“My dear—” he began in the gallant voice, with only an undertone of hostility.
“I know. You think I’m always remote.” She tried to laugh, tried not to show how that hurt. If Roderigo hadn’t thought his wife remote, he wouldn’t have needed Eugenie Le Fevre. If he hadn’t had Eugenie, Marjorie might not be remote. Circle, and around once more, like a horse quadrille, change reins, pirouette, and on to the next figure.
Rigo, point made, changed the subject. “Make note, my dear. Asmir Tanlig. Sebastian Mechanic.”
“What are they to be to you?” She inquired. “Representatives of the middle classes?”
“Little enough of that, except perhaps at Commoner Town. No, representatives of the peasantry, I’d say, who will circulate among the villagers and find out if anything is known. I may need others to find out about Commoner Town, though Tanlig would fit in well enough there, if he cared to. Mechanic, now, he’s peasant through and through, and resentfully prideful about it.”
“Hardly the type of servant to improve our reputation among the bons.”
“The bons aren’t to know anything about it. If we are to complete our mission here, we’ll need access to all levels of society. Sebastian is my link to the people of the soil. He knows enough not to call himself to the aristocrats’ attention. And if you want to know how I got on to the men without bon Haunser knowing, the Sanctity charge from Semling told me about them. I’ve already asked them the question.”
“Ah.” She waited, holding her breath.
“They say no.”
“Ah,” she said again, breathing. So there was hope. “No plague here.”
“There is no unexplained illness that they know of. As we agreed, I told them we’re making a survey.”
“They might not have heard….”
“Both of them have kin in Commoner Town. I think they would have heard of any strange sickness. But, it’s early days. The aristocrats have putative control of ninety-nine percent of the planet’s surface. There could be things going on here the commoners simply don’t know of.”
“It sounds as though you have things well in hand.” She sighed, her weariness and hunger suddenly heavier than she could gracefully bear. “Would you have any idea where Anthony might be?”
“If he’s where I told him to be, he’s with Stella up in the summer quarters, making a rough floor plan of the place for me. We’ll have to furnish it rather quickly, I’m afraid. Asmir tells me there’s a craftsmen’s area in Commoner Town. A place called, unimaginatively enough, Newroad. Lord knows where the old road was.”
“Terra, maybe.”
“Or any of half a hundred other places. Well, it doesn’t matter where it was, so long as we know where this one is. According to Asmir, we can get very acceptable stuff built there within two or three weeks—long Grassian weeks—and he’s already sent word on what he calls the tell-me for some kind of craftsmen’s delegation to come call on us.”
“By acceptable, does he mean to the bons, Rigo? I have a feeling everything we do will be measured and weighed by the bons. I think our poor horses were not revived because the bons did not know whether they would accept them or not, here on Grass. They have creatures of their own.”
“Hippae.”
“Exactly. Who are never kept in stalls, so the Obermun told me.”
“Where in the devil are they kept, then?”
“I have serious question as to whether they are ‘kept’ at all, Rigo, though they live in something not called stables. Why don’t we collect Anthony and Stella and go explore them together?”
The places not called stables were cavernous halls dug into the side of a hill, lined and pillared with stone. A rock-lined, spring-filled tank at the back cast a wavery luminescence across the low-arched ceiling. Half a dozen tall slits in the hillside were the only entrances.
“We could put the stallions and the mares in here and all their foals for the next hundred years,” Stella observed with brooding annoyance, taking a large bite from the apple she had brought with her. “And it would still be blasted inconvenient.” Stella, with her black hair and eyes and passionate disposition, resembled her father. Like him, she moved as a whip cracks, always seeming to arrive wherever she was going with considerable noise but without having bothered to travel the intervening distance. She shouted now, listening to the echo of her own voice as it rattled back into blackness among stout pillars. “Hallooooo,” a hunting halloo, as one sighting a fox might cry. “Grass stinks!” she cried, with the echo coming back, “ing, ing, ing, ing.”
Anthony made no comment but merely looked around himself with dismay, trying not to let it show through the calm demeanor he had determined upon as appropriate for the son of an ambassador. He had carefully thought out what his role should be, and prayed hourly for the fortitude to continue in it. He was the one who resembled Marjorie. He had her wheat-colored hair and hazel eyes, her cool, white skin, her sapling-slender body, her placid appearance and equable temperament. Like her, he was prey to a thousand inner doubts and horrors he never let show on the surface. Like her, he was thought beautiful, was passionately admired even by unlikely people. At nineteen he was almost of his father’s height, though not yet of a man’s bulk.
A stripling, his mother thought, admiring him.
A mere boy, his father thought to himself, wishing Tony were older so that he could be told why they had come, older so he could be of more help.
“A social problem of some dimension,” Obermun bon Haunser was at that moment remarking to some of his fellow bons. “And so is the daughter, Stella. We’ll have to warn off our own young ones,” he said. Sooner or later the Yrariers would learn of this opinion, and he wondered what he would say then. He did not like the idea of being looked at angrily by Lady Westriding. Her look had a
