The boy had small, sharp teeth all exactly the same size.
Yama noticed that his black, pointed fingernails were more like claws, and that his hands, with leathery pads on their palms and hooked thumbs stuck stiffly halfway up the wrists, resembled an animal’s paws. He had seen many of Pandaras’s bloodline yesterday, portering and leading draft animals and carrying out a hundred other kinds of menial jobs. The strength of the city.
Yama asked about the caterans who had been eating in the taproom of the inn, but Pandaras shrugged. “I don’t know them. They arrived only an hour before you, and they’ll leave this morning for the Water Market by the Black Temple, looking for people who want to employ them. I thought that you might be one of them, until you showed my master the coin.”
“Perhaps I am one, but do not yet know it,” Yama said, thinking of his vow. He knew that he was still too young to join the army in the usual way, but his age would be no bar to becoming an irregular. Prefect Corin might think him young, but he had already killed a man in close combat, and had had more adventures in the past two decads than most people could expect in a lifetime. He said, “Before we go anywhere else, take me to the Water Market, Pandaras. I want to see how it is done.”
“If you join up then I’ll go with you, and be your squire. You’ve enough money to buy a good rifle, or better still, a pistol, and you’ll need armor, too. I’ll polish it bright between battles, and keep your devices clean—”
Yama laughed. “Hush! You build a whole fantasy on a single whim. I only want to find out about the caterans; I do not yet want to become one. After I know more about where I come from, then, yes, I intend to enlist and help win the war. My brother was killed fighting the heretics. I have made a vow to fight in his place.”
Pandaras drained his cup of tea and spat fragments of bark
onto the ground. “We’ll do the first before the Castellan of the Twelve Devotions sounds its noon gun,” he said, “and the second before the Galaxy rises. With my help, anything is possible. But you must forgive my prattle. My people love to talk and to tell stories, and invent tall tales most of all. No doubt you see us as laborers little better than beasts of burden. And that is indeed how we earn our bread and beer, but although we may be poor in the things of the world, we are rich in the things of imagination. Our stories and songs are told and sung by every bloodline, and a few of us even gain brief fame as jongleurs to the great houses and the rich merchants, or as singers and musicians and storytellers of cassette recordings.”
Yama said, “It would seem that with all their talents, your people deserve a better station than they have.”
“Ah, but we do not live long enough to profit from them. No more than twenty years is the usual; twenty-five is almost unheard of. You’re surprised, but that’s how it is. It is our curse and our gift. The swiftest stream polishes the pebbles smoothest, as my grandfather had it, and so with us. We live brief but intense lives, for from the pace of our living comes our songs and stories.”
Yama said, “Then may I ask how old you are?”
Pandaras showed his sharp teeth. “You think me your age, I’d guess, but I’ve no more than four years, and in another I’ll marry. That is, if I don’t go off adventuring with you.”
“If you could finish my search in a day, I would be the happiest man on Confluence, but I think it will take longer than that.”
“A white boat and a shining woman, and a picture of one of your ancestors made before the building of Confluence. What could be more distinctive? I’ll make a song of it soon enough. Besides, you said that you know to begin your search in the records of the Department of Apothecaries and Chinirgeons.”
“If Dr. Dismas did not lie. He lied about much else.”
The sky above the crowded rooftops was blue now, and traffic was thickening along the road. Fishing boats were moving out past the ends of the piers of the floating russet and tan sails bellying in the wind and white birds flying in their wake as they breasted the swell of the morning tide. As he walked beside Pandaras, Yama thought of the hundred leagues of docks, of the thousands of boats of the vast fishing fleets which put out every day to feed the myriad mouths of the city, and began to understand the true extent of Ys.
How could he ever expect to find out about his birth, or of the history of any one man, in such a mutable throng?
And yet, he thought, Dr. Dismas had found out something in the records of his department, and he did not doubt that he could find it too, and perhaps more. Freshly escaped from his adventure with the cateran and from the fusty fate the Aedile and Prefect Corin had wished upon him, Yama felt his heart rise. It did not occur to him that he might fail in his self-appointed quest. He was, as Pandaras had pointed out, still very young, and had yet to fail in anything important.
The first money changer refused Yama’s rials after a mere glance. The second, whose office was in a tiny basement with a packed-dirt floor and flaking pink plaster walls, spent a long time looking at the coins under a magnifying screen, then scraped a fleck from one coin and tried to dissolve it in a minim of aqua ragia. The money changer was a small, scrawny old man almost lost in the folds of his black silk robe. He clucked to himself when the fleck of gold refused to dissolve even when he heated the watchglass, then motioned to his impassive bodyguard, who fetched out tea bowls and a battered aluminium pot, and resumed his position at the foot of the steps up to the street.
Pandaras haggled for an hour with the money changer, over several pots of tea and a plate of tiny honeyeakes so piercingly sweet that they made Yama’s teeth ache. Yama felt cramped and anxious in the dank little basement with the tramp of feet going to and fro overhead and the bodyguard blocking most of the sunlight that spilled down the stair, and was relieved when at last Pandaras announced that the deal was done.
“We’ll starve in a month, but this old man has a stone for a heart,” he said, staring boldly at the money changer.
“You are quite welcome to take your custom elsewhere,” the money changer said, thrusting his sharp face from the fold of black silk over his head and giving Pandaras a fierce, hawkish look. “I’d say your coins were stolen, and any price I give you would be fair enough. As it is, I risk ruining my reputation on your behalf.”
“You’ll not need to work again for a year,” Pandaras retorted. Despite the money changer’s impatience, he insisted on counting the slew of silver and iron coins twice over. The iron pennies were pierced—for stringing around the neck, Pandaras said. He demonstrated the trick with his share before shaking hands with the money changer, who suddenly smiled and wished them every blessing of the Preservers.
The street was bright and hot after the money changer’s basement. The road was busier than ever, and the traffic crowding its wide asphalt pavement moved at walking pace. The air was filled with the noise of hooves and wheels, the shouts and curses of drivers, the cries of hawkers and merchants, the silver notes of whistles and the brassy clangor of bells. Small boys darted amongst the legs of beasts and men, collecting the dung of horses, oxen and camels, which they would shape into patties and dry on walls for fuel for cooking fires. There were beggars and thieves, sky-clad mendicants and palmers, jugglers and contortionists, mountebanks and magicians, and a thousand other wonders, so many that as he walked along amongst the throng Yama soon stopped noticing any but the most outrageous, for else he would have gone mad with amazement.
A black dome had been raised up amongst the masts of the ships and the flat roofs of the godowns; at the edge of the river, and Yama pointed to it. “That was not there when we first came here this morning,” he said.