Papa went on, “Tell you true, Mouche—but if you tell your Mama, I’ll say you lie—many a time when the work is hard and the sun is hot, and I’m covered with bites from jiggers and fleas, and my back hurts from loading hay … well, I’ve thought what it would be like, being a Hunk. Warm baths, boy. And veils light enough to really see through. It would be fun to see the city rather than mere shadows of it. And there’s wine. We had wine at our wedding, your mama and me. They tell me one gets to like it.” He sighed again, lost in his own foundered dream, then came to himself with a start.
“Well, words enough! If you are agreeable, we will go to Sendoph tomorrow, for the interview.”
Considering the choices, Mouche agreed. It was Papa who took him. Mama could not lower herself to go into House Genevois as a seller rather than a buyer. That would be shameful indeed.
Sendoph was as Sendoph always was, noisy and smelly and full of invisible people everywhere one looked. Though the city had sewers, they were always clogging up, particularly in the dry season when the streams were low, and the irregular cobbles magnified the sound of every hoof and every wooden or iron-rimmed wheel to make clattering canyons between the tall houses and under the overhanging balconies. The drivers were all supernumes who had to work at whatever was available, and they could not see clearly through their veils. The vendors were equally handicapped. Veils, as the men often said, were the very devil. They could not go without, however, or they’d be thought loose or promiscuous or, worse, disrespectful of women. There were always many Haggers standing about, servants of the Hags, who were servants of the Hagions, the Goddesses, and they were swift to punish bad behavior.
The town was split in two by ancient lava tubes, now eroded into troughs, that guided the northward flow of the River Giles. Genevois House stood on the street nearest west and parallel to the river, its proud western facade decked with tall shuttered windows and bronze double doors graven with images of dueling men. The south side, along Bridge Street all the way to Brewer’s Bridge, was less imposing, merely a line of grilled windows interrupted in the middle by one stout provisioner’s gate opening into the service courtyard. The east side, on the bank of the river itself, showed only a blank wall bracketed at each end by a stubby tower of ornamental brickwork around fretted windows set with colored glass. This wall was pierced by an ancient gate through which a rotting tongue of wharf was thrust into the river, a tongue all slimed with filth and ribboned with long festoons of algae. Parts of House Genevois plus the courtyard walls, the wharf, and the bronze doors, dated back to the lost settlement, the colony from Thor that had vanished, along with its ship, long before the second settlers arrived.
The door where Mouche and his papa were admitted was an inconspicuous entrance off Bridge Street, near the front corner. Inside was the parlor of the welcome suite, where Madame Genevois kept them waiting a good hour. Through the closed door Mouche and Papa could hear her voice, now from here, then from there, admonishing, encouraging. When she came into the interview room at last, her sleeves were turned up to her elbows and her forehead was beaded with perspiration. She rolled the sleeves down and buttoned them, took a linen handkerchief from the cache-box on her worktable, and patted her forehead dry.
“Well, Family Man; well, Mouche,” she said. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but we have a new fencing master who is inclined to be too rigorous with the beginners and too lax with the advanced class. It is easier to bully novices than it is to test competent swordsmen, but I have told him I will not tolerate it. He is paid to exert himself, and exert himself he shall.” She patted her forehead once again, saying in a matter-of-fact voice: “Take off your clothes, boy, and let me look at you.”