by Doris Egan
An old man with a sleepy look about him shuffled in with the tray; Stereth took it easily from him and poured us all cups of tah. Of course, technically there was no reason he couldn't poison us, but it would be impolite to refuse. Stereth said, "Yes, it seemed the best course. Those in the Imperial Government who come from the Six Families will always see me as an outlaw; but by not taking a new name, I don't come across as a social climber as well. I'd prefer not to be seen as another parvenu begging for acceptance."
"You could have taken back your old name," said Ran.
"No, I couldn't," he said shortly, and that was the end of that.
I put in, "Besides, if your name is a legend, why change it?"
He smiled again. "It does give me a certain cachet with some of the people I deal with. And the others it keeps on their toes."
We talked of the paintings on the wall for a few minutes, till we'd all finished our tah; then Stereth poured wine for us and asked, "Is there anything I can help you with?"
Ran said, "Tymon can tell it best."
So I told him what I'd heard, and hinted at what I surmised. He listened. When I was through he said, "What makes you think I would take an interest in some scheme of Pyrene's and a few bought officials?"
Ran said, "First of all, I don't believe that the new Minister for Provincial Affairs would let anything happen to the provinces until he's had a chance to rob them himself."
Stereth burst out laughing. It was a joyful laugh, not like
anything I'd ever heard from him in the Sector. "I'm sorry Cantry stayed in bed. All right, friends, no need to go further; I'll look into the matter. Good enough?"
Ran nodded. With the immediate business cleared I put down my winebowl and said, "I've been trying to find out what happened to some of the band. Do you have any idea?"
He straighted his silk robe. "Tell me who, and I'll tell you what I can."
And so he did. Grateth had turned farmer and stayed in the Northwest Sector. Des had said something about a possible job with the Capital Touring Company, but it fell through, and his present whereabouts were a mystery. "He's not been taken out and beaten for trying to fix the flyer races, though. I checked."
"What about Sembet Triol? He wasn't at the fort that night—"
"No." Stereth bit his lip. "He was pardoned, but his noble family refused to take him back."
"But an Imperial decree is supposed to wipe out the past—"
"The Sakris are an older family than the Mellevils." The Emperor's name was Mellevil. I hadn't known that Sembet Triol was a Sakri. So was our client, if you recall—though I don't suppose it would have made any difference if we'd known about the connection. The Sakris are a large family.
"Where is he, then?"
"I don't know. He left his short sword at the Justice House, took his purse of compensation, and told me he was going west. I don't know where. I suppose we'll never know."
We'll never know. Such a final phrase. There's an expression on Ivory: Penathi so mai, "the wind we hear in the branches, that we'll never see." It means, let it go. Like ishin na' telleth, it was an Ivoran motto I couldn't live up to.
Where was the structure? Where was the beginning, the middle, and the end? All these tales and myths had never fully prepared me for the fact that there are just some things we're never going to know. What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles used when he hid among the women. Where Sembet Triol had gone and what would
become of him, and why magic worked for some people and not others, and exactly when Tavia had begun to hate me.
Ran was saying, "What is this purse of compensation business?"
"I arranged for five hundred tabals in gold to go to every member of the original band, or everyone who was in the fort that night."
No gold for us? I glanced at Ran, whose look replied, Let's not press our luck. He said to Stereth, "What about the others?"
Stereth shrugged. "They all got pardons."
"But no cash. Some of them are going to end up outlawed again."
"There were over four hundred of us at the end," said Stereth reasonably. "The government couldn't process and pay off each one individually. They never would have taken my negotiations seriously if I'd insisted on that."
"Did you push for it at all?" I asked.
He reached for a bowl of kinuts from a nearby pedestal and handed it to me. "Life is as it is. They're better off than they were before they met me, aren't they?"
This was true, but depressing nevertheless.
Stereth was gazing at Ran now. "I hope I've been helpful. Perhaps in future you can do some service for me, gracious sir Cormallon."
Ran blanched and said, "I'm always eager to perform a service for a friend." A noncommittal generalization.
"As Minister for Provincial Affairs, I'm always looking for new talent. Theodora—Tymon, I mean—is welcome as well."
Minister for Provincial Affairs. For the first time I gave that phrase some thought. The Emperor would have been happy to give him that, because it was a post nobody wanted. For one thing, it involved actual work. For another, and this was the basic point, it meant dealing with the provinces… which in the view of the Six Families, were one step up from dungheaps. The overwhelming majority of food shipments, tah, weapons, and military personnel came from the provinces, but you wouldn't think it to listen to the news coming out of the capital. They were a self-involved lot there, and any provincial kid worth his salt,
lying awake at night listening to the Net, wanted to run off to the capital to make his fortune. Whereas if they'd just all stay home and organize, nothing could stop them.
Stereth was a man with provincial experience. Surely these thoughts had crossed his mind. Perhaps I was being paranoid, but it seemed to me suddenly that all the provinces needed was somebody with vision to coordinate an alliance, and Stereth seemed just the one to do it. Or get beheaded trying.
I would be interested in following his career—from afar.
Ran, I saw, was giving Stereth's offer courteous consideration. I met his eyes across the table and softly mouthed the words, "Beware of heights."
He turned a bland smile toward Stereth. "I don't want to disappoint you, but the affairs of my House take up so much time…"
Stereth made a dismissive gesture. "Think no more of it! Just an idea." He reached for another pedestal, topped by a dish of candied fruit. "Have a piece?" he said.
Ran hesitated almost too lengthily, then took one.
The doors to the visiting room closed behind us, and I drank in a deep breath. "It's good to be alive, isn't it?"
I spoke in Standard, as the doorkeeper was with us.
Ran said, "He was careful to use both our names. I wonder what he'll ask in return for keeping silent about this little chapter in our lives."
We reached the vestibule, where the doors to the garden stood open. I saw the head of a security guard beyond one of them. "Please wait here a moment," said the doorkeeper in his quavering voice. "Your escort will be along shortly." And he tottered over and took a seat on the stool by the wall.
"Whatever it is," I said, "we'll worry about it then." Nothing seemed too difficult to handle at that moment, under the dappled starlight slanting over the floor, amid the heavy scent of the roses. I breathed in perfume and night wind.
"The avoidance of death sometimes has this effect," said Ran practically, as he seated himself on a bench.
I sat beside him and wondered about a culture that specializes in buying off or absorbing its enemies. It didn't
always work, though, did it? Look at Petev and Copalis in Death of an Emperor.
"Ran, I have a question."
He sighed. "No, I don't know what the salad reference means, Theodora. Nobody knows. Let's just go home and get some sleep."
"I wasn't even thinking about that!"
"Oh. Sorry. What was it, then?"
(I should tell you, in case it starts driving you crazy, as it did me, that we never did figure
out what the salad reference meant. Several weeks later I got up the courage to call Octavia and ask her, thinking that if she left the planet before I found out it would dog me for the rest of my life. We spoke briefly over the Net, and I still recall her wide-eyed, angry look when I asked her if it had anything to do with her transfer to Produce Control. "No it doesn't, Theodora. You know what it means." The impression I got from her was one of incredulous disbelief at my nerve in pretending ignorance. Then she said, "I can't believe you," and switched off. So not only don't I know, my pet theory was knocked out of the ring.
But Ran's reminder got me to thinking briefly about this afternoon, and it occurred to me that I might have ruined the expedition for poor Shez, who'd had no idea what was going on. I remembered how silent she'd been, right up till the time that Kylla'd told her to say good-bye to Aunt Theod—
"My gods!"
"What?" said Ran, looking around sharply.
"I've become one of the Cormallon aunts!"
He burst out laughing. After a minute he said, "Next time send up a few flares so I can follow your thought processes."
"Here they are," said the old doorkeeper suddenly, as the two armed Imperials who'd brought us in earlier appeared in the entranceway.
"Please follow us, gracious sir and lady," said one, and
we were careful to do so circumspectly. One doesn't fool around with Imperials.
So we left Stereth's little palace and followed them over the pebbled pathways under the stars toward the gate. Fountains splashed on either side of us. And I thought of the journey back from Tuvin in the groundcar, the whole long tired trip, and how I wakened from a nap to look out on my right at the well-watered fields near the river. It was nearly twilight and the low sun made long, delicious shadows in the lush grass. A white house with wooden pillars was set in from the road. A broad expanse of lawn ran south of it, bordered on the edges by tasselnut trees that bent toward the river. And in the middle of this sea of dappled grass, standing by herself, was a little girl who whirled her arms as though directing a great and invisible orchestra. She was too intent to see us pass.
What was in her mind? Was the man who'd come out on the porch of the white house, who stared north and south as though searching for something, her father? Of course I never saw her again, and I suppose there'll be no reason ever in my life to return to the Tuvin Road. And I thought of all the hints, all the flashing gleams on the river, all the stories we'll never know the endings of.
Guilt-Edged Ivory
Chapter 1
Assassinations are so inconvenient.
It wasn't as though there weren't plenty of other things to occupy my attention at the time. Another summer in the capital, and I was supervising a good cleaning out of the house there, wishing we could spring for importing a Tellys dustcatcher (just an idle wish—the hole it would put in the House budget would never be worth it). My tinaje healing skills were rusty, so I'd signed on to an apprenticeship with a big-name tinaje artist who had offices in the Imperial Dance Academy. And I was taking some trouble to make a clandestine appointment at a Tellys medical clinic (we'll get back to this one later).
And to top it all off, my sister-in-law Kylla was behaving very strangely.
She swept in one afternoon when we were rolling up the carpets from the second floor and taking them down to the courtyard to be beaten. There were no clients in the house, of course, since the place was a mess; and my dear husband had taken himself as far away from manual labor as he could, remembering a sudden appointment in Braece. Danger means nothing to Ran when weighed against duty, but the prospect of actual physical work sends him scuttling like a rabbit caught on a landing pad.
Kylla invaded this prosaic scene like some exotic bird of paradise, all bangles and gold facepaint. Her black hair was caught back in a velvet band rimmed with tiny metal dangles that made a sound like distant bells; her dark eyes were rimmed with midnight blue, clear as the borders of a new map. Since her marriage she'd taken full advantage of the relaxed dress code for respectably wedded women, relaxing it to the point where her grandmother probably would have had a heart attack if she'd seen her grandchild wandering around in public this way. People as gorgeous as Kylla can get away with a lot, though.
"Where's Ran?" she said to me, without preamble. Her robes swished over the head of the stairs.
"Braece," I said.
She looked around at the servants carrying down the huge carpet from the upper office, the tables pushed against the walls, the clouds of dustmotes, and nodded as though she understood. The sleeves of my worst robe were tied back, and I wiped the sweat from my brow with a bare arm, aware that I looked every bit as messy as my surroundings. "The pillows are all outside," I said apologetically.
"I'll stand," she replied. There was a jingling sound behind her, and her four-year-old daughter Shez peeked around, the bracelets on her arms slipping.
"I want to sit," said Shez.
Kylla sighed, lifted her, and deposited her atop the carved blackwood table against the wall. Shez sat regally and surveyed her domain from this new height.
"What's wrong?" I said. Kylla was not usually this preoccupied, or this morose-looking.
She started to pace. "Has Lysander called here?"
"Lysander? Why would he call here? I mean, he's always welcome—" Ran and I got along well enough with Kylla's husband, but we only tended to see him when they were together. Ran was still close to his sister, but I suspected that Lysander was accepted mostly on the grounds that he'd married Kylla.
"He might have called Ran on the Net," she said.
"If he did, Ran hasn't mentioned it. What's going on?"
Just then Shez started to chant, "I want to see them beat the rugs! I want to see them beat the rugs! I want—"
Kylla said, "Please, darling, mother has a headache."
Mother has a headache? Kylla had the constitution of a workhorse, and nothing in the universe fazed her.
"Good gods, Kylla."
"Why? What did I say?" She looked distracted.
"What is it, what's the matter?"
"Why?" She was suddenly alarmed. "Do I look bad?"
"Do you look b— You are a glorious vision of sunrise, as always, but you are driving me crazy. You look worried, is what you look. Do you want to tell me what the problem is, or do you want me to harass you with calls every hour until you crack?"
She smiled suddenly and patted my hand, still encrusted with dirt. "I'm so glad you married Ran."
It was out of left field but warming, typically Kylla; not every barbarian who marries into a good Ivoran family can expect the kind of sweetness she's shown me from the beginning. You see why nobody can stay mad at her? However— "You're off the point, Kylla."
She nodded but didn't seem disposed to go any further.
"I want to see them beat the rugs! I want to see them beat the—"
I hauled Shez down from her perch, took her to the head of the stairs, and gave her to the housekeeper who'd come out from Cormallon to help us. "She wants to see them beat the rugs," I explained.
The housekeeper took her hand and led her away. I returned to Kylla. "Speak," I said.
"I thought Lysander might have called Ran for advice."
"What sort of advice?" Lord, this was like pulling nails from stone.
She took a deep breath. "The council wants him to get married again."
I blinked. "Whoa! The Shikron family council?" She nodded. "Wants him to divorce you?" She shook her head. "Wants him to take a junior wife?"
She burst into tears. "They, want, him… to take a new senior wife, and make me a junior!"
Good heavens. I put my arms around her, not easy considering I only come up to her shoulder. "Sweetheart, that can't be. You were married first, you'll always have seniority rights."
"Not if… not if she outranks me."
"How can she outrank you if you were married first?"
"They want him to marry Eliana Porath!"
I said, "I thought it wasn't customary to take any extra wives until middle age. Lysander's still in his twenties."
"But the council wants the connection, and the Poraths want the money."
"Oh." Lysander's family was rolling in it, from every-
thing I'd heard. I guessed the Poraths weren't doing so well. My mouth hardened. And for this they were going to screw up three people's lives.
I said, "They can't force Lysander to marry, can they? He's First of Shikron."
"Lysander says they can make his life a living hell. But he also says that Eliana Porath has a face like a mud pudding, which I know isn't true. I went to school with her cousin."
"Oh, come on now. I'm sure he doesn't want this marriage any more than you do. He worships the ground you walk on, Kylla, everybody knows it." This last part at least was true.
Teartracks ran through the gold swirl on her cheeks. "I'm getting old," she said. "I'm losing my looks."
For the love of— "For heaven's sake, Kylla, you're twenty-five standard. You're a year younger than me! If there's a wrinkle anyplace on your body, point it out to me. I'll give you a hundred in gold for it."
She sniffed. "I think my fanny's falling."
"My fanny fell when I was twelve. At this point we'd need a hoist to— I fail to see why that's amusing, gracious lady Kylla." She'd smiled behind the tears. "Say, Ky, why don't we see what Ran's got stored in the way of Ducort wine?"
"It's the middle of the day."
I made a rude noise with my tongue that I'd learned from a bunch of outlaws in the Northwest Sector. "Better yet—let's go to the Lantern Gardens and see what they've got on their list of new drinks. We'll stay for the matinee and watch the naked fioorshow."
She laughed. "Do you know something? I've never had the nerve to actually stay for the show."
"You amaze me. Wait, I'll check on Shez." I went into the other room and looked down through the back window to the courtyard. Lines were strung from one side of the house to the other, crisscrossing among the leaves of the coyu tree. A fortune in Andulsine carpets hung in a thousand brightly colored threads. Six men and women stood there beating (carefully) and Shez stood on the cobbles beside them, whacking away with enthusiasm. "Wham!" I heard her voice float up from below. "Wham! Zam! Ham! Tarn!" Her face glowed.
