Cashel paused, letting a group of housewives pass from the other direction with baskets full of greens bought in the produce market a little nearer the river. He could’ve pushed through the congestion easily enough, but he and Tenoctris weren’t in any kind of hurry.
On the building site, men were already at work on the kiln which would provide lime for the cement; it was better to burn it there than to transport so dangerous a load through the city, with the chance of losing it to a sudden rainstorm besides. Piled as high as the quarried blocks was a load of broken limestone and marble to feed the kiln. Some of the bigger pieces had been ships’ ballast at one time; those were dark and still slimy from bilgewater.
The housewives passed; Tenoctris started forward, then stopped when she realized that Cashel was staring at the rubble. She said, “Cashel?”
Cashel’s skin prickled, the same sort of feeling as when he got too much sun when plowing in early spring. There was something about the stones…. Holding his staff out for balance in his left hand, he clambered onto the pile.
Several of the workmen glanced toward Cashel, but nobody shouted at him. He wasn’t doing any harm by climbing around on a pile of rock, so only the urge of people to boss other people would’ve led them to speak. Cashel was too big for that to seem a good idea, even to a half dozen burly workmen.
Tenoctris watched intently, but she didn’t say anything that might have distracted Cashel from whatever he was doing. Cashel grinned. He didn’t know what he was doing either, just that there was something about these chunks of stone that made his senses prick up. It was the way you could feel there was something wrong with your sheep, even before ewes ran out of the woods blatting because one of their sisters had managed to catch her neck in the fork of a sapling.
“Here!” Cashel said in triumph. He used his free hand and his staff’s iron-shod tip to pry a piece of marble out of a litter of limestone gravel.
“Hey! What’s that you’re doing up there?” called the foreman of the building crew, a squat man of thirty with a bushy moustache and biceps that would’ve looked well on a man of twice the size. The other workmen watched in interest, glad for an excuse to stop work and hopeful that there’d be more entertainment to come.
“I’m looking at your rock,” Cashel said. The crew wouldn’t own the building materials, but he guessed they’d still be willing to sell a chunk for the price of a round of ale. “This piece here.”
He hefted it, noticing the foreman’s eyes narrow. It was the torso of a statue, meant originally for a woman, Cashel guessed, though he couldn’t swear to much in the shape the piece was now. The marble had weathered and worse, been buried in a forest where rotting leaves had blackened it and eaten at the surface during every rainstorm. In some places white foam had boiled from cancerous pits in the stone. A soaking in a ship’s bilge had added final indignities.
Though the block was of no obvious interest—even to Cashel, except for the tingling it raised in him—it was still stone and weighed as much as a man of ordinary size. The foreman knew that and understood what it meant that Cashel held it easily in one hand.
“I want to buy it from you,” Cashel said. “I’ll pay you a, a…”
He didn’t know what name a silver coin had. In Barca’s Hamlet there was mostly bronze and little enough of that, except during the Sheep Fair, when merchants and drovers came down the road from Carcosa. Ornifal used different coins; and though Cashel now carried a purseful of them on a cord around his neck, they weren’t something he paid a lot of attention to.
“A silver piece!” he said, getting the idea out well enough. That’d buy a jar of wine that the whole crew could share at any of the open-fronted cook-shops in this quarter of the city.
“For what?” cried a workman in amazement.
“Let’s see his money,” said another, slipping his masonry chisel into a pocket in his leather apron.
“What is it you want it for?” the foreman asked, scowling like thunder. He was confused and because of that a little angry. He walked forward.
Instead of answering—because he didn’t have an answer, just a feeling—Cashel said, “Tenoctris, will you pay the man for me? I, ah…”
To pull out his purse and open it, Cashel would have to use both hands. He didn’t want to let go of either his staff or the piece of statue until he’d gotten to a place where he had more friends than he did here.
“Yes, of course,” Tenoctris said. She carried a small purse in the sleeve of her silk brocade robe. She squeezed a coin through the loosened ties, then held it up so that sunlight winked on the silver in the sight of all the workmen; then she gave it to the foreman.
“Deal?” said Cashel from his perch above the others.
“Deal, by the Lady!” said one of the workmen. “For that you can carry off the whole pile and we’ll tell the boss the rats ate it.”
The foreman rang the coin against the head of the hammer in his belt. It sang with the bright note of silver rather than something duller and leaden.
“Deal,” he said, still a little doubtful. He spat in his palm and held it out to Tenoctris. She stared at the man blankly.
Cashel stepped down from the mound of rubble with the care required by bad footing and the weight he carried. “Shake his hand on the deal, Tenoctris,” he said. “Ah, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course,” said the old woman, nodding to Cashel in gratitude for having explained how you sealed a bargain. Nobles probably did it different. Tenoctris was of a noble house; though from what she’d said, in her lifetime they hadn’t had money even by the standards of Barca’s Hamlet. Still, she took the foreman’s hand gracefully like an adult humoring a child and let him shake hers up and down.
Cashel cleared his throat. “Ah, Tenoctris?” he said. “I’d like to be getting back to the—”
Cashel’s tongue stuck. He’d dressed this morning as he would have back in the borough, in woolen overtunic and undertunic. The garments were peasant’s wear, though smartly cut and of the best quality—as they were bound to be, since his sister Ilna had woven and sewn the cloth. Nobody in the Isles, maybe nobody in all time, could do more with fabrics than Ilna could.
Tenoctris was in silk, but her robe was neither new nor stylish. The two of them would pass for a noblewoman fallen on hard times and the sort of rustic servant such a lady could afford. That was fine, but Cashel didn’t want to use the word “palace” here and cause all sorts of fuss and excitement.
“To go home, I mean,” he said instead.
“Yes, of course,” Tenoctris repeated. She turned, getting her bearings with a skill that a countryman like Cashel couldn’t match in this warren of streets. “I think if we go…”
A few of the passersby had stopped to see what was going on. Cashel and Tenoctris weren’t doing anything more exciting than hens did in a farmyard, but it was a little different from the usual. There were people in Valles—and everywhere Cashel had been in his life—who’d rather watch others work than do something themselves.
Through them came a clean-shaven heavyset man, not a youth but still younger than his baldness made him appear. He wore a tunic of tightly woven wool, black with a stripe of bleached white slashing diagonally across the front. His face was set. He wasn’t exactly angry, but he looked ready to snap into anger if something balked him.
“You there!” he said to the foreman. “Are you in charge? I want to buy this pile of stone. I’ll pay—”
The workmen’s eyes shifted from the newcomer to Cashel and Tenoctris. Cashel made a wry face, but he’d learned young that some days bad luck was the only kind of luck you were going to have.
Cashel squatted and set the block of stone between his feet rather than drop it on the cobblestones. Then he rose again, holding his staff with both hands and waiting for whatever might come next.