The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid (16 page)

VI

“Gazi!” called Anthony Fallon as he re-entered his house.

“Well, how now?” came her irascible voice from the back.

“Get your shawl, my pretty, for today we shop.”

“But I’ve already marketed for the day . . .”

“No, no vulgar vegetables. I’m buying you fancy clothes.”

“Art drunk again?” asked Gazi.

“How’s that for a gracious response to a generous offer? No, dear. Believe it or not, we’re invited to a ball.”

“What?” Gazi appeared, fists on hips. “Antané, if this be another of your japes . . .”

“Me? Japes? Here, look at this!”

He showed her the invitation; Gazi threw her arms around Fallon’s neck and squeezed the breath out of him. “My hero! How came ye upon this? Ye stole it, I’ll warrant!”

“Why is everybody so suspicious of me? Kastambang gave it to me with his own pudgy hand.” Fallon straightened the kinks out of his vertebrae. “It’s tomorrow night, so come along.”

“Why the haste?”

“Don’t you remember—this is bath day? We must be clean to attend this do. You don’t want the banker’s jagaini to sneer at you through her lorgnette—so don’t forget the soap.”

“The one good thing ye Earthmen have brought to Krishna,” she said, bustling about. “Alack! In these rags I’m ashamed to enter a good shop to purchase better garments.”

“Well, I won’t buy you an extra intermediate set of clothes, so you can work your way up through the shops step by step.”

“And have ye really the wealth for such a reckless spense?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I can get the stuff at cost.”

They rattled back across town, passing the Safq. Fallon gave the monstrous edifice only a cursory glance, not wishing to reveal an excessive interest in it before Gazi. Next they clattered past the House of Justice, where the heads of the day’s capital offenders were just being mounted on spikes on top of a bulletin-board. Below each head, a Krishnan was writing in chalk the vital statistics and the misdeeds of its former owner.

And then into the Kharju, where the sextuple clop of the hooves of the ayas drawing the carriages of the rich mingled with the cries of newsboys selling the
Rashm,
and pushcart peddlers hawking their wares; the rustle of cloaks and skirts; the clink of scabbards; the faint rattle of bracelets and other pieces of heavy jewelry; and over it all the murmur of rolling, rhythmic sentences in the guttural, resonant Balhibou tongue.

In the Kharju, Fallon found the establishment of Ve’qir the Exclusive and pushed boldly into the hushed interior. At that moment Ve’qir himself was selling something frilly to the jagaini of the hereditary Dasht of Qe’ba, while the Dasht sat on a stool and grumped about the cost. Ve’qir glanced at Fallon, twitched his antennae in recognition, and turned back to his customer. Ve’qir’s assistant, a young female, came up expectantly, but Fallon waved her aside.

“I’ll see the boss himself when he’s through,” he said. As the assistant fell back in well-bred acquiescence, Fallon murmured into Gazi’s large pointed ear: “Stop gooing over those fabrics. You’ll have the old
fastuk
raising the price.”

A voice said: “Hello, Mr. Fallon. Is Mr. Fallon, yes?”

Fallon spun round. There was the white-haired archaeologist, Julian Fredro. Fallon acknowledged the greeting, adding: “Just sightseeing, Fredro?”

“Yes, thank you. How is project coming?”

Fallon smiled and waved toward Gazi. “Working on it now. This is my jagaini, Gazi er-Doukh.” He performed the other half of the introduction in Balhibou, then switched back to English. “We’re dressing her properly for a binge tomorrow night. The mad social whirl of Zanid, you know.”

“Ah, you combine the business with the pleasure. Is this a part of the project?”

“Yes. Kastambang’s party. He’s promised me information.”

“Ah? Fine. I have invitation to this party too. I shall see you there. Mr. Fallon—ah—where is this public bath I hear about, that takes place today?”

“Want to see the quaint native customs, eh? Stay with us. We’re on our way to one after we finish here.”

The
ci-devant
feudal lord completed his purchase, and Ve’qir came over to Fallon rubbing his hands together. Fallon demanded the best in evening wear, and presently Gazi was pirouetting slowly while Ve’qir tried one thing after another on her unclad form. Fallon chose a spangled skirt of filmy material so expensive that even Gazi was moved to protest.

“Oh, go on!” he said. “We’re only middle-aged once, you know.”

She threw him a look of venom but accepted the skirt. Then the couturier fitted her with a gold-lace
ulemda
set with semi-precious stones—a kind of harness or halter worn by upper-class Balhibou women on the upper torso on formal occasions, adorning without concealing.

At last Gazi stood in front of the mirror, turning slowly this way and that. “For this,” she said to Fallon, “I’d forgive you much. But since ye be so rich for the nonce, why get ye not something for yourself? ’Twould pleasure me to pick a garment for you.”

“Oh, I don’t need anything new. And it’s getting late . . .”

“Yes ye do, my love. That old rain-cloak of yours is unfit for the veriest beggar, so patched and darned is it.”

“Oh, all right.” With money in his scrip, Fallon could not long withstand the urge to buy. “Ve’qir, have you got a man’s rain-cloak in stock? Nothing fancy—just good sound middle-class stuff.”

Ve’qir, as it happened, had.

“Very well,” said Fallon, having tried on the garment. “Add it up, and don’t forget my discount.”

Fallon completed his purchases, hailed a khizun, and started back toward the Juru with both Gazi and Fredro. Gazi said: “ ’Tis unwontedly open-handed of you, my love. But tell me, how gat ye such a vast reduction from Ve’qir, who’s known for squeezing the last arzu from those so mazed by the glamor of his reputation as to venture into his lair?”

Fallon smiled. “You see,” he said, repeating each phrase in two languages, “Ve’qir the Exclusive had an enemy—one Hulil, who preceded Chillan as Zanid’s leading public menace. This Hulil was blackmailing Ve’qir. Then the silly ass leaned too far out of a window and broke his skull on the flagstones below. Well, Ve’qir insists that I had something to do with it, though I proved to the prefect’s investigators that, at the time, I was in conference with Percy Mjipa and couldn’t have pushed the blighter.”

As they passed the Safq, Fredro craned his neck to stare at it and began to babble naïvely about getting in, until Fallon kicked his shins. Fortunately Gazi knew a mere half-dozen words of English, all of them objectionable.

“Where we going?” asked Fredro.

“To my house to drop off these packages and put on our
sufkira.”

“Please, can we not stop to look at Safq?”

“No, we should miss our bath.”

Fallon glanced at the sun with concern, wondering if he was not late already. He had never gotten altogether used to doing without a watch; and the Krishnans, though they now made crude wheeled clocks, had not yet attained to watch culture.

Gazi and Fredro kept Fallon busy interpreting, for Gazi knew practically nothing of the Terran tongues and Fredro’s Balhibou was still rudimentary; but Fredro was full of questions about Krishnan housewifery, while Gazi was eager to impress the visitor. She tried to disguise her embarrassment when they stopped in front of the sad-looking little brick house that Fallon called home, jammed in between two larger houses, and with big cracks running across the tiles where the building had settled unevenly. It did not even have a central court, which in Balhib practically relegated it to the rank of hovel.

“Tell him,” Gazi urged, “that we do but dwell here for the nonce, till you can find a decent place to suit us.”

Fallon, ignoring the suggestion, led Fredro in. In a few minutes, he and Gazi reappeared, clad in
sufkira
—huge togalike pieces of toweling wrapped around their bodies.

“It’s only a short walk,” said Fallon. “Be good for you.”

They walked east along Asadá Street until this thoroughfare joined Ya’fal Street coming up from the southwest and turned into the Square of Qarar. As they walked, more people appeared, until they were engulfed in a
sufkid
-wrapped crowd.

Scores of Zaniduma were already gathered in the Square of Qarar where, only the night before, Fallon and his squad had stopped the sword fight. There were but few non-Krishnans in sight; many non-Krishnan races did not care for the Balhibou bath customs. Osirians, for example, had no use for water at all, but merely scrubbed off and replaced their body paint at intervals. Thothians, expert swimmers, insisted on total immersion. And most human beings, unless they had become well-assimilated to Krishnan ways, or came from some country like Japan, observed their planet’s tabu against public exposure.

The water wagon, drawn by a pair of shaggy, six-legged shaihans, stood near the statue of Qarar. The cobbles shone where they had been watered down and scrubbed by the driver’s assistant, a tailed Koloftu of uncommon brawn, now securing his long-handled scrubbing brush to the side of the vehicle.

The driver himself had climbed up on top of the tank and was extending the shower heads over the crowd. Presently he called out: “Get ye ready!”

There was a general movement. Half the Krishnans took off their
sufkira
and handed them to the other half. The unclad ones crowded forward to get near the shower heads, while the rest wormed their way back toward the outer sides of the square.

Fallon handed his
sufkir
to Fredro, saying: “Here, hold these for us, old man!”

Gazi did likewise. Fredro looked a little startled but took the garments, saying: “Used to do something like this in Poland before period of Russian domination two centuries ago. Russians claimed it was
nye kulturno.
I suppose one cannot have the bath without someone to hold these things?”

“That’s right. The Zaniduma are a light-fingered lot. This’ll be almost the first time Gazi and I have been able to take our bath at the same time. If you’d like to take yours afterward . . .”

“No thank you! Is running water in hotel.”

Fallon, holding the family cake of soap in one hand, and towing Gazi with the other, wormed his way toward the nearest shower head. The driver and his assistant had finished tightening the joints of their extensible pipe system and now laid hold of the handles at the ends of the walking beam that worked the pump. They tugged these handles up and down, grunting, and presently the shower heads sneezed and began to spray water.

The Zaniduma yelled as the cold fluid struck their greenish skins. They laughed and splashed each other; it was a festive occasion. The land of Zanid rose out of the treeless prairies of west-central Balhib, not many hundred hoda from where these gave way to the vast dry steppes of Jo’ol and Qaath. Water for the city had to be hauled up from deep wells, or from the muddy trickle of the shallow Eshqa. There was a water main from the Eshqa above the city and a system of shaihan-powered pumps for raising the water, but this served only the royal palace, the Terran Hotel, and a few of the mansions in the Gabánj.

Fallon and Gazi had gotten reasonably clean and were picking their way out of the crowd, when Fallon stiffened at the sight of Fredro, on the edge of the square, with their two
sufkira
draped over one shoulder, focusing his camera for a shot of the crowd.

“Oy!” said Fallon. “The damned fool doesn’t know about the soul-fraction belief!”

He started toward the archaeologist, pulling Gazi, when she pulled back, saying: “Look! Who’s that, Antané?”

A voice resounded through the square. Turning, Fallon saw, over the heads of the Krishnans, that an Earthman in a black suit and a white turban had climbed up on the wall around the base of the tomb of King Baladé, to harangue the bathers:

“. . . for this one God hates all forms of immodesty. Beware, sinful Balhibuma, lest ye mend not your iniquitous ways, and He deliver you into the hands of the Qaathians and the Gozashtanduma. Dirt is a thousand times better than exposure to . . .”

It was Welcome Wagner, the American Ecumenical Monotheist. Fallon observed that the heads of the Krishnans were turning, one by one, toward the source of this stentorian outcry.

“. . . for in the Book, it says that no person shall expose his or her modesty before another. And furthermore . . .”

“Is
everybody
trying to start a riot?” sighed Fallon. He turned back toward Fredro, who was aiming his camera at the backs of the crowd, and hurried over to the archaeologist, barking: “Put that thing away, you idiot!”

“What?” asked Fredro. “Put away camera? Why?”

The crowd, still looking at Wagner, began to grumble. Wagner kept on in his piercing rasp: “Nor shall ye eat the flesh of those creatures ye call safqa, for it was revealed that the One God deems sin the eating of those Terran creatures called snails, clams, oysters, scallops, and other animals of the shellfish kind . . .”

Fallon said to Fredro: “The Balhibuma believe that taking a picture of them steals a piece of their souls.”

“But that cannot be the right. I took—I took pictures at festival and nobody minded.”

Some of the crowd had begun to answer, “We’ll eat as pleases us!” “Go back to the planet whence you came!”

Fallon said tensely, “They had their clothes on! The tabu applies only when they’re stripped!”

The crowd had become noisier, but Welcome Wagner merely yelled louder. The driver of the water wagon and his assistant, becoming absorbed in the scene, stopped pumping. When the water ceased to flow, those who had been standing around the wagon began straggling across the square to the denser crowd that was forming around the tomb.

Fredro said: “Just one more picture, please.”

Fallon impatiently grabbed for the camera. Instead of letting go, Fredro tightened his grip upon the device, shouting:
“Psiakrew!
What you doing, fool?”

As they struggled for possession of the camera, the
sufkira
slid off Fredro’s shoulder to the ground. Gazi, with an exclamation of irk (for she would have to wash the garments) picked them up. Meanwhile Fredro’s shout, and the struggle between the archaeologist and Fallon, had drawn the attention of the nearer Zaniduma. One of the latter pointed and cried: “Behold these other Earthmen! One of them is trying to steal our souls!”