Hour of the Octopus

by Joel Rosenberg

  Toshtai raised a flipper of a hand. “Hardly my point. I was recalling having heard similar complaints for many, many years now, back to when Arefai was still soiling his swaddling clothes. You are a long time dying, old woman. Which is perhaps just as well, for that means your mind is still available to my idiot son here.”

  Well, that was that: Toshtai was furious. He was too angry to address Arefai directly, but he was furious.

  Toshtai’s eyes were passionless as they met Arefai’s. ‘To challenge someone like Minch, where you can only lose for winning, and lose for losing, is the act of a fool. You were saved only by the speed of Dun Lidjun’s hand and the wit of Kami Dan’Shir.“

  “But that’s only part of it. Write it out for the boy, every stroke and dot,” Estrer said. “Or I will. It’s not his fault; you had him trained for war, not for politics.”

  Toshtai dismissed that with a tiny chopping motion of his hand. “It’s all the same; only the tools differ.” He turned back to Arefai. “Arefai, Arefai, think next time before you challenge. If Minch had beaten you—”

  Arefai wouldn’t have thought of interrupting, but Toshtai apparently caught something in his expression. The lord of Den Oroshtai slammed his hamlike fist down on the low table, sending flasks and serving plates dancing and clicking.

  “Don’t you tell me that cannot happen. Minch is a fine kazuh swordsman, and if his inner strength exceeds yours on a given day, it’ll be you who gets opened from left shoulder to right hip.” He calmed himself with a visible effort. “As I was saying, as your aunt insists that I say bluntly: if Minch had beaten you, the only way to cement Den Oroshtai to Glen Derenai would have been to marry ViKay to your brother Edelfaule, a man she does not care for and her father does not trust.”

  Estrer snickered. “A likely prospect, indeed. When peasants bathe! And the rest?”

  Toshtai’s lips turned up at the edges. “Alternately, if you had killed Minch, it would have cast shame upon Lord Orazhi—what sort of host is he, that his son-in-law-to-be would challenge then kill another of his guests?”

  “I should have let him challenge me, then.”

  Estrer rolled her eyes. “Don’t swear to keep your pole in your robes until that happens, or your new bride will be turning to peasants and vegetables for her satisfaction. You think Demick would allow you to cast yourself in the role of the preserver of the peace of Glen Derenai?” She took a pair of sweetmeats from the tray and popped them in her mouth, chewing quickly, like a peasant, then washing them down with a long pull from her flask. She pursed her lips. “Very nice. Almost as nice as your move in keeping that Kami Dan’Shir close to my nephew here. A clever one, that Kami Dan’Shir, if not particularly loyal.”

  Toshtai arched an eyebrow. “Oh? Why would you accuse him of disloyalty?”

  “Accuse? I don’t accuse. I often observe, I frequently note, I declare far too often, and I state constantly, but I don’t accuse.”

  Toshtai snorted. “Very well. And what is it that you note about a flaw in Kami Dan’Shir’s loyalty?”

  “And why should he be loyal? Just because you’ve taken him from the comfort of his family, providing no substitute?”

  Toshtai smoothed one hand down the front of his robes. “There are many ways to look at things.” He turned to Arefai. “All of them suggest that you need a better mind. Kami Dan’Shir has one. Spend time around his. Brush up against his thoughts, his way of thinking. Some of it may rub off.”

  Estrer laughed. “Your game is deeper than that.”

  Your game is deeper than that. “It’s obvious—” Arefai stopped himself. No, it was all wrong. It wasn’t going to work. Arefai just couldn’t do it, and Toshtai wouldn’t listen.

  Or perhaps he would: “Go on,” Toshtai said, leaning forward ever so slightly.

  Arefai swallowed. “I was going to say, Father, that it’s obvious you want me to spend time around him because my sword and arm can quite probably protect him while his mind can quite probably protect me, no?”

  “Well.” Toshtai grunted. “Perhaps you aren’t a complete simpleton after all.”

  Estrer’s eyes were shining with pride.

  Arefai wasn’t unhappy about it, either. It would have been better if he had done it with his own wit, but nonetheless he had impressed his father by putting in the observation Estrer had told him to make at just the moment that Estrer had signaled him to make it. He wasn’t really stupid, she had explained. It wasn’t his fault that he was more direct, less subtle than the likes of Toshtai and herself.

  But indirectness and subtlety could be learned, she had said. They were simply aspects of timing.

  And timing was, she had explained, everything.

  Chapter 11

  Breakfast, placques, gold, Narantir. An apple and a knife, a flock of birds, and other gains and losses.

  Morning dawned—as it has the habit of doing every day—with me confused—as I seemed to be almost every day.

  You would think I would get used to it after a while.

  I would have been tempted to think the previous night a dream if it wasn’t for a vague hint of perfume in the air, a red silk scarf on the floor near my bed. Perhaps even that wouldn’t have persuaded me if I hadn’t noticed various marks on my body here and there that hadn’t been made by falling off a horse. I mean, I could write off the pain from scratches on my back as having been from the ground, but I don’t really think I could have persuaded even the most credulous that my horse had rubbed rouge against my left shoulder and right thigh, or left teeth marks under my right nipple.

  And I couldn’t have persuaded myself that an old, familiar feeling of luxurious lassitude came from a good night’s sleep. That was how I felt—how I had felt—after a night with my NaRee.

  I washed myself quickly in the washbasin over by the door, eyeing myself in the mirror.

  I didn’t like it. The sharp-eyed fellow looking back seemed to me to be somebody who had spent the night with the betrothed of the closest thing he had to a friend among our beloved ruling class, but maybe it wasn’t quite tattooed all over his face.

  Very well, ViKay: why?

  It’s not my way, not particularly, to be so ungrateful as to question the motives of an attractive, willing woman. Well, no, that is a lie: it is my way to question the motives of anybody and everybody for doing anything and everything, but only within reason. It hadn’t seemed reasonable last night, what with ViKay warm in my arms and silken in my bed, but it was now morning, and I was suspicious.

  It was possible that her only reasons were gratitude and passion. Anything was possible, I guessed.

  I walked to the window. Below, where last night our beloved ruling class had frolicked, the lawn was littered with the detritus of the reception: uneaten food dropped here and there, pebbles scattered from the paths and onto the lush greenness of the lawn, an occasional flower picked here, a fern crushed by a careless footstep there. While two old, arthritic maids stooped to load trash into their baskets, a six-man team of gardeners, their bronzed torsos already slick with sweat from working under the low sun, busied themselves with the bushes and flowers, scissors and rakes flashing and clicking in the sun. A pick-pick here, a snip-snip of scissors there, a pat-pat of a hand over there, a splash-splash of water somewhere else, and a refuse-strewn, slightly worn garden was quickly becoming a typical piece of convenient lush loveliness.

  I would have stayed and watched them work, but a distant savory smell and my own hunger drove me into the hall.

  There are advantages to living the way the upper classes do. There must have been a servant posted outside my door, waiting for sounds of my rising. Outside, in the hall, under a two-life tapestry of sweating peasants working in a field, a breakfast tray had been left on a hall table. The rich smell of the bread made my mouth water, and hunger cramps almost doubled me over.

  I brought the tray in quickly. The two fist-sized loaves were fresh, still warm from the oven. Under the silver dome, an arrangement of cold
asparagus, sliced boiled eggs, and garlicky slivers of squid waited with several sauces that they shared with a small plate rimmed by a dozen paper-thin pieces of raw beef lying on a thin coat of golden mustard sauce.

  Not a bourgeois meal; whoever was running the kitchen here had apparently found it more convenient to issue me a noble breakfast.

  I tore into it, not taking the time to savor the way that the tarragon butter set off the crunchiness of the asparagus, barely noticing that the squid had been taken from the heat at the precise tender time between rubbery raw flesh would become rubbery overcooked. It practically melted in my mouth, but I could have eaten it anyway. The beef slices were light but rich, the way thinly sliced beef always is, and the slices of egg only served to convey dollops of a rich brown demiglace sauce to my mouth. The bread wiped up what was left.

  Refreshed with a quick use of the thundermug and a less abrupt towel bath, I dressed and was ready to head out into the day. It was still early yet, not quite into the hour of the hare.

  But Arefai was waiting for me out in the hall. Sprawled in an armchair that hadn’t been there before, he was toying with a few sweetmeats on the platter balanced on the arm of the chair, a steaming cup of urmon tea on a hallstand. This morning, his color scheme was off-white, from the cream-colored taband binding his damp hair back, down through a wan sieved pigskin tunic, down to heavy silk trousers gathered tightly at waist and bloused at the ankles over lambskin boots.

  He lolled at ease, considering the tapestry across the hall from him. It was worth a second look.

  “Very pretty,” he said. “Notice how the shadings make the sweat drops on that broadfaced man come alive? I would swear that they’re ready to run down the side of the tapestry.” He took another sip of tea and set the cup down.

  “I didn’t know you had such an eye for art, Lord,” I said.

  He brushed it away. “Just repeating something my aunt pointed out to me the other day. Not that it doesn’t seem so, once she pointed to it. She’s both persuasive and observant.” His smile was genuine, and affectionate. “I don’t doubt that you’ve noticed that about Aunt Estrer.”

  “It had occurred to me.”

  “In any event, we are off wrongly: a good day to you, Kami Dan’Shir,” he said, rising smoothly, not swiftly, not, thank the Powers, the way one would rise to kill the impossibly impertinent bourgeois who had spent the night with his woman.

  “And to you, of course, Lord Arefai.” I waited patiently. Another thing I didn’t understand: he had wanted to talk to me, but instead of interrupting me, Arefai had simply waited until I had finished my breakfast.

  So why am I being treated as though I matter, Lord Arefai? Because 1 had your woman last night while you slept?

  Somehow, I doubted that.

  “I…” he stopped, then started. “I didn’t have the chance to thank you properly, or publicly, yesterday.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. Minch’s trap.

  He went on: “I ask that you permit me to remedy the failing.”

  “No thanks are due, Lord Arefai.” That was true enough. I’d happily trade a quick-flash-of-insight-keeping-Arefai-out-of-trouble for a night with ViKay… without thinking he need throw any thanks into the bargain.

  Then again, were we engaged in some after-the-fact bargaining for the favors of his intended, I suspect he would have insisted I include, say, half of my liver.

  “Those of us in the lower classes live but to serve,” I said, careful to keep anything resembling a hint of a trace of an inkling of sarcasm out of my voice.

  He tilted his head to one side, then nodded, accepting what I’d said at face value. “Lady ViKay has invited Lords Demick, Debray, Minch, and Everlea for a game of placques this morning. I carry her invitation, and my own: Would you join us?”

  I’d much rather juggle knives, I didn’t say. I’m safe juggling knives.

  “It would be my pleasure,” I said.

  Sitting on an elbow-height marble table, my cup was barely three-quarters full as a white-clad servitor refilled it with a gracious dip of the silver teapot, while another wielded a tiny silver hook to remove the old, soggy sweet-leaf from the teacup. Idly, I crumpled a fresh sweetleaf and tossed it in, then considered ViKay’s profile over the edge of the cup as I sipped.

  “Yours to play,” she said to Minch. Perhaps as a preview of the wedding, she was all in red and orange today, from the bare dusting of rouge that kissed her cheekbones to the flame-colored polish coating her long fingernails. Her gown was enough loose wrappings of a diaphanous crimson silk that it only hinted at the curves beneath, but I remembered.

  I shouldn’t have worried about her; our beloved ruling class learns young to keep their thoughts to themselves. Her occasional glance my way was neither furtive nor overly bold, nor was it any different from the way she looked at any of the young lords gathered around the placques table or waiting their turns under a nearby jimsum tree. For all I knew, she had gone from my bed to one of theirs.

  Well, actually, that seemed unlikely, all things considered.

  I bit into a cherry tart. There are worse ways to spend a morning than under scented trees playing at placques.

  Back in the troupe, every now and then we used to play a game of placques around the campfire during the evening, after dinner, after practice, usually me and Enki Duzun against Sala and Gray Khuzud, although sometimes Fhilt or one of the Eresthais would play. We would spread out a blanket, pile clothes at the four corners to screen our hands from view, and shuffle our cheap bone set of placques by the simple expedient of shaking their bag, then each of us drawing our nine just by reaching in. It took some doing, to prop up the battered old placques so that only your partner, sitting opposite, could see them, but that was acceptable.

  Here, we sat around a table that looked like the crossroads of two walled streets. Each player’s viewing area was protected by chin-high diagonal translucent rice paper screens drawn upwards from the surface of the table itself. Instead of the cheap lacquered bone, short symbols for beast and season inscribed in ideograms, each of the placques in front of me had been carefully painted: the summer hare stood crouched in summer-tall grasses, clearly ready to run at the slightest challenge; the spring cock was frozen in midstrut before a budding bush; the spring octopus sat improbably straight on the banks of a swollen river; the autumn bear stood tall on its hind legs, looking out over the hills that were naked of leaves, waiting for the winter’s snow.

  The summer dragon, of course, was just a summer landscape, tall wheat bending beneath what could have been the wind instead of a dragon’s chill breath. There is much magic in dragons; few magicians with any sense often deal with dragon magic, and no nonmagicians with any sense ever do.

  “I should have another victor here,” Minch said, for the severalth time.

  Wrong, I didn’t say.

  I could see Minch’s hands fumble behind the paper, but that was only to be expected. If I had the pattern of this racking figured out—and I did; this was by far too simple—he had trapped himself into leading from his own rack instead of from his partner’s. Just a matter of not taking pains to play it out ahead of time.

  The order of rank of the beasts is the same as the hours of the day: dragon, lion, bear, snake, octopus, ox, horse, hare, cock. He had only summer placques left: the lion, snake, and ox, with me left with the dragon and hare in front of me opposite the cock, horse, and bear in front of Arefai. My other placque was only the cock of spring, but it was the sole spring placque left.

  Finally, he tipped over a placque. It hit the marble surface with the familiar tik, and a quick push slid it to the center. The ox of summer. Not good enough. I beat it with Arefai’s summer bear, then slid my own summer hare to the center when Minch called for the winter cock from Lady ViKay. Arefai carefully stacked the placques to one side.

  The rest were mine. I had Arefai play the summer bear to my dragon, and finished with the simple little cock o
f spring.

  “Brilliantly played, Kami Dan’Shir,” Arefai said, no doubt endearing me further to Minch.

  Well, it was good enough. There were no other spring placques left out.

  Really, much of placques is a simple game: you simply have to learn how to count to nine, and then decide to count to nine in each of the four major seasons. When one opponent fails to follow season, you know how many placques of that season he originally held. Add that to the number in that season you held, add in the number your partner held, and subtract from nine, and you know how that season was originally divided.

  It gets more complicated if you play merchant placques, which includes both the minor seasons and adds chickens, mares, cows, she-bears and lionesses, but only merchants like things so complicated, what with almost eighty pieces out. To play at standard placques, all you have to do is count to nine.

  Arefai beckoned the serving girl with the waxboard over. “I count twenty-eight in front of the brilliant Kami Dan’Shir, and…” He rose, to look down into Minch’s playing area.

  Eight, I didn’t interrupt and say. There are thirty-six placques. I have twenty-eight. Minch has eight. Thirty-six minus twenty-eight is eight.

  “… eight in front of Lord Minch.”

  The serving girl removed the piles from in front of us and set them down on the shuffling table. Her long fingers moved blurringly fast as she moved the pieces of cold marble over the silk-covered table, so fast that the clicking of the placques sounded like an even drumroll.

  As though by magic, when she straightened, the stone tablets had been divided into four groups. ViKay pointed at the one nearest her, Arefai selected his, Minch his, leaving one for me.

  When she placed the rack gently in front of me, I sipped at my hot tea while considering the layout. Five summers, two springs, and a single winter and autumn. A nice summery rack, actually, topped by the lion and dragon. The trouble was that I had nothing better than an ox in any of the other seasons, and it was ViKay’s turn to lead. I gave a mental shrug as I put the spring cock and autumn hare facedown on the table and slid them toward Minch, then reached for the placques that ViKay had set in front of me.