Festival Moon

by C. J. Cherryh

  "They got 'im, they got 'im, Of Det don't get 'em, damn that boat t' hell—"

  Jones let the pole ride then. She was shaking as she sat down on the halfdeck.

  Mondragon shipped his pole and sat down too, head in his hands.

  He was still like that when she got up and pushed again, taking them out, out from among the boats, out onto the Grand.

  "Boregy," he said then, out of the dark and the bridge-shadow.

  "Yey," she said. There seemed nothing in her. It was all drained. "They get of Iosef?"

  "Not him, not Tatiana, not Anastasi."

  No one ever counted Mikhail.

  "Damn shame," she said. "Damn shame." With a hollow hurt at her gut. "He got the warning, huh? Ought to be real grateful. Him and that black boat."

  "It's not over."

  "Get out of it, dammit, Mondragon, let the high-towners cut each other up for stew, they ain't nothing here—say you was knocked silly. Say you spent the night in the Det. You give him enough a'ready, he ain't going to ask more."

  "You got a wave coming, Jones, which way do you face?"

  "To it," she said. There was a copper taste in her mouth. "Yeah, I hear ye. Hey-hin! Yoss!" As she swung the bow and hit the Grand current.

  FIRST-BATH

  Lynn Abbey

  Meanwhile...

  The house of Kamat was quiet. The whirlwind festivities preceding the 24 Harvest holiday had passed it by. Properly solemn banners had been draped from its porches and balconies—Andromeda Kamat, dowager of the house, was too aware of the Kamat's position in Merovingen to overlook such a fundamental display of ostentation—but their annual entertainments had been canceled and the family had shunned all but the most restrained and intimate invitations.

  Certainly their absence was scarcely noted, as every family, whatever its station, pursued both its interests and its amusements. Had they appeared, however, tongues would have wagged—for wasn't Kamat still in mourning? Had they not, this Greening past, sat in somber state as the longboat took Nikolay Kamat on his last journey down the Grand Canal? House Kalugin could scoff at tradition, or Boregy or Ito, but, among the ambitious, appearances were important and so the Kamat behaved.

  Discretion suited Richard Kamat this year, at least. He was not yet comfortable with his sudden elevation to Househead. His father had been fifty-two that Greening evening when he died and healthy as the proverbial and storied horse. Richard—eldest son, only son—had expected another decade or two of seasoning before responsibility settled unalterably around his shoulders.

  They had been celebrating Nikolay's birthday. The house was filled with guests enjoying the Househead's largess: cold, fragrant syllabub; lively music floating across the balconies; guest-gifts of silk dyed with rich, First-bath indigo. Nikolay had excused himself, probably to visit the same elegant library where his son now sat by candlelight, but had hesitated—spun around to look back into the room—just before the landing. Had someone called his name or known of the vagrant slice of tamarind waiting beneath his heel?

  Richard shook his head. Philosophers at the university said a man could not remember a sound— reproduce it in the silent space between his ears—but merely recognize it at a later time. But Richard still heard the sound his father's head had made as it struck the lip of the first stair below the landing. His father had lingered a week, never speaking nor recognizing, only waiting for the new moon ebb tide to drain through the pilings far beneath his house.

  It must have been an accident, the young man mused. No assassination could have been so perfectly, so absurdly contrived. Certainly it had answered no unspoken prayer of Richard's but had thrust him, unwilling and unprepared, into a position which remained ill-fitting these several months after the funeral.

  A single chime, muffled by heavy drapes, rang through the study. Richard reached into his pocket and fingered the repeater knob of his watch. Patrik was right on time, as usual. Punctuality and devotion to Kamat affairs defined and completely described his father's lackluster younger brother; no one, certainly not Patrik himself, had ever considered him as Househead after Nikolay's death.

  Reaching behind the drapery, Richard tugged a rope twice then, with Nikolay's spyglass tucked under his arm, headed up a narrow stairway to the roof. He gave passing notice to the revelry in the canals, hoping only that the festival lanterns and electrics would not obscure his view of the ocean horizon. There was, after all, a second reason that Kamat was quiet; that it would have been quiet this night even if Nikolay rather than his son peered through the wedding-cake jumble of spires, turrets and bridges that created Merovingen's nighttime silhouette. Whatever phase the moon had been when the Scouring had begun, it was dark tonight and Kamat had work to do. Cursing the ambient lantern-light, Richard waited for the flash of phosphorescence heralding the monthly flood-tide surge through the Det estuary.

  The new moon surge, which was about as reliable as anything on this forsaken world of Merovin, would drive the waterwheels deep in the Kamat basements. More importantly, some peculiar aspect of that faintly flickering green water would wash amid the wool, the mordants and the indigo to create the midnight blue which Hosni Kamat, patriarch and founder of the clan, had simply named First-bath.

  Hosni had never cared why the luminous Det-surge fixed the blue dye so fast and firm into the wool—so long as no one else knew either. Nikolay, frantic in those months when the new moon surge remained opaque and the wool was lifeless, had spent years tinkering with flasks and retorts trying to unlock the secret. His son, Richard, took after Hosni—so far: he had no time for curiosity, only results.

  As soon as the horizon flashed green in the spyglass, Richard returned to the study and yanked hard on the cord. Patrik would have the gates cranked open by the time the young man had descended the half-dozen or more levels of the artificial island. The great bricks of indigo would be set beside the vats along with the acrid sacks of chemical mordants for although the polluted Det-water was the most secret ingredient in the First-bath soup, it was far from the only jealously guarded secret in the process.

  Patrik knew how much of each substance to add to each vat and in what sequence as did Richard himself. Richard's mother, Andromeda, knew the secret, too, though she descended to the workrooms no more than once or twice a year. But no one else witnessed the actual making of First-bath. The precise formula, and the even more precise instructions for its proper recreation were written down; old Hosni believed in luck, both good and bad. Three vaults, only one of which rested inside Kamat's walls, held the master recipe; one of Richard's personal duties was assuring their sanctity each month.

  Such contingencies were, however, for other moments. He lit a lantern as he extinguished the oil lamp on the table and headed for the private stairs to the workrooms. He had little need of the light as he plunged downward—the twists and irregularities of these passages had been locked in his mind before he learned to read—and no expectations of meeting anyone coming up.

  He kept a firm grip on the lantern, though, when collision rocked him back against the bannister and he kept his balance—which was more than could be said for his opposite number who stumbled and sprawled at his feet. With the memory of Nikolay's death still powerful in his mind, Richard had the lantern on a hook and an arm around the body before his thoughts cleared enough to wonder who he had encountered on the private stairway.

  "I'm all right," a woman assured him, wrapping her fingers around his wrist and using all his strength to rise, unsteadily, to her feet.

  "Marina?" he murmured, nearly motionless with surprise as the light fell around her.

  His sister kept silent, not that there was anything she could say which the wild-animal brilliance of her eyes hadn't already told him. Her sweater, a lacy affair glittering with metal threads and plunging dangerously low in front, was ripped—and hadn't ripped when she fell. Her hair was mussed; her cosmetics smeared and her perfume long-since replaced with gin. She wove a little under the silent pressur
e of his disapproval and let her fingers fall away from his arm.

  "There was a party at Nikolaevs," she admitted. "Carrolly had an invitation."

  "We're supposed to be in mourning." The words burst out of his mouth and hung between them, sounding patronizing even to his own ears.

  "I didn't embarrass us. I'm wearing one of mother's designs—everyone noticed it."

  "Ree, take a look at yourself. You're drunk."

  "Not quite, Richard, and that didn't happen at Nikolaevs."

  "We'll talk. Later—at breakfast."

  She sighed, and a portion of her defiance ebbed away. As different as day and night, they were barely a year apart in age and until Greening they'd never had any secrets from each other.

  "We'll talk it out, Ree," Richard said more gently, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. "There's First-bath tonight; come up to the study for breakfast."

  The liquor smell was potent, almost as if she'd been drenched with the stuff. There were marks revealed by the torn sweater which he did not realize were dried blood until she'd pushed past him on the stairs. For a moment he considered that Marina might need him more than the wools, silks and cottons in the workrooms did. But, no—though she undoubtedly did need someone—he knew her pride well enough to let her stumble on up the stairs. She'd be in the study when the First-bath was rinsing and that would be soon enough.

  The conglomeration of pilings, piers and ballast that separated Kamat's island from the Det shuddered as the tide-gate fell open. Richard quickened his pace down the stairs, arriving in the workrooms as tne pungent sea-water sluiced through the vats. Patrik, distributing the bricks of dye and mordants from a maze of catwalks, acknowledged his nephew's presence with a brief nod. "The kilns are ready," the wisp-haired man shouted over the roar of the water. "One and two are filled."

  Unlike the dyeworks depicted in pre-Scouring texts or, indeed, other such enterprises throughout Merovingen, Kamat heated their dye water with white-hot ceramic bricks—which Richard released into the first two baths with a rumble and hiss of steam—and maneuvered their great webbed spindles of cotton, wool and silk yard hydraulically.

  It was a mare's nest of wooden gears and pulleys; vaned, horizontal turbines and enough knotted rigging to bring tears to a proper Revenantist's eyes: the Det tidal surge, a modest enough fist of water as ocean currents were measured, did all the work. Twice a day (though the phosphorescence necessary to the First-bath process coincided only with the new moon in late summers) the water rushed through the tide-gates here on Kamat and at similar, but larger, works off the Nikolaev wharves. The ebbing tide ran with strange odors and stranger colors from time to time but, all in all, Merovingen's power looked favorably upon Kamat's inventiveness—seeing it as a bulwark against the less-benign technology coming downriver from Nev Hettek.

  When all the vats were filled with dark liquid and the turbines had begun their tasks of churning the yarn-filled spindles through the bath, Patrik joined Richard by the kiln and congratulated him on yet another month's production of First-bath fiber.

  First-bath: midnight indigo, pride of the house of Kamat. A richer color and a softer fiber than anything else yet produced on the forsaken world of Merovingen. But Hosni Kamat considered First-bath more than just a fortuitous dye bath; to the departed patriarch, First-bath meant the highest quality ingredients brought together under the most disciplined and refined conditions—and it applied to people, most especially his own family, as well as fibers and dye.

  "I'll get the workers to help with the unloading," the older man said: telling rather than asking. "You'll be wanting to catch some sleep now."

  Richard wiped the sweat from his face. "Later. It's Festival; we'll be shorthanded and they like to see us here, too, on First-bath night." That was true enough, though he admitted nothing about his breakfast with Marina or his concerns for her which would keep him awake under any circumstance.

  "More important you be rested when company comes calling."

  Richard snot a glan:e that was both questioning and commanding tow; i his uncle.

  "Your mother got a letter after dinner .. . from her father and hand delivered by some Hetteker official."

  "She didn't tell me—"

  "She didn't tell me, either. I saw the messenger leave. You'd already gone to the study."

  "Might not mean anything .. . certainly not company tomorrow," Richard pondered aloud.

  Patrik shrugged—the "hands off motion that penetrated to the core of his being and meant that within Kamat he'd always be number two, never number one. "Who knows? It's your decision."

  Richard returned the gesture and headed for the double doors of the loading bay in silence. Workers, about a half-dozen of them, waited on the other side of the heavy, locked doors. The Househead greeted each of them by name; he'd started here on the loading dock back when he stood no higher than the bales he tried to move. There was no false camaraderie—no pretense that he was not Kamat nor they from the lower city—but there was understanding that they needed each other and as much genuine affection as their differing conditions would allow. "Good Festival to you," Richard added, shaking each hard-callused hand.

  "And you, m'ser."

  "The Angel watch you another year, Thorn . ;. Dana... Rhys." Formal and stuffy, perhaps, but his grip was dry and firm as the workers expected.

  The doors swung shut and Richard was alone again with a handful of hours before dawn. There wasn't time for sleep and, in any event, he had enough to think about between his sister's behavior and his mother's unannounced message from Nev Hettek. Not that his imagination could draw a bridge from one to the other: Marina's misadventures could have no bearing on grandfather Nemesis Garin's sudden, after twenty-six years, re-emergence into his mother, Andromeda's life. No, mostly it was just that he, Richard, was Househead now and the problems of the house were his problems no matter how little he understood them.

  With a sigh, Richard swung through the rafters and landed, light-footed, in the slip where the Kamat stored their private boats—where he stored the sleek punt whose care, before Nikolay's death, had absorbed most of his leisure time. Years might still pass before the Househead's study up along the eaves felt comfortable, but the burnished wood punt was Richard's final, private refuge.

  Loosening the ropes, he eased the craft down to the black water. Its waxed and varnished keel cut the surface without ripple or sound. Richard notched the pole against the house pilings and pushed off for the grate that opened onto the Kamat-Foundry Canal.

  "Be stayin' put if I was you," a voice called from the darkness beyond the grate.

  Water riffled around the pole as Richard brought the punt to a halt. He recognized the voice of Celotta, who had House permission to tie-up against the grate in exchange for keeping her night-eyes open. Celotta had brought her boat deep into Kamat's shadow; Richard could hear her voice but he did not see her. Such caution on a Festival night was noteworthy and as Househead, Richard gave her his full attention.

  "Has some boatman got the Melancholy?" he asked affably, heeling the punt around the pole so he and Celotta could speak yet remain well within the shadows of Kamat and her boat.

  Celotta gave a coarse laugh. "Don't get the Melancholy here down below." Melancholy being that complex of behaviors which struck some around Festival inflicting them with a profound knowledge of the futility of life on Merovin—and, in truth, the Melancholy— if it actually existed—required a broader horizon than usually occurred canalside.

  "Then what's the problem? Why're you tied up so tight, so early?"

  "Strangers on the waters." "Who?"

  "Can't say—but they be lookin' higher than the canals. Wouldn't be out alone and lookin' so fine."

  Can't say or won't say? Richard thought, knowing full well that Celotta knew more than she let on. Still, Merovingen had always been a brawly sort of town. Taking the sleek punt out after sundown entailed a certain amount of risk—and Celotta had never objected before.

&n
bsp; "I've got my pole," he reminded her, fishing for more information.

  "Won't help."

  "What kind of strangers we got on the canals of Merovingen tonight? Have the sharrh, themselves, come back to Scour us off for good?"

  He had inserted a believable amount of levity into his voice but Celotta's face reflected no amusement. "There's strangers on the water, m'ser Richard," she said, shaking a gnarled finger at him. "Strangers enough that I tied up in shadow. Don't need to see the face of trouble when you can smell it. Don't want to find you fetched up in the harbor someplace."

  Celotta had been his mother's age once, a long time ago when she'd had a man beside her in the poleboat. Andromeda had changed, her cheek bones had risen and a fine network of lines crept out from the corners of her eyes and mouth, but Celotta had changed more. She'd swallowed more than Det water in the past twenty years: her eyes were red-ringed; her cheeks were crevassed and her grin nowadays showed more gaps than teeth.

  If he hadn't known her since childhood, Richard knew he would have judged her mad and simply ordered her from his path. But knowing her, and knowing how she had become what she was and how canny she remained, he trusted her and let her tie-up be.

  "You have wool?" he asked as the tide pushed the punt back into the Kamat under-house. "First-bath?"

  Celotta was one of more than a hundred boat-dwellers who helped make ends meet by converting Kamat wool into Kamat sweaters. Each week she delivered at least one well-wrought garment to the loading dock; every couple of weeks more, Richard guessed, she sold a similar sweater on the black market. Kamat didn't mind the private enterprise of its workers, but the First-bath fibers now drying in the workrooms wouldn't leave the House before they were finished into garments for the Uptown trade. "Not tonight, Celotta," the Househead laughed. "Not tonight."

  "Can't blame a girl for tryin'."

  Richard grunted an agreement as he shoved the pole into the mud and impelled the punt back to its slip. He took great pride, and not a few awards, for his boat handling in the races and regattas that proliferated through the highest and lowest strata of Merovingen. The punt barely touched the straw bumper at the end of the slip before coming to a smooth stop.