He shrugged but said nothing.
She itched to push him for answers but he was her dearest friend and she had to respect his silences. Besides, being born and bred of practical Vale stock, she wouldn’t waste her breath putting questions she knew she’d get no answers to.
Even for her, Old ’Un wouldn’t talk about anything before he came to Vale.
Disgusting old Uncle Herven started picking at Old ’Un, complaining that no one knew what or who he was, complaining that he never answered questions, hinting that the stranger would murder and rape them all given half an opening.
Her father said: He don’t want to talk, that’s his business. He does his work and keeps himself to himself, which is more than I can say about some folks here.
He smiled his lopsided smile and she felt better. “Look, Little ’Un,” he said. “If you won’t leave him with me, then you keep your eyes wide and watch your back.”
“You and Mama, hunh!”
His low rumbling chuckle was just louder than the hissing of the fire. He tested the knife on his thumbnail, slipped it into the flexible sheath he’d made for it, reached across the fire. “Stick this in your boot.”
“But that’s forbidden. Papa said—”
“Not big enough to matter, this knife. Besides, what the priests don’t know won’t hurt you.” He dropped his hands on his knees. “So get you off. Enjoy your fairing.”
“If you say so.” She slid the knife into her boot, jumped to her feet. Whistling breathily, hands clasped behind her, she sauntered past black geldings snuffling at oats and straw in the manger, jerking their heads up as a stallion some distance away bugled a challenge or a dog howled at the moon, nudging each other for comfort of kind.
The five-year-old stallion Jet was the fourth one in. She rubbed his nose. “Bays, hunh. They’re never as good as you. You show ’em tomorrow, hey? You and Nightlord.” She scratched his face between his wide-set eyes, smoothed the shaggy lock of mane falling forward between his ears. “Tomorrow Mama and me, we’ll polish your hooves until they shine and braid red ribbons in your mane and in your tail and you’ll be the most beautiful horse at the fair.” She gave him a last pat, stepped back, and called, “Tanu. Tanu.”
With a warbling squeal a small brindle beast came lying from somewhere near the roof, landing with a solid thud in Jezeri’s arms, golden eyes opening and shutting slowly, flower-petal ears twitching, blunt black nose twitching, long sinuous tail swaying back and forth, horizontal stripes of umber and amber down to a hairless black tip that was a finger as dexterous as those on his hands. Jezeri tickled his stomach, laughed at his song of welcome, then settled him into the roomy pocket her mother had sewn inside her tunic. Tanu scratched about until he was comfortable, popped his head through the tunic’s neck opening, closed his hands on its sides, slid his long tail about her neck. He sang his contentment to Jezeri, then settled into a vibrating expectant silence as she began threading through the stock sheds, the wagonloads of cages filled with birds of all sizes, coursing-cats, hounds, and more exotic beasts, creatures she’d never seen before—though none remotely like her Tanu.
The fledgling night was filled with sound. Voices—talking, laughing, shouting, singing. Snatches of melody from a guitar at one shed, a flute at another playing another tune, a mouth harp buzzing away at a third. Dog barks and ox bellows. Horses snorting, neighing. The mewling of assorted cats. The shriek of a night bird soaring high above the river lake. Jezeri laughed with the joy in being alive and young and about to explore the greatest fair of all and Tanu echoed and reinforced her laughter.
At the edge of the stock section she stopped and frowned into the night. On her left were the sounds, the bits and pieces of bright color, the dancing shadows and glimpses of marvels from the fringes of the other three precincts of the fair; these beckoned to her, but ahead of her something else caught her interest more strongly. The docks and ships from lots of places, some from Estarin, maybe a chance, just maybe, to discover clues to the Old ’Un’s past. Tanu began singing to her in his cheerful imitation of her speech patterns. She scratched behind his ear. “I know. Plenty of time for both. The ships first, yes—though there’s probably nothing there, you know. Old ’Un’s luck. Still, we go hopefully.” She giggled as Tanu’s tail-finger tickled her cheek. “Stop that, you. This is serious investigation.”
The wharves were sunk in the shadow of a huge crumbling warehouse, a roofless relic damaged in a quake and long abandoned for the tighter and more suitable sheds built closer in to the waterside. Scattered lanterns hanging from masts cast scattered pools of light that made the darkness all the blacker in the open sheds and the barred sheds fronting the docks. Jezeri strolled along the walkway, her boot heels thudding dully on the warped, worn planks.
The ships at the first dock were dark and deserted, but at the second, a man and his sons were unloading wheels of salt like full moons from a riverboat like a crescent moon with its high peaks fore and aft. A lantern swung swaying from the single mast, the shadows it cast dancing to the beat of music wafting from the other sectors of the fair, the jars of the competing tunes and instruments mended by distance. The salt wheels rose in squat towers on the dock beside bales of seaweed, the salt smell cool and fugitive, the seaweed tangy and medicinal. Jezeri knew what the dark leathery leaves were, though she’d never seen the sea. Traders brought rolls of them now and then to the Vale and her Aunt Jesset, who was heal-woman at Aieea’s shrine, used them in her medicines.
Jezeri prowled on, weaving between piles of wood, some of it turned into rough-cut planks, the rest left in trunks with the bark still on, though the small limbs had been trimmed away. She smoothed her fingers over the cut ends, reveling in the melange of smells, letting Tanu sniff the wood, wondering if the more exotic woods might wake memories in him, though he was such a tiny thing when he crawled out of Old ’Un’s shirt.
The neighbors came to call: Where did he come from? Who is he? What is his rearing? Is he dangerous?
Her father said to some: Out of nowhere.
He said to others: Jezi found him.
Aunt Jesset came to tend him. She said: What’s your name, friend?
He smiled at her. He said: Pick a name.
Her father said: What can we call you, friend?
The stranger said: What you will.
The neighbors said: What’s his name?
Her father said: We call him Old ’Un. Fits well enough, he looks older’n the oilberry tree Grandma planted by the string door.
He came out of the dawn. Jezeri (three years of willful mischief) came on him when she was poking about the milkers’ corral, getting underfoot and into a lot of things she had no business bothering with. She was startled but unafraid and curious. He was torn and burned and battered, starved, parched, a miserable tatter of a man with an odd remnant of grace. He used the corral gate to pull himself erect, bowed to her with an elegance that delighted her, and collapsed at her feet.
Tanu crawled from his shirt and tottered to Jezeri, a pathetic bit of bone and fluff. He huddled against her bare foot, clasped her littlest toe with a small black hand, and won her heart forever.
As she lingered with the woods, she searched the silent ships that had brought them for a sign of anyone she could talk to, but their lanterns were unlit, the crews most likely tasting the delights of the fair. Tanu groused with her, then reached up and patted her chin, making her laugh, sang his own laughter in response. “Like I was afraid of,” she said. “Nothing. Oh, well.” She strolled on, leaving the unhelpful wood behind, peering into the barred cells at the treasures sequestered there.
Bales of fine woolens, silk, linens, their glory gleaming through rips in the more plebeian outer wraps. Piles of artifacts from the ancient places. Boxes of porcelains and stoneware. Rolls of tapestry. Scrolls housed in fine vases. Glimmering mirrors and other glassware. A thousand wonders from a thousand places whose names she didn’t know; she didn’t know much of anything outside the Vale. It seemed to her these things exhaled a fragrance that brought all the world crowding into her body when she breathed it in, that once she’d breathed it in she’d never be small enough to fit back into the Vale—then her Vale-bred practicality reasserted itself and she laughed at her fancies.
A cluster of men knelt on a blanket near the end of the line of sheds, stacks of coin in front of them, tossing the bones in a desultory game where skill vied with luck and neither mattered much and the piles of coin were exchanged with good-natured cursing and friendly threats.
Jezeri stopped to watch. She’d played that game with her brothers and the hired hands—till they chased her off because she won all the time. The bones seemed to whisper to her fingers when she threw them. She followed them as they skittered across the blanket and knew how they would land, clapped her hands when the man who threw them raked in the stake.
He looked around, grinned. “Eh, boy, sit in. Just a friendly game.”
Tanu voiced his disapproval in loud and emphatic song. Sometimes he was worse than Mama the way he tried to protect her. She stroked him under his chin to shut him up, wanting to accept the invitation, knowing she could win, but wary of traps. She took a good long look at the men on the blanket.
All but one wore short, striped trousers that ended raggedly at midcalf, sleeveless canvas shirts laced up to the throat. Some braided their long hair, others pulled it tightly back and tied it at the nape of the neck with gray fraying cords. All but one had knotty bare feet, arms ropy with muscle, looked as tough and about as trustworthy as the crippled direwolf that cornered her a few years back. A friendly game all right, she thought. Long as I lose.
All of them sailors off the ships. All but one.
He was staring at Tanu, pale eyes flat and unrevealing as carved eyes in a carved face, fine soft black hair fluttering a little in the breeze that followed the river. He was smaller than the sailors, with a slim body that somehow made her think of supple, slinky things like ferrets or weasels, with a narrow gaunt face that reminded her of someone—she didn’t know who until one side of his mouth curled into a mirthless half smile. Startled, she sucked in a breath and held it. Old ’Un, she thought. Not like he is now, but before. Bloodkin? She let the breath trickle out. No. His kind, but not his kin. She narrowed her eyes, searching for a way to ask questions that wouldn’t betray him, but a chill around her stomach warned her off that track.
The sailor rattled the bones in his massive fist. “Not cut loose from your ma yet, boy?” he taunted her. “Eh, be a man.”
She broke her gaze from the interesting enigma of the odd man, grinned at the hopeful gambler, delighted to be taken for a boy. “Find another flat,” she said. She walked off, had a thought, called back an old Vale proverb, laughter bubbling in her deliberately roughened voice. “Do a friend, that’s a shame; do a stranger, that’s fair game.”
She rounded the last shed and slouched along beside the ruined warehouse, scratching behind Tanu’s ears, staring up at the massive stone walls that seemed as ancient as the earth under her feet, man-made cliffs with much the same enduring feel as the stone bones of her home mountains. Tanu chittered suddenly, came out of the tunic pouch, and climbed on her shoulder to ride there, peering into the darkness behind them. Jezeri chewed her lip, the darkness frightening now in a way she didn’t quite understand; she walked faster, then broke into a nervous lope as she rounded the warehouse and moved into the temple garden between the Pilgrim Way and the palings that fenced in the merchant precincts. The peeled logs were a foot or so apart and she could have wriggled between them, but there was a gate close by and she could see the brass helmets of the fair-wards. She trotted to the gate, grinned at the aspirant collecting gate-offerings, flipped him a copper, and sauntered into the noise and excitement beyond.
Acrobats, their faces white ovals, glitter paint about their eyes, red mouths like bloody gashes. Three high, hands touching hands, two towers circled with stately grace in a vertical dance. Man on man, the girls on the topmost shoulders waving silversilk to catch the light, round and round the towers went. A rattle of a drum, a flirt from a tin horn, and the towers crumpled, the girls whirling over and over, caught by their partners, whirled over a last time, landing feather light, arms outstretched, red mouths smiling. A clatter from the drum, a blare from the horn, and all six flew about in twisting leaps and tumbles, crossing and recrossing the small open space, wild as wind-tossed tumbleweeds. Then the girls took collecting bowls and walked through the crowd, moving with an oddly touching awkwardness as if uncomfortable when tied so close to the earth.
Jezeri dropped a copper in the bowl as one of them moved past, thinking the pleasure they’d given her well worth one of her scant hoard of coins.
She drifted on, past dancing dogs and fortune-telling finches, past fire-eaters and freaks—and stopped to stare as she caught the glitter of silver swords. She pressed her leg against the side of her boot, suddenly all too aware of the hidden and forbidden knife. She edged closer, elbowing her way through the gathering crowd. When she’d pushed and wriggled to the edge of the low stage, she saw with disappointment and disapproval that the silver was only paint on wood. She watched the fighters posture, attack, retreat, joined the applause of the crowd at the end of a spectacular exchange, rubbed at her neck, swung around to see who was watching her, saw nothing, and decided she was imagining it. After a time she grew bored and pushed out of the crowd.
A dancer. So nearly naked under crimson gauze that Jezeri blushed as crimson as the gauze. A bored man sat at the back of the low stage, tapping a steady rhythm on a small double drum he held between his thighs. Another sat beside him, drawing a humming tune from a fat single-stringed fiddle. Jezeri stared at them, wide-eyed. They were blue. All over. A deep rich blue like the dye her mother pressed from ridda leaves. Where the skin was tight over bone, the blue lightened to a gleaming sapphire. Their eyes were blue. Even their teeth were blue. Their heads were shaved, their bare torsos decorated with white lines that set off the hard, ridged muscles. The music they made was strange, but the woman danced powerfully to it, entranced by it.