When all the water barrels were refilled, and Maia and the other women had scrubbed the floors and walls, Kirin helped Sevan, Attir, and three cousins empty all the chamber pots into the courtyard sewer. The young men washed them thoroughly while the older men mopped the wet floors.
“Makes me look forward to trapeze practice,” Kirin muttered.
“That’s why Papa and Uncle Pieter make us do it,” Sevan muttered back.
The dirty work done, Kirin spent hours of hard practice on the trapeze. The balance beam, tightrope, and dance floor were also crowded with the active members of the troupe. He and Sevan practiced somersaults and spins, building the timing and trust between flyer and catcher that made their complex act look effortless.
“What kind of patron do you think we’ll get?” Kirin wondered aloud to Sevan during a break. “A merchant?”
Sevan shrugged. “Maybe a wealthy mage. Or one of the Gwythlo lords.”
Kirin frowned. “Grandfather would hate being beholden to one of them. So would Pieter.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Sevan answered darkly as they returned to practice.
Finally Pieter decreed, “That’s enough for today. Time for baths.”
Kirin obediently hooked the flyer’s bar of the trapeze onto its resting place, then leaped off the platform and turned a last somersault before landing on his back in the net. He flipped onto his feet and bowed to Maia with a flourish as she stepped off the polished dance floor.
She stuck her tongue out at him. “My husband, the showoff.”
“Well of course!” He grinned engagingly. “Got to practice hard so I can keep up with you!” He took her in his arms and kissed her while her younger brother Attir and two of the barely-teen-aged cousins sneered and mocked.
She kissed him back, made a face at the mockers, and kissed him again.
“Get your clean clothes and sponges,” Carmella reminded everyone. “Anyone who forgets has to do extra chores.”
“Yes, Mother.” “Yes, Aunt.” “Yes, Carmella.”
Kirin and Maia soon joined the rest of the family as they trooped down three flights of stairs together and out into Sulfur Street. Kirin carried Grandmother’s basket as well as his own sack of clean clothes, since she walked with a stick these days. Sevan the Elder and Grandfather had left much earlier to get clean before they went to the Guildhall.
“I hope we get a new performance space soon,” Uncle Ger’s wife said.
Ger shrugged. “Nobody in the family has had to do this in living memory, Silla. Who knows how long it’ll take? Or where we’ll end up?”
The family matched Grandmother’s slow pace as they strolled up Sulfur Street towards what was formally known as King Trannel’s Baths according to the carving over the entry hall. Kirin hadn’t ever heard anyone call it that; everybody referred to the enormous building as the Warrior Baths after the cyclopean bas-relief carved on the Sulfur Street side. The younger children ran in circles around their elders.
Kirin held Maia’s hand as they walked side by side, with Sevan and Carlai doing the same beside them. Neighbors greeted them, some of those bound to or from the same place as the family. At the entrance hall to the Baths, Kirin handed Grandmother her basket and the men and women parted company into separate areas for each sex. Sturdy little Berrin, Uncle Ger’s youngest son and newly turned six, was finally of age to bathe with the men, and proudly took his father’s hand today instead of his mother’s.
“How do you suppose Grandfather will find us a patron?” Kirin asked Pieter as the DiUmbra men filed into the green-and-white-tiled changing room. “Is there a place to go to find them?”
Pieter shook his head, speaking as they stripped. “I don’t know, but he and my brother are talking to the Gleemen’s Guildmasters about it now.”
Kirin frowned as they handed their clothes to bored old attendants who gave them back wooden tags on leather thongs. “Do rich people call the guild to find troupes to sponsor?” He tied the thong around his neck so he could reclaim his garments afterwards.
“Rarely.” Pieter sighed and hefted the crock of soap he’d brought along for the family’s use. “We’ll need divine grace to find one.”
“Oh.” Kirin helped Berrin tie on his own tag so he wouldn’t lose it, while Uncle Ger corralled his other sons. Pieter led them to the big eight-lobed fountain and claimed a section for their use, then passed around the soap. Kirin and Sevan helped the fathers in the group make sure the younger ones lathered up properly before rinsing.
I’ll be doing this with my own son someday, Kirin thought happily. Maybe in just a few years!
He enjoyed the thought while he took turns with the other grown men pouring water over each other and the younger ones. They scooped it from the fountain in battered wooden buckets provided for the purpose, until everyone’s hair shone clean and sleek.
“You acrobats never have trouble with lice,” complained a carpenter whose shop lay across Sulfur Street from the Inn. He combed his own scalp in obvious frustration.
“Virtuous living,” Pieter replied, “And good soap. That cheap stuff you use is too weak.” He offered the man a dab from the family’s crock. The neighbor accepted a fingerful of the soft herb-scented soap to work into his brown Silbari hair.
Sevan quietly moved to stand between the carpenter and Kirin; he and Kirin exchanged glances but said nothing. Every adult in the family knew who kept their quarters free from pests, and how he did it, but also knew better than to talk of it openly. The familiar surge of resentment for his combined curse and blessing, his Shadow, surged in Kirin. Followed immediately by gratitude for his brothers and father and cousins.
This is my family, he thought. Mine. I won’t let them down.
They finished washing and pulled on halfhose for swimming, which conveniently covered Kirin’s slave tattoo, and herded the children into the main room. It held three connected pools shaped a bit like a huge letter ‘C’ wrapping around a stone shrine to the male half of the heavenly pantheon. A thrice-life-size marble statue of a powerful man, mature in years and wisdom but strong in body, represented Haroun the Father Seraph, standing naked with his sword over one shoulder and his left hand grasping the neck of Salim, the Tormenting Seraph. The marble had been carefully chosen, Father Haroun stood brown as any Silbari while Salim knelt in pale gray-white. Other members of Haroun’s retinue gathered around, proud in victory and carved from the same brown marble; the lesser Seraphs were only twice life size.
Kirin and his family made prayers to the shrine before entering the water.
The northern foot of the ‘C’ made a shallow side pool where the small children teemed; Uncle Ger took their youngest there to gossip and splash. The big pool ran deeper and longer, where the older boys and grown men swam. Kirin and Sevan dived in and joined the many swimming in an elongated circle, up the outside and back along the inside of the pool. A towering statue of Seraph Sath dominated the smaller pool. His charge was men who love men and he presided over the waters with the stern visage of a military commander. Legend claimed that a famous general had been the model. The Sath worshippers had a separate entrance and bathing facilities at the back of the building but shared the main room.
Stern monks of a militant order maintained decorum in the big room. The Sathists private section featured in lively gossip and sometimes acid (and very frank) mockery among the married men and their sons. But the One God had made men thus, so people accepted, however grudging, when some youth answered the call of Sath and attended the other pool.
Skin color, of course, was different. The only pale skin in sight belonged to Kirin and the statue of defeated Salim.
Kirin and Sevan raced each other around the big pool twenty times, then stopped for a rest at the starting side. Kirin hauled himself out of the pool and sat on the rim, looked around at the denizens of the baths. Skinny laborers, brawny longshoremen, substantial craftsmen, big-bellied clerks, and mages who got more exercise with pens and silver ingots
than with their legs, he knew most of them by name and they knew him. The Warrior Baths were free, endowed by a wise king of the past, and everybody who lived near Sulfur Street used them. Kirin turned to Sevan as an idea popped into his mind.
“Do you think we might find a patron here?”
Sevan leaned on his elbows on the edge of the pool and snorted denial. “On Sulfur Street? Maybe there’s a well-to-do ship chandler or two, or a minor merchant trader, but none of them can afford what we need. No, Papa and Grandfather have got to find somebody with real money, and that means a house in Cliffside or the Promontory, or near the Mother Temple. You’re not going to find anybody with that kind of money bathing here!”
“Oh. Right.” Kirin’s hope deflated. He looked over the plebian crowd with new eyes. “We can’t go knocking on doors in Cliffside.”
Sevan laughed. “True! We’d get thrown out on our asses by the Watch.”
“So where do we find a patron?”
Sevan shook his head, exasperated. “I wish I knew, and I wish you’d stop fretting about it. Come on, let’s do twenty more circles and then take care of the little ones while Ger and the others get some swim time.”
Kirin dropped back into the pool and joined him. He always been more of a fish in the water than Sevan and made it a point to dive under his brother’s steady crawl and swap sides when the crowded conditions permitted.
Afterwards they played with the little boys, teaching them to swim, until the half-hour bell rang. The family gathered together again, herded the children back to the changing room, reclaimed their clothing and dressed once more, this time in the carefully packed clean clothes. Kirin enjoyed the luxurious sensation of being really, truly clean for the first time in days. The men waited bare moments in the entry hall before the women came out to join them, to the usual amiable quarrel over who kept whom waiting.
Maia took his hand again, whispered in his ear, “Let’s go to the Bazaar.” Aloud she told Pieter and Ger, “Mama wants me to get some things for her and grandmother; may I take Kirin along?”
Pieter agreed readily and Ger had no objection, so the two of them handed their clothes bags to Attir and turned the other way as the family headed for home. They walked a few blocks up cobbled Sulfur Street and passed through Oldgate into the swirling sights, sounds, and scents of Aretzo’s Bazaar.
A reed pipe fluted counterpoint as a snake charmer called his cobra out of its basket. A fruit seller hawked pomegranates, mangos, limes, and lemons.
Kirin breathed deeply of the aromas. Three generations of a family sold skewers of lamb broiled over pine coals while their neighbor offered clay mugs of mint tea kept simmering endlessly in a gleaming samovar. A Herdae spice merchant, swathed in a robe that left only his eyes and fingertips exposed to hide his extensive tattoos from offended Silbari eyes, hawked vanilla, cumin, pepper, coriander, and mustard. Smoky lamps inside dim tents competed with the offerings of sharp incense and sweet balms. A harness shop exhaled leather and steel, to which its neighbor contributed a hint of purging fish oil. Horses showed their paces in a corral reeking of their inevitable manure. Chains of frangipani blossoms were sold by enterprising urchins to the buyers studying the animals. Mounds of Island coconuts and barrels of northern chestnuts lent their exotic proximity to prosaic piles of Silbari almonds, cashews, and pistachios. Half the world could be found in Aretzo’s Bazaar.
And plenty of strangers. Kirin automatically walked behind Maia in guard position, one hand hovering near his belt knife. With foreign goods came foreign men. Few would dare offer insult to a woman in the Bazaar, but it was known to happen. This way Silbaris who did not know him, who would have looked askance at a pale-skinned man for holding a Silbari woman’s hand, could ignore him as a hired protector. Mercenary guard had long been one of the few positions freely open to halfblood men in Aretzo.
Kirin and Maia found their way to the apothecary that Carmella trusted. Maia haggled furiously and finally made several small purchases, counted out the copper coins her mother had entrusted to her, and frowned at the small pile remaining. As they left she confided, “I’d hoped to save enough to buy us each a beef skewer, but this won’t do it.”
“That’s fine, love,” Kirin assure her. “Maybe we can get some roast pork instead.”
Maia shuddered and touched her stomach. “Don’t say that, the thought makes me queasy. I think I could stand some chicken.”
They found a stall and bought two flatbreads folded around slivers of chicken, fennel, and collard greens with a healthy dollop of spicy sauce. A shaded nook almost hidden between tents offered a place to sit and nibble. It had a stone block only big enough for one. Since they were mostly hidden, Kirin sat on it and held Maia on his lap, which despite his hard muscularity was softer for her than the stone. He enjoyed the warm armful of healthy woman nestled against him, nuzzled her clean hair and thought about the night.
She finished her meal and rested quietly against him, breathing softly into his close-trimmed married-man’s beard. For a long timeless moment, he simply held her, there amid the teeming bazaar, and ached with happiness.
“Kirin,” she finally whispered. “I talked with Mama about . . . about our baby.”
His arms tightened a little as worry stabbed his heart, but he made himself relax. “Is everything—is he—or she . . .” He swallowed. He knew there were things that could go wrong when a woman grew a baby, terrible things that men barely whispered about, horrors that even a powerful priestess couldn’t prevent. “Are you all right?”
She kissed him on one ear. “Yes. I’m fine. But I won’t be able to dance when my belly swells, which means we can’t perform Malik and Mercia. The troupe will have to do our less popular acts, which means less money. That would be hard enough if we still had our traditional space. Without it . . . the family’s in serious trouble. If Grandfather’s right, we could lose our home before midwinter.”
Kirin understood the words she did not say. This is a terrible time for me to be pregnant. But I don’t have to stay that way.
Unwillingly his eyes stole to a little alleyway between two hard-faced guards leaning on red stone pillars. Everybody knew that Madame Ymera, the witch who ruled the Red Street, maintained a tent there where women went when they didn’t wish to be pregnant. The Orthodox frowned on the practice and discouraged it, but even the Hierarch would think twice about directly attacking a witch—and reputed vampire—as powerful as Ymera. The Purists claimed that terrible things happened to the unborn souls, while the Dissenters disputed that as they did so much else. The red pillars and the little tent remained. Kirin swallowed hard and clung to Maia.
“Don’t you want—I mean, do you want . . .” His throat closed on the words.
Her arms went around his neck and she buried her face in his hair. “I want you! I want our child. I hate even thinking about—about not having our baby. But what if we lose our home? I’m scared of having to give birth in a stable or, The One forbid, in an alley.” She shuddered.
“We’ll still have our family,” he found himself saying, and only then understood how very much he wanted to be made a father by her. “You won’t be alone. Your mother, your sister-in-law, all the aunts will be there for you. I’ll be there. You’ll never be alone, I swear it.”
They held each other wordlessly.
A funeral passed by, the bier carried by eight grunting men and draped in sheer flamingo-hued gauze; the color of resurrection. Censers and a chanting Priestess preceded it, mourners followed, including a professional quartet with their hair down and garments torn. They wailed artistically, but their voices grated on Kirin’s ears.
I want life! he thought.
A pair of Duermu women walked by leading a string of donkeys.
Tested with fear and loss, he remembered. Someone powerful will help me. Please God, let it be a Patron.
Maia sighed and kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s get away from this place, love. Let’s go home.”
He helped
her up and looked her in the face. “I will do anything you need me to do, to keep you and our baby safe. Anything at all.”
“I know,” she answered, and slipped her free arm around his waist to hug him. They resumed their pose of woman and guard, and silently walked home.
CHAPTER 8: TERRELL
As the miles unrolled under unhurried hooves, Terrell’s sadness faded away, replaced by fascination. Within days they were beyond the Gwythford fields and woods that he’d explored as a boy, and before the first tenday they’d gone beyond the larger web of forests and villages that he’d explored as a youth. The broad valleys and low wrinkled hills of Gwythlo grew narrower and steeper.
Looking at a map fifteen days after their departure, Terrell asked General DiCervi, commander of the Silbari Brigade, “So, tomorrow we leave Gwythlo?”
“Yes, Your Highness.” DiCervi bent over the map table, pointed. “Here’s the Severing River. We’ll cross it tomorrow morning, leaving Gwythlo for Autria, one of your father’s other realms. The day after that we’ll arrive in Autria’s capital and you’ll pay a state visit to their king.”
“Who’ll probably fall all over himself greeting you,” Pen commented. “Folks at Court say he’s scared that the Emperor will depose him if he sneezes wrong.”
DiCervi flashed a smile before he resumed his usual stern expression. “After that it’s a four day journey up this big tributary, Battle River, to Autria’s border with Solvigi, which your grandfather also conquered on his way to taking Silbar. It is ruled directly by your father through a viceroy at the Warburg, below the Storm Pass. You’ll be in strange country there. The folk of that valley are mostly wild herdsmen and hunters who speak a very foreign tongue, except for the Gwythlo military settlement around the Warburg. The Storm Pass will take us into northeastern Silbar itself. From there we travel down the Storm River.” He poked the edge of the map. “To the River Amm, and down that to Aretzo.” DiCervi’s city accent grew strong as named the home that he’d rarely seen in the last eighteen years.
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