Mitigan went at once to inform his colleague. “She said people would be there from all over Dinadh. Which means there’ll be someone there who knows where Famber is, or was.”
“Fine,” muttered the man from Collis. “So we go to Tahs-uppi. Where is it?”
It took them some days of fumbling questions to elicit the information that Tahs-uppi was not a place but an event that took place at the omphalos, the navel of the world. Plotting a route that would get them there occupied them for scarcely another day. The morning after, very early, they stole a beast from a herd cave and departed T’loch-ala, leaving only one dead body behind them, that of an impertinent herdsman who’d wakened early and gone down to his flock without waiting on Lady Day. Had he waited properly, he would still be alive, a fact the songfather of T’loch-ala would later discourse upon at length.
“Have you never married, then?” Poracious Luv asked the King of Kamir.
Jiacare Lostre reflected. “I saw wedlock as wedded lock indeed, another set of chains binding me fast. Seeing what fate I saw for all Kamir, I did not wish for children.”
“You can speak like common people if you like,” she said, grinning at him. “You are no longer king.”
He flushed, started to say something, then stopped. The slow beat of aristocratic speech had become second nature when talking to any but intimates or servants—in which category he had always included his ministers, just to infuriate them. And yet, he had not spoken like that when he was Osterbog Smyne. Why should he as ex-king?
Enjoying his embarrassment, Poracious thrust her seat back to the limit of the inadequate space the ship provided, stretching out her legs. She felt cramped. She was cramped. Her sleeping cubicle was the size of a disposal booth, and after spending several hours in it, she wished it were a disposal booth. One would travel more comfortably as ashes.
Of course, the journey could have been passed in sleep. Most passengers had chosen to sleep until a day or two before they reached their destination, but the king wanted to savor every moment of freedom, and Poracious had thought it wisest to stay with him. On the well-established ground that men like best to talk about themselves, she had led him to discuss his life and times at great length.
“What did you do for amusement?” she demanded. “Everyone has to have amusement.”
“One spends one’s time—” he began, catching himself. “I spent a great deal of time in the gym. I used to retreat there as a child, and I’ve rather depended upon it. One is told … I’m told I acquit myself well.”
“In what sport?”
“Bisexual heptathlon.”
She regarded him thoughtfully. He had the build for it, wiry and compact, and no doubt the energy for it, too, since he’d used it for nothing else. Or almost nothing. “I suppose they allow you women?” she said in a silky tone.
“Oh, Lord Fathom, yes,” he blurted, unthinking. “Women. Men. Animals, too, one supposes, if one liked. One’s father had an insatiable appetite for little girls. So far as one is aware, his desires never went unfulfilled. There are middle-aged women all over Kamir living on pensions from the government. One supposes that’s how the ministers managed it.”
“That and payment to the girls’ families, probably,” said Poracious.
He sighed. “I always had trouble imagining what kind of family would … would … ”
“Many kinds,” she said dryly. “Believe me, Your Majesty.”
“Jiacare,” he said. “If I am to speak like a commoner, you must stop calling me Majesty. Call me … Call me Jickie.”
“Right. Jickie. As I was saying, I’ve seen families who would sell their children, their grandmothers, their husbands or wives. Sometimes out of desperation, sometimes out of greed, but I have seen it.”
“One’s own life has been more circumscribed,” he admitted. “One has only read of such things, and it is hard to know what is real and what is fiction.”
She nodded ponderously. “Most fictions turn out to be real. At least, such has been my experience. I no sooner hear some horrible story, told as a mere tale, than someone assures me it really happens, here or there. Sometimes it turns out the perpetrator heard the same tale and decided to copy it. Massacres, mutilations, murder, mayhem. There are worlds where all these things are everyday affairs. Asenagi, for example. From among whose people you did not hesitate to send an assassin after Leelson Famber. Surely Kamirian law does not countenance such activity.”