next two weeks. They came too late to touch me.”
Joshua, having heard this many times before, had patted his knee and looked decidedly bored. Micah had been playing cards for minnows and paid him no attention whatsoever. The boy did, however, look up when Rafe gathered his belongings to leave. Micah had handed him a letter, rather ingeniously folded, and addressed to Cousin Reuben The Second Stall Past The Chicken Seller Fanoo The One With The Purple Cock.
Rafe had nearly choked on his beer. Micah took this to mean that perhaps he should come with him to the market and Rafe had wasted five minutes assuring the boy (and walking gold mine) that it wouldn’t be at all necessary.
But to his surprise, his visit home had yielded an unexpected opportunity: the new Balam girl, striding forcefully beside him in the inevitable ankle-deep muck of late spring. And as an added bonus, her presence had momentarily postponed the inevitable paternal confrontation. He had raided what stores of saffron he knew of in the house, which weren’t quite enough to satisfy the order. So they were now headed to the market, where both hares and the rest of the saffron could be procured, and he could also deliver Micah’s letter safely into the hands of the Cousin Who Must Not Take Him Away.
In the meantime, he had many reasons to be intrigued by the Balam girl’s conversation. Provided that he could channel it to the proper theme. He had long suspected the Kinwiinik of having a much more enlightened grasp on celestial mechanics than those doddering Rastinites who liked to fancy themselves natural philosophers at the University. But the trouble with believing something truly radical—for instance, that the earth revolves around the sun—was that one needed to gather evidence. And where better to look than with those who regularly use the stars to guide them unimaginable distances across the sea?
“I expect that you arrived on the boat that put in just last week. The long-awaited chocolate shipment?”
“Oh,” said the girl, with a sharp little smile, “I wasn’t told what it was carrying. But if it’s from home, it surely carried cacao. And other food, for the feast.”
“Those peppers that could curl the hair of a sheepdog?”
“Many,” she said. “The sun here isn’t very strong, is it? You people, with your ant-egg skin, don’t grow with much head-spirit.”
Rafe had not the slightest idea what ant eggs looked like, nor what that had to do with his skin (or his head-spirit!), but he could tell from her eyes that she was challenging him. He straightened. “The consumption of peppers hot enough to constitute a form of torture is hardly an indication of strength!”
She looked at him steadily. “You would say so.”
Rafe bit his lip on a nasty retort and took a deep, calming breath. He had a point here, and he would not let himself be diverted. He could subdue even his notorious temper in the pursuit of the sacrament of knowledge (as Nereau so eloquently put it).
“So what made you come here?” he asked with all the forced placidity of a tight curl beneath a hot iron.
“Saffron,” she said.
Rafe grit his teeth. “I mean, what made you leave your home? Why travel here? Is your family looking for a husband for you?”
A vague shot, which landed very satisfyingly home. She stopped in the middle of the street and rounded on him. “I am dedicated to the service,” she snarled, “and I may never marry if I do not choose. And I do not choose.”
“Ah,” said Rafe.
“What is that?” She resumed walking.
“What is what?”
“What you are thinking.”
Rafe took his time to consider this. He smoothed down his ink-stained cuffs. “I think,” he said, “that a Balam dedicated to service would know the contents of the hold in the ship that had carried her from home.”
She scowled at him, but the quivering right corner of her mouth ruined the effect. “I grant,” she said, “that I might have been curious.”
“And it did carry cacao?”
“Aren’t you a merchant’s son? You know well it did. Several very good varieties, including the most excellent Caana I have given your family in exchange for this saffron. Perhaps your father will be interested in discussing a larger purchase.”
Rafe hadn’t thought to leave his father any. But he supposed that the continued prosperity of the Fenton empire was in his most general interests. He could spare a few ounces. “How long was the journey?” he asked, casually.
“Oh, three months, the way your people calculate them.”
“So many! Is that normal?”
“If we sail straight through the North Sea. Sometimes the boats spend much time on the coast, and then on the islands of stonecutters and basket-makers.”
“Is that part of your service, then? Sailing those great boats?” He took care not to appear too wide-eyed, merely curious. “Watch your step,” He took her arm to keep her from slipping into a hole in the road. From the smell of it, the bums playing jacks nearby had used it for a latrine.
She shook him off gently. “Some are specialized for that service,” she said. “And others . . . for other things.”
“You have some of these other skills, I take it? I won’t dare ask you what they are.”
“Clever of you.”
Rafe had to strangle a grin. “And those great journeys,” he said, as the market came into view. “You are guided by . . . maps? Charts? It must have taken your people many, many generations to find the way.”
“Not so many,” she said absently. “We follow the way of the Four Hundred Sibling Gods, who are the stars in the sky. The priests interpret their signs and give us the routes.”
“And how long have your people known the earth is shaped as a sphere?”
She frowned. “It is—is it?”
“That’s what we believe now. But moving across it is—”
She bared her teeth. “A complete mystery to me.”
Oh, damn. Perhaps he hadn’t sounded as casually uninterested as he had thought.
“I just meant—”
“So where do we find the hares? Or should we look for saffron first?”
Their glance felt like a brief clash of blades—one which he summarily lost. He had always suspected that to navigate those great distances the Kinwiinik must have some knowledge of mathematics and natural philosophy which those at the University lacked. Given the proposed bylaw change, he had to sit his master’s exams within the month if he didn’t want to find himself at the mercy of a handful of hidebound doctors who despised him (for entirely trivial reasons). If he could do so with some actual mathematics for his theories about the sun and the stars and the earth’s place in the universe—if these could be bolstered by the truth of why navigators from the Land either foundered on unexpected shores or drowned in their attempts to traverse the large ocean distances that
