Clee grimaced. “I should say, my half-brother.”
“Ah,” said Pen. After an awkward moment, he offered, “I have a half-uncle, who farms near Greenwell. I like him. His wife is always very kind to me.” These thing happen, Pen hoped this implied. Not a problem.
Clee snorted. “Castle Martenden is not just some fortified farmhouse. Kin Martenden have been great landholders in these parts for centuries.”
Pen thought this an unjust description of Jurald Court. Or at least, it ought to be large, sprawling fortified farmhouse.
“My brother is at loggerheads with the city, which covets his lands and rents and rights,” Clee went on. “The city fathers grow big in their own esteem. They’ve bought out a dozen minor lordships already that fell into their debt. I think the merchant guilds conspire to net the foolish that way.”
Pen remembered the ruins on the road in, and thought the city’s outlying district might have grown as much by force of arms as mercantile trickery. Although, he supposed, wealth must come first, before arms could be bought. Martensbridge was a royal free town, its charter making it unbeholden to any lords except the Hallow King of the Weald himself. It stood oddly balanced between its distant lord, and its treaties with its nearer neighbor cities with their more varied allegiances. Pen’s impression was that Martensbridge felt itself a lot more free than royal, and recalled the joking prayer an acolyte had told him over dinner: Five gods bless and keep the Hallow King—far from us!
“What about the princess-archdivine?” Pen asked. “I’ve never met a princess. Or an archdivine, for that matter. I hope I might get a chance to see her before I go home. Is she very beautiful?”
Clee vented a laugh. “She’s fifty.”
Pen supposed princesses in tales always seemed to be young and lovely because when they grew older they became queens. The princess-archdivine’s title was more political, and unrelated to her marital status. “I suppose even royal princesses can have callings.”
Clee shrugged. “The archdivineship of Martensbridge has been a dumping ground for Wealdean royal spares for centuries. I’ll give this one credit, though, she’s powerfully shrewd. Besides managing Temple lands, she’s fostered the silk makers here, which has brought even more coin to her hands, which has allowed her to buy yet more territory. No one knows what will happen when the city and the princess run out of other fodder, and have to start in eating each other.”
With that ambiguous remark, Clee blew out the candle and rolled over. Pen, eyelids weighted with exhaustion, did not even attempt to talk to Desdemona.
* * *
For the next two days Pen sat in the library and read, trooped downstairs to eat, and smiled shyly at people who all seemed too busy to talk to him, save, sometimes, Clee, when taking a stretch from his scribal work. The locked cabinet was an itch at the corner of his eye.
Pen supposed even librarians had to go to the garderobe sometime, but this one never left the room unless there were other persons present; another copyist or two, or dedicats or acolytes reading and taking notes. None of the valuable books were allowed to be removed and read elsewhere save by divines of the highest ranks, of which there seemed to be three or four here besides Tigney, and even they received stern looks and admonitions along with their volumes.
Pen finished the fascinating Cedonian chronicle, and started another in Darthacan. He discovered his reading in that language had somehow become far more fluid and swift—he didn’t have to stop and think through the sentences, and he seemed to know many more words than he’d ever learned in the Greenwell Lady-school. A slimmer chronicle in comfortable Wealdean supplied a short history of Martensbridge. The marsh hamlet at the outlet of the long lake had acquired its name when an earlier lord of kin Martenden had built the first stone bridge, the text asserted, convincingly enough. The improved roads had brought increasing wealth. Somewhat unfairly, Pen thought, kin Martenden had lost control of the growing town when their own overlord’s family died out, and the greater territory fell to a prince of the Weald. The town had bought or won or bribed—on this, the chronicle was unclear, but it seemed to involve lending money to the right lords with hungry armies—its first royal charter soon thereafter, swept in under the cloak of the princess-archdivine, and never let to lapse thereafter. Glass- and silk-makers came down from the north over the high passes from Adria and Saone, metal-workers from Carpagamo, and settled in the new free town. Caravans arrived from as far away as the reduced modern descendant of the Cedonian Empire, ah! Pen wondered if he might meet such travelers in the marketplaces or counting houses, and test his new tongue.
The chronicle claimed that Great Audar had once resided here, and told a legend of a bargain he made with a helpful talking marten that somehow resulted in a blessing for the locality, and a more exciting source of its name. Pen had read of that legend appended to at least two other towns, one with a snake and one with a hawk, though both with Great Audar, which made him distrust the book’s author just a little. Apart from the talking animals. While there were rumors about the Hallow King’s strange, secretive cadre of royal shamans having some special understanding of the kin animals of their land, Darthacan Audar had been the bitter enemy of the Old Weald and its forest magics in his long-ago day, so Pen didn’t think this could be some oblique reference to those mysterious practices.
By the third day, although his mind was still wildly excited by the written riches in the room, Pen’s eyes were burning, and his not-well-padded haunches were rethinking his calling as a scholar much as they had a career as a courier. Besides, for the first time this week it had stopped drizzling and the sun was out. Desperate for movement, he went down to see Tigney.
The divine’s door was open; Pen leaned on the frame, cleared his throat, and ventured, “How goes it, sir? Is there anything I can do here? To help? Any task at all?”
“A task . . . ?” Tigney leaned back from his writing table and regarded Pen thoughtfully. “I suppose you are a mountaineer. Not used to being cooped up all day, I daresay.”
“The library is very fine, but that’s so, sir. Even in the winter, we hunted in the lower forests every week, or ran the trap lines.”
“Hm.” Tigney drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop, then gestured to a neat stack of clothing folded on a chair. “Ruchia had no heirs of the body. Often in such cases a Temple sorcerer’s possessions are willed to their successor along with their demon, but Ruchia left no directive with me. You cannot wear her clothes, but if you would like to run an errand, you could take them to the garment merchant on Elm Street, and turn them into money for the Order.”
A modest task, but it would allow Pen to walk about the town. And, if he performed it well, Tigney might find other work for him. Being the errand boy of this house couldn’t be worse than being the errand boy of Jurald Court. He’d never felt a calling before to serve the gods, but who knew? “Certainly! I’d be glad to.”
While Tigney gave him more precise directions to Elm Street, Pen went to tie up the bundle. His hand hesitated.
“I think you do not want to sell this one, sir.” It was an elaborate, embroidered skirt. Pen shook it out, puzzled. It seemed just a skirt, if heavy. Why had he said that?
Tigney’s brows rose. “I thought I’d checked them all. Ah—was that you, who spoke just now?”
“Not sure, sir.” Pen ran the long hem through his fingers, which found an unsewn slot. Poking within, he drew out a folded length of thin cloth. He shook it free to find it covered all over with fine writing, in none of the languages he recognized. No, it is a cipher. What?
Tigney held out his hand in demand; Pen delivered both skirt and cipher. “Ah!” said Tigney. “Cloth, not parchment. No wonder I felt nothing. Clever Ruchia!” He glanced up rather sharply at Pen. “Are there any more like this?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
Pen didn’t feel there were, but Tigney ended up prodding through every hem and fold in the stack to be sure. He then sat up and read the
message on the cloth, without referring to any cipher-book. Leaning back with a relieved sigh, he muttered, “Nothing too difficult, then. Thank His Whiteness. I think.”
Pen swallowed. “Sir—was Learned Ruchia a spy?” That frail old woman?
Tigney waved a hand in vigorous negation. “Certainly not! A trusted agent of the Temple, yes, able to sail smoothly through some very troubled waters, I will give her that.”
Pen took in this evasion. He was pretty sure it came out to a yes. Which made Tigney . . . her spymaster? Neither personage fit his mental image of either role. He smiled hesitantly and said nothing.
As Pen bundled up the cloth once more and made for the door, Tigney added kindly, “You can keep half of whatever you can sell them for.”
“Thank you, sir!” Pen waved and left quickly, before Tigney could change his mind about either the errand or its reward, after the capricious manner of seniors.
Safely out of earshot on the steep street, Desdemona snappishly remarked, “Half! Tigney is a cheeseparing drudge. You should have had it all.”
So, she hadn’t been asleep. “I thought it very generous. He didn’t need to offer me any. Also”—he grinned—“he forgot to tell me when I had to be back.”
“Humph,” said Desdemona, sounding amused. “Well, we do like a truant.”
Pen took the long way to Elm Street, down to the river and along it past the old stone bridge to a market, still busy even though it was early afternoon. He stood a while and listened to a pair of musicians, one with a fiddle and the other with a skin drum, set up to amuse the crowd with silly or mournful songs, a hat at their feet upturned invitingly. Pen reflected that unlike all the other vendors here, they could not call back their merchandise if the bargain was bad, and fished a few precious coppers out of his thin purse for the hat before continuing down the quayside.
At a low point of the embankment wall, he set the clothing bundle down and leaned over, trying to see up the river to the lake. He might need a higher vantage. “Desdemona . . . is music a good gift of the spirit?”
“Oh, aye. We like a good song.”
“What about knowledge? Reading?”
“That’s good, too.”
“Were you reading along with me, these past days? Over my shoulder, as it were?”
“Sometimes.”
“Should I do that more?”
“To please me, do you mean?” She sounded disconcerted.
“Well . . . yes, I guess so.”
A long silence, then: “Those things are all interesting, but it is the share of your body that is my daily gift, without which I could not maintain existence in this world. Or in any other. So gifts of the body are actually very acceptable.”
“That would be . . . my body, right? Things done for my body?” said Pen, trying to work this out. Not that he could maintain his own existence in the world without it, either.
“Have you any other body? I don’t.”
“At present.” Though the demon had shared a dozen other bodies before his. Would she share more, after . . . ? His memory reverted, unwilled, to the interrupted morning bed activities back at the Lady-school, and his face heated. However discomfited he had been, sooner or later his body was going to have its way about that, chatty audience or no. Not that he hadn’t been willing to share that intimacy with Preita, in prospect. And this was different, how . . . ?
Desdemona drew a long breath. “Think of how a good rider maintains his favorite horse. Brushed and glossy and well fed. Sound shoes. Carefully exercised and trained, and taken out for fast gallops. Ribbons braided in its mane, fine saddles and bridles to make a show, maybe trimmed with silver or colored glass beads. A steed to be proud of.”
Wait, I thought I was supposed to be the rider . . . ? All these equine metaphors were growing befuddling.
“In short,” said Desdemona briskly, “as we have never had an actual lord before, could you at least try to dress like one?”
Pen snorted, eyeing the sleeve of his countryman’s smock. “I’m afraid this is how actual lords dress, when their purses are as flat as kin Jurald’s.” Also, the demon was beginning to sound disturbingly like his sisters again, which sat uncomfortably with the thoughts he’d been having just before she’d gone off about horses.
“Put another way—what you enjoy, we enjoy, for the most part.”
Pen was startled by this. “Food? Drink?” Other pleasures of the flesh . . . ?
“Yes, indeed!”
“Wine-sickness?”
She said smugly, “Oh, the wine-sickness can be all yours.”
“You . . . can evade my pain?” The implications of that were odd.
“We can withdraw from it to a degree, yes.”
“Surely managing one’s demon should be harder than managing a horse.” Not that horses were easy, five gods knew. “I mean, those Temple disciplines and so on?” Everyone kept talking about the all-important Temple disciplines, but no one ever explained what they were.
“The hard things will come on their own. You need not go hunting them.” She added after a reflective moment, “Though I pity the poor demon who gets stuck with a Temple ascetic. Hair shirts, really, what is the point?” She gave the impression of a faint, dramatic shudder, and Pen smiled despite himself. She added more tartly, “And it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one’s own discomfort for a benefit to another.”
Pen blinked, an old puzzle suddenly laid open to him, bare and plain. Yes. That’s it exactly.
Feeling a need to digest this, he heaved the bundle of clothes back up. “Let’s go find Elm Street.”
He was quite out of his reckoning with Tigney’s directions by now, but Desdemona, clearly, knew the town well. They arrived at their goal efficiently, without any doubling back.
The shop was dark, with a peculiar smell. Pen set the clothes on the counter, and the shop woman told over them with quick fingers, and named a price.
“Pen,” muttered Desdemona, “let me do this.”
“If you don’t embarrass me,” Pen muttered back. The shop woman gave him a strange look, but then his mouth began a sharp, though polite enough, negotiation that resulted in due course in a sum double what he had first been offered.
“Good,” said Desdemona. “Let us look around a little.”
Abandoning the counter, they went to the shelves and piles. Obligingly, Pen sorted and dealt. “Can you even see what you’re doing?” he murmured.
“Oh, yes. You could, too. Wait . . . now try.”
Pen squinted, and the shadows seemed to retreat. The view wasn’t really an improvement. But somehow, from these unpromising heaps, he pulled some quite fine discards, if torn or discolored in spots. Granted the elegant blue brocade doublet with the three-inch gash in the front, set around with brown stains, was a bit disturbing.
“We can set these to rights,” Desdemona promised.
“Isn’t that what you call uphill magic?”
“Only a very little. Can you sew?”
“Not especially well, no.”
A brief silence. “We believe you will find that you now can.”
Pen set back several items that seemed too gaudy, to Desdemona’s disappointment, but at last they agreed on a small pile of what she assured him were men’s garments, the likes of which Pen had never seen at Jurald Court, nor Greenwell either. The silk-weavers here seemed to set a high standard for local castoffs, certainly. Back to the counter for another negotiation, and in a few more minutes, Pen left the shop not only with the additions to his wardrobe, but with a goodly supply of coins. Even when he turned over Tigney’s half, there would be some money left over.
Someday, he promised himself, I shall have new clothes, from a real tailor. Though how he was to get to that someday, he had no notion.
Heading back downhill, they passed a bathhouse. Pen stopped and eyed it. “Pleasures of the body, eh?” Clean and warm surely qualified. Not to mention shaved and trimmed.
“Superb idea!
” said Desdemona. “But not that one. There’s a better one farther up near the palace.”
“It looks tidy enough . . .”
“Trust me.”
The voice he’d come to recognize as Mira of Adria said something, which he tried but failed to not-understand. If you would but put him under my direction, I could show him how to make a fortune in a place like this seemed to be the gist of it.
Pen chose not to pursue the remark.
* * *
The bathhouse near the palace-and-temple precincts was intimidatingly large, compared to the one in Greenwell run out the back of a woman’s home, but not too crowded at this time of day. Pen visited its barber for a serious shave and a trim of the ragged ends of his hair, then the men’s side for a thorough lathering with scented soap of head and body, a sluicing rinse with a bucket of warm water, and a soak in the huge wooden tub with the copper bottom, big enough for half-a-dozen men, kept heated with a small fire underneath. He oozed down in the water and lingered with his eyes half closed until the skin of his fingers began to grow wrinkly, he began to worry that Tigney might be ready to send out a search party, and he became aware that Desdemona, who seemed to be purring as much as himself, was eyeing a couple of the better-looking of his fellow bathers in a way that Pen found unsettling. Time to decamp.
Dressed, hair combed out and drying, and back on the street, he glanced at the looming bulk of the temple at the top of the hill. It was the most imposing structure in town, and the chronicle of Martensbridge that he’d read yesterday had made much of it. A temple had always crowned this high site, but the prior one, being built of wood in the style of the Weald, had burned down in one of the periodic fires. In a joint building effort of Temple and town that had taken several decades, it had been replaced by this one of stone, after the Darthacan manner. This represented not a change in lordship or worship, but a change in wealth, Pen gathered. Curious, he turned his steps not downhill, but up.
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