Singer from the Sea (13 page)

The Duchess of Bellser-Bar was on Genevieve’s other side, a tall, voluptuous women with smooth black hair twisted into a complicated bun at the nape of her neck and creamy skin like thick matte velvet on which her separate features stood out as though painted: dark feathered eyes, dark swooping brows, scarlet recurved lips. Before Genevieve could ask about the talking fish, she spoke in a throaty, amused voice, saying:

“Don’t listen to Tansy, my dear. His province knows only Havenpool and its fresh-water fish, but for salt-water fish, you must ask someone from my province of Merdune. We call all those Sealand people puddle jumpers, don’t you know?”

“Oh, now, Alicia,” said Prince Thumsort.

“Oh, now, Tansy,” she retorted with a laugh. “Don’t bore the girl to death with fish. Tell her about your son Edoard. That’s what girls like hearing about. Young men.” And she leered at Genevieve, a look of enormous and totally spurious complicity.

“That’s him,” the Prince retorted, pointing vaguely with his elbow. “Halfway down on your left. The one in the wine-colored coat, with the puffy front to his shirt. I can’t see why the young ones like those puffy fronts. Always dropping food on them.” And the Prince subsided into his soup.

“Duke Edoard is perfectly charming,” murmured the Duchess. “He is third in line of succession, after Yugh Delganor and his father.”

“What is he Duke of?” asked Genevieve.

“Not much so long as Thumsort is alive, though he dances beautifully, and he sings in a supercilious way that
all the young ladies find absorbing. Shall you be absorbed?”

Genevieve smiled. “I doubt it, Your Grace, though if it is customary, I shall try.”

“So do I doubt it, looking at you. Not the usual thing at all, are you?”

“What is the usual thing, Your Grace?”

“Please, don’t Your Grace me. Call me Alicia. And I shall call you Genevieve. No, it’s quite all right, don’t blush. You are the daughter of a Duke, just as I am, though I rather gave the rank away for a time. The fact I eventually married another Duke, or one married me, is just part of the clutter. I read books, so I know it’s clutter. Other worlds have not retained all these titles and castes, and they seem to get along quite well.”

She took a mouthful of soup, nodding at Genevieve to do the same. “You must keep eating, dear. Little nibbles, little spoonfuls, so your mouth won’t be too full if someone asks a question, but always a tiny bit. Otherwise the whole dinner will be over, and you’ll have had nothing. Now, the usual thing with girls is that they are rather silly.”

“Mrs. Blessingham tries very hard to keep us from being silly,” murmured Genevieve. “She says even though our roles are somewhat restrictive, we must not compensate by dramatizing ourselves, for there is nothing we can experience that generations of women before us have not experienced; nothing is new, not our lusts, not our hopes, not even our despair. She says that with few exceptions, nothing is as tragic as it seems, nor is anything quite as joyous as we dream it will be, and of all disasters, romantic notions are responsible for most.”

“Dreadful to have one’s little excesses smoothed away so uniformly,” murmured the Duchess with a little smile. “Smile, dear. Appear to be enjoying yourself, or your papa will worry. And don’t be offended with me. I have raised four girls myself; two of my own, Sybil and Lyndafal, and two that Gardagger had by his first wife. Such a tragedy. Gardagger and his first wife went on a tour, you know, shortly after their son was born, and she fell ill of the batfly fever and died! All three of his children were
only babies when he married me. Luckily, they were malleable. I quite liked his girls, though they both died young, as did my Sybil.” She took several more spoonfuls of soup and a bit of bread. “Your Mrs. Blessingham sounds formidable.”

“I considered her so at first, but she was a good friend,” said Genevieve. “I looked forward to several more years in her company.”

“But?”

“But … Father wanted me to come to court. Particularly inasmuch as I was invited to do so by Yugh Delganor.”

A shadow crossed the Duchess’s face. “The Prince of Havenor? Now, in what capacity did the heir offer such an invitation?”

Startled, Genevieve looked up to see the scarlet lips twist ever so slightly, as though the Duchess had tasted something sour. She said, “I was told it was the Lord Paramount who decided whether individuals were allowed at court, that the heir merely expressed the Lord Para-mount’s wishes.”

“Interesting,” commented the Duchess. “Very interesting. Well, here are the footmen, bringing in our fish. Now we will see if Tansy knows as much as he thinks he does.”

At the other end of the table, the Marshal was attempting conversation with the Prince, Yugh Delganor, who sat at his right.

“I hear from many sources that you will shortly be going on a mission for the Lord Paramount.”

“From many sources?” The Prince frowned. “The mission is not sufficiently advanced to be talked of at all.”

“Forgive me if I have transgressed,” murmured the Marshal, falling back on the delicately deferential manner he had perfected many years ago as a junior officer. “I assumed it was a matter of public knowledge.”

“Well, Count Farmoor knows of it,” cried the Countess Inelda, who sat across from the Prince. “He tells me the Prince is going to Mahahm so we won’t all die of batfly fever.”

“The Count is correct to say I will go,” said the Prince.
“Though the detail, much less the outcome, of our visit is far from sure. While I prefer not discussing matters that are still so very undecided, I suppose it does no harm to acknowledge that we intend to approach the Shah of Mahahm-Qum in an effort to increase our imports of P’naki.”

“Mahahm has a monopoly on P’naki, does it not?” asked Aufors Leys, who sat beside the Countess Inelda.

“One we hope to find some way around. Mahahm’s sole export is P’naki, and the revenue from the sale supplies them with virtually all their necessities. Little food is grown there. Almost no fiber, except wool from the sheep that graze on seaweed washed up by the tides. The Mahahmbi have religious proscriptions against many things we would consider essential, such as wine and good food and various comforts. They have, perhaps, made a virtue of necessity since they have no way to pay for luxuries.”

“The entire population of the desert would simply starve and go naked if it couldn’t trade in P’naki,” said the Countess. “Or so says my husband.”

The Prince nodded judiciously. “We need the P’naki, of course, to control the batfly fevers, and while we import all of it we can get, that amount is just enough for the current population of our riparian areas where the flies breed. Though our total population remains level, in accordance with the covenants, people are always moving about. At one time they left the rivers to go up the mountains, now they are coming down from the mountains to settle along the rivers. If we are to keep the fevers at bay, we need more P’naki.”

“I should think Mahahm would be glad to increase exports,” said Aufors Leys.

“On the contrary.” The Prince shook his head with an expression of judicious concern. “The Mahahmbi tell us they can’t produce more than they do now, that we’ll just have to get along with what they give us.”

“Can’t the stuff be synthesized?” asked the Marshal.

The Countess shook her head, making her long cylindrical curls swing to and fro, like chimes. “Count Farmoor says perhaps it could be, on any technological world, but
not here. Or, I should say, not economically. Only at astronomical cost, in fact. So he says.”

The Prince nodded agreement. “Since we’re the only planet affected by batfly fevers, the market offers little financial incentives to off-world manufacturers.”

The Marshal asked, “The stuff is herbal, isn’t it? What growth is it made from?”

The Prince frowned. “We have no way of knowing whether it is herbal or some animal by-product or some combination of both. It comes, so I’ve been informed, from the desert, but the Mahahmbi consider the desert to be sacred and foreigners aren’t allowed into it. They would be furious if we attempted to find out the details.”

“From what Daviger says, they’re always furious,” commented the Countess. “But I’m sure you’ll calm them down, Your Royal Highness.” She gave him a smile of guileful sweetness.

The Prince ignored the smile, responding with a ponderous nod. “I shall make that effort. At any rate, the Lord Paramount hopes it does come from vegetation of some kind and that we can study the way the thing grows and obtain seeds or scions which we can grow here on Haven, though our experts are not sanguine about the possibility. We have no desert, and it may grow only in the desert.”

“Also, the Mahahmbi may not want to lose the profit they make by having a monopoly,” remarked the Marshal.

“We’re prepared to pay a generous royalty for it, and if we can prove they’ll make more money letting us do it that way, they should accept—”

“And if we can’t,” interrupted the Countess, “We can expect the fevers to go right on killing our sweet children …” She sighed dramatically.

The rest of the conversation at the Marshal’s end of the table, though continuous, was unremarkable, while at Genevieve’s end the Duchess focused the talk largely upon the royal greenhouses, which she invited Genevieve to visit with her during the coming week. After dinner, Genevieve spoke with Duke Edoard, who took her hand, refused to release it, and invited her to attend the next concert of the Royal Orchestra.

“I will need to see what plans my father has made,
Your Grace. And speaking of fathers, I much enjoyed my dinner table conversation with yours.”

He smiled. “Your expression of pleasure is polite but unlikely to be fully sincere,” he said. “Father usually talks either about the batfly problem or about fish.”

“I know little about the batfly problem, but fish can be interesting,” she said with a smile.

“Ocean fish, perhaps,” he commented, looking across her shoulder at someone else, and thereby missing the fact that his words had sent her somewhere else.

She saw a heaving deck, tilted toward a troubled sea, people actually in the sea, all trying desperately to do something with a portal in the deck, to open it or close it, and all around in the sea was a sound … a sound she thought she had heard before …

Then she was back, bowing herself away into a corner where she could catch her breath. Aufors was beside her at once, whispering, “What’s the matter, Jenny? Did that idiot say something to upset you? You’re pale. You look frightened.”

“It’s nothing.” She laughed. “Sometimes I get a little breathless in crowds, that’s all.” Though of course it wasn’t all. Until now, whenever this happened, she had had Mrs. Blessingham to run to, thereby removing—or perhaps only sharing—the curse of foreknowledge. Now she had no one. Certainly not the Marshal, who would be offended and insist upon having her looked over by doctors. Nor Della who, though loyal, would tell her husband everything, and he, in turn, would tell everyone else he met. Aufors? No. She didn’t want him to think her … odd. And this “talent” of hers was odd, very, very odd.

In a moment, she was herself again. In a moment she decided it was not foreknowledge she had had, but a vision of something that had already happened, maybe something she had read about, a memory that had been elicited by something Edoard had said.

Aufors sat down beside her. She blinked several times and tried to come up with a neutral topic of conversation. “What did you all talk about at your end of the table?” was the best she could do.

He recounted the conversation concerning P’naki, meantime
keeping a close watch on her, seeing the color gradually come back into her cheeks, and with the color, awareness of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing.

She murmured, “I’d like to hear the rest of it later, Aufors, for father is giving me a very strange look.”

Aufors had the good sense not to look in the direction Genevieve had. He rose, bowed, and took himself away to be replaced almost immediately by the Duchess.

“What happened to you?” she asked without preamble. “You turned white as milk. Did that brat of Tansy’s say something rude?”

“No.” Genevieve shook her head, smiling. “No, he invited me to go to the concert as his guest, and then … I had this moment’s breathlessness. All this is too much excitement for one who was a schoolgirl up until a few days ago.”

“My mother had them, those breathless moments.” The Duchess took Genevieve’s elbow in her hand and turned her toward the corner where they stood, thus hiding her face from the room at large. “She would turn pale, as you are now, and stare off into the distance, saying she had seen a vision of a time or place not present. Her sister, my aunt, claimed it was all pretense, but my grandmother believed her as she, too, was said to have such spells. My daughter Lyndafal, has inherited the trait, though not I. Seemingly it skipped a generation. We are kinfolk, you know, Genevieve. My mother was related to your mother through a common ancestress back a few generations, Lady Stephanie, foster daughter of Duke Fitful of Merdune, who made her Marchioness of Wallachy.” The Duchess cocked her head, as though expecting a reply.

Genevieve faltered, “You mean Queen Stephanie? The Dark Queen? I know nothing about her except that her daughters and their daughters have shared her dark skin and eyes and nose. Their portraits hang in the great hall at Langmarsh House.”

“I know little about her myself. There was something most mysterious about her; she was a complete unknown, no family at all, but as a child she came to the attention of the Duke, he adopted her, and she became the wife of
the Lord Paramount. Among the many children she bore him—almost all girls—were twin daughters, one of whom was Bricia, my great-grandmother, and the other was Mercia, your many times great-great-grandmother. Stephanie wrote a strange little book, a collection of tales that she called a history. I have a copy at home. I tried to read it once, but it was terribly dull. There’s probably a copy in the library here, for the owner of the house was also Wal-lachian and quite a collector, so I’ve heard …”