"The ranking uncles, lord. Then they told the Paramount, but he didn’t come to inspect her. Such a pity! The lady tried to kill the little one already," Paquarin reported thoughtlessly. But hearing her own words, she realized she’d done wrong. Jholaa wanted the baby dead even before its deformity was discovered. The Runao began to sway from side to side, but stopped suddenly. "The lady Jholaa says, Better to die at birth than to live unmarriageable," she told Supaari then, and truthfully, although Jholaa had said it some years ago. Pleased with her own cleverness in stitching this into the present, Paquarin rattled on righteously, "So it must be done. No one will have a cripple. But it isn’t right for the dam to do it. It’s the sire’s duty, lord. This helpful one saved the child for your honor."
Still stunned, only half-hearing Paquarin’s chatter, Supaari looked at the midwife for a long while. Finally, making his face kindly and reassuring, he asked, "Paquarin, can you tell me, please—which foot is deformed? The right? Or the left?"
Embarrassed, she flattened her ears and she swayed again, more rapidly, and fell into her native Ruanja. "Someone isn’t certain. Someone begs pardon. Runa don’t know of such things. It’s for the lords to decide."
"Thank you, Paquarin. You are good to save the child for me." He handed the infant to the midwife, each movement as controlled and careful as those he would have performed in the next morning’s ritual. "It is best to say nothing to anyone else of my visit to the child," he told her. To be sure she understood, he said directly, in Ruanja, "Sipaj, Paquarin: someone desires your silence."
Eyes closed, ears folded back in terror, Paquarin offered her throat, expecting he would kill her to obtain it, but he smiled and reached out to calm her with a hand on her head, as a Runa father might, and assured her once again that she was good. "Will you stay with her tonight, Paquarin?" he suggested. He did not offer money, knowing that natural affection would keep her in the courtyard: this woman’s line was bred to loyalty.
"Yes, lord. Someone thanks you. The poor mite shouldn’t be alone on her only night. Someone’s heart was sad for her."
"You are good, Paquarin," he told her again. "She shall have a short life, perhaps, but a proper and honorable one, shall she not?"
"Yes, lord."
He left Paquarin in midcurtsy and moved without unseemly haste through the nursery. Heard the laughter and scuffling of Ljaat-sa Kitheri’s half-grown grandchildren, and decided that the boys’ noisy wrestling was the only sign of genuine life in this dead and stifling place, and wished them luck in killing their fathers early. Walked down narrow corridors, past empty staterooms, hearing muffled snatches of conversation behind closed and curtained doors. Strode past placid Runa porters standing vigil at each doorway, well suited to their job, too phlegmatic to notice boredom. Nodded to them as they opened the inner gates and the outer portcullis and saluted his passing. Escaped, at last, onto the quiet street.
There was no sense of release, even beyond the compound. No feeling of being under the sky, inside the wind. Supaari glared up at the pierced-wood balconies and the overhanging eaves, seemingly designed to prevent the rain from ever washing the streets clean. Why does no one sweep here? he wondered irritably, ankle deep in blown litter, outraged by the compacted, cluttered heaviness of the place. Inbrokar was chained and hobbled by every moment of its convoluted, incestuous history. Nothing is made here, he realized for the first time. It was a city of aristocrats and advisers, of agents and analysts, forever ranking and comparing, manuevering endlessly in feverish self-promotion and predatory competition. Madness, to believe he could ever have begun something here. Folly, to rage against this city’s perpetual self-imposed darkness, its fibrous, matted preoccupation with position and degree.
Moving through a city he had once found beautiful, he was greeted here and there with counterfeit deference by various Kitheri friends, acquaintances, hangers-on. Their condolences came rather too soon, the child brought to light this very day and its birth unheralded, but they were as properly composed as their authors’ faces. How long has this been planned? Supaari wondered. How many had been alerted to this delicious and elaborate joke, waiting out his wife’s pregnancy, as anxious as he had been for the appearance of an infant he was meant to kill?
It occurred to him then that the luxurious thoroughness of the plot stank of the Reshtar’s subtle sensibility. Who had spoken first of swapping Sandoz for Jholaa? he wondered, stumbling a little at the thought. Had Hlavin Kitheri steered him toward the arrangement from the start? Staggered, Supaari leaned against a wall and tried to reconstruct the negotiations, carried out in language as ornate as the Reshtar’s palace, in the company of poets and singers who shared Hlavin’s voluptuous exile and who had seemed as eager to see the merchant elevated as Supaari himself was to be ennobled. Who gained? he asked himself, standing blindly in the street, oblivious to passersby. Who profited? Hlavin. His brothers. Their friends. Hlavin must have known Jholaa was too old, must have suggested to Dherai and Bhansaar how amusing it would be if the Darjan lineage were extinguished in its infancy, by its own deluded founder—
Lightheaded with humiliation, Supaari fought nausea and, dearly bought illusions gone, knew with a strange certainty that sickness was not normal for Sandoz’s kind. Courteous and desiring to please, Supaari knew that he himself had invited Hlavin Kitheri’s contempt as unknowingly as Sandoz had invited…
Who shall pay for this? he thought. And, fury rising to fill the place of shame, he told himself with ugly irony that this was an unfortunate commercial phrasing.
Seething, he turned back toward the Kitheri lair, his mind black with thoughts of bloody revenge, of challenges and ha’aran duels. But there was no recourse. Wait until the morning and, before witnesses, expose Kitheri duplicity—and listen to the laughter as the plot became merely a joke, played out publicly. Save the child’s life now—and listen to the laughter again someday, when marriage contracts were made to be broken. Alive, beautiful and enchanting, the daughter would end as the mother had: a prop in an elaborate comedy, used to humiliate him for the amusement of the gentry.
It’s not that personal, he thought, slowing down, in sight now of the Kitheri compound. It’s not about me. It’s simply my category that is to be kept in place. They need us where we are. Third-born merchants. The Runa. We feed and clothe and shelter them. We provide their needs and their wants and their whims and their desires. We are the foundation of their palace and they dare not let one stone shift, or the whole of it will fall around them.
He leaned against a neighbor’s wall, staring at the palisaded enclosure of the family that had ruled Inbrokar for generations, and came finally to a cool familiar place in his heart, where decisions were made without anger or wishes.
From long experience, he knew the Pon river barge schedule out of Inbrokar’s docks. Supaari VaGayjur considered the bargain he had made and fell back on a merchant’s honor. He had kept his part of the agreement. He owed these people nothing.
I will take what is mine, he thought, and go.
"FRANKLY, HLAVIN, I EXPECTED MORE OF HIM," REMARKED IRA’IL VRO to the Reshtar of Galatna. Alerted by informants, they had watched Supaari return to the Kitheri compound, moving to a corner tower to observe as the merchant spoke to the midwife in the back courtyard and then left with her and the child. Ira’il faced Hlavin Kitheri, only to confront an unnerving stare. "You must be so disappointed…" Ira’il said, voice trailing off uncertainly.
Confused, he inhaled guardedly to catch Kitheri’s scent. There was no whiff of anger, but Ira’il turned back to the tower window to cover his unease. He could, by shifting his eyes a bit, pick out the treasury and provincial revenue offices, the state archives and libraries, the arena located only steps from the High Court. The baths, the embassies; the towering stone pillars, with their silvery cloisonne of radio transmission equipment, rising from the General Command. He knew all the landmarks now and admired the cityscape: a timeless celebration of stability and unchanging balance—