“Stop it!”
“And that was in the short time she and I were ‘associated.’ It’s no use clapping your ears like that. You can hear the truth from your inner voice.”
Méarana took her hands from her ears. “You didn’t know her the way I did.”
“I should hope not.”
“She’s not like that any more.”
The scarred man forbore to answer. Proverbs about leopards and spots came to mind. But the argument continued despite Méarana’s silence, with himself taking all sides. Shut up! he told himself. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Turning away from the harper, doubling over his clenched arms, he fell to his knees on the thick carpet of the sitting room and…
… suddenly, everything around him was unfamiliar, as if he had stepped off-stage. What was he doing here, in this comfortless room, so far from the consolations of Port Jehovah? He cursed Zorba de la Susa. He cursed Méarana Swiftfingers. Most of all, he cursed Bridget ban.
But that was in another country, a part of him said, And beside, the wench is dead.
Tears squeezed from his eyes. Though why should he mourn the death of Bridget ban? She had been dead to him for years.
Something subterranean rumbled with gigantic laughter, sending Inner Child scurrying in flight, silencing even the silent Donovan (for there is a silence more deep than mere quiet).
Each of him regarded himself to the extent that things unreal can regard anything. A fragment of an ancient poem brushed his mind too lightly for the words to alight; and a terrible foreboding took hold of him. An image of a shadow, slouching, at a distance, like a stranger seen under a lamppost on a foggy night. Dead, he thought; or a part of him thought. All tears are dust.
And the word—dust, dust, dust—echoed down the drainpipe of his mind like a man falling into an endless cavern. He saw a party of people, small, as if viewed by an eagle from a distance, circling along a narrow ledge above an immense abyss. One of them pointed with a walking staff into the darkness below them. There is something down there, he said, that cannot speak.
When he came to himself once more, it was night. The room was dark, save for a reading lamp in the corner. He lay curled up upon the bed and, in the corner, the harper slept upright in a padded chair. Slowly, he straightened, careful lest he make a noise, but Méarana’s eyes opened.
“You had a seizure,” she said. “Worse than before.”
The scarred man lay still for a while, then pushed himself erect and sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned his hands on his knees. “It was easier,” he said, “when I thought I had forgotten.”
The harper didn’t ask him what he had thought forgotten. She said, “I brought a doctor in. He prescribed rest, and some herbs.”
He laughed softly and without humor. “The famous herbalists of Thistlewaite. Did he stick pins in me? I’ve heard they do that here. Chicken soup?” He remembered being haunted by thoughts of death. But whose death? And whose thoughts?
There was something very wrong inside his head.
That elicited a second humorless laugh. It was more pertinent to wonder if there was anything very right in that vandalized ruin.
How could such a kaleidoscope keep Méarana safe from harm? De la Susa had not known what he was asking of him.
The Thistles divided their daylight into twelve hours starting from the sunrise ceremony, but unlike folk on other worlds they did not number their hours. Instead, each had a name. Thus, the third hour after equatorial sunrise was Bravely Working Hour, presumably because by that time most people were at their jobs. The other hours were named in like manner after the rhythms of life, and in this wise the Thistles synchronized their activities. When at the Mid-day Snacking Hour one sat to a light meal of biscuits and cheeses, one experienced the harmony of knowing that everyone in the sheen was doing the very same. There might be some dissonance with other sheens, or even with those districts in the Eastern Marshes where dawn arrived before its appointed hour, but it was generally acknowledged that the Eastern Marshes were out of synch in more than their sunrise, and the folk of other sheens were odd beyond all credit.
There were no public clocks. The right of proclaiming the Hours was reserved to the emperor. Within the palace complex stood a single cesium clock of unimaginably ancient vintage. It did not match the Thistlean hours, having been calibrated long ago to the tock of a different world, but the Sages of the Clock would note the time displayed and perform a ritual called the Transposition of Times, and determine when each new local hour began. Uncounted people on uncounted worlds spent their workday “watching the clock,” but on Thistlewaite there were workers actually paid to do so. The Voice of the Sheen would then, to trumpet blast and gongs, announce the Hour from the parapet of the imperial palace, and the cable channels would carry her word throughout the sheen.
Méarana heard the trumpets as she made her way down Poultry Street, a narrow lane whose coops and butchers had long given way to mobi stores and shopping arcades, leaving only subtle aromatic reminders of its original inhabitants. Méarana said a word equally pungent and quickened her pace, for the trumpet meant that she would be late for her command performance. She tolerated Donovan’s eccentricities on most things, but the packing of her clothing was not among them and that had delayed her.
White Rod was as pale as his wand of office when Méarana finally appeared. Trembling, he led her into the throne room, where Resilient Services sat alone at High Tea, to all appearances sorely vexed. Méarana thought she would need a suantraí to sooth the man’s palpable anxiety. She waited for White Rod’s underling to pull her chair out for her. Instead, underlings hesitated, emperors rose, and guests sat in fits and starts. Apparently, custom required that He Who Serves the Tea was to sit last of all; but because the tea had already been poured before Méarana’s entrance, harmony was now broken. She did not see why this mattered at all, least of all that it mattered so terribly, but she supposed that now there would be a two-headed calf born somewhere for which her lateness could be blamed. She was a Die Bolder, born and bred, and a devotee of causality. Concatenation struck her as absurd.
You would think that a harper would know all about harmony, the emperor told her when that quality had been restored. It was an elliptical rebuke, with a great deal of opprobrium in the ellipsis. “It is a terrible discourtesy with which to end my visit,” she allowed.
The emperor of the Morning Dew sat back a little in his chair. Today he wore a dinner jacket of bright green, done up with contrasting red embroidery, with a ruffled cravat at his throat. On his head, he had placed a white powdered wig bearing a long pigtail down his back. “End visit,” he said, as if examining the phrase for possible alternative meanings.
“Yes. Donovan and I leave on the evening shuttle to rendezvous with the throughliner Srini Siddiqi. My mother awaits me.”
“Your mother. Yes. Play me,” he said as he poured a second cup of tea and, using a silver tongs, dropped a lump of sugar in it, “song of your mother.”
Hitherto, the emperor’s requests had been for songs of adventure, of faraway planets, of romance and distance. The harper played Mother as a geantraí: a jaunty tune that conjured her in the moment in which Bridget ban strode across the decks of Hot Gates like the queen of High Tara—tall, magnificent, purposeful. Somehow, though, as her fingers wandered across the strings, a goltraí crept in: a keening lament as heartbreaking as all the losses of the world. By then, she had been transported by her own music, as sometimes befell when the harp took charge and the strings played her fingers rather than the proper way round.