"Come and buy! Come and laugh! Come one, come all, people of Montinore Manor!"
The tinerant wagon-the legal term for its owners was licensed itinerant -was a simple box with a curved sheet-metal roof, but gaudily painted. Light trucks had furnished the wheels and springs; four red-and-white oxen drew it. Right now they were lying down and chewing their cuds unconcernedly while her father walked around the vehicle and unfolded the sides. Another much like it followed; that was their sleeping quarters and for baggage, with the family's one horse hitched behind the door in the rear, and a tin chimney through the roof.
Rogelio Maldonado opened the cargo wagon up in cleverly arranged stepped metal trays on both sides, a staircaselike arrangement that reached almost down to the muddy surface of the village green. There was a tempting smell from bottles of perfume, and from trays of spices-curry powder, dried chilies, ground sage and sesame seeds; there were rock candy and crystallized ginger; toys and picture books and tops; cloth in bolts and little cakes of wild-indigo essence and saffron and madder. Ribbons and precious cotton sewing thread (and the newer, distinctly inferior linen variety for those who could not afford it) shared space with buttons and vied with tools and pans and pots and a few luxury foods like potted shrimp and pickled peppers and jams. There were also the miniature anvil and hammers and punches, last and awls, that proclaimed the travelers to be tinkers and shoemakers and repairers of leather goods as well. Bundles of wildflowers hung from twine set along the sides of both wagons, in the first stages of drying to make sachets.
A crowd was already gathering from the homes and cottages along the single patched asphalt street of the settlement below Montinore Manor, drawn from wheel and loom and garden hoe and workbench by the noise and the gear and the prospect of a break in the dull round of days. There were three hundred souls in the village, a little more than average, most of them here on the Saturday half-holiday: holiday meaning for most it was time to do for themselves and their families instead of the landholder. A few in the crowd were probably servants from the manor or castle from the embroidered tabards, and a pair were off-duty soldiers in the padded gambesons usually worn below armor for protection, and now keeping their owners warm against the spring evening. She looked around, deliberately waking her memories; when you moved every couple of days that was necessary, or you could get lost because your mind used its map of some other familiar place.
Yes, there was a glimpse of white off to the north and west, over low, rolling hills covered in leafy rows of vines-the manor house, a pre-Change mansion that had been the center of a vineyard estate. A little more west of north, and the brutal exclamation point of the tower of Castle Ath reared over a low hill, flying the black-and-red of the Lord Protector and the more complex heraldry of the new baronet; mountains green and forested rose beyond, and to the west. That was all demesne land. South more vineyards, east the old railroad tracks and the five open fields where the tenants had their strips of land, looking more settled every time they visited as the trees planted along their edges grew.
Hmmm, Estella thought, considering as she danced. They're better-dressed than last time. Especially the peons. More shoes, too. And the place looks tidier, the church has been painted. As we heard, there's a new broom here:
The fiddle squealed on as Papa unrolled the awnings above the slanted steplike trays of their goods. He claimed to have a little gitano blood, but it was probably not true, though she and her brothers looked the part-which in his rare moments of candor he admitted was what you got when you crossed Sonoran mestizo with small-town Arizona Anglo. The half-believed claim had gotten them help that let them live through the Change-she remembered little of that, since she had been barely ten-and nowadays some of the other tinerants were the genuine article, and it was the fashion among the rest to imitate it. Hiding in plain sight; if you were suspect and despised because you were a tinerant and a gypsy, you'd be less likely to be suspected of witchcraft.
Other than size Montinore village was similar to hundreds of others in Portland's territories, which was no accident; they were built to a standard pattern out of the Lord Protector's history books. The church was brick, and a few of the free-tenant houses were pre-Change, ordinary frame structures covered in clapboard. Others had been moved here, hauled with ox-teams or disassembled and rebuilt. The peon cottages were all new-built from salvaged materials, one room and a loft, with a toolshed and chicken coop attached. Each house was on its own garden plot, a long narrow rectangle stretching back from the road; the tenant farmhouses had barns and byres attached on their larger allotments. There was a mill here, built on a water-furrow from a dam on the creek a few hundred yards away; the wheel wasn't turning right now. The bailiff's house stood near it, and the miller's, the two best in the village with the priest's cottage right behind.
"Come buy!" Estella shouted again. "Come buy!"
Suddenly an off-duty soldier grabbed her around the waist from behind, hands groping at her breasts. "I'll buy!" he said, laughing.
You think that's funny, pig? Let's see how you laugh at this. But no, better not be too emphatic.
Fortunately he wasn't wearing his hauberk, which would make it easier to reach behind and grab so: and then he howled and let her go.
"That would be renting," she said sweetly, as he bent and rubbed at himself and laughed-it had been more of a playful tweak than a real wrench-and-twist. "Ask someone else, soldier, and don't believe all the stories you hear about tinerant girls."
Then the steward was there holding his white staff, with the fat bailiff in tow; she let the tambourine fall silent along with the fiddle. Both were looking more sour-faced than usual, and the bailiff's even more loathsome son looked more like a sulky boar than he had the time before.
"You have your permit?" Wielman said.
Her father bowed-the whole family did, except for Estella and her mother, who curtsied. Then he produced the stamped, signed authorization they had for travel and petty trade; it was countersigned by a bishop and several priests, all of them deceived by the ostentatious piety of the Maldonado family. Such permits were something the PPA gave out only grudgingly, and only because they knew that otherwise swapping and barter would go on underground.
Which they do anyway, Estella thought. Along with a good deal else, by the Lord and Lady!
"You can stay four days and nights," he said at last, after checking that the signatures were up-to-date and taking the bag of "gifts" her father offered, along with the regulation fee; the bailiff got another. "We have a new lord: lady: here, so be careful. I don't have the right of the High Justice, but she does."
And nobody would care if she used it on tinerant trash, Estella thought, grim behind her smile.