The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - RASKOV (Part 2)

(Chapter 15, Part Two)

I looked at my cigarette, at the edge of the paper rolled over itself. I decided not to acknowledge the second part of his statement for a moment.

“Where do you need to go?”

“I need to speak with Arethne Raskov.”

“Alkimila’s older sister,” I said.

He looked at me, surprised. “That’s not well known,” he said.

“Ensign-Captain,” I said, “I may be just a woman, but I’m good at my job.”

“I don’t consider you just a woman,” he said. He stood up and offered his arm. “Shall we?”

I put my cigarette out and laid it neatly on the edge of the stone rail of the promenade above the water below. “Barsina?”

“Miss.”

I slipped my arm in hers and smiled at Mardonios. “My girl will support me for now. I appreciate your arm, sir, but I don’t wish to impose on you.”

He bowed, and gestured the way.

He had not brought his official car—“It’s in the garage under the commissariat”—and it had been faster to simply cross the Night Market, practically in our footsteps, arriving outside the tenement and ginshop ten minutes after we went inside. Narvi had evidently flown like the arrow from the mounted hunter’s bow to Mardonios, and the militia commander had not wasted a minute in following Barsina and me with the uniforms and Alagon.

So we walked through the wharf district, avoiding the worse patches of rubbish and filth in the streets, the seabirds clattering and complaining on the roofs and contending with the storks in their high nests on the chimney tops, and Mardonios, seeing the storks, favored us with a bit of his boyhood. There were a lot of storks around Helioshad, a fact known to me, and he used to stalk them with a crossbow in the marshes north of the city towards the edge of the savano.

As he had said, Mardonios patro was a banker, an epistarch occupation, and Mardonios filo circulated in the upper circles of society in Helioshad.

“Thelumene was one of the glittering stars in that firmament,” he said. “Very filled with herself, very opinionated, always so right—but how we all pursued her.”

“Really,” I said. “I can’t imagine that about her.”

“It wouldn’t have ever been with us,” he said. “Not that we couldn’t have afforded the fee to raise my class or her family the fine to marry down, but Mist’ Testaferrato wants her to marry only true aristoi and as wealthy as he can find one. She’s—light in heaven, she must be twenty-five now—”

“Twenty-six,” I said automatically.

“Twenty-six then—how do you know?”

“I know a lot of things,” I hedged. “Woman—job—good at—yes? I’m a private inspector.”

“Hmm. Well, she’ll be married soon, one way or another.”

He’d hunted at his father’s lodge on the savano. He’d swum in a river dangerous with crocodiles. He’d climbed to the edge of the Upper Plateau and stood eight kilometers above the high plains, breathing in a respirator.

“I almost expect you to tell me you’ve been to space, Ensign-Captain.”

“No, no, that I haven’t. Not yet! But after that adventure, I came back and there I was at the Testaferrata estate, and me nineteen, and she sixteen, like a gilded princess with sixty other little peacocks and peahens of the aristoi and epistarchs on the lawn by the duckpond, and their parents, and their well-wishers, and must have been a couple hundred manservants and footmen and militia and who knows how many handgirls.”

I could see the scene vividly in my mind’s eye, quite as if I stood there myself—torches, citronella, tables groaning with food under wire mesh covers to keep off flies, a band playing music from the capital. Dancing, kissing. The bondsmaids working, working, working. “It … sounds like it would have looked very romantic … ”

“It was. I remember that she was wearing a red chiton with a gold-stitched girdle.”

“And you had only eyes for her,” I said dryly, “and she for you. I’ve read fairy-stories.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Not how I recall it going. There were twenty young men like me around her. I didn’t realize her eyes saw me. She didn’t betray that … immediately. I didn’t pay so much attention to her,” he said.

“Why?”

“Well, she felt so much younger then than she had been before. And I felt so much older. Like a man, yah? You know.”

“I’m not sure what that would have felt like, Ensign-Captain.”

He laughed. “I guess not. She was still very pretty, but she was a feathery, flighty little thing, waving her fan and ordering people about and getting angry.”

We started to cross the arching narrow stone footbridge over the deep ravine of the Green River, rushing over its coppery verdigris stones.

“It seemed childish. So I didn’t fawn over her. Which might have been a mistake, in hindsight, I don’t know.”

“Why would that have been?”

“I was paying attention to another young woman, instead,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have.”

“Why not? What was she like?”

“She was my age,” he said. “Very poised, very intelligent, very collected. She was very beautiful, too. I could hardly bring myself to look at her, she seemed so perfect, and I couldn’t look away once I did.”

“I see,” I said. “And then what, Ensign-Captain?”

“I spoke to her.”

I was silent.

“I spoke to her and asked if I could help her with whatever task she was doing; I don’t even remember. Cups, plates, bowls of olives, I don’t know what—anything to have a word with her. And I regretted it,” he said.

“Why? Because she was very stupid or low after all?”

“No, the girl was wonderful. I helped her—for a minute. But … she was Thelumene’s personal maid, and when Thelumene saw me paying attention to her instead of orbiting around her flame with a score of other moths, she came right over and bent her over a chair and beat her right there in front of everyone on some excuse. Then kicked her, pulled her hair.”

“You don’t seem to have helped her at all,” I said, holding Barsina’s arm and stroking her hand.

“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t. And I never got to apologize to her, and I’ve never forgotten that. Nor forgiven myself. For speaking to her, or for standing there not speaking.”

“A piteous tale,” I said lightly, “but at least you weren’t getting the beating.”  And we fell silent. He walked along, wrapped in his thoughts as with a brown shawl.

On the other side of the Green River from the Wharf District are better neighborhoods—lower epistarchs like journalists and accounters and small-bankers, and the shops and schools for them and their families, and then Landing Park again, and then the bronze doors of the State Gallery. We walked about the lower floor, keeping an eye out for Miss Raskov, but also looking at the art. I did not veil myself with him there, because I was sure with him I wouldn’t be thrown out even if anyone remembered me, and Barsina and I were arm in arm, not like Miss and maid, but like we were girlfriend and girlfriend, or married. He broke loose from his dark mood and spoke up again and talked about the great old painters of the fourth- and fifth-centuries and the seventh-century artistic rebirth, the height of art on Iphigenia, which he praised at the expense of what he called the current grandiluce, glorioverted age. He could even point out which century was which and explain the symbolism in the imagery.

The new exhibit was not open yet. Mardonios slipped his head in to see if anyone was working on it, and as he got a shoulder in as well, an upset voice was heard without saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me, what are you doing?”

He stepped from the opening, and we all turned.

It was the Sub-Director’s assistant, Arethne Raskov, and she was quite surprised to see him and me there together.

( … This way to Chapter Fifteen part 1 … ) ( … This way to Chapter Fifteen part 3 … )

… ( … This way to Chapter One part 1 … ) …