Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

The crowd scattered and the boys on the tractor ran off.

The only one left was the hapless soul with the handcart. The guards hit him a few licks and went off, leaving him to right his cart, repack it, and trundle it around the new hole in the middle of the road.

Laughter and a satiric run on a stringed instrument of some kind.

Rose looked around.

A street musician was standing in a doorway, swaying, a lutelike instrument cradled in his arms. His face was flushed and he looked more than a little drunk. After a moment he began to sing, improvising a comic account of the accident, describing the guards, the careless boys, and the hapless would-be trader in scurrilous terms, picturing them as capering ludicrously about the hole in the road which he invested with enormous significance, mostly sexual and wholly comical. He had a crowd in moments; laughing and clapping with him, they threw coppers at the case open at his feet. Then someone yelled, someone else took the lute from the singer and bustled him away and again the street was empty-until a squad of guards came marching around an angle.

Behind them the Vaarlord of this Kehvar (quarter, ward, neighborhood) lolled on the seat of a groundcar, his gorgeousness exhibited behind pelletproof glass as he looked over his subjects. He was a big man, with a seamed, scarred face. He didn’t loll well. Cultural things, she thought, idleness as an attribute of greatness. No, as a toiler, he was an abject failure. There was too much animal vigor in the man; his eyes moved over the houses and the people, over her as one of the people, with hard possessiveness. His hair might be gilded, his mustache and goatee stiff as gold wire, his face enameled white, his lips carmine, but none of that mattered. She watched him pass and shivered. Head down, Rose, she told, herself. It’s survival time.

Quiet went down the street with him, the people around her going still as he passed, prey beasts in the presence of a lion, praying he wasn’t hungry.

One of the guards following him looked at her, interest sparking in his eyes. He kept walking, but he turned his head to watch her as he went along.

As casually as she could manage, Rose turned down one of the semi-streets that crossed this one, moved swiftly through several angles, ran into a swarm of beggar children, turned again to get away from them, nearly ran into two guards at the boundary between two Kehvars engaged in a bracing match that was clearly, on the verge of breaking into a shooting war. The locals were smarter or faster than her, they’d gone for cover. She backed off as quickly and quietly as she could, ducked down another of the winding ways and made her way back to the main trafficflow.

Street noises grew louder and less distinct, voices of the child beggars and the street singers blending with drums and pipes and lutes. There were more guards out. New ones like wasps, dark yellow tunics with black vee stripes down the front and back. Kephalos had said it would be so, each Vaarlord hired his own guards. There was a HighVaar over the whole city, but he ruled more by consent than coercion. He was a convenience, a court of last resort, the keeper of the peace; he was the only one who could force the Vaarlords to keep to their boundaries, but he didn’t meddle inside those boundaries.

Which meant she’d better keep her eyes wide open and stop dreaming her way through these streets. Come on, Rose, you know the score. Get a move on, the sooner you’re under a roof the better.

The market was five acres of dust and noise. Several free traders were down onplanet looking for this and that, trading what they had for as much as they could get, a complex system of barter that both sides played out full-voiced and passionately, games both sides enjoyed to the max. Spice dealers and flower women, dealers in rare oils and essences, these turned the air into a soup of smells. There were cloth-sellers and leather dealers, used clothes men, lampsellers, knife women, pot women, chandlers and cosmetics dealers, dealers in everything imaginable. Jugglers and jongleurs plied their varied trades with varying success. Painters and sculptors and a local brand of artists who produced a complex combination of both with a touch of performance thrown in, these had their stands and their rivalries. A maximum of confusion and stimulus. Rose sighed with pleasure and plunged into the middle of it.

“Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come by, come and see, treasures for the trading, come by, come and see.” Tuluat stopped his chant, leaned across the table toward Autumn Rose, big dark eyes warm and confiding. “And what can I be doing for you, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i?”

Autumn Rose smiled guilelessly back, newly browned eyes warm and trusting, the warmth as genuine as his. “Why, Fentu Tuluat, perhaps you can. I have a few trinkets…” she sighed, “that have sad memories attached. I hate to lose them, but a break is a break and time heals wounds. Perhaps you’d like to look at them?”

“The blessing of the Tanadewa, time and its healing.” Tuluat shook out a square of black velvet, smoothed it on the table in front of him. “Do be letting me see.”

Autumn Rose took her gleanings from the ship and set them with slow care onto the cloth, a ring with a starstone (slightly chipped), an antique chronometer in a nicked and battered gold case, a fingerstone of Tongjok jadeite in the form of a smiling fat frogga, an Escalari earbob its dangles carved from hardalwood and set with fossil amber, and half a dozen similar small but valuable items. When she finished, the serious bargaining began.

Autumn Rose weighed the coins in her left hand, shook her head and ran them through the portable assayer she’d found in Barakaly’s antique desk. She clicked her tongue. “Short, Tuluat. Lovely striking, but there’s too much base metal in the gold. I think another ema and two silvers, what are they, ah, peras will make up the difference.”

He shrugged, grinned and handed the coins over without protest. “Now if you are liking to sell that little gadget, I am offering… hmm… a nice sum, say… hmm… 300 emas.”

“No no, I don’t think so.” She tucked the assayer back in her belt pouch, flickered her fingers at him. “You’ve made enough from me today.”

He shrugged again, laughed. “So so, I will be having it within the week anyway and cheaper at that. Unless you prove more alert than I am thinking, Jonjabaey, lovely Jaba’i.” He turned away, flung out his hands, “Tuluat the Tukkaree, that is being me, buying and selling, selling and buying, come and see, come and see, treasures for the trading, come and see, come and see.”

“You are being a free trader, Jonja?”

Rose started, cursed under her breath. The guard had come out of nowhere, was suddenly pacing beside her; he wasn’t one of those in the market, he had a combination of green with purple diamonds and black slashes that was eye-blinding and surprised her because she couldn’t imagine him fading into shadow, no way. Tuluat just might be right, I’m not into this yet. “No,” she said, “just a traveler.”

“Where do you be heading?”

Uh oh, she thought. I hope this isn’t what it looks like. “Just ambling around, seeing what there is to see,” she said. Mistake, she thought. I shouldn’t ’ve answered in the first place. I don’t know. I don’t know. One thing I do know, I don’t like the smell coming off him.

“There is not being much worth looking at round here. Better you are letting me show you a place I am knowing.”

Right, she thought, just come alonga you, huh? No way, skinkhead. She didn’t say anything, just kept walking, looking straight ahead. If she couldn’t handle this jerk, she should’ve stayed away. Best if she could just lose him some way.