by Patty Jansen
She detected a tone of wariness.
Have you met these people?
Some. They're odd, maybe dangerous. I don't know that anyone knows what they want.
They have made Barresh their home. Their leader is a man called Daya Ezmi.
The same Daya Ezmi who is Thania Lingui's son? I didn't know Thania Lingui had a zhadya-born son.
Yes. He is the man who has married the woman Iztho wanted to marry.
There was a short pause.
She typed, You are allowed to swear.
He responded immediately. Fuck. And a bit later, Can you come home?
That question surprised her. She typed, I have no money, but then remembered her vow not to ask him for any, so she deleted it again and wrote instead, Do you think I could be more useful in Miran?
There was a pause. Probably not. Another pause. But if what you're saying is true, I don't like you being there. If you're found out, they might think you're a spy. You do not mess with anyone within a whiff of the Asto leadership and come away without damage.
I'm fine. Mikandra frowned at the screen. Why the concern all of a sudden? There are lots of Mirani here. No one knows who I am.
Maybe he was right about the danger, but if the Barresh council suspected her and wanted her out of the way, they could have arrested her on some made-up charge a long time ago.
Please, listen to what I say and pay it more attention than you usually do with advice. These people are dangerous and have ways to find out what they want. They know your identity no matter how careful you are. They will observe you and learn things they have no business to know. Leave that place as soon as you can and come home.
Despite the heat, she shivered. She remembered that pounding feeling when meeting Daya and Anmi in the library. What had Ydana Ezmi said again about the abilities of these people?
At home, she could look after Mother and Liseyo. She could ask him for money. In the overall scheme of things, the price of a ticket was a piddly amount for him. Nothing was more tempting.
But going home was giving up. Going home was not courage. Going home was going back to having nowhere to live and having no money unless she asked Rehan.
Living cheaply independently was a lot easier in Barresh than in Miran. But oh, she smelled the heavenly scent of freshly-baked fish bread, she felt the warm glow of a fiercely-burning fire and the comfortable warmth of a cloak.
She blinked pricking eyes and typed, I'm fine here for the time being. There are some things I want to do And then, to distract herself, she added, I didn't know Lihan Ilendar got married.
I didn't know that before yesterday either. It surprised everyone, even in the Guild. When people on the street heard, they were angry and tried to set the house on fire.
I guess this wasn't because they didn't get their invitations to a wedding party?
Hahaha. No. They called the family traitors and scrawled all over the outside walls. Most people think that these people were hit gangs hired by other Traders, but there is no proof for that. The family are gone now, and the riots have spread to the next block. It's tricky to navigate the exclusion zones when going to the office.
Is there any way you can do work at home? She had a sudden vision of flames in the snow, rioting men throwing burning sticks and kicking down a gate. Their voices echoed through the night.
She shivered as if a blast of cold hit her.
What was that? There was no menisha brew in sight.
A reply had appeared on her the screen I can work at home, but we need to keep access to the airport. I need to keep an eye on who these people are and what they're doing.
Would they stop you trying to get through?
At this point, I have no idea what they will do. Most of them are young Nikala men who wear scarves over their faces. I don't know who they are and why they're not working. I don't know if they're there because they want to or because someone pays them. They're probably just bored and looking for trouble for the sake of having something to do. I don't know that the city guards can stop them. I don't know that they want to. At the moment, the city feels hostile to us.
Be careful.
Funny you should say that.
That made her smile. She couldn't picture what his face looked like when he sat there alone in the office while Braedon helped Eydrina Lasko out and Taerzo fixed aircraft, but she could feel his loneliness. The Rehan she had met was a stiff, rude and abrupt man with a hard emotionless look on his face. His written words showed an entirely different person.
After telling him that she planned to stay in Barresh and promising him several times that she'd be careful and not to do any stupid things, she announced that she had to go to work or be late. She signed off with a feeling of despair and regret. Nothing she could do made much of a difference. Investigations of Exchange data with the authorities were way over her head and needed to be done by Lawkeepers. He hadn't mentioned the court case for a number of days. She didn't think that it was going well. While Taerzo and Braedon busied themselves with other activities, he sat alone in that office, being eaten from the inside by his own destructive thoughts.
The brothers would have been much better off having assigned Braedon to this task, not Rehan with his highly-strung mind.
She wished she could do something, because if this went on, there would be no apprenticeship for her and then what? She would be stuck here forever.
How long could Rehan hold out before he ended up like Leitho? And what could she possibly do to help the court case?
Chapter 24
While walking around the block to the council buildings, she had a thought so obvious that she hit herself in the head for not having thought of it before.
She worked in a library. Libraries held information. The stupid mess that passed for the records and accounts of the Mirani army was only part of the library's holdings. While walking through other parts of the hall, she had spied sections with beautiful maps and old books. There were also new books that contained all the transcriptions of council meetings. Sure, somewhere in the library there would be information about this group of people, zhadya-born or Aghyrians, whatever they called themselves, why they were here, and what they stood for. If she knew what they wanted maybe she could hand the brothers information that might back up whatever their Guild Lawkeeper could find. Possibly even, Iztho had been mentioned in council meeting transcripts, and she knew the shelves where those stood.
During the midday break, she would normally sit in one of the many courtyards or go to the markets where she had become addicted to Machizu's food, but this time, she remained in the library. There were a lot of people in the library, but the section with council meeting transcripts remained deserted. Mikandra walked through once and spied the dates on the spines. Anything prior to independence had been written in Mirani. She took one book off the shelf and opened it. On the pages was an account in neat print of a meeting discussing a new regulation. She flipped a few more pages, but then noticed Bakimay looking at her, probably shadowing her and reporting everything to Daya.
Damn, she would have to wait until there was no one here. She put the book back and wandered into another section. Bakimay went back to her work. A bit later, Mikandra again walked into the council meeting section. The books she'd want would be those from around the time of the two-day war. There were a couple of gaps on the shelves. Mikandra didn't dare linger and went to the adjacent section, which was all about local produce and contained books about plants and trees and fish and other creatures Mikandra had seen at market stalls. Ringgit, the noisy animals that lived in the marshes, turned out to be air-breathing, winged fish. They floated on the surface of the water. The noise was their mating call.
Bakimay walked past a few times with her eyebrows raised. She stopped once without asking anything, but the second time, she couldn't contain her curiosity.
"You can go outside. Is not raining."
"I know." The locals had found her reluctance to go out in t
he rain amusing.
"Work finished. Work again this afternoon."
"I'm not working. I'm looking for something. Maybe you can help me?"
"Oh?" Bakimay raised her eyebrows. Pengali eyes were very expressive and it amused Mikandra to see carefully-cultured hostility warring with curiosity.
"I'm looking for information about the history of Barresh, especially about the different groups of people who live here."
"Pengali were first. Everyone else come later."
"I'd like to read about when all the different people came to live here, if I can."
Barely hiding her curiosity, Bakimay pointed her to a section of the library that had already been finished and that held many beautiful old books so different from the disintegrating volumes from the Mirani army headquarters.
Mikandra found a wealth of information on history, most of it in Mirani script but in an ancient syntax that she had learned at school but hadn't been used in Miran for hundreds of years. Apparently, Barresh had once spanned a couple more islands than the current two, and those old settlements had been abandoned. There were old plans of proposed bridges between the islands, and grandiose buildings, even trains.
Newer books were beautifully illustrated histories written in the script she had seen the women practice in the library. It seemed that keihu had been only a spoken language until independence.
To her huge surprise, Pengali was a written language, and a very ancient one at that, although several books referred to the legal requirement to write everything in Mirani "to appease the occupying force".
Apparently, the cliffs of the escarpment held many caves and passages where ancient histories of the Pengali tribes were carved into the stone. Apparently, too, the beautiful glass-stone eating bowls and other carved objects were Pengali-made, as was most of the fabric, the felt and the woodwork. The Pengali looked primitive, but their culture was ancient, rich and productive. In contrast, the keihu had never done much more than provide lazy and corrupt government.
Interesting.
But the history section was so big and there was so much material that she could spend days going through it before she found something that even vaguely related to Aghyrians. All she could figure from the old materials was that they hadn't lived in Barresh until recently.
Then she had another thought. On the morning she left home, Father had been grilling Liseyo over her knowledge of Mirani history. If she wanted the short version of the history of Barresh, the place to go would be a school.
She went to see Bakimay, who usually left the library at midday, but had probably stayed to keep an eye on their strange Mirani employee.
"What? Already finished? Not happy? History is boring, hah. Not like Miran, hah."
Mikandra clenched her jaws. "The books you showed me were interesting. But it will take me a long time to read all those books. I don't have much time. I'm wondering if you could do something else for me."
The suspicious look didn't leave Bakimay's face. Mikandra wondered if instead of going to the markets, she had gone to the Chief Councillor to inform him of this new development in this suspicious Mirani woman who was probably a spy.
She imagined the two of them sitting at a table—looking suspiciously like the one in the guesthouse where she had sat with Ydana Ezmi—talking about her.
"I like to know what kind of history is being taught to children in Barresh. I'd like to visit a school."
"You ask strange questions."
Mikandra bet she meant strange not in a good way. "We are interested in history in Miran. History is what makes a place. History helps us understand a place."
Bakimay's eyebrows went up. "You not like others. You come on time. You work. No complaining. Work is boring, yes? But you come and come."
Was she dreaming or did she hear Bakimay give a compliment? "I need the money. My family taught me to honour my promises."
Bakimay shook her head, which made the beaded plaits dance around her head. "You not like others. No drink, no? No party? No selling foul orange brew?"
"Not all Mirani are like that. I'm sorry if you've been treated badly by the ones who do these things. At home in Miran, I am a student of history." More lies. Liseyo would be rolling on the ground with laughter if she heard this. "I want to visit a school. Could you take me to one?"
"Schools are in Pengali parts of city. You find Pengali people no friend of Mirani. Only old ones speak your language because when occupation we had to learn. Mirani used Pengali as servants. Mirani think Pengali are stupid. But Mirani soldiers happy to fuck Pengali girls as whores. Mirani fight Pengali men. Mirani cut off tails. Mirani kill a lot of our people. No friends. Pengali not nice to Mirani. Still want to come?"
Mikandra cringed. She lived with all these soldiers who indeed—save the tail-cutting—did just that. Was it a surprise that the only Pengali at the guesthouse parties were women? "If you can be my guide and translator, yes, I would."
* * *
Bakimay told her to come to her desk at the end of the day. She handed Mikandra a khaki tunic. "You put on. Look like one who lives here."
Another blunder. All Pengali had probably found her white and red tunics offensive and proof that she was the same as the type of Mirani people they knew.
After she finished work, Mikandra went into the library wing's bathroom, a courtyard pool surrounded by cubicles where water from hot springs ran through stone ducts. A worker had explained to her that steam pressure from the heat of the earth drove the water.
Having a bath in Miran was a formal occasion performed no more than once a day. In Barresh, you were considered dirty if you didn't bathe and rinse each time you visited the private facilities. This was a habit down to the very poorest people in the city who bathed in the open-air pools if their houses didn't have hot pools. Every building she had visited had a bathing facility with towels and flasks of megon oil to stop smells and skin infections.
If you smelled, you were dirty. In a place with a climate like Barresh, not smelling was a constant challenge.
So she jumped in the pool, dried and rubbed oil on herself and went back to Bakimay, wearing the khaki tunic with the council emblem. By this time, it was starting to go dark.
To her question if school hadn't finished for the day, Bakimay snorted and said that she didn't understand Pengali at all.
Bakimay took her through the tree-lined streets of the main island, where the keihu families' stately houses stood behind walls with ornate gates.
On the far eastern end of the island, many of those old houses were either being renovated or expanded into complexes of three or four floors with many rooms.
It was into one of those complexes that Bakimay took Mikandra.
What had been the old house's gate now opened into a tunnel, a dark maw leading into the depths of the building. Inside, with the approaching night, it was almost too dark for Mikandra to see. The ceiling was so low that Mikandra had to bend to get into doorways. Surely the original house didn't have ceilings that low. Bakimay said that as soon as the Pengali took possession of an empty house, they divided each floor into two so they had more room for people to live. A mansion that would have housed a rich family and their servants was now the home of hundreds.
It was warm in this tunnel, with a riot of smells competing to be noticed. Mikandra sensed the presence of people in the darkness. There were soft voices, and giggles. When Pengali weren't shouting at each other, their language didn't sound quite so harsh.
The first time a rough-skinned hand touched her arm, Mikandra jumped. Then her eyes because used to the darkness, and she noticed people around her. It was too dark to see their faces, but the white pigment spots or stripes on their shoulders and tails stood out in the low light.
Sweat trickled down Mikandra's back. All those Pengali bodies might be clean, but the Pengali had a curious odour of wet mud that Mikandra's nose, used to fresh highland air, found unpleasant.
Bakimay took her to a room on the buil
ding's ground floor. There was no window, but air and light trickled in from a couple of shafts that stood out like glowing tubes in the ceiling. Groups of Pengali children sat on mats on the ground underneath these light tubes. They looked up when Bakimay came in. Several of the older children rose and made what sounded like an official greeting.
The only adult in the room was a young male. He spoke to Bakimay in Pengali and Mikandra stood to the side, feeling like a big awkward smelly giant.
The kids all looked at her with their huge eyes. The skin patterns that adults had on their shoulders and backs covered their entire bodies. Their tails were shorter than those of adults, but much more vividly coloured and moving constantly. The white portions in their skin patterns almost glowed in the light.
One of them waved a tail at Mikandra and she waved back. The children in the group giggled, a soft snorting noise. She dropped to her knees. Within moments, the children had forgotten about their work or about sitting still. They were all over her, patting her hair, feeling her skin and her ears. They were small, lithe, bouncy, striped or spotted all over, and they tangled and tumbled, using their tails for everything.
The teacher gave a sharp order, accompanied by a snap of his tail.
Several of them scurried back to their previous spots. The teacher snapped his tail at the remaining ones.
Mikandra said, "Leave them. They don't bother me."
Three little spotted children had settled themselves in her lap, having a tail-fight for the best position. A little girl was at Mikandra's back, trying to plait the too-short strands of her hair and another one was trying to jump onto her shoulders.
The teacher snapped another command, and the little ones drooped off, back to their mat. The little rascal who had tried to climb her shoulders pulled his knees up against his chest and glared at the teacher.
Mikandra tried not to laugh.