'Every ignorant villager,' said Keshad over his shoulder.
Captain Anji had waited throughout, standing patiently behind his wife. 'Have you seen their uncovered heads, Keshad?'
'No.'
'Then you are only speculating. If you will, Keshad, return to the office with Avisha and have one of the clerks ink a contract, something I can take with me when I ride out to examine the herds. Come, Mai, I'll escort you personally. The Ri Amarah are honorable and trustworthy friends.'
He nodded at Avisha, who wished herself dead and her bones picked clean for having spoken so stupidly. Who was she to mock Sheyshi? At least Sheyshi kept her mouth shut.
'Open your mouth and prove yourself a fool,' she muttered as the company moved off en masse, the big man's head towering over the rest. They were talking about sheep again!
'Do they really have horns?' Chaji came to stand next to her. He indicated Keshad, who was fulminating, staring toward that same poor beggar with offering bowl held out in trembling hand as he limped through the crowd in the same general direction as the Qin company. An odd-looking man under the grime, and oddly familiar.
'Avisha,' said Keshad under his breath, 'here's a vey. Keep walking, split away from me. Then go say a pretty word to him and bend close and put it in his bowl, and afterward tell me if there is a mark in the bottom. Wait until he is out of our sight before you meet up with me.'
He had spoken to her! She did as she was told, angling away, pretending to be walking by herself, a simple village girl come to the city for the first time. Men smiled at her, in her pretty clothes and well-kept hair. Women eyed the cut and quality of her taloos.
'May the gods grant you blessings, holy one.' The beggar was old, thin, with a beaky nose and dark rodent's eyes that had an unpleasant glimmer. Then he moaned grateful noises, a few mumbled words that could have been anything. He reeked, as if he'd been sleeping in a smokehouse after having been rolled in dung. Whew!
She remembered where she'd seen him before.
She caught up with Keshad by the gates to the inner city, where he had paused to wait for her with the four Qin soldiers assigned to guard him.
'Well?' he demanded.
'It's a wooden bowl. There was a mark painted in the bottom, crossed knives linked under a circle.'
Keshad pressed a fist to his mouth, then lowered it.
'What means that?' asked Chaji, very serious now.
'That's what empire folk call a blessing bowl, for the god Beltak. Now, maybe he stole it, or maybe he found it, but maybe he didn't.'
Avisha bit her lip. 'Heya.' She hesitated. When Keshad gave her
a look of barely veiled disgust, she blurted out the rest. 'The very first day I came to the compound, I saw a beggar in a red cap in the courtyard. I'm sure maybe it was him.'
'Maybe he is a spy,' said Chaji. 'The captain warned us, maybe Red Hounds from the empire follow us over the mountains. You want, we kill him right now.' He grinned at Avisha. 'You want to watch? Very fast, we kill him.'
'You can't kill a holy beggar in the public street!' Keshad surveyed the street traffic, the gate guards staring at the Qin soldiers and factor and girl loitering in the sun, the laborers and market women pausing to whisper. A pair of raggedly dressed young men watched the Qin soldiers with what looked like admiration. 'Even if this one is a spy, no one seeing the impiety would know that. They'd only see outlanders killing a holy beggar.'
'The captain must know,' said Chaji. 'I send Seren and Tarn to follow the spy. Avisha, return to our own compound. Tell Chief Deze what we saw. You and I-' He indicated Keshad. '-we go to the Ri Amarah compound, find the captain.'
Avisha admired the swift way Chaji took control of the situation, but Keshad balked. 'Are you perhaps overreacting?'
The Qin were not in general demonstrative men. Chaji's look of scorn flashed quickly, and was hidden at once. 'From the empire, there is always danger to the captain. Even a tailman knows this. Avisha, you go quickly, yes?'
'Yes,' she said breathlessly, not sure if his dazzling gaze was offered in praise or just because he was tense.
'Eiya!' muttered Keshad. 'We'll do as you say, but I know the city better, I'll be able to retrace the spy's trail. Send the others to follow the captain. You and I follow the beggar.'
'You try to escape, maybe?' Chaji said with a grin. 'You try, I enjoy chasing you down.' He sent Seren and Tarn off after the captain, then grabbed Keshad's elbow and dragged him through the gate with Umar trotting behind, leaving her alone, the center of stares, a girl who consorted with outlanders and accepted their smiles.
'Trying to get a husband?' said a young laborer, passing her with a long-handled adze braced across his broad shoulders. 'I'll interview you, lass. They say the Qin soldiers have nubs instead of good
sharp tools. Don't waste that pretty face on them. Come by the carpenters' guild house. Ask for Keness.'
'Leave her be,' said his older companion. 'Don't insult the lass. Anyway, the outlanders saved us, in case you forgot.'
'I don't like the way they look. Cursed proud, if you ask me. Still, I suppose the coin is good, neh?'
She ran away into the crowd, tears burning. Of course the Qin didn't worry she would run away from them: the coin was good; she had no better option. No use crying about it. She was protecting the children and doing what she must, and it wasn't as if the Qin were so bad. Mai had been good to her! She was fortunate to have fallen in with them.
When she stopped sniffling she realized she had gone the wrong way and stumbled into a secondary market where men, women, and children were roped into lines. Labor gangs, being pressed into service. Half of them had fresh debt marks carved into the flesh by their left eyes, some still dribbling blood from a hasty job.
Their hard luck made her realize just how fortunate she was.
As men and women jostled her, she stopped, trying to remember in which direction lay the inner gate. Stunningly, an anonymous man groped her breasts. She shrieked, slapping out, but hit instead a woman carrying greens in baskets hanging from a pole balanced across her shoulders.
'Clumsy bitch! Sheh! And you a rich clan's daughter in such silks. Not that you'd know what hunger is.'
Babbling apologies, Avisha crouched, careful to keep her hem from dragging in the mud, and plucked the thick se leaves one by one out of the muck. The woman cursed at her until she shrank back, red-faced and sniveling, looking for a place to get out of the fray and catch her breath, but there was nowhere that people weren't moving, shoving, blustering, shouting.
'Heya! Ready to move, now! We march to the docks. No falling behind.' A factor brandished a whip as, from the saddle, he addressed a pathetic gang of laborers, young women and men with fresh debt marks and freshly shaven heads that made them look like Sapanasu's clerks, only in homespun, not the robes worn by the Lantern's hierophants.
She would not have recognized Nallo with all her hair gone, if the
woman standing in the second rank of the gang had not blanched and tried to cover her face.
'Heya!' The whip cracked a warning in the air. 'Look sharp! Stay in line! You'll find you're well treated in your new work if you keep discipline and remain orderly. Don't disappoint me, or your new masters.'
They marched off toward the docks down the main avenue, feet shuffling on churned earth. In their wake, the market traffic resumed, but Avisha stood as with feet planted, folk bumping into her, cutting around her, cursing her for getting in the way and would she please move on move on. She began to cry.
Nallo had sold her labor. She was now a slave
Kesh thought that probably the old man was just a beggar, fallen on hard times, a Sirniakan carter stuck in Olossi because his team foundered and afterward reduced to begging. It happened. But Chaji's urgency infected Kesh. It was odd that the girl had seen him hanging around the Qin compound weeks ago.
Their biggest problem was in how to move through the city without drawing attention, because of course everyone noticed two armed Qin soldiers. They would have to hope that the beggar's attention would be fixed on the large party he was following, which was certainly roiling the waters. And not just because of the Qin soldiers
