In my weakened state I was no match for Jat Lon. At outright lying I never was, I suppose. He saw my doubts, and again his eyes strayed toward Misi’s thunderous snores. He smirked.
“Momma was very grateful for the gift! I tell you, Knobil, she’s a lot of woman always, and that session was a bone-breaker! I thought I wouldn’t survive such gratitude!” He chortled lecherously. “But what a way to die, you know?”
“Huh? You mean she’s…she’s not your mother?”
Jat guffawed, causing Dot to sit up with a jerk.
“Mother? Never! Ask Lon if you want to know about my mother. I don’t recall her at all. He may.” Jat s bright eyes twinkled. “No, Misi and I are cab partners. That’s what ‘Momma’ means among traders. And she’s some partner—but don’t you dare tell her I said so!”
I struggled to rearrange my understanding of these curious people. “Then Dot’s mother—”
“A woman called Dako Jeeba. We disagreed over some furs. Sons go with fathers, of course, and we had no daughter. Misi and I get along well, but we won’t stay partners till the sun sets, I’m sure.”
I nodded and glanced at the motionless green figure out on the step. “And Pula?”
Jat glanced again at Pula’s motionless back and then smirked quizzically at his son. “Dot?” he said. “Tell Knobil what’s negotiable.”
The kid grinned. “Everything.”
“Good boy!” His father nodded. “I admit I fancied Pula, Knobil. But Lon’s a horny old goat, and he outbid me.”
Pula? That child? Misi’s daughter and Jat’s gray-pated father?
Jat chuckled and rose, holding out a hand to his son. “Come, little twister, let’s go see about a meal. Now you know more about trader ways than most people do, Knobil.”
“Pula and Lon are cab partners also?”
“Right. He pays her by the trick. Misi pays me.”
Chuckling—I suppose at the expression on my face—he squeezed by Pula and sprang down to the ground, catching Dot as he jumped down after. That was neither the first nor the last time that Jat diverted a conversation away from subjects he wished to shun. He had explained some curious customs, but not what use traders had for a crippled wetlander.
Slowly my pain and fever subsided. I progressed to the point where I could attend to my own bodily needs, a highly undignified procedure that involved hanging my rear out a window, but a great triumph for a man with planks on his legs. Dot found the performance hilarious and would bring other junior members of the trader community to watch. I suspected he made them pay him.
Gradually, too, I became less of an animal and more of a human being again. Even conversation was a skill I had to regain. The traders’ life was pleasant by most folk’s standards, varied and even luxurious. Traders ate well and enjoyed material possessions I had forgotten or had never seen. Mirrors, for example. I had not viewed my face since I was only half as old, admiring the arrival of my mustache when Violet and I had just escaped from the grasslands. I saw nothing to admire now—pallid skin and deep ravages of suffering. The freakish blue eyes were the same, yet they looked older than the world itself. I wondered how anyone else could even bear to look at them.
Whatever dread destiny the traders had in mind for me—and I felt certain that Hrarrh knew exactly what it was, so dread was likely an optimistic outlook—I could see no chance of escape until my knees healed. Always there was a driver in the cab with me, either Misi or Pula, and never was I allowed to meet a non-trader.
My obvious strategy was to try to be as pleasant and cooperative as possible: grateful, helpful, and dumb. I asked Jat for things to do, and thereafter I peeled vegetables when it was his turn or Lon’s turn to cook for the caravan. I strung beads for him, sharpened knives, cleaned tack, polished pots, kneaded dough—anything to keep my mind off its fears. But it was never enough.
“Misi? Can I help you? Will you teach me to sew?”
The wagon was crawling across a level empty plain. With nothing but low scrub to eat, the team was making unusual speed—a fair walking pace—but the flat ground presented no challenge to the drivers. One side of the wagon was shuttered against a wicked dusty wind. Misi was sitting indoors, only rarely needing to interrupt her embroidery to lean out the front window and yank on the hippos’ traces. She was a skilled seamstress, producing the finest needlework imaginable with hands that could have strangled bulls.
After a moment the big onion eyes came up to stare at me. “Men don’t sew, Knobil.”
“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t. I can’t ride or hunt. Why not sew?”
She thought awhile, then made her strange subterranean chuckle noise. “I don’t know why not.” She heaved herself to her feet and began to rummage through the chest on which she had been sitting. She eventually produced a bundle of fabrics and brought it across with her bag of equipment, settling massively at my side. The wide bed no longer seemed spacious.
She opened the bundle, spilling forth a wide selection of fabrics in many colors, some plain and some already embroidered. She selected a beige rag and handed it to me. “For practice.”
I fingered it curiously. “What cloth is this?”
“Cotton, Knobil.”
“It is so fine! Not like woollie cloth. What sort of an animal has fleece so fine?”
“Not an animal.” She scowled, as if thinking hurt her. “Cotton comes from a plant. It grows in hot swamps; there aren’t many of them just now. When I was little, cotton was cheaper. Mostly costly now.”
A long speech for her! I tried to imagine Misi as little. I wondered how one sheared a plant. “What are all these others, then?”
She began handing them over and naming them. “Linen…taffeta…burlap…felt…”
“This shirt that you are sewing—what cloth is it?”
I had been watching the shirt blossom under her touch. A plain brown garment had sprouted a forest of flowers, arabesques, and insects, in an exploding rainbow of color. It was almost complete. This was the first time I had had the chance to handle it, but I had already noticed the fineness of the material.
Pause. “Silk,” she said reluctantly.
“And what does this come from—animal or plant?”
“Don’t know!” That was a very speedy retort by her standards.
“I was told—did you trade silk to the ants?”
“Might have done.”
“Where does it some from, then?”
She waved a great hand vaguely southward. “From forests.”
I fingered the shirt again. “When the ant women dressed up for their feasts, they wore very bright gowns. The gowns seemed to be made of very light material. Would those gowns have been silk?”
Misi nodded. I waited until she said, “Likely.”
“It’s beautiful.”
She began to roll up the bundle, but I took it from her and started to go through it, comparing the different cloths. I had found something that interested Misi! For the first time we were having a conversation that was not a wrestling match.
Then I found a tiny rag of something different. It was clear and iridescent, of no color and yet of all colors, so fine as to be very nearly transparent. I held it up in surprise. “What’s this?”
Another pause, and it was a long one. “Water silk.”
“It’s beautiful! I can almost see through it! What is the difference between water silk and ordinary silk?”
“Color.”
“That’s all?”