A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  He practically jumped out of his chair. “I can do that!”

  I must have been giving Basisi some kind of look, because she smirked at me and said, “Have fun! The common room is yours if you feel like it, later.” I sighed and turned away, making my way down the steps to the basement with the Pezian on my heels. We’d left the two lanterns burning. The light was dim and flickering, but enough to navigate the space without tripping.

  “What did she mean about the common room being yours?” the Pezian said, perching on a crate by the steps.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important.”

  “I don’t mind how important it is. I’m curious about y— about . . . about what she said.” Curious about you, he’d been about to say, and then he’d changed his mind. I supposed it must be part of that quest of his I’d intuited with my Chantly instincts. There was just something a little off in the way he’d flirt furiously, then back off, then flirt again, as if he was trying to figure out how other people’s boundaries worked by patting around in the dark for them. If I’d had to guess, I’d say that he’d recently gotten his fingers burned for coming on too strong. Maybe by a potential conquest. Maybe he’d just been scolded by a few elders from the flock of his cousins. Maybe he’d just decided on his own to try to be better.

  “She meant I could go out and tell stories if I wanted some spare coin,” I said, picking up an empty crate and beginning to pack wine bottles into it. “I do that sometimes. Or I used to, when I first got here. Not as much anymore.”

  “Oh, are you going to tonight?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t need the money? That’s good.”

  “It’s not about the money.”

  I expected him to say something, but the silence stretched out, empty and expectant, like an open palm.

  “I just don’t feel up to it,” I muttered.

  Sick? he could have asked. Tired? But there was just quiet. I glanced over at him. He had his hands clasped between his knees, his feet swinging gently. He was watching me without any shame, just . . . curious. As he’d said.

  “It’s complicated.” I think I was challenging him, daring him to ask, to push, to grab for a real answer. Maybe even to volunteer information of his own, to say he knew how I felt. He sat still, biting his lip a little and watching me work. “Nothing to say now?”

  “Did you want me to say something?” he asked mildly. “I can, if you’d like me to. Would you?”

  I shoved wine bottles in the crate, letting them clatter and clink against each other. I didn’t care if they broke. I wanted them to break. I wanted wine running over my hands like blood, maybe the sharp bite of a glass shard in my fingers. I sat back on my heels, and let my hands fall into my lap. Did I want him to say something? “I don’t know.”

  “All right.”

  We said nothing. The candles flickered. Hollow footsteps passed across the wood floor above our heads. We could hear the muffled noises of the inn’s common room, people talking and laughing.

  We said nothing.

  Until I said, “You remembered the story. The one about Oyemo.”

  “And the one about the trout of perfect hindsight,” he said. Surprised me. I’d forgotten he’d heard that one. Another minute passed in silence. “Would it be all right if I said something?”

  I turned my hands palms up, shrugged one shoulder.

  “You seem sadder now than you did earlier, when you were working with Mevrouw Basisi. Is it because of me?”

  “No,” I said, still staring blankly into the crate of wine bottles. “Nothing to do with you.”

  “Oh, good.” I thought that was going to be the end of it, that we’d sit in silence again, there in the nearly dark. “You don’t have a good face for it, you know. Being sad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some people are prettier when they’re sad. They look delicate and . . . I don’t know. Wistful. Like a flower in snow.”

  “You’re saying I’m not pretty?” I said, just about managing wry. “That’s a new strategy.”

  “I’m saying you look like you’ve spent most of your life laughing and that’s what your face is used to. Sad doesn’t fit right on you. It looks like you’re wearing someone else’s coat.”

  I looked at him, utterly bewildered.

  “I think you started getting sad again when Mevrouw Basisi poked you and told you to talk. Or when I asked about the story from before.” He put his head to one side. “Why?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said again, my voice no louder than a whisper.

  “You don’t like telling stories?”

  “I love stories.”

  “But you don’t like telling them?”

  I could only shrug, helpless and empty. “That’s what I do. What I’m supposed to do, anyway.”

  “Seems like it’s taken a lot out of you. It’s nicer to listen sometimes, I think.”

  “I don’t get to listen much anymore. People only want to take. No one wants to give.”

  He fidgeted, picking at the cuff of his knee-breeches, no longer looking at me so intently. “Perhaps they’re intimidated. Perhaps they think you’re not interested in listening because you’re so good at it already.”

  Do you think that? I could have asked. Do you have a story that you think I’ve already heard?

  And then maybe he would have said yes. Maybe he would have given me a shyer version of that boyish smile that made “flirt” spring up in letters of fire behind him. Maybe he would have told me, if I’d asked, about dawn over the spires on the Palazzo della Colombe, about the first time he’d seen them, about who he’d been with. Maybe he would have told me, if I’d asked, about the voyage from Pezia, or about how his parents met, or a memory of eating his favorite food. Maybe he would have told me about his first love, or that he’d never been in love, or that he hoped he never fell in love at all. Maybe he would have told me something true and precious and secret, something just for me, something the size of a baby bird to nestle safe into a warm, wool-padded box in my heart.

  But I didn’t ask any of this.

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. His face fell, but he nodded and hopped off the box. I blew out the lanterns, and we went up the stairs, him ahead of me, glancing back over his shoulder every few steps like he thought I’d vanish.

  I’ll finish the rest tomorrow.

  Mevrouw Basisi and I moved the rest of the wine, the potatoes and flour, and the cured meats today. We’ve let most of the barrels and jars stay in the cellar; they’re all well-proofed against damp—the cellars are almost waterproof themselves, else they’d be completely unusable when the king-tide comes, instead of mostly unusable. Basisi says the waters rise an inch or two above the lip of the canals, but usually no farther, what with the windmills pumping day and night to keep the flood outside the dikes. There’s even backup systems, in case the winds stop and the waters start rising too high—they get people to come in and crank the pumps by hand. And people volunteer!147 I thought they must use prison labor, but Basisi says that people just show up at the dikes to help; even when all the pumps are manned, more people arrive with buckets and start bailing like the city’s a rowboat with a leak. Everyone knows how important it is to keep the waters down.

  Everyone seems secure but . . . prepared. They’re not relaxed, but they’re not stressed either. They’re just ready. Or perhaps I should say they’re at the ready.

  I expect that at the very worst, we’ll have damp socks. Everyone keeps giving me advice, knowing I’m a foreigner—they’re all terribly worried that I’ll do something stupid, not knowing how storms work. I can’t talk to anyone without them firmly explaining to me that I must be careful to stay out of the canals, that swimming in them will definitely make me ill.148 I suppose they’re used to foreigners having foolish ideas—the canals are just as any other river in any other city: filled with human waste. You wouldn’t want to swim in that. They always tell me that if the canals flood, I shoul
d be careful not to walk through the water without wet-boots. Everyone seems to have a story about someone they knew who had a little cut on their ankle and went walking in the flooded streets, and then had to get their whole leg chopped off when the tiny cut took a virulent and horrific fever.149

  Needless to say, I will be very careful. The floods bring other illness too, everyone says—I don’t know if I can believe it. I’ve heard so many different arguments for the causes of illness and the treatment thereof that I don’t know what’s real anymore. In Genzhu and Map Sut, they say it’s an imbalance of the humors, but even they disagree about whether it’s six humors or eight and how the imbalances come about.

  But as the saying goes, when in Araşt . . . If the Heyrlandtsche say the tides and the flooding make people sick, then I shall assume they know what they’re talking about.

  Everyone’s making preparations for tides and storms, but that hasn’t stopped them from buying up Sterre’s stock at all. She had signed so many contracts of future sale before the ships arrived that nearly their entire supply of stars-in-the-marsh was used up in fulfilling them. She is delighted. We had two boxes left after deliveries today, and as soon as people know that there’s any available, they’ll buy them up in a trice.

  * * *

  146. Oh god, I wish I could meet this young man and commiserate with him about what an obtuse, self-involved prick you are. I’d buy him a drink just to hear him tell this story from his perspective.

  147. Yep. They do. See: those stories I told at van Vlymen’s party, particularly “The Seven Siblings.”

  148. Hah, I get these explanations too. Every new person I meet mentions to me that I shouldn’t even touch the canals if at all possible, shouldn’t dabble my feet in them, shouldn’t breathe near them or acknowledge they exist. . . . I’ve taken to playing a little game. When someone starts earnestly warning me about the canals, then I say in an innocent and confused voice, “You mean I shouldn’t drink from them?” and then I see how many different colors their faces turn before they realize that I’m joking. I really would like to meet whatever batch of idiot foreigners decided to bathe in the canals and traumatized the Heyrlandtsche so permanently.

  149. Hah! You’re right again. They do all claim to know someone who lost a leg or a hand because a minor injury got a little splashed with dirty water. And yet, you look around on the street, and the instance of missing limbs is roughly the same as it is anywhere else: a few people in every crowd, rather than the full thirty to fifty percent of the population that they would have us believe.

  TWENTY-SIX

  While I’m still in a reasonably good mood:

  I promised myself I’d make some notes on the stories Mistress Chant told at the salon when I was feeling better. I’ll do that now before the tide turns.150

  1. The one about the Vintish mercenaries. Technically mercenaries employed by Vinte, not all Vints themselves. Mercenary captain’s name was Fintan Iarainn (of Calabog/Fyrndarog, by the name); was supposedly secretly in love with one of the Vintish ministers of war (le Paon, I think?). (Mistress Chant downplayed this, but it could be played back up—I like romances, even if she doesn’t.)151 Iarainn hears that General Catuen’s army is sieging Fort Cielisse and leads his men through the forest. Sneaks into the general’s camp (how???), poisons the general with aesica (herb native to Bramandon) to sow uncertainty among the army and make them think there was a traitor within their own ranks. Fighting breaks out among the captains, army splinters, Fort Cielisse holds against the siege until the rest of the reinforcements arrive. Lots of stuff about loyalty to an adopted homeland, etc. (Personally, I’d like it better if le Paon was inside the fort when it was being sieged.152 No idea if le Paon is male, female, other. Could possibly find out in Vinte someday?)

  2. “The Tale of Peregrine Lee.” Peregrine Lee’s husband dies in battle. She starts digging a tunnel through a mountain to connect the two warring countries, makes it easier for them to make peace with each other. At first, everyone thinks she’s wasting her time, then one by one, some miners come to help her. Kind of boring, and no internal logic—what does the tunnel do? Why does it help? Why can’t their diplomats just walk over or around the mountains? Why not build a road? Needs more information to make sense.153

  3. A Heyrlandtsche story—seven siblings living in a very poor cottage are starving during a famine. Three times, people come to their door to ask for help: First, a prince who had been set upon by bandits and separated from his caravan; they bind his wounds and send word to the caravan. Then, a merchant whose cart lost a wheel; they help her repair it, and notice also that her horse has thrown a shoe. Then, a beggar with a little dog whose leg is broken: they fix the dog’s leg; they offer the beggar clean clothes and a bath; they give him the last crust of bread that they have. A few days later, the siblings are hungry, so they go to their neighbor’s house and ask for help; the neighbor gives them a bowl of chicken bones and a pair of onions. They go to their other neighbor’s house, and receive a cabbage. They go to a third neighbor’s house and receive a bunch of carrots and a few cups of barley. They make everything into a soup, and take bowls back to their neighbors, and for a day, they eat well. Then a few days after that, the prince returns. He gives them a sack of coins; they try to protest, but he says he wants to help them as they helped him. The next day, the merchant returns. She gives them seven laying hens and a barrel of potatoes; they protest, but she says she wants to help, etc., etc. The next day, the beggar returns. He gives the siblings a basket of berries he has gathered from the forest. The siblings, humbled at the sincerity of this small gesture, accept it and ask the beggar why he bothered with it. The beggar says that there isn’t much he could do to thank the siblings for their hospitality, but he wanted to care for them as they had cared for him, and picking berries was one little thing he could do for them. (This was the best one.)

  I’ll do the rest another time, maybe.

  Today was a good day: I was working as a translator again, instead of a Chant. It was such a relief to be away from all that, and I kept thinking about what I was writing a couple days ago: I could give up Chanting next week. I could.

  Well, not if I’m still working for Sterre. She won’t let me stop being a Chant yet.154 It matters too much to her that I keep talking about these flowers as if they’re a sacred relic, as if possessing one will somehow solve all the ills a person might have and resolve all their insecurities: Buy stars-in-the-marsh! Your business will prosper, your children will be beautiful, everyone will like you, and all the sex you have will be above average!

  But now, with the futures contracts, the sales have already been made, so all she needs is for me to go with her porters to the houses of the buyers whose mother tongues are something other than the Spraacht. We go over the contract, confirm the amount, collect the papers, and distribute the roots to them in neat brown parcels, and then we leave.

  A funny thing happened today, though.

  We were going up to the house of the ambassador from Tash. I wrote before about how close the houses are crammed together—even the ambassador’s house. Even the servants use the front door for everything. The houses are too narrow for another door (in some of them, you could just about touch both walls if you stood in the front hall with your arms outstretched to either side—they have to haul furniture up from the outside, using a hook on the roof gable and a pulley, because there would be no way to get it upstairs otherwise), and any doors that were sunken below the level of the street would only flood uselessly as soon as the king-tides came. Besides that, if there is a back door in the house, it only leads into a garden the size of a blanket, and you’d have to go through a lot of other people’s gardens and over dozens of walls and fences if you wanted to reach it from the outside. Only the incredibly rich, like Sterre and Heer van Vlymen, have gardens big enough to walk around in, and even those are located a ways outside the city proper.

  It’s nice, I think, not having a servants’ entrance. It ma
kes everyone equal. And people keep their front steps clean—scrupulously clean! They scrub their front steps more thoroughly than they scrub their dishes. That kind of cleanliness, of course, is rarely true about side doors in other cities. Servants aren’t allowed to toss slop out the doors carelessly here, because it would befoul the street. They just go a few more steps and empty the pots into the canal.

  This is all a long way of describing why we were waiting on the ambassador’s front steps, me and Gillis, one of Sterre’s porters. The big cart waited behind us, watched by four armed guards so no ruffians could sneak up and ransack us for our precious cargo. We rang the bell, and the door was answered by a person in simple Glass Sea clothing (covered from head to toe, with only their hands and arms below the elbow exposed), whom I greeted in the customary manner. “We’ve come with the flower roots that Ambassador Kha’ud ordered. Stars-in-the marsh, very fine quality,” I said in Tashaz. As we were both to be considered servants, I did not completely avert my eyes in deference, instead politely pinning my gaze to the slope of their left shoulder.

  Of course the ambassador was fluent in the Spraacht, but they were important enough and such a valuable customer that Sterre considered it an imperative of courtesy to send a translator. Safer, too, to make sure that everyone agreed and understood each other in two languages. Less chance for mistakes. “Are they available to settle the contract?” I asked.

  “I’ll find out. Wait here.” We were accustomed to having to wait a few minutes on the steps—the houses are too small to have waiting rooms for merchants, servants, and parcel-deliverers, and of course you don’t bring just anyone into your parlor.

  We didn’t wait long; the servant came back promptly and showed us up to the office, where the ambassador sat on a gold-embroidered cushion on the floor at a knee-high table. They wore the open-fronted robe appropriate to their station, cream-colored with woven patterns in shades of blue around the cuffs and collar and at knee-level, with a matching headscarf covering their hair and mouth, bordered with a tasteful and understated fringe of silver seed-beads. Beneath the robe, a long tunic, loosely sashed around their waist, dyed in the unmistakable shade of Vintish indigo.