His eyes glittered as he offered a small smile. When he spoke again, it was slowly, enunciating his words, and Amais found she had little trouble understanding him.
‘I apologise for intruding,’ the man said, ‘but I think that you are strangers in the city. Might you be looking for a place to stay tonight?’
Vien still looked a little confused. Amais glanced at her and translated. Vien blinked several times, quickly.
‘But who is he?’ she asked Amais, in the high-court language of old Syai that she had been taught by her mother.
The man obviously understood, because he bowed again, this time directly to Vien. ‘Beautiful lady,’ he said, in heavily accented but compatible dialect, ‘my sister runs an inn not ten minutes from here by pedicab. It is safe, cheap – might I interest you in lodging there with her tonight?’
Amais found her heart thumping painfully, her eyes darting from the smiling tout to her apparently frozen mother. Aylun, in her mother’s arms, was obviously being clutched at ferociously, but had caught the mood of the moment and didn’t do more than let out a small soft whimper.
‘We have to sleep somewhere, Mother,’ Amais said, in the language of Elaas, something she knew that the man would not understand. His expression didn’t change as she spoke, but she saw his glance sharpen as he tried to interpret her words.
‘But how do I know we can trust him?’ Vien said, thankfully in the same language. Amais had not been at all sure that she would take the hint. ‘I mean, he could be anybody, taking us anywhere…I don’t know this city…’
‘We have to stay somewhere,’ Amais repeated.
‘Do you think we should take the chance?’
Aylun whimpered again, a little more loudly. Vien bent her head over her toddler to hush her, and Amais bit her lip.
‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ she said.
She did not tell her mother, not ever, that she had heard the man give instructions to the lead pedicab that would convey them all to the inn at which they were to stay – and then, a few minutes into the ride, having watched the three lost returning souls staring around them with round eyes and open mouths since he had loaded them and their luggage into the pedicabs, change his instructions. At the very least she had thought she understood, ‘No. Not the other place. Go to…’ and what followed was incomprehensible, perhaps an address. Either way, it would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been paying attention. But the pedicabs suddenly turned away from the warren of steadily narrowing dirt streets into which they had been heading and emerged onto a busier thoroughfare, a still narrow but cobbled road in decent repair, choked with pedestrians, pedicabs, bicycles, horses, donkey-pulled carts, the occasional antiquated rickety-looking sedan chair that looked more affectation than a comfortable or even convenient form of transportation, sherbet and sweetmeat vendors, and children who appeared to be selling or giving out printed sheets of paper and who were darting in and out of the traffic in a manner that made Amais clutch the edges of her seat in fear for their lives. A couple of times she thought she saw a woman dressed in the silks she had originally envisaged, but the women in question were not out in the street exactly, but hovered in certain doorways, or were in the process of sashaying up narrow stairs that led into mysterious shadows of upstairs parlours.
A sharp bark by the leading pedicab operator brought them all to a halt outside a shabby hostelry. Vien paid the pedicabs, and then offered a handful of what she had been given in change to the man who had brought them here, and again it was only Amais who really paid attention to the reaction that the money produced. His face washed with ephemeral expressions of surprise, delight, and perhaps a faint tinge of regret. She knew that her mother had offered too much, that the man might have wondered how much more she had on her, if it wouldn’t have been more lucrative to have delivered them to the first place he had had in mind, after all, and not to the one where they now found themselves, shabby and threadbare and with the turquoise paint peeling off the pillars outside the front door, but looking quite respectable for all that.
The proprietress, a hatchet-faced woman with a mouth that appeared to have forgotten how to smile if it had ever known it, showed them to a single small room on the third floor of this establishment – but after the cramped cabins on the ships the place looked like a palace to Amais. They would each have a pallet of their own, without the need to climb swaying ladders when ready for bed, with actual room to move between them. The windows were shuttered; the landlady crossed to them and flung the shutters open, letting in light, air, and all the smells of the city.
‘There is a teahouse around the corner,’ she said to Vien, ‘if you want dinner. Rent is a week in advance.’
Vien dutifully counted out the rent money in gold – the only currency she actually had on her – and the landlady left with a raised eyebrow but without another word. Amais had the uncomfortable feeling that once again her mother had doled out too much. It was hard with gold – she made a mental note to find out if any of it could be exchanged for local money that could be better figured out.
Vien deposited Aylun on the nearest bed, and sank down beside her.
‘I don’t think I can go anywhere tonight. I need to rest, I need to think.’
‘Aylun will be hungry.’
‘I know,’ said Vien, rummaging in her bag for more gold. ‘Go to this teahouse. Bring us back something to eat.’
Amais opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind, taking the coins her mother had thrust into her hand and turning away. She closed the door very gently behind her, as though she feared that a slam might wake her mother up – for that was exactly what Vien was, dreamy, almost sleepwalking, buckling under the weight of this place and its impressions and all that it meant – and the memories that crowded around incongruously of a different life somewhere far away which now seemed no more than one of Amais’s stories. Amais knew all this because she fought against the same shock herself. Part of her was whispering, Welcome home. The other part wanted nothing so much right at that moment than to hear her father’s deep voice utter, in a language unknown in this strange land, words that would have made her instantly feel cocooned in the security and the power of his love: ‘She is with me.’
Vien ventured out of her room only on the third day, and did not go far. The streets seemed to frighten her a little, and she looked lost and unhappy. She tried for days – she would take the urn with the ashes of her mother, as though that was a talisman against some unspeakable horror that awaited her in the city and which she was pitifully unable to understand, and venture forth with a clear intention of visiting the Chirinaa Temple and taking care of this, the most sacred and – as she had thought – the most pressing of the things she had sworn to do when she returned to Syai. But she never made it to any Temple. She avoided Temples as though she were afraid of them, of what she might find there. Chirinaa had been so very different from what Vien had thought it would be. Not that she had ever had any clear expectations, but the reality had been coldly inimical to all of the ones she might have begun to shape in her mind, and Vien instinctively shied from having this last illusion destroyed. What if the Temple was nothing like she expected? What if there too she was so inept, so inexperienced, so utterly lost? What if she did or said the wrong thing and her mother’s spirit remained forever denied rest?
Amais had immersed herself in the world of Tai’s journals and her own stories and had come to her own conclusions. She was watching her mother; she was watching the city, so different from the Imperial Syai she thought she knew, the one she had believed utterly that she would enter when she stepped onto the shores of Chirinaa. Instead of that, she found herself in an unquiet city seething with sulky rebellion and sometimes overt outrage – a city which had been one of the anvils on which Syai’s revolutions had been forged over years and centuries, a city whose streets had run with blood as one side or another labelled some other group as dangerous and unleashed calamity upon them. It was a city that had risen in rebellion more than once, most recently, according to the street talk that Amais overheard, for a young man called Iloh, whose name was proscribed