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him, which, after a moment's delay, they did.
Inside the gate, a cobbled-together mass of twisted metal and woven grubush
that screeched as it was dragged back into place, the stench was as high as
Gerswin had remembered. He swallowed hard to keep the contents of his
stomach in place and thanked himself for his foresight in eating only a light meal
before setting out. t
The one, two, and occasional three story clay brick , buildings were crammed
together, with narrow streets, narrower alleyways. Unlike the plains clay, the
building clay was reddish-brown, without the purple tint that usually signified
some degree of landpoison.
The pilot nodded. He had seen the outside clay works often enough, had even
stolen a food basket or two from the clayworkers as they turned the clay into a
slurry and let it settle, then repeated the process time after time.
The "finished" clay was lightly fired in grubush-fueled ovens. Once the bricks
were mortared in place, the walls were covered with a sandpaint mixture that
hardened the bricks further and gave both interior and exterior walls a dingy
white appearance. The few times the sun did shine, the walls sparkled, and that
sparkle gave the shambletown a glitter totally unwarranted by its interior
occupants, human and otherwise.
All the houses in the upper shamble, the newer section, had porches, not for
people, but for the continual plant flats, designed to allow in light but not the
continual rain or ice rain. The precipitation was collected off the inclined roofs
and tunneled to either the clay collecting barrels or the main settling ponds.
Outside of the stink of unwashed bodies, the people appeared relatively
healthy, though uniformly thin. The men all had beards, usually straggly. An
occasional limp or twisted arm showed a broken bone that had not set properly.
From the open space inside the gate, Gerswin strolled down the narrow street
toward the square, watching to see if Conslor Weddin continued to keep an eye
upon him.
The square, an oblong paved with rough stone fragments and measuring no
more than forty by sixty meters, contained only a single platform, used for a
variety of purposes, surmised Gerswin. It was vacant except for a few passers-by,
and for
Gerswin and Fynian, who had apparently been instructed to follow the
Imperial officer.
The muted sounds of children drew Gerswin to a freestanding porch off the
southwest corner of the square, where were gathered close to a dozen toddlers.
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Gerswin stood by the brick wall enclosing the space under the roof and watched.
Two children, dressed solely in rough stained leather tunics, used miniature
clay bricks to build a wall. Behind them, an even smaller child sat on the smooth
brick flooring and sucked on the end of a wooden rattle. None of the children's
hair appeared more than roughly cut, nor did any wear more than a loin cloth
and sleeveless, patched-together leather over-tunics, despite the brisk breeze. The
chill from the morning's frost had yet to leave the air.
A somewhat older child sat on the bricks at the feet of a shriveled and gray-
haired woman and used a battered wooden pipe to produce a series of shrill
squeaks, some of which resembled musical notes.
A toddler barely able to walk caught sight of the gray Imperial tunic and the
touches of silver-embroidered insignia on his collars and pointed at the clean-
shaven pilot.
"Ummm! Ummm!"
Gerswin looked at the wide gray eyes, and finally grinned.
She frowned and closed her mouth. Finally, she repeated the phrase again.
"Ummmm!"
The wind shifted, and a new stench wrenched at Gerswin's gut, an acidic odor
burning into his nostrils from the lower section of the shambletown.
He took a last look at the toddler, waved, and turned toward the half dozen
steps that stretched the three meter width of the street that led southward to the
older part of the shambles.
"Ummmm! Ummmm!" Was there a plaintive ring to those words?
Gerswin nearly stumbled on the first step, but caught himself and continued
downward.
The street remained level for another fifty meters, flanked on both sides by the
relatively newer and larger dwellings of the upper section, before narrowing at
the top of another set of steps.
The officer could hear the uneven sound of Fynian's dragging limp as they
continued downward.
Beyond the second set of steps, the narrow grid pattern of the upper
shambletown dissolved into the twisting lanes of the lower town. The houses
were no longer uniformly sand-painted, since in places the old facade had
crumbled or been washed away.
More plant flats appeared in sheltered and glassless windows or on rooftops [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]