by David Drake
Sharina thought of asking if she could change clothes first, but that would be an insult--a way of saying that Diora's kin and friends weren't as important as the delegates who'd just left. Sharina's job was to make people feel good about their government.
Anyway, she'd been miserable all afternoon. Being miserable for another hour or however long wasn't going to kill her.
"Of course I'll see your neighbors, Diora," Sharina said. "Will your mother be among them?"
"Oh, no, milady!" Diora said in amazement. "My mam wouldn't think of pushing in to a business like this. I said to send the leading men of the neighborhood, six of them, and that's who's waiting on you now... if that's all right?"
"Of course it's all right," Sharina repeated. Diora didn't seem to see anything incongruous about only men being fit to meet with the Important Personage... who happened to be a woman. She thought of what Ilna would say, and as a result Sharina was giggling as she entered the hall to greet the delegation from the Bridge District.
Quite apart from simple decency--and Sharina hoped she was as decent as the next person, certainly the next person here in the palace--she knew that she'd be better off having enemies among the nobility than she would with enemies in the palace staff. The number of ways 'mistakes' by Diora and Diora's friends among the servants could make Lady Sharina uncomfortable--or a laughingstock--was legion. Sharina would have known that even without the personal experience of being an inn servant.
The delegates waited in the atrium with their backs to a mural. Sharina's doorkeeper watched over them with a carefully neutral expression, ready to bellow at them as intruders if Lady Sharina showed displeasure at seeing them. The men themselves couldn't have been more frightened if they were waiting to be thrown to real gryphons and chimeras like those painted against a black ground behind them.
"Good afternoon, masters," Sharina said with a smile. "I'm glad to meet friends of Mistress Diora. She's been a wonderful help to me since I came here."
There was a general sigh. Sharina thought the big fellow with welts burned into his forearms by flying sparks--a farrier, beyond doubt--might faint from relief.
"Master Alswind," Diora said. The oldest man nodded stiffly. He wore a purple tunic which might have fit him twenty years before, when the noble to whom he was in service gave it to him as a castoff. That had been a good forty pounds ago, and if Alswind made a full bow he or the garment would burst.
"Master Rihholf, Master Aldern, Master Dudo--" the farrier "--Master Demaras, and Underpriest Arpert."
Each bowed as his name was called. Arpert, a little man with a wedge-shaped face, was wearing the unsewn wrapper of white wool--the formal wear of the Old Kingdom--which marked him as a priest, but officiating at religious ceremonies in the Bridge District was probably an honorary position rather than a full-time job. Sharina suspected Arpert kept a tavern, or perhaps not quite so exalted an establishment.
Sharina made the slight bow that was all the movement her stiff bodice allowed. Alswind wasn't the only one here trapped by clothing. "I'm pleased to meet you gentlemen," she said. "Will you be seated?"
There were benches with zebrawood seats and legs of pierced bronze on either side of the entrance door. Sharina gestured to them.
The delegates looked startled. "Oh, we could never sit in front of you, mistress!" said Rihholf, a plump man wearing a shoulder cape which must have been very uncomfortable in this weather--and which didn't quite cover the awkwardly darned moth hole in the breast of his tunic.
"She's not a mistress, you pigeon-brain!" Dudo snarled at him. "She's a lady!"
Sharina pointed at the benches. "Sit!" she said. She'd handled unruly diners in the inn's common room. If somebody didn't take charge promptly, midnight would come and nobody would have explained why these men had come to her.
Sharina stepped aside so the delegates could get to the benches without stumbling over her. There was a brief hesitation while they decided which man would sit where. Diora solved that by pointing to positions, three to a bench, and announcing each sitter's name in a crackling whisper. The residents of the Bridge District might defer to the concept of maleness, but there didn't seem to be any nonsense about women waiting for the decisions of men who obviously didn't have a lick of sense.
"Master Arpert?" Sharina said. "Speak. Tell me why you're here to see me."
Aldern opened his mouth, closed it, and looked aside to his fellow delegates. "Speak, the lady says!" Dudo muttered. "Or so help me--"
"Right," said Arpert, suddenly focused. "We came to see you, lady, because we can't get anybody else to listen to us and Gunna's girl Ora here--"
"Diora," Alswind whispered. He'd managed to sit without splitting himself, but his back was as straight as if he'd been impaled.
"Diora, that's right," Aldern continued, "she said that you listened to people that nobody else would, and that you could maybe help. It's about the bridge, you see. It shouldn't be there, but it is again. At night. And there's the sounds, and it's getting worse."
"Folks're scared to death," said another man; maybe Demaras, but Sharina couldn't have sworn to his name if her life depended on it. She was tired, and there'd been so many names in the last three months. "I don't mean just the babies and the old women neither."
"The City Watch, they say it's no affair of theirs and they just stay away," said Arpert. "Which is what they mostly do anyway. Who cares if somebody's robbed in the Bridge District? That's how they feel about it."
The men nodded gloomily to one another. Sharina bit her tongue to keep from shouting in frustration. If these dimwits had gone into a watch station mumbling nonsense the way they were doing here, she didn't blame the watch officers from brushing them off!
But that wasn't fair. Arpert and his fellows weren't the poorest of the poor--they probably didn't think of themselves as poor at all; for that matter, they probably had as much ready cash as folk whom Barca's Hamlet considered prosperous farmers. Still, they were frightened and knew they were badly out of place here in the palace. Sharina was seeing them at their most flustered.
Which meant she'd have to help them if she wanted to complete the interview before dawn broke. "You say the bridge shouldn't be there," Sharina said. "Why not? You live in the Bridge District."
"Oh, not for hundreds and hundreds of years, mistress," Rihholf said, repeating his error of a moment before. Dudo, wrapped in greater worries, didn't correct him this time. "There was a bridge from the Old Kingdom, but it fell back nobody knows how far. There's still the abutment on our side, but on the left bank even that got swept away in the floods when Isnard the Bold was City Proctor and tried to make himself king."
Three generations ago, Sharina translated mentally. For the most part the library Reise brought to Barca's Hamlet was of Old Kingdom classics, written a thousand years and more in the past. There'd been a few volumes of contemporary Ornifal history, though, since Reise was an Ornifal native and had been a palace steward before he fled to Haft for reasons he'd never made clear to his children.
"But the bridge is back now at night," maybe-Demaras said earnestly. "Or something is, all blue light that doesn't look like anything on this earth!"
"One moment, please," Sharina said. "Brogius--" her doorkeeper "--would you send an usher to Mistress Tenoctris and tell her there's a matter on which I would appreciate her counsel immediately? In fact, will you go yourself? I want Tenoctris to hear what these citizens have to say."
"Yes, milady," Brogius said. He paused only to put down his ceremonial axe--the double bitts were pierced brass and shaped like eagle heads, the symbol of Ornifal--and trotted off on his errand.
Sharina hadn't been sure the doorkeeper would agree to carry out an usher's task, even though finding an usher could double the time the job took. Palace servants were as jealous of the rights and duties of their offices as peasants in the borough were about boundary markers.
People spoke just outside the doorway. The door reopened and sandals whispered on
the mosaic floor of the anteroom. Sharina turned with an angry expression. If someone had decided to walk in on her unannounced because her doorkeeper was temporarily absent, that person was going to learn that Sharina didn't need servants to get rid of unwanted intruders.
Brogius stepped back into the atrium, followed by a birdlike woman in green silk robes. "Milady?" he said. "She was coming--"
"To see you, Sharina," Tenoctris said, stepping past the doorkeeper with her usual bright smile. "I was hoping you and Cashel--and perhaps your brother as well--might join me while I look for the source of a disruption."
Tenoctris was tiny and seventy years old in terms of normal aging--but cast into this era from a thousand years in the past. The sparkle of her personality lit up any gathering of which she was a part. She looked at the men on the benches to either side of her and added, "But I didn't mean to intrude. Let me wait--"
"No, no," Sharina said, taking the old woman by the hand. "Masters?" she said to the expectant men. "This is my friend Tenoctris the Wizard. She's the person I was bringing here to listen to what you have to say."
She cleared her throat, drawing warmth from the older woman's hand. Sharina had gone cold when she heard Dudo's description.
Because that bridge of shimmering blue light could only be the result of wizardry; and Sharina had seen enough wizardry to know the terrible dangers it could pose for the Kingdom of the Isles.
Ilna os-Kenset stood in her garden, weaving a memorial for those whom wizardry had killed at her side. Her fingers moved the shed and the shuttle of the double loom, quickly and absolutely without error.
Another weaver would have had to concentrate her whole being to work on a design as complex as this arras. Ilna let her fingers choose the warp threads while she thought about the path which had brought her where she was.
A thread could go as many different places as there were cords in the weft, but there was only one correct choice for each pattern. Ilna supposed that was true of lives as well. She didn't complain about that; but occasionally she wondered what life would have been like if her pattern had been a little different.
Her fingers flew. The tapestry grew with the steady ease of a tide rising.
Ilna was dark-haired and petite. From a distance she looked pretty. Close up, especially if you looked into her eyes, she was beautiful; but Ilna's beauty was that of a swordedge.
Ilna's eyes were as clear as pools mirroring Truth. If you didn't want to hear the truth as Ilna saw it, you'd best go elsewhere--quickly.
The back wall of the garden was painted with a meadow scene. As a foreground, a bed of tithonia tied together reality and illusion. Tiger swallowtails fluttered among the wealth of orange flowers, and bees hummed in the mint bed. There were tithonia at the entrance to the millhouse in Barca's Hamlet; the sights and sounds there would be much the same.
If Ilna had stayed home--if they all had stayed in Barca's Hamlet, her brother Cashel and Sharina and most particularly Garric or-Reise... how different would the world be? But of course, the threads of their lives hadn't bent that way. Ilna didn't argue with reality.
Her fingers moved; ceaselessly, flawlessly. Ilna worked in wool for the most part. The three-colored sheep of the borough produced long, fine fleece, and the Sheep Fair in the fall was the only event that brought strangers in any number to Barca's Hamlet.
She'd been a skilled weaver before she surrendered to evil and gained inhuman abilities. Ilna had escaped from evil in the end; but she couldn't escape knowledge of the things she'd done, and she still had the skills she'd learned in Hell.
Each strand had a story that Ilna absorbed much the way that her nostrils drew in the perfume of the flowers about her in the garden. Lambs gamboled on a slope overlooking a pond whose margin had been trampled to mud. A shepherd bowed a three-stringed rebec and sang to his flock....
Garric had played the pipes. Ilna, standing at her loom in the dooryard of the mill, had often heard the clear sweet notes soothing sheep in the meadow.
That was in another life, gone now for both of them. And even if the tides of time and space hadn't thrown the wizard Tenoctris onto the shore of Barca's Hamlet, the future wouldn't have gone the way Ilna had dreamed it would. Garric, strong and handsome and educated by his father to a level few youths in the great cities could reach, would never have married an illiterate peasant like Ilna os-Kenset.
Her fingers wove; mostly in wool, but there were threads of silk where the pattern demanded it, and the image of Garric's long straight sword glittered in silver wire. The Beast towered over the humans opposing it, snarling from triple heads hell-lit by the blazing rock beneath.
Someone knocked imperiously on the door of Ilna's bungalow. A guard opened the barred eyeslit and spoke to the visitor.
Her house in the palace grounds was three rooms off a tiny atrium--plus the gorgeous garden where Ilna worked while the weather allowed. It was more space than she and Cashel needed here; but Ilna by herself had kept their half of the millhouse in Barca's Hamlet clean, and that was larger yet.
From what Ilna had seen, the maids available in Valles were mostly slatterns; and if they weren't, well, she didn't want them in her home anyway. She and Cashel had no servants here.
Ilna did have guards, though. At Garric's personal orders a pair of Blood Eagles stood watch at all times, changing shift at every fourth hour.
Ilna had protested. Garric had listened politely, then told her that while his friends lived in the palace, they were in danger because they were his friends. Ilna--and Liane, Sharina, and Tenoctris--would have guards, however they felt about the matter. He had guards himself.
Garric hadn't assigned guards to Cashel. A smile wasn't the most frequent expression on Ilna's face, but she smiled now at the thought of a couple Blood Eagles trying to protect her brother better than he could protect himself.
Ilna continued weaving. In the center of the panel, a boy and his older, legless companion faced the Beast. Their faces were distorted with the might of the spells they were casting; the cloth itself seemed to ripple at the words of power. They hadn't any business trying to work incantations so far beyond their abilities; but they'd done what was necessary, and because of their sacrifice, the world of men survived.
The argument at the door continued; loudly on the part of the men outside demanding entrance, quietly but with increasing harshness from the two guards within. Ilna could have let the Blood Eagles handle it, but the intruders' business was properly with her, and she'd never been one to leave her tasks for others to do.
Ilna closed the shed of her loom and stepped through aisle of twisted columns into the atrium. "I'll handle this," she said to the guards.
The Blood Eagles wore helmets and breastplates of iron scales cushioned by quilted leather vests. The armor was hot, uncomfortable and probably unnecessary; but the guards were there in the first place in case the improbable happened. One of them was grizzled and in his fifties, but his younger companion seemed to be in charge.
Instead of stepping aside, the younger man closed the eyeslit with a bang and said to Ilna, "The president and two councillors of the Temple of the Protecting Shepherd are here to see you, mistress. How would you like us to deal with them?"
If I said that I'd like them disemboweled here in the garden, would you do that? Ilna wondered. She found soldiers disquieting not because they were capable of doing terrible things, but because they might do terrible things if somebody else told them to.
The Blood Eagles provided both a royal bodyguard and a pool from which junior officers were drawn for the regular regiments. The older man of this pair would never go anywhere: he wore the black uniform because he was brave, loyal and a good soldier, but he had no more brains than a large dog.
The younger man was of another type: a veteran, because he'd had to prove himself to be enrolled as a Blood Eagle, but alert and clearly ambitious. With Garric's expansion of the Royal Army under way, this fellow would be promoted in the near future.
<
br /> Different as they were, they shared a willingness to kill people they'd never met, simply because they were ordered to do so. Perhaps there was a need for such men just as there was a need for sharp knives, but Ilna would have preferred not having them around.
"I'll take care of them myself," she said calmly. She slid the bar aside and pulled the door open.
And if I really thought they should be disemboweled, I could manage that myself also.
Ilna was accurate to a hair in judging strangers' wealth and social standing by their clothes. The three men on her arched porch were wealthy businessmen, but not of the highest class. They dressed in Valles fashion with layered tunics and sashes of colored silk, but only the pale, cadaverous man at the head of the trio was born on Ornifal.
"I am Velio or-Evis, President of the Temple of the Protecting Shepherd," he said. He spread his right arm in a rhetorical gesture. The stocky man to his right had to jump back to avoid being struck; he muttered and glared at Velio.
"My companions are Councillor Casses and Councillor Ermand," Velio continued in a slightly chastened tone. "We're here to discuss with you the arras which you're providing to screen the image of the Protecting Shepherd."
Ilna's face didn't change as she decided how to deal with the intrusion. "Come in," she said after a moment, stepping back to pull the door fully open, "but you've wasted your trip. I told your temple clerk that I'd finish the cloth tomorrow. You can save yourself a lot of trouble in the future by assuming that I mean what I say."
The stocky councillor, Casses, wore a long-sleeved tunic to minimize the tattoos on both arms. He'd been a sea captain at one time, though now he must have a shore-side business in order to sit on a temple council.
Ermand was a much more polished sort. He held his right hand out palm down in a courtier's gesture, offering it for Ilna to touch lightly with her fingertips.