Shadowplay s-2

by Tad Williams

  “What are you talking about, the sunset?” asked Yazi. “If your thoughts wandered any farther, girl, you’d have to put bells on them, like goats.”

  When Qinnitan looked back the man was gone into the crowd. She didn’t know what to think. Even Yazi suddenly seemed capable of having secret depths.

  Pigeon came bounding out to greet her when they reached the dormitory hall, excited as a puppy. He threw his arms around her, then grabbed her hand to pull her back to the bed they shared, waving his free arm excitedly. He had taught her some of the hand-language he had spoken with the other mute servants back in the Orchard Palace, but at times like this he didn’t bother trying to make his thoughts known in a more subtle way, nor did he need to. Some of the other women looked up as he dragged Qinnitan down the open space between the tiny wooden beds, a few with indulgent smiles, remembering brothers or children of their own, many others with the generalized irritation of someone who had just finished a long, hard day’s labor being forced to observe the endless energies of a child. It was strange, living with so many women again—almost a hundred in this dormitory alone, with several more buildings like it on this side of the citadel. The culture was oddly familiar, the same quick-blooming friendships and rivalries and even hatreds, as though someone had taken the wives of the autarch’s Seclusion, dressed them in dirty smocks and sweatstained dresses, then dumped them into this vast, depressing hall that had once been the royal stables for some long-dead king of Hierosol. These women were not so comely, and not so young—many of them were grandmothers—but otherwise there seemed little difference between this and her former home, or even the Hive where she had lived before.

  Cages, she thought. Why do men fear us so that they must cage us all together and keep us apart from them?

  Hierosol was better than Xis, but even here there were strict rules about keeping out men, even for those of the washerwomen who were married. Only Soryaza’s intervention with the dormitory mistress had gained a place here for Pigeon, and he was one of but a dozen or so children, most babes in arms who stayed behind during the day to be cared for in an offhand way by a pair of washerwomen now too old to work, two crones who each morning found the sunniest place in the dormitory and sat there like lizards, muttering to each other while the children more or less looked after themselves.

  “Soryaza says she has work for you again,” Qinnitan told Pigeon, suddenly reminded. He had been banished to the dormitory for being underfoot—a crime worse than murder, to hear the laundry-mistress talk. “You’ll come in with me tomorrow.”

  Pigeon seemed less interested in this news than in tugging her the last few steps toward their bed. In the middle of it, nested in a pile of wood chips and shavings like the legendary phoenix, sat a slightly irregular carving of a bird —a pigeon, she saw after a moment. Pigeon pointed to the sculpture, then dug the small knife he had stolen from Axamis Dorza’s house out of the chips and proudly displayed it, too.

  “Did you make this bird? It’s very fine.” But she could not help frowning a little. “I do wish you hadn’t done it on the bed. I’ll be sleeping in slivers tonight.”

  He looked at her with such hurt that she bent and picked up the carving to examine it. As she turned it over she saw that he had arduously carved her name (or at least his childish approximation of it) on the bottom of it in Xixian letters —“Qinatan.” A rush of love for the boy collided with a burst of fear to see her real name written on something, even a child’s rough carving. Yazi and Soryaza were not the only women here who could speak the language of Xis, and some of them might read it too. She already had enough problems with people asking questions.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “But you must remember my name here is Nira, not...not the other. And you are Nonem, remember?”

  This time he did not look hurt so much as anguished at his own mistake, and she had to pull him to her and hug him tight. “No, it’s beautiful, it is. Let me just take it for a moment. And the knife, please.” She kissed him on top of his head, smelling the strange boy-smell of his sweat, then looked around. Several women on either side were watching. She smiled and showed them the bird, then took it with her and headed for the privies on the far side of the dormitory hall. She sat down in one of the small cubicles there, so like an animal’s stall that she felt sure they had once been just that, and, when she felt sure no one was looking, took the knife and quickly scraped the boy’s childish letters off the bottom of the bird.

  On the way back she stopped off to borrow a looking-glass from one of the other serving-women. In return for the loan she gave the woman the round ball of soap she had assembled from discarded slivers in the laundry. The mirror was the size of Qinnitan’s hand, in a chipped frame of polished tortoiseshell.

  “Mind you bring it back before bedtime,” the woman warned.

  Qinnitan nodded. “Just...for hair,” she said in her fragmented Hierosoline. “Bring soon.”

  When she reached her bed again she saw that Pigeon had done his best to clear away the remnants of his day’s carvings. She set the carved bird on the empty barrel she shared as a table with the next bed over, and borrowed a comb from the girl whose bed that was, and who luckily did not ask anything in trade.

  Qinnitan set the mirror on her knee and stared at the reflection. To her despair, she saw that her unruly hair had escaped the scarf again right where the red streak emerged. As if she had not already left enough of a trail across the citadel! She no longer had access to the cosmetics and dyes the women had used in the Seclusion, so she had done her best to disguise the flame-colored patch with soot from the candles and the laundry fireplaces, but working in that damp, hot room ensured that the soot didn’t work for long. She would have to get a bigger scarf, or cut her hair off entirely. Some of the older women here wore their hair very short, especially if they were past childbearing age. Maybe no one would think it too odd if she did the same... “Nira, isn’t it?” a scratchy voice asked.

  Startled, Qinnitan looked up, hurriedly tucking her hair back under the scarf. It was the old woman from the laundry, the one with the burned face and missing teeth who had only been working there a few days. “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Losa. I thought that was you when I saw you across the room. And is this your little brother?”

  Pigeon was looking at the old woman with mistrust, his usual expression with strangers. “Yes, his name is Nonem.”

  “Ah, lovely. I didn’t mean to bother you, child, I was just...” At that moment, just to add to the madcap air of sudden festivity, Yazi approached, followed by a young girl in a very fine dress—the kind of dress the laundrywomen only saw when they were called upon to clean things from the upper apartments of the citadel.

  “Nira, I just...” Yazi saw the old woman. “Losa! What are you doing here?”

  The woman smiled, then quickly pulled her lips together to hide her ruined teeth. “Oh, I couldn’t get out the gate to get home. All kinds of soldiers coming in, and such a fuss! Wagons, oxen, people shouting. Someone said they were Sessians hired by the lord protector. I thought I’d ask if I could stay here.”

  “We’ll talk to the dormitory mistress,” said Yazi, “but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” At any ordinary time Yazi would have pressed the old woman for details and it would have been the subject of the evening’s conversation all over the dormitory, but now something even more exciting was clearly pressing on her. “Nira, there’s someone here to see you.”

  Qinnitan was beginning to feel quite overwhelmed. She turned to the very young girl in the beautiful blue dress and velvet petticoat. A crowd of women was beginning to gather as people came to see what had brought such an apparition into the dormitory.

  “Yes?”

  “I am to take you to my mistress,” the girl said. “You are... Nira?”

  Qinnitan’s confusion quickly turned to panic, but she couldn’t very well deny it. She struggled to frame the Hierosoline words. “Who...who is your mistress?”


  “She will tell you herself. Come with me, please.” Beneath the formal manners, the girl seemed a little anxious herself.

  “Oh, that is too bad,” old Losa said. “I was looking forward to a chat.”

  “You’d better go,” Yazi told Qinnitan. “Maybe a handsome prince saw you when we were wandering around lost today. Should I come with you, in case he has trouble making himself understood when he proposes to you?”

  “Stop, Yazi.” Qinnitan just wanted everyone to go away and forget about this, but it was obviously going to be the talk of the dormitory, perhaps for days.

  “She is to come alone,” said the girl in the blue dress. “But what about...my brother?” Qinnitan asked.

  “I’ll watch him,” Yazi said. “We’ll have fun, won’t we, Nonem?”

  Pigeon liked Yazi, but he clearly didn’t like the idea of letting Qinnitan go away with some stranger. Still, after a warning look from her, he nodded. Qinnitan rose, leaving the comb and mirror for Yazi to return to their owners, and followed the girl out of the dormitory into the cold, torchlit night.

  She felt in the pocket of her smock for Pigeon’s carving knife and held it tightly as they walked back across the tiled immensity of the Echoing Mall.

  “Who is your...mistress?” she asked the girl again.

  “She will tell you what she wishes to tell you,” the little girl in the blue dress said, and would say no more. “

  I am not happy,” said her father. Pelaya knew it was the truth. Count Perivos was not the sort of man who liked surprises, and all this had obviously come as just that. “Bad enough that a foreign prisoner should bribe my daughter to send messages to me when I already have so much else to worry on—using her as a...a go-between. But to find he also expects her to arrange some sort of assignation for him...!”

  “It’s not an assignation and he didn’t bribe me.” Pelaya stroked his sleeve. The cuff needed mending, which made her heart ache a little—he worked so hard! “Please, Babba, don’t be difficult. Was there anything bad in his letter to you?”

  Her father raised his eyebrow. “Babba? I haven’t heard that since the last time you wanted something. No, his thoughts are at least interesting, perhaps useful, and all he asks in return is any news I can give him about his home or his family. There’s nothing wrong with the letter, except that he knows too much. How could a foreign prisoner have so much to say about our castle defenses?”

  “He told me he fought here twenty years ago against the Tuan pirates. That he was a guest of the Temple Council.”

  “I remember those days, but he remembers where every tower stairway is and how many steps it has, I swear! He must have a memory like a mantisery library.” Count Perivos frowned. “Still, some of his warnings and suggestions show wisdom, and I am willing to believe he meant them in good faith. But what is this madness about a serving girl?”

  “I don’t know, Babba. He said she reminded him of someone.” Pelaya spotted her servant coming across the garden with the dark-haired girl walking slowly behind her. “Look—here they come now.”

  “Madness,” her father said, but sighed as if weak protest were all he was allowed.

  Seeing the laundry maid up close, Pelaya was both relieved and confused. Relieved, without quite understanding why, to see that this girl was only a year or two older than she was, and that while she was by no means ugly, she was not astoundingly pretty, either. But something else about this laundry servant put her on edge, although Pelaya could not say what it was—something in the quality of the girl’s watchfulness, in the cool and measured way she looked around the torchlit garden, was not what the steward’s daughter expected from someone who spent every day up to her elbows in the citadel’s washing tubs.

  Now the girl turned that dark-eyed gaze onto Pelaya and her father, examining them as carefully as she had the surroundings, which was strange in itself: should she not have been looking first at the nobles who had summoned her? Pelaya found the inspection a little unnerving.

  “Your name is Nira, is it not?” she asked the girl. “Someone wants to meet you. Do you understand me?”

  The girl nodded. “Yes, Nira. Understand.” Either she had not been in Hierosol long or she was far more stupid than she looked, because her accent was barbarous.

  Not for the first time that day, Pelaya wondered what she had stumbled into. A simple friendship had become something larger and much less comfortable. She was reassured that her father and his bodyguard were here to ensure that nothing was passed between the prisoner and this servant girl and that no tricks were attempted.

  Now Perivos stepped forward. He spent a moment examining the girl Nira as thoroughly as she herself had inspected everything and everyone else. “So this is her?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I wish Olin Eddon would hasten himself. I have better things to do...”

  “Yes, Father. I know.” She took a breath. “Please, be kind to him.”

  He turned on her with a look of surprise and annoyance. “What does that mean, Pelaya?”

  “He is a kind man, Father. Babba. He has always been polite to me, proper in his speech, and always insists that his guards stay—and my maid as well. He says I remind him of his daughter.”

  Her father gave a little snort of disbelief. “Many young women remind him of his daughter, it seems.”

  “Father! Be kind. You know his daughter has disappeared and both his sons are dead.”

  The count shook his head, but she could see him softening. More subtle than her sister, she had learned ways to bend him gently to her will, and sometimes he even seemed to collaborate in his own defeats. “Do not badger me,” he said. “I will grant him the respect of some privacy—he is a king, after all—but I do not like it. And if anything untoward occurs...”

  “It won’t, Father. He’s not like that.” Pelaya Akuanis was far too ladylike to curse even to herself, and did not know any really useful curse words in any case, but Olin’s favor was costing her more than the prisoner could know. She could not besiege her father for favors like this very often: it would be long months before she could expect to get her way in anything important again. I hope it’s worth it for him, talking to some laundry trollop. But she knew even in her disgruntled state that wasn’t quite fair: there was unquestionably something more to this girl, this Nira, although Pelaya still could not guess what it might be.

  Olin and his guards arrived even as a quiet rumble of thunder growled through the northern sky. A storm was on the way. Pelaya’s father stepped forward and bowed his head to the prisoner.

  “King Olin, you are a persuasive man, or else we would not all be standing in this garden with the rains sweeping toward us and my supper waiting. My daughter has risked her father’s love to bring you and this young woman here.”

  Olin smiled. “I think that might be an exaggeration, Count Perivos, from the things your daughter has said about you. I have a headstrong girl child myself, so I appreciate your position and I thank you for indulging me when you did not need to.” He lowered his voice so the bodyguard standing a dozen steps away could not hear. “Did you receive the letter? And is it any help to you?”

  Pelaya’s father would not be so easily swayed. “Perhaps. We will talk about it at some other time. For now I will leave you to your conversation...if you will swear to me on your honor that it is nothing against the interests of Hierosol. It goes without saying that it is nothing lewd or immoral, either.”

  “Yes, it goes without saying,” said Olin with a touch of asperity. “You have my word, Count Perivos.”

  Her father bowed and withdrew himself a little way.

  “Do not be frightened, child,” Olin said to the laundry girl. “Your name is Nira, I am told. Is that correct?”

  She nodded, watching the bearded man with a different kind of attention than she had given to the garden or Pelaya or anything else, almost as if she recognized him—as if they had met before and the girl was trying to remember where and when. Fo
r a moment Pelaya felt a kind of chill. Had she done something truly wrong here after all? Was she unwittingly helping an escape plan, something that would cost her father his honor or maybe even his life?

  “Yes,” the girl said slowly. “Nira.”

  “All I want to know from you is a little about your family,” Olin said gently. “That red in your hair—I think it is rare in this part of the world, is it not?”

  The girl only shrugged. Pelaya felt a need to say something, if only to remind the man that she was still sitting here, part of the gathering. “Not so rare,” she told him. “There have been northerners in Xand for years—mercenaries and folk of that sort. My father often talks about the autarch’s White Hounds. They are famous traitors to Eion.”

  Olin nodded. “But still, I think such a shade is uncommon.” He smiled and turned to the laundry girl. “Are there mercenaries from Eion in your family, young Nira? Northerners with fair hair?”

  The girl hesitated for a moment as she made sense of his question. Her fingers moved up to the place where another little curl of hair escaped her scarf and pushed it back beneath the stained homespun cloth. “No. All...like me.”

  “I see something in you of a family that I know well, Nira. Be brave—you have done nothing wrong. Can you tell me if your family came from the north? Are there any family stories about such things?”

  She looked at him a long time, as though trying to decide whether this entire conversation might be some kind of trick. “No. Always Xis.” She shrugged. “Think always Xis. Until me.”

  “Until you, of course.” He nodded. “Someone told me that your parents died. I am very sorry to hear it. If I can do anything—not that I have much favor here, but I have made a couple of kind friends—let me know.”

  She stared at him again, clearly puzzled by something. At last she nodded.