The Sea Peoples(41)
Deor nodded, settling the bowler on his head; it really didn’t look right for someone named Deor Godulfson. Toa swung the door open and Deor led them out; Pip followed, with Toa bringing up the rear. She approved of that. He had a sense for when he was being followed, and it had saved both their lives more than once.
Outside the sky was clear, and the little building they’d been in was shown to be a simple brick rectangle with a slate roof and Parks and Maintenance Department, Municipal Government of Greater New York in cast-iron letters above the door. It was mid-morning and they were on the south side of a broad treelined street, with a park to its north; over the tops of the elms there she could see a great triumphal arch. The city-rumble was there in the background, the familiar modern sounds of horses and wagons and carriages, thickly interspersed with the growling of motor vehicles like something out of an old storybook.
The traffic’s been blocked out of these streets, though, Pip thought.
She recognized the signs from occasions in Townsville City with her parents or grandfather, though this metropolis was vastly larger.
Parade or something else official.
The southern side where they stood was also a park, but you could tell that it was a newer one, and from the look of the rest of the neighborhood she suspected that buildings had been torn down to make room for it—the layout was a regular north-south grid, and the architecture of the blocks she could see was a curious mixture of busy-looking and sooty brick and newer, lighter-colored structures in a much more uniform neo-Classical style.
The flower-banks of the new park were very pretty—a blaze of forsythia and crocus and yellow daffodils, and the fountains raised skyward in graceful arcs, but the trees were new and smallish, the pathways still pristine, each of the blue and red bricks beneath their feet sharp-edged. A fairly dense crowd was scattered through the park, but they were obeying signs that read:
It Is Forbidden To Walk On The Grass.
And all focused on the ceremony going on in the center of the open space. The whole city block was enclosed by an ornate gilded iron railing about head-high on her, with a line of outward-leaning points in the shape of leaves and vines at the top, and broad paths met in the center of it like a Greek cross. Where they joined stood a small circular building of glistening white marble, topped by a shallow copper dome and surrounded by thickets of flowers. It stood on a six-foot circular platform of the same stone, worked in shallow relief with figures of robed and hooded women with their arms before their faces in a gesture of mourning. In front of the stairs was a sculptural group, three female figures in ancient Greek robes: one spinning out a thread, the second measuring it, and a third about to make a cut.
The Fates, she thought; even tense and looking for threats she could see it was fine work if you liked a naturalistic style.
Either the Fates, or the Sixth Form prefects at work.
Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was a tall sheet of worked bronze at the top of a graceful semicircular staircase. Each half of the door held a design of a pomegranate tree. A temporary speaker’s platform draped in the flags of the old . . .
Well, not so old in 1920, she thought.
. . . American republic stood behind the statues, with a group of dignitaries on it; all men of middle age or more, some in archaic-looking rigs of black cutaway coats and waistcoats and top-hats, some in elaborate military uniforms, both types she recognized from history books.
A regiment’s worth of cavalry was drawn up in a hollow square around the building, sitting their mounts silently with the sun bright on the pennants and the blades of their lances, which might account for the extremely orderly, not to mention silent, disposition of the crowd. None of them wore armor except for rather odd-looking brass helmets, polished and with horsehair crests, and they all had revolvers at their belts as well.
Their uniforms were blue with gold piping, elaborate with corded decoration, and their jackboots polished to a mirror sheen. Those were as nothing compared to the smaller group of cavalry around the speaker’s platform itself; hussars in tight red breeches that fastened up the outside seam with jet buttons, boots with gold tassels, short fur-edged midnight-blue jackets worn slung over one shoulder in the style of a cape, clasped with a woven-silver cord adorned with gold and silver braiding and several rows of multiple buttons. Under that was a dolman also decorated in braid, on their heads were tall fur busbies, and their embroidered saddlecloths had four long points. It all made the pictures she’d seen of the King-Emperor’s court in far Winchester look drab, or even the Pope’s in Badia.
Well-mounted, though, she thought.
The horses were long-legged hunter types, their coats gleaming with health and good grooming, the leather of saddles and tack as immaculate as the uniforms of the troopers. It was undoubtedly a ceremonial occasion, but the lancers and hussars looked as if they knew how to ride, at least. Being the granddaughter of Townsville’s Colonel meant she’d grown up around horse-soldiers. All the successor-states in Oz had plenty of empty country covered in grass.
But why lances and sabers, if they have working firearms here?
One thing that was familiar was the sonorous politician’s blather of the speechmaker delivered by one of the top-hatted dignitaries, at least in tone if not content.
“The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and village in the country. It remains to be seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided.”