Troubled Waters

by C. J. Cherryh

  He stood before the window, hardfaced and silent in the waning light.

  Pride, Marina reminded herself, the romance novels were filled with prickly, fragile masculine pride. He was a Mondragon, and that counted for more than she imagined he could forget. His house was gone—betrayed and slaughtered, with him taking the blame, (Andromeda had that from her aunt, Fortune, who'd married into the Fon clan for a time). He could hardly feel good with Kamat gold burning in his hand, however much he needed it.

  She buttoned her breeches and laced her boots before going to him. "I know about a man's pride," she whispered. "I really do."

  "You should be more careful," Tom replied, still staring out the window.

  "My brother will welcome any child I might bring into the House," she said lightly and confidently. "It simplifies his life somewhat."

  Mondragon dropped the gold into his pocket, then leaned against the window frame. His arms bulged beneath his shirt and his neck pulsed in the chiaroscuro light. "Life isn't what you think. I'm not what you think. Nothing is, not this afternoon, not anything. If you've any sense at all, Marina, run away before you get hurt."

  That, too, was something men said when they were in tight straits, when they wanted someone more than they dared to admit. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his hard, cool cheek. "You run away, then, and I promise I won't look for you. Is that fair?"

  He shook his head wearily, but said that it was.

  In romantic novels, the heroine always knew when and how to leave a tryst. Following their oft-read examples, Marina finished dressing, left an earring casually beside the basin (for retrieval the next time she came) and slipped quietly out of the apartment.

  "You all right?" Kidd asked the moment she arrived at waterside.

  Marina realized that for all her care, her hair was still mussed and her shirt unevenly belted. She attended to those details quickly and assured Kidd that she was, indeed, all right.

  "I was beginning to get real worried. 'Bout two hours ago a kid comes out of there like his tail's on fire. Took the stairs two at a time, up the bridge-beams, and lit out onto the roofs, I think. Didn't know what to make of it."

  "Raj?" She felt guilty suddenly, remembering the boy's lovelorn poetry and that she and Tom had not troubled to be quiet.

  "Little kid, maybe eight or nine. Glad you're all right, m'sera. We should get going."

  Marina sat down in the boat feeling serene and elated, both at the same time. She ached a bit and felt that her walk was somehow different—mature, no longer schoolgirlish. There was an emptiness above her thighs she had never felt before: a constant reminder of what had been and what would have to be again.

  While Kidd poled the boat into the current, she imagined a little scene where she told Richard that the next Kamat heir would have Mondragon blood. Richard looked pleased; he congratulated her for her wise and attractive choice. Then she imagined telling Tom (his room was nicer—he was living in Kamat, working for Richard, or so seemed likely). Tom's face was unreadable; not even her imagination could make him smile broadly.

  A cold wind blew across the canal. Marina wished she had her own bulky sweater rather than her mother's lacy wrap around her shoulders. Her belly was ice cold and she hunched forward, catching Kidd's eye as she did. The servant looked away.

  Richard was at the slip talking with a knot of canalers whose boats were riding low under bales of Kamat wool. He still wore his good clothes, but that was not as uncommon for him as it was for Marina. He stared at her as she climbed out of Kidd's boat, and she stared back. They were different as night and day, yet too close for secrets. Marina saw that he, too, moved differently, as if his body were not the familiar place it had been in the morning; and she was confident that he noted the change in her. Yet Richard had had his flings since before College.

  "The boy's been found," she said, needing something to break the silence between them.

  He nodded and relaxed his shoulders. "Good. I'm glad. Nobody seemed to know anything anyway."

  "I had the most amazing afternoon, Dickon—"

  "I'll see you at supper, Marina."

  He had changed. There was no doubt about it, and the mystery of it cast a pall through her sitting room. It wreaked havoc with her thoughts as she strove to commit the tryst to the scented pages of her diary. She'd begun the diary, after all, when her brother had become more absorbed in business and could spare less time for his little sister's dreams.

  Marina was ready to replace her brother's face with her lover's in her dreams—but she wanted to choose to do it.

  Far below Richard's octagonal office a canaler shouted out the start of the first night watch. By custom, the family ate supper midway through the watch, but timing would be the only customary aspect of tonight's dinner. Richard's hand trembled as he poured an amber dram of brandy. He threw his head back and caught the liquor at the back of his throat. It burned, and the burning steadied his nerves.

  He poured a second dram and savored it in the proper fashion.

  The meeting with Vega Boregy had gone well. Difficult, but well. Boregy was as smooth and polished as his hardwood desk; it would have been terribly easy to play the student to his mentoring—and, Angel knew, Vega had tried to grease the skids. But Richard felt he had resisted, felt he had gotten a fair deal for his House.

  Kamat had, in effect, become a Boregy client, yet that had not entailed a downward step in Merovingen's all-important hierarchies. Boregy was banking and finance; Kamat was mercantile with solid interests far beyond Merovingen. The man had been impressed when Richard showed him an annotated, and abridged, tally of his House assets. For three generations Kamat had operated alone, lest it be swallowed. Clientage was, perhaps, the inappropriate word; alliance felt better—so long as Richard kept his wits securely about him.

  He swallowed the second dram.

  Aye, there's the rub, Richard quoted the ancient play in his mind. To keep my wits about me, when I don't know what I'm doing.

  He picked up the decanter and carried it to the fireplace where Eleanora Slade waited quietly in a wing chair. "Sip it slowly," he advised her as he filled her tiny glass. Brandy of this age and purity seldom escaped the private cellars of the great houses.

  Eleanora's eyes filled with tears after the first swallow. She stared at the bit that was left and wondered why anyone would trouble to acquire the taste for it. "This is a celebration?" she asked in the blunt way that Richard had come quickly to cherish.

  "A reward for work well down; and the strength to do more work tomorrow."

  She shook her head and handed the glass back to him. "You must work very hard, but I see your point. Why will you call them Samurai?"

  Richard emptied her glass and threw it at the fire. For a moment the flames hissed and burned hotter. It was an old custom, and one that had nothing to do with fire-wary Merovingen. Shepherds carved their mugs, then burned them when their rotgut liquor soured the wood.

  "My father had a book: THE BOY'S HISTORY OF HONOR. It had hand-colored pictures and I remember reading it, oh, a dozen times or more. The Samurai were men of honor a thousand years before mankind ventured into space. They served the great houses, but they were more than employees. They were part of the house and they defended it as if it were their own. There was no distinction between a house's honor and a Samurai's honor. I always remembered that.

  "It's what we want in our new security force: honor. Honor to each other, honor to the houses, and honor to Merovingen. Not like the blacklegs who started out as pirates, smugglers and thugs, and who haven't changed very much."

  Eleanora slipped her shoes off and tucked her feet beneath her in the chair. "I understand that, but, Richard, there are only a few sorts who will be interested in patrolling the warehouses and docks night after night—and most of them would make better thugs than samurai. How do you plan to separate the wheat from the chaff?"

  He smiled and kissed her lightly on the forehead. "You've touched the heart of the problem: h
ow indeed? And I'll tell you just as honestly, I just don't know." One of the many bells above the door jingled, announcing that supper had begun its journey from the kitchen to the diningroom. "The family awaits. Wish me luck; I'll be back when it's over."

  "You don't need luck Richard. You'll do yourself proud without it."

  He kissed her again and, as he descended the spire, reappraised what it would take to get the rest of the clan to acknowledge her as an equal. He was getting used to the politics and intrigues of Househeadship—he was even starting to enjoy them—but he wasn't going to bring those problems into his bedroom or his heart.

  As usual, Richard was last to the diningroom, having traveled the farthest. Andromeda and Marina were already standing beside their chairs at the far end of the huge, empty, table. He gasped his greetings and thumped solidly into his chair; Andromeda rang the silver bell beside her plate and the meal began.

  They exchanged pleasantries and gossip over the appetizer—sculler prawns in aspic—but the conversation waned more quickly than Richard had expected, as if his mother and sister sensed that there were more important things to discuss than Beri Raza's twins and preparations for the Festival of the Angel next month.

  The soup was still steaming in its tureen when Richard began the enlightenment of his family. Some of it was already known, but bore retelling: the anarchy that flowed in the wake of the rivalry among Old Kalugin's children; the wanton smuggling at the warehouses, much of it by the hand of Nev Hettek and the wink of the blacklegs; the rumble of discontent that had been heard Below since the Sword of God and the fever settled into the city. Richard laid it out with careful, uncontestable logic; the women nodded as their spoons rose and fell.

  "Merovingen has passed the point where balanced karma can be restored without change. Even Old Kalugin knows that. It's like the Det herself; she eats at her banks and each season we shore everything back up, but when she floods, there's no turning her and it's the city that adapts." Richard summed up the past and the present before plunging into the future.

  "And since everything must change before balance is restored, Kamat will change too, but this time we'll be in the van—not the rear."

  He told them what had been decided at Boregy. A new security force—self-incorporated, but funded and controlled by the great merchant houses—was ready to emerge, and Kamat was the driving force behind it. A new force in Merovingen to balance the corrupt blacklegs, the Sword and other nameless sowers of anarchy. And as it succeeded, Kamat's fortune and karma would rise.

  There would be fifty of them at first, working the warehouses in round-the-clock shifts, but the force would grow much larger as its counterbalancing power was felt and appreciated. They would be called Samurai and, as Richard had explained to Eleanora, their honor would be paramount.

  "The blacklegs will make trouble," Andromeda cautioned. "They won't stand down for your men of honor, Dickon. What will we do then, if we're the ones who start it?"

  "If there is fighting, there will have been fighting whether we created the Samurai or not. And if there is fighting, it is better to be in a position to win from it."

  "But what if we don't win," Marina asked.

  "Then we leave the city and shear sheep."

  "What about First-bath? What about our obligations?"

  Andromeda nodded approval of her daughter's question. "Yes, Dickon, what about everything we stand for?"

  "I don't intend to lose, Mother."

  Richard's voice held a finality that had not been heard at this table since Nikolay's death last Greening: the voice of a Househead issuing orders. Andromeda sat back so suddenly that the butler asked if something were wrong with the meat. She stared at her son, whom she loved but had never directly influenced, and saw a stranger.

  "You're the head of Kamat now," she said, more to herself than to him. But she was no fool, and she did not add that her husband, Nikolay, would never have embarked on such a course.

  Marina's curiosity moved to fill the void in the conversation. "Will the Samurai be Kamat people? I'm sure cousin Gregory would love to be involved."

  Richard shook his head. "It's not the sort of job for blood, though I'll rely heavily on Kamat at the start. But it's not strictly a Kamat enterprise. The other mercantile houses will have to get involved as well."

  "Will they?" Andromeda re-entered the discussion. "We compete, we don't cooperate. And no one's likely to take a step if it means crossing the Kalugins."

  "The Kalugins are hardly monolithic, Mother. You can't turn right anymore but another Kalugin's on your left. However, the Signeury's agreed to seal the prospectus and I've good cause to believe we've got a Kalugin or two on our side."

  Vega Boregy had, in fact, assured Richard that Iosef, himself would approve the chartering documents. And Anastasi had been aware from the beginning, though Richard wouldn't admit that to anyone who didn't already know. Let Anastasi choose his own ground for proclaiming his tacit involvement and support.

  Andromeda was unreassured. "Money. Is it all Kamat money? What about Boregy, or Kalugin itself? Are we talking all the risk?"

  Tension seized hold of Richard's shoulders. There was a fine line between what the family had a right to know and when it insulted or challenged the House-head. He told himself Andromeda's question was legitimate, but he distrusted its tone. "We only consolidated our liquid assets, Mother, we didn't commit them willy-nilly to an unchartered enterprise."

  This time when Andromeda sat back in her chair she let the butler take her scarcely touched plate away.

  "Remember that you're young yet. You ought not move so quickly. They aren't above using you as the proverbial stalking horse."

  "I'm ready for Boregy and Kalugin—but I'm not ready for treachery at my back." It was not a wise thing to say, not the sort of thing that Nikolay would ever have said, and it hurt this sister and mother more than it outraged them.

  "We would never oppose you, Richard," Marina whispered, looking at her mother's stricken face, not her brother.

  "I count upon it."

  Richard gestured for a servant to remove his plate. The butler came forward to fix the tea while a girl barely out of her teens struggled to get the silver dessert service safely from the sideboard to the table. Conversation, even thought, stopped while forks clicked against each other and the pudding raced for the edge. The butler caught the bowl just as it became airborne, everyone sighed with relief and the tension—even the family's tension—was broken.

  The mood was lighter when Marina spoke again. "I told you they found the boy. He's all right, but I guess he won't be starting at the college right away."

  Richard swallowed hard; blancmange was his favorite dessert and he was always inclined to race through it. "How'd you find that out? I was having no luck at all with the canalers."

  Marina caught a cautioning glance from her mother.

  "I inquired among my friends at the Children's Charitable League," Andromeda said quickly. "They knew."

  Richard nodded absently, and Marina tried, without success, to place the Children's Charitable League among the many genteel organizations her mother belonged to. She gathered that Andromeda did not want Tom Mondragon mentioned at the table and meant to change the subject. Although, since Tom was practically the only subject in her mind, her execution fell somewhat short of her intentions.

  "Dickon, I think you should consider hiring Tom in your Samurai. He needs a job, Boregy is hardly supporting him in decency, and he'd certainly be qualified."

  "Tom?" Richard asked, unaware of the rigid mask that had descended across his mother's face.

  "Tom Mondragon. I saw him this aft—"

  Words failed for Richard, and so did everything else. He choked on a piece of fruit. The butler surged forward, determined to save the Househead's life regardless of his dignity. Richard shook free of the Heimlich hug and scalded his mouth with tea.

  "Marina!" he gasped, making her name three distinct raspy syllables. "Of all the hare
brained, lunatic, irresponsible things to do! My god—Thomas Mondragon's practically the reason we need the Samurai. Lord, I'd sooner recruit Megary than Mondragon. The man's a complete scoundrel."

  Marina put her napkin to her face and bolted from the diningroom with loud sobs. Andromeda folded her napkin carefully, then unfolded it and started again.

  "What do you know about this?"

  "There's no way to deny infatuation," she said without looking at her son. "The only was is to ride it out. She would have seen him sooner or later."

  "I'd guess that seeing him didn't stop the infatuation, did it?"

  "The Mondragons kept an exemplary household. I'm sure that whatever else he is, Thomas Mondragon is well turned-out—"

  "He's not some House-blood come looking for an heir. He's god-be-damned Sword of God, Mother!"

  Andromeda Kamat, daughter of the Cassirer of Nev Hettek and related to the governor of that city by haphazard liaison, looked up with hard, flashing green eyes. "Then he's just the sort of man you're going to need!"

  She was out of her chair and stalking toward the door before the butler twitched.

  CHAPTER X

  TROUBLED WATERS

  by C. J. Cherryh

  "I dunno," Moghi said. "I ain't seen 'er. What'd ye say t' her, anyhow?"

  "I don't damn well remember," Mondragon said. It was like that with their quarrels. "Look. Watch her boat. Put it in dry dock. Put it on my tab."

  "I ain't so sure about your credit," Moghi said.

  "You owe me a shade more for the two hundred," Mondragon said, keeping it cold, very cold. "You got away with a killing, Moghi. Your lads out hardly a night. I don't think it's like you haven't seen money from me lately. And Jones one of your own."

  "Shit," Moghi said, and spat and turned away, walking across the boards. But he gave that wave of his hand that signaled acceptance. "Jep, have the boys put that there boat up." He reached the office door—no patrons at this hour, in the half-hour before Moghi's regular opening for breakfast. Mondragon had used the back way—being one of the few Entitled. And Moghi turned and fixed him with a cold stare of his own. "Ye better straighten it out wi' that 'un," Moghi said. "Ye don't mess with mine, m'ser. Ye break it clean or ye make it up, but ye don't fight in my place, ye don't raise no row. It ain't Jones that done it. She's one o' mine, she knows the Rules. You pushed 'er. An' I ain't likin' this. Ain't like her. Ain't like Jones to leave that boat."