Each woman there had a man with her. Each one was wearing one of those scarfy outfits they calledchauri, each with a cloak draped behind them. They came in a wide range of colors, but all solid colors. There wasn’t a single garment on anyone that was a mix of colors.
She found out later that the only reason she hadn’t been given a cloak the color of the house she now belonged to was because her white T-shirt and blue jeans were already the two colors representing Dalden’s house. That he’d let her wear her jeans, when the women of his town weren’t allowed to wear pants of any kind, had been an exception made just for her because she wasn’t Sha-Ka’ani and he’d wanted his people to see that plainly. It wasn’t such a strict rule anymore though, now that his country knew that other countries like Falon’s didn’t even follow that rule, so exceptions for visitors did get made now, when that didn’t used to be the case. Itwasstill their rule though, which was why she was going to be supplied with a full new wardrobe and was expected to wear it.
She didn’t mind. She was definitely tired of jeans after wearing hers for three months, even though they’d been cleaned and returned to her each day by that thing Dalden called dial-a-closet. She’d been offered ship’s uniforms but had declined. She had never felt that her height looked good in one-piece jumpsuits of the clingy sort.
Old-style again were the marketplaces—they looked like something out of a medieval fair, with small tents with tables in front of them, or goods laid out on rugs. Then a beautiful park with a pond in it and children playing, that could have been in any American hometown.
The streets were laid out in even, straight lines. Turning one brought the biggest building in the town into view, a towering white stone castle. Brittany’s jaw dropped. It wasn’t a castle as she knew them; it looked more like something that could be found in a fantasy picture book. It wasn’t one big building, either, but built in sections, some round, some square or rectangular. All of the sections were in different heights and shapes so that none of them were the same, yet they grew in height pyramid fashion, the shorter towers on the outside, the tallest at the center. There were conical roofs on some, spiral roofs, normal roofs, and flat roofs on others, even crenellated walkways on top of some of the towers.
Tall white walls surrounded the castle, with a wide-open archway spanning the street to enter the inner castle yard. And they were heading to it. This was where Dalden and his family lived.
It was too much. They couldn’t have built something like that just for this project; it had to be something they’d found and were going to make use of. The whole town, for that matter. Maybe somewhere in Russia or that part of the world. Didn’t they have strange-looking buildings like this? And beautiful untouched countrysides? And towns so different-looking from anything she was used to?
She felt better with that conclusion, on firm ground again, and ready to be impressed as they rode through the archway into the castle yard. There was a long rectangular building right in front, with steps spanning the length of it, and at the center, a tall pair of steel-looking doors flanked by two warriors guarding it.
There was a stable for thehataariout front, and she got her first sight of small men that worked in it. They weren’t really small, just not giant-sized like the warriors, and they dressed differently, too, in thin white pants and shirts.Darashmales of the servant class apparently, whom she’d been told about. They were descended from a people conquered so long ago that no one had the date of it anymore.
They weren’t slaves, but were more like a mix between a medieval serf and someone from the servant class of eighteenth-century England. They were the working class, the ones who did all the menial labor warriors snubbed their noses at, though they didn’t get paid for it. There were laws to govern them, they had some rights, but they couldn’t just pick up and move like normal working-class people. For the most part, she’d been told, they were a happy lot who knew their worth in as much as the warrior society would probably collapse without them.
Dalden’s parents led the way inside. Shanelle would be staying a few more days, but then would be leaving for Ba-Har-an, a country that used to take a good three months to reach byhataar, but now was just a few minutes away by airobus. The distance, or prior travel time, was why not much had been known about Ba-Har-an before Challen had been asked to contact them for trade with the League, plentiful deposits of gold having been scanned in that region that other planets were interested in.
But it wasn’t really the distance that had kept the two countries virtual strangers for so long, but that the Sha-Ka’ani were a sedentary warrior species. They might differ here and there in each separate country, but they pretty much universally weren’t explorers. By nature, they preferred to stay, grow, and prosper in familiar surroundings.
Chapter 42
BRITTANY MIGHT HAVE BEEN PICKING HER JAW UP OFFthe floor again after walking through the mammoth steel doors of the castle if she hadn’t had prior warning—pools in bedrooms had been a clue—that inside wasn’t going to look like a castle, but more like a palace. Even so, the bright, open airiness of the place made it unique: high ceilings, huge rooms, everything predominantly white, even the floors, which were marblelike granite.
Potted plants and flowering trees added greenery and other colors, and a blue carpet runner about twelve feet wide extended down the center of the hall where they entered. Two big rooms on each side of it were divided by arches, but arches so wide they were barely divisions, so that standing at the end of one room you could see clearly across to the end of the other. Tall open windows at the ends of these rooms let in soft breezes that kept the place cool, as well as so much daylight they might as well have been still outside. More trees in great urns were in the two rooms, along with backless couches, tables….
Brittany’s interest perked yet again. Tables meant carpentry, but her kind or—bah, there was only one kind. Yet Kodos had said there was no one around here who could teach him how to work with wood, that most of the buildings in town had been built by the Darash so long ago that the knowledge of how to do so had been lost. A challenge loser could be made to build a building in punishment, but it tended to be of such poor quality that it would never be used.
“You expect to lose some challenges?” she’d teased her young friend.
He’d replied a bit indignantly, “I want to show a challenge loser how to build something properly so it can be useful, rather than task the next challenge loser with tearing it down, as is usually the case.”
She hadn’t asked much about these challenges, figured they were just another warrior sport. But that conversation had illuminated the early one she’d had with Dalden when he equated her job with punishment. Warriors apparently could be merchants, could direct Darash in farming, but the only thing they did with their own hands was sword-wielding. Amazing how these people managed to connect and combine their stories into a whole tale without loose ends.
The party divided then, with plans to gather again for dinner: Challen off to attend toshodanbusiness, Tedra off for a catch-up session with Martha, Shanelle and Falon off to her old room, and Dalden pulling Brittany along to his: down one hallway, then another, through a tower, then a garden outside with a covered walk that passed down the middle of it, into the next building, a few more hallways, some stairs, some more stairs. She was absolutely lost by the time they reached his room, which was so far away from the main sections of the castle that it might as well not be considered part of it.
The room covered the whole upper floor of the building it was in, so the balcony that surrounded it surrounded all of it. And yes, there really was a sunken pool in it, about eight feet round, like a miniature oasis with potted trees around it and a stone bench next to it. An extra-big bed was against the only wall that didn’t have those open, arched windows. Not a normal bed as she knew it, it seemed to be a thick, stuffed mattress that fit into a full boxlike frame with no springs. Although it was very old-fashioned looking, the bedding appeared soft and comfortable.
There were a few more of those backless couches around a long, low table. Did they eat lying down? Carved chests sat between arches—detailed woodworking! The floors were again white marblelike stones but lightly veined with blue. Sheer light-blue curtains stirred at the windows, their only covering. There were no windowpanes or shutters.
“Tell me something, how do you keep out the flies and mosquitoes?” she asked Dalden.
“The what?”
“Insects, bugs, you know, tiny things that fly around in the air and make a habit of biting people.”
“You will find such things in the lowlands, not up on a mountain.”
“Ah.”
“What think you of your new home?”
She knew he’d been eagerly awaiting that answer, though his expression was guarded. It was truly beautiful, his room, uncluttered yet lavish. But the whole place made her think of a sultan’s harem. It brought home clearly that she was nowhere near her own home.
“It’s big,” she allowed.
