Ydlbert poured us milk from the bucket. “The new carts are too wide to fit through the city gates, and we had to carry the vegetables on our backs.”
“Monkeys, all,” Anya said, though we knew monkeys only from my brother’s stories of abroad.
“It was dreadful, wife.”
“Now you know what it’s like to trudge about with seven bairns inside you,” she said, and stood up to check the smaller children’s placement in their hammocks.
Ydlbert ladled more porridge into our wooden bowls. “We have to do something about that gate, is all,” he said.
“Cast a spell?”
“Talk to the Archduke.”
When I arose the next morning at sunup, Ydlbert was crouched on my stoop, holding a baked potato, that miraculous and most nourishing food my brother so providentially brought back with him from the Beyond, for warmth. The dog eyed his provisions greedily. “For the sake of the Lord God,” I said, “you can come in, man.”
“No time,” he said.
“We’ve got hot porridge, and some fine pickles.”
“And no time to eat it. This matter cannot wait.”
I wrapped myself up in my warmest garments, and we detoured up the side path to fetch my brother from his simple hut. We found him cutting back the dead vines in his winter arbor. Mandrik was the only man in the village besides myself and Father Stanislaus who could write, and had a fairer hand than I for drafting a petition. Besides, if nothing else, good luck followed him like the stink follows a stuffed cabbage; and he brought along his psaltery, and sang a song of his own devising to while away the walking time and to ease our restless spirits.
We can’t fit our carts
Through the city gates.
No, we can’t fit our carts
Through the city gates.
But we gone petition the Archduke
Before it gets too late.
Now, Ydlbert and Yves,
They don’t believe in what I write.
“Yes, we do, brother,” I interjected, to which Ydlbert appended, “Amen.”
Yes, they doubt me like Thomas,
They don’t thinks I’m all right.
Just wait until we reach the castle
And everything’s gonna be out of sight.
Despite Mandrik’s optimism, we knew we had no chance of being admitted to his Urbanity’s presence. What was he to do—accept petitions from every bumpkin farmer who came urgently to seek his counsel? No, we would leave our letter, beautifully penned in fine black ink by my brother, with our humble entreaties for kindness and mercy.
The Archduke’s castle stood sentinel over the southern half of the town. As we approached from the west, its crenellated towers loomed over the walls, theoretically protecting them from barbarian invaders, though, for one thing, Nnms had never been invaded, and, for another, if I were a barbarian, a place with good masonry would be my choicest choice for attack. None of us had ever been to the castle—the Archduke sent his red-liveried men around the village whenever he needed anything—though its towers were all we could see, except the steeple of the church, over the walls.
Once inside we did not turn, as was our custom, toward the sanctuary, but south, toward the Archduke’s castle. As soon as we left our familiar path, however, we became disoriented. This was an ordinary occurrence in the city; the streets were so narrow and wound so tight that it was impossible to know where one stood, and since they shifted every time someone burnt down his forge or added a new room to his home, they were never the same two weeks in a row. At least in the winter the stench was less pronounced. Ordinarily I carried my south-pointer, but in the hurry to get to my brother and to town, I had forgotten it. At each turn we were thwarted by walls, laundry lines, slop piles, archways, and dark stairs rising toward invisible heights. Before long we were lost utterly. Mandrik handed Ydlbert the psaltery and turned in a slow, patient circle, snapping his middle fingers against his thumbs.
“What are you doing?” Ydlbert asked, stomping his feet in his worn shoes. Not having grown up in the same household, he had less tolerance, I suppose, for my brother’s divining tricks.
Long way to go,
Can’t see the towers from here.
Lost our way, Lord,
Can’t see the towers from here.
But one itty-bitty sign, Lord,
Makes the True Pathway clear.
He stopped snapping and held his arms at his sides. Then he turned back the way we’d come, saying, “It’s that way.”
Ydlbert rolled his eyes. “How do you know?”
Mandrik shrugged. “Give me back my psaltery before I lose my temper.”
Ydlbert handed it to him and cast me a sidelong glance.
Mandrik hummed to himself and led us down a few blind alleys, but before long brought us to the Archduke’s gate, narrower than the town’s, and the only opening in the sloping granite wall surrounding his demesne. The guards, identical in height and accent, and shivering in their silken livery of ruby hue, were surprisingly courteous once we showed them our petition, and they summoned us across the vast courtyard to the door.
As we had imagined, we were not to be admitted to the presence of the Archduke, but we were shown to the impatient attaché, who was clad in flowing black silks and stood tapping his narrow-toed shoes and fingering his shiny mustache. Mandrik smiled, bowed, and so charmed the attaché that, despite his nervousness, he allowed us to present the skeleton of our case aloud, and with feeling. Mandrik sang this petty functionary only a short snippet of song:
We love the Archduke,
He’s our mainest man.
Yes, we dig him deeply,
He’s the mainest, mainest, mainest man.
(Skeet a deedly deedly doo doo doo-ah)
And if he’d widen up the West Gate,
We’d serve him the best we can.
By the end of the verse, the attaché had tears in his blue eyes, and daubed at them with a black lace-edged handkerchief before applauding my brother’s song. Calling out, “Bravo! Bis! Bis!” he accepted the petition with a show of grace. I used my walking stick to draw a diagram for a wider gate on the ground, and I explained, in the best words I could muster, that, while in our interests, the new gate would also serve the town. “Oh, absolutely,” said the attaché, really quite overcome with feeling. “I have never received a petition so worthy of the Archduke’s attention. Rest assured that I will relay it to his Urbanity. Do take his and my warmest wishes back to your countrymen.” He gave us a skin of wine to ease our journey home.
Ydlbert and I drank the wine on the road, and arrived at Mandrik’s hut stone-drunk. All three of us slept around the fire on his bare dirt floor, but when Ydlbert and I returned to our families in the morning, we were more flush with the good news than with the morning chill and the previous night’s debauchery.
The next Market Day, when we headed back with our awkward carts and our tarpaulins, we saw hazy dark smoke on the horizon; it was clear, even from a distance, that something was afire. When we reached the city, we saw that the gate had been widened by twice the length of a man’s arm. The squalid row of tenements