by Dave Duncan
Languid and greasy, the river drifted northward along the coast, held captive on the east by Sigisa, which was a sand spit, not a true island. In the dry season the river shrank and the wells turned brackish, but at that time of year, with the rainy season just ended, the river was a safe harbor, and a dozen ships were anchored there, most of them surrounded by dugout canoes, loading or unloading cargo. The western bank was jungle and swamp, reputed to be full of poisonous snakes, spiders, insects, and even frogs, little scarlet blobs no bigger than a thumbnail whose touch burned a man’s skin.
“I don’t like the look of that side.” Dolores was pouting at the impenetrable green tangle. “Let’s not stay there.”
They turned to study the equally dense tangle of shacks and tents on the sandbar. Wolf said, “Do you think the town looks any better? I think I’ll sleep in plate mail.”
“Not in my bed you won’t.”
Their first requirement must be to find somewhere secure to live and store their valuable baggage. Real estate was reportedly volatile in Sigisa, with houses changing hands all the time on the roll of a die or twist of a knife. Anyone wishing to breathe the air there was expected to pay off the goons, from the mayor down to the junior assistant deputy harbormaster who would be the first aboard when Glorious dropped anchor. There were limits, though. If Rojas shaved his victims too close to the bone, ships would find another port. Estimating what could be plucked off Glorious would take hours of negotiation in that murderous heat, but that was Clonard’s business. Wolf planned to go right to the top.
Although Sigisa was the main port for the slave trade, he had been told in Mondon that there were no slaves in Sigisa itself, because they would escape too easily. As evidence that one should not believe all one heard, the dozen sweating brown rowers in the lighter that was towing Glorious to her anchorage were very obviously chained, and the man standing over them held a whip. Just as Glorious was moving slowly past a ship loading a fresh cargo of prisoners, Flicker and Quin emerged on deck with the four Tlixilians, who recognized the place at once and glared around as if they would much enjoy burning it to the ground with all its inhabitants.
Wolf addressed the one who mattered, the youngest, a great-great-grandson of a former emperor. “I have kept my promise.”
Blood-mirror-walks studied him distrustfully, eyes black as coal. “And what must we do now, Wild-dog-
by-the-spring?”
“Must? I do not use that word to warriors. That way lies home.” Wolf pointed to the jungle and the snowy cone of Sky-is-frowning peering over it. “Swim now if you wish. Or wait for dark, and I will have you rowed across. I will give whatever you need for your journey—food, canoe, gourds, blankets.” Blankets seemed absurd in that tropical sweat house, but El Dorado lay beyond high ranges. “I ask only that you take word to the floating city that we will help its struggle if we can. I showed you the weapons we offer in trade. You are free to go at any time.”
The chunky jaguar warrior was still suspicious, sniffing the air for a hint of treachery. “And you remain here?”
“I hope to. You could help me in that, if you wished.”
Blood-mirror-walks curled his lip in an I-knew-it sneer. Here came the bargaining he had been expecting. “Help how?”
“It is possible that there will be some Distliards in need of dying.”
Heron-jade made a blood-curdling noise in his throat. “Is that a promise?”
Wolf laughed. “No, but I will arrange it if I can. Today I must challenge the lord of this town and he may send his warriors against me. I will fight, but I need friends. I freed you, I healed your wounds, and you have eaten my salt. Are not the best friendships sealed in battle? Within three days I will win a home here, or I will be dead. But the choice is entirely yours. Go now, or tarry three days and help me against the Distliards.”
The others just watched Blood-mirror-walks, and he did not consult them. He was young and assertive. To refuse a fight against the Hairy Ones was unthinkable. “We have eaten your salt,” he agreed. “We will stay and fight at your side, Wild-dog-by-the-spring.”
5
The anchor had barely splashed down before a gang of harbor officials came swarming over the side, looking at least as villainous as Wolf had expected. They closed in on Captain Clonard, who had an unlimited supply of impressive fake documents to flaunt on such occasions.
They were intercepted by a gentleman resplendent in fine linen tunic and silk hose, the garb of a wealthy planter or rancher in Mondon, topped off with a couple of glittering decorations. Dolores, on his arm, was even more impressive in bright brocade, twirling a silk parasol. Wolf announced in his haughtiest aristocratic Distlish that he had urgent business with the Alcalde.
The chief ruffian said, “No one goes ashore until I am satisfied.”
Staring at him in disbelief, Wolf pointed to the ship’s standard, which was undoubtedly large and multicolored, but hung so limp that its heraldry was unreadable. Then he unwrapped a package to reveal a scroll bearing much scarlet wax and ribbon. “You would argue with the King’s seal?”
No, even a senior de Rojas minion would not do that. A lighter was brought alongside; Dolores was lowered into it in a sling. There was—much apologies, señor! no such thing as a lady’s carriage in town, but the distinguished visitors were assured that the walk to the municipalidad was not far. Leaving the rest of the team to guard the precious baggage, Don Lope and Dona Dolores set off to call upon the ill-famed de Rojas.
It was a very educational stroll. Baron Roland had explained that the business district lined the riverbank, the center of the spit was occupied by a residential squalor of tents and wattle shacks, while an avenue of large villas stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the seafront to divide the riffraff from the fresh air. He had not mentioned that there was almost no room left to move.
Every gap was packed with people. Most of the men were Distliards, almost all the women naturales, but there were exceptions—haughty Euranian ladies with trains of servants, even haughtier warriors in feathered cloaks and body paint; child pimps, child hookers, child pickpockets. Unlike drab old Chivial, Sigisa shimmered with color: rainbow loincloths and fine gowns; gaudy half-naked prostitutes soliciting; hucksters thrusting fabrics, beads, or pottery at passersby; blinding sunlight and inky shade; foliage against the cloudless sky; flowered creepers; parrots, macaws, and toucans. The air was a potpourri of exotic scents of spices, flowers, and people. No one was hurrying, everyone going somewhere. Blank-faced servants, swaggering pirates, armor-plated men-at-arms blazing in the sunlight and close to heat stroke, enormous war dogs and their handlers…carts and wagons and horse-drawn drays.
The slim hand on Wolf’s arm was steady, but he knew Dolores well enough now to know that she was nervous. She would be crazy if she were not. The shore was lined with shipyards, marine chandlers, livestock pens, distilleries, lumber yards, and a dozen other enterprises. Behind them lurked lath-and-wattle shacks, houses mixed with grog-shops, stalls displaying fruits and fly-infested meat, leather workers’ shops, potteries, and certainly brothels. Every breath brought a new scent, every moment new peddlers shouting their wares. Dull it was not.
The visitors had leisure to admire the bustle, for their guide naturally took them by a roundabout route, so one of his boys could sprint more directly to their destination and warn of their coming. At last they came to the Rojas palace, a complex of fine wooden buildings on the seaward side of the town, enclosed by an impressive palisade and guarded by troops in shiny cuirasses and helmets. If there were many of those beauties around, Wolf decided, this hacienda would be a very tough nut to bite on. He was even more impressed by the interior, which had the same air of wealth and taste as Baron Roland’s Ivywalls, meaning it did not look as if it had been designed by King Athelgar. Some of the furniture might have been imported all the way from Distlain; the pottery and wall hangings were Tlixilian.
One side of the reception room looked out on a garden, and another was
open to the spangling blue sea and its cooling breeze. The visitors were granted a few moments to admire it before the Alcalde strolled in, displaying remarkable grace for a man who must be puzzled to the marrow. An emissary sent by King Diego ought to arrive with a squad of men-at-arms and a warrant for his arrest, not just a skinny girl dressed as a grand lady. Gang boss, vice lord, murderer, local tyrant, Ruiz de Rojas had been born on Mazal, his father one of the first settlers, his mother a naturale. Wolf had expected someone of villainous appearance like Captain Clonard, but Rojas was thirtyish, handsome, superbly dressed, and instantly charming. His mixed blood showed in his features. He wore his heritage proudly, letting it add to his hauteur: You may claim conquest or inheritance, I have both. I rule here by right.
He was respectful to an envoy bearing a royal edict, but he did not fawn or grovel. Informed that the señor’s companion was in fact his wife, he bowed gracefully and kissed her bejeweled fingers in proper Distlish style. Then he turned to a waiting servant and nodded.
The man vanished and a moment later ushered in a striking young woman—almost as tall as Dolores, svelte, and the color of ripe chestnuts, as Lynx would have said. She wore a shimmering white silk gown, and her jet-black hair was wound in coils held by silver combs. She moved like gossamer on a summer dawn.
“Don Lope, Dona Dolores, may I have the honor of presenting my dear wife, Fortunata?” Rojas had arranged for her to be on hand, of course—a very quick reaction to the news of the important arrivals. Wolf found it doubly remarkable because the grandees in Mondon kept their native or part-native wives and concubines out of sight of Euranian visitors.
According to the gossips of Mondon, Fortunata had been born into the highest level of Eldoradoan nobility. While still a child she had been dispatched to one of the minor cities to become a royal wife, and her caravan had been captured by a Distlish raiding party. After passing through various hands, she had become the gangster’s wife in settlement of a gambling debt. She spoke Distlish hesitantly, so Wolf and Dolores responded in Tlixilian.
Her eyes widened. “I thought no Distliard spoke the pure tongue, señor!” She meant they spoke the El Dorado dialect—courtesy of Heron-jade and Blood-mirror-walks, of course.
Now the Alcalde was even more puzzled, but he bade his guests be seated. They babbled flowery trivia about the voyage out from Distlain and the news from Mondon. Considering that most of the social life in Sigisa was at the saloon-and-brothel level, Fortunata was amazingly poised. After his servants had brought refreshments and withdrawn, Rojas’s curiosity won out.
“Your visit to Sigisa is more than social, Don Lope?”
Wolf smiled. “Personal business.”
The major glanced inquiringly at the package bearing the royal seal.
“This?” Wolf said. “It’s a forgery, but quite a good one. Care to see?” He handed over the package, which was not in fact sealed by the seal dangling on the ribbon. The inside was blank. Wolf kept his smile firmly in place, for this was the point at which the mayor might send for thugs and thumbscrews, and then the visitors would leave with the flotsam on the morning tide.
Rojas studied the wax and the vellum carefully. “And its purpose?”
“Merely to get your attention, Excellency. I never said it was the King’s seal.”
Rojas laughed with every indication of real amusement. “Just to own this would get you hanged back in Ciudad Del Rey, señor!”
“But this is not Ciudad Del Rey.”
“True. So what can I do for you?” Smiling, he offered Wolf back the forgery.
“No, please keep that as a souvenir of a brash intruder, Excellency.” A little penmanship and a hot knife could make that document extremely valuable for anyone with a low scruple count. “I am considering tarrying awhile in your fair city to pursue…certain interests…”
The inquisitors had rehearsed him half the night. Distlish grandees did not sully their hands with trade, so ostensibly he was talking about land, but no one could acquire clear title to land here, for all of it was claimed by at least two monarchs. So there was meat under the pastry, and Rojas set to work to find out what it was. Wolf declined to be pinned down. In practice they talked about how the war was going, how a stranger might go about buying or renting a villa, and how one might meet interesting people in Sigisa. Money would be no problem.
Rojas was witty, subtle, and as cynical as only a vice lord could be. The war was nothing to him. Neither King nor Emperor claimed his loyalty. “The Distliards are fools to pursue such a bloody struggle,” he said, “when they could gain so much by peaceful trade. And the Emperor is paying the price of arrogance. Had he been less greedy when he was overlord of the coastal cities, they would not have rebelled when the strangers came.”
“What of them?” Wolf asked. “Zolica, Yazotlan, Tephuamotzin?”
“Fools! We see their emissaries around town sometimes. You can know them by their high manner and low intelligence. They are so keen to settle scores with an ancient foe that they cannot see how much more dangerous Distlain is. They buy a jaguar to silence a noisy dog.”
“What will happen to them when El Dorado falls, señor?” Dolores asked. Wolf had been careful to keep the women involved in the conversation, so she could rescue him if he blundered into trouble.
Don Ruiz shrugged with both hands. “Then they will follow right after. That is if El Dorado falls.”
“Can it be that it will not?”
He smiled. “They are learning. You know the ways of the bullring, señor. If you do not kill the bull inside of twenty minutes, he will kill you.”
6
That,” Wolf said as they left the Rojas mansion, “was without doubt the hardest conversation of my life. I never met any man so incredibly winsome. I hated lying to him! I am never any good at lying, anyway.”
The nightlife of Sigisa was beginning to waken—bands, drunks, drummers, lutenists, and singers, backed by massed choirs of frogs and monkeys in the jungle.
“That’s what I love about you, your naivete.”
“A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed. He saw through us, didn’t he?”
Rojas’s questions had been inoffensive, but he had kept pick-pick-picking at Don Lope’s fraudulent life story until he had unraveled it and could see that Wolf had never set foot in Distlain any more than he had. So the visitors were spies. He had been too polite to say that, but knew. He was supposed to know, of course.
Terms had been settled over an excellent supper. His Worship the Alcalde knew of just the respectable villa the august Don Lope needed, and the owners—who had gone Home on some important business—would accept a very reasonable rent. If the spirits were kind, Fortunata could find the charming Dona Dolores some excellent servants by tomorrow. Don Lope and his lady were more than welcome to spend tonight here, at his hacienda. The spies had declined with thanks.
Wolf said, “I think he swallowed the bait, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Dolores was unusually subdued, holding tight to his arm and keeping her head down. “His wife loves him.”
“Does that matter?”
“It’s puzzling.”
“Did he ever tell us the truth?”
“I don’t know! In a way he never told us any lies at all.”
“What?”
Wolf felt her shiver. “Our teachers warned us that some people have no sense of wrong. They do not understand evil, so truth-sounding will not work on them. Ruiz must be one of those.” She laughed nervously. “He’s very good company, isn’t he?”
“Very. We can still take Flicker’s advice and strike inland.”
But she was not willing to consider that yet, and when they reached the ship and held a whispered consultation with the others, neither were they. Even Flicker wanted to press on with the dangerous challenge Wolf proposed.
Quin had already shipped out as a deckhand on a Distlish vessel, homeward bound.
Next morning the mysterious Don Lope and his charming
lady arrived at their new home—just the two of them plus one female servant and four great sea chests. Glorious had already raised anchor and caught the tide. The villa was luxurious, at least by local standards, but one month’s rent would have sufficed to build it in Chivial. Wages for the three servants waiting there came to almost as much, and the cost of the food they had already bought could have provisioned Greymere Palace for a week. This was Sigisa, the crumbling cliff-edge of civilization.
Rojas had been a little obvious with the servants, because they were all Distliards and any Distliard in the Hence Lands would rather starve than touch menial work. Perhaps Wolf was not supposed to know that. Or perhaps he was. None of the three impressed him, although Estavan, the gardener, could have uprooted palm trees with his bare hands, having being cast in the same giant mold as Heron-jade. Gustavo of the black fingernails was chef, and the smiling Che said he was to be majordomo, although he had no evident qualifications except a sensational profile.
Still, the hacienda was a mansion, a thatched, single-story wooden structure with several outbuildings, all reasonably furnished, all set in spacious grounds surrounded by a high stockade. The front entrance boasted a reasonable garden of trees and flowered shrubs. There was a gate on the ocean side, too, just above high-water mark, but currents off Sigisa were too treacherous for swimming—so Don Ruiz had said. Wolf ordered chairs set out on the lawn, where he and Dolores could relax in the shade of palm trees to enjoy a snack and the noble lifestyle they so richly deserved. The lawn itself was a scabby mess, only to be expected in the tropics and so near the sea, but the ground sloped down toward the ocean, giving them a fair view over the palisade. They debated whether the sail just dipping below the horizon might be Glorious departing.