The Bronze of Eddarta by Randall Garrett Page B

take a few deep breaths, and began to walk toward the boulevard that would take me up the hill to Lord City.

9
    It’s a little-known fact of life that, now and then, the odds
have
to turn in your favor. It might have been the warm feeling I carried away from Tarani, or it might have been the adrenaline surge of finally, after all this time, reaching the point of action—but I felt good about that short-notice plan as I climbed the zigzag avenue toward Lord City. I had a feeling things were going to work out right, for a change.
    It was still pretty early in the day, and I walked up with a column of burdened wagons, dragged along by unhappy vleks. I looked back once or twice and was impressed, again, by the advantage the walled city would have in battle. This place had been built by frightened men hundreds of generations ago, and they had legalized and bequeathed their paranoia to its present occupants.
    It seemed odd that any such unbalanced system could have survived for so long, but Gandalara was a world that changed slowly. Innovations had been made—the Gandalarans had a remarkably efficient economy and a respectable technology, hampered as they were by their lack of elemental iron. But they had an extra weight entrenching the natural conservatism of people who always feel the tentative balance of their survival. The All-Mind.
    It wasn’t just the “older generation” who set up the rules in Gandalara. It was the memory and experience of all previous generations—and that was a tough opponent to beat down. Gandalarans had struck a compromise between the need for change and the need for stability. Trades were family property, passed along from one generation to the next, so that improvements in irrigation techniques or the sand/ash mixture for glass were preserved each step of the way. Eddarta was the first place I had been in which each person was so strictly limited to his own trade; it reduced prideful occupations to the status of assembly-line construction.
    Eddarta had another unique quality—the people of Eddarta used their river for transport of cargo and only cargo. There wasn’t even a Gandalaran word to imply a
person
floating on water. Tarani and I had seen miles and miles of thick rope stretched along the riverbanks on our way toward the city. Vleks were tied to that line, and small, shallow-draft barges were tied to the vleks and hauled along. There was usually one person on the riverbank with a rear guiderope, and sometimes two or three other people with poles to keep the barge from beaching itself in the reedy growth along the banks.
    The traveled areas of the river had their banks trimmed of the whitish reeds that grew taller than men, and the reed harvest served the secondary function of providing building material for the rafts. Bundles of reeds were cut, then bound tightly together. The open ends of the reeds were sealed somehow to create a long, floating log. Several logs, lashed together, made a raft.
    We had seen such rafts hauling stuff upstream and controlling speed downstream—only on the smoothest, slowest stretches of water. A few yards of rapids called for wagon transport beside the river until the current calmed down again.
    A series of those rafts operated on the branch of the Tashal which flowed through Lord City. I saw two stone archways as I approached the high walls. One admitted only people; the other admitted cargo. The wagons which had toiled up the slope were unloaded onto rafts, and the goods were taken inside by Lord City boatmen, who were dealing with faster current, here, than I had seen out in the country—the cataracts above and below the city kept the water moving pretty fast. To counteract the speed of the current, the Lord City boatmen had contrived a pretty complicated two-bank system.
    One vlek team did the primary work of hauling, while the team on the opposite bank kept the raft aligned properly. Both banks had two levels of pathways, so that while one set of