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“My staff has arrange this for me while I watch our parade with your friend the calde.” Siyuf stopped a liveried waiter. “My lodging will be up the big stairs, I think? Number seventy-nine?”
He shook his head. “We don’t have a room seventy-nine at Ermine’s, General.”
“Generalissimo. Wait, I will show you.” While Chenille smiled and strove to appear i
“Ah!” The waiter nodded. “Number seven nine. That’s a double room, we call it the Lyrichord Room, Generalissimo. On your right at the top of the Grand Staircase. You can’t miss it.”
“A room you say. More, I understood.”
The waiter lowered his voice confidentially. “Our suites are four, five, or six rooms, depending. We call them rooms for convenience. Your room, the Lyrichord Room on account of the instrument in the music room, is a double suite with eleven rooms and three baths, besides balconies and so forth. Three bedrooms, sellaria, cenatiuncula for formal dining, breakfast cosy, drawing room—”
She waved him to silence. “You have here a wine waiter, one good and knowing?”
“The sommelier, Generalissimo. He’s at the Calde’s Palace just now, I believe.”
“I come from there. He too, I think. Send him to me when he arrive.”
Siyuf turned away, motioning to Chenille. “Men are so stupid, do you think also? It is what renders them less than attractive, even the most fine. One thing, better I had say, one thing from many. Men are duty. So we are taught in my home. Girls are pleasure.”
Chenille nodded meekly, blinking to show that she was assimilating this information. “In Trivigaunte, you mean? That’s where your home is? I still can’t get used to liking somebody from someplace so far away.”
“This is natural. I have a house there bigger than this Ermine of your Viron’s, the house which was my mother’s. Also outside our city, a farmhouse made large for rest and educating my horses. For the hunt two houses also, one in a cave where is more cool. Do you perhaps hunt? I will show it to you. You will be very delighted I think, but there are places where you could not stand so straight, perhaps.”
“I’d like to learn. Only I thought all of you were east of here. The calde, I call him Patera, said something about tents out there. Anyway, it’s really nice you’ve got this suite too, only I never would have guessed.”
Arms linked, they started up the broad staircase. “I have my tent outside your city, and my headquarters, which I bring closer soon. Also this is convenient, as we see. I have good hunting there, so perhaps I will not have to take you home to teach. Already we kill three wing people and catch one also.”
“Four Fliers?” In her astonishment Chenille forgot to sound admiring. “I didn’t think anybody could.”
Siyuf laughed. “Nine years in Trivigaunte another kill a wing person, but she does not catch the round thing on the back that push forward. I forget this word.”
“I have no idea.”
“By this we put wings on my pterotroopers. This time it is me that kill and I have catch the things that push also, but he does not yet tell me how it go.”
Siyuf moistened her lips, and for the first time Chenille felt frightened. “Not yet he will not tell. But soon. He is like all men stupid, and not fine even but small and thin. We take his clothes and do other things until he is our friend. This is not confusing to you, I hope?”
“I think I get it.”
“We take the clothes, and look, he is nothing. I have five husbands, all are more fine. Perhaps you would like him? When we have finish, I will give him to you.”
“Oh, no! I don’t want him, Siyuf.”
“Good.”
“I really don’t like men at all, except Petera and one other one.”
They had reached the top of Ermine’s sweeping and richly carpeted Grand Staircase. Siyuf glanced to her right and down at her key. “My husbands I like sometimes, but so one like a hound. For me, tall girls and strong over all else. I enjoy, you see, at first a certain resistance.”
Maytera Marble paused to stare at the strange procession crossing Manteion Street; although it was some distance away, Maytera Rose’s legacy had improved her eyes out of reckoning. In the streetlights’ glow, she saw a large and rough-looking man, accompanied by a smaller man so thin that he seemed a mere assemblage of sticks. After them, three soldiers, large and handsome like all soldiers, two of whom appeared to be carrying a fourth. Behind the soldiers, a tall augur and — and…
“Sib! Oh, sib! General, General Mint! It’s me, sib!” In her joy Maytera Marble actually sprang into the air. The diminutive sibyl walking beside the tall augur looked around, and her mouth dropped open.
Maytera’s eyes were not the only things Maytera Rose’s legacy had improved; Maytera Marble dashed up Manteion Street as though winged, and Oreb himself could not have covered the distance more rapidly. Her good hand clutching her coif, she shot between the rough men, collided with the leading soldier with a clang and a fluster of elided apologies, and threw her arms about Maytera Mint.
“It’s you, it’s really you! We’ve been so worried! You don’t know! You can’t, and when Patera said you were all right I thought that’s just when it happens, when everyone’s saying the danger’s over, that’s when they get killed, and, and — oh, Hierax! Oh, Scylla! Oh, Thelxiepeia! I simply couldn’t stand it. You were the light of my existence, sib. I know I never told you but you were, you were! If I’d had to live by myself in the cenoby with just Maytera Rose and that chem I couldn’t have stood it. We’d have gone mad!”
Maytera Mint was laughing and hugging her and trying to lift her off the ground, which was so ridiculous that Maytera Marble exclaimed, “Stop, sib, before you hurt yourself!” But it really did not matter at all. Maytera Mint was right there, laughing, and was the same dear Maytera Mint but better because she was the Maytera Mint who had come back from Tartaros knew where and there was no mother and daughter, no grandmother and granddaughter half so close as they, and no child or grandchild half so dear.
“I’m happy to be back, Maytera,” Maytera Mint declared when she could stop laughing. “I hadn’t really known how happy till now.”
“Where have you been? Dear, dear sib, dear girl! Patera said they’d got you, they had you in some horrible place under the city, and then they didn’t, you were with soldiers, but the generalissimo, not the fat one, the other one, said you were dead and — oh, sib! I missed you so much! I wanted you to meet Chenille. I still do, because Chenille’s been a second granddaughter to me, but nobody, nobody in the whole whorl can ever mean as much to me as you!”
The tall augur said, “The — ah — all Viron. Feels as you do, eh, Maytera? Just look at them.”
Already heads were turning and people pointing.
“You — ah — speak to them, General? Or, um, I myself—”
Maytera Mint waved both hands and blew the onlookers half a dozen kisses; then the silver trumpet sounded, the trumpet that Maytera Marble had heard in Sun Street on that never to be forgotten Hieraxday when the Queen of the Whorl had manifested during her final sacrifice, ringing from every wall and cobble like a call to battle: “I am General Mint! His Eminence and I have been down in the tu
There were cheers, and several voices shouted, “Yes!”
“Lord Pas’s prophet, Auk, will be there. We know, because Lord Pas told us. Please! Do any of you know him?”
A giant, taller even than Remora, waved. He held a ram under his left arm, and a tame baboon trotted after him as he pushed through the crowd; Maytera Marble thought that she had never seen so big a bio, a bio nearly as big as a soldier.