So, left to my own devices, I’d spent the last few days tooling about Tema. Beyond the beach dunes stood a city, shimmering through the heat haze: Antema, capital city of the Protectorate. It had been the greatest city in the world before the Gods’ War and was one of the few cities that had managed to survive that horror mostly unscathed. These days it was not quite as impressive as Sky — the World Tree and the palace were just too stunning for any other city to top — but what it lacked in grandeur it made up in character.
I admired the view again, then sighed and finally fished in my pocket for the messaging sphere Ahad had given me.
“What,” he said, when the sphere’s soft thrum had finally gotten his attention. He knew exactly how long to keep me waiting; an instant longer and I would’ve stilled the activation.
I had already decided not to tell him about my visit with Spider, and I was still considering whether to request a meeting with Itempas. So I said, “It’s been a week. I’m getting bored. Send me somewhere.”
“All right,” he said. “Go to Sky and talk to the Arameri.”
I stiffened, furious. He knew full well that I didn’t want to go there, and why. “Talk to them about what, for demons’ sake?”
“Wedding gifts,” he said. “Shahar Arameri is getting married.”
It was the talk of the town, I discovered, when I got to Antema and found a tavern in which to get very, very drunk.
Teman taverns are not made for solitary drunkenness. The Teman people are one of the oldest mortal races, and they have dealt with the peculiar isolation of life in cities for longer than the Amn have even had permanent houses. Thus the walls of the tavern I’d fallen into were covered in murals of people paying attention to me — or so it seemed, as each painted figure sat facing strategic points where viewers might sit. They leaned forward and stared as if intent upon anything I might say. One got used to this.
One also got used to the carefully rude way in which the taverns were furnished, so as to force strangers together. As I sat on a long couch nursing a hornlike cup of honey beer, two men joined me because there were only couches to sit on and I was not churl enough to claim one alone. Naturally they began talking to me, because the tavern’s musician — an elderly twin-ojo-player — kept taking long breaks to nap. Talking filled the silence. saey beer, tAnd then two women joined us, because I was young and handsome and the other two men weren’t bad-looking themselves. Before long, I was sitting among a laughing, raucous group of utter strangers who treated me like their best friend.
“She doesn’t love him,” said one of the men, who was well into his own honey horn and growing progressively more slurred in his speech because of it. Temans mixed it with something, aromatic sea grass seed I thought, that made it a fearsomely strong drink. “Probably doesn’t even like him. An Amn, Arameri no less, marrying a Temaboy? You just know she looks down her pointy white nose at all of us.”
“I heard they were childhood friends,” said a woman, whose name was Reck or Rook or possibly Rock. Ruck? “Datennay Canru passed all the exams with top marks; the Triadice wouldn’t have confirmed him as a pymexe if he wasn’t brilliant. It’s an honor to the Protectorate, the Arameri wanting him.” She lifted her Amn-style glass, which contained something bright green, and out of custom, all of us raised our drinks to answer her toast.
But as soon as our arms came down, her female companion scowled and leaned forward, her locks swinging for emphasis. “It’s an insult, not an honor. If the damned Arameri thought so much of our Triadice, they would’ve deigned to marry in before now. All they want’s our navy to guard against the crazy High Northers —”
“It’s an insult only if you make it one,” said one of the men, who spoke rather hotly because there were three men and two women and he was the homeliest of the group, and he knew that he was most likely to go home alone. “They’re still Arameri. They don’t need us. And she genuinely likes him!”
This triggered a chorus of agreement and protest from the whole group, during which I alternated my attention between them and a set of peculiar masks hanging on one of the tavern’s walls. They reminded me a bit of the masks I’d seen in Darr, though these were more elaborately styled and decorated, in the Teman fashion. They all had hair locks and jolly faces, yet somehow they were even more distracting than the staring mural people. Or perhaps I was just drunk.
After the argument had gone back and forth a few times, one of the women noticed that I had been quiet. “What do you think?” she asked, smiling at me. She was a bit older, relatively speaking, and seemed to think I needed the encouragement.