Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “Yeah, I suppose I’ll have to use his services sooner or later, certainly before we ship away,” Kati replied.

  “Why don’t we do it now?” Jocan encouraged her, with unexpected enthusiasm.

  “Well, why not?” Kati shrugged. “Come with us, Mikal?”

  “I think I’ll tag along with Dorn and Loka while they tour the markets,” answered Mikal. “It’ll give me some idea of where to find whatever things we may need, and an extra pair of arms and legs might come in handy for the two of them. If you have no objections?”

  Kati was not particularly surprised at his choice, but she did again feel a twinge of jealousy of the easy rapport that Mikal and Dorn seemed to share. With a guilty pang she recognized that she was almost glad that Dorn and Loka would be leaving soon. It was embarrassing!

  “No objections.” She forced a smile on her face and dug out a silver from her money bag. “This should cover our food and then some; do whatever you want with the change.”

  She lay the coin in front of him and then she and Jocan left the eatery, Jocan almost bouncing. She was of the opinion that it was time for Mikal to learn to handle monetary transactions on his own, although she was certain that he usually paid too much for things. That was a minor detail, however, considering how rich the stash with which the Kitfi had gifted them, had turned out to be.

  As for Jocan, she was going along with his enthusiasm mostly out of curiosity as to what it was that had him running to a money-changer’s office, of all places.

  *****

  The attraction turned out to be the money-changer’s daughter.

  While Jocan was leading Kati to their destination, he suddenly turned to her and said:

  “Oh, Kati, would you mind very much...?” He stopped, turned pink right down to his collar, and tried again:

  “Kati, I’m afraid that I told them that I was travelling with my aunt; I said that you were my Aunt Katerina.” He appeared embarrassed by his deception, and uncomfortable at having to confess it.

  Kati suppressed a giggle.

  “So I’m your Aunt Katerina,” she said, pinning him with her eyes. “What did you tell ‘them’ about your Aunt Katerina?”

  “Just that I’m travelling with her.” He looked more uncomfortable yet. “That she’s my dead mother’s sister and married into a mountain family, and that she’s really nice; I’m very fond of her.”

  “Don’t lay it on too thick, scamp,” Kati chided, and burst into laughter. “Who are ‘they’ and why are you perpetrating this little fraud? And watch it kiddo, Aunt Katerina may be nice, but she can straighten out rascally nephews with the best of them!”

  Jocan’s face broke into a broad grin and he dropped to walk beside Kati, giving her a quick hug.

  “I knew I could count on you,” he said, sounding relieved.

  “’They’,” he continued, “are the money-changer and his family. You see, there’s a daughter, a beautiful girl about my age and I want to make a good impression. She is...absolutely beautiful.” His eyes had taken on a dreamy look.

  “Oh, oh,” Katie subvocalized to herself. “Well, I guess I better see what’s what, before I react.”

  “It’s going to be ridiculous,” the granda responded to her subvocalization, grouchily. “First love is always ridiculous. Yours was, right?”

  That was partly why Kati was worried. Her memories of “first love” were memories of a foolish infatuation; she was perfectly willing to concede that now, in her ripe mid-twenties. Jocan was not all that much younger than she had been when she had met Donny. She remembered well the loneliness that had preceded her infatuation, and since Jocan had also been through a stretch of lonesomeness before she and Mikal had recruited him, it was likely that his judgement was off. Sex hormones and a shortage of meaningful personal contact; it was a combination designed to short-circuit critical thought.

  However, she intended to keep quiet until she could see for herself what, exactly, was going on.

  *****

  When Kati and Jocan entered the money-changer’s place of business, the first thing Kati noticed was that this was no small, one-man operation that Lev’s in River City had been. Here was a counter which divided the room approximately in half, one side reserved for the customers, and the other housing several workers who were busy with paperwork. Kati idly wondered what sort of paperwork was necessary to track the simple task of taking in coins of certain denominations, and giving in return, others, of different denominations but equal value. That was absurd, of course, was her second thought; of course it could not be as simple as that. The money-changer had to net a profit out of his transactions—otherwise there was no point in his being in the business. Besides, he had to pay taxes, have a business licence, and apparently there were questions aplenty about the purity of the gold being passed around on this world. For all she knew there was more work to do in this shop than the staff could comfortably get done.

  “Jocan!” A pretty, black-haired, brown-skinned girl got up from her seat beside the massive safe.

  She seemed to have been working with columns of figures; a stack of papers lay on a tiny desk attached to the chair she had risen from. She came to lean against the counter, across from Kati and Jocan.

  She turned her unexpectedly grey eyes to examine Kati. Kati had the feeling that she was being weighed according to some scale—but the assessor was unable to arrive at a result. There was puzzlement in the light-coloured eyes, and the girl’s mouth pursed just the tiniest bit. It seemed that she was unused to not being able to rate a person’s worth with one glance.

  “Good,” Kati muttered under her breath. “I prefer to keep people guessing.”

  “This is my aunt, Mirrah,” Jocan said, sounding a bit anxious. “My Aunt Katerina. Aunt Kati, may I introduce Mirrah, daughter of Makar, the Money-Changer?”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mirrah,” Kati said formally, even as her gut was tightening in protest.

  There was something in the pretty girl’s grey eyes that chilled her. Something that made her recall the way Donny had looked at her when he had returned to the restaurant where she had been working at eighteen. After someone apparently had told him that the skinny teen-aged waitress was worth money, had inherited a bundle from parents recently dead.

  Only here and now, this Mirrah was not sure that there really was money in the family that Jocan had invented. The aunt was giving off mixed signals.

  “You wanted to do some business with us, I presume?” The girl’s tone was correctly polite. She ignored the cow-eyes that Jocan was directing at her.

  “Yes. I suppose that your father performs the actual transaction?”

  That was a little less polite, Kati knew. But she wanted to deal with Makar the Money-Changer himself, and not his daughter.

  “Father,” Mirrah called to the middle-aged man seated at the end of the counter, writing something on a pad of paper. “Jocan’s Aunt Katerina would like your help.”

  “I’ll be right there.” He wrote another couple of words, put the pad and his pen on a shelf which he pulled out from under the counter, rose and came over to where Kati was waiting and Jocan was mooning over Mirrah.

  “And what can I do for you, Mistress Katerina?” he asked. He eyed her up and down in a manner that made Kati wish that Mikal had come with them.

  She pulled out her money bag, and, forcing herself to appear relaxed, undid the thongs that laced it shut, and dug into it for the last of the gold pieces that she had in there. The bag had grown fairly flat, and she hoped that the mercenary Mirrah was making note of that. With Jocan mooning over the girl, the simplest solution to the problem thus created, was to get her to decide that he was not worth her trouble.

  She had finally located the gold piece. She lay it on the counter, between Makar and herself, Keeping her hand on the counter, too.

  Mirrah’s eyes were on the gold, while Jocan’s were on her, adoring.

  “I need to exchange this for silver and copper pi
eces,” Kati said steadily. “What sort of a deal are you willing to give me?”

  Makar looked down at the gold coin. His expression had turned into a poker face. He pulled out a magnifying glass like the one Kati had seen Lev use in the River City and examined the coin carefully. He then turned to look at Kati with a thin smile on his face, his eyes unreadable.

  “I can give you the equivalent of eleven silvers,” he said, his voice suddenly ingratiating. “That’s what it’s worth to me.”

  Kati grabbed the coin and dropped it back into her money bag.

  “In that case,” she said evenly, “I think I’ll look for another money-changer. Lev in River City told me that my gold coins were very pure and easily worth the going rate of twelve silvers. I am of the opinion that one of my golds is worth twelve silvers here in Delta, too.”

  Makar’s eyes flashed with anger. Jocan had turned to stare at Kati in amazement. Clearly things were not going quite as he had hoped they might.

  “Lev’s an idiot,” Makar snapped, “and Delta’s a lot bigger place than the River City! And you’re a fool if you think anyone in this place is going to give you twelve silver for an inferior piece of gold!”

  “I’m not asking for twelve silvers for an inferior piece of gold,” Kati said coldly. “And I did notice as we walked here, that there are at least two other money-changers along the way. I think Jocan and I will check them out.

  “Come on Jocan.”

  The boy followed her, but slowly. Outside she turned to his pouty face, suddenly angry at his teenaged idiocy.

  “Jocan, those people are crooked,” she said to him. “Mirrah is there to draw in the guys—you included. How much did they give you for your gold piece when you exchanged it?”

  “Six silvers,” the boy said sullenly.

  “And Dorn told you that you should get at least seven for it. You got cheated.” The young fool!

  “Well, Makar told me that it was poor quality gold and there was no way he could give me more than six, that the other money-changers would have given me even less for it,” Jocan muttered.

  “And the whole time he was telling you this, Mirrah was making googly-eyes at you, right?” Kati sighed. Somehow she had expected the boy to be more astute after surviving more than two years on his own in the ruins of River City.

  “Yeah, Kati, that’s so.”

  He looked miserable. From one extreme to the other, but that was the life of a teenager.

  Kati grabbed his arm and directed their steps towards a small, hole-in-the-wall, money-changer’s office. Something like Lev’s place, she thought, and would have made a bet that it was the place to which Dorn had intended to send Jocan. What with addresses being pretty vague on this world, it was easy for the teen to make the mistake of assuming that the big place was the one to go to.

  “Come on,” she said to him encouragingly. “Look upon this as a learning experience.”

  The money-changer in the small place was a friendly, tiny, middle-aged woman. She gave Kati the equivalent of twelve silvers for her gold with a smile and some cheerful chatter. Jocan watched her make change for Kati with his eyes big and round.

  “How does this work anyway?” he then asked Nilda, the proprietress. “I mean, how do you earn money doing this?”

  “Generally I charge a small fee for making change,” she replied. “It’s not much per transaction, two coppers per gold coin, whether a customer wants lesser coin, or wishes to change lesser coins into gold. But these old coins in good condition, I don’t charge a fee for, because the Mint, the organization that makes the coins, gives me more than the equivalent of twelve silvers each, when I take them to be exchanged. I believe that they melt them down and use them to make regular gold coins which have less gold in them than these do. I like getting them because I actually make a better profit on them than on regular coins, but the truth is that I don’t see them very often anymore.”

  “Makar, the money-changer down the street was only going to give Kati eleven silvers for that coin,” Jocan muttered with a shake of his head.

  Nilda laughed.

  “Did you go there first?” she asked. “A lot of travelling people do. His place is quite a bit more visible than mine. Keeping a place that size, with the number of relatives working there that he has, he has expenses that my more modest business does not incur.”

  “Well, I’m not all that keen on supporting a business that big when I can get a better deal at a smaller one,” Kati laughed. “Jocan, here, however, was rather taken by the black-haired daughter.”

  Nilda’s laugh was a cackle.

  “Yes, Mirrah does bring business, and repeat business also, to Makar’s. She is probably the one employee of his who actually earns her keep. However, I usually get the business of the women and the more cagey men, who prefer to get a decent deal rather than pay to admire a lovely face and a comely figure.”

  *****

  “Kati, are you going to tell Mikal and Dorn and Loka about what happened?” Jocan asked in a hang-dog voice as they walked back towards the Portside Inn.

  Kati had planned to. It was a funny story, and the four adults could have had a nice chuckle over it. On the other hand, if Jocan was embarrassed by it, she could keep it to herself.

  “You’d rather that I didn’t, is that it?” she asked him.

  “Yeah. I feel like an idiot.” He grinned sheepishly. “Here, I’m supposed to know the ins and outs of this, my, world, and help you and Mikal travel along smoothly, and what do I do? I fall for the oldest trick there is; I let myself be cheated by the owner of a pretty face.”

  Kati grinned back at him broadly.

  “Don’t feel too badly about it. It may be an old trick, but it’s still in use because it works. And being young, this was the first time you’d come across it. You’ll be smarter the next time.

  “But don’t worry. My lips are sealed; I don’t have to tell this story to the others. It can be our little secret.”

  *****

  It was surprisingly hard to say goodbye to Loka and Dorn. They had known one another for less than ten days, yet in that time, perhaps because the greater portion of it had been spent in the close quarters of the small boat, the five of them had become fast friends. Yet, once Dorn’s boat was out of Delta, Mikal, Kati and Jocan would likely never see Loka and Dorn again. Kati found herself regretting the annoyance that she had felt at the camaraderie that had developed between Mikal and Dorn; standing on the dock, bidding adieu to the boaters, that attitude seemed petty. There were hugs all around, and every kind of wish for success in the future, before the couple from River City finally stepped off the pier and into their small craft. A stiff breeze was blowing from the ocean this morning and the threesome left behind watched as Dorn and Loka raised their sail. As the sail caught the wind and the boat began to make its way upriver, Kati and Jocan waved and all three of them shouted final good-byes. They remained at the end of the pier until the boat disappeared behind the river’s first bend.

  “So, it’s just the three of us now,” Kati said slowly as they finally turned to face the city. “Feels a bit empty.”

  “The sooner we get transportation across the sea the happier I will be,” stated Mikal, turning to study the boats in the harbour. “But it looks like I’m not to be happy today.”

  “Shall I take a walk across the harbour?” Jocan asked. “Who knows, there might be a big ship at the other end.”

  “We could all of us take the walk,” Kati said. “It’s not like we have that much to do except walk about the port and wait.”

  They suited action to words and began to stroll towards the part of the harbour where the ocean-going vessels docked.

  “In some ways, waiting is the hardest task of all,” Mikal commented.

  *****

  That wait became nerve-racking very quickly.

  The day on which Loka and Dorn left on their return trip home, Kati suggested that the three of them spend time at Delta’s markets, shopping for
more clothes and various personal items that they would need on the further journey. She retrieved a couple of more gold coins from one of her boots and told her companions not to worry about expenses; if necessary she was prepared to exchange another gold for silver and copper at Nilda’s shop. However, it seemed that many items were more reasonably priced in Delta than they had been in River City, and since Jocan decided to act as a haggler, their spending spree turned out surprisingly economical. Nilda did not get any business from them that day.

  The following day they wandered around the city, playing tourist and exhausting themselves by walking up and down the hills, over and over again. They had their meals in eateries in different parts of the city, wherever they happened to be when hunger threatened. The midday meal was very good, in a little neighbourhood establishment with a short menu but a lot of customers. The dinner was only barely passable; they ate it in a much bigger restaurant with a lot more pretensions, but, apparently, a much less accomplished cook.

  On the third day they started to get on one another’s nerves.

  By then, they had settled on a routine of walking the harbour each morning and afternoon, just in case a suitable ocean-going vessel happened to tie up at one of the piers. This morning Kati let Mikal and Jocan do the morning tour of the harbour without her; feeling the need to be alone, she returned to her room at the Inn after breakfast with a book in the local language, hoping, with the granda’s help, to learn to decipher the chicken scratches the planet-dwellers called writing. The book should not have been a difficult one—it was supposed to be a travellers’ guide to Delta—but the way the people of this particular world chose to notate their speech looked pretty intimidating to her. However, she had decided that it was time for her to explore further the granda node’s abilities; and, hopefully, doing so would take her mind off the wait. Plus, learning to read the local lingo could be useful, even if the society they were in did not emphasize the written word the way hers had.