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Part I

- 1 -

The air was frosted, the tiles beneath their feet were frosted; breath surrounded their heads like clouds of incense. The others of Ulanda’s beginner class giggled with relief at having made it through the dance without too many mistakes.

The Temple Dance Master tapped her stick. A light snow fell, the first of that winter, the crystals like pollen on the woman’s yellow robe. A knot of several other people stood a little apart, shadowy figures in hooded white cloaks.

Ulanda blew on her fingers then pulled the sleeves of her knitted tunic down over her hands and grabbed the ends to make mitts. The Simic-born Dance Master was watching her, not her five classmates.

“Ulanda.” The Dance Master’s voice took each syllable and shattered it. “From the second chorus, min’tat position, without drums.” The neural Net feed they had been using for music snapped off, and the frozen square was quiet.

Slippers had caked the dusting of snow into broken foot shapes on the tiles, obscuring the colored placing squares. Her feet were already numb. She licked her lips and tried to hear ci-ci drums in her mind.

Third time through and her lungs were as frozen as her feet. The snow fell harder, hiding the tiles entirely. When she looked up from the closing turn, only the Dance Master and the strangers remained. The other five of her class were gone and she couldn’t see their footprints.

Fifth time and at the end of the last turn, she fell. The Dance Master helped her up, and then wrapped the ends of her thick woolen robe around, leaving only her head out as though she had grown from the teacher’s middle.

One of the white-cloaked forms moved closer, snow breaking away from the cloth of the hood. Eyes the green of the ocean looked at her.

“Ulanda, will you dance for me?”

Tilting her head back to look up, all that was visible of her teacher was the wrinkled throat and chin and the ends of the yellow hood. “Must I?” she whispered.

The chin nodded down to her. “You must.”

Another of the cloaked forms drew closer. “Sarkalt,” Ulanda heard him murmur, “it’s too cold. Let the child go now.”

But the Dance Master’s stick tapped. “Ulanda, again.”

 

***

 

The warm rain stopped and the runoff from the roof into the flooded courtyard slowed to single drips. Now Ulanda could hear the drums clearly. They were for the la’cellini, the dance of thanks, prelude for the cel’ka that in its common cycles, each building on the last, took an hour or more for the Temple dancers to perform. Part of the K^sini festival for the start of the rainy season.

And the dream? The beginning of the broken promise -- drums and winter ice, a snow-covered patio. Not this hot, airless now where there were no promises left.

Patyin was curled against her back, part of the heat. He stirred, then stretched and smiled. “Did you say something?” At his words, the glow-globe began to shine, rising slowing to ceiling height. “Is it morning?”

“No to both. You only just fell asleep.”

“Then the dances haven’t finished. Good.” With a grunt, he turned half over, then reached to the opposite side of the bed, looking for something. The bottle of wine. Empty. He let it drop. “I told Gei we’d meet him on the jetty before the procession started.”

“If he’s still at the K^sini.”

“He’ll be there. Or we’ll be there and he won’t.”

Ulanda leaned against him, her hair falling over his chest in a dark shower. If she was hot, he was on fire, like a stick of incense burning, his skin scented with cedar. In Kalin, she thought, an honest prayer would be accompanied by incense made of marsh grass and mud, not cedar.

Wetting the tip of one finger with her tongue, she traced the outline of his lips. In her face, his breath was samp grass and bitter almond from the local wine he’d had earlier. “The procession is boring. Stay and make love to me instead.”

He chuckled. “Time enough after we get back. Tomorrow. Or is it today already?” He looked mildly pleased at his wit.

“If it’s tomorrow, then we don’t have to go.” Ulanda smiled into his eyes as though as pleased as he was at his wit. She didn’t need to watch what her fingers were doing: darting along his skin, barely touching in light strokes that might end with a pinch and become, as quickly, a tickle. His shoulders, his arms, along his ribs. Waking sated nerves.

When he gasped, she covered his mouth with hers, her cheek against his nose, holding his breath in. Chest heaving, he pushed her away.

Instead of the passion she wanted, he only looked puzzled. She laughed, and with the back of one hand, stroked his red sweaty face. From simple fire, to a live coal. When he reached to return her touch, she thought he would finally pull her to him, but he only coiled a long dark strand of her hair around one finger.

“Gei said...”

“Did I mention boring?” Drawing the strand free, she brushed his chin with the already straightening curl. From his chin, letting the hair go, she drew her forefinger down his throat and then his chest, the thick, almost white curls parting under her long fingernail. He was the typical ice-blond of the southern islands.

He tried to capture her hand, but missed when she moved to his belly, pushing the light cover away. And moving lower again to the still erect flag of his penis.

“I don’t know if I like you when you’re like this,” he whispered as this time he managed to take her fingers in his.

“Did I ask you to like me?” she said, lying back.

He chuckled as he swung around to get to his knees and then straddled her. “No, I don’t recall liking each other had anything to do with it.”

After they made love, he gathered her to his side, her head in the crook of one arm. In a moment, he was snoring.

 

Her short sleeping robe was on the floor next to the bed, and careful not to wake him again, Ulanda disentangled herself from his embrace, and slipped it over her shoulders. From Wis’opil, bought years ago and half the world away; a soft indigo cotton. Piltsimic weaving. There wasn’t anything in Kalin Market to compare.

As she watched Patyin sleep, her hands smoothed the few wrinkles in the cloth from lying on the floor. And from smoothing, to brushing the tips of her fingers across the surface of the weave. Closing her eyes, she saw what her fingers couldn’t feel in the fine weave -- or her mind find in the sound of the rain. Patterns in the weaving. Nights and days in her life, the extract of years. And still, the threads crossed and re-crossed, relentless in their perfection.

She balled her hands into fists, wanting to strike somebody, anybody. Patyin would do. Sudden rage filled her throat; she couldn’t breath.

And it’s not his fault.

Memory slammed into her. Ri-altar. Niv. And her words to the Overpriest.

 

Days of rain had turned the small back courtyard off her bedroom into a shallow pool, about an inch deep. She splashed through her own reflection, dark with a halo of golden light from the glow-globe. The air smelled only of the nearby river: brackish water and fish and hemp from the nets. Beyond the courtyard wall was another house, the roofline dark against the clouded sky. A baby began to cry, but was quickly hushed. Further away, in the direction of the river jetty, a dog barked.

And from the town center came the roll of the ci-ci drums, drowning out the sounds of the river.

Ulanda didn’t remember the end of the dance on the snowy patio all those years ago, but only waking the next morning, expecting the crowded warmth of the Temple dormitory. Instead, she had been in a small cold room with two other children, only their noses and hair showing above the blankets. Blond heads, Ri-born, most people at South Bay Temple were native to the world. Shivering even with the blanket around her for warmth, she had stood and looked out the single window. The ocean was white-green under the crack of light that was the dawn. She was in the Priest House. In the Acolyte’s quarters.

 

Despite the sound of the drums, Ulanda heard Patyin get up and call her. And again. Then the commode, then a mouthful of water gargled and spat out. Then the front door hit the wall as he left.

When the rain started again, covering the sounds of the festival, she went back inside and shut the front door. Hot water for a bath, she thought walking short passage from the front of the house to the covered rear porch where the cooking was done, the glow-globe following her. And while she bathed, heat more water for tea. Then to bed.

Suddenly, the glow-globe darted past her and brightened. She looked up.

Leaning against the post supporting the porch awning was a man. Black pants and vest, the vest open to the mat of dark curly hair covering his chest and rounded belly. He was tall for a Piltsimic, perhaps to her shoulder, but easily three times her mass.

 “You’re supposed to be in Cam^ka.” He spoke in Empire plain-tongue, not Ri-native.

The fear she had only just then felt, disappeared. She wasn’t sure what replaced it. “I take it this isn’t a casual encounter.”

“Does it look like one?”

“May I offer you tea, then?” At the same time, she made a sign with her fingers that meant acquiescence, a Temple-based gesture that had no Ri equivalent. An allowance, an admission that she was open to the possibilities his being here offered.

He grunted. “And talk.”

“About what?” Then added in the poetry of High-formal: “The curl of the tea leaf off the bush? The release to the steam?”

He chuckled then laughed, shaking his head, the dangling lobes of his large ears flying. And in Ri-native said: “Something like that.”

His Ri-native had the accent of the Yulse Calsai, a long chain of islands that circled a quarter of the world in an arc that pointed on both ends to Ri’sani, the main island. Most off-world trade was centered in the north Calsai islands, but there was an easiness even in those few words that suggested he might have been born on Ri.

Three oral languages without a neural Net to translate... and one that wasn’t oral and which was usually only known to people who had dealings with Temple. Plus a fifth, she could assume he knew Piltsimic-native, a language she didn’t. An educated man. His directness -- or rudeness -- she discounted, both were Piltsimic traits.

Ulanda poured fresh water into the kettle and took it to the ceramic fire-ring set in the tile floor. Next to the fire ring was a tea service and a basket of twigs and dried marsh grass twisted into knots in the Kalin fashion.

Live coals remained under the ashes from the tea she had made earlier for Patyin. A knot of the grass rekindled the flame, but she let that die, watching silently as the fire-spent embers, still in the shape of the long leaves, collapsed under their own weight. Let him wait. The Piltsimic had come to her.

The stout man grunted again as he knelt with the tea tray between them. He added more grass to the coals, then a handful of the twigs, and put the kettle on the ring. “Well?” His low voice turned the word into a growl.

Flames had spread out against the round bottom of the kettle before she spoke, this time in Ri. “Why should I be in Cam^ka?”

“Because some fool didn’t manage to notice that you’d left. Because I went there first and wasted a day.”

She raised her eyes to his. So, his being here had history behind it, and some effort. And resources that included the use of a flitter and likely access to Net records from the two ports, Cam^ka and Kalin. Very well connected. Or rich, or his connections were. Or Temple.

“A whole day?” She was careful to keep her voice light, almost playful. “And much of the night, apparently. I don’t envy this fool of yours. Did you come with the Temple people for the K^sini? I heard they came by flitter, not boat.”

“Don’t recall saying I was with them.” His small dark eyes narrowed. “You’ve been here, what? Two months? Plan on staying long?”

In marshy Kalin? On a mud flat turned shallow river for a few hours after the almost daily rains? And with the real rainy season and the floods about to start? She looked away with a shrug that mirrored her thoughts on the matter.

From one of the jars of tea, she took a pinch of the leaves and dropped them into the fire. Sparks and the scent of the leaf, anticipating the flavor. She could turn his Piltsimic directness back on him. “Where were you before you went to Cam^ka?”

He opened the other tea jar on the tray, shook his head and put it down. “Where I was only matters if you agree.”

She moved the jar back to its proper place on the tray. “Agree to what?”

His inspection of the teapot was next. An unglazed yellow clay base, marsh flowers carved into the clay and the cuts outlined with a shiny blue glaze. Local made, and like the furnishings, it had come with the house.

“A job,” he said without raising his eyes from the tea pot.

“I have one.”

With a sidelong look at her: “So you do. What about the boy?”

She shrugged again. “Does he matter? If you’re offering something better, that is.”

“His father is Master of Scribes here in Kalin. No mean position.”

“In Kalin? What of the job you’re offering me? As mean a position in as mean a place?”

A final inspection of the teapot -- as though the shapes his broad thumbs traced in the glazing pattern took all his concentration -- then he put it on the lip of the fire-ring and took the jar of tea she had just opened and held it under his nose. “This stuff is pitiful.”

“Patyin likes it. Perhaps it’s an acquired taste.”

“Have you acquired it?”

“How many times need I say no?” She got to her feet and went to the cabinet. “I’ve some wine. It’s local, but...”

He shook his head. “Probably another acquired taste.”

“After two months in Kalin? Yes, it is.” In the cabinet were several bottles, something Patyin hadn’t known or he would have taken them. With them were some fruit, mangos and bananas, and a bunch of wilted kale she had meant to cook for dinner. And under the kale, an oiled paper bag. Anise cookies, most of them broken. The few whole ones barely covered the surface of a plate and she arranged a rosette in the center from the larger pieces, sprinkled loose seeds over top, and brought them to him.

The Piltsimic picked out a whole cookie and ate it in one bite. And another, but this one he held up instead of eating. “What are stale cookies supposed to contribute to the dialogue?”

“Crumbs?”

He ate it. “Crumbs, it is.”

A sharp whistle, the water was near boiling. She slid the kettle off the fire. “Is this the point in our talk when I get to hear who is doing the offering?”

He moved the plate of cookies to his lap. “Call me Bolda.”

She raised one eyebrow. “Your offer?”

“What? The substance or the who?”

She made an exaggerated motion of allowance. “As I don’t know either, whichever or both as contributes to the dialogue.”

He chuckled through crumbs, but didn’t answer.

“I’m gratified I amuse you.”

“Well, it’s not me you have to amuse.”

So, it wasn’t him. She felt disappointed, but knew it hadn’t been likely. “At such great personal effort, you must trust that I can amuse.”

“For more than two months at a stretch? Actually, amuse might not be the right word. You’ll catch his attention like fingernails on a plaster wall.”

“Such confidence in my skills. I’m overwhelmed.” She put another pinch of the objectionable tea into the dying flames. “Or is it my dancing we’re speaking of?”

“Just one dance.”

Smoke from the burning tea caught the back of her throat. She couldn’t breath. Out of the harmony of the rain on the roof, the water running from the kitchen awning onto the courtyard, came the sound of the individual drops, each distinct, each creating another harmony, the one she had looked for earlier and hadn’t found. A resonance with the air, the cloth, with the tiles, with her heart beat. And in the sound: the ci-ci drums.

Will you dance for me?

“Of course,” she managed to say.

“According to Patyin, it’s a dance you perform very well. Although I doubt he has much basis for comparison.”

“No.”

“Is that my answer or your opinion?”

She shook her head. “No. And no again if you ask again without telling me more.”

“You get a standard contract. If you please the man. If you don’t, then your expenses will be paid, and if you need it, some help making other arrangements.”

“No.”

The last cookie eaten, he fanned his face a couple of times with the empty plate, then put it on the floor. “This is getting boring. It’s too hot to argue.”

“So? Your being here says you know more about me than you let on. And knowing more and being here, says...”

“Says what? Temple? Temple doesn’t hand out second chances. You screwed up; live with it.”

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Asam e’Bolda of the Imperial Household.”

Cedar. Black joss sticks burning. Prayers that Patyin would have made to the Empress. “You misjudge me. I’m no fool.”

“Is that so?” Without taking his eyes off her, he got to his feet. “Is there anything you want to pack?”

“Now?” she said and felt like the fool she had claimed she wasn’t. Of course, now. A day wasted.

She heard the front door open and stay open -- a difference in the flow of air and the sound of the rain. Patyin. She didn’t take her eyes off the Piltsimic. Behind him, the silvered curtain of water running off the awning blurred as she lost the edges of her vision.

But there were two sets of footsteps in the hall and a change in the air again, the feel of more people, the sound of their breathing, emotions like scent. Possibilities.

She turned her head and had to blink rapidly before being able to see Patyin and Gei, shoulder to shoulder in the hall.

“Ulanda?” Patyin slurred her name. “What... who’s that?”

“Another customer,” Gei said. He sounded sober. “I thought you said you had an exclusive arrangement.”

The Piltsimic said something in a language she hadn’t heard before. From the courtyard where she had stood earlier, two forms rose out of the darkness and were gone into the bedroom before she could make sense of what she was seeing. There was the sound of scratches on the floor tiles, not footsteps. From the hall, Patyin and Gei could obviously see what was making the noise. They backed up. Then her sight of them was blocked. Dark robes, a glint of ochre chitin.

“I told you it was too hot to play games,” Bolda said to her in plain-tongue.

As though that had been a key, she suddenly caught the Piltsimic’s tight Net lead. And the node? Tiny Kalin had a single node but it wasn’t available for general use, the links set for the one school in the town, the weather watch, the port assay, and the navigational leads. Besides, what she felt wasn’t a domestic Net system; the signature of the energy pathway was hauntingly familiar.

He blocked her from the lead like swatting an insect. It faded, then, suddenly, was there again. He looked amused. “So, you haven’t forgotten everything.”

And through his lead -- and then in the air, surrounding them -- the whine of a flitter. And then the shape of the craft over the house. The flitter landed half in the courtyard, half in the next yard, the mud wall between flattened under it. Black hull tiles gleamed dully.

She stood to see it better. A design around the eye of the ship, a change more of texture than what the poor light allowed her to see. The wings of the Empress’ signature?

“I want a permanent position...” Her heart was in her throat as she turned towards the Piltsimic. It was all she could do to keep her voice from breaking. “Something at least equivalent to a Steward Third Grade. And I want it as a signing bonus.”

Again, the Piltsimic looked amused. “Fine.”