Poul Anderson - Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks

Pum halted before him and said importantly, “Greeting, holy one. My master and I wish to honor Our Lady of Nuptials.”

The priest signed a blessing. “Praises be. A foreigner confers double fortune.” Interest gleamed in his eyes. “Whence come you, worthy stranger?”

“From north across the waters,” Everard replied.

“Yes, yes, that’s clear, but it’s a vast and unknown territory. Might you be from a land of the Sea Peoples themselves?” The priest waved at a stool like that which he occupied. “Pray be seated, noble sir, take your ease for a while, let me pour you a cup of wine.”

Pum jittered about for several minutes in an agony of frustration, before he hunkered down under a column and sulked. Everard and the priest conversed for almost an hour. Others drifted up to listen and join in.

It could easily have lasted all day. Everard was finding out a lot. Probably none of it was germane to his mission, but you never knew, and anyway, he enjoyed the gab session. What brought him back to earth was mention of the sun. It had dropped below the porch roof. He remembered Yael Zorach’s warning, and cleared his throat.

“Och, how I regret it, my friends, but time passes and I must soon begone. If we are first to pay our respects—”

Pum brightened. The priest laughed. “Aye,” he said, “after so long a faring, the fire of Asherat must burn hotly. Well, now, the free-will donation is half a shekel of silver or its value in goods. Of course, men of wealth and rank are wont to give more.”

Everard paid over a generous chunk of metal. The priest repeated his blessing and gave him and Pum each a small ivory disc, rather explicitly engraved. “Go in, my sons, seek whom you will do good, cast these in their laps. Ah… you understand, do you not, great Eborix, that you are to take your chosen one off the sacred premises? Tomorrow she will return the token and receive the benison. If you have no place of your own nigh to here, then my kinsman Hanno rents clean rooms at a modest rate, in his inn just down the Street of the Date Sellers.…”

Pum fairly zoomed inside. Everard followed with what he hoped was more dignity. His talkmates called raunchy good wishes. That was part of the ceremony, the magic.

The chamber was large, its gloom not much relieved by oil lamps. They picked out intricate murals, gold leaf, inset semiprecious stones. At the far end shimmered a gilt image of the goddess, arms held out in a compassion which somehow came through the rather primitive sculpturing. Everard sensed fragrances, myrrh and sandal-wood, and an irregular undertone of rustles and whispers.

As his pupils widened, he discerned the women. Perhaps a hundred altogether, they sat on stools, crowded along the walls to right and left. Their garb ranged from fine linen to ragged wool. Some slumped, some stared blankly, some made gestures of invitation as bold as the rules permitted, most looked timidly and wistfully at the men who strolled by them. Those visitors were few, at this hour of an ordinary day. Everard thought he identified three or four mariners on shore leave, a fat merchant, a couple of young bucks. Their deportment was reasonably polite; it was a church here.

His pulses pounded. Damnation, he thought, irritated, why am I making such a production in my head? I’ve been with enough women before.

Sadness touched him. Only two virgins, though.

He walked along, watching, wondering, avoiding glances. Pum sought him and tugged his sleeve. “Radiant master,” the youth hissed, “your servant may have found that which you require.”

“Huh?” Everard let his attendant drag him out to the center of the room, where they could murmur unheard.

“My lord understands that this child of poverty could never hitherto enter these precincts,” spilled from Pum. “Yet, as I said earlier, I do have acquaintanceship reaching into the royal palace itself. I know of a lady who has come each time her duties and the moon allow, to wait and wait, these past three years. She is Sarai, daughter of shepherd folk in the hills. Through an uncle in the guard, she got a post in the king’s household, at first only as a scullery maid, but now working closely with the chief steward. And she is here today. Since my master wishes to make contacts of that sort—”

Bemused, Everard followed his guide. When they halted, he gulped. The woman who, low-voiced, responded to Pum’s greeting, was squat, big-nosed—he decided to think of her as homely—and verging on spinsterhood. But the gaze she lifted to the Patrolman was bright and unafraid. “Would you like to release me?” she asked quietly. “I would pray for you for the rest of my life.”

Before he could change his mind, he pitched his token onto her skirt.

Pum had found himself a beauty, arrived this same day and engaged to the scion of a prominent family. She was dismayed when such a ragamuffin picked her. Well, that was her problem. And perhaps his too, though Everard doubted it.

The rooms in Hanno’s inn were tiny, equipped with straw mattresses and little else. Slit windows, giving on the inner court, admitted a trickle of evening light, also smoke, street and kitchen smells, chatter, plaintiveness of a bone flute. Everard drew the reed curtain that served as a door and turned to his companion.

She knelt before him as if huddling into her garments. “I do not know your name or your country, sir,” she said, low and not quite steadily. “Do you care to tell your handmaiden?”

“Why, sure.” He gave her his alias. “And you are Sarai from Rasil Ayin?”

“Did the beggar boy send my lord to me?” She bowed her head. “No, forgive me, I meant no insolence, I was thoughtless.”

He ventured to push back her scarf and stroke her hair. Though coarse, it was abundant, her best physical feature. “No offense taken. See here, shall we get to know each other a bit? What would you say to a cup or two of wine before—Well, what would you say?”

She gasped, astounded. He went out, found the landlord, made the provision.

Presently, as they sat side by side on the floor with his arm around her shoulders, she was talking freely. Phoenicians had scant concept of personal privacy. Also, while their women got more respect and independence than those of most societies, still, a little consideration on a man’s part went a long ways.

“—no, no betrothal yet for me, Eborix. I came to the city because my father is poor, with many other children to provide for, and it did not seem anybody in our tribe would ever ask my hand for his son. You wouldn’t possibly know of someone?” He himself, who would take her maidenhead, was debarred. In fact, her question bent the law that forbade prearrangement, as for example with a friend. “I have won standing in the palace, in truth if not in name. I wield some small power among servants, purveyors, entertainers. I have scraped together a dowry for myself, not large, but… but it may be the goddess will smile on me at last, after I have made this oblation—”

“I’m sorry,” he answered in compassion. “I’m a stranger here.”

He understood, or supposed he did. She wanted desperately to get married: less to have a husband and put an end to the barely veiled scorn and suspicion in which the unwedded were held, than to have children. Among these people, few fates were more terrible than to die childless, to go doubly into the grave… Her defenses broke apart and she wept against his breast.

The light was failing. Everard decided to forget Yael’s fears (and—a chuckle—Pum’s exasperation) and take his time, treat Sarai like a human being simply because that was what she in fact was, wait for darkness and then use his imagination. Afterward he’d see her back to her quarters.