“Why did they tell you that?” The Lady Marche’s face and voice were cold. “This is no inn. There are beds for hire in the village.”
The mertzer looked down and studied his dust-covered boots for a moment. When he looked up again, something seemed to have altered beneath the surface. Quietly, he spoke for a few seconds in that other language the Lady Marche knew.
The hair on Daenek’s neck stiffened as he watched her face.
She stood looking at the man before her, then answered him in the same tongue. The mertzer followed her as she turned around and stepped back into the house.
Daenek ran and caught the door before it shut. He held it open a creek and watched as the mertzer, framed by the kitchen doorway, sat down heavily at the small table inside. The Lady Marche set before him a cup of water and half of one of the coarse brown loaves she brought back from the village marketplace. A few words of the different language they shared floated out to Daenek. He let the edge of the door slide from his fingers and turned away.
Deep in thought, he walked slowly through the rustling yellow stalks towards the cliff overlooking the quarry. The mass of words he had heard but did not understand seemed to gather inside his head like the stones of the necklace in the Lady Marche’s locked trunk. He squatted down at the edge of the chasm and gazed, unseeing, at the grey walls of the quarry.
After several minutes, he looked up and searched the opposite rim for the familiar watcher. The stonecutters always took several days off after their two years of work had been hauled off by the mertzers’ caravans—they would all be in the village now, drinking and idling on the street where the women were. Except for the mute, hulking watcher. Daenek spotted him in his usual crouching position on the quarry’s far side. With no rock chips to be gathered, he spent all day there, occasionally chewing on a scrap of dried meat or hard bread he took from the pockets of his dusty work apron. Daenek remembered the watcher’s vigil from the last time two years ago.
Their eyes met across the gulf, the boy and the powerfully built man looking into each other’s distant face. The words with which the Lady Marche had ordered the watcher away from the house were still solid in Daenek’s mind, though that was seven years past now. The watcher’s skin had greyed with time spent in the quarry’s dust, and when he walked about his job on the bottom he stooped low whether his bag was full of rock fragments or not. But the face was the same, silent and patient as the rocks he crouched among. Words, thought Daenek. What were they all saying with them?
The mertzer propped himself up on one elbow as Daenek stood in the little room’s doorway. The wide, ruddy face looked up at the boy from the makeshift bed formed of the blankets the Lady Marche had placed in the unused room.
“Hello,” said the mertzer gravely. He sat up on the blankets and made a slow gesture around the room with one hand. “Come in and talk.”
Daenek saw that he kept one blunt finger of his other hand inserted in a small book with a frayed cloth cover. What language is it in? wondered Daenek. The mertzers’ or that other tongue? Probably not in the village’s words, like the poorly bound volumes kept on the shelves downstairs. The mertzer had other books as well, equally old and battered-looking. They tumbled out of his open pack lying in one corner of the room on top of his jacket and cap.
“Why didn’t you go with the others?” Daenek stepped into the room and stood at the edge of the blankets.
The mertzer leaned back against the wall and gazed up at the boy with half-closed eyes. He sighed. “No good reasons,” he said finally. “Lots of bad ones, I suppose.” He reached over and pulled his pack to him by its straps, a few of the books spilling out on the floor.
“To tell truth,” said the mertzer, rummaging through the pack’s contents, “I was landed, as the mertzers say. Kicked off. Which is a hard, a cold thing for them to do to one of their own.”
He straightened back up with a small object clutched in his hand. “They wouldn’t have done it to one who’d been born a mertzer. That’s sure.”
He held the object out to Daenek. It was a small glass tube sealed off at one end. “Would you do me a kindness,” the mertzer said, “and go fill this with water, up to here?” One of his fingers tapped at a line inscribed on the side of the glass.
Daenek filled the tube at the bathroom sink, then returned it to the mertzer. “Thank you,” he said, nodding his shining dome of a head. He seemed to forget Daenek’s presence as he methodically poured a tiny bit of powder into the tube from a metal container that he fetched from his pack. Sealing the open end with his thumb, he shook the cylinder until the water had turned a milky white. He threw his head back and quickly gulped down the contents.
Fascinated, Daenek watched as the man’s face paled, as if the blood were falling back to his heart. Slowly, the ruddy complexion returned and the mertzer leaned back heavily against the wall with his eyes closed.
Several minutes passed with no further change. He must’ve fallen asleep, thought Daenek. He turned away, feeling a little disappointed, and started to walk quietly out of the room.
“A cold thing,” rumbled the mertzer’s voice behind him.
Daenek looked over his shoulder and saw him lean forward, his eyes blinking, and run his thick fingers through the tangled grey hairs of his beard. Back to the edge of the blankets Daenek walked, and looked down at the mertzer. “Why did they kick you off?”
The mertzer gazed at him with a puzzled expression, still blinking furiously. The look disappeared as the eyelids slowed and finally stopped. “Eh?” He shook his head. “The captain—that young fool. Been two years since his father, the old captain, died and already his ears won’t open to anything anybody else can tell him. Knows it all, he thinks.”
Daenek sat down beside the man, drawing his legs up beneath himself on the blankets. “What did you try to tell him?” He was absorbed in what was the longest conversation he had ever had with anybody other than his mother, the Lady Marche.
“Ahh, the engines.” The mertzer scowled, gazing sourly at the empty space before him. “All rusted and patched together, exploding and falling apart with every cog’s turn. Metal so fatigued you can write your name on it with a sneeze. Lay up for a year, I told him, spend the last run’s profits on parts, go in debt to the buyers in the Capitol, if need be. Better that, than to soon trudge with every damn village’s wares loaded on our backs!”
He struck the wall behind him with his fist—his face was even redder than before, the skin darkening with the pressure of his anger.
“And what did the captain say?” Daenek leaned forward eagerly.
The mertzer sat without speaking for a few moments. His face was paler, almost ashen, when he finally spoke. “That the engines were running so well as to need one less machinist tending them. And not one of those fine fellows I’ve lived and worked with all these years would say a word for my sake. So here I come walking up to you and your mother’s house, a mertzer with only his own legs to move him about. Irony, of a sort.” He fell silent, then very softly spoke a few words in that other language.
Daenek recognized the words. It was a line from one of the songs he had heard that night, years ago, when he had watched the Lady Marche pose in front of the mirror with the veils from her locked trunk. Without knowing what any of the words meant, Daenek carefully pronounced the next line of the song. It was the first time he had ever said any of the remembered words aloud but they came from his lips clear and with no hesitation.