'For what it's worth,' Copis was saying, 'I've never seen it before either; but I've heard about it, of course, and I'd have recognised it at once because there's a picture of it on the back of the silver hard-quarter. Doesn't do it justice, of course; makes it look pretty.'
Poldarn shook his head. 'I don't believe that anybody who could build something like that uses buttons. Or clothes, even. They're probably covered from head to foot with scales, or feathers.'
Copis sighed. 'We aren't here to sell to the monks, silly,' she said. 'You may not have noticed, but there's a fair-sized town as well as that granite monstrosity. That's where they keep the people who do all the work-you know, scrub the floors, slop out the latrines, cook the food. And do you know what makes them special, as far as we're concerned? They get paid, in money. Therefore,' she concluded with a smile, 'we can sell them buttons.'
They stopped for the night at an inn down in the valley, where for some reason they seemed to cause something of a stir; the grooms and the servers looked at them oddly and wouldn't say why. That made Poldarn nervous, but Copis swore blind she'd never been there before, let alone tried out the act. 'I'd remember,' she said, 'trust me.'
In the morning they drove up the hill to the Foregate. The Foregate was a gate, but there was no town wall, just an arch, at least fifteen feet high and twelve feet wide, made up of mirror-smooth granite blocks with no decoration or embellishment of any kind, free-standing in the patchy grass. No walls, but two sentries.
'That's silly,' Poldarn pointed out. 'You could just drive round the whole thing.'
Copis shook her head. 'Wouldn't advise it,' she said. 'If you did that, they'd call out the guard and you'd find yourself in a cell in the watch-house, if you were lucky.'
Sure enough, the four carts that had been ahead of them on the road were drawn up in line, waiting to go through the gate, while the sentries questioned the drivers. 'Symbolism, you see,' Copis explained. 'Deymeson doesn't need a wall, because its defence is the awesome reputation of the sword-monks.'
'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'Then what's all that masonry further up the hill?'
'Walls, of course,' Copis replied. 'Symbolism is all very well, but some people are too stupid to understand it. The walls and towers and stuff are for their benefit.'
Apparently the sentry hadn't heard of buttons, or else didn't believe in them, because he insisted on opening all the barrels and rummaging about inside, like a man loading grain with his empty hands. He gave up eventually, but there was a resentful glow in his eyes that suggested that he didn't take kindly to being baffled, and would be keeping a very sharp eye on them in future.
Beyond the gate and the scrappy five-acre parcel of scuffed grass and bare mud it stood in were the first houses of the town, warehouses or granaries if their windowless facades were anything to go by. The main street led straight up the steep hill, and the buildings on either side of it gave no indication of what they were used for; two narrow windows per frontage, like scratches or blisters in the blank grey stone, and even those were all on the second or third floor. Some of them had no visible doors or windows at all. There were no people to be seen anywhere.
'I knew this was going to be a waste of time,' Poldarn muttered, 'as soon as you told me this was some kind of religious place. They're probably all at prayers or doing meditation or something.'
'Not the ones who live down here,' Copis said firmly. 'For a start, the order doesn't pray in the sense you're thinking of, they prance about hitting each other with wooden swords. And they live up in the castle, not down here. I don't suppose they see a monk in this part of town from one year's end to the next.'
Just then Copis noticed a turning on her left. It was an archway, just wide enough for the cart to get through if they weren't too fussy about scraping the wheel hubs. 'Let's try this,' she said.
'We can't. For all you know, that could be somebody's private courtyard.'
'Then they ought to put up a gate and lock it,' Copis replied, pulling the cart out in the middle of the street to give herself the right angle to get through the archway. 'Besides, I've got a theory.'
Poldarn signed. 'More symbolism?'
'We'll soon see.'
The archway led into a narrow passage, paved with slate and roofed over, very high up, with dark red tiles. After a very sharp bend, it led into a square.
'Now that's more like it,' Copis said.
It was as if the street had been turned inside out, the way a cushion is turned to hide the seams. In the middle of the square was a fountain, flanked by two statues of young women playing harps. All four sides of the square were lined with open doors; some were shops, with trestles covered with merchandise standing under oilskin awnings; the rest were ordinary houses. Why their owners bothered having them wasn't clear, since it was fairly obvious that everyone spent most of their time out in the open air, standing on one side of the traders' trestles or the other. There was one boy with a tray of evil-looking sausages; another sitting on top of a huge barrel, his legs swinging, his hands cradling a big tin cup; on the side of the barrel was chalked a tariff-a quarter a cup, or six for a turner. As for the stalls, pretty much anything you could ever want to buy was there, in every possible permutation of size, colour and quality, from coarse white sailcloth to seven-colour brocade ('First time I've seen that north of the bay,' Copis whispered in awe), from cheap pine-handled bean-hooks to pattern-welded walking-swords, from clogs to court slippers with absurdly long toes and savagely tight gussets, from green-turned wooden bowls to four-handled pewter goblets, from blanket-cloth ship-jackets to the sort of complicated audience gown that needed two strong maids and a three-foot-long buttonhook to install-everything, in fact, except for buttons.
('Now are you glad we came?' Copis muttered.
'All right, yes.')
The nearest thing to a button in the square was a card of sand-cast brass toggles, rough and unfinished and priced at five quarters. Copis grinned like a dog smelling blood. 'No competition whatsoever,' she sighed happily. 'The one thing I was afraid of was that there'd be a deep-rooted button cartel who'd run us out of town for trying to shove in on their pitch.'
'Doesn't look that way,' Poldarn replied. He'd tied up the horses to a conveniently placed rail and was unstepping the awning poles. 'This is extraordinary. Nothing at all like this in Sansory.'
Copis nodded. 'And this is the first place we came to. For all we know, the whole damn town could be like this. You know, we should've brought all the stock.'
They set up the stall, expecting a soldier or bailiff to arrive at any moment and demand to see their trading permits, but nobody paid any attention, apart from a few good-natured enquiries about what they were selling. To their relief, when they replied, 'Buttons,' they weren't stared at or asked what a button was; in fact, quite a crowd had gathered by the time they opened the stall for business. By noon, the table was looking decidedly threadbare.
'Definitely coming back here again,' Copis said, during an uncharacteristic lull. 'And we can easily jack the prices up a quarter or so; to judge from what they've been saying, they reckon we're practically giving the stuff away.'
'We'll see,' Poldarn replied. As far as he was concerned, their mark-up was steep enough as it was without increasing it further. In fact, there was something about trade in general that struck him as rather dishonest, only a step or two removed in legitimacy from the god-in-the-cart scam. 'I figure luck's a bit like a cart. Pushing it when you're struggling uphill is usually all right, but when you're coasting gently downhill it's probably not a good idea.'