Page 44 of The House of the Red Balconies

Hylas was keeping himself busy working on the water infrastructure of the town. He had two teams now making repairs to the pipes, and they had restored water to all of the fountains that had been dry, although they had been obliged to shut off the supply to two of them, temporarily, because the volume of water currently entering the town wasn’t sufficient to keep them all flowing.

In the second week of Turning Month, Mutari reported that she’d been able to arrange for Hylas and a couple of surveyors from the fort to visit the big island surreptitiously. They made it an overnight trip, camping in the forest near the site of the spring, and managed a thorough survey of the area that allowed Hylas, on his return to the government office, to begin planning the aqueduct in earnest. They were still, however, no closer to getting permission from Gylphos to build it.

Loukianos returned to the government office the day after Hylas got back from the big island, acting as if nothing had happened. Mostly. He asked Hylas how things had been at the Bower lately, and seemed surprised when Hylas said he didn’t know because he hadn’t been.

“Well, we must remedy that, then!” Loukianos declared heartily. “We must both make our triumphant return tonight.”

In fact, Hylas had been enjoying the evenings at the Red Balconies. Some nights he burned incense and sat with the companions, watching Pani and Menthe work on their frescoes, listening to Zo play or sing or talk to his guests. But a couple of nights he had helped out Ahmos and the night cook, whom he had seen looking harried over one thing and another. He was not really a guest of the house, and it had seemed natural—felt better, even—to make himself useful than to sit around being entertained all the time.

“Mistress will make a joke about how she ‘hopes you don’t expect to be paid now’,” Zo had said, gently imitating Aula’s sharp tone. “And it won’t sound like a joke, but it will be meant as one.”

“I know,” Hylas said. “I think I am beginning to understand how she is.”

He would miss spending the evening at home with Zo and the others. But he didn’t dread the prospect of returning to the Bower of Suos with the governor. Loukianos and his friends could be amusing in their way. And there was always the morning to look forward to.

“Actually,” he told Zo the next day, “it was worse than I expected. I think they’ve been as gloomy at the Bower of Suos the last two weeks as we were here at the end of the year. Not only has Loukianos abandoned them—and me, which they pretend to care about⁠—”

“How implausible!”

“Yes, I know. And Timon of Kos hasn’t been seen anywhere in weeks, either.”

“Really?” Zo frowned. “He’s written me a few times. I didn’t mention it to you … ”

“You don’t have to tell me everything,” Hylas said automatically. Certainly there were things, quite significant things about his own feelings, that he wasn’t telling Zo.

“No. They weren’t very interesting letters. A lot of stuff about how I’m torturing him. Not in a fun way. But I also assumed they weren’t true. You know, that he was out at other tea houses amusing himself and not thinking about me all the time as he claimed.” He made a face. “Clearly I’d better do something about that. It would be unprofessional not to.”

Hylas didn’t ask what he planned to do. It was none of his business.

It was a few days after the governor’s triumphant return to the tea houses, and before Hylas had come up with a way to invite him to the Red Balconies, that Mutari proposed a trip to Tetum. Hylas at first didn’t know what she was getting at, why she was mentioning it to him. Was it just because she thought it would be inconvenient for him if she went off to her homeland for an extended stay at this point? But there was nothing going on now; she’d already been tremendously helpful getting him to the big island with the surveyors, and he would have plenty to work on in her absence.

No, it turned out; she wondered if he wanted to come with her.

“I’ve become almost used to not making a fool of myself in every social situation,” he told Zo the following morning, “but I certainly haven’t forgotten how to do it. I didn’t know what to say to her. ‘Aren’t you somebody’s mistress? Are you allowed to invite me places?’”

“I mean, you could have said that.” Zo sipped his tea. “She is somebody’s mistress.”

“‘Will he kill me, though?’ That’s what I wanted to know. ‘Will you have to hide me in your luggage?’ Apparently not. Apparently he’d consider it a favour if I would go with her, as her escort. I barely know him, but she trusts me, and—he must trust her, so … I suppose I must also have a reputation of some sort that, er, helps.”

It was a very strange thought. He’d never imagined there could be any advantage in having a public reputation as a man who had so little idea what to do with a woman that he could be trusted around other men’s beautiful mistresses.

“Mm,” said Zo diplomatically. “So, are you going to go?”

“Yes. The opportunity to visit Gylphos—there are lots of things in Tetum I’m interested to see, and to have a local guide, it’s too good a chance to pass up. And of course she does think we may be able to make contacts that will help with the aqueduct.”

Just when Hylas had begun to feel guilty for talking excitedly of a trip that Zo couldn’t go on, Zo showed signs of being excited on Hylas’s behalf, talking about the things he should look for in the market and the sights he should be sure to see—all of it based on hearsay, as Zo himself had never been to Tetum or any part of Gylphos. Hylas knew Zo was playing up his enthusiasm to be a good friend, and he insisted Zo tell him what he wanted brought back from the markets of Tetum as a present.

The trip to Tetum lasted two weeks, and he missed Zo the entire time. And yet he enjoyed himself thoroughly too. He bought Zo three presents: the sweets he had requested, a pair of earrings with bright blue enamel beads, and a fan of plaited reeds painted with a scene of water birds and a hippopotamus. He visited people with Mutari and had to do very little talking because most of them did not speak Pseuchaian, but everyone was very polite to him. They looked at famous buildings and ancient statuary, and a cousin of Mutari’s gave him a tour of some farms that used interesting Gylphian irrigation techniques.

Another of Mutari’s cousins kept trying to encourage him to talk to her teenage son, who did in fact speak Pseuchaian fairly well. Hylas assumed this was because the boy was interested in engineering, but this didn’t seem to be the case. Eventually Mutari gave him a hint that the mother was probably trying to make a match between him and her son, having made assumptions about Hylas from the fact that he was Mutari’s escort. Hylas realized that yes, the signs had been pointed that way fairly clearly. He also realized this was a story of his trip that he was not going to be able to tell Zo.

They had no luck finding anyone to talk to about the aqueduct. They learned that a new envoy to Tykanos had been sent by Suna, but after arriving in Tetum he had gone travelling, and no one knew exactly where he was. In some ways, business in Gylphos seemed to be done very similarly to business on Tykanos.

“Well,” said Mutari, as they relaxed on the river boat on the first leg of their return journey, “at least we had a good time. I got to visit my cousins, you learned all that fascinating stuff about canals and bought some presents for your boyfriend … ”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Mm, I don’t know about those earrings, then.”