The Eagle And The Nightingales

something to protect my feet, she thought stubbornly, as she crossed the street headed east, skipped over a puddle and skirted the edge of a heap of something best left unidentified. There was just so much she would do to protect her persona, and there was such a thing as carrying authenticity too far.

She did not carry a harp at all, only a pair of bones and a small hand-drum, the only things a musician as poor as she would be able to afford.

The mist here beneath the overhanging upper stories of the buildings chilled the skin and left clothing damp and clammy, but in an hour or so it would be horribly hot, and the one advantage this costume had was that it was the coolest clothing she had to wear, other than the Elven silks. That was mostly because the fabric was so threadbare as to be transparent in places. It was all of a light beige, impossible to tell what the original color had been now. The skirt had probably once been a sturdy hempen canvas, but now was so worn and limp that it hung in soft folds like cheesecloth, and was as cool to wear as the most finely woven linen. She didn't have a bodice; no woman this poor would own one. Nor did she have a shirt. Only a shift, which if she really was this impoverished, would serve as shirt, petticoat, and nightclothes, all one. It was sleeveless, darned in so many places she wondered if any of the original fabric was left, and had at one time been gathered at the neck with a ribbon. Now it was gathered at the neck with a colorless string, tied in a limp little bow.

She hurried along the streets, sometimes following in the wake of one of the water-carts that was meant to clean the streets of debris and wash it all into the gutters. In the better parts of town, that was probably what it did do_but the street-cleaners were paid by the number of streets they covered, and every time they had to go back to the river filling-station to get more water, they lost time. So in this neighborhood, the water sprinkling the street was the barest trickle, scarcely enough to dampen the cobbles, and certainly not enough to wash anything into the gutters. Those few businesses who cared about appearances, like Freehold, sent their own people out to wash the street in front of the building. And there were those who lived here who didn't particularly care for having garbage festering at the front door, who did the same. But mostly she had to pick her way carefully along the paths worn clean by carts and rag-pickers.

As the light strengthened and the mist thinned, she got into some better neighborhoods, and now she took advantage of the directions her children had given her, slipping along alleyways and between buildings, following the paths that only the children knew completely. Even the finest of estates had these little back ways, the means to get into the best homes, so long as you came by the servants' entrance where no one who mattered would see you.

Even the Palace. They can put gates across the roads and guard the streets all they like, but even the Palace has to have an alley. Even the Palace has to have a way for people to come and go_people that the lords and ladies don't want to know exist.

Rat catchers. Peddlers. Rag-and-bone men. Dung collectors. Pot scrubbers and floor scrubbers and the laundry women who did the lower servants' clothing. Garbage collectors. There was a small army of people coming and going through that back entrance every day, people who didn't live at the Palace, despite the huge servants' quarters, but who lived off the Palace. Even the garbage from the Palace was valuable, and there was an entire system of bribes and kickbacks that determined who got to carry away what. The Church actually got the best pickings of the edible stuff, and sent the lowest of the novices to come fetch it every day. They carried away baskets of leftovers from the royal kitchens that fed the lords and ladies and the King himself. Allegedly those went to feed the poor; Nightingale hadn't seen any evidence for or against that.

None of these people were 'good enough' to warrant the expense of clothing them in uniforms and housing them in the Palace; they got their tiny wages and whatever they could purloin, and came and went every day at dawn and dusk. They never saw a lord or a lady_the most exalted person they would ever see would be a page in royal livery.

But, oh, they knew what was going on in that great hive, and better than the lords and ladies who lived there! Each of them had a friend or a relative who did rate quarters above, and each of them was a veritable wellspring of information about just what was going on. Gossip was almost their only form of entertainment, so gossip they did, till the kitchens and lower halls buzzed like beehives with the sounds of chattering.

Very few of them ever got to hear even a street-singer; no one was out in the morning when they would scamper in to work, and by the time they went home in the evening, it was generally in a fog of exhaustion. Sevenday was the day for Church services, and if one picked the right Chapel and began at Morningsong and stayed piously on through Vespers, the Priest would see that piety was rewarded with three stout meals. No street-singer could compete with all the bean-bread, onions, and bacon grease to spread on the bread that one could eat, and a cup of real ale to wash it down. Sometimes on Holy Days, there were even treats of a bit of cheese, cooked whole turnips, cabbage soup, or a sweet-cake... all the more reason to come early and stay late. And if one happened to doze off during the sermon, well, Sevenday was a day of rest, wasn't it?

So when a poor musician like Tanager showed up, looking for a corner to sit in, asking nothing more than the leftovers that the kitchen staff I shared, she was generally welcomed. As long as she didn't get in the way and didn't eat too much, her singing would help pass the time and make the work seem lighter, and one just might be able to learn a song or two to sing the little ones to sleep with.

So in the corner Tanager sat, drumming and singing, and between songs listening to the gossip that automatically started up the moment that silence began.

Now the alley was hemmed on both sides by high walls, walls with tantalizing hints of trees and other greenery on the other side. Nightingale_or 'Tanager'_joined the thin stream of other threadbare, tired-looking people all making their way up this long, dark alley, some of them rubbing their reddened eyes and yawning, all of them heading for their jobs at the Palace.

There was nothing at the end of this corridor of brickwork, open to the sky, but a gate that led to the Palace grounds.