“Courtesans, eh,” said Tehenn. “A gift for the Elders, no doubt.”
“She didn’t look particularly interested in the Elders, Tehenn.”
The herald looked ironic. “Nay then,” he said, “you’re climbing the wrong tree, master. My wife would have both my ears off, and kick out my guts. But doesn’t anyone simply do straightforward trading any more, without bribery—” He fell silent.
“Gifts are traditional, in the East,” said Reswen.
Tehenn looked more ironic than before. “So are knives in the back,” he said. He gestured a quick farewell to Reswen, and went off the lead the caravan into the depths of the city. Reswen watched them curl away out of the square, a long line of swaying beasts and litters and dusty mrem, surrounded by curious, staring Niau people ... and thought about knives.
He headed off to see about the house.
THE HOUSE in Dancer’s Street looked not very different from the other houses there. It was obviously a well-to-do place, all white marble and intricate carving; those knowledgeable in Niau architecture would have dated it to the second wave of the city’s building, when the prosperity of the place was beginning to gather speed, and people building houses were eager to show how well they were doing. It had in fact been built by one of the oldest mercantile families, the rrh’Hhwaen, who had made their fortunes in the import and treatment of hides. The stink of the tannery had never come near this place, though. Originally the one house had been alone in a small parkland, but the family’s fortunes declined over several generations, and finally they began to sell off the land around them to priests and other wealthy people.
The area had become the high rent district: absolutely respectable, the other houses there owned by nobility, or other, even richer merchants. Finally even a few temples had been built there—the temple of the White Dancers was down at the end of the street in a quiet cul-de-sac. The street was perfectly clean; there was no filth in the gutters, and had not been for a long time, since the more innovative of the rich merchants had been the first in the city to install plumbing, and had had the novel idea of having their garbage hauled away and dumped somewhere else, rather than burning or burying it on their own grounds. Reswen knew parts of the city where he strongly suspected the garbage had wound up for many years, before even the poorest mrem rebelled and insisted that it be dumped outside the walls. But the merchants had not been too concerned about that; their own nest was clean. Wherever you looked, there was marble white or gray or polished black, everything gleaming; you could catch glimpses of rich tapestries or figured hangings through those windows thrown open to the morning. The sun fell more gently here, through tall old trees that remained from the ancient parkland and had been spared in the making of the street. Even the cobbles, marble as well, shone softly where they had been worn smooth.
Reswen, pacing down the street, considered that he would not have lived here on a bet. The place was a little too clean, a little too affluent, for his tastes. Now is that completely normal? he found himself wondering. Maybe my police work has corrupted my sensibilities. What’s wrong with cleanliness? Little enough of it in most parts of this town.... But on the other hand, anymrem needed a little dirt to survive, even if only to scratch in once or twice a day while doing the necessary. And all the cleanliness here only served to accentuate the dirt when it did show up, in people’s lives. And it always showed up, sooner or later. The people who could afford to live for long in houses like these did not always come by the money honestly ... or did not always comport themselves in honorable ways, thinking their riches excused them. These people, some of them, were the reason Reswen was obliged to overpay his spies.
But he put the thought away for the moment, as he came up outside the house. The place had a wide, walled courtyard in front, gated in gilded iron. Inside, the caravan people’s beasts were milling around while the house servants led them away, one by one, to the stabling behind the garden in the rear. Reswen waved a claw at the gate guard, who opened it for him.
He went quietly up the marble flagging toward the house, smelling the air appreciatively, for there were garden plots on either side, thick with herbs and sweet-smelling flowers. They curved toward the wide portico of the house itself. Its old name, “Haven,” was carved in simple, antique style over the portico. This porch had pillars, in the manner of classic architecture, but between them, shielding the house’s unshuttered windows, there were marble screens pierced and carved with endless cunning: openwork trellises of marble, with marble vines and tendrils curling up and around them, flowering in white and blue and red and gold. The gold was real, and the blue and red were lapis and carnelian. Floating through the bright tracery, Reswen could hear the sounds of talk, laughter, astonishment. Haven was a place designed to astonish, which suited Reswen well. He went up the steps and stopped in the doorway.
In the great white-and-gilded expanse of the forehall, a cold collation had been laid out for the Easterners, since Niauhu hospitality stated that food should be offered even before rest to the welcomed traveler. The house servants, of course, stood ready for escort upstairs anyone who should wish to retire; the rooms should be in good order, and even an Easterner should find the luxury impressive. Soft couches, floors strewn with rare soft furs, rich hangings, and no common dirt closets, but luxurious rooms with water running through them, and every kind of toiletry that the fastidious Niauhu had been able to invent over many years. Reswen had made it his business to sleep, at least once, in every one of the rooms. His staff chuckled over what they considered a canny move by Old Ginger to have himself a few soft nights. Reswen let them chuckle. He had other reasons ... though he was hardly fool enough not to enjoy himself at the same time.
Reswen strolled about in the forehall a bit, keeping to the edges of the room to have a look at the visitors. Many of them had gotten rid of their desert clothes, and were busy drinking up the wine in snow that had been brought for them. Fine, Reswen thought. Loose tongues will make this job a little easier, no matter how cautious they are on the first day.... He counted about thirty people who interested him; the other twenty Easterners in the forehall were servants, some liveried, some not. About twenty of the notables were noble, several of them priests of one god or cult or another; some of them were family, spouses or sons or daughters. Several of them seemed to be merchants—they had that sharp, noticing look about them—and there were a couple of others, advisers or hangers-on, that Reswen couldn’t immediately classify.
And then of course there were the courtesans. Reswen stopped by one of the tables, indulging himself in a cup of cold wine and a tiny fried roll-cake with fresh fish in it—pool whitefish, by the taste of it, and quite well seasoned with something sharp and spicy. He resolved to have a word with the cook later; Reswen believed in complimenting his staff when they deserved it. He glanced over and saw Tehenn moving with his usual graceful assurance from one guest to another, smiling here, laughing and gesturing for a servant to pour wine there, and proceeding by his own careful methods to work out who here was in authority, and with whom he needed to make arrangements for the more formal meetings to take place later in the day and the evening. Reswen had to admire Tehenn’s smooth operation. I wonder, could I get him working for me?... There were attractive aspects to it. To have the Elders’ herald in the H’satei, a mrem privy to all kinds of sensitive information ... Then again, if the Elders found out about it, they would certainly sack everyone involved, Reswen included. And it would be a shame to deprive the city of such a good herald....
The thought faded out as Reswen found those blue, blue eyes trained on him again from across the room. The courtesan was extremely beautiful, but that was to be expected, or she would hardly have been brought along. She was wearing hardly anything—which was also to be expected—nothing but a wonderfully made harness of linked silver ornamented with aquarmarines and sapphires, over sea gray fur darkening to charcoal gray on face and ears and paws and
tail. A dusky loveliness, hers, in which those eye burned blue as sky; and a lanky loveliness, long-limbed, graceful, and cool. Reswen let his eyes widen as if he were what he looked to be, a minor functionary of some sort, unused to being gazed at by fine ladies. Very hurriedly he gobbled the last of the fish cake, put the wine cup down, and headed toward the front door like a mrem caught doing something he shouldn’t.
A few heads turned as he made his hasty exit, and Reswen was careful to notice which ones. One of the priests, a great gross creature splotched in muddy orange and white, wearing ornate robes and bizarre symbols in lead and gold strung on a silver chain around neck and girdle. One of the merchants, a round-eyed gray tabby in divided robes of white silk and cotton, his markings blurred, his eyes green and oblique. And another of the females, a dark and subtly patterned tortoise-shell with golden eyes, modestly dressed, some servingmrem perhaps. Just now, when they had no idea who or what he was, such reactions were of interest. After Reswen had been formally introduced, natural reactions—or unconcealed ones—would he harder to come by; after all, who is utterly without some small trait or habit or misdeed that he would rather no one, especially not the Chief of Constables, knew anything about? Out he went, and down the steps, and out into the courtyard, where he paused for a moment and breathed like a mrem who had had a narrow escape. Then around the side of the house, past the stables, where the servants were putting up the visitors’ beasts, and down one side of the stable block, being careful to breathe out all the way down.
This brought Reswen to a wall at the foot of the garden, and a little door in it that opened on the street behind Dancer’s. He lifted the latch, stepped through, and pulled the door to behind him. Here was another white marble and polished granite neighborhood, but he gave it not a glance, heading across the cobbled street to a smallish town house between two larger, grander ones. Reswen went up the steps of the town house, knocked at the door, and waited.
The door opened, and a brown-striped tabby servant in civic livery looked out, saw who Reswen was, and stepped aside. “They’re waitin’ for you downstairs, sir,” he said.
“That’s good, Lelef,” Reswen said, and headed down another white marble hall, much plainer than the last one. Down the staircase at the end, to a granite landing; down the granite stair at the end of it, to a wooden door set in stone; and through the wooden door into a tunnel, cool but dry, faced at first in rough blocks of black and gray stone, then in timbers. Occasionally roots stuck through into the tunnel between the timbers. It was a longish walk; at the end of it the tunnel terminated in another wooden door. Reswen opened the door and went in.
The room revealed was as long as the Haven house from back to front, which was no surprise ... since it was directly under it. The walls of the timber-faced room had numerous metal tubes projecting from them, and at almost all of these tubes, mrem of Reswen’s service were sitting, listening attentively, wax pads on their knees, making occasional scratched notations in the wax. The room was filled with a soft hollow mutter of voices drifting down from the floors above; still the innocent sounds of surprise and merriment that Reswen had heard, the little while he had been up there.
“Sir,” came a voice, and one of his officers, Krruth, came up from the rear of the room to meet him. Krruth was an unlikely-looking mrem. He had lost an eye due to illness when young, and his upbringing, a wretchedly poor one, had left its stamp on him. Krruth was bent and blasted-looking, thinned right down to the bone, and his dull black coat did nothing to make him look any better. But Krruth had something a hundred times better than good looks, as far as Reswen was concerned—his memory was a room with one door in and no way out. He never forgot a face or a voice, and he was a repository of information more reliable than many a gilded parchment back in Reswen’s office.
“Krruth,” he said, and they sat down together at a table in the middle of the room. “Anything of interest?”
“Nothing as yet,” said Krruth, “But from what we have been able to hear, I warrant there will be.”
Reswen nodded. “The rooms are all in order?”
“All the listening tubes are working, yes, and last week we put a new set in to replace the old ones in the water closets, so the echo will not bounce back upstairs and make anyone curious.”
“Very good. What are your impressions so far?”
“They’re being cautious, sir,” Krruth said. “But introductions can hardly be avoided, and some of them have let fall information they might have preferred to hold back a while. The delegation—for so they title themselves, not just a humble caravan—has eighteen body-servants, whom our own ‘servants’ will begin working on as soon as convenient. Indeed, several of their servants have already tried to seduce ours, so this bodes well. We have here several priests, all of the same worship; they are involved with some kind of Eastern grain-god.... We will find out more about that later. They put about that they are required to travel with another of the party, a corn factor, to advise him on his business decisions. The one we judge to be the corn factor says nothing about that; he says he is here on behalf of several other guilds who are interested in trading with the Western cities, and he claims that this is not an unusual thing, this joint representation. But I heard his voice, and I have my doubts. He sounds too scornful and angry to be telling all the truth.”
“Keep an ear on him, then,” Reswen said. “And the others?”
“The corn factor has brought his wife and children with him, for a holiday, he says, but about this too I have my doubts,” said Krruth. “The wife sounds to be the petted sort who has never seen the outside of her home city’s walls, and has no desire to see it now. She came in complaining about the heat and how thirsty she was, and is now complaining about the chill, the crudity of the food, and the warmth and poor vintage of the wines. The children are barely adolescent, and brats both, from the sound. They are presently eating everything in sight, and spoiling to wreck the place. I think they have never seen such splendor in a house, and can hardly wait to destroy some of it to let us know that they are not particularly impressed.”
Reswen rolled his eyes slightly. “Something their father put them up to, you think? To reinforce our opinion of the Easterners’ wealth?”
“Hard to say. We shall see.”
“Can the upstairs people handle it, or should we ‘call the police’?”
“No need, I think. There are other matters of more interest, at any rate. Despite the fact that the one merchant—Rirhath—claims to speak for all, there are three other merchants—a clothier, a jeweler, and someone who deals in predictions of meat purchases in the East. Peculiar sort of trade.”
“I have heard of it,” Reswen said. “It does seem odd, betting on whether the uxen will calve properly next year, but the Easterners have apparently learned to make money that way ... I suspect we may have to learn ourselves.”
“I prefer dice. At any rate, they have been very impressed by the surroundings ... a word or two was let fall that we appear to be better off then they thought, though they knew very well that we’ve given them this accommodation on purpose, to impress them.”
“Among other reasons,” Reswen said, and chuckled. It had been his predecessor’s idea to get the city to buy Haven and turn it into a place where guests could be cosseted, pampered ... and listened to very closely, not in the usual ways or at the usual times. Everyone in Haven was on Reswen’s payroll, and these mrem he did not mind overpaying, not at all … considering the kind of work they had to do, and the dividends it produced.
“Then we have the higher-class servants—they are so, though they are dressed like nobles, and Rirhath calls them ‘our associates,’ Two scriveners and a mathematician.”
“Spies,” Reswen said. For some reason, they always came disguised as scribes.
“Possibly. We shall have a look at their shorthand over the next few days and see how long they have been writing it. At
any rate, they have said very little for the time being ... they’ve been too busy eating.”
“Definitely spies,” Reswen said. “Underpaid and underfed. Poor creatures ... we should try to hire them.”
Krruth grinned. “And then we come to the courtesans.”
“Plural? I thought there was only one.”
“No, two. Deshahl and Laas are their names. The first is the high-priced one. The second I judge to be a less highly, ah, seasoned sweetmeat, to be given to someone of less importance, or several someones. The second has said little, and done little but drink since she came in. The first is flattering Tehenn most outrageously, poor thing; she has no idea how few fish that pool has for the likes of her. But then she is flattering every other Niauhu male of rank she’s seen. I wonder that she didn’t make a pounce on you.”
“She did, in a manner of speaking….” Reswen thought of those blue eyes again, then turned away from the thought. “How has their unpacking been going?”
“Well. They had no objection to our people unloading their beasts and putting the bags and so forth in their rooms. We are still searching some of them, but nothing interesting has turned up so far. The usual mercantile goods. Vash tells me that some of the cloths and jewels are particularly fine, much better than Western make.”
“All right. Continue as you have been. Anything of real interest, I want to hear about right away. Send a runner. Otherwise, so far I think we’ll find out things in the usual order: Today and tomorrow and this eightday will be dry, and news of their covert intentions will begin popping out of the holes later in the month. All the same, see to it that all the peepholes are manned for the next few days, until we get these mrem’s routines worked out. After that, check with me.”
“Very well, sir. Now I will need descriptions for these voices.”
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