by Jim Grimsley
The porter smiled in recognition, setting the tray on a wooden table in the room, while Himmer stood patiently, his belly hanging over his trousers. The householder, a pretty boy of sixteen or so, looked Himmer up and down. “Those southerners,” he asked Jedda, still in Erejhen, “do they all look like that?”
Jedda burst into laughter. The boy was looking at her suspiciously. “How did you learn to talk the true talk?”
“I knew a teacher,” she answered, and he laughed, so she guessed she had used the phrase properly. Said with that inflection, it meant, none of your business.
“Why don’t they let us go into the city to find dinner?” Jedda asked the boy.
“You shouldn’t be wandering,” he answered. “The city is a strange place for you.”
“You don’t trust us.”
He shrugged. “Why should anybody?” That was the best she could understand of the word he used, an impersonal pronoun of indifference. The phrase sounded as though it were one of their formulas for interaction. “You can walk around tomorrow.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Kirin,” he answered, but she would have guessed that. Every one of them will tell you his name is Kirin, Opit had told her. And every one of the women will tell you her name is Kartayn.
When he was gone, she had to repeat the conversation for the benefit of Himmer, minus the reference to his physique. “How did you learn the language?” he asked.
“From the Anin. In Charnos. I spent two years there.”
“The Anin?”
“I know, they’ll all tell you they don’t speak the northern language, and most of them don’t, but some of them come as close to speaking it as anybody can. I’ve learned what I could absorb. The Anin have very close ties with these people, regardless of what they want us to think.”
Himmer was watching her in a peculiar way. She had known he was attracted to her, had guessed this moment might come. They sat down to a meal together, his tray and hers, on the heavy wooden table, more wood than anybody could afford in the outer world, and for a mere piece of furniture. They were both stroking the grain of it, the precious substance, and looking at one another. “Did you ever dream there was such a place?” Himmer asked.
“No.” She was whispering as she looked around.
“Relax, it’s not working, remember? When was the last time you were in a place where the stats didn’t work?”
They began to eat, real meat that neither of them was used to, with fresh vegetables and fruit and some delicate small sweet dishes like nothing on Senal. Wine, so rare on Senal that only the highest levels of the Ministries could afford to drink it. They ate their fill, not nearly all the food on the trays, and then toasted each other and sipped. The wine was going to her head, a delicious rush of flavors across the tongue and around the mouth, so many tastes at once, and even a texture, a silkiness on the tongue. “No wonder people pay so much money for this,” Jedda said.
“I’m thinking the same thing.” Himmer was looking down into his cup. “I had a glass of wine before we left Béyoton. With Tarma, you know.”
His last name was Taleratele, ten letters. Only Tarma outranked him with eleven. “She’s a very interesting person,” Jedda said. “I’ve never met anyone who was actually one of the Orminy.”
Himmer picked up his stat again, checked it. Jedda did the same with hers. Nothing, no response.
“I don’t suppose it could be faked,” he said.
“No,” Jedda said, standing up, looking out the window again. “It’s something else.” He had joined her and they were staring out the long expanse, across the gulf of air, the rooftops, the flickering firepots along the city wall. “A friend of mine used to travel outside the Anin lands in the south,” she said. “He told me that there were places where the stats don’t carry. Mostly in the north, where the putter roads stop.” She paused for wine. “When he asked the Anin why, they would shrug and say, who needs to go so far north?”
Himmer was intrigued now. Standing maybe too close, maybe not. “But you think you know why?”
“I don’t have a clue. Maybe it’s just too far.”
Himmer shook his head, “That’s not possible. We’ve billions in equipment sitting on the other side of the gate to keep the stat link open. If the link reaches here at all, it should reach everywhere, the same as the rest of Senal.”
She refrained from any answer.
“Your friend reported this.” She nodded. “But if he knew—” Himmer was asking the obvious question.
“You’d think we’d all know, wouldn’t you? At least the ones who need to. But apparently even the Orminy weren’t told.”
“Why keep it a secret?”
“You want word to get around there’s a place where stats don’t work?” She leaned against the stone lintel.
“Your friend told you about this. You’ve kept it a secret. How did you get around the upload?”
“Dumped,” she said. “I don’t do it much. They catch you. But we both did, Opit and me.”
She was taking a risk, saying this much to a man with ten letters in his krys name. He blew into his fingers. “I’ve done it a few times myself,” he said. “Buying. You know.”
So they were prepared to trust each other, she thought. After a moment, she asked, “Why are we here? Why bring me with an Orminy-level delegation?”
“You speak Erejhen. You’re the highest krys rank we could find who does.”
“You have people in Planetary who speak Erejhen. Not many, but I know they’re there.”
“You’ve made a lot of money trading with the Anin.” Himmer folded thick arms across his bulging stomach. “You’ve traveled here more than anybody we know. Your knowledge may be valuable.”
He was speaking as if the stat were recording. He meant that she had called attention to herself, that she had singled herself out. This was what she heard. She had figured as much when she got the call to come to Béyoton so suddenly.
“There’s no law against making money.”
“There’s no harm in trying to advance your status,” he agreed. “We all know that.” He poured himself the last of the wine. “There’s nothing dangerous in it. But the Ministries are paying a lot of attention to the people who go through the Twil Gate. To the people who trade with Irion. Especially to the ones the natives here seem to like.”
To a Hormling, lost in the thirty-some billions on Senal alone, the possibility that someone important has begun to pay attention is a dangerous state.
“Why are we here?” Jedda asked.
He had already turned his back, and she guessed he had anticipated the question.
“What makes you think I would know?”
“Why are we here?” she asked again.
After a while, Himmer said, “To ask Malin to open the north to exploration. That’s what we’ve been told.”
She felt a prickle in her scalp.
“That’s all we want, to explore?” She already knew he might be lying, in part, and might continue to lie.
“For now.”
“But in the future?”
He swallowed. Gestured to the window. “Don’t you see it? Land. What else?”
They were both quiet. After a moment, he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’m not used to wine.”
“My God.” Jedda moved to the comfortable bed with its thick down mattress.
“The Erejhen occupy ten times the land here that the Anin do. That’s our best guess. We haven’t mapped it, but we suspect this to be true. A country the size of the whole Anolin continent, and as far as we can tell there are barely sixty million people living here. And the Erejhen somehow control all of it, the whole country, Anin and Erejhen both.”
“We’re planning to invade. To colonize?”
“Not right away.” Himmer’s expression was a perfect mask; she could hardly tell how he felt about what he was saying. “As the Orminy keep saying, we will move patiently in Irion.
” He was looking out the window again, at the stars. “Now we know there’s even more land than we thought. The high north country. Where do you think that is?”
“We’ll know that when they want us to know.”
He was smiling. “You think these people are really prepared for us? For thirty billion of us?”
Jedda lifted the dead stat from the bed. She looked at him, held it toward him.
Himmer said, “This can’t be something they do. How can they negate our technology, when they don’t have any themselves?”
“None that we can see,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We can’t build anything like the Twil Gate. And somebody here can. Somebody here did.”
Himmer was staring into space. After a moment he shook his head. “No. Not the Erejhen. The Orminy believes it can’t have been them, and I think that’s right.”
He had been thinking about this, gathering information. He had probably maneuvered for this assignment to the delegation. He was saying this to challenge her, so she rose to the occasion. “Then who built those towers we saw? Who bored that tunnel through the mountain that carries the road north?”
The room was facing the wrong way for him to see the towers from the window, but the memory was vivid enough, and when Jedda said the words, a light broke slowly over Himmer.
Jedda went on, wishing she had more of the wine. “There are towers like those depicted in tapestries all over this country. You’ve seen the bases of the ones that were pulled down in Evess. The Anin told me they asked Irion to pull those towers down a long time ago, and he obliged them.”
“Irion is some kind of god to these people?”
“Not a god. Sometimes Irion is the name of the country and sometimes it’s something else, it’s a person. But the usage is not like anything else in either of their languages.” She looked at him and smiled. “I’m sorry, I’m sure I’m boring you. But this place has begun to fascinate me, the same way it did Opit.”
They had been standing very close to one another for a long time. The moment came, and he pressed her gently on the shoulder. His scent suddenly became quite pleasant to her, spicy and sweaty at once. She went with him willingly though she had never been with a man as large as him before, in girth. Only a few Hormling chose such a body habitus. She found she liked him after sex more than before; he had a subtlety. Making love without the stat was a different experience, she had forgotten. The pleasure involved one so much more with the partner.
As always, in the aftermath of sex, when she was sleeping with someone who had a superior krys name to her own, she had a spell of remorse, because the sex was forced, or could have been, or had an element of obligation to it. That she gained an advantage from such a union, if the stat was linked. But we weren’t linked, she reminded herself, in the stone room with the curtains pulled closed at the windows. Nothing changes in the data.
She woke early to find the room warm, and this led her to wondering how the house was heated, so she looked around. She had been expecting open fireplaces, nothing much more sophisticated than that. Four vents in the room, one in each corner, and soft heat rising out of two of them. Piped heat, from some source central to the house.
Jedda pointed this out at the breakfast meeting, made the remark to Himmer, who repeated it in turn to Tarma, giving credit for the observation where it was due. Tarma’s attention snapped to Jedda at once. “Yes,” she said, “that’s right, I was very comfortable in my room.” One of the house porters was in the room with the delegates, and so Tarma gestured to Jedda, and Jedda asked, beginning, “Hello, young Kirin, I was wondering if you would have time for a question. What makes the heat for the house?”
“Underground makes it,” he said, “and we bring it up in pipes. Through the whole city.”
“These mountains are volcanic?”
“No,” he said, “Irion made the network, a long time ago. When he made the city again.”
“He made the city?”
“Yes. Don’t you know the story?” This was one of their favorite expressions, she had learned. “There were wizards fighting here one time, on the two towers, and they broke the towers and the whole city burned. My Nanny could tell you their names, I don’t remember.”
“Two wizards?” The word Opit had taught her was pirunu, but he was saying something like prinu. But she thought it was the same word.
“Yes. They were fighting. And because of them, nobody could live in Montajhena for a long time. But one day King Kirith asked Irion to make the city over again, if he could, because the King had a longing to see it, and Irion never could refuse the King a thing, so he went to work and after a while made Montajhena whole, the same as it was before.” Jedda wished for the stat now, to catch this. “We’re in the new city, down here,” the porter said. “But up in the old city, things are the way they were when Old Jurel was here. Do you know about him?”
He would have gladly told Jedda that story, too, young as he was and in spite of the fact that he hadn’t got half the names from his nanny yet. But Tarma was impatient, so Jedda said, “I have to make up to this important one, now,” and the porter laughed and went away shaking his head.
At the door he stopped and said, “You speak the true words pretty good.”
So Jedda explained to Tarma that the heat came up from underground, and was vented into the buildings, according to the boy. The same was true everywhere in the city, if what he said was true.
“Volcanic,” she said. “No doubt.” But she was impressed.
“These rocks don’t look volcanic,” this from Kurn, from the Science Ministry, so of course her words carried weight even though she had made her reputation as a botanist, in the area of oceanic plant design.
A man entered the room then, wearing a gray robe tied at the waist with a rope braided of threads of many colors. He had other garments beneath and these flashed red and saffron as he walked, panels of the gray robe shifting with his steps. The red and saffron robes indicated that he was one of the high-ranking Prin, one of the Krii, some kind of higher status within the Prin, the body of supervisory priests whom the Anin all feared. The backbone of Erejhen control of the country. Several attendants flanked him. He was as handsome as anybody Jedda had ever seen, and his attendants shared the same slender build, the same beauty of feature, though their colors ranged from ivory to ebony. Tarma had evidently been expecting him, since she remained seated when he entered. “Good morning,” he began, in perfectly accented Alenke. “I’m here to welcome you on behalf of the Thaan. She is returning to the city at this very moment and will be here as soon as she can be.”
“When exactly is that?” Tarma asked, dryly.
“If I may, madam,” he said with a bow, “I must first introduce myself on behalf of the Thaan, who welcomes you and will be here as soon as she can be.” He moved smoothly through it the second time as though he had never said it the first, and Jedda understood that if he had been interrupted again he would have started over yet another time. “I am the Krii of the Everyday, and my name is Kirin.”
Tarma looked to Jedda for help with the title. “He ranks very close to the Thaan,” Jedda said. “I believe.”
“That answers,” he agreed. “I’m the one who keeps the books, the steward? Is that a word?” He seemed pleased with himself. “I’m one of her stewards for Shurhala.” When asked, he explained that Shurhala was the name of Malin’s palace in the mountain, a wondrous place, he said, and he was sure Malin would ask the delegation to visit her there. “So you’ll see it for yourselves.”
“We can only wonder how long we’ll have to anticipate the invitation,” Tarma said.
“Malin is with Irion,” the Krii explained. “It was when the King departs. How can I say it?” He seemed confused only for a moment. “It was the anniversary of the time King Kirith left us. A very special time. She was with Irion, but now she’s coming back to us.”
“Who is Irion?” Tarma asked
. “Where is he? Malin knew we were coming, we were expected days ago in Evess.”
“Your time is not her time,” the Krii explained pleasantly.
“What the devil does that mean?” Tarma asked. “I wish I had my stat, I get so confused without it.”
“Who is Irion?” Jedda asked him.
The Krii looked at her. She felt a prickle when he did, as though he were touching her. “He is who he is,” the Krii said, and bowed his head. “I’ll leave you now that I’ve said good morning.”
“Are we free to walk about?” Jedda asked. “I’d like to see the city.”
“So would I,” Himmer said.
The Krii thought for a moment, then answered, “Montajhena is always very beautiful to the newcomer,” and spoke to the people in his retinue, in the mode of Erejhen they sometimes used with one another, a strange fullness to the sound, and blanks in it, places where the Krii was sounding a note too high or low for the Hormling to hear. Jedda was surprised and listened closely but only heard a little. After a moment they all retired, him as well, bowing.
Tarma looked at the rest of the delegates, indignant. “My time is not her time.”
“These people have different values than we do,” Kurn reminded her.
Himmer appeared to exult in Tarma’s discomfort and decided to exacerbate it, though Jedda wondered if anyone else noticed. “Here we have representatives from the four ministries and the Orminy,” he pointed out, leaving Tuk An unmentioned, because he was from the military. “This Malin shows very little regard for our efforts to open relations with her.”
Tarma convulsed, showing more emotion than anybody else would have dared. Jedda watched, but tried to make it subtle. They are not used to being treated like ordinary people, the Orminy, she thought. That much was apparent from Tarma’s reaction. She reached for her stat and caressed the handle, as if willing it to work. After a moment or so, she appeared to realize she was pushing her rank further than she ought, and so she permitted the rest of the delegates to withdraw, and Himmer and Jedda went down to the garden at the side of the house.
They walked in the winter garden smelling the open air. Himmer had become more accustomed to the open space, to the fact that there were so few people around, and he seemed more at ease.