Kalimpura (Green Universe) (30 page)

Unlike, say, me.

“I would go with you tomorrow and check these places some more.” It was an effort to keep the urgency out of my voice.

Mother Argai shrugged. “I cannot stop you. You might be covering yourself more, I am thinking.”

The blue robe, of course. I wished I had my old Neckbreaker mask, but if I improvised a veil, I might pass that way. Covering the face was not a Kalimpuri tradition, but there were enough women from Sind and the other provinces to the west who did so that it would not be so especially remarkable.

“I will be covered,” I promised her.

*   *   *

The next morning we slipped over the back wall before dawn. Together we found a teahouse and sat in the morning gloom until the brilliant tropical day had taken back the streets that, in truth, always belonged to the heat.

The bitter brew steamed in tiny cups painted with flowers and birds. A plate of salted pineapple stood between us, along with balls of rice and honey. I loved the smells but ate sparingly. Though I did not expect to fight today, I wanted to be prepared.

Besides, the knot in my gut would not have let so much food past in any case. And eating through the veil would be annoying at best.

Mother Argai spent quite some time watching me. Finally, whatever had been bubbling with her came to her lips. “You are not so much the hothead anymore, Green.”

I nodded, acknowledging her statement without committing myself to a reaction, or the words that tried to jump to my own lips.

“Someday you may be wise. You will always be strong.” One hand gripped her tea tight, and I realized for the first time that her fingers had grown wrinkled and were even becoming gnarled. Time’s arrow slew us all, no matter how lucky we might otherwise be. “Be fortunate awhile, and you will be a woman to follow.”

“I don’t want anyone to follow me,” I said truthfully.

“It is too late for that.”

At those words, we lapsed back into silence and waited for the streets to finish awakening so that we might carry on unremarked and unremarkable amid the endless crowds.

*   *   *

I’d managed to claim another pair of short knives from the cache Mother Argai brought back to the house the night before. Once they were in my possession, I’d spent some time throwing them in one of the unused rooms of the house. Some of the carved wooden screens would never be the same again, but I once more possessed weapons I’d actually be willing to cast aside or leave buried in an enemy’s guts. Truly, the god-blooded blade was an amazing artifact, but my fear of losing it was beginning to cripple my fighting style.

So today I moved through the streets wrapped in my slightly too loose leathers beneath my robe, the mundane short knives at each wrist, and the god-blooded knife in my thigh scabbard in place of the usual long blade I kept there. The entire affair, including the robe and veil, seemed heavy and hot, but I did not wish to pass unarmed through this city. Not with so many enemies. Even if I had a thousand friends, I had hundreds more who would kill me on sight. Any member of the Street Guild, just to start.

One of the charms of the Evenfire Gate was that it stood far from the Street Guild’s usual haunts. The western boundary of Kalimpura was as distant from the waterfront as any other corner of the city.

I had passed through those neighborhoods more than once, but these had never been my usual haunts, either. Walking there with Mother Argai, I had to revise my opinion of Kalimpura as a Selistani city. There were more foreigners here than down by the docks, many more. Quite a few of them were not particularly human.

Copper Downs had its pardines, and the rare, stranger folk who strayed in by ship or over the wild lands of the Stone Coast interior, but most people there were Petraeans. Even the migrants, such as the Selistani community gathered around Chowdry and the Tavernkeep’s place, were still a mere smattering among a large mass of pale faces.

Likewise the Kalimpuri waterfronts, where crews from dozens of lands might meet and mix, pass between ships, or drink and fight in the waterfront taverns. Few of them remained much longer than required to work another passage. Their needs were seen to by Kalimpuri who spoke more than one language, or sometimes just the language of money.

Here, though … It was a bazaar of people and their practices. The Sindu, of whom I was making a pretense of being one myself, were numerous, but they seemed for the most part to be Kalimpuri with an odd taste in clothes. There were more of the very short men in red silk, passing intent on errands, a number of them with those long metal skewers that I realized could be used as a pike or other weapon, even against a man ahorse. Other hues of skin and hair and eye presented themselves, most of which I could not name by origin or country.

More different were the three women I saw with rough-studded skin, like crocodile leather but almost lavender. Their eyes were narrow and gold with barred pupils, and each wore silver chains between their left hand and their neck, though their clothes were rich as any spice merchant’s.

Slaves? Divine commandment? Marriage jewelry? I would never know.

And stranger things than those women shambled through this part of the city. I found myself wishing I’d been more aware of the district around the Evenfire Gate when I was living in the temple as a Blade Aspirant. I might have passed many fascinating hours here.

Likewise of interest were the shop goods, and even the shops themselves. I trailed Mother Argai at a bit of a distance with both of us on the lookout for places where a giant of a man with pepper-red skin might be found. That meant I was looking, truly looking, at what I passed.

When one walks through a city, most of what one sees soon becomes something of a blur. This counting house here looks much like the next customs broker’s office. Bakeries and tea shops blend together. Spice markets and root markets are both full of stalls, wagons, shouting merchants, and their racing boy assistants. So you tend to see things in groups. It’s easy to pass over the details, except for the ones your own training and experience have focused you on.

In that sense, I am always looking for bowmen on rooftops, regardless of whether I feel threatened. Likewise the flash of a blade. Persons with their arms out from their body, as if carrying a weapon. People moving too fast. Or with too much intensity. Signs of violence, signs of danger.

I should imagine an ostler moves through the crowd noting the horses and mules. Their color and conformation would mean something to him. Likewise the height of each animal and its age, how it walks or stands, the yellowing of the teeth. To me those beasts are for the most part little more than mobile landscape, but to such a one as my imagined ostler, everything in traces or reins is a wealth of information.

So we each look with the eyes that we have been given by our lives. I for one have never been able to set that sight aside, nor do I particularly wish to. Noticing weapons has saved my life a number of times. Even to this day such practices are part of my ordinary experience.

That day, though, I was noticing people and their places. Oh, those places …

Some were almost familiar. A fruit stall is a fruit stall until you attend to what is being laid out for sale. In Copper Downs, I would expect to see at the least apples, pears, cherries, and plums, depending on the season, as well as a dozen varieties of berry. Here in Kalimpura, pineapples, mangoes, papayas, guavas, plantains, and bananas would be the more usual case. Furthermore, our growing seasons were nearly year-round.

But around the Evenfire Gate, I did not even have names for many of the fruits I saw. The cook in me wanted to stop and sample the waxy yellow gourdlike thing that resembled a nine-fingered hand. I wondered at the enormous fruits like giant, armored papayas covered with spiky bumps. Some I did recognize but only as rarities in my experience—pale fleshed lychees like overgrown strawberries fallen on hard times, for example. The scents were a barrage of the curious and the strange.

I could have spent a productive hour there with a small knife and a good cloth, tasting. The chutneys and sauces and cold plates that would come from such an expedition tantalized me.

The vegetable stands were just the same. Crowded walls of leafy greens I could not identify rose in bruised array as if defending the squirmy, fine-haired roots piled behind them. Long, purple stems like giant radishes reeked in so fine a fashion that I knew they must cook down to some other scent entirely. Cheerful peppers of dozens of different sizes and shapes dangled in strings or glowered in tiny baskets.

And the smells of those …

The fresh food had its own sharp signifiers. The cooked food being sold from carts and little trays and baskets and sometimes from outstretched hands bore the scent of more cuisines than I could name. I might have gained five pounds of weight that day if I’d allowed myself to stop and sample along the way.

The meat stalls were a bit stranger. Cages of future meals barked, mewed, hissed, clucked, and whirred. Eyes ranging from tiny compound jewels to great, slow blue plates blinked at me from behind bamboo weavings or wire meshes. Disinterested goat heads stared down from hooks, while the beaks of a dozen kinds of fowl lay silent on chopping blocks. Oh, the meats.

The wonders were found not just among the food, either. Everything was sold here that one might expect to find in a caravan marketplace. Goods I had no notion of lay in piles with their straps or buckles or woven cords. Leatherworkers bent industriously at their tasks next to stalls where a large animal might be shod or a small one collared. Painters and prayer-men and arbogasters mixed shoulders with the hungry and the hunted and the simply curious.

It was a glorious place.

I wondered how a Red Man would fit in here.

Which of the food stalls might he eat from? I had no notion of what foodstuffs could be found in the Fire Lakes where his kind were said to hail from. It sounded like a district of thorns and rocks from both the name and the reputation.

If Firesetter were here, someone sold him his dinner. No one hunted their own food in a city, and only the wealthy had gardens enough to pluck the harvest for their table.

Eels writhed in a wooden bucket as I passed a fishmonger’s stall. That seemed an oddity to me this far from the waterfront, but I paused and looked behind his table to see an open-fronted shed filled with troughs and tanks.

Here was a farmer of sorts, even in the midst of the city. Did my Red Man pluck these narrow, curious fish from their enclosing water and eat them whole?

Rocks and thorns seemed more likely. That in turn spoke to me of small, hard fruits and lean game hunted over long distances. Not the rich lushness of our local ingredients here in Kalimpura. Nor the thin-sliced mixtures of Hanchu cooking, where chronic scarcity had been transformed into a sort of gustatory art.

Someone here must sell narrow strips of sliced cactus and dried snake meat and other such desert fare. Of course, though I did not know it at the time, my Red Man ate none of that. He like me had been raised among strangers far from home, and found his comforts in ways that would have seemed alien to his own kin.

In any case, I looked. And looked. And looked.

Mother Argai slowed and let me drift to her side in a shaded little nook by the city wall. The roads in this end of Kalimpura tended to indifferent paving largely consisting of mud and muck punctuated by the occasional lonely cobble. She’d found a spot slightly built up, and not currently occupied by either a beggar or a merchant. That suggested to me that we were now standing on a trash heap, but as a longtime sewer runner, I did not find this thought disturbing. Neither did I mind the smell, though other women might have quailed at it.

The wall here had lost some of its plastering. Gritty stone beneath had been exposed. Weeds and tiny flowers struggled from the cracks in the masonry, and some inept, badly spelled graffiti had been left there for public edification.

All in all, a comfortable enough spot, and safely anonymous for a few moments at least. I squatted on my heels in the shade of the wall and wished I’d brought a waterskin.

Peering up at Mother Argai, I asked, “How do you find anything here?”

“You look.” She glanced along the street. “The gate itself is half a dozen rods farther up. Yesterday I passed through five taverns and never left sight of it.”

I looked where she had. The structures here tended to be either large old stables and coaching inns—though surely they called them caravanserais here—that had been divided and subdivided into brawling little knots of business and residence and the Lily Goddess only knew what else; or else they were small sheds and shacks standing wall-to-wall in any patch of formerly open ground.

It was all use and reuse of the buildings of a city. The ingenuity of the poor was something I’d observed in Copper Downs. It was no less on display here.

Ingenuity or not, there was nothing in sight that I would have identified as a tavern.

“I do not mean to sound foolish,” I began.

Mother Argai chuckled, waving me to silence, then pointing. “See those poles there. With the checkered awning…”

What looked like an entire bolt of Hanchu trade fabric sagged over a motley collection of chairs and benches that I’d taken for a used furniture broker’s stock-in-trade.
Very
used furniture, at that. A handful of men stood or sat in the dubious shade provided by the cloth.

No women, but then there were not so many women visible here near the Evenfire Gate in any case.

“That is a tavern?” I said, questioning. “They usually appear somewhat … different.”

“You drink along waterfronts, Green, and have an unhealthy affinity for sailors.”

I could have argued that second point, perhaps severely, but she was certainly correct about my relationship to waterfronts. My life has ever been about coming and going. Belonging was another matter entirely.

“Yes. To me, taverns have thick walls and shuttered windows and quiet wood-floored rooms.” A moment later, I added, “And perhaps upper storeys, or a stableyard out back.”