"I"ll take it, ma"am," said Geo, intercepting. Then he recited:
"_Shadows melt in light of sacred laughter.
Hands and houses shall be one hereafter._
"Many thanks," he added.
Beneath the veil, on her shadowed face, her eyebrows raised. "You have been schooled in courtly rites?" She observed him. "Are you perhaps a student at the university?"
Geo smiled. "I was, until a short time ago. But funds are low and I have to get through the summer somehow. I"m going to sea."
"Honorable, but perhaps foolish."
"I am a poet, ma"am; they say poets are fools. Besides, my friend here says the sea will make a man of me. To be a good poet, one must be a good man."
"More honorable, less foolish. What sort of a man is your friend?"
"My name is Urson," said the giant, stepping up. "I"ve been the best hand on any ship I"ve sailed on."
"Urson?" said the woman, musing. "The Bear? I thought bears did not like water. Except polar bears. It makes them mad. I believe there was an old spell, in antiquity, for taming angry bears...."
"_Calmly brother bear,_" Geo began to recite.
"_calm the winter sleep.
Fire shall not harm, water not alarm.
While the current grows, amber honey flaws, golden salmon leap._"
"Hey," said Urson. "I"m not a bear."
"Your name means bear," Geo said. Then to the lady, "You see, I have been well trained."
"I"m afraid I have not," she replied. "Poetry and rituals were a hobby of a year"s pa.s.sing interest when I was younger. But that was all." Now she looked down at the boy whom Urson still held. "You two look alike.
Dark eyes, dark hair." She laughed. "Are there other things in common between poets and thieves?"
"Well," complained Urson with a jerk of his chin, "this one here won"t spare a few silvers for a drink of good wine to wet his best friend"s throat, and that"s a sort of thievery, if you ask me."
"I did not ask," said the woman, quietly.
Urson huffed.
"Little thief," the woman said. "Little four arms. What is your name?"
Silence, and the dark eyes narrowed.
"I can make you tell me," and she raised her hand to her throat again.
Now the eyes opened wide, and the boy pushed back against Urson"s belly.
Geo reached toward the boy"s neck where a ceramic disk hung from a leather thong. Glazed on the white enamel was a wriggle of black with a small dot of green for an eye at one end. "This will do for a name," Geo said. "No need to harm him. Snake is his symbol; Snake shall be his name."
"Little Snake," she said, dropping her threatening hand, "how good a thief are you?" She looked at Urson. "Let him go."
"And miss thrashing his backside?" objected Urson.
"He will not run away."
Urson released him, and four hands came from behind the boy"s back and began ma.s.saging one another"s wrists. But the dark eyes watched her until she repeated, "How good a thief are you?"
With only a second"s indecision, he reached into his clout and drew out what seemed another leather thong similar to the one around his neck. He held up the fist from which it dangled, and the fingers opened slowly to a cage.
"What is it?" Urson asked, peering over Snake"s shoulder.
The woman gazed forward, then suddenly stood straight. "You ..." she began.
Snake"s fist closed like a sea-polyp.
"You are a fine thief, indeed."
"What is it?" Urson asked. "I didn"t see anything."
"Show them," she said.
Snake opened his hand, and on the dirty palm, in coiled leather, held by a clumsy wire cage, was a milky sphere the size of a man"s eye, lucent through the shadow.
"A very fine thief indeed," repeated the woman in a low voice tautened strangely from its previous brittle clarity. She had pulled her veil aside now, and Geo saw, where her hand had again raised to her throat, the tips of her slim fingers held an identical jewel, only this one in a platinum claw, hung from a wrought gold chain.
Her eyes, unveiled, black as obsidian, raised to meet Geo"s. A slight smile lifted her pale mouth and then fell again. "No," she said. "Not quite so clever as I thought. At first I believed he had taken mine. But clever enough. Clever enough. You, schooled in the antiquity of Leptar"s rituals, are you clever enough to tell me what these baubles mean?"
Geo shook his head.
A breath pa.s.sed her pale mouth now, and though her eyes still fixed his, she seemed to draw away, blown into some past shadow by her own sigh.
"No," she said. "It has all been lost, or destroyed by the old priests and priestesses, the old poets.
"_Freeze the drop in the hand and break the earth with singing.
Hail the height of a man and also the height of a woman._
_The eyes have imprisoned a vision_ ..."
She spoke the lines almost reverently. "Do you recognize any of this?
Can you tell me where they are from?"
"Only one stanza of it," said Geo. "And that in a slightly different form." He recited:
"_Burn the grain speck in the hand and batter the stars with singing.
Hail the height of a man, and also the height of a woman._"
"Well," said the woman. "You have done better than all the priests and priestesses of Leptar. What about this fragment? Where is it from?"
"It is a stanza of the discarded rituals of the G.o.ddess Argo, the ones banned and destroyed five hundred years ago. The rest of the poem is completely lost," explained Geo. "I found that stanza when I peeled away the binding paper of an ancient tome that I found in the Antiquity Collection in the Temple Library at Acedia. Apparently a page from an even older book had been used in the binding of this one. I a.s.sume these are fragments of the rituals before Leptar purged her litanies. I know at least my variant stanza belongs to that period. Perhaps you have received a misquoted rendition; for I will vouch for the authenticity of mine."