by Kate Elliott
Captain Anji and four soldiers strolled up the other avenue, which was lined with pens and booths selling songbirds, chickens, crickets in miniature cages. The crowd melted away to give them room. Conversations faded to silence as the two groups met, and merged.
“Will you attend me, husband?” Mai asked with a smile that made the captain grin, even though he was in public, and caused Keshad to look away.
“Of course,” the captain said. They went back the way she had come while she described to him the characteristics of the local breeds and the wet season problems with foot rot.
“If I know something, it is about sheep. I was meant to marry into a sheepherders’ clan.”
“Where you would have been wasted.”
“They were wealthy.”
“I assure you,” said Anji with a smile that made Avisha blush even though it was not directed at her, “they did not have as many sheep as my Qin clansmen. That our estate will have, if we acquire the core of a strong herd.”
“I am interested in this herd.” Mai indicated an extensive pen mostly emptied by sales. They entered into a protracted discussion with a clan that herded extensive flocks near Old Fort.
Avisha sidled up next to Keshad. She glanced toward Chaji, to see if he was watching her, but like the other soldiers he was scrutinizing the passersby, the farmers deep in conversation, a pair of laughing laborers carrying axes on their shoulders, the skulking dirty children.
“That was well done of you to spot those spies that merchant wanted to place in the house,” she said to Keshad.
He flicked a glance at her, as if surprised she could talk. “Eh. Yes.”
“Eh, do you know, if you and your sister hadn’t helped us over the river, I don’t think we would have survived.”
“Probably not,” he said without looking at her.
“Have I made a proper thanks?”
“A hundred times over.”
“Oh. Ah. Have you news of your sister?”
He made a brushing motion with his hand, as at a pesky fly. Abruptly, he stiffened, and she took a step back, afraid he was going to say something cutting, but he was looking past the soldiers into the crowd.
“Avisha.” Mai touched Avisha’s arm. “It’s best if you return to the compound.” The company had re-formed, ready to move on. “We’re going now to take afternoon cakes and tea with the Ri Amarah in their compound. They’ll tell me today their decision, if Miravia can visit me in my own house. But since you’re not allowed in the compound, you would just have to wait outside, so you might prefer to go back home.”
Avisha wondered if this was what Sheyshi felt like, pushed to one side. “Are you sure you want to go? The Silvers cover their heads to conceal their horns!” When Mai laughed, Avisha went on determinedly. “That’s what everyone says.”
“The women don’t have horns.”
“That doesn’t mean the men don’t have them. Everyone knows they do!”
“Every ignorant villager,” said Keshad over his shoulder.
Captain Anji had waited throughout, standing patiently behind his wife. “Have you seen their uncovered heads, Keshad?”
“No.”
“Then you are only speculating. If you will, Keshad, return to the office with Avisha and have one of the clerks ink a contract, something I can take with me when I ride out to examine the herds. Come, Mai, I’ll escort you personally. The Ri Amarah are honorable and trustworthy friends.”
He nodded at Avisha, who wished herself dead and her bones picked clean for having spoken so stupidly. Who was she to mock Sheyshi? At least Sheyshi kept her mouth shut.
“Open your mouth and prove yourself a fool,” she muttered as the company moved off en masse, the big man’s head towering over the rest. They were talking about sheep again!
“Do they really have horns?” Chaji came to stand next to her. He indicated Keshad, who was fulminating, staring toward that same poor beggar with offering bowl held out in trembling hand as he limped through the crowd in the same general direction as the Qin company. An odd-looking man under the grime, and oddly familiar.
“Avisha,” said Keshad under his breath, “here’s a vey. Keep walking, split away from me. Then go say a pretty word to him and bend close and put it in his bowl, and afterward tell me if there is a mark in the bottom. Wait until he is out of our sight before you meet up with me.”
He had spoken to her! She did as she was told, angling away, pretending to be walking by herself, a simple village girl come to the city for the first time. Men smiled at her, in her pretty clothes and well-kept hair. Women eyed the cut and quality of her taloos.
“May the gods grant you blessings, holy one.” The beggar was old, thin, with a beaky nose and dark rodent’s eyes that had an unpleasant glimmer. Then he moaned grateful noises, a few mumbled words that could have been anything. He reeked, as if he’d been sleeping in a smokehouse after having been rolled in dung. Whew!
She remembered where she’d seen him before.
She caught up with Keshad by the gates to the inner city, where he had paused to wait for her with the four Qin soldiers assigned to guard him.
“Well?” he demanded.
“It’s a wooden bowl. There was a mark painted in the bottom, crossed knives linked under a circle.”
Keshad pressed a fist to his mouth, then lowered it.
“What means that?” asked Chaji, very serious now.
“That’s what empire folk call a blessing bowl, for the god Beltak. Now, maybe he stole it, or maybe he found it, but maybe he didn’t.”
Avisha bit her lip. “Heya.” She hesitated. When Keshad gave her a look of barely veiled disgust, she blurted out the rest. “The very first day I came to the compound, I saw a beggar in a red cap in the courtyard. I’m sure maybe it was him.”
“Maybe he is a spy,” said Chaji. “The captain warned us, maybe Red Hounds from the empire follow us over the mountains. You want, we kill him right now.” He grinned at Avisha. “You want to watch? Very fast, we kill him.”
“You can’t kill a holy beggar in the public street!” Keshad surveyed the street traffic, the gate guards staring at the Qin soldiers and factor and girl loitering in the sun, the laborers and market women pausing to whisper. A pair of raggedly dressed young men watched the Qin soldiers with what looked like admiration. “Even if this one is a spy, no one seeing the impiety would know that. They’d only see outlanders killing a holy beggar.”
“The captain must know,” said Chaji. “I send Seren and Tam to follow the spy. Avisha, return to our own compound. Tell Chief Deze what we saw. You and I—” He indicated Keshad. “—we go to the Ri Amarah compound, find the captain.”
Avisha admired the swift way Chaji took control of the situation, but Keshad balked. “Are you perhaps overreacting?”
The Qin were not in general demonstrative men. Chaji’s look of scorn flashed quickly, and was hidden at once. “From the empire, there is always danger to the captain. Even a tailman knows this. Avisha, you go quickly, yes?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly, not sure if his dazzling gaze was offered in praise or just because he was tense.
“Eiya!” muttered Keshad. “We’ll do as you say, but I know the city better, I’ll be able to retrace the spy’s trail. Send the others to follow the captain. You and I follow the beggar.”
“You try to escape, maybe?” Chaji said with a grin. “You try, I enjoy chasing you down.” He sent Seren and Tam off after the captain, then grabbed Keshad’s elbow and dragged him through the gate with Umar trotting behind, leaving her alone, the center of stares, a girl who consorted with outlanders and accepted their smiles.
“Trying to get a husband?” said a young laborer, passing her with a long-handled adze braced across his broad shoulders. “I’ll interview you, lass. They say the Qin soldiers have nubs instead of good sharp tools. Don’t waste that pretty face on them. Come by the carpenters’ guild house. Ask for Keness.”
“Leave her be,”
said his older companion. “Don’t insult the lass. Anyway, the outlanders saved us, in case you forgot.”
“I don’t like the way they look. Cursed proud, if you ask me. Still, I suppose the coin is good, neh?”
She ran away into the crowd, tears burning. Of course the Qin didn’t worry she would run away from them: The coin was good; she had no better option. No use crying about it. She was protecting the children and doing what she must, and it wasn’t as if the Qin were so bad. Mai had been good to her! She was fortunate to have fallen in with them.
When she stopped sniffling she realized she had gone the wrong way and stumbled into a secondary market where men, women, and children were roped into lines. Labor gangs, being pressed into service. Half of them had fresh debt marks carved into the flesh by their left eyes, some still dribbling blood from a hasty job.
Their hard luck made her realize just how fortunate she was.
As men and women jostled her, she stopped, trying to remember in which direction lay the inner gate. Stunningly, an anonymous man groped her breasts. She shrieked, slapping out, but hit instead a woman carrying greens in baskets hanging from a pole balanced across her shoulders.
“Clumsy bitch! Sheh! And you a rich clan’s daughter in such silks. Not that you’d know what hunger is.”
Babbling apologies, Avisha crouched, careful to keep her hem from dragging in the mud, and plucked the thick se leaves one by one out of the muck. The woman cursed at her until she shrank back, red-faced and sniveling, looking for a place to get out of the fray and catch her breath, but there was nowhere that people weren’t moving, shoving, blustering, shouting.
“Heya! Ready to move, now! We march to the docks. No falling behind.” A factor brandished a whip as, from the saddle, he addressed a pathetic gang of laborers, young women and men with fresh debt marks and freshly shaven heads that made them look like Sapanasu’s clerks, only in homespun, not the robes worn by the Lantern’s hierophants.
She would not have recognized Nallo with all her hair gone, if the woman standing in the second rank of the gang had not blanched and tried to cover her face.
“Heya!” The whip cracked a warning in the air. “Look sharp! Stay in line! You’ll find you’re well treated in your new work if you keep discipline and remain orderly. Don’t disappoint me, or your new masters.”
They marched off toward the docks down the main avenue, feet shuffling on churned earth. In their wake, the market traffic resumed, but Avisha stood as with feet planted, folk bumping into her, cutting around her, cursing her for getting in the way and would she please move on move on. She began to cry.
Nallo had sold her labor. She was now a slave
KESH THOUGHT THAT probably the old man was just a beggar, fallen on hard times, a Sirniakan carter stuck in Olossi because his team foundered and afterward reduced to begging. It happened. But Chaji’s urgency infected Kesh. It was odd that the girl had seen him hanging around the Qin compound weeks ago.
Their biggest problem was in how to move through the city without drawing attention, because of course everyone noticed two armed Qin soldiers. They would have to hope that the beggar’s attention would be fixed on the large party he was following, which was certainly roiling the waters. And not just because of the Qin soldiers and the huge slave. Everyone must stop to stare at beauty as it passed.
The red cap slid sideways to the side of the thoroughfare as, far up ahead, the company stopped at a merchant’s stall. From within the crowd, he could not see what the merchant was selling, but then the object she held in her hand caught sunlight and flashed.
Mirrors, for the vain to stare at their pretty faces.
The beggar loitered. Keshad glanced at Chaji and Umar, and they nodded. Very suspicious!
The company moved on, the black-clad soldiers opening a wedge through the crowd not so much by forcing it as by simply being there. For a moment, the crowd thinned in just such a pattern that he saw her lustrous black hair arranged in a complicated set of falls held up by combs and hairsticks. She was speaking to the captain, laughter in the lift of her chin.
He was not a fool. Compared with the Qin captain, he could be of no interest to her. He didn’t even want anything from her anyway. It’s just she was clever and lovely and close at hand to stare at, when his heart was already torn in half and thrown to the wild beasts to savage because he had lost his sister and his purpose in life in one dreadful change of fortune. Because Nasia, the slave-woman who had been his lover, had stared at him with recrimination in her face, even as he told Mai to turn Nasia away from her only hope of freedom.
“Lost him,” said Chaji as he shoved Keshad to get him moving.
“There he is,” said Umar, behind them. “Beyond the gold awning.”
As they cut past noodle shops, the singsong of the flirting ladle girls drifted alongside appealing smells: “hot and spicy! for the rains!” “best qual-i-ty, best quality,” “mushrooms and leeks, here’s your mushrooms and leeks.” At a plank table, two men chopped radishes and purple-heart; over a brazier, a girl slip-fried them with pipe-shoots and salt in smoky sesame oil.
Chaji grabbed his elbow. “There’s Chief Tuvi, walking rear guard. Get moving.”
The larger party was walking up the shoemaker’s lane, the long way around to the district where the Silvers lived if you didn’t know the city as well as Keshad did. But the beggar’s red cap moved past the shoemaker’s lane and cut up the tailor’s lane, so they climbed after him, pretending at intervals to look at fancily embroidered festival jackets selling cheap because in the wake of the attack the city had not mustered a festival this year.
“The captain is actually the half-brother of the Sirniakan emperor?” Kesh asked.
Chaji gave a curt shake of his head, which meant Keshad had stepped out of bounds by asking an inappropriate question, and kept walking.
“Lost him,” said Umar. “Hu! There he is.”
They hurried through the bone-carvers’ alley, in shadow under canvas slung between buildings. The carvings were polished to such a high gleam that they seemed alive in the dim light: winged horses, dancing lions, writhing salamanders, swimming dragons. Hugging the corner, they ventured onto a wider street. Uphill, Chief Tuvi’s broad shoulders vanished around a sharp turn where the street split into three. A red cap slouched behind a pair of matrons.
“There,” said Umar, starting forward, but Chaji caught him by the tunic and tugged him short as a barrow filled with bricks rumbled by, pushed by a sweating man wearing a linen kilt and an unlaced sleeveless vest flapping back from his torso.
“He’s working with a second man,” said Chaji. “That one with a rag tied around his left arm, standing beneath the green awning, behind the rack of sandals. He’s seen us.”
“The hells!” swore Keshad. “Two of them!”
“Maybe more. Where are Seren and Tam? Why haven’t they caught up with the captain? It isn’t like he’s moving fast.”
A whistle blasted above the street noise. Chaji bolted, Umar at his heels, shoving past anyone in their way as they sprinted after the company. Keshad found his way blocked by the barrow-man, who was swearing as he struggled to stop the unbalanced barrow from spilling. Kesh grabbed the lip and pulled, and the man thumped it down on its legs with a curse.
“Sheh! Cursed outlanders!”
The red cap bobbed past, flowing downhill. Keshad pushed past the same pair of well-dressed matrons and followed the cap down the street. The beggar ducked behind passers-by, then twisted into an alley. Kesh sprinted after him, but negotiating the confines of the alley of combs was not so easy because the artisans recognized him, Master Feden’s household having spent a good deal of coin on fancy combs and lacquered sticks and clasps. A small girl seated with legs dangling from a second story balcony watched his progress, her round face solemn as she tracked him.
Panting, he came out into the tailor’s street. He scanned up the angling terraced steps and down toward the sprawl of the outer city seen
through gaps in buildings. A red cap bobbed in the crowd, then stilled as the man stopped and looked back.
To make sure he was being followed.
“Aui!”
Although similar in stature, this was a different man. He wore a subtly different twist of dirty kilted rags and had less of a bandy-legged gait, a man who had spent less time on horseback than the first beggar. Now that Kesh thought of it, where did a beggar get bandy legs from riding horses so much, unless he was an outcast fosterling raised and later discarded by the lendings?
Where had they lost track of the first beggar? It could have been at any time after Avisha had tossed two vey in the man’s bowl. Maybe down by the gold awning amid the clamor and slurp of the noodle stalls. Easy enough to slide one red cap in the place of another.
“Guards! Murder! Murder!”
The red-capped head was still turned to watch him, and Keshad knew absolutely that to run down past that man would be idiotic. He plunged back into the alley of the combs and halted in front of the stall of a woman he’d dealt with a hundred times.
“Where’s your mistress?” he asked the lad overseeing the wares. “Mistress Para!”
She was an attractive woman, her taloos wrapped around advanced pregnancy. But she was remarkably light on her feet as she emerged onto the porch with a cup in one hand and a tiny chisel in the other. “Keshad!” She smiled. “I heard you left the city.”
“Heya! My apologies. Can I cut through your house to the alley behind?” Beyond the bright opening of the alley, traffic passed on the tailor’s street.
She was Air-touched like him; it gave them a measure of kinship. She stepped aside, and he sprang up the steps in his outdoor shoes and raced through the workshop while a pair of apprentices paused in their work to gape. He ran down the long corridor that fronted the living quarters. Emerging finally in the narrow kitchen yard, he pelted through an open gate into the fetid confines of the back alley.
He cut back toward the tailor’s street and hurried down the terraced steps toward the commotion below, where men were still shouting for the guard. He hadn’t meant to cut so close to the incident, but when he saw Seren leaning against a wall, holding his side as though injured, he shoved through the traffic and fetched up beside the young soldier, who was red-faced, breathing raggedly, and doubled over, barely able to keep his feet.
