PENRIC’S MISSION
A novella in the World of the Five Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold
I
“Desdemona!” Penric breathed, awed. “Will you look at that light.”
He leaned on the railing of the Adriac cargo ship coasting slowly up the narrowing Gulf of Patos, and stared eyes-wide at the rocky shores of Cedonia. The dry clarity of the air made the distant granite mountains seem as sharp-cut as glassmaker’s crystal. The angled sun of morning was the color of honey. He tilted back his head to take in the astonishing blue vault above, so deep it was dizzying; he felt he might dive up through it as into the sea, endlessly, and never drown.
It was what he imagined enchantment should be, in some myth or legend of personified elements, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Sky. Mortals, he was reminded, did not usually come out well at the ends of those tales.
“Yes, but by noon it will scorch that pale scholar’s skin of yours to blisters. Keep yourself covered. We’ll have to see about getting you a proper hat,” his demon returned, speaking through his mouth as prosaically as the bossy older sister he sometimes imagined her to be. But he thought she was not unmoved by the sight, shared through his eyes, of the light of the land of—could you call it her birth?—that she’d last departed, what, over a hundred years ago?
“Longer than that,” she sighed.
He pressed his finger to his lips, warning her not to speak aloud in company, and moved around to the prow, keeping clear of the crewmen shifting ropes and sails. Half-a-dozen other passengers clustered there to catch a first glimpse of the city that lent the gulf its name. The ship came about and tacked toward the farther shore, climbing a slight headwind.
A tumbled slope drew aside like a stage curtain, revealing their goal. Spread across the wide amphitheater of the gulf’s head, Patos seemed built of the bones of this land: stone houses with red tile roofs, stone streets, arched and colonnaded; the familiar five-fold shape, high on one hill, of a stone temple. A broad stone fortress guarded stone quays reaching out into the clear blue waters, where a dozen other cargo ships crowded, offloading.
The grove of cranes and masts made up for what seemed to Penric’s eyes a decided lack of trees, which was in part why his ship’s heavy lading of cut timber was expected to be welcomed trade. A bit slow, bulky, boring; a ship for ordinary men with ordinary purses to make passage in. Such as a lawyer’s young clerk, carrying a sheaf of unsigned merchants’ agreements and a hopeful marriage contract. All entirely bogus. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and touched the leather case that held them, plus the second set of documents that was much less dull sewn covertly inside its lining.
Velka gave a little wave as Pen joined him on the forward deck. The man was a Cedonian mercantile agent with whom Penric had made friends, or at least friendly acquaintance, on what he had been assured was a remarkably smooth three-day sail from the Adriac city of Lodi, and on whom he’d been happy to practice his Cedonian. Smiling slightly, Velka said, “Still excited for your first trip to Cedonia?”
“Yes,” Pen admitted, grinning back, still inebriated by the morning light and not even bothering to be sheepish. The young clerk should certainly be allowed such elation.
“I expect you will find it full of surprises.”
“I expect so, too.”
Des passed no comment, even internally, but Pen felt she watched the harbor scene as keenly as he did.
Two oarsmen in Cedonian Customs’ tabards rowed a green-painted boat out from the quay and swung alongside Pen’s ship. He picked up his single valise and followed Velka with the first batch of passengers to disembark, making his way over the side and down the rope net without mishap. When it had rid itself of its human freight, the ship would go on to another quay at the Imperial naval shipyard and arsenal to discharge its timber. Penric mused on the rationale, which rather escaped him, of one country selling essentials for shipbuilding to another country when they might, some future year, be at war or at least in chronic naval clashes with each other. Well, the puzzle did not fall within the ambit of this mission.
Imperial Customs consisted of a long wooden shed housing tables, a few agents in official tunics, some bored guards, and a dull air of bureaucracy. The passengers shuffled into line and turned out their goods for inspection. His clerk, when Pen took his turn, examined his fake papers and wrote down his fake name and age and fake business with only mild interest. His valise was dumped out on the table and his possessions pawed through, as the clerk looked for Pen knew-not-what.
His belongings had been carefully selected back in Adria to fit his travel persona, and included nothing of interest; most certainly not his white robes of a divine of the Bastard’s Order, or the white, cream, and silver shoulder braids marking him as a Temple sorcerer. Nor even the four-cord green braids of a teaching physician of the Mother’s Order, which had been foisted on him back home in Martensbridge even though he had declined to take oath to a second god. The faint ink stains on his long fingers might well have belonged to a lawyer’s clerk.
In any case his most secret and dangerous contraband, his chaos demon who gave him his uncanny powers, passed entirely unsuspected.
Velka, lingering to speak with some port official, waved Penric on, and Pen emerged once more into a light grown even sharper. He stepped away briskly, not wanting to be lumbered with a companion at this stage. He wondered if he should first seek out the man he’d come all this way to bargain with, or go find lodgings. Perhaps locate the fellow, then pick lodgings convenient to him. Asking around the harbor marketplace for his quarry’s address would leave a trail of witnesses to his interest. There must be something more discreet.
Good thinking, observed Desdemona. Your best bets will be up by the provincial governor’s palace, or some tavern near the army barracks where the soldiers gather.
It felt strange to have a visceral sense of the layout of a city he’d never set foot in before, but one of Desdemona’s previous riders had lived here for some years. Over a century ago, Pen reminded himself. Things would have changed, although probably not major buildings or streets, not with all this stone.
The marketplace, a semi-permanent little village of booths and awnings, smelled of fish, ropes, tar, and spices. Offerings included used clothing, domestic tinwork and ceramics, and food, exotic—to Pen—oranges and lemons, dried figs and nuts and strange bright vegetables, olives and their oils. The vendors and patrons showed nearly as much variety, men and women, and children of both sexes running about adding their notes of chaos. Clothing tended to loose linens, tunics and trousers for the men, demure draperies for the women. Skin colors ranged from almost Roknari bronze to olive to a deep brick tan on those who clearly worked outdoors.
Hair was as varied, curly to straight, sun-streaked bronze, dark copper, brown, but mostly black. He was glad he’d taken the advice to dye his own to an unassuming brown for the journey. His blond-white hair stood out even back home; here, where he found his mountain-average height suddenly half a head taller than most men around him, it would have blazed in this sun like a signal beacon. His eyes he could do nothing about, save to squint a trifle. He attempted to shrink in a clerk’s stoop.
Completing his fascinated survey of the market, he began a stroll up a street leading toward the hill hosting the governor’s palace. The noise of the harbor—seabirds crying, workmen and vendors shouting, the creak of the cranes, clack of hooves and rumbling of carts—at first eclipsed the steady double-time of booted feet coming up behind him. When he turned, the squad of half-a-dozen soldiers was almost in his face.