The lodging assigned was in a room over the shop of a tailor named Gualdis, at a corner where three streets ran together. The man had a fat wife and three daughters, one of whom brought from a cookshop on the corner a big dish of lentils and greens with bits of sausage through it, from which they all ate together. The girls chartered profusely, curious as so many magpies about Rodvard and how life was lived in Dossola, for they were too young to remember when Prince Pavinius had turned from Grand Governor to Prophet and the Tritulaccan war began.
Rodvard liked the middle one best; called Leece. She had thick and vividly black eyebrows that gave her eyes a sparkle when she laughed, which was frequently. (The Blue Star told him that behind the sparkle crouched a kind of dumb question whether he might not be the destined man, and the thought of being sought by her was not unpleasant to him, but she turned her head so rapidly and talked so much that he could make out no more.)
After he had been shown to his bed, the usual sleeplessness of a changed condition of life came to him, and he began to examine his thoughts. He felt happy beneath all, and doubting whether he were entitled to, searched for some background of the sense of approaching peril which had held him the night Lalette came to his pensionnario door, and again when he spoke with Tuolén the butler. But it was nowhere; all seemed well in spite of the fact that he was more or less a prisoner in this land. The common report had it that this was not an unusual experience, that Amorosian agents circulated all through the homeland, recruiting for their own purposes especially those with any touch of witchery, and he thought that might be true. The Initiate on the ship had taken him very readily into protection, and if he were like those in the court, must have known that Rodvard bore a Blue Star.
Yet it seemed to him that these Amorosians were so well disposed toward each other that one might do worse to live out a life among them, in spite of a certain unearthliness among their Initiates. Now also he began to look back toward Dossola and to understand why it was that Mancherei should be so hated, most particularly by the upper orders. For it seemed that if he could but return, persuade Remigorius, Mathurin and the rest how the people of the Prophet lived among themselves, the Sons of the New Day might fulfill their mission by striking an alliance in Mancherei. No, never (he answered himself); that would be to set the son above the parent, the colony over the homeland, and politic would never permit it.
Yet was it not cardinal in the thinking of the Sons of the New Day that to hold such a thing wrong was in itself wrong? The evil in the old rule was that it set one man above another for no other reason but his birth. Was not Pyax the Zigraner, with his odd smell and slanted eye, entitled to as much consideration as Baron Brunivar? Why not then, up with the standard of Mancherei and its Prophet? For that, what had Pavinius found so wrong in this place that he had deserted the very rule he founded?
Rodvard twisted in his bed, and thought—of course; I have been slow indeed to miss the flaw. For though there were no episcopals here, the Initiates surely filled their office. If freedom from tyranny were won only by making episcopals into judges, then it was only a viler slavery. Was life, then, a question of whether spirit or body should be free? But on this question Rodvard found himself becoming so involved that he went to sleep, and did not wake till day burned behind the shutters.
Leece brought him his breakfast on a tray and wished him a merry morning, but when he would have spoken to her, said she must hurry to her employ. (Her eyes had some message he could not quite read; if the Initiates were right, it would be a gentle one, and kindly.) His mind was more on her than on his new fortune as he went forth, and he missed a turning in the streets, so that his task began badly with a tardy arrival.
The building of his toil, like so many in Charalkis, was new and of brick, with mullioned windows along the street front and a low, wide door at one side, through which carts passed empty to pick up bales at a platform within. Rodvard entered to see a row of clerks on stools sitting before a single long desk and writing away as though for dear life. A short, round man paced up and down nervously behind them, now and again speaking to one of the writers, or hearing a question from another.
This short man came over to Rodvard and looked up and down his length. “I am the protostylarion,” he announced. “Are you Bergelin, the Dossolan clerk? You are in retard by a third of a glass. The fine is two obulas. Come this way.”
He led down to the inner end of the desk, where under the least light stood a vacant stool. “Here is your place. For the beginning, you have the task of posting to the records of individual couvertines from those of the general sales by ships. Here—this is a ship’s manifest from a voyage to Tritulacca. Three clocks from the couvertine Arpik, as you see, have been sold for eight reuls Tritulaccan. You will open a sheet for Arpik, on which noting this fact, one sheet for each couvertine, then place a mark here to show that the matter is cared for, not pausing to translate—yes, Ivrigo?”