And in the meantime the Acragas project, altering the rigging of a small coastal barge in conformity with her design, was proceeding. It had sailed up and down the harbor a few times, but there had been problems with the sheets controlling the radically new sail — it was a primitive lugsail, she noticed, not a lateen or gaff sail; her diagram could have resulted in any of the three — and there were other difficulties with staying the mast. Yet the crew were enthusiastic, and would continue working with it. Necias seemed pleased.
Fiona saw Necias every day, and he had provided her with a staff of servants who, no doubt, were instructed to spy on her as much as possible. Necias’ visits were not long — there was much weighing him down now, with the preparations for war with Neda-Calacas — but he seemed genial, well-disposed toward her, and full of plans. There were also a great many social invitations, many of which had to be declined, but Fiona felt obliged to visit as many of the prominent deissin as possible; she didn’t wish them to think the Acragas family was monopolizing her. She wanted to make it clear that they could have access to her, should something arise — though what that something was, neither she nor they yet had any clear idea. The lugsail idea, if it worked, was going to wreak a massive enough change in trading patterns. That change would have to be analyzed before any others were contemplated.
For the most part Fiona intended simply to talk to people. Her own servants first of all, starting with her secretary Acragas Palvas, a junior member of the Acragas family employed chiefly to write the endless numbers of replies beginning with: “The Ambassador Fiona of Igara regrets that she cannot ...” He was an odd, awkward young man, compensating for his awkwardness by a fussy insistence on correctness. Fiona suspected that he was secretly scandalized by her. He was, she thought, doomed to this kind of role all his life: he was undistinguished except by his rigidity and punctilio, and probably was intelligent enough to know it. Perhaps, she thought, he would have been happier in the more formal, militarized society of the Brodaini, where everyone was careful to know his station and observe the forms; here among the Arrandalla he was sadly misplaced.
The others of her staff, a pair of maidservants who were also trained to act as hostesses when the situation demanded, were more forthcoming. They seemed all blushes and giggles at first, and it took some time before Fiona understood why: to these girls the idea of a woman ambassador was so unheard of it was titillating, a naughty joke. She was, to them, a minor indecency.
Fiona persevered: if she couldn’t communicate with these two young women there was very little hope for the rest of her tasks. Gradually they opened to her; under Fiona’s persistent prodding, they began to regard her less as an official and more as a woman, and subject to womanly confidences. The women of the city — those of the wealthier classes, anyway, and those who served them — lived almost entirely in their own world, carefully bordered, the world of the partillo and the servants’ hall. They rarely ventured out, and never alone: there was usually an older female relative, or if wealthy enough, liveried servants, to act as chaperones.
Their world was small, closed, intimate: there were no secrets between them. Both the maidservants considered themselves lucky: they’d both come from the lower artisan classes, families of leatherworkers and furniture makers respectively; and the Acragas family had bought their contracts when they’d reached their teens. They’d received training in acting as hostesses, and each had another valuable skilclass="underline" Tibro, the elder by a year, had a fine singing voice and could play the flute, while Vico, surprisingly, was literate; her older brother had taught her to read. These various abilities raised their hopes for the marriage sweepstakes. If they were very lucky, they might have hopes of becoming a junior wife of some minor deissu or other, perhaps even an Acragas; otherwise the chances were good of becoming the wife of one of the other servants, some of whom were paid very well indeed — which would mean a stable life and a steady income, revolving around the excitement of the palace. On the whole, prospects were better than if they had stayed at home, where they would most likely have been married off to craft guildsmen, comrades of their fathers and probably much older than they; the guild system kept apprentices and journeymen too poor to marry.
Tibro and Vico were remarkably frank about these matters — and what they said was common enough knowledge, anyway. The social system of Arrandal, particularly as regarded respectable partnership and marriage, revolved around money. The deissin married one another’s daughters in order to keep their wealth within a limited circle, and to stabilize trading relationships. The servants, guilds-men, and small traders spent much of their lives acquiring enough capital to marry and start a family; and ambitious working girls put aside much of their own meager pay in order to make themselves more attractive to prospective husbands.
Illicit relationships, Fiona learned, had their financial aspect as well. Rich men, in addition to their various wives, often kept mistresses, usually without any attempt at concealing them: a mistress kept in style added to one’s own status, since it proved one could afford her. Fiona would very much have liked to have talked to one of these women — perhaps later, after the furor of her arrival died down, she could arrange it.
The results of all these financial constrictions on sexual passion seemed clear: large-scale, open, and more or less legal prostitution, catering to all wages and tastes; plus a large and lively literature, both of unfulfilled longing and of adultery. When Fiona asked Tibro, the vocalist, to sing some songs of the common people, she complied with a series of ballads about chaste couples who, too poor to marry, are forced to love one another from afar for years, usually with the woman trying her best to avoid marriage to an older, more suitable candidate, before finally being able to marry — or, alternately, dying before they could fulfill their love for one another. Campas’ elaborate poems about shepherds and shepherdesses living their frustrating and chaste lives, Fiona thought, made a little more sense against this background.
More lively were the songs about fornication. Usually these involved a young, junior wife married to an older deissu, and who acquired a lover her own age. Universally these women seemed to come to bad ends: dying at the hands of jealous husbands, betrayed by their lovers, condemned by the law, shut up in nunneries. The deissin had an active and jealous regard for their property, among which they most certainly counted their wives.
And so the ballads painted contrary pictures: one of ideal, continent couples locked in hopeless, unfulfilled love; the other of lusty young men and women cheerfully trysting in odd corners of the palace, hiding from the watchdogs of the doddering but jealous spouse. Two views of Arrandalla society, Fiona thought, with the truth probably lurking somewhere in between.
She’d reported her conclusions to the ship, and her surreptitious recording of Tibro’s ballads were on file. Artifacts of a civilization, keys to help Fiona’s successors live within this culture and perhaps to comprehend it, and to provide, in some future, material for an academic thesis, “Marriage and Morality in Classical Arrandal.”
None of which, of course, would help her now.
Fiona leaned out her window, seeing a swift dispatch boat skimming over the canal below, a self-important little man sitting in the sternsheets with a dispatch case. She was three storeys above the green, sluggish canal, and the fresh southerly trade wind kept the smell at bay. Across the canal was a moored barge on which an old woman was stringing laundry that she’d just washed in the filthy water. Fiona thought of typhoid and shuddered.