The unicorn would bring life to all those who kissed it in the wisdom of denial. The unicorn gave life therefore to traitors. The rest would die and the dying would come hard, for giant Tasman jackals snarled in the pits where they were kept.

XIX

Urbicide may be as quick as a coronary

Or as painful as the cancer ward.

Some cities die very fast:

Hiroshima, Pompeii, Sodom.

Some cities die very slow:

Masada, Sparta, Dresden.

Ask Leningrad (which took 900 days to die) who was more blest.

They envied Nagasaki for her fireball from the West.

Urbicide became the fashion of the day. Killing lower Urbis was accomplished by a dozen knights who entered the tunnels of the underground near noon. A torch was set on oil-soaked leaves of poisonous root moss, and the smouldering fumes swirled and eddied through the labyrinth. The caverns became death chambers where old Singerians died in rags and children breathed their final breath. Mothers clasped infants and fell across them to shield them from the evil haze. There was no place or time to sing the one great melody for which they lived … and died.

Only those within a few steps of outside air survived, and as they staggered to the fresh clean air of day, each was clamped in chains and taken to the prison yards to await their sentencing.

Everyman and Anthem were spared the poisonous caverns of the underground. They had gone early in the day to sing in the construction camps where tradesmen labored with the quarried stones to move them into columns of the city’s latest temple. From every tunnel exit they heard the wailing of arrests. Lower Urbis died by nightfall.

Everyman and Anthem searched for someplace to wait the coming storm. They found a small forgotten park, grown up in weeds, that sheltered an old grotto in decay. They prayed in silence for their brothers in the tunnels.

The day was marked by such arrests as Urbis had never seen before. Singerians by hundreds were herded into cells so gorged that there was no room to lie or sit.

When morning came construction crews arrived at every opening to the lower city. The poisoned air was sealed in by masons who built walls at every entrance.

A brokenhearted Anthem wept. None who lived were sure who the survivors were. Nightly as the sun went down, grief-laden voices rose from a hundred cells and the Star-Song floated on the air:

“In the beginning was the song of love.

Alone in empty nothingness and space

It sang itself through vaulted halls above,

Reached gently out to touch the Father’s face …”

Upper Urbis battened down their windows to keep the music out, but still it filtered through the lattices so that the free men of the city wondered who was really free. Only those unchained could know.

The music of a free man taunts a slave. And the free were found only in prison cells and tunneled tombs below. The rest of Urbis prayed for freedom to the unicorn of life and tried to sleep. But sleep, like freedom, came only to the prisoners.