He looked away. It could quite easily have been embarrassment, the logical reaction of a reticent man faced with unexpected gratitude. 'Chance,' he said. 'Pure chance. Oh, I knew who you were, of course. But I happened to run into you as I was making my own escape. It was just instinct, really.'
'I see.' She was frowning. 'So if you'd happened to run into someone else first…'
'I didn't, though,' he said. 'So that's all right.'
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I think I made it sound like I was afraid-I don't know, that you were calling in a debt or something.'
'It's all right,' he said. 'Let's talk about something else.'
'Fine.' She lifted her head, like a horse sniffing for rain. 'Such as?'
'Oh, I don't know. How are you settling in?'
'What?'
'Well, you asked me.'
She hesitated, then shrugged. 'There are days when I forget where I am,' she said. 'I wake up, and it's a sunny morning, and I sit in the window-seat and pick up my embroidery; and the view from the window is different, and I remember, we're not in Eremia, we're in Civitas Vadanis. So I guess you could say I've settled in quite well. I mean,' she added, 'one place is very much like another when you stay in your room embroidering cushion covers. It's a very nice room,' she went on. 'They always have been. I suppose I've been very lucky, all my life.'
The unfair question would be, So you enjoy embroidery, then? If he asked it, either she'd have to lie to him, or else put herself in his power, forever. 'What are you making at the moment?' he asked.
'A saddle-cloth,' she answered brightly. 'For Orsea, for special occasions. You see, all the other things I made for him, everything I ever made…' She stopped. Burned in the sack of Civitas Eremiae, or else looted by the Mezentines, rejected as inferior, amateur work, and dumped. He thought of a piece of tapestry he'd seen in Orsea's palace before it was destroyed; he had no idea whether she'd made it, or some other noblewoman with time to fill. It hardly mattered; ten to one, her work was no better and no worse. The difference between her and me, Vaatzes thought, is that she's not a particularly good artisan. I don't suppose they'd let her work in Mezentia.
'It must take hours to do something like that,' he said.
She looked past him. 'Yes,' she said.
'Let me guess.' (He didn't want to be cruel, but it was necessary.) 'Hunting scenes.'
She actually laughed. 'Well, of course. Falconry on the left, deer-hunting on the right. I've been trying really hard to make the huntsman look like Orsea, but I don't know; all the men in my embroideries always end up looking exactly the same. Sort of square-faced, with straight mouths. And my horses are always walking forward, with their front near leg raised.'
He nodded. 'You could take up music instead.'
'Certainly not.' She gave him a mock scowl. 'Stringed instruments chafe the fingers, and no gentlewoman would ever play something she had to blow down. Which just leaves the triangle, and-'
'Quite.' He looked up. 'Here we are,' he said. 'Twenty-Ninth Street. The square's just under that archway there.'
She nodded. 'Thank you for showing me the way,' she said.
'I hope you find what you're looking for.'
'Vermilion,' she replied. 'And some very pale green, for doing light-and-shade effects on grass and leaves.'
'Best of luck, then.' He stood aside to let her pass.
'I expect I'll see you at the palace,' she said. 'And yes, I'll write to my sister.'
He shook his head. 'Don't go to any trouble.'
'I won't. But I write to her once a week anyway.'
She walked on, and he lost sight of her behind the shoulders of her maids. Once she was out of sight, he leaned against the wall and breathed out, as though he'd just been doing something strenuous and delicate. There goes a very dangerous woman, he thought. She could be just what I need, or she could spoil everything. I'll have to think quite carefully about using her again.
Money. He straightened up. A few heads were turning (what's the matter? Never seen a Mezentine before? Probably they hadn't). Almost certainly, some of the people who'd passed them by on the way here would have recognized the exiled Eremian duchess, and of course he himself was unmistakable. Just by walking down the hill with her, he'd made a good start.
He started to walk west, parallel to the curtain wall. Obviously she's not stupid, he thought, or naive. Either she's got an agenda of her own-I don't know; making Valens jealous, maybe? — or else she simply doesn't care anymore. In either case, not an instrument of precision. A hammer, rather than a milling cutter or a fine drill-bit. The biggest headache, though, is still getting the timing right. It'd be so much easier if I had enough money.
A thought occurred to him, and he stopped in his tracks. The strange, weird, crazy man; him with all those funny names. What was it he'd said? I have certain resources, enough to provide for my needs, for a while. Well, he'd asked to be taken on as an apprentice, and in most places outside the Republic, it was traditional for an apprentice to pay a premium for his indentures.
He shook the thought away, as though it was a wisp of straw on his sleeve. Money or not, he didn't need freaks like that getting under his feet. For one thing, how could anyone possibly predict what someone like that would be likely to do at any given moment?
Embroidery, he thought; the women of the Mezentine Clothiers' Guild made the best tapestries in the world; all exactly the same, down to the last stitch. A lot of their work was hunting scenes, and it didn't matter at all that none of them had ever seen a deer or a boar, or a heron dragged down by a goshawk.
He smiled. Hunting made him think of Jarnac Ducas, who'd never had a chance to pay him for the fine set of boiled leather hunting armor he'd made. Of course that armor was now ashes, or spoils of war (much more valuable than the Duchess' cushions and samplers); but Jarnac had struck him as the sort of nobleman who took pride in paying all his bills promptly and without question. Where was Jarnac Ducas at the moment? Now he came to think of it, he hadn't seen his barrel chest or broad, annoying smile about the palace for what, days, weeks. The important question, of course, was whether he had any money. No, forget that. He was a nobleman; they always had money, their own or someone else's. They had the knack of finding it without even looking, like a tree's blind roots groping in the earth for water. With luck, though it wasn't of the essence, he'd run into Jarnac well before the city was packed up on carts and moved into the wilderness; in which case he'd be able to establish his foothold in the salt business, and everything would lead on neatly from that. Besides, he reflected, it would be appropriate to build Jarnac into the design at this stage; good engineering practice, economy of materials and moving parts.
He sighed. Time to get back to the palace for another of those interminable meals. Why they couldn't just eat their food and be done with it, he couldn't begin to guess. It wouldn't be so bad if the food was anything special, but it wasn't: nauseating quantities of roast meat, nearly always game of some description, garnished with heaps of boiled cabbage, turnips and carrots. They were going to have to do better than that if they were planning on seducing him from his purpose with decadence and rich living.
Jarnac Ducas, though. He smiled, though there was an element of self-reproach as well. So ideally suited for the purpose; he remembered a glimpse of him on the night when the Eremian capital was stormed, a huge man flailing down his enemies with a long-handled poleaxe, an enthralling display of skill, grace and brute strength. A good man to have on your side in a tight spot. Well, yes.
(Another thing, he asked himself as he climbed the steps to the palace yard gate; why so many courses? Soup first, then an entree: minced meat, main meat, cold meat, preserved meat in a paste on biscuits, fiddly dried raw meat in little thin strips, followed by the grand finale, seven different kinds of dead bird stuffed up inside each other in ascending order of size. There were times when he'd have traded all his rights and entitlements in the future for four slices of rye bread and a chunk of Mezentine white cheese.)
They were ringing a bell, which meant you had to go and change your clothes. Another thing they had in excess. He'd counted fifteen tailors' shops in the lower town that day, but nobody in the whole city knew how to make a kettle. He thought about the Vadani, instinctively comparing them with his own people and finding them wanting on pretty well every score. Their deaths would be no great loss. When their culture and society had been wiped out and forgotten, the world would be poorer by a few idiosyncratic methods of trapping and killing animals and a fairly commonplace recipe for applesauce. Of course, that didn't make it right.
