The Duchess of the Shallows

by Neil McGarry

  It was easy to remain unobtrusive in such a crowded street, and if Agalia and Ahmed exchanged further words Duchess did not hear them. She followed them away from the Godswalk, moving towards the winter homes of the city's nobles. Although such homes were a means of demonstrating prestige and position, the nobles' holdings outside the city – their lands and the commoners who worked them – were the true source of their wealth.

  As Duchess moved along the neat and well-tended way, always keeping the two in sight, she reflected that, in a different life, this district might have been her home. Had things been otherwise, she might now be ensconced in one of those lavish estates, awaiting marriage to some lordling or highly placed city official. She would never have known the hardscrabble life of the Shallows, or the calloused hands and sore back that came from hard work. She would have lived like a bird in a cage, well dressed and well scrubbed. The thought made her feel sad but also a little relieved. By law and custom, the women of Rodaas had little opportunity and even less power; Agalia an example right before her eyes. She wondered how it was for Agalia in her lord's bed. In Rodaas, wives were required to submit to their husbands in all ways, and marriage meant the surrender both of property and of body. Amongst the nobility, marriage was business first and affection second...at best. She thought of her one night with her sweet Lysander and imagined what it would have been like to have been required to open her life and her bed to him. Part of her wanted to believe that her father would never have sold her in such a manner, that he was better than the other nobleman. After all, he had been a guild scholar as well, and thus different from the others, but part of her still she wondered.

  Not that it mattered; she was not of the higher districts anymore but of the Shallows, and in the Shallows everyone, male and female, had only the position and power they took for themselves.

  They soon arrived at a large estate surrounded by a high wall, and Agalia waited while Ahmed ordered the gates opened. By the look of things, the baron had certainly spent time and money on his home. The walls were whitewashed and a newly installed iron gate barred a fresh path of crushed white stone that crossed a green lawn to a leaping fountain. The estate house itself also looked recently refurbished, with new-painted shutters and neatly tended flowerbeds. Even the guards by the gate wore clean livery.

  The two vanished through the gates and Duchess dared to move closer, watching them walk along the path towards the home in the distance. As she did so, one of the guards caught sight of her and gruffly told her to move along. She hurried away, not wanting to draw extra attention, and in any case she'd seen enough. The walls were too high to easily scale, and if there were only a pair of guards in the whole place that was too many for her. If she were to get into House Eusbius and get out with both Hector's dagger and her life, it would have to be by her wits.

  As she headed back to the garret, she reflected on the noble life that was no longer hers, and on the unhappiness and victory that had been in Agalia's face. She'd been too long away; the parties her father had thrown were now a blur of tall figures who treated her like the waif's cloth doll – something to be picked at and lifted and kissed and then set aside. She lived a different life now and for all its hardship, perhaps she was better for it. Certainly she was no Agalia, forced to live at the beck and call of some man.

  But she would never be invited to Baron Eusbius' party in her own right. Lysander, however, was in his way accepted among the nobles, even if at some remove. He moved easily among them, whether at country hunts or city parties. If she were to join the Grey she needed Lysander. And he needed to know that.

  Chapter Six:

  Chasing the Grey

  It was Lysander, after all, who had set her on this path. Lysander who had made her aware of the road that led from Noam's kitchen to the answers to her endless questions.

  For the first two years after fleeing her father's house, she saw little but the stone walls of Noam’s bakery and the small rooms above it, where his family lived and slept. She'd rarely been allowed outside, and then only in the immediate vicinity of the shop. At first she was kept so busy learning Noam’s craft that she had no idle time for wandering about the city. Those were long days of flour and yeast, of stirring and kneading, and by the time her chores were done all she had wanted to do was curl up on her straw mattress and sleep.

  In her memories of her father's house the kitchens had seemed a wonder, a place of licks of batter from spoons and cups of overly sugared tea served to her accustomed hiding place beneath the big wooden table. In Noam's kitchen, she was quickly disabused of such notions. She always felt clumsy and stupid, and it didn’t help that Noam’s wife was brusque and short-tempered, and viewed time spent explaining anything to Duchess as time wasted. She quickly grew to despise the constantly annoyed woman, and wondered more than once what she would say if Duchess revealed she was the daughter of a lord. She'd never dared to say such a thing, though; Noam would have had her hide, and if the story got out she might get far worse than a beating.

  So she held her tongue and learned the craft of baking. After the first year or so, Duchess had become more adept at making dough and pie crusts, and strong enough to wield the rolling pins nearly as well as any, and so she was finally permitted to spend her idle time wandering the Shallows. Perhaps Noam felt that she'd grown enough so as not to be recognizable, or perhaps he was just tired of her constantly underfoot. At first she’d been too intimidated to go very far, but as she grew used to the Shallows she came eventually to treasure those moments when she could escape the close confines of the bakery and move through the streets, gawking at the folk who called this area of the city their home. And in those first days abroad in the Shallows, it was not long before she first heard someone speak of the War of the Quills, and the fall of House Kell.

  It had been only two summers, but long enough that she now replied to calls of Duchess without a second thought, and the tales seemed like the ancient history of a far-off land. Even so, the first mention of her father's House had shocked her back to Marina Kell in a flash, leaving her shaking and with the taste of smoke in her mouth. Still, she found herself trailing after these stories like cats after a fishwife, and as time went on she managed to piece together the story as well as she could from this far down the hill. And every tale worth the mentioning agreed on one point: the entire affair had been her father's fault.

  Some called him a misguided hero; others an enlightened madman, but all wondered at how far he had overreached. Birth had made him a noble, inclination had made him a scholar, and in the end, the gods had made him a fool. Marcus Kell had a place amongst both the nobility and the tradesman, and he decided to elevate one to the level of the other. Under his leadership, the tradesmen had demanded their own representation on the Imperial Council, by right of wealth if not birth. The nobles flatly refused; their wealth came from land, whereas the tradesmen earned their gold from talent alone. Since a tract of land passed from father to son was still a single tract of land, but a craft that was taught by one to another was twice the talent, in time, the tradesman might come to dominate the council.

  At her father's urging, the tradesmen and their guilds had waged war via the pen, creating pamphlets that were distributed high and low, calling upon the empress and her council to recognize the power of the tradesmen and their guilds. Carpenters, wainwrights, blacksmiths, innkeepers, brewers, coopers, cobblers, shipwrights…every craftsman in the city made sure every customer received a pamphlet, and sometimes two. Where the audience was illiterate, the guilds hired scholars and singers to read the pamphlets aloud, standing on crates in crowded plazas, or shouting down from rooftops above the market.

  From what Duchess could piece together, it seemed that public opinion began to swing in the tradesmen’s favor, so the aristocracy decided to win by starvation what they’d lost by rhetoric. Their lands might be finite, but most of the food in the city was produced there, and soon there was a near-total embargo to Market, Trades, Shallo
ws, Wharves and Deeps. In the lean days that followed even a loaf of bread was a luxury, and the city population of mules, donkeys, dogs, cats, and even rats drastically declined as the Rodaasi searched desperately for sustenance. The harbor was of course open to anyone with the skill and the will. Every morning saw thousands of people swarming to the harbor in search of fish, clams and crabs, but there were not nearly enough fishermen to feed the horde. The blackarms tried briefly to restore order, then gave up and stood by while docks were damaged and boats sunk. Some of the guard, little better off than those they were supposed to police, even took off their armbands and joined the mob.

  Everything changed when an imperial barge was burned and the empress sent in the Whites to take control of the situation. The Whites were excellent warriors but unskilled at policing crowds, and when their efforts were greeted with a hail of stones, they responded like warriors. More than one hundred people, armed only with sticks and anger, were slaughtered in a single day, their bodies thrown into the harbor to rot. The mob broke and fled, but the guilds remained defiant.

  And it was then that the war had taken an unprecedented turn. For the scholars and the tradesmen somehow convinced the Red, who kept the lower districts safe from the Deeps gangs, to stay their hand. Worse, they then paid the leaders of those gangs, with gold and with steel, to take their quarrels up the hill, to Temple and Low and even to Garden. Given the choice between fighting each other over worthless territory in the Deeps and taking money and good-forged weapons to plunder the upper districts, the outcome was easy to predict.

  The Whites, outnumbered ten to one, were driven out of Wharves, up past the Shallows and made their stand at Bell Plaza, which they held for a week before the tide of violence boiling out of the Deeps washed them away. And then the tales became whispered stories of horror, of pitched battles at Beggar’s Gate, of the Godswalk stained with blood, of what happened to the butcher's son and the scrivener’s daughter. Almost everyone in the Shallows had lost someone to the war, or knew someone who had. Even two of Violana’s sons had perished in the fighting.

  Not all the stories were bad, however; with the harbor free of imperial control, foreign powers took advantage of the turmoil and began to import food as quickly as they could ship it. The fruit, grain and meat they brought was more expensive than that produced by the nobles, but it was food, and those with the coin paid while those without stole from the rest. This of course brought more foreigners into the city: Ahé and Ulari, and even Domae, which led to some grumbling about foreigners competing with good city folk.

  But no tale of the war was complete without the fall of the House Kell. Such a shame, what happened there. But then that was where all the trouble started, wasn't it? The keepers said that in the end all justice followed in Mayu's footsteps, and Mayu always walked in circles. Marcus Kell had given the tradesmen ideas above their station, so perhaps it was right that the fighting ended with his death.

  Still, it had been an awful end, with those Deeps gangs setting their fires everywhere. The whole family wiped out, right down to the littlest child. Thank every god of the Walk that Lady Kell had not lived long enough to see it. Still, all agreed that everything had worked out in the end. Kell's death became the rallying cry of both noble and tradesman alike, each putting aside their grievances and joining forces to take back the city and hammer the gangs back into the Deeps, where they were welcome to kill each other at will. After that Low District became Scholars, and the guilds had won their representation on the Imperial Council. The tale-tellers never seemed to wonder, however, why the folk of the Shallows and Wharves had gotten nothing from the conflict except mayhem, destruction, and death.

  It had been awful, hearing those tales for the first time. She'd always hoped to learn what had happened to her family, if they'd gotten away or even died, only some answer. But listening to stories about Deeps gangs overrunning the house with torches and axes made her want to scream at the storytellers that it was all a lie. She was standing right there, knowing full well there had been no ravening gangs or blood in the hallways.

  And yet she'd said nothing. Who would believe her? And worse, what would happen if they did? Whoever truly had set that fire might not be pleased to find that the flames had left one member of House Kell alive, and might decide that a blade could finish what the blaze had started. This was a prison worse than any she could imagine. All mysteries and no answers, and no way to even guess the shape of her cell, much less find the door.

  It was not until the day she met Lysander that she glimpsed the path that might lead her out.

  * * *

  When she was ten, Noam gave her leave to run occasional errands outside the Shallows, although always accompanied by himself or by one of his daughters. That day Jossalyn had been her escort, which dampened Duchess' excitement at being allowed past Market Gate. Jossalyn was the second-eldest: eleven, big-mouthed, and imperiously aware that she was Noam's true daughter and Duchess was not. Accordingly, she was unfailingly bossy whenever the baker was absent, which was a good deal of the time. Duchess had at first been intimidated by Jossalyn's loud voice, but had soon learned that the girl was all sea and no salt. She would bluster and threaten, but Duchess never knew her to actually hit. She was just one year older but already developing, although her breasts were at this point little more than buds, and she was both embarrassed and insufferably proud of them in turn.

  After finishing their errands, Duchess and Jossalyn wandered idly through Market District; Duchess had no chores left that day and was disinclined to return to the bakery so soon. She did not relish the notion of an afternoon with Jossalyn, but the girl had refused to take the many hints that her presence was unnecessary. They wandered north and east of the market, heading away from the stalls and towards the many houses clustered at the edges of the district. Market District was more than just the market, of course, and many of the city’s merchants too wealthy for the Shallows but not quite well heeled enough for Scholars District made their home here. The buildings were neater and more attractive than those in the Shallows, with newly thatched roofs and fresh paint on lintels and doorposts. The streets were better cobbled and better tended as well, and the rubbish was confined mostly to side alleys and narrow lanes. Duchess had noticed there was no dumping of chamber pots from second-story windows, either, which was a nice change. She’d learned fast that in the Shallows it was best to keep to the center of the street and to take cover if you heard a window open.

  As they passed one of those alleys their attention was drawn by a group of boys shouting and dodging about amongst the rubbish. Duchess was intrigued; in the Shallows she would never have gone into an alley full of strange boys, but she felt safer in Market and turned to investigate.

  "Don't go down there," Jossalyn commanded. "There are rats running about, down there in the trash. Big ones, with diseases. Probably just like those boys." Jossalyn feared rats and imagined them everywhere, which was probably fair because in the Shallows they just about were everywhere. As usual, she was far too loud, and one of the boys stopped whatever he was doing and regarded them. He had fine features, golden hair and bright blue eyes, so clear they seemed to sparkle even under the ever-present Rodaasi clouds. Duchess had never seen a boy so beautiful, and she found herself moving towards him.

  "Don't go near him, for Mayu's sake!" Jossalyn shrilled. "He's filthy!"

  The other boys, four or five of them, had also stopped to watch. The blond cocked his head and gave Jossalyn a long, appraising look. "Well, I can always climb in a tub, but I doubt those breasts of yours will be getting any bigger," he said. "Oh, wait...I'm sorry, little boy." The others guffawed loudly, and despite herself Duchess gasped laughter through her nose.

  The blond boy's shot hit directly home; Jossalyn's eyes widened, and then filled with humiliated tears. "Shut up, you filthy thing! You don't know anything!" She turned on Duchess, who was covering a smile. "I'm telling Father!" She ran sobbing along the alley and back to the street
, trailed by the boys' laughter and catcalls. She probably would tell Noam, Duchess knew, but she doubted the baker would care that some street boy had insulted his daughter. He would care that the two of them had been wandering the alleys, but for the moment she felt curiously unconcerned.

  The blond boy turned to Duchess. "Aren't you going to run crying now, too?"

  Duchess shook her head. "I don't even have breasts, much less small ones."

  To her surprise the boy grinned like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. "Not yet, but you've got some steel in you, that's for sure." The others had quieted, watching the boy as if he were their leader. He turned and started back down the alley, then looked back at her and smiled brilliantly. "I'm Lysander, by the by."

  That smile dazzled her. Feeling a bit bolder, she asked, "What are you doing?"

  "Catching cats," he said, turning back again to the other boys. She crept forward and saw that using old crates, bits of discarded wood and other rubbish they had constructed a corral of sorts. Inside was a sleek gray cat, crouched with its tail tucked around it, eyes wide and haunches tense. "This is the best place to do it," he went on, as if she had asked. "The alley looks like it continues after that bend down there, but it's really just a dead end. The cats don't find that out until it's too late." He flashed another grin and then turned back to the game.

  The boys took up positions to block the gaps in the corral and Lysander stepped inside to face the cat. The animal regarded him warily as he approached, hands spread wide, moving lightly on the balls of his feet. Duchess watched, holding her breath. When he was within three feet the cat bolted, scrabbling towards a hole in the wall of trash. One of the boys headed it off, and the animal leapt back towards Lysander, who made a grab for it. The cat zigged and he came up empty. He swung around for another try and the cat zagged, this time cutting between his legs.