Kaab meant things to go well here. But she was coming to realize that it was one thing to learn about the natives of this land among the shining temples and plazas of Binkiinha thousands of miles away; quite another to come east across an ocean and be surrounded by them.
Oh, but if only Ixmoe could have seen them—the beautiful Local women with their strange, exotic skin the color of ant eggs, their thousand and one fascinating shades of hair—then, then she would have understood. Especially in Riverside, where Kaab stood now under the decaying houses bedecked with peeling paint and crumbling gaud. These women, unbound by the rules even of this city, behaved in ways that would shock her modest friends walking the white paved sacbeob ways of her homeland.
A clatter to the southeast. Kaab’s hand flew to the hilt of her dagger, dark, reassuring obsidian in the hidden pouch she had sewn into the insufferable Local gown without which Auntie Saabim refused to allow her to leave the house. When she looked around for the source of the sound, she saw only a pair of young men, remarkably similar in face and dress, arms entwined, sauntering through the narrow streets of cracked and broken cobblestone, stepping lightly over murky brown puddles, paying no heed to anyone but each other.
She kept her hand on her dagger as they passed. A third man was coming down the street; when he was closer, she recognized him—a gold-headed wonder of lace and red velvet—as the man who had pinked her in her first duel last week, the day she arrived. What was his bizarre name again? Pem . . . no, Ben.
Kaab stepped quickly into the shadow of a narrow, twisted alley, lest he spot her. She needn’t have worried; his mind was obviously on other matters as he ambled by, whistling something that he apparently thought of as a tune.
Curious, she followed him, watched him enter a tavern and leave again soon after, a black cloth tied around his arm. There was no harm in going in, was there?
Kaab opened the tavern door and breathed in the lingering perfume of stale alcohol. Other than the few scattered, ancient derelicts seated among the mismatched jumble of chairs and the two comely barmaids bound up far too tightly in faded cotton wiping the battered tables, the place was empty. The girls, one a tall thing with hair the color of maize, the other short, stout, pale as peeled cassava, stopped their work when Kaab entered, but she had grown used to the staring by now. She waved the maize-haired girl over, ordered a beer she had no intention of drinking—not after her first taste a few days ago of the watery piss these people called beer—and touched the girl’s hand when she brought it in a chipped red clay mug. The sight of her cheekbones filled Kaab with thoughts of Citlali, the girl with the divine . . . ah, but the disaster of Tultenco, the forged treaty, the treachery of the Nopalco court, the desperate flight before dawn—it was all too recent to bear thinking about.
“Haven’t seen you around before,” said the barmaid. She smelled faintly of sweat.
“That,” said Kaab with a small, aloof smile, “is because I have not been around before.”
“No, Cassie,” one of the old men farther back in the tavern said, his voice heavy with drink despite—or perhaps because of—the early hour. “Don’t you remember? Not a week ago this filly lost a duel to Ben over Tess the Hand right outside here.” Kaab whipped her head around to look at him, her eyes narrow, ready to take umbrage. But he tipped in her direction, respectfully, an impossibly rumpled felt hat of an indeterminate shade, and she relaxed. “You made him work for it before he won, though,” he said. “Never seen a girl with a sword do that.”
“Tess the Hand?” said the girl, her eyes not leaving Kaab. “Then she’s got good taste.”
If the beautiful prostitute went by the name Tess the Hand, she was a beautiful prostitute worth discovering more about. “Tell me about her.”
“Why, have you got custom for her?”
The Balam were the first family of Traders among the Kinwiinik. Kaab knew better than to appear too eager. “Perhaps.”
“Well,” said the girl, twirling a lock of her thick hair around her finger and giving Kaab a wink, “she’s the best there is.”
Kaab felt unaccountably warm, a thousand thanks be to Ahkin in this miserable cold. “I am not surprised,” she said. “She had the air of a talented woman.”
“What do you want from her?”
Kaab thought for a moment. “Does she have particular specialties?”
“Oh, she does it all. Like I say, she’s the best there is.”
“And how much money does she ask for?”
“Depends on the job, really. You’d have to ask her.”
This was growing more tedious than a game of Nine Bean with only three players. Really, a girl dressed like that in an establishment like this had no business being coy. “Oh? One deals with her directly, not with her—with the—” The idea the crippled sailmaker had explained on the voyage over still made no sense to her; no wonder she couldn’t remember the word, either. “The man who manages her? Ben?”
The girl obviously had no idea what she meant. “What would you want to talk to Ben for? She can conduct her own business, thank you very much.”
Well, that was a relief. “I am glad that at least some here do their prostitute work without the assistance of managers.”
At this the girl threw back her head and gave herself over to full-throated laughter like a gibbon. “Is that what you think Tess— Oh, that’s so—” But here she lost herself in hilarity again, while Kaab forced her fingers not to drum on the table. The girl gave a last chuckle and wiped her eyes. “Tess isn’t a whore. She’s a counterfeiter. And Ben’s not her pimp; he’s her protector. She’s a talented woman, like you said. A lot of people would take advantage of her skill if they could. Ben’s sword makes sure nobody does.”
Far too basic an error to make, little bee. Kaab clenched her fists and restrained herself from banging one on the dented chestnut-brown surface of the table. “I see. That is an amusing misunderstanding. So Tess and Ben are lovers?”
“Hardly. He’s not her flavor, nor she his, if you catch my drift.”
Kaab’s heart began to beat against the tight cage of her bodice like the wings of a hummingbird in flight.
“Though,” said the barmaid uncertainly, “he’ll indulge in any flavor he’s asked so long as there’s enough money in it.”
“His preferences are not of interest to me,” said Kaab. “But her—do you know where I might find her?” After all, if Tess—Tess the Hand—was a skilled counterfeiter, a closer acquaintance with her could be of use to Kaab’s family.
“Not here, that’s for sure, at least not till later tonight. She’s out on a job. So’s Ben, for that matter. He just ducked in here so I could tie on his mourning band—lost his father, you know—and he was dressed so fancy I couldn’t help staring. ‘Heading to the Hill, are you?’ I said, and the Green God take me if he didn’t say, ‘Why, yes I am,’ pretty as you please, and waltz out the door.”
Kaab would have been happy to tarry longer, but she had promised Juub that she would demonstrate the swordplay she’d learned on the ship, and if she was any judge of adolescent boys, then the longer she kept her cousin waiting the more irksome he would be when she got back. “Thank you for your time, which I appreciate greatly,” she said, standing and dropping a handful of minnows onto the table.
“What are the chances you’d take fifteen minutes and show me how much you appreciate it?”
Kaab looked her up and down, taking in the orange dress, the crimson petticoat underneath it, the blue eyes sparkling above it all. “Alas, lovely woman. In another place, at another time, I would cut your hair short for thinking fifteen minutes sufficient time to spend with me. But today my path leads toward other directions.”
The girl grinned and shrugged. “She’s lucky, whoever’s in those directions.”
Kaab grinned back, and out the door she went.
Her beer remained on the table, untouched.
The light streaming into the lecture hall from the high, leaded-glass window
s dimmed, thank the gods, as it made its way down toward the students, and Rafe, fortified by sausages, found himself more than equal to it. There was Doctor de Bertel, waving his arms, eyes wide, stalking to this side of the podium and then that. “I see he’s being subtle today,” Rafe said as he walked in with Joshua and Micah, Thaddeus having preferred, wisely, to stay abed.
“Why don’t you shout a little louder, pet?” said Joshua. “I don’t think they can hear you in Chartil.”
“What are you talking about?” said Micah, exasperated. “They wouldn’t hear him in Chartil no matter how loud he talked.”
“I don’t know where you picked this one up,” said Joshua to Rafe, who was failing to suppress a grin, “but I like him.”
“Ah well,” said Rafe, but he said it more quietly. “At least de Bertel is enjoying himself, the poor dear.” The three settled themselves onto a sparsely populated bench in the back of the hall.
De Bertel, meanwhile, whose reputation as an entertaining lecturer not even Rafe could discredit, had worked himself into such a state he hadn’t noticed their entrance. “. . . and thus the learned Chickering enters into a disquisition on the failings of Rastin—Rastin, of all people! This from a man who almost murdered his mother because of his grief over the death of his dog.”
“There is another appropriate response,” murmured Rafe, “to the death of one’s dog?”
Alas, the snicker this elicited from Joshua finally caught de Bertel’s attention, and his smile when he saw Rafe was uncomfortably reminiscent of something hungry. Rafe met his gaze long enough to communicate insolent disdain and then set about ostentatiously examining his fingernails.
De Bertel, for his part, seemed to be considering something. “But I think we shall depart from our intended subject,” he said finally, “and discuss instead a set of even more extraordinary claims Chickering makes: that the earth itself—rather than being a fixed object at the center of the firmament around which the heavenly bodies rotate—that the earth itself moves.” His voice was tinged with false wonder. “Now, after reading the second book of Rastin’s Considerations, what might you say to a person who averred such a thing?” He nodded at a young man in the front row. “Master Pike?”
Pike, tall and gangly in his front-row seat, had already stood. “I should say, sir, that he was barking mad.”
“And what proof might you offer, Pike, as demonstration of his lunacy?”
Rafe clucked his tongue. “Poor Pike. He couldn’t even get through book one of the Considerations.”
“Now, now, pet. Pike could have hidden depths.”
Rafe sighed wearily. “I am in a position to be able to tell you with the utmost confidence, Joshua, that there is far less to Pike than meets the eye.”
“We know, as a first principle,” said Pike, apparently unaware of the spray of contumely behind him, “that a larger object falls more quickly than a smaller one.”
Rafe snorted. “Yes, because we’ve investigated the question so closely.”
“If the earth had the same kind of movement as other bodies,” Pike continued—why, oh, why must he insist on speaking through his nose like that?—“then it would fall out of the heavens, leaving all other objects that rest and move on it, heavy and light, animals and humans, floating in the air.”
De Bertel looked as pleased as if his dog had performed a trick correctly. “Quite so. But it pains me to have to say that the moving-earth crowd are hardly the worst offenders against the legacy of Rastin.” Ah, so this was where he was heading. “Of late, an idea has arisen that makes Chickering look like Fontanus.”
“And here we go,” Rafe muttered.
“With what?” said Micah.
A few more of Rafe’s classmates looked back at him to catch his expressive eye roll. “Those who espouse this new idea,” continued de Bertel, “suggest not only that the earth moves, but that it moves around the sun—and that it therefore cannot be the center of the world.” Gods, how thick was he going to lay the naïve amazement on?
De Bertel turned, of course, back to Pike. “What, Pike, are we to make of their claims?”
Pike said nothing; hardly surprising, as he hadn’t read the answer in a book. But de Bertel was in a generous mood. “Don’t worry, Pike, I won’t keep you on the hook. I’d be disappointed, in fact, if you’d devoted enough time to such nonsense to be able to answer my question.”
“No matter how well the scorned lover knows that scorn returned will avail him nothing,” sighed Rafe, “he still finds himself powerless not to strike back.”
“Someday you’ll be a scorned lover, pigeon, and then you’ll sympathize.”
Rafe rolled his eyes. “On the day the sun declines to rise.”
“Of course, such a notion is preposterous”—finally de Bertel was looking directly at Rafe, as were, for that matter, most of the others in the room—“an insult to thinking men everywhere, and its benighted adherents dreamers lost to reason who make mock of true scholarship.”
“Oh, pigeon.” Joshua’s voice combined sympathy and regret. “I should have insisted Anselm try harder to stop your oration in the tavern.”
“I would have just bitten him harder.”
“I am grieved to know,” de Bertel went on, looking more and more like a cockatrice with raised hackles, “that there is one among us who has so abandoned his senses as to subscribe to this feculence.”
“Gods, how long is he going to take with this?”
Joshua patted his hand. “Come now, pigeon, you’ve had far worse beatings than this.”
“Yes, and enjoyed them far more. I think I shall have to move things along at a somewhat quicker pace.”
Joshua was a mother hen solicitous of her wayward chick. “Rafe . . .”
But there was Micah to consider. The boy didn’t deal well with unpleasantness, and Rafe had no wish to unsettle him. “Remember how upset you got two days ago,” he said, touching Micah’s shoulder, “when Matthew and I fought about his absolutely ridiculous theory of circular motion?”
“Well,” said Micah, “your theory was ridiculous too. But Matthew got really mad.”
“The fight I’m about to have is going to be much worse.”
“I’d better go, then.” Like a shadow, Micah’s small form moved along the wall and down the stairs.
De Bertel ignored him, caught up in his oration against the unnamed “one” who espoused such absurd notions of celestial place.
Rafe sat straight and gazed, expressionless, at the high-vaulted ceiling. “‘O, how his hope-spent mother’s heart would grieve,’” he said, his clear voice cutting effortlessly through de Bertel’s gravelly one, “‘to hear such wibber-wash as yon fool prateth!’”
All noise ceased at once, and it was not without satisfaction that Rafe noted every eye in the room on him.
De Bertel, for his part, had gone quite still. “You know, Fenton,” he said casually, “I find myself recalling your perplexity a few days ago in the matter of—was it Chesney? Yes, I believe it was. You said you were utterly incapable of determining, after reading Observations on the Nature of Heaviness and Lightness, whether he was actually insane or simply a cow of dubious intelligence.” He looked so pleased with himself that he had to be preparing a lightning bolt of no ordinary proportions. “Allow me to suggest that you should be the last among us to be perplexed by the question, since you have in fact shown yourself to be both.” The class laughed, but Rafe felt the air in the room grow more charged.
“You have to admit, pigeon, that wasn’t bad.” Joshua sounded apologetic.
Rafe looked at the ceiling again. “He does have his moments. But then, so do I. And I’ve read more poetry than he has.” He recited:
“The cowherd told his talking bull, ‘The day
Thou best my wit, I die by mine own hand.’
‘Then live,’ the bull replied, ‘thy wits unmatch’d.
Debate thyself, whilst I attend thy wife.’”
De Bertel acknowledg
ed the sally with a very slight bow. “Your wit, Fenton, admits of no equal.” He assumed the air of a man who has just remembered something of mild interest. “You have your examination still to sit, don’t you?”
“Indeed, sir, and never has a prisoner eyed his jailer’s key ring with greater fervor.”
“I have the honor of informing you that the Board of Governors met this morning and, piqued by the ill-advised and bombastic gathering last week, decided to vote on their proposal immediately.”
“What?” Rafe stood so fast he almost fell, swayed, and threw his hand onto Joshua’s shoulder for balance.
“Needless to say, it passed, by what I am given to understand was an overwhelming majority. And, now that it occurs to me, I realize I’ve been remiss in my duty to you and to the University. I’ll have to make sure I’m one of your examiners. After the enlightening time we’ve spent together in my lectures, I shall enjoy testing your mettle to discover whether you’re qualified to become a Master.”
“My school—!” The color had vanished from Rafe’s face. His hands were trembling.
“Oh, pigeon,” whispered Joshua.
“I’m sure, Fenton,” continued de Bertel pleasantly, “that you’ll have no trouble whatsoever convincing each and every examiner of your qualifications.”
Rafe finally found a response. “As fascinating as this lecture is, doctor,” he said, his voice shaking only very slightly, “you’ll understand if I decline to stay for the rest of it. I have a great deal of true scholarship still to make mock of, and I must go take the bull by the horns, lest I continue to be bested by intelligent bovines.” He turned and, over his classmates’ laughter—for they respected grace in defeat—left the room.
Disaster, calamity, ruin—language didn’t contain the word that described this. His eyes brimmed. His school, the dream he’d cherished for years, his reason for being here, his reason for living. Gone. Forever out of his reach. Tears spilled over his lids and ran freely down his face as he careened out of the building into the light, headache be damned, walking, speeding up, running, heedless, over the flagstones and down the steps, right into the Duke Tremontaine.
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 11
