Upstairs, the rooms were bare of furniture, though a clutter of clothing and papers remained. Only Genevieve’s things were untouched. It was likely the Mahahmbi religion forbade them looking at or touching women’s things. He laid his hand on the gown she had worn the day he left. Soft as her skin was soft. He held it to his nose, taking in her musky-sweet aroma, ashamed to find himself shaking. He hadn’t come for this. Or he had, but not in this way. He wanted the woman herself, not merely her scent, her gown, her memory! He shook furious tears from his eyes and went back down stairs, to the pantry behind the kitchen, where the downward route must be.
Even knowing it was there, he had to search for it: a door that didn’t look like a door with steps going down into more darkness. He turned the torch up and lit his way down one flight to a series of comfortably furnished and neatly kept rooms. The malghaste might wear rags in public, but they did not seem to do so in private. A rack along the wall was hung with perfectly respectable garments,- the rag garlands were thrown separately over a hook at the far end.
A tap set into a tiled section of wall above a floor drain explained where they got water. A tiny metal stove had a kettle atop it. Everything was neat, but no one was there, no one at all, and the tunnel led mysteriously into the dark.
After three hours, he had seen endless hallways, many of them with rooms along the sides, some of them leading up into blind courtyards exposed to the sky, some of them leading up into occupied houses, where he could hear voices behind hidden doors. Women, mostly.
“We go Galul. Oh, happy, happy, we go Galul.”
“You be good girl. You be good. Master not like bad girl.”
“Oh, baby, baby, nice baby. Drink and get fat, baby.”
When alone, the women evidently talked baby-talk Mahahmbi, for he could understand it perfectly well. Which meant they probably talked nonsense syllables when men could hear them. He was tired and hungry, so he decided to explore only a little farther and then, if he found nothing, go back to his house, the Prince’s house, whosever it had been. He was getting nowhere down here, and his lack of success indicated that the people he had seen during the previous night had been the malghaste, leaving town.
It was after he turned back that he heard a voice, singing. Cautiously, he slipped toward the sound, stopping outside an ordinary door.
“Hush, hush,” sang the voice inside. “Rock-a-byes. Shut his eyes. Oh, poor little one, Mama gone so far, Daddy gone so far, him all alone with old Awhero . . .”
He turned away, thinking it more of the same babble, but then stopped. The name. Awhero.
“. . . alone with old Awhero, poor Dovidi . . .”
Aufors opened the door and walked in. His son was in a makeshift cradle-hammock hung a few inches from the floor, an old woman was swinging it to and fro. She leapt up when he entered and backed away toward the far wall, her hands covering her face.
Aufors gave her a predatory grin as he turned his light onto his own face. “Aufors Leys,” he said. “Dovidi’s father. Genevieve’s husband.”
“Ah,” she murmured, dropping her hands from before her face. “Well … So beetle’s dropped out of roofbeam, has it! I thought I’d have to go hunting you, and here you are. You’ve dyed your hair, too. Very sensible, though this is last place I’d have thought you’d come.”
He gave her a weary smile, “My wife went down below, said the com-man, and he was the last to see her. Where else should I go but down below after her?” He looked around at the room. A bed. Several small chairs. A skinny stove pipe running up the coiled stair and leading to a tiny stove, only large enough to hold the steaming kettle. From the smell of it, she was burning harpta dung.
“Well, you haven’t come after Genevieve, lad, for love of creation. She’s long gone. It’s only baby that’s here, and if he wasn’t sick as wee toad with belly-ache, he and I’d be gone as well. I think there’s not twenty of us left in Mahahm.”