The Assassins of Tamurin (27 page)

Master Luasin, the musicians, and the stagers spent the next two days going out early and returning late. The latter were unpacking our stage gear at the theater where we were to give our public performances, and Master Luasin was with the officials at the Bureau of Arts, arranging our schedule for the palace theater. We performed whatever works the bureau told us the Sun Lord wanted to see, and since it sometimes changed this at the last moment, we had to be ready with almost anything in the classical repertoire.

The company’s first performance of the season, which was always for the Sun Lord, normally occurred a couple of days after reaching Kuijain. But to Master Luasin’s disgust, the Bureau of Arts had neglected to inform him that the Sun Lord would not be in the city when we arrived, because he’d gone to the eastem frontier to inspect the border armies.

We couldn’t begin our performances until he retumed. To do so would have been a grave insult, possibly leading to the loss of his patronage, and Master Luasin would have boiled his own grandmother for glue before taking such a risk. Of course, the Sun Lord wasn’t our only audience in Kuijain, although he was our chief and most generous patron. We presented dramas for him every five to ten days, but the rest of the time we performed for paying audiences in Kuijain’s largest public theater. We always played to full houses, too, for the High Theater was greatly esteemed by people of elegance and refined taste, and there were plenty of such people in Kuijain. But protocol kept us from declaiming so much as a line in public until we had played before the Sun Lord.

Thus we had time on our hands that couldn’t be completely filled by rehearsals. Always curious, I nagged Perin to show me the city, which she good-naturedly did. As we went about, I wondered if anybody would remark on my likeness to the dead Surina. I did receive a few puzzled glances, but that was all. This wasn’t really surprising, since few commoners, even in Kuijain, had seen the Sun Lord’s consort from close enough to detect how much I resembled her.

As for the Elder Company, Harekin had snidely suggested that the Kuijainese might think I was the ghost of the dead lady and try to exorcise me, but everybody else had lost interest in the coincidence. Master Luasin no doubt had received instructions from Mother to place me in the Sun Lord’s view, but he said nothing about it because of the odd relationship into which we had settled. He knew I was more than I seemed, and I knew he worked for Mother, and you’d think we’d have exchanged occasional whispered confidences. But we never acknowledged it, not by so much as a glance. For my part, it was because I preferred to keep my own counsel, and as for Master Luasin, I think he was too afraid of Mother to speak to me without her permission. Or maybe Nilang had shown him her wraiths; I never knew, for he was dead before I had a chance to ask him.

Perin had promised to take me to the Round Market, and about a hand after settling into the villa, we went. The excursion was as much for her as for me, because she liked searching out knickknacks and small articles of adornment—she had a special weakness for gossamin scarves and bracelets carved from opalescent chank shells. So we furnished ourselves with a couple of hemp bags and set out, but we didn’t go there directly; she told the periang’s scullsman to take us past the Sun Lord’s palace first.

The palace stood in Jade Lagoon on Stone Bar Island, one of the largest of the islands that made up Kuijain. On the island’s east side ran the Honor Canal, and on die west lay the lagoon’s glittering breadth, with the opulent villas of Bethiya’s greatest magnates basking beside its esplanades, like frogs around a pond.

Every inch of Stone Bar Island was covered by the palace, whose amber brick walls stood with their feet in the lagoon. Its only land gate was on the Honor Canal side; this was the ceremonial entrance of Dry Gate, connected to the rest of the city by a bridge. There were three water gates, the main one being the suitably named Wet Gate, which opened onto the canal a hundred yards from the bridge.

Our scullsman rowed us along the Honor Canal beside the palace walls. They rose so high above us I couldn’t see much of the interior, except some beautifully upswept roofs of blue tile, edged by bright, gilded carvings, and a tall tower with round windows. Dry Gate was closed, but the iron portcullis of Wet Gate stood open, and inside I could see a walled basin containing brightly painted watercraft. Just by the gateway was a guard boat, with two soldiers in it. They watched us as we passed, but it was only because we were women and they Uked the look of us.

“It’s so big,” I said, as the island drew away astern and we emerged into the lagoon. I was impressed, even though I’d known that Terem Rathai wouldn’t be Uving in a prefectural residence left over from the old days. This was because Kurjain, for all its size and importance, had never been the prefectural capital of Bethiya; that distinction had belonged to the city of Tanay. However, Tanay was on Bethiya’s eastem border and too close to the Exiles for safety, and it had also been badly damaged in the wars. So the first Sun Lord took himself and his government to Kuijain, and there he built his palace. He’d had a taste for grandeur and pomp, not surprising in someone who claimed to be the successor of the Emperors of Durdane, and if his creation was not as vast as the old imperial palace in Seyhan, it was nevertheless immense. Its name was Jade Lagoon Palace, but everybody in Kuijain simply called it Jade Lagoon.

“It’s at least four times bigger than Yazar’s,” Perin told me. “I’ve been inside, but I’ve only seen a tiny bit of it—one of the small banquet halls, and the lesser audience hall. Oh, and the Porcelain Pavilion, because that’s where the theater is.”

I pondered those golden ramparts, knowing that somewhere behind them was the Water Terrace, where Mother’s baby son had died. I grimaced at the thought, but Perin didn’t see.

We swung out of the lagoon into Copper Bell Canal. At intervals there were gaps between the buildings, where a street or alley met the water in a flight of steps, with a stone landing at the foot. Once in a while an esplanade ran alongside the water; here the landings were larger, so that a dozen or more craft could moor at their iron posts.

And everywhere was the bustle and hum of Kurjainese life. At the major canal intersections you could hardly see the water for boats: periangs with their passengers; waterspoons carrying white radishes, lettuces, early melons, leeks, strings of dried mushrooms, ducks and geese in cages; fishermen’s skaffies piled with the silvery mounds of their morning’s catch; slippers in from the Short Canal, deep in the water with timber, stone, hides, grain, wine, and the gods knew what else. Among these humble craft, like swans among ducks, rowed the ornate sequinas of the rich. Their hulls were vividly painted and their upperworks were a riot of gilt, silvering, and gossamin awnings striped like rainbows; Perin said the size of the sequina and the number of its oarsmen denoted its owner’s wealth, with six rowers indicating moderate riches and twenty, opulent.

How all these scullsmen and rowers managed to avoid collision, capsizing, and sinking was beyond me, yet they did. But they all yelled good-natured abuse at each other, and to add to this the merchants on their waterspoons and skaffies shouted their prices and stock, calling people to come alongside to haggle and buy. The high walls beside the canal bounced the racket back and forth, and in some places you could hardly hear yourself think for the din.

Copper Bell Canal led straight to the Round Market in White Crane Pool. Kuijain had a score of these circular basins, of which White Crane was the largest. The basins were landmarks; in another city you might send someone to Pear Orchard Square, but in Kuijain you’d tell him to go to Pear Orchard Pool.

I’d expected an impressive market, but the Round surpassed all my expectations, for it was enormous, and almost all of it was on the water. Every kind of merchant boat I’d seen was gathered here in a vast raft of commerce.

Each boat was a floating shop. To do your marketing, you either sculled up and down the lanes that meandered among them, or hopped from boat to boat, using planks laid for that purpose. People rarely fell into the water, but when they did, there was great hilarity as the dripping, grumbling shopper was hauled out, mopped off, and offered a cup of wine to settle the stomach—a necessity, since the canals were very dirty. Kuijain got its water from island wells, but these were not trustworthy, so nobody drank water unless it was boiled or mixed with vinegar or wine. Small beer was the most common drink; it was brewed in huge quantities upriver where the water was clean and shipped to Kurjain in enormous casks. Even so, there were many fevers and bowel complaints during the hot months, and people died of them. Kuijain, for all its opulence, could be an unhealthy city.

But sickness was very far from my thoughts on that bright spiing moming. Perin paid off the scullsman, we climbed the steps from the boat landing, and I found myself in the biggest market in Kuijain.

Not quite all of it was on the water. An esplanade ran around the circle and there, facing the great raft of boats, 
was a many-arched arcade with a shop tucked under each arch. Most of the crowd was Durdana, but there were others, too, both buying and selling. I'd seen lots of foreigners in Istana, but in Kuijain there were half the races of the world: Erallu, Ris Rua, Daisa, Yellow Smoke Islanders, Avashan, Khalaka, Abarite, and others I couldn’t name. Two of these were weirdly painted men with amber eyes, dressed in outlandish garb of fringed deerskin despite the morning’s warmth. Perin told me they were Chechesh, from the islands behind the north wind.

We sauntered along the arcade, inspecting the shops. These were of the better sort and it wasn’t long before Perin decided she must have a pair of ivory earrings, and set to bargaining for them. Being uninterested in baubles, I wandered a little way on and discovered a bookseller’s stall.

To my delight, it had plenty of new books. Istana’s single printer had stuck to popular classical texts, most of which I already knew, and its market had offered mostly old discarded volumes of the sort nobody wants to read. But here I found not only secondhand books but mint-new ones, smelling of ink and glue, with titles I'd never seen:
Lives of Famous Immortals, The Ten Thousand Infallible Arts, Records of the Unworldly and Strange, Mysteries of Nature, Dreaming of the Good Old Days.
There were books of stories as well, equally unknown to me:
The Seven Beauties, The Game of Love and Chance, The journey of Sisima, The Horn of Gold.

The middle-aged woman in the shop was cheerful, and we fell into conversation. I was pleased to realize that she took me for a native of Kuijain; I'd been in the city only a little while but had already picked up the accent. It tumed out that her husband was the printer.

“I’ve never heard of some of these,” I said, setting down
Mysteries of Nature.

“Oh, those would be the new ones.” She showed me
The Game of Love and Chance.
“This just came off the press. The author lives here in Kuijain.”

“What’s his name?”

“Hm, well, that’s between him and my husband. You see, the book’s a bit rowdy and adventuresome, not serious stuff, and when a scholar writes such a book, he needs to keep it quiet.” She snickered. “Such a man has passed the Universal Examination. He doesn’t want his literary reputation to suffer.” “Why does he write it, then?”

“For the money, what else? This fellow is as poor as a road-mender’s widow, so my husband says.”

“Your husband must have an army of page carvers working for him,” I said, examining
The Game of Love and Chance.
Every letter was beautifully executed, without a single burr or splinter mark. “So many pages to cut. And so well cut, too.”

She laughed delightedly. “Everybody says that who doesn’t know. But he has no carvers at all.”

I looked up at her. “He doesn’t? Then how does he—” “It’s a new thing. There’s two or three printers doing it now. You don’t carve a whole page at once, you see, and you don’t use wood. Instead you have every letter cut on the end of a little bar of metal, lots of bars for each letter. You might have ten bars with mishan and twelve with sessan, for example. Then you clamp the little bars together in rows, as many as you need to make all the words on a page, and you print from that.”

It seemed clumsy to me. “But then you have to keep making more little bars when you want to print a different book.” “No, no. When you’ve printed all the copies you want of one book, you take the rows apart and rearrange the bars to make a new one.”

“I see,” I said politely. It sounded clever, but I didn’t think it would catch on. You’d need so many of the bars, and every time you wanted another copy of, say.
The Seven Beauties,
you’d have to reassemble them. But with carved pages, all you had to do was put the block in the press and start printing. The man’s wife was so enthusiastic about it, though, that I agreed with her that it was a wonderful idea.

That settled, I decided to buy
The Game of Love and Chance,
and we haggled amiably over the price. Eventually we agreed on a fair one, and I got some coins out of my belt pouch.

As I held them in my palm, about to count out the money, my lips went numb and the back of my neck tingled. On a silver dram, the Sun Lord’s embossed profile shivered and dissolved, to be replaced by Nilang’s visage in miniature, staring up at me. A voice in my head whispered:

Drum Street, Fat Duck Canal, the blue door

The face vanished. As always, the sending seemed to last much longer than the heartbeat it actually required. The printer’s wife had noticed nothing. I gave her the money, tucked the book into my bag, and slung it over my shoulder.