‘You honour me,’ I said.
We stood without speaking for a time, watching the gulls again and the white flecked waves, until at last the distant mist and haze offered up the mountains once more, the jagged coast of a new world. I wondered what I would tell my hosts when they asked at table what brought me there. I could give away my rank and speak of Congression, of how the provost of Albaseat put into my mind that in Vyene the empire throne might be won in a different kind of game, with less bloodshed and more lying. And that to play in this new game I needed to know more about the key figures in the Hundred, more than they chose to show before the Gilden Gates. I could perhaps speak of the Prince of Arrow. Of how, more than the wind in the Keshaf ’s sails, his derision drove me to see the borders of empire for myself, to know what I would own, to give me better reasons for wanting it. And at the last, if foolishness took hold, I might speak of Ibn Fayed and of a mathmagician named Qalasadi. I had spent years in pursuit of revenge against an uncle who killed my mother and brother, and here was a man who would have slain all my mother’s kin in one night and left me holding the blame. Surely he deserved no better than Uncle Renar got?
The port of Kutta sprawled across a long and dusty arc of coastline, hemmed between the sea and mountains that launched skyward, browns and dark clumps of greenery soon giving way to bare rock. We stepped ashore onto a long and rickety quay crammed with so many people it seemed that at any given moment a dozen of them threatened to fall into the water. I let Yusuf forge a path. The balance between the force that may be exerted in such endeavours and the nature of the response when offence is taken varies with geography. Rather than pitch headlong into a pointless fight mere yards into what I planned to be a long journey through Afrique, I let myself be led, and kept close and watchful.
There seemed no reason for the crowd, all of them but the half-naked Nubans swathed head to foot in robes, either white or black, most turbaned in the Maroc way, the shesh covering head and face, leaving just eyes to contend with. The noise also! A wall of sound, a harsh jabber, half-threat, half-joke. Maybe the peace of the voyage made it seem so, or it’s that a throng is more raucous when the language is unknown to you, or perhaps just the heat and press of bodies amplified the clamour. Struggling behind Yusuf in that mass of humanity I knew that for the first time I had stepped into somewhere truly foreign. A place where they spoke a different tongue, where minds ran different paths. Maroc had been part of empire for centuries, its lords attended Congression still, but for the first time I had entered a realm that bordered kingdoms not ever part of empire. A place where ‘empire’ would not suffice but needed to be qualified with ‘holy’ for they knew of other empires. In Utter they call us ‘Christendom’ but in Maroc we are the Holy Empire, more fitting since nineteen in every twenty of Maroc’s people answer the adhan call when the muezzin sing from their minarets.
The crowd even had a different stink to it, spices overwriting any odour of unwashed bodies, mint, coriander, sesame, turmeric, ginger, pepper, others unknown, carried on the men themselves as if they sweated it out.
‘Keep up, Sir Jorg!’ Yusuf grinned over his shoulder. ‘Show but the slightest interest and you’ll be penniless by the time we reach the java house, laden down with rugs, brass lamps, enough dreamweed to kill a camel, and a hooka to smoke it through.’
‘No.’ I pushed aside embroidered rugs from two salesmen, passing between them as if through a curtained entrance. ‘No.’ They spoke empire tongue well enough when a sale stood in the offing. ‘No.’ Once more and we were through, crossing a wide and dusty square pursued by barefoot yammering children wearing dirty linens and clean smiles.
Hemming the far side of the square a dozen or so java houses opened with tables sprawling out into the shade from awnings in faded green and red, behind us the quays and ships – boats mainly, the larger ships tying up at more substantial quays before great warehouses further around the bay.
Apart from the children in their whites, and what could be old women or old men hunched in black wrappings, set on various slow journeys along the shaded margins of the square, nothing moved. The crowds through which we forged a path remained resolutely jammed along the narrow stilted walkways, their cacophony hushed behind us, mixed with the gentle threshing of ocean waves against breakwaters. The sun’s heat pushed down, an immense hand, making even the flies struggle, stripped of their frenzy, languid almost.
A man approached us from one of the alleys between the shops, leading three horses, a tall araby stallion and two mares, all pale. Five such stallions had been part of the compensation Father accepted for Mother’s and William’s deaths.
‘My man, Kalal. We can ride to my estate, or sit awhile first and watch the sea.’ Yusuf gestured at the nearest and grandest of the java houses. ‘You’ll like the java in Maroc, Sir Jorg. Hot and sweet and strong.’
I didn’t like the java in Ancrath or Renar, cold and sour and weak, and expensive, above all expensive. I doubted increasing its strength would change my opinion. Yusuf must have read my frown, though I had thought myself good at writing on my face only what I chose.
‘They serve teas also. And I could
