I get your best clothing ready, Ginna?”
“Yes. Please do.”
At least the dinner would bring some variety to his life. He knew it was safer being tucked away in a corner and ignored, but this didn’t make his days any less tediously featureless. He was willing to sacrifice safety for variety, even if it meant a chance of being noticed by The Guardian, who even now was being secretly called Kaemen the Sullen and Kaemen Iron Heart.
So it was eagerly, although with some trepidation, that he put on the clothing Amaedig brought to him, the bright blue and red knee-length shirt of water-silk, the tightly fitting hose made from the soft inner skin of the kata, his wooden-soled, beaded slippers which were the most awkward things to walk in but the height of court fashion, and finally a cloak of plain brown cloth with no insignia on it denoting rank or honors bestowed.
“I wish you could come too,” he said.
“What would I do there, among all those high-born people?”
“A good question. What shall I do? I think you’re better off, having your station clearly defined.”
They sat for a while making small talk, waiting for the hour to come. They stared out the window, watching the sun sink over the tilted rooftops. Then it was time for her to draw water from a nearby well, as she did every evening, and she left him. He paged through some poems he had copied out of a book in a library he had only discovered the week before.
He thought about that library, and the strange old man who presided over it. He had found it in an alleyway he had never noticed before. There the librarian sat, frequently all alone, like an extension of the dust that covered everything. It was always twilight in there. Only a single lamp burned. The books were all bound in heavy leafier and linked to the shelves by long chains. You could take them to any desk if other scholars and most of the furniture didn’t get entangled in the meantime.
So he’d sat in there, straining his eyes, making copies of some strange verses which seemed to foretell the coming of a new age, when everything would be different and there would be unfamiliar gods in the heavens. The book he copied was written in an ancient script, in a sort of dialect. There were countless allusions in the text which were opaque to him, and many words he did not know. He couldn’t be sure he understood even the vaguest outline of the meaning. He wasn’t wholly dissatisfied with his life, but he did wish he were better educated. Whenever he tried to discuss anything with the librarian he was met with a barrage of more opaque allusions which told him nothing more than that he was only half literate and very ignorant. According to the old man there were two varieties of people in the world, venerable sages, who were usually several centuries dead, and everyone else, who were only distinguished from animals by the way they smudged and dog-eared book pages if not watched with unfailing vigilance. So Ginna learned little from him. He did not understand what he was reading. But there was nothing else to do while the hour of the banquet approached, so he read.
He was sure he was neither a sage nor venerable.
* * * *
When at last the time came, a great gong rang out from the highest terrace of Ai Hanlo, and Ginna climbed to the entrance to the great hall. The moon had not yet risen. The sky had cleared. The stars and the flickering light of torches made the dome glow a ghostly golden.
All around him were hundreds of other folk dressed in bright costumes, many with gaudy plumes on their hats, headbands encrusted with gems, and flickering, iridescent cloaks and gowns. Many were carried in litters borne by servants more finely garbed than Ginna was. Some were escorted by soldiers in gleaming silver armor carrying ceremonial pikes of clearest glass. He felt out of place among them all, plain and awkward. He hoped he was inconspicuous. When he had watched others do it, he handed his stone disc to a watchman who stood at the entrance, and went in.
He found himself in the room of the blue skylight. Huge flaps in the dome had been turned back, exposing the blue panes, letting the starlight in. There was such a crowd now, most of it taller than he, that all he could see clearly was that skylight. Oil-burning lamps hung from the roof. Braziers flickered atop pillars. Torches lined the walls and colorful paper lanterns were strung overhead on wire.
He was jostled this way and that by brightly draped bodies. Sometimes, when he was in the clear enough to see what was going on, he would notice signs and gestures passing back and forth, an upraised hand, a pause, a lady’s fan before her face, a certain turn of the head. It was as if a second language was being spoken around him, or a whole series of languages, layer upon layer, understood only by the speaker and the spoken to, with all others deliberately excluded.
Eventually he wormed his way to a table along one of the walls, on which various appetizers were spread out. He paused, watching other people take the food, to see if some ritual were involved, but they seemed to be just helping themselves, without regard to rank. So he took one of the little fishes which curled back and caught the stick which impaled it between its teeth. He also took a sweet bun. As he did he noticed a bowl of punch which was bubbling and swirling all out of proportion to the number of times the dipper was used. He leant over and peered into the pink liquid.
As he had suspected, something was swimming in it.
A scaly, man-like little head popped up and spat punch into his face. He leapt back, astonished, and collided with an elderly lady.
“It means hurry up and take some punch.” she told him. “The spirits never agree with you unless you drink quickly.”
“The spirits?”
“Yes, the sprite in the bowl, which prevents it from ever being empty. Haven’t you ever—? Oh, I see…” She had noticed the lack of rank indicated by his clothing. Discreetly she submerged into the crowd.
He turned back to the punch bowl, but found his face smothered in the perfumed ringlets of a massive beard belonging to an equally massive man in the uniform of a general of The Guardian’s armies.
“You there! Watch where you—”
“Excuse me, noble sir!” There was no room for any gesturing.
The man looked down at him and smiled, and the fearsomeness of his appearance seemed to vanish in the winking of an eye.
“You seem ill at ease here, young man.” He held out his hand. The boy took it. The grip all but crushed his fingers. I am Kardios ne Ianos, commander of the Nagéan Legion, at your service. And you?”
“Ginna.”
“Of what house? Ginna who?”
“Just Ginna.” He blushed and looked down at the floor to hide his shame at not being anybody.
“But then how—?” A recognition flooded over the man. He called another military figure over, and some ladies. “Look,” he said, “it’s Ginna, the magic boy they talked about years ago.”
“We’ve heard of you,” said the officer.
“I was sure you were entirely mythological,” said one of the ladies flatly.
“Are you really magic? Can you perform some wonder for us here?” asked Kardios.
“No. I’m not really magic. I’m ordinary.”
“Come, come,” said a wiry man with a hooked nose, bending over him. “When
