Copyright Information
Copyright © 1986 by Phyllis Ann Karr
All rights reserved.
*
Published by Wildside Press LLC
Note
Because of the kinds of stones carved, the skill needed for carving, and the relative ease of carrying, the smaller the moneystones, the more valuable: pebbles (gemstones) are worth more than small stones (semi-precious), with large stones (common types of rock, but nicely carved) worth the least. Economics is complicated, and their economics might not work at all for us. But how well do our own economics work for us?
“Pinefeathers” is not a misprint for “pinfeathers.” We would say “pine needles” or “tufts.”
Chapter One
Torin’s brother Talmar was probably dying. Beautiful Sharys planned to accept a marriage toy from Valdart instead of Torin. The toy involved, a rare pendant from beyond the western ocean, had either disappeared from Valdart’s tent overnight or been transformed into a citron. Likewise, Talmar’s magic globe had disappeared from his tent to appear in Torin’s. Since Talmar’s own charms protected both his tent and Valdart’s from thievery, it looked very much as if Torin, born to magic-mongering through trained by his own choice in toymaking, were the likeliest intruder. All in all, East’dek’s Amberleaf Fair had not begun auspiciously.
In order of time, Sharys had dropped the first of these rockslides across the path up the toymaker’s mountain of life. She had come to his tent yesterday morning as he was setting up his booth.
For half a year, Torin had always kept one toy close at hand but never displayed for sale: a woman and a man no larger than his thumb, completely separate yet clasped irremovably together in each other’s arms, carved without the use of joint or glue from a single piece of cherrywood. When he glanced up and saw Sharys standing before his showledge, his hand went to this carving in its padded bag even as he asked, “Aren’t you helping prepare the students’ banquet today?”
“Oh,” she said, “I have only the cold transformations. The fresh fruits and cauliflower and the rest. Mother’s doing the wines and Grandmother’s doing the hot things, except the soups. Mother and I are making those out of the vegetable water when it’s boiled, but we won’t do that until the very last.…”
Often throughout the summer and early autumn he had almost brought the toy out of his pocket, but left it there after all because he could not think of appropriate words. Now, on impulse, he gathered his courage and pulled out the bag.
“Torinel,” she said, “don’t.”
He hesitated, then put it on the showledge between them.
She picked it up, opened the bag, drew out the entwined statuettes. After gazing at them for a moment, she returned them to the bag, pulled its drawstrings tight, and handed it back to him. “I’ve been afraid you would. That’s why I wanted to tell you at once. Brother Torin, last night Valdart offered me a marriage token, and this morning I decided to accept it.”
He had not thought of this chance. Not even though he had been close friends with Valdart since they were children together and with Sharys since she was a child, and should have been able to guess something of their souls. “You’ve hardly met him,” he said at last.
“I met him three years ago, when he came to visit you in spring and stayed until it was almost too late to travel again.”
“But you were still a child then.”
Sharys smiled. “Most people will probably say I’m still a child now. But you don’t believe it.” She glanced at the marriage toy in its bag. “Torinel, I’ve thought about this all night.”
If he could call her still a child, he would have been able to touch her hand. “Sharilys…think about it longer. This year he’ll stay until spring. But he has no craft except adventuring, Sharilys. One winter out of four or six—at most—a few days some stray spring or summer, otherwise you’d raise your saplings alone.”
“With my mother’s and grandmother’s help.”
“Since the spring Valdartak and I were twelve years old,” said Torin, “I did not see him for twenty years, until he came into my shop three springs ago.”
Sharys touched Torin’s hand. “I’ll think about it until the last night of the fair. But would you truly want to marry into a magic-mongering family, Toymaker?”
She pressed his hand and left. As he watched her walk away, slender in her light green conjurer’s robe (so nearly the traditional color for all children before their First Name-Lengthening), he became aware of movement beneath his fingers. He lifted his hand and saw it had come to rest on the bag with the marriage toy. His face grew a little hot.
“Well, best quiet it.” Dilys the storycrafter had approached his booth from the other side. Her holiday tunic was so covered with embroidery as to appear almost a solid whorl of color.
“I didn’t hear your walk,” he said.
“Which may be why you usually lose a toy or two from your showledge every fair.”
He coaxed an awkward smile to his face. “Or I may accidentally transform them into life more often than I realize, so that they stroll away and lose themselves.”
“I doubt that.”
For the length of a few breaths they both looked down at the small, wiggling bag. “We’ve talked this through before,” Dilys went on at last with a sigh. “When you’ve accidentally lent it an extra measure of animation, it is not killing to transform it back into what it was.”
“But it needs concentration.” Covering the bag again with his hand, he closed his eyes. His thoughts were harder to align than usual, but eventually he felt the double statuette quiet once more into carved wood. He wondered how much Dilys had heard. Although she had become like a sib to him in the ten years of their friendship, there were conversations one would not want even a parent to overhear. He lifted his hand again to let her see the naturally unanimated bag.
She touched it, looking a hint regretful. “You aren’t the first person who’s had to step out of the light and allow the one you’d choose to make a different choice, Torinel,” she remarked. “I’ve crafted stories about it. Maybe you’ll close your booth early and come hear me tonight?”
“Yes…maybe, if you avoid telling stories about marriage,” he half promised.
“I’ll devote the whole evening to the cycle of Ilfting the Dwarf.”
* * * *
But as it happened, he had to close his booth early for another reason.
The East’dek area fair was rather small, coming near the end of the autumn festival season. This Amberleaf Fair, only seven scholars had sat down to the traditional first-day banquet for members of their class: Vathilda, Hilshar, and Sharys, the hosts, and Talmar—four magic-mongers; Laderan and his apprentice Iris—two skyreaders; and one judge, Alrathe.
Until his fifteenth spring, when after much delving into himself he left magic for crafting, Torin had shared the scholars’ banquets. Sometimes, when business was slow at such hours, his thoughts still returned to the present meal behind tent curtains held stiff with a spell. But this afternoon his mind had hardly glanced at the banquet, engaged as he was with Kara and Ulrad.
Both were far-traveling merchants, and both had returned this autumn from the south, though by different routes. Kara made a three-year circuit, Ulrad a two-year. Kara was tall and thin. She dressed like most crafters hereabouts, in colored trousers, light tunic, and holiday cape. Though she lacked a star on her cheek, people sometimes mistook her for a magic-monger. Since magic-mongers varied as much as anyone else in body, Torin thought the effect came from her gaze, at once distant and inward-seeming. One of her donkeys carried nothing but her own clothes, so that wherever she went she could adopt the local fashion.
Ulrad carried fewer cloth
es but boasted that he wore only what pleased him best, wherever he was. Somewhere his clothes might blend in with the crowd, but Torin suspected that they looked more or less outlandish everywhere in Ulrad’s round, so that he always made himself a walking sign of his trade, like Dilys with her heavily embroidered holiday tunic. Ulrad’s choice of style, however, was puzzling. Most of his garments were meant to fit his body rather close, but that body fluctuated by as much as two or three dozen pounds between seasons on the trail and seasons in well-populated places, so that the garments rarely fit as they should. When Torin had seen him in Horodek at the start of this year’s autumn fair season, he had been thin from the long journey and his clothes hung loose; now, at the East’dek fair, the toggles already looked about to tug free from his vest and the seams of his breeches appeared in some danger.
Having missed Horodek’s Amberleaf Fair, Kara sought out Torin’s booth on the first day of East’dek’s. She was not pleased when Ulrad bustled up and began to make his new selection before she was finished making hers. “I think you’ve already had the choicest picking in Horodek town,” she observed.
“Ah!” Ulrad chuckled. “But this lad’s crafty. He doesn’t spread all his best work out at the big fairs. he always saves some for the small ones.”
“Not the best tradecraft,” Kara replied. “Nevertheless, even if this were the season’s only fair, I have earned the earlier choice.”
“It’s a long season,” the toymaker put in, “with time to craft new pieces between fairs. Why not both choose at the same time? But in case you both want the same toy, Kara takes it.”
Ulrad grunted. “No matter if my trade pieces are more to your own liking, Toymaker?”
“No matter.” Torin was almost as proud of his business scruples as of his quality craftwork. Besides, after trading in this area ever since the Horodek fair, Ulrad should have more local moneygems than exotic trade pieces, so this time the toymaker planned to make him pay in moneygems.
As they picked amongst the toys in the general display, Kara and Ulrad probably suspected that Torin did indeed always try to keep fine pieces in reserve, some for farmcrafters with late harvests and folk with homes on the farthest rim of the neighborhood, who could come only to the smaller, later fairs; some that he would offer first to certain friends and old customers; some that he would put out only on the last day, so that local buyers would always have as good a chance as eager tradecrafters.
Far-traveling merchants, who were as much adventurers as tradecrafters, developed different ideas about good business. Torin theorized that it grew in part from the difficulty of determining fair prices between area and area, and in part from the inconvenience of carrying wares indefinitely. Had he shown these two his entire stock, Kara might have left some fine toys for local customers, but Ulrad would have tried to buy up all the best at once, lecturing the toymaker that it was to his advantage to sell as quickly as possible. Kara, at least, kept her suspicions to herself and did not try to argue settled crafters into dealing by the rules of her own poetry of life.
Still, it soothed a toymaker in his thirty-fifth autumn to be sought out by traveling merchants and to consider how traveling merchants had been seeking him out since the first season of his independent craftworking only ten years ago, and in how many far places toys marked with his birdlike “T” were already prized and praised. So musing,
he almost brought out the marriage toy for their consideration.
No. Not yet. Had Sharys told him after the day’s work was finished, or had Dilys not interrupted his despair at its very start, he might have flung that toy into the fire. After half a day of selling new toys and accepting old ones to mend at free moments during the fair, he had begun to tell himself that when Sharys actually coupled with Valdart would be soon enough to burn his own token. Or sell it to a traveling merchant and let it be carried far away where its next buyer would see only the fine craftwork without guessing the personal pain. For it was an exquisite piece of carving.…
Ulrad’s hand and Kara’s landed on the same toy at almost the same moment. They stared at each other, and Kara said, “How much, Toymaker?”
“Which is it?” Torin reached down to move aside their covering fingers.
Ulrad tightened his grip. “Not until you’ve noted that my hand touched it first.”
Kara lifted her hand from his and smiled. “Take care you don’t damage it for me. How much, honest Torin?”
Reluctantly, Ulrad let it go. Torin saw it was the statuette of Ilfting the Dwarf and his pet porcupines, inspired by a story Dilys had invented. “Three pebbles.”
Kara nodded. “Three pebbles is the accepted price hereabouts this season for a quart of southern brandy, two for a yard of thick silk, one for a citron.”
“My citrons brought two pebbles apiece at the Horodek fair,” said Ulrad, “and the last of them would have brought two and two-thirds here, if you hadn’t come with a donkey’s load of the fruit to thin its value.” He looked at Torin. “But they say, Toymaker, that you can be more than half magic-monger when you choose, and make your own tongue pleasers out of rocks and twigs once you have the pattern. You’d rather have honest moneygems now, I think?”
Torin would indeed have preferred Ulrad’s moneygems to Kara’s trade wares, but he disliked Ulrad’s practice of raising his price for delicacies as his stock diminished. “You have some very garbled ideas about magical transformations,” he remarked, “and if we didn’t find natural items better than transformed ones, magic-mongers would be rich and you merchants poor.” He handed Kara the statuette.
“Aye,” grumbled Ulrad. “Two halves of a walnut with that chosen-brother of yours, that adventurer Valdart. Neither my trade wares nor my moneygems are good enough for him this season, either.”
“You must have tried to buy some memento he wants to keep,” said Torin.
“A little thing. A pendant with one of those glittery orange stones they make on the other side of the western ocean, set in blue metalwork like a pair of mer-birds with their beaks touching and tails intertwined.”
Kara glanced at Ulrad, her left eyebrow slightly raised. “I’ve heard of such craftwork. On a bluemetal chain to match the setting?”
Ulrad nodded. “And cheap enough, they say, if you can cross the ocean to get them. I’ve heard they’re worth no more in the cities of that coast than a citron’s worth in Weltergrise, where they’re grown.”
“So cheap,” said Kara. Ulrad reddened, as if just realizing he had blabbed matters more prudently left unsaid. Intelligent crafters understood that traveling merchants earned their livelihood through buying products where they were worth less because of the growing climate, cheapness of local materials, or certain crafting secrets, and selling them where they were worth more because of their rarity. But it was less than polite to discuss the principle while doing business.
“Toycrafter!”
Torin looked up to see a thin figure in a light purple robe—Iris the apprentice skyreader. She sprinted to his booth, pushed in between the merchants, and repeated: “Toycrafter!”
Ulrad started to say something, but Kara touched his arm behind the newcomer’s back.
Usually Iris played her scholar’s status and called Torin “son” although he was thirteen years older than she. He had always refused to reciprocate with “mother.” This time she did not wait for him to say “Skyreader,” but caught her breath and went on, “Talmar. Trouble with his breath. Collapsed in a fit. Scholars’ Tent.”
“Go,” said Kara. “I’ll watch your booth.”
“Here!” Ulrad gestured at his selections. “At least let me pay for this pile—”
“Let him go,” said Kara. “It’s a birth relation.”
“My brother.” Torin glanced at his toys. Not to trust Kara’s offer would be rude, but this was only the third time he had seen her in ten years, only the fifth time he had seen Ulrad.
“But you can’t heal him yourself, can you?” Ulrad grumbled. “You�
�re not in that trade. You might as well—”
“My parents’ younger child.” The toymaker turned to Iris. “I know the way, Mother Skyreader. You can follow when you will.”
Despite the situation, Iris grinned as she rooted her elbows on one end of the showledge.
Between living in the same neighborhood with her, tacitly committing his booth to her before witnesses, and bribing her with the term of address she had tried to tease out of him unsuccessfully for years, he thought he could trust her guardianship. Except, he remembered halfway across the fairground, she would turn independent skyreader next spring and likely leave this area. He would take a careful inventory of his possessions as soon as he got back.
* * * *
The protective charm hung loose on its cord at the Scholars’ Tent, but the brown silk doorcurtain was stiff. Torin put his palm on it and its folds melted into suppleness. He was grateful the magic-mongers had cast a selective spell; he would have disliked calling his way inside. He pushed through, feeling the curtain start to stiffen again as it swished into place behind him.
Ugly sounds were coming from Talmar. The other scholars had put him in a cushioned, slantback chair at the east end of the tent, where he alternately hunched forward choking and lay back wheezing. Vague familiarity mixed with Torin’s fear.
“Ah!” said the old sorceress Vathilda.
“Torin, oh, thank Cel!” Sharys jumped up from beside Talmar’s chair and hurried around the table, her hand extended.
Torin took it and returned with her, each half-pulling the other. Talmar’s face was swollen and purplish beneath a red rash, his eyelids puffed almost shut. He heaved up again into Vathilda’s arms, coughed rackingly into a rag she held to his face, then fell back once more. Hilshar, who stood behind the chair, patted a compress over his forehead and cheeks.
Reaching the chair, Torin crouched on one knee beside it, loosed the young woman’s hand from his and got hold of his brother’s. They would probably never have chosen each other for friends. Their birth bond had usually lacked surface affection, but that mattered nothing now. “Talmarak,” Torin called, then repeated it with yet another honorary syllable, “Talmarviak!”
At Amberleaf Fair Page 1
