The Grass King’s Concubine (6 page)

Nothing he had seen and done in his early years had prepared him for the Brass City. He had arrived one chill spring dawn, bumped and battered and sleepless from six days by post-carriage and cart and foot. The carrier had spilled the passengers, cold and dazed, into the chaos of Counting-House Square, to stand baffled and blinking in the maze of coaches and pony traps, fumes and horseshit, street vendors and clerks and labor marshals. Market cries vied for attention with the rattle of wheels over cobbles, the clang of temple bells and the stern low bass of the East Quarter Foundry engines. The air reeked with sulfur and sewage and rot. Jehan had stumbled into the crowd, kit bag over his shoulder, one hand pressed to his mouth and nose, bewildered under the assault, and promptly lost himself in the back streets and his purse to a pickpocket. “I’ve seen worse,” said his new captain when, at last, exhausted and reeling, Jehan presented himself at barracks. “At least you’ve still got your boots.” It had been months before he could sleep properly, ears bludgeoned hourly by bells, factory whistles, and the numb gray grind of machinery.

There was no official welcome. The army had its uses for him and handed him his duties, neatly printed in sharp black letters on medium-grade rag-pulp paper. His colleagues appraised him, nodded, and treated him at first neither better nor worse than any of the other young country officers who filled the lower ranks and sat, all elbows and embarrassment, in the drafty corners and at the worst tables in the mess. The Brass City did not love, nor was it lovable. At first, it frightened him, with its noise and dirt and relentless ragged poverty. He shuddered from its odors, its sounds, its rough hands and foul mouths. He wondered at the longer-serving officers, who came and went without any seeming awareness of the midden that surrounded them. “You’ll learn,” said the captain. “There are far worse things here than the grime.” The idea had appalled him. Yet less than a fortnight later, the heavy steam boiler that powered the looms of the Short Gutter Street cloth mill burst, spraying the workers with boiling water and white-hot shrapnel. Friends and family members crowded in to find their kin. The army’s job was not to assist them but to stand guard lest any desperate hand help itself to a bolt of almost-good cotton, a set of tools, enough splintered wood for a week’s fire, a handful of metal fragments to sell as scrap. The Brass City stank and screamed and polluted and cared nothing for anyone. You did not speak to your neighbor, lest he take advantage, steal your food, sell your children, seduce your spouse. Guildmasters and businessmen eyed one another suspiciously from their large houses, biting coins before accepting them. Foremen took everything they could, expected bribes and handed out work to favorites. On factory floors, in the dockyards and mill yards, warehouses and tenements, shops and cabarets and hovels, in every street and gutter, men cheated and stole and killed for half a brass sous or a mouthful of bread. Assigned as a subaltern to the most junior captain, Jehan’s duties were a mixture of boredom—answering letters, copying lists of orders and rules—and alarm, patrolling the docks and markets, finding and destroying illegal printing presses, breaking up
mobs and arresting troublemakers. He grew accustomed to offhand treatment in the mess and being spat at or cursed in the streets. The City Guard were there to keep the city dwellers under control, and that was all. There was nothing bold or honorable about that service.

He never got used to the poverty that haunted the back streets and gutters and workers’ districts, nor to the hunger and despair he saw in the faces of women and children. One day he found himself pocketing a handful of pamphlets seized from an underground press and reading them by the light of his tallow candle. It did not seem so huge a crime, to want a living wage and enough to eat.

The mill owners and ironmasters thought differently. And they paid his wages. It was not his place to criticize, only to obey and to uphold the way things were. It was not his place to question. But late at night he sometimes wondered where the honor was in what he did.

The City Guard was not supposed to think about honor. That was for the elite units who served in the Silver City. On the whole, the City Guard dealt only with the poor, the powerless, the unimportant. Escort duties were the exception. Though most of the important civic officers and merchants had their own armed and trained bodyguards and visiting nobles were usually attended by a unit of the elite Silver City Regiment, the Guard occasionally found themselves called upon to shepherd visiting country gentry or merchants from other cities. From the moment he received the orders to escort a Silver City lord and his niece to the oldest temples and a business, Jehan suspected a problem. Either this lord had offended someone better born or more influential than he, or he had something to hide. Presenting himself at the Silver Road Gate on a bright autumn morning, Jehan was alert for trouble.

The lord hid himself away in an old-fashioned dark carriage, conveying his directions via the coachman on the box. The crest painted on the carriage doors was small, marked with a single bar. His name, according to Jehan’s orders, was Monsieur Pèlerin des Puiz, which rang faint
bells in Jehan’s memory, though he could not recall anything specific. A recent elevation to the nobility, most probably, and lifted thence by money, not blood. Jehan’s small troop cleared the way through the crowded streets, ignoring the hoots and insults of hawkers and apprentices. The lord kept his window shutters down as the small cavalcade rattled and pushed its way toward the Temple of the Flame, on the edge of the jewelers’ district.

That was one of the quieter parts of the city. Its artisans, by and large, made enough to get by and guarded places in their workshops jealously. As the press and mill that surrounded the gate subsided, a hand tugged up one of the shutters on the carriage, and a face looked out. Sandy skin and dark eyes: steppe blood there, more evidence of the mercantile origins of the family. Jehan’s own hands, resting on the neck of his mare, were two shades darker. The face—it was a young woman, presumably the niece—looked about eagerly, drinking in shop fronts and vendors, workers under their awnings and apprentices hurrying on errands. Someone spoke to her from within; she pulled her head back in, then reemerged with a veil drawn over her face. Country gentry, then, little different from his own family.

Except, of course, for degrees of wealth and depth of blood. Jehan’s elder brother would have insisted on both of those. Four years in the Brass City had convinced Jehan that wealth was the only difference that really counted. That was the opinion of the Flame priests, too, judging by the way they hastened out of their precincts to greet the visitors. The lord and his niece, trailed by a disapproving maid, were whisked inside by the head priest. Handing the reins of his horse to the senior of his men, Jehan followed them as they made their tour of court and hearth, shrine and hall and visitors’ rooms. The head priest talked; the lord listened and made measured, conventional responses. Several times the niece looked as though she had something to add; each time, her uncle looked at her, and she subsided. As they left—having made a significant donation—she looked back over her
shoulder at the hearth, and something in her expression spoke of disappointment or regret. It was much the same at the next temple and the next. She was searching for something, this girl, searching and not finding it. Well, if she was religious, she would learn soon enough that in the two cities the gods neither listened nor cared.

Their last stop was at a mill on the left bank of the river. Jehan expected the women to remain in the carriage after it parked in the forecourt: Such places were men’s business. But the niece was the first to step down from the carriage, ignoring the hand offered her by the coachman. The uncle followed, leaving the maid behind.

A middle-aged man bustled out of the main door, trying to smile through a face filled with worry. The manager, no doubt. He bowed to the lord and made as if he would kiss the niece’s hand. She looked startled, then held it out awkwardly.

“Sir, Mademoiselle, welcome…” His voice was thin and dusty. “We are delighted, of course, though I regret…I mean, with more warning, we…The books are laid out in my office, if you…”

“My niece was curious about the work you do here,” the lord said. “You can send the books at the usual time.”

“Ah, yes.” Some of the worry faded from the manager’s face, to be replaced by bafflement. “Of course, it’s an honor to show Mademoiselle, although the workshop is rather, erm, dusty.”

“I don’t mind dust,” the niece said. Under the veil, Jehan could see the line of her jaw, set firm. “We have enough mud at home. Dust won’t bother me.”

The manager shuffled his feet. “Perhaps a little refreshment first…”

“No, thank you.” The lord took his niece’s elbow. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“Of course.” The manager made a sign to someone within the doors. “I should warn you, though that the, er, the young ladies who work on the main floor are somewhat, erm, rough in their ways, and…”

The lord nodded. “I did tell you, Aude. Perhaps…”

“I won’t faint.” There was a definite edge to the niece’s voice. “And you said I could see.”

“Very well.” The lord sounded more resigned than angered. He beckoned to Jehan. “Perhaps you should accompany us, Lieutenant.”

“Certainly, Monseigneur.” That faint memory teased at the fringes of Jehan’s mind again. Something about a letter?

A dull thudding reverberated from within the building; as they made their way inside, it grew louder. The manager led them down a long tiled hallway and up a wide flight of stairs. “The main area is on the ground floor, of course, but you will have a better view from the gallery.” He led them down another, shorter corridor toward a set of double doors. A regular vibration ran through the floorboards, shivering up through the worn soles of Jehan’s boots. The lord frowned. The manager went on, hurriedly, “The noise is unpleasant, I regret.” He opened the doors, and the thud became a thunder.

A wide room stretched out below them, lit by tall dirty windows in the side walls. Row upon row of dark iron machines marched down its length, each festooned with tight lines of thread. Women in grayish aprons leaned over them, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, hair tucked up under rough caps and headscarves. Shuttles plowed back and forth; foot pedals thumped and racketed on the hard earth floor. Children scuttled here and there, diving under looms to retrieve clumps of broken thread and floss. The air was thick with fragments of fiber. The lord coughed, tugging a handkerchief from a pocket and pressing it to his mouth. The manager was speaking, but Jehan could not make out his words over the noise from below.

The niece—Aude—stepped forward. Setting her elbows on the top of the balustrade that edged the gallery, she leaned forward to watch what went on below. The manager, frowning, joined her. Pointing, she asked a question, which the man seemed to answer. She shook her head and asked another.

On the floor below, something changed. Almost before he’d registered that, Jehan found his hand on his sword hilt. Something…One by one, the women working the looms stepped back, shaking their heads or pointing. Jehan stepped to the side, where he could see past Aude and the manager but still keep an eye on the door. A man in heavy trousers and a filthy apron—the foreman, most likely—had hold of one of the women, hauling her away from her machine. As one by one the looms stopped, the noise subsided. Jehan could make out the thrum of the manager’s voice as he explained the mechanisms.

The last loom thumped and rattled into stillness. From below, the voice of the foreman rose: “…think we don’t notice, but our eyes are everywhere. Everywhere, d’you hear me?”

The young woman’s response was inaudible, but up and down the rows of machinery, a ripple of murmurs spread. The foreman looked around, still holding on to his victim, “And you lot should be working, not gossiping.”

The murmurs rose, and a couple of the women began to move down the room. The manager said, quickly, “Yes, well, perhaps we should be moving…”

“Up there,” a voice said. “Is that what this is? Showing off for the aristos?” On the factory floor, heads began to turn, looking up at the gallery. Jehan did not like what he could see brewing in the faces.

The manager took hold of Aude’s elbow. “Let me take you to my office. I think…”

“But he’s hurting her,” Aude said. She shook the man’s hand off and started toward the door.

Her uncle made to intercept her, but she ducked past him and out into the corridor. He tutted, blocking the exit to call after her. “Come back at once.”

“This is really a most uncommon happening,” the manager said, hustling forward. “Our girls are all very honest, very reliable. We don’t allow any troublemakers here.”

“Hmmm.” The uncle looked as if he wanted to make something out of that.

Time was wasting. As firmly as he might, Jehan said, “Perhaps, messieurs, you might retire to the office? I’ll attend the young lady.” The voices from below were growing sharper. A dull thump suggested that something had been thrown. The two gentlemen continued to stand in the doorway. Jehan repeated, “Messieurs…”

A clear sharp voice carried up from the weaving floor. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re hurting her. Let her go.”

Jehan shut his eyes and cursed. Then he pushed through the dithering older men and set off down the corridor at a run.