Lora of Two Worlds

The Baron of Charnwood’s mansion stood in the Fairwind Quarter — a little smaller than the Grand Princess’s, and the smallness was all in the back garden, which came up half a length short.

No lily pond, as at the Odenheim house — but watered it was: the mansion had drawn a live thread of the ward canal in through the garden wall, coiled it half a round, and let it out again to rejoin the canal and run down at last into the Loene.

By day you’d never notice. At night, with the house gone quiet, the channel water went plink-plonk, plink-plonk — close your eyes, and you were in mountains with a little stream running through them.

Ruth lay on the couch by the window, listening to the familiar sound of running water, and thought without meaning to of home on the Cliff Sanctuary mountain.

”Ruth — still awake?”

Ivy, sleeping across the room, asked it softly; and at Ruth’s ”Mm,” she turned over and said, low:

”The lord would have us look about the house and the city tomorrow, and go out to the farm the day after. Tell me — a grandee of his rank: how comes it he doesn’t love his fine city, and must always be running off to the farms?”

”Didn’t your father ever teach you: attend to the lord’s arrangements and don’t ask the why of them?” Ruth reached over and closed the window; the water went softer; she lay back down:

”And is the farm a bad thing? We come to know the lord the better, and with less stiff ceremony besides. Sleep now — tomorrow I’ll take you down the Royal Avenue and the South Market.”

The girls tittered twice among themselves. Of the four of them, Ruth alone had come to Lohenheim twice with her father — so talk of going about the shops ran highest with them.

In the great hall the candles burned at full light: Leon was still at the birth-tribute business with Josiah Waite.

By the old custom, every year at the King’s birthday, the marcher lords, the circuit inspectors, and the wardens all sent the King their birth-tribute.

Since the old King’s reign, the tributary realms and the neighbor kingdoms had even set their tribute-audiences on the birthday itself, tribute and birthday-gift rolled into one — and the return-gifts they carried home came doubled.

The capital ministers’ birthday gifts ran long or short by the giver: a man might send verses of his own writing, or scroll-paintings; a beauty, or a ripe widow; an elixir of unaging life.

And then, of course, there were the likes of Joss Wray, who sent up a million florins at a stroke.

Wray would never take a farthing of it from his own purse. He set the officials beneath him — the ones who came begging — to the ”honoring.” Honor him well, and the promotion was as good as signed.

And if the affair ever came to grief and the money was traced — no fear there: every coin of it had gone to the King. Go ask the King for your refund.

In the life before, it always died at just that step: no minister would carry the case one inch farther. The whole realm was the King’s — not only could you not make him refund, you must look after his face for him and keep him from ever knowing.

And so the King got his money, Wray got his favor, and the Goldwaters of the world got their high offices.

A pity — for in this life, Leon meant to let none of them pass.

He put it to Josiah Waite: ”If we wanted to gather thirty boatloads of bad coin out of the Southmarch — how long would it take?”

”Bad coin? Thirty great boats — that’s a million florins... out of the Southmarch...” Waite reckoned it over, and smiled:

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

”If my lord isn’t particular as to the kind of bad coin, there’s no call for the Southmarch — even the Lohenheim jurisdiction has its coining-sheds. Say the word and I’ll gather from the domains close by. Scattered, yes — but the scatter keeps eyes off it.”

”Good. I trust you. Go at it your own way. Anything the magistrates have flatly outlawed will serve.”

From the Empire’s flourishing age down to this day, bad coin had never once left the realm. Sovereign after sovereign had worn his wits to the stump against it, and never rooted it out.

After the dual-tax schedule, every soul must pay his tax in copper — and bad coin came back into the open daylight, bolder than ever: light-weight coin, coin washed with iron, coin alloyed with zinc, every kind there was.

With the bad coin in hand, the rest fell to Linn and his people: how to swap out, whole and clean, the birth-tribute Goldwater had scraped together.

Watching Waite go, Leon’s feelings ran every way at once. To fight this evil with evil, setting the dogs on the dogs — whichever house was destroyed root and branch, his own end was served.

Over the high sky beyond the door hung the curve of a waxing moon, like the curve of Lora’s smiling lips.

Only — a man who had stepped down into the pit of power-struggle had left that simple smile behind him, and it would not come again.

In the tower chamber of the General’s house, Lora sat with her swan quill in one hand and her cheek propped on the other, staring blankly at the moon through the window.

”Lucky if I bring in one crop of Southland rice this year. Cotton waits for spring. Gold, horses, coal — all of it waits for spring. Then with what money do I buy the vine-hills? Am I to go borrowing it off him?”

The moon in the sky smiled down at her — very much like him.

Lora screwed up her mouth, tossed the quill down, and shut the window on it:

Or else — sign purchase contracts with the wine farmers? I wonder what terms the court’s monopoly wine merchants would ask? Perhaps I ought to go ask cousin Felix; then I’d know how the thing is done.

The task on the board today: plant the Southland rice out on trial!

Next day Lora went nowhere at all: sweet soup in Grandmother’s rooms, and this morning pasta soup in Mother’s.

”That it should fall to you to see this business done — I hardly know, Daughter, whether my heart should ache or be glad.”

Before her marriage, in the duke’s house, the Countess had wanted for nothing under heaven. And now her youngest daughter — in the house of her own childhood — had lived through the family fortune swept away, her brothers scattered on service, and must go sell, with her own hands, the two mountains her grandsire had given her.

”Be glad, of course! With a daughter this capable, when the day comes and I keep a house of my own, no knave alive will cheat me.”

The pasta soup was made with milk in it — sweet and salt together. When she had first come to this world, she’d barely been able to swallow the stuff; now she found it a flavor of its own.

Could it be she was turning into a true woman of the Empire?

”Mother, I want to go out to East Manor and stay some days. Last time I was there I saw their great wooden threshing-tub, and it put me in mind of something I once heard — a threshing engine, with a treadle worked like a waterwheel: it threshes faster and cleaner by half.”

The Countess laughed. ”And where in the world did you hear that one? That straw paper of yours, now — that’s truly good stuff. Have them lay in a good store of it over the winter idle.”

”Yes, ma’am! Mission accomplished!”

Lora very nearly threw her mother a parade-ground salute.

As she went skipping across the grass, she suddenly noticed the white swans were gone, and asked Lilac in a hurry:

”Eh? Where have the swans got to?”

”You truly don’t remember. It’s the ninth month — white swans should be off south for the winter. Ours have had their wings clipped and can’t fly, so they’ve been moved into their little house.”

”Their little house? Take me to see.”

Behind the pond stood a very low little shed — too low to walk into, and windowless. From the doorway you could see the four swans, sitting and standing by turns, thoroughly slug-abed.

”Why, this is solitary confinement, pure and simple! Ah — the poor things.”

Lilac laughed. ”They’re swans, not people. Paper windows are no use to them — that long bill of theirs would have the paper pecked to confetti in a minute. As long as it breaks the wind, they’re well enough off.”

That was true enough. There was glass now — but glass was treasure yet; the human kind hadn’t got the use of it, let alone the swan kind. Lora walked on a step or two and asked again:

”Lilac — I saw another pair of great clamshells in the little study. Where did those come from?”

”Clamshells? Ah — that’s for Lord Roland to say. He brought them back for you to play with, from Augustburg.”

Lora remembered a workshop lane in Venice given over to the very trade — the shell-workers’ row — where they ground the shell out wafer-thin, cut them into translucent little squares, and set them into the wooden lattice of windows: they outlast paper by years.

And what age was that, again?

If she could come by eight or ten clamshells, she could make the swan-house a little window of it — light inside, and proof against their bills.

Thinking her shell-pane thoughts, she went out the side gate, took her carriage, and rolled away east the whole road to East Manor.