Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

There is an addendum to the legend that involves an Ursini’s viper and the inadvisability of stepping on one, even while dancing, but it is a complication seldom mentioned by the tour guides and myth-mongers. The bite proved nonfatal, though chastening, and both it and the dance have provided fodder for local proverbs ever since and a warning against excessive exuberance. The one contrary state that eschews the danseuse emblazons a snake on its flag with the motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

A counter-legend holds that the landing officer had simply been a native of “Dancing,” said to be a city on Old Earth that had anciently been a member of the original Hanse. But what sort of romance can you spin off that? Naked women and serpents in the garden of a fresh new world were by far more fascinating.

The Steelyard was more than a spaceport. It was also the chief Counting House of the Vrouw. Thus, although located in the capital of the Eastern Cape Circle, it had extraterritorial status, and merchant princes from every Circle, and even from other Hansard planets, stationed factors there.

Groundside customs was more thorough than on Harpaloon. The Toll-Clerk, as he was called, studied their Kennel passes with great intensity, even employing a loupe to verify the watermarking of their papers, and required a retinal scan of each of them. Billy Chins proved a problem. A chumar , the lowest caste of Terran worker, he had little in the way of papers; and no one had ever thought his retinas worth scanning.

Rules meant much in the Greater Hanse, and their functionaries did not accept bribes to overlook them. However, everything was for sale, including entry visas, so the distinction was a fine one and not always apparent to out-worlders. There were regulations on how to bypass the regulations. These required three oath-helpers to swear to Billy Chins’s good character, and a native of the Vrouw to purchase the contract. The Clerk summoned a Trader from the Floor, and shortly a wide-bodied man in a marten-rimmed, sleeveless coat and wearing a silver medal on a neck-chain stepped off the lift.

“What is then all this?” he asked the Clerk and, the situation being explained, he turned to Billy Chins. “You-fella Terry? Good-good. We process, jildy Khitmutgar, you? Oho! Who thy master? This one?” A skeptical eye was cast over Donovan, but swift handshakes proved both members of the Brotherhood. The Trader switched to the Tongue. “This shalt proceed swiftly, my brother, and at a nominal fee. I hight Hendrik ten Muqtar, senior trader of the House of Coldperk. I will ask of thee no more than but a single marek, for honor’s sake.” He made a complex gesture with his hands. “But as for the Purse of the Steelyard, they will accept no-but less than one hundred mareks, however middling our contract.”

“Pliss, pliss,” said Billy Chins. “Me-fella blong this-man, Donovan. No blong you-fella.” To Donovan, he added, “I go long you. No go long him. Plis no send Billy Chins away!”

Donovan fluttered his fingers and addressed ten Muqtar. “Forgive him his intemperance.”

“It makes naught. Here. Behold the standard contract. Thou shalt enter names here, and here. Aye, the light pen, so that it may scan. Oho! A Kennel chit! Had I but known of him, thy fee would have soared. Deep pockets hath the Kennel.”

When all was completed to the jot and tittle of Hansard Commercial Regulation §189.3, Part V, paragraph 6.2 (a), Billy Chins tugged on ten Muqtar’s coat and said with something like awe, “Ally-all Terry here got plenty somtaing, laik you-fella?”

Ten Muqtar flashed them a quick sad smile and spoke to Donovan. “Tell your boy that the Hanse placeth no bars to those willing to work, and that many of the Original Folk have become here wealthy. But thou wilt have noticed that when the Clerk required a Trader to buy a Terran’s contract, he sent for a Terran. We prosper here and enjoy great liberties, but the doors of society are closed to us.”

“As oppressions go,” said Donovan, “that doth pale beside a Harpaloon lynch mob.”

“It is much of a such,” ten Muqtar said with a shrug. “Here, much business is done at dinner parties and on the courses of golf. Where a man’s expectations are greater, smaller slights grate the more.”

The skywalks ran above the Trading Floor and Méarana and her party paused while crossing to gaze over the banisters at the activity below.

A mob of Harpaloon drunks did not shout and mill as wildly as did the press on the Floor. They cried out or sent messages over headsets, buttonholed and bargained, waved fingers in the air in an arcane code. A display board at the far end listed cargos and vessels arriving in orbit and the Traders, who sat like lords around the periphery of the Floor, sent their Runners to ask and offer prices, the two hunting up and down the scale until they met and cleared the cargo. This was for the most part accomplished while the vessel was on the crawl, and a ship’s contents might be sold and sold again before ever it reached High Dancing Orbit.

The throng of arrivals followed the walkway to a broad outdoor plaza at third-storey level. It was come on to winter in that quarter of Dancing Vrouw and the wind drove light flurries of snow across the paving stones and into the sleeves and shoes of inaptly-dressed out-worlders. Incomers scattered, hailing skycabs or huddling in the tramline station or scurrying across the plaza to the Roaming Qaysar Hotel.

This hotel, a stolid, seven-storey building of dark ironwood timbers and light masonry, was said to be the largest primarily wooden building in the Spiral Arm. Flanking it on either side were Factor Houses from around the Vrouw: from nautical Giniksper to tropical Dangerminda to Kalmshdad in the Northern Waste. Farther off, stood the more modest entrepôts of other Hanse worlds—Yubeq, Hanower, Rigger, and elsewhere; so that overall the prospect before them was of a solid wall of buildings, diverse in size and style and color. Parti-colored House arms flashed in light-signage, in holo-projections, or in cloth flags.

Greystroke had booked them rooms on the seventh floor of the Roaming Qaysar and, having stowed their belongings, they foregathered in the suite’s common room before a wall-spanning window. Below, lay the city of Pròwenshwai: a faery jumble set along crooked streets, bisected by broad, straight avenues, interrupted by white plazas and green parks. Stairways twisted up bluffs where streets dared not go. Here and there, clocktowers, minarets, and kokoshniki pierced the skyline.

It was a city that delighted in wood and its possibilities. On the buildings below, cornice, tympanum, spandrel, gable, jamb, and shutters had been set into parquet or carved into basilisks, wyverns, griffins, distlefinks, gargoyles; into flowers and leaves and lacework. Statues emerged from the walls of the greater buildings.

“Is look strange-strange,” said Billy Chins. “Never off Harpaloon, me.”

“‘Tis broader spread than any city I’ve played,” Méarana said. “Even Èlfiuji is more compact.”

“You should see it when night falls,” Greystroke added. “They call it the Carpet of Lights. And at midwinter, when the snow covers all, they put candles in every window, and in small bags lining every walkway. Over that way,” he pointed, “is the Tower of the Snake. Remind me to tell you that story. You can recite it for drinks, Donovan, when you return to Jehovah.”

Donovan did not rise to the jibe. “Where’s the Toll Gate?” he said.

“Right behind the hotel. You can’t see it from this angle. It’s one of only two entries from the international enclave into Eastern Cape Circle itself.”

Donovan cocked his head. “Where’s the other?”