by Patty Jansen
“Please, just let it rest. I’m sure we’ll solve it in some way. It’s probably a good idea for me to train a few back-up builders anyway. In case—”
“Be quiet. I will not hear that from my future wife.”
“Hear what?” She looked into his hard face.
“I will not hear apologies and excuses to settle for second best. You are of the Endri of Miran. We pay for a lot of these Nikala people’s houses, for their services, for their health care. We pay them so that they will work for us, not for some stranger to poach workers from under our noses. That’s the last I’ll hear of it.”
If he’d been Enzo, Ellisandra would have told him in no uncertain terms that she could look after herself and didn’t need babysitting. Enzo would expect that sort of thing from her, because she told him off a lot, especially when he was being a pompous dick. But Jaeron was her future husband and she couldn’t possibly make a scene before they were even married, and in the household that he would expect to lead, in front of Tolaki and the family’s domestic staff.
So she said nothing, but she went into the living room where with her fists balled so tight that her nails made little crescent-shaped impressions in her palms.
By the time Ellisandra came home, she knew for certain: letting Jaeron talk to the stranger on her behalf would never do. He’d even said he’d take Raedon Tussamar. Jokes used to go around that if you wanted to start a brawl, you invited Raedon Tussamar. He might have calmed a bit now that he was married, but one thing she knew about a confrontation between those two men and the stranger: she did not want to be the stranger.
And damn it, what had he done to deserve that?
Given people jobs, fed them and started rebuilding a house. No wonder Miran had such a bad reputation within gamra.
She looked over the wall into the yard from her bedroom window. It was almost dark, and everyone had gone. The sled had left, and she couldn’t see the canvas shelter from her position, although a faint glow radiated into the yard from somewhere behind the wall where she’d seen the camp kitchen set up this morning. He wasn’t still working there, was he? It would be much too cold.
But as she stood there with her breath fogging up the glass, a single man walked through the yard with a measuring tape. Every few steps, he crouched in the snow to add another line of string to the network of posts and string that she had seen this morning and that had since that time spread to this side of the house. A flapping storm light silhouetted his tall figure.
The workers had already done a lot: knocked down a couple of the half-burned walls, removed damaged stones, put up a couple of metal frames. Snow had been cleared away from the site. Most workers used snow as an excuse not to work. With the amount of snow that fell in Miran, that was guaranteed to make for a lazy lifestyle. There were many jokes about how nothing was ever built in Miran because snow stopped work for most of the year.
But clearly they had no trouble turning up for work if the pay was high enough. Think of all the projects workers could finish if only they worked when there was snow. She wondered what else this man had said to the workers to get so many of them to show up.
She had an idea: she’d go and talk to this mysterious man herself tomorrow morning. Maybe she could come to an arrangement about Loret and his group, because the thought of Raedon Tussamar going out there made her shiver. This man might be mysterious and no one might know who he was, but that didn’t justify sending thugs.
For one, he’d done a decent thing by paying his workers well. And he’d managed to do in one hit what many years of commerce in Miran had been unable to achieve: to get building work done on a snow day.
When Ellisandra pushed aside the curtains in her room the next morning, she found that the morning had dawned bright and clear. That didn’t happen very often in Miran, especially not in winter. The view from her window now stretched all the way to the summit of the mountain they called “The Watcher”, its snowy slopes crisp and clear against the sky. Light from the two suns beat down on the fresh snow, making it glitter like thousands of tiny gemstones. The shadow of her house in the snow was sharp, with a blue-tinged double edge. A set of tracks ran through the yard where two maramarang had chased each other. You could see where their wings had brushed the snow and where one of them had taken to the air, while the other one had climbed onto the rubbish bins.
Activity at the Andrahar house was in full swing, a most unusual sight in winter. Another delivery sled had turned up, this one with just a single stack of stone blocks. A couple of men helped the nomad boys unload.
The stranger stood talking to the sled’s driver. Today, he was wearing a black leather outdoor suit similar to the one Jaeron wore. The sunlight made his hair glow. It wasn’t quite as silver-coloured as that of Endri men. His hair had a yellowish tinge to it.
Ellisandra went down to the dining room, where both her brothers sat at the dining table having breakfast. They had been talking but fell quiet as she came in and sat down.
Enzo had a reader next to his plate and flicked through a couple of pages without reading. Jintho glared at him.
“Did I disturb something?” Ellisandra asked.
“No, I was just about to leave.” Enzo picked up the reader. He fixed Jintho with a hard stare before leaving the room. “You will come then?”
“I’ll see.”
“The fuck you will. I can’t plan anything with half-arsed promises. You’ll either be there or you won’t, you limp dish rag.”
Jintho glared at him. Enzo turned on his heel and left the dining room, slamming the door behind him.
“What was that about?” Ellisandra asked while taking her usual place.
“I guess you’ve seen the activity next door?”
She nodded. Jintho’s room was on the same side of the house as hers.
“What about it?”
“Well, apparently the Exchange has no record of this man entering Miran, and no one has any idea who he is and where he’s come from.”
“Someone could go and ask him.” Jintho probably wouldn’t appreciate that she was planning to do just that as soon as she finished breakfast, so she said nothing about it. When she told him later what she’d found out, he would be more understanding.
“The guards have asked him, but they can’t find anything to pin on him. He’s clean, unknown to them, has never been to Miran before and they have no reason to cross-examine him.”
“Has that ever stopped them before?”
“Not if the visitor is someone of low status. They seem to think that he might be a spy or some kind of bait.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like the previous cases where either Asto or Barresh have tried to infiltrate Miran. The pattern is well-known: they send a single person who is quite high profile. This person does something illegal and gets arrested. The next thing all of gamra is up in arms about it because ‘Oh, no. Miran has done something bad again.’ Then the next thing there is a raid or highly publicised escape of some kind. Like, the Andrahar trial, Amandra Bisumar’s departure from Miran, the raid on the council supposedly to ‘free prisoners’, forgetting that these people were here by their own will. We know about these tricks. They’re only doing it to prove that we are stupid or to prove to all their member entities that yes, Miran is still bad and still deserves to be boycotted.”
“What does that have to do with you and Enzo that you were just talking about?”
Jintho’s mouth twitched. He averted his eyes.
“Jintho?”
“He wants me to join the Citizen’s Group.”
“Not you, too.”
“That was my thought. It’s bad enough that my brother and future brother-in-law are involved.”
So it was true, Jaeron was definitely in the Citizen’s Groups. Ellisandra shivered.
“Your fiancé reckons that the guards are being too soft. He’s asked Enzo to help him question the guy next door. Enzo wanted me to come.”
“No. Don�
�t get involved. I don’t want Enzo to get involved either, especially not with Raedon Tussamar. He’s trouble.”
“You try tell Enzo that. He’s convinced that this foreign man is some sort of spy and that the Andrahar family are planning a last-ditch attempt to scuttle the laws they want to change in the council.”
“Is this visitor a member of the Andrahar family?”
“As far as we can track, no. The guards have looked at his pass. His identity checks out. He’s even got a chip. It checks out, too. He’s from an influential family in Barresh.”
“So, he works for the Andrahar family? They can’t come back here without having their heads removed, so they send someone who passes for an Endri to do whatever the family plans on doing with the house. I don’t think it would look very good if an innocent worker was attacked.”
“That’s what I said. But Enzo wants to rough him up just to make sure, and see if they can scare him into leaving.”
“Does he need to leave? That’s exactly how Miran gets its bad reputation. If we ever want to climb out of this isolation hole, we’ve got to stop attacking the few foreigners that are still stupid enough to come to Miran.”
“That’s what I told him, too, but . . .” He spread his hands and let them fall by his sides.
“And? Are you going?”
Jintho shrugged. Looked down at his empty plate. “I don’t know that I have much of a choice. Enzo has to sign my application, as the family’s heir.”
“Application?”
“For a commercial licence.”
So he hadn’t abandoned the idea yet.
“Don’t look at me like that, sister. I know what you’re thinking, but this shop is going to happen.”
There was a kind of desperate tone to his voice that she had never heard before, but he would tell her nothing more, and she really had to leave if she was going to talk to the man and be at the theatre in time.
8
ELLISANDRA LEFT the house after obtaining a promise from Darma that she would bring Father his breakfast. Hidden deep within the warmth of her cloak, she stepped onto the porch. Clear weather meant that it was colder than usual. The air had a strong bite to it that made her wish that she had brought a scarf.
With the crisp air came a flood of bright light, both from Ceren’s suns and reflection from the layer of cloud that blanketed the lower-lying areas. From the top of the steps to the porch, she could see those clouds between the two houses on the other side of the street: filling the valley below the city with a hard-edged and incredibly bright cloud deck. The sky above was the deepest blue imaginable and both suns, a hand’s width apart, shone brightly in the sky. The morning sun was the white one and the evening sun the yellower one underneath.
The gates to the Andrahar house stood wide open, and Ellisandra walked through unchallenged. A large group of workers stood in the shelter of the tent, many of them with their hands wrapped around steaming mugs of soup. How many people could this guy afford to hire? There had to be at least twenty.
The wonderful scent of hearty soup drifted through the yard. The cook stood under the shelter, stirring a big pot on the stove. A chunk of meat hung over an open fire, dripping fat into the flames. It was still pink on top, and would certainly take until midday to cook.
The midday meal.
Behind the stove stood a closed tent or maybe two tents, interconnected dome shapes of light grey fabric.
A young man came past with a tray and asked, “Lady, can I give you a warm drink?”
Ellisandra was going to refuse, but the smell of the soup was heavenly.
She accepted a boiling hot cup and walked slowly towards the house while cradling it in her hands. The heat seeped through her mittens.
The builders had made pretty good progress so far. They had put up the metal frame up and a few young men were stacking stones for the first layer of walls. All their faces were familiar. As Ellisandra walked past, there were polite nods and mutterings of Good morning, lady and Nice day, lady. Did she see a twinge of guilt in some of their expressions?
She found the stranger talking to Loret under the shelter of the canvas. They stood looking at the plans pinned on the table. The stranger was at least a head taller than Loret, who, as a typical Nikala man, had a short and wiry build with strong arms and shoulders. Being middle-aged, Loret was perhaps a bit softer around the waist than most, but the stranger’s presence dwarfed him.
The stranger wore his hair loose, like a very proper Endri man. Like most Endri men, he wore golden loops in his ears.
As soon as he spotted Ellisandra, he crossed the yard and came to her. He was even taller than Jaeron, and definitely had an Endri way about him, even if his eyes were . . . light brown. The colour of sand in the bottom of the river and creeks.
Well, that was . . . really strange.
“My lady, can I be of assistance?” His voice sounded oddly formal, but perfectly Mirani.
Ellisandra felt ridiculous even for coming here. He paid the men two tirans a day, and he employed a cook to feed the workers, too. There was no way she could compete with that. The men would be working in a desperately cold and clammy theatre and would have to make do with cold bread rolls, for half the pay.
“I was . . . curious. I went to the markets yesterday to hire workers, and it seems that you have employed them all.”
“My excuses, lady. They did not mention that they were taken.”
“They wouldn’t have been taken yesterday, but the theatre production happens every year, and every year we hire the same men who are good at building stage sets. There is quite an art to it, and these men have experience.” She met Loret’s eyes briefly before he looked away.
Oh, he’d known very well that she had been about to come to him, but given how much the stranger paid, she wasn’t sure she could blame him for taking this job either. It was likely to go on for longer, too.
“You work for the theatre?” There was interest in his voice.
“Yes, I’m the director.”
“Of the Mirani state theatre?” His eyes were intense. That colour was so weird.
“Yes, I just said so.”
He bowed. “My excuses, lady. I did not mean to interfere with the theatre. Also, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Vayra Perling Dinzo.”
What sort of name was that? “My name is Ellisandra Takumar.”
“From the Foundation family?”
“Yes.”
“You live next door.” It was not a question.
“I do.” How did this guy know all these things? She glanced at her house over the top of the wall. Her window was nothing more than a dark rectangle. It would be next to impossible to recognise people from down here, wouldn’t it? A chill went over her back. She had never considered that anyone could look into her room from here, because there had never been anyone to look. Come to think of it, why was his Mirani so good?
“How come you know me? I haven’t seen you before.”
“That is because I haven’t been here before. It is my first time in Miran. My excuses if I gave the impression that I’ve been studying you personally. That is not true. Of course, a lady like yourself is well worth knowing, but the reason that I know where you live is that I’ve studied the layout of the streets and I know which family lives where.”
Did he always speak stiff and formal like this? “So you’re here to rebuild the house?”
“Correct.”
“But why? The Andrahar family can’t come back to Miran.”
“They’re not coming back.”
“Then why are they rebuilding the house?”
“They are not. I am. The house is mine.”
“Yours? What about the foreign investment laws? What about . . . You can’t sell anything to people from outside Miran.”
“I know. I also know that according to Foundation Law, the Andrahar family can’t legally sell the house, but they can give it away, and that’s what they did.”
Give th
e house away? Suppose they could. She didn’t think the law said anything about that. “Why would they do that?”
“They’re not using it.”
“But why you? Um, I hope that’s not an impolite question.”
“Not at all. I’ve known the family for a long time. They became our neighbours in Barresh when they fled. I was a toddler, the oldest of five, and fascinated with the older children next door.”
She frowned.
“Miruhan and Iztho, Taerzo’s twin sons.”
“Taerzo is the younger brother, isn’t it?”
“Correct. The twins were always playing in the yard so I often climbed over the fence to join them.” He smiled. “I was often bored and lonely, so I liked coming to the family. There were always people in the kitchen, talking about all sorts of interesting things. Three of the brothers were Traders, and they always had interesting travel stories to share. I liked looking at the aircraft in their back yard. Whenever I had to come home, my parents always had to drag me away from there. My parents thought it was a good idea if I learned Mirani, so Isandra and sometimes Rehan were my teachers. Later, Isandra ended up joining the Barresh council, and I did a lot of work for her, mainly translation and legal work. When none of her sons wanted to return to Miran, she gave the house to me.”
Just like that, huh?
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to rebuild it exactly to the old style, with the entrance porch, the coloured glass windows, the floor mosaic, the correct slate roof tiles that were all stolen, the painted tiles in the bathroom—”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“They told me what the house used to look like, and I made a model based on their instructions and pictures that exist of the house. I will fine-tune it now that I’ve been able to take measurements.”
“Is that what all the yellow posts are for?”
“Correct. I’ll show it to you some time.”
“That’s really nice, but . . .” you’re barging into the middle of a political fight that’s partially about keeping foreigners out of Miran. “What are you going to do with the house?” He couldn’t possibly live there.
