds through a poorly thought-out inside line. Sily and her mount had been riding hard and they worked themselves into a lather as they fed off one another’s wild, youthful energy. It broke its leg attempting to avoid the wild-eyed man jumping to try and catch hold of its flailing reins.
She remembered the screeches of her horse more than the cutting of the leather belt against her own skin, remembered wishing more than anything that he would end the beast’s misery before administering his ‘corrections’ to her. She was relieved when he cut the thing’s sweat-sodden throat without a word afterwards, tossing his belt knife in the dirt as he walked away from Rusa and Alces huddled together protectively over their smaller sister.
The blonde woman chewed the bittersweet memories as the Squad moved toward storehouses she had visited with her father so many times during her youth. Stretching her neck to see the stark rectangle of trampled brown grass reserved for livestock on the way to the docks or out into the wider Grove in the hopes that maybe Papa would be in-market from Tremula.
Rusa and Sily took turns marking the passage of time by pointing out when the sun poked beneath some completely arbitrary reference point in their sightline. If it was another of their weird Populan games, Pellia wasn’t sure any of it meant anything.
‘Just behind that balcony on the Third’ the sister remarked, staring up at the black tower to the west with a skeptical eyebrow and joining the family version of I-See.
The Third Tower of Avium was much shorter than its sister outside Keeptown where the Archmaesters and their precious libraries resided. It was the home of the Order of the Inquisitor and as all knew, was the last resting place for uncounted dissidents, traitors, and more than a few particularly troublesome nobles. But where the black tower of the Inquisitors lacked in height, it more than made up for it in girth as well as crookedness as it somehow remained standing despite its ominous lean over the market’s northwestern corner and the shops enjoying the shade it provided below. It was a strange counterpoint to the colors and raw life that existed in the market all around it, a crabbing, craggy finger poised to crush the many skittering bugs beneath it. Pellia wondered how something so horrendous as the Inquisitors could live amongst something so lovely as the market.
‘Just below the Reaver’s hand’ Rusa intoned a few minutes later, marking another five-ish minutes past.
Pica’s eyes were instantly drawn to the ancient and now-largely unrecognizable ‘Guardian’ standing up to its knees in the churning water of the Grey Sea; it was one of a pair of identical, but mirrored, grey-green stone titans that stood where the ends of the gargantuan walls reached deep into the sea. They had once been alive, it was said, and it was their great hands that had pulled the protective shell of the Citadel from the earth. The Reaver and the Mediatrix froze after their last ground-shattering leaps onto the mythical anchor-pins stabilizing the walls of the tremendous enclosure, turning solid and ensuring the security of Avium could never be breached. Each of the stone behemoths held one hand high where, at some point, they had probably held swords or spears skyward, while the other they used to shield their eyes as if peering far out to sea for some long-lost voyage that still hadn’t returned all these millennia later.
Tacca, equally bored and disinterested in time or statues, was about to give the lot of them yet another rebuke for their distractedness when Pellia stopped the officer short.
‘The airship! It’s back!’ The northerner jumped excitedly at the sight of the great blue balloon floating high overhead. Mirroring the statues, she placed a hand over her dark eyes to shield them from the glaring sun.
‘Just our luck, the whale is back.’ Simen snorted, then shivered. ‘Coming in from over the sea like that… we aren’t going to have to ride that thing, are we?’ He took his eyes from the monstrosity. ‘Are we Sergeant?’
Tacca frowned, considering the question as well as the young soldier’s sudden pallor. ‘Not that I’ve been told, Simen. But what does that really mean?’
They all nodded to that as they reflected on their ‘choices’ in relation to their current duties.
‘Well, I want to ride it,’ Pellia declared, not missing a beat and puffing her chest like a bluebird as if her size or strength had something to do with the matter of boarding a ship. ‘It looks like an ice carp. I wonder if it has a name!’ She was overjoyed at the thought and almost jumped up and down as she began to consider potential options.
‘Well, the first one was Parotodus.’ Sily uttered the word uncertainly, saying the name aloud for the first time and looking over her shoulder at Scribe to indicate she had read it from him. He didn’t react, but the deepening lines creasing his forehead showed he was concerned or deeply concentrating as his eyes bore into the ship.
‘The first one…?’ Alces looked to his brother and then Simen, both shrugged.
‘That is clearly a different ship.’ Sily was matter-of-fact, sounding her exasperation at the seeming lack of attention to detail of her comrades. She pointed to it. ‘See the wings? They’re longer and thinner than the one we saw on our first day home.’
‘And the way the tail moves as well!’ Pellia chirped, pointing to the sideways-rotating motion of the rearward fins.
‘You’re right! It’s skinnier too.’ Sily confirmed as she positioned herself solidly on a nearby crate for a better vantage of the craft. ‘It looks like it could be even faster than the Parotodus.’ The name was smoother this time.
Simen greened at the thought and turned away to continue their trudging patrol, sure he would be sick if he had to look at the unnatural thing for a moment more.
It met them again almost immediately, hovering just ahead as they cleared the tall buildings that shouldered the last bend in the road to the docks proper. The group stared at it hanging above, now motionless against the incoming breeze of the sea to the west. Its great tailfins waved lazily and in repetitious cycles, the great expanses of canvas arcing outward from the wooden hull like a gull’s black-framed wings. As they watched, chains attached to the ends of the gliding sails began to retract and torsion the thick spars that held them taut and stable during flight; slowly four wings folded into their stowed positions, disappearing into insets constructed into the ship’s compact frame.
‘It’s landing?’
‘Looks like!’ Sily couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice as it became certain that the ship was growing larger from their position below.
A tremendous bugling assailed the market from the deep-water High docks to their north, the massive bellowing of unseen horns rapidly increasing into a monotonous roar, and sending waves of brightly colored birds skyward in a great, mismatched flock. They joined the horn section as they flew, filling the air around them with offended squawks and hollers. All eyes turned westward toward the dockyards.
‘What is that?’ Tacca raised a last skeptical frown to the airship above before turning to its dockyard of sea-locked kin below.
The squad pushed their way through the gaping crowd toward the incredible noise and were stunned as they caught sight of the massive deep-water ship parked precariously alongside one of the harbor’s furthest north-wing docks. It was leaning over the pier and overshadowed shuffling figures on the pier as they attempted to ease an obscenely large piece of cargo onto a waiting wagon below.
Pica watched as sailors hastily dropped additional anchors to add weight to their port side, countering the lean as the item swung further out from the deck.
Tacca groaned at the sight, already hearing the cracking of the great ropes in her mind as she watched the scene unfolding. ‘Let’s get down there. Least we can do is try to save a couple of ‘em when that whole thing turns upside-down. Might well go right through the dock itself.’ She turned to her squad suddenly stern. ‘Double trot and loosen up that armor while we move. Don’t wanna get drug down to the bed.’
As one her squad reacted, following her quickly down the slight decline that had been carved from the stone under the market to meet the new upper docks. The road they traveled on was well-tended and had clearly cost an exorbitant amount of gold and influence to construct. Even just the appropriation of a corner of the Grand Market and its demolition to cut a straight ramp from the location of the dockhead to the market sixty feet above must have been a mammothian task. Adding to that the materials, the beautiful grey-swirled stone that paved the way, the many architectural flourishes gracing alcoves and pathways along the side, and Pica wondered how one could even pay for such a thing at all. Where does one even find such wealth?
The builders, needing a beachhead for the piers, had managed to make do with the copious cliffside stone excavated to make room for the stretching new road and mismatched fill stone excavated from the Old City to the south. It was all covered over in grey-speckled and sparkling white quartz bricks and was as dazzling as it was the spoilage of ancient Prunian history. The five wide piers were no less grandiose, a gods-sized fork of stone and heritage white oak stabbing into the cerulean waters. Serving as a grand terminus to the Grove Protectorate, a commencement of everything Other.
It was clear to Pica why the new docks and the road down to them continued to be so contentious for the people of the lower districts and the old docks. The highway, while opening a potentially shorter new route for the historic traders to get to the Grand Market, bypassing the old corridors that wound through the old city center and had become plagued by under investment in repairs or improvements, was no faster at all. Even now, Pica looked at the lounging imperial guards who sluggishly ‘searched’ a variety of cargo they had forced the unfortunate fisher to unload from her wagon. Behind her, a growing line stretched along the broken-cobble road that used to run from the old docks to the fishing village that had existed here before. Now, it served as the checkpoint into the markets above.
Similarly, larger ships, those previously unable to dock with the city itself and largely dependent on the labor of local tugboats and their crews to ferry goods into Avium, were now free of that obligation. Instead, they could import directly now that anchorage over the underwater shelf was accessible by the long piers. Much had been lost in the construction of this dock, Pica wondered how many of those they had passed on the road from Cerasus had lost their lives under his feet.
That was the crux of it, he thought, it was the prestige of it all, the clear luxury that had so carelessly replaced thousands of lives and livelihoods in favor of faster trade, bigger shipments, and richer clientele than could be offered by the old traders and manufacturers. Looking about at the quality and capacity of the ships currently moored along structures did enough to assure Pica in his assessments as crates of mass-produced clothes, furniture, foods, and exotic machines flowed seamlessly into the city from the exotic lands of the Taher’I peoples across the Atra Sea.
The chaos they had seen above was emphasized as they reached the fourth pierhead and saw it up close. Two teams of oxen, the culprits behind the incessant bellowing that had thundered the market above awake, had been lined up at the beginning of the dock and appeared to be in the process of backing out onto the wide pier. Of the teams, one had been blindfolded with rags, their handlers trying to urge the eight anxious animals slowly onto the wooden decking of pier and to the waiting wagon. The other team watched in disbelief as their turn arrived, rolling their eyes and throwing their heads as the handlers struggled to turn them around as well.
‘No you don’t.’ Tacca intervened sharply, stopping them cold with a hand solidly on the whipping arm of the lead driver. ‘Where’s the dockmaster? What exactly is happening here?’ Her tone was even, she gripped his arm just tight enough to stay him, she implied she could do much, much worse. She jabbed the sergeant’s markings above the rabid Mellivora insignia on her chest for emphasis. ‘Who is in charge of this unsanctioned circus?’
The man shrugged and mumbled incoherently, shifting uneasily and edging away from the surprising imposition of iron authority. He held his arms aloft, emphasizing his lack of control over anything other than his livestock with a gesture clear to anyone and hung his head resignedly. She held him stiffly for a moment, glaring at the ox-driver before stowing her fury for someone elsewhere down the line. She released him with a disgusted snort and breezed away ahead, ceasing his workers and their beasts entirely, and leaving Pica and the others to begin attempting some semblance of crowd control. Ambivalent but interested in the spectacle, Sinea watched from their posts nearby.
‘Oi!’ Tacca shouted up at the deck as she reached the end of the long pier and the heart of the chaos, ‘which idiot up there is trying to capsize a tub on top of the Protector’s shiny High Docks?’
Nobody answered beyond some obscene hollering from the rigging and only a couple laborers paused to look at her briefly before continuing their work with a worried glance around. Sily took the hint and took a few steps back to better see the ship, recognizing it immediately once she saw the strange letterings which were meant to convey the name of the vessel and finding them entirely indecipherable. It was a foreign trader, one of the hulking bulk carriers which rolled over the long nothingness that stretched between the Grove and the southern continent of Nib ‘u. She had initially thought it a member of the Merchant Fleet, a rogue trading operation out of the City-of-Three and a representative from that republic of corporatists.
‘Shit,’ Tacca muttered to herself before retreating to her soldiers and the gathering crowd at the beginning of the stretching dock. It was fitting, she reckoned, that when expecting one type of political fiasco, she may have just walked into an entirely different sort, one with much wider implications than a simple negotiating committee from the bankers in the east. She beckoned to her troopers.
‘Look, that is a Nibian trader, something much bigger than our prerogative here today. Tighten up and let’s leave this to the Sinea goons bef-’
A crack resounded through the stout timbers of the wide pier, a shiver running through people and structure alike as the package finally settled its enormous weight fully onto the cart. After a moment’s pause, the laborers around it erupted, cheering in a rhythmic harmony that simultaneously thrilled and terrified the local ear. Soon, the shouts of sailors who had watched from other nearby ships joined in, congratulating the foreign crew for their hard labor after such a journey.
A rumble followed, the sound of footsteps on planks replacing the ululation and echoing as many of the laborers took positions to pull and push the wagon down the pier themselves. A driver appeared atop the wagon as they did so, a long whip coiled unraveling from her hip and kept on display in her clenched fist. She was painted black-and-white like a desert horse and stood high above the straining laborers with the look of a particularly noxious cat. She unfurled the long lash in her hands once more as they struggled to gain traction on the wet timbers below, wafting it tenderly in the air to float as delicately as a peacock feather above. It rent the air as she flicked it forward, any beauty of the device lost in the threat it promised to those below the shock of it. With a groan, the wheels turned and all went horrifically silent.
To keep her squad from gaping like the rest of the slack jawed locals watching the lumbering thing being pulled toward them in slow inches, Tacca began them dispersing the crowd to create a place for the thing to ultimately stop and, hopefully, become someone else’s problem.
By the time they reached that point, the striped woman had used her whip to significant effect had gotten them moving at a steady pace with only a stray warning needed as they crossed from white wood to grey stone. She glared at Sergeant Tacca as the space between them closed, the sound of sinister popping taunting the officer and challenging her to try and stop the rolling monstrosity.
Tacca accepted, damning Sinea once more for good measure and stepping before the convoy just as the last foot stepped off the dock. She barked loudly, ordering the people to come to a halt and, at a signal, sending Fourth Squad to relieve the straining people of their ropes.
‘They’re chained together!’ Pica shouted revulsed, ‘the clothes are sewn over the shackles!’ He tried to make one of them show the sergeant and they resisted fearfully, shaking him off and cursing until the soldier retreated.
She spun, addressing the slaves’ driver. ‘Slaves aren’t permitted in Avium, nor in any land under the name of the Protectorate for that matter.’ Tacca raised her voice, ensuring all gathered could hear her words. ‘It is my pleasure to relieve these people of your service and my duty to ask you what purpose you have attempting to smuggle them in so.’
The crowd grinned collectively and the looming tension in the air was shattered by the alluring, sun-bronzed, and battle-hardened sergeant who had taken it upon herself to restore some sense of normality and order to the whole situation. Voices of support issued and the crowd eased itself into a more sporting temperament.
The woman in stripes rose to a taller height and hissed in a language known only to the slaves who whipped their necks to stare as she began her curses, Her hand flicked slightly as if having a mind of its own but she stayed the movement, assessing the shifting situation with darting, white eyes. The slaves began to move once more, pushing past Mellivora and beginning to strain at the base of the long hill.
‘I must demand, in the name of the Grove Protectorate, that you halt these people and this… thing!’ Tacca shouted, her voice stilling all in the area except the slaves who side-eyed the soldiers’ weapons warily. It was clear they understood the substance of her command, even if they didn’t grasp the language, but they carried on with flashing glances backwards in preparation of the coming whip.
The striped driver flashed a toothy grin to Tacca and bowed appealingly as she calculated quickly. With a barked command and two precisely timed pops of her whip, the chain came to a grateful halt and rolled back a few feet to settle at the base of the incline. Many sat down immediately, legs already shot from the effort and shaking after the month it took at least to cross the Atra and Grey Seas to Avium.
Pica suspected they had spent longer than that crammed into the depths of the boat, it was not of a type designed for great speed but rather focused on carrying large loads steadily across great distances. Based on the shrunken, malnourished forms he and his friends were seeing as they offered canteens to the crushed people, they hadn’t been fed much on the journey either. He wondered how many would die if they were forced to pull it all the way to the market. What if it was something destined for the clifftops? How many would die anyway?
‘Why aren’t they trading out for the oxen, Sergeant?’ He called back to Tacca standing directly before the wagon and staring daggers at the woman towering above.
For a moment, she didn’t answer; pausing to allow the driver an opportunity to offer some response of her own to the open question. The woman did nothing, simply glaring at the rose-and-slate officer, eyes gone black with loathing. Pica thought she had understood the words and had seen a shift at the mention of the slaves. He watched the exchange as he and his comrades cared for the shivering laborers, distributing their water and trying to speak with them. Whether from the journey or the place it had begun, they communicated little to the troopers beyond agony and their terror of the towering, armored troopers moving between them.
The crowd recoiled as the chained oxen clanged and bellowed to life under the whips of their own drivers. Slowly, they moved forward to position themselves alongside the waiting cargo. Tacca considered blocking them as well and took a step toward the head team preemptively.
‘I think…’ a soft, rounded voice imposed itself on the scene from the opposite side of the wagon, stopping her short, ‘there may be some…misunderstanding here.’
The sergeant turned slowly to find the source of the words and beheld a tall, dusky-beige skinned man with a sharply pointed, ink-black beard stepping from an unseen carriage of sorts that had been cleverly built into the large wagon. He wore long, reflectively white robes of a densely woven and velvety cloth that swept about him fluidlike as he squeezed around the wagon and strode forward. In his right hand and held loftily above his head, he carried a twisting, golden rod with an ornamented glass piece atop the flared end. In his left, he clutched a book bound in jade green leather and etched with wide golden lettering of an indiscernible font or alphabet. It was secured to his heavy sash by a flowing, intricately gilded chain in the way common to most messengers and scribes of the Grove.
He was supremely regal overall, if foreign in appearance to the gathered onlookers and the Mellivora troops alike; all took much pleasure in attempting to account the vast array of gold, sapphire, ruby, and brilliant silver that adorned the man. Most attention-grabbing of all was a thin, finely engraved band of supremely rare platinum, a mere inch tall and pounded thin as paper, which sat elegantly on his brow, his curly peppered-black hair and tumbling over it in a warrior’s tied-back tail. The moment Tacca had hoped to avoid arrived as she took in the sight of an emissary in all his glory, looking between the dazzling man and the sneering woman in stripes staring at her with a smirk just over his shoulder.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she bowed her head respectfully, choosing deference to obvious wealth as the safe bet until shown otherwise. ‘And may I ask your business in the Grand Citadel of Avium as I offer you welcome to our shores?’
The white-cloaked man proceeded gracefully, approaching the imposing officer in the rose-and-slate uniform and standing in a deferent stance a respectful distance away. They were equally tall and looked squarely into each other’s eyes before the bejeweled man flung his cloak wide behind him and extended his leg forward in a deeply formal, and inappropriate, bow.
Pica was stunned by the armor that revealed itself from behind that dazzling white cloth. From head-to-toe, the foreign man was covered in a strange, cream-colored, and sharply ridged hardened leather of an extreme level of artisanship; the joints between the molded plates fit so tightly as to be invisible yet still flexing easily and without a whisper as the man returned to his feet. There was writing of some description carved into the set and in-filled in a color that was only slightly lighter than the material in which it was inscribed, Pica attempted to make sense of the words as they popped into and faded out of existence with the shifting sunlight and shadows.
Despite their equal statures, Tacca managed to tower over the man and stood with hands on hips and the determined look of a person completely in charge of the situation. Unlike her young charges, she was not one to be surprised by a lavish southerner arriving on a pretty ship, and although she was certainly cowed at this particular series of events, she wasn’t showing it publicly.
‘Salaam, good lady,’ he began slowly, adding another dramatic bow, ‘we are emissaries serving the Great… Caliph Bos Urus: Raiser of the Sun that Shines and Hand of the Arid Empire.’ He bowed again, dropping low enough to gently kiss the ground with each title as he revered the name of his ruler.
‘…Son of the Golden Tide, Holder of the Eternal Key!’ He fell, somehow lower, and kissed again, increasing the volume and passion in his thick accent as he proceeded. Sily wondered if Tacca’s eyebrows could reach any higher before they flew from her face entirely as she stood stunned before the now-prostrated man before her.
‘We have been sent here at the will of our Shining Lord,’ he raised his scepter to the sky briefly from his position on the stone, ‘in an offer of peace and friendship with your Emir…er,’ he paused briefly as he worked his way forward slowly and with some difficulty, wrestling with a word that he was not sure applied correctly in a language he knew only slightly better, …Pro-tec-tor’ he finished slowly, gazing up at the agape Tacca.
‘We have safe passage, guaranteed through the city,’ he continued, reaching to the luxurious green book attached with gold to his side and flipping it open to the requisite page deftly. He held it forward for her inspection in both hands, kneeling and with head bowed as she began to look at the proffered documentation.
Nothing on the pages made any sense to her despite many long years and leagues of travel with the Company, she motioned to Scribe who hustled to her side, his pen hovering eagerly above his own ledger. With only a second of looking over the pages, he began his own transcription and translation, flipping through his own book from time-to-time to reference Gods-know-what.
The man remained motionless throughout, never once raising his eyes to meet Tacca’s or objecting when Scribe poked gingerly at the papers with the back of his own instrument or took a closer look with a smooth lean forward. His companion remained motionless, eyeing the sergeant snidely from her perch above. Something was changing in the dynamic of the crowd, both she and Tacca could feel a power shift and the latter began to shift uncomfortably as her hold of the situation began to slip; their intuitions were made a reality as Scribe finished his work and offered his version to the sergeant without a word or shift in expression.
‘From the desk of Bos Uros of Nib’u, Raiser of the Sun-’she mumbled, lips moving involuntarily as she read Scribe’s elaborate script spidering its way across the page.
A susurration ran through the crowd and eyes shifted from the slowing scene before them and towards a new one arriving from the northern gate; a blast of bugles followed by much yelling and huffing of an incredible volume as a stream of green-and-gold pushed roughly through the assembled crowd. Those who had been content to watch Mellivora from the sidelines before were suddenly full of vigor, flooding forward to clear the crowd ahead of the coming procession.
A rotund and red-faced man on a large, and somewhat distressed horse pushed forward and entered the square, a platoon of similarly, if less ostentatiously, liveried Sinea Shields following close behind and taking up positions to cordon off the crowd along the thoroughfare.
‘I am Lord Meleagris of the Protector’s Golden Shields, Knight of the 9th degree, and Duke of Cherry!’ He presented himself and a farcical mustache loudly, wheeling his mount around clumsily.
The beast skittered and hopped sideways as it came to an unsteady halt before a freshly bewildered Sergeant Tacca. She noticed that the beast favored a hoof and was likely in the process of healing before it had been pressed into service as a pack mule for this disturbing knight; she couldn’t help but smile as she attempted to envision how many men it had taken to get ‘Lord Meleagris’ atop the snorting creature. It eyed her up, clearly considering biting the only thing close enough to grab onto.
‘I have come,’ the Duke of Cherry continued loudly and unperturbed by the general instability of his transport, ‘at the request of our auspicious and wise Protector, to greet our esteemed guests, the representatives of the Taher’I peoples, and to extend a custodial escort to them and the gifts they carry for the Protectorate’s eternal prosperity!’
He managed to nod his thumb-like head to the beige man who stood smoothly with a snap of his large book, a prior-unseen young administrative officer appeared from behind the Lord and began insistently flourishing yet more papers in the face of the rapidly reddening Tacca. She had been forced to take a step back to avoid having her foot clobbered by one of the battle-shoed hooves on the wild-eyed mare the knight sat pompously upon and she all but snatched the thick vellum roll from the squire as she took a large step back and away from the slowly leaning pony.
Her eyes darted over the documents before she passed them to Scribe with a snort. He snatched them like candy and began furiously copying them in his usual level of detail, paying particular attention to any dates, names, locations, and official signatures available to his greedy flat-green eyes.
‘Aloud’ the fat horseman hissed maliciously, leaning down to sergeant and reinforcing his assumption of authority.
She stood stiffly before him, her own soldiers exchanging looks and shifting a bit in anticipation and uncertainty of the rapidly shifting tone of the situation.
Simen fingered the hilt of his sword expectantly, thumb ready to pop it from scabbard as he eyed the Sinea Shields arrayed in a line before them. They returned the looks, faceless behind golden grills and shadowed by the wide brims of their helms. They would be more than a fight if they had met crosswise after a long night in the Quarter and in equal numbers, Pica thought, as it was, they would be lucky to get off more than a swing at all. He touched Simen gently on the forearm and shook his head, they would have to watch their sergeant’s shameful dressing down without intervention.
‘I said...’ Lord Meleagris began, his tone rising sharply.
Tacca held out a hand and the scroll appeared in it immediately, she unrolled it with a flourish and held it far from her face dramatically as she read.
‘Knight Meleagris of the Shields of the Protectorate, Lord of yada-yada and so-and-so,’ Tacca proclaimed loudly in a clear deep voice that carried to any interested ear, and some that were just trying to find a pathway through the throng, turning the heads of any not already enraptured by the bizarre events unfolding in the Avium marketplace that afternoon. She cast the scroll into the dirt, ignoring scandalized looks from both the Lord of Cherry and Scribe, and continuing from memory in a booming voice.
‘…hereby takes command of, and thereby transfers custodial responsibilities for, the Taher’I emissary and their possessions in the name of the Protector and the Grove…’
With a prayer for an end to her suffering life in the face of such infernal sufferings as legal shenanigans and bureaucratic chicanery, she denied her eyes’ urgent request to hide themselves all the way in the back of her skull and continued with the spectacle that knights tend to expect of their ‘inferiors.’
She finished at a long list of signatories scrawled across the last few inches of the second page, the final of which was simply The Protector. With a foggy brain and a thick tongue that demanded water, or maybe Pyrean rum, she saluted with uncanny stiffness and kicked the scroll back across the cobbles to the jowly, potbellied man who, the more she looked at him, appeared more a giant, boisterous gourd than a knight of any variety she recognized.
Her surrender of authority to, and humiliation at, the hands of the porcine Sinea commander complete, she signaled her soldiers to return to barracks with a series of sharp hand motions and a nod to retrieve their canteens.
The striped woman hissed, rearing a hand back and bringing the long whip forward with astounding speed that ripped the air as it prepared to do the same to the broad haunches of the bulls who were now being hastily secured to the front of the wagon. The slave-laborers, relieved of their duties and without instruction, turned and returned down the pier to the large ship, leaving behind the Grove and any so-called freedom they may have allegedly had while there.
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