Frans was hugely entertained. "You play cards?" he asked Sandoz.
"I wouldn’t want to take unfair advantage," Sandoz demurred, unruffled by the drama. He stood and carried his dishes back to the galley. "I have always heard that the Dutch Reformed aren’t much for cards."
"We aren’t much for liquor either," Frans pointed out, pouring another round for everyone but Nico, who didn’t drink because the sisters had told him not to.
"This is true," Sandoz said, returning to the table. "Poker?"
"It’ll make a change from that bloody scopa," said Sean.
"How about you, Nico?" Frans asked, reaching for a worn deck that was always on the table.
"I’ll just watch," Nico said courteously.
"I know, Nico," Frans said patiently. "I was only being polite. It’s okay, Nico. You don’t have to play."
"I’d like to send a message home first, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble," Sandoz said.
"Radio’s right through that hatch, to your left," Frans told him. "It’s all set up. Just record the message and hit ’send.’ Yell if you need help."
"Not bloody likely," Sean muttered as Sandoz left the commons.
He sat down in front of the communications equipment and considered for a while what he would say. "Fucked again," came to mind, but the message would arrive when Celestina was still very young, and he rejected the remark as too vulgar.
He settled on eleven words. "Taken by force," he said. "I think of you. Listen with your hearts."
19
City of Inbrokar
2047, Earth-Rotative
"I WON’T HAVE IT," THE AMBASSADOR FUMED, CLAWS CLICKING AS HE paced from one end of the embassy’s innermost courtyard to the other. Ma Gurah Vaadai came to rest in front of his wife, his ears cocked, and defied her to argue. "I’ll resign before I give my daughter to that beast. How dare he ask for a child of mine!"
"My lord, Hlavin Kitheri hasn’t asked for our Sakinja," soothed the lady Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai as she lifted a graceful hand and with a gesture of melting beauty, pulled a simple silken headpiece back into place as though she were wrapping her soul in calm. "His invitation was simply—"
"He is a coward," Ma snarled, swinging away from her. "He assassinated his whole family—"
"Almost certainly," Suukmel purred as he stalked away, "but unproven."
"— and then lied about it! As though anyone would believe that vaporous nonsense about a merchant—a midlands peddler! — bringing down the whole of a lineage like the Kitheri. And now he dares to ask for my daughter!" Face twisted with disgust, Ma turned to his wife. "Suukmel, he buggers animals—and sings about it!"
"Admittedly." She did not object to her husband’s vulgarity. It was an ambassador’s daily burden to speak always with forbearance and tact; Suukmel was happy to afford Ma this small relief. "Hlavin Kitheri is, as my lord husband points out, many remarkable things," she continued with pacific confidence, "but he is also a man of admirable breadth of view, a great poet—"
"That rubbish!" the ambassador muttered, glaring past her in the direction of the Kitheri palace, dominating the center of Inbrokar. "He’s mad, Suukmel—"
"Ah, forgive your poor wife, my gracious lord, but ’madness’ is a word used imprecisely, and too often. A careful person might say discontented or desperate or extraordinary instead," Suukmel suggested. "Have pity on anyone whose nature is not well suited to a role decreed by birth, for it is a difficult life." She rearranged her gown and settled into a new posture, more graceful but subtly more commanding as well. "Hlavin Kitheri has acceded to his Patrimony, my lord. Whatever his past, whatever the circumstances of his rise, whatever your private reservations about his character, it is your public duty as Mala Njer’s ambassador to treat the forty-eighth Paramount as the legitimate ruler of Inbrokar."
Her husband growled at that, but she continued thoughtfully. "Kitheri is a man worth studying, my lord. Even apart from the poetry, his years of exile in Galatna Palace do not appear to have been wasted. He has, shall we say, intimate contacts all over his territory?" Ma grunted, amused, and she continued smilingly, voice light. "Men of ability and energy, men who now bring to Kitheri information and insight. Ideas. Perspective. Already, in the first season of his reign, he has created new and unprecedented offices and appointed such men to them, even thirds, and he has done this almost without opposition from those who cherish tradition."
Ma Gurah Vaadai’s prowling ceased and he turned to stare at his wife. Her eyes dropped becomingly only to return to his with a gaze that seemed both direct and curious. "It is interesting, is it not? How has he managed this?" she asked in a voice full of wonder. "Perhaps my dear lord will discover something of value in your observation of him at court?" she suggested. "In any case, Kitheri is no longer looking for a wife."
"Of course not. He’s probably looking for more tailless monsters to couple with—" Then the news sank in. "What have you heard?"
"He is affianced, my lord husband. A VaPalkim child. The regent’s eldest."
"Elli’nal? She’s hardly out of swaddling!"
"Precisely." Ears falling, her husband gaped at her. "It is a masterly stroke, don’t you agree?" she instructed him. "Inbrokar is the central state of the Triple Alliance, with Mala Njer to the west and Palkirn to the east. A marriage contract with Elli’nal leaves the Palkim government quiet at Kitheri’s back while the child grows. Then he may deal with his western neighbor, Mala Njer, on pragmatic grounds." A moment passed, but he understood. "Mala Njer can be many things to Inbrokar, my lord husband. Protector. Partner. Prey. Perhaps Kitheri wishes to reconsider the terms of our alliance."
"I have not been informed of this Palkirn marriage," Ma said.
"Nevertheless…"
He followed her glance to Taksayu, her Runa maid, sitting in a corner: the very model of silent, deferential attention to her mistress. Who could be trusted to make friends among others of her kind. Who spoke K’San well; who heard things and reported them. Who had the intelligence required to appear stupid when it was useful.
"Well, then!" Ma burst out, flummoxed. "What does Kitheri want with my daughter?"
"Nothing at all, my own dear master," said Suukmel sweetly. "It is not your daughter whom Hlavin Kitheri wishes to meet but your wife."
Ma threw his head back and roared. "You can’t be serious," he cried.
"Quite serious, my lord. Furthermore, I should like to meet him."
It was hard to say which was more shocking: a woman’s use of the word «I» or the notion that her husband would permit her to meet any unrelated male, let alone one of Kitheri’s revolting nature. "Impossible," Ma said at last.
"Nevertheless," she said, eyes steady.
It was common knowledge that more than half of the uxorious Ma Gurah Vaadai’s considerable success as a diplomat, and nearly all his satisfaction in life, was his wife’s doing. Hidden away, gathering information, judging, measuring, working twice removed—after sixteen years of marriage, the lady Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai continued to surprise her husband, to horrify and challenge him. Not beautiful but knowing, adroit, desirable. Not mad, he thought, and yet what she proposed certainly was…
"Impossible," he repeated.
Nevertheless.
TWO DAYS LATER, MA GURAH VAADAI, AMBASSADOR OF THE MALA NJERI Territorial Government to the Patrimony of Inbrokar, went to the Kitheri compound to present his personal credentials to the forty-eighth Paramount: to this shameless poet, this bald assassin, this perverted prince who wished to meet Suukmel.
The encounter was to be purely ceremonial, yet another tedious example of Inbrokari protocol, as convoluted and nonsensical as the Kitheri compound itself with its mismatched towers, its palisades and balconies connected by swooping ramps, soaring archways, by fretted and carved galleries. Generations of Kitheris had lived here, each new paramount honoring his dead father with a newly winged roofline, a pointless martello, a spiraling turret, a stratum of carving, another tier of covered walkways. The entire palace was physical demonstration of the folly of novelty. It was, Ma Gurah Vadaai thought, typical of the Kitheri dynasty to preach invariance and practice innovation. Bred and trained for combat, Ma hated the place, as he hated hypocrisy and pretense, even though his duty now was to practice hypocrisy and preserve pretense. Only Suukmel’s enjoyment of subtlety made this fatuous game tolerable.