A scratching trumpet blast made Carnelian whisk round. One of the Masters was looking up to the leftway. The trumpet shrieked louder, closer, and one of the gatehouse towers answered it with a clanging bell. When the air stopped reverberating other bells could be heard sounding from the further reaches of the Wheel.
Carnelian saw the messenger flashing past above. He searched the black huddles of the other Masters for some reaction. One of them was making signs clumsied by his gloves,… as expected. She will soon know… we are somewhere in the Wheel.
The gatehouses loomed up on either side. A double arch passed a leftway between them. One of the inner walls was snagging sunlight. Carnelian held the edges of his cowl and craned up to see that the gatehouse was sheathed with brass almost to the top. He was aghast at such profligate use of metal. The sun smouldered the wrought surface. Ledges trapped blue from the sky. Carnelian could not at first believe there could be so much metal in the world. Faces in the brass were larger than wagons, with eyes like wheels. Only when he saw the hinges, and the rollers as tall as men that lined its lower edge, did he realize that it was a gate.
He looked away and saw his wonder on other faces, but there was only fear on the faces of the Marula. They reminded him of his own misery and of the danger. The sun beat full upon their sweat-gleamed faces as they looked fixedly at Osrakum's dark wall. The focus of their terror was plain to see. Off a little to the left, the Wheel squeezed the slurry of its crowds into the funnelling canyon. Standing flanking that funnel throat were the guardians, the two Gods of the Masters, each a quarter of the height of the mountainous Sacred Wall.
Beyond the towers the carriageway fanned out to meet a cordon of toll posts. They had to wait their turn. Holding their billhooks upright, the toll-keepers looked out from under conic wooden helmets into which the five dots of the quincunx were inlaid in bone. Their leather jerkins bore the glyphs of gate and sea.
Aurum sent a Maruli forward to drop a pouch into a toll-keeper's hand. The black man then leaned back to take in the whole of their party with a gesture. Nodding, the toll-keeper emptied the pouch out and began to count the bronze, double-faced coins off against the Marula and then the Masters. While he was doing this, one of his companions nudged him and pointed up at the Maruli. The black man's face was slick with fear. The toll-keepers narrowed their eyes and began shouting at the Maruli, gesturing with their billhooks that he should dismount. The man looked back at the Masters, begging instruction; his brothers' lance blades were lifting. The billhooks were now clattering against the Maruli's saddle-chair. 'Get down!' cried one of the soldiers.
The Maruli's aquar sank to the ground and he was dragged out of the chair groaning. More toll-keepers had come up. One was barking questions. Hunched, the
Maruli slapped the man back only to find the billhooks shaking around his head. The Marula around Carnelian were growling. Nervously, he scanned the crowd beyond the toll cordon.
Aurum surged forward. The toll-keepers drew back from him, their billhooks lifting like cobras. Aurum's glove beckoned one. The man came reluctantly. The Master leant over and opened a slit in his cowl so that the man could peer in. The man's face turned to clay. As he began sagging to his knees, Aurum grabbed the billhook to hold him up. They exchanged a mutter, then the toll-keeper fled back to the others who all began nodding, almost bowing as they opened up a way and let them pass through, between the posts of brass and into the roaring crowd.
They were forced to wait while some man-drawn carts rolled by, then they swam into the shifting currents of the Wheel. A tinker clinked kettles on a branched pole that looked like a tree flocked by earthenware birds. A party of northerners lumbered past on large-headed aquar, each saddle-chair holding three or four of them, skin marbled with dirt, matted hair pebbled with amber.
As the Marula thrust a way into each new current they looked back with questioning faces. Each time Aurum shook his shrouded head. At last they came to where a river of people was flowing along a black paved road. Aurum gave a nod and the Marula led them in.
Carnelian reeled in his father's aquar while all the time searching for enemies. They were in a soup at a rolling boil. Faces, hand-clasped bags and sacks and pouches, fruit-filled baskets, bubbled in and out of sight. Mottled beasts, some with feathers, some without, panniered, loaded, yoked to wagons, to chariots or swinging palanquins like soft humps. Painted eunuchs, women in gaggles, swaying on carried chairs, swollen with child, their menfolk trying to make way for their bellies. Toll-keepers rode through like lords at a fair. Merchants marshalled their caravans with whips and bellowing. Urchins ran weaving, screaming, playing hide and seek among the angling thickets of legs. The roar never ceased. The air was never free of the brisde of poles, the slap and billow of canopies, of swagging ropes. The ground rarely showed its slimy mush of peelings and feathers, of flowers and dung.
Tortuously, they worked their way round the Wheel on the black road and then, abrupdy, turned in towards its centre to climb a wide ramp. Through a gap in the crowd, Carnelian saw a snatch of its balustrade where an old woman sat amongst a rot of melon rinds, offering up trinkets, her toothless grin tracking passers-by.
At the summit of the ramp a roar of water drowned out the crowds. Over the balustrade Carnelian saw a wide channel thrashing white, rushing water round in a wide arc. The water spilled out from the channel all along its length into cisterns mobbed by people.
When he looked up he realized the whole vast mosaic of the Wheel was laid out around him. He twisted to look back. The gatehouses they had come through now looked smaller than his hand. Behind them was the irregular rim wall. He followed that round and found another pair of gatehouses at a greater distance, then round to another pair further still, and to where yet another gateway touched the edge of the canyon's mouth. Across on the canyon's other side he found one more gate that closed the ring. The quincunx cypher made sense to him. Not counting the way into the canyon, the Wheel had five gates in all.
The shadow of the Sacred Wall was still dulling colours over half the Wheel. Where the sun had reached, delicate patchwork stretched its hues off towards the moat. Far away it was stitched together from tiny lozenges, closer it resolved into neat rows of vendors sitting among their baskets and their blankets, green-heaped with herbs, and all manner of vegetables and fruit. Dark cuttings toothed the Wheel's rim showing where channels cut into it from the moat. A ring shearing in the human flow showed the road they had left. Inside that, the water channel and its cisterns formed a glittering circle. Six ramps crossed this. Five of them lay on one of the spokes that led to a pair of gatehouses. The sixth led to bridges over the moat and on into the canyon and the crater of Osrakum.
As they descended into the inner Wheel, Carnelian was beginning to believe they had managed to elude their attackers. He could hear music. Flags proclaimed the trades of the bonesmith, the featherer, the copper-beater. The weavers were there with their cottons, the pigmenters with their dyes. Lacquered boxes rather than baskets held every kind of precious commodity. One man was rolling out leathers rippled like water and another displaying cylinders of ivory as thick as his arms. Among them strolled buyers, their face tattoos proclaiming them the servants of the Masters. Behind them swung chests with their treasure of coined bronze.
The music of horns and cymbals was coming from somewhere up ahead. Carnelian tried to see round the riders blocking his view. They were nearing the ring of poles that he had seen from the ramp defining the hub of the Wheel. From each pole hung strange fruit. The fetor of decay swelled with the carnival music. Carnelian could see dancers cavorting between the poles, snaking yellow ribbons through the air. People were poking sticks into the things hanging from the poles. Squinting, he was appalled to see that they were men dangling in the air spread-eagled on diagonal crosses. As he came closer, Carnelian flinched away from one man's agonized face. A hawker was selling makeshift spears to his tormentors. Carnelian had to pass so close to the crucified man that he could smell his sweat and the excrement that streaked his legs.