The earl’s family listened, smiling—approving, Pryn decided.
‘It’s been an education,’ she went on, ‘finding the various places where it…writes —’ she could think of no other word—‘its passage, its process, its however fleeting presence.’
‘And where,’ Jenta asked from his side of the room, ‘have you been observing all this power?’
‘All over!’ Pryn declared. ‘It’s inscribed as clearly in the stone carvings above your mantel there—where some person must have hammered and pounded and chipped the stone to chisel it to shape—as it is in Old Rorkar’s oldest—’ she started to say ‘slave bench,’ but because a slave passed between them, said, ‘beer barrel, whose staves someone must have shaved down and whose edges someone must have pitched together and whose bindings someone must have tied on with wet rope so that it would shrink dry!’ She looked about again, wondering if, indeed, the barrel makers here were the same women who made rope-bound barrels in fabled Ellamon. ‘Where I got a chance to observe it most closely, I think, was in the city.’ (The expectant smiles of her country listeners did not change.) ‘In Kolhari. There I fought along with the Liberator against the intrigues and conspiracies that wove about his efforts to free all the slaves of Nevèrÿon.’ There, she’d said it!
‘Free the slaves?’ Tritty asked. ‘Well, all of us have had our problems with the institution. Between the time I was at court and the time Lavik went, they’ve forbidden slaves there. And I thoroughly approve—there’s just no need for them in the city.’ Tritty nodded to one of the white-collared servers who passed among the couches again with another platter of fruit, on whose red and purple rinds the lamplight slid and slipped. ‘But you say all the slaves of Nevèrÿon? Someone is actually lobbying for their freedom? Of course it’s not the same situation in the country. Still, it sounds like an advance.’
‘Tritty—’ Pryn laughed—‘someone is fighting for it tooth and nail! He himself wears an iron slave collar and has sworn not to remove it till slavery in Nevèrÿon is gone forever. I’ve seen plots of unbelievable insidiousness launched against him! I’ve seen more blood spilled in his cause in a day than, indeed, I’ve ever seen spilled in my life!’
‘He sounds like a powerful man.’ Inige smiled in a way that, for a moment, made Pryn sure that in his northern law study he’d learned more of the Liberator than she could ever know.
‘He’s called Gorgik, and his name makes people pause in the poorest alleys and the wealthiest homes throughout Kolhari.’
‘I’m only surprised,’ the earl said, ‘that we’ve never heard of him here. We had guests from Kolhari only days ago; he wasn’t mentioned.’
‘Oh, he is a powerful man,’ Pryn said. ‘When I left, he’d at last secured an audience with one of the Empress’s own ministers to plead his cause!’
It was Inige’s chuckle that broke the silence. ‘You know, the Empress has over a dozen ministers, advisers, viziers, and vizerines. All day every day, groups and individuals meet and confer with all of them, pleading, begging, demanding, cajoling, sometimes trying to bribe, sometimes trying to reason. Most such petitions, as you must know, are of necessity refused. To receive such an audience does not necessarily mark your man as powerful—if anything, the fact that he has only just received such an audience suggests he is among the least powerful of that city’s numerous players in the game of magic and time.’
‘Oh, I don’t think—’ Pryn paused. ‘But that was not all. I met an important merchant woman with a great home in the suburb of Sallese. She was helping finance the construction of Kolhari’s New Market, as well as building a whole set of warehouses for—’
Lavik’s laughter was louder than Inige’s chuckle. ‘But nobody who’s anybody lives in—’ Lavik stopped, looking around to catch her parents’ reproving gaze. She cuddled her sleeping child a little closer, still smiling.
‘I think—’ Inige said—‘what my sister was trying, in her way, to say is that it’s a little surprising for us to hear of a truly powerful personage living in such a neighborhood. That’s not the usual sign by which power can be read from an account of a person’s—’
‘Neighborhoods do change—’ Tritty suggested.
‘What,’ Inige said over his stepmother, ‘is this powerful…merchant, you say? What is this merchant’s name? Most of the real power in Kolhari resides either at court or in homes of royalty in Neveryóna.’
‘She lives right at the edge Neveryóna,’ Pryn said.
‘No,’ Tritty muttered, ‘that isn’t the best part of the neighborhood…’
‘—and she really is rich. Her name is Madame Keyne.’
‘Ah, a Madame Keyne?’ Tritty said. Then: ‘Really, that kind of snideness from my stepdaughter is most unseemly. And yet it’s no secret to us, so while you are a guest in our house it shouldn’t be kept from you. We who move in court circles have always tended to consider Sallese a neighborhood of pretentious tradesmen and vulgar commercial interests, people who would ape and mimic the accoutrements of power, mystifying and declaring magic those elements that were beyond them or that they simply did not understand.’
‘Belham made her fountains…’ Pryn said, hesitantly.
‘He also lived in your aunt’s shack,’ the earl said. ‘Is there a way to put this delicately? Belham was a brilliant man. But the careers of the brilliant are not always rising flights.’
‘Myself,’ Jenta said, ‘I always thought that from the way we went on about the vulgarities of Sallese—at least back when I was at court, or visiting Neveryóna—meant there was something going on there.’
‘Now,’ the earl said, ‘my eldest son speaks the truth.’ He gave a wise nod (the exact nature of whose wisdom Pryn did not quite follow, as she had decided on a mango and had found that a bite taken from one direction was deliciously juicy, while a bite from another made it all string and pith). ‘I told you, we had guests here just recently from Kolhari, and there, so said our guests, the talk is indeed of many great, far-reaching projects. And there was, from time to time, even in these halls, mention that some of the better-connected Sallese residents have joined their moneys with some of our truly powerful friends in Neveryóna—’
‘Our friends,’ Ardra said from where he’d moved again to the bottom of the steps, ‘don’t like it, either.’
‘There was talk, I believe—’ the earl pondered a moment—‘of a project that will take some ten years to complete, which would involve doubling the length of the Kolhari waterfront, rebuilding it dock by dock. Was your Madame Keyne one of the tradesmen who’d agreed to lend some support to this great undertaking?’
‘Oh, no—’ Pryn began. ‘At least I don’t know if she was. She never mentioned it.’
‘There was also some talk, as I recall, about another project to repave the entire southern road that runs from Kolhari to the Garth and beyond.’ Inige spooned up some spiced mush from a glimmering tureen, which Pryn had first declined but was now having second thoughts about—though the slave carrying it did not seem inclined to give her a second chance. (How did one ask?) ‘They want to expand it along its whole length to something like three times its present width till it’s as wide in the north as it used to be at this end in the heyday of Neveryóna—our Neveryóna, that is. Then Rorkar and the rest can export their goods to Kolhari with ease. The smugglers who run their tiny amounts up and down would be driven out of operation, and both import and export for the whole south could be reorganized along real profit lines. There were some Sallese people involved in this project, too—although we’re talking about an undertaking whose completion time is estimated at twenty years. Was one of them perhaps your Madame Keyne?’
‘I don’t…’ Pryn was uneasy. ‘I don’t think so. She never spoke of it.’
Lavik made a cooing grimace over the baby, now asleep in the crook of her knee. She looked up. ‘Of course there are some truly powerful merchants, or what have you, in Sallese. And as much as it irks us, we’re forced to hear th
eir names too. But they are the people who are involved in enterprises that will change the shape of Kolhari, and thus the future of Nevèrÿon. They are the ones who are engaged in projects that might well make it reasonable to build one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets. And no doubt one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets will be built by one or ten or twenty-five canny, money-grubbing pot vendors run amok. But you mustn’t confuse that with power—with real power—any more than you let yourself confuse the notoriety of some radical upstart, wrangling a hearing from a court minister while friends and enemies both mumble that he may become a minister himself with the real power of court. Come.’ She hoisted the baby under a plump arm and pushed to one knee. ‘Take a walk with me outside. We’ll be having cheeses and cordials in a few minutes. I always like a turn about the nearer gardens after I’ve eaten. And no matter what that old iron-bound harridan upstairs says, the evening air is good for the baby!’ Lavik pushed the edge of her couch with her free hand to stand.
‘Oh, can I carry her!’ Pryn cried, impelled as much by anxiety over the haphazard way Lavik lugged her drooping daughter as by a childhood conviction that babies were the warmest, sweetest, most wonderful things in the world—a conviction that had vanished, she’d noted, when she’d thought she might be having one but that, now she knew she wasn’t, had apparently returned.
‘Sure!’ Lavik extended the child, even more awkwardly.
From Tritty: ‘Dear, don’t stay out with her too long. Of course, I don’t mean that I object…’
The baby didn’t fall; but Pryn was there to take the warm, wheezing thing as though she might.
From the steps came an adolescent grunt.
Cuddling the snoring baby in its loose swaddling, Pryn glanced at Ardra.
He sat with a fist on each knee. ‘You know, I usually take Petal for her evening walk around the grounds!’
‘Oh, darling…!’ his mother said from her couch.
‘I only let you do that last night because you asked,’ Lavik said. ‘It isn’t a ritual. Besides, when you play with her, you always pretend she’s going to grow up to be a little general. I don’t know whether I like that.’
‘Well, it’s only fair that I get a chance to play with her before she grows and becomes a girl—don’t you think?’ Ardra stood. ‘I’m going for a walk around the near garden anyway. Just as though we didn’t have a guest.’ He strode across the room, in stiff-legged mocking of a military strut.
‘If he really wants to—’ began Pryn, while the earl and Tritty and Jenta all thrust out consoling hands and uttered stabilizing protests. The last voice over all was Tritty’s:’…to learn that he can’t always have his own way!’
But Ardra was out the door.
‘Come on,’ Lavik said. ‘I think it’s important that lots of people hold her, so that she gets a sense of the range of society. Don’t you think?’
The sleeping Petal probably had little sense of anything right now. Shoulder to shoulder with Lavik, Pryn carried the baby between the dining couches. Behind them Tritty clapped her hands: the room filled about them with white-collared men and women, some younger than Pryn, others quite old, some of whom Pryn had already seen serving, but many of whom she hadn’t. Lavik led her through a smaller arch. ‘If you get tired, just let me know.’
Pryn had expected to pass through at least as many corridors and halls as she had on her journey in with Tritty. But they walked through a low, stone passage with blackness at its end, and stepped out into it…Pryn thought they’d entered some cavernous hall, a roofless one with dozens of lamps set at unfathomable distances, making myriad small lights…
But they were outdoors.
What she’d thought lamps were flares about an expanse of garden that, it was clear, even in the dark, would have dwarfed Madame Keyne’s walled enclosure. Pryn remembered the plural that had always accompanied their references to the grounds. One of the gardens? They walked along a path, paved—they passed a flare and Pryn glanced down—with brick. Yellow? Red? Some other color? She couldn’t tell. In the distance, holding aloft more brands, each with its raddled smoke ribboning up into the darkness over its own pale halo, moving along other paths, pausing here and there to light another pathside flare, moved innumerable slaves!
Some dozen steps ahead walked resolute Ardra—though Pryn only realized who it was when he passed one of the brands.
Lavik said: ‘He thinks he’s protecting us.’
Pryn glanced at her. ‘From what?’
‘Was your home ever occupied by soldiers?’
Pryn shook her head.
‘Ours was, once. Right after dad and Tritty first married. I was ten. Ardra was only three, so you wouldn’t think he’d remember. But he became the occupying soldiers’ mascot. Tritty’d been through things like that before—so had dad, I suppose. But for me and Inige—and Jenta too, I guess—it was awful.’ She sighed. ‘Ardra, however, hasn’t thought about anything but growing up to be a soldier ever since. I say he’s protecting us. Sometimes, though, I think he dreams of slaughtering us all in our beds. The soldiers who were here—when I was ten—did some of that too! Jenta is dad’s oldest living son. But we used to have two more half-sisters and a half-brother, by his first wife—only she was related to all the wrong people; they wouldn’t let her—so we heard later—or her children live.’ Lavik hunched her shoulders. ‘It wasn’t pleasant. Believe me, that’s the only reason dad tolerates my running off to have babies with jungle savages or Jenta’s going off to live like a hermit with a girl goatherd, nice as she is, from the next town over. I mean it’s a way of survival, of putting us outside the normal political considerations of bloodlines and alliances and the like—the sort of things that get you clapped into dungeons or murdered, when you’re really interested in other things entirely. What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity, and dad doesn’t have enough for that. So we use other means. Now with Ardra, of course, it’s different.’ Lavik nodded ahead at the would-be captain, stalking the garden night. ‘Thanks to the people he’s related to, both through Tritty and his real father, he doesn’t have our options. Oh, he’s safer here than he would be in the north—and don’t think Tritty isn’t grateful to father, either. The odd thing is, though, he’s turning out exactly the way he should. Inige and I have spent hours discussing it! Oh, I don’t mean the way dad would want him to be, or even his mother. But he’s exactly the sort they’re going to want to do all the jobs that are waiting for him as soon as he comes of age. You’d think there was some sort of power guiding it all.’ She took a large breath and gave a small sigh. ‘Really, it’s uncanny. I wish there were something I could do to make him a little…I don’t know—looser, I suppose. But maybe it’s just as well. I’m glad you’re here,’ she said suddenly. ‘I mean it’s nice to have ordinary visitors who aren’t always plotting to do someone in—especially when it’s you. Honestly, we all think so!’
‘I’m…glad I’m here too!’ Pryn looked at the young man walking ahead, whom, she felt now, she’d deprived of the warm, marvelous responsibility she held.
The warmth shifted; the breathing changed.
Pryn looked down. ‘She’ll be all right, don’t you think?’
‘Sure,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s been on the mend for two, really three, days now. Though, if you listen to the old slaves upstairs, who, for some reason, everyone thinks know about such things—and that’s all Tritty ever listens to—they’ll scare you to death!’ She glanced at Petal over Pryn’s arm to check her own pronouncement of recuperation. ‘She’ll be fine. You know—’ Lavik’s tone grew thoughtful—‘I was thinking about something you said—to father, when we were up on the hill. When you travel to Kolhari from the south, the road really goes around the marsh below the city, joins the northern road, and enters over the same hills you come over from the mountains. But you’ve seen it on maps…?’
‘Yes?’ Pryn said, listening to the dark around them, which sounded the same tone on which Lavik spoke.
&n
bsp; ‘Do you remember,’ Lavik asked, ‘when I said I’d never seen Kolhari at dawn from the hills?’
Yes?’
‘Well, when I went to court, it wasn’t just my furniture in the provision wagon. In fact I went with nearly a dozen nobles’ children, boys and girls—more girls than boys, actually. When we reached the hills above the city, they stopped our sleeping carriage—it was dawn. We all woke up, the few of us who’d managed to sleep. The drivers and chaperones called the boys out to see. Everyone started out, I remember, but they told the girls that we had to stay inside, because it wasn’t seemly for young ladies to go pell-melling out on the highroad in their night shifts, even if it was dawn and nobody was about. So we stayed in, all excited at what the two—yes, there were only two—boys might be doing. And you know something? As soon as he came back from court, Jenta immediately saw the city in the water—Neveryóna. Just the way you did. But J couldn’t! We’d both always heard about it, of course. But it had to be explained to me, and the streets and alleys and buildings had to be pointed out and outlined before, at sunset, I could even be sure it was really there! And it was only because I had seen some city maps of Kolhari, finally, that I was able to be sure what the rest were talking about.’ They walked through the dark gardens, whose extent and plan Pryn kept silently trying to assess. ‘Do you know what a map is? I mean a real map?’
‘Yes…’ Responding to Lavik’s deep seriousness, Pryn spoke a little lower. ‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘You’ve seen one?’ Lavik asked. ‘I don’t just mean the silly scratches on the astrolabe this evening that don’t mean anything at all.’