by Patty Jansen
“And who’d buy these expensive clothes? Merchant Ranuddin couldn’t keep his shop afloat, so why should a couple of young men with no experience have any more success?”
“Come on, Elli. We could use another decent place to buy clothes. The closing of merchant Ranuddin’s shop has not left us with many choices.”
“But merchants open shops.” Since when did he ever buy clothes anyway?
“Does the fact that I’m Endri mean that I can’t be a merchant?”
“No, but what do you know about running a shop? About pleasing customers and getting stock and pricing? Merchant children grow up with this stuff. You didn’t.”
He spread his hands in a melodramatic Jintho way. “You’re right. I grew up with absolutely nothing. One older brother to occupy the council seat. One older sister to devote her life to the arts. No business to manage, no occupation to fill. My existence is pointless.”
She sighed and looked at the papers. Another one of his schemes indeed. Started on a whim, poorly researched, poorly thought-out and abandoned a few days later. After he’d paid the application fees of course.
She could be made to agree with him on the pointlessness of his current life, but whose fault was that anyway? There were many opportunities to find useful employment, if only he could stick out completing any training or mentorship.
Why did she have such a stupid family? Father made an idiot of himself by making inappropriate advances on the female staff, Enzo was a women-don’t-know-anything-and-can’t-do-anything arsehole and Jintho took the concept of whinging, entitled, lazy loafer to new heights.
“How was the committee meeting?” At least he always seemed genuinely interested in her work, one of the very few people in the family to display this curious phenomenon. He also came to the theatre performances whenever he could.
“I don’t know,” Ellisandra said while sipping from her tea. “I asked Sariandra Bisumar to join us, but I’m not sure if that was such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“If nothing else, I’m afraid she’s going to side with Aleyo and be all traditional.”
“Being a Bisumar, does that surprise you?”
“Guess not.” Ellisandra shrugged. “She’s young. I don’t mind a little bit traditional, but there is no need for her to enforce her father’s opinions.”
Jintho met her eyes. “Why do you think she’s on the committee?”
Ellisandra shrugged. “Most Endri young women spend some time in the theatre. There’s nothing unusual about her wanting to join. Being the daughter of the High Councillor, I could hardly put her in the orchestra, right? Nothing wrong with that.”
“No, there isn’t. But how well do you know Asitho Bisumar?”
“Well enough to know that her life can’t be that easy.” Which was polite speak for Asitho Bisumar is a complete prick. After his first wife and two daughters had run out on him, he remarried so quickly that all kinds of rumours circulated about him. “I guess I felt sorry for her.” Sitting there in the stand next to her mother, Sariandra had looked forlorn and shy.
Ellisandra knew the price for ignoring the daughters of high-profile councillors, so it seemed like a good idea to ask her into the committee, to make her loosen up a little.
Jintho shook his head. “Asitho is an obsessive control freak. His wife and daughter can’t do anything without his approval—”
“I know. She had a kind of device on her, a Coldi-made thing, that communicates directly with the Exchange and lets him know where she is—”
He gave her a sharp glance. “Be careful of that thing.”
“Why? It was only a reader of some kind.”
“It records things.”
What? “You mean spying?”
He nodded.
“Why would she do that? We’re in the theatre. We don’t discuss anything important, just plays and stage props and dresses—”
“You don’t discuss the politics of the plays? All of the classics are highly political.”
“We don’t—” Hang on, she had just loudly voiced her low opinion of a play chosen by the council, and argued with Aleyo and Sariandra about changing the ending.
Not only that, but Asitho had wanted to see Enzo, and Enzo had pressured her into giving him details she wasn’t free to give, and those details he needed for new legislation . . . for which Asitho wanted to see Enzo.
She stared at her brother, a deep chill coming over her. “But . . . why?”
“Because Asitho Bisumar doesn’t trust anyone.”
Riana came back into the room with the tongs for the bread and a platter of beans which she set on the table in the tense silence.
“Thank you, Riana,” Ellisandra said, her mouth dry. “Has Father finished chewing a piece off Enzo yet?”
“I helped master Enzo take him upstairs. That’s why I took so long bringing the tongs, I’m sorry.”
Well, that was something at least. Probably Enzo had taken the first available opportunity to get the old man out of the room. Likely, too, Father’s clear-minded moment had faded as fast as it had come.
“Sorry you had to do that, Riana. You could have called me. I would have done it.”
“You deserve a break from that leery old man. You’re a pleasure to work for, Mistress.”
Jintho snorted.
“You’re a pleasure to work for, too, Master Jintho.” She moved to place a plate in front of him. “But really, it’s not a good idea to put all these papers on the table where they will get dirty with the food. Master Enzo wouldn’t like them being on the table. If he comes—”
“I don’t think he’ll come.” Ellisandra thought of the carafe of brew in the other room.
“But he hasn’t eaten, mistress. I worry about him. He’s much too thin.”
“He’s a big boy. He can look after himself,” Jintho said.
Riana walked out of the dining room again, leaving Jintho and Ellisandra in a cocoon of silence. Suddenly, she wasn’t all that hungry anymore either.
6
AT THE END of the hallway, next to the formal living room, was a large room where few people came these days. It was a large echoing space with an elaborate mosaic floor. The room itself had been added onto the house when Father was a boy. It was a round stubby tower a bit over two floors high. It had a domed ceiling adorned with murals where a spear of light traversed the dusty air. Two days a year, it would fall exactly on the metal plaque in the middle of the room.
Ellisandra and Jintho used to sneak in there as children and run around the middle of the hall-like room, stamping their feet as hard as they could and listening to the echoes.
A gallery level ran along the sides halfway up the walls. All the walls on both levels were lined with shelves which contained thousands and thousands of old books. They were wooden shelves, too, custom-made to fit the curved walls, from wood imported from the coast.
In his working life, Ellisandra’s father, Geonan Takumar, had been the head librarian of the Miran library. The function of that library was not only to hold a collection of works of public importance, but also to document and hold records of council proceedings and laws. She had been a little girl when the council, under the newly-elected High Councillor Nemedor Satarin, had decided that recording meetings in large books was arcane and had move the entire system to the Exchange. The books were to be destroyed.
Her father had been so upset about it that he had taken a lot of the books home. She remembered them being delivered to the house, and remembered being told off by the maid for playing on the boxes which were temporarily stored in the laundry while this room, which had been built as a ball room, was turned into a library. She remembered the smell of those books when the boxes were finally opened and their precious content placed on the shelves.
She could still see Father looking at her with his wizened face. His long silver hair had been beautiful in the way it fell over his shoulders lit by a shaft of sunlight that pierced the room from the window
s in the little tower in the very top of the domed roof. He sat at his desk and she stood next to him on her tippie-toes, wanting to know if there were any pictures in all those books.
There weren’t. They were all boring books. Father berated her for saying so.
“You have to understand this well, daughter of mine: Takumar is a Foundation family. You will have learned at school that the five families came together on the hill where the Foundation monument now stands and negotiated and signed an agreement that would shape Miran and would give both the Endri and Nikala rights and responsibilities. That was the first meeting of our council. The decisions of all those meetings were recorded in these books. They’re written down in ink on paper. No one can erase ink on paper, unlike this silly system the council wants us to use. These records are here for eternity. I will keep recording them for as long as I can, and I hope Enzo will continue to do this after me.”
“But why?” she had asked, as children were wont to do.
“Because we’re a Foundation family. In that first meeting, the heads of the Takumar, Ilendar, Andrahar, Calthunar and Velisar families agreed to be protectors of a fair Miran. These books are our records. This is where the fairness can be tested. Now Nemedor Satarin, who isn’t even Endri, wants us to record our meetings on a foreign system that is dependent on foreign technology. The worst thing about it is that details can be changed afterwards. They tell me that there is a timestamp that can never be altered, but I don’t trust it.” He pointed at the book in front of him. “This is indelible ink on paper. Their way is nothing more than squiggles on a screen. You turn off the screen and the text is gone. More importantly, even, who else can read it? It’s a foreign system. Nemedor Satarin says he’s convinced it’s secure. I don’t believe that.”
In hindsight, Ellisandra was surprised at how much of this she had remembered and understood. She had been quite young. It had made a big impression on her: Father standing up for something he thought was wrong. Father had many faults, but this wasn’t one of them.
Today, the room was cold and dark. Darma would light the fire in here only occasionally to dispel the humidity and the worst of the cold, but she had done that a number of days back, and now it was cold enough that Ellisandra’s breath steamed in the air.
She crossed to her father’s old desk that sat in the middle of the room and turned on the lights with the switch in the corner of the desk. Pinpricks of greenish light flicked into being around the walls. Those lights were the only concession to modern technology in this house. Father would not have oil lights near his precious books. To be honest, Ellisandra far preferred the warm glow of oil lights, even if they could not be turned on with the touch of a button.
Now then, where would he have put the books she wanted?
She slowly turned around, looking along all the shelves behind and to the sides of the desk and all those books on the gallery level above her. The place was much neater than she remembered it being when Father still came here a lot. In those days, there would always be stacks of books everywhere, and also some dust because Father forbade the staff to dust and clean in the room when he was working on something, which was most of the time.
She found what she was looking for in the most obvious place: right behind the old-fashioned desk stood three fat leather-bound books with Foundation Law embossed in gold letters across the back. Underneath in small letters, it said abridged version. The full version required almost a room of books.
She slid the books off the shelf, piled them on top of each other and carried them to the warmth and comfort of her room where Darma had lit the fire and where traditional oil lamps spread soft light. That cold light cast by those light pearls was just awful. Someone had told her that it was the only type of light used in Barresh, and she couldn’t imagine it.
She kicked off her house shoes and curled up in the big chair by the fire. The text of the play beckoned to her from the table and seeing it brought a stab of guilt. Really she should read through the play and make a list of what stage props they needed and in what act, and start thinking about the larger pieces, and the orders for materials that would need to go out as soon as possible, and look in the store inventory to see what they already had that they could re-use, and . . . But she could do that tomorrow. This to-do about Foundation Law made her suspicious. So, Enzo didn’t want to tell her, huh? He and his friends thought that women were too stupid to understand law and politics, huh?
Well, he had obviously never directed a play and didn’t have a clue how much politics there was in Mirani theatre, even in dividing up the roles. And he obviously underestimated her.
She opened the first book. The first couple of pages contained a long index of subjects covered in the three books. The section dealing with Ownership and Property would be in the second book. So she took that and opened it at the indicated page. She scanned the page until she found a section that dealt with housing and land.
Foundation families: According to the original Foundation document (section 1.1.A) ownership of land or fixed assets, including but not limited to, dwellings, commercial or service premises, shall be determined by the families designated in Foundation, or their agents. Ownership by these families carries the responsibility of maintenance and the employment of staff for this aim. Ownership carries the right to derive an income from the property, but this income cannot be derived from the sale of the property itself—Cross-reference with Section 1.1.A: Foundation families shall be responsible for the maintenance of general services from which they can draw wages but nothing above reasonable living expenses—
She put the book down, frowning. Did she understand it correctly that if anything owned by a Foundation family could not be sold at all?
That was odd.
If so, why had the Velisar family sold their business? Why had the Ilendar family sold their house to the Tussamar Traders? Why—
Wait. The Andrahar family had not sold their house and business for all those years since they had left Miran. Everyone had wondered why, and maybe this was it. Maybe now they knew that the council was about to change that law and had sent someone to . . .
To what?
Clearly no one had cared about the enforcement of this law for some time. Ever since she remembered, the Foundation families had always sold properties, if usually not their main residence. But that was because they were living in it, right?
She couldn’t imagine that influential people like the Andrahars would let themselves be restricted by this law if no one enforced it.
The next paragraph went on about the details of what constituted profit from a sale. In the margin, Father had written, Personal residence: claim as a business. So that was a loophole by which they sold property anyway? Because somewhere it said—she leafed through the book to find it—that Foundation families were free to conduct businesses in the same way as other families.
She wondered if this applied to all Endri or just Foundation families. Also the book said nothing about the sale to or from people outside Miran. Rules about that would have been added much later.
She would find references to those decisions in Father’s notes, because they would have been taken after the start of the gamra boycott. And this was why there were so many empty Endri houses. Those families had been unable to find a loophole to sell their house. The market for houses had collapsed as well. The only people who could afford those houses were other Endri, or some of the upper merchants, and there weren’t enough of them.
People often complained about the many orphaned accounts from families that had left Miran. Mirani tirans were tied to land ownership and could not be exchanged for foreign currency or spent outside Miran. When a family left, their money was taken out of circulation, and, according to some, the sheer value of unused credits in these accounts was starting to become a problem. But because the tiran was linked to land ownership, it was next to impossible for the council to increase the number in circulation, because it would play havoc with the live
lihood of too many people, unless the council declared accounts held by people outside Miran void, and compensated those families in a different way. But that made it certain that those families would never return to Miran, and would cost the council a whole lot of foreign money it didn’t have.
So why did these men think she was too stupid to understand that?
When Ellisandra left the house the next morning, the snow had blown into big fluffy banks in the yard. The groundsman Karit had already shovelled a path from the front door to the gate as was his first task in the morning, but judging by the low scudding clouds with that typical leaden greyness that heralded snow, he would have to do it again later today.
A pathmaker was just coming up the street, a low flat sled drawn by two shaggy-haired tiyuk. The animals held their heads close to the ground and strained in the harness while pulling the heavy load uphill. Steam blew out of their nostrils. Both the animals were mature males, with the horn plates on their necks and the typical dark mottled pelt.
The driver was one of the herder nomads who came to the city during winter when pastures were covered in snow and the townsfolk had lots of hauling or snow-removing jobs. The woman sat huddled in her cloak, showing only the top half of her windblown wizened face surrounded by thick fur. She wore no gloves.
Ellisandra waited on the side to let them pass with much snorting and cracks of the whip.
Except the sled wasn’t a pathmaker, which in hindsight she could have told by the fact that it seemed too heavy for the job. On the flat tray at the back lay a multitude of building materials: metal beams, bags of cement, resin sheeting, big packs of insulation wool, and stone blocks, a lot of them, quality building stone, too. Two young men sat on this pile.
The sled went past and stopped at the gate of the Andrahar house. Someone opened the gate from within with a clinking of the metal chain against the bars, and the sled turned into the yard with much cracking of the whip.
Well, that was odd.
Ellisandra followed it uphill, stepping in its tracks.