Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  Essa expected everyone to be taken to meet whomever it was that they were supposed to meet—after all, what had been the point of bathing and dressing them all? But no, the maestra was escorted off, and the rest of them were left in a windowless room where at least they were—finally—given food, even if it was unfamiliar and very spicy, to the point of making her cough. The dog and Skiff huddled together, and the twins bickered among themselves.

  Essa looked around and tried to imagine what details she would have recorded in her journal, if only she had one. She thought of the mathematician’s manuscript and hoped that someone else might have proofed it by the time she got back.

  He had sneered at her—that was what had made her sign up for the expedition—had told her she might have plenty of school years but she had no experience in trade.

  At the time it had seemed one of the most significant, angering moments of her life. Everyone looking at her while he stood with folded arms, giving her the reasons he wouldn’t accept her as a student. And then he’d had the gall to say he’d reconsider if she proved herself by proofing his manuscript in a worthy manner. Worse, she hadn’t pointed out that he was taking advantage of her labor, and invoked Diahmo in rebuke.

  Since then she had faced storm and shipwreck. His sneer seemed much less significant, somehow, in the face of those elemental forces. She imagined herself back in that inn in Tabat— she skipped right over the wherefore and why of how she might get there—facing him down. She didn’t want to study with him anymore, but she did still rather want to do something with mathematics. Something that involved the university and clean classrooms during the day and warm baths and that sort of thing at night. If one ever got back to Tabat, that might in fact be doable.

  Getting back to Tabat . . . She let out a long sigh, louder than she had intended.

  “This is your fault,” a twin said to her.

  “Fuck off,” she wearily retorted. They’d tried to pick fights before, all through the journey, jockeying for status. Now they were doing it just because they were bored.

  He leaned over and shoved at her shoulder. “You fuck off,” he said.

  All of the rage at the journey and its circumstances boiled up in her in an instant, and she couldn’t do anything except shove back, so focused with rage that all she saw was his face, first startled and then suddenly full of elation, and then the fight was on in a tangle of fists and falls while the dog barked as Skiff tried to pull it back. She was fighting both twins, which would have been harder if they hadn’t been fighting each other too. A hard fist caught her just under the eye with a slice of pain and a flash of black stars across her vision. Someone grabbed at her shoulder, and the flimsy colored robe ripped, tangling with her arms as it fell away.

  Then shouts and hands yanking them apart and the maestra’s voice, so disappointed and furious, shouting at them all to stop.

  Essa pulled her robe around herself. Her eye throbbed as she tried to focus on the maestra, who was speaking.

  “Come along then.” Her long fingers gestured at them to follow. “They’re putting us up in guest rooms. We’re still discussing how to get to the port, but it doesn’t seem like it will be a problem. Essa, you and Skiff will room together, as will you boys.” She didn’t mention the dog, but Essa assumed it would follow her and Skiff, which it did.

  The guest room was small, its walls the braided grass and bamboo latticework that had marked many of the village structures. Fresh robes hung on pegs near the door; a shelf held basin, comb, and other necessaries; but where a mirror would have been in Tabat, someone had painted an oval of green leaves, red flowers, and blue and yellow butterflies.

  Essa had feared they’d have to share a bed, but sleeping shelves lined the eastern wall, each with a gauzy screen that could be drawn down to shield the occupant from mosquitoes. She slipped off the remnants of her robe without paying attention to Skiff or the dog and bundled herself into the nearest shelf without thought, exhaustion driving her down into the bedding. She closed her eyes and still felt as though the ground below her swung in place, but she could finally relax into it, fall down into darkness, down and down and down.

  Shouting woke her. She didn’t know if it was minutes or hours later. A glance toward the window through the gauze showed a lighter shadow inside the darkness: almost dawn.

  She might have closed her eyes again, but a thread of panic in the clamor out in the hallway pulled her upright and through the gauze, pulling on a fresh robe. The noise yanked her down the hall to the door where everyone stood but no one dared cross the threshold. She joined the crowd, staring in to where the maestra lay across a bed, throat a scarlet ruin. Skiff was already there, the dog behind her, its teeth white and protective.

  “A wild animal,” someone said.

  “No,” Skiff said, voice suddenly louder and more authoritative than Essa had ever heard it before. “I know how animals bite. That’s someone trying to make it look like an animal did it.”

  Essa averted her eyes. She didn’t want to know.

  The twins were there too, for once not speaking in any language, their eyes wide and horrified. Others spoke in the language Essa had heard before, which she could not make sense of.

  Several large and muscled people carrying spears showed up and gestured everyone else away from the door. Two took up posts outside the doorway while another motioned at the visitors to follow.

  As though emboldened by her earlier speech, Skiff began to speak more words than Essa had ever heard from her before; she downright chattered as she and Essa followed after the twins.

  “Without the maestra,” she said, “who knows what will happen? Perhaps we will stay here. It does not seem a bad place. Warm, at any rate.”

  “You don’t want to go back to Tabat?” The idea startled Essa.

  The girl gave her a blank stare. “What’s for me and Yadi there?”

  “Your family . . .”

  “They sold me to the kennels. Here I don’t answer to anyone.” Skiff tugged at the dog’s ear affectionately, and it tilted its head, looking up at her.

  “Shut up,” said a twin.

  “You shut up,” Essa started to say, framing the words in Ligurian, but she fell silent as they stopped in front of a doorway.

  Where most of the architecture of this house had seemed organic, this door seemed even more so, as though freshly grown out of the wall to hide an opening with a curtain of heart-shaped leaves, each about half the size of Essa’s palm, fuzzed with a shimmer of white over the green. Through the foliage, she glimpsed a large chamber, lit by a combination of natural morning light and torches.

  Before she could see much more, they were shoved through the doorway and then down onto their knees in front of a massive figure on a throne.

  It was not a single person, but two, she realized, as she looked up past the robes embroidered with feathers and scales to two heads on a single trunk, both bearded but full-lipped, as though sexes had mingled into one pool.

  “We are Turtle.” The right-hand head spoke, the other staying silent. “We watch over this settlement. Your leader is dead.” All four eyes were fixed on Essa, as though she were the only one worth addressing, and she found herself straightening under that stern gaze.

  “I . . . ,” she started, but a twin said, “By precedence, my sibling and I are the new leader. We will still require passage to the coast, so we can find our ship.”

  The eyes stayed on Essa. “You do not wish to stay here?” The Trade tongue was clear and understandable but edged with thick accent.

  “Not really,” she said. “Though your village is very pretty, and so is the country. I like all the flowers in the trees.”

  The left-hand side smiled a little, but the right-hand face remained stolid and unyielding as a cliff face. She saw that there were subtle differences despite the identical faces—the left-hand one wore a garland of white orchids and what Essa thought were black berries, and bell-shaped earrings, thumb sized, swung from t
heir earlobes, while the right-hand one had a necklace of butterfly wings interspersed with shimmering beetles and no earrings, but a ring of braided iron wire pierced their lower lip near its left corner.

  She thought about adding, “Some of us want to stay,” and pointing out Skiff, but that would mean losing the dog along with all the other cargo, and the duke was not the sort of man who would like loss piled upon loss. To the point where she already wondered what the reaction would be when she returned. It would be so much better if she had some of the cargo with her, if she could report that the dog had been delivered as intended, and was brewing in the southern kennel, building social capital for Tabat as well as pups to be sent back to build up the duke’s own stables.

  No. Better not to open up that account book and start working future figures. She would maximize profits by holding on to all she could. She looked to the twins for agreement and found them both nodding. Her eyes traveled to Skiff’s face, which was silent but rebellious. She wondered if the girl would run away. It wasn’t that she was a slave, but the duke would have paid good money to her family in return for a decade of servitude. He’d fed and clothed her and educated her in a trade. It was a common practice nowadays, despite what anyone said about it. And no matter what, Skiff couldn’t keep the dog. It belonged to the duke.

  “We need to think and pray and consult the gods on this,” Turtle said.

  “Then what are we to do in the meantime?” a twin asked.

  The gaze finally swung toward the twins, so slow and ponderous that they actually flinched back. “You will stay where you have slept and eaten so far,” the right-hand head said. “There is music tonight, a celebration of the moons, and you will be invited, as any traveler would be, to feast and drink and dance with us. In the morning I will tell you what I have decided, and what is the best for you. Such mathematics are hard.”

  “I could help with that,” Essa said. “That is what I am trained in.”

  The right-hand lips quirked. “And like any Merchant, you will shape the equation as it suits you. Things that I value, you do not, and vice versa, and I do not think you understand all the intricacies of that or you would already have told me your sums.”

  Four hands lifted to gesture jointly, and the travelers were pulled away by hands that smelled of sandalwood.

  The twins paced throughout the day while Skiff petted her dog, whispering into its furry ear, but Essa spent most of her while sleeping, enjoying the feeling of being safe and warm.

  Midday, someone came to her with a clamshell of some pale liquid and she drank it down, finding it peppery and sweet, sinking into her stomach to anchor her so the swaying finally went away, bit by bit. Another someone came with an armload of fresh dresses, as brightly patterned as before, and another with jewelry—earrings, bracelets, necklaces, anklets, crowns, combs, and hairpieces—all made of braided ironware strung with little white coral beads, each as small as a shrimp’s eye.

  At dusk, bells and whistles called them to the center of the village, where they found great stone blocks, which had been unadorned during the day except for friezes of bas-relief carving, patterned rather than figurative, and were now strewn with flowers and lit with upright candles, illuminating wooden platters and glazed ceramic bowls filled with food, each artfully decorated with more flowers and conceits carved from fruits, like tiny green birds perched on the edge of a roasted ear, or root petals around bright red seeds, looking more like flowers than the accompanying, more subtle blossoms. Everything smelled of roasted meat and vanilla, cinnamon and smoky fruit, and the sharp tang of the grain beer being handed out in wooden tankards, the largest thing Essa had ever drunk from.

  It was so good to be so full after days of privation, even if everything was still too spicy. She was starting to get accustomed to it. She felt some of her tension loosening, particularly after she took a deep draft of sweet, burning liquid that rocketed down to her belly, then spread out like afterfire along her limbs. Drums joined with the whistles and flutes, and the music shook its way through her skin and into her, coaxed her out to stamp and dance with the others, laughing as they taught her.

  For an evening she didn’t think about decisions, wasn’t a Merchant, just a dancer. The other travelers did not join her though. The twins stood and drank morosely, faces growing angrier and angrier as the evening continued, until finally they had some sort of obscure shouting match with each other—Essa couldn’t catch what all was said, for they had picked an obscure dialect of Rosian. They seemed fixated on the carvings, knelt beside the blocks to examine them. Youths and maidens tried to draw them into the dance and were impatiently rebuffed with shoulder shrugs, never looked at.

  Meanwhile Skiff had vanished somewhere along with her dog.

  Essa didn’t care. This was the moment, the moment was now. She let herself be drawn into a cluster of giggling girls her age. She emerged well kissed but shaking her head, declining all invitations, and then did the same with a hopeful-looking youth, his eyes dark welcome. Sex led to complications in trade. Everyone knew that. Wait until deals were done before you take your pleasure, or pay a price to Chalwoarma, Trade God of Lustful Influence.

  Across the crowd, she saw one of the guides watching her, the man with beetles on his arms. Sfeo. A long, slow, and not unpleasant shiver worked its way through her stomach and then farther down. His dark eyes pulled at her, an insistent, eager allure.

  She shook her head, took a step back. She had just been thinking that from now on she was going to live by the maxims. Not thinking had led to this journey in the first place.

  She broke the gaze and did not look back as she walked away. Behind her the drums and flutes continued; she could hear the stamp and murmur of the barefoot dancers. The memory of the liquor burned in her throat as she made her way through moonlight to the hut’s door.

  Skiff and the dog were not there. Essa stayed awake a little while, thinking somewhat dizzily about Skiff. The girl was named after a coin—that was how her family saw her—and not even a major coin like a galleon or frigate, but the next to lowest, a skiff, a raft the only denomination lower. No wonder the child didn’t care about the city.

  But Essa loved Tabat, its terraces and its staircases and the tang of oil and steel when you rode the Great Tram down to the sea. Homesickness washed over her, tears flowing in its wake, and she sank sadly into slumber.

  In the morning, the morning heat woke her with a shimmer of sweat on her upper lip, a drop rolling along her hairline. She washed her face with water from the basin but felt the sweat returning even as she dried herself with the towel.

  Everyone else was eating breakfast out on one of the building’s upper porches. Scarlet and blue birds, eagle sized, but with tails twice as long as their bodies, chased each other in and out of the whispering palm leaves at eye level, and two squirrels, black as jet, sat on the banister watching the dog. Essa sat down and poured herself juice from the pitcher on the table. In the center was a platter of fruit slices, colored like fleshy candy, red and orange and yellow and pale green, sometimes in combination. Essa could name only two or three of the fruits. Foreign fruit did not usually make the journey up to Tabat.

  “Neither of you could be expected to have noticed this,” one twin said, eying the dog licking crumbs off the floor around Skiff’s feet.

  For a giddy second of amusement, Essa thought they meant the dog and Skiff, but then she realized the remark had been directed to the only other humans in the room. She helped herself to a slice of fruit from the platter, an oval of soapy-feeling orange flesh, and tasted it. It melted in her mouth with a sweet, filling richness.

  One twin raised their head and said in Ligurian to the other, “You can’t be disappointed in them, they’re just too slow. Once you factor that in, you find them much less frustrating.” They beamed at Essa and Skiff in what they no doubt thought a kindly fashion.

  Essa revisited the moment when she’d snap something back in Ligurian, like, “Your mother didn’t
find me too slow last night.” But she bit her lip and kept silent, spooning a few mouthfuls of what looked like overdone rice porridge, scattered with tiny red and black flecks, onto her plate.

  “The patterns are writing,” the twin went on, speaking slowly and clearly as though to a particularly obtuse client.

  Essa ignored them and looked to a platter just past the orange fruit. It was stacked with small doughy crescents that proved to hold a crunchy, minty paste. The surrounding thin rounds of yellow-fleshed fruit, paned like stained-glass windows, proved tarter, washing away the last sweetness. She reflected that it was probably a good thing the dishes served them had proved much less spicy than last night’s meal, if they all had heads that throbbed like hers.

  “They reference an ancient settlement nearby where they used to grow an herb they called vanra. From the description, we think it’s actually feytongue. You of course know what that means.” The twin paused in a way that implied that of course, in actuality, neither Essa nor Skiff would know such a thing, but Essa forestalled his next words.

  “Feytongue, used in a number of magical processes, primarily dye and print related, although it can augment some others. Imports from the Southern Isles, trades in half and full ounces, full legal, taxed as a magical good. Supply affected by winter storms once every few decades. At the time we left, hovering around four golden skiffs per half ounce.”

  She was an accountant after all. She spent her time memorizing these things. No real-world application to that knowledge, her ass. And the last figure wasn’t totally accurate but an estimate.

  There was silence.

  Essa helped herself to more fruit and alternated bites of the creamy orange with nibbles at the tart yellow. It was very good.

  “Well,” a twin finally said, as though Essa had said nothing. “It’s quite valuable, and a ready supply of it would give us a reason to establish direct trade with this settlement. We’ll need the both of you to help us scout and chart it, as well as gather enough to make some profit from our time here and give us samples to show the house.”