Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3)

Renegade's Magic (The Soldier Son Trilogy #3) Page 105

Substantial timbers supported the pavilion’s leather walls. The walls were painted in ocher, red, and black in designs that were strange to my Gernian self yet familiar to Soldier’s Boy’s eyes. The music came from half a dozen musicians on an elevated stage. They blew horns and pounded drums, but there was no melody to their music, only rhythm. And the churning folk that had at first so confused me were actually a train of dancers, each one touching the shoulder of the one before him, and dancing in an endless chain that encircled not just Kinrove’s pavilion but wove a serpentine path through the smaller tents of the encampment. Many of the dancers carried short-stemmed pipes with fat wooden bowls. Soldier’s Boy blinked as the dance wove past him.

The dancers were all manner of folk, men and women, young and old, some brightly dressed in rich clothes and others looking worn and ragged. Women and girls predominated. Their bare feet had pounded the hard earth to loose dust. They did not dance lightly: every footstep landed with a thud. Their feet kept time with the rhythm of the music and stirred the dust that hung in the air all around us. Some looked fresh but most of them were worn thin as sticks.

Their faces were what arrested me. I did not know the theme of their dance, but they all wore expressions of fear. The whites of their rolling eyes showed, as did their bared teeth. Some wept, or had wept. The dust clung to the wet tracks down their cheeks. They did not sing, but there was moaning and sighing, a dismal counterpoint to the endless drumming and the blatting of the horns. When they drew on their pipes, they took deep breaths and then expelled the smoke in streams from their nostrils. None of them took any notice of us. They danced on, an endless chain of misery and rhythm.

We stood for what seemed a long time watching them pass. Likari appeared at my side and leaned close against me, obviously both dazzled and frightened. Olikea’s face was pale; she reached out and seized her son by the shoulder and abruptly pulled him closer to her, as if danger threatened him. Soldier’s Boy patted Likari absently and looked round for the lantern bearer who had guided us here. He had vanished, leaving Soldier’s Boy, Olikea, Likari, and the bearers with their quaya standing in the midst of this organized chaos. We waited, inundated with noise and dust, long enough that Soldier’s Boy began to seethe at the slight. Just as he turned to Olikea to complain of it, the door hanging of the pavilion was whisked aside and the plump young woman who had earlier visited us emerged.

“So you have come!” she declared as if mildly surprised. “Welcome to Kinrove’s kin-clan and our Trading Place encampment. I will have someone guide your bearers to a place where your goods can be stored while you visit us. Kinrove bids me invite you to enter his pavilion and find refreshment there.”

With this, she swept her hand toward the opened flap of the tent. Soldier’s Boy nodded curtly to her and stepped up onto the wooden platform that floored the pavilion. He had to stoop to enter it. Olikea and Likari followed him. As soon as the heavy leather flap dropped down behind us, the sounds of the music and dancers outside were muted. I had not realized how much of an irritant it was until I was relieved of it.

The leather walls enclosed a substantial chamber. It was warm, almost too warm, and stuffy from the number of people it held. In a strange way, it reminded me of Colonel Haren’s rooms at Gettys. It gave me the same strange sensation of having been transported to another place and time far from the forests and meadows and beach.

The floors were covered with reed carpets woven with designs that echoed the painting on the outside of the pavilion. Strips of bark fabric decorated with feathers and multicolored glass teardrops hung down from the shadowed ceiling. Suspended glass lanterns lit the room and drove the shadows back into the tapestry-draped corners. A long table burdened with food ran the full length of one side wall. There were several thronelike chairs in the room, all well cushioned and obviously designed to accommodate the weight and girth of a Great One. I was surprised to see that Jodoli occupied one of them, and a young but very heavy woman sat in another, smoking an elaborately carved ivory pipe. When she noticed me looking at her, she parted her lips and expelled a disdainful stream of smoke at me.

On the side of the tent opposite the food table, servants were pouring large jugs of steaming hot water into an immense copper bathtub. The water was scented and the rising steam perfumed the air. Other serving folk were coming and going, bringing in smoking platters of freshly cooked food and removing empty tureens or replenishing wineglasses.

But all of this coming and going of people bringing hot water and fresh food or removing dishes or refilling wineglasses was only the busy framework around the central spectacle. On a raised dais in the very center of the tent, Kinrove reclined in a cushioned hammock. The man was immense. Flesh was heaped upon flesh in rolls until the skeletal structure that had once defined him as a man was buried and muted. His body literally overspilled him; his belly sat in his lap and his head and chin were sunken in the roundness of his shoulders. A loose green robe covered him but did nothing to disguise his bulk; rather, it emphasized it. Broad stripes of gold outlined the contours of his body and repeated them. Among Gernian folk, such a man would have been an object of both ridicule and fascination. I had seen a man half his size displayed as a “fat man” in a Gernian carnival tent. He had been mocked and stared at. Here, Kinrove was an object of awe bordering on worship.