The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - FORTUNATO (part 1)
Chapter 1, part 1
Aulis is a hard place for a woman to make a living.
For one thing, you don’t get much respect. Unless you’re in the upper class stratosphere, nobody outside of your own maid is gonna bow and scrape to you. The best you can hope for is some fruit vendor to give you a “Yes, Miss,” when you ask if the limorancios are fresh. But he just wants your obols, and is probably going to think of you as that bint when you tell him you don’t want that one, it isn’t ripe.
I’m not saying it’s better anywhere else on Iphigenia. Hells below hells, it’s a rough world for everyone. We’re still building it. We probably always will be. But in Aulis you can almost see what it would be like … but won’t ever be.
There are women journalists in Aulis, women students in the Academy, and one of the Council directors is a woman. You go down to the Artist’s Quarter, and they sit on the beaches, paint, and drink beer, the same as the men. But that’s the edges, the outskirts, and the special cases, and the real world, the everyday world’s a little different. It’s a man’s world.
Don’t get me wrong, I like men well enough. Some of the best people I’ve met are men.
So are some of the worst.
So I’d got my limorancios, see, in my net bag, and I was walking through the Night Market. It was day, and it was hot—Night Market is just its name because it was the overnight vegetable market five hundred years ago, and no one has bothered to change it now that it’s open twenty-five hours a day, seven days a week. I was wearing my cinnabar chiton and my sage shawl, and my hair was braided and hung over the back of my neck on my headscarf and my fillet as I like it—the fringed one with the dolphins.
There were potatoes, and Barsina had asked if I went into the Night Market to get new potatoes and rosemary. I went for the limorancios because she liked them, but yah, I’d also get the potatoes.
I put my hand in my girdle to find my coin wallet and found another hand going in there too.
“Oi!” I said and grabbed it.
“Miss Fenek!” someone with a long rat nose said.
“Narvi,” I replied, squeezing the wrist. I squeeze hard.
“Now, that’s a bit much,” Narvi said with a sickly grin, missing half his teeth. “No harm!”
“Don’t I pay you enough?”
“I didn’t know it was you,” he said, rubbing his wrist.
“A little bold, dipping in broad daylight.”
“Yah, I guess … ” He was starting to edge away.
“Maybe you can give me a free tip to keep it friendly.”
“Well,” he looked around. “For you, Miss Fenek, seeing as you pay regular.”
“I can only pay when people don’t cutpurse me.”
He favored me with his cracked lips and missing teeth again. “Lessee … Ah!—You’ve not heard about the Ensign-Captain, maybe?”
“What about him?” Old Fat-and-Farty Topĉu, the militia boys called him, his feet on an open desk drawer and a bottle of viskion in front of him all day. A girl’s best friend because he didn’t bother to interfere in her business since she was only a girl and of no importance. He appreciated the bottle I dropped off at his office now and again, though he never said thank you.
So many missing teeth. “He’s retired out.”
I grimaced, at the teeth and at the news, “He had to do it someday, I suppose. When?”
“Already. Desk cleaned out, duty roster cleaned off, name off the door.”
I sighed. Have to tighten up my methods, I thought. “Who’s his replacement?”
Narvi tapped his nose. “That would be telling.”
“Narvi. Be a friend.”
Looking away, he opened his hand for me. I fetched out a kvara and put it in the dirty palm.
“Oi, really?”
“Shoulda helped yourself to another while you were in my girdle. Besides, I can find out as fast as I can walk across the market.”
“Tcha,” he said. “All right, the man’s name is Mardonios.”
“What sort is he?”
“Ship-tight,” he said. “Up-and-comer. Clean uniform, polished boots. Younger man, shaved.”
There was that. I don’t like these officers with scraggly faces. I don’t go out of my way to kiss men, and wiry, greasy beard just makes it even more disgusting. But an up-and-comer—that could be trouble. “Cleaning up the Night Market?” I said heavily.
“La, la, Miss,” he said, and he put out his hand again while he studied the pigeons on the Heroes of Demetra 14th statue.
This might actually be something, so I gave him another kvara.
“The commissariat’s expanding. Militia’s moving the borders around. Night Market now includes the southern Green Quarter.”
“Oh.” An ambitious sort and a broader domain. The Night Market commissariat’s been the Market, the Brothel Quarter, and the Mercanter Narrows as long as I’ve been in Aulis, which, admittedly, goes back only so far. If the column-commander was redrawing the lines of responsibility, this new man was someone’s golden boy, and small-timers like me would get squeezed.
I gave him a final deka. “All I can spare. Gotta buy potatoes. Keep me informed and your hands out of my girdle, yah?”
“Anything for you, Miss Fenek!” One last look at those choppers in his wide grin, and he was away, looking for less alert prey.