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"You're going to ask how I know your name."
"Howù" He stopped himself, and laughed sharply. "No, I'm not." He picked up
his
mug and nearly drowned himself with a swallow of beer. Choking and
sputtering,
he managed to say, "So you know I'll be a poet?"
"You know intuitions can be inaccurate. But yes."
He threw his head back and laughed so loudly that several students bellowed
at
him to shut up. "Come up to my room!" he gasped. "I beg youùmy friends will
never believe me."
At the building next door, where a dingy tailor's shop and an even dingier
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pie
shop occupied the first floor, Coles showed Zanja down a narrow alley and up
a
rickety set of stairs to a dark hallway. He opened a sagging door, saying,
"Carefulùyou might trip on someone."
The room, as dark as the hallway, smelled of dirty clothing, rotten food, and
stale piss. Coles felt his way to the window and opened the shutters. Now a
faint light managed to fight its way through the tallow-doth screen, and
Zanja
could see three bodies sprawled upon the floor, snoring away on thin
mattresses
amid a debris of occupation: wooden crates served as furniture, and an
overflowing chamber pot suggested they all had recently drunk too much beer.
"We're late to lecture!" Coles shouted cruelly.
"Ha, ha," a sleeper mumbled.
"Jackass," declared a second.
The third, having noticed Zanja's presence, sat up in alarm.
"She's not a prefect," said Coles. "But she does act like one. Wake up, will
you? It's nearly midday!"
Zanja took a pile of dirty plates off a crate and sat on it cautiously. The
three disarrayed young men blinked at her blearily.
"Allow me to present my friendsùwho are closer to me than Mothersùand from
whom
I must soon partùforever!" Coles's excess of feeling was greeted by groans.
"This is Speck." He gestured at a very slight, very pale man whose face was
covered with freckles. "This is Briefly." The alarmed man retired beneath his
blankets without uttering a word. "And this is Legs."
The third man rolled onto his back and cheerfully kicked his long legs in the
air, like a colt having its first roll in the grass. "Aren't exams over yet?"
he
asked.
"Not for six days," said Speck gloomily.
"Then what were we celebrating last night?"
"Ourselves," said Briefly, his voice muffled by blankets.
"We were celebrating having the wherewithal to celebrate," said Coles. "And
now
we're poor again: the same old tragedy. Oh, by the way, this womanùthis
oddityùthis Paladinù"
Briefly emerged from under the blanket, freshly startled, apparently not
having
recognized Zanja's Paladin habiliments in the gloom.
"ùwhose name I don't even knowù"
"Zanja."
"This woman, Zanja Paladin, has declared I will be a poet of renown."
"He will."
The roommates gazed at Zanja for a moment, then began hooting with laughter.
"His stuff is unreadable!"
"He'll starve!"
"Gibberish!" declared Briefly, and pelted Coles with the stockings he had
been
about to put on.
Coles said complacently, "She knows the future."
They leapt out of bed and gathered around her then, demanding that she tell
them
all their futures. Although the exams they had been prematurely celebrating
would mark the end of their last term at the university, not one of the four
young men had any idea what he would do next. Zanja took out her glyph cards
and
made a show of shuffling them.
"Tell me I'm not going to be an accountant," pleaded Legs.
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"No," said Zanja, drawing a card at random. "Or at least, not for very long."
"Will I marry?" asked Speck rather anxiously.
Zanja could not determine if this were an appealing prospect or not, so she
said, "Not until you can be a good husband."
Briefly stood silent, scratching a flea bite on his ankle. Fleas were not yet
dangerous plague carriers, but still Zanja's skin crawled. She selected a
glyph
card for Briefly and silently showed it to him.
"The Secret!" cried Coles. "Tell, tell, tell!"
But Briefly shook his head and retrieved his socks.
Zanja said, "Incidentally, my predictions aren't very reliable."
"What good are you, then?" asked Speck in disgust. "If we can't make a living
we'll all have to go back to farming."
"You'll manage the same way everyone does," she said, much to their dismay.
"Does Briefly actually have a secret, though?" asked Coles.
Zanja glanced at Briefly, who was now strapping his shoes. "That's for him to
tell, I guess. Listen, before you go wherever you are going, I want some
advice."
All four of them sat happily on the floor, apparently glad for any excuse to
delay going to class. Emil, whose only opportunity to be a student at Kisha
had
been stolen from him, would have been disgusted.
"I need to know something about the water tribesùthose that live on the coast.
I
need the information quickly. What should I do?"
In the long silence that followed, Zanja began to regret attending to her
impulses. At last Coles said, "I doubt anyone knows anything about the
tribes.
I've never heard them mentioned in a single lecture. And I do listen."
Speck uttered a snort.
"Analytics, Anatomy, Botany,..." muttered Legs, apparently listing the fields
of
study in alphabetical order.
"Ale-itics, Animosity, Beerography,..." echoed Speck mockingly.
"History," said Briefly.
"A historian might know something," said Coles. "It depends on what you need
to
know."
"I'm looking for a specific person, a water witch, who is with one ¦r the
coastal tribes." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]