Pretender

  The presentation to the hasdrawad and the tashrid came before everything…granted that Tabini really meant to let him speak freely.

  Most of all—he had simply to stay alive for the nonce, and keep his head down, and not take walks in the hall, even escorted, until the dust settled.

  He settled down to a little rest after the late breakfast, a little quiet time with his notes, a little time for his long-suffering staff to go on sleeping, if only they would do that. What had been a very small staff in the dowager’s employ would, he hoped, begin to accrete old members of their own, filling out the numbers, but by the time they increased to any degree at all, he had to settle the apartment problem. He did think perhaps he should send a personal note to Madam Saidin, who had served him very kindly, and who now was back in the service of the Atageini. He might send flowers to her and the staff there, perhaps, if he had any funds at his disposal, though accessing such funds was usually a staff job…and staff was what he lacked…and then there was the matter of kabiu, in choosing what to send…

  Everything ran in a circle, and right back to the necessity of finding quarters somewhere in the Bu-javid, this ancient building wherein apartments were inherited over centuries, and where the contents of said apartments tended to resemble cultural museums, priceless art and antiques, each carefully arranged according to the numerical rules of kabiu, adjusted to the presence of a particular family. The Atageini had afforded him the old apartment, since Tatiseigi had been in the country and Lady Damiri, who had been using it, had moved in with Tabini. One might say the Kadagidi residence within the Bujavid might be up for a new occupant, and very likely Murini had governed from those premises rather than set up in Tabini’s apartment—but it would hardly be appropriate for a court official to set up there against the will of the Kadagidi. Murini might be a fugitive and his demise foreordained, but the Kadagidi themselves were an ancient clan, and to insult them would only slow the process of peacemaking and create a problem. No, the Kadagidi would be back, once man’chi had been settled. They would claim their valuables and their treasures, and their premises and precedences within the network of residencies, and to imply anything else would create a problem of lasting resentments, a cause that simply would not be allowed to rest.

  So, well, he might find himself lodging down in the garden apartments again…opposite the aiji’s cook, without a staff, as he had started. In a certain measure he wished he could take that option, go back to his pleasant little ground-floor rooms, in which he had availed himself of general services, rather than having a personal staff: But that was not the case, now—he had managed to lodge Banichi and Jago in those early days, but his life was far more complex, and his duties had gotten to be such that he hardly knew how to proceed about anything without extended staff, with specialists among them. He had staff up on the station who might well come down from his apartment there once the shuttles were flying again—granted that Tatiseigi would surely reclaim Bindanda’s services. He would very much regret that, not alone because the man was an excellent cook, a good tailor, and a very clever observer; but there was Narani, that worthy old gentleman, and the others—and if they did get the shuttle fleet flying, that was certainly a staff long due a chance for blue sky and a little rest.

  Well, well, he said to himself, it was a case of having far more problems than power to solve them, where it regarded housing and offices: He did not dispose of Bu-javid residences, and there was no sense battering himself against the situation. And until he did have staff he could not set up to provide for staff: circular problem. What had taken him years to build and Murini days to demolish had to be restored, but there was not a single move he could make until his problems reached Tabini’s desk—and there was likely a pile of those waiting, all with far higher priority.

  Jago turned up, looking wearier than she had seemed last night, all the energy of combat and hazard ebbed out of her. She accepted a cup of tea and some small cakes, which she had no trouble disposing of. She sat in the other chair, informally so, ankles crossed, and reported Banichi, Tano, and Algini all still asleep.

  “As they should be,” Bren said. “Rest as much as you can, Jago-ji.”

  “We shall certainly do so,” she said. “We have a notion of bringing staff in from the coastal estate, but as yet we have nowhere to lodge them.”

  “True. Not to mention one has great concern for their safety, to make such a trip.”

  “Regarding such affairs,” Jago said with a deep sigh, “the dowager’s staff has arranged a formal dinner this evening. A message will arrive.”

  God. Already. He had no energy left for verbal fencing. But Ilisidi wished to have her fingers deep into whatever was going on, one could imagine. She had been unable to be everywhere at once in the fighting and now wanted all the details, while the irons were still hot. “Will the aiji attend?”

  “One understands so,” Jago said. “So will the Astronomer, the Ajuri, the Taibeni, and the Atageini lords. Not to mention the young gentleman.”

  Familiar company—give or take the Ajuri. “Everyone, then.”

  “Everyone,” Jago said, and added, before he could even think of it: “The staff has sent for certain items of current fashion, and the paidhi will not be inglorious in his appearance.”

  He wanted to go fling himself face down into the very soft bed and stay there for days.

  Instead he took notes until he could no longer postpone preparation—making sure he remembered all the details of recent days. He took a very long soaking bath, until his fingers wrinkled, had a leisurely second shave, a long encounter with thick towels, and finally gathered the fortitude to face formal dress.

  Jago’s “current fashion” turned out to be velvet lapels, easily applied by a clever staff. Fashion seemed to have recovered sensible moderation in the lace—in fact returning to an earlier style, which made the shirts from his oldest wardrobe, so the servant said, quite adequate, and very fine quality. The latest cross-belted shoes he absolutely could not come by, to the staff’s distress, but footgear was always a problem on the mainland. He went with a comfortable pair of old ones, ineffable luxury of comfort, and kept the traditional queue for his hair and the paidhi’s white ribbon, though the staff suggested that the Lord of the Heavens might possibly go with blue…so little this staff understood of what lay beyond the visible sky.

  He stayed doggedly by the white, relying on the one modest title that he knew how to defend, and the modest position of a court officer with real and historic basis—although the dowager’s major domo, who looked in on the proceedings, was certain that they should send for the dowager’s tailor and go down into the city to exert some special effort in the matter of the boots, at least for the following day.

  The paidhi was only glad to see his staff had had the same luck with wardrobe, recovering comfortable uniforms from the apartment that was now the Atageini premises. They turned up only slightly scraped and burned, as far as showed below cuffs and above collars—Banichi had a bit of a cut on his chin and several on his hands, but looked otherwise unruffled. Clearly Banichi had survived and there was no statement on the health of the persons who had caused the damage.

  And meanwhile the sun had declined and one could actually muster an appetite.

  He’d ever so quietly hoped, at least in the depths of his heart, that it would be a relatively homey, simple meal, nothing fussy and many-coursed.

  It was evident from the formal reception, Ilisidi seated in the eastern manner, and the bustle of the servants over seven different offerings of drink—fortunate seven—plus the arrival of two southern members of the tashrid, anxious for their safety and redemption, and six from the north, perfectly triumphant in the action the north had taken—that it was no simple family affair.

  It was the grand dining hall in Ilisidi’s suite, a room, oh, about the size of a train station, and Tabini was unfashionably late, arriving barely ahead of the stated serving time, with a great cloud of attending secretaries,
and with Damiri, with Lord Tatiseigi. Almost invisible in the flood of adults, was a very starched and proper Cajeiri, his two young bodyguards looking exceedingly uncomfortable in court dress—they being no Assassins, they looked more like young city gentlemen than Taibeni foresters.

  “Nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri exclaimed, much too loudly, darted through a screen of adult bodies, and chattered on about how he had moved into his parents’ residence, but how he was very soon to have his own rooms, and his own staff (how they were to manage this in a general shortage of apartments, one had no idea) and how he was already writing a letter to Gene and Artur and all the rest of his young human associates.

  “Young sir,” Bren said, “one is ever so glad to hear such news. But recall that the names of your associates aboard the ship are foreign to present company. These elderly gentlemen are often extremely alarmed by foreign names, particularly when it suggests your father’s son has been influenced by humans.”

  A small sulk. The eight-year-old was back. “Then one will not be pleased with them. One will never be pleased with them.”

  “They have excellent qualities, the paidhi-aiji assures the young gentleman, and they have served the young gentleman’s interests ever so well, at great personal risk and loss of property. Be patient and persuade them cleverly and slowly.”

  The scowl persisted through patient, but at cleverly and slowly gave way to a deep frown, a thinking kind of frown, then a dark glance aside at adult company and back again. “Are these people your enemies, nand’ Bren?”

  “Some of them certainly believe the paidhi has not served their interests. They have lost property and suffered greatly from the upheaval. One is certain, young sir, that the dowager can much better explain—”

  “She calls them fools. She calls them very shortsighted. She says they have no good grasp of the numbers.” This last in a whisper not quite adequate, but at least the boy tried to keep his voice down. Bren looked for escape, managed only:

  “It is a very delicate situation, young sir. One begs you watch and listen—and by no means use any word of Mosphei’ in these people’s hearing.”

  “Not even ’damn fools’?”

  Wicked boy. It was not the best acquisition he had ever made, and not the paidhi’s best moment that had let him pick that up, in the depths of space.

  “Especially not that,” Bren said fervently, and the young rascal swaggered off, smug and victorious, to talk to his great-grandmother, who was engaged with the volatile lord of the Ajuri.

  Bren kept quiet and drew over to the side, pretended to sip the offered wine, wanting to keep all his wits about him and earnestly hoping the youngster was not going to follow days of extraordinarily good behavior with a catastrophic letdown.

  The Astronomer had arrived with Tabini, and while he had been talking to Cajeiri, the court mathematician had shown up, the two old gentlemen now involved in an ongoing debate and very little noticed the summons to table. They were still in the anteroom, passionately flinging numbers about, when the rest went in to dinner.

  “Well, well,” Ilisidi said, immediately seated—the privilege of age and rank—in her position at the head of the immensely expanded table. Tabini and Damiri occupied the places beside her, with Cajeiri—not to mention Tatiseigi and the Ajuri at either hand of that family group. Bren wanted a seat much removed from the high table, but servants directed him to a seat uncomfortably high and on Tatiseigi’s left hand, in fact, but there was no objecting. One sat where one’s host’s staff indicated and made the best of it. The Astronomer was seated just next, and that chair was vacant, the old man still engaged outside the hall.

  “Here we are,” Ilisidi said as the buzz of movement diminished, “family and guests. One is ever so gratified. Do sit.”

  One sat, even the aiji and his family.

  Appropriate expressions of appreciation followed, a general murmur, and then the host’s recommendation of the first course, in all of which there was, thank God, a moratorium on politics. The Astronomer and the mathematician strayed in and found their places, fortunately not near one another, and the Astronomer began asking Bren questions which, again fortunately, pertained to the abstract character of space and travel through it, not the details of their trip itself, and distracted him from any conversation with Tatiseigi, who, having Damiri next to him, was interested in talk up the table, not down.

  It was an extravagant and otherwise very kabiu dinner, security standing formally behind each participant, everything in season, wonderfully prepared—with due indication from the dowager’s attentive staff and a graceful and quick substitution for every dish that might have proved inconvenient for a human guest. Bren sampled the dinner ever so slightly, finding his stomach, having had chancy fare for days, was not amenable to a surfeit of rich food. There were seven courses to get through, again, fortunate seven, forecast by the number of the varieties of drink offered at the outset, and the portions were atevi-scale.

  A massive effort. There were seasonal flowers on the tables all about. A whole beast appeared, offered as the main course—it was the season for game, and there it sat in the middle of the table, horns, hooves and all, done up in glaze that, fortunately, in Bren’s opinion, contained a fair amount of alkaloid. The paidhi took fish as an always correct alternative, quite happily so, while the beast was diminished to bone—the cook must have started that dish the moment Ilisidi arrived at the apartment, or optimistically before that.

  There were fruits of the season, there were grain cakes, which were, if not the ones with black seeds, perfectly safe, and very good with spiced oil; there were eggs with sauce, one of Ilisidi’s favorites. There was a secondary offering of fish, and shellfish, with black bread—never eat that one, Bren knew. And last of all came a sweet course, a dessert, a huge confection, more architecture than food, the presentation of which drew great appreciation—Bren nibbled at a very small slice of cake with sweet sauce, sure it at least was safe, but it was absolutely beyond his power to swallow more than two bites. Endless rounds of tea, and the absolutely mandatory compliments to the chief cook and his staff…

  Then Ilisidi, host and mistress of the table, invited her grandson the aiji to speak. A silence ensued, a deepening silence, as Tabini stared fixedly at his wine glass, and turned it a full revolution on the table.

  “Nandiin,” Tabini said then, in that deep voice, and Bren expected a lengthy speech, full of plans. “Nandiin, there was bloodshed in the Kadagidi house, when the traitor’s plane announced its intention to land. One believes that preceded his decision to turn south. There, he was allowed to land.”

  Chilling, both in implications of an in-family bloodletting, a purge within the house—and in implications the southerners had been very unwise to allow that plane to land. One remembered that Tabini had twice offered amnesty to that clan. One suspected it would not happen the third time. An infelicity of two leaped into Bren’s mind, in Banichi’s voice.

  Another silence. Another revolution of the wine glass.

  “We are informed the tashrid will have a quorum by dawn, the hasdrawad by midafternoon,” Tabini said further, while the wine glass turned in his fingers.

  Then those unsettlingly pale eyes flashed up, squarely at Bren. “The paidhi will deliver a report to the joint body before sunset.”

  Bren’s heart sped. Thank God he had put in the time to have it ready, edited down from two years of notes to Tabini. Thank God, thank God. A final polish. That was what it needed.

  “Aiji-ma,” he said with a little nod of his head.

  “We have received reports,” Tabini said, still in that deathly, biding silence, “from the coast, from the north, from the east—” With a nod toward his grandmother. “We have asked that the people keep shops and shutters closed until the legislature has ruled. This is for public safety, and for public attention to the radio, so that they will know what is done. This is our decision. Those of the two houses who have come foremost, those on their way at our first summons, the
ir names we know.”

  Another revolution, in silence.

  “We have been immoderately generous throughout our administration,” Tabini said, “in our treatment of those who have offended us. Those who have offended twice, and those who have offended the people, however, will find no such generosity. We do not admit that Murini has ever been aiji. None of his decrees has legal force. Such administrative matters as he signed must be presented again, or allowed to fall, from the greatest to the smallest act. We look for a list of these matters to appear on my desk, sorted into public and private categories, within two days. Any matter, however small, which does not appear on that list will not be considered for confirmation. Any omitted matter must be submitted as a new action.”

  It could be done. Clerks would have the lights on all night, but surely it could be done, given the court penchant for record-keeping and lists. It would be every grant of title, every court judgment, even divorce decrees which had found their way through the lower court system to the aiji’s audience hall, every Filing of Deed or Intent, every adjudication, every assassination or fine: In short, every act public and private that Murini might have signed during his tenure. Most, purely administrative, would get a glance and a stamp; some would receive much more attention. It was, in effect, an audit of legal grants and confiscations, of awards and contracts, of alliances between houses, everything that might affect man’chi or empower one clan over another.

  A mammoth job. One wondered whether, as with his old staff, the aiji’s surviving staff had begun to come out of concealment, and whether, as with the university students making off with the vital books and papers from their library, the aiji’s old staff had been able to preserve certain record books. It would be ever so helpful if they had.