“It would have boosted sales!” Kuni said. “After the wealthy men saw the dresses on their favorite mistresses, they’d surely want to buy them for their wives.”
“Have you no concern for the reputation of your family?!” Kado chased Kuni into the streets wielding a measuring ruler.
By the time Kuni was seventeen, his father had had enough of the idling young man coming home every night drunk and asking for dinner. He locked him out of the house and told him to find somewhere else to stay and ruminate on how he was wasting his life and breaking his mother’s heart. Naré cried and cried and went to Kana and Rapa’s temple every day, praying for the goddesses to set her baby on the right path.
Reluctantly, Kado Garu took pity on his little brother and took him in. Kado’s generosity, however, was not shared by his wife, Tete. She took to serving dinner early, long before Kuni came home. And when she heard the sound of his steps in the entrance hall, Tete would bang empty pots loudly in the sink, indicating that there was no more food to be had.
Kuni quickly got the hint. Though he had thick skin — he had to when he hung out with the sort of friends he made — he was humiliated that his sister-in-law thought of him as only a mouth that she didn’t want to feed. He moved out and slept on the floor mats in the houses of his friends, roaming from house to house as he wore out his welcome.
He moved a lot.
The smell of fried pot stickers and ginger-vinegar. The sound of glasses filling with warm ale and cold beer.
“… so then I said, ‘But your husband isn’t home!’ And she laughed and said, ‘That’s why you need to come in now!’ ”
“Kuni Garu!” Widow Wasu, proprietress of the Splendid Urn, tried to get the attention of the young man telling stories at the center of the crowd.
“Yes, my lady?” Kuni reached out with his long arm and draped it around her shoulder. He gave her a loud, wet kiss on the cheek. She was in her forties and accepted that she was aging gracefully. Unlike some of the other tavern keepers, she didn’t slather herself with rouge and powder, and looked far more dignified as a result. Kuni often proclaimed to others how he was fond of her.
Wasu nimbly ducked out of Kuni’s embrace. She pulled him away from the others, winking at the laughing and shouting crowd, who hollered appreciatively. She dragged him into her office in the back of the bar, where she deposited him in a pillow on one side of the desk, and she herself took the pillow on the other.
Kneeling upright and with her back straight in formal mipa rari, she composed herself and put on what she thought was a stern face — this discussion needed to be focused on business, and Kuni Garu had a way of changing the topic whenever one wanted something from him.
“You’ve hosted three parties at my place this month,” Wasu said. “That’s a lot of beer and ale and fried pot stickers and fried squid. All the charges were put under your name. Your tab, at this point, is getting to be bigger than the lien on my inventory. I think you need to pay some of it.”
Kuni leaned back on his pillow and stretched out his legs in a modified thakrido position, with one leg over the other, the way a man sat when he was with his mistress. Kuni narrowed his eyes, smirked at Wasu, and began to hum a song whose lyrics made Wasu blush.
“Come on, Kuni,” Wasu said. “I’m serious here. The tax collectors have been hounding me for weeks. You can’t treat me like a charity.”
Kuni Garu curled his legs back under him and suddenly sat up in mipa rari. His eyes stayed narrowed, but the smirk disappeared from his face. Widow Wasu flinched even though she meant to stay firm with him. The man was a gangster, after all.
“Mistress Wasu,” Kuni said in an even, low voice. “How often would you say I come to drink at your place?”
“Practically every other day,” Wasu said.
“And have you noticed any difference in your business on the days when I’m here and the days when I’m not?”
Wasu sighed. This was Kuni’s trump card, and she knew he would bring it up. “It’s a little better on the days when you are here,” she admitted.
“A little better?” Eyes as wide as teacups, he breathed loudly through his nose, as though his ego had been hurt.
Widow Wasu tried to decide whether she wanted to laugh at him or to throw something at the good-for-nothing young man. She settled by shaking her head and folding her arms across her chest.
“Look at the crowd out there!” he went on. “It’s the middle of the day and this place is filled with paying customers. When I’m here, your business goes up by at least fifty percent.”
This was a gross exaggeration, but Wasu had to concede that bar patrons did tend to stay longer and buy more drinks when Kuni was around. He was loud, told great dirty jokes, pretended to know something about everything — the man had no shame, and could get people around him to relax and enjoy themselves. He was like a bawdy troubadour, a tall-tale teller, and an impromptu gambling hall operator rolled into one. Maybe business didn’t go up by 50 percent, but 20 to 30 percent? That was probably accurate. And Kuni’s little gang also managed to keep the really dangerous men out of the Urn, the sort who would start fights and smash the furniture.
“Sister,” Kuni said — now he was turning on his charm for her—“we need to help each other. I like coming to the Urn with my friends — we all have a good time. And we like bringing you more business. But if you can’t see the benefits of this arrangement, I’ll take my act elsewhere.”
Widow Wasu gave him a withering look, but she knew she wasn’t going to win this one.
“You better tell such good stories that all those Imperial soldiers get totally drunk and empty their pockets.” She sighed. “And say something nice about the pork pot stickers. I need to get rid of them today.”
“But you’re right that we should reduce my tab a bit,” Kuni said. “Next time I’m in here, I’m expecting that my tab will have already been cleared. Do you think you can make that happen?”
The widow nodded reluctantly. She waved Kuni away, sighed, and began to write off the drinks that Kuni and his gang were so happily consuming at the bar.
Kuni Garu stumbled from the Splendid Urn on unsteady legs, but he wasn’t really drunk yet. Since it was early in the afternoon, his closest friends were still at work; he decided that he would kill some time by wandering the main market street of Zudi.
Though Zudi was a small city, the Unification had nonetheless changed its complexion substantially. Master Loing had lectured to the boys about the changes disdainfully, lamenting that his students couldn’t appreciate the virtues of the simpler Zudi of his youth; but since this new Zudi was all Kuni had known, he made up his own mind about it.
Emperor Mapidéré, in a bid to keep the old Tiro nobles from plotting rebellions in their ancestral domains, stripped them of any real power and left them only with empty titles. But that wasn’t enough for him. The emperor also divided the noble families and forced some members to relocate to distant parts of the empire. For example, a Cocru count’s eldest son might be ordered to resettle — taking his servants, mistresses, wives, cooks, and guards with him — to Wolf’s Paw, away in the old territories of Gan. And a Gan ducal clan’s side branches might be told to pack themselves up and move to a city in Rui. This way, even if the hot-blooded younger nobles wanted to make trouble, they would have no influence with the local elites and could inspire no sympathy in the local populace to join their cause. The emperor did the same with many of the surrendered soldiers and their families from the six conquered Tiro states.