Daniel grinned. Unless she’d found the information during one of her data searches, of course; as she probably had. He supposed this was another case where his interests and Adele’s complemented one another.
Given the amount of noise the wheels made, Daniel didn’t expect to see much in the way of wildlife. As they came out of the forest onto a road with high curbs and houses to either side, however, a blister swelled suddenly from the trunk of a tree and launched itself outward with an undulating motion. While flying the creature had a glistening translucence, but it vanished completely as soon as it landed on the weathered slats of a house a hundred yards away.
The wooden buildings on the road from the harbor had been raised four or five feet above the ground on pilings. Chickens scavenged around the houses and in the street, sometimes scattering noisily as children playing ball rushed too close. Women sat on the steps, sewing and cutting vegetables against their thumbs as they chatted in high, musical voices.
In actual money there probably wasn’t the equivalent of ten Cinnabar florins as far as Daniel could see up and down this street, but the impression he got of the district was simplicity rather than poverty. The women’s clothing was a mix of colors tending toward reds and yellows, and the houses were painted bright pastels even though much of the paint had flaked away.
The street was wide, but pedestrians were the only other traffic. Once the car passed a pair of men trudging along with the carcase of a pig slung between them, but for the most part Daniel saw women with bundles or wicker baskets on their heads. Occasionally they stopped and looked at the vehicle in blank-faced wonder.
Adele leaned close and said, “There’s canals at the back of the houses. They carry the commercial traffic; and act as sewers, I gather.”
Daniel nodded in understanding.
They were coming to the dwellings of the wealthy, though as they approached Daniel thought what he saw ahead was the industrial district. The three- and four-story houses were built of concrete, but their window gratings were iron worked into patterns of remarkable art and delicacy despite the smears of rust on the walls beneath them. Here drainage ditches bordered the road on both sides. Some of the houses had culverts to their substantial front gates, but many used instead drawbridges—which they kept raised.
Bunting draped the facade of a building a quarter mile in the distance. The gates were open and servants stood in the street waving flags. Daniel increased the magnification of the goggles he wore with his 2nd Class uniform. “Good God, that’s a Cinnabar sandal!” he said.
“The Novy Sverdlovsk flag is a red eagle on a black and white ground!” Adele said into his ear. “Is that . . . ?”
“Yes, by God, it bloody well is!” Daniel said, focusing on one of the flags alternating with those of Cinnabar. “Good heavens, they didn’t have long to run them up, did they?”
The tires slowed from a thrum back to a flop-flop-flop. The driver turned hard—the horizontally-mounted steering wheel didn’t have power assist, Daniel noticed—and drove through the arched gateway into a courtyard almost filled by the dozen or more similar vehicles which were already parked there.
A priest in black robes and a score of other people in glittering finery—the headdress of some of the women was remarkable—looked down from second-story balconies. In contrast to the animated servants, these folk were working very hard to impersonate statues.
The car stopped and the diesel rang silent. Adele leaned close to Daniel as they got out, murmuring, “The Pansuelas invited all the other landowners in Lusa City when they learned we were arriving. There’ll be additional guests from neighboring islands later in the evening.”
A couple accompanied by footmen walked down the spreading stone staircase from the wing opposite the entrance. The man was a tall, distinguished sixty-year-old; the woman was somewhat younger and her bosom could almost be described as overdone. She embraced Count Klimov while the man took Valentina’s hand and held it as he said, “I am Enrique Pansuela; this is my wife Flora. We are honored, deeply honored, to have guests of your obvious nobility!”