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I asked her about the others. Decina, the cook, is a permanent servant, paid in foodstuffs that she trades for whatever other things she may require. The coachman and the other farm laborers are paid in the same fashion, and all take a wagon into Blanko once a month to trade for whatever they want or need.
Torda, the other maid, is a distant relation of Inclito's. "A cousin?" I suggested.
"She'd like you to think it, sir. Madame's brother's son was married to her mother. I think that's the way of it. Only he got killed in a war, and she married somebody else, and that when she"-she meant Torda-"got born. It's some story like that, sir. Anyhow she came here in rags, that's what cook says, expecting to be treated like Mora, you know. Only they was always fighting. That was how it was when I came and I've got to go."
This tray she brought me holds a cup and saucer, a little pot of very good tea, sugar whiter than I was accustomed to in Gaon, half a lemon, and enough cherry tarts for four or five persons. I am drinking the tea, but I intend to leave the tarts for Oreb. That business about fresh bread for breakfast suggests a substantial meal.
Looking back over what I wrote an hour ago, I find my speculations on the motives of the Neighbor on Green who recruited me to clean his sewer. Let us try another, one I think deeper and more difficult.
Why (I asked) did he not do it himself? I am going to propose two theories; neither or both may be correct. The first is that the Neighbors find it hard to move some kinds of objects. So it seems to me after the dealings I have had with them. I do not think that they are here in the sense we are, even when they are standing beside us. This is only speculation, but I believe they may be able to move natural objects such as sticks and stones, and things that they themselves made when Blue and Green were their homes, better than other things. The silver cup they gave me (which I am very sorry I left: behind), the door the Neighbor opened for me when I was confined on Green, and the sword and light he gave me are all examples. We human beings are native to the Long Sun Whorl, and not to Blue or Green; and so the tangled corpses of so many hundreds of us would have presented a Neighbor with great difficulties, if I am correct.
Second, he wished me to see (and to smell and touch) those bodies. He might have freed me in many ways, and made me the leader of my fellow prisoners in many ways, too. But I ca
I believe, however, that his true goal was to give me a realistic understanding of what we faced.
Before moving ahead, I ought to double back to the time after Mora left me. I've written nothing about that.
When I received the letters, it struck me that if I was going to ride out here with Mora and Fava it would be of value to know at what time their palaestra ended. I asked directions and walked over to it, and fin ding the coachman already waiting for them, I wrote Inclito a note thanking him for his invitation and saying that I could not come that day but hoped to come the next, and asked him to tell his coachman to allow me to ride with Mora and her friend.
The owner of the stationery store had invited me to share his supper; it was a simple meal of bread and soup, and I surprised and pleased him and his wife by eating little of either and amusing them with stories of my journey to Viron with Pig and Hound. Before we ate (as! should have said in the begi
Onorifica came back, perspiring from her bread-making but with her hair in better order. She had appeared frightened when she carried my tray in, her eyes darting around the room; I had thought that she was afraid of Oreb and had assured her that he was gone. This time she seemed more resolute; I made her sit down and offered her one of her own tarts.
"Cook was like to die at me for that, sir." She sat gingerly, picked up a tart in both hands, and nibbled at it like a fat squirrel.
I remained silent.
"She's afraid of you, sir. Swears she won't show her face in the kitchen door as long as you're here."
Of course I said that she had no reason to be, although I wondered how true it was; it seemed barely possible that his cook was the spy Inclito felt certain he was harboring.
"They're afraid of you in town, too, sir. Terrible afraid's what I hear."
I asked whether she had been there, and when she said she had not, how she knew.
"Coachman says, sir." She paused, worried (I believe) that she might be getting her informant into trouble. "He's got to come straight back after he drops them off in the morning, sir, and he does."
"But in the afternoon he has time to-" Gossip clearly would not do. "Talk to people there, assuming that he arrives a little early."
"That's right, sir."
"When I rode out here, Onorifica, Mora and Fava told me that their teachers had been quizzing them about me all day."
She chewed and swallowed. "I think so, sir."
"They also said that they'd given me a good character, and told everyone I was perfectly harmless. That last is quite true, and I'd like to think that the first is, too-though I know better."
"Is that all they said, sir?"
I shook my head. "They said quite a lot, Fava particularly. But that's all they told me that they had told their teachers."
"Mora wouldn't lie to you, sir."
"I'm delighted to hear it." I would have been even more delighted if I had believed it.
"But that Fava! Don't you trust her, sir."
I promised I would not.
"Looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. Well, Master don't trust her, let me tell you. I've heard him jawing away sometimes, and she come in the room and that's the end. After that he talks about as much as a sti-" As Onorifica spoke, she caught sight of the staff that Cugino had cut for me. In a markedly different tone she asked, "Does your stick talk, sir?"
I smiled and said that it had not done so recently.
"It has that little face on it, though, don't it, sir?"
"Does it really? Show it to me."
"I'd rather not to touch it, sir, if it's-would you want me to fetch it, sir?" Her eyes pleaded with me to refuse, so I got up and got it myself.
She pointed, her trembling finger a good cubit from the wood. "Right here, sir."
There was a small hole where a knot had come out. Above it, a minute protuberance that might be called a nose, and over that two small, dark markings, that could-with a cartload of imagination-be taken for eyes. I rubbed this "face" with my thumb, dislodging a few dry scraps of i
"Don't touch it, please, sir." The color left her cheeks. "Don't make it talk."
Suppressing a smile, I promised not to.
"What I got to ask you about, sir, is-is… " Her lips twitched soundlessly.
"Whether I really am a strego, as your mistress calls them? A magic worker?"
Her expression told me I had missed the mark, but her head bobbed.
"No, Onorifica, I'm not. No one is."
I waited for her to speak.
"Nobody is. There is no such thing as magic, in the way you mean it. Things we don't understand, ghosts and sudden storms for instance, make us think that there might be. But ghosts are merely the spirits of the dead, and though I don't know what causes sudden storms, I know they aren't raised by magic. It's true that certain people can predict the future, but they do it by drawing upon insights that they don't know they have, or because they're informed by the gods."