Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  Anywhere not here, was the clear subtext of that suggestion. Gereint said, “I’ll likely be heading west.”

  “Good. But if you do decide to stay in Breidechboden, apply for a permanent residence pass as soon as you qualify. Clear? Go on, then.” And he waved Gereint into the city.

  The public roads were wide near the Gates, the apartments tall and well built, faced with bright-painted plaster. Only specially licensed wagons and carts were allowed into Breidechboden between dawn and dusk, so the streets offered plenty of room for people ahorse or riding in sedan chairs or walking on their own feet. Wagons and riders kept to the middle of each roadway; pedestrians and sedan chairs traveled on raised pavement walks that ran on each side of the streets, clear of the refuse that littered the roadways. Gereint headed right, toward Seven Son Hill.

  The street led in an arc around the curve of the hill. The apartment blocks here were less tall but considerably finer, faced with white limestone and plaster painted to resemble marble. Then these gave way in turn to private houses with small walled gardens. Wealthy merchants and men of business lived here. If one continued around the circle, one would come eventually to the Hill of Iron, where the king’s palace rose up above the common city.

  The lee side of Seven Son Hill—the side that faced away from the center of Breidechboden—was a place where the private houses were large and the gardens generous. Here the facades were real marble, the doors carved and polished, and the gates decorated with the figures of dogs or horses or falcons or grotesques. The public street was much cleaner, and the private walkways that ran to each house were lined with tubs of flowers.

  Tehre Amnachudran lived in one of these houses. Gereint had known more or less what the Amnachudran townhouse must be like when her father had told him where she lived, but he was surprised again, studying it now, at the family’s wealth.

  The house had leaping deer figures by its gate. More deer held round porcelain lanterns on either side of its walkway; at night, each stag must seem to carry a small glowing moon between its antlers. Mosaic tiles ornamented the pillars that framed the heavy double doors of carved oak. The house itself was faced with gray marble and exotic porphyry; the windows that faced onto the street were fitted with fine, expensive glass. Beside the door, a bell cord of red silk led away into the inner reaches of the house.

  Gereint stood for a long moment, holding his horse’s reins and gazing at the bell cord. But if he meant to stay in Breidechboden at all, he needed a place to stay. And he trusted Eben Amnachudran. And he was, he acknowledged to himself, curious about Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan. So at last he reached out, gave the cord a strong pull, and heard the distant clangor of the bell—iron, by the sound of it, but with a mellowness to the note that was unusual for iron.

  Rapid steps sounded, and the shutter in the center of the door swung open. A sweet-faced older woman gazed out at him with some surprise.

  “A letter from Eben Amnachudran for his daughter,” Gereint said quickly, before the woman could say anything about tradesmen not being welcome. He gave the woman the letter through the shutter, expecting her to tell him to wait and take it away to give to her mistress.

  Instead, the woman gave him a long, assessing look, nodded, slipped the letter out of its leather envelope, and read it herself. Then she looked up again, this time smiling a welcome. The shutter swung closed and latched, and there was the sound of the bar being drawn away. Then the doors swung open and the woman smiled at him. “Honored sir—please be welcome,” she said warmly. “My name is Fareine Reinarechtan; I have the honor to manage Lady Tehre’s household. Loop your horse’s reins over that stag’s antlers; that’s right. I’ll have someone come at once to take it around to the stable. It’s quite convenient, not a quarter-mile down the street, and I promise you the animal will be well cared for; everyone keeps their horses there. Come in, honored sir, and be welcome.”

  Gereint stepped through the door, bowing slightly. It felt… very strange, coming into this house as a welcome guest, with a false name in that letter of introduction and the geas rings hidden by his boots. “Forgive me for intruding without warning. If a message had been sent ahead, it couldn’t have come far before me. May I ask whether Lady Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan is at home?”

  “She is, and I’m sure she’ll welcome you, but if you will be good enough to wait, honored sir… I am afraid Lady Tehre does not like to be interrupted while she is working, but she will be down very soon, I am sure. Permit me to show you to the kitchen while I have a room prepared for you—Esmin! Such a long way you have come, all the way from the honored Eben Amnachudran’s house?”

  “I was very interested in Eben Amnachudran’s description of his honored daughter’s work, though he was not able to be very, ah, detailed. As I’ve business of my own in Breidechboden, the honored Eben Amnachudran was kind enough to provide me a letter of introduction.”

  “A fortunate moment for my lady, I am sure. Esmin! Where is—? Ah, Esmin, dear! Get a room ready for our honored guest, please, and mind you make certain there are plenty of towels by the water basin. Honored sir, Lady Tehre will be down very soon, I am sure…” Still producing a gentle flow of chatter, the woman led the way down the hall.

  The reception hall was all red marble and porphyry, with fluted columns in the best southern style and mosaics on the walls. It gave way to massive vaulted rooms just as intimidating. Thankfully, the kitchen turned out to be much more approachable. It, too, was a vast room, but comfortable and friendly. Ovens lined one end and a huge table stood at the other, with a narrow stair leading down, Gereint surmised from the cold draft, to an ice cellar. There were two assistant cooks as well as the head cook, and a clutter of girls to do the scullery chores and run errands. To Gereint’s faint surprise, the cook and both her assistants were women. Was all the household female?

  The cook appeared to take Gereint’s bony height as an amusing challenge. She was a placid, ample woman with small black eyes set in a broad moon-face. She jiggled when she laughed, which was often. The kitchen girls clearly adored her.

  “I do like men who know how to eat,” she remarked with approval, offering Gereint a second plate of sandwiches after he cleared the first with gratifying speed. “That’ll put some bulk on those bones, so it will. And there are cakes to finish, plenty to have some now and leave some for the evening.”

  Gereint was pleased and a little surprised that the household staff did not seem to stand on ceremony: There must be a formal dining room somewhere but no one suggested eating there. He and the household staff alike sat around the big table to eat the sandwiches and stole slices of apple from the girl who was slicing fruit for pastries. The girl threatened to stab their hands, but laughed.

  The second round of sandwiches vanished almost as quickly as the first, but there was still one untouched plate remaining when the kitchen door swung open once more. The household staff leaped up. Gereint got to his feet as well; the cook hissed sharply at one of the girls who was slower than he to take her cue. The girl flushed dark red and jumped up as well. Lady Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan swept in just as the girl made it up.

  For a small woman, Lady Tehre managed to sweep very convincingly. On a first glance, she was very little like either of her parents. She was small breasted and narrow hipped, yet she did not look boyish, either. She had dark hair; not black like Sicheir, but dark like molasses, a rich brown with golden highlights. She wore it tucked up on her head in an untidy style that went beyond casual to thoughtless. It was lovely hair. Yet she was not actually pretty—or maybe she was, but she did not hold herself with the conscious awareness of a woman who knows she is pretty.

  Tehre Amnachudran had nothing of her father’s visible kindness or her mother’s comfortable warmth. She looked… not precisely stern. But if she had been tall and stately, she might have possessed an intense, striking beauty that went beyond ordinary prettiness. Because she was small and delicate, she merely looked high-strung.

  And, u
nlike her staff, she was not very welcoming of strangers. “A maker, do you say?” she said to Fareine, doubt clear in her tone. “I don’t know—I haven’t been—”

  “Your honored father sent him,” Fareine put in smoothly. “All the way from Meridanium.” Gereint had given his name as Gereint Pecheran, which was one of the most common Meridanian names.

  “Oh, did he?” Lady Tehre hesitated. “Well… well… let’s go to my workroom, I suppose. Fareine—”

  “I’ll bring you something there,” the older woman promised immediately.

  “Good, good,” Tehre said, but absently, very much as though she had not actually heard what Fareine said. She gave Gereint a mistrustful look, but waved for him to accompany her. “You’re a maker? I’m working on this problem having to do with the elongation of cracks in large structures. Of course, when you’re working with masonry, stone breaks when you subject it to remotely applied tension, I’m sure you know that, but what I can’t see is how the cracks shift from slow, sporadic propagation to sudden catastrophic propagation. Do you work with masonry? Large structures?”

  “I have.” Not often, but Gereint did not say this. Women were often makers, but very seldom engineers, but Tehre Amnachudran certainly sounded more like an engineer than an ordinary maker.

  The workroom proved to be a large, cluttered room on the main floor of the house, with wide windows that probably opened to the garden, though these were all tightly shuttered. Broad papers covered with delicate sketches in ink and charcoal were unrolled and pegged down on the tables—no wonder the windows were shuttered: Too strong a breeze would not be kind to those delicate papers. Expensive lamps shed an even, steady glow over the diagrams.

  Edging closer to the table nearest the door, Gereint saw that one of the sketches was a detailed diagram, heavily notated, of some sort of mechanism with unfamiliar mathematical equations tucked around the edges. He frowned at the diagram, trying to make sense of it—it looked like someone had tried to design an extremely ornate bridge, a bridge with twin exterior galleries on either side, its galleries supported by pillars and connected to the bridge proper by high arches. The design might have made more sense to an engineer than it did to Gereint, who gave up on it after a moment and turned to studying Tehre Amnachudran instead of her mysterious diagram. Fareine edged past him and set plates of sandwiches and honey cakes carefully on the edge of one of the tables that was not entirely covered by sketches.

  “You probably know that cracks don’t usually run dangerously in bridges or walls or ships or things like that, until they suddenly do,” Tehre said to Gereint, showing no sign of noticing the plates. She tapped one of the diagrams, where mathematical equations marched down the clear space of the margin. Gereint tilted his head, trying to read the equations, but they did not seem familiar.

  Tehre said, “I think it’s clear there’s a critical length and once a crack reaches that length, it’ll run catastrophically. You’d think that as the strength of a material increases, so the critical length would increase, but obviously that’s not the way it happens, yes?” She spoke rapidly, her voice sharp and demanding—or not exactly demanding, but intense.

  “Because anyone knows that some very strong materials like stone can tolerate hardly any kind of crack at all before they break under tension, which is why you can build with wrought iron under tension but you always put stone under compression, yes? So we really need to think of resistance to crack propagation as a property related not to strength exactly, but to the forcefulness of the blow it takes to fracture a piece of the material, do you see? What I think—” tapping the row of equations once more, she seemed suddenly to wonder whether Gereint was following this, and stopped, looking at him with doubt.

  Gereint said, “I haven’t worked extensively with bridges or walls, but I’d think that what you need most is proper definitions of qualities like ‘strength’ and ‘forcefulness’ and ‘toughness’ and ‘brittleness’ and ‘flexibility.’ And ‘stretchability,’ once you start thinking about metals, because once you start thinking about crack propagation through metal, it’s probably ‘stretchability’ that allows for greater resistance to fracture, don’t you think?”

  Tehre gazed at Gereint as though actually seeing him for the first time. Her eyes, an unusual bronzy green, were large and striking in her delicate face.

  Then she flipped open a large book on the nearest table, paged through it rapidly until she reached blank paper, and picked up a quill. “The length of a ‘safe’ crack in a structure must depend on the ratio of its ‘brittleness’ to the amount of tensile force applied to the material,” she said, writing quickly. “No! Not the amount of tensile force applied, but the amount actually absorbed by the material. And so the critical length of a crack would actually be inversely proportional to the ‘stretchability’ of the material.” She paused and blinked down at the book. “That seems counterintuitive. But isn’t that right?”

  Gereint said, “It follows, but it means you need a term for ‘toughness’ as well as one for ‘stretchability.’ One is more like resistance to fracture as a result of a blow, isn’t it, and the other is more like resilience under tension. Or is that right?”

  “I can see you two will do well,” said Fareine. “But, Tehre, don’t forget, you still need to eat one of these nice sandwiches.”

  “What?” Tehre turned to the old woman and stared at her for a moment before actually focusing on her. Then she laughed.

  Gereint was surprised at that laugh. It was a nice laugh, filled with affection and genuine amusement—at herself, at her own intensity and distractibility. It occurred to him that Tehre might well borrow a word like “distractibility” to mean “ability to slip under friction” or something of the sort, and he smiled.

  “We’ll go out to the garden, I suppose,” Tehre suggested. “Fareine, is everything”—she waved her hands vaguely, still holding the quill—“in order?”

  “Your guest is properly settled,” Fareine assured her mistress. “Thank you, honored sir; if you could take these plates, I’ll go fetch jugs of wine and water, shall I?” She handed over the sandwiches and cakes and bustled out again.

  Gereint raised his eyebrows at Lady Tehre, meaning Which way?

  “Through here,” the lady said, swinging back a small door. She immediately went on, walking backward through the doorway into brilliant sunlight and catching herself with the automatic skill of long practice when she tripped over the step. “You’re a maker, did Fareine say? Or an engineer?”

  “A maker, primarily. But I was wondering the same about you, since you seemed to be thinking about building large structures…”

  “Neither the one nor the other,” the woman said, a little bitterly. She looked around, seemed to spot a nearby shaded bench as though it was the first time she’d ever seen it, and sat down. Gereint followed, offering her the plate of sandwiches again, since she seemed to have forgotten about it.

  “Or maybe both,” added Tehre, taking a sandwich and gazing thoughtfully down at it. She was still thinking about Gereint’s question, evidently. He hadn’t meant it to be so complicated. But the woman said absently, “A maker and a builder and an engineer and a philosopher…” She looked suddenly up at Gereint. “I’m trying to understand how things work. But some important concepts are”—she made a frustrated gesture with the sandwich—“missing. I’m sure if I just define my terms properly… You’re quite right, by the way, that’s the first thing that has to be done, but you have to work with the concepts before you see what you need names for…”

  “I have business of my own in the city, so your father was kind enough to suggest you might wish to offer me a guest room while I’m here,” Gereint said after a moment, as the lady did not seem inclined to go on with her thought.

  “Yes, of course, if you like,” Tehre said, but Gereint had the impression she hadn’t really heard him.

  “Are you going to eat that, or just wave it around? Meat is expensive since the refugees
from Melentser started arriving, you know,” Fareine added, returning with the promised jugs and a pair of goblets.

  “Oh,” said Tehre, and took a bite. But her attention remained on Gereint. No wonder she was so small, if she never ate anything without being prompted.

  “Wine, honored sir?” Fareine poured for her lady and Gereint and for herself, a little wine and a good deal of water, and then settled on the end of Tehre’s bench.

  “What do you make?” Tehre asked Gereint abruptly.

  “Small things, mostly. But all kinds of things. Knives and lanterns, belts and boots, pots and plates…”

  The woman laughed, unexpectedly. It was the same laugh as before, quick and genuinely amused. “Not a specialist! All right. I’m mostly working philosophically right now—with the philosophy of stone and iron and wood, with the building materials of the world.” She sighed. “It’s hard to actually practice building large structures just to see how they’ll break if you apply different kinds of stresses. Have you read Wareierchen?”

  “Yes,” Gereint said promptly. “And Dachsechreier’s Making with Wood, and Garaneirdich’s The Properties of Materials. What do you think of Terichsekiun?”

  Tehre’s small face lit up, giving her, at last, the misleading appearance of uncomplicated prettiness. “Oh, his Strength of Materials is so fascinating! It’s so interesting that cast iron acts so much like stone, isn’t it, and so different from wrought iron?” She took another bite of her sandwich and chewed absently, lost in thought.

  “You seem to have been thinking about bridges,” Gereint commented, and was entertained to see how Lady Tehre was instantly distracted. She jumped to her feet, set her sandwich aside half finished, said, “I’ll show you; come look!” and started back toward the workroom.