The Crow Read Online Free PDF Page B

hawkers marching up and down, calling the virtues of their wares.
    There was a whole street of spice sellers, who sat behind their counters with bowls of precious ground spices before them, saffron and cardamom and whole nutmegs and cinnamon sticks; then you would turn the corner and find a street of shops full of songbirds and finches, fluttering in cages of copper wire. The next street was full of stalls with copper braziers that sold little tin cups of black coffee and sweet honey-filled cakes and hot bean pastries. Jugglers and minstrels plied their trades for the gossiping customers.
    Hem stared, amazed at the ordered chaos of Turbansk, his nostrils flaring. The streets were aromatic with spices from the hawkers' stalls and everyone, men and women, wore musky perfumes. As the heat of the day increased, the perfumes merged with other, earthier smells – rotting vegetables and sweat and waste – so that Hem felt faint, as if he were drugged in some sweet stupor, moving through a constantly changing hallucination.
    The people of Turbansk took great pleasure in personal adornment; at first Hem thought everyone in Turbansk must be fabulously wealthy, for he saw no one who did not wear golden earrings or bracelets or some intricately fashioned brooch. Later he knew that those who were poor wore trinkets of brass, with glass jewels; but to Hem they seemed no less beautiful than emeralds and gold. Nothing had prepared him for the rich colors and ceaseless movement, the countless men and women and children who moved with unerring grace through the teeming streets. To his astonishment, he saw no beggars: they had been everywhere in Edinur. He turned and asked Saliman if they had been banished from the city, and Saliman laughed.
    "Nay, Hem, here the Light does its work. No one goes hungry in Turbansk," he said.
    Hem mulled this over in silence. "Then won't people get lazy?" he said at last.
    Saliman gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean?"
    "If they don't have to work for food, I mean."
    Saliman stared ahead for a moment, as if revolving thoughts in his head. "If a person doesn't want to work, that is their loss," he said at last. "To make things, to care for what one loves, to earn one's place in the city, that is one of life's great pleasures. It is not a Bard's business to tell people what to do: if they are hungry and ask for food, we give them something good to eat. We have plenty, after all. Then they are able to think what they might do best. If their best is sitting in the gardens watching the carp in the pools, then so be it."
    Hem blinked in surprise. It seemed wrong to him, simply to give food away for nothing.
    The city of Hem's daydreams so far surpassed them that his expectations had wavered like smoke and collapsed utterly. He scarcely remembered his first week there. It passed in a blur of unfamiliar voices and words and colors and smells: the fresh touch of linen sheets against his skin; the silken caress of his new robes; the tastes of the food, which flamed along his tongue, making him choke and gasp; the hundreds of faces he saw in the streets every day, each one a stranger. Although Hem wasn't afraid, this sudden profusion of sensation induced something very like panic. In the midst of his confusion the only still point was Saliman, who – perceiving the chaos of Hem's mind – for that first week took him everywhere. Hem haunted Saliman's footsteps like a little dog, never less than three paces behind him, as if he were the one rock in a turbulent and threatening world.
    But in seven days the world stopped whirling and settled down, and Hem began to find his bearings. He was instated into the School of Turbansk as a minor Bard and now wore on his breast a brooch in the shape of a golden sun, the token of a Bard of Turbansk. Saliman told him to keep the medallion of Pellinor – the precious token from his babyhood, which was the only thing he possessed of his family's heritage – in a cloth bag that he