Eric nodded, seeing that Gustave was about to object. “Maybe we’ll never want anything, Gustave. Probably we won’t. But if we did, by chance, we’d be in a good position. Aren’t you the one who always tells us not to give up an advantage until we have to?”
The older man simmered. “Then we have to be polite to whoever they send—bow, scrape, pretend he’s our equal, some fool, some off-planeter, some foreigner”
“Well, yes. Since the ambassador will be from Sanctity, he’ll probably be Terran, Gustave. Surely we could suffer that for a time. As I mentioned, most of us speak diplomatic.”
“And thisfragraswill have a silly wife and a dozen bratlings, probably. And servants. And secretaries and aides. All asking questions.”
“Put them someplace remote, where they can’t ask many. Put them at Opal Hill.” Eric named the site of the former Semling embassy with some relish, repeating it. “Opal Hill.”
“Opal Hill, hah! Farther than nowhere! All the way across the swamp-forest to the southwest. That’s why the people from Semling left. It gets lonely at Opal Hill.”
“So, the man from Sanctity will get lonely and leave as well. But that will be his fault, not ours. Agreed? Yes?”
Evidently they were agreed. Figor waited for a time to see if anyone had any second thoughts or if Gustave was going to explode again, then rang for wine before leading his guests down into the grass gardens. Now, in early fall, the gardens were at their best, the feathery seed heads moving like dancers to the beat of the southern wind. Even Gustave would mellow after an hour in the gardens. Come to think of it, Opal Hill had very nice gardens as well, young but well designed. The Sanctified penitents expiating their sins here on Grass by digging up ruins and designing gardens—the ones who called themselves the Green Brothers—had spent considerable care upon the Opal Hill gardens. Nothing had disturbed the gardens since the people from Semling had left. Perhaps this ambassador person could be interested in gardening. Or his wife, if he had a wife. Or the dozen bratlings.
Afar from Klive, deep among the grasses, Dimity bon Damfels tried to exorcise the pain in her legs and back. Even after all those hours on the simulator, all the pain she had experienced there, this was different. This was intrusive, hateful, intimate.
“When you think the pain is unbearable,” the riding instructor had said, “you can review the track of the Hunt in your mind. Distract yourself. Above all, do not think of the pain itself.”
So she distracted herself, reviewing how they had come. They had ridden out along the Trail of Greens and Blues where the patterned turf along the path went from deepest indigo through all shades of turquoise and sapphire to dark forest green and bright emerald, upward to the ridge where tall plumes of aquamarine watergrass undulated in ceaseless waves. Beyond the ridge the watergrass filled a shallow basin dotted with islands of sandgrass, the whole making such a marvelously lifelike seascape that it was called the Ocean Garden. Dimity had once seen a picture of a real ocean when she went with Rowena to Commoner Town to pick up some imported fabric. It had been hanging on the fabric merchant’s wall, a picture of a sea on Sanctity. She remembered saying at the time how much the imaged expanse of water looked like grass. Someone had laughed at this, saying it was the grass that looked like water. How would one know which looked like which? In fact, they looked like one another, were like one another, except that one could drown in water.
Musing on this, Dimity surprised herself with the thought that one might almost drown in grass as well. One might wish to drown. Her left knee was in agony. Little trails of fire crept from the knee upward toward her groin. Distract yourself, she repeated mentally. Distract yourself.
At the end of the Trail of Greens and Blues, the hounds had run silently into Thirty-shadows Forest, where giant black stems, thick as her body, grew tall, clucking hollowly far above as they collided in the small wind. Here velvet turfs were planted in mosslike clusters around hillocks of stonegrass, and here the mounts had followed as the trail led upward toward the Ruby Highlands.