“Business as usual,” he said. “Lots of folk here today to sell those flowers that everyone’s going crazy for.”
It wasn’t an auction, not quite—there was no scrambling and fighting to make bids. Looking through the coffeehouse, I just saw serious, quiet people sitting at tables and talking in low voices. They’d pair off—sellers and buyers, I assume—and they’d each write a number on a little strip of paper. Then they’d call two other people over, hand them the number they’d written down, and the other two would retire into some dim dusty corner and compare the numbers they had.
The original buyer and seller sat quiet at their table, not even really looking at each other. One vroleisch I watched pulled some knitting out of her bag and entirely occupied herself, with no regard whatsoever, it seemed, for the person sitting across the table from her. At length, the two negotiators would come back with the price they had agreed to compromise on, and the buyer and seller looked at it quietly and then paid, or didn’t.
Very strange.
I crammed myself into a rickety chair very near the door and watched the dance of negotiations happen. “Are they selling well?” I asked the guard.
“Well enough, I’d guess. One bulb went for eight hundred and fifty guilders earlier today.”
It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone would recognize me. A vrouw at one of the tables took her pipe from her mouth and blew a stream of smoke to the side, studying me. I ducked my head politely to her, and she got up, pushing with one hand on the table to help herself to her feet, and came over. “I know you, don’t I?” she said.
I glanced around the room. “Have you bought stars-in-the-marsh recently?”
“Yes. Yes! That’s where I know you from—you’re that young man who’s brought all this to our attention, aren’t you?”
“The same,” I said. “Call me Chant.”
“Mevrouw Katheline Valck. Do you smoke, Heer Chant?”
“Thank you, but no.”
“You must come with me anyway,” she said languidly, taking another slow puff from her pipe. “Come sit at my table.”
I had no reason to refuse, so I followed her and settled myself between two people. She introduced me around the table, and everyone greeted me warmly.
“Crispin was just telling us about his flowers,” she said. “Some very exciting new developments.”
“The flowers until now,” Crispin said. “We’ve always thought they were that wintry blue-white color, haven’t we? All of them.” A murmur of agreement went around the table. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “But they’re not. There are”—he dropped his voice—“variants.”
Katheline raised her eyebrow, lowered her pipe. “Have you one of these variants?”
He nodded. “It bloomed in my garden just last night. It’s the color of white gold, with delicate crinkling edges to the petals. And,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “Less of a smell.”
“You don’t say,” said one of the other vrouwen, Sabien, immediately interested. “How fascinating.”
“It’s quite beautiful,” he said. “I’m hoping to sell it for a handsome sum. Something so rare should belong to someone who truly treasures it, not just a simple hobbyist like me.”
“I’ve never heard of variants,” I said. “But I suppose it happens.”
He nodded enthusiastically. “Consider lilies—I once had a garden of sunshine-yellow lilies, and one year, a new shoot came up and bloomed maiden’s-blush pink. Quite a surprise. That’s one of the reasons I love gardening so much,” he said, in a sweeping and grandiose tone, and his companions groaned.
“Do shut up,” Katheline said. “Don’t start on that again.”
“You never know what’s going to happen,” he continued stubbornly.
“Please stop.”
“Sometimes you plant blue hyacinths and they come up white.”
“Crispin, seriously.”
“Sometimes your cherry blossoms get frozen off and the whole crop is ruined.”
“I’m sorry,” Katheline said to me. “I’m sorry for my idiot friend.”
“The point is!” he cried. “The point is, you never know what’s going to happen. It’s always a surprise.”
Fortunately I managed to escape soon after that, but . . . Variants. I really have never heard of them before, and Sterre has never mentioned them—and she would have, if she’d known. She would have seen the potential value. I wonder how we two have never known about something like that.
FORTY-TWO
Sterre’s offices again today. There is not much to do. The stormy season makes things slow, and the lashings of rain against the windowpanes today made us all lazy and sleepy. “Sterre,” I said, “has anyone told you about variations in their flowers?”
“Eh? In the stars-in-the-marsh, or are we talking general flowers?”
“Stars-in-the-marsh,” I said. “I was at that coffeehouse on the Rojkstraat yesterday, and I met someone. His flowers bloomed, and one was different.”
“Well, that happens from time to time. “ She yawned. “What’s the odd one look like?”
“White-gold, he said, with crinkly edges to the petals.”
“Oh?” she said. I thought she sounded strange. I looked over, and she was sitting at her desk, very still, a peculiar expression on her face.
“He wasn’t upset about it,” I said, in case that’s what she was worried about. “He thought it was pretty. He said he could probably sell it for a lot of money.”
“He probably could,” she said. She was suddenly very occupied with the papers on her desk. “Did you get his name, by any chance?”
“Crispin—I didn’t get a surname. Big man. Heyrlandtsche in his accent and manner, but Sdeshe by blood, or so I’d guess.”
“No, I wouldn’t doubt you on those judgments at all,” she said. “Hm. I think I’d like to find him. And visit him.”
“Are you going to buy the flower?”
Sterre paused and looked at me. She looked around the room, at the clerks making their way through the paperwork, and gestured me inside her office. I followed, confused. “Shut the door, Chant,” she said, and I did. “I can trust you, can’t I?”306
“Yes,” I said, surprised. “What’s going on?”
She tapped her fingers against the table. “You’ll keep something discreet, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
She got up and tucked her hands behind her, pacing slowly back and forth behind her desk. “You’ll keep a secret.”
“Sterre, what’s the matter?”
“When I was in Kaskinen, buying that first shipment last year, I was asking all about them—care and keeping and so forth. They told me that they’re good, hardy plants; they can survive nearly anything as long as you keep their roots drowned. They warned me about something, though.” She cleared her throat. “They said that every decade or so . . . It’s like a sickness. A plague. And it sweeps through the marsh, and it kills off most of the flowers.”
I’ve never seen a plague. Gods willing, I never will. But I’ve heard of them. I’ve seen the aftermath—crops rotting in the field, starvation.307 “It can’t hurt people, can it?”
“No. No, it’s just the plants.” She took a deep breath. “They told me what signs to watch for—that the flowers go yellow, and the edges of their petals wrinkle, and then black speckles come up from the base of the stalk and spread over the flower itself.”
I took a breath. “He didn’t say that had happened. He didn’t mention black speckles at all.”
“But the yellowing, the petals’ mutation.” Sterre leaned on the desk with both hands. “I need to find out, discreetly, where he bought his root. If he bought it from me, or if somebody else happened to smuggle in a few of these.”
“Why?”
“Because if he bought it from me, then when all his flowers die, he’ll come for my blood,” she snapped. “If I sold him a defective product, if I’m responsible for him losing a fortune . . . I h
ave my reputation to think of, Chant. Reputation is everything. People know me. They know I’m reliable. They know they can lend me money because I’ll pay it back, and they know that I’m careful about who I lend money to in turn. They know the quality of my products.”
“So if it’s diseased, let’s just go to him and buy it back. We can destroy it and nobody will know.”
She gave me a haunted, hunted look. “Maybe. It spreads through the water. I daresay if he has any others, they’ve already caught it too. We’ll have to buy all his flowers, just to be safe. We’ll isolate them and destroy them. If we’re lucky, maybe it won’t spread. Maybe it’s just the flowers in his garden that have it. . . . If he planted them in pots, or if his garden is on a bit of high ground, then it’s simple. But . . .” She glanced out the window. “Considering the state of things, that’s more than I want to waste hope on.”
The water. I looked outside too, looked at the lashings of rain, and gulped.
Nearly the entire city is covered in an inch of water, and the comings and goings of the tides, plus the city’s system of artificial currents, mean that it moves instead of staying stagnant—the dikes keep the tides mostly repressed, but they still rise and fall a few inches. Not only that, but people water their gardens from the canals, if they’re not already flooded.
Just one infected flower in Crispin’s garden, and it can spread all across the city.
“What should we do?” I said. “If his flowers aren’t isolated, what should we do?”
She breathed. “Nothing. We can do nothing. Nobody knows about the disease but us—we’ll say that it happened because of the tides.308 Yes. The water is filthy. Everyone knows you don’t drink from the canals, you don’t swim in them. You don’t use the water for cooking until it’s been cleaned and filtered.” Which is true—each neighborhood has a great cistern of water, pumped up from the canals or collected in rain barrels. First, they skim any debris from the top and let any sediment settle to the bottom, and then they run it into the cisterns, where it filters down through layers of gravel and sand and charcoal, until clean, crystalline water trickles from the bottom into troughs. “We’ll say the flowers need clean water, and we’ll blame the disease on the king-tide and the rains.” She nodded firmly. “That will save us.”
“But . . . what about everyone else?”
“Everyone who?”
“The people who own flowers. The people who have been buying and selling. They’re so expensive now.”
“Bad luck,” Sterre said, shrugging.
“But the people who sold futures—if their flowers die, they’ll have to break their contracts. They’ll lose all the money they invested. Some people will be ruined.”
“Not that many,” Sterre said. “Hardly anyone bet their whole fortune on them.”
“How can you know that?”
She shrugged again. “They took a risk. That’s what investment is about. It’s not like everyone in the city has one, anyway. Only a few hundred, a thousand.”
“We’ve imported more than ten thousand,” I said. “And they were cheap when you started. Do you keep records of all your customers?”
“Of course not. There’s a hundred thousand people in the city, Chant. And most people who bought stars-in-the-marsh bought more than one.”
“You’re fine with them losing money because you brought a sick plant in?”
“I had no way of knowing it carried the disease! I’m not morally responsible for this.”
“But your reputation—”
“Yes. My reputation would suffer, because people are stupid and they’ll want someone to blame. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. I haven’t done anything wrong, per se. I didn’t poison the plants.”
“I don’t think it’s right.”
Sterre sighed and rubbed her forehead. “To be honest, Chant, I don’t really care whether you think it’s right. But you must keep this a secret. You promised you would. You promised.”
I had promised. But I was so . . . angry. I was full to bursting with this scrambling, thorny rage, except it wasn’t quite directed at her. At least, not solely at her. I sat there, breathing, and I kept thinking, She’s abandoning them, she’s leaving them all behind, she’s made them throw away something precious with a promise that they’d get something even more infinitely rare and precious and extraordinary in return, and now she’s leaving them there all alone by a rotting pig trough in the middle of nowhere, just like he did, just like Chant did to me, and she doesn’t care if it all withers up into nothing, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t care, she’s just like him and she doesn’t care—
She’s making me abandon them too.
“I’ll keep it a secret,” I said, trembling. “But I need to leave. I need to go home for the day. I—I just need to think.”
“Fine,” she said, flicking her hand at me. “Go. There’s nothing for you to do here anyway. Until the rains stop, we’re just shopkeepers.”
I walked out of her office without another word. I switched out my thin lambskin slippers in the vestibule for tall water-boots, and wrapped my oilcloth cloak around my shoulders, and lifted the hood. I was shaking. I could barely keep my knees from giving out under me. I felt sick, and all I could think was: Just like him, just like what we did in Nuryevet, except this time she can’t even tell a story to convince me she did it to save someone. Just like him, and she’s ruined everything, and now she’s turning away.
There’s a trick to walking through Heyrland in the rainy season during high tide. The water was ankle-height on my way home. When the rains pause and the water is still, you can see the edges of the street. When the sun is out, it’s even easier—you can tell how close you are to the edge by the temperature of the water through your shoes. In the shallows, the water is sun-warmed; the closer you get to the canal’s edge, the cooler it is, as the currents bring up colder water from the darker, deeper layers below.
In the rain, all that’s impossible. It’s all cold, and the uneven surface doesn’t let you see anything beneath it. I’ve walked back and forth from the inn to Sterre’s offices dozens and dozens of times, and I know the way and most of the odd characteristics of the path. The best thing to do, the easy thing, is to stick near the houses where you can be sure there’s solid ground, and almost every bridge in the city is arched, so that boats coming through the canals can slip beneath them. But there’s a few difficult areas—a public square that I have to cross that is bisected by a canal with a flat footbridge that I can never quite find on the first try when the water is like this.
Sometimes I and other people in Heyrland carry sticks with us that we can use to tap the ground ahead when it’s obscured, to make sure that we’re not about to trip in a pothole or come unexpectedly to the edge of a canal, or fall into some stairwell that usually leads down from the street level to the water level—the same sticks that the blind use all year round. I had no stick with me today, so I wrapped my oilcloth tight around me and pulled the hood low over my face and felt out my way with my feet, step by step. It was very slow.
I didn’t mind. It gave me time to think.
My sick feeling was overcome by a rising tide of fury. I let my anger grow and surge and batter at the walls of my head like the waves crashing on the dikes. Leaving them, I thought, leaving them, leaving them, leaving them.
It doesn’t fucking matter how I feel about audiences; it doesn’t matter if they’re baying for my blood or snapping at my heart like hungry wolves. You don’t just leave someone behind when they need help.
I can’t do that again. I can’t let it happen right in front of my eyes.
Fuck you, Chant. Fuck you for leaving me behind, fuck you for leaving Nuryevet behind after you’d sold them out to save your own miserable neck.
I’d curse you in Xerecci here, Chant, I’d say go to the desert, and mean it with all the venom I could muster, but you loved the desert; you loved the warmth. So: To the ice fields with you. To the top of the tallest, c
oldest mountain with you. Wherever you are, I hope you freeze.
You left me because I stopped loving you. Isn’t that right? You used to puff yourself up like a smug little bird when I admired something you did, and after Nuryevet, I stopped. After Nuryevet, I could only see a man who thought his life was worth more than other people’s.
I saw you. I saw through all your lies and your veils and your smokescreens and your thin little excuses. And you couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand watching me watch you every day, couldn’t live with yourself while I was standing next to you and grieving for what you’d—we’d—done. You ran away from Nuryevet, and then you ran away from me to escape what you’d done, to escape your guilt, because you weren’t strong enough to take it, not years and years of it, not long enough to see me to the end of my apprenticeship as it should have been.
Isn’t that right? Isn’t it right? Come the fuck back here and admit it, you monster, you coward, you weakhatefulhorriblecruelselfishconniv- ingpoisonousBASTARD.
But I’m never going to know if that’s right. To the coldest, darkest hell with you. I hope that you freeze.
Sterre may have held the money, but I was the one with the power. I was the one who put a story to the flowers and made them valuable—I was the one who convinced people that the flowers were some kind of miracle, that buying a flower would fix something that was broken about their lives. I was the one who convinced them that there was something broken in the first place! And I hadn’t thought about what I was doing. I hadn’t known any better, and I should have. I’m a Chant, trained and sworn. I sank my homeland beneath the waves and unnamed myself. I should have known better. I should have thought about it, and instead I . . .
Is it any excuse? I was drifting at the time; I’d lost myself. I had lost my connection to the world, to the people, to Chanting. Surely that has to count for something? Surely that has to explain, at least, why I could be so stupid and so blind, even when Mistress Chant was practically shouting in my face to warn me off it. She knew. I should have known already, or I should have listened. I shouldn’t have made excuses for Sterre just because she was giving me a place to belong and—and making me feel like she’d scooped me up from the roadside where I’d been abandoned.
A Choir of Lies Page 28
