VIII
The Rooftop
Ghan was not in the library the next morning, and Hezhi knew what that meant; he was down in the city, planning her "escape." Her mind was still awhirl with the idea; she had stayed up late into the night, in the courtyard of her rooms, running her ringers upon the little Mang statuette. Somehow, the fierce little horsewoman made the almost unthinkable idea of leaving Nhol—of leaving the palace—seem possible, something she could survive. The little figure could not, however, allay her doubts; there were many of those. What would she do, wherever she went? Certainly she would not be a princess, waited on by servants. That and indexing in the library were all she knew how to do. Where else would her skills with books be useful? The Swamp Kingdoms, perhaps—they might have a few libraries. But the Swamp Kingdoms were too close to the River, still in his domain. Did the Mang have libraries? Probably not.
Hope and fear kept her company all night, and in the end it was knowing her only other choice was the underpalace that al-lowed hope to be the one that woke up with her. She would not be waited upon there, either, and no book could survive that flooded, terrible place.
Hope told her Ghan would think of something; hope was the statuette, the image of a creature, unfettered, unbindable.
The worst of it was that now that plans were in motion, she was helpless. After years of investigating her own life so that she could understand and control her fate, matters were again in the hands of others. She spent the morning thumbing vacantly through books whose pages she did not even see. Ghan's place was held by a plump young man from somewhere in the Butterfly Court, where the tax collectors carried out their business. He was pleasant and rather bland, and apparently of no help whatsoever to Yen, who came in about midmorning. Consequently, Yen brought his questions to Hezhi.
Yen was a fast learner, so his queries were no longer simple ones. She welcomed the challenge—it and Yen kept her mind and stomach off of wondering where Ghan and Tsem might be, what they might be doing. But once they had found the necessary texts—Second-Dynasty proscriptions for tertiary water fane drainage—her mind wandered off again into the land of what-will-be. She really couldn't help thinking that once she fled from Nhol, was exiled from it, she could marry whomever she wanted, even a merchant's son.
She also considered that, once she was no longer a princess, no one would want to marry her, not even a merchant's son. And of course, it could never be Yen, who was dedicated to his life here as a Royal Engineer. Still, it was a pleasant, even an entertaining, thought.
He looked up to ask her a question and caught her thoughtful gaze, and she blushed, fearing he could tell exactly what she was thinking.
"I'm sorry," he said sincerely. "I'm keeping you from something."
"No, no," she corrected, perhaps a bit too quickly. "I'm just distracted today. I have a lot to think about."
"Well, as I said," Yen began, making motions to leave.
"No, stay," she pleaded. "I wanted to ask you about something."
"Oh. Ask me?" Yen sounded very surprised. "An opinion, I hope, for of real knowledge I have no great supply."
"You know about this," she assured him.
He looked at her expectantly.
"It's just that I've never been out of the palace," she said at last. "The city is a mystery to me, even what I can see of it. Tsem—my servant—he tells me a bit, but of course he's never lived out there. I just wondered if you could tell me something about it. Anything."
"You've mentioned this before," Yen said, "and I didn't tell you before, but it puzzles me. I've seen nobles in the city many, many times. Why have you never been out?"
"I'm not old enough," she confessed, hoping the weight of what that meant to her was not apparent in her voice, on her features.
"Ah. But soon?"
"Yes. I suppose that's why I ask."
"Well, I don't know where to start. It all seems so plain to me, so common. Most people spend their whole lives wondering what the inside of the palace is like, you know. We don't think much about fishmongers and scorps, unless we have to."
"Scorps?"
"Scorpions. Thieves, cutthroats. Some parts of the city are rather dangerous, you know."
"The merchants' quarter, where you grew up?"
"No, not really. We have burglars, now and again, people who break into our houses to steal things, but they aren't really dangerous. They avoid the kind of trouble killing a rich man might bring down on them. They are very stealthy, crafty—but not dangerous. No, the scorps haunt the docks, the warehouse district, Southtown…"
"Would you come with me?" she asked him abruptly.
"What?"
"Just for a few moments, would you come with me?"
"Ah, I suppose. To where?"
"A place I know, where we can see the city, where you can point to things when you talk about them."
"Will that be all right? Without an escort?"
She had briefly forgotten about that. Tsem was with Ghan.
"Just for a short time. And no one will see us, I promise."
"If you promise," he said solemnly, "then I'm bound to believe you."
"That is my father's house," Yen said, pointing. "The one with the red awning, you see?"
Hezhi followed the line of Yen's finger, out and away from the rooftop garden. "Yes. Why, that's one of the largest houses there!"
"My father does well enough. Still, the least part of the palace makes it seem like a hovel."
She frowned. "But what of those houses?" she asked, indicating the thick, tiny huts of Southtown.
"Well, of course, those are real hovels," Yen told her. "One-room shacks with leaky roofs."
"What are the people there like?"
Yen shrugged. "I only know what I see—people from the rest of the city rarely venture into Southtown, you know. But the people there are scorps, beggars, cutpurses, prostitutes. The sort without the ambition to better themselves."
"Do they have a choice about that?" she asked. "Can they better themselves?"
Yen nodded easily. "I think so. We all have choices, you, me, the people in Southtown. I could have followed my father, been a trader, but see, I chose another path."
She wasn't so easily convinced. "Surely it must be very difficult to live there. I mean, someone from down there couldn't get appointed to the Royal Engineers, the way you did, could they? I have trouble enough imagining life without slaves, servants, soldiers to protect me…"
Yen chuckled shortly. "Why bother to imagine that? That would never be your lot."
The irony of that almost stung, but she could not, of course, reveal her distress. "I try to imagine many things," she stated.
"As do I," Yen replied, and for a moment his eyes flashed in a most peculiar way, a way that tickled her belly with warmth, brought blood to her face.
"More," she demanded, tearing her eyes from the young man and looking back out over the rooftops and streets.
"Well… the docks, there. I used to sit on them when I had nothing else to do, watch the foreigners come in. Some of them were so strange, they couldn't even speak, but only gabble in their own barbaric languages."
"Tell me about them," she requested, resting her chin on the walled edge of the court, watching sunlight flash on the River like a thousand thousand golden eels. A great three-masted ship was just heaving out of the channel, toward, dock, its sails crumpling as it came, all but the lateen sail in back.