I couldn't blame Oasis for drifting off; she'd been exhausted. I was exhausted, too, but I had another problem. I'd spent all of Davod's money, and I needed to tell him.
I slid the door closed as quietly as possible on my way out.
In the hallway, the air was thick and warm, and the song of the water organ downstairs echoed through the staircase.
Down in the lobby, a middle-aged Goloagi woman dressed in a gown with layers of white tulle with woven red and pink flowers sat playing. Her eyes were closed, and her curly hair moved with her shoulders as she massaged the keys, inciting melodious tunes of dizzying complexity. I sat in one of the plush chairs and listened, trying to work out in my mind how to explain to my best friend that the money he'd given me for supplies instead went to buy medicinal herbs for a complete stranger.
The woman was a practiced virtuoso. Her fingers danced across the keys as her whole body flowed into the melody. She blended herself into the song as though the instrument were an extension of herself.
If it was one in the afternoon, what beer number would Davod be on, and how many would it take to have him in a forgiving mood?
I sat and listened. When the organist was done, she turned to me and smiled before floating up the spiral staircase.
I needed to go see Davod. I couldn't wait any longer.
Out on the street, I stood and stared. Over people's heads I could see the pub where he'd said he would be, just beyond the giant Falcon statue. So I took a deep breath, and with my heart racing, I mustered all my courage, crossed the street, and entered a totally different shop.
Beside the door was a light-colored wooden table with some curiosities on it. One of them was a box with a hand crank on one end and a fan on the other, and the top was open to display a host of gears and belts.
When I turned the crank, the fan started turning. As I turned faster I heard a click, and suddenly the fan started turning faster and faster with each crank. It clicked again, the tension in the crank grew, and the fan turned even faster with each revolution. I thought to start over, see if I could make out how it was doing that when a voice came from behind me.
"Can I help you?" It was an older Herali man with long, straight hair that hosted streaks of gray and cascaded down his shoulders.
"What is this place?"
He scowled and fixed his emerald eyes at me. "We're engineers. We engineer things. Don't touch any more of the demos."
With that, he disappeared behind a gray curtain that filled a doorway to the rear of the shop. I held my hands behind my back and looked around. Mounted on the wall was an insect made of wood and paper, easily three feet from wingtip to wingtip. It had an open casing on its back with a box of strange gears and levers along with a coil connected to a small crank that I badly wanted to turn. Another exhibit was a long metal railing with several marbles held in a pool. The rail ran the length of the wall and followed a series of jumps, bridges, and other obstacles. I wanted to touch that one, too.
The one that truly grabbed my attention stood alone in the corner. At the bottom was a tub filled with tiny glass beads and a scooper, and at the top was a chute. My eyes traced the chute downwards past a wheel with paddles that was connected to another box of gears and levers that didn't appear to do anything at all, but ended in two small copper spikes with a tiny space between them.
I needed to know what it did, and I couldn't tell by looking. So, I scooped up a cupful of the beads and fed them into the chute. They fell through a hole in the bottom and dropped down a slide, clattering against the wheel paddles like rain, turning it. Then, as it gathered speed, I heard a sound like a loud popping that rattled off. Between the copper spikes, tiny shards of lightning split the air. I was spellbound. I was desperate to see it again
"DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO TOUCH ANYTHING?"
"This is amazing! How…"
"GET OUT!"
"Sorry. I…"
"GET! OUT!" And he shoved me out of his shop and slammed the door.
I was back on the street, looking at the pub trying to figure out how to tell Davod.
I passed beside a shop covered in old wooden boards haphazardly nailed over the doors and windows and covered in all manner of papers. Older, faded papers were buried behind new ones. One of them said there was a loft on the fourth floor with a view of Rattlesnake Plaza for one-hundred-seventy-eight kren per month.
I'd never seen that much money in person.
There was a competition the following day where organists from throughout the empire had come to see who was the best. The paper didn't say anything about the prize, but tickets were twenty-two kren. Another paper had someone selling fine wooden sculptures. A crisp, white paper with a silver seal in the corner and formally-crafted calligraphy listed several prostitutes who had lover's-pox and warned me not to lay with them. Someone was selling a plow; they wanted twenty kren but were willing to take the best offer. Someone else was giving puppies away. A small piece of paper tucked away at the side and written in fine handwriting asked me how many more men needed to die in Carthia before the Count's greedy, egotistical ambitions were sated.
Yes, it asked me that.
Outside the pub, I heard Davod's hearty laughter within, and my heart stabbed against my chest. How was I going to explain it to him? I couldn't breathe. How could I have been so stupid? It wasn't my money to spend.
Next door was a shop, so I went in there.
The first thing I noticed was a silver tray atop a table with a pyramid stack of small white cakes, and my eyes coveted them dearly. The walls were painted an off-white shade of yellow but mostly covered in woven rugs, each depicting a scene of some kind. There were family portraits; one featured a man embracing a woman holding a baby. There were landscapes, some islands, a scene of a woman sitting on the beach in Tobor drinking from a coconut and watching the waves roll by. Others had calligraphy in one language or another. There was one in Herali that said knowledge is freedom, and freedom is the requisite of peace. Another, in Goloagi, said Man's power is wealth, God's power is love. Many were the totem spirits—Turtle, Rattlesnake, Rabbit, Falcon, Cougar, Wolf, plus some others I didn't know. I'd had no idea simple rug-weaving could make such intricate designs.
"Do you see anything you like?"
Before me was a Tobori girl with skin like pure alabaster and long, wavy yellow hair. She had an otherworldly beauty to her; her complexion was pristine and the curves of her cheeks were clearly defined yet elegantly soft. She looked me up and down with dark-green eyes and an inviting smile.
It was worth a shot. "To you… hello… nice… uh… the meeting."
She smiled wide through plush, ruby lips and flawless teeth, and spoke with a pinch of island accent. "I won't speak Tobori with you, sorry, but it's nice of you to try. Would you like some cake?"
That grabbed my attention. "I wish, but I'm not here to buy anything. I'm afraid to face my friend because I spent all his money."
At that, she laughed. Her laughter was like music unto itself. "So you're hiding in here! Worse, you spent all the money you could have used to buy one of these fine pieces!" Her delicate fingers stroked the tufts of a portrait of some nobleman in elegant regalia standing with one foot on a stool and an ornate scabbard hanging from his side.
I lowered my eyes. "Something like that."
Her eyes passed up and down my body, and her smile widened. "In that case, come. I have something to show you."
"You do?"
"But first, have some cake. You know you want to."
I took a deep breath. "I can't. I really can't buy anything, I'm sorry. I wish I could…"
"Don't worry about it," she swooned. "We usually throw it away at the end of the day."
At that, I took one and shoved the whole thing in my mouth. Goodness, it was still warm! The dry outer cake-shell had kept the inner goo from leaking out, the sweet, syrupy ooze of cream mixed with Tobori Janju liquor. It burst with the most satisfying dance of sweet and sharp, just as I'd remembered.
"Come on," she giggled, and I left the cakes behind to follow her through a blue velvet curtain at the back of the shop beyond which some rolls were packed away on high shelves along with boxes, and in one corner stood a broom, dusting mop, and some jars. Following her was… the way that blue silk dress gently hugged her figure was… I wasn't blind.
She peeked over her shoulder and caught my eyes soaking in her lush behind. "I always love to unpack new material, to be the first one to see it, I just love it. It's hard to explain. Would you like to see it?"
Sounds escaped my lips. "Yeah."
Her Tobori accent hooked my ears and drew me into her beyond my wildest fantasies. "My father travels to Saen every few months to seek out new product. This roll here, he brought it just last night. Will you help me?"
I'd have done anything and everything she asked of me. Her hand rested on a large roll of black paper tied up with brown twine on a shelf about as high as her piercing dark eyes. At the front was a small paper tag with some writing on it. I recognized the Saeni script, but I didn't know any of the words.
She looked at it closely and turned to me with her lips cracked open in an expectant gaze.
"What's it say?"
"Sai-iwa nau'ye annu-ui. It's a lover that you let go of long ago and you can't stop thinking about them. Do you want to see it?"
"Yeah. Yeah, let's do it."
A massive cylinder of a roll two yards in length and easily two feet in diameter was on the table. The girl rolled it to one side where the paper met a seam of wax down the length of it, then worked a small knife under the seal, pulling it down until the paper could be peeled away with ease. Beneath that, a roll of rug was compacted together. She turned it slightly and found the edge of the outermost one, then peeled it away and stretched it out onto the table, smoothing out tufts of fabric and fluffing them up as she went until the image sewn into it was clear.
There was an infant lying in a wicker basket half covered in a white sheet and left outside a wooden door. The detail showed the texture of the stone walls of the building, the grooves and tiny pocket holes in the cobbled doorstep, and a stone archway beyond which people walked by in the street. A ray of yellow sunlight passed through the arch and landed on the baby.
"This is extraordinary," I said. The baby's hand reached out of the basket, grasping in the open air. The little wrinkles, tiny fingernails, I touched my finger to the baby's hand, and the tuft of the fabric was soft as rabbit's fur.
The girl giggled. "Would you like to see what comes next?"
"Yeah."
She rolled the thing over to find the edge of the next rug, then pulled it down and held it flat while she rolled the rest of them out of the way. Woven into the fabric was a cozy village with a waterfall beneath a bridge at the center of town just like in Gath. In the pool beneath the waterfall beside an old mill, children played at splashing one another while distant mountains framed the sky.
"I love this. It's just like where I grew up. What's next?"
She peeled away the next one and unfurled it. There was a girl with skin darker than I'd ever seen, like a green so deep as to flirt with shades of black, but her hair was white and cropped short about her ears. She wore nothing but a necklace of wooden beads that left her breasts exposed and a small strap around her waist that hosted an incidental cloth. She rode atop some strange kind of creature with a long neck, and a blue stripe that ran from below its eye down across its body, standing on its hind legs and showing talons on its stretched out forelimbs. She held a bow and looked out over an endless sea of forest that covered hills and valleys like a blanket, all under a cloudy sky.
"What is that?"
She pursed her lips and fluttered her lashes at me without speaking a word.
"I've never seen anyone that color, and what kind of creature is that?"
She giggled and said nothing.
The next image woven into the fabric, like the others, was flattened out from being packed so tightly though a simple stroke of my hand across its soft fur was enough to restore the tufts. It showed two men wrestling on a stone circle while others watched. One of the men was my color, with long hair flailing about, while the other had the same unusually dark green skin as the girl on the previous one. Among the spectators, that girl again. She stood with that creature by her side, standing on its hind legs and watching the fight with everyone else. In the background, lush trees filled the expanse.
"You say these came from Saen?"
"The Fetticia region covers six counties where this is an art form. People spend their whole lives mastering the technique."
"Right," I said, "but Saen is mostly desert. This isn't a desert. So where is this?"
She shrugged and peeled away the next one. At the center of the sky, the gargantuan gray balloon of an imperial zeppelin loomed. On the ground, more of those dark-green people looked up from the rocks and trees, some of them pointing while mothers shielded their children. Opposite them, men stood in formation, also looking up at it with spears drawn and shields raised. Between them, tents burned and there were bodies on the ground, more of those dark green people, lying amid tufts of crimson fabric.
I couldn't move. I couldn't turn away. As she pushed the roll back to the beginning so as to grasp at the next one, I stuffed another one of those cakes into my mouth and squeezed it with my tongue until it burst. She giggled lightly. "Someone likes janju cakes!"
"Listen," I laughed, though my mouth was full. "You grew up with this stuff."
She smiled at me and turned her gaze at the next tapestry as it unfurled before us.
It was a girl. She had that same exceedingly dark-green skin as the other. She wore a belt inlaid with gold studs, from across which was a white silk that fell down to cover her privates, but her breasts were out and, as with everything else, details were woven into the image with sublime precision. She had a gold band on one wrist, silver on the other, with more on her leg and a few more on each arm in a dizzying array of colors. A golden band adorned her head with jewels that seemed to sparkle. She had what looked like three necklaces tied together through a net of delicate gold chains, and earrings that seemed to wrap all over her ears with gold chains dangling and brightly-colored jewels at the end of each. Behind her, long tufts of ivory-white hair seemed to flow everywhere, well past her knees and off the edge of the picture. She stared at me through hypnotic eyes as yellow as the sun. Her fingernails were black and sharpened into claws, and in one hand she held fire.
I had no words. She mesmerized me. I wanted to study the image, keep it in my mind forever, and never let it go. In every corner of the fabric, the image of this strange dark-green girl captivated my attention.
"Do you want to see the next one?" she said.
I had to shake myself to come back to reality. I couldn't even answer until a minute later when she started to giggle. "Yeah."
I'd have bought that tapestry right then and there if I could—I never regretted being broke so much in my life.
She peeled at the next one and ran her hands along the soft fabric. A band of men, worn and haggard, crouched in the shadows of the forest with bows out and arrows nocked. They hid behind some bushes looking out onto the dirt road where a column of armored men marched in formation. In the distance, snow-capped mountains filled the sky. After a while of studying this image, I saw in the corner beside the men was a woman, barely visible as she blended in with the trees, clutching an infant close to her body.
"Wow.".
She giggled and revealed the next one. Most of the color was beige that tapered off into a darker tan around the corners. In the center of the frame, rows and rows of beds lined up into the distance with people lying down. Some of them let their arms, gray with boils on their skin, fall off the bed and drop to the floor while others had sheets covering their faces. Some were turned to the side, curled up into fetal position while others gaped their mouths open and their eyes closed. Boys walked down the rows with basins in hand; one knelt beside a bed wiping the person with a rag. Off to the side, a man pushed a wheelbarrow with a leg draped over the side and flies hovering above, and in the top right corner, a collection of three large, squarish glyphs dominated the space.
I nearly whispered, pointing at the glyphs. "What does that say?"
She explained in that delicious island accent. "You may see these symbols in graffiti here in Ulum. It's an ancient Umeazi script that fell out of use generations before the Empire enfolded their lands. It says, 'we will never forget.'"
"Was this the plague?" I said.
"That makes sense," she nodded.
"But that was twenty years ago."
She looked up at me and smirked. "It may surprise you to learn that there are people in this world who are older than you!"
"Of course."
Next, In the foreground, a man stood on a rock with a longbow in one hand, overlooking a huge throng of people, tens of thousands of people, crowded around a grain silo in the distance. The morning sun shot rays of amber through the clouds.
In the next image, a man was in a metal cage in the middle of the desert. There was sand all around, and the edges trailed off into a cacophony of reds, blues, purples, and yellows. Beside the cage, a figure dressed in white cloth lay just outside, reaching in to hold his hand while the relentless sun beat him.
I stood speechless, trying to make sense of what I was looking at while the girl gazed at me with an expectant smile. Without a word, she rolled the whole thing back over to grab the next one, peeled it away from the dwindling mass, and unfurled it.
I felt a sudden pang in my gut as if I'd been stabbed.
There was a large outcropping of rock from which arrows rained down. A man, a woman, and some children were running through sparse trees. On the ground all about them, bodies of men lay scattered and broken while tufts of crimson fabric watered the soil. A jolt of terror shot through me like the pain of death reaching out to tickle my heart.
"These images. What is this? What am I looking at?"
The girl only smiled at me and reached for the next one. I held her back. "Where was this? Who were these people?"
She shrugged, not once tearing her eyes from my face, and spoke not a word.
"This happened. This was a battle; who were these people?"
She unfurled the next one. Two clusters of men in armor, with spears pointed out at the other group and shields raised, advanced on one another. Amid each crowd, banners flew atop poles while rolling hills took up the backdrop, and above each army, three Imperial zeppelins advanced on one another. Off in the distance, on each side was a small hill. On the right stood a beast like a giant man with two heads—one of a bull with horns, and the other a lamb. In one hand it held a sythe that reached above its head, and in the other a leash, the end of which was a lion standing with one paw reached out and his mouth agape and belching fire. On the left hill stood a figure whose head was the sun with one arm outstretched, on which perched a falcon.
I said nothing. She said nothing and separated the last two, gently pulling them apart and unfurling one, flattening it out. It was the Emperor, but it wasn't him. The man sitting on the Imperial throne wearing the Imperial robe with the Imperial crown on his head wasn't Goloagi at all, but a Herali, with straight, dark-green hair cascading over his shoulders. His face was anger and sadness.
I laughed at first. "You'd better not let anybody see that!"
"Why?" she chuckled. "Are you going to tattle?"
"No! Of course not!"
She smiled then turned to the very last one. It was a map of the whole Empire. There were no words, but I knew my duchies. All fifteen were there, Heralia, Golago, the Islands of Tobor, Umaz, the expansive desert of Saen that dwarfed them all, Jinata, Bozan, Kulun that reached out to touch the Agarthan Sea all the way east, Wozuen, Zanala, the tiny Duchy of Krovass, Mayeno, Galaneao, Showan, and Piandrass. They were all there, but there was another that didn't belong. South of Heralia, beyond the Terbulin ridge, was a sixteenth duchy.
"What is that? Why is that there?" I pointed at the extra province that wasn't supposed to exist. "Is that Carthia?"
"No," she said. "Carthia is right here," she touched the northern area of this additional duchy, barely an inch south of the border with Heralia.
I turned to her directly. "Do you know anything about Carthia? I was called to arms; that's why I'm here. But I don't know anything about the place."
Her face sank. "Oh."
"What do you mean, oh?"
She looked up. Her eyes suddenly grew distant, and an emptiness filled the air around her. She stood, then made her way back through the velvet curtain to the front of the store without looking back.
I followed her. "What's wrong?"
She slowly turned her gaze back to me. There was an invisible wall between us. I lifted my hands to take her shoulders, and she stepped back from me with a weary smile.
"I never got your name," I said.
"That's true."
As I tried to wrap my head around her sudden change in demeanor, she put her hand on my back and ushered me towards the door.
"I don't understand. Did I say something wrong?"
Her eyes met mine one last time as I stepped out onto the street. "Goodbye, heartbreaker. Go fess up to your friend."
And she closed the door on me.