CHAPTER III
THE KING JUDGES
Like the shape of a mighty wheel with four spokes was the plan of the city of Adlaz—or more like a circle drawn around the angles of a cross, the curved line of the outer boundary passing through the far-flung arms. Built in a long-ago time of perils and wars, Adlaz was a walled city, and its wall was both stout and high, and set with many castellated towers. It was also a very ancient wall, to which its moss-grown, weather-worn gray stones bore witness.
In all of the sweeping circumference of the outer wall, which enclosed some ten square miles of street and square, there were four breaks only, and those were protected by ponderous gates of bronze and guarded well by soldiers of the king. Those breaks were where the rim of the wheel met its four spokes. The wall was the rim. The spokes were four wide roadways, which ran east, west, north and south from the city's center. The hub of the wheel was a park or esplanade, fronted on all sides by magnificent buildings in which the colored rocks hewn from the Maeronican quarries were blended splendidly. In the very center towered the massive structure of the Temple of the Sun, built all of white marble, the tips of its hundred spires capped with solid gold.
Other and many streets were laid out in all directions within the angles of the four great avenues; but none was so wide as they by many feet. Within the wall dwelt nearly half a million souls, Maeronicans, if one named them from their country, but loving to call themselves the Children of Ad, after their city, which in turn drew its name from a certain mighty king, the time of whose rule was so lost in the mists of dim antiquity that he was little more than a tradition in the mouths of the people.
Across from the Temple of the Sun, and in the northeast angle of the arms of the cross, stood the palace of the kings of Maeronica, another immense pile of masonry, built also of a solid color, not dazzling white as was the marble of the house of the god, but the deep, rich red of granite porphyry. Back of the palace lay the barracks of the king's guard of half a thousand picked men, his stables, and the quarters of countless servants. In the southwest angle was the Place of Games—a hippodrome and circus, with an amphitheater of black basalt of an age and splendor that would not have shamed the proudest days of seven-hilled Rome itself, although its foundation stones were laid long before Remus leaped over his brother's wall.
Around the hub and extending to the wall were the homes of the Children of Ad—nobles, captains, rich idlers, merchants, money-lenders, and the common people. In latter years, since Adlaz, strong and triumphant, defied her enemies, it had been the pleasure of many of her wealthier sons to build their mansions beyond the sheltering wall of the city, and along the four splendid roadways stretched many a fair and wide estate. Such were those the prisoners from the fademes saw as their car was driven up the long, black road from the harbor in the mountain.
It was late afternoon, and the sun was casting his last slant rays over the distant mountain-rim, when the car was halted at the bronze gates of the western entrance to Adlaz. The red captain trotted his horse forward to parley with the captain of the gate-guard and explain why he led Brunar's horsemen, and who were these whom he brought with him to the city. That parleying was added to by one of the riders in steel. Whatever he told the gate-captain, it did not add to that worthy's esteem for the captives, for he favored them with an exceedingly evil look as they rode through his gates.
"Ugh-h," remarked Ensign Brooks, "I can't say that I care for that party. He has a lean and hungry look. Speaking of hunger, I wonder how soon we will get where we are going to, and whether it will be supper time when we get there. I could eat cat right now, I'm so near to starvation."
Oleric heard him and replied with a smile. "You shall eat soon, and of good fare. So much at the least I can promise."