Jo Clayton - A Gathering Of Stones

Danny lifted his mug. “Here’s to the Arsuiders. To know ‘em…” he gulped down the last of the lukewarm grog, “… is to know ‘em.”

“Yeh.” Laux ran his tongue over his teeth, making his lips bulge. “Look here, Laz, you whistle up a good wind.” He grunted with impatience and stopped talking as Pweez came in to clear away the dishes; when the boy was gone, he went on. “Taught some manners to those top’sh off Ottvenutt shoals. First time I’ve got past without taking some damage. You say you’re a rambling man, no place you have to be, no one expecting you here or there. What I’m saying, if you don’t fancy taking a chance on that,” he flicked a hand toward the porthole, “why not stay on board? Say we can settle on what you get out of it.”

Danny Blue picked at a hangnail and thought about it. He was tempted. He didn’t know where he was going-except away. Away from the Chained God and his manipulations. Which did the god want him to do? Stay? Go? Enough to send a man biting his tail. His half-sire Daniel Akamarino had spent his life drifting from one place to another with no goals, no ambitions, his work the only center his life had. That kind of work wasn’t available here, that reality was a place Danny found himself wanting to visit, but it was out of reach and he wasn’t about to waste time yearning for what he couldn’t have. His other half-sire Ahzurdan never took one step without plotting out a hundred steps beyond, though for him too, work was justification, a reason for being. And that was gone too, not available. With the war going on in his head, Danny Blue couldn’t reach the degree of focus a sorceror needed for all but the most ordinary activities.

*Stay, fool,* Ahzurdan’s phasma said, *you won’t find a better place. Things will only get worse.*

*Don’t listen to that mushbrain,* Daniel’s phasma said, you and me, we’re going out of our skull shuttling around on this crackerbox. We can get along just fine on the ground.*

Danny Blue liked old Lio Laux, the M’darjin was close to being a friend. He liked the crew. But he agreed with his half-sire Daniel, he most definitely did not like living on the ship. He was cramped, uncomfortable, and bored most of the time.

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s a good offer, but Dirge Arsuid sounds interesting, it’s a place I’ve never been, I think I’ll take a look at it. How long you going to be in port?”

“In by noon, out by dark. I don’t overnight here ever.”

“That’s that then. See you round, I suppose. Maybe on my way back.”

Danny Blue followed the guide Laux had summoned for him, a boy, twelve or thirteen, sallow skin with a greenish tint, stiff spiky hair dyed in green and yellow squares, green paint on his eyelids, yellow triangles painted under each eye, lips carefully tinted green. Heavy round ceramic plugs swung in rhythm with the swing of his meager hips, hanging from flesh loops stretching down from his earlobes, green in the right, yellow in the left. He had ceramic armlets clamped above and below the elbow on his left arm; they were striped in green and yellow. He wore a glove on his right hand, snakeskin dyed a rich dark green. His left hand was bare, the nails painted blood red. On his feet he wore snakeskin slippers dyed to match the, glove. Instead of trousers he wore knitted hose, right leg green, left leg yellow, with a bright red codpiece and belt. To cover his torso he had a tight sleeve/ess green shirt with pointed yellow darts slashing downward diagonally, starting from his right shoulder, aiming toward his left hip. He strolled along as if he were going that way from choice and had no connection with the scruffy drab creature following him. His was a conservative dress for his kind, a simple walking-out costume. Warned on the ship to mind his manners, warned again before Laux turned him loose, Danny Blue managed not to stare at the show around him, but sometimes it was not so easy to keep his eyes straight ahead. As when a creation in feathers and gauze fluttered past, its species as uncertain as its outline. The boys he saw all had painted faces but no masks; every adult, male and female alike, wore halfmasks, stylized serpent snouts as if they adopted the insult in the old tale and made it something to flaunt. Laux said they carried viper poison in the rings they wore and could shoot it into someone with a special pressure of the hand. They usually refrained in the daylight, it was bad for business, but you didn’t want to push them much, their restraint was delicate as a spider’s thread.

It was a city of silences and shadows, of walls and towers; it smelled like clove carnations; they grew in the walls, red and white carnations, they floated in the water, bobbing past him as he walked along the roughened tiles, red and white carnations with white orchids and a rose or two, swirling around the narrow black boats poling along the canals. Red and white. The whole city was red and white. Every wall was faced with glossy red and white tiles. Panels of red tiles, columns of white tiles. Patterns of cut tile, red and white swirling together, sweeping along in dizzying flows. Red and white, white and red. Except for the pointed roofs. Those were black tile, shiny black. It rained most days from two till four, thunderstorms that dumped an inch or more into the grooves that ran in spirals from the peaks and dropped into channels that fed the glossy black gargoyles; the rain water spewed from their mouths, arching out over the walkways to spatter into the canals.

The boy led Danny Blue past a water plaza.

There was a black tile fountain in the middle and lacy white footbridges arching to it from the corners of the square. There were seats round the fountain. Several Arsuiders sat there, in groups like flocks of extravagant birds, heads close, talking in whispers. They stopped talking when they saw Danny, watched him until he went round a corner. He didn’t look back, but he could feel the pressure of their whispers following him.

The Stranger’s Quarter, local name Estron Coor, was laid out near the heart of the City, not even the Ahzurdan phasma knew why. The Stranger’s Wall was a swath of murky red with black diamonds in a head-high line marching around the enclosure. The single door in that wall was iron thickly coated with a shiny black paint, nicked and bruised and smeared, the first dirt Danny Blue had seen in the city; the opening was narrow, a man only marginally bigger than average would have trouble squeezing through it.

The boy stopped before the door, his costume swearing at the wall; next to its heavy brooding solidity, he seemed more a concept than a living person, a player in some fantastical drama. He whistled a snatch of something, a complex tonerow sort of thing, stepped aside when he got a matching answer from the gatehouse perched over the entrance, no windows in it, only arrowslits with oiltraps in the base of the overhang. Danny Blue kept his face noncommittal but wasn’t liking this much at all. Lam said they barely tolerated outsiders in their midst; this tower underlined that and went beyond. Strangers were treated like disease germs, encysted, kept away from the rest of the organism.

The door creaked open, a sound that felt like a rusty knife twisting in the bone. No sneaking out of here, Danny thought. He went through the narrow opening into the Estron Coor. The boy was still watching when the door was maneuvered shut by a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys. Making sure I stay where I’m put. What a bunch. Danny Blue looked around.

There was an Inn, three stories high and tight againstthe Wall; from the look of the second story windows and other signs it was eight rooms long and barely one room thick. The third story was tucked in under toothy eaves with shuttered unglazed holes too small to qualify as windows. Next to the Inn were several miniature stores with living quarters above them, a cook shop, a grocery, a butchery, a miscellany. Across the canal from the Inn there was a ponderous godon with offices or something similar in part of the ground floor and a line of portals with chains and bars enough to suggest that behind them were rare and costly things. Next to the godon there was a sort of multi-purpose temple with seven flights of steps leading to seven archways, no two alike; ghosts in various stages of preservation drifted in and out of openings that made a sieve of the cylindrical tower emerging from the squat ground floor; they undulated past women with painted breasts who sat in those openings, they mingled with the drifts of smoke from the incense which kept the air inside the walls smelling rich enough to eat. The Ahzurdan phasma sneered at the women. *Temple whores. Tempted, Danny?* The Daniel phasma muttered something Danny couldn’t hear, didn’t particularly want to hear.