Infidel (5 page)

The Minister thumped her fist on her desk.
 

“These bloody black roaches think that covering up women’s faces makes the lot of them more pious. Piety does not determine price. I won’t part with the fruit of our labor for a brick man’s fee. Do they think we are a country of stevedores?”
 

Rhys pulled his attention back to the Minister and the pleasantly cool room. The slick semi-transparent screen of his slide displayed his notes on the translation of Chenjan contracts relating to an exchange of goods and services with Tirhan. Like many of the documents Rhys had dealt with during his translation work with the Tirhani government, the actual goods and services were not specified, merely the terms of the amounts agreed upon, the delivery dates and times, the payment milestones, and generic legal jargon.
 

“Are you going to have your assistant consul politely decline their offer?” Rhys asked. “I’d like to have an idea of the tone you wish to present before I receive the document for review.”
 

Though the goods were never named outright, Rhys suspected the Minister of Public Affairs was negotiating arms sales with Chenja, and had been for as long as he had worked for her. A third of the population of Shirhazi was employed in its weapons manufacturing plants. Most of Tirhan’s economy was tied up in arms deals that fueled the centuries-old war between Chenja and Nasheen. It kept Tirhan’s neighbors busy and made Tirhanis rich. It also required a significant ex-pat community of magicians to produce it. Shirhazi was a hodgepodge haven of refugee Chenjans and exiled magicians from Nasheen, Ras Tieg, even Mhoria. The Minister knew he knew her business, but they never discussed the movement of arms in such blunt terms. Some of this was merely the Tirhani custom of false modesty and false politeness. Rhys had spent much of his time as a child learning similar conversational rituals at the Chenjan court while on business with his father. He had picked up the Tirhani version easily. He found it much more comforting than brutal Nasheenian honesty.

 
The Minister’s frown deepened. “You must decline their offer politely, but with a touch of disdain. This is the second time this new Minister has treated us as infidels during a negotiation. He must know his place before God. I will have my consul remove the offer completely, as a lesson. I will have him forward you our reply tonight, but do not trouble yourself about its delivery. I will have their minister stew himself to death while his people starve in the trenches.

“Would you like some tea?”

The segue was abrupt, and familiar. The Minister pulled a cup and saucer from her desk, a strainer, a tea bag. Business was concluded for the day.

Rhys rose. “Thank you, but I must humbly decline,” he said.
 

“Oh, no, I insist you sit and have a drink,” she said. She ladled a teaspoon of fire beetles into a water shaker and shook it up to heat the water. “I cannot allow you to part ways without a drink.”
 

Tirhani false politeness.

“I respectfully decline. I am not thirsty. Thank you for this reception. I do look forward to hearing from your consul.” Rhys bowed his head and waited. They had still not discussed the matter of payment.
 

“It is really too much,” the Minister said, taking her cue. “You do too much for us.”

“I am, as ever, pleased to offer my services to the benefit of this great country,” Rhys said.
 

“And how much is it I may reward you for those services you’ve provided today?”
 

“It is nothing,” Rhys said. “It is my pleasure.”
 

He continued waiting.
 

“No, indeed, I insist. It is the least I can do.”

“I am pleased to serve such a pleasant employer.”
 

“I must redeem you. Come now.”
 

“A day’s work, twelve hours, correspondence with a Chenjan minister,” Rhys said. “God willing, the price for such work is sixty notes.” It was a price ten percent higher than he believed she would pay.

“That is too much,” she said, and her expression soured further. “I could have had a boy from the Chenjan ghetto do the same, for far less.”

“And you would have gotten work of an equal quality to the price you paid. You will not find a boy familiar with Chenjan politics and the workings of the minds of her war ministers begging for bugs at the corner.”
 

“Yet I have had Chenjan men provide me with just such a service at half the cost.”

“Half? Then they are beggars, and scoundrels, and it is no surprise that they are no longer in your employ. Instead, you have found my services more than adequate for several seasons.”

“It is adequate only when it is fair. I’ll pay you forty, no more.”
 

“I do appreciate proper recompense for the valuable work I provide for Tirhan. If you wish my family and I to soil ourselves in the Chenjan ghetto, please pay me what you would a dockworker, and excuse the state of my soiled bisht,” he said, taking a handful of the gauzy outer robe he wore and holding it out to her. It was not, indeed, soiled, but it was a bit dusty. “I cannot ask for less than fifty-five.”

“I, too, have mouths to feed, and a public to serve. Do you wish to bankrupt my country? Fifty notes will fill the bellies of half the children in the Chenjan ghetto.”

“For fifty-two notes, I can feed my children and perhaps excuse the Minister’s insults as to my ethnicity.”

The Minister leaned back in her chair and regarded him. “You’re very Chenjan,” she said.
 

“It’s why you hired me,” he said.
 

The Minister pressed her hand to the upper left corner of her desk. Rhys felt the air fill with the soft chatter of wood mites. The mites in the desk vomited up the Minister’s pay tickets. She wrote out a receipt for fifty-two and handed it to him.

Rhys accepted the receipt and bowed his head.
 

“Peace be with you,” the Minister said, “and may God bless your house and family.” She raised her teacup.

“And yours,” Rhys said, “God is great.”

He walked out of the Minister’s cool office and into the grand hall of the Public Affairs Ministry. The building’s gilt-domed mosque was on the top floor, two floors above him. He had gone to prayer before his meeting with the Minister, and now he took the stairs back to street level. It was a long descent, but he preferred it to the lifts, which were encased in an opaqued glass shaft that made him nervous. He knew too much about how easily a magician could alter the instructions given to the burr bugs that drove the lift up and down the height of the building. The convenience wasn’t worth the risk.
 

As Rhys took the stairs, he passed several other magicians doing the same. Though Rhys had the ability to perceive another magician through look, manner, and gaze alone, magicians on official business in Tirhan were required to wear a yellow, ankle-length khameez with wide sleeves and greenish bisht over the top of it. The bisht was thin and gauzy, hemmed in yellow along the collar, and both garments were cool and light enough to make walking around in the heat bearable. Cool and modest as the garments were, however, they did mark him apart; removed him from the rest of the community. There were days, passing through the streets of Tirhan as people moved out of his path, that he wondered if this was how members of the First Families of Nasheen felt when they descended from the hilltops to mingle with the common folk. Tirhan was notoriously short on magicians and shape shifters, and their genetics and breeding programs had been working on a solution to their dearth of talented individuals for decades. It also meant their immigration policies were extremely favorable toward magicians and shape shifters, regardless of nationality. That had been a blessing six years before when he crossed the border.

Rhys walked across the cool marble inlay of the foyer and out the wide archway that opened onto the street. He passed through a low-res organic filter that kept out the heat and stepped onto the palm-lined pedestrian way. Bakkies weren’t permitted within the city center, so Rhys had to walk to the edge of the center to catch a taxi. Above him, trains crawled along a suspended rail, spitting red beetle and roach casings from the back end. The trains were good for getting around inside the city and out to the factories, but Rhys lived in the suburbs. His wages were comfortable enough that he could afford a taxi.
 

As he walked, clerks, officials, and street cleaners and sweepers stepped out of his way. He passed the big tiered marble fountains and grassy knolls of the park at the city center. In the middle of the fountain stood a stone sculpture of a robed, veiled magician, her hand reaching toward the sky. Water cascaded from her palm and sloshed over the tiers below. Each slab was adorned with gold and silver gilt stone beetles and dragonflies, thorn bugs and owl flies. Stone dogs, foxes, ravens, and parrots crowded around the lip of the fountain. They had been coated with a skein of flesh beetles, so they appeared to shift and move.
 

Rhys had never liked the fountain. In Chenja, human representations presented as public art were banned. In Nasheen, they were merely discouraged. Idols left on display encouraged the worship of idols. Rhys often worried to see men and women approach the fountain and toss stones into the water as tokens in return for wishes granted, as if offering up prayers to… magicians. He supposed it was one more alien Tirhani gesture he would never get used to. Tirhan had grown up short on magicians. That idea was foreign enough.
 

Rhys lined up for a taxi at the edge of the center. The porter directing traffic insisted he come to the front of the line. Rhys no longer protested such treatment. The first few times he insisted on waiting in line—at the taxi ranks, at a restaurant, while out with his wife at a local art gallery—the porter, the clerks, and all of those waiting in line had grown anxious and expressed their concern—and later, outrage—at his refusal of their courtesy, particularly after they heard his Chenjan accent. Tirhanis would not have foreigners calling them impolite.
 

He stepped into the front passenger seat of the taxi, and four other men squeezed into the seat in the back. The driver refused a fifth who wanted to sit between him and Rhys.
 

“I am escorting a magician!” the driver yelled, and shut the door.
 

The driver was Rhys’s age, probably in his early thirties, and he appeared to have been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard for some time. It had grown in in patches. He kept it short, which eased the contrast between beard and hairless cheek.
 

The men in the back wore white khameezes, aghals, and sandals, and from the look of their manicured nails and neat beards, they were probably lower-level assistants or officials working in the financial district. They could have, perhaps, been lawyers or businessmen, but they seemed too young to have reached such heights, and interns would not have had the cash for a taxi fare.
 

The driver slowed the taxi as the traffic ahead of them came to a halt. Rhys looked out the window. He saw a toppled rickshaw thirty meters up the road. He closed his eyes and searched for a local swarm of wasps to sniff out the disturbance, but could sense none nearby. He gave up and opened his eyes.
 

“Pardon, Yah,” the skinny man in the middle said, and leaned forward. Yah, or Yahni, was the polite prefix to a magician’s name across Umayma, an old term dating back to the days when bel dames policed the world.

But Rhys had never been certified as a magician. The title was not earned, just assumed when he wore the robes.
 

Rhys did not correct him.
 

“You are married, yes?” the man asked.
 

“I am,” Rhys said. He wore a silver ring on each of his ring fingers, the left to symbolize his engagement, the right to confirm his marriage.
 

“And how is it you drew this woman’s interest? Was it that you were a magician?”

Rhys’s wife was Chenjan, but she had been raised in Tirhan. He had had to learn his courting behaviors whole cloth. Not that he had much experience in courting before he came to Tirhan.
 

“It did help that I was a magician,” he said.
 

The men nodded seriously.
 

They got off at the next street. Rhys and the taxi driver rode the rest of the way in silence. Just outside the hybrid oak park at the edge of Rhys’s district, the driver came to a halt.

Rhys stepped out. “What shall I give you?” he asked.
 

“Praise be, it’s an honor to ferry a magician.”

“From the city center to the grove is generally a note and a half. Is this agreeable?”

“A note and a half? Do you wish to see me starve?”

“I am a fair man, not a fool.”

They haggled. Rhys paid the driver a note sixty-five. He took the shortcut through the grove. It smelled of lemons and loam and the tangy sap of the hybrids. Bugs swarmed the treetops, none of them virulent. Clouds of wasps patrolled the streets, tailored to track and record the movements of nonresidents. At the end of the grove, he stepped out onto his street.