"Opal will stick a pin in your backside if you use that word around here. Whores sell their bodies on the street for water. We are trained snuggery handmaidens. We are Opal's girls. We do much more than-well, much more than whores do. We are, um, companions. We speak prettily, and tell stories and sing and recite and dance, and we listen to the men as though they are the wisest sages in the city. We entertain and make them laugh. Do it properly, like I do, and no one cares if we don't have fair skin and blue eyes and straw hair like Scarpen Quarter folk."
"Opal says I'm the best fan dancer she's seen for my age."
"Maybe, but she can't teach you, not properly, you know that. You'd have to go to a professional dancer for lessons, and that'd cost tokens we don't have. Opal's not going to pay for it. She doesn't want a dancer, or a musician, or a singer-she just wants handmaidens who can also dance and sing and play the lute. There's a difference. Forget it, Terelle. It's not going to happen. When your bleeding starts, the law says you are old enough to be a handmaiden and Opal will make sure that's what happens."
Terelle lifted her chin. "I won't be a whore, Vivie. I won't."
"Don't say things like that, or Opal will throw you out."
"I wish she would. Ouch!"
Vivie, irritated, had leaned across and yanked a lock of her hair. "Terelle, she's given you water for more than five whole years, just on the strength of what you will become after your bleeding starts. You know that. Not to mention what she paid Pa. She invested in you. She will spit more than sparks if she thinks she's not going to get a return on her investment. She won't let you get away with it. Anyway, it's not such a bad life, not really."
But the crouching shape of her unwanted future grew in Terelle's mind. "It's-it's horrible! Like slavery. And even barbarian Reduners don't own slaves any more. We were sold, Vivie. Pa sold us to those men knowing we would end up in a brothel." The bitterness spilled over into her voice.
"This is not a brothel. It's a snuggery. A house for food and entertainment and love. We have style; a brothel is for lowlifes with hardly any tokens. And I am not a slave-I am paid, and paid well. One day I shall have enough to retire." She picked up her hand mirror from the divan and fluffed up her hair. The reddish highlights in the black gleamed in the lamplight. "I think I need another ruby rinse."
"I'll do it tomorrow."
"Thanks." Vivie smiled at her kindly. "Terelle, you're not a slave, either. For the odd jobs you do, you have water and food and clothes and a bed, not to mention the dancing and singing lessons. You've been taught to read and write and recite. When you start working properly, you'll be paid in tokens like the rest of us. You can leave any time you want, once you pay back what you owe."
"Leave? How can I leave unless I have somewhere else to go? I'd die of thirst!"
"Exactly. Unless you save enough tokens first."
Terelle slumped, banging her heels against the legs of the divan in frustration.
Vivie laid her mirror aside. "Terelle, Terelle, don't you remember what it was like in the Gibber Quarter before we came here? I do. It was horrid." She shuddered. "The only time we had enough water was when we stole it. I was glad when Pa sold us to the Reduner caravanners-"
She broke off as they heard footsteps in the passageway outside. Terelle jumped off the divan and grabbed up her tray. When the waterlender entered, she was picking up the empty mugs on the low table. She bobbed and scuttled past him. When she glanced back from the doorway, she saw Vivie smile shyly at Kade from under her lashes. One bare shoulder, all invitation, had slipped from the confines of her robe.
Terelle pulled the door shut. Back in the main reception room, the crowd had thinned. Most of the handmaidens had gone upstairs with their first customers of the night. Men who had not secured a girl waited their turn. Opal, plump and painted, flirted shamelessly as she bargained prices with latecomers. Servants brought more amber, keproot and pipes. The air was thicker now, yet there was an edginess to the atmosphere. Terelle scanned the crowd, seeking the cause.
The pedeman in the blue tunic sat alone, and his eyes, still sheened with feral hunger, sought her-but he wasn't causing any trouble. On the other side of the room, Merch Rosscar glowered at Merch Putter, the man he had earlier called a cheat. He began another drunken tirade, his speech slurred, his words threatening, his nastiness growing more and more overt. Putter stirred uneasily. Terelle glanced at Opal, who gave the merest of nods. Terelle dumped her tray and slipped out of the room. She went straight to the unroofed courtyard where Garri the steward and Donnick the doorman controlled entry to the snuggery via a gate to South Way.
"Trouble," she told them. "Madam Opal wants Merch Rosscar removed."
"Drunk again, I s'pose," Garri said. "Look after the gate a moment, Terelle. Anyone comes, they'll have to wait a bit till we get back. Come on, Donnick."
Terelle sat down on the doorman's stool next to the barred gate. Outside in the street all seemed quiet; at this late hour, not too many people were still up and about. The city of Scarcleft tumbled down the slope known as The Escarpment in stepped levels and South Way was one of three roads that descended from the highlord's dwelling, on Level Two, to the southern city wall, on Level Thirty-six. During the day it was usually one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.
She leaned back against the courtyard's mud-brick wall so she could look up at the sky. On those nights when Opal's was closed, once every ten days, she would take her quilt up to the flat roof so she could fall asleep watching the stars as they slid, oh so slowly, across the black depth of the sky. She liked not being surrounded on all sides by walls. She liked the feel of the wind gusting in from the gullies of the Skirtings in unpredictable eddies. She even liked it during the day when the air was so hot it crackled the hair on her head, and she had to rub rendered pede fat onto her lips to stop them drying out.
Whenever Terelle tried to explain such things to Vivie, the older girl would throw her hands up in incomprehension and remark that talking to her sister was as unsettling as having a stone in your sandal. So Terelle didn't try any more. She learned to accept the fact that she was odd and Vivie was the one who fitted in. Terelle wasn't comfortable in the snuggery; Vivie revelled in it like a birthing cat that had found silk cushions. Terelle sometimes cried real tears-and Vivie had never shed a tear in grief in her whole life.
Now, though, the oil lamps around the walled courtyard dulled the sky and made it hard to see the stars. A flame sputtered and shadows danced. Once more she saw the dark lump of a future crouching just out of reach, waiting to smother her.
I'm trapped, she thought. It had been her fate from the moment she had been included in the deal made with the caravanners passing through their settle. Her father had his tokens, enough for a year or two's water, and she had this. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of citrus flowers, a hint of perfume, the stale smoke of burned keproot.
She had to get out. She wasn't Vivie, and she never would be. Yet how to escape?
Garri and Donnick returned, hustling an irate Rosscar between them. Outside in the fresh air, he appeared less drunk and more dangerous. "I'll be back, Merch Putter!" he shouted over his shoulder, even though the merchant was nowhere in sight. "You'll regret the day you cheated me!"
Terelle opened the gate, but when the steward attempted to guide the man through it, he lashed out with a kick, catching the older man in the knee. Terelle winced. Garri had swollen joints at the best of times. Donnick, a hulking youth of eighteen with few wits but a good heart, gently levered the drunken man through the gateway and closed the gate.
Terelle stepped back into the passage leading to the main reception room. Light flickered as some of the lamps guttered. There was someone coming the opposite way, and she politely flattened herself against the wall to let him pass. But he didn't pass. He stopped: the pedeman in the blue tunic. She turned to hurry on, but he barred her way, his arm braced against the wall at chest height.