by D Des Anges
Chapter 12
Hana al-Fihri would have been a very green shoot in the garden of diplomacy, barely more than a new-sprung seedling, if she had not immediately been driven after her encounter at the Deans’ Gala-Fest to lay all about her efforts to determine the veracity of Radigis of Yeavering’s claims.
Almost as soon as she returned home Hana had thrust from the window her caged finches that their slothful chirruping would not disturb her thoughts, and begun to ransack her prodigious memory as a scholar might abuse his shelves.
Radigis of Yeavering was not a name Hana had encountered before; but he was only the assistant to a Magister, and there was no reason she should have. It was a lowly position, Hana thought, to labour in regardless of whether the Magister in question was relatively elevated. Hrothgar was on the occasions he could be bothered to work instead of tupping teenagers, and not so utterly unseeded as the Magisters of Woden or Orn.
But Magister’s assistant was a Magister’s assistant.
She had folded her shift into a careful square, and laid it in the belly of her trunk.
Of course, the assistant of a Magister so lacking in devotion to duty as Hrothgar saw more of the Magister’s work than the assistant to a dedicated servant of the lore. Such men, when possessed of a mind to go with their manners, were ambitious.
Ambitious men, Hana knew, were useful… up to a point.
She had laid the last of her scarves into the trunk, pulled her house robes about her, and let down her hair in a silver waterfall. It fell almost beyond her waist, and was so heavily perfumed that its freeing had given the room a scent it had not borne while her hair was pinned.
An ambitious man in low office, willing to trade (he had made this most plain) whatever he had in exchange for whatever assistance she might give him.
Thirty-five years ago Hana might have been insulted by the notion that she was fit only for use as a footstool or stepladder to a man of base birth in search of richer pickings, but thirty-five years ago she ruled a nation through her husband and was not so cunning. It was better to cultivate the dreams of ambitious wyrms than to crush them, lest they turn to snakes in their disappointment.
Radigis had already seemed to have the measure of her desires.
Hana had turned off the gas light, and sat in the dark, with her chin supported by her naked fingers as the birds complained over the balcony and fluffed out their feathers in the night air. It had been long past midnight by then, the late-running of the Gala-Fest and her slow walk home taking her on into the hours of the morning.
If Radigis was indeed a son-by-wyflock to the Prefect of Cumbria, and if he did indeed exercise the favourable line of writing to the man’s friends-of-Albion in Bodrum, Kos, or Marmaris, then he was to be cosseted. And he was a man of mind, and thus he knew he was to be cosseted, groomed, and favoured.
He knew he must be favoured, and she must prepare, against the possibility of his honesty, and use, the means with which to buy his continued solicitousness.
* * *
For three days after the Deans’ Gala-Fest, Hana made her enquiries. There was an art to the making of these enquiries which dampened her interlocutors’ likelihood of recalling that they had been asked, or divining that she had some purpose in her questions.
To Hana’s continuing displeasure it was an art she had been unable to communicate to her daughter.
First, she made her report to Ioan Twelling of the evening’s occurrences. She wrote of the idle prattle of the lower Magisters and the suspicions of the Deans, making sure to mention in passing the substitution of Hrothgar, but to make no great reference or observation of Radigis.
It was a letter Ioan Twelling would undoubted read without depth and in haste, for such letters arrived with her acquaintance with the regularity of raindrops spattering the windowpanes of Durham. Therefore no especial craft was required in its phrasing, though Hana made sure not to falter in her vigilance all the same.
Ornithopters being reserved for urgent dispatch and clear skies, neither of which was likely on this day, Hana left her flat in the pretext of delivering the letter to the mail-trains.
The mail-train, a mere addendum to the travellers’ conveyance, stood cold, unmanned and guarded only by a child at the station. The squeaky-voiced youth’s face was a-glow with the sorry pox of adolescence. To him Hana must have seemed an exotic and alarming intrusion, but he warmed to her as she joked about his great responsibility for the whole of the railroad.
He took her pfennic in good humour, along with her letter, pointing out first the carriages which would depart for York.
Hana then wrote to Brigit of Hwiccetorr, former of Ulster, apologising for her long silence:
I had but brought your face to mind these last few days when I happened upon the daughter of another Prefect; I quite forget the Prefect’s shire but her husband is of low employ, and I recalled the sad tale of your own Goodman’s struggle with Offa. Is it often, then, that a Prefect denies his daughter even a word on her hand? You must know more of these things than I, being so placed among the Goodwyfen of Albion.
She continued in this manner for more than a page, and dispatched her letter by rider rather than by train, Hwiccetorr not lying within easy reach of a station. It was also so that two letters by train on one day cried for closer examination of both their content, and her plans.
The same day, there was proclaimed on the Wireless – one could scarcely escape the news – a captured aethropede, to be interrogated that afternoon.
It was an inconvenient obstruction, for Hana knew now that every idle conversation must be steered through the waters of satisfied ichor-lust and performed patriotism before it might be allowed to idle in the unassuming doldrums she required. These territories, of who knew whom and who was in wyflock to whom and who was assisting whom in what capacity, were now walled off beyond the gossip of the moment.
In the name of fitting exactly the furrow into which an Albionwoman must lie, Hana made sure to warm and ignite the Wireless receivers, that she might elevate the level produced by the membranes of reproduction for her neighbours to hear and approve. She left the shrieks and squeals of arthropod torment, the hiss and zip of orgone electrified poorly, to flood the air of one room, and spent the remainder of the day preparing a haunch of lamb in the kitchen, instead.
The following morning Hana received through the hand of an intermediary a letter of invitation from Ioan Twelling, asking that she might be so kind as to dine with him the next night and in the morning after accompany his wife to a great breakfast of the wives of the Witegamot. His words claimed he had come aware of the service she had done for him at some length and cost to herself and wished to make his thanks known. Hana suspected otherwise.
There was an air of the regal about his address, which Hana found almost amusing. She gave quiet thanks to the empty air of her flat for what was most like to be not her reward for fidelity but rather the outcome of Hilda’s mounting boredom and dissatisfaction with the company she kept in York.
Hana herself found by good fortune the confirmation she required while attending the marketplace in search of distilled wines for Hilda Twelling.
Outside the low awning of a clothiers’ shop window she spied Hrothgar’s cloth-brained, plump-bottomed ‘bad back’, and bore down on her with a smile of artifice long-practiced.
“My dear,” she said, as the young woman turned to stare stupidly at her. “When do you expect?”
The girl looked down at herself in confusion. “I do not?”
“Ah, then I am mistaken, for I was told,” Hana said, lowering her voice and her eyes at once, inviting the girl into conspiracy with her, “that Hrothgar of Durham’s young mistress was in need of solace and the name of an apothecary who was discreet and gentle…”
“I am not—” the girl began with great indignation, baulked, checked herself, and said hastily, “—Hrothgar’s mistress, he doesn’t have a — not that I would — fuck.”
“That
may be the cause of your predicament,” Hana agreed, a little dry, and she made a frown of concern and confusion. “But if you are not in trouble this way, why would they have sent me to you?”
“I don’t –” the girl said again. She scowled rather unattractively in Hana’s opinion. “He. I was sure he was, you know, his balls had dried.”
“Perhaps he fears you have been unfaithful,” Hana suggested, taking the girl’s unresisting arm. “Have you been seen with other men? Not, my sweet girl, that I would mark you for a brazen, but you know how men’s minds take to suspicion.” She added without qualm at the enormity of the lie, “Especially of those with whom they are much smitten.”
The girl concealed her pleasure poorly, and said, “But I am never seen with other men — there is the man Hrothgar employs to deal with his works of office but—”
“But?” Hana prompted, soothingly. All about them shopkeepers shouted oaths and curses as if they were perpetually in a state of victimhood at the hands of terrible robbers.
“—But he is as well-married a man as any in Albion…”
“So is Hrothgar,” Hana pointed out. “Perhaps this gives rise to his suspicions…”
“Bertha is the daughter of Cumbria,” the plump girl hissed in no small amount of misplaced awe, “and his first daughter at that, no one would suspect Radigis of adultering on her account, she is too well-placed—” and here the girl stopped, wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and said, “—and anyhurr I would not, and Hrothgar knows… oh, why would he… I would never, he must know — faugh.”
Hana patted the back of her hand. “I am sure it is a misunderstanding,” she said, in lullaby tones. “Perhaps wishful thinking. You say his areas of generation are dry — but maybe he wishes otherwise, and calls in unnecessary aid.”
“Maybe I should ask him,” the girl said, soggy and sniffing.
“Maybe he would make denials, and cast you out,” Hana said, stroking her arm. “It is best not to talk of these things. You are sure you are in no need of an apothecary?”
“I bleed to the clock,” the plump girl said, with more Albionwoman bluntness.
Hana thought, I’m sure you bleed like a speared cow, but she nodded her understanding and released the girl’s arm. “I wish you good health, Gooddaughter, and no future need of the apothecary either.”
“T-thank you,” the girl muttered, lost in what must have passed for thought for her.
Hana slipped into the distillers’ as swiftly as if released from the bowstring of some vast siege engine, and completed her day’s purchases without looking for the fair-headed recipient of the Magister’s affections again.
On the day that she came to leave for York, Hana resolved that she might make a meal and a rug from the cow carcass of her journey; therefore in assembling tidbits of Twelling to feed to Radigis, should he reappear, she might also confirm that Radigis was worth feeding. She had now the truth of his wyflock, exact as he had put it to her, and even if Ioan would not tell her plain if Cumbria’s assets were as spoken in the great hall, Hilda could.
It would not be a long train ride, but she had never quite settled herself to the motion and noise of the engines, nor to the use of the railroads at all. For Thaleb Abdul Mummat was still held in high regard for bringing the railroad to what was once Fihriana, after he placed Qadi al-Fihri’s head on a spike above the palace, and this ensured Hana could never quite bring herself to care for the railroads.
By this association, Hana never passed a train journey in comfort, and her passage to York that night was no better. She watched the gas lights of Durham fade behind from the window, and the darkness engulf the land, and was assailed by the life-like memory of Qadi al-Fihri’s face, these thirty years dead.
She was haunted, politely, in turn, by the nine children she had failed to save from the swords of Mummat’s men. Their glorious and great revolution, and their railroad that left Fihriana – now Thalebbar – another hollow decaying state along the railroads through to the Tea Lands, through to the Nubians.
The rhythm of the tracks passing below the wheels almost lulled Hana into a doze, and when she shook herself free of the influence and the past, she felt her age in her bones.
York was as wet as an upended ocean when she arrived. The great arches of its intimidating station – almost a palace to the trains themselves – afforded less protection from the furious gusts of freezing wind than she would have liked. In the downpour, which leapt and danced about so much that it hardly earned the ‘down’ of its name, there were the melting remnants of hard hailstones.
All-in-all Hana did not feel kindly toward York until the horse-and-cover sent for her arrived.
* * *
Hana came away from York the next afternoon with a number of impressions in her mind.
Chief among them was that the wives of the Witegamot were a dull and fatuous lot who had unfortunately been well-trained in the art of diplomatically shutting up, or else had simply not the observance to note the doings of their husbands. Hilda, who enjoyed her letter of invitation to the meal through proximity rather than rank – for Twelling was no Witegamotman – was duly shunned as a pariah. Hana and Hilda had as a result spent much of the morning in conspiracy, condemning even the very tiniest flaws of their fellow-breakfasters.
This petty vengefulness suited Hana well, for in indignation Hilda became a ferocious gossip, and much of use of the personal lives of the Witegamot flowed in a river of spite from her lips to Hana’s ear.
From Twelling himself, Hana took away a neat and most trade-worthy fragment of news. The Witegamot planned to put to a vote of Men of Good Standing, Prefects, Magisters, and Men of Lore the matter of whether to impress upon Albion Broadcasting the need to relay also the ‘sound and essence’ of public floggings and punishments hitherto confined only to those in the local area. It was a matter which Twelling opposed as ‘impossible to govern and unnecessary to introduce’.
Hana had learned furthermore that the Magister of Durham was to be removed and replaced by the cousin of the Prefect of Durham, and that Twelling intended to use his Objection to prevent this. His reason, given over the second jug of distilled wine, was that the Prefect of Durham was a ‘fool with a wandering wæepen’ and that his cousin was worse.
And Hilda had confirmed, with characteristic derision, that while the Prefect of Cumbria – Hermegliscus Redwaldsson – had so little influence on affairs in the dominions of Albion itself that he ‘might as well be a tree’, he was kept from losing his position through ‘the far-sighted employ of spies and swayed-loyal Amtspersons in Kos’. It was for this which he took the ‘entirely undeserved’ title of Winedryhten.
Hana had the profit on her journey, not to mention the opportunity to observe the bodies that comforted the Witegamot: the Governance himself was unmarried, and to Hana’s disappointment this had not been discussed.
Within the cold confines of her home, the smallest of the finches had at last succumbed either to the winter or to the harassment of its fellows, and there were two notes waiting for her, one on the kitchen table and the other pushed under the door to the flat itself.
Hana lifted the dead finch from its cage and threw it in the box of kitchen effluent, and attended to the note from under the door; the kitchen table note would be in Hajar’s hand, and most likely either an apology for her lack of cooperation or a refusal to apologise for her lack of cooperation, and neither interested Hana.
The note from the floor bore the rust-red thumbprint of an errand boy, and was sealed with green wax and an insigna-free stamp which left a flat and featureless circle. Hana opened it without hesitation, and was not surprised to see:
Emira, I have gold for you, and wish to make a gift of it. Where shall we speak, now that we are friends?
It was unsigned, in a slanting variation on the runic script of Albion.
Radigis’s ‘gold’ might prove nothing more than glittering tin, but he had certain potential, and she now had a lure with whic
h to tempt him. Hana pushed aside Hajar’s note, laid out a sheet of cheap writing-paper, and replied:
Goodman, it happens that I am come into some fine wines which I would be honoured if you would share in. Shall we dine?
Let him bring his secrets, Hana thought, as she took to the window to watch for an errand-boy. If he could extend her reach to the prisons of Kos and the last Auda Bedu Ird whose hearts still beat within, she would give him the keys to the hearts of the Witegamot themselves if she had to.
Chapter 13
“Where?” Ferdinand asked, throwing his arms wide to indicate the boarding house dining room. It was, barring their small party and a drunkard who smelled of sheep, quite empty.
Warmed by a low fire and a brazier at the kitchen side of the room which did not mask the smell of hot eowan, it was dark and long and low and their meal was more full of fish than any cooked so far from the sea should be.
“Where,” Ferdinand repeated, having drawn the unwanted attention of the shepherd’s red and listless eyes, “are we like to hire a bloody ornithopter here? Have you run mad at last?”
Hajar, by now attuned to these exclamations as she had become to Benjon repeatedly addressing her and indeed everyone else as an idiot, only gazed at him without feeling upon her face and said, “What else would you have us do, build a bloody ladder? Are you a carpenter now?”
Ferdinand gave no answer and stared at his fish stew, clearly as enthused by it as Hajar. Benjon had mechanically bolted his and now sat greedily eyeing her portion. It was only another manner in which he differed now that his mind was not his own, for the ‘real’ Benjon ate as he slept: rare, and reluctant.
“Or perhaps you can scale it and throw down a rope to pull me up,” Hajar suggested, “because I cannot fucking climb it myself.”
“I can,” said Benjon’s voice.
“No, Benjon’s arms are not strong enough,” Ferdinand pronounced after perfunctory examination of the articles, and Hajar said:
