She stopped at a fisherman’s stall along the quay and bargained with an old grandmother for five swimmers. These swimmers were eight-legged armored creatures as big as a man’s fist. They were tasty but almost more trouble than they were worth. They could not be cooked in their shells because then the poisons diffused throughout the body of the meat; they had to be cracked and carefully dissected. Only the brain and gills were edible, perhaps two fingers worth of morsel, a modest mouthful. The remaining muscular flesh might safely be eaten if it was carefully sealed with a special bacterium and left to rot until it reeked. There were recipes to disguise or boil out the oily ripeness. Some people preferred such dishes to human flesh. Teenae did not.
She wandered far beyond the quay, slogging through the sand, puzzling out Joesai’s mental process. Such an analysis was difficult because he did not reason with logic. Sometimes she doubted that he reasoned at all. He was tradition-bound to a fault, though never imprisoned by a tradition that did not suit him. He acted out old formulas, not as if he believed in them, but in a kind of jovially absent-minded way, as if being traditional saved his mind the bother of thinking while it was occupied elsewhere at more important tasks.
He had his men and she had none; that was the problem. He had the eyes of a bee, and she had merely two. To win, she must first establish a balance. Was she here alone to flatter Joesai or to counterbalance his weight with her own vitality? She needed mass. She needed allies.
Up ahead a dancing child played with a decaying length of sea vine, snapping it like a whip. To avoid the soft beach, Teenae was now walking along the border between the endless battle of sea and continent that had pounded out a lifeless curve of wet black sand. The attacking foam seized her hurried feet and the counterattacking sand left behind heel-deep pools of water.
“Hi,” said the boy, whacking the surf with his vine. Its rotten stalk broke. Because Oelita was on her mind, she scrutinized the four wheat kernels on the boy’s back — the Scar of the Heresy. The first underlay of the design, she noted, had been executed by a traditional craftsman of the n’Orap clan. There were few so skilled in Kaiel-hontokae. When the boy reached his full growth the final delicate details of the cicatrice would be cut in or embossed and colored. “You got some swimmers,” he said to her. “Yeech. I throw them back when I catch one of those.”
“Do you lay traps, or do you dive?” she asked.
“I mostly bait, but I’m a good diver.”
“Who decorated you? I notice that your scars were all done by the same artist. He’s very good.”
“My two-father. You should see my mothers! He is not yet finished with my body.”
She thought about a man who would commit his son to a heresy in a way that could not be erased. He was a believer. Joesai would not have approved. Since a child he had been adamant that no one’s symbol should ever be carved into his body. The designs he wore were meaningless. And so Teenae conceived her plan for telling Joesai of her opposition to his actions.
“I have some work for your two-father. Would he be home?”
The boy’s family lived on one of the crooked dead-end streets at the bottom of the hill below Sorrow’s Temple, a street wealthy enough to afford paving. Its houses and shops were a motley mixture of yellow and red brick, of field stone and mortar, of cut stone and elegant arches, all with slanting slate roofs and tiny windows. Stairways disappeared into common courtyards or to second floors or meandered up the hill to the next street.
Three children were carefully daring footholds in the stones of the aqueduct that passed overhead to feed the eight public fountains from which the townfolk drew their water. Other children pestered shoppers to carry their bags for a coin. An Ivieth couple, the female far taller than her mate, pushed a smelly sewer wagon as they made their rounds to collect fertilizer for the fields. Coming in the opposite direction a father and his daughter hurried past the wagon, laden with water tanks on their backs, bringing in the evening supply from the nearest fountain.
At the shop entrance Teenae removed her sandals and washed her feet in the small footbath. Watching her intently was a little girl with naked skin as smooth as freshly bleached fine paper, who, upon deciding that the visitor was safe, ran over to her half brother and climbed to his shoulders for a ride. From that perch, arrogant but silent, she looked Teenae straight in the eyes and simultaneously steered her brother by the ears. Down the hall another girl, older, hauled a jug of water upstairs, smiling broadly at Teenae when their eyes touched.
A sloe-eyed woman with elaborate spirals radiating from her eyes greeted them in a shop filled with imported fabrics, tapestries, rugs, fine porcelain, brass kitchen utensils, even clocks from Kaiel-hontokae. The family obviously dealt in luxury imports.
“I have never seen such fine porcelain!” exclaimed Teenae.
“This is only our display room. It would please me to show you the ceramic collection down below. We have more from the o’ca kilns than we can show here. A new shipment has hardly been unpacked.”
“This is o’ca?” Teenae was impressed by their enterprise in importing from such a distance.
“She’s here to see Zeilar,” said the boy.
“Ah. You are interested in the skins. We have a small but superior stock. My husband Zeilar only collects them as art so that he shall remain inspired by the masterpieces of others. He saves the best of the leather that passes through the hands of my husband Meikam.”
She led Teenae upstairs and then up another flight on an almost vertical wooden ladder to a large room that was the only room on the third floor. It was spacious and better lighted than the apartments below. Zeilar sat upon several of the larger pillows that littered the floor, reading a handwritten book beside a window three times as tall as any other in the building. Through the window the peaked roofs of the village thrust upward to obscure the sea. The hides of perhaps a dozen men hung about the room as partitions or in place of tapestries. Surfacing the low table that dominated the whole space was a quilt of leather designs and behind this table stood a multijointed mirror, man high, with almost golden reflectivity, which was built to give one an image of oneself from many viewpoints.
Zeilar set his book aside and she saw that his face was carved in an abstract symmetry that would make the effort to decode his current expression an almost impossible task. “Look around,” he said comfortably.
The most enormous hide was perhaps the strangest for it carried unconventionally representational scenes of mountains and cities and ships connected by a wild looping of roads. “Do you know the stories of these men?” she asked.
“Harar ram-Ivieth,” Zeilar replied. “He was an accomplished songwriter and one of the few men ever to have rounded Geta on foot. I never met him for he died before I was born but many Ivieth know his stories and more than once an Ivieth has passed through Sorrow called to Harar’s Pilgrimage. I have a copy of his book, Folio-wing God.”
The smaller hide of a woman attracted Teenae’s attention when she recognized its delicate workmanship. That’s what she wanted. The cuts, the fine work, the control of the scar-tissue texture, the embossing, and the final tattooing were unbelievable.
“Not for sale,” said Zeilar noting her interest. “She’s my oldest niece. I had her skin to work with since she was a child and she inspired me, the saucy wench. She was drowned by the Njarae. I’m not sure she wasn’t murdered. Her death left a knife in my heart.”