“You see,” said Mim, “I would have been quite safe.”
“I wish I was that confident.”
“Look you, Kurt, I know these people. There is lady Yafes, and that little boy is Edu t’Rachik u Gyon-the Rachik house is very large. They have so many children it is a joke in Nephane. The old man on the curb is t’Pamchen. He fancies himself a scholar. He says he is reviving the old Sufak writing and that he can read the ancient stones. His brother is a priest, but he does not approve of the old man. There is no harm in these people. They are my neighbors. You let t’Tefur’s little band of pirates trouble you too much. T’Tefur would be delighted to know he upset you. That is the only victory he dares seek as long as you give him no opportunity to challenge you.”
“I suppose,” Kurt said, unconvinced.
The street approached the lower town by a series of low steps down a winding course to the defense wall and the gate. Thereafter the road went among the poorer houses, the markets, the harborside. Several ships were in port, two broad-beamed merchant vessels and three sleek galleys, warships with oars run in or stripped from their locks, yards without sails, the sounds of carpentry coming loudly from their decks, one showing bright new wood on her hull.
Ships were being prepared against the eventuality of war. Tavi, Kta’s ship, had been there; she had had her refitting and had been withdrawn to the outer harbor, a little bay on the other side of Haichema-tleke. That reminder of international unease, the steady hammering and sawing, underlay all the gaiety of the crowds that thronged the market.
“That is a ship of Ilev, is it not?” Kurt asked, pointing to the merchantman nearest, for he saw what appeared to be the white bird that was emblematic of that house as the figurehead.
“Yes,” said Mim. “But the one beside it I do not recognize. Some houses exist only in the Isles. Lord Kta knows them all, even the houses of Indresul’s many colonies. A captain must know these things. But of course they do not come to Nephane. This one must be a trader that rarely comes, perhaps from the north, near the Yvorst Ome, where the seas are ice.”
The crowd was elbow-to-elbow among the booths. They lost sight of the harbor, and nearly of each other. Kurt seized Mim’s arm, which she protested with a shocked look: even husband and wife did not touch publicly.
“Stay with me,” he said, but he let her go. “Do not leave my sight.”
Mim walked the maze of aisles a little in front of him, occasionally pausing to admire some gimcrack display of the tinsmiths, intrigued by the little fish of jointed scales that wiggled when the wind hit their fins.
“We did not come for this,” Kurt said irritably. “Come, what would you do with such a thing?”
Mim sighed, a little piqued, and led him to that quarter of the market where the farmers were, countrymen with produce and cheeses and birds to sell, fishermen with the take from their nets, butchers with their booths decorated with whole carcasses hanging from hooks.
Mim deplored the poor quality of the fish that day, disappointed in her plans, but selected from a vegetable seller some curious yellow corkscrews called lat, and some speckled orange ones called gillybai. She knew the vegetable seller’s wife, who congratulated her on her recent marriage, marveled embarrassingly over Kurt-she seemed to shudder slightly, but showed brave politeness-then became involved in a long story about some mutual acquaintance’s daughter’s child.
It was woman’s talk. Kurt stood to one side, forgotten, and then, sure that Mim was safe among people she knew and not willing to seem utterly the tyrant, withdrew a little. He looked at some of the other tables in the next booth, somewhat interested in the alien variety of the fish and the produce, some of which, he reflected with unease, he had undoubtedly eaten without knowing its uncooked appearance. Much of the seafood was not in the least appealing to Terran senses.
From the harbor there came the steady sound of hammering, reechoing off the walls in insane counterpoint to the noise of the many colored crowds.