‘I’m not the one who’s making the decisions, Pol. You’re supposed to talk with him and see if you can find out why he might decide to change sides.’
‘Getting into his palace might be a little tricky.’
‘I think Gallak might be able to help us with that.’
‘Maybe. I’ll talk with him this evening and sound him out.’
My adjustment to the living arrangements in Gallak’s house was probably more difficult than Gallak’s was. I was forced to keep reminding myself that he believed that I’d been living under his roof for six weeks and that he was used to having me around. ‘How did your day go, Polanna?’ he asked pleasantly after supper.
‘About the same as usual,’ I replied. ‘I went down to the bazaar to have a look at some of the shops I haven’t visited yet. I didn’t buy anything, though.’
‘Do you need some money?’
‘No. I’m fine. Have you ever met King Drosta?’
‘A couple of times, why?’
‘Just curious. What kind of man is he?’
‘Young. He might grow up some day – hopefully before he’s eighty.’
‘I didn’t quite follow that.’
‘His Majesty’s very fond of women.’ Gallak’s tone was disapproving.
‘I don’t find anything wrong with that.’
‘I do – if it’s the only thing a man can think about. Our king can’t seem to think of anything else. I doubt that he even knows the names of most of his advisors.’
‘How stupid.’
‘He’s not really stupid, Polanna. Actually, he’s very clever – in an erratic sort of way – but his brains shut down entirely when a woman starts to dance. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the performance of a good dancer as much as the next man, but Drosta starts drooling before the dancer even gets started – and I mean he actually drools. He’s an ugly young fellow to begin with, and the slobbering doesn’t improve him very much. There’s going to be a new king on the throne in Drasnia soon, and Drosta should be concentrating on some new trade agreements, but his advisors can’t drag him out of the brothels long enough to even meet with the Drasnian trade envoys.’
‘Shocking,’ I murmured.
‘My feelings exactly. Can we talk about something else? Just the thought of that lecher makes my skin crawl.’
That gave me something to think about, and the next morning after Gallak had gone off to swindle some people, I started to practice my dancing. I didn’t need a roomful of men to clap out the beat for me, since I could keep that in my head. I cleared some furniture out of the way and mirrored one wall of the room with a single thought. Then I got down to business. As I’d noticed when I’d watched Ayalla dance, the key to a truly outstanding performance is attitude, not the steps. By mid-afternoon, it was beginning to come to me.
I practiced faithfully for two weeks. The major obstacle I encountered had to do with flaunting. Some of the movements in Nadrak dancing embarrassed me, and I knew that I was going to have to overcome that if I hoped to give the kind of performance I had in mind. Oddly, I found that dancing with my daggers clenched in my fists helped enormously. When I held those Ulgo knives, I could flaunt myself in ways Ayalla had never dreamt of. All I had to do then was to come up with a way to suppress the blushing. My dancing even shocked me, which was probably the whole idea.
Winter came and went, and Gallak and I settled into a Nadrakish sort of domesticity. He spent his days swindling customers, and I spent mine practicing my dancing.
No, I wasn’t dancing just for the fun of it. Gallak’s assessment of King Drosta’s personality had suggested to me the perfect way to get close enough to the Nadrak king to evaluate him. By spring, I knew that if my dancing were only half as good as I thought it was, Drosta would be drooling bucketfuls before I was even half-way through my performance.
As the snow in the streets of Yar Nadrak started to melt, I began to feign a restlessness. Gallak and I had been sort of housebound during the winter, and he readily agreed that a bit of social life might be in order.
Social life in Gar og Nadrak is rather rudimentary, since about all that’s involved is a visit to the local tavern. I don’t care much for taverns myself, but this was business. Before we left the house, I changed clothes. I suppose I could have given a performance dressed in leather, but I don’t think it’d have had the same impact.
I sat with Gallak at a table in the tavern called the Wild Boar. I even drank a couple of tankards of the fruity-tasting Nadrak ale. I was just a little nervous, actually. The other people in the tavern all grew slightly tipsy, and along about mid-evening a young woman who was the property of one of Gallak’s competitors in the fur trade was urged by her owner to favor us with a dance. The tavern patrons took up the clapping in unison, and the young woman began to dance. She was no match for Ayalla, but she wasn’t really all that bad. The applause at the conclusion of her dance was thunderous.
Silently, without even looking at him, I nudged my owner’s ego just a bit. ‘My Polanna can dance better than that,’ he asserted loudly.
‘That’s Gallak for you,’ the dancer’s owner snorted. ‘He always has to be better than everybody else.’
‘Offer him a wager,’ I whispered to Gallak.
‘Do you really know how to dance?’ he whispered back just a little apprehensively.
‘I’ll turn your bones to water,’ I assured him.
‘We’ll try it, I guess.’ He didn’t sound too sure. ‘All right, Rasak,’ he said to his competitor, ‘would you like to lay a wager on it?’ He reached for his money-pouch. ‘I’ve got ten gold pieces that says that Polanna’s a better dancer than your Eyana. We’ll let our friends here decide which is best.’
‘Ten? You sound awfully sure of yourself, Gallak.’
‘Sure enough to back it with money. Are we having some second thoughts, Rasak?’
‘All right. Ten it is.’
The crowd cheered and stamped their feet. Then they began that rhythmic beat.
I took a deep breath, rose to my feet and removed my outer dress. My dancing costume was closely modeled on the one Ayalla had worn in the tavern back in the forest. I briefly noticed that Rasak’s expression was just a little sick when he saw me in that flimsy blue costume.
All right, let’s not make an issue of it. I’d long since outgrown knobby knees and adolescent gangliness. Moreover, the fact that I’d been dancing for hours every day for six months or more had put me in fighting trim – figuratively speaking, of course.