The Complete Ivory

by Doris Egan

  She stood there frozen, so I added, "Should I go and inquire of them if they have some complaint to lodge?"

  At this she took several more steps back, then turned and went down the porch steps, off through the garden. She was wearing ankle boots under her rainbow robe. I heard her muttering as she squished through the snow: "No consideration for other people… barbarians making themselves at home… never thought I'd live to see it…"

  I closed my eyes again. Maybe I should have stayed upstairs. But no, Fd've been a complete wreck by morning, and they still expected me to go on that damned boat ride today. And it would have caused quite the little brouhaha if my throat had closed up completely during the night.

  I fell asleep imagining the tomb marker: She Died Polite.

  When I woke an hour later, A Scythian yellow torn was sitting on the edge of the chaise watching me. Lethally long-haired, champion shedders that they are, I had not perhaps picked the best house to stay overnight in. Out here in the open air, though, I felt confident enough to actually consider stroking him before common sense reasserted itself.

  The house was up and stirring, so I returned to our room for a quick wash and dress, then took a plate of hard market bread and Iychan apples out to the porch again for breakfast. This morning was the boat ride on the old capital canal. As it turned out, our carriages didn't leave till almost noon, and I spent a boring few hours in the nasal safety of the garden, where the winterspell was breaking up and the ground was turning muddy. I left the social niceties to Ran, who claimed I was laid up (in my room, he allowed them to infer) with some malady of my delicate barbarian constitution. The Poraths expressed proper sympathy and promptly forgot about me, to my relief.

  I wandered the length of the garden, down to the guardhouse by the gate, and back again. Two of the Scythian yellows followed me as I went, in instant and touching loyalty. This is typical of my experience with cats.

  At noon, when Ran emerged to accompany me to our carriage, he observed my new followers. He shook his head. "Why do you let them rub against your ankles? This always happens, Theodora. You know that they know you're allergic."

  "Yeah, but they also know I'm not going to kick them away." Increasing my speed to avoid one of the toms, I began shaking the hem of my robe, careful not to touch any gold hairs. "I thought this was a morning boat ride."

  "Try to get the nobility out of bed before noon. Eliana was dead to the world—wouldn't even answer till an hour ago, and came out still yawning. Just as well, I guess. I wouldn't want to have to watch her and Kylla stare at each other over the marmalade. Grandmother and Jusik are the only punctual souls in the house."

  We came to the gate, and one of the security guards stepped over to open it for us. He was young, with curly brown hair cut short, and he wore his uniform with a faintly uncomfortable air. "Noble sir and lady, may I ask you if the family looks ready to leave yet?"

  He must have been preoccupied; no "forgive my presumption," or any of the usual superfluous layers of politeness. Ran looked at him speculatively. "They were getting their cloaks when I left. If you're to accompany them on the boat, I'd suggest you prepare to go now."

  He nodded. "Thank you, sir. Thank you, my lady." His eyes met mine briefly, and I couldn't help but be struck by the fact that they were a remarkably deep, fine shade of brown. I also couldn't help noticing there were black circles in the sun-gold skin beneath them. And that both eyes had a reddish cast that usually comes from a recent abuse of drugs or alcohol. Not that there was any need to be judgmental: One of my eyes had no doubt had a similar appearance just last night, from quite a different cause. He hauled open the gate, waited till we were through, closed it, and started walking back through the garden toward the house.

  "Where are Kylla and Lysander?" I asked Ran.

  "They're riding with the Poraths in the family carriage."

  We looked at each other. I said, "I hope Grandmother Porath has some discretion in the seating arrangements."

  "You know," he said, "I rather doubt that she does."

  The boat was big for a canaler. There were two levels for passengers, an enclosed one on the main deck and an upper level open to the air. The musicians, I saw, had been brought back for the day, and their ranks had swollen to include more horn and string players.

  About two dozen of last night's partygoers had been asked back for the ride. I saw the blond Tellys woman, again talking animatedly, this time to a knot of three new people. She spotted me across the room as I came in and I saw her react. She made a motion to her listeners as though she were going to leave them, but one, a woman, put a hand on her arm and said something. And then the blond woman was off again, gesturing authoritatively as she spoke. She was a naturally strong talker, it seemed.

  The boat loaded up and cast off into the canal. I pressed my face against the glass as we pulled out, and saw a carriage drive up madly to the pier, stop short, and discharge a red-faced man in multicolored robes who threw something down in disgust and waved his arms angrily before whirling around and getting back in his carriage. Apparently some people are too tardy even for the nobility.

  I turned back to the big salon on the main deck. Here all was happiness and light. Grandmother's chair had been brought in, and when the musicians struck up, a look of serene joy came over her—you wouldn't have known it was the same woman. Kade took his sister Eliana out onto the floor and led six other couples in a pattern dance, one of the stately things I hear they do at court. They "bowed to the sun." "bowed to the moons." "laced the boot." "kissed the stranger." "circled their partners," and did any number of complicated figures before the tune was over. Lacing the boot was particularly complex. One young woman flubbed it and had to be drawn back into place by the person next to her, several beats too late.

  The second the music stopped, Grandmother Porath stood up—it seemed there was no pressing constitutional reason for her to use her sedan chair—and walked to the head of the couples. "Kade!" she snapped. She held out her hand. He bowed, took it obediently, and Eliana withdrew from the dance. I noticed that her defensive chaper-one, the tall skinny woman, followed her as she moved away.

  And this time there was none of that slow, stately stuff. Grandmother led them in a wild country pattern dance, and if you've never seen one I can only say it's a lot like the previous dance, only about a hundred times more enthusiastic. Speed and the ability to jump are essentials.

  Ran had wandered to the front of the salon to watch the jabith player, and I found I was standing next to somebody familiar. Sixteen or seventeen, light brown hair, nicely dressed… He was watching me, too. "Excuse me," I said. "Have we met, noble sir?" The "noble sir" prompted my memory; this was the young man Kylla had spilled a drink on last night.

  "We were nearly introduced," he said, with a dry look that told me he had not forgotten. "I'm Coalis." He gave it to me in three syllables: Co-al-is.

  I must have looked blank. He wasn't offended by it; apparently he expected people not to know who he was. "Kade is my brother," he explained. Apparently he did expect people to know Kade.

  And he was right. "Ah," I said.

  "You're the barbarian that Cormallon sorcerer married," he remarked. Usually they don't come right out and say it.

  "Yes. I'm Athenan."

  "Oh? What's your field of interest?"

  Now, that was an unusual thing for an Ivoran to say. "Cross-cultural myths and legends. I haven't done a lot of work in it lately, though."

  "No, I'm the same way. Other things interfere."

  I raised an eyebrow. "What's your field of study, noble sir?"

  "Coalis, please. It's na' telleth philosophy."

  "You're—" I stopped.

  "What?"

  "I was going to say, you're a little young for na' telleth philosophy, aren't you? I tend to associate it with the old and jaded."

  He said without emotion, "No point in not getting a head start."

  I supposed not. I wondered what the Poraths though
t about their second son opting out of the game. Well, he seemed like a frank sort of boy—"Are you planning on going into a monastery? Or is this just a personal study?"

  "I've been accepted at Teshin. I go on the winter solstice." He took a glass from a table and sipped at it; I saw it was water. "My family wants to give me the summer to change my mind. Prediction is fruitless—" This is a na' telleth saying—"but I see nothing so far that would change it."

  I've always been fascinated by this sort of conversation with strangers. Completely ignoring etiquette, I said, "I suppose they've been throwing you at nice young girls for months."

  "They have. It's a pointless exercise. Sex isn't prohibited to monks, you know, only passion. And marriage."

  What's wrong with passion and marriage? I decided not to say it; it seemed like the kind of answer that would take up the rest of the day.

  "What do you think of this wedding thing?"

  "Wedding thing"—I was starting to sound like Lysander.

  He understood what I meant. "Not the best idea Kade's ever had. But Grandmother's supporting it, so I guess it will happen." He might have been talking about the rain.

  I was saying, "So this was Kade's idea—" when Ran approached and took both my hands. He nodded his head toward the dance floor.

  I stood fast. "Coalis, this is my husband, Ran Cor-mallon."

  "Honored by this meeting," Coalis said agreeably. "We passed at breakfast, I think."

  "The honor is mine. Come on, Theodora, dance with me."

  "My leg's broken."

  "I know the jabith player, he used to live with one of my aunts. He's going to play 'The Other Side of the Mirror' next for us. I know you can do that one, I saw you do it at our wedding."

  "The other side of the mirror" is an Ivoran term that implies the meeting of life, love, and death; that sunny mornings are followed by rainy afternoons, and that we'll all come to dust in the end. The other side of the mirror is a skull. Unless you understand that it's a wildly cheerful dance, you'll miss the point.

  I said, "Coalis here is a na' telleth. He'd probably love to dance this one."

  Coalis smiled austerely. Ran pulled me out onto the floor.

  I found that we were standing, alarmingly, at the far right of the double row of dancers. "We're lead couple!" I said.

  "I know."

  The musicians looked ready to start up any moment. I hissed and pulled his sleeve to make Ran face me. "We'll have to go first, and everyone will be watching us! I don't know this dance that well!"

  "Nonsense. You'll do perfectly well, you always do."

  Ran's often overinflated views of my capabilities can be soothing, but there are times when reality must be injected into a situation. I turned to the woman on my left and smiled politely. "Would you mind being lead couple? My partner and I are going to the bottom."

  Ran said, "Theodora—" but I ignored him, grasped his hand, and pulled him to the end of the row. "That wasn't necessary, was it?" he said, as we took up our facing positions.

  Ran's ego rarely admits other viewpoints—actually, it's one of his more endearing qualities. Mind you, he'll yield to my wishes often enough, he just makes it clear that he thinks I'm crazy.

  At that moment Grandmother Porath announced, from the chair she'd retired to, "We'll begin this dance from the left side! Musicians!"

  The row of dancers all turned to us. I felt the blood leave my face.

  "Barbarian self-consciousness," murmured Ran. "Don't panic. We can do this."

  My mind had gone completely blank.

  "Left-right palm touch," said Ran, as the music started up. "Then place, advance, place. And turn—no, to your left—"

  Moments of terror followed by moments of enjoyment. I've always gotten a kick out of that backwardskipping thing during the jig, and did this time too, until I skipped right into the two people behind me. However, we all seemed to survive it.

  When it was over, we all bowed and I said to Ran, "I need to go somewhere and sit down." I felt as if I'd been digging ditches for a day and a half.

  "Kylla and Lysander must be on the top deck. I hear there are benches up there."

  "Terrific."

  We made our way across the salon to three doors behind the musicians' seats. Two of the doors had stairs going up. Ran said, "One of them's probably to the watch. —You look tired. I'll see which one goes to the upper deck." He started up one of the staircases. I leaned against the door-jamb, turning to face the salon, and found my sleeve tugged—by Grandmother Porath, who'd come by to harangue the musicians.

  "I know," she said, sympathetically. "Sometimes it's so hard to know where to go."

  I wasn't sure whether she meant directionally, or if it was a reference to my nearly sending four people keeling over in "The Other Side of the Mirror."

  I said, "Do you mean in the dance or in life?"

  She cackled. "The dance. I've done life."

  "Theodora?" Ran's voice floated down. "This is it."

  I bowed to Grandmother Porath and went up the stairs. At the top it was all sunlight and soft winds, and the buildings of the capital passing slowly on either side of the canal. About a half dozen people had come up here for the relative silence and the relaxed atmosphere; Kylla and Lysander were sitting on a bench near the railing. Ran and I joined them. A striped awning had been set up to shade this side of the boat.

  "Nice," I said tentatively, wondering how things were between them.

  We were passing under Kyme Bridge. Lysander said, "You can see the roof of our house if you stand in front."

  "We'll probably be passing it in another ten minutes," added Kylla, calmly enough. At least they didn't seem to be throwing things.

  Unfortunately, one of the Poraths chose that moment to invade the upper deck: Kade, architect of "the marriage thing," and probably the person Kylla least wanted to see, next to Eliana, emerged from the stairs. He peered around the deck, then started angrily toward the opposite rail. The security guard who'd let us out the gate that morning was leaning there weakly, looking none too well.

  You could hear Kade's voice clear across the deck. "Aren't you supposed to be watching my sister?"

  The guard's voice was harder to catch. "… fine, on the boat… nothing's going to happen…"

  "That's not your job to say! Your job is to watch her!"

  "… job is to watch everybody… defensive chaperone all the time… better protection than the Emperor…"

  Kade glanced around at the rest of us—I must honestly say that our group had fallen silent and was eavesdropping openly—and realized he was creating a spectacle. He grabbed the guard and hauled him over behind the stairway entrance, where their voices became unintelligible.

  "Oh, well," I said, with some disappointment. A minute or so later, the guard, looking rather subdued, preceded Kade down the stairs.

  Kylla turned to her husband. "Even their security guard doesn't want to spend his life with Eliana Porath."

  "Oh, gods, Kylla—"

  Ran caught my eye and we withdrew a few feet to the railing. He said seriously, "You know, I don't see any good way out of this. The Poraths have put their House on the line so obviously, it'd be a slap in the face if Lysander tries to squeeze away."

  "That's why they're being so open."

  "Trap or not, it'll still be an insult. And you know how the Six Families are. Murder's a game to them. They do it all the time without reason, and when they do have a reason—" Ran's face expressed his disapproval of killing for impractical motives; it was a judgment he shared with all the commoner classes of Ivory, right down to the market square beggar.

  "So what are you saying? That Kylla's going to have to grin and bear it? She won't, you know."

  "I—" He broke off, looking surprised. "Did you feel that?"

  "Feel what?" Something in his voice made me nervous. I put a hand on his arm for reassurance, and just then there was a kind of shimmering, a faint tremor. There'd been an earthquake in the capital abo
ut sixty years ago, but there was no reason to think we were due for another. Except that something different and uncontrollable was definitely happening—

  I took a step back and looked around, but everything was all right: The buildings, the canal, the passengers still intent on their conversations. Whatever it was seemed to have stopped.

  I looked at Ran. He was leaning against the rail. "We're getting closer to it," he said thickly. His face was white.

  The only thing we were getting closer to was Catmeral Bridge, near Kylla and Lysander's villa. I went back to Ran. "What is it? Do you want me to get help?"

  There was a commotion on the level beneath us. Somebody yelled. A voice tried to answer reassuringly, there was another yell, and running footsteps. The window just below us was open and we could hear it all. There was a woman's scream.

  I looked over the side of the boat. Someone was in the canal; a blue and gold silk robe floated, bobbing and then disappearing as the wearer sank, dragging it into the gray water. A few seconds later there was the flutter of an arm, and a dark head appeared and vanished.

  Splashes directly under us marked two security guards diving out the same window. The boat was slowing down. Everyone on the upper deck had joined us at the railing to stare. "Who is it?" I heard someone ask. There was no answer. The guards cut their way through the water, diving and reappearing where the head and arm had made their last appearance. They must have spent a good twenty min-

  utes swimming back and forth to the boat and then diving again and again. I was impressed with their training: Swimming is not a widespread art on Ivory.

  Kylla, Lysander, Ran, and I all watched silently, along with the rest of the boat, until the two guards returned. There was no sign of a body.

  We looked at each other. Blue and gold silk: Kade.

  Chapter 4

  We missed most of the confusion downstairs. I was told later that that scream we'd heard was Grandmother Porath, who'd fainted immediately and had to be laid on some pillows the crew brought out. Between dealing with her and watching the security guards dive for his son, Jusik must have been in a state.