Neveryona (52 page)

‘Nor does anyone here care to talk about it,’ said the earl.

‘Is that what they teach you in the north is proper dinner conversation?’ Tritty asked. ‘Really. You know,’ she turned back to Pryn, ‘Queen Olin, whom you were discussing with my husband, was often a guest here – at least in his Lordship’s father’s day.’ On her couch, she turned to the earl. ‘Or was it your father’s father’s?’

‘You know, I was never really sure.’ The earl reached from his couch to a tray, passing in the hands of a slave, piled with sliced and peeled kiwis, a fruit of which Pryn
had never even heard before that evening. ‘It
is
hard to keep the past organized. And when the past is disorganized, the present is … well, as you see it: all barbaric splendor – and misery. But as long as I can keep clear the principles by which the present orders itself, I suppose that’s why I stay one of the most powerful of the remaining, real barbarian princes – “Earl” is the title the northern aristocracy has granted us. But the fine points of such terminology have never troubled me.’

Lying on her back, Petal reached for unseen heights with, alternately, toes and fingers.

‘My father is prince of one of the Seven Clans.’ Sitting on the floor by her own couch, Lavik gently shook the baby’s foot. ‘The Dragon Clan, actually.’

Suddenly Petal, with a great rock,
almost
turned over.

‘ – which hasn’t existed
as
a clan,’ Inige added from his own couch, ‘for more than a hundred years … which, I suspect, is what they’ve been saying in these parts for at least
five
hundred.’ He dropped a handful of tiny bird bones he’d collected in his palm into a dish on the carpet with all the other bird bones. ‘But that’s the way in a world without history. And that, as the lawyers in the north with whom I shall go back to study in the fall all tell me, is what makes us, here
in
the south, barbarians!’ He laughed.

So did the others.

Pryn wondered how one got to study with a lawyer – and wiped her fingers, which she could not bring herself to suck as they did of all the various food juices, on the brocade over the edge of the couch she had been given. For the third time she caught Ardra staring with a gaze that could as easily have masked astonishment as desire or loathing. Certainly she could see nothing wrong with her wipings, but within the blank look from the adopted son (a look that the others might simply have been too polite for), it was too easy to inscribe, along with desire
in its positive or negative form, starkest disapproval. Her hand went back to her stomach, then behind her neck to scratch at the chain, then to her hip, then to the couch edge again – as if to work loose from the compass of his wide, wet eyes.

Her other elbow, propped on the embroidered bolster, was getting sore. Pryn shifted her position and wondered what she might eat now.

‘But we’re at it again.’ From her couch, Tritty ladled dark gravy over an impressive roast on a tray held by a young, white-collared woman with very wide shoulders, who took the meat off to a side table where an older man, with the same white collar, waited, carving knives poised i want to know where our guest has been, what
she’s
seen, what’s fascinated her most on
her
travels!’

‘Yes,’ Jenta said. ‘Where have you been? What have you done?’

‘What has fascinated you about it?’ Lavik pulled the infant into her lap; the little creature curled up, closed her eyes, and began an infantile snore.

Pryn pushed herself further up, suffused again with pride at being the focus of such a gathering. ‘What I have been fascinated most by, in all my travels – indeed, what I began my travels with, caught up between its beating wings and flung out under the sun by it, to land wherever I might and make my way from there with only its chance trajectory for guide – indeed, what I love to observe, to gaze down into and explore its subterranean workings, is … power!’

The earl’s family listened, smiling – approving, Pryn decided.

‘It’s been an education,’ she went on, ‘finding the various places where it …
writes
– ’ she could think of no other word – ‘its passage, its process, its however fleeting presence.’

‘And where,’ Jenta asked from his side of the room, ‘have you been observing all this power?’

‘All over!’ Pryn declared. ‘It’s inscribed as clearly in the stone carvings above your mantel there – where some person must have hammered and pounded and chipped the stone to chisel it to shape – as it is in Old Rorkar’s oldest – ’ she started to say ‘slave bench,’ but because a slave passed between them, said, ‘beer barrel, whose staves someone must have shaved down and whose edges someone must have pitched together and whose bindings someone must have tied on with wet rope so that it would shrink dry!’ She looked about again, wondering if, indeed, the barrel makers here were the same women who made rope-bound barrels in fabled Ellamon. ‘Where I got a chance to observe it most closely, I think, was in the city.’ (The expectant smiles of her country listeners did not change.) ‘In Kolhari. There I fought along with the Liberator against the intrigues and conspiracies that wove about his efforts to free all the slaves of Nevèrÿon.’ There, she’d said it!

‘Free the slaves?’ Tritty asked. ‘Well, all of us have had our problems with the institution. Between the time I was at court and the time Lavik went, they’ve forbidden slaves there. And I thoroughly approve – there’s just no need for them in the city.’ Tritty nodded to one of the white-collared servers who passed among the couches again with another platter of fruit, on whose red and purple rinds the lamplight slid and slipped. ‘But you say
all
the slaves of Nevèrÿon? Someone is actually lobbying for their freedom? Of course it’s
not
the same situation in the country. Still, it sounds like an advance.’

‘Tritty – ’ Pryn laughed – ‘someone is fighting for it tooth and nail! He himself wears an iron slave collar and has sworn not to remove it till slavery in Nevèrÿon is gone forever. I’ve seen plots of unbelievable insidiousness launched against him! I’ve seen more blood spilled in his
cause in a day than, indeed, I’ve ever seen spilled in my life!’

‘He sounds like a powerful man.’ Inige smiled in a way that, for a moment, made Pryn sure that in his northern law study he’d learned more of the Liberator than she could ever know.

‘He’s called Gorgik, and his name makes people pause in the poorest alleys and the wealthiest homes throughout Kolhari.’

‘I’m only surprised,’ the earl said, ‘that we’ve never heard of him here. We had guests from Kolhari only days ago; he wasn’t mentioned.’

‘Oh, he
is
a powerful man,’ Pryn said. ‘When I left, he’d at last secured an audience with one of the Empress’s own ministers to plead his cause!’

It was Inige’s chuckle that broke the silence. ‘You know, the Empress has over a dozen ministers, advisers, viziers, and vizerines. All day every day, groups and individuals meet and confer with all of them, pleading, begging, demanding, cajoling, sometimes trying to bribe, sometimes trying to reason. Most such petitions, as you must know, are of necessity refused. To receive such an audience does not necessarily mark your man as powerful – if anything, the fact that he has only just received such an audience suggests he is among the
least
powerful of that city’s numerous players in the game of magic and time.’

‘Oh, I don’t think – ’ Pryn paused. ‘But that was not all. I met an important merchant woman with a great home in the suburb of Sallese. She was helping finance the construction of Kolhari’s New Market, as well as building a whole set of warehouses for – ’

Lavik’s laughter was louder than Inige’s chuckle. ‘But nobody who’s anybody lives in – ’ Lavik stopped, looking around to catch her parents’ reproving gaze. She cuddled her sleeping child a little closer, still smiling.

‘I think – ’ Inige said – ‘what my sister was trying, in her way, to say is that it’s a little surprising for us to hear of a truly powerful personage living in such a neighborhood. That’s not the usual sign by which power can be read from an account of a person’s – ’

‘Neighborhoods
do
change – ’ Tritty suggested.

‘What,’ Inige said over his stepmother, ‘is this powerful … merchant, you say? What is this merchant’s name? Most of the real power in Kolhari resides either at court or in homes of royalty in the suburb of Neveryóna,’

‘She lives right at the
edge
of Neveryóna,’ Pryn said.

‘No,’ Tritty muttered, ‘that isn’t the best part of the neighborhood …’

‘ – and she really
is
rich. Her name is Madame Keyne.’

‘Ah, a Madame Keyne?’ Tritty said. Then: ‘Really, that kind of snideness from my stepdaughter is most unseemly. And yet it’s no secret to us, so while you are a guest in our house it shouldn’t be kept from you. We who move in court circles have always tended to consider Sallese a neighborhood of pretentious tradesmen and vulgar commercial interests, people who would ape and mimic the accoutrements of power, mystifying and declaring magic those elements that were beyond them or that they simply did not understand.’

‘Belham made her fountains …’ Pryn said, hesitantly.

‘He also lived in your aunt’s shack,’ the earl said, is there a way to put this delicately? Belham was a brilliant man. But the careers of the brilliant are not always rising flights.’

‘Myself,’ Jenta said, ‘I always thought that from the way we went on about the vulgarities of Sallese – at least back when I was at court, or visiting Neveryóna – meant there was something going on there.’

‘Now,’ the earl said, ‘my eldest son speaks the truth.’ He gave a wise nod (the exact nature of whose wisdom Pryn did not quite follow, as she had decided on a mango
and had found that a bite taken from one direction was deliciously juicy, while a bite from another made it all string and pith), ‘I told you, we had guests here just recently from Kolhari, and there, so said our guests, the talk is indeed of many great, far-reaching projects. And there was, from time to time, even in these halls, mention that some of the better-connected Sallese residents have joined their moneys with some of our truly powerful friends in Neveryóna – ’

‘Our friends,’ Ardra said from where he’d moved again to the bottom of the steps, ‘don’t like it, either.’

There was talk, I believe – ’ the earl pondered a moment – ‘of a project that will take some ten years to complete, which would involve doubling the length of the Kolhari waterfront, rebuilding it dock by dock. Was your Madame Keyne one of the tradesmen who’d agreed to lend some support to this great undertaking?’

‘Oh, no – ’ Pryn began. ‘At least I don’t
know
if she was. She never mentioned it.’

‘There was also some talk, as I recall, about another project to repave the entire southern road that runs from Kolhari to the Garth and beyond.’ Inige spooned up some spiced mush from a glimmering tureen, which Pryn had first declined but was now having second thoughts about – though the slave carrying it did not seem inclined to give her a second chance. (How
did
one ask?) They want to expand it along its whole length to something like three times its present width till it’s as wide in the north as it used to be at this end in the heyday of Neveryóna – our Neveryóna, that is. Then Rorkar and the rest can export their goods to Kolhari with ease. The smugglers who run their tiny amounts up and down would be driven out of operation, and both import and export for the whole south could be reorganized along real profit lines. There
were
some Sallese people involved in this project, too – although we’re talking about an undertaking whose completion
time is estimated at twenty years. Was one of them perhaps your Madame Keyne?’

‘I don’t …’ Pryn was uneasy. ‘I don’t
think
so. She never spoke of it.’

Lavik made a cooing grimace over the baby, now asleep in the crook of her knee. She looked up. ‘Of course there are some truly powerful merchants, or what have you, in Sallese. And as much as it irks us, we’re forced to hear their names too. But they are the people who are involved in enterprises that will change the shape of Kolhari, and thus the future of Nevèrÿon. They are the ones who are engaged in projects that might well
make
it reasonable to build one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets. And no doubt one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets will be built by one or ten or twenty-five canny, money-grubbing pot vendors run amok. But you mustn’t confuse that with power – with
real
power – any more than you let yourself confuse the notoriety of some radical upstart, wrangling a hearing from a court minister while friends and enemies both mumble that he may become a minister himself with the real power of court. Come.’ She hoisted the baby under a plump arm and pushed to one knee. Take a walk with me outside. We’ll be having cheeses and cordials in a few minutes. I always like a turn about the nearer gardens after I’ve eaten. And no matter what that old iron-bound harridan upstairs says, the evening air
is
good for the baby!’ Lavik pushed the edge of her couch with her free hand to stand.

‘Oh, can I carry her!’ Pryn cried, impelled as much by anxiety over the haphazard way Lavik lugged her drooping daughter as by a childhood conviction that babies were the warmest, sweetest, most wonderful things in the world – a conviction that had vanished, she’d noted, when she’d thought she might be having one but that, now she knew she wasn’t, had apparently returned.

‘Sure!’ Lavik extended the child, even more awkwardly.