Disappearing Act

by Margaret Ball

  Strictly speaking, Gabrel should have consulted his superior officers in the Society's private army before setting forth on this expedition. But what if they were part of the group trying to stop Calandra's inquiry? It seemed better to leave as quickly as they could, and without mentioning the fact to anybody official in Valentin.

  Anuman, the Kalapriyan merchant who'd outfitted Gabrel for previous upcountry treks, was a friend as well as a trader; he was good-natured about being awakened in the middle of the night and almost as amiable about accepting Gabrel's chit in payment for food, traveling clothes, and other supplies. Of course, he increased the cost of everything by at least fifty percent; that was understood as the price of being in a hurry, and no doubt contributed to Anuman's amiability.

  Gabrel's best friend in the regiment, Leutnant Moylen Cornelis, was not quite so pleased about having his quarters invaded in the dark hours before dawn. But after a few jibes about the unusual duties involved in being the assigned escort of a Diplo, and a few remarks about the possible rewards thereof—which, couched as they were in Barents slang, Gabrel devoutly hoped Diplomat Vissi had not understood—he emptied his purse for them willingly enough and even volunteered the services of his groom for the first part of the journey.

  "Moylen, you're too good," Gabrel protested.

  "Not in the least, dear fellow. Naturally you'll take my spare mounts as far as you can ride, and I'll want Sanouk to bring them back. And you'll need gold to pay for a couple of ghaya to carry your things into the hills. I don't want you being tempted to sell my racing string to some hill-country Vakil of two villages and a farm in trade for his pack animals."

  Moylen Cornelis was Old Trader Family on both sides and could well afford to keep a string of racing turagai and otherwise live in the style befitting an Old Family scion; his monthly pay as Leutnant in the Society army wouldn't have paid his mess bill for a week. So Gabrel, whose father's military pension had to cover not only family expenses but also the education of his three younger brothers, was able to accept his friend's generosity without too great a struggle with his own pride and conscience.

  "Besides," Moylen had added as the clinching argument, "if Sanouk's with you, he can't gossip about this in the bazaar. Your departure will remain a mystery for at least four more days."

  "How did you know I wanted it kept secret?" Gabrel demanded, suddenly feeling suspicious even of Moylen. Kaspar Slevinen—whose body would be discovered tomorrow—had been close to Haars Huyberts and Stoffelsen. Whatever was going on, at least those two of the Old Trader Families were involved in it. Was House Cornelis also part of the plot?

  Moylen gave him a mocking smile. "Dear boy, officers planning to travel upcountry on legitimate missions don't take off in the middle of the night with a pretty girl in tow."

  "Diplomat Vissi," Gabrel said stiffly, "and she's not exactly a girl."

  Moylen cocked an eye at Calandra, who was tactfully standing a few feet away and pretending deafness while studying the maps tacked to Moylen's sitting-room wall. She hadn't had time to change into the anonymous traveling clothes provided by Anuman; the borrowed ball dress, with its gauzy panels of peach and lavender dampened by sweat, clung to and emphasized the lines of her slender figure. Her hair was a mass of black curls, also damp with sweat and making a frame of ringlets around a delicate oval face. "No? But hardly a doddering old lady yet, wouldn't you say? Also, official missions don't begin with somebody half strangling my groom and scratching at my bedchamber door. I don't know what you're up to, Gabrel, and something tells me I don't want to know, but—be careful, will you? The regiment would be damned dull without you."

  In the event, it had hardly been worthwhile borrowing Moylen's turagai; Calandra had never ridden before. At the end of the first day Gabrel had had to lift her from the saddle, and she'd managed only a few steps before her legs failed her and he had to carry her the rest of the way to their rooms in the Vaisee village where he'd planned to stop for the first night.

  "Why didn't you tell me you couldn't ride?" he scolded her.

  "Why didn't you tell me it was so bunu hard? Anyway, I'm learning. I'll do better tomorrow."

  "You will not," Gabrel contradicted her, and walked out to make other arrangements.

  Selling one of the turagai to a Rohini caravan leader provided enough extra money to pay both their passages on a boat going up the broad reaches of the Vaisee-jara as far as it was navigable, and left a little over for Sanouk to remain in the village a few days before returning to his master with the remaining two beasts. Gabrel hoped Sanouk's reluctance to tell Moylen that one of his prized racing turagai had been sold after all would keep him in the village until his money ran out; he hoped Moylen would understand the necessity and forgive him when they returned; come to think of it, he hoped they would return. He'd traveled upcountry before, but always as an officer of the Barents Trading Society's army, with all the might and support of Barents behind him. Now he was traveling as one half of a young, anonymous offworld couple with an inexplicable curiosity to sample Kalapriyan life outside the coastal enclaves. The difference was evident in the attitude of the innkeeper, who'd wanted payment in advance at three times the going rate; Gabrel had to waste time haggling with the man, demonstrating his fluent Kalapriyan and his intimate knowledge of both lodging rates and Kalapriyan curses, to get the price down to a mere one and a half times what a native would pay. The other purchases he made in the local market before returning to Calandra required a similarly protracted spell of bargaining; chaffering was Kalapriya's unofficial planetary sport, and if a Kalapriyan Olympics were ever organized, the herbalist in the market could have chaffered for Vaisee.

  "Here," he said on his return, tossing the herbalist's round leather box at Calandra, "put this on your—um—where it's sore." He unstopped the stiff leather bag that had been his other purchase and took a drink of the contents to cover his embarrassment. The local madira burned like fire going down his throat; he was out of practice. "That salve will numb you up and help the skin heal over, and you'll have time to heal in the next few days; we're leaving the turagai here and taking a boat up the Vaisee-jara."

  "All the way to whatsit—Darample?"

  "Dharampal," Gabrel corrected, wondering what incompetent slob had created the Kalapriyan maps in the Diplomat's download. "And not all the way, naturally, the river's unnavigable once we reach the foothills. But you can't take turagai into the mountains. We'll have to buy a couple of ghaya to carry our packs, and we'll walk."

  "All right by me," declared Calandra cheerfully, but her grin faded when she tried to stand up. "Um—I think I might need some help . . ."

  It turned out that Calandra needed help not only to get from the rug she'd collapsed on to her narrow bed, but also to get the herbalist's salve on all the places that were sore, some of them being quite hard to reach in her present stiffened condition. Gabrel told himself that he should have thought of that and hired a girl from the marketplace to aid Calandra, then told himself that he'd have been an idiot to do any such thing. It was hard enough for a couple of outlanders to travel inconspicuously outside the coastal enclaves without setting any extra mouths chattering, and there was no impropriety in helping out a fellow traveler in difficulties. Then he concentrated on thinking of his fellow traveler as Diplomat Vissi rather than as the laughing girl he'd danced with the previous night. It took some strenuous thinking about other things to keep his reactions under control while he smoothed the salve onto the backs of her thighs. Every once in a while he stopped and took a drink from the leather sack of madira, not so much because he needed it as for an excuse to take his hands off the Diplo before they wandered where they shouldn't. Diplos probably had extremely effective ways of warding off unwanted attentions . . . And doing sums in his head wasn't enough distraction. He would have to find something else to recite . . . but the only poem he could think of offhand was the ballad of Rusala's adventures with the seven daughters of King Death. Not a good choice; Rusala
had had entirely too much fun with those girls despite their unfortunate parentage.

  "You don't have to curse," Maris said, her voice slightly muffled by the pillow she was biting.

  "I wasn't cursing." Gabrel drew a blanket over the slender, girlish form and stood up, wiping little droplets of sweat from his brow. "I was—um—reviewing Kalapriyan grammar. Ishti-class verbs. In the past subjunctive."

  "Find you get a lot of use for the past subjunctive, do you?" The Diplo had stopped chewing on the pillow and was propped up on her elbows, regarding him with a bird's bright inquisitive glance from under her mop of black curls.

  "Easy for you to sneer," Gabrel said, finding a heaven-sent evasion for just why he'd felt it necessary to chant ishti-class verb conjugations for the last ten minutes, "but us ordinary citizens don't get whole languages downloaded into special chips in our heads. We have to learn them the old-fashioned way, by repetition and sweat."

  Maris flopped back onto her pillow, facedown. "Those language chips aren't as great as everybody assumes," she said through the red and black embroidered pillow cover. "We don't come out, like, talking the language fluently or anythin'."

  "Oh. More like a running start on learning the language?"

  Maris sputtered into the woolen pillow cover. "Oh, yes. You could definitely say I got a running start." She shook with suppressed laughter.

  "Now what's so funny about that?" Gabrel demanded.

  Probably not a good idea to explain. "Uh, nothing. The, the salve burns a little bit," Maris improvised.

  "That should stop soon. At least, the stuff my Gran used on nettle stings always burned at first and then made the skin go numb, and this smells like the same mixture." Gabrel sniffed at the pot of greenish-yellow grease. That and the fumes of the madira smelled like home to him, a rich mixture of stinging and floral perfumes that Barents could never match. Reminded of the madira, he upended the bag and took another mouthful. It didn't burn so much now. "Made it up from Kalapriyan herbs she gathered up in the Hills, she did, and never would tell me what went into it."

  "I thought you were from Barents?" Maris propped herself up on both elbows and rested her chin in her hands; she wasn't ready to risk sitting up yet, but it was impossible to conduct a conversation with one's face in a pillow.

  "In a manner of speaking," Gabrel said. "I'm the third generation of career military in our family. My grandfather was in on the pacification of the plains states. He did his best to see people treated fairly when they came under Barents law, and some of them remembered that when he retired. The ex-Vakil of Latacharya offered him a house on the slopes of the foothills, looking up at the mountains. I used to stay with him and Gran a lot when I was a kid; by that time my dad was in the Service here." He smiled, remembering those enchanted days in the freedom of Latacharya, and toasted them with another swallow of madira.

  "And your mother stayed on Barents, did she?"

  "Oh, no. Not Mam!" Gabrel chuckled. "She followed Dad wherever he was assigned. But—they were both only children, you see, and her parents hadn't approved of her marrying into the military; they were minor Barents nobility and as high in the instep as only impoverished minor nobles can be. So I think she planned on building her own extended family. I had three younger brothers, all born here on Kalapriya. Only trouble was, every time Mam was expecting she got hellish sick, so they'd send us kids up to Latacharya for the duration. And after my second brother was born Gran suggested we just stay there where she could school us until Mam was through with her family-building." Gabrel smiled reminiscently. "It's not like being in the true Hills, Latacharya isn't, but it's got that smell of conifers and snow-melt, and when the traders came through for a fair we kids used to sneak away from Gran and hang around the caravanserai all day, learning Kalapriyan words—some of which got our mouths washed out with soap when we tried them out at dinner, because Gran and Grandfather knew the language well enough themselves! And when I was ten I got my own hawk with her perch in Grandfather's mews; I was going to train her myself and go hawking with the native boys . . ."

  "What happened?" Maris could tell from the way Gabrel's voice slowed that something had interrupted the idyll.

  "My Dad took a saber cut across the thigh, dealing with some bandits along the river who hadn't quite understood that Vaisee was under Barents protection now. He didn't lose the leg, but—he couldn't ride anymore. They offered him early retirement and three-quarters pension, and he decided it was time for us all to go back to Barents. He thought the climate in the plains might have been part of Mam's trouble . . . she lost two babies after Number Three was born. And he may have been right," Gabrel said, "because Number Four came along ten months after we moved back to Barents, only then the doctors said she mustn't try to have any more. So she's been saving her expansionist ideas for the next generation. She wants me to get married to a nice fertile girl with a big family. She must be the only mother on Barents who wants a lot of in-laws . . . Sorry, I don't know why I'm boring you with all this nonsense."

  "Keep talking," Maris urged. "It takes my mind off." Not to mention that when he was telling her about his past, he wasn't asking her any embarrassing questions. "So how did you wind up back on Kalapriya?"

  "Told you," Gabrel said. Or had he? For some reason he was finding it hard to remember exactly what he had and hadn't said. "Career military. Oldest son, naturally follow in m'father's footsteps. Grandfather's too. Besides, cheapest education on Barents is military academy. For us army brats, that is. With four sons to raise on a pension, m'father couldn't very well feature sending any of us anywhere else. Besides, got me back to Kalapriya." He tilted the leather bag and was disappointed to find that only a few drops of madira trickled out. Oh well. No need to sit up if he wasn't drinking. He lay back on the rug and stared at the criscrossing wooden rafters above them. "More chance of promotion here, never know, could be we'll have to take over the hill states, nice little war. Peacetime on Barents, nothing to do but get older waiting for your superior officers to get older and retire. No kind of career for a soldier." He tossed the empty bag up in the air, failed to catch it, and winked at Maris. "They think that's why I volunteered for Kalapriya, y'see? Young fire-eater, looking for action. Actually . . ." He yawned. "Actually I jus' love the place. Would've come back anyway. But don't tell m'colonel that."

  "I promise not to tell your colonel that you like Kalapriya," Maris said, "and . . . don't you think you'd better take your boots off before you go to sleep?"

  But her suggestion had come too late.

  * * *

  Apart from his headache the next morning and the mystery of why he'd downed an entire bag of madira when he didn't even like drinking, Gabrel found the days of the boat trip upriver uneventful enough. Calandra was clearly still stiff on the first morning, but she assured Gabrel that the salve had worked wonders and that she would be able to apply it herself from then on.

  The boat wasn't really designed for passengers; it was more of a one-size-fits-all, carrying crates of salt fish and tropical fruits and spices upriver, presumably returning with boxes of nuts from the mountain orchards and bales of the coarse, bright fabrics the hill people wove from the long hair of their ghaya. It veered from one side of the Vaisee-jara to the other, stopping at every little village along the river on either bank. An old grandmother took the boat back after a visit downriver to see the newest grandchild, a slightly younger midwife traveled upriver to attend the accouchement of a minor hill-Vakil's third wife; a Rohini jewel trader squatted over his brass-bound box of gilt-filigree trifles and scowled suspiciously at the Rudhrani soldier, on leave from his post with the Vaisee Royal Guard, who demeaned himself to take the boat for a visit with his upcountry family because, as he cheerfully explained, his last turag had lost her race with a colleague's gelding and had become that colleague's property, and he now meant to apply in person to his father for a loan to finance another string of racers.

  Gabrel slouched against a stack of crates, his gold
hair covered by an anonymous loose felt hat, his fair skin turning brown in the hot sun over the river, his height at least somewhat disguised by his slouch and by a coarse blanket of hill-country weave thrown over his shoulders. He breathed in the spice-scented air and the babble of dialects and felt himself at home in a way he never felt in Valentin, much less on Barents itself. This was where he belonged, in the field, soaking up local lore and stories. He listened to the midwife and the grandmother trading competing stories of difficult births, and learned much that a Barents Trading Society officer would not normally understand about the importance of a red cord under the bed and the disastrous possibilities inherent in offending Vasanti of the Three Breasts by leaving cooking implements in view during an accouchement. When a curtained box was carried on board by four dark southern men who stationed themselves at its corners, glaring at all passengers impartially, he recognized that a bride of good family was being sent north and understood, with regret, the old ladies' unspoken decision to stop telling childbirth stories for a while.

  Soon enough their place was taken by a Rohini star-gazer who offered to make the pilot's birth-chart in trade for passage to the next village, and who explained with great fluency the effects of the stars Lokaishana and Kanchana in guiding the pilot to a water trade, and the necessity of the man's placating the water demons also ruled by Lokaishana. This led to a theological argument with a dour man who now revealed himself as a hill-priest returning home from pilgrimage to the holy mouth of the Vaisee-jara, and who asserted categorically that demons could not be placated by offerings but must be controlled by amulets containing sacred writings. He just happened to have a supply of such amulets stitched into the seams of his bedroll and might be willing to part with some for an appropriate price.

  The discussion became lively enough for Gabrel to pick up several interesting new terms of abuse concerning the ancestors, personal habits, and sexual preferences of both holy men; he felt some regret when the bride's guards bought up the hill-priest's entire stock of amulets, engaged him on the spot to protect them against malign influences, and took their cortege off the boat when it tied up for the night just downstream from the Ford of the Dead Emperors. Oh well, this part of their journey was nearly over anyway; half a day more would bring them to the rapids where the Dharam-jara joined the Vaisee-jara and created a river deep enough for boat travel, and from there on they would have to go on foot.