[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
ball of fundleberry sherbet sitting on a circle of rose leaves; the remains of
what had been a rack of venison.
I didn't mind the isolation; I would have preferred more. Slantwise across
from me, right next to
Toshtai, Minch's eyes seemed too often pointed at me.
Lady Estrer's withered hands trembled as she manipu-lated a sliver of pheasant
first to the bowl of green mus-tard, barely touching it to the thick sauce,
then to her dry lips, following it quickly with a tiny mouthful of roasted
barley. She chewed with an even rhythm, like a cadence, as though it was a
matter of ritual and ceremony, as though eating had nothing to do with hunger
or taste.
She looked over at me and snorted. "Kami Dan'Shir, you eat as though this were
to be your last meal." Her eyes, staring out of dark pits in a lined face,
Page 30
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
watched me too closely.
"It could be," I said, after swallowing a large mouthful of the turtle soup to
rinse out the taste of the marinated frog hearts in clotted cream. It is not
one of my favorite dishes; hot dishes should be hot, cold dishes cold. This
sort of lukewarm mush hiding lukewarm snippets of frog didn't even have any
spirit to its temperature. "If the rest of the food is like the frog hearts,"
I added.
Her thin lips curved up. Lady Estrer always likes a little audacity, as long
as it's only a little.
"It's a classic dish," she said.
I nodded. "I'm sure that is so, Lady."
She chuckled thinly, then subsided.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Arefai grinning as he beckoned to one
of the servitors to
spoon some more of the horrid green and off-white mixture onto his own plate,
right next to his double helping of snails in aspic.
The trompon blasted out an adequate arpeggio as the doors swung open.
Stupidly, I looked up for the entrance of the jugglers, but there was no such
thing: no Gray Khuzud, balanced naturally on the balls of his feet, no Sala of
the Rings, her costume always just about to slip open interestingly or fall
from her bare shoulders, no Large Egda, no Eresthais, no Evrem, and there
would never be an Enki Duzun. My sister was dead, dead, dead, and the fact
that her murderer had died was as cold in my mouth as lukewarm frog hearts.
No: all it was, was Dun Lidjun, escorting a pair of la-dies, returning from a
quick turn around the gardens. The old soldier brought them to their seats,
then quickly re-claimed his own, the path only coincidentally bringing him
around behind most of the foreign visitors.
Of course. All is accident.
He dug into a huge mound of the local version of Pre-cious Rice, his eating
sticks clicking like dice.
"You were saying something, Kami Dan'Shir?" Lady Estrer asked.
Oh, no. A bourgeois can't afford to have his mouth working away when he
doesn't intend to. "I am sure Lady
Estrer is correct, but I can't recall what I said; I'm certain it's of no
importance."
"Pfah." She lifted a goblet and drained half of it, as quickly as she could
pour. "The truth is that you weren't saying anything, that you've been sitting
in insolent si-lence. This, Kami Khuzud, Kami Dan'Shir, or whatever you call
yourself now, is a dinner. A dinner is a social event, at which one acts
sociably. To act sociably, you make a comment every now and then; I do the
same. Per-haps we find a matter to dispute politely, or possibly we find some
other person, one not here, whose flaws to dis-cuss in some detail." She made
a choppy gesture, a twist of the wrist that brought her hand palm-up. "Your
turn."
I opened my mouth, closed it, then opened it again, red-dening.
Arefai laughed, which only made me more frustrated, but his laugh was
friendly. Thank the Powers for small fa-vors, eh?
When in doubt, try for the truth.
"I'm sorry, Lady Estrer, but all of this is new to me. It's& a different life
I find myself in, and I'm not used to it, not yet." I held my hands out in
front of me, open. "I'm used to fitting in with local customs, but that's in a
superficial setting, in terms of keeping out of trouble. In Ourne, I'd know to
cross a street sunwise of any of our of the nobility, no matter the time of
day, and in Market Indon I'd know not to step into anyone's shadow, but not to
worry should their shadow cross me. I can ful-fill a guest's cooking chores in
the mountains of Helgramyth, or spend a quiet evening on a chair on the white
cliffs of Wisterly, watching the Tetnit watch the Sleeve& "
I spent the next minutes explaining myself, trying hard, trying even harder
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
not to offend.
"& but I'm not used to making polite conversation with my betters in Den
Oroshtai."
Lady Estrer's lips pursed in what could have been a smile. "Oh," she finally
said.
I don't know what Arefai was smiling about.
* * *
As I said, dining customs vary slowly from one end of D'Shai to another. In
the north all the way from Helgramyth and Otland to Wyness Tongue it's
consid-ered a matter of impoliteness or immaturity to temporarily leave the
table during a meal. In Wisterly, by contrast, the host must keep bringing
food until after you have done so, the social fiction being that a
sufficiently large meal re-quires some walking
off to aid digestion. (In Wisterly there's an amusing legend about how Lord
Flin had his cook grind an emetic root into the soup for the twenty-seventh
course that Esterven the Insatiable had begun eat-ing at his table.)
Den Oroshtai, located in the moderate middle of the south, is moderate; it's
not obligatory, but it's not consid-ered unusual to absent yourself in the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]