The Virtu (10 page)

But Felix and Mr. Vilker, they put their heads together and figured out there was some kind of ruined temple or something about an hour from Endumion. And then Mr. Vilker turned and did some smooth talking at Mr. Gauthy and convinced him it was educational, and so him and Felix should take Florian Gauthy to see it, and Mr. Gauthy should pay for the hired horses. Mrs. Gauthy was standing there giving Mr. Vilker the hairy eyeball, but Mr. Gauthy didn’t notice her, and anyway Florian Gauthy looked like he was about to die of joy on the spot, so off they went.

They were at the top of the gangplank when Felix turned back and asked me, “Do you want to come?”

“Nope.”

He raised his eyebrows, grinning a little. I didn’t want to get into how I felt about Troia, so I said, “Don’t need to see old bits of rock, thanks. Got those at home.”

“Barbarian,” he said cheerfully, and not mean at all, and followed Mr. Vilker and the kid back onto dry land. And I had to admire him. I mean, I knew how he felt about deep water, and I was watching him pretty close, and I still couldn’t hardly tell how much of a relief it was to him to have solid ground under his feet.

Mr. Gauthy’d already gone off to do some more trading, being the kind of guy who breathed, slept, and ate his business. And the captain’d cleared out as soon as he’d done what he was obliged to and given our names to the other passengers. So that left me and Mrs. Gauthy and the Troian kid standing there giving each other nasty looks.

It took me a second to see the funny side of it, which I did at the same time I realized I didn’t want to talk to either of them anyway, so I didn’t need to stand here until they’d thought up a really good insult to be sure I didn’t.

“See y’all ‘round,” I said and went back to where I’d found Felix all spooked out earlier. I hadn’t been meaning to do much but look at the water for a while and see if it could clear out some of the pricker-bushes I was feeling about this whole damn thing—the day and the ship and the journey and what we were going to have to deal with once we made it to Kekropia and all the fucking rest of it. But there were a couple of sailors there, a guy about my age and a gal a little older, doing something with the ropes—which, from the two decads I’d spent on the
Morskaiakrov
I knew was pretty much a given—and after a little while I couldn’t stand it no more and said, “Hey, can I ask y’all a question?”

The look they gave me said they’d been told not to sass the passengers, but that was all the slack I got.

You can’t back down now, Milly-Fox. Cough it up. “I been wanting news about a ship called
Morskaiakrov
. Y’all know anything?”

The look they were giving me now was like I’d smacked ‘em upside the head with a dead flounder apiece. After a moment, the gal got her shit together and said, “You ask after the
Morskaiakrov
?”

“Yeah.”

“You know Dmitri?”

“A little. Look, I just want to know if everybody got off okay.”

The captain said behind me, “The crew of the
Morskaiakrov
came safe to land near Ikaros. They lost one man, I think, but the rest suffered no more than the broken limbs and coughs and chills that are to be expected. And it will be many years before Dmitri will be able to afford another ship.”

I turned around careful, ‘cause he wasn’t sneaking up on me to kill me and I didn’t want to do nothing embarrassing before we’d even left the dock. So I looked up at Captain Yarth and said, “Who died?”

He said, “I believe the name was Piotr.”

“Oh.” Not Ilia, then, or Vasili or Dmitri or even Yevgeni who’d been an asshole, but who I’d kind of liked for it. No, just Piotr, who’d been quiet and kept to himself and told a story I’d never heard before, about a witch named Lisaveta and why the combs she wore in her hair were made of human bone. Shit.

“Thanks,” I said to the captain and, “Thanks,” kind of more generally to the sailors, who were still staring at me like I’d fallen out of the sky and set the ship on fire. And then, ‘cause I needed all at once to get away from people who were alive and hadn’t died in that storm—or almost died, and I wasn’t kidding myself about how close I’d come—I went back down to the main part of the ship and kept going, down the gangplank, back along the dock, and into the nearest alleyway, just to get out of sight of the
White Otter
. And then I just leaned against the wall and stared at the bricks of the wall opposite for a while.

Piotr was dead. Well, I could add him to the list. Zephyr and Ginevra and Margot’s little Badgers and Griselda Kilkenny and Lucastus the Weaver and Bartimus Cawley and Cornell Teverius and Cerberus Cresset… And Thamuris, because he’d probably be dead before we reached Klepsydra. And—fuck, there was no sense telling myself fairy tales—Gideon and Mavortian and Bernard. All those dead people and what the fuck was I doing still alive?

I didn’t have an answer, and no matter how long I stared at them, the bricks couldn’t give me one.

Ingvard hired a buggy and pair, and we rattled out of Endumion in fine style. I sat beside Ingvard and the boy took the rumble seat, leaning eagerly over our shoulders to ask question after question. It was a beautiful day, bright and clear. The Troian countryside was ripe with summer, and peaceful; the bad blood between the local houses of Attalis and Erekhthais, which I had heard about at exhaustive length from half the celebrants in the Gardens, had not extended its reach into the lives of the farmers and shepherds whom we spotted from time to time. Florian asked questions about crops and wool—a merchant’s son to be sure, but one with a good head on his shoulders. Ingvard answered those questions easily; clearly he had his employer’s business at his fingertips. I sat and looked at the bountiful drowsiness and felt myself expanding with delight. It was as if some dark weight had been lifted from my shoulders, leaden shackles struck off my wrists. We were halfway to Huakinthe before I put my finger on why, and then I wished I hadn’t.

For an afternoon, I was free of Mildmay. Ingvard and Florian were cheerful, normal people, who did not know I had been mad, who had not been lamed and nearly killed on my account, who did not represent, simply by the way they talked, everything about my childhood I most desperately wished to forget. They were not silent, opaque, resentful, unhappy. They did not suffer from wounds I did not know how to heal. They did not set a fire raging in my blood that I could not acknowledge, much less surrender to. And I was so glad to be away from him, away from those cold absinthe eyes, that scarred stone face, that I felt like singing.

“Ker Harrowgate? Are you all right?” Ingvard Vilker’s voice jerked me out of my reverie.

“Fine, thanks.” I smiled at him. “And, please, call me Felix.”

“Ingvard,” he said in return, stressing the “v” with a quick mock-glare over his shoulder at Florian. “Not ‘Ingward.’ ”

“I don’t say it like that!” Florian protested.

“Not anymore.”

“You can’t blame me for being stupid when I was six. Besides, Father still says it wrong, and you don’t nag
him
about it.”

“That, dear boy, is because he pays me.”

“Are you Norvenan by birth, or were you born in the empire?” I asked.

“Born and bred in Karolinsberg,” Ingvard said. “I came south when I reached my majority to seek my fortune. And found it, I think.”

“As my father’s secretary?” Florian demanded.

“A fortune is what you make of it,” Ingvard said. “Here, Florian. Read to us about Huakinthe.”

“But—”

“I promised your father this would be educational.”

“Oh, all right,” Florian said, not nearly as sulkily as he might have.

He read well for a boy his age, stumbling occasionally over unfamiliar words, but managing the sense of the passage as well as the sounds. Huakinthe, he told us, was a ruin from Troia’s imperial past. It had been a major port in the trade between the empire and its daughter-colony. With the fall of the empire, Huakinthe itself had been abandoned, and when trade between Troia and Kekropia was reestablished, the more northerly port of Erigone had taken Huakinthe’s place.

Florian broke off and said, “Why do you suppose they abandoned the city?”

“No trade means no jobs,” Ingvard said.

“Oh. But…”

“The fall of the Troian empire was… ugly,” I said, having to pause a moment to find an accurate but deecorously inexpressive word. “The city itself may have developed unpleasant associations or a reputation for bad luck.”

“Oh,” Florian said again, and I caught a glance of lively interest from Ingvard.

“I didn’t know you were so interested in Troian history. He should talk to Ker Tantony, shouldn’t he, Florian?”

“Ker Tantony?” I said.

“Florian’s tutor. Jeremias Tantony. He’s quite the amateur historian.”

“Oh, Ker Tantony’s all right,” Florian said. “Ker Harrowgate, what did you mean, the fall of the empire was ugly?”

“Civil war is always ugly,” I said. “If your tutor’s a historian, he must have taught you that much. Towns were burned, innocent people killed. There were two years of famine and an outbreak of some sort of plague. I understand that the Euryganeics called it the end of the world. They might not have been far wrong.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, and I realized I had let my fragmentary, nightmarish memories of Nera, another city lost in another empire’s fall, color my tone too vividly. I was about to apologize when Ingvard said, mock-sternly, “Florian, you aren’t done reading.”

“Oh! Right.” And Florian continued reading, tripping over his words at first, but gradually regaining his equilibrium.

The sights of interest in Huakinthe included the city wall, the palace of the Anthemais, the family who had ruled the city, and a temple. “It says it’s the oldest known temple of… I don’t know this goddess’s name.”

“Let me see,” I said, and Florian handed the book forward. I found the place at which he had stopped. “… the goddess Graia, an ancient and primitive goddess whose worship died out in most of Troia nearly five thousand years ago. Cities such as Huakinthe and Prokne, which felt themselves to be under her especial protection, continued to honor her, although the public rites had become solely symbolic by the time the city was abandoned.”

“What sort of rites do you suppose they’re talking about?” Ingvard said.

“Fertility, most likely,” I said without thinking.

Florian said, puzzled, “But how can you have non-symbolic… oh. Oh,
disgusting
.”

Ingvard and I burst out laughing, and Ingvard turned the conversation to other matters until we reached Huakinthe. I had been skeptical of the guidebook’s claim that the city wall of Huakinthe would be of interest. As a child in Simside, I had had my world bounded by the city wall of Mélusine to the south, just as it was bounded by the Sim to the west. During my tenure at the Mirador, I had frequently climbed to the highest ring of battlements, the Crown of Nails, and looked at the city, and from that vantage point I had come to have a more rational—though no less awed—understanding of the city walls. They were a mere seven hundred years old, but their height and mathematically exact lines and the beauty of the way the six gates and the river were accommodated… I understood entirely the Ophidian king who had decreed that the boundary marked by those walls should be honored in perpetuity and that anyone caught damaging the walls would be found guilty of treason to the city of Mélusine—making it a crime in a class by itself. Despite the changes of dynasty and government in the intervening centuries, no one had ever rescinded or repudiated that particular law. Her walls were Mélusine’s pride.

I expected to be entirely unimpressed by Huakinthe’s walls, and indeed it was true that they did not even compare to Mélusine’s. But then, Mélusine’s walls did not compare to Huakinthe’s, either.

There were only two isolated stretches of Huakinthe’s walls still standing, one maybe twenty-five feet long and the other twice that, out in the middle of the pastureland like two monumental foreigners who had gotten lost on their way to the sea. Ingvard hobbled the horses, and he and Florian and I walked to the nearer and shorter of the two stretches of wall. The cows watched us go by with placid disinterest.

It was clear that the city wall had once been higher than these remnants, impossible to tell by how much. But the ragged progress of the top of the wall showed where stones had been taken away, or had fallen. It was still twenty feet tall at its highest point, a looming sadness. The most remarkable thing, though, was the size of the individual blocks. Ingvard made Florian lie down beside the wall because not one of the three of us could believe the evidence of our own eyes that the stones were longer than he was tall.

He scrambled up again, already asking, “How did they move the stones? Do you think they used magic?”

“Probably,” Ingvard said as I hastily pretended to be too interested in the ferns growing from the cracks between the stones to have heard the question. I didn’t know if Captain Yarth had told the other passengers I was a wizard, and I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about it if they knew. I realized I’d been extraordinarily lucky thus far that Florian’s roving curiosity had not prompted him to ask about my tattoos. Of course, by the same token, no one had recognized the tattoos for what they were—markers of my status as a sworn Cabaline, an enemy of the Bastion and the Empire—and I went cold as I realized that I was going to have to come up with some explanation for why I was neither Eusebian nor covenanted. I couldn’t expect the captain and his crew to keep the matter a secret—at least, not without explaining to them
why
I wanted it kept secret, and no matter how stupidly blind I’d been, I wasn’t stupid enough to think that that particular explanation wouldn’t make everything several times worse.

I knelt down to hide my face as the answer occurred to me, because the grimace would certainly have alarmed Florian and Ingvard if they had seen it. Malkar had solved this problem for me almost fifteen years ago, when he invented a tale to confound the Mirador’s curiosity. No one on the
White Otter
would know anything more about Caloxan wizards than I did. I bit the inside of my lower lip savagely to keep from erupting in hysterical giggles and stood up again. Ingvard and Florian had moved a little way further along the wall and were arguing vigorously about how heavy the stones might be. I joined them, and presently suggested that we continue on to the palace of the Anthemais. They concurred amiably and we returned to the buggy.