by Larry Niven
“Raililiee, it’s on my desk, if you please.”
Raililiee went.
Green Stone said, “The Angie Queen was to carry certain goods for the Captains of Condigeo and Feathersnake caravan.”
“Yes.” The captain waved portside. “Do you see them two piles of goods on the dock? I was to separate them; you are to choose the pile you like.”
The piles were unequal. Blocks of furniture in one; clothing in the other; bags of beans here, shoes there; other inequalities…Green Stone said, “It would help if I had an inventory of what’s in which pile.”
“We haven’t done that. Wagonmaster, wouldn’t you prefer to take inventory yourself?”
“I’ll see to that. It’ll take up more dock space. We’ll have to pull the piles apart to see what’s in the middle.”
Raililiee was back with two sheets of bark.
Sandry said, “I can read.” He took the parchments. “‘How the Bonehead Got His Horn.’ Preetror was telling a story. It’s all compressed style. Doesn’t make much sense—wait a minute…yes. Coyote stole a sea animal’s horn—narwhale, I think—and had to hide it quick when narwhale turned man and came running after him. He gave it to a deer—I’d have said horse, but he’s underlined deer—and said that it would help him run. So they’ve each got one horn.”
Green Stone laughed. “Raililiee? These were the teller’s last words?”
“These were on his desk, under his hand, and a dried-up quill in it.”
Sandry read the other sheet. “‘Mirandee and the Tax Collector.’ You’re too young, Green Stone.” Sandry grinned. “ ‘The Emperor’s Hearts.’”
“All stories?”
“Yes, but…‘In city Aztlan, wall of thousand hearts. Brick, stucco, jars. In jars, hearts. Emperor, heart. King for a year, heart. Felons and enemies, hearts.’ He’s being too concise, but—Aztlan?”
Captain Saziff spoke with apparent reluctance. “Aztlan holds rights to all the magical sources east of here. Sunfall Crater. The wood of stone. They claim title to whatever smells of magic. Caravans run between Crescent City and the trading posts. No one goes to Aztlan.”
“No one?”
“Few, then. Some are invited. Of those, few return. Why would they? The Island City of Aztlan is said to be paved with gold. Warriors cast spears to the four winds, and rainstorms follow the spears. Magic flows everywhere, in the air, down the river. No one is ever hungry or thirsty there.”
“And you believe this?” Green Stone asked.
Saziff shrugged. “Those who have been there say it is so.” A small wave lapped at the sides of the ship. Gulls wheeled above the shallow water.
“Who says it?” Stone demanded.
“The soldiers and traders at their trading posts,” Saziff said. “They live in Aztlan and are always anxious to return. Sometimes a trader has been invited and sent away again, like Ruser of Low Street. Yes, I believe it.”
“So all trade is with the trading posts?” Green Stone asked.
“Yes. Caravans go northeast to the trading stations. They return with stonewood and other talismans, mainly of silver and turquoise. There are also maguey products. Rumor said that huge killer birds had stopped the caravans from Crescent City to Condigeo. I thought to make a fabulous profit. Curse! I never guessed that the birds stopped all caravans, even those from Aztlan.”
“Why would those be spared?” Green Stone asked.
“I thought they would be protected by the Emperor,” Saziff said. “The priests of Left-Handed Hummingbird serve him. He is powerful—he is the Emperor—but it may be that his power doesn’t reach far from Aztlan. That is frightening.”
“Frightening?” Sandry said.
“That something more powerful than the Emperor controls the caravan routes between here and Aztlan.” Captain Saziff looked them in the eyes. “Lord Sandry, Wagonmaster Green Stone, I see I must speak plainly. If the caravans cannot travel to Aztlan and back, Crescent City has little worth trading for. Crescent City goods are useful, but no more so than those made on the coast. No one would come here for Crescent City meats and vegetables. There is willow bark, and there is jewelry, but it is more prized for its magic than its workmanship. Beyond that…” He shrugged. “Unless they have hidden magical items to sell, we are both ruined. These goods”—he waved down at the dock—“there are secrets to the way I divided them, yes, but in normal times either would be worth great wealth. Now—now they are worth more in Condigeo than here! We are both ruined.”
“Speak for yourself,” Green Stone said. “Feathersnake does not need trade with Crescent City to make profits along the Hemp Road.” He looked thoughtful. “Tell me of the reputation of the money changers here.”
Saziff nodded as if comprehending a great secret. “The city money changer, Jade Coin, is well known here and in Condigeo,” he said. “A friend.”
“How much of a friend?” Green Stone asked.
“He takes perhaps one part in twenty for bringing him accounts,” Saziff said. “But he is honest. The city mayor keeps him that way. But they all are, here. It is the pride of Crescent City to have honest money changers.”
Green Stone said, “There is little trade here. They cannot ask much for the use of a warehouse for a year. If I leave the goods in the care of Jade Coin to be held until a new caravan comes from this Aztlan, I think there may be profit enough.”
“You will need a good man to negotiate,” Saziff said.
“I know that. Or I can return,” Green Stone said.
“I have a proposition for you,” Saziff said.
Green Stone smiled. “See if you can describe it.”
Saziff sighed. “We run these piles together. We leave our shares in your warehouse, and when you next come here and return to Condigeo, you divide what you have obtained for the entire heap, and I will choose which pile is mine.”
Green Stone grinned. “There will be expenses. I will divide three ways, and you will choose one.”
“Ruin!” Saziff shouted.
Saziff would choose two piles out of five. Sandry smiled to himself. This bargaining—it is a skill I need to learn….
Chapter Twenty
The Merchants
of Low Street
Regapisk, no longer Lord, and Arshur the Outsider rowed north through the Salty Sea. Zephans Mishagnos spent much of his time asleep in the bottom of the hollowed-out log. Just now he might have been dead but for the snoring. The parrot rode the prow, muttering to itself.
It was easier to see the glow of magic at night, whatever Arshur believed. The moon’s glow was a comfort but distracting. Through the mist, Regapisk saw a change in the light.
“Pull hard, Arshur. If I angle us a little left—”
“Yeah, then what?” But Arshur pulled mightily, and Regapisk steered, and a few hundred breaths later Zeph sat up with a start.
“Hah! That feels good.” Zeph looked around him, then down into the water. He grinned. For the age he claimed, Zeph had kept an amazing number of teeth. “Rest for a bit. Regapisk, do you notice anything about this live patch?”
There were rivers in the sea, streams of unformed magic, as Regapisk thought of them, too far to reach, and a darker stream ahead. But the oval patch he’d steered into—“It’s not moving with the water. It’s deep.”
“It’s not moving!” the parrot screeched.
“Shut it, I can hear! Reg, look down.”
Arshur said, “I can’t see anything. Wait…sometimes you see fish that glow.”
The outlines of light weren’t moving, and they weren’t fish. It was all angles and circles. “Cone-shaped buildings,” Regapisk said.
Zeph said, “The sea rose when Atlantis sank. There were quakes. It must have left sunken villages all over the world. These were the Crescent City docks. Avoid that dark stream; it’s the Rainbow River. We must be right on top of Crescent City. This cursed fog is hiding the watch lights.”
“I see something ahead,” Arshur said. “Pointed.”
“The palace. Like this.” Zeph’s hands formed a blunt peak. “The houses all look like that.”
Through thin mist, the vista looked spiky. Two glowing patches shrank to bright points as they rowed near.
“Thirsty, boys?” Zeph dipped a bowl over the side. “Curse! They’ve been dumping their garbage in the water.” He poured out what he had and dipped the bowl more carefully, held it a moment (Regapisk saw a darkening of the manna glow), then passed it around. Fresh, clean water.
They pulled up in a row of canoes. Zeph spoke at length to a man on guard. Then he reached toward the quiet water, and Regapisk perceived Zeph entangled with the glowing lines of manna.
Zeph told them, “I made a deal. I clean up the sewage for docking rights. We get the loan of a donkey too.”
They piled half their goods on the donkey. The little beast stood patiently until they put one more load on, then it lay down and refused to budge until they lightened its burden. It got up, ready. Regapisk and Arshur carried the rest of the gear.
They moved onto the main road and followed it away from the dock. Not far from the palace, at the end of a row of tents and blankets arrayed with wares, Zeph directed them to lay out what they had to sell. Dawn was hiding the stars.
Regapisk asked Arshur, “What’s got you chuckling?”
“You didn’t notice? Yeah, I thought not. You never saw it from a dock. We’re parked twenty paces from the Angie Queen. Don’t look back.”
Regapisk couldn’t help it. The docks were a long way below them by now. Seamen were beginning to move. Regapisk couldn’t pick out the ship, but he knew the captain’s gaudy coat.
Arshur said, “Zeph, we have to buy some clothes. We can’t go dressed like oarsmen. Someone will know us.”
“Oh, all right. Six up, that’s Cheprea; she sells clothes. Tell her you’re with me, and ask for trade-in. Here.” Zeph gave them two big yellow melons and some coins. “I’ll be along as soon as I buy a good talisman.”
The street looked more like Peacegiven Square than Lord’s Town. Merchants sat at tables, looking up eagerly when anyone came past, then returning to staring glumly at their meager supply of trade goods. No one seemed to be buying anything.
“Gentlemen! Got a headache?”
“Only metaphorically,” Regapisk said, looking into the darkened cone of a booth.
A dark, lean man grinned at them. Face and head, he was shaved clean. Great sheets of pale bark surrounded him. “Willow,” he said. “The secret to surcease of pain, almost beyond price the world over. You’re with the caravan, aren’t you, sirs?”
Regapisk said, “I fear not. We don’t have the headaches and we don’t have the money.”
The merchant lost his smile. The dapper man in the next booth was grinning, though. “A natural mistake,” he said soothingly. “You, at least, look very like the warrior Lord who killed the birds.”
Regapisk felt his belly twist inside him. “Would his name be Sandry?”
The willow merchant said, “Something like that. A relative?”
“No, it’s just that I’ve heard of him. He learned how to kill terror birds around Condigeo.”
“Did he? Well, he saved the city. We’ve been hard put to find our next meal. They brought trade goods too, and I wish they’d find their way here!”
Regapisk said, “I would think that a warrior would need infusions of willow bark pretty often.”
“Yes, it’s excellent for wounds, or a knocked head, or blisters such as an oarsman—”
“We can scarcely buy clothes.”
The willow merchant scowled.
The dapper man in the next booth wore half a dozen silver necklaces with silver and turquoise ornaments bobbing on them. He said, “Haladik’s problem is good news for everyone else. The bark has been growing and thickening on the willow trees, untouched, ever since the nightmare birds came.”
“Where do you find willow?” Regapisk asked.
The dapper man grinned. “Should I tell you? Yes, perhaps I should; it’s not work I care for. In low areas, near water. But everything nearby will be claimed. Ten leagues upriver, it will be different.”
“Not work you care for,” Regapisk said.
“Perhaps Lord Sandry will want to know. They’ll need trade goods. They’re assembling a trading concern, I hear, around Badger Caravan. They’re being almighty picky about it too.”
Regapisk silently wished them joy of it, and a quick departure. “And you, sir? What are you selling?”
“Gems and talismans. Like this, and a good deal more under guard. Some are charged and some depleted.”
“Depleted?”
“Yes, used up by a wizard. They’ll need recharging.”
“You can bring a dead talisman back to life?”
“Well…examine this one.” The jeweler showed Regapisk a big turquoise inside a massy silver frame, without taking it off the chain around his neck. “You just take it to a place rich in manna. Silver conducts manna. Turquoise holds it. Take it into the Stone Forest, or into Sunfall Crater, paying your fees, of course. Wait a bit, then take the turquoise out of the frame—thus—before you leave, or it’ll all drain out through the silver. Are you sure you’re not with the traders?”
“I might join them,” Regapisk said.
The jeweler nodded. “But your interest is in Cheprea, four booths that way. Tell her Ruser sent you, if you like.”
The tea and bun shop was on a high platform attached to the south side of a curiously shaped building made of logs laid in a spiral. The door into the building was directly below them, but the platform had its own stairway outside. Tables faced the sea.
The stairway was steep, and Zeph was looking older again. Arshur helped the old wizard up the stairs and to a table where Regapisk was already seated.
Regapisk felt better. He had buckskin trousers and a coat woven from yarn made of some vegetable fiber and dyed a dark blue. It had two shiny buttons. According to the clothing merchant, it had belonged to some elderly merchant dead in the Bird Wars who had threatened to haunt anyone who wore his clothing. Regapisk wasn’t worried about ghosts, and besides, there were plenty of beggars on the streets near the docks. He’d give the coat away if an unsettling ghost really appeared.
He was now dressed like many of the townsmen, except for the heavy bronze sword at his side. The bandit’s weapon wasn’t a very good sword, not well shaped, and it didn’t keep an edge well, but it was a sword. Not many in the town were armed. Regapisk felt very much the gentleman, and sometimes he even dared think of himself as Lord Regapisk.
“You don’t look good,” he told Zeph.
Zeph didn’t react. The parrot screeched, “You don’t look good!”
“Yeah. Can’t buy a talisman,” Zeph said. “I got good money for the melons. This was the right time to sell, gates just open, birds all driven away, people hungry and opening their pocketbooks, but there’s no glow left in the talismans! I have more money than I ever had, and I can’t buy a talisman with a decent charge. That wagonmaster bought everything that was for sale! Curse!”
“Ruser the jeweler spoke of both charged and uncharged talismans,” Regapisk said.
“You know Ruser? I already talked to him. The wagonmaster bought every charged item in his stock. Except this.” He showed a small turquoise set in stonewood dangling from a leather string around his neck. “Keeps me going, but that’s all. He’s got some great items, but none of them charged.”
A waitress came over to take their orders. She winked at Regapisk, but she waggled her hips at Arshur. They ordered terror bird stew. It seemed to be the only meat dish they had. She brought big ornately decorated ceramic bowls, full of meat and hot red bulbs Zeph called peppers. The spoons were ceramic with wooden handles.
Arshur watched as Regapisk dipped stew and ate, then used his spoon the same way.
“So what will you do?” Regapisk asked.
Zeph shrugged. “Go back to my salt farm and wait,” he said. �
�What choices do I have?”
“Not me,” Arshur said. “I’m going to be a king, and I won’t find that at a salt farm.”
Zeph nodded gravely. “I expected that.”
“What will you do?” Regapisk asked. Something far out in the Inland Sea splashed and blew a plume of spray. Whale, Regapisk thought. Not a mer, though. Mers never came up this side of the Finger. The last mers they’d seen were back at the Nail.
“Feeling responsible for me?” Zeph grinned.
“A little. We saved your life.”
“Maybe. Say you did. I knew you weren’t coming back to the farm with me.” He jingled his coin bag. “I’ll hire me some youngsters to help out until a caravan comes through with live talismans.”
“You trust the locals?”
“Some,” Zeph said. “Ruser the jeweler’s an old friend. He’ll know people who have honest kids.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Willow Bark
“There’s nothing to trade for,” Green Stone said. He passed his soup bowl to Burning Tower and watched morosely as she filled it from the big pot. “I weary of terror bird stew, and there’s scarcely a wagonload of magical items in the whole town. Of course there’s twenty times that much in depleted jewelry, with all the power gone.”
“Willow bark,” Nothing Was Seen said. “I’ve listened. It grows wild north of here and hasn’t been harvested in moons, since the birds came.”
Green Stone said, “It will be, soon enough. The towns-folk want our goods, and they have little enough to pay with.”
“How far north?” Sandry asked.
Nothing Was Seen shrugged. “I couldn’t get too close to them. It was a strange group, merchants with nothing to sell, and two men who walk like sailors. I’ve seen one of them before, in Condigeo, I think. Big man, big muscles, some gaudy scars. Looks like a Lordkin.”
“And the other?”
“Looked a little like you,” Lurk said.
“Regapisk,” Sandry said. “Who else could it be?”
“Do you want to find him?” Lurk asked.