Even as he spoke she saw, across the heads in front of her, a tryzatt appear from the left, walking slowly yet somehow tensely and impatiently up the center of the paved thoroughfare. Behind him came perhaps a dozen soldiers, spaced out on either side and carrying not spears, but leather whips coiled in their hands. They looked harassed and stretched to the limit, as men might look after hours spent in policing a plague-stricken town or struggling to bring home a leaking boat in bad weather. Their dust-grimed faces were streaked with sweat. They glanced continually this way and that and from moment to moment one or another would fling out his arm, pointing quickly, or call a hasty warning to a companion.
Yet it was not at the tryzatt nor yet the soldiers that Maia stared aghast, but at those walking between them- if walking it could be called. Singly-in twos and threes- in huddling, flinching groups like driven animals-little by
little there came into view a dreadful procession. No wounded of a defeated army, stumbling from the battlefield, could have presented so terrible a sight. All were ragged, gray-faced, hollow-cheeked, staring about them either in deadly fear or else in a glazed, unseeing stupor of despair worse than any fear. Among them were a few women, one or two of whom might once have been attractive; and these, with their filthy faces, matted hair and look of exhausted misery, filled Maia with unspeakable anguish, so that she began to tremble and her head swam; so much worse they seemed than the rest, so much more a distorted travesty of what they must once have been. One man, tall and bony in his tatters, seemed to be attempting bravado, swaggering along alone and apparently trying to sing. As he came closer, however, it became plain that he was mad and virtually oblivious of his surroundings. Two more, as they limped forward, were supporting a woman between them and staggering from side to side. A fourth, with wrists chained together, was holding his hands in front of him and elbows to his sides, swaying in a kind of grotesque rhythm like a cripple trying to dance. Among them all-how many? Forty, fifty?-there was not one whom children would not have been terrified to see coming up a village street.
As they came on down the Sheldad, with its multi-colored shops and ornate, stylish buildings, the crowd on either side broke into jeering and brutal laughter. A tradesman, lifting the pole which he used for raising and lowering the pent-shutter of his shop, jabbed with it, over the shoulders of the soldiers, at the man who was trying to sing. Missiles showered upon the prisoners-garbage, broken pieces of wood, a stone or two, an old shoe, a dead rat. One who tripped and fell was pelted until the nearest soldier, with a kind of rough sympathy, pulled him to his feet and supported him for a few yards, so that his tormentors were obliged to desist. Over all the hubbub carried the sharp, intermittent voice of the tryzatt, looking over his shoulder and continually urging his men to keep the prisoners closed up and moving.
Maia, cowering in the jekzha, felt as though trapped in a nightmare. It was all she could do not to get out and run away. This kind of cruelty was entirely foreign to anything in her nature. The whipping of Meris had been altogether different-for one thing, those whom she considered her
superiors had been in deliberate control of it-from this unforeseen, frenetic, all-enveloping savagery. Intuitively she knew that these people were going to die. One had only to look at them: they could never come back from the place where they were. Some might well be close to death now: they looked it. Animals could not have suffered like this, for their owners, if only out of consideration for their own gain, would never have allowed animals to be treated half so badly.
And then, suddenly, she caught her breath; mouth open, hands pressed either side of her chin, rigid with incredulous, unspeakable horror; with a shock even beyond screaming. For it was Tharrin out there in the road: Thar-rin lurching, tottering, wild-eyed, a long streak of blood down one side of his face, dragging his feet in broken sandals, suddenly flinging up one arm and ducking away from nothing, from an anticipated missile that he had only imagined. For one long moment-as though to put her in no doubt-he turned his head and stared full at her, but with no more recognition than a crazed cat looking down from a burning roof. Never in her life had she seen so appalling a look on any human face. Even if it had not been Tharrin's, it would have been enough to put her beside herself.
After a white-how long?-they were gone, followed by a rag-tag of urchins running behind, shouting with glee. The crowd broke up, the jekzha moved on. They were turning into the Caravan Market before the jekzha-man realized that Maia was sobbing hysterically.
