The Carpet Makers (13 page)

The young man’s relief was unmistakable. “I give it for the Emperor!” he shouted out.

“I accept it for the Emperor,” Kremman responded, and departed.

The General Tax Ledger had been sealed again and locked in its cabinet, a copy of the current tax list had been produced and attached to the Book of Changes, and the only thing left to do was to issue the Tax Levy Declaration.

Collection of the taxes was actually carried out by the city; he had nothing to do with it. His responsibility was simply to determine the amount due. He also had nothing to do with the transport of the money; the next hair-carpet trader who came to Yahannochia would take care of that. The Tax Levy Declaration was for the trader, because he would have to account in the Port City for the amount of money that had been entrusted to him and his steel cart.

Most people believed that the taxes were sent to the Emperor, but that was incorrect. The money never left the planet. This world discharged only one sort of payment to the court of the Emperor—the hair carpets. The tax monies were simply used to pay for the carpets.

That’s why the hair-carpet traders were given the responsibility for the transport of tax money. When they reached the Port City, they delivered the hair carpets, the remaining money, and the declarations of the tax collectors. These figures were then balanced against the records sent to the Port City by the guildmasters of the carpet makers, and it could thereby be determined whether a trader had done his duty or had unjustifiably enriched himself.

“The taxes have been levied,” Kremman said casually when the city elder entered the room. “If you have any other disputes to be resolved by an imperial judge, now is the proper time.”

“We have none,” the old man responded, “except, as I said, the heretic.”

“Ah yes, your heretic.” Kremman interrupted his writing of the Declaration and leaned back. “What sort of mischief was he involved in?”

“He said all sorts of blasphemous things; for example, that the Emperor doesn’t rule anymore, that he had been overthrown, and other such nonsense. And that was in the presence of two highly respected carpet makers, who are prepared to testify about the incident.”

Kremman gave a bored sigh. “Oh, these old rumors. These stories have been making the rounds now for a good twenty years, and there are always more crazies who think they have to heat them up again. Why don’t you just hang him? A misguided fellow, nothing more than that. That’s what the law is for.”

“Well,” the city elder drawled out his response, “we weren’t sure whether the law was applicable in this case. The heretic is a foreigner, and a very strange foreigner, at that. We don’t know where he comes from. He claims to come from another world, so far away that it can’t be seen in the sky.”

“That’s not so peculiar; the Emperor’s realm is immense,” Kremman interjected.

“And he says he belongs to the rebels who claim to have overthrown the Emperor—pardon my words, but I am just repeating what the foreigner said. He said that he came down from a rebel spaceship that’s circling our world.”

The tax collector laughed out loud. “Absurd! If such a spaceship existed, it surely wouldn’t have hesitated to undertake some effort to free him. A crazy man, as I already said.”

“Yes, we thought that, too,” said the old man, nodding thoughtfully, and he paused a moment before adding, “but the thing that convinced us to wait for your judgment was that we found a radio device on the foreigner.”

“A radio device?” Kremman pricked up his ears.

“Yes. I brought it along with me.” From the depths of his cloak, the elder drew a small black metal box into view, on which nothing but a microphone membrane and several buttons could be seen.

Kremman took the device in his hand and hefted it with curiosity. It was astonishingly light and in strikingly good condition, free of the scratches and scrapes common to nearly every technical device the tax collector had ever encountered during his lifetime.

“And you’re sure it’s a radio?”

“The foreigner claimed it was. And I can’t imagine what else it could be.”

“It’s so … small!” Kremman had once owned a radio many years ago, a great, bulky crate. Back then, he had reported his tax valuations directly to the Port City. But one day he happened into a sandstorm; his mount fell, and his valuable possession was smashed against a rock.

Kremman examined the little device more closely. The switches weren’t labeled; only on the back side was something stamped—like a number, but in written characters that only vaguely reminded him of the ciphers with which he was familiar.

A strange fear crept into the tax collector the longer he held the apparatus in his hand—the sort of fear that befalls you when you are standing on the edge of a cliff and are forced to look down into a dark, immeasurably deep abyss. This device, he realized, was an irrefutable argument. It was a foreign body. Whatever it meant, its mere existence proved that things were afoot here, which went beyond the realm of his judicial competence.

This sudden insight allowed him to take a relieved breath. There was a path he could take, which freed him from all responsibility and was also in complete accord with regulations.

“The heretic should be sent to the Port City,” he pronounced finally. “He … and the device with him.”

“Should I bring him before you?” asked the elder.

“No, that’s not necessary. I’ll record my decision in the Declaration. The next carpet trader who visits Yahannochia will transport him and bring him before the Council.”

Rapidly, as though he wanted to preclude any possible objections, he entered a suitable notation in the lower margin of the Tax Levy Declaration, dribbled sealing wax beside it, and marked the wax with his signet.

VIII

The Hair-Carpet Robbers

THE GIGANTIC CARAVAN
of the trader Tertujak, with its wagons and tent-carts and mounted soldiers, surged slowly across the broad lowland plain toward the Zarrak Massif, which stretched endlessly from horizon to horizon like a dark, impenetrable wall.

Tertujak sat in his wagon poring over his account books. He felt the distinct shift when cart wheels began to grind their way through yielding sand and no longer rumbled over hard rock and gravel—where every pothole and every rock in the road had given him a hard, almost painful jolt through the wagon frame. He had traveled this route often enough in his life to know, even without glancing through his window, that the climb had begun to the only point where the Zarrak Massif could be crossed, the pass at the foot of Fist Rock.

After brief consideration, he decided it was time to see that everything was still in order. He heaved his massive body out of the pillows and opened the narrow door that led to a platform by the coach-box. It was almost too narrow to accomodate the trader’s substantial corpulence, but Tertujak squeezed himself through, grasped the handgrip intended for just this purpose, and nodded curtly to his driver before looking around.

Once again, he was sure he would find all sorts of things that displeased him. His people were sometimes like children; he had to be constantly on his guard, couldn’t let them get away with any of their many sloppy practices that could otherwise become habits. For example, the train was already too spread out again; the provision carts, instead of being grouped all around the hair-carpet wagon, were following behind it in a long crooked chain. The fault lay, as always, with the sutlers hawking their wares, who preferred to hang back at the end of the trek to carry out their questionable little deals with the soldiers undisturbed, and also to demonstrate that they were not under the command authority of the trader.

Tertujak gave a disapproving snort through his nose, while he considered whether it was imperative to intervene. He let his eyes wander down the long, straight line of the Zarrak mountain chain that rose up before them. Directly ahead of them stood Fist Rock; the black karst stone towered high and seemed almost threatening. It was named for its shape: five deep clefts leading down from an inaccessible high plateau toward the plain and a ledge on the side gave the impression of a giant’s fist, which seemed to guard the only pass through the massif. They would cross over the mountain saddle near the bent thumb of the fist, and from there, for the first time in years, they would be able to see the Port City, the destination of their journey.

The prisoner came to mind again. Not a day passed without his wondering about this peculiar man who had been turned over to him in Yahannochia. Naturally, he hadn’t been eager to take on the extra burden, but he had not been able to refuse. Now the prisoner was sitting up front in one of the trade wagons between two large bolts of cloth, chained and guarded by soldiers with strict orders not to speak with him and to silence him if he should talk. The prisoner was considered a heretic, and whatever he said might be intended to pervert the heart of a pious man.

What was it about this man that made it necessary to bring him before the Council at the Port City? They would probably never find out.

Tertujak sought the attention of his cavalry commander and waved him over with a curt gesture.

“What do the scouts report?”

“I would have spoken with you soon about that, anyway, sir,” said the commander, a lanky, gray-haired man named Grom who was keeping his mount trotting with almost dancelike steps alongside the trader’s cart. “The ascent is very sandy this time; I don’t think we will even reach the pass before nightfall, let alone get beyond it.”

That agreed with Tertujak’s assessment. He shoved out his lower jaw a bit, as he always did when he had made a decision. “Let’s make camp,” he ordered. “We’ll start off tomorrow morning at first light; be sure everyone is ready then.”

“As you wish, sir,” Grom responded with a nod, and rode away. As Tertujak withdrew into his spacious cart, he heard Grom blowing commands on his signal horn.

Setting up camp occurred as it did every evening, and everyone who belonged to the trader’s caravan knew exactly what he had to do. They circled the wagons around the trader’s cart and the armored hair-carpet wagon: the wagons filled with trade goods formed an inner ring, and the provision wagons made an outer ring beyond them. In the area between the inner and outer rings, tents were set up where the mounted soldiers would bed down. The draft animals, mostly baraq buffalo, were unyoked and tied to long ropes so that they could lie down. The mounts were herded together; they slept standing up. The foot soldiers, who had been lying the whole day on various wagons and had dozed the time away under awnings, were the only ones who had to wake up now; their duty was to stand guard around the camp the entire night.

The trader’s personal cook pulled his little camp kitchen up to the huge, richly decorated wagon of the trader. Tertujak had opened his cart and stood waiting in the doorway.

“Sir, we still have some salted baraq meat,” the cook began eagerly. “I could roast you some karaqui and prepare a salad of new-moon herbs, with a light wine to go with it—”

“Yes, fine,” Tertujak growled.

While the cook was busy with his pots, Tertujak looked around as though searching out the source of the inner unease that filled him this evening. It was already twilight; Fist Rock high above them was nothing more than a silhouette against the dark silver of the sky, which still shone bright just above the horizon but was already black at its zenith. Tertujak heard the voices of the men setting up the last tents. Elsewhere, fires were already being lit. They had to be sparing with fuel, so there were only a few fires, just enough to cook food for the members of the caravan. A jolly, easygoing atmosphere prevailed. The strenuous work of the day was past, tomorrow they would cross over Fist Rock Pass, and then it was only a few days’ trip to the Port City.

Three foot soldiers appeared out of the twilight. One of them approached the trader with deference and reported that the night watch had been posted.

“Who is the officer of the watch?” Tertujak asked. It was the duty of that officer to walk the chain of posts throughout the night to be certain that none of the soldiers fell asleep.

“Donto, sir.”

“Tell him to be especially alert tonight,” Tertujak said, and added a little more quietly: “I have an uneasy feeling.”

“As you command, sir.” The soldier disappeared again, and the other two took up positions next to the trader’s wagon.

Tertujak scrutinized the wagon standing behind his, the hair-carpet wagon; it was twice as big, with eight wheels and equipped with harnesses for seventy-four baraqs. It contained the most precious treasures transported by the entire caravan—the hair carpets and also immense sums of money. Even in the fading twilight, he could see places where the metal armor was beginning to rust. He would have to have the wagon refurbished after the carpets had been shipped off and the accounting had been completed in the Port City.

He returned to his cart, had his meal served, and ate silently, lost in thought.

They had managed to buy enough hair carpets, but it had taken longer than he had planned. That meant they would arrive in the Port City after the other traders, and he would once again get one of the less attractive routes for the next trip. Then it would be even more difficult to reach the prescribed number of carpets, and sometime …

He didn’t want to think about this “sometime.”

He shoved his plate away abruptly. He ordered the cook to clean up and had another bottle of light wine brought to him.

In the light of an oil lamp, he brought out one of his most precious possessions, an ancient trader’s logbook his forefathers had begun several hundred years ago. The pages of the book crackled with dryness, and in many places the columns of figures were now difficult to decipher. In spite of that, this book had given him much valuable information about the various hair-carpet routes and about the cities along them.

It was only a few years ago when he realized that this book could enlighten him about something else, namely the changes that had occurred over long periods of time. They were creeping, unnoticeable changes that nobody perceived; it was only when he compared and added up the figures of several centuries and nearly ten generations that the evolution became clear. There were fewer and fewer hair carpets. The number of carpet makers was slowly declining, and also the number of carpet traders. The route a hair-carpet caravan had to cover in order to collect the number of carpets prescribed by tradition was becoming longer on average, and the competition among the traders for the good, productive routes in the Polar Regions was becoming stiffer.