“We shall accept responsibility for these young people,” Ilisidi said. “But we stand in need of baths. Baths, Tati-ji. Even before brandy. Before supper. One does hope there will be supper.”
“By all means.” Appearing a little mollified, Tatiseigi made a movement of his hand. A servant ran up the marble stairs at high speed. There would be hot water only if the boilers were up. In places of this age, predating the human presence on the planet, boilers were the standard, and they did not operate at all hours. One would assume that if there was hot water, it would go first to the dowager.
Maids among the servants made deep bows, ready to escort the dowager and, odd woman in their party, Jago, upstairs.
“Young gentleman,” Tatiseigi said to Cajeiri, “you will use my own bath.” A signal honor, to a close kinsman, and with a slight disgust: “With your Taibeni. The rest of you, there is a bath backstairs.”
That, in Bren’s ears, certainly said where he belonged, in the mudroom, the bath the house would use coming in from the hunt. And Jago, who had matter-of-factly started to join the dowager in retreat, did not. She came back to him, and with Banichi, Tano, and Algini, formed part of a very unkempt and undigestible lump in the center of the immaculate foyer.
Tatiseigi scowled, and Bren gave a polite, measured bow—his staff knew. His staff understood it was not a case of saying the hell with it and taking the insult and the bath, which might or might not have hot water. He had to stand his ground or lose, here in the hall.
Jago, however, was not the only one of the women to stop. The dowager fixed the old reprobate with a chill glance.
“Ah,” Tatiseigi said, as if he were the most forgetful old man in the world. “Yes. The paidhi.”
“The Lord of the Heavens, Tati-ji, has prevented a swarm of foreigners from the far heavens descending on us in fully justified rage, a situation which we shall discuss in far greater detail over brandy. He has urgent business in the capital. But he has stopped here to pay you particular courtesy.”
Lord Tatiseigi turned a glance in his direction, a very prickly sort of glance, and it was time to follow the dowager’s statement in his own hall with a blithe and extremely courteous deference.
“With great appreciation, nandi,” Bren said, “for the good will of your lordship, under threat from the Kadigidi, which I am certain you disdain. One is particularly sensible that certain persons would hold the paidhi’s presence here as a statement of defiance, and certainly you run a risk, to open your doors to me. But I have every confidence the lord of the Atageini sets his own policy.”
Tatiseigi’s nostrils flared. A deep breath, a calculation in old, canny eyes. I know your infernal tricks, those eyes informed him. I know your flattery. My behavior will be my own, too.
But the respect was at least some face-saving to a lord who had, doubtless before his staff frequently, and loudly, cursed the paidhi and his human influence for years. Tatiseigi was so incredibly conservative and famously kabiu that the Kadigidi and the rebels in Shejidan themselves would hesitate to move against this house, a pillar of atevi culture, a bulwark against the very changes the rebellion publicly decried and wished to undo.
“The paidhi,” Tatiseigi said. “The white rooms, nand’ paidhi. Appropriate, one may say. There is a bath.”
White being the paidhi’s color. The neutral. The houseless. The impartial interpreter and advisor.
Bren bowed, slightly more deeply than courtesy dictated. The old man’s bitter insult was strangely comforting. Tatiseigi was angry with him. Tatiseigi had never been pleased with him, not from the beginning. And he argued, and made the dowager make a personal intervention for his welcome here… politics, politics. And a certain level of forthright detestation of him and the Taibeni. Whatever the strength of that old bond between Tatiseigi and the dowager, it still held; humans were still despised in this household, and on that frank detestation his safety seemed more likely. Treachery did not wear such evident resentment.
A manservant turned up to direct them up the stairs and deal with details, and Banichi and Tano and Algini went with him up the stairs, Jago going ahead of them to resume company with the dowager and the maidservant. Cajeiri and his young friends walked behind the dowager, accompanied by another young man, and with them, far in the lead, a old man who might be one of Tatiseigi’s bodyguard, but not wearing Guild leather, or carrying evident weapons.
Not the most cordial welcome, as it had evolved, but the room was lordly and the bath was glorious, fit for ten atevi at once. The manservant turned certain taps and went elsewhere to open up other lines in the antiquated system. Soon the pipe gurgled, then gave forth an explosion of air, then an abundant flow of cold, then warm, but never quite hot water gushing in with considerable force, hot water either piped in from another boiler or stolen from the distant heating system, or put at a secondary priority to the dowager’s and Cajeiri’s baths, as some of these older houses could arrange. Whatever the water-source, it was warm, it was clean, there was soap, and the flow from the two gold-plated faucets was capable of filling such a huge bath in short order.
Within the time it took them to shake the worst of the dirt off onto the tiles, it had become a very deep bath, sufficient for a human to float and for all the gentlemen of his staff to get in at once, no formalities, no objections, no precedences here.
He was ineffably glad to be rid of the clothes he had worn since the hotel, garments which he surrendered to the servants with apology. Bruises showed in amazing number on his pale skin, polka dots from head to foot. It took a truly bad bruise to show on his atevi companions, but there were a few that did, not to mention small cuts and scrapes.
He scrubbed the dirt he could see, slipped off the tile seat that ran the circumference of the tub, and ducked his head completely underwater, surfaced in bliss and used the provided soap to work up a thick lather. His hair and body felt as if he had picked up passengers. If there were, he cast them adrift. A good deal of scrubbing finally got the lingering smell of fish off his hands… he swore he’d imagined it, since the train, but now he was absolutely convinced it was gone from him and from his companions, replaced by the strong herbal scent of old-fashioned handmade soap. He scrubbed days of dirt from under his nails, and ducked under to rinse, hair streaming about his shoulders, until lack of air made him surface.
“Good,” Banichi said. “You have not drowned.”
“Clean,” he said with a sigh. Banichi at the moment was white-haired and spotted with lather, and bent under the water to rinse, sending islands of froth scudding on the waves Tano and Algini raised.
There was no deep conversation, none, what with the lord’s sharp-eared servants popping into and out of the room, carrying this, bringing that, soap, towels, lotions, every excuse and a hundred trips into the suite. But they needed no conversation. Exhaustion ruled. His staff had been as long out of the saddle as he had in their long voyage, they were surely as sore as he was, and, given their profession, they’d been at a level of tension and alertness he could only imagine for the last number of days. That alertness was still not quite abated, the quick reaction, the dart of attention to a suspicious noise in the bedroom. It was notable that, in Tatiseigi’s oh, so proper house, his staff hadn’t allowed the house servants to come near their weapons or their personal baggage, which sat defiantly, not in the master bedroom, but piled in the corner of the bath with them, in a dry spot on the tiles, tides from the filled tub occasionally washing near it, despite repeated indignant assurances from the staff that the baggage would be perfectly safe and untouched in the bedroom.