The man shook his head. 'That's all right,' he said. 'I guess you're entitled, at that. Best of luck finding out. Try the Patience; could be that you stay there all the time, and they know all about you. They're a good enough crowd there, at any rate.'
Leaving him and going on their way was almost painful, as if he'd lost his child at the fair and was going home without him. At least Copis had the sense not to give him a hard time about the security breach, more tact than he'd given her credit for.
'So how far away is Josequin?' he asked, trying not to sound desperate.
'From here? Oh, we should be there before dark.' She plied the switch to get the horses moving a little faster. He was grateful to her for that.
'Josequin Fair?' he asked, more to distract himself than because he wanted to know. 'Sounds big and important.'
'It is,' she replied, and she managed to keep talking about it for a long time, telling him far more about it than anybody could ever want to know. She was still explaining a couple of hours later, when they saw the smoke.
At first he thought it was just low cloud (or mist, though not heat-haze this time), but it was the wrong shape and colour; it moved differently in the wind. After a while they could smell it. Neither of them said a word. There wasn't really anything to say.
They came over the crest of a small hill, more or less the only bit of high ground they'd encountered all day. From the top they had a fine view down over a dead level plain. Josequin lay in the middle of it.
From where the city should have been there rose the smoke of countless fires; long past the stage where the flames swell up into the sky and the smoke is thick and black, more likely it was the smoke from the really hot embers, still glowing two or even three days later.
'You said I had business there,' Poldarn murmured.
'Yes,' Copis replied. 'I did say that.' She was gazing at the mess, her eyes very round. 'It was just something to say, that was all. I didn't mean anything by it.'
'No,' he said. 'I don't suppose you did.'
Chapter Five
The bonecarver's stall had some new lines: bone and stagshorn spoons as well as the usual horn offerings, bone-handled penknives, tiny bottles with no obvious uses whatsoever, a few shoe buckles, a beautiful chess set, exactly the sort of thing every visitor to Weal Bohec was expected to take home with him as a souvenir. The offcomer nudged his way good-humouredly to the front and asked to see a pair of calipers.
'Lovely work, though I say so myself,' yawned the stallholder. 'Solid brass hinge and legs and look, there's a calibrated scale engraved just here.'
'My word,' said the offcomer, impressed. 'Calibrated in what?'
The stallholder looked puzzled. 'How d'you mean?' he said.
'What's it calibrated in? We use different weights and measures where I come from, you see. As do most of the places I go. What's the scale on this?'
The stallholder shrugged his round shoulders. 'Nothing in particular,' he said. 'I just put in some marks, to be helpful.
'They're all exactly the same distance apart,' he added reassuringly.
The offcomer nodded. 'I'm sure they are,' he said. 'But what distance would that be? Local standard? Guild standard? Or just something you made up out of your head?'
'Look,' the stallholder said, 'do you want to buy them or not? Because I've got customers waiting.'
The offcomer looked round, then turned back. 'I'll think about it,' he said. 'Thank you so much.'
The stallholder grunted, put the calipers back in their proper place on the velvet roll, and turned his attention elsewhere. When he next looked in that direction, the offcomer was gone. He didn't notice.
Four stalls down, the shoemaker was doing good business with a range of cheap wooden patens. It wasn't a local timber, the offcomer noticed; most likely they'd come as ballast on one of the big grain freighters from the other side of the bay. Stuff like that always went down well in Weal Bohec, where people were so careful with their money that they'd rather buy a rough, splintery piece of wood with a leather strap round it that didn't fit for one and a half bits than pay two and a half for a pair of tailored leather shoes. As a result, quality goods were always cheap here because of the lack of demand. The offcomer particularly liked the look of a pair of tooled pigskin riding boots, Guild manufacture, with double-stitched seams and silver hobnails. Five silvers across the bay, three and a half here. He wondered why the Guild tolerated this place.
'I'll think about it,' he said automatically, as the shoemaker urged him to try them on.
'Won't take you a minute,' the shoemaker urged him. 'Go on, best quality. Imported. They may not be here when you come back.'
The offcomer smiled. 'I'll risk it, thanks,' he said. 'I'll only be gone a moment.'
'A lot can happen in a moment.'
'Very true.' He smiled and raised his hand, in the universal gesture of polite refusal. The shoemaker's face fell.
'You want me to put them under the counter for you?' he said. 'So I won't go selling them to someone else by mistake?'
The offcomer shook his head. 'That'd be restraint of trade,' he replied. 'They cut your ears off for that where I come from.'
That was a lie, of course. The offcomer had been born in a little village, miles away from the nearest Guild town. But it was enough to shut up the shoemaker, who went back to selling patens. Just in time.
Across the way from the row of stalls were the main steps leading up to the exchange, the most grandiose and impressive building in Weal Bohec. A few people were coming down the steps already, traders and traders' scouts, hurrying ahead with the hot news from the morning session. The offcomer took a step back and watched them. There were a few boys, glad to be out in the fresh air after a morning crouched on the peg stools of the exchange; a couple of middle-aged characters wearing house livery with the unmistakable air of generic henchmen; a few elderly runners who'd been doing the same work for forty years. There was always plenty of bustle around the exchange, promoting the idea, almost unique to Weal Bohec, that business is something that can only be done in a state of mild hysteria.
After the first hurtling outriders came the Serious Men. The idea was that the more Serious you were, the longer it took you to leave the hall, since all the real transactions were carried out in the corridors and courtyards after the meeting itself had ended. The slow walk of a Serious trader making his way from the chapter house to the front gate was one of the great sights of Weal Bohec, a magnificent exhibition of the art of walking as slowly as humanly possible without actually stopping. Conventionally, a Serious Man wouldn't dream of covering the distance in less time than it takes to chop down a fifteen-year-old ash tree with a small hand-axe. Truly Serious men, such as the legendary Gransenier Astel Voche, or Huon Tage, six times president of the chapter, had been known to leave the chapterhouse at noon and not get outside until dusk without ever coming to an actual full stop.
The offcomer knew all of this, of course, so he leaned up against a pillar of the Portico of Probity and Diligence, made sure that he had a clear view of the gateway, took an apple from his sleeve and started to crunch. He ate slowly, savouring the rare and expensive flavour of a genuine Bohec Sweet Pippin, a variety carefully nurtured and interfered with over centuries to make it taste more like a peach than an apple; in other cities, when they wanted peaches they ate peaches, but that was never the Weal Bohec way. From time to time he had to dab the rather overabundant juice off his chin with his sleeve.
He was just worrying the last few fibres of edible flesh off the core when the first Serious Men sauntered out from between the worn, anthropomorphic pillars of the gateway (traditionally, they were supposed to represent Prosperity and prudence, but since their faces had been worn away centuries ago by itinerant shoe repairers sharpening their knives on them it wasn't possible to be certain any more). The offcomer spared them a glance, but as he'd expected his man wasn't one of them. He took a last nibble at the remains of his apple, folded it in a handkerchief (the Bohec city statutes prescribed savage fines for a man of quality who wilfully littered the streets, though of course these rules didn't apply to the lower orders, who couldn't be expected to obey them) and tucked it in his pocket. It was pleasant in the shade after a morning in the sun, and the justly famous aftertaste of the apple was well worth savouring.