Danger had once more raised its red-rimmed eyes. The Brotherhood would not harm him, not after offering bread and salt; but there were more Terrans in the Corner than belonged to the Brotherhood, and a disingenuous word spoken here or there could make his departure problematical. “I will tell ye so much as is safe for ye to know, brothers. But ye must swear a mighty oath to contain these words only within these walls. I wish to know of the doings of the Hound, Bridget ban, during her sojourn here. The Folk must speak to me with open hearts.”
Bwana studied him, and the Fudir could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Then he clapped his hands again and cried out. “The Book!”
The others of the Seven looked uncomfortably at one another. One rose and murmured, “Perhaps I would not hear this.” Bwana flicked his fingers at her and she and two others rose, bowed over their folded hands to both the Bwana and the Fudir, and departed swiftly.
Shortly, a book was brought in. It was a thick volume, bound in the ancient style and inscribed on its binding with the curlicues of the old Tantamiž script. The printing was badly worn and a dull brown stain covered some of it. Of its title, the Fudir could make out only Guest is God, but on the reading of those words his heart went hollow. It was in the old script and its spelling was antique. Athtithi Dhevo Bhava, instead of Adidi Dyefo Vapha. The author’s name was not visible, but he wondered. Could this volume be that written by Saint Shanthanand Saraswathi himself? How old was it? It was encased in a plastic block—destroyed and preserved in one act—and so its age had ceased. It might have come from Lost Terra herself, lovingly cradled and carried from the Home World to the Old Planets and from there to come to rest finally on rickety Thistlewaite.
The Fudir, who fancied himself an unsentimental man, was surprised to find himself on his knees before the book, his cheeks hot with tears; but whether for the ancient, half-legendary swami-ji, or for everything lost that had once been, he did not know. He placed his hand on the block along with the Bwana and the others of the Committee who had stayed, their fingertips touching one another: pallid, ebony, dun, and sallow. The colors of Olde Earth.
“By the blue skies and the green hills
By all that was and all that yet might be,
By the Taj and the Wall and the Mount of Many Faces,
We swear that what we say will be said only here and only now.
May we never see Green Terra if we lie.”
After the words were spoken, the Fudir rocked back on his heels. His fingers lingered on the Book, maintaining contact, as if he could feel the binding and the covers and the pages preserved forever unreadable within the plastic. He had spoken many oaths in his lifetime, and some he had even kept. This was the first he had ever taken that he had felt was holy.
And so he told them that the harper’s mother had vanished and that the daughter had set forth on a hopeless quest to find her, and that he had come with her as her guide and protector. As Terrans, his hosts knew all about hopeless quests, and so were inclined to sympathy. They gave their leave to make inquiries in the Corner.
Nor did it hurt that the Fudir would pay for information from the deep pockets of the Kennel.
“And this,” he said, pulling from his scrip the necklace he had borrowed from Méarana. “It may mean nothing; it may mean everything. The Hound bought it here on Thistlewaite, or received it as a gift. Somewhere there is a merchant or a dealer in curiosities who remembers it, and perhaps remembers whence it came.”
Bwana and his councilors studied it in turn. “It is unfamiliar to me,” said the chairman. “If it be thistlework, it must be of a far-off sheen. Yet, we see imports in our bazaars from even Fire Over Water, which is the farthest of the Fourteen States, and I have never seen its like. See thou Mwere Ng as thou departest, and she will prepare whole-grams of it. I will have its likeness circulated among jewelcrafters and importers and may fortune reward thy curiosity.”
And so matters ran for several days. Méarana would play songs of the Periphery and engage in “small-talk” with the emperor, and the Fudir would nose around the Terran Corner and other eddies of the city asking after the activities of Bridget ban and the provenance of the medallion. The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step, but it seemed to the harper that neither she nor Donovan were advancing the search for her mother by so much as even that single step. The sense of being stuck in a dreamland crept over her. The days were distinguished only by the particular songs she sang, and the precise lack of information with which the Fudir returned each evening.
Now and then, simply to remind them where they were, the world shrugged his shoulders and the land trembled. Once, Méarana was shaken awake in the night and she lay awake a long time thereafter before sleep reclaimed her, and in the morning she found that a great tree had come down on Great Heaven Street.
Because Resilient Services had discovered the relaxing properties of her harp, he had bid her remain for his afternoon Council and play gentle suantraís while he reviewed the reports the dough-riders had brought in from the distant shau, prefecture, and county officials. And so her day at the palace expanded from command performances at High Tea, to “muzaq” at staff meetings.
No decision in Sheen Jenlùshy was ever final until ratified by the emperor: not the death sentence to a murderer meted out in Wustershau, not the mei-pol festival to be held in Xampstedshau, not the list of candidates proposed from the 7th Dough for the imperial examinations. Each must be reviewed with the Six Ministers, a decision rendered, and the triplicate copies apportioned.
The suantraí was supposed to induce drowsiness in its hearers. Méarana wondered why the emperor thought it necessary. The subject matter alone should induce coma.
While her fingers plucked long-mastered melodies from the strings, she learned that for each official there was a quota of decisions to be overturned. This number could be exceeded in the case of an especially inept official, but never shorted. “If all decisions stand,” Morgan Cheng-li explained as he escorted her from the palace later, “official think above station, fixed by birth and examination. So, if no other cause, council overrule random cases, as lesson in humility.”
Resilient Services himself overruled the Council on a few occasions, and Méarana supposed that this was for the same reason. In one case, the emperor denied “yin privilege” to the daughter of the Minister for All Things Natural Within the Realm. “Yin” was the privilege of bypassing the examination system to secure a place in the hierarchy. Apparently, this was sufficiently pro forma for the children of officials that the Minister’s face twitched in irritation. The Grand Secretary noted this and snapped, “Five blows! Filial impiety!” The sergeant-at-arms, who stood by the wall with a long cane of slapstick, stood to attention; but Resilient Services, looking up from perusal of yet another report, said, “Belay that, please. Imperial grace.”
“I was frightened,” the harper later admitted to the Fudir, when that worthy had emerged from the Terran Corner slightly scathed and greatly enlightened. “At least, a little,” she added. They had met in the Fudir’s room at the Hotel Mountain Glowering. Méarana sat in the comfortable sofa while the scarred man examined his face in the mirror.
“What? Of our young emperor?” The Fudir applied a healing stick to the cut over his left eye, wincing slightly at the sting.
“Not so much of him as for him. His slightest whim is instantly obeyed. What does that do to a man’s soul? And the others grovel before him. It can’t be good for a man to have others grovel to him.”
“Better perhaps,” said Donovan, “than for the ones who must grovel.”
“There was one set of reports… Did you know there is a second, independent hierarchy whose only purpose is to monitor the behavior of the regular officials and report any ‘nonharmonious words or acts’?”
The Fudir dabbed at the other cuts he had suffered. “The Bureau of Shadows,” he said. “It could be worse.”
“Worse, how?”
“They coul
d be shadowing the common people. If a government is going to snoop, they may as well restrict their snooping to one another. The system could be brought to perfection if the first set of officials were then restricted to monitoring the second. How soon can you break off these afternoon tête-à-têtes?”
Méarana sat up. Something in the Fudir’s voice…” What did you discover?”
“Two things. First, the jewelmonger Hennessi fu-lin remembers your necklace. He bought it in pawn from a man of Harpaloon. The man never came back for it, so he sold it to your mother.”
“Harpaloon. Mother’s next stop. Was she following the necklace? What was the second thing?”
“The Terrans remember that she met several times with a man from Kàuntusulfalughy who had been stranded here by the thistlequake. It isn’t much, but it’s the only activity of hers that I’ve heard about that wasn’t tied directly to disaster relief.”
“Who was it? What did he and Mother talk about?”
The Fudir held up a hand. “It may mean nothing at all. The Sleuth is always too eager to see patterns. The rest of us pointed that out and the Sleuth got huffy and left…”
“Fudir… The Sleuth is inside your head. Where could he go?”
“He’s sulking; not communicating. That makes it hard for the rest of us to put things together. The Terrans claim that when your mother returned she asked after this Kauntling. Debly Jean Sofwari. He was a science-wallah, or impersonating one, because he wore the white robes they favor. The Terrans say that he was flitting all around the sheen swabbing people’s mouths.”
“He was what?”
The Fudir spread his hands, palms up. “Could I make up something like that?”
“That must be why Mother met with him. She wanted to learn if he was a madman.”
“I bribed the log-keeper at Dewport Field, but Sofwari must have had his own ship. There’s no record of him in the departure logs. The automatic system was wrecked in the ‘quake and they were doing everything the hard way. I’ll spend another day snooping after Sofwari, but if the Terrans had known anything more, I’d have some inkling. We don’t know why your mother found him so interesting. He was too young for her bed.”
Méarana stiffened. “Dinnae speak of Mother in such ways.”
“Méarana… You must know that your mother’s bed was not a restricted area. Little Hugh was there; I was there. Even Greystroke was there. So was a Die Bold businessman, the Peacock STC director, a—.”
“Stop it!”
“And that was in the short time she and I were ‘associated.’ It’s no use clapping your ears like that. You can hear the truth from your inner voice.”
Méarana took her hands from her ears. “You didn’t know her the way I did.”
“I should hope not.”
“She’s not like that any more.”
The scarred man forbore to answer. Proverbs about leopards and spots came to mind. But the argument continued despite Méarana’s silence, with himself taking all sides. Shut up! he told himself. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Turning away from the harper, doubling over his clenched arms, he fell to his knees on the thick carpet of the sitting room and…
… suddenly, everything around him was unfamiliar, as if he had stepped off-stage. What was he doing here, in this comfortless room, so far from the consolations of Port Jehovah? He cursed Zorba de la Susa. He cursed Méarana Swiftfingers. Most of all, he cursed Bridget ban.
But that was in another country, a part of him said, And beside, the wench is dead.
Tears squeezed from his eyes. Though why should he mourn the death of Bridget ban? She had been dead to him for years.
Something subterranean rumbled with gigantic laughter, sending Inner Child scurrying in flight, silencing even the silent Donovan (for there is a silence more deep than mere quiet).
Each of him regarded himself to the extent that things unreal can regard anything. A fragment of an ancient poem brushed his mind too lightly for the words to alight; and a terrible foreboding took hold of him. An image of a shadow, slouching, at a distance, like a stranger seen under a lamppost on a foggy night. Dead, he thought; or a part of him thought. All tears are dust.
And the word—dust, dust, dust—echoed down the drainpipe of his mind like a man falling into an endless cavern. He saw a party of people, small, as if viewed by an eagle from a distance, circling along a narrow ledge above an immense abyss. One of them pointed with a walking staff into the darkness below them. There is something down there, he said, that cannot speak.
When he came to himself once more, it was night. The room was dark, save for a reading lamp in the corner. He lay curled up upon the bed and, in the corner, the harper slept upright in a padded chair. Slowly, he straightened, careful lest he make a noise, but Méarana’s eyes opened.
“You had a seizure,” she said. “Worse than before.”
The scarred man lay still for a while, then pushed himself erect and sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned his hands on his knees. “It was easier,” he said, “when I thought I had forgotten.”
The harper didn’t ask him what he had thought forgotten. She said, “I brought a doctor in. He prescribed rest, and some herbs.”
He laughed softly and without humor. “The famous herbalists of Thistlewaite. Did he stick pins in me? I’ve heard they do that here. Chicken soup?” He remembered being haunted by thoughts of death. But whose death? And whose thoughts?
There was something very wrong inside his head.
That elicited a second humorless laugh. It was more pertinent to wonder if there was anything very right in that vandalized ruin.
How could such a kaleidoscope keep Méarana safe from harm? De la Susa had not known what he was asking of him.
The Thistles divided their daylight into twelve hours starting from the sunrise ceremony, but unlike folk on other worlds they did not number their hours. Instead, each had a name. Thus, the third hour after equatorial sunrise was Bravely Working Hour, presumably because by that time most people were at their jobs. The other hours were named in like manner after the rhythms of life, and in this wise the Thistles synchronized their activities. When at the Mid-day Snacking Hour one sat to a light meal of biscuits and cheeses, one experienced the harmony of knowing that everyone in the sheen was doing the very same. There might be some dissonance with other sheens, or even with those districts in the Eastern Marshes where dawn arrived before its appointed hour, but it was generally acknowledged that the Eastern Marshes were out of synch in more than their sunrise, and the folk of other sheens were odd beyond all credit.
There were no public clocks. The right of proclaiming the Hours was reserved to the emperor. Within the palace complex stood a single cesium clock of unimaginably ancient vintage. It did not match the Thistlean hours, having been calibrated long ago to the tock of a different world, but the Sages of the Clock would note the time displayed and perform a ritual called the Transposition of Times, and determine when each new local hour began. Uncounted people on uncounted worlds spent their workday “watching the clock,” but on Thistlewaite there were workers actually paid to do so. The Voice of the Sheen would then, to trumpet blast and gongs, announce the Hour from the parapet of the imperial palace, and the cable channels would carry her word throughout the sheen.
Méarana heard the trumpets as she made her way down Poultry Street, a narrow lane whose coops and butchers had long given way to mobi stores and shopping arcades, leaving only subtle aromatic reminders of its original inhabitants. Méarana said a word equally pungent and quickened her pace, for the trumpet meant that she would be late for her command performance. She tolerated Donovan’s eccentricities on most things, but the packing of her clothing was not among them and that had delayed her.
White Rod was as pale as his wand of office when Méarana finally appeared. Trembling, he led her into the throne room, where Resilient Services sat alone at High Tea, to all appearances sorely vexed. Méarana thought she would need a suantraí to sooth the
man’s palpable anxiety. She waited for White Rod’s underling to pull her chair out for her. Instead, underlings hesitated, emperors rose, and guests sat in fits and starts. Apparently, custom required that He Who Serves the Tea was to sit last of all; but because the tea had already been poured before Méarana’s entrance, harmony was now broken. She did not see why this mattered at all, least of all that it mattered so terribly, but she supposed that now there would be a two-headed calf born somewhere for which her lateness could be blamed. She was a Die Bolder, born and bred, and a devotee of causality. Concatenation struck her as absurd.
You would think that a harper would know all about harmony, the emperor told her when that quality had been restored. It was an elliptical rebuke, with a great deal of opprobrium in the ellipsis. “It is a terrible discourtesy with which to end my visit,” she allowed.
The emperor of the Morning Dew sat back a little in his chair. Today he wore a dinner jacket of bright green, done up with contrasting red embroidery, with a ruffled cravat at his throat. On his head, he had placed a white powdered wig bearing a long pigtail down his back. “End visit,” he said, as if examining the phrase for possible alternative meanings.
“Yes. Donovan and I leave on the evening shuttle to rendezvous with the throughliner Srini Siddiqi. My mother awaits me.”
“Your mother. Yes. Play me,” he said as he poured a second cup of tea and, using a silver tongs, dropped a lump of sugar in it, “song of your mother.”
Hitherto, the emperor’s requests had been for songs of adventure, of faraway planets, of romance and distance. The harper played Mother as a geantraí: a jaunty tune that conjured her in the moment in which Bridget ban strode across the decks of Hot Gates like the queen of High Tara—tall, magnificent, purposeful. Somehow, though, as her fingers wandered across the strings, a goltraí crept in: a keening lament as heartbreaking as all the losses of the world. By then, she had been transported by her own music, as sometimes befell when the harp took charge and the strings played her fingers rather than the proper way round.
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