Mikal walked over to the counter, where the taller of the girls had come to serve him. The other one turned her attention back to the papers on the desk in front of her.
“Can I help you, Sieur?” the one behind the counter asked.
Sieur? She must have accepted him for a man of the Continent Nord. The Sud had no nobility, or titles. Did these people habitually refer to Northerners by the honorifics of the Old Families? Possibly—perhaps they had discovered that it was the sort of flattery that impressed Nordlanders, perhaps especially those who had zero claim to the Sieur and Sieurra titles. Well, best to deal with that nonsense immediately—for a split-second he wondered how Karn Gurt would have reacted to the word. That scion of an Old Family had seemed somewhat embarrassed by his place in society. Yet Kati had said that Max Lordz had played the “Sieur” shamelessly when he had helped her with her investigation; possibly Karn was prepared to do the same.
“I’m no Sieur,” he said now, making a face. “Be careful bandying that term about among Nordlanders, nowadays. The old nobility has lost much of its power and privilege, thanks to having rather mishandled the Continent. Lots of people are insulted by the honorific, these days.”
The woman he was addressing shrugged, while her companion looked up from her papers and tittered. Mikal flashed his brightest smile at her, while the other woman half-turned to give her a disapproving look.
“You’re on the job, Taya,” she said, frowning. “I’ll talk with the customer.”
Then she turned back to Mikal and said coolly:
“Your looks mark you as a member of the nobility, regardless of who you are pretending to be. Only the nobles of the Nord have had the means to marry off-planeters, and thereby alter the looks of their descendants. Your hair and skin colour are quite different from mine or Taya’s, or that of almost all of the inhabitants of Suderie. Therefore you must belong to the Continent Nord’s Old Family elite, and need to be addressed as ‘Sieur’.”
It sounded like a recitation of a lesson. Mikal listened, dumbfounded; then recovered his sense of humour.
“Never heard of children conceived on the wrong side of the bed?” he asked, his eyes beginning to dance.
He glanced over at Taya who was clearly stifling giggles.
“Wrong side of the bed? What are you talking about?”
Mikal realized that the young woman in front of him seemed genuinely puzzled. What was going on here? What was the matter with the girl? She did not look stupid; Mikal was not foolish enough to equate beauty with stupidity. The two attributes were in no way related.
“You’ve never heard the term?”
For a moment he wondered if his node was mistranslating it—but no. The nodes were canny in their ability to transfer idiom from one of the galactic languages to another, and this was not his first time on Wayward. True, when he had been on Makros III with Kati, she had sometimes come up with a word, or a few, which her Granda had not been able to render understandable to Mikal, or anyone else around her, but she had arrived from a galaxy far away, as well as a different time.
“Oh, Lara, don’t be such a priss!” Taya burst out, laughing. “Tarig isn’t here to tell you to behave like a proper lady! You know what the man’s saying, as well as I do! He’s got noble blood in his background, but not officially, because whatever Old Family rake did the begetting never bothered to take responsibility!”
The woman, Lara, pinched her lips shut, turning towards Taya, no doubt preparing to give her a piece of her mind.
Mikal forestalled her.
“Let’s never mind that, right now,” he said. “I’m here to find out about carpeting, hand-knotted carpeting, actually. I was told that you have begun to manufacture such rugs; is that true?”
Lara turned back to him, and Taya flashed a grateful smile in his direction before returning her attention to the papers which she was studying.
Mikal was pretty certain that it was Taya who he’d be taking for lunch—assuming that she was willing to allow a Nordlander of questionable parentage to pay for her midday meal.
“It’s true,” Lara said primly. “And we sell ours at a better price than anyone else in Suderie. If you want proof of that, just contact the other hand-knotting outfits, and ask about their prices. You will find that ours are the lowest.”
“How’s the quality of the work?” Mikal asked. “Low prices usually mean shoddy workmanship, especially in a field where human labour is paramount.”
“Our quality is as good as any,” the woman replied. “I can show you samples, if you would like.”
At Mikal’s nod she turned to look at Taya again, and that girl got up from her desk, walking over to a cupboard in the back, and brought out a pile of carpet samples, bringing them to the counter, and laying them down in front of Mikal with a conspiratorial smile. Mikal responded with a bright grin, earning a tsk-sound, and a stern look from Lara.
He ignored that and began to examine the samples.
“These are the designs under production, right now,” Taya said. “We do take special orders, but if you choose to go that route, you will have to pre-order. We have a few of those in the system already, so you’d have to wait at least a few weeks before we could even begin production on a new one.”
Lara did not interrupt her speech. Mikal had an inkling that Taya was the more knowledgeable of the two, although Lara apparently was the one in charge of the office. Perhaps Lara was the favourite of someone higher up in the pecking order?
“I suppose that you don’t allow customers to tour your facilities?” He directed the question to Taya.
“Absolutely not,” Lara answered before Taya could open her mouth. “Especially not Nordlanders.”
Her mouth pinched shut again.
Mikal raised his brows at her.
“You people have something against Northerners?” he asked, directing a sidewise glance at Taya who was smiling at him.
“Well, not long ago, a Nordlander nobleman came here with some scruffy, off-world, Free-Trader friend of his—maybe she was his occasional fancy woman, who knows?—and asked to go through the hand-knotting facilities. I asked Tarig, who’s in charge of the hand-knotters, about it, and he conducted them through, thinking to be customer-friendly, especially since the Sieur really was of the Old Families.”
Lara sniffed contemptuously, before continuing, whether at the memory of Max Lordz or Captain Katerina, Mikal did not know.
“They disturbed the work-force. Or that woman, Captain something-or-other did. She insisted on chatting up one of the young knotters, disturbing the work of the whole room in which it happened. Tarig was furious. He went to Yaroli, who contacted the Nordlander merchant who has been providing us with the knotters. Later Tarig told me that the merchant was familiar with this Captain and had said that he would take care of her.”
Lara seemed inordinately pleased with her report, and Mikal was surprised by the spite she was displaying. Why? Usually Kati brought out the best in people; she rarely was the target of spite.
*****
He put the question to Taya when they walked to a nearby restaurant to eat the lunch that he had offered to pay for.
He had made the date the first chance he had to talk to Taya without Lara looming. That had been at nearly the lunch hour, when Lara had suddenly turned to her co-worker and told her to finish up any business with Mikal, and then lock up the office for the midday meal. She was going to find Tarig, having agreed to lunch with him at an exclusive club to which he belonged.
“Yeah, I’ll come and eat at your expense,” Taya had responded to his invitation, grinning broadly. “With the caveat that we’ll eat at Mama Halle’s Restaurant.”
“It’s not where Lara and Tarig are going, I trust,” Mikal had laughed. “That’s all that matters to me. I don’t have a clue about the eateries around here.”
“No, they won’t be at Mama Halle’s.” Taya had had another burst of the giggles. “Have you seen enough of these samples?”
>
At Mikal’s nod, she had picked up the samples and stowed them back into their cupboard. Then she had grabbed a set of keys from her desk, and ushered them out.
“We don’t get that many walk-ins,” she had explained, as she had locked the door. “If I’m eating at my desk, I leave the door open, just in case, but hardly anyone ever shows up during the lunch hour. People are pretty ritualistic about their meals, in this town. Restaurants don’t care for it; they’re always busy at those times, and almost empty at others. But, hey, that’s how we Suderites are.”
She had laughed as she said that, apparently amused by the foibles of her fellow citizens.
“What about Tarig’s workers?” Mikal had asked.
“The kids?” Taya’s smile had disappeared. “They get fed where they are, with whatever the supervising staff cook for them. Some of the overseers are really good, and are really sweet to the boys, but not all, I’m afraid. Tarig only cares if the production is disturbed.”
“I suppose that’s typical,” Mikal had sighed. “How are the knotters paid? Is the money sent to their families, or are they old enough to handle their own finances?”
Taya had shaken her head.
“They don’t get paid,” she had said. “Yaroli paid a lump sum to the Nordlander merchant who brought them here, and I think that he was supposed to make a monthly payment from then on, until the merchant came to take them back, in a year or so, but the last I heard, something had happened to the merchant, and our boss man figured that he’d be able to keep the kids indefinitely, for free. He was quite gleeful about it.”
She had given Mikal a sideways glance.
“I know a lot of stuff because I keep Yaroli’s books,” she had added. “Lara is supposed to be doing it, but she can’t add two numbers together and get the right answer. I can, and I can do a lot more than that, too.”
Mikal had grinned.
“So what is it with this Lara, anyway?” he asked. “She seemed really spiteful about the woman who had caused a little disturbance in the work area. Why bother?”
Taya giggled.
“You noticed?” she chortled. “Actually, the way I heard Tarig and Yaroli tell it, when they were going on about it, was that Captain Katerina hadn’t caused the disturbance. One of the boys doing the knotting had recognized her from somewhere; I don’t have any idea where. The boy had been thrilled to see her, and had run to her, and she had picked him up and held him, as if he had been her long-lost son, which he obviously wasn’t—those boys are pretty odd-looking and the Captain was a fairly normal-looking lady. An awfully nice lady; I liked her the moment I saw her. The other boys in the room had stopped work to stare at them, of course, and Tarig had been furious—his precious production was interrupted—and he had kicked the visitors out on the spot, going immediately to Yaroli to complain. Yaroli had got hold of the Nordlander merchant, and he had told him that he would take care of the ‘Free-Trader woman’, as Tarig called her.
“Anyway, Tarig’s reaction to this Captain Katerina had been pretty much like mine: what a nice, attractive, fun woman she seemed to be, in spite of his annoyance at her disturbing his production. He can be pretty crude and thoughtless, and went on about how he’d like to bed her—and here he has been bedding Lara all along. That’s why she got promoted to being my boss from working in the back on the machines, by being pretty, and sleeping with Tarig, who talked Yaroli into giving her a front-office job, and a substantial raise. She thinks that it means that Tarig will dump his wife, and marry her, but she’s in dreamland on that. It’ll never happen. Tarig’s the kind of a man who likes to have a wife and kids at home, and a mistress to show off, on the side.”
“No wonder she got snippy when I mentioned the wrong side of the marital bed,” Mikal said.
“Yeah.” Taya giggled again. “She’s there all right. And the lovely rose on Tarig’s lapel, while his wife takes care of the little ones.”
She shook her head.
“Not an arrangement I’d agree to. Tarig, of course, needs plenty of funds to keep things going, and therefore pretty much has to do whatever Yaroli wants him to do, so long as he gets paid well for it. Which is why he is so nuts about production, production, production.”
“How is the business doing? You’d know, since you keep the books, right?”
Taya gave him a sidewise glance.
“Don’t tell me I’m in the clutches of a commercial spy,” she said lightly, but with an undercurrent of seriousness which Mikal would have missed in his non-ESP days.
They had reached the restaurant Taya had been aiming for, and he had a moment’s respite while they went in and dealt with a harassed but handsome, young head waiter who obviously knew Taya, and led them a tiny table for two in a corner of an outdoor terrace.
“This is an extra table,” Taya commented when they had sat down, nearly overwhelmed by two nearby potted plants. “Normally they don’t use this space for serving customers, but Luco never turns me down when I do come here with the occasional friend. He’s had a table put in this crevice for me before; I don’t know who else gets service like that from him.”
Mikal had noticed that the young man had given him a searching look when they had come in. Did Luco have a romantic interest in Taya? If so, good; Mikal judged him to be a fine young man, and a hard worker.
“His family owns this restaurant,” Taya continued. “His parents want him to work most of the jobs for at least a while, to get the feel of the place. Once his father considers him competent to run it, they’re planning to retire, and leave him in charge.”
“That’ll be a responsible position for someone as young as he looks,” Mikal commented. “I bet he could use a person good with numbers to keep the restaurants’ books!”
He grinned wickedly at the girl.
She blushed.
“Actually, the truth is that if it wasn’t for Luco, I would have left Yaroli’s employ, oh, ages ago,” she confessed. “Things aren’t very pleasant there, but if I had to take a job across the city, I don’t know when I’d see Luco; he’s so busy with the training his Dad is putting him through. This way I can drop in at lunch, and at least say hi, no matter where in here he is working, or how busy he is. The family has been quite accommodating, so I assume that they don’t have a problem with me hanging around.”
“Sounds like Luco’s a lucky man,” Mikal said. “Almost as lucky as I am with my Kati, and, incidentally, you remind me of her a bit. You’re both lively, kind, and intelligent, with minds of your own. She would say that she’s not nearly as good-looking as you are, although I think she’s absolutely the most beautiful of women.”
“Sounds like she’s awfully lucky, too,” Taya responded with a wide grin. “She has a lover who appreciates her.”
Luco, in spite of the rush in the restaurant, came by, himself, to hand them their menus, and to recite the specials. Taya noticed the uneasy looks he was directing at her companion, and hurried to say:
“Mikal here just paid me quite the compliment, Luco. He told me that I remind him of ‘his Kati’, as he put it, but that this Kati would probably consider me better looking than she is, though he thinks she’s the most beautiful of women. Isn’t that absolutely the sweetest thing you’ve heard?”
Luco’s face broke into a grin. Mikal thought that Taya was proving to be quite the psychologist, too; she would be a definite asset to the restaurant.
“Very nice,” Luco said. “I should have known. The people you choose to associate with are always the best, Taya. Apologies for having put on a jealous face.”
“Understandable,” Mikal threw in. “However, you’ll have to get used to it, and you have to learn to trust her. I have some experience with being the significant other of a lively woman whom a lot of other men covet, and it does take patience, and faith in her, sometimes.”
“So are you going to tell me whether you’re a commercial spy, now that we have that out of the way?” Taya asked, after Luco had gone off with thei
r orders.
“Not a commercial spy,” Mikal responded, smiling.
He thought that he probably should level with the young woman. Things were going to be coming to a head shortly, and Taya seemed to have the best interests of the child carpet knotters in mind.
“Actually, I’m not even a Waywardian,” he began, “although I’m working with a group made up, mostly of them.”
Just then, the communicator which Lank had given him, and which he, Ciela, and Chrysalia had apparently modified with a lace crystal shard to be compatible with the Waywardian system, alerted his node.
“Can you hold that thought for just a moment?” Mikal asked Taya, removing the little button out of its hiding place in his tunic pocket, switching it on, and connecting to it nodally. It would be either Nebbish, Karn, or Cassi, he knew; Kati would have contacted him via ESP.
It was Cassi.
“I’ve got about two dozen indignant women who are ready to demonstrate outside Yaroli’s premises, so as to shame him into freeing those children,” she announced through the communicator. “And each of them is going to be getting hold of her friends and acquaintances who might be interested in coming along. When can we plan this show for? How are things coming along at your end?”
Mikal laughed.
“Cassi, you’re an absolute marvel,” he told her. “Tell your co-conspirators: soon. We’ll have to discuss the exact date and time with all involved. Have you heard from anyone else?”
“No. Jaqui and I have been too busy talking to all the troublemaking middle-aged women in Suderie to even think of anything else. We got a list from Forax, you see, and instructions as to where the nearest public communications console was, not having a handy off-world gadget like you do. Now we’re off to find a place where to eat lunch. Shall we meet at the hotel like we planned earlier?”
“Certainly. I’ll let you know what I’ve come up with, then. And we’ll find out Kati’s results, and Karn and Nabbish’s.”
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 71
