“Hush, honey. Distraction’s bad right now, Iron Bridge coming up. I know, I know, I’m talking to them; but I have to, you see. People I know, urn… some of them from times I went with Tai and nursed… Abey damn that wind, why can’t it… dosed with tonic and purgatives… sh, sh, honeygirl, we can make it, see, slip by, slide through, come out the other side… friends and clients and oh you name it… k’lann! you cretin, I’ve got windright… oh potz!” He snatched up a boathook and pushed himself away from the barge, found the sheet he’d dropped and brought the sail around; it filled and the boat stopped gliding backward.
Tense with concentration, he maneuvered through the River traffic, passed under the Iron Bridge, then the Wood Bridge, tacked around the last bend and angled in toward the dilapidated wharf at the edge of the Edge.
› › ‹ ‹
The Ladroa-vivi was the last gatt (wharf) on the north side of the River, standing more than half a mile past the Wood Bridge. There were a small house for the Shindagatt (when there was one) and a rotting warehouse which was empty except for dust, spiders in the rafters, and the occasional drunk. Its interior smelled of urine and death and no one went there except those drunks or fugitives hiding with the spiders to get above the stench and away from the light. Once or twice a month the Shinda guards searched the place, confiscated any contraband they found hidden there. The Shinda Prefect who ran the city threatened repeatedly to bum it down, but he never did.
The sheds and groves around Ladroa-vivi were the meeting ground for idle porters and truant slaves, thieves and vagabonds, diseased habatrizes and overage Salagaum; they played dados with loaded dice, kucha with cards so old the cheatmarks were more legible than the pips, jiwa-bufa with bones the rats had eaten clean and stones from the River. Or they smoked tumba or drank raw mulimuli from clay jugs. Or sniffed fayyun, or smoked bhaggan, or dumped handfuls of the dust of dried pepepo-a caterpillar fed on crazyleaf-into the slugs of mulimuli and went so far off that half the time they never came back. Or ingested other drugs from the pharmacopoeia of self-destruction.
Those who hung about kept their eyes open and trusted to agility and luck to shelter them from danger-as did the Kassians, the bee-priestesses of Abeyhamal, who ventured here to bind up wounds, set broken legs, and dose the hallucinating with purges and settlers.
While Reyna Hayaka was busy knotting the painter, Ailiki leapt onto the gatt and sat on her haunches waiting. Reyna laughed, then lifted Faan up beside the beast. He set the basket on the planks, gathered the skirts of his robes to keep them clear of the muck, and climbed quickly up the short ladder.
“Something new, eh?” A Wascram smuggler with Connections, the self-appointed Shindagatt of Ladroavivi stepped, from behind a tree and stood at the top of the gatt, his hands on his plump hips, his elbows out.
Reyna slid the basket handle over his arm, swung Faan up and held her against his breasts, half hidden by the folds of his outer robe. “Ulloa, Chez,” he said. “Nothing to interest you.”
“Playpretty?”
“No! I don’t go that route, you know that.”
“Some a you clients do.”
“They don’t tell me. I won’t have it.” He turned, putting his shoulder between Faan and the Shindagatt. “Two pradh and you don’t say.”
Chezar Joggaril rubbed at his broad broken nose; for a moment Reyna thought he was going to argue the price, then he shrugged. “Verna,” he growled.
“One hour?”
“Bring it youself.”
“I said.”
“No trade, just coin; I’m not in the mood for games.”
Chezar shrugged. “Leia got female troubles,” he muttered. “Needs some more a that red stuff.”
Reyna shifted his hold on Faan who was starting to wriggle, wanting down. He patted the child to quiet her and frowned at Chezar… “I’ll bring a bottle. You sure that’s it?”
“Same as last time.”
“Vema.”
With the mahsar Ailiki trotting behind him, Reyna strode into the trees. He stepped over a sprawled mule-head, started to circle around a game of jiwa-bufa scratched into the hard dry earth. One of the players, a Salagaum, looked up, pushed straggling gray hair out of his eyes.
“‘Loa, Rey.” He wrinkled his brow, swayed on his knees, and peered hazily at Ailiki. “What’s that?”
“Ulloa, Jumsi. Pet I picked up. ‘Loa, Morg, Jago, Huz.”
He moved quickly through the trees, emerged from them into a nameless wynd filled with refuse, cats and stray dogs, stopped for a moment to resettle the child in the curve of his ann. “Faan, sweeting, honeychild, be quiet now. Like a little mouse.” He touched her mouth, shook his head. “There’s danger here, danger until we reach Beehouse. rm going to cover you with this robe and I want you to stay very very quiet, shhh…” He hefted her higher and tugged his outer robe over her. “K’lann! wish I knew how you turn into solid lead.”
He strode along the wynd, slowed as he turned into Verakay Lane, the longest and widest of the streets in the Edge; /Wild followed close behind him, a small gray-brown shadow.
“‘Loa, Rey.” An old Fundar woman leaned out a window, a soppy cloth trailing from her hand; she flapped it at him, splattering washwater over everything beneath her. “What you got there?”
“‘Loa, Thamman.” He waved at her, went quickly on.
A line of Naostam boys went running past, stuttered to a stop, swung round, and shouted obscentities at him. He paid no attention to them; they were just echoing their fathers. He had Naostam clients, but they refused to know him when they passed him on the street.
He heard the clank-clash of a pair of Shinda guards before they turned the corner ahead of him, retreated a few steps and ran down a wynd between two tenements, then worked back to the Lane, dodging through porters and laborers, handcarts and oxcarts, scurrying cut-purses and lounging out-of-works squatting around jiwa-bufa circles drawn in the dust.
Mahnk Peshalla stood in the door of his tavern waving a fan lazily back and forth. He had the high cheekbones, narrow face and beaky nose of his caste, rat-tail mustaches and a thin beard twisted into long tight ringlets; though he was poor Biashar, the son of a merchant who’d lost everything when a ship he’d invested in never came back, he had two official wives (of the three that Biasharim allowed themselves) and was more generous to beggars and streetfolk than most, sponsoring a score of Wascram boys in the Edgeschool. When he saw Reyna, he flicked the folding fan shut, slapped it against his arm. “Rey,” he rumbled in a voice like a barrel rolling down a gatt, “What you got good?”
“This and that, Mak, this and that.”
Louok the Nimble was standing atop an overturned washtub making silver cemms dance between his dark fingers, the coins glinting in the morning light, changing to copper shabs, then back again, appearing and disappearing. “Now you see it,” he chanted, “now you don’t, silver into copper, yes, that’s the way it goes, copper into air, my hands are empty, my pockets, too, yet see and see, silver.” He paused in the middle of his handdance, waved to Reyna, whistled a snatch of a tune popular in the Joyhouses, went back to his performance, milking a rain of coins from the air and dropping them into a large boot. He upended it, shook his head when a moth flew out, tossed the boot to one of the Wascram boys crouched by his feet, and went on with his performance as the boys moved through the crowd, collecting coins from his audience.
On the other side of the Lane Zinar the Porter shifted his load. “‘Loa, Rey,” he yelled, “Tell Dawa the Lewinkob silk’s in.” He slapped at the bale on his head. “He should get up to Horry’s fast, or it’ll be gone.”
“Gotcha, Zin.”
Quiambo Tanish went hurrying by, his arms loaded down with supplies for the school. He waggled an elbow at Reyna, slowed for a few steps. “Tell Pan to come by school tomorrow, I’ve got the talk cleared through the Manasso Head.”
“Will do, Tan.”