Peacemaker (28 page)

There were introductions all around, Calrunaidi being new to the aiji's table, and Jase not having been at such an event in years. Cajeiri was experienced in state functions—he sat primly proper, kept a pleasant face, accepted the appetizer and didn't touch it . . . the proper fate of that appetizer in Bren's own opinion, but Ilisidi relished it.

They had twelve more courses to survive. He ate a very little of very mild things, he was careful about the wine, no matter how tempted, and he listened far more than he spoke. He had the edge of a headache already, and dared not take another pill. The youngsters pushed food about on their plates and only ventured a taste now and again of something which would not drip.

Typical of very large gatherings in Tabini's apartment, only Tabini's bodyguards and Cenedi were in evidence: Jago and Tano had sworn to him that Banichi was going to commandeer a chair in the security station and stay there—at very least.

He wished the paidhi-aiji had that option. But he sincerely hoped Banichi was doing exactly that.

They served the seventh course, pickled eggs—one thought of Kaplan and Polano, and Bren wished they had the ones he was served.

Artur made the mistake of moving a dish to accommodate a servant's reach, and a water goblet nearly went over. Conversation stopped, Artur turned bright red and apologized very quietly. The servant bowed profoundly, embarrassed, and Jase quietly reassured the boy. More, Lord Maidin engaged the youngsters in a kindly way, and the conversation continued, a welcome distraction.

Near the head of the table, Cajeiri relaxed, let go a pent breath, and the dowager kept Tabini and Damiri engaged without missing a beat, while Tatiseigi listened.

Artur remained nervous and quiet, but disaster, thank God, had not happened. Down the table, meanwhile, one of the adult guests had a red wine droplet slowly inching its way down the side of the glass, which Bren watched in dazed, edge-of-headache fascination—until a watchful servant, during service, deftly blotted it with a folded napkin.

Luncheon continued, relentless, to the very last sweet and elaborate confection, a sort of fruity cookie with icing, which the youngsters did not resist; but crumbs were no great calamity.

They had lived through it. And no one had gotten into an argument. The dowager and the aiji-consort had sat across the table from one another without so much as frowning. Lord Tatiseigi had managed a much better mood than he had in the foyer, and he was about to become the center of attention as they moved on to the next event of the day.

It was a great relief.

“We are due in the lower hall,” Tabini said from the head of the table. “We are gratified by the attendance of our intimate guests—and by the unexpected grace of our great ally, one of the ship-aijiin, who has visited our table for the first time in years, and by the attendance of our son's guests, who have braved the journey itself and behaved very sensibly under extremely trying circumstances. Let us welcome them.”

“Indeed,” most said, while the youngsters looked bewildered—until Jase cued them to bow in place and accept the compliment.

“Now we shall go downstairs,” Tabini said, rising, “and we ask our guests to observe security and keep themselves and staff within the secure area.”

That was the standard request for a formal affair in the lower hall. Events were—one surmised, without looking at a watch—proceeding exactly on schedule. He rose as the others did. Irene slid off her chair with a thump and tried not to look responsible. Bren smiled at her—it was far less racket than most of the heavy chairs made. Over all it was a good show they had made, and he wanted to tell the youngsters so, but there was Lord Calrunaidi looking to renew acquaintance and to comment on the delicacy and manners of the human youngsters—“They are the young gentleman's age? So very small, so nicely mannered.”

“I shall relay it to them, nandi. Thank you on their behalf. They have worked very hard to acquire court manners to honor the young gentleman.”

“Excellently done,” Calrunaidi said, and nodded to the youngsters across the table. “Excellently done,” he repeated, a little more loudly, as if volume would help understanding.

“Thank you, nandi,” Irene managed to say, and everyone bowed.

“So grown-up!” Lord Calrunaidi said. “Excellently, excellently done!” One thought distractedly that if he could have come by young humans as guests for his own remote household he would have ordered a handful of them. It was one conquest made, and of a rising star at court.

Jase simply and efficiently marshaled the youngsters into a close knot and had them following him as they headed for the door and the outer hall. Jase's guards were standing by; and they would take the service elevator down—one of the aiji's guard would get them to the lower hall with a minimum of fuss and back through the servant passages to reach their station.

Impeccable in timing, Banichi and the rest of Bren's aishid fell right in with him as he reached the foyer, right behind Lord Tatiseigi's guard. Banichi was, he was glad to see, looking perfectly fine, perfectly in order, and he
hoped
Banichi had had a chance to lie down for the interval.

They exited to the hall, walked at a leisurely pace toward the lift that would take them downstairs, and stood about the lift door awaiting their own turn, just behind Jase and the youngsters, who were trying to wait quietly and politely.

The lift came back: they made it in, with only his aishid, the youngsters and Jase.

“Well done,” Bren found the chance to say. “Just do as you've been doing.”

“Sir,” Gene said; and “I almost ruined everything,” Artur said.

“Not nearly,” Bren said. “You did well. Perfectly well. Relax. Everyone relax.”

Deep breaths. And the lift reached bottom and let them out into the ornate lower hall, which instantly drew looks from the youngsters, who had never yet seen the most ornate hall in the entire Bujavid. There were plinths and pedestals, vases and statues, every door carved and no few gilded, not to mention the sculpted arches of the high ceilings and the carved jade screens and the jeweled live-fire lamps and the milling crowd of not-quite-intimate guests in full court finery in the intersection with the main hall.

“Oh, my God,” he heard Irene say, the youngsters quite frozen in the path of his bodyguard, and the lift needing to return for more guests.

“The Bujavid at full stretch,” Jase said, deftly steering Irene aside and catching Gene by the shoulder. “Just stay with me. I'll be staying close with nand' Bren. We're relying on his security. Don't stray.”

Tano and Algini were staying with Jase to assist him. Banichi and Jago were at Bren's back. The main hall was a moving kaleidoscope of people—a good number of them in Guild black, the one element of the Guild presence that a Guild sifting of their membership couldn't ask to stand down. The lords of clans, districts, and provinces—and in many cases the managers of regional businesses and civil offices
had
their own security presence, and in all but a few instances it was Guild. It was a security exposure which, given the nature of the event, there was no preventing, and now came the truly worrisome part of the evening. They had tens of thousands of people down on the esplanade and coming partway up the steps to the Bujavid because of the card distributions. The Nine Doors were shut, but they also had reliable guards both out on the landing and inside, between the long steps and this lower, usually public, hall—

Presumably, since Algini's advisement to the Guild, the Guild had positioned as many units as possible out into the streets to keep order.

But nobody could ever guarantee the streets against fools, and with the best intention in the world, the Guild could not guarantee the man'chi of every member of every unit and every servant in the lower hall. The Shadow Guild had never had any hesitation about civilian casualties—or any other sort. They only hoped that the Shadow Guild was without orders at the moment.

Bren's heartbeat kicked up as they moved through the crowd—pressing forward, not letting themselves be cut off, on the general path toward the museum—the fivefold doors near the main public entry. Display cases stood as pillars in the middle of the hall, the very first displays of state treasures an ordinary citizen would meet as he came into the lower hall—the emphasis this season was on porcelains.

All five museum doors were open, the space beyond lit with spots of electric light on particular glass cases. Into that central doorway Tabini and Damiri went, with the dowager, and Cajeiri, and Lord Tatiseigi, and the paidhi-aiji had to keep up, maintaining the set order as, within the crowd, other lords began to seek their own assigned order of entry.

It was Lord Tatiseigi's event, a part of his priceless porcelain collection having been shipped in for public exhibit. Now the opening of the exhibit would be associated, in national memory, with the investiture of his nephew as future aiji of the aishidi'tat. Lord Tatiseigi could hardly be happier . . . that face was not accustomed to smiles, and he clearly had one as he passed the doors.

Bren passed the doors himself, under the scrutiny of the museum's assigned security, into a vast hall of spotlighted cases containing small tea services and porcelain vases, ancient cloisonné armor—he was himself pleased to have a chance to see it, knowing it was an unprecedented appearance of the treasures. So many exhibits came and went in the Bujavid, as convenient as a venture downstairs—but he often enough found himself missing the very ones he most wanted to see. This was a very welcome exception.

And the youngsters, who had known only the featureless, identical panels and muted tones of the ship's passenger section and the stations—they were in awe of living trees and ordinary rocks, convolute porcelains and glittering metalwork and any other texture the world offered them.

More, they had begun to recognize things. One case stood central, centerpiece of the armor exhibits, and they went right for it: a mecheita-rider's cloisonné armor, on a model mecheita gleaming in gold accents and war-capped tusks.

From that extraordinary figure, their attention flitted to the tapestry backdrop of mountains and woods, and a company of riders worked in the muted colors of paeshi silk. And they pointed out the fortress on the hill. Would earthborn youngsters even notice the details of a tapestry like that?

He wasn't sure. He might have, having the interests he did. But he had never been the average youngster. That was how he had landed here, tonight.

“Come in, nandiin, nadiin,” Lord Tatiseigi said, over a provided microphone. “You see pieces which have never traveled outside the Padi Valley, some of which have never entered the national registry until now. Please take your time, and please accept a card for the exhibit itself.”

There was a little murmur of pleased surprise. Signed and ribboned cards were always welcome. And the crowd, cleared bit by bit through the guarded doors, began to disperse through the various aisles of the main exhibit area, and through archways that led to exhibits that were also open this evening—related items, one noted, which placed the Atageini treasures in historical context.

The museum director took the microphone, and began a formal address, thanking the aiji, the aiji-consort, the aiji-dowager, the heir, and Lord Tatiseigi, and then managing a neat segue to future exhibits of ancient blackware and brownware.

And back again, as all but one of the five doors shut, greatly reducing the ventilation in the room, and not helping the general noise level.

The Director segued neatly back again to the exhibit, naming the major eras and regions of porcelain production in terms of glazes and clays subdivided and categorized in a history that went far back before the aishidi'tat.

“. . . you will note, in the fourth row, the legendary Southern blues of the pre-disaster period . . .”

Bren actually understood Southern blues: the beautiful glassy aqua color that could no longer be made in the old way, since the Great Wave had wiped out the Southern Island culture. Tatiseigi did indeed have a collection that rivaled that in Lord Machigi's district, and one could only surmise what had been lost in that long-ago cataclysm.

“. . . in the peripheral cases, and beyond the western archway, you will discover an interesting sequence of massive figured ware, then the freestanding figures of the Age of the First Northern Rulers, which followed the collapse of the Southern Island . . .”

That was suddenly interesting. The theory that the elaborate figured porcelains of the current age were an outgrowth of the pillar-like Reverence Statues of the northern lands, as the north met porcelain techniques from the survivors of the Southern Island culture . . . that was a notion he had heard, and he was familiar, too, with the theory that there was possibly a relationship to the Grandmother Stones of the tribal peoples, with which every museum-goer on Mospheira was familiar. Those were all but unknown on the mainland . . . except where the Edi and the Gan had settled.

But that theory, their guide said, was mired in controversy involving the origin of the tribal peoples themselves, who refused to accept the notion that they were part of the northern culture. They maintained they were descended from former lords of the Southern Island, and that the Grandmother Stones of the Southern Island had been swept away in the flood.

There was some support for the southern origin: they were a matriarchal people, unlike the patriarchal north.

But there was political heat behind the question, and the Director immediately veered off the topic, beginning to acknowledge the various notables present, a long, long list that was going to take the next quarter hour at least.

Bren bowed a little as his name was mentioned, fairly early in the list. The youngsters, who had showed a very human tendency to flit this way and that, took Jase's cue to stand respectfully and bow, as Jase and the three of them were mentioned . . .