What have I let us in for?
“Nadi Bren.” One of the dowager’s servants came from a side hall, and said, with the usual calm of the dowager’s servants, “Nadiin. One will guide you to your rooms.”
16
Down a long hall to the side, dust everywhere—but the dust on the stone floor showed a clear track of feet having passed this way recently. Like bread crumbs in the wilderness, Bren thought to himself as he and Jase, behind Ilisidi’s man, climbed a short flight of stairs where Banichi, following them, surely had to duck his head.
Jago had stayed behind in the downstairs, having something to do with Tano and Algini and the baggage in the second van, Bren thought.
The stone of the stair treads was bowed, worn by the use of atevi feet—old. Older than the use of cannon, perhaps. He wasn’t sure how long it took to wear away stone. The floor above was stone, which he had learned from Malguri meant a barrel vault beneath, in this age predating structural steel.
The hall above had no windows, no light but what came from a lamp at the side of the stairs and what filtered up from the open door below. It was increasingly shadowy at the top of the stairs, pitch black down the hall, and the servant—if such he was: he looked very fit—opened the second door of a small row of doors, and showed them into a hole of a room, into which the thin stream of white daylight from a glassless window-slit showed the outlines of a bed and a table. The draft from that window was cool spring air. It moved languidly past them, doubtless to find the door downstairs.
The servant struck a match and light flared in a golden glow on an atevi face, atevi hands, a candle on a rough (but recently dusted) table. A small vase stood next the candle with three prickly-looking flowers that looked to be from the hillside. The wick took fire, and illumined a rubble stone wall, a deeply shadowed but smallish room, bare timbers helping the masonry hold up a doubtless weary roof.
“There are more candles,” the servant said, and indicated a small wicker basket at the end of the same table. “And matches, nandiin. The dowager requests one have a caution of fire.” The man presented him a small bundle of matches, neatly tied with ribbon. “One regrets that the inner halls are under restoration and not pleasant. Ordinarily, guests would be lodged there, but there are plenty of blankets. The accommodation is at the end of the hall and it does function. Please follow me.”
The paidhi sensed intense unhappiness in Jase’s silence and chose not to touch it off with a question. “Down the hall, then,” he said, as cheerfully as he could. Banichi was waiting in the doorway, and one wondered whether hehad had any warning.
Possibly Banichi was thinking, You fool, Bren-ji. But Banichi gave no hint at all in his mildly pleasant expression. It might be more comfortable than a rooftop in the much warmer peninsula. Might be. Marginally.
And thiswas the vacation spot he’d chosen.
The putative servant took several candles from the basket and lit the first from the lighted candle on the table, then carried it outside and lit another, which, as they all stood watching, doubtless with separate thoughts of the situation, the servant set in a wall-sconce.
“Nand’ Banichi, your room, and nand’ Jago’s,” the servant said, lit a candle and set it by thatdoor to relieve the darkness of this tunnel; and so they went; the room for Tano and Algini was next.
On the other side of this hall, although there were doors, as best the paidhi could judge the geometry of the building he’d seen from outside there were no windows: the rooms they were not using must be little more than stone coffins with no source of light but the candle, rooms dependent on mortar imperfections or God knew what for ventilation. He supposed, since he had challenged Ilisidi to challenge Jase, they were lucky not to be lodged on that side of the hall.
And the euphemistically named accommodation? The servant opened the door on a room with cold spring daylight showing through a hole in the stone floor. With the stack of towels. And a dipper and bucket.
The servant explained, for Jase’s benefit. The paidhi well understood. He wasn’t sure Jase quite believed it was the toilet.
The one at Malguri had had indoor heat. This didn’t. It had an updraft.
Malguri had had glass windows. Fireplaces in palatial suites, however old the plumbing. The distinction between Historical Site and Oldest Continuously Occupied Site began to come through to him with a great deal more clarity.
Jase hadn’t said a word. He was probably in shock, and walked along tamely as they all retraced their steps, the supposed servant in the lead, back down the candlelit hall toward their room—their—singular room.
Their—singular—room, which to his memory had one—singular—and not very wide—bed.
It was not polite for a guest to complain of accommodations. It was just not done. One assumed one’s host knew exactly what her guests were being put into, and one smiled and made no complaint.
He’d said trustingly to Ilisidi, in a private meeting in her luxurious study, in the Bu-javid apartment she maintained, “Aiji-ma, Jase doesn’t understand atevi. You taught me. And I daren’t go so far from the capital as Malguri. Might I impose on you, aiji-ma, to linger a little at Taiben this season? Perhaps to go over to the seashore and show Jase-paidhi the land as it was? I’ve promised him the sea. I’ve undertaken to provide him that—and your help would be best of all, aiji-ma.”
There’d been one of those silences.
“What happened to ’Sidi-ji?’ ” Ilisidi had asked with a quirk of her age-seamed lips and a lift of a brow, meaning why didn’t he use that familiar, intimate address he’d a number of times dared with her.
“I think,” he’d said, knowing he was fencing with a very dangerous opponent, at a very unsettled time in the aiji’s court, “I thought I should show some decency of address in such an outrageous request of your time, nand’ dowager.”
And Ilisidi had said, after an apparent moment of thought, one thin knuckle under a still-firm though wrinkled chin: “I think—I think that if you want the seashore, nadi, why, we should goto the seashore. Why not Saduri?”
He hadn’t thoughtit was a site open to the public. He’d foolishly said so.
And: “ Weare not the public,” Ilisidi had said, in that aristocratic mode that could move mountains.
So here they were. Tano, Jago, and Algini, with a number of putative servants, came up the steps at the end of the hall with a fairly light load of baggage.
“The rest of the baggage is going to be stored downstairs,” Jago said cheerfully.
Bren didn’t feelcheerful. Tano looked bewildered, and Bren didn’t dare look at Jase, just depressed the iron latch on his door to let their personal luggage in.
“Is there a key for this door, nadi?” he asked Ilisidi’s servant.
“No, nand’ paidhi. That room has no lock. But one assures you, the entire perimeter of this site is very closely guarded, so one may be confident all the same.”
Bren rather expected Banichi or Jago to say something caustic about that situation. But by that example, and their silence, he wondered whether theirrooms had locks.
One servant took his and Jase’s baggage in. Jago handed him his computer, which was notgoing to find a recharge socket in this building, but which he on no account allowed to remain outside his immediate guard, especially in a premises occupied by uncle Tatiseigi. That servant left. He walked in, Jase walked in, and he shut the door, leaving them in the white daylight from the window and the golden glow from the candle, which had by a whisper of a flame survived that gust from the closing door.
“Nadi,” Jase began with, he thought, remarkable restraint, “what are they doing? Why are we here?”
“Well,” he said, and tried to think of words Jase knew.
“I,” Jase began again, this time in his own language. He was clearly now fighting for breath—and probably falling down that interlinguistic interface again.