A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “As you say, mevrol.”

  “Honestly I thought there was something wrong with you.”

  I blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re a good worker, Chant, but you’ve been wandering around limp and listless. I thought perhaps that was just the way you were, all gray like a dishrag. I’m pleased to be wrong, and I commend your timing in getting over whatever that was about.”

  “Grief, mevrol,” I said, careful not to be impertinent about it.

  “Well, it’s better to be past all that. You’ll need all your focus today.”

  “I said I was ready.”

  She laughed. “And you’re even feeling well enough to be snippy with me.” So much for me not being impertinent, I suppose. “Good! Good. I want you full of fire today. How’s the uniform?”

  There are two divergent fashions for Heyrlandtsche mannen right now. The first is a more comfortable and conservative style, worn by the middle classes (or the upper classes in casual settings), involving dark muted colors in linen or lightweight wool—essentially a knee-length robe, open in the front and cut loose (or even baggy) in the body and sleeves, and belted about the waist. Beneath that, a waistcoat and a light linen undershirt, breeches and hosen. Understated and unassuming, quite plain, like a blank slate. People dress it up in small ways, with fancy buttons, or colorful silk hosen, or a bit of embroidery at their cuffs or collar. The collars are removable and interchangeable, and therefore very much subject to the whims of fashion. Currently, the mandated style is to wear them wide enough to drape over your shoulders, like a miniature shawl. If you’re rich, then your collar is made entirely of lace; if you’re not, it’s one of several varying grades of cambric merely edged with lace—or not, as the case may be.

  These clothes are the sort of thing I wear (though my collars are secondhand and not at all up to the current style). It makes me nearly invisible.264

  The other fashion, worn exclusively by the upper classes, is a ridiculous,265 dandyish266 confection267 of as many as four colors that was somehow intended to make sartorial reference to soldiers and, in my opinion, misses the mark by several . . . thousand miles.268 It’s like the other fashion, except that it’s tailored snug through the torso, with an undeniably charming nipped waist,269 and the skirt of the coat is much shorter, barely reaching past one’s hips—more like a doublet with a wide bit of fabric as trim on the bottom hem.270 The sleeves are huge through the arm and cuffed tight at the wrist, and it’s worn with a pair of fitted knee-breeches271 and hosen. And, as the crowning glory, if you want to call it that, the whole production is slashed all over with dozens of tiny cuts in elaborate patterns to show the fabric beneath in a contrasting color. The whole thing is topped off with a hat of varying styles, but it always has at least three enormous, fluffy ostrich feathers, imported all the way from Onendogo.

  The version of this that Sterre had made me change into was stripes of blue and black velvet overlaid on silk of an intense reddish plum in the top half and pale peach in the trousers.272 It was trimmed all over in bands of narrow gold braid, and while the hat was (thankfully) the smaller of the available styles, the ostrich feathers were abundant, all dyed rich blue. I felt ridiculous and self-conscious273—I’ve been wearing the muted and conservative style the whole time I’ve been in Heyrland, and secondhand items to boot, everything at least five years out of date.274 But of course I couldn’t tell her that I felt like a child borrowing someone else’s clothes, swimming in all that extra fabric like I was. She might have been insulted. “It’s fine,” I said, trying not to fidget.

  “It fits all right? Nothing scratching or pinching? I don’t want you to be distracted at all today.”

  Again, I couldn’t complain. “It’s fine, mevrol.” It wasn’t fine—I was beginning to understand why all the mannen I see wearing this style always lounge so aggressively. The trousers are too tight to bend your legs without the fabric cutting off your circulation and crushing your family jewels into a fine powder, so you can’t sit comfortably in a chair like you normally would—you have to slouch, so you can stretch your legs out straight, or drape yourself across something, all louche and disarrayed.275 There wasn’t room for that in the carriage, piled in with boxes as we were, so I flexed my feet and tried to ignore how I could feel my own pulse in my calves. “Nobody else in your offices wears a uniform,” I said.276 “And I didn’t have to wear one for the salons.”

  “This is different,” she said quickly. “Have you ever seen an auction before? A proper one?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever seen one at Stroekshall?” she amended.

  I hesitated. “No, mevrol.”

  A smile spread across her face. “You’re in for a treat, heerchen. And for a trial by fire, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh—you’re going to run the auction.” She patted the crates piled around her. “Hence the uniform. You have to look presentable;277 you’re representing me, of course. Make me a lot of money today, got it?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You’re the best translator in the city. Everyone else needs at least four to run an auction like ours—you’ll impress them just by being alone at the podium.” I must have looked like a wild, frightened animal. That’s what I felt like. She patted my hand. “It’s no different from what you do at the Rojkstraat, and you did a very impressive job wrangling that little crowd in front of my offices the other day. You’re a natural. Calm down.” I forced myself to stop and breathe—there wasn’t anything else to do. The biggest crowd I’d ever spoken to before was at the Rojkstraat, probably—a few dozen people, a small crowd. In Stroekshall, there would be hundreds. “There, better. It’s going be noisy. It’s going to be fast. You’re going to want to try to slow them down to make yourself comfortable—don’t. You want it fast. You want to push it faster if you can. Fast makes people uncomfortable, makes them anxious, makes them compulsive. You want them panicking. You want them making snap decisions.” She leaned forward. “You want them to think you’re the only one in the room who isn’t terrified. Be confident. Be anchored. You want them to think you know what you’re talking about. Because you do. You know more about the stars-in-the-marsh than any other person in the city. You know how to turn a person’s heart to your will.”278

  When you grieve for years, it becomes a habit. You become so bland and flat and listless that you forget how to rise to extremes on either end of the emotional spectrum. I wanted that flatness again—I wanted to claim I was sick and go back to the inn and curl up in my attic and sleep for the rest of the day.

  That would have been the Chantly thing to do. That would have been the grieving thing to do. But there was Ylfing in me again, and the Ylfing part of me wanted to shake off the haze and run forward with my arms outstretched. And, besides, I thought of what my master would have done. He would have just done it. He wouldn’t have been frightened. He adored an audience, especially a captive one. That, I think, tipped me the rest of the way over, made me angry enough to set my fear aside. I can’t quite put words to it, but I felt all of a sudden like I had to do it, out of spite or to prove something to myself (by which I mean: to the memory-him that lives still in my head). A real Chant could do what she was asking, and I’m a real Chant, and therefore . . . Therefore.

  Fuck what anyone else thinks. To the desert with all of them.279

  “You can do it,” Sterre said. “You don’t actually have an option to not do it, of course, because I would have had to hire translators days ago, and all the others have been snapped up by other merchants at the auction by now. You’re all I have. It’ll have to be you. You’ll do it.” She didn’t sound threatening, just assured. Like she knew what she was talking about. Like she was the only person in the room who knew what she was talking about.

  I took a breath. “Yes. I will. I can.” Fire, I thought. She wanted me with fire in my belly—I could do that. I’d found that again, fighting with Mistress
Chant about our ways of doing things, and dancing with Orfeo. I had life in me again.

  And to the desert with my master, specifically.

  We had guards when we arrived at the doors of Stroekshall, and they helped our team unload the carriage while people in the crowds around us surged forward, shouting and crying out and waving their money-purses at us. “Ten guilders, de Waeyer! Ten guilders for just one!”

  “Fifteen! Fifteen!”

  Sterre only smiled like a wolf and led me inside. My legs prickled as all the blood rushed back into them, freed from the oppressive strangulation of the cloth that had pinched at my bent knee and the crease of my hip when I was sitting in the carriage. “This is a good sign. Don’t sell them for less than fifty apiece—more, if you can. Remember, the others went for seventy each. And put your hat on.”

  “Yes, mevrol.”

  “Drive the price high. Sing them into submission. They know who you are, and some of them have bought before. Don’t harp on the story for too long—come up with something new if you can.”

  “I would have liked some time to think if you wanted new material,” I said. I’d relaxed the leash on my tone, and my voice came out petulant and snappish.

  Sterre only laughed again and clapped me on the back. “That’s the spirit! More of that.”

  Inside the hall, there were even more people packed in as tight as possible, shoulder to shoulder through the entire first floor, and more of them hanging from the balconies above. At the other three doors, guards accepted admission fees—they had to pay a full guilder just to get inside. That’s three days’ wages for a common laborer, and almost a full day’s wage for someone skilled, like a ship’s carpenter. This fee was to dissuade people from coming just to gawk at the proceedings. Only serious buyers allowed today.

  Our door was reserved for entrance by the merchants who had products to sell at the auction. There was a tall man with thinning black hair standing a few spaces ahead of us in the line with a wheelbarrow full of bolts of cloth wrapped in white muslin. A fold at the end of one bolt had fallen loose, and I saw layers and layers of jewel-like silk shining inside in shades of strangely lovely green-brown, as clear and bright as a millpond in spring.

  “Prepare yourself,” Sterre whispered. “There are people in front of us, but it won’t take as long as you’re hoping. Be ready to go in minutes.”

  “I’m ready.” My stomach was fluttering. I watched the stage—as she’d said, every merchant had at least four translators on stage, all shouting at once, pointing to people in the audience and taking their bids for whatever was being sold, relaying them to an accountant standing at the back of the stage. And she was right—it did move fast.

  The man in front of us and his translators hauled the bolts of cloth onto the stage and unwrapped the muslin from them. They blazed with color, so bright that I could almost taste them, like berries bursting on my tongue. The translators announced that they were examples of a shipment from Map Sut, four hundred bolts in total, in these twelve different shades.

  They unfurled lengths of the cloth, all silk—there was a mulberry-purple, a blue-black. . . . They were all two colors, flashing one or the other depending on which angle you glimpsed them at. There was one that I would have sworn was fire-orange until the merchant holding it turned towards us, and I saw it was violet. Some people in the audience cried foul play, thinking the cloth somehow enchanted or faked, but the translators shouted them down: it was merely two-tone silk, they said, woven with the warp in one color and the weft in another. No magic at all, and anyone who liked could come up and touch the cloth to see for themselves.

  Of course the hall was packed too tight for anyone to move much, so the audience had to be satisfied with the confirmation of the people within the first couple feet of the stage.

  The cloth sold, those twelve bolts and the rest of the four hundred, for a sum so enormous that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.

  And before I had expected, we were standing at the base of the steps leading up to the stage, and Sterre was patting me on the shoulder.

  She murmured to me, “You’re brilliant. You’ll do fine.” She was as nervous as I was, I think, but her nerves calmed mine. I watched the other translators, watched their frantic flurrying motions, and I fell into a still, quiet state.

  “I’m ready,” I said again, and the round of applause signaling the end of the previous merchant’s turn on stage roared up as we mounted the steps, with our porters carrying the crates of stars-in-the-marsh behind us, and then it was too late to turn back or change my mind.

  I didn’t want to. I felt as solid as rock, and I felt as if I were flying, like I had yesterday afternoon with Orfeo.

  Sterre stood at the back of the stage and handed me the list of lots that she had separated the stock into. I looked down at it, looked up at the crowd. They were quiet, dead quiet. There weren’t hundreds, I saw. There were thousands—perhaps two, three thousand people, all crammed in here, quiet as the dead, waiting for someone to speak.

  “The honorable Mevrol Sterre de Waeyer,” the Stroekshall representative announced from the stage. “Importer of fine luxury goods from Araşt, Vinte, Bramandon, Arjuneh, Oissos, Kaskinen, Pezia, Onendogo, Cascavey, Borgalos, Tash, Mangar-Khagra, and the Ammat Archipelago! The auction will be translated today by,” and he paused for the barest heartbeat, glanced at me, saw that there was only one of me. I stared back at him, blank and calm. I didn’t feel like either Chant or Ylfing at that moment. I was something completely different. “Translated by Heer Chant,” he finished.

  Another round of applause, perfunctory and brief.

  “Twenty lots,” I announced. The stage was arranged in the middle of one of the broad sides of the hall so no one would be too far away from it. I could make my voice reach even the farthest corner. “Twenty lots of stars-in-the-marsh, of five bulbs apiece! You’ve heard the stories. Your neighbors’ gardens are agleam with these beauties. If you leave here without these today, you will have lost. These are the very last bulbs in Heyrland! There will be no more until after the storms. These are the very last ones.”

  I paused. I let them hang off my words. My mind flashed back to last night, to laughing in bed with Orfeo as I hovered above him, just out of kissing distance, tempting and beguiling and teasing, until he whined some objection and pulled me closer. You want me, I thought at the crowds. You want what I have. Come to me. Come claim it.280 “The first lot: bidding begins at one hundred guilders!” And my skin blazed with the weight of eyes on me. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

  I think that’s what it must feel like when a god looks at you.

  In the hall: Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. A wall of sound. Hands flew in the air all over the floor; the crowd surged forward a step. People waved handkerchiefs from the balconies above, trying to catch my attention, calling for my eye to fall upon them.

  The previous merchants’ auctions had been nothing like this. Those at least had been civil and orderly. This was a tempest.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t actually need to take anyone’s specific bid. All I needed to do was to hold out and cry numbers until only one person remained or the wanting had been thinned enough to deal with reasonably. “One fifty!” I said—repeating myself in Vintish, in Tashaz, in Bramalc and Botchwu and Avaren and Araşti—and then, “Two hundred!” and so on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Stroekshall clerk scrambling, wild-eyed, and I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye, flashes of white and black, but I didn’t dare turn to see what was going on.

  I caught the eye of someone close to the front of the stage—she mouthed, as clear as day, “Five hundred,” so I repeated that. Five hundred. Another surge of noise, a cry of despair.

  Then it was six hundred. Then eight hundred. A thousand. People had dropped out now, a significant number of them, but still there were dozens—hundreds, even—who had the gold to spare on these worthless flowers. I spoke in a daze, my tongue tripping faster and
faster through the tongues I knew. At length I threw in Arjunese, Oissic, Mangarha, and what I knew of Pezian.

  I spoke in Kaskeen and didn’t even feel the pangs of hurt that I’d come to expect when I was reminded of my master-Chant.

  Mine. They were all mine. They were as ravenous as any audience I’ve had, snapping and howling wolves the lot of them, but all their baying was not for me, but for the flowers at my feet. I held the wolves back with my words and with their own wanting, and that was enough. I was alone, and I was enough.

  The first lot sold for one thousand, four hundred and seventy guilders. Sterre seized my arm and turned me. Her eyes were wide, her face flushed with glee. “Chant, change of plans. Ask the buyer to come forward. Ask whoever else is willing to buy at that price to come forward.” There were six of them—none of them had wanted to go higher. They’d been bidding in increments of ten towards the end. They made their way through the crowd to the sound of murmurs. No one had ever seen anything like this before. I certainly hadn’t.

  When they reached the stage, Sterre knelt to be closer to them, and I stood close in case she needed my services—but they were all native-born Heyrlandtsche citizens, merchants themselves or members of the Council of Guilds. “I have twenty lots of five bulbs each. How many lots do each of you want?”

  And then we were finished, or so I thought. Sterre rose to her feet a few minutes later and handed me a stack of papers. I looked down at them—unsigned futures contracts. “Sell these,” she muttered into my ear. “One bulb apiece, highest quality.”

  My mouth was dry, my hands shaking, but I turned back to the audience. It was my job, after all. “Mevrol de Waeyer has sold her current stock,” I announced. “But because there was so much demand, she is offering contracts of future sale for the next shipment of stars-in-the-marsh.” I raised the sheaf of papers over my head. “One bulb per contract. We’ll start the bidding—” I paused, glanced at the accountant on the other side of the stage, who mouthed a number to me. “We’ll start at three hundred guilders apiece.”