Gods and Chaos- 2

Words can burn across a city like fire. Kale heard them everywhere, people lighting sparks, speaking of the things he’d been trying to deny. He plugged his mind and kept walking.

He was swimming in the sounds and scents and sights of the market: boys hawking trays of shining trinkets, women haggling the prices of fresh produce, horses dropping excrement in the road. The stalls dotting the market-square were shaded by awnings of every color. At each presided a vendor emphatically urging passerby to examine his wares. And among all the clamor there were always voices speaking fearfully or mockingly or eagerly about the idol.

“Kale!” Thella pushed through the gap between a boy herding pigs and a rickety cart. She was wearing her servant’s dress, its spotless white contrasting sharply with the brown sludge pasting the cobblestones. “Have you been waiting long?”

“No, I just arrived.”

“Good. Let’s go.” She pulled him after her into the crowd.

They jostled through the throng of the market-square, wound the side streets, and paused for Kale to shake free the beggar who plucked at his tunic.

“I thought you pretended to be an idealist,” Thella dryly remarked.

“I am an idealist. That’s why I believe people should work for their bread, not depend on the charity of others.”

“You think everyone has the luxury of work?” she asked. “That wasn’t the case in Shillarine.”

“That’s one thing that makes Telenine different. Besides, Thell, even idealists have to be realistic. I can’t feed every beggar. I can’t do everything.”

“That sounds like an excuse to do nothing.”

As they reached their destination, a dozen different scents tickled Kale’s nose. This was the street of the spice sellers. In front of each stall was a table looking as if it were covered in a patched quilt. The tables sported rows of boxes filled with seasonings: everything from the pink, locally grown mesh to a finely ground, yellow powder that Kale could practically taste in the air. The bitterness of it filled his mouth, mingling with sweet and sour and salty and all the variations from all the spices.

Kale and Thella moved from stall to stall with their sacks, bargaining and occasionally dipping into a spice box for something the chefs needed. A feast in the evening always meant shopping in the morning for the servants.

Kale rummaged through a barrel of dried peppers while Thella bargained with their owner. Then the woman suddenly quieted. “Where’d that accent of yours come from?” Suspicion was heavy in her voice.

Thella went rigid, and the danger Kale smelled in the air was more potent than the scents of the spices. He straightened slowly, laying a restraining hand on Thella’s shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with her accent. Your ears are going old.”

“No, there’s something. . . she’s a Shill, ain’t she? And those are servant clothes the two of you is wearing! The palace is hiring Shills now!” The woman’s voice grew loud and shrill.

Kale hurled the peppers back into their barrel, furious. “Come on, Thell. We’ll spend our coin elsewhere.”

“We don’t want your kind here!” the woman screamed. “Murderers and thieves! Shill sorcery, raising demons and meddling with magic. Your sort ain’t natural, twisting people’s own minds against them! And now you’ve woken your old pagan gods again, right in front of the king’s own eyes. Looking to conquer and slave us all, are you?”

Passerby threw startled glances as the two stalked away, and Kale kept his hand firmly on Thella’s back till they were a significant distance. Her eyes were flashing in a fashion he knew all too well.

“I wanted to kill that woman,” she growled quietly.

“That would definitely have gone a long ways towards convincing folk that not all Shill are murdering pagans.”

Thella’s lips were a tight line. “Let’s just leave.”

It was a silent walk back to the market square.

Thella was brooding and Kale was focusing on staying clear from her path, but both noticed the obvious shift around them. Folk hurried by in the direction of the marketplace temple, murmuring excitedly, agitatedly, but not too loudly. Streams of people were pooling into a crowd before the temple. Thella and Kale curiously joined them.

A man was screaming from the pedestal of Virkalek’s marble statue. And he was more than a man.

The presence surrounding him was hard to define. He wasn’t large or small, handsome or particularly horrid. His body was gaunt with rags hanging off of it, but his movements were defined by a fiery, fanatical energy. Almost frantic. The glint in his eyes wasn’t quite sane, and the eyes themselves were nestled deep in a stiff, unkempt tangle that looked more like a nest of black wires than a beard.

“. . . you must tear down the temples, rip asunder the lies enslaving you! The falsehoods, the blasphemies, the desecrations! You have been deceived, but the dawning of truth is at hand, and with it, blood! Blood, flowing in the streets! Fire, raining from the skies! The gods themselves have decreed judgment; do not be found among the faithless as the gods rise in retribution!”

The crowd was restless. In peaceful, contented Telenine, men like this one did not exist. Kale watched the faces: a few were doing their best to make it obvious that they scoffed at the outrageous preaching, but their sneers were hollow, painted. Some folk looked afraid. But the vast majority of the crowd was shocked; not at what they were being told to do, but at the fact that they’d never realized before now that it was necessary. Shocked by revelation.

And Kale, who couldn’t afford to believe in gods, was feeling the same urges as the crowd, though he tried denying them. Urges to destroy.

“Kale! Did you hear what I said?” Thell jabbed his gut with her elbow. “We need to leave! Mobs like this can make men into monsters. I’ve seen it before, in Shillarine.”

“That couldn’t happen here.” But his voice was lost, his mind glazed with the ideas incepted there. Thella struggled to pull him after her as she edged away from the crowd. It was simmering to a boil.

“Your priests!” the man screamed. “Your priests have lied to you! They are to blame, and all who follow them! But they are only the first step! Heed my words, for I am mouthpiece of Murlack and the gods of old! I am his voice! You are his voice! And his voice thunders!”

And the crowd raged with the thunder of a storm, heeding the man’s dictum.

Then the mouthpiece screamed, “Unite against the blasphemers! Rise and overthrow! All the guilty must be slain! And even the King who claims to love you-”

But his grasp on the crowd slipped and his words were broken. The enraptured people stirred. The temple guards, who’d been equally lost, shook themselves.

“Run back to your gutters, old man!” a voice from the mob jeered. “Shill sewer scum!” The fanaticism with which they’d been ready to follow the strange figure was now turned against him. Cheers turned to jeers and everyone pretended that they alone hadn’t been taken in.

A guard approached the black-bearded man. “You’re a bigger fool than you look if you thought your words could drive us to rebellion. Telenine loves Renaden, and it’s lucky for your sake that you hadn’t spoken against him yet. Scram, before this crowd tears you apart or we clasp you in irons and drag you before the King!”

“I will stand before your King soon enough,” the scarecrow figure hissed, and the whole crowd heard him. His mad stare skewered the guard and then slashed at the crowd, and for a long moment, there was silence.

                Kale turned to Thell. “We can go now.”

                “That’s gracious of you,” she said in disgust.

                The two extricated themselves from the rapidly dissolving mob.

                “You see?” Kale smugly asked when they were a ways away. “Another example of Telenine’s greatness! Anywhere else, a man making insinuations against the King and the gods would be punished, maybe even with death. But here, not living in fear has made the people open-minded, and they recognized and dismissed that fool as a delusional fake.”

                “What?” Thell exploded. “Kale, that crowd was about to riot! How can you say any of that?”

                Kale dodged a donkey cart. The two were making their way out of the market. “You’re exaggerating,” he said. “The crowd was willing to listen to his ideas till he spoke against our King.”

                “That’s not what I saw!” Thell shouted angrily. “I saw a crowd that was willing to do anything. Your idealism becomes naivety, Kale, when it reaches the point where faith in others blinds you from seeing them as capable of wrong!”

                Kale stopped walking and looked at Thell pityingly. The stream of people flowed around them. A hawker cursed as he stumbled into Kale’s heels, nearly dropping his baskets. Thell rolled her eyes.

                “Kale, don’t start-”

                “It must be hard, when everything reminds you of Shillarine. But I can promise: that won’t happen here. Telenine is different.”

                “Poor little refugee, that’s all I am, isn’t it? That defines how you see me. It’s just as bad as being called a pagan Shill by that spice-seller. I don’t want pity! This city can burn to ashes for all I care.” She stomped away.

                “I’ll see you at the feast!” he called after her, unworried by her anger. Thell’s fiery temper often made her like this.

Kale sauntered down the street, enjoying the feeling of being part of his city. Warm sun massaged his back, and the strains of a lute touched his hearing. There was no place he loved or believed in more than Telenine, with its ideals and its promise. City of a thousand towers, it was called, blessed by the gods themselves.

But in the back of his mind, Kale was uneasy, and not only because of the testing that evening. He recalled words from a history of Shillarine’s demise:

“There is nothing more dangerous than a crowd driven by fear, driven by hatred, or driven by an idea. Especially an idea not fully understood.”
Those words would prove prophetic.