by David Drake
“They’re not covered with wet leaves, though,” said Hogg.
Two prostitutes moved to intercept them. They weren’t impressive at a distance, and a closer approach didn’t improve their appearance. Daniel slanted slightly to his right. That would take him past the women, who seemed barely able to hobble.
Hogg waved and called, “Maybe later, girls.”
“Really?” Daniel said, frowning.
“Maybe if it’s dark enough,” Hogg muttered. “And I’m drunk enough. Which has happened a time or two, young master.”
He grimaced and added without meeting Daniel’s eyes, “Look, I feel sorry for ’em, okay? Some of ’em wasn’t half-bad girls in their day.”
“Right,” said Daniel. He thought about the beggar on the harborfront; but he said nothing further aloud.
In front of the Manor was an oval ornamental pool, thirty feet long and ten feet across at the center. A pair of prisoners, leg-shackled together, shuffled toward the pool with a hand barrow. Daniel skirted the other end, wondering if it had at one time been planted with water flowers.
To his amazement, the prisoners tipped their barrow’s contents of kitchen waste into the water. Potato peelings, grease, and unidentifiable bits swirled on the surface.
“What did you just do, you scuts!” Daniel shouted. The nearer prisoner was a hulking brute who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, but Daniel was so angry at the sudden vandalism that he would have done the same even without Hogg standing close by with the sub-machine gun.
“Bugger off,” said the smaller man at the back of the barrow. He was hunched. His pointy face had the features of an unhealthy rat.
“I’m working off my sentence,” the big man said. He smiled shyly. “They says I kilt a man.”
Daniel blinked, as much at the pleasant expression as at the words. “Did you?” he said. “Kill him?”
“Dunno,” said the big man. “I was drunk. I guess maybe I did.”
“But why dump garbage here?” Daniel said, disarmed by the prisoner’s obvious good nature.
“Bugger off,” the other prisoner repeated. “Kelsey, we gotta get back.”
“Higgens, you learn some manners or I pull you head off,” Kelsey said. He didn’t sound exactly angry, but there was a burr in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “All they gonna do when we get back is lock us back to that anchor chain in the basement. I druther talk to this gentleman.”
Higgens turned his head away. Kelsey watched him sternly for a moment, then smiled again to Daniel and said, “The sponge here eats the food, you see. There it goes!”
Daniel looked down. The water had been still: now the surface was in trembling motion as a current drew the scraps along one curved side of the pool.
Somebody turned the filter on, he thought. Then he saw a tentacle the thickness of his arm, covered with writhing cilia which were drawing the water toward them.
Daniel shaded his eyes to look below the surface. Directly beneath him was a grating which normally would have covered a filter and pump. Something pinkish-gray and as big as a steer’s torso grew on it, concealing most of the grate. There were four tentacles like the one he had seen, all shimmering with cilia.
“You say it’s a sponge?” he said, kneeling to get closer.
Over the striped body crawled flat bronze creatures the size of a man’s thumb. They could have been blotches of color on the hide had Daniel not seen that they were moving slowly.
“Don’t you fall in, sir!” Kelsey warned. “It’ll eat you quick as it’ll eat a rat!”
He knuckled his bearded chin. “And I allus heard it was a sponge, but I don’t know. I’m not, well, I ain’t got much schooling, you know.”
“I saw it eat a drunk last year,” Higgens said. “He screamed like you wouldn’t believe. Wouldn’t have done no good to pull him out, because once it stings you it’s all over. So I been told, anyhow.”
“Thank you, Kelsey,” Daniel said, straightening. He fished a florin out of his purse, then thought a moment and found a second coin. “And you too, Higgens.”
He flipped the coins to the prisoners, one and then the other.
“Come, Hogg,” Daniel said. “We have business with the port authorities.”
But as soon as we get back to the Kiesche, he thought, I’ll have Adele learn more about this sponge. It was the most interesting thing Daniel had seen on Corcyra yet.
CHAPTER 12
Brotherhood on Corcyra
When Cleveland reached the top of the ladder, Adele gave him the jute rag on which she and Tovera had already wiped their hands. The harbor level had dropped several feet in the recent past, and the bottom four rungs were slimy with a mixture of lubricant, algae, and the organic waste which nourished the algae.
“Ah, thank you, your ladyship,” Cleveland said. He turned his head, obviously looking for a place to deposit the rag.
Adele took it between her right thumb and forefinger. “I prefer to be called Mundy, Cleveland,” she said. “In Xenos, and certainly here.”
She dropped the rag into the slip. “Returning like to like,” she explained with a cold smile. “I can no more clean up this harbor than I could remove all negative and discourteous people from the human race.”
“I…,” Cleveland said. He suddenly smiled. “I understand, Mundy. I’m trying to do the latter, starting with myself; but until I have become perfect, I won’t bother the rest of humanity.”
He cocked his head slightly. “From what I’ve seen,” he said, “you have less need of correction than anyone I’ve previously met.”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘negative,’” Tovera said. Her grin reminded Adele of a skull’s. Perhaps skulls also had a sense of humor.
“Rather than go up Central Street,” Cleveland said, gesturing to the sloping boulevard leading straight up toward the Manor, “I suggest we go through the town. It may be a little longer, but this end of the Plaza is an obstacle course that I’d prefer to avoid.”
Adele shrugged. “You know the town,” she said.
Cleveland led them briskly across Water Street—or whatever it was called here. Adele reached for her data unit, then caught herself with a grim smile.
“Cleveland?” she said. If Tovera can learn to mimic a sense of humor, I can give the impression of being a socialized human being. “What is the name of the street that circles the harbor? I’m just curious.”
“That’s just Harborside, your…that is, Mundy,” he said. He gestured ahead of them, moving his left hand from side to side. “Now we’re on Sweeney’s Alley at this end, but it’ll be Crescent Alley at the top when we reach Ridge Road.”
The passage they’d turned up seemed to meander between the structures rather than them being built to either side. It was generally about ten feet wide, though occasionally the corner of a building narrowed by it.
“Are all the streets here this way?” Adele asked. The alley had no sharp angles, but she couldn’t see more than thirty feet ahead or behind because of twists in the course.
“This is the widest street after Central,” Cleveland said. “Generally, at least. People built where the slope allowed them to. Every ten years or so the harbor district gets flooded from what I’ve been told.”
Adele followed him under a balcony enclosed in carved wood screens. The lower half of the screen on the downhill side had cracked away and was replaced by a sheet of plastic.
Tovera waited two steps back until they were clear. Her right hand was fully inside the case which held her sub-machine gun.
Cleveland didn’t appear to notice; Adele suppressed a frown. She could not object to Tovera’s extreme professional care, and in theory it shouldn’t have affected Adele. Tovera wasn’t directing her to scan roof tops or to be ready if a gunman leaned over the gate across the way. Irrationally it did induce paranoia in Adele, though her intellectual control prevented that from being visible to anyone outside her mind.
The gate Adele had been conside
ring darkened as a middle-aged woman stepped to it. The vertical stripes of her loose dress did little to reduce her bulk; she held a trowel in her right hand.
“Madame,” Cleveland said, smiling as he passed. To Adele’s surprise, the woman’s stony expression dissolved into a smile which took ten years off her apparent age.
Adele nodded to the woman but didn’t attempt a smile. She had found in the past that her smiles rarely struck strangers as friendly. Which was fair, as Adele rarely felt friendly toward strangers.
The flower beds she glimpsed past the gardener were gorgeously colorful. They looked unplanned, but Adele understood patterns well enough to realize that what she saw was as carefully structured as one of her own databases.
“Brotherhood appears to be…,” Adele said, then paused to word the rest of the statement correctly. “A more ordinary community that I was expecting in the midst of war.”
Cleveland turned his head and smiled. “Some members of my faith believe that the presence of our fellowship only fifty miles south in Pearl Valley helps make Brotherhood such a pleasant community,” he said. “Despite the port and the miners which are the basis of the economy. I prefer to think that people are generally decent when given an opportunity to be.”
Adele felt a wry smile tug at the corners of her lips. Whereas I myself consider it a good day when I don’t feel a desire to shoot one of the people with whom I have to deal. She supposed that both reactions were within the acceptable norms of civilized society.
“This is Ridge Road,” Cleveland said as they rounded a curving house wall. “We’ll turn to the right here.”
On the ten-foot wide street was the first motorized traffic Adele had seen since they started up the hillside. Two men were guiding a cart with hub-center motors from left to right; on the bed rode what looked like a refrigeration unit.
Coming the other way was a chain-driven vehicle on four high, flimsy looking wheels. It looked like something built locally from spare parts; on the front axle was a triangular metal pennon stencilled with a light-blue trefoil.
The woman driving from a saddle was beautiful and well dressed. She was alone on the vehicle, but it ambled at the pace of the squad of soldiers on foot escorting her. The troops’ battledress was striped black on dark green; they carried stocked impellers comparable to the carbines in the Kiesche’s hold.
“Ah, that’s Caleira driving the buggy,” Cleveland said. “She was working as an entertainer—she may be local, but I wouldn’t know. She’s now the companion of Mistress Tibbs, the Chief Administrator of the Self-Defense Regiment. Their headquarters is on the other side of the Square, so I guess that’s where she’s going. And the Navy headquarters is in the building alongside theirs, but they’ve both got their barracks by the harbor.”
“I see,” said Adele, noting the information mentally. She would transfer it to digital form as soon as she got an opportunity. The troops were well-turned-out, and they hadn’t given her the impression of being bravos looking for a fight, the way many uniformed gangs did here on the fringes. “And Brother Graves?”
“Across the street and two doors up,” Cleveland said and started across. Another vehicle of some sort was visible to the right, but it seemed to be parked. Men were carrying pipes from it; the only moving traffic was pedestrian.
Adele could see the plaza to the left; the paving blocks nearer the slope rippled like the sea, just as Cleveland had warned. The building which faced the plaza was a palace built of either stone or stone-clad concrete. Further from the Plaza were two-story shops and offices, some with apartments above, on both sides of the street.
Between a clothier’s shop and a tavern—not a dive—was a door painted a pearl white. Cleveland swung it open to a flight of steps upward. The panel moved with the weight of steel, but it hadn’t been locked.
Tovera touched the edge of the door. “I’ll close it,” she said courteously to Cleveland. “So that you can lead.”
“Right!” said Cleveland, skipping up the stairs two at a time. The door thumped shut. If he realized that Tovera didn’t trust him behind them, his pleasant smile gave no sign of it.
Adele followed. She found these wooden treads relaxing. She was more used to metal stairs.
Adele heard minute hesitations in Tovera’s steps as the servant glanced over her shoulder. She wondered if Tovera’s need for constant vigilance made her unhappy. Perhaps she no more regarded it than she did breathing.
Cleveland opened the door at the head of the stairs. “Brother Graves?” he called. “I’m here with, ah, Mistress Mundy. Captain Leary is dealing with the port authorities, but Mundy is a partner in the expedition.”
“Please come in, mistress,” said a small, middle-aged man wearing a tan business suit with a thin brown stripe. He was balding from forehead to mid-scalp, but his voice was lively and the hand with which he shook Adele’s was firm. “I’m Graves—and don’t worry about ‘brother,’ since you have no reason to regard me or Cleveland as your brothers. We appreciate your help all the more for that reason.”
The office was a single room, though there was a door in the back wall which probably led to living quarters. There were couches along two walls and a pair of chairs flanked the entrance.
The other item of furnishing was a commercial console which Adele realized was as powerful as a starship unit. She smiled at the thought. It’s probably configured differently.
“I don’t know how much help we can be,” she said aloud, suppressing the reflex to explain that she wasn’t Daniel’s partner. In fact she was his partner, in every respect except the legal ones which didn’t matter to either Daniel or herself. “It seems to me that digging up the treasure is more a matter for a mining engineer than—” How to describe the Kiesche’s crew? “—generalists like ourselves.”
“Mining engineers are twenty a dandiprat on Corcyra,” Graves said. He gestured to the couch, then seated himself on one end of it. “I’m one myself, as a matter of fact. The political situation on Corcyra, however—”
His wry smile seemed warm, but there was sadness behind it.
“—is such that bringing mining equipment openly to Pearl Valley would arouse suspicion. And almost certainly violence by one of the competing parties, if any inkling of the purpose got out.”
Adele made another mental note, this time to check the meaning of “dandiprat.” From context, it could be anything from a coin to a vegetable…but that wasn’t the matter at hand.
“The cargo we brought is weapons,” Adele said, sitting on the other end of the couch. Cleveland took a chair, while Tovera continued to stand near the hinge side of the door. “We thought we would blend in that way and explain our presence in an acceptable fashion. When we’ve examined the situation, we’ll acquire such machinery as we need here.”
Graves grimaced. “Yes,” he said, “yes, you’re right, of course. But that brings its own problems. I cringed when I saw the manifest you transmitted from orbit, because I’m sure it will cause others, the Garrison at least, to attempt to get the arms for themselves.”
“Do you mean, to hijack our cargo?” Adele said, trying to keep her tone neutral. Tovera smiled slightly.
“Oh, they wouldn’t do anything that raw!” Cleveland said, looking from Adele to Graves. “Why, neither the Regiment nor the Navy would allow that to happen even if Mursiello were willing.”
Graves spread his hands palms up and looked down at them. “I’m an engineer, Brother Cleveland,” he said. “I think such an action would show very bad judgment on Colonel Mursiello’s part, but—”
He raised his eyes. His expression was the same sad smile as before.
“—I don’t have a high opinion of the Colonel’s judgment even now. Still, what I’m expecting is pressure to sell the cargo to another of the parties instead of delivering it to the consignees.”
Graves clenched his fists again. “I ought to be at the port office too,” he said, “but I told myself I wouldn’t be much support in that
sort of unpleasant hectoring. I still should have gone.”
He looked up. Adele shrugged. “I don’t think Captain Leary will be unduly swayed by someone shouting at him,” she said. “How will you get the cargo to Pearl Valley? Doing that will reduce the risk of trouble, I presume.”
“Yes, of course,” Graves agreed. He rose and went to the console. “That much I can take care of. There’s a barge under contract to us. I’m alerting the crew so that they’ll be ready to perform at any schedule that you, that Captain Leary, sets.”
He used a virtual keyboard to make entries. The holographic display was unreadable from this side, but Adele’s personal data unit was absorbing that input and all others within the office.
Graves looked toward Adele through the holographic blurring. He said, “I’m not a very good representative under these conditions, I’m afraid. I’ll only say in my defense that none of our community has the right personality for cutthroat beggar-your-neighbor dealings such as have become the only way business is transacted in Brotherhood. Some of us did have that personality. I did myself, I’m sorry to admit.”
He gave Adele a smile of warm fellowship.
“But that was before I felt the kinship in Pearl Valley and became a Transformationist myself. There doesn’t seem to be any way to go back, thank goodness. Though sometimes I feel that the old me would be useful to the faith.”
“Will the weapons be of any use to you?” Adele said. She was mostly successful in hiding her frown.
“We’ll fight to save ourselves and our faith,” Cleveland said. “Brother Graves shouldn’t denigrate himself. He’s been a very effective advocate for our community in the Independence Council. I know, having just come back from a separation of many light-years—”
Cleveland forced a smile. His expression was that of someone just released from torture, trying to put a brave face on what he had undergone.
“—what it means for him to remain here and deal with people who are boiling with hatred and hostility every hour of every day.”