The Gate of Ivory

by Doris Egan

  She shook her head. "If you don't mind, I'd rather you didn't tell him about it. I'm not supposed to have any contact with either of you… and very likely he wouldn't take it well if he learned you were talking to me."

  "I gather Eln doesn't know you're here."

  "You gather accurately. But let's not destroy a beautiful day by digging into all the decaying details, all right?"

  "Whatever you say—you're the one paying."

  So we went down a few streets until we came to a cavelike entrance built into the hill on the north side of town. This branch of the Asuka business was very different from their glass-and-steel tower in the capital; it actually was built into a cave, and much of it had been cleaned, but other than that left in a natural state.

  "We'll take a suite," Kylla told the woman in the front. "The best one on the women's side. What's your security like?"

  The woman, a burly, middle-aged top-sergeant sort, raised an eyebrow at the coins Kylla was counting out on her table; but she appeared otherwise unimpressed. "Solid rock, as you can see for yourself, gracious lady. At least two feet thick in every room, usually thicker.

  WeVe put steel reinforced entryways to each room, too. No windows." She took out a pipe, lit it, and added, "We're bonded against listening devices. There's a sor-cerous sweep once in the morning and once in the evening to see that it's clean of tampering. And, I will say that we're the best in this town or any other—face paint if you're going out tonight, masseurs, you name it."

  "Tinaje?" I asked.

  She hesitated a moment, then said, "Of course. My girl Celia is a tinaje specialist. Have you tried her before?"

  "No," I said, "I've never had a full professional tinaje session. She's specifically trained?"

  "Of course, or she wouldn't be here. Will you be wanting her before or after your bath?"

  Kylla looked at me. "After, I think," she said. "We'll be letting you know."

  We were taken to a large room carved out of rock—by nature or man I couldn't tell, nor did it seem important. The important thing was the pool in the center, a thing of beauty with stone steps leading down to a steaming, rock-heated bath that came past my chin when I stood up at its midpoint. It was wide enough for eight or nine people, and you could sit against the walls and have the water lap up to your chest. Which of course I lost no time doing.

  "Mmmm," I said to Kylla, when I felt the urge for conversation.

  "Yes," she said. We were leaning against a wall of the pool, arms up on the sides, floating out straight from time to time and dropping back down. It was nice to have that as the sum total of my responsibility for the day.

  "You want to talk about Ran and Eln?" I asked eventually.

  "No," she said.

  "Neither do I," I said, and floated some more.

  After a while I said, "So what did you look me up for?"

  "Well, actually…" she wrung out her braid and pinned it atop her head. "Grandmother told me to come."

  "She did what? How did she know? I thought she was sick."

  "She is sick. But she holds on, Grandmother does. She called me in last night and said, 'Cherie, our Theodora is going to be in Tenrellis market tomorrow morning, and she's going to be very tired, and she's going to need cheering up.' So I sort of borrowed an aircar, and here I am."

  "My. Grandmother stays on top of things, doesn't she?"

  "She tries."

  I felt around the stone below my arm. "There are some switches here. Do you think we can make this a whirlpool?"

  "You want everything, don't you, Theo?"

  "I wasn't complain—"

  "Of course we can make it a whirlpool." She lifted the casing and pushed a button. A current started to run clockwise through the water. "So, do you need cheering up?"

  "Maybe. It wouldn't hurt, I guess."

  She clucked and picked up the housephone by the steps and called for lunch. When it arrived, we climbed out and dried off on the enormous gray Asuka towels. We ate on the couches beside the pool, tiny meatpies and bread and cakes, and a potful of green tah. Then she clucked over the state of my body, which was still fairly blistered and rash-ridden, and sat down at a low, mirrored desk in the corner of the room and began pulling boxes and vials out of the drawers. "Here we are," she said, and started handing them to me.

  So I put powder on all the parts of me that tend to get too damp, and oil on all the parts of me that tend to get too dry, and it was glorious beyond literary expression. Some of the itches I had picked up in the Simil Valley even faded away, and I vowed never to leave urban civilization again.

  "Now let's play," said Kylla, and she got out yet more vials from this miraculous desk, this time tiny containers of face paint and nail colors and body designs. "Just hold still," she said. "Believe me, I can do this better than the house designers."

  I could well believe it, and I held still. When she was finished, a full hour later, the mirror showed me a total stranger. This person was taller than me, and more fine-boned, with larger, darker eyes; and she obviously knew no fear, because she was wearing face and body swirls that I myself would never have the nerve to put on. I stood up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling mirror on a nearby wall. "Wait a minute," said Kylla. She went to the pile of jewelry she'd discarded before entering the bath, picking up here a hoop of gold and gems, tossing aside there a handful of tiny I-don't-know-what's. "Hmm, your ears aren't pierced, are they? Well, try these." And she hung the hoop around my neck, and pushed two wide, delicately banded bracelets up my arms, and clipped a twisted strand of gold to my earlobe. Then she stood back and said, "No, you need symmetry." And she pulled the strand of gold off again. "Now look," she said. I turned to the image in the mirror.

  It gave me an odd feeling. I could see that I was still at the bottom of this theme Kylla had created; but maybe because she had done so many changes, I could see things I usually missed in my own reflection. It was a shivery experience, half objective and half not knowing what to think. I was lightly tanned, darker than I'd ever been, and I'd lost my baby fat somewhere on the northward trail; probably in the Simil Valley. No more Teddy Bear nicknames—it was quite possible they wouldn't recognize me on Athena. They certainly wouldn't recognize me with this pirate booty draped all over—I'd had no idea I could handle jewelry this gaudy and not appear a fool. I looked as though I could pass for one of the sophisticated ladies I'd seen coming out of private dining rooms in the Lantern Gardens, with wealthy, family parties.

  "Oh, Kylla/' I said finally.

  "Not bad," she said, as she appraised the finished canvas. "We ought to outline your eyes in blue or green next time—better for unusual skin like yours, make you look more exotic."

  Exotic was not a word I had heretofore thought of in relation to myself. I looked back at the image in the mirror. It was lovely, I had to admit, although the idea made me nervous somehow; but it wasn't, well, Athenan.

  I said, "It bothers me a little."

  "Think of it as a play," she said. "You can scrub it off and leave the role any time you like; this just expands your options."

  They would read me out of the Ethics in Scholarship Group if they ever found out about this back on Athena, where it was a well-known fact of good society that a single black or gold ring, with perhaps a simple necklace for special occasions, was all a person of taste should require. Still, how likely were they to find out? I said, "How about the tinaje? It'll mess up the body paint, won't it?"

  "Not unless the girl uses oil. I don't think they use oil for tinaje, but I'm not sure."

  "They don't," I said. She looked at me. "It's just one of the things I happen to know in this life, " I explained.

  "Ah," she said, and she rang for the manager and asked if the tinaje specialist was available.

  A few minutes later Celia came in. She looked like the daughter of the manager, and perhaps she was. She asked me no questions—which Vale would not have approved of, but not all systems are the same—and simply told me to lie o
n my stomach on the couch. Then she started on my upper back, without preliminary.

  "Ow," I said. "That hurts."

  "Some people like it hard," she said, poutjng.

  "I know some people like it hard. I'm not one of them."

  She went back to work and I tried not to groan. But courtesy has its limits and after a few minutes I stopped her. "You're not a tinaje specialist, are you? You're perthes-trained, maybe even bratelle."

  She knelt back on her ankles and looked at me suspiciously. "You said this was your first session."

  Kylla got up from her couch. "Never mind, dear." She gave the girl a coin and dismissed her. "I didn't know I was dealing with a connoisseur," she said, and she sounded amused. She was probably thinking I'd come a long way from the stranger Ran brought home grimy from an inn fire and stuffed into his sister's robes. Well, it doesn't hurt to remember our beginnings.

  So we just lay back on the couches and talked, about the latest scandal of the Emperor's wives, the rumors of the Emperor's impotence, and the accusations about the Emperor's progeny. A corrupt government at least provides food for conversation, particularly if personal topics are too painful to bring up on a pleasant day at the baths.

  I told Kylla I would be glad to get back to the capital, and would be just as happy never to look up through the trees at the winter constellations again. She laughed—by then she had brought out a bottle of wine, which we were making use of without glass or wine bowl—and declaimed, "Too long, too well I know the starry conclave of the midnight sky; too well, the splendors of the firmament, the lords of light whose kingly aspect shows, what time they set or climb the sky in turn, the year's divisions, bringing frost or fire."

  I applauded. I wanted to stamp my feet, but it would have meant getting up off the couch. She said, "Thank you. That was the play I was in at Lady Degrammont's School for the Sage and Cultured Upbringing of Most Valuable Young Ladies. I was just the watchman," she added. "I wanted to be Agamemnon, but they gave it to Edra Simmeroneth because her family paid for the new wing."

  Some things in academe are the same all over, I thought vaguely; then it caught up with me and I said, "Agamemnon?"

  "Yes, it's a play about a king who comes home from a war—"

  "I know it, I know it. It's in partial form at the An-tiquities Library on Athena. How do you know it? I thought Ivoran history had gone its own way, I thought all that material from the past was lost—"

  "I don't know how old it is," she said, and the thought didn't seem to interest her. "But it's a good story, Theo. You don't think anyone would forget a good story, do you?"

  I said, "If you had that translated into Standard, the classics branch on Athena would pay you hard money for it. I don't think they have the least idea it exists anywhere."

  She shrugged. "A lot of trouble to go to," she said. Then she said, "Before I forget," and pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of the robe she'd thrown over the couch. She wrote on it and handed it to me.

  It was an address. "What is it?" I asked.

  "In case you need to get in touch with me. This is a friend of mine in the capital. He'll see that any messages get through to me quickly."

  A friend? The name above the address was Lysander Shikron. Not a Cormallon name, or any ally of the Cor-mallons that I had heard of before. I remembered Eln taunting her that night at dinner, when he said that she'd brought a lover within Cormallon boundaries. I decided not to ask.

  Kylla looked, for the very first time, just a little guilty. She said, "Theo, take good care of that address. It's something that neither Ran nor Eln should know about.''

  When I got back to the inn later, I found Ran and Karlas still on their third game of chess.

  "I'm glad I didn't stay," I said.

  They looked up at me. "What happened to,you?" Ran asked.

  "I went to the Asuka baths, and the house designer painted pictures on me."

  "You look beautiful, my lady," said Karlas.

  "Thank you. What's the matter, Ran, don't you like it? It didn't cost all that much."

  "I don't know," he said slowly. "You don't look like a barbarian any more."

  "Is that bad?"

  "I don't know," he said again. He looked down at the board and frowned.

  Three days later we were in the capital. It was the first month of spring, a full Ivoran year since the day Ran sat down across from me in Trade Square and asked me if I wanted a job.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We rented a house in one of the cheaper quarters of the city. The first thing Ran did after signing a false name on the rental agreement was to circle the building, squeezing his way down the narrow alley between our place and the tavern next door, and then crossing round back and inching through the crawlspace by the clothing store on the other side, all the while with a look of fixed concentration. The rest of us stood just inside the entry-way while he worked. It gave me the feeling you get late at night, when lightning has flicked brilliance into your room and gone again, and you wait for the rumble to follow.

  Then he put a neat printed card on the front door that read: "TRADESMEN AND VISITORS UNWELCOME. This constitutes fair warning that the first person to violate this property will accrue seven years of ill luck."

  I said to him, "Sorcery is still illegal, isn't it? Should we be calling attention to the fact you've put a spell on the house?"

  "Everybody does it," he said. "Anyway, the cop on the beat isn't going to cross the property line to arrest us—not unless he's an idiot. And he won't be an idiot if we pay him regularly."

  So we moved in. It was good to have a roof over my head again, even if it was the rotting one we'd gotten here. During the first rainfall I put a pan down on the floor under the most major leak and said to Ran, "What are we going to do when the real spring rains hit?"

  "We'll need a lot more pans," he said calmly.

  And that was the spirit of the season. Ran went first to the Street of Gold Coins to see if he could set up shop as a sorcerer. He used the name he'd put on the rental agreement, and was arrested the first day. Arrested, he described later, by two very bored policemen who had no interest in pulling in one minor lawbreaker on a street-ful of minor lawbreakers but who claimed they had no choice. An anonymous informant had lodged an official complaint against him with the Bureau of Urban Affairs. A bored judge, who sat court in an extra room at the police station to save time, pronounced him guilty, levied a fine, and apologized to him in one sentence.

  Ran tried it all again two days later, under another name. He was arrested again and fined. We were running out of money.

  The next day Ran went to Trade Square, rolled out a blanket on the ground, set down Karlas' battered chessboard, and offered to take all comers. He came home with three tabals.

  "You should charge more per game," I said. "Considering how long a game takes."

  "My dear tymon," he said, in one of his less acceptable flights into aristocracy, "it's not a question of charging. This is a wager. When you make a wager, you have to have the cash on hand to back it up. We are in no position today to risk more than three tabals. Now, logically, as the days go by, we will accumulate enough capital—"

  "All right, all right." It was true, and I ought to have thought before I said anything, but his tone was irritating. I had been playing rather guiltily with the thought that I should open up the coffers I'd squirreled away with my nonNet banker before the trip to Issin, and make the coin generally available to the household. I felt some obligation, but at the same time it would mean consigning the homeward trip even farther into a murky future. Already Athena was becoming too abstract for comfort.

  However, I knew I ought to be bringing some money into the house. So I went to Trade Square myself next morning, with a length of rope and some green cloth, and looked for my old vendor-mate, Irsa.

  "Hello, youngster," she said when she saw me. "Wondered when I didn't see you—wasn't sure if you were too high-rung now, or if you were dead." She put do
wn the fruit she was holding and hugged me properly.

  "How are the kids, Irsa?"

  "Trouble. Big trouble. Never get married, believe me." Which is what she always said. "How about you? Lost a little weight, haven't you? You've not been sick?"

  "Well, Irsa, as you say, the wheel always comes around. Which is why I wanted to ask you about renting a few feet off your market space, and what the Merchants' Association would do if I asked for my old membership back."

  She shook her head. "It's the way it always is, isn't it? Well, sweetheart, I wish I could say no charge on the space, but times are hard, so… ten percent of the take?"

  That was steep—steeper than I expected from Irsa. She'd only charged three percent in the old days, and sometimes not even that when things were bad.

  I was in no position to bargain, so I said, "If that's how it has to be."

  She grinned that broken-toothed grin. "But don't let the Association bother you, sweetheart, you're still a member in good standing."

  "What?"

  "I kept up your dues, is what I'm saying to you. I thought, well, if things go wrong, and they always do, why try to talk them into letting you rejoin? And they're a mess since the chairman resigned, the committee members all want separate bribes. Too much trouble, my dear."

  "You mean you've been paying them for me right along, all this past year?"

  She nodded. I was overwhelmed. What she must have paid out covered far more than the ten percent she was asking. "Irsa, I don't know what to say. You're a life-saver. Thank you."

  "Well, let's not dwell on it. Go on and set up your cards, you're losing customers."

  "Actually, I didn't plan on doing the cards. I lost that old deck anyway, a long time ago."

  "So what then—"

  "Tinaje."

  She blinked at me. "How—"

  I said, "I figure I can set up a sort of tent if I run a rope from the top of your cart to the pole over there. I've got enough cloth and I'll just put down a mat inside."

  "I didn't know you were healer-trained," she said.

  "I've spent part of the last year studying tinaje with one of the best healers I know.''