The rooms were on the second floor, one of them at the corner of the hostel overlooking the street. It had a warm stove, two narrow beds, and a wide, lamp-lit table. Septemius grunted as he dropped his bag on the table, taking possession of it. Old Bowough fell onto the nearest bed with a sigh and was asleep within moments, a white dog on each side. Septemius stood looking down at him, his face drawn into vertical grooves, like the wall of a gully. “It gets harder on him all the time,” he said to no one in particular.
“We should settle,” said Tonia. “The medic girl at the quarantine house was right, Septemius.” She lit a candle and wandered through the connecting door, approving the cleanliness behind it, the wood-paneled walls, the wide, quilted bed, the swept hearth before the tile stove in which a small fire was already alight. The other three dogs, they gray ones, were circling the hearth, their black ears and muzzles seeking appropriate smells, fuzzy tails cocked high over their rumps as they tried to agree on space and precedence.
Kostia jounced the bed once or twice, then moved to hang her clothing in the armoire, taking, by habit, the left-hand drawer and set of hooks. “We should settle down.”
“Would you settle?” he asked from the doorway, examining the room for himself, seeing to the lock on the shutters, the bolt on the door, eyes glittering like so many shards of cutting glass, sharp as bright needles, wet from unshed tears. Memory did this to him, sometimes. “Would you?”
“Perhaps not yet,” Kostia laughed. “Though we would if Grandpa Bowough needed.” She took the candle and went to the door, drifting along the hall to locate the sanitary arrangements—individual little rooms with composting toilets of the variety used in many of the Women’s Cities—and the shower room with its capacious and well-stoked boiler. She drifted back, well pleased. The facilities were as clean and well kept as the rooms.
“We could have a little house in the itinerants’ quarter, outside the walls,” Septemius mused, “for the old one and me. You would be accepted within the walls, no doubt. Their own citizens attend school when they are much older than you. You could go to the schools of Women’s Country. There is no doubt work you could do.”
“Perhaps not quite yet,” Tonia said again, with good cheer. “Remember, Uncle, you are a historian by profession. There are still things we need to know about the lands outside the walls.”
It was a device of theirs, this assignment of profession to him who had none except mountebank and traveler. His nieces made him over in their heads, dressing him up in scholar’s robes, like the women at the academy in Abbyville, calling him a historian when he was only a wanderer who had seen what there was left of the world. And he had seen it all, many times over. The towering forests of the northwest, green with ferns and dripping with fog, misty and marvelous as a perilous faery-land; the rock-shattered coasts with the waves coming in during storm; the farmlands of the interior, hills or plain, with the surrounding fields laid out square-cornered and full of root crops or grain or flax fields so blue they seemed a reflection of the sky. And the cities strung all through there, Women’s Country cities. As alike as one dog to another and as different as one dog from another. This place, Marthatown, now, it had its own flavor, partly sea-mist, partly smoke from the ovens where the cured fish hung, partly sheep manure and wool and rawhides—its own particular smell which set it apart from the other cities.
But it was not unlike the others. They all had warehouses where the food from the communal fields and flocks was stored and from which those stores were allotted, so much to each family, so much to the garrison, so much to trade with other towns. In Marthatown they stored wool and hides, grain and dried fish and some root crops. In Susantown they stored apples and smoked meat, flax fiber and linseed oil. Up at Tabithatown they stored dried mushrooms and cut lumber. The town always smelled of sawdust and pitch and rang with the scream of the saw at the watermill. All of them had a market section full of little shops and booths. They all had craftsmen’s alleys where the weavers and quilt makers and candle makers and seamsters lived; every city had its candle shops and herb shops and scrap reclamation centers and streets lined with square, courtyarded houses where grandmothers lived with their daughters and granddaughters and baby boys and servitors.
All the cities had a Council Hall where the medical officers worked and the scarce commodities were allocated—drugs and glass, raw and worked metal. They all had plazas with gates that led out to the garrison ground. They all had streets where the provisioners of the garrison worked, and they all had carnivals, though not all at once.
“We did well in Mollyburg,” he said, apropos of nothing. “We could live out the winter on what we made there. I think the people here would give us a license for temporary residence.”
“Grandpa Bowough would probably like that,” said Kostia, clicking her thumbnail across her teeth. “He’s been very tired lately.”
“Shall I see if we can rent a small house in Wandertown? Hoboville? Journeyburg?”
“Let’s think on it,” Tonia said. “For a day or two.”
Conversing with Kostia and Tonia was like conversing with one person. They picked up each other’s words, leaving
