“Well! What good taste, Fleet Captain! And I’m glad Hetnys mentions it.” She gestured, and a servant bent near, received murmured instruction, departed. “I have something you’ll be interested to see.”
Out in the dark a high, inhuman voice sang out, a long, sustained series of vowels on a single pitch. “Ah!” cried Fosyf. “That’s what I was waiting for.” Another voice joined the first, slightly lower, and then another, a bit higher, and another and another, until there were at least a dozen intoning voices, coming and going, dissonant and oddly choral-sounding.
Clearly Fosyf expected some sort of reaction from me. “What is it?” I asked.
“They’re plants,” Fosyf said, apparently delighted at the thought of having surprised me. “You might have seen some when you were out this morning. They have a sort of sac that collects air, and when that’s full, and the sun goes down, they whistle it out. As long as it’s not raining. Which is why you didn’t hear them last night.”
“Weeds,” observed Captain Hetnys. “Quite a nuisance, actually. They’ve tried to eradicate them, but they keep coming back.”
“Supposedly,” continued Fosyf, acknowledging the captain’s remark with a nod, “the person who bred them was a temple initiate. And the plants sing various words in Xhi, all of them to do with the temple mysteries, and when the other initiates heard the plants sing they realized the mysteries had been revealed to everyone. They murdered the designer. Tore her to pieces with their bare hands, supposedly, right here by this lake.”
I hadn’t thought to ask what sort of guesthouse this had been. “This was a holy place, then? Is there a temple?” In my experience, major temples were nearly always surrounded by cities or at least villages, and I’d seen no sign of that as we’d flown in. I wondered if there had used to be one, and it was razed to make way for tea, or if this whole, huge area had been sacrosanct. “Was the lake holy, and this was a temple guesthouse?”
“Very little gets past the fleet captain!” exclaimed Raughd.
“Indeed,” agreed her mother. “What’s left of the temple is across the lake. There was an oracle there for a while, but all that’s left now is a superstition about wish-granting fish.”
And the name of the tea grown on the once-sacred ground, I suspected. I wondered how the Xhais felt about that. “What are the words the plants sing?” I knew very little Xhi and didn’t recognize any words in particular in the singing discord coming out of the dark.
“You get different lists,” Fosyf replied genially, “depending on who you ask.”
“I used to go out in the dark when I was a child,” remarked Raughd, “and look for them. They stop if you shine a light on them.”
I hadn’t actually seen any children since we’d arrived, except for the field workers. I found that odd, in such a setting, but before I could wonder aloud or ask, the servant Fosyf had sent away returned, carrying a large box.
It was gold, or at least gilded, inlaid with red, blue, and green glass in a style that was older than I was. Older, in fact, than Anaander Mianaai’s three thousand and some years. I had only ever seen this sort of thing in person once before, and that when I was barely a decade old, some two thousand years ago. “Surely,” I said, “that’s a copy.”
“It is not, Fleet Captain,” replied Fosyf, very pleased to say it, clearly. The servant set the box on the ground in our midst and then stepped away. Fosyf bent, lifted the lid. Nestled inside, a tea service—flask, bowls for twelve, strainer. All glass and gold, inlaid with elaborate, snaking patterns of blue and green.
I still held the handled bowl I’d been drinking from, and now I lifted it. Five obligingly came forward and took it, but did not move away. I had not intended her to. I got out of my seat, squatted beside the box.
The inside of the lid was also gold, though a strip of wood seven centimeters wide above and below the gold showed what it covered. That sheet of gold was engraved. In Notai. I could read it, though I doubted anyone else here could. Several old houses (Seivarden’s among them), and some newer ones that found the idea romantic and appealing, claimed to be descended from Notai ancestors. Of those, some would have recognized this writing for what it was, possibly would have been able to read a word or two. Only a few would have bothered to actually learn this language.
“What does it say?” I asked, though of course I knew already.
“It’s an invocation of the god Varden,” said Captain Hetnys, “and a blessing on the owner.”
Varden is your strength, it said, Varden is your hope, and Varden is your joy. Life and prosperity to the daughter of the house. On the happy and well-deserved occasion.
I looked up at Fosyf. “Where did you get this?”
“Aha,” she replied, “so Hetnys was right, you are a connoisseur! I’d never have suspected if she hadn’t told me.”
“Where,” I repeated, “did you get this?”
Fosyf gave a short laugh. “And single-minded, yes, but I already knew that. I bought it from Captain Hetnys.”
Bought it. This ancient, priceless thing would have been nearly unthinkable as a gift. The idea of anyone taking any amount of money for it was impossible. Still squatting, I turned to Captain Hetnys, who to my unspoken question said, “The owner was in need of cash. She didn’t want to sell it herself because, well, imagine anyone knowing you had to sell something like that. So I brokered the deal for her.”
“And took your cut, too,” put in Raughd, who I suspected wasn’t enjoying being eclipsed by the tea set.
“True,” acknowledged Captain Hetnys.
Even a small cut of that must have been staggering. This wasn’t the sort of thing an individual owned, except perhaps nominally. No living, remotely functional house would allow a single member to alienate something like this. The tea set I had seen, when I had been a brand-new ship not ten years old, had not belonged to an individual. It had been part of the equipment of a decade room of a Sword, brought out while my captain was visiting, to impress her. That one had been purple and silver and mother-of-pearl, and the god named in the inscription had been a different one. And it had read, On the happy and well-deserved occasion of your promotion. Captain Seimorand. And a date a mere half a century before the ascendancy of Anaander Mianaai, before the set had been taken as a souvenir of its owner’s defeat.
I was sure the bottom of the inscription in the box lid now before me had been cut off, that On the happy and well-deserved occasion was only the beginning of the sentence. There was no sign of the cut—the edges of the gold looked smooth, the wood underneath undamaged. But I was sure someone had removed it, cut a strip off the bottom, and put back what was left, centered so that it didn’t look so much as though part of the inscription had been removed.
This wasn’t something passed down for centuries among some captain’s descendants—those descendants would never have removed the name of the ancestor who had left them such a thing. One might remove the name to conceal its origin, and even damaged this was worth a great deal. One might conceal its origin out of shame—anyone who saw it might be able to guess which house had been forced to part with such a treasure. But most families that owned such things had other and better ways to capitalize such possessions. Seivarden’s house, for instance, had accepted gifts and money in exchange for tours of that ancient, captured Notai shuttle.