To Conquer Chaos Read Online Free PDF Page B

second and final blast, and dashed across the bridge as the hornman also was crossing. He felt the swinging sack bump Waygan on the arm.
    “You!” Waygan said. “Might I not have known?”
    Conrad didn’t answer. He lowered his sack while recovering his breath. In the shadows men tugged on ropes, and the drawbridge rose creaking to the vertical. On its underside it bore foot-long spikes of wood sheathed with copper, which faced any oncoming thing with a virtually unclimbable obstacle.
    “Did you fall asleep over your soap-cooking, stewboy?” Waygan went on. “You look as though you’d have done well to use some of your produce on yourself.”
    “If you’re so clever,” Conrad retorted, “let me see you work all day with grease and wood-ash and come home spotless!”
    “Hah!” Waygan slapped his horn, making it give out a hollow boom. “So you’re ‘working all day’ now, are you? What news! We’ll have to take care that Lagwich isn’t buried under a mountain of soap, shan’t we? No, wait—wait! Don’t be in such a hurry to leave me. While I see you before me, let me tell you not to go and plague the foreigners while they’re here, is that understood? It was bad enough that they should have met you first, instead of someone who could give them a favourable impression of the town. Don’t show your dirty face near them again!”
    Conrad jerked his sack on his shoulder again and trudged up the narrow alley away from the gate. He was fuming with rage. He was too used to being disappointed to have thought much about it during the afternoon, but it would have been pleasant to gain some reflected glory from guiding the strangers into the town and taking them to the wise men. And Waygan had done him out of even that meagre reward.
    What was going to become of him? Almost everyone mocked him, and he didn’t see it was his own fault. Possibly it was because his father was as he was, but to shift blame on to a sick man seemed unfair …
    He was getting near home when there was a clatter of running footsteps ahead. By reflex he drew into a shadowed doorway; that sounded like a gang of youths, and sometimes he had been set upon. The youths halted in front of a nearby house and shouted for a friend to come down to them.
    “Come and see the foreigners!” they cried. “Up at Malling’s house! Come and look!”
    Immediately shutters flew open on all sides, and not only the friend they were calling for but many other people poured into the street, pulling coats about them. Conrad hesitated. That Yanderman—he’d seemed pleasant enough, and polite to Conrad despite his appearance. Perhaps even now there might be the chance of a word of thanks for his help, to make the townsfolk think twice before mocking him again.
    He made up his mind, and followed the crowd at a discreet distance.

    Malling was the oldest of the wise men, and his house was one of the five reserved for holders of the office and sited within the stone wall of the fort at the top of the town. The great courtyard was thick with people struggling to get near the house-door where the watchman Gelbay stood with his staff, belabouring the over-eager and ordering them to stand clear.
    Conrad was about to try and work his way through the press when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and he turned, heart sinking, to look into a gap-toothed face.
    “Why, it’s my useless son, may the things take him to the barrenland!” said his father in a rasping voice. “What d’you think you’re doing here? Get home, you lazy rascal!”
    “Why should I?” Conrad said, jerking free. “Wasn’t I the one who showed the strangers the way to the town?”
    “Oh, hark at the proud cockerel!” his father sneered. “I tell you to go, and that’s reason enough.”
    “When did they let you out of the pillory?” Conrad said, astonished at his own boldness. “Your breath is rank as a privy with the stink of sour beer.”
    His father’s face twisted with wild anger.