“Why not.”
They slid down and strolled along behind the flats, coughing as smoke blew over them, keeping apart from the other walkers, most of whom were scavengers going to or coming from their particular mounds of refuse.
The string of flats swerved to the side of the road. A small horde of men came from a blocky building, surrounding the flats, while their leader waved a clipboard in the face of the trader driving the tractor.
“You are being cleared for three flats,” he said. “You are having six. That is going to cost you, Tusuk.”
“You are needing to read that thing again,” the trader roared at him. “Six wheel it is saying. Is not saying nothing about flats. You are needing to count ’em, fool. Six wheel.
“Huh.” The guard brought the clipboard closer to his nose, scowled at the papers on it. “Wheel is meaning flat.”
“Wheel is meaning wheel.” Tusuk pounded his fist in his palm. “You are needing to count ’em,” he insisted. “Six wheel. I am having already paid the padj. Six wheel, sixty peras.” He waved a paper heavy with purple wax in the guard’s face. “Paid paid paid!”
Kikun nudged her. “Come on, come on, Rose. It’s all very interesting, but we’ve got things to do.” He pinched her arm lightly. “I’m ratcheting up the effect. See you later.”
6
The houses were stone on the first floor with narrow slits instead of windows. The second floors (and the rare third floors) were wood with loopholed shutters over grilled windows. About half of these windows were closed tight, even through it was nearly an hour after noon. These were wary secret houses, ready to close up at too bold a touch.
The city had no walls. According to the ship’s kephalos, despite the wars that seem to be the natural state of things and constant raiding from wandering bands of pirates (marauders whose only bases were huge junks that moved from island to island within loosely defined territories), even villages had no walls. Walls involve a communal mind-set. Walls are meant to protect groups and need many hands to build and staff. It takes much less cooperation to build individual structures and arrange them so that the overlap provides mutual defense (hence the angular semi-streets). Also this world had been intermittently rediscovered by free traders and was a good market for what weapons the traders were willing to sell. Jump harnesses and pellet guns with exploding missiles made walls irrelevant. It was more efficient to provide covering fire. That’s only a contributing factor, kephalos said. If there were none of these weapons around, it would be the same thing. These people simply have no love for walls. They like mobility. Walls shut in as well as keep out.
She ambled along through hordes of children playing in these semi-streets, round games and ball games and complicated versions of tag, games she remembered from her own childhood, though she’d spent more time watching than playing, shut away from the street children by the walls of the Chateau where her mother lived and worked. She thrust her hands in her pockets and slowed yet more, enjoying the clamor and confusion.
##
As she rounded one of the sharper angles, she nearly stepped into a group of four guards (dark green with crimson slashes and black leather accents) beating a ragged man with their long whippy canes, all five of them silent except for grunts and squeals. One of the guards straightened, glared at her. Hastily, she cut out into the street and walked on by-like the rest of the locals getting out of there as fast as she could. It was a warning, a timely one, reminding her to stop gawking and get to business.
As she passed from the semi-slums near the outskirts, the traffic got thicker. Women with bales of cloth and fancywork balanced on their heads (she admired and briefly envied the beauty of their walking, the music of their voices. They wore what looked to be long rectangles of patterned cloth wrapped in complicated folds about their bodies, batik prints with a silky sheen, some local fiber, no doubt. If I have time and some spare cash, I should get me some lengths of that, it looks like it feels wonderful against the skin). Men leaning forward and plodding along under backframes loaded with tubers and gourds, sacks of flour and other staples. Handcarts and flats of the two-wheeled variety with small noisy tractors pulling them.
##
She went round another angle and saw a clot of angry, shouting, arm-waving locals and three guards trying to shift them away from an accident. A tractor without its flats being raced along the thruway by a gang of boys had crashed into a handcart loaded with local chicken-types. There were feathers everywhere, blood, squawking birds, locals trying to get at the boys, the guards pissed off at everyone. A different set of guards. These had dark crimson uniforms with green strips angled down the front. One of them lost his patience entirely, aimed his pellet rifle at the ground and blew a hell of a hole in the dirt.
The crowd scattered and the boys on the tractor ran off.
The only one left was the hapless soul with the handcart. The guards hit him a few licks and went off, leaving him to right his cart, repack it, and trundle it around the new hole in the middle of the road.
Laughter and a satiric run on a stringed instrument of some kind.
Rose looked around.
A street musician was standing in a doorway, swaying, a lutelike instrument cradled in his arms. His face was flushed and he looked more than a little drunk. After a moment he began to sing, improvising a comic account of the accident, describing the guards, the careless boys, and the hapless would-be trader in scurrilous terms, picturing them as capering ludicrously about the hole in the road which he invested with enormous significance, mostly sexual and wholly comical. He had a crowd in moments; laughing and clapping with him, they threw coppers at the case open at his feet. Then someone yelled, someone else took the lute from the singer and bustled him away and again the street was empty-until a squad of guards came marching around an angle.
Behind them the Vaarlord of this Kehvar (quarter, ward, neighborhood) lolled on the seat of a groundcar, his gorgeousness exhibited behind pelletproof glass as he looked over his subjects. He was a big man, with a seamed, scarred face. He didn’t loll well. Cultural things, she thought, idleness as an attribute of greatness. No, as a toiler, he was an abject failure. There was too much animal vigor in the man; his eyes moved over the houses and the people, over her as one of the people, with hard possessiveness. His hair might be gilded, his mustache and goatee stiff as gold wire, his face enameled white, his lips carmine, but none of that mattered. She watched him pass and shivered. Head down, Rose, she told, herself. It’s survival time.
Quiet went down the street with him, the people around her going still as he passed, prey beasts in the presence of a lion, praying he wasn’t hungry.
One of the guards following him looked at her, interest sparking in his eyes. He kept walking, but he turned his head to watch her as he went along.
As casually as she could manage, Rose turned down one of the semi-streets that crossed this one, moved swiftly through several angles, ran into a swarm of beggar children, turned again to get away from them, nearly ran into two guards at the boundary between two Kehvars engaged in a bracing match that was clearly, on the verge of breaking into a shooting war. The locals were smarter or faster than her, they’d gone for cover. She backed off as quickly and quietly as she could, ducked down another of the winding ways and made her way back to the main trafficflow.
##
Street noises grew louder and less distinct, voices of the child beggars and the street singers blending with drums and pipes and lutes. There were more guards out. New ones like wasps, dark yellow tunics with black vee stripes down the front and back. Kephalos had said it would be so, each Vaarlord hired his own guards. There was a HighVaar over the whole city, but he ruled more by consent than coercion. He was a convenience, a court of last resort, the keeper of the peace; he was the only one who could force the Vaarlords to keep to their boundaries, but he didn’t meddle inside those boundaries.