Harness Chapter 2: Raised Up
By Michael Gernes
The scaffolding creaked around Orlondo as he climbed its steps. It didn’t matter how lightly or firmly he set his feet. The chilly air within didn’t help with his shakes either. The brightly-painted drapery around the platform’s exterior hid him from the pale, overcast sunlight. It also hid him from the plaza’s crowd, but he still heard their waiting clamor outside, rising as the herald on the podium above addressed them.
Finally, he emerged. He willed himself up the last step, through the platform’s opening, and into the open breeze. As he did, high, brassy clarions sounded on both sides of him. Then the herald resumed with her bellowing introduction, and his trembles rippled all the way from his fingers up his sides.
“And so, both Lordship Councils of Premonta desire this honest guildmember—” the woman paused for a moment, squinting at the crowded document in her hands “Orlondo of Piccovila—to be a harness-bearer of our Republic. Shall one of your fellow citizens conduct this armor, Gatewatcher, in peace and in war?”
The crowd cheered. It had the volume of many throats, but Orlondo caught a guarded, compulsory note to it and his chest tightened. As he stepped toward the podium, he tugged at the emerald velvet sash the city clerks had hung on him below.
“Wave to them. Then bow. Before you lose them.” The herald hiss-whispered at Orlondo. So he did, a little stiffly, as he looked over the crowd for the first time.
They filled all of the Plaza of the Armory, even spilling out through the great archways at either end. Huge, considering they’d come for an artist’s assistant from no family. A master artisan of the guild, he corrected himself, for one whole week.
For a moment, his head swam, He had the sensation his body might pitch over the edge into that sea of faces. He recognized some of them—other apprentices from the street, bankers and cloth factors who’d patronized Solvi’s studio, an old priest he’d heard preach at the Temple of the Little Well once—but mostly they blended into anonymity. Like the muddy background figures of some huge fresco.
Many ate and drank as they gazed on. They plucked sweetmeats or filled their cups from baskets and kegs at the plaza’s edges. Orlondo nodded at the sight. Free food from the First Citizen always brought out a large crowd, whoever was on the platform. Especially now, with the war biting at everyone’s purse. A third of Premonta’s wheat had been sold off to southern towns facing siege; Ulria’s orchards were still smoking.
He remembered all the assembly days he’d been in the plaza to feed himself and watch some spectacle. How quickly the crowd grew bored. How frequently jostling had turned to brawling as heads buzzed. And how on some bad days, the crowd’s shoving could end in punches from spear butts, or even loosed crossbow bolts. The Councils paid their mercenaries to stop the city’s riots, not love its people.
A hand touched his shoulder and brought him back. He glanced behind him to see Delphia’s face beneath the brim of her helmet. He was glad she’d pressed Counselor Cante to place her among the Magistral Guard today. She wore a solemn expression, but her brown eyes were warm as she nodded her head toward the left end of the platform.
The herald had side-eyed him during his pause, but now she spoke again. “The Harness-Bearer must pledge fidelity before this armor can be invested with Premonta’s legacy.”
From the edge of the platform stepped a green-cloaked man in a towering bag-hat—the Standard-Bearer of the Republic. Orlondo struggled to remember this latest one’s name. One of Delphia’s soldiers was a half step behind, hoisting Premonta’s banner: a green hill flanked on either side by yellow lion-snap flowers. And lurking behind them, Orlondo spotted the lean figure of Cante himself.
Just try to follow along as you’re bid, Cante had told him earlier. The mob needs ceremony. Especially to swallow one of their own being raised.
Orlondo’s face had blazed at the word. I thought it was our Republic, Counselor? Isn’t it theirs too?
Cante’s jaw had tightened subtly before he smirked. One rise at a time. And will you still be down among them after today? Then he’d slipped out through the drapery.
From over his shoulder, Delphia whispered. “This is the part where you kneel.” So he did, dropping to a knee on the carpet atop the platform.
The herald resumed reading from her roll as the Standard-Bearer looked expectantly down at Orlondo. He suddenly remembered it was his oath to take and began to stumblingly repeat it. Most of the words fled his mind immediately, but he tried to hold onto some of the meaning. He knew he was expected to be loyal to Premonta; he’d lived within the city almost his whole life, so where else could he be loyal to?
He supposed he could obey the Republic’s officers. He didn’t know this Banner-Bearer, but he was sure the orders would really come from the First Citizen—and Cante. He’d already spent half his life obeying most of whatever Solvi told him to do.
But Orlondo paused for a beat when the herald came to the end: “I will fight Premonta’s enemies and not let them seize her heritage from my harness. I will not desert my service. Nor avoid my death for Premonta.” He opened his mouth as the moment stretched out.
When he’d taken his masters’ oath to the guild, he’d sworn to keep its secrets and teach them only to accepted apprentices. But that was on pain of fines, or exile from his craft. Now he thought of a painted panel he’d seen in the Little Well of a torn, bleeding martyr.
Orlondo focused again as a pair of robed oblates knelt to lower a litter with a large, velvet-draped coffer before him. The crowd grew hushed.
Cante peered at Orlondo from behind the Standard Bearer’s shoulder, his thin brows lowering over his ink-dark eyes.
Orlondo had never been this close to a fragment of the city’s plinth before. Let alone past the Hollow Tower’s barred gates, where its ancient remnant sat. But he knew a platter-sized section lay beneath the box’s lid, waiting to be interred in Gatewatcher’s reliquary. Cante had said it was the largest carving from the plinth in forty years.
The herald hemmed audibly and darted her eyes to the box, prompting Orlondo again. Then he quietly repeated her words, finishing more loudly: “I swear these vows upon this sacred stone of Premonta, in sight of the Divine Well, and the God Beyond it.”
Finally, Orlondo placed his hand over the box, and immediately felt an odd flicker-pricking where his fingers rested on the velvet. The sensation flowed up his forearm and his muscles twitched as it moved across them. In a blink, his arm was limned in a flickering trail of green fire. For a moment, he wondered at its coldness. Then he squeezed his eyes shut as pain and images flooded his head. Tears welled up, and he was many places at once: down among rain-splashed cobbles; looking over a red-roofed city and its golden countryside, as if from a mountainside; deep in a stone shaft as the last sunlight sank over the lip above. It all fled quickly, but as he blinked, the image of the green flame remained.
The Standard-Bearer nodded and finally spoke. “You are so sworn. The stone has marked you. And you, by your deeds, may mark it. Remember always: the Republic rewards bravery with honors, treachery with vengeance.”
As Orlondo drew his hand back, a shiver rolled down from behind his neck. His thighs were stiff from kneeling. As he rose, pain and dizziness nearly dropped him back, but he felt steely fingers grip under his left arm to help.
Delphia laugh-whispered to him. “My father said he nearly stained his linen when he was harness-bound. You did well enough.”
“You can tell me what you saw later.” She beamed, gesturing around the plaza. “For now, how does it feel to be cheered by all of your city?”
Orlondo surveyed the crowd again. The groundlings were shouting. More gladly this time. But above the plaza, silken-gowned figures stood silent and glaring among the balconies of the highest towerhouses.
“Not all of my city.” He frowned.
———
After the oathswearing, Orlondo waited for nearly a quarter of an hour, alone among the platform’s activity. The harness stood facing the crowd, its waist level with the platform’s left end. Not far above him, the reliquary hung from the plackart’s backside, its surface covered in precious ornamentation and colored glass. It was odd seeing his work again like this, but he resisted the urge to touch the silver foil he’d worked himself.
Orlondo watched as a semicircle of oblate brothers and sisters stood robed around him, chanting their prayers over the plinth box. Through it all, the crowd wolfed, guzzled, or gossiped. He watched them too, aware of their distance.
When he’d finally said yes to Cante’s offer, becoming a master had seemed a reason to risk whatever the counselor had in store. Ever since he’d been apprenticed, it had been the awaited prize. But the others he’d seen raised had seemed somehow more completed by it, and they’d eagerly planned their mastership pieces for years.
The guild had simply nodded him in over his book (and Cante’s word). But it wasn’t the illustrations alone that he’d poured himself into over the last year, eager to sketch each new play. It was the fighting.
The way he’d gone from slow and stumbling in Delphia’s armor to aware and faster. The way a little crowd had gathered around the yard as their matches had steadily gotten better. The way he’d angled his limbs to strike over her shield, lens-focused and unburdened by thought all at once.
And it was the way he felt like he could be more. More than when he’d run on those days the shoving in the plaza had turned to fighting—then screaming, as blood ran in the cobbles. More than just a painter’s apprentice, hiding from hard-eyed men in armor.
Maybe more in others’ sight, too. Even hers.
Finally, the chanting stopped, and all eyes on the platform turned toward him. He tried not to shiver as the wind suddenly gusted.
Below the reliquary, the oblates swung two great, curving culet plates open on hinges, exposing the darkened interior of the harness. Orlondo stepped toward the opening, and a murmur built through the crowd below. He cast a glance at the pair of slender, youthful pages following him, then stooped to step inside.
He squeezed past the massively timbered inner framework of the chest, then laid a hand upon a beam to steady himself and stand upon a planked platform within the space. He could barely see anything until the first page slid a handbill-sized inner plate aside on its rails, letting air and light within. The second page carried a slim, cylindrical lantern that threw dull reflections off the roughly-planished interior steel of the chest. Both youths slipped in around him, their size allowing them to slide between the frame and the curving, articulated plates.
The lantern holder suspended her light from a cord and looked at Orlondo, expectantly. The other page, a sandy-haired boy, spoke. “Uh, Master Orlondo, you must step onto the loom.” His title still felt jarring.
The first page reached around Orlondo’s sides, swinging a pair of hinged, pulley-block armatures into place along his arms. The second page swung a similar pair into place behind Orlondo’s legs. Cunning joints suspended each armature, while allowing multiple thick cables to run through the channels of its blocks. Each armature connected at swivelling joints to the solid, hardwood panel that hung down behind him like the back of some great chair without a seat. The cables continued from each armature's leading end, strung taught to pass through a receiving block and into the gearing mechanisms of Gatewatcher’s closest limb. It reminded Orlondo a little of the ships’ rigging he’d sketched at the Riverport for a time, but vastly more intricate.
Orlondo stepped up to place his booted feet on the wooden, sandal-like platform of each leg armature, resting the backs of his legs on thin, leather cushions. Then, he placed his arms along their armatures, inserting his hands into the gloves of an articulated gauntlet attached to the end of each arm, similar to those on Delphia’s foot harness. Finally, he gingerly placed his head within a gesso-hardened, cradling leather helmet suspended from its own armature.
The pages hurriedly set to work, strapping each of his extremities to its array. Then they began attaching lacing cords to the arming points of Orlondo’s thickly quilted cap, doublet, and hose—knitting him to smaller cords running through the blocks. It reminded him of donning Delphia’s armor, but he could scarcely imagine doing any of this for himself. Nor could he move his limbs yet once they were done.
After another quarter-hour, the space had heated up from the confinement of their breath and bodies, so much that Orlondo felt sweat trickling under his cap and within his garments. His head throbbed a little in the heat. Finally, after tugging on a few points, the girl page announced: “You’re ready. The invocation is said.” Her companion nodded and pulled fabric covers from a series of leather-bound frames bolted to the inward curve of the cuirass, revealing large, upward angled mirrors.
Looking into the mirror in front of him, Orlondo saw not his face, but the upper floors of the plaza’s buildings, and the towers of the city walls beyond. Although he knew the image bounced along from the finely-ground Lagoon lens in Gatewatcher’s great helm above, his head still swam a little.
The pages squirmed past him to exit. A little later, he heard a hollow thump, and knew they’d closed the rear plates. You won’t be able to move until they strike the plinth, Delphia had told him. So he waited. From somewhere outside, he heard a brief hush descend on the milling crowd. In its place, the plainsong chant rose higher behind him, carried even through the plates of the harness.
Then he felt another impact, like the thrum from someone striking a bell just behind his head. But he felt it deep within himself, as if his gut had turned to water. It set his teeth on edge and prickled along his skin again, like a saw dragged across metal. And he tasted it, bitter as the iron in blood, but tinged with hints of countless sweet and sour flavors too.
They’d sealed the plinth fragment into the reliquary, he knew. His head and limbs felt featherlight, like a memory of his boyhood fevers.
The thrumming sensation was duller now and receding, but Orlondo felt it course through him down to the tips of his fingers and toes. He brought his right hand up in front of his face, the armature curling around it, the cables drawing tighter. In the mirror beyond, he could see the giant, articulated palm of Gatewatcher’s hand, and he flexed it into a fist.
He found he could swivel his head again. As he did, his vision whirled between the mirrors, sliding across a wide view of the plaza, taking in the throngs of Premonta’s citizenry below him.
They weren’t so quiet now. Orlondo heard a few shouts toward the back of the plaza, and saw a swirl of motion there. A swarm of people stood at the edge of the crowd, redfaced, shaking upended baskets at a taut line of Magistral Guard. A woman pointed at more piled, empty baskets, then at a clutch of children surrounding her.
To the left of the scene, other people were still lining up at the kegs. Enough of them were being served to glare over their cups at the growing quarrel.
Orlondo winced. He was supposed to take his first steps. The mob must see you take to the harness, Cante had told him. To assure them the Council are only half fools. That just requires a stroll; not a march. You’ll have days to drill beyond the gates later.
But the counselors had clearly let the food run out before the drink. And he saw the crowd’s faces turning away from the platform, toward the shouting.
Maybe he could still draw their attention back.
Orlondo placed his body’s weight on the small armature shelf below his left foot and raised his right leg to take a step. He heard the harness’ plates shift and groan against each other, and felt the resistance against his leg, as if all that vast weight around him was somehow suspended, allowing him to move it. As he put his foot down again to take his first stride, a thud vibrated through the plating, and he felt the harness’ foot slam down on the cobbles, the armature stiffening slightly as he did.
He rocked within his bindings, pitching his head forward slightly. His stomach dropped for an instant. He was carried along with the momentum, terrified the harness would continue tilting. He frantically glanced at the mirrors, as much to see the horizon as to check where the crowd was.
Some had whipped their heads back toward him at the harness’ noise. They looked up, eyes widening and struck quiet; but only those in the closest rows. Behind them, the crowd was shifting toward the left, backing off from the plaza center. A larger body of Guard were rushing into the plaza from the platform, pushing with levelled spear shafts to shift the crowd, and reach the back.
Gatewatcher’s rocking stopped, and Orlondo’s vision steadied. The harness settled into a balance. He breathed again, momentary relief washing up his chest and back. He also realized he’d forgotten about the little waterglass set below the mirrors. With a glance, he saw its painted float bobbing back toward level.
He hadn’t fallen. But that alone wouldn’t help things. He could hear the shouting rising through his window slit. It was angry, but with a growing edge of fright.
Orlondo twisted his torso within the loom’s armatures and swiveled his head back toward the platform. Gatewatcher twisted with him. Although the surface was at waist height to the harness, from Orlondo’s perspective he towered over the figures on it. Like figurines he might reach out to pluck off a shelf.
He searched the stage, hoping Delphia would be rushing down to steady the Guard. Instead he saw her facing the Banner-Bearer, her arms upturned, as if in a plea. The official was red-faced, holding her back and gesturing angrily out at the crowd. He couldn’t hear any of their exchange, but he had a guess.
Then his eyes fell on Cante. The counselor shook his head ruefully, watching the crowd under brows ridged in surprise, or maybe confirmation.
Obey the Republic’s officers. Orlondo thought. Well, what if I hear no orders?
He balanced on his right foot this time, and took his second step away from the scaffolding. He was ready for the rocking, and quashed his unease before it rose. Then he took another step.
He saw in his mirrors and window how his strides had brought him to loom over the crowd’s edge. The plaza was already parting. The crowd on one side, the Guard on the other. Some in the crowd had started hurling mugs across, to shatter on the cobblestones. Those in front scrambled against the mass behind. He saw a girl not much younger than himself stumble, almost falling underfoot. The mercenaries were snapping their spears to level, and pressing closer together to form ranks.
For a moment, Orlondo looked down over both groups through Gatewatcher’s huge lens. He was so close that the many shades of their faces were all lit in pale green. Cast by the reliquary’s arcing nimbus of light, he realized.
They stared back at him too, with widening, white eyes and creasing brows, or glowers under helmets.
Orlondo studied the space between the two sides. Then with his heart fluttering, he stepped into it, hoping he’d judged right. He felt the teetering as he stepped, and turned his back to the crowd. If he fell, his momentum would topple him over the ranked soldiery.
He didn’t. Instead, as Gatewatcher creaked to a stop, it was the Guard who backed away.
Then he saw the brass speaking trumpet mounted in front of his loom, jutting toward him. He craned his neck forward, grabbing it with his mouth. He blew an ugly, hooting blast across the plaza.
“Premontans,” He blurted into the horn, swiveling to face the crowd. “I’m grateful so many of you came. So many that you filled this plaza. So many you downed all the First Citizen’s gifts. Which I know is no easy thing.” He paused. He saw recognition in faces from the front rows, and heard a few ragged laughs, so at least some could hear him.
“So, it seems it’s time for us all to leave. Will you make a little way for me first? I will be right behind you.” He wondered if his words had carried far enough at first. But a loud murmuring rose and he was relieved to see nodding, even toward the back of the crowd.
He turned back to the other side. “Soldiers of the Guard. Your captains are over there, behind me. And Premonta’s banner will want an escort.”
After a pause, the soldiers raised their spears, and began filing back toward the scaffolding.
Orlondo exhaled quietly.
Then, the crowd started to move. They streamed out through the archways and alleys. Within a few minutes, the plaza had emptied enough for a path to open before him to the Way of the Gates.
Orlondo turned back to the platform again. He leaned forward, carefully, just enough to bow stiffly. Then, drawing a breath in and focusing on his balance, he strode after the people, toward the gates. Where he’d been meant to go.