Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

6. Of Falls, Fountains, Notions, and New Markets

THE ALTERNATION BETWEEN EASE and unease in Pryn’s recent life had become so frequent she no longer felt the need to name it. She wandered around the room a while longer, now looking out the window at the garden, now looking through the door along the courtyard balcony. She examined corners, looked under chair bottoms. On one circuit she decided not to eat the grapes — the only untasted fruit remaining on the tray. A circuit later, she picked one, bit it: juice and sweetness exploded over her tongue. She devoured the bunch, one after one, till the little stems, their maroon crowns surrounding yellow nubs where the fruit had pulled free, prickled above the blue glaze between the brown pear with its white wound and the red pit with its remaining bite of pith.

Licking sticky fingers, Pryn thought she heard sounds in another part of the house. She stepped out the door. Yes, somewhere on another floor, someone was shouting at someone who was trying to quiet her. She looked over the rail at the inner court. Statuary, plants, benches were arranged, she saw now, in separate groupings, a low, inlaid table at the center of each.

She went to the stairway and started down.

The muffled yelling stopped.

There were not even wrinkles in the cushions where the Ini had lain.

Pryn crossed toward the door — the one Madame Keyne had stood in. A metal gate, it stood ajar. At its sides heavy drapes were tied back no doubt to be closed in breezier weather.

Pryn pushed through as the heavy-set woman, with a scarf around her head, came along by the house, three young women and a young man behind her. Pryn recognized the cook. She had lugged in the bathtub last night, but Pryn had not seen the others before.

As they walked, the red-scarfed woman instructed: ‘…and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. Your duties among the chickens and pigeons are not arduous, Larla, but they are exacting; and you will be expected to take care of the swans and peafowl as well. Samo, you will learn most of your gardening duties from Clyton, who has been here for many years now; but you will also be expected to precede Madame to the country home in Ka’hesh by at least a week to help with the heavy cleaning there — the place is always a shambles at the end of winter, because she will rent it out to the local young nabobs when she is not using it; and they are none too careful, though it’s a finer home than any of their own draughty piles…’

As they drew abreast of her, among the house girls Pryn saw the new gardener’s assistant, a dark-haired youth, rather too thin, a bit round-shouldered; still, he glanced at her with heavily lashed, very black eyes. I wonder, thought Pryn, moving the waist about on her new shift, does he think I’m a woman of the house? which made her smile at herself. (And perhaps my father is alive…?) No, I am not traditionally beautiful. Still….

She’d been trying to remember details of her distress at the Ini and her confusion over Radiant Jade. But when behavior seemed so completely without reason, especially when all around was new as well, it was hard even to think about it, much less hold on to the feelings it evoked — unless that behavior was directly before you. What was directly before her now? More trees, more rocks, more flowers…

She frowned over her memories of the morning.

The interests of these women, Pryn realized, were far stronger than she’d thought. But what, exactly, did they do? Since Pryn had done it with boys on several occasions (and rather enjoyed it), she fancied that she should know most of what there was to know, at least about that part of it. Certainly it couldn’t be much different, she reflected, from what, only a year or so back, she’d come upon her girl friends Janina and Fetija doing behind the storage shed at the back of her cousin’s bakery. She’d teased them about it for three days, till Fetija had cried and Janina had punched her. And what Fetija and Janina had done was finally not much different from what she herself had done once when she was nine with an older girl cousin — at the older girl’s behest, of course.

Or was it different?

What she and her cousin had done had been interesting enough. But there had been a side to it that had bothered her — though whether that bother had been physical, emotional, or social, at nine she’d been unable to tease out. Irked by the knottiness of it all, she had, at nine, put those odd, if in themselves oddly pleasant, acts out of memory — though precisely that distress, she could now admit, had made her, as it lingered, tease Fetija so unmercifully till Janina’s punch in the shoulder had stopped it.

Well, Pryn thought, she was fifteen now and too old to be a tease; besides, she was too curious about what was happening in this strange garden — though once more she found her thoughts drifting toward the notion of putting the obstreperous physicality of it all out of current thought. It made it easier, somehow, to deal with.

While she frowned and wandered beneath shadowy trees, it suddenly struck her that — Jade, Madame Keyne, Ini, and her sore side notwithstanding — she actually felt about as fine as clear air and carefully tended gardens could make one.

She stepped across the red brick path, between dark pines, by clustered palms with shaggy scales, beside bushes of red lilies with yellow hearts. She passed a fanged and winged monster, carved in obsidian, dangling a dozen breasts like some aged bitch: for all her fierce face, she looked quite benign. The flowers carpeting about her claws made her the more motherly while her glistening blackness made their violet the more intense.

Pryn walked onto a stone-sided bridge crossing the stream below a waterfall.

Four fountains, one at each corner of the bridge, sprayed out into the stream.

As she reached the bridge’s middle, Pryn looked up at the cascades. Jutting from the water’s streaming face, rocks dangled foamy beards. Some were tipped with moss. Others dripped with grasses. Some of the rocks, she realized, were not natural but carved: the head and tail of a stone fish curved from the water, three feet of falls between them; a stone dolphin arched out near the top. Toward the bottom a great cuttlefish flung stone tentacles from the spume, the whole a living moment rigid in the midst of the unstoppable, inanimate rush.

Then one fountain’s spray faltered, weakened, became a dribble over its stone lip. Pryn was about to walk over and examine it when she heard, then saw, coming around the curving path ahead, an elderly man with curly white hair thick over chest and belly.

His brown head was bald.

Trundling a barrow filled with rakes, hoes, and shovels, he wore around his neck a scarf the same red as the one the cook had worn around her head, or Jade had worn at her waist. He wheeled his barrow straight up to the malfunctioning fountain, set it down, grasped the fountain head — a carved stone shell — and twisted, left, then right. With a great crunch, it came off.

What had been a defective spray became a defective spill.

The man put the fountain head on the bridge’s planks. Rummaging in his barrow, he pulled out a stick with a hook at one end. He shoved the hook into the hole from which the water wobbled, prodding about to dislodge any obstruction.

Pryn stepped nearer to see.

The man glanced at her. ‘Morning.’ He prodded and turned.

Pryn smiled. ‘If this Liberator is making your helpers leave,’ she commented, ‘it doesn’t seem to be stopping new helpers from applying for their jobs.’

The man grunted. ‘A different breed.’

‘You don’t think the new people will be as good as the ones who left?’

‘Better or worse, I can’t say.’ He pulled the stick free and examined the end. ‘Just different.’

There was nothing on the hook.

Nor was the water flow any stronger.

He thrust the stick back in the spigot and poked some more, both arms wet to hairy shoulders.

Pryn walked on over the bridge.

The path took her up — but on a rise different from the one she’d climbed that morning with Madame Keyne. She climbed by hanging banks of fuchsia and honeysuckle; the path moved away from the falls, then back, became a flight of red brick steps between wooden rails beside the splashing water, then became a path again. At last Pryn came to a level stretch, to look across the fall’s rock-punctuated rim. The stream that fed it rushed beside the continuation of the brick. On the other side of the water were high, dank shrubs. Ahead, on her own side of the stream, Pryn saw four brick-edged tributaries leading away into four brick-ringed pools, each pool about five feet in diameter, one set just beyond the other.

By the far pool, the Wild Ini squatted. With a length of branch, she jammed and prodded something in the pool’s bottom.

Ini had taken a wooden grate out of the water. It lay by her knee in the wet grass.

As Pryn’s skirt brushed a bush, Ini looked up, startled. ‘She wanted me to wear the scarf!’ the pale-haired girl hissed. Imagine! She said because I could be one of her employees now, that I should wear her damned red scarf!’ Ini jammed the branch in again. She picked up a handful of leaves and pebbles she had gathered in a pile beside her, pulled the branch out of the water with one hand, thrust the leaves and pebbles in with the other, then fell again to packing and prodding them down into whatever conduit the grate had covered. ‘Me? Ha! That’s where her scarf is now!’

Pryn had flinched at Ini’s first look; surprise had left her heart pounding. As her heart stilled, it occurred to her that somehow, among all the last days’ frightening experiences, fear itself had somehow become…less fearful. She stood by the pool, watching, not unafraid, but not bothered so much by it.

The muscles in the Ini’s shoulders knotted and flexed. Her breath came in small gasps. Suddenly she stood and flung the dripping branch down on top of the grate. Somewhere the gardener’s barrow was crunching up a brick slope. Ini blinked at Pryn, then put her wet, dirty hands on Pryn’s arms. ‘We better get out of here before Clyton sees us!’ Her whisper was absolutely frantic.

Pryn followed Ini off around the pool and behind the trees, brushing leaf-bits, dirt, and droplets from her arms where Ini had touched her and marveling that the little murderess had not bothered to return the grate to the bottom of the pool or to scatter her pile of leaves and pebbles, or even to dispose of her branch — yet at the same time seemed so frightened of discovery.

Pryn walked beside striding Ini.

As they came around another bank of flowers, Ini suddenly asked: ‘Do you like this garden?’

‘Yes. Very much.’ Pryn’s curiosity at why Ini had asked raised the inflection on her final word.

Ini snatched a blue blossom from a bush. ‘So do I. It’s beautiful, wild, surprising at all turns. I think that’s why I like to walk around in it. It reminds me of a forest, but with even more color and confusion crammed in.’ Ini did not look at the flower she’d picked. As she walked, she mashed it in her fingers, so that bits of blue petal fell to the brick.

‘Have you ever thought,’ Pryn offered, as they turned down another path that took them toward the rock wall, ‘how a garden is like a map of the forests outside it? You can’t read distances and directions on it of course. But the various flowers and trees, arranged so carefully here, are, each of them, like samples of what you can find out in the wild — ’

Ini’s sharp, high laugh cut Pryn off. ‘This garden? A map? What nonsense! This wall, with which that silly old woman, who wants me to wear her silly red scarf, tries to separate her garden from the wildness outside, so that she can pretend there’s order here — do you think it works? Do the people and passions you see inside these walls speak of an ordered household?’ Ini laughed again and flung down the mashed bud. ‘No, it’s all wild! Her mistake is to think that by something as simple as a wall — ’ Still walking, she struck the stone beside her with the flat of her hand, hard enough to make Pryn wince — ‘she can keep the wildness out!’ Ini grinned. ‘But the very fact that the trees and shrubs and rocks and water and air and the people breathing it are here means that the wildness is in already. And the wall is not all solid, either. There’s an arch built over the place where the stream comes in for the waterfall. There’re bars along the arch through which the water flows. The bars go down into the water — to keep people out. But I dove down there once. Just below the surface, two of them have rusted away, and anyone could swim through. And down at the other end, at the corner, where the gardener almost never goes because it’s grown up too thick to wheel a barrow, five or six stones have come loose to make a hole that anyone could crawl, from the Liberator’s garden right into ours — though over there at the Liberator’s house nobody ever goes into the garden. I know, because I’ve gone exploring in there, lots of times!’

‘You have?’ Pryn asked, impressed. She thought to recount her own adventures with the Liberator. But a second thought decided her to remain as ordinary seeming as possible in the eyes of this most extraordinary young woman. ‘You’re very brave,’ Pryn said, recalling how quickly they’d fled the gardener.

‘Yes,’ Ini said. I’m not afraid of anything. Especially the Liberator. Or whatever’s over there. In his garden. I just go over there and walk around in it! All the time. Just like I lived there! And nobody does a thing to me — they wouldn’t dare!’

Which was when Pryn realized the little murderess’s face practically glittered with fear — and that she was obviously and luminously lying!

‘Where are you from?’ Pryn asked.

‘What do you want to know for?’

Pryn shrugged. ‘Because you’re interesting. And I like you.’

‘You do?’ Ini grinned at her. (Pryn immediately wondered if, indeed, she did. But she smiled back.) ‘I came from a little farming province. But I got taken by slavers and sold in the desert — do you know what they do with slaves in the desert?’

‘No,’ Pryn said to Ini’s eager grin. ‘What?’

Pryn thought Ini was about to tell her.

But something happened in the Ini’s face — as though the mind behind it had moved on to some memory that turned the features bitter, then angry. ‘What a stupid question!’ Ini looked away. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Pryn thought for a moment. ‘Did you escape?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you kill a lot of people when you escaped?’

Ini looked at her feet as they walked. ‘No. Not when I escaped.’

‘After you escaped?’

‘No.’ Ini still looked down. ‘Before.’

‘You killed people when you were still a slave?’ Pryn was confused. ‘Who did you kill?’

‘Other slaves.’ Ini looked up at Pryn with the same startled expression as when she’d first looked up from the pool. ‘It was my job! That’s why I did it! Otherwise they would have killed me — why did you think I did it!’ She turned away sharply and stepped ahead of Pryn. Once she glanced back. ‘You think this garden is like the forest? It is no more like the forests outside it than that — ’ She stopped, suddenly, to point to a green leaf caught on the rough bark of a tree-trunk beside the path — ‘is like that!’ Her finger moved to indicate another green leaf, among a cluster of leaves, at the tip of a low twig.

‘But…’ Stepping up to the trunk, Pryn frowned. ‘But those two leaves are as alike as leaves can be, aren’t they?’

‘You think so?’ Ini grinned, suddenly and hugely.

Pryn bent closer, wondering if this were a joke, or perhaps more of the strange perception that allowed someone to be an Ini. The single leaf stuck to the trunk and the riot of leaves on the branches about them seemed, in themselves, a fine map of the relation between the garden and the greater wilderness around.

Then, though there was no breeze, the leaf on the bark fluttered. It split down its central vein, revealing an insect body.

Beating green wings, the moth fluttered from the trunk a few inches, then landed again to compose itself once more into a ‘leaf.’

Pryn looked at Ini, who seemed again as angry as she’d ever been.

‘You see? They’re not the same at all! And I thought you said they were! The similarity is all illusion, a bit of chance — oh, yes, all very well for the moth. But all the illusion does is distract us from the difference! And once you see the differences between them…?’ Ini’s hand, still wet from the pool and dirty, smacked the trunk over the moth as hard as she had struck the wall. ‘Then you can control them — ’ She ground her palm, first one way, then back, while, with her other hand, she plucked the leaf from the twig, crushing it — ‘both.’

Her hands fell from the tree.

The twig was bare.

On the trunk were a few green bits over a spot slightly darker than the bark around it.

Ini turned away, grinning again, and started down the red brick steps.

Pryn hurried behind her.

The path took them around and down, till they came out between high hedges. Ahead was the little bridge with the four fountains at its corners.

Madame Keyne walked across it toward them.

Ini slowed. Pryn caught up with her, slowing too. She wondered what she or Ini would say. Madame Keyne smiled.

Then they heard the trundling barrow.

The gardener rolled his tools from another small path. ‘Morning, ma’am.’ He nodded toward Madame Keyne, set his barrow down, and stood.

‘Good morning, Clyton,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘You’ve done a fine job with the irises, I see. Such things don’t go unnoticed. Gya has a new assistant waiting for you down at the kitchen. His name is Samo. Things should be back to normal for you — and the rest of us! — once he learns his chores.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Bending to rummage through his tools. Clyton pulled loose some piece of wet, wadded, and torn material and turned to the Ini. ‘This yours?’

‘That?’ asked the pale-haired young woman.

Pryn looked from Ini to Clyton to Madame Keyne. The older woman’s brows were raised in the shadow of a question, with, about them as well, the shadow of amusement.

The gardener held out the ruined, red scarf.

Ini’s pale eyes were wide, her lips tight. Suddenly she announced: ‘Yes! I think it is mine!’ She stepped forward and took the dripping cloth from the hairy fingers. ‘It must have fallen off into the water when I was exploring the upper stream this morning!’

The waterfall plashed and cascaded over the stone beasts.

At either side of the bridge, the four fountains sprayed their even and orderly waters.

Ini took the ends of the scarf and stretched it out. Wrinkled and ripped, it was still spotted with bits of gravel and leaf from where it had been wadded into the conduit. She raised it, put it behind her neck, brought the ends before her, and knotted it about her throat — as Clyton wore his.

Then she let her unsettling laugh.

‘Well,’ said Madame Keyne. ‘A bit the worse for wear. Still, I’m glad to see you’ve decided to join us. But Pryn — ’ (Pryn wondered if Ini were what Clyton had meant by a new breed of servant.) — I was actually looking for you. I’m going into town, down to the New Market. I’d like you to accompany me, if you would…?’

‘Yes, Madame.’ Pryn glanced at Ini, who simply stood, watching Clyton pick up the handles of his barrow, to trundle off on another path.

Madame Keyne turned back across the bridge. Pryn left Ini to hurry after; she caught up with her at the bridge’s far end.

As they walked along the shrub- and flower-banked path, Pryn imagined Ini following, no more than six steps back — possibly with knife out…

Pryn looked sharply around.

The path behind was empty.

Sighing, Pryn turned back — to see that Madame Keyne was watching her with that same expression of curiosity and amusement. Pryn felt her own face move toward an uncomfortable frown. ‘Madame Keyne, don’t you think that young woman is…strange?’

‘Strange?’ Madame Keyne answered. ‘I think she’s quite mad.’

‘And do you believe she just — dropped her scarf? In the water, I mean. By accident?’

‘Of course she didn’t!’ Madame Keyne chuckled. ‘But then, I wouldn’t want to wear it either.’ She chuckled again, more softly. ‘When I was a girl, a young noblewoman came to stay with my family, here at the house — this was before the Child Empress began her joyous and generous reign, so you know how long ago that must have been. The High Court was still under the rule of the Dragon, and the Child Empress herself was still incarcerated somewhere off in the south; and all Kolhari was supposed to be called Neveryóna — though no one ever did. The young noblewoman was ever so much more highly born than we were — once or twice removed, she was a second or third cousin to the Empress herself. She had suffered some terrible ordeal in the south that I didn’t understand and nobody was supposed to mention, and she was being returned to her uncle in the east. While she was passing through Kolhari, we were honored with her presence — because whatever had happened to her meant she couldn’t stay with her relatives over there, on the other side of the wall. At any rate, all her servants — and she came with ever so many — wore red scarfs. I thought it was very elegant, and I resolved that when I grew up and had servants of my own, I would have them wear the same.’ A third time she chuckled, though now there was no voice to it at all. ‘And I have!’ Madame Keyne took Pryn’s arm. ‘The young noblewoman later became the Empress’s vizerine. And of course, at this point she is no more a young woman than I — though when she was our houseguest, the six or seven years that she had on me seemed like all the time in the world. Still, can you imagine a spirited child like our Ini submitting to such a silly, jealousy-founded, and capricious whim from someone like me? Really, I’d think much less of her if she didn’t balk a bit. She has spirit. And I like that.’

‘You’re not afraid of her?’

‘Afraid?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Of Ini? No, I’m not afraid of her. Part of me is rather fond of her. Part of me is rather sorry for her. But you see, the Ini is fascinated by power. She wants to see how it works, wants to stand as close as she can to it, to stare down into it and watch it moving, pulsing, actually becoming — right before her! Currently, I have more of it than anyone else she knows. If she hurt me, or even displeased me in any way too severe, she knows she would be denied her favorite pastime: observing me. I don’t believe she’s ready to risk that.’ (Pryn recalled the little murderess’s own assertion of her favorite pastime, and marveled at this woman’s self-confidence — which seemed, somehow, quite as out of touch, in its way, as the behavior of Ini herself lurking somewhere behind them in the garden.) ‘Now if she ever met anyone with more power than I,’ Madame Keyne went on, ‘then I might have reason to fear. Blessedly rare as her sort is, she’s not the first I’ve met. Reading such signs is among the things civilized life teaches. But until she meets such a person — or should I say “personage”—I feel rather secure.’ Madame Keyne pressed Pryn’s arm. ‘Now if I were Radiant Jade, indeed I would fear her. But then, I suppose, precisely that danger is half the fascination, don’t you think?’

‘Radiant Jade is fascinated by her?’

‘Well — ’ Madame Keyne mused — ‘one might say that my secretary…’

‘—has taken an interest in her?’ Pryn suggested.

Madame Keyne laughed again. ‘You might say that. Yes, that’s a very good way to put it.’

Pryn said: ‘Your secretary told me that you hated her.’

‘That I hated my secretary?’ Madame Keyne frowned. ‘Or that I hated the Ini?’

‘Ini.’

Again Madame Keyne sighed. ‘The truth is, girl, I love Jade; and for her sake I put up with the little monster — of whom, finally, I do think I have the greater understanding. Though I like to fancy I’m not as mad as Ini, in many ways we’re astonishingly, if not distressingly, alike. If we weren’t, I tell myself, why would Jade be able to move her own — ’ Madame Keyne glanced at Pryn — ‘interests from one of us to the other so easily?’

The path, taking them toward the great house, now swung them away toward an outbuilding, in front of which, among some fruit trees, stood a cart — the one Pryn had arrived in last night. It was hitched to the same horse. The hangings, however, had been roped back to the frame so that the inner space, save for the overhead awning, was free.

Madame Keyne walked up to it. ‘There’s room for two on the driver’s seat. Sit here — ’ She patted the board — ‘and we can talk.’ She helped Pryn up. Then, pulling in skirts and pushing up bangles, she climbed to the seat, as the black-eyed young man whom Pryn had seen earlier among the new servants came running out of the shed.

‘Madame, if you would like me to drive, I’d be happy to — ’ he wore a red scarf around his waist.

‘Samo,’ Madame Keyne said, ‘I told you before, I am going to drive. If we are all to be happy here, you must learn that this is not like the other houses you have worked in. I shall drive today. Now you run ahead and open the gate. That, today, is your job.’ Madame Keyne picked up the reins and flicked them.

Nodding, bowing, Samo dashed off down the driveway.

As Pryn settled on the seat beside Madame Keyne, the horse’s haunches began to move. The cart lurched beneath them. They rolled forward. The trees scattered handfuls of light and shadow in their faces, over their laps.

Ahead, Samo tugged at the heavy planks in the high wall’s entrance. Pryn felt a surge of comfort to be riding with, and indeed to be sitting so near, Madame Keyne, who, for all her dubiously placed certainty, seemed the most normal person in the household. Summer warmth had worked its way into the morning chill. Pryn looked about at the lawns, the outbuildings, the hedges, now at where some statue poked above a grove of shrubs, now back to the main house — where she saw Radiant Jade.

The secretary stood just at the house’s corner, one clay-stained hand raised — to wave? No, she had simply raised it to touch the wall. Jade watched them.

Pryn turned back.

Samo’s face passed by the cart’s edge as he lugged the metal-studded planks a final foot; and they were out on the road.

As the cart rolled down the avenue, the widely spaced estates drew closer together, till at last the walls between them vanished and there were only unwalled houses, sitting one by the other, less and less land between. The cart turned. Beside larger buildings stood smaller, shabbier structures. Other carts joined them in the street — which had broken from its straight, tree-lined directness, to bend and branch as if it had become a tree itself.

Alleys siphoned carts and wagons away from them. Alleys poured porters and pedestrians and more wagons and carts in among them. Merchants, laborers, children — and more carts — filled the streets with noise.

Once Pryn touched Madame Keyne’s arm. ‘You said we were going to the New Market? I only saw the old one yesterday…’

Madame Keyne reined the horse again to angle left of another cart piled with sacks. ‘If you think you saw marvels in the Old Market, believe me, girl, in the New Market you will see wonders beyond imagining! Both locations have their advantages and disadvantages, of course — the Old Market is at the upper end of New Pavē and has the wares that can be purchased on the Bridge of Lost Desire as one of its added attractions. But the New Market is only a street away from the Empress’s public park, which seems to be well on the way to fulfilling the same function — and on a somewhat less vulgar level of commerce. Though I swear — ’ Madame Keyne wheeled the cart away from some youngsters who ran out into the street — ‘if need be, I’ll have that bridge transported to the New Market stone by stone!’

Pryn laughed at the notion, though she was as unsure just why Madame Keyne had suggested it as she was of any motivation within the Sallese gardens.

Jouncing along in the sun over a route she’d last traveled draped about in the dark, Pryn felt a reckless pleasure that was, after all, the legacy dragon riding ought to leave one with. ‘Madame Keyne, why did your secretary get so upset when she learned I could write and read?’

‘Did she now: Hi, there! Hi!’ which last, with much tugging and pulling, was to get around another cart, piled with bricks of a dirty yellow.

The brick cart was parked before some thatched awning, and the small, ragged woman who was its driver had climbed down, calling and calling for the shop proprietor to come out and look at the shipment — to no avail.

‘She probably thought I wanted you to replace her in her job — as indeed I should!’ Reins flicked again as they rumbled along the boisterous avenue. ‘Toss the two of them out, the ungrateful minx and her odious kitten! That’s what I should do — what I would do if I were some uncivil aristocrat with a host of red-scarfed servants. But I am a poor, hard-working merchant, like my brother and father before me. My red scarves are all, as it were, borrowed from a tradition not mine. And for arcane reasons, which, no doubt, I shall never truly understand, that just doesn’t seem to be the way we do things here. I can’t bring myself to such behavior, nor would I respect anyone who could. So I am used and abused for my sympathies within the walls of my own home, the most helpless victim before the crazed and childish connivances of my inferiors.’ She laughed again, in a way that, for the first time, reminded Pryn of Ini. ‘Has it struck you that way before, girl? I confess, till this minute, it never seemed so to me. Well! Radiant Jade became upset when she learned you could read and write? Imagine! I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous!’ She pulled the horses to the right, the smile still on her face as she strained. ‘But I refuse to discuss it further. After all, didn’t I leave the house this morning to get away from such pettiness? We are going to market — to the New Market, the wonder of Kolhari! And what is the wonder of Kolhari today will be the wonder of the world tomorrow! Mark it on vellum, my girl. For I am not a woman to speak lightly when…’ Madame Keyne had been pulling the horse this way and that, but here traffic suddenly increased. A bare-breasted barbarian, one water-pitcher balanced on her head and another held on her shoulder, passed practically in front of the horse’s nose — indeed, if the animal hadn’t jerked up its muzzle it would have knocked at least one of the pitchers to the asphalt. The cart jarred in its traces. Madame Keyne half rose and hauled back on the reins.

From the side of the crowded street, a man rushed forward. He had a short red beard and astonishingly dark eyes, between coppery lashes. He grabbed the horse’s bridle and, with a wild little cry, was lifted from the ground, bare feet waving — on his ankles he wore as many clattering and clinking circlets of silver, ivory, and wood as Madame Keyne wore on her arms.

The horse lowered him, pulling and prancing; the little man finally got the animal calmed, now clucking, now cooing, now patting the great red cheek.

‘Well,’ Madame Keyne said, the reins again tight, looking unperturbed, ‘you’re here, exactly where you said you’d be!’

‘And I see you’ve kept our appointed meeting, just as you said you would.’ The horse, stepping about, quieted. The little man, with his beard and jangling anklets, grinned up at Madame Keyne from sunburned wrinkles fanning about light lashes. ‘Have you considered my plan for liquidating this Liberator, who plagues our city, our nation, our world with his schemes and plots and treasons?’

‘Yes. I’ve reviewed your plan, carefully and in detail. I’ve been impressed by your thoroughness, not to mention the sincerity of your motivation.’ Madame Keyne switched the reins to one hand. With the other, she pulled up a blue bag of more solid cloth from among diaphanous folds and pleats. ‘You outlined the fine points of your expenses, and I completely agree with the rigor of your research and the exactitude of your estimations. You’ve told me — you’ve convinced me your plan will require twelve gold coins and five iron ones to purchase the weapons and hire the men that will insure its success.’ She reached into the purse and drew out some money. ‘Here.’ She thrust coins into the man’s hands — he had to release the bridle to take them. ‘I give you six gold coins and two iron ones — and we shall see what comes to pass.’ She snapped the reins. The horse started.

‘But Madame — ’ Clutching the coins, the man danced back with jangling ankles to avoid the cart corner.

‘That is my decision,’ Madame Keyne called back. ‘I can do no more for you at this moment.’ They moved out into the traffic. Traffic moved between them and the confused, would-be assassin.

Astonished at the exchange, Pryn looked at Madame Keyne, who guided their cart through the morning crush. A memory of the cellars under the Spur; an image of that accusing barbarian — what was his name…Sarg? — dead on the underground tiles. Who, Pryn, wondered, had financed that attack?

When they had driven a few more minutes, Pryn asked tentatively, ‘You really want to…liquidate the Liberator?’

Madame Keyne shrugged — or possibly it was just some motion in her driving.

‘I mean…do you think the Liberator’s plan to abolish slavery plagues all Nevèrÿon?’

‘All Nevèrÿon? How can I say? But I would be a very foolish woman if I thought it was going to help me.’ Madame Keyne urged the horse through a place where traffic had slowed for street construction. It might have been the place Pryn had been put down yesterday.

The cart pushed on.

‘But if you really wanted to have the Liberator killed, why did you give that man only half of what he needed — less than half! Did you think he was asking for too much?’

With lightly closed lids, Madame Keyne raised her eyes a moment to the sky. ‘By no means!’ She blinked at the avenue again. ‘That man is very good at planning the kind of thing he plans. And he was very anxious that I not think him excessive in his demands. Truly, he has whittled his budget down to the bare minimum for success. We spent several hours a week ago at an inn in the Spur, while he drew maps of underground passages leading from cisterns to cellars. But you see, I’m afraid that if I gave him his full twelve and five, our Liberator would be dead — it really was a fine plan. But I have not yet decided whether that’s what I want. The little fellow’s terribly well motivated, in that way which only conservative fanatics can be. With six and two, I have no doubt that in desperation he will mount his plan anyway — under-equipped, under-manned. Which means there’s a good chance he will fail. But it will give the Liberator some trouble, which, at this point, is all I am prepared to do. Indeed, if he is any sort of Liberator at all, he should be used to such encounters! But as of now that’s all I’m interested in — at least until I learn more about this Gorgik.’

‘But what do you want to know?’ Though Pryn was not about to admit she had fought through such an encounter herself, she would have admitted to anything else she knew about the Liberator. And Madame Keyne’s equanimity over the probable death of the man with the anklets and the possible death of Gorgik made the self-comparison with Ini no longer seem so fanciful.

Madame Keyne’s attention was ahead of her on the crowds. ‘Girl, this isn’t a pleasant subject. I didn’t intend to bore a new arrival to our city with such tediousness. Besides, did you see that cart full of yellow brick? Myself, I’ve never seen bricks like that before. Very interesting to me, those bricks — ’

‘But Madame Keyne — ’

‘Enough, girl. We’re almost at the New Market. What you must do now is prepare your mind for true wonders!’

The street here was clogged with humanity — most of it male. The cart’s movement among them was quite slow. Many men were ragged. A good number were naked. Curly light hair; narrow shoulders; close-set eyes — the overwhelming majority were barbarians. As the cart rolled among the ambling, occasionally boisterous men, Pryn sensed a quality which she wondered how she might notate in written signs. She had seen poor people before — indeed, she’d never had any reason to think her own aunt anything more than on the upper end of poor. Still, poor for her had always meant a ragged woman or three with two to ten dirty children in a littered yard before a ramshackle hovel on the outskirts of Ellamon. This was the first time she had ever seen so many poor people, and men at that, amassed at a single center.

Poor men filled the street, building to building; with it and because of it the street seemed filled with poverty itself. (That, Pryn decided, was how she would have written it down.) Holding the cart bench beside her, Pryn leaned toward Madame Keyne. ‘Who are these people…?’

‘These — ’ Madame Keyne pulled up on the reins again, for they had gone beyond the last building, to approach a sort of railing — ‘are the men who do not work in the New Market.’ Madame Keyne halted the horse.

The cart had come to the fence — a single rail supported just above waist-level by pairs of posts driven into the ground in narrow X’s.

On this side barbarians milled.

On the other — a stretch of bare earth — a few people walked.

‘And over there — ’

‘Madame Keyne!’ The man who sprinted up across the clearing was not a barbarian. ‘There you are!’ He wore a red scarf around his sweat-beaded forehead. ‘We never know which direction you’re going to be coming from, or who’s going to be driving!’ He laughed. ‘I had my men stationed down at the Old Pavē waiting for you — ’

‘—over there,’ Madame Keyne finished, ‘are the men who do.’ She wrapped the reins about the small post at the side of the driver’s seat. ‘I hope you’ll never find me that predictable.’ She stood up as the man ducked under the rail.

He was a tall man, a young man, and very strong. The wide leathers he wore around his wrists were dark at the edges with perspiration. ‘Here, Madame, let me help you down!’

Barbarians moved back from the cart.

Three other men ran up across the field, two of whom also wore scarves. They ducked under the fence. One took Pryn’s hand — his own hot and callused — as she climbed out. Another told the other where to lead the horse.

Madame Keyne swept blowing blue skirts over jangling wrists and, with some jovial remark, ducked under the rail.

Pryn went to the rail, ducked, stood —

The clearing was huge!

From within the crowd, it had looked practically empty. But now, strolling across it, Pryn could see there were as many as thirty or forty men walking or standing about in it. Glancing at the rail, she looked back at the crowd they’d come through. Big as the clearing was, the herds of men on the other side of the railing went almost all the way around it.

Ahead of Pryn, Madame Keyne stopped a moment by another group of three, standing together on the bare dirt and looking over parchment plans one held for the others to see. Now and again a man wheeled a barrow past, filled with stones and earth. Over there a foreman was pointing something out to a worker. Over there another, walking alone, stopped to squint up at the sun. Many, Pryn saw, wore the red scarf at head or waist — one man had it tied around his leg.

As Pryn walked by, Madame Keyne fell into step beside her. ‘Look at it!’ She put her hand on Pryn’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

‘But what is it?’

‘The New Market, of course!’

‘But…’ Pryn looked about, searching for stalls, porters, counters, vendors displaying the marvels she’d been promised. Suddenly she turned back to Madame Keyne. ‘But you’re still building it!’