The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

holding pens was not all that came drifting by on the breeze. There were other, equally unsavory smells—the stench of the leather-workers’ vats, the effluvium of the glue-makers’ pots, the pong of garbage- and dung-collectors’ heaps. Fortunately there was something of a real current of moving air here, and it ran crossways to the road; as soon as they were out of the immediate area, the worst of the smell faded, diluted by distance.
    But now the slaughterhouse odor gave way to new odors, or rather, older ones. Nightingale winced and tried to barricade herself against a stench that was both physical and mental. Her stomach heaved, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.
    Mighty God. Even animals wouldn’t live like this. Even flies wouldn’t live like this! And why does the Church allow this? There is a question for you!
    Only the poorest would live here, so near the slaughterhouses and the dreadful stench, the flies, and the disease—and the tenement houses lining the road bore ample testament to the poverty, both monetary and spiritual, of those living within. The houses themselves leaned against each other, dilapidated constructions that a good wind would surely send tumbling to the street. Drunken men and women both, wrapped in so many layers of rags and dirt it was hard to tell what sex they were, lay in the alleys and leaned against the houses. Filthy children crowded the front stoops, big bellies scarcely covered by the rags they wore, scrawny limbs showing that those bellies were the sign of malnourishment and not of overeating. They, too, lay about listlessly on the steps, or sat and watched the passing traffic, too tired from lack of food to play. The scream of hungry babies joined the sound of commerce on the road; Nightingale resolutely closed her ears to other sounds, of quarrels and blows, of weeping and hopelessness. This was new; poverty was always part of a city, but never starvation, not like this. It was one more evidence of King Theovere’s neglect, even here, in the heart of his own land and city.
    I can’t do anything about this — at least, I can’t do more than I’m already planning to do. I can recruit some of my children from these — I can feed as many as my purse will permit. She salved her conscience with that; there was too much here for even every Gypsy of every clan to correct.
    She sighed with relief as more and sturdier buildings took the place of the tenements. More warehouses, mills for cloth, flour and lumber—and something that Nightingale had never seen at firsthand among humans before, although she was familiar enough with the Deliambren version, which they called “manufactories.”
    Here, in enormous buildings, people made things—but not in the way they were accustomed to make them in villages and towns elsewhere. People made things together; each person performed a single task in the many stages of building something, then passed the object on to the next person, who performed another task, and so on until the object was completed. Every example was like every other example; every chair looked like every other chair, for instance, and every pair of trews like every other pair of trews. The system worked very well for the Deliambrens, but Nightingale was of two minds about it. It did mean made-goods were much cheaper; no one needed to be an expert in everything, and almost anyone could afford well-made trews or chairs or tea mugs. But it felt like there was no heart in such goods, and nothing to show that a tea mug was special . . .
    Ah, what do I know? I am a crofter of music, not of mugs — and I am sure there is still a demand for trews and chairs and mugs made by individuals. The system did the Deliambrens no harm; they took as much pleasure in life and crafting as any other being. Still—
    I would not like to work in such a place, but that does not mean that other folk would feel the same. Stop making judgments for others, Nightingale.
    The donkey