“Inform me of your choice in the morning,” he said, bowed, and made his way back to his tent.
A messenger, Tastis’ son had said, with a note under your seal will always find access to the city. Tegestu smiled grimly, pleased with his plan. This unknown, already-doomed man, he thought, will have such a seal. As he goes about my business of treachery.
CHAPTER 18
“There,” Campas said. “I thought you’d like to see it.”
Leaving the landing, where it had been discharging cargo all night, was a heavy, bluff-bowed seagoing barge, ninety feet long and made for the coastal trade, clinker-built, with huge iron-strapped wooden leeboards and two masts: the first amidships, leaning slightly forward like a tipsy sailor, and the other, much smaller, aft of the tiller. Both sails, unfurled now in the light breeze to help the barge move along the placid canal, were big lugsails, slatting loudly in the uncertain breeze.
“Fiono sails,” Campas said. “The first time they’ve been put on a big boat.” He looked at her and nodded. “With the wind from a little west of south like this, other barges would have to be towed,” he said.
Fiona turned her eyes from the barge to Campas. “You seem to know a lot about barges for a literary man,” she said.
Campas grinned. “Most Arrandalla know about the sea, and about the river traffic,” he said. “Also, my father had an interest in a chandler’s shop, and I apprenticed there for a time when I was twelve or so, keeping the books. Met a lot of the bargemen that way, and the deep-sea sailors as well.”
The barge passed, the two visible crewmen too occupied with steering the vessel, and with keeping the sails drawing, to pay attention to the two figures on the bank. The barge, varnished a deep brown all over, had no ornamentation except for a little red trim on the transom, on which the barge’s name was picked out in gold leaf: FIONA’S BLESSING. Fiona, as she made out the lettering, felt herself flushing.
Campas’ grin broadened. “Sailors give benefactors their due,” he nodded. “They’ll never forget you, not for what you’ve done for them. Every seaman who ever was trapped on a lee shore will bless you for the sail that will let them claw off it.”
“That’s kind of them.’’ Fiona said. “But not necessary.” These bargemen were people whose lives she had affected in a direct, personal way; and she hadn’t even met them. The sail had been her passport into the inner circles of Arrandal, given coldly as a matter of policy: now she was being credited by sailors with a compassionate intervention she had never intended.
Well, she thought. At least her credit was good someplace.
The barge having passed, silver ripples closing easily over its wake, they walked toward her tent. Campas was cheerful, bubbling with happy conversation — now that the barges with part of Necias’ household had arrived he had less work to do, and more time to spend with his poetry, and with her.
Fiona peered upward, past the brim of her sun hat, at her lover. Barring accident, she thought coldly, my life expectancy is four times his. In another fifteen years he will be an old man, his teeth going bad, rheumatism or body parasites or a host of other wasting diseases making permanent conquest of his body. There is so much we cannot share, including all my history prior to this: he couldn’t hope to understand even the smallest part. We cannot share our lives; that would be a tragedy for us both. The most we can hope for is a season or two. Then I will help him find some deissu’s daughter for a first wife, and make an end. That would be for the best.
He glanced at her, arid she smiled up at him, contented pleasure filling her. Enough, for the moment, to enjoy his company, his wit, his laughter. Even for her, the future was uncertain enough to make her value the present, an interlude to be treasured in the memory.
Ahead she saw a Classanu in quiet livery running across the empty parade ground, puffs of dust rising from his boots as he dashed for the tents of one of the Brodaini encampments — and then the Classanu looked in their direction, stopped dead, and started running directly for them, his arms waving. Campas muttered something under his breath and increased his pace to meet him.
“Translator, ilean Campas!” the man said, breathless. “My lord needs a translator — there is some trouble. In the camp of Captain Pantas! Hurry, please, ilean!”
Campas cast a look back at Fiona, a look that said stay back, and then began to run toward the flag that marked Pantas’ camp. The Classanu sketched a bow in his direction and ran for the Brodaini tents.
Pantas, Fiona thought. Bowmen, members of the city militia who used the laminated Arrandalla bow. Pantas had bought them all black wide-brimmed hats and blue neckerchiefs, and they considered themselves elite.
She began to run. She was a fast runner, having for sport or pleasure run long, dusty distances over the arid plains of her homeworld, and she settled to a fast ground-eating stride that, despite his longer legs, almost caught Campas before he arrived at the bowmen’s camp.
Pantas had quartered his men in an old stone cow-barn belonging to one of the farms that occupied the firm, fertile ground near the city — the hay had long gone to feed Tastis’ animals, but the big building was a cool contrast to the midday heat, and better shelter than tents would have been. As Fiona approached she saw a roiling mass of men outside, milling in the dust, and an angry babble of voices.
She slowed, taking her gloves from her belt and pulling them on, then reaching to the back of her neck to pull the hood of her privy-coat out from beneath her Arrandalla shirt. She heard Campas’ voice raised, cutting through the shouting, demanding angrily.
The crowd parted for him and Fiona saw, in the middle of a circle of the bowmen, a party of a dozen grim-faced Brodaini standing back-to-back in a defensive circle. The bowmen, she saw, had their bows strung, but as yet no arrow had been drawn from their short, ornamented quivers; the Brodaini had their long, sword-bladed spears planted firmly in the ground, ready for instant use, but for the moment they were threatening no one. Coming closer, Fiona saw the Brodaini had a prisoner, one of the bowmen, forced on his knees in the center of the group.
“What’s the meaning of this? Where’s your captain?” Campas demanded, to be immediately answered by a dozen outraged voices. He shook his head violently and cut the air with his hands, and the noise subsided. One strangely hissing, nasal voice came rising above the throng.
“They’ve got one of ours, and we mean to get him back! We’re not going to let them take away our corporal!”
“Treason!” It was a Brodaini-accented voice, speaking Abessas with effort. “Man speaks treason. Arrest man. Man traitor or spy.”
Campas, his mouth a tight line, wheeled to speak to the Brodaini in their own tongue. Fiona thought she saw relief in their besieged faces.
“I was making an inspection with my men, ilean translator,” the Brodainu said. He was a short, stocky, self-important-seeming man, his face sun-browned and brutal. “We’re ordered to inspect the sanitary arrangements — these Abessla pigs don’t understand about slit trenches, they just drop their trousers wherever they want, and so we have the authority to police the camp, and make them defecate like human beings.” Campas’ frown deepened as he heard his people so described, but he waited patiently for the man to get to the point.
“We heard this man speak treason,” the Brodainu said, turning to scowl down at the captive. “We heard him say to his friends he wanted Tastis’ government in Arrandal.” His tone was stubborn as he recited the story, as if insisting on a point that seemed obscure even to him. “We can’t have corporals talking like that to their men,” he continued. “We arrested him to take him before the Judge Advocate. His friends interfered.”