Hour of the Octopus

by Joel Rosenberg

  When in doubt, try for the truth.

  “I’m sorry, Lady Estrer, but all of this is new to me. It’s… a different life I find myself in, and I’m not used to it, not yet.” I held my hands out in front of me, open. “I’m used to fitting in with local customs, but that’s in a superficial setting, in terms of keeping out of trouble. In Ourne, I’d know to cross a street sunwise of any of our—of the nobility, no matter the time of day, and in Market Indon I’d know not to step into anyone’s shadow, but not to worry should their shadow cross me. I can fulfill a guest’s cooking chores in the mountains of Helgramyth, or spend a quiet evening on a chair on the white cliffs of Wisterly, watching the Tetnit watch the Sleeve…”

  I spent the next minutes explaining myself, trying hard, trying even harder not to offend.

  “… but I’m not used to making polite conversation with my betters in Den Oroshtai.”

  Lady Estrer’s lips pursed in what could have been a smile. “Oh,” she finally said.

  I don’t know what Arefai was smiling about.

  As I said, dining customs vary slowly from one end of D’Shai to another. In the north—all the way from Helgramyth and Otland to Wyness Tongue—it’s considered a matter of impoliteness or immaturity to temporarily leave the table during a meal. In Wisterly, by contrast, the host must keep bringing food until after you have done so, the social fiction being that a sufficiently large meal requires some walking off to aid digestion. (In Wisterly there’s an amusing legend about how Lord Flin had his cook grind an emetic root into the soup for the twenty-seventh course that Esterven the Insatiable had begun eating at his table.)

  Den Oroshtai, located in the moderate middle of the south, is moderate; it’s not obligatory, but it’s not considered unusual to absent yourself in the midst of a meal that’s likely to last from late in the hour of the octopus well through the snake and into the bear.

  In no place is it wise for a bourgeois to draw attention to himself by being either the most present or most absent from table; I looked to Lady Estrer for permission, and at her nod pushed back from the table, then walked quickly toward the door, trying to look invisible.

  The door led into a hallway; the hall took me past the guards into the courtyard.

  The courtyard was quiet but not silent in the dusk that accompanies the hour of the snake. The snake comes in with the night’s death of the sun, and lasts through the onset of true night, only to give way to the hour of the bear in either starlight or black darkness.

  Shadows turn from gray to black in the hour of the snake. It’s the traditional time for forbidden lovers to find each other, to kiss and caress in the all-concealing shadow of a building or the overhanging branches of a tree, then to slip off into the night if they part, or to steal away together and find their bed for the evening.

  I like the hour of the snake.

  Above, on the walls of the keep, a trio of young watchmen paced, their eyes turned out toward the night, their triple tenor harmony sending shivers up and down my spine.

  “Kami Dan’Shir?”

  TaNai was sitting on a stone bench under the bolab tree, her hands folded in her lap. In the dying light, her eyes seemed vague and distant.

  “Good evening, TaNai,” I said.

  We both liked this part of the courtyard, near the corner over by the morningwise wall; while the whole courtyard was in theory free for use of the bourgeois staff so long as we left quietly at the approach of any of our betters, this was less used than more of the heavily worked parts and less likely to subject us to interruption.

  She was in the same robes she had worn earlier, but she had belted them less tightly about her waist; mentally, I worked at untying the seven-bend knot over her belly.

  I smiled. Silly, silly Kami Khuzud, my sister would have said. What is the rush?

  You live here now; you will be in Den Oroshtai for the foreseeable future, probably forever. Take some time; enjoy the moment, the game. Life is to be eaten one bite at a time so that you can enjoy it, not swallowed whole to curdle untasted in the stomach.

  “You’re smiling,” she said. “Is there a reason for that?”

  “Several,” I said, smiling.

  She cocked her head ever so slightly to one side. “Are they secrets?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m smiling because after being in the noise of a formal dinner, it’s a pleasure to be out in the dark and quiet; and I’m smiling because it’s a lovely night, with bright stars in the sky, soft smells in the air, and you, sitting in the dark, smiling at me.”

  The way of the acrobat includes a few sleights, and I’d mastered some of the easier ones. I reached out my right hand toward her ear, and as she followed the motion, I palmed the rose in my left hand.

  “No,” I said, as she looked toward my empty hand. “It’s not there. But I thought…”

  Her brow furrowed.

  “Ah,” I said, bringing my left hand up to her other ear. Just as my wrist went past the edge of her eye, I transferred the rose from my palm to my fingers, then pulled my hand back. It’s a neat effect that fools the mind on a level both above and below that of logic and reason: you see somebody reaching an empty hand past your ear then immediately pulling it back, no longer empty.

  “I thought I saw a flower,” I said. I sniffed at it once, then handed it to her.

  TaNai smiled. “Very pretty, Kami Dan’Shir.” She tucked the rose into her belt.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “The night wouldn’t be complete.”

  She touched a finger to my lips. “Shhh,” she said. “You don’t have to try so hard.”

  “Eh?”

  “I know, I know,” she said, “good bourgeois girls are supposed to mimic their betters, and make a game of it all, to make you take a large step forward while we take two small steps back, to extract flowery phrases and clear commitments while we evade at each step, until we weary of the game and finally fall into your arms or your bed, but I’m not a good bourgeois girl, Kami Dan’Shir. I was born to the middle class, daughter of a quarrymaster, and raised to bourgeois only because Lord Creeslai, Lord Toshtai’s oldest son, wanted me as his concubine.” Her tongue touched her lips, once; I envied it. “The games he wanted to play had nothing to do with evasion and reluctance, and I grew to like his directness.” Her face was sad in the dark. “And when he died, something warm and alive in me died, but that didn’t.” She rose and took a step toward me. “So don’t play with me: ask me. Next time.”

  Her lips were warm and dry on mine for just a moment, and then she spun away and was quickly gone.

  I had absented myself from table long enough; it was time to return to the noise and the awkwardness.

  I took my seat between Arefai and Lady Estrer just in time for the refreshment course of raspberry puffs with mint, hot from the oven, so light in the mouth that they melted on the tongue as quickly as sherbet.

  Arefai was just toying with a nice arrangement of mustard crab and fennel. While his father could put away a prodigious amount of provisions, the aptitude or perhaps the desire had not been passed to either of his living sons.

  He had opened his mouth to say something when his attention was drawn by something over my shoulder. It was Crosta Natthan; I hadn’t seen the old man walk up.

  “Lord Toshtai invites you to appear before him,” he said. How the chief servitor managed his administrative duties while also serving as Toshtai’s personal valet was one of the puzzles I hadn’t tried to solve. “Lord Minch has brought a difficult puzzle that he believes you might find interesting.”

  I stood. Yet another way to go wrong; was I being invited to go around behind the table and sit with Lords Minch and Toshtai, or was this another performance? Assuming for the moment that no matter what I did was wrong—a fair assumption, given the perversity of the world—it was better to be humbly wrong; I stalked across the marble floor, trying to keep my paces slow and confident.

  This, at least, was something I had don
e before; I knew that when all eyes were on you, the slightest nervousness to any motion looked like an out-of-control lurch. Movements in front of an audience must look smooth and confident, or they will stop believing in you, and an acrobat depends on having the audience believe what you’re implying. Never mind that my father’s drunk act is always done stone-cold sober; they have to let themselves believe that he’s drunk, that the others of us are surprised and helpless, that the slightest error will result in one or more knives thunking into his chest or neck.

  I stopped in front of Lord Toshtai and bowed at the waist. In front of him on the table sat the wooden box that he had had earlier, during the audience in the morning room.

  “Lord Minch,” he said, “knowing my affection for puzzles, has brought me a difficult one, made by a craftsman of his employ.”

  He opened the box to reveal a mess of wrought iron, gold chain and wooden balls lying on a bed of purple velvet. Toshtai gestured that I should pick it up. “A simple problem: remove the ring from the… rest of it.”

  Minch sat back, looking ever-so-slightly smug. He was arrayed for the evening in another outfit of red and gray, this time with a loose scarlet dining tunic, cut loosely at the waist, over a blousy pair of gray silk pantaloons. His sword and swordbelt hung from a peg on the side of his chair; he toyed with a tassel on the belt.

  I picked up the puzzle.

  Superficially difficult, of course, but those can be the easy problems. On one end of it, a wrought-iron triangle had been welded to the end of a golden chain; a silver ring, just barely too small to slip off the end of the triangle, had been threaded on the chain, as had been a marble ball. The other end of the chain was welded to a smaller ring that also enclosed the end of a long, flat, recurved piece of iron, itself suspended by an arrangement of steel rings inside a perpendicular curved piece.

  Nothing would slip through, clearly, but if you slipped the ring beside the recurved piece, you could slip it and the triangle through, followed by the ring. Work the ring over one end of the recurved piece, then around the other side, then slide it back here, and through. Then lift the silver ring over the edge there, instead of around, and…

  It takes longer to describe it than to do it; the silver ring came off in my hand, and the gasps from those at the table triggered old performing reflexes: I tossed the ring high in the air, then caught it behind my back and brought it forward.

  I displayed the ring in one hand, the rest of the puzzle in the other fist—no sense in letting anybody see exactly what I had done—then brought my hands together and quickly reversed the process, metal clicking against metal, until the ring again dangled from the end of the chain.

  To more than a smattering of applause, I laid the puzzle back in the box.

  I’ve always liked puzzles, and this was a fine one of its type, such as it was. The reason most people will take too long to solve it is that they’re looking for some unfair trick—taking a saw to the iron triangle, for example, or bending or stretching something—because, deep down, they don’t feel that the problem has a real solution, and aren’t willing to work toward that. That’s the sort of phony puzzle that somebody might try to use to embarrass somebody, and this, of course, could be mistaken for that.

  Giving an insoluble puzzle would be a great insult, and falsely accusing, even indirectly, someone of doing that would also be a great insult, and one that would have to be properly apologized for.

  Lord Toshtai knew enough not to lightly accuse Minch of giving him an insoluble puzzle; he would never make such an accusation unless he had seen proof, and not merely suspected that the puzzle was insoluble.

  But perhaps someone who didn’t enjoy puzzles wouldn’t understand that, wouldn’t see the important difference between unsolved and insoluble?

  Truth: trying to figure out the subtleties of the interplay between members of our beloved ruling class is something that I’d never had either the opportunity or the taste for. An acrobat isn’t above it all; he’s beside it all.

  But I wasn’t an acrobat any longer. And I had been too busy thinking it all through to be watching faces.

  Lord Minch was not applauding me; his head cocked a bit to one side, his bony face was studiously blank.

  The ends of Toshtai’s lips twitched upwards, then sagged back to normal. “A fine puzzle, Lord Minch,” he said. “I am grateful that you went to all the trouble to bring it to me, and hope that you will allow me to do something in return.”

  Minch’s smile almost seemed genuine. “I can think of nothing,” he said.

  Toshtai dismissed me with a quick flick of a finger. I forced myself to turn and slowly walk away.

  “Except, of course, to be sure to bring your Kami Dan’Shir to the wedding in Glen Derenai; I am sure he will be very entertaining there, as well,” Minch said.

  I didn’t have to see Toshtai nod. “Of course,” he said. “It would not have otherwise occurred to me, but… of course.”

  I didn’t for a moment believe Toshtai’s words, and the undercurrent of Minch’s tone sent chills running around the circumference of my neck, just about where a sword would separate it from my head.

  Just what I needed: another enemy in our beloved ruling class. I had survived one, but I didn’t want to have to establish a pattern.

  There was a spot outside the keep, over by the south wall, that held fond memories for me. A flat spot of grass edged by an old, crumbling retaining wall, the slope above held at bay by the roots of a huge jimsum tree. There wasn’t much of a path to and from it, and the path had largely been overgrown.

  It was where NaRee and I had first kissed, and it was where we had, a month ago, a generation ago, lain together for the last time, as it turned out.

  I didn’t miss her much, not anymore.

  I wouldn’t miss my own breathing.

  The last time I was there, the night had been alive with sounds and smells; there had been the cry of an owl, the whispered music of rustling leaves, the minty scent of a cool wind blowing gently through trees.

  But now it was quiet and still, and I couldn’t smell anything.

  When the moon is full, the hour of the bear is a bleak and pitiless time in the night. The light, no less harsh for its weakness, pours down on everything, reducing all to shades of an unflattering, unloving blue-gray, robbing everything of color. The one-peden fields below, spread out like the squares of a single-bone draughts board, were even and square, if I looked at them from the right perspective, like I was a piece waiting to be played on the board.

  And then, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to do, and not because my eyes were sagging shut no matter how hard I tried to keep them open, I went back into the keep, staggered up to my rooms and into my bed, and was fully asleep before I was fully horizontal.

  Chapter 6

  Travel, a spot of archery. Predisposition, and other portents of problems.

  I guess it’s just superstition, but I had a hard time finding an appropriate freden, a throw-weight.

  It’s something that Gray Khuzud taught us to put in our pouches, as we walked from village to village, from city to city: a small stone or tiny stick or piece of bone perhaps, of no value or usefulness. It shouldn’t be too anything: not too large or too small, not too rough or too smooth. Just something ordinary, and dispensable. You tuck it in your pouch—near the top, if you please—and then you forget about it. Just forget about it.

  Until.

  Until the road gets too long, until your packs are too heavy, until your legs just can’t stagger another step, and until each breath burns in your throat as each step shoves sharp knives up through the soles of your feet. Then—and not before; it won’t work if you don’t wait, for the timing is everything—you reach down into your pouch, and take out the small stone or stick or perhaps piece of bone that you’ve selected, and you invest it with all the weight and weariness of the road, you imbue it with every bit of exhaustion and fatigue and pain.

  And you thro
w it away, far away, as hard as you can.

  Perhaps it’s magic that anybody can do, or perhaps there is something else to it, but when you do that, the road seems to shorten in front of you, if only a little; your legs gain strength, even though it’s just enough strength to go on, and perhaps your breath is a little cooler in your throat and your feet ache a trifle less.

  It’s enough.

  I finally found an appropriate freden near the walls of the keep. Just a plain stone, smooth but not polished, about the size of my thumb. I slipped it into my pouch and let it clink against the few coins there.

  Back when I was with the troupe, we had a fair amount of equipment to haul with us, although nothing more than we could carry on our backs.

  Acrobats must carry their own rigging and their own props, as well as the ordinary sorts of things you need when you’re often going to be spending nights between towns, sleeping by or on the road itself. Each night, generally, we’d have to use one or another: either we would make camp outside of civilization, and have to break out the camping gear, leaving the balls, sticks, knives, costumes, lanyard, halyards, and such safely packed, or we would be safely ensconced in a town, in which case we could leave most of the camping gear stowed away, while we’d take out the props and do a show.

  Sometimes, rarely, when we played the smaller villages, we would have to use everything: make camp just outside of the village, set up our own equipment, do a performance for which we would be paid in rice, vegetables, and chickens, then cook for ourselves, sleep, and be ready to leave when the hour of the dragon gave way to the hour of the cock.

  That was the worst case: everything out, everything used, everything to be properly stowed before we could move on.

  But it took, at most, in the worst case, maybe half an hour from the moment we arose to the moment that Large Egda, the most heavily burdened of the troupe, would swing out on the road, a mumbled, half-remembered song on his thick lips.