by K. J. Parker
'That you?' screeched a woman's voice as the second set of doors were opened for them. Now they were in a dining hall half as long and high again as the Charity amp; Diligence in Sansory, where Poldarn had first met Cleapho. A high gallery, its turned wooden balustrades painted and gilded in an overwhelming variety of colours, ran round three sides of it. Dead centre of the gallery on the far side stood a woman-at least, Poldarn assumed there was a human being somewhere inside the vast billow of fabrics from which the loud voice appeared to be coming. 'That you?' she repeated. 'Have a good trip?'
'Fine,' Ciana replied, as if he'd just stepped out to buy anchovies. 'This is Poldarn, he'll be staying a few days. Where's the mail?'
'Study,' replied the voice among the draperies. 'Dinner's cooking.' Poldarn's newly acquired instinct helped him judge the distance between the woman on the balcony and himself; too far away for her to see his burned, melted face. 'Tell your friend he can have the Oak Suite.'
She disappeared backwards through a pair of enormous panelled doors. 'My wife,' Ciana explained. 'Come on, I'll show you to your room.'
Up the gallery stairs, down one side, down a long corridor hung with dark tapestries that stank of dust, left down another corridor, carpeted and lined with frescoes of sea battles. Eventually, Ciana stopped outside a door (it looked like it had been planked out of a single tree, except there couldn't possibly ever have been a tree that tall and wide) and pushed it open with his fingertip. 'Hope this'll be all right,' he said. 'We don't entertain much, so we only keep a couple of rooms ready. Still, it keeps the rain off.'
Before Poldarn could say anything, four women pushed past him into the room, carrying a huge laundry basket between them like orderlies bearing the wounded from a battlefield. Once inside, they moved so fast, brandishing sheets and blankets and skinning pillowcases off horse-sized pillows, that it was impossible to see past them and admire the view. 'Someone'll be up with water for a bath,' Ciana was saying, 'and then it'll be time for dinner. Not the same as a simple meal under the trees, but you can't have everything.' Then Poldarn lost sight of him behind the whirling clouds of laundry, though he saw the door close.
The women finished whatever they'd been doing and vanished like elves, leaving Poldarn alone in the Oak Suite. Why it was called that he wasn't quite sure, since as far as the eye could see every surface was either black marble or extravagantly carved and gilded burr walnut. In the far corner was a sort of pavilion affair, inside which he guessed there was a bed. On a broad table (wealthy farmers in Tulice worked smaller acreages) was a tall pile of neatly folded clothes for him to change into. A solid silver bath stood in front of the fireplace like a raider ship dragged home and set up as a trophy of war. He'd just taken off the gown that he'd been manhandled into in the entrance hall and was about to put on the new clothes (thick, soft and surprisingly plain woollen shirt, trousers and socks) when the door opened yet again and a dozen women-different ones, as far as he could tell-burst into the room holding tall copper jugs that filled the air with steam. They took no notice of Poldarn, standing in the middle of the room with a face covered in scar tissue and no clothes on; they filled the bath, laid out a tall pile of white towels, and disappeared.
A bath, Poldarn thought, staring at it. Not a dip in a river or a splash of water out of a pool or dunking your head in the slack-tub: an actual bath, indoors, in hot water. Have I ever had one of these before? Must have, or else the smell of the steam wouldn't seem so familiar, and I wouldn't be looking forward to it so much. Chances are I used to enjoy baths, at some stage in my career.
The water was hot; considerably hotter than he'd anticipated when he'd vaulted over the towering side and plunged in. For three or four agonising heartbeats he was convinced he was about to die, but then the pain and shock faded, replaced by a feeling of overwhelming comfort. Wonderful bath, he thought, I've missed this-He frowned but decided not to worry about it. Someone had left a tall, slender bronze jug on a pedestal next to the bath, where he could just manage to reach it from where he lay. It was full of some white, milky liquid, and a little voice at the back of his mind said that the right thing to do was pour this stuff over his head, knead it into his hair, hold his breath and duck under the water for a bit. He wasn't quite sure what this performance was designed to achieve, but the instinct was terribly strong. He tried it, and surfaced a few moments later to find that the bathwater had all turned the same milky white colour. Amazing, he thought.
What in the gods' names am I doing here? he asked himself. Superficially, the answer was perfectly straightforward: he'd had the extreme good fortune to scrape acquaintance with a wealthy, generous eccentric, and in consequence was wallowing in a hot bath full of milky white stuff instead of crouching under a cold stone arch in the wet streets, hoping his boots would still be on his feet when he woke up. No problem with that; and he'd forgotten, assuming he'd ever known, just how extremely nice pleasure could be. A man could easily go out of his way for pleasure; he could do far worse than spend his whole life hunting for it, like Ciana stalking the big pig. True, there wasn't really any need for the furniture and tapestries and life-size marble statues and enough servants to colonise a small continent. A bath was probably enough, and clean clothes whose previous owner hadn't died by violence, and something half decent to eat. A man could be fooled into believing this sort of thing was normal if he hung around here long enough.
Normal as a two-headed dog, Poldarn reminded himself, sticking his toes up out of the water and looking at them as if he'd never seen them before. He was, after all, in Torcea, the capital of the Empire, in the house of a giant. (A short giant, maybe; but if he drew back those enormous shutters and looked out of the window, it was a safe bet he'd see outsize leaves and the tree-thick stem of the giant pepper-vine, and below that a soft white mat of clouds.) None of this was why he was here; he hadn't fought and killed his way from Haldersness to Dui Chirra and slaughtered a giant boar with a tree branch just so that he could have a relaxing bath. Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree -Still couldn't think of the last line, damn it. The song spun round in his mind, the jagged edge where the final line was missing grazing all his thoughts, leaving them raw and painful. He decided to think about something else.
He was, he supposed, here to overthrow the Empire, kill the most evil man in history and bring about the end of the world. A brief rest, wash and a brush-up, bite to eat, and then it'd be business as usual. Poldarn remembered washing his face in the fern-fringed pool, on the first day, when Copis had found him; this was better, but otherwise the two experiences were pretty much the same, and he was really no further forward.
Dinner with Ciana and his family (which was huge and excessive, like everything else to do with him) would have been an ordeal, except that the food was very good indeed, and there were no soldiers, sword-monks, bandits, pirates, mysterious women who turned into crows or old school friends anywhere to be seen. Ciana's wife, a large woman with thick red hair down to her waist, had taken one horrified look at Poldarn's face and then made up her mind that he was invisible; her three brothers scowled at him through the forest of silverware; an assortment of thickset, hairy men who were probably cousins tried to make him eat and drink enough to feed a large village, and burst out in raucous laughter whenever he asked someone to pass the mustard. Ciana himself told a succession of improbable hunting stories, which neither Poldarn nor anybody else paid any attention to. There was also a tall, slim woman, with grey eyes and light brown hair that curled where it touched her shoulders, who sat opposite him. He guessed she must be Ciana's baby sister; she didn't talk to anyone, and ate nothing except bread, a carrot and a few thin slices of smoked lamb, and if his appearance bothered her, she gave no sign of it. Miraculously, once the last course had been stripped off the plates and cleared away, Ciana stood up and walked away from the table, promptly followed by the rest of the company. Poldarn, who'd assumed that he'd be s
tuck there half the night while the household drank itself into a coma, found himself following a severe-faced manservant back through the panelled corridors to his room, where someone had lit the lamps and turned down the coverlet. He pulled off his clothes, dropped on the bed like a shot deer, and fell asleep.
Soft red light light outlined the edges of the window frame when he opened his eyes. Three women were standing over him, holding jugs of water and towels; it took him some time to persuade them to go away and let him wash on his own. They'd left him yet another change of clothes, and a pair of beautifully soft green leather slippers; his boots, however, had vanished without trace. The implication was that he wasn't going anywhere, at least for a while. For a moment he was annoyed; but what the hell, he thought, will it matter so very much if I destroy the world tomorrow rather than today?
No sooner had he dressed than the door opened (nobody ever knocked) and yet more women came in; one of them was the woman he'd reckoned was Ciana's sister. She smiled at him.
'I'm Noja,' she said. 'My brother asked me to fetch you down to breakfast.' More food, Poldarn thought, surely not; she met his gaze and laughed. 'You've missed him and the rest of them, I'm afraid,' she went on. 'He thought you'd probably rather sleep in. But if you're not starving to death, maybe you'd like some bread and cheese and some fruit-'
'Thanks,' Poldarn said quickly, 'that'll be fine.'
She nodded. 'Food is a serious hazard in this house,' she said, as she led him down the stairs. 'It sort of stalks you like a predator. You have to be very careful or it'll overwhelm you. Which is why I never leave my room in the mornings till everyone else is safely out of the house, and nobody's likely to jump out at me and make me eat roast pork and sausages.'
Poldarn shrugged. 'I've got nothing against roast pork,' he said, 'or sausages, even. But I've been, well, travelling for quite a while, and I guess I'm out of practice where competitive eating's concerned.'
'I see,' Noja replied. 'In that case, later on I'll show you some good places where you can hide during mealtimes. You can trust me, I've had years of experience.'
She didn't lead him back to the great hall where they'd eaten the previous evening; apparently she had a small breakfast-room of her own, where she could indulge her perverted taste for not guzzling in polite seclusion. It seemed odd to Poldarn that there could be such a small, plain room in Ciana's house; it was scarcely larger than the shed Spenno and Galand Dev had built to house the master furnace, and only about half a dozen servants stood around and watched while they ate their hot rolls and watermelon.
'You probably think my brother's a clown,' Noja said suddenly, as she washed her fingers in a silver bowl. 'Actually, he's not. Our father was a tenant farmer in Tulice; my brother came here with two shirts and a writing set, and worked day and night for five years as a jobbing clerk until he'd saved the deposit for a loan on his first ship. He sent for me when I was fourteen, saved me from having to marry the boy next door, for which I'll always be grateful. The hunting thing comes from when he was about ten, before I was born. The landlord's sons used to come out to Tulice to hunt, and they used to let him carry the nets and work the dogs, and when they'd had a good day they'd give him a generous tip, five or six quarters; that's how he was able to save up the fare and the price of his ink bottles and writing slope. These days he's doing very well, thanks to a good eye for quality and a fair amount of common sense, but he's never forgotten those hunting trips when he was a kid, he's always trying to get back there, even though he knows he can't-he says there's a hole in time that's just big enough for his mind to slip through, but his body's got too fat. I suppose we've all got one or two special memories that we hold on to, like an anchor or climbing up a rope.'
Poldarn looked at her. 'Not me,' he said.
'Really?' Her look suggested that she didn't believe him.
'Really,' he said. 'Which is probably just as well. If memory's a rope, my guess is that the other end would be round my neck.'
She stared at him, then laughed. 'What an extraordinary thing to say,' she said. 'You make it sound like you've got memories, but you've found out how to avoid them, the way I avoid mealtimes.'
'They haven't caught me yet,' Poldarn said, 'but I have a feeling it's more luck than judgement.'
Noja examined him again, like Spenno assessing the strength of a welded seam, then smiled. 'Well, best of luck, anyhow. What would you like to do today? Jetat said that if this is your first time in Torcea, maybe you'd like me to show you the sights.'
'Actually-' Poldarn hesitated. There was definitely a case to be made for it, probably a whole sheaf of precepts of religion about the importance of thorough reconnaissance; it'd be better than having to ask the way in bakers' shops, and he didn't have any money to buy a map, assuming there were such things as maps of cities. 'That would be very kind of you,' he said, 'if you can spare the time.'
Her smile widened, like a flaw in a casting. 'I'm entirely at your disposal,' she said gravely (Copis, assigned to him by the Faculty of Deymeson). 'I'll tell them to get a carriage ready.'
The Ciana family's second-best carriage certainly made a change from carts. The spokes of its wheels were impossibly slim, and there was a dainty little set of folding steps to preserve passengers' dignity as they got in. Two coachmen sat in front, and two large men in livery sat behind (chaperones or bodyguards, or maybe they were just there to produce food in case a passenger had somehow managed to go an hour without eating something). There were four matched horses, and enough non-functional silverwork was riveted and stitched to the harness to pay for a road across the Tulice marshes. Which was, of course, exactly the degree of style appropriate for the entry of the god in the cart into Torcea 'That's the Oratory, over there,' Noja was saying, 'and you can just see the spire of the North Star Tower over there-no, you've missed it, that's the Merchant Venturers' Hall, and down from there on the left is the Ordnance Grounds, with the Processional leading to the North Bridge-'
'I see,' Poldarn lied. 'Is that near where the Emperor lives?'
Noja looked at him. 'How do you mean?' she said. 'When he visits, you mean? Well, usually he stays at the Guild House, or the Prefecture…'
Poldarn frowned. 'The Emperor doesn't live in Torcea?'
'Good heavens, no.' She laughed. 'The palace is at Gondleve, that's a day's drive north; or there's the summer palace at Ondene, or the autumn lodge at Ducuse. And when the Council's in session, of course, he's at Bolway.'
'Oh,' Poldarn said. 'So where would he be now?'
Noja had to think about that. 'Probably,' she said, 'at Beal, for the honey festival. Tazencius likes to be seen at things like that, so people will start thinking he's really the Emperor.' She smiled. 'You know, I haven't been to the honey festival for years. I don't suppose it's the same as it used to be-we used to go every year, but my brother sold off that side of the business. Would you like to go? It's quite fun.'
Poldarn could feel pressure on the edge of his circle. Nobody had asked what his business in Torcea was; one explanation was that they already knew, and of course there were others, more likely. 'How far is it?' he asked. 'I really don't want to put you to any trouble.'
'Not far,' Noja replied. 'We can stay overnight at the Purity of Soul at Orchat, it's not what it used to be, of course, but people still go out there quite often; and the festival proper doesn't actually start until tomorrow evening.'
He studied her for a heartbeat or so, then said, 'It was an accident.'
She looked puzzled. 'Sorry, what was?'
Slowly Poldarn drew the side of his little finger down his face, from his eyelid to the corner of his mouth. He'd never get used to how the skin felt. 'I used to work in a foundry,' he said. 'Getting splashed with molten brass is something of an occupational hazard. Both you and your brother have been amazingly polite about it, but-'
This time, Noja's laugh sounded different; when Spenno rapped a newly cast bell with a small hammer, you could tell by the ring whether the cas
ting was sound or blemished. 'I'm so sorry,' she said, 'I wasn't laughing at you, it's just-you do know why you're here, don't you?'
Here we go again, Poldarn thought. 'I've got a few bits of business I've got to attend to in Torcea, if that's what you mean,' he said. 'And your brother was kind enough-'
'You don't know.' She was looking at him again. 'Well, it's hardly likely he'd tell you, but I thought one of his relatives, or maybe the servants-He brought you home with him for me.' She flushed. 'Other brothers bring back lace shawls or amber brooches for their sisters, Ciana brings me-well, ugly men.' She frowned. 'That didn't come out right,' she said. 'Is it all right if I start at the beginning, or would you prefer to make a scene first?'
Poldarn shook his head. 'Perfectly true,' he said. 'Actually, my friends tell me it's an improvement. Go on.'
'Well.' They were driving past a huge and singularly impressive building, but Noja seemed to have abandoned her tour-guide role for the time being. 'I told you my brother brought me out here when I was fourteen, and I was glad because it meant I didn't have to marry some farmer. Truth is, I didn't want to marry anybody; still don't. Which Ciana understands, bless him, he's amazingly good about it. He's also very well aware that I get bored very easily when I'm on my own, and too much female company makes me want to scream.' She looked sideways at him. 'Actually, when I'm in a bad mood, I'm not nice to have about the house; so he's always on the lookout for company for me. Interesting people; or, failing that, people who don't get out of the way fast enough. But he can't quite bring himself to keep me supplied with good-looking men, or even ordinary-looking ones-he's still a brother, after all-so wherever he goes, he's perpetually on the lookout for men he can trust me to be alone with-'
