The Robin and the Kestrel (23 page)

"Gradford has changed since last I was here," Gwyna replied casually. "There were no restrictions then, on what music could be played and what a peddler could sell."

The innkeeper shrugged, and once again his expression of faint distaste told Jonny that he did not care for the current state of things. But then, what innkeeper would? His custom had been cut down to a third of what it had been;
he
certainly was not prospering.

"I can't sell you strong liquor, either," he continued. "Only beer and ale, and hard cider." By his wary expression, some of his customers had found a great deal to object to in this particular edict, but Jonny only laughed.

"N-never d-drink anything s-stronger," he said, shortly, with a grin that made the innkeeper smile in return.

At that point, they entered the inn, and that was when Jonny realized just how bad things had gotten for the innkeepers of Gradford. Not that the place was ill-kempt, quite the contrary. The common room, with polished wooden tables and real chairs, with hangings on the walls and lanterns or candles on every table, with not one, but
two
fireplaces, was clearly a quality of hostelry they would not have been able to afford in the days of Gradford's prosperity. Or—perhaps, if their music pleased the innkeeper, they
might
have graced this room, but only as paid performers, and then only if a Guild musician didn't want the job. Or if the innkeeper didn't want the Guild musician . . . .

"I'll have a table ready for you as soon as you like," the innkeeper was saying as he hurried them across the waxed and polished stone floor of the common room and towards the staircase at the other side. "It's a good ham tonight, and sweetroots, or chicken and dumplings with carrots, and a nice stew of apples for after. Your room is up here—"

The room, up on the third floor, was obviously not the best in the inn, but it was finer than they
should
have gotten for their coin. It shared a bath with three other rooms; there were good rag rugs on the varnished wooden floor, a plain, but handsome wardrobe, matching tables on either side of the bed, and the bed boasted heavy bedcurtains, a feather mattress and feather comforter. No fireplace, of course, but it did have a small coal-fired stove, and presumably a certain amount of heat came up from the common room below. There were sturdy shutters to shut out the wind, and cheap, thick glass in the windows, full of bubbles and wavy—but in the class of inn they generally frequented, they were lucky to have shutters, much less glazed windows.

They ordered a bath for after dinner, put their gear away, and took the stairs back down to the common room. The ham, as promised, was good, and the room no more than a third full. Small wonder there were only two choices for a meal; with so few customers, this innkeeper could not afford to have several dishes prepared so that a patron had a wider choice.

"You know, we have a few hours of daylight left," Gwyna observed, as they lingered over their stewed apples and spiced tea. "We ought to walk around and see what's to be seen."

Jonny raised an inquiring eyebrow over that remark. Had she seen something he hadn't? He
had
been too busy driving to pay a great deal of attention to anything else.

"There seem to be a lot of street preachers," she said in answer to his unspoken question. "In fact, it looks almost as if the street preachers have taken over from the buskers."

"Ah," he replied, enlightened. "W-we should s-see what th-they're s-saying."

"Exactly." She sighed, and put aside her empty bowl and the spoon. "Much as I hate to ruin such a nice meal with a sour stomach. I think we really need to get a feel for things before we go out tomorrow."

"Right." He rose, and offered her his arm. "W-would m-my lady c-care t-take a s-stroll?"

"Why, yes, I think she would." She dimpled, and took the proffered arm. "The company, at least, will be pleasant."

"Even if th-the s-stroll isn't?" he replied.

She didn't answer him; she only shook her head with a warning look as they walked out into the inn-yard, and joined the thin stream of people leaving their work and going home.

There were plenty of street preachers, one for every comer, sometimes shouting so loudly that their speeches overlapped, and some of them were unintentionally funny. The trouble was, no one else seemed to see anything humorous in what they were saying.

A chilly wind whipped up the street, tossing skirts and cloaks, and numbing Kestrel's nose. It was a wind remarkably free of the usual stinks of a large city, and the gutters were empty of anything but a trace of water. Perhaps this place was like Nolton, with laws regarding the disposal of garbage, and crews to clean the streets. In a city like this one, with so many people crowded into so small an area and no river to cleanse it, that was not just a good idea, it was a necessity.

Buildings on both sides of the street loomed at least three stories in height, built of stone with tiny windows in the upper stories. Roofs were of a brownish slate, or of sandy tile. There wasn't a great deal of color, even in the dress of the passersby. Only the brilliantly blue sky above gave any relief to the unrelenting gray and brown. Nothing delineated the changes in Gradford quite so clearly as that; elsewhere, people reacted to the coming of winter by bringing out as much color in their clothing as they could afford. Presumably the people of Gradford had once done the same, but no more. The city
looked
sober, as if it already hosted nothing but Brothers and Sisters of various ascetic Orders.

They walked about a quarter mile towards the Cathedral, which loomed over the smaller buildings just as the Duke's Palace loomed over the city the smaller buildings j itself. They both paid careful attention to each preacher for at least a few minutes at a time; usually a few minutes were enough to get the gist of what each was saying.

Gradually Kestrel began to get a sense that there were three lands of preachers, and each set shared a common style and a set of messages.

The first kind were the wild-eyed, unkempt street preachers he was used to seeing in every city or town he had ever found himself in. Dressed in strange assortments of tattered and layered garments, they exhorted the crowds passing with wildly waving arms and hoarsely shouted diatribes. They were fairly incoherent, contradicting themselves from sentence to sentence, and full of dire prophecies about the "Second Cataclysm." He'd always thought they were a little mad, and he didn't see any reason to change that opinion now. Interestingly, these men had only the same sort of audiences they got in other cities; people as mad as they were, gawkers, and adolescents who got a great deal of amusement out of making a mockery of them.

But the adolescents making mock were uniformly ruffians, rather than the mix of ne'er-do-wells and ordinary youngsters that usually tried to give these poor old men a difficult time. And the authorities, in the form of the City Constables, ran the youngsters off with warnings, and not the preachers, who would elsewhere have been considered nuisances.

So
these days in Gradford, even the lunatics come in for a smattering of respect.
Kestrel wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it himself

The second variety of street sermonizers was a type he normally saw only during Faires: country-fellows who were not ordained Priests and supported themselves through what they could collect on their own. These were men who would say, if questioned, that they felt "called by The Sacrificed God" to preach the Truth as they, and not the Church, saw it. They generally leapt at the chance to preach restraint to a crowd bent on celebration. Their motives were simple enough; perhaps move some of their listeners to moderation, or at least, through a bit of passing guilt, charm a pin or a coin out of their pockets and into the collection plate. Kestrel thought of them as a different form of busker, for they used the same venue as buskers. Their messages were along the line of "repent of your sins and be purified," and "do not waste your lives on short-term pleasures when your energy could better be spent in contemplating God." They urged sacrifice, with the veiled hint that a sacrifice tossed in their direction would find favor with God. More often than not—at a Faire at least—this kind of preacher would manage to "save" some fellow who'd been a chronic drunk all his life and had just hit bottom; having "saved" the fool, the preacher would parade him about like a hunter's prize. And the former drunk, having found a new addiction that made him the center of attention, would perform obligingly.

There were at least two with reformed drunks in tow on this street. And although these men were normally ignored by Faire-goers, who often parted around them like the water in a swift-moving stream avoiding a rock, here their message was falling on more appreciative ears. More than one listener looked both attentive and impressed. Interesting, but not unexpected.

Then there was the third class of preacher—a type that Kestrel had
never
seen preaching in the street before; real Priests, in immaculate robes, who clearly did not need to be out here and in fact had no collection plates at their feet. These men—they were always men, even though women could aspire to the Priesthood as readily as men—were clean, erudite, and well-spoken, pitching their trained, modulated voices to carry their words over the heads of the crowds.

It was this third type of preacher that had the messages that were very disturbing.

"—come from God are alone pure and righteous," the first of these was saying, as they came within nearing distance. He had a very well-trained and sonorous voice, and he already had a crowd three deep around him. He was brown of beard and hair and eye; his well-kept robe was a dark brown, and he should have blended in with his surroundings. But he didn't—he stood out from them, as if he was a heroic statue, the focus for all eyes. "No matter what the ignorant and unholy will tell you,
all
things called 'magic' are inherently evil. Magic can only be the tool of demons and false gods; there is no truth in it, and none in those who practice it."

He looked around at his audience; Kestrel was very careful to school his features into a semblance of sober interest. This man was no fool; any show of resistance to his words would cause him to single that person out for special attentions and special messages. The onlookers would notice. Things could become very awkward, very quickly.

"Perhaps you have heard somewhere that there are mages within the Church itself, but I tell you that this is
not
true. Whoever has told you this has lied to you," he said, lying gracefully and believably. "Magic is
deception;
magic only counterfeits the real and holy powers granted only to Priests by God. Those powers practiced within the Church come directly by grace and blessing of the Sacrificed God, and they are
nothing
like magic! And only those within the Church,
within the ranks of the ordained
will be blessed with those powers. Those who claim to achieve the same ends through their magic are false, deceptive, and evil. They seek to mislead you, seduce you to muddled thinking and questioning, and then to lead you astray down the paths of darkness."

Neat,
Jonny thought, admiring the Priest's command of rhetoric, though not his words.
Redefine magic as anything that is not performed by a Priest, and
then
you can condemn it without condemning the Priests.

"Not only is the magic itself inherently and by its very deceptive nature evil," the Priest continued, warming to his subject, "but anyone,
anyone
who uses it
or allows himself to be touched by it
is evil! Magic is a mockery of God's powers! God will not be mocked! He will not permit his servants to be mocked! The day is coming when all those evil ones who practice magic will perish, and those who permitted them to work their magic will perish with them! Those who live by magic will die by the hand of the righteous!"

There was more in this vein, although Jonny noticed that the Priest was very careful not to say
who
would be dealing out this punishment to the "evil magicians." Given the tales that had been spreading of musicians using magic to manipulate their listeners, it was easy to see where
this
was going. He might not have brought up the "evil musicians" yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Nightingale had been only too right, and so had Harperus.

He felt a sudden sickness in the pit of his stomach, and it didn't take any effort at all on his part to persuade Gwyna away and get out of hearing range. The Priest was still going strong when they left, and as far as Jonny could tell, it was more of the same. No mention, as yet, of musicians. But given the fact that there were no musicians anywhere in sight, perhaps he saw no need to mention them, in his condemnation of every other person who ever made use of magic and mages.

About the only encouraging note in this was that the Priest was losing listeners at a fairly steady rate—perhaps people who had used the services of a Healer, or those who had employed a mage for some minor work in finding a lost object, locating water, or taming a beast that would not respond to normal efforts. It would take more persuasive means than simply
saying
that magic was evil to convince most folk that it was bad.

After all, most people in their lives saw many instances of the use of magic, all of it hired and completely matter-of-fact. How could any of this be evil? Mages created amusing illusions for parties, rid homes of poltergeists and kobolds—they didn't do anything that a Priest couldn't do. And they generally didn't ask as much in return. Priests were often greedy in their demands when someone turned to them for help; a simple mage could only ask the usual rate, and did not care
what
god you followed or whether you were up to date on your tithing.

That was what Kestrel read in the faces of those who turned away from the preacher. But there were some who stayed, nodding in agreement . . . .

A very bad sign.

The sun had turned the sky above the city to a glorious crimson as they came into the "circle" of another of the real Priests out on the street. This man had a much larger gathering of listeners, and fewer of them were leaving with looks of stubborn disbelief on their faces. Jonny steeled himself to hear something unpleasant. This one also wore a brown robe, but he was a much older man, the kind that people would instinctively turn to for advice; clean-shaven with snow-white hair. But there was something subtly cruel and hard about his eyes, and the set of his mouth indicated a man who would never accept any opinion but his own.