This was an ordinary occurrence in the city; the streets were so narrow and wound so tight that it was impossible to know where one stood, and since they shifted every time someone burnt down his forge or added a new room to his home, they were never the same two weeks in a row. At least in the winter the stench was less pronounced. Ordinarily I carried my south-pointer, but in the hurry to get to my brother and to town, I had forgotten it. At each turn we were thwarted by walls, laundry lines, slop piles, archways, and dark stairs rising toward invisible heights. Before long we were lost utterly. Mandrik handed Ydlbert the psaltery and turned in a slow, patient circle, snapping his middle fingers against his thumbs.
“What are you doing?” Ydlbert asked, stomping his feet in his worn shoes. Not having grown up in the same household, he had less tolerance, I suppose, for my brother’s divining tricks.
Long way to go,
Can’t see the towers from here.
Lost our way, Lord,
Can’t see the towers from here.
But one itty-bitty sign, Lord,
Makes the True Pathway clear.
He stopped snapping and held his arms at his sides. Then he turned back the way we’d come, saying, “It’s that way.”
Ydlbert rolled his eyes. “How do you know?”
Mandrik shrugged. “Give me back my psaltery before I lose my temper.”
Ydlbert handed it to him and cast me a sidelong glance.
Mandrik hummed to himself and led us down a few blind alleys, but before long brought us to the Archduke’s gate, narrower than the town’s, and the only opening in the sloping granite wall surrounding his demesne. The guards, identical in height and accent, and shivering in their silken livery of ruby hue, were surprisingly courteous once we showed them our petition, and they summoned us across the vast courtyard to the door.
As we had imagined, we were not to be admitted to the presence of the Archduke, but we were shown to the impatient attaché, who was clad in flowing black silks and stood tapping his narrow-toed shoes and fingering his shiny mustache. Mandrik smiled, bowed, and so charmed the attaché that, despite his nervousness, he allowed us to present the skeleton of our case aloud, and with feeling. Mandrik sang this petty functionary only a short snippet of song:
We love the Archduke,
He’s our mainest man.
Yes, we dig him deeply,
He’s the mainest, mainest, mainest man.
(Skeet a deedly deedly doo doo doo-ah)
And if he’d widen up the West Gate,
We’d serve him the best we can.
By the end of the verse, the attaché had tears in his blue eyes, and daubed at them with a black lace-edged handkerchief before applauding my brother’s song. Calling out, “Bravo! Bis! Bis!” he accepted the petition with a show of grace. I used my walking stick to draw a diagram for a wider gate on the ground, and I explained, in the best words I could muster, that, while in our interests, the new gate would also serve the town. “Oh, absolutely,” said the attaché, really quite overcome with feeling. “I have never received a petition so worthy of the Archduke’s attention. Rest assured that I will relay it to his Urbanity. Do take his and my warmest wishes back to your countrymen.” He gave us a skin of wine to ease our journey home.
Ydlbert and I drank the wine on the road, and arrived at Mandrik’s hut stone-drunk. All three of us slept around the fire on his bare dirt floor, but when Ydlbert and I returned to our families in the morning, we were more flush with the good news than with the morning chill and the previous night’s debauchery.
The next Market Day, when we headed back with our awkward carts and our tarpaulins, we saw hazy dark smoke on the horizon; it was clear, even from a distance, that something was afire. When we reached the city, we saw that the gate had been widened by twice the length of a man’s arm. The squalid row of tenements which had previously intervened between the gate and the church square had fallen into heaps, razed. Two old men with buckets were dumping dirt on some of the smoldering remains, and three or four bands of children climbed and slid in the rubble, searching for spoons and bits of colored tile and glass. One woman picked dourly through the remains of what once had surely been her hovel, clutching a wailing infant to her breast. This part of the city had never before seen the full light of day, and suddenly it was flooded with light, as healthful and clean as one of our own fields; and yet to see this misery exposed seemed untoward, as if we should avert our eyes. But we could not avert them. “Looks like something’s happened,” said Ydlbert’s brother, Yorik, who had perhaps never been the brightest star in Mandragora’s firmament. Ydlbert slapped him, but it seemed in jest.
We processed through to the center of town, and there set up shop around the kettle fires the townsmen had lit. Around us they walked with their hands shielding their eyes, both from the smoke and from the uncustomary brightness in the square. Even the space before the church was clearer now—the Archduke had, without our prompting, razed the filthiest habitations, so that we could display our produce in better view. The next week, aware of how much space had gone unused, we brought even more of our goods to sell, and the week after that, some of the local tradesmen began bringing their wares, to take advantage of the milling people and the light. A potter sold jars and crockery; the tanner draped hides over a sawhorse; the smith stood at one corner of the empty space, calling for horses to be shod. Each week the market grew bigger, and each week more debris was removed, until finally, that spring, there was a fine, clear path to the sanctuary, a processional wide and grand enough for princes and kings. The road within the city gates was surfaced with broad, flat stones, smooth underfoot and to the carts’ wheels. “It’s Paving,” Mandrik told me, the first time we drove our wary horses over them. “I have seen it in Indo-China, though there it was all of hammered brass, making the roads sparkle brighter than a courtesan’s eyes.” I had never seen a courtesan nor heard of paving—I knew only that what I saw was beautiful. But Mandrik knew that something momentous had happened, even if I did not have the knowledge to understand his explanation fully.
Each week we brought more and more of our crop to market, until it seemed our land could no longer stand the burden of such production. That spring was balmy, with soft rains and a strong sun, but we dripped our sweat into the ground every hour of the daylight, and still could not sate the townspeople or exhaust our soil. One day as I worked on my farthest strip—near my grandmother’s cairn—wishing I were my brother that I might have a song to sing, bathed in sweat, toiling in the heat of the midday sun, pulling a wooden plow so old and worn that I would soon need to replace its coulter and share, the next great thought insinuated itself into my mind like a whisper: Hammadi could pull the plow for me, and I could simply walk behind, to guide it. Hammadi could pull a much bigger plow than can I.
I gave up the rest of the day to tinkering, and by nightfall had constructed a new harness for plowing; the next day I attached handles to the plow so that I could guide it from behind. Ydlbert stopped over the next morning—from his adjacent strip he had seen me leave mine two days since, and wanted to make certain I had not taken ill. I led him to my barn, hitched up Hammadi, and set her to work. She performed the work of three farmers with only a fraction of the effort and none of the grumbling. Ydlbert shook his broad, balding head, and crouched down as if exhausted in the good dirt that marked the border between our two fields. “Yves,” he said, “think of it. Think what you’ve done. The horses will do all the work—we’ll
