Wilton was as big as the largest towns Zanja had traded in up in the border country. Located near the junction of two major rivers, it was a warren of narrow byways and sudden plazas, with balconies on opposite buildings a mere hop apart from each other, and a casual attitude toward garbage that left her always on the lookout for dung and debris underfoot or falling from overhead. The rivers brought travelers from far‑flung communities who were riding the current to the seaport and paused here to replenish their supplies and sell some of their wares. Many of these travelers looked no more like a South Hiller than she did, and some of them even resembled her.
“I won’t say you can get everything in Wilton,” said Emil. “It’s not like it used to be, and it’s nothing like Hanishport, where you canget everything.”
“Everything but what you can get in Hanishport’s neighboring town, Lalali,” said Willis. “Of course, in Lalali you’ll be robbed and murdered in the bargain.”
The taverns had set up their tables in the streets, the better to entice the farmers to drink what money they had rather than buy seed or tools or pay their taxes. It seemed a hopeless enterprise, however. This early in the season the farmers come into town for market day hadn’t much to sell, and they all had a pale, winter‑pinched look, and a way of keeping their hands up their sleeves.
Emil and Willis had come into town to talk to Willis’s brothers, who worked at the garrison. Annis left to make some arrangements with one of her chemist friends.
A row of beggars sat against a wall with their empty hands lifted, moaning tales of being reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. Emil tapped Zanja’s arm and pointed at the garish sign that hung over the door. As was common throughout the country, the business folk of Wilton used glyphs to identify their shops. Merchants used only one symbol, the tavern keepers two, which made the name of the taverns amusingly ambiguous. However, the symbols were always represented as pictures: in the case of this tavern a wheel and a hoe.
The tavern was empty. Willis shouted for ale.
“So what is this place named?” Emil asked Zanja, as they sat at a battered table.
“Progress Through Hard Work,” she hazarded. “It seems rather an odd name for a tavern.”
It was an elementary reading compared to what Emil could do, but he nodded approvingly. “There’s a humor in it–most people would miss the joke entirely these days, and simply call this place the Wheel and Hoe.” A big, light‑footed woman entered from the arched doorway that led to a steep stone staircase. Down its length echoed the wail of a baby.
“So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know my husband had gone out.”
She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies for them.
“Husband,” snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, “City folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and then they call usbackwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently clothed and fed.”
“Those beggars are smoke sick,” Zanja said.
“All the more reason why they need their families,” Willis snapped.
“So what would you call this woman’s man?”
“Not her husband,” Willis said obstinately. “Where is the household? Where are the other parents for the child? It’s just the two of them. That’s no family.”
Zanja took a swallow of the bitter ale she’d never developed a taste for, and ate the greasy pork pie the alewife set in front of her. The woman’s husband returned, and they had a brief, bitter argument behind the closed door of the kitchen. When Willis’s brothers arrived, the ale husband came out smiling and rubbing his hands, and wouldn’t leave them alone until Emil threatened to go to another ale house.
Willis’s brothers smelled distinctly of the stable. They were identical twins who dressed alike and ate alike and finished each other’s sentences. When both of them turned their attention upon Zanja, she realized that they probably made love together as well, and she had to struggle to keep from revealing how repellent she found the prospect.
There was a certain affliction that every member of Willis’s family seemed to share, a single‑mindedness that sorely tried her patience. “Tell me about this new commander,” Emil said. “You have at least seen her, haven’t you?”
“She’s young,” said one.
“And handsome,” said the other.
“How young? Is she one of this new breed, Shaftali‑born?”
“She’s older than fifteen!”
Emil rather wearily reminded the brother that, though it had been fifteen years since the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the Samnites had been a presence in Shaftal for a good fifteen years before that.
“I suppose she could be thirty,” said a brother. “Maybe a bit older.”
“What does it matter?” asked the other.
“The young ones sometimes speak our language, and they understand us much better than their fathers did. I think they are the more dangerous enemies because they don’t make as many stupid mistakes.”
The brothers looked at him blankly. “Sainnites are Sainnites.”
“Exactly,” said Willis impatiently.
Emil looked as if the three of them together were enough to give him a headache.
The brothers told him that the soldiers reassigned from Rees had arrived all at once, before the thaw. There were too many of them for the brothers to notice any one in particular. They complained at length about the great quantities of baggage the two of them had carried that day. In particular, they remembered some large, remarkably heavy trunks that the two of them had been unfortunate enough to have to move into one soldier’s quarters. “Trunks full of rocks,” they said bitterly. “A lot of rocks.”
“Weapons,” suggested Willis.
“Oh, sure, it could have been ax heads or something made of iron, though what one soldier wanted with so many of them I don’t know.”
“It was books,” said Zanja.
Willis and his brothers burst into raucous laughter. “Books! Even we don’t have books anymore, and at least we know how to read!”
But Emil said somberly, “Books? What kind of Sainnite would have such a collection of books?
“Perhaps a Sainnite young enough to be fluent in both languages, so he can read Shaftali books.”
“And educated at least a little–though how that might happen I don’t know. Some of them must be able to read, but not in Shaftalese.”
“And he’s influential enough that his commander allows him to fill a wagon, when most soldiers have only one small trunk, and whatever they can carry on their backs.”
Emil turned to the brothers. “Find a man like that,” he said. “A young Sainnite, fluent in both languages, educated, and influential, who arrived with the others from Rees. Find out everything you can about him.”
The brothers gaped at him as though he was a street corner magician pulling coins out of children’s ears. Willis, predictably, protested, “You don’t even know this man exists. It’s just guesses.”
Emil said quietly, “No, it’s fire logic.”
Willis banged his tankard on the table. “I need more ale.”
Zanja gave him hers. The thick stone walls retained the day’s chill too well, and the fire on the hearth was stingy at best. Dour Annis came in, and greeted the brothers with indifferent kisses. Probably the brothers were her cousins, like just about everyone in South Hill. Then she kissed Zanja, much less indifferently.
The four of them left the brothers drinking their ale, and followed a circuitous route to a road that ended at the garrison wall. There was no gate; the wall rose up out of the road’s debris. The city buildings stood aloof, with the basements of the buildings that had once stood there filled with the rubble of their demolished walls. The garrison wall had been built of reused stone blocks. As they stood there, a soldier strolled past along the battlement, eating an apple. He carried a long gun by a sling over his shoulder. He did not even glance down at them.