Trader's Honour

Chapter 3-1

3

IN THE DARKNESS of the night, Mikandra lay awake for a long time, trying to decide the path of her future. She could, of course, do nothing and let the offer lapse as Father wanted. That way, she could stay with Liseyo and protect her against Father’s anger.

But even then, she could never be home all the time, and if Father decided to marry her sister off to some old man, there was nothing she could do to stop him. Liseyo would have to learn to fight for herself. If an old man came to her wanting marriage, she would have to make him decide that she wasn’t a good option.

She lit the lamp on her nightstand and read the letter over and over again. It mentioned the costs, but didn’t say where she could go to meet those costs. They just assumed that the Trader Guild students were from rich families and brought their own money. Could she safely assume that sponsorship by Iztho Andrahar meant that he would be paying for her?

She was embarrassed that this thought had not crossed her mind at the time when she had applied and was even more embarrassed that accepting would mean being indebted to a family she had not realised Father hated so much.

She knew there’d been some trouble that concerned Iztho Andrahar’s dealing in Barresh, but was it really as bad as Father said?

The fuss about the two-day war in Barresh seemed longer than a year ago. It was the first time in living memory that the Mirani army had been defeated. Granted, Miran was by far the biggest nation on Ceren and most of the other nations were no more than loose groups of primitive tribes living on the coastal fringe of the Mirani continent. Barresh was a coastal enclave on the far western coast, and had been a thorn in Miran’s side for hundreds of years.

As far as she understood the Barresh war, there had been an uprising of the locals against the Mirani troops stationed there as part of Barresh’s status as protectorate of Miran, and she failed to see how a single man could have enough influence to start a war. And cause defeat of the Mirani army? One single man?

At the time of the war, she’d just started at the hospital and the deluge of injured soldiers that came in had caused major problems. Those men spoke of bands of natives fighting unfairly with blue fire. Some said new weapons. The more superstitious would talk of dark magic. Whatever it was, the “fire” was real and dangerous. Many soldiers died under her hands because too much of their skin had been burnt.

None of the survivors—and she treated many in their agonising recovery—spoke of the involvement of any Mirani Traders in the conflict.

In contrast, they mentioned that the influence of Asto was everywhere in Barresh, and that was the real reason the war had been fought: because Asto had been trying for hundreds of years to get a foothold on the continent that provided its population with so much of its food. So, likely Asto had supported the rebels in Barresh with blue-fire-spewing weapons, and the Mirani army had been unpleasantly surprised.

What did Iztho Andrahar have to do with it?

That made her think that she should go and find out what the issues were, and the thought annoyed her. She wanted to accept the offer and wanted all this other stuff to just go away.

Who cared what Iztho had done or hadn’t done? He was a Trader and that meant by default that he was honourable. If he had been involved, it would have been because he acted according to the Traders’ moral code. Call her naïve, but she believed that.

She’d never get a chance like this again.

She wanted to go, but she was just so . . . afraid of the future. Afraid to leave her family and travel, afraid to go to this huge place that was the Trader Guild headquarters, full of strangers. She, a daughter of a lowly administrator who had never travelled offworld. She’d get no help from the Mirani Trader apprentices. They were all boys and Mikandra wasn’t sure whether they’d shun her because she was a girl, or because she wasn’t from the right family. Both, probably. Making friends from elsewhere seemed like a scary thing to do. If she did, the boys would report back to Miran and she’d be shunned anyway for “loving foreigners”. She’d seen that happen to Aunt Amandra.

Was that only a small price to pay for the opportunity, or would it forever harm her chance to do well and would she end up worn out and bitter, like Aunt Amandra? Worn out and bitter, with no money and no home to return to and no inheritance?

So what? Go and leave her mother and Liseyo? Or stay and protect them?

She had only three days to decide.

She finally fell asleep and woke up with a shock to see that no one had come into her room overnight to remove the letter from the Trader Guild. It still lay on her bedspread, mocking her with its three-day response ultimatum.

Mikandra got up, dressed in the warm clothes she wore under her hospital gown. First her underthings. Then a thick woollen dress because that’s what girls had to wear. The corset went over that. And a jacket with long sleeves. Then stockings that were always itchy. Then she folded up the letter and tucked it in the pocket of her dress.

She decided that she’d go to the hospital and pretend she wasn’t going to accept the offer. If she didn’t feel any sadness over it, or if she felt good about being in the hospital, she wouldn’t go. If she did feel that she should leave—although the prospect scared her—she would do something about it later today. Both the office of the Andrahar Traders and the Trader Guild offices were close to the hospital and she would walk past them on the way home.

She pushed aside the curtains, letting a cold draft into the room. The night had brought a thin layer of snow, the first for the season, just enough to cover the street. A trail of footsteps in the neighbours’ yard marked where the kitchen hand had gone out the gate to pick up the grocery deliveries. If it got any colder, the footsteps would remain white. For now, they had turned black wherever the kitchenhand’s boots had touched the ground.

She turned back to the room, walked past her desk and stuck her ID pass in her pocket, just to be sure. If she went to the Guild, they’d probably ask for that.

Mikandra went down into the kitchen, where Rosep slaved over the hot stove already, preparing the evening meal while Father, Mother and Liseyo had their breakfast.

Liseyo looked even smaller than usual. Her eyes were puffy and Mikandra thought that she’d been crying. She ached for her sister, the girl who should have been a boy. The oldest son of the oldest son, discounting the fact that his oldest child was a daughter. Father loved those traditions. He’d taken over the Lawkeeper’s business from his father and now he had no son to continue his business, and passing it to her or Liseyo didn’t even cross his mind. Mikandra often wondered what went on behind the closed door of her parents’ bedroom.

This morning, Father was in his official Lawkeeper robe, which he loved to wear outside the court although he didn’t have to. He quizzed Liseyo on her schoolwork.

Who were the Foundation families?

Ilendar, Andrahar, Takumar, Tussamar and Zithunar.

What is the first principle of the Foundation law?

That Miran is not complete without both Endri and Nikala people.

And the second?

That each part of the population does the tasks assigned in the bylaws.

How many seats are in the council?

One hundred and thirty-one.

Who sits in the council?

One seat from each family, and a seat can be allocated to others if the family relinquishes it.

Mikandra knew all the answers, but Liseyo faltered through and grew more timid with every question.

How is the High Council elected?

Liseyo shrugged and looked down at her plate.

Father sighed and rolled his eyes. “We just had the election and your aunt won a place in the High Council. We went through the entire process. Where is your sense of observation?”

Liseyo said nothing. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“It’s happening right in front of you. We discussed it then. Try to remember.”

There was a heavy silence.

Eventually, Liseyo blurted out, “I don’t know. I forgot.”

“Then I shall take steps so that you won’t forget.”

Mikandra itched to shout out Can’t you see that she’s upset? But there was no time for an argument. She had to go to the hospital or be late.

She collected her cloak from the hall and left the stifling atmosphere in the house for the crisp morning air.

Snowflakes still descended from the sky, adding to the slippery slurry in the streets. The clouds hung low over the city and occasionally blanketed the roofs of the Endri family houses, each in its own walled yard. Some houses, like the neighbours’, were painted white, but those made from natural stone had turned dark grey with the humidity. Patches of lichen bloomed in weather like this, with orange ooze leaking from the little plantlets. By mid-morning, the groundsmen would be out scrubbing the stuff off the walls.

They were about to go into low-winter, that season when life in Miran seemed to come to a halt as everyone hid indoors from the cold and blizzards. It was the season of long dinners where grandmothers would tell old tales about how every year the suns got jittery and debated jumping out of the sky.

It was a good story that frightened young children, but of course these days, people knew that Ceren’s orbit was elliptical and the sun-cycle—the twenty-day rotation of both suns around each other—only seemed to speed up during that time because the planet’s comparative speed was less when it was further away. There was no annual judgement and no curses by irate ancestors, but those things all made for good frightening tales.

True to the stories which said that at low-winter the ancestors sent clouds to eat the city, buildings vanished in and out of the mist while Mikandra walked down the hill. One moment, the watchtower was gone, next only the top would be visible and the next only the bottom. She’d been up there once on a clear day, and seen the entire city underneath her, and the mountain valley that was the city’s home, a patchwork of bean crops and oil seed fields. She’d seen the mountain slopes that rose to the southern end of the city, with meadows that were fragile green with tiny flowers and burbling brooks when the snow melted, plains of waving dead grass when the suns passed overhead and the wind was merciless and dry, and fields of snow in both high and low winter. The day she climbed up had been one of the rare occasions that the view to the east was clear, and she had seen all the way down the mountain pass into the blue haziness of the eastern plain.

The view from the Mirani watchtower was famous in all the settled worlds, so incredible that people claimed you could see the curve of the horizon, although Aunt Amandra said it was nonsense, because you couldn’t see the curve until you were much higher.

Mikandra remembered that when she was young, she would occasionally see some foreigners climbing the many steps that wound around the outside wall and remembered her grandmother complaining about tourists as if they were some scandalous thing.

The watchtower had been built in the old days, when the city was young, and people feared attacks from outside. Yet the only time that it might have helped its citizens, it had failed. Like the city walls, like so much in Miran, it was a relic of the past. The city guard made a show of putting men on tower duty, but it was a symbolic role. The air and land around the city was these days monitored by the Exchange. Technology had moved on.

Mikandra entered the hospital grounds, and climbed the steps into the building.

With the first snow came the first cases of frostbite and an increase in the number of people visiting the hospital. Scores of patients waited in the cavernous foyer, which echoed with the voices and shufflings of the sick. Coughing and moans. Sorry heaps of people sat on the hard chairs, huddled in filthy matted cloaks. Mikandra knew a lot of the faces. She’d seen them with frozen fingers or weeping sores or skin infections, hacking coughs and other ailments caused by the cold. They were Nikala, all of them.

A few harassed-looking nurses walked around, taking records of each patient and their ailments. One greeted Mikandra with a weary smile. Calintho, youngest daughter of a branch of the Takumar family. She couldn’t help thinking another girl shunted into a thankless job. Bet Calintho was infertile, too.

But she clamped down on those thoughts. She was going to be positive today. Cheerful and dutiful. The perfect self-sacrificing healer. But the letter in her pocket still reminded itself of its presence by poking a sharp corner through the fabric of her dress.

Mikandra hung her cloak in the cloak room and paused in the doorway to the emergency ward where patients were taken for first treatment. Her mentor Eydrina Lasko stood by the bed of an elderly man who had been brought in yesterday with a hacking cough and for whom the regular ward had obviously not yet provided a place. Eydrina was a middle-aged woman—married to an upper city administrator, but with no children. She wore her bushy curly hair—an indicator that she was of the Nikala class—in a loose plait over her back and had tied the springy curls that escaped the tail with a headband.

She hadn’t seen Mikandra come in, and continued to examine the patient with competent hands.

The bed next to him had held a new mother with a fever yesterday, but today there was a young man with his leg propped up on pillows. He looked asleep. The bed on the other side held an elderly woman—a homeless grandmother who came here often, usually with feeble excuses that barely justified keeping her in the hospital. She usually cried when she was told she had to make way for patients in greater need.

Then there were people with bandaged heads from attacks of the flying maramarang that scavenged on rubbish after dark, someone with a broken leg, others with sores. Most patients were old. Most were men. Most were homeless.

Looking at her tutor, surrounded by a sea of misery, Mikandra felt a dread creeping up in her. This was only the start of low-winter. Things would get worse when the real cold hit.

Eydrina looked up.

Mikandra forced her face into a smile and entered the room. “A good morning to you, Eydrina.”

Her tutor returned a weary smile. “You seem pretty cheerful for the fact that winter has started. It’s not a very good morning, not by anyone’s standard.”

“Oh. Anything happened?”

“Just the usual, made ten times worse by the weather.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Eydrina gave her a long list of patients to be looked at, to wash, change bandages and clean wounds, to prepare for operations—most of them involving old men having part of their legs removed. A woman with a dreadful cough needed a massage and hot compresses on her back to help her clear her lungs. Some patients needed to be moved to other sections of the hospital. The maramarang victims needed to have their wounds cleaned out with a solution that stung badly. Mikandra dealt with a cantankerous old man and a slightly younger man who had claw marks all through his hair. She had to shave it, very carefully, before she could wash his skin. The hair was disgusting and so full of filth that she couldn’t see where his head started and his hair stopped. She nicked him twice, because he was involved with an argument with the man in the next bed—with scratch marks all over his face—and wouldn’t sit still. Apparently, a fight about a sleeping spot had put both of them in the path of a horde of maramarang. The scavengers were about the size of a baby and had big fur-covered wings with huge claws that they used to rip their prey but that served just as well for opening rubbish bins. They were hotbeds for disease.

Mikandra washed, massaged, cleaned, rebandaged.

Kitchen staff brought breakfast, which some patients needed help to eat. Some didn’t eat at all. New patients were seen by the emergency healers, of which Eydrina was the leader, and brought into the ward unless they needed a surgeon’s immediate attention.

It was busy. It was cold. It was tiring and depressing.

Mikandra couldn’t help thinking that as Trader she could bring so many things that would make these people’s lives better. She would bring in money for Miran so that hospitals could buy the best medicines and equipment. The best people even.

That was if gamra would lift the boycott that had been in place since the Barresh two-day war.

Of course she could also make things better while staying here, if she really cared. She could lobby the rich Endri families for money to have windows put into the ward—

—except glass was imported from Barresh and none was coming in because of the boycott—

She could find another supplier. Surely someone on the east coast could make glass.

And she could ask for donations for further medical supplies—

—whichever ones didn’t fall under the boycott, which weren’t many.

It all came back to that boycott.

That problem was much bigger than her and she couldn’t fix it.

So what about something she could fix, like the lives of patients?

What if she asked Liseyo to put on a theatre performance to cheer up the patients? That would be a nice thing to do. She could see Liseyo in her role, playing the ladies of the past, her little face smiling. Wasn’t life about making the people you loved happy?

Was running away really the best solution?