‘Or a husband, I expect,’ nodded Amschat, weakly.
‘Actually, Granny had a lot to say about that—’
‘I bet she did,’ said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?’
Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. ‘Probably.’
And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socializing.
Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
She was getting a bit worried about magic.
It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.
It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole ravelled themselves together as if … as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges travelled in the dead centre of the river with the men armed and the women below — except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market — hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: ‘They’re not ultramarines.’
‘Listen to the child!’ said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
‘I am listening,’ he said, ‘and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.’
Esk shook her head. ‘They’re just spircles,’ she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognized the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
‘There seems to be a doubt,’ he said, ‘but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?’
The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the broker’s part would see him flat in the dust. And that damn child was squinting at him as though she could see through to the back of his mind. His nerve broke.
‘I regret this unfortunate dispute,’ he said. ‘I had accepted the stones as ultramarines in good faith but rather than cause disharmony between us I will ask you to accept them as — as a gift, and for the fleeces may I offer this roseatte of the first sorting?’
He took a small red stone from a tiny velvet pouch. Amschat hardly looked at it but, without taking his eyes off the man, passed it down to Esk. She nodded.
When the merchant had hurried off Amschat took Esk’s hand and half-dragged her to the assayer’s stall, which was little more than a niche in the wall. The old man took the smallest of the blue stones, listened to Amschat’s hurried explanation, poured out a saucerful of hypactic fluid and dropped the stone in. It frothed into nothingness.
‘Very interesting,’ he said. He took another stone in a tweezer and examined it under a glass.
‘They are indeed spircles, but remarkably fine specimens in their own right,’ he concluded. ‘They are by no means worthless, and I for example would be prepared to offer you — is there something wrong with the little girl’s eyes?’
Amschat nudged Esk, who stopped trying out another Look.
‘—I would offer you, shall we say, two zats of silver?’
‘Shall we say five?’ said Amschat pleasantly.
‘And I would like to keep one of the stones,’ said Esk. The old man threw up his hands.
‘But they are mere curios!’ he said. ‘Of value only to a collector!’
‘A collector may yet sell them to an unsuspecting purchaser as finest roseattes or ultramarines,’ said Amschat, ‘especially if he was the only assayer in town.’
The assayer grumbled a bit at this, but at last they settled on three zats and one of the spircles on a thin silver chain for Esk.
When they were out of earshot Amschat handed her the tiny silver coins and said: ‘These are yours. You have earned them. But—’ he hunkered down so that his eyes were on a level with hers, ‘—you must tell me how you knew the stones were false.’
He looked worried, but Esk sensed that he wouldn’t really like the truth. Magic made people uncomfortable. He wouldn’t like it if she said simply: spircles are spircles and ultramarines are ultramarines, and though you may think they look the same that is because most people don’t use their eyes in the right way. Nothing can entirely disguise its true nature.
Instead she said: ‘The dwarves mine spircles near the village where I was born, and you soon learn to see how they bend light in a funny way.’
Amschat looked into her eyes for some time. Then he shrugged.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Fine. Well, I have some further business here. Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, or something? I’d warn you against unscrupulous traders but, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t think you will have any trouble.’
Esk nodded. Amschat strode off through the market place. At the first corner he turned, looked at her thoughtfully, and then disappeared among the crowds.