Mist & Dawn, page 23
Kotori moved to the next room, which, back in the day, used to contain the armourer’s office.
“This could be something more intimate—a library… or since it would be unwise to have the women visit you in the Citadel, you could turn this into a sumptuous bedroom, to… eh…”
Harek again made no comment about this.
“Or it could be a room for displaying trophies from conquests.”
Now Harek turned around and gave him a sharp look. “Are we at war with anyone?”
“Well… uhm… your highness, we’re not, but conquests could feature adventurous trips to remote locations, navigating the coast and penetrating the Mother’s Veil, setting eyes upon the Mother and surviving to tell the tale.”
“I’m sure you would like me trying to end or shorten my life like that.”
Kotori took in a sharp breath. “No, not at all. It was just an example.”
And another bad move on his part. Yes, it was true that many of the people who had set eyes on the Mother—said to be a huge striped ball that occupied the sky in the ocean obscured by the veil of clouds—might survive if they wore protective clothing, but many of them still grew lumps on their skin and died before their time.
“I mean, your highness, if you travel to exotic locations, you bring back mementos—gifts, I must stress. You need to display them appropriately.”
“Ah, you mean like the gilded box with my father’s excrement that the Chevakians displayed in the hall to their place of government? Did you know that it’s still there?”
Why was it that with every word he said, the boy took him deeper into the morass? Really, at his age, he should know better and hold his tongue.
The next room was the kitchen, and then they saw a few much smaller rooms for servants.
The women would need servants, Kotori said, because they couldn’t be expected to work. The bathroom, also on the ground floor, was huge and a dressing room off the bathroom could be made into a birthing room, since there would only be a few women in the house at the start and they wouldn’t need a large ceremony room.
Kotori couldn’t stop talking, because he felt a need to fill the awkward silence, a silence that would invite uncomfortable questions, such as whether the queen knew of all this and approved of it.
Harek took all of this in without saying anything.
They went upstairs and inspected the bedrooms.
Kotori knew he was getting ahead of himself, but he could already imagine this house full of soft music and beautiful women on the cusp of motherhood, who would entertain the young prince and keep their families in the regions happy at the same time.
They were on the stairs back down when Harek said, “What do you know about women?”
“What do I—what?”
Kotori stopped on the stairs to stare at the prince, who walked behind him.
“Know about women,” Harek repeated. “You seem to talk about them all the time.”
“Well, I… I used to come to the mothers’ house often to make castings. I saw the mothers at their seductive tricks, I saw them bloom into motherhood, I saw them birth the king’s children. I was one of the few men who got to see that. It’s beautiful, even if it’s hard. The other women are very caring for their sisters when that time comes. You haven’t lived until you have seen new life emerge from a woman’s body.”
“Hmmmm.”
And then he said nothing, so Kotori kept walking, overcome with powerful memories of princes whose births he’d witnessed, at all times of the year, day or night, often in the main ceremony room with all the cheering and the music, but sometimes in the upstairs lounge or in the bathroom, on the stairs, or in the hallway outside the room. Those many, many princes who had gone into the army and who had never returned from distant wars.
Or some of those princes, like Denori, who had built their own mothers’ houses, where they also invited Kotori as revered guest.
He thought of all the beautiful strong women who used to live in the mother’s house. When the house finally closed, Selwa—dear Selwa, mother of the king’s oldest sons—had returned to her family on the south coast. And while the queen had given birth to princess Loriane on the stage in the large ceremony room and Kotori had been present, Harek had been born in the King’s private quarters with the attendance of only the midwife.
Kotori remembered hearing about it in the morning, after the fact. The queen didn’t even want him to do a casting for the young prince.
Harek’s voice jolted him from his memories.
“I have been told that you have never shown an interest in women.”
“I… ehhh? I’ve just told you I care greatly about these women.”
“That you have no interest in having women. Not the king’s, that you shouldn’t be interested in, not the women in the women’s house, and not the women that you could have if you wanted, outside the Citadel.”
“What kind of question is that? What do you want me to say to that? I’m the court astrologer. That’s my life.”
“It was not a question. Some men don’t care much for women.”
“Well…” Kotori put his hands in his pockets. “As the court astrologer, I’m not supposed to—“
“Supposed to and actually doing it are two different things. Being the court astrologer never stopped Sizek.”
No, it hadn’t. Some of the rumours said that the previous astrologer had more children than the king, although none had come forward at the time of his death.
“Not for me. And if you will excuse me, young man, this kind of talk is highly inappropriate.” The boy was fifteen, by the Mother’s Breath.
“I don’t think so. Why are you so keen for me to look at this house?”
“Because it’s empty?”
“No, I don’t think so. You take me here, because you want to be surrounded by women who adore you, and you want to fill this house with them, or any house, really, as long as you can return to the old ways where they invited you to special occasions and they listened to every word you said.”
“Uhhh—uhmmmm?” Kotori had nothing more to say to that remark, because it was so painfully true, and to deny it would just make things worse, as everything in this conversation had already been used against him.
Harek continued, “Whereas I just want to look at the house. I don’t have to tell you what I want to do with it. I don’t need your suggestions about it. In fact, you might keep your sordid suggestions to yourself, because there are people in the Citadel who won’t like hearing them. I am not interested in stoking those sentiments, but well, walls sometimes do have ears.”
Kotori swallowed. And swallowed again.
“Well, young prince…. That’s a bit…”
He wasn’t suggesting that he would…
“Blunt? Maybe, but that seems to be the only way you understand things. But let me put it this way, if I wanted to resurrect this sordid tradition of mothers’ houses, I wouldn’t need to start with the house, I’d start with the women.”
“How do I know whether you don’t already have those lined up?”
Harek gave him a startled look and said nothing for a while. Ha.
“Ownership of this house requires a use for it. If an owner can’t state a use, people will talk. The walls may have ears, young prince, but the cobblestones in the streets and the tiles in the kitchen have mouths.”
He met the boy’s eyes and could see in them that Harek realised that this game was up. If he wanted the house, then he would have to tell someone what his purpose for it was or risk gossip or his mother’s anger, or both.
Ha! Kotori might be old, but he was not stupid.
CHAPTER 25
Over the next few days, Javes turned his attention to the many jobs he needed to catch up on as administrator for Ysherra. Most of it was rather mundane stuff that required him to sit in his office and read correspondence and write responses. The volume of this stuff building up over just a few weeks never ceased to amaze him.
The window of the office gave him a view across the farm, where he would see Renko work with the camels, looking after Mindo.
For all that the man was strange, he was a decent worker. Javes watched him carry bales of hay, fill up water troughs, cut down thistles or other prickly plants and help another farm hand build a stone wall to line the draining channel that would carry water from the typical sudden downpours to the town’s holding ponds.
In the afternoon, Mindo would accompany the farm hands to the corner of the farm where that channel met up with another coming from the neighbour’s property. A pool of water collected here, protected from the harsh sun by sheer rock walls. The locals often swam here.
Javes could hear their laughing voices and echoing splashes from the room of his office.
On the second day after having returned from his trip, Javes visited the local telegraph office. He had to send a few messages—including his acceptance to attend the northern district council meeting—but he filed a request to see correspondence from the Whitesands Creek telegraph line for the day he had travelled through there with Mindo.
Javes was a bit annoyed that the employee told him he would need a few days to look at it, but the man said they were busy because a lot of northern district council documents were being sent, so that was fair enough.
Javes also occupied some of the man’s time for the purpose of this meeting.
He received the meeting’s agenda, which included full documentation about the location of Tiverian army troops around Watya.
To be fair, he had not given the issue much thought, but now that he saw those maps, he realised with a chill that he should have given it more attention. Much more attention.
Troops from Tiverius always trained in the area, people said, and that was true. But just how many soldiers had they stationed south of the broad and rambling stone-covered river bed where a low bridge—that always flooded after heavy rain—provided the pivotal link from the northern districts to the capital? The map showed at least four camps where there only ever been one.
What were they doing there? What were they afraid of? Arania had been very peaceful and well-behaved for years.
Or was it the tiny camp of building workers who were constructing the sorely needed dam that would service the town and the surrounding fruit tree groves and grain fields, and that would stop the massively wide bed of the river overflowing and keep the bridge open?
Because Tiverius didn’t want the dam, that much was clear to him.
The Aramys River was the lifeblood of Chevakia, feeding the central agricultural district. They said a dam would risk water supplies to that area.
For twenty years, Javes had seen the correspondence of the northern council with the capital about a potential dam pass his desk.
It had gone from Give us the dam to If you give us money, we’ll build it, to If you’re not going to give us money to extend the railway, the dam would be a good alternative to If you’re not going to give us anything, we’ll build it ourselves, keep the extra produce to feed our own people first, and charge good money for the rest.
It was ridiculous that the district needed to trade railway promises for the dam, while other districts in the country got both.
To say that the relationship of the northern council with the doga in Tiverius was tense would be understating it. But it had always been that way.
So, the doga was sending soldiers in response?
What was going on in Tiverius?
There was a time it would have been easy for him to find out, because he’d grown up in Tiverius and his family lived there. But since both his parents had died in quick succession, his brother had relocated his transport business to Peria and he now lived in the City of Glass, because The doga is not interested in encouraging business initiatives. They only want our taxes.
Belo was doing very well now, judging by his correspondence.
While he waited for the telegraph office’s response to his request, Javes visited Ysherra’s bath house, because that was an excellent place to catch gossip.
And there was plenty of gossip.
Yes, it was true that there were military camps not only at Watya, but also at Lekata. It was also true, according to a man whose family came from Lekata, that the soldiers didn’t go into town. They’d brought their own supplies.
The man described this as, They don’t even want to support our local businesses, but another man said the military commanders probably didn’t want to spook the locals.
At that point, an elderly gentleman in the corner of the bath house said, “But then explain this to me: if they told us what they’re doing, they wouldn’t need to fear spooking us.”
That remark stuck in Javes’ thoughts.
Yes, the doga was up to something, and no one knew what. Of course, the administrators of affected regions had asked. The reply from Tiverius was exercises. Very predictable.
Javes received a message from Saree in Whitesands Creek to keep an eye out for Trini, who had left without telling her mother where she was going. Saree worried about her daughter.
Ysherra was the next town down the road from Whitesands Creek, so logic dictated that she would come through town.
Saree worried that her daughter would return to those people, presumably those she thought were related to Mindo.
But if those people were in the area—and Javes asked, but everyone said that where strangers had visited, they were now gone—Mindo showed no sign of wanting to return to them.
In fact, as Javes watched him work from the office window, every time someone unfamiliar to Mindo came to the farm, Mindo hid in the shed or, in one case, behind some hay bales.
Time came to prepare for his trip to the northern council meeting.
Deep in his heart, Javes didn’t want to go. He didn’t like people. He would have to take Mindo, but was having difficulty justifying to himself why it was necessary. Mindo was a competent worker and could just as easily stay. Javes’ distrust of him had waned again, because Mindo had done nothing to justify that distrust. He hadn’t tried to go into town, he’d avoided people, and he was learning Chevakian, even if telling Javes how he had ended up on the desert coast was still beyond his ability to explain.
Since Renko had also attended the youth meetings in town, Javes asked him about it.
“They call themselves the people of the Gathering,” Renko said.
“What—like they do in the ancient culture in Samira on the coast?”
“Yeah.” Renko shrugged.
Javes went deep into his memory. This was stuff they’d learned in a subject called Lands and peoples at the Scriptorium. He recited from his memory. “Traditional Samiran customs are about community consensus. They hold a gathering every night.”
“Yes, like that.”
Huh. That was interesting. “When I was at the Scriptorium, there was a student who came from that region. The Samiran movement is very old and very small and very secretive.”
“They’re not small anymore. They’re sending people into all the towns and asking the young people to join.”
“You went to those meetings.”
“A few.” He looked aside. “It sounded like fun.”
At the time, Javes had also suspected a girl was involved, but a relationship had never eventuated, so he’d never pressed Renko on the subject.
“But it wasn’t?”
“Not so much that, but they wanted us to do stuff that I can’t, like travel for months. Another young guy said he couldn’t because he needed to help his mother with the shop, and they tried to make him tell his mother that this was more important, and I left when that happened, because that was stupid.”
“Did he go?”
“No. But some of the girls did.”
Javes hesitated before asking the next question. “Do you know if any of them were… violated by the men?”
“You mean, raped?”
“That and other things.”
“You sound like you’ve heard something about this.”
“Yes, I have.” And then he explained what he heard from Trini, and also made it clear that he didn’t know how Trini had decided Mindo was from the same group or had anything to do with them, but that something strange and inappropriate had definitely happened to her.
Renko shrugged, his face looking uncomfortable. “They only left not long ago, so I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen any of my friends who went since they left.” He met Javes’ eyes. “Should I be worried? You know… with him here?” Him being Mindo.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. When poorly behaved men and young women get together, bad things happen. I don’t want to assume that it’s a fixture of the movement to provide the men of the movement with girls to rape.”
Renko’s expression continued to be uneasy.
Javes pressed ahead. “Is there anything you could tell me?”
Renko hesitated. “I don’t want you to think this is a fact, but when you just said Trini was certain that Mindo was one of them… I can see that. When I talk about these meetings, the people there were locals, mostly. They came from the hamlets or were from town. One was from Watya. But there was one guy there… he wasn’t from around here. He was like…” He shook his head. “I can’t describe it. You know when you go into Watya and you go to the shops of the serious clothes sellers? You know how mama made me go in because she wanted me to have at least one set of clothes that made me not look like a farmer? You go into this shop and the shop person comes to you and offers you tea and takes your dusty overcoat and looks at it like it’s the dirtiest thing he’s ever seen, and then he shows you all this stuff that’s like wow that has to be so expensive and when will I ever get to wear it? And you feel like you don’t belong there because these are obviously not people like you and they’re way above anything that you could possibly ever be? That’s what this guy was like. The kids adored him. But he looked down on us and made it clear. I don’t know why he was there, because he didn’t seem to enjoy the meetings at all. Mindo reminds me of that guy. He’s not the same, obviously, because Mindo is nothing like that. He’s learning quite quickly and can be funny.”
