Shadow Gate (14 page)

She could not allow it to overwhelm her. She and Anji, and their company of about two hundred soldiers and additional grooms and slaves, had chosen to make their stand here, to carve out a life in exile.

“Verea, is there anything you need?” asked one of the young men hesitantly. When she smiled at him, he reddened and tugged at the cloth wrapping his head that concealed his hair, as if the action would deflect her gaze.

“No. I thank you.” She rose.

Isar looked up from his customers, marked her exit with a creased brow, and offered a brief and possibly disapproving nod.

If only his daughter were permitted to accompany her, but of course that was impossible.

She pushed through the hanging banners stamped with the signs that signified to customers what was sold within, and emerged onto the porch. Every storefront had such a porch, set a few steps up from the street, on which folk left their street shoes before entering. Her attendants
waited outside. Priya sat cross-legged on the porch, watching the passing traffic. Her lips shaped the words of prayers that she chanted to herself whenever she had a quiet moment. Chief Tuvi and four soldiers stood guard. Eliar, her chosen escort and local guide, was leaning against a wooden pillar chatting with O'eki, the mountainous slave, about wool.

As Mai bent to strap on her sandals, Priya rose. O'eki broke off his disquisition on the importance of a long and lustrous fiber to a carpet that would stand up to repeated wear.

Eliar grinned as he pushed away from the pillar. “Did my father talk you out of your reckless scheme, Mai?” he asked, as casual with her as if she were his sister.

Chief Tuvi gestured, and the soldiers fell into formation, two in the vanguard and two for the rear guard. “Mistress? What is your wish?”

She gathered her courage, let out a held breath. “Surely shopping must be the same in every town, even a foreign one. I am ready to go!”

T
HE MARKET STREETS
in Olossi brimmed with ten times the wonders that even the twice-annual market fair in isolated Kartu Town could ever ever ever boast. Along one narrow street you could browse the stalls and shops of papermakers, with rice-paper lanterns, plain or painted fans, decorative paper for folding, and painted landscapes suitable for screens as well as ordinary white rice paper for windows and doors. An alley snaked between shops selling fabulous creatures carved from bone. She found mirrors backed with bronze lacework, braided cords to ornament jackets, and silk ribbons woven plain or patterned.

“You're dickering,” said Eliar as they strolled down a rank of stalls that sold nothing but beads: wood, ceramic, stone, crystal, polished, unpolished, in so many colors she could not name them all. His silver bracelets jangled
as he gestured toward the bustling shops. “But you're not buying.”

“This is my first time out. I was fearful of venturing out, after the battle, with everything in disarray. Then your sister told me it was also the year-end festival with ghosts and such. So I thought it would be better to stay indoors. But now that's over—” She laughed. “You can see it wouldn't be wise to buy when I don't really know how bargaining works here.”

“The same as any other place, I suppose.” Eliar heaved a sigh that ought to have shaken earth and sky together. “Not that my father and uncles will let me travel to other towns and see.”

“The roads aren't safe. Didn't a man from your house get killed on the road to Horn last year?”

“Yes. But they wouldn't even let me ride out with the militia during the battle. All I was allowed to do was fight the fire in the lower city after the army had already run!”

Mai shuddered, remembering the way buildings and tents and living creatures had burned and burned and burned. “People died fighting those fires.”

“So they did. I shouldn't make light of it.”

A girl scuttled up to the pair of soldiers standing rear guard. Ducking her head shyly, she held out a wooden platter of sweet rice dumplings. “My papa asks you take these as a gift, for fighting for the city. The Silver isn't permitted any.”

Eliar's frown deepened.

“That's rude!” muttered Mai.

“Maybe not meant so,” he said. “Best the soldiers be seen accepting the gift.”

She gestured to Chief Tuvi. He strolled back to inspect the dumplings and the girl, who wasn't more than ten. He indicated she should eat one first, and when she popped one promptly in her mouth, he allowed the soldiers to share the rest.

“Even so, walking through the market is more than your sister can do,” said Mai, mouth watering as she
watched the soldiers devour the moist dumplings. She couldn't bring herself to taste them when Eliar was rejected in that way, but if he meant to let the slight pass, she would not mention it again. “She wasn't allowed to accompany me.”

“She's unmarried. She's not allowed to walk in the market until she becomes an adult.”

“Which I am, although I'm younger than she is? Just because I'm married? That doesn't seem reasonable.”

Like his father, Eliar might smile and charm but there were things he would not joke about. “That isn't our way, verea.”

“Forgive me. I had no intention to offend. I grew up selling produce in the market in Kartu Town. It seems strange to me that your sister lives so restricted.”

“Let's move on,” he said.

Even Miravia's absence could not ruin the delight of walking through the bright day and enjoying the sight of a city so rich they could build with wood as much as with stone and brick. So many colors and smells! Vendors sold oil by the ladle. At food stalls you could buy noodles, or mounds of colorful spiced and pickled vegetables.

A girl sat on a blanket under the shade of a canvas awning, fruit mounded in neat piles before her, crying her wares in a cheerful voice: “Sunfruit! Best and sweetest! Ghost melon for the new year! Strings of redthorn.”

Mai wiped away unexpected tears.

Priya cupped Mai's elbow under an arm. “Mistress, are you well? Perhaps we should return?”

“Just remembering when I used to be that girl, selling fruit in the market in Kartu Town.”

She bought several sunfruit, making only a cursory effort to bargain, and shared out the segments with the others. The moist flesh cooled her mouth, but it tasted a little sour.

The smell of fried fish made her stomach turn, so they walked on, past carpenters raising walls where a hall had just days ago burned, past roofers shifting broken tiles,
past folk hauling water and pushing wheelbarrows piled with bricks, past men and women calling out their wares in a singsong that grabbed and held the ear. The rhythm of the marketplace truly was the same anywhere. And today she had no need to feel hurried, to grasp at trinkets in passing, to wonder if the coin she'd been given as a sign of favor by Father Mei might be pried from her hand by Grandmother Mei in a fit of pique. She could wait, see what appealed, how prices compared, and she could come back whenever she pleased, because she and Anji were wealthy. Anji's troop of Qin soldiers had saved Olossi. Acting as negotiator for their services, she had pinched the Olossi council for so much coin that she couldn't imagine how she'd had the audacity just days ago to manage it.

No, there was no haste to buy.

Not until they came to the street catering to those who knew how to write, with its brushes and inkstones and ink knives. In one shop, a dozen wretchedly preserved scrolls had been tossed into a dusty basket in the corner.

“Look here, Priya,” she said to the slave, drawing her close, hand tucked into her elbow. “Don't those look like prayer scrolls? Whatever would such a thing be doing in this land, where they've never heard of the Merciful One?”

The shopkeeper hustled over. “Verea.” He nodded at Priya, not realizing she was only a slave, and then at Mai, gaze shifting between the two to gauge their relationship. “How may I help you?”

“I'd like to look at these,” Mai said. “What a curiosity!”

“Please, please.” He was a short, broad-chested man wearing a sleeveless vest and loose trousers that fell to just above the ankle. He cleared a space on a table and carelessly dropped several of the frayed scrolls there.

A youth wearing only a kilt belted low on the hips was seated on the floor in the opposite corner at the rear of the shop, twisting hairs into brushes. His well-muscled
chest was mostly hairless, quite smooth. He glanced up as if he had felt the weight of her gaze, and grinned flirtatiously right at her. She looked away, although not because she feared a lad's dazzling smile. The Hundred folk wore much less clothing in public than Mai was accustomed to, displaying a great deal of lovely brown skin. Perhaps it was no wonder Isar did not like his unmarried daughter to walk in the market.

Priya sucked in a sharp breath, a hiss of surprise. She had untied a ribbon and smoothed out the first few turns of a battered scroll, careful lest the ragged tears rip further.

“This is a copy of the Thread of Awakening,” she murmured.

Was that a tear below Priya's eye, or a stray drop of rain? Priya had always a well-modulated voice, in which Mai heard only affection and wisdom. Tenderly the slave tied the scroll back and peeled open a second.

“Aie!” She sounded as if the sight pained her. “The Discourse on the Seven-Branched Candle. Ill handled for its pains. I cannot imagine how these holy books journeyed here.”

“Yet here they are,” murmured Mai as the woman mouthed the words silently and rocked side to side to the rhythm of the unspoken phrases.

The months-long overland journey with Anji's company had been hard on Priya, but she had never relaxed her care of Mai, never once spoken of her own fears and aches. Nor had Mai, in the seven years Priya had been her personal slave, ever asked. Anji was the one who had discovered that Priya had been kidnapped years ago from a temple where she served the Merciful One, and marched over high mountains to be sold into slavery far away from her homeland. Her only comment:
“I survived because of the teachings of the Merciful One.”

“Do these exceptional scrolls interest you, verea? They are rare. Outlander work. It was chance I was able to lay
hands on them. You'll find nothing else like them in all of Olossi.”

“Look how dirty and torn they are,” said Mai with a kind smile. “How sad that those who handled them treated them with such scorn. Here, now, what can you tell me of these prints?” She indicated a set of pictures leaning against the wall. “How I love butterflies! So colorful they are! But is this a practiced hand? Or apprentice work? Please advise me, ver.”

Distracted, he followed her to the ranks of prints on display. “It's very good work, although you might find Hoko's work more to your taste, she is a master artisan, the best in town. Here are Hoko's festival prints special for the Year of the Red Goat, which I can offer at a markdown since we scarcely had a festival this year due to the terrible events. See the detail of this wharf scene! The festival banners, the ghost ribbons, the food stalls. Here, the incomparable Eridit, and there a talking line of children from the Lady's temple dance the episode of the reunited lovers from the Tale of Change.”

“It's very fine, but the colors here look a little smudged. Oh, I do like that one, but—”

She smiled brightly and spoke cheerfully, and wielded her “but”s like a trimming knife until the shopkeeper begged for mercy. “Your sweet tongue is as sharp as those swords carried by your soldiers, verea,” he said, laughing. “I accept defeat! What is it you want?”

“It seems a high price for prints for a festival now over, for a year that won't come around again for—well—how can I even count that far? Many rounds of years, surely, before the Red Goat walks again.”

“I can't lower my price, verea. My overhead. Surely you understand. But I could throw in something else. Is there something you have your eye on?”

She made a show of examining other prints, the brushes, the inkstones. He had an assistant bring tea. As she sipped, savoring the gingery taste, she entertained
him with a long digression about needing to bind a new accounts book, as she must of necessity set up a household.

“So you and the outlanders are indeed staying, as it is rumored?”

“Is it spoken of?”

“Surely it is, verea. You must know every person in Olossi talks of little else. How could it be otherwise, since your bold attack saved us from ruin?”

She liked him, for his laugh and his praise of Anji and the soldiers, and because bargaining entertained him as much as it did her. Because he offered tea not just to her and Priya but also to Eliar and Tuvi and the four soldiers as they loitered under the eaves, waiting for her. “I'll need two accounts books. I am sure you can bind them with good-quality paper, something that will hold up better than those poor scrolls, and provide the necessary scribal tools.”

In the end she purchased the prints and the accounts books, with the entire basket of dusty scrolls thrown in as a courtesy. The books and scribal tools and prints would be delivered, but Priya herself carried away the basket, clutched as tightly as a precious child. Mai could not have been more pleased.

“M
ISTRESS, HERE IS
juice, just as you like it with lime and mint.”

“Ah! That's very nice, Sheyshi.”

“While you were gone, I washed the cloth just as you said. I folded the bedding. I cooked rice. The young mistress helped me.”

“Very good, Sheyshi. Where is Miravia?”

“She went back through the gate, Mistress. Do you want your hair brushed, Mistress?”

“Yes, Sheyshi.” Mai sank down onto pillows and sighed with pleasure as Sheyshi took out the combs and sticks that held her hair. Released, her hair fell past her
hips. As Sheyshi brushed with steady strokes, Mai watched Priya examine the scrolls. The slave said nothing, but tears shone on her weathered skin.