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“Why?” asked Tris, curious now. This was far more interesting than a simple answer to her question. “Why should a prathmun be those things?”
The girl sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands, smearing more dirt into it. “We handle the bodies of the dead,” she told Tris wearily. “We skin and tan animal hides. We make shoes. We take out the night soil. But mostly, we handle the dead, which means we defile whatever we touch. If you don’t move along and a giladha —”
“What?” asked Tris.
“One of the visible people,” replied the girl. “If they see you talking to me, they’ll demand you get yourself ritually cleansed before you go anywhere or do anything. Now will you go away?” demanded the prathmun, impatient. “You’ll get cleansed, shenos, but I’ll be whipped.”
She said it so flatly that Tris believed her. She walked two steps away, then asked without turning around, “What’s shenos? And how do you tell who’s a prathmun?”
“A foreigner is shenos,” retorted the prathmun, dumping the rest of her trash barrel into the cart. “And we all have the same haircut and the same kind of clothes, and straw sandals. Now go.”
Tris followed the road that lay straight before her, the direction the prathmun had indicated with such flattery. “Niko said I’d find some of the customs here barbaric,” she informed Little Bear when she was out of earshot of the prathmun. “I’ll bet you a chop for supper this is one of the ones he meant. Whoever heard of people not being people just because they deal with the dead?”
Once she reached Achaya Square, Tris found the Street of Glass easily enough. Reading about Tharios on the way here, she had formulated a plan of exploration with her usual care to detail. She would start at the foot of the street where most of the city’s glassmakers kept their shops, beginning with the smaller, humbler establishments near the Piraki Gate, and work her way back to Achaya Square until her feet hurt. She meant to spend a number of days at the shops that caught her interest, but first she wanted an overview. Tris was the kind of girl who appreciated a solid plan of action, perhaps because often her life, and her magic, was in too much of an uproar to be organized.
As she walked, she looked on the sights and people of Tharios with interest. Buildings here were of two kinds, stucco roofed with tile — like those in her home on the Pebbled Sea — or public buildings built of white marble, fronted with graceful colors and flat-roofed, with corners and column heads cut into graceful lines. The Street of Glass and Achaya Square fountains were marble or a pretty pink granite. Statues carved from marble and painted to look lifelike stood on either side of the paved stones of the road. It was all very lavish and expensive. Tris might not have approved, but her view of people who spent so much on decoration was leavened when closer inspection showed her soft edges on statues and public buildings, and fountain carvings worn almost unrecognizable by long years of weather. Tharios was an old city, and its treasures were built to last.
The Tharians themselves were a feast for her eyes. The natives ranged in skin color from pale brown to black, and while their hair was usually black or brown, many women used henna to redden it. Men cropped their hair very short or even shaved their heads altogether. Ladies bundled their hair into masses of curls that tilted their heads to the appropriate, sophisticated, Tharian angle. The prathmuni, male and female, sported the same rough, one-length cut Tris had seen on the girl she spoke to. All prathmuni wore a ragged, dirty version of the knee-length tunic worn by Tharian men. Tharian women dressed in an ankle-length, drape-sleeved version called a kyten. In summer these garments were cotton, linen, or silk, with sashes or ribbon belts twined around waists and hips. On top of the tunic or kyten upper-class Tharians also wore colored stoles, each of which indicated the wearer’s profession. She knew that mages here wore blue stoles, shopkeepers green, and priests of the All-Seeing God red. Beyond that she was lost. No matter what color the stole, it was usually made of the lightest cotton, or even silk, money could buy. The Tharians looked cool and comfortable to Tris.
Since the prathmun girl had called her attention to shoes, Tris noted that better-dressed Tharian men and women generally wore leather sandals that laced up to the knee. Many of the poorer residents went barefoot. This wasn’t as risky as it might be anywhere else: Tris saw prathmuni collecting trash and cleaning the streets on nearly every block.
Though Little Bear was content to stay with his mistress, Tris’s breezes were not. They roamed freely around her, tugging at curls, tunics, kytens, and stoles, exploring people’s faces, then returning to Tris like excited children gone for a walk with a favorite aunt. They brought scraps of conversations about trade rates, fashions, family quarrels, and political discussions from all around her, pouring those scraps into her ears. She half-listened, always interested in local gossip.
Some conversations mentioned her. A few of the Tharians she passed had discovered her way to stay cool. Perhaps her breezes wouldn’t have been noticed if the air were not perfectly still. The only winds outside Tris’s circle of influence were those made by handheld fans and those roused by pigeons in flight from uncaring feet.
Tris sighed, and drew the breezes closer to her. People continued to stare as her dress and petticoats stirred in different directions. She ignored them. It was too hot to give up her fresh air so a number of stuck-up southerners weren’t made nervous. If they were as clever as they claimed, they’d find ways to hold breezes of their own, Tris told herself.
She had a number of breezes tied up in knots of thread back at the house. Perhaps she could peddle some at the market, and make a bit of extra money. There were two more moons of summer to go, and the problem with city walls was that they tended to keep out the wind. She ought to be able to sell a knot, or two, or three, for pocket money. She would ask Jumshida how to go about it.
On she walked, planning and observing. She passed between shops filled with wonders: vases, bowls, platters, glass animals in a multitude of colors and sizes. In the shops on the Achaya Square end of the Street of Glass, windows were made of small panes of glass, treasure troves in and of themselves that gave a watery, rippling shape to the beautiful objects behind them.
Mingled with the higher-priced glass was glass that had been spelled in some way. Magical charms and letters in the sides and rims of pieces, suncatchers magicked to catch more than just sun, rounds of glass imbued with magic to capture and hold an image in them, all glinted silver in Tris’s vision, showing her the work of the glass mages of Tharios. It was for this reason that she chose to start among the poorer shops, those more likely to sell plain glass and few charms. Tris knew she would spend most of her time later among the glass mages, comparing notes and learning how they practiced their craft.
Closer to Labrykas Square the shops had ordinary, shuttered windows, with the wares arranged on shelves to tempt passersby. Tris lingered at one and another, admiring the curve of a bowl or the blue-green hue of a cosmetics bottle, but she always made herself walk on after a moment. She was determined to start at the very bottom of the glass-makers’ pecking order.
As Tris approached Labrykas Square, the first public square beyond the Piraki Gate, her breezes carried a conversation to her. “— a disgrace!” someone cried. “One of the riffraff, murdered and left in the Labrykas Square fountain like, like so much trash!”
“It will take a powerful cleansing to purify the fountain again,” a woman replied soberly. “Surely the All-Seeing God will take offense against the district for the defilement —”
“The district? I think not!” retorted the first speaker. “It’s obviously the work of some shenos who respects nothing and no one. The All-Seeing knows that no Tharian would commit so foul an act.”
“The Keepers of the Public Good will put a stop to it,” the woman said with the firmness of complete belief. “They have —”
The breeze had not caught the rest of the discussion. Tris shook her head as she walked on. Someone is murdered, and all these people care about is the
purity of the square? she thought, baffled. That’s pretty heartless.
NOTES
Calendar used in most lands in which these books are set, including major holidays.
January Wolf Moon
February Storm Moon
March Carp Moon
Sunborn (spring equinox)
April Seed Moon
May Goose Moon
Wild Night (Beltane)
June Rose Moon
Midsummer (summer solstice)
July Mead Moon
August Wort Moon
September Barley Moon
Coldborn (autumn equinox)
October Blood Moon
Dead’s Night (Halloween)
November Snow Moon
December Hearth Moon
Longnight (winter solstice)
Days of the week:
Sunsday
Moonsday
Starsday
Earthsday
Airsday
Firesday
Watersday
