Part 3 (2/2)
SIX.
Chirak Shaldeth was sitting behind his desk as Habnit led Shaldis between the tiny beds of jasmine, roses, lime, and avocado trees of the innermost court.
Her grandfather's study, and his chambers off the second-floor gallery nearby, formed a sanctum of silence from the noise of the camel-drivers' court at the front of the house and the smokes and stink of the kitchen yard that lay between. Though both his sons-Habnit and Shaldis's uncle, Tjagan-had chambers off the opposite gallery, Chirak had always forbidden either-or anyone else-to enter the garden when he was in his study. It was the only silence and privacy in the crowded house, and Chirak claimed it as his alone.
The folded lattice wall that would later in the day shut some of the morning cool into the study hadn't yet been put up, and she saw her grandfather as a pale shape looking out from the shadows of his private cave. When Habnit and Shaldis stopped in the entrance, the old man's square red face twisted.
”Veil yourself, girl. Any man would take you for a wh.o.r.e.”
There was a time when Shaldis would have retorted that she'd been in such a hurry to come here to save his life that she'd left her veils behind-and would have cheerfully taken the beating for such impertinence-but she'd spent many months now observing her friend Summerchild's impeccable good manners and how the lovely concubine could simply sidestep insults without replying in kind. So now she took a deep breath, salaamed with the exact depth and simplicity that her brother Tulik did when coming into Chirak's presence, and said, ”Father told me an attempt had been made on your life, sir.”
Rage blazed up in those pale-brown eyes, but so clear were her unspoken words, I can leave if you don't like the sight of my face, that he said nothing.
This forbearance left Shaldis speechless with shock. She thought, He's truly afraid.
She'd never seen him forgo a burst of rage before, not against a member of his family, only against other businessmen and merchants, whose goodwill he needed.
”What happened?” A bandage wrapped his neck to hold a dressing to the left side of his jaw, and the left sleeve of his robe bunched over more bandages underneath. ”You're hurt, sir.”
Beard and eyebrows jerked forward. ”Of course I'm hurt! It's no thanks to the cowardly imbeciles in this household that I wasn't killed!” All the smoking bile he would have hurled at her for not prostrating herself in the deepest of the twenty salaams proper to women-and a granddaughter of the house to its patriarch at that!-spewed into the glare he directed at his son. ”So this is the brat that's grown so crafty, is it, Habnit? Just like any other female, telling me what I already know! She's a fool, and the daughter of one!”
”Have you had anyone look at your wounds, sir?” Shaldis felt sick at the way her father cringed from the words, marveled that her own voice sounded so cool and steady.
The old man rounded on her. ”Fat lot of good it would do! There isn't a wizard in the town who could charm a wart off my backside anymore! And if you think I'll let some midwife smear it with rotted leaves and lizard dung you're out, girl! I've good-healing flesh. Ask any man in my company of the militia, when I was a boy.”
”Father, you must-” began Habnit, and the old man snarled at him like a dog.
”If I did all you said I must, I'd be a poor man, and a dead one, too! As for this brainless whelp of yours-”
”What happened, sir?”
His hand flinched toward the rod that lay across his desk-the fourfold split bamboo with which he lashed the teyn and which he didn't scruple to use on his sons and grandchildren as well. But he drew it back. Shaldis had thin, straight white scars on her arms and legs from girlhood beatings. It was one of the things that had made her mother plead with Chirak: too many scars could easily sink a prospective marriage, marking a girl as defiant. Parents and matchmakers looked for them.
How did I ever live this way? Day out and day in?
Chirak's lip drew back from his teeth again. ”I was attacked in my chamber, is what happened- Didn't you listen to what your father said? I woke hearing a noise-it was pitch-black, even the night-light had gone out, though there's no magic to that: that imbecile Flower never puts enough oil in the lamp.”
Maybe that has something to do with your withholding food from all the maidservants-who were all named Flower, the custom in most wealthy houses-for wasting oil.
”I felt hands seize me and I pulled aside as a knife slashed into me. I shouted-I've had a couple of the camel drivers sleeping in the gallery outside my room, since those d.a.m.ned protective wards I paid a fortune for have quit working, and the wizard who laid them on the house seems to have skipped town.”
He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his bamboo rod and slapped angrily at the wood of his desk. ”I pulled away and the slime-got b.a.s.t.a.r.d followed me, as if he could see in the dark. When your father and your uncle burst open the door there was no one in the chamber and the door and window shutters were bolted from inside. They ransacked the room and found no one. The drivers were still waking up in the gallery, both of them. Drunken louts and fools, but the door was bolted. It's a pretty pa.s.s the world's come to when you can't get a wizard who'll put a spell of ward on an honest man's house, but there's still plenty of them around who'll hire themselves out as a.s.sa.s.sins! Only a wizard could have got into the room or out of it without being seen.”
”Do you keep gold or valuables in your chamber these days, sir? Or anything a robber would have been seeking?”
”Just like a woman, trying to find other explanations for what's staring her in the face! Have you ever known me to keep such a thing in my room, girl? What would I be doing that for, when I have a perfectly good strong room?” He lashed sideways toward the strong room with his rod, then flicked Habnit a stinging slice on the arm. ”What G.o.d did I offend, to deserve you bringing a stupid female into my house to plague me with inanities? Someone tried to murder me, girl!” He slewed back furiously to Shaldis. His voice shrilled, ”Not rob me, not rape me, not kiss me in the dark! How much clearer do I need to make it? Someone put a spell on the guards to send 'em to sleep; someone who could get out of a bolted chamber and rebolt the doors and windows behind him! D'you need it spelled out for you?”
”Yes, I do, sir,” replied Shaldis evenly. ”I'm sorry if the questions I ask seem trivial to you, but small details help me put together a picture of what happened and who I should be looking for.”
”You should be looking for a wizard!” the old man screamed at her, and the rod whistled close to her face. ”That's why your imbecile of a father wanted to bring you here! A wizard who hates me! Now can you or can't you find him?”
”Her,” said Shaldis.
”WHAT?”
”Her, sir. Every wizard has lost the ability to work magic. If magic was used, then your attacker was a woman.”
”That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard in my life! It's the kind of puling bathhouse rumor women pick up and believe rather than look at the facts! Because there's been a raft of charlatans in this city and not a decent teacher in that precious Citadel of yours-and well they deserved to be run out! Let them work for a living for a change!-you and every other fool in the marketplaces just up and decides that all men have lost their power! Stuff! I want to hear no more of it.”
He jerked to his feet, not quite as tall as her father but wiry, with a leashed and dangerous power. He slapped the desk with his rod, and Shaldis fought not to jump.
”If that's the best you can do, girl, you can go back to your precious Citadel, and good riddance to you! I told you how it would be, boy,” he added, his green-flecked glare raking his son. ”Women haven't the brains to see what's under their noses! Now get her out of here before I get truly angry!”
SEVEN.
I should probably have a look at his chamber before he comes out of his study,” said Shaldis.
Interrupted in the midst of his nervous apologies, Habnit regarded his daughter with surprise. She returned the look with a calm perfected in eighteen months of continuous hazing by the male students of the Citadel. She felt now as she had during those ugly days: knees trembling, stomach hurting, jaw aching from gritting her teeth. In those days each of the masters had been secretly confronting his own loss of power-they had been of no help to a girl who obviously still had it.
In what she hoped was a rational voice she went on, ”And I'll need to see every woman in the household.”
Her father goggled, then stammered, ”Of-of course,” and led her through the gloomy pa.s.sageway that connected the rear garden to the busy kitchen court. ”Let's just go up to my room so I can get a-a tablet and stylus for you.”
Shaldis had a tablet and stylus in the leather satchel slung around her shoulder, but she followed her father up the stairs anyway. She knew what he really wanted was the wine he always kept in his room.
She supposed, if one had to live in her grandfather's house, it helped to start drinking an hour after sunup. At least it clearly helped her father. She'd seldom in her girlhood seen him staggeringly drunk, but never entirely sober.
The pain of that girlhood awareness returned, but it was an old pain, like the shadow of a cloud she knew would pa.s.s.
They took the wooden stairs that ascended from the kitchen court to the upstairs gallery. This arcaded wooden walkway ran around all four sides of that busy heart of the household. From it, they cut back through the maids' dormitory to the gallery that similarly surrounded her grandfather's garden. It would have been more direct to climb the stairs from the garden itself-there were two flights of them, one on the north side leading directly to her grandfather's rooms and one on the south to the smaller chambers of her father and uncle-but in that case her grandfather would have seen them from his study.
Neither Shaldis nor her father felt any need to comment on this roundabout route. But after two years away from the household, Shaldis was interested to see how naturally she fell back into the unspoken set of local rules about not disturbing Grandfather. Fear of the old man seemed to breathe from every mud brick and painted pillar of the house, like tainted water that everyone drinks because there is no other.
At the top of the kitchen court stairs she halted and looked down into the big rectangle below. The pregnant jenny Five Cakes was now sweeping the soft, pitted bricks of its pavement: Shaldis had always found the slow, deliberate movements of the teyn, and their habitual silence, curiously comforting, though she'd heard they could move with terrible speed when roused. Shaldis's mother emerged from the kitchen, unveiled since this area of the house was harem but with her hair bundled under a striped scarf, followed by Fish-Hook, the biggest of their boar teyn, carrying a huge iron cauldron in his arms.
Of course they'd be dyeing cloth the day I come back to investigate in the household, thought Shaldis. The place would stink of boiling urine for weeks.
Her mother, always stout, had put on weight, she saw, under her billowing yellow dress, but her voice as she gave Fish-Hook his simple instructions was as lilting and sweet as ever. The girl who skipped behind her Shaldis took for a very young maid-her grandfather believed in buying children for slaves because they were cheaper-until she heard her mother call the girl Foursie.
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