The Purpose of Miss Shepley

Chapter Thirteen

Clown

I have a riddle. What do you get when you breed a wyrm with a wolf and a raven?

Duke

I do not know.

Clown

A Northerner!

Duke

Ha ha ha

Clown

I have another for you. What do you get when you breed a wyrm with a wolf and a raven and a sheep?

Duke

A shepherd?

Clown

Ah, very close! The correct answer is: a Northerns lord!

(excerpt, Tales for Children, as performed by The Farport Puppeteer Troupe)

.:.

It took twelve days, but, at last, we came to Farport.

Doctor Brown had described a place crowded, loud, and curiously unnatural. I did not expect to particularly like this, and my expectations were not disappointed. In truth, I thought Doctor Brown had rather understated things. Farport was, in short, perfectly horrible.

It was a modern city built round an old city, far more like the Southlands than the Northerns in its character, though it, too, had been carved out of the Wolfmarch after the Great War. Indeed, Farport had been the subject of bitterest dispute when the peoples drew up the terms of the Peacetroth -- the only point more contentious was Albord Baelric's insistence that the Folk should never again have their own king.

The Wolves argued, quite rightfully, that they had been more than generous in creating the Northerns, but the Folk of Farport complained that they had made lives there, raised up children, who'd known no other home...

In the end, the Wolves had relented, but only after stipulating that Farport should never grow one inch beyond its existing walls. Now that the Wolves were gone, the city was stretching itself, at last.

We passed, first, through a ring of new timber buildings, strung like dull brown beads on long straight streets. They were very plain things, tall and rectangular, with rectangular windows and rectangular doors, and identical saplings planted in front of each one.

We passed thirty or forty such houses, and then the otherwise unrelenting pattern of window sapling door was disrupted by a towering evergreen, too great and too beautiful to be cut down, I supposed. Half a dozen children crowded under it, playing games and hanging from its lower branches. They squealed and laughed no less than any child could, but they still seemed rather pathetic to me, penned up in these crowded lanes, round this one tree... My lambs had more liberty.

We came to the walls of the old city and the North Gate -- a heavy iron thing long since rusted open. There, we were obliged to wait for about two hundred of the Lord Regent's soldiers to get out of the way.

They marched in and out of the gate, clearly performing an exercise of some sort. The soldiers all looked very fine with their blue coats and their black muskets, but they were young men -- I doubted many were older than eighteen -- and their maneuvers were sloppy. Their commander whistled to them, like a shepherd whistled to his dogs, and they would turn left or halt or take aim, but they often bumped into each other or turned the wrong way first.

At length, they moved on, and we entered the Old City. This was all brick and stone, disorderly and cramped. Row upon row of windows and doors spread as far as the eye could see, with hardly a green leaf anywhere, save a few rectangular lawns and brutally pollarded trees. The air reeked of dung and smoke and damp rot, and it was gray... Gray, gray, gray -- gray walls lined up on gray streets under almost a ceiling of gray clouds.