Festival Moon

by C. J. Cherryh

  The grate was dark and quiet as he hoisted the punt out of the water. Celotta had battened her boat winter-tight. Whoever these strangers were, she feared them.

  And Richard had no doubt, as he bypassed the door to the workrooms, that Celotta knew who the strangers were—if not by name then by affiliation. The canalers spoke in code, as did almost everyone else in Merovingen; they gave only what the conversation demanded. If Richard had asked the right questions, or known the right answers, Celotta would have shared more of the substance of her fears. As it was, she had given him, a hightowner, all that she dared.

  There was no simple route from the loading dock to the third-level bridge gate that served as the main, civilized entrance to Kamat's private quarters. Richard was forced through a series of dark, narrow passages; decaying exterior stairways and semi-private thoroughfares as he circled and wove through Kamat Isle. As a child he had learned every twisted corner of his home. Now, after many years' absence, he was stymied by crawlways too small for his adult-sized body and gaping holes or new walls where Merovingen's constant reconstruction and the river's constant erosion had changed the facade of the island.

  Kamat Isle was more stable than many in the city's archipelago. Good gray rock supported at least part of the cantilevered structure—or, at least, it had when Richard was younger and had led his sister and his cousins beneath the storerooms. They might simply have found an ancient ballast room designed to offset the tilt and skew of subsidence into the river, but Richard still believed he'd discovered a true island in Kamat's gut. He still had the rock he'd found that long ago afternoon and used it as a paperweight on his father's desk.

  He emerged from the shadows by the gatehouse where the descendants of the Adami, whose fortunes had crumbled about the time Hosni Kamat was looking for a suitable residence, eked along in genteel poverty and obscurity as servants to their successors. The Festival banners still fluttered in the breeze, but the lanterns had long been extinguished and the bar lowered. Feeling more than a little foolish and uncharitable, Richard hauled on the knotted rope and roused Ferdmore Adami from his sleep.

  "Didn't know you were out, m'ser," the servant, who was just about Richard's age, said as he struggled with the bar.

  "I had a notion to find my childhood route from the loading dock to the gatehouse. The Island's changed, Ferdmore. I don't know it half as well as I once did." Richard strove to make light of the inconvenience he was causing.

  "Wouldn't have gone to bed if I hadn't thought you weren't all inside," Ferdmore replied as if the whims of the successful were none of his concern.

  The young man winced as a sliver jabbed into his palm; Richard resisted the urge to reach through the grating to steady the bar. It wouldn't gain the Househead anything to assist his servants—especially not the Adami who clung to the remnants of their pride with a desperate stubbornness—but that didn't make it easier to say goodnight when he could see dark liquid dropping down to the walkway. "Good Festival, Ferdmore."

  "And you, m'ser Kamat," Ferdmore mumbled, sucking his skin as he scurried back inside the gatehouse.

  The lower hall was deserted with only a single night lamp to cut through the darkness. Richard took a candle from the box, lit it on the lamp flame and continued deeper into the house. Kamat had electrics—the Adami had ssen to that in their days of glory—but the family seldom used them. As Merovingen measured these things, Kamat was new to its wealth and remained inclined toward thriftiness.

  Richard had his free hand on the newel post when the itch of curiosity snared him. Unlocking the but-lery, he examined both the guest book and the House's stack of outgoing messages. It was Festival and a half-dozen callers had paid a formal visit to the vestibule. Richard recognized them all save one: an R. Baritz had signed his name shortly after dinner. Ser Baritz hadn't left a properly seasonal message in the creamy vellum beyond his signature, but Ferdmore had made a pencil notation that the gentleman had asked for m'sera Andromeda and stayed for only a short time.

  R. Baritz—not a Merovingen family name nor even one of the Nev Hettek names his mother had let drop in her conversations over the years. But R. Baritz was undoubtedly the messenger Patrik had seen. Why else, in this Revenantist city, sign with just an initial, unless your given name were Retribution or some other Adventist brand?

  Richard flipped through the outgoing messages. There were several smooth envelopes embellished with his mother's fine handwriting, and none of them the least bit suspicious. Surely after twenty-six years and two children, Kamat had no reason to suspect Andromeda, even if she was the youngest daughter of the Garin-Cassirer Conglomerate in Nev Hettek.

  The death of Nikolay had struck his mother deeply, Richard mused as he headed up the stairs. Perhaps she had even taken a touch of the Melancholy. Perhaps she wished a reconciliation with the family which had expected her to lock Kamat in Nev Hettek's orbit rather than the other way around. Perhaps she wanted to go home—but even that should be no cause for alarm.

  Still, the unexplained visit set uneasily with the young Househead. He ignored the landing which would have taken him to his bedroom and an hour or so of rest and continued upward to Nikolay's study where a touch of the Melancholy seemed to settle around him as well.

  "Richard? Richard, it's me, Marina...."

  Richard jerked upright as his world flew back into focus. An hour's worth of sunlight slanted through the eastern windows. He'd fallen asleep hunched over an account book and felt lousy for his rest. Closing the book and reflexively shoving it under an untidy heap of papers, he welcomed Marina.

  His sister, dressed in what was her usual fashion, could have passed for any one of hundreds of almost-pretty, anonymous women of the middle and lower strata of the city. Her shirt and trousers were a dark, muddy color—neither brown, nor blue, nor black and certainly not First-bath—that grated against Richard's eyes and sensibilities. She carried a servant's breakfast tray; Richard had to remind himself it was a sign of their enduring friendship and not another manifestation of her stubborn determination to be "like everyone else."

  Andromeda said it was just a phase: a harmless form of rebellion, and cautioned her son, as she had cautioned her husband, against making an issue out of Marina's wardrobe or behavior. Still, his sister's rag-tag appearance blunted whatever relief he felt on seeing her well and smiling after her misadventures.

  "Tea?" she asked, setting the tray down.

  He nodded and, turning her back to him, she set about preparing the beverage exactly as he preferred it.

  "I suppose you want to know what happened last night? That you're worried about me again, and the company I'm keeping. Well, it wasn't like that, really, Richard. A disaster: yes, but not the way you think and not in a way I could have prevented."

  Richard took the metal-wrapped glass and stirred it, needlessly. "You could have stayed home." It was said lightly, as in the old days before Nikolay's death, and Marina chuckled as she settled into the chair opposite his desk.

  "That would have been out of character, and you know it. Carrolly had an invitation for two and no one to take her. Well, you've been complaining that I don't associate with the right people, how much nghter do they have to be than Nikolaev, hmm? I didn't think you'd really mind. Chiro Ito, after all— wouldn't he be a great sire for the next Kamat heir?"

  Sighing, Richard took a long sip of the tea—and scalded his tongue. "Marina, I don't want to go through this again—"

  But they did, recovering well-argued territory. Not that Marina didn't have some valid discontents. So long as the house was the source of power and position in Merovingen, blood relationships were going to be important. So long as women did not have to marry, nor even disclose the names of their lovers, parentage was going to be problematic. A man, a househead, might never know who his children were (unless he took the extreme step of sequestering his wife, as Adromeda had sequestered herself for Nikolay) but, on the other hand, he could be certain that his sister's children shared at lea
st a few of his genes.

  Nikolay Kamat had two children: Richard, whom he trained as his successor, and Marina, who, in the usual course of things here in Merovingen, would provide Kamat with an heir. Most of the elite, nubile daughters found this state of affairs entirely to their satisfaction, but Marina found it insufferable.

  "I am not a cow," she snapped as the discussion neared its oft-rehearsed conclusion. "If I don't find a man I love as much as Momma loved Poppa, I may just die a virgin!"

  That was the trouble with a life-long contract. Unrealistic expectations.

  The last of the tea was tepid and tasteless. Richard put the glass back on the tray then leaned back in his chair. "No one is rushing you, Ree," he explained with taut patience. "I'm not going to ask you to have children for love of me or Kamat or anything else. And if having an heir were all that important to me, believe me—I would buy a year out of the life of some poor woman who needed the money. So don't you ever use the House as an excuse to endanger yourself. You're more important to me than a dozen heirs. Now, why don't we go back to the beginning and you explain to me how you came to be charging up the stairs with your sweater shredded and your hair down. If you had a problem at Nikolaev's, I want to know."

  Marina tucked her legs beneath her in the chair. "It wasn't at Nikolaev's," she said with a strangely conspiratorial grin. "Nikolaev's was utterly boring: everybody, and I mean everybody, was there and nothing was happening. Carrolly and I found Chiro and Ben Ventani and they were as bored as we were. Ben said he knew a little tavern, a smuggler's dive, that operated below Ventani..."

  She has no idea of the risks involved, Richard thought as Marina spun out her tale with schoolgirl enthusiasm. Going canalside at Ventani was just another adventure—like going below Kamat had been when he led the way to the bedrock. He had been forced to see Merovingen's rough side—he did know how to use that boat-pole better than most of his friends knew how to use their fancy swords—but Marina had been sheltered. And infected with a dangerous dose of his mother's notions of romance.

  "They wore masks but they talked like they were blacklegs and I think they'd been there before. They took one look at Ben and rousted him. He drew his sword and—"

  Richard rocked forward in his chair. "Is Ben Ventani all right?" Blacklegs rousting junior members of elite houses put a different, even more dangerous, light on Marina's tale.

  "Yes—now let me finish. Everybody started fighting, Carrolly and me included. Lord, Richard—I don't even remember anyone grabbing at me, but they kept a hold of Ben and dragged him out of there with the rest of us yelling and screaming at the top of our lungs."

  Marina saw Richard's jaw twitch with unspoken questions; she stuck her tongue out at him and kept him silent.

  "Well, after that everything changed. The old man behind the bar got friendly. He got us brandy and said he'd get us all back home safely if—if we'd stick around and talk to a friend of his: the man they'd really been after when they rousted Ben. Carrolly and I thought we should go straight to the authorities right then but Chiro said we'd wait 'cause he'd realized that the barkeep wasn't half as friendly as he was pretending to be.

  "It was about high second watch when we heard somebody moving around upstairs and we were taken to a back room. Richard, you'd have to meet him. He mumbled his name—Tom Mon-something-or-other— but he oozed elegance... and power. You'd like him."

  She paused and Richard realized, with a horror his sister did not perceive, that whoever or whatever this Tom truly was, Marina had already fallen in love with him.

  "He said he'd get Ben out, and he did; there was a message from him when I woke up. He—Tom, that is—must have been in some real trouble but I know he hasn't done anything wrong. I just know it, Richard. There must be something we can do to help him."

  Richard steepled his fingers and hid behind them. "Yes: stay away from him. Whatever kind of trouble he's got there's nothing we can do for him and plenty he could do to us."

  "Oh, Richard, you're no fun anymore. You're turning into a dull lump of a merchant." She shook her fist at him in mock-anger; despite himself, Richard felt a smile creep across his face.

  "I'll make inquiries," he conceded. "Discreet inquiries—and until I learn something one way or the other, you keep out of it, you understand?"

  "You're a love, big brother."

  She came around the desk to give him a hug and he knew he'd keep his word. If they'd been at a smuggler's dive, the canalers would know the place and if there was an elegant, powerful stranger holding court in one of the upper rooms, they'd know that, too. It was only a matter of asking the right questions.

  Richard didn't start to put the pieces together at that exact moment, but his suspicions exploded with nauseating clarity the moment his mother, Andromeda, walked through the door bearing another tea-tray upon which perched a folded calling card. For a moment his heart seemed to have forgotten how to beat and then, as his pulse started to race, he had lost the capacity for coherent speech.

  Andromeda was blonde and pale with a prominent bone structure normally described as aristocratic or elegant but which lately, since the death of Nikolay, had given her an almost skeletal appearance. Her once crisp, efficient movements had refined and quickened to the verge of hysteria. There was no doubt that she was trying to recover her equilibrium after her husband's death—she had resumed all her social, domestic and business obligations—but the effort had pushed her to the brink of madness.

  She presented Richard with an unrequested glass of tea. Her son stared at the russet liquid before starting to speak.

  "Mother, do you remember a family in Nev Hettek: Mon-something-or-other?" He did not look up into those smiling and too-bright eyes.

  Andromeda set the tea-pot back on the tray with a loud clatter. "Mondragon," she said with an exhaustive sigh. "Oh, thank god, Richard—you already know. I didn't know how I could possibly explain it to you."

  Richard took the calling card from her but did not read it. The details might still elude him, but his worst suspicions had just been confirmed.

  "Tell me anyway, Mother. Start at the beginning."

  * * *

  The sun had circled to the other side of the house, coming through the open shutters, falling on Richard's face and awakening him from a restless nap. Most of what his mother had told him wasn't new but there had never before been a pattern to his knowledge of Nev Hettek; he had never needed one.

  Merovingen was Revenantist; Kamat was Revenantist; he himself accepted a moderate Revenantist creed without hesitation. There were Adventists in the city—lord, his mother had never really stopped being Adventist—and there were places on this world where Revenantists like himself were in the minority. He had always believed it didn't make much difference one way or the other in anyone's walkaday life.

  But it did. Revenantism caused the machinery in Kamat's dyeworks to be made from wood instead of metal; it caused Kamat to strive for the best—First-bath—rather than the most; it caused them to be craftsmen instead of neophyte industrialists and capitalists like the controlling families of Nev Hettek. Revenantist fatalism accepted all manner of quirks and oddities and shunned all things judged "progressive" —which could drive an Adventist to fanaticism.

  Adventism bred individual fanatics who sliced through society on their appointed rounds of purification. Tom Mondragon, whom all Merovingen believed a Boregy cousin lately returned from the Falken Isles—so Andromeda said—had been such a fanatic in the rise of the Fon government of Nev Hettek and, more importantly, the militant Sword of God in that city. Adventism also bred a larger-scale fanaticism which festered in the ruling houses of Nev Hettek and led them to regard Merovingen with thoughts that were as much avaricious as purifying.

  The city resisted Nev Hettek about the same way it resisted the Det river: with cunning, adaptability and outright stubborness, but somehow the balance had shifted this past season. An individual fanatic, one Thomas Mondragon, trained and honed by the Sword
of God, had slipped his leash and come running down to Merovingen. Probably the young man would be swallowed and lost in the spired city but that was not a chance Nev Hettek intended to take now he had sheltered in Boregy patronage. The power clusters of Fon's government were emitting a desperate sort of vengeance.

  Most obviously, once suspicions were properly roused, there was Sword of God muscle moving through the canals—the strangers who had cowed Celotta into a winter-storm tie-up. But the more legitimate powers of Nev Hettek were active as well. Baritz was an Adventist minion, with impeccable credentials from the Fon governor and the upriver mercantile interests.

  Baritz had appeared at the Kamat gate with a sheaf of messages. Officially Baritz offered himself as a factotum in the Kamat businesses, unofficially he reminded Kamat that they were dependent on Nev Hettek for the iron, tin and chromium salts that made colorfast dyes possible. Even more unofficially, he reminded Andromeda that her Nev Hettek family, the Garin, was modest, vulnerable and very, very eager that this time she behaved properly.

  The risks, the note from her father had said, were enormous. Failure to give Baritz the latitude he requested would certainly result in the downfall of the Garin's small metallurgy operation. Blackmail, pure and simple—but also effective, even if Kamat had not been truly dependent on those barrels of salt mordants. ...

  Richard shook the downward spiral of thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the mirror before him. Dark-haired, round-faced and with a softness of feature that led many to suspect he was still a school-boy, Richard, like his sister, was Kamat from skin to bone. He had inherited none of his mother's natural elegance and therefore relied upon the precision of his wardrobe to make the Househead impression his face and gestures could not.

  Ironically, he shunned the highly fashionable clothes Andromeda designed for the House atelier, preferring, instead, simple styles tailored to perfection. His velvet jacket—First-bath, of course—lay smooth around his shoulders and hugged his waist with just the right degree of snugness; his trousers hung without bulges or wrinkles and the foulard silk cravat which he stabilized with a pigeon's blood ruby finished his apparel in a way which diminished the pudginess of his features.