It was the Month of the Peaches, and the end of a long, hot day.
Corvinalias Elsternom e Rokonoma the Fourth, Count of Upper Cloudyblue, wished he could cover his ears, for after a week of travel he was thoroughly tired of listening to his Great-Uncle Jey. But the old Duke would not be silenced; Corvinalias could only sag against the gunwale of the rowing barge as it carved its way up the grayish-green, bluish-brown River Whellen and hear Uncle Jey repeat his story about a long-ago trip to blah blah blah. The young Count huffed out a sigh, smoothed the edges of his neat black cape and yawned. He scratched his beak with the edge of his wing.
Uncle Jey was clearly under the impression that no one else in the world had ever had adventures. Or at least any worth talking about. Sure, his tales about being one of the first people to ride a Uman ship across the Midland Sea had been fascinating— when Corvinalias first heard them as a hatchling. But since then he’d had adventures of his own, ones he was fairly certain would hush Uncle Jey’s mouth, if only it could take a break and give his ears a turn.
First of all, Corvinalias had chosen a Uman pet (that part was no adventure; Umans were very popular pets) and followed it from the Isle of Gold to the mainland, sticking with it through a series of mishaps which would have made a fine tale all by themselves. But it was after he shed the pet that the real adventures began: Corvinalias had befriended a pair of wild Umans, male and female, and had journeyed with them out of the Midland Sea altogether. He’d spent months with them on a strange and beautiful boat, seeing things that no civilized being had ever yet seen. Although the stupid albatross hired to bring back the notes he’d scratched lost them all, Corvinalias had been confident that upon his return to the royal Isle, he could refine his memoirs in the telling.
It had begun well: his Elsternom relatives had thrown him a round of soirées and the Rokonomas had made him a member of the Scientific Institute. But somehow no one seemed all that interested in the wonders of Cloud Whales, or the destructive majesty of rotatory cyclones, or the shortsighted economic models that plagued Umans in the Herb Islands. Instead they continued to cling to old bores like Uncle Jey or Cousin Chack, pretending to be fascinated, because powerful old relatives— however tiresome— doled out desirable favors.
Corvinalias wanted no favors. He only wanted what was coming to him: branches E23 and NE1, Whorl Nine, of Lower Cloudyblue. By popular custom those were part of his county; surely Uncle Jey would re-scratch his will to make it official.
The old Duke was in the middle of a sentence when Corvinalias nudged him. “Hoy,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but do you see that? Up the river, there?”
Uncle Jey blinked dismissively at a minute speck on the horizon, washed ruddy by the sunset. Old he might be, but he was a magpie, and magpies could see all kinds of things other people couldn’t. “What, Vinny? A clump of Uman-beings. A town. What about it?”
“This one’s special. Try and guess why.”
Uncle Jey couldn’t resist a challenge. He puffed out his white vest and fluttered from the barge’s gunwale to the roof of its cabin, catching one fingernail in some decorative trim and nearly falling to the deck, down where pair after pair of Uman oarmaids swayed. He scrambled back up, strode to the inlay of a nautilus in the center of the roof, and squinted at the town.
Corvinalias joined him. He could hear the Uman family bustling about inside the cabin: their servants preparing the evening meal, their baby crowing about something. It hadn’t been easy, staying out of reach of that baby. True, he could have chosen to ride in the other barge, the one rowing behind them that was full of knights, not grabby babies. But the cooking was better on this one, and nobles preferred to travel in style.
“That town has a ferry across the river,” said Uncle Jey, “but the boats haven’t got any oarmaids— is that it? Winch-boats do seem rare here on the mainland. Now when I was young and the Umans put in the Isle of Gold’s very first winch-boat…”
“Not that. Keep looking.”
Uncle Jey droned on about the installation of some ferry or other, rambling off on tangents, bathing the cabin roof and the barge and indeed the whole river in a haze of recycled reminiscences. His blather merged with the shrilling of cicadas from the trees on the riverbanks; the town loomed ever larger and closer; finally, when the oarmaids began calling signals to one another in their mainland Uman dialect, to help them navigate past the automated ferry serving the town— Corvinalias had borne quite enough. He stood up and stretched his wings with what he hoped was a decisive air.
“I’ll show you the special thing. Come with me.”
Good Market wasn’t big, but it was busy. It was a border town, lying as it did right along the River Whellen, and at Good Market the people— for Corvinalias definitely considered Umans a people, however the Scientific Institute might categorize them— had become used to a stream of traffic from outside the Whellen Country.
And then there was the machinery. Say what anyone will about Umans, they were clever things and had invented many variations on those ingenious toys the lever, the screw, and the wheel— and in the Whellen Country as nowhere else, such inventions had been brought to a pitch of perfection.
The magpies’ shadows flashed over streets paved with neat limestone, crisscrossed with grooves in which dark-gray ropes continually hissed. Umans sat side by side in boxes with wheels, that rolled along following these grooves.
“Hmm. They seem to have winch-boats by land as well,” admitted the old Duke, and in his tone Corvinalias recognized a grudging touch of admiration.
“They’re called cable cars.”
“And they’ve pitched tents on the street corners.”
“Amusement pavilions, full of shows and games.”
“Oh yes, Umans and their busy meaty ape fingers, what? Hum. It seems the streets are lined with some sort of glass bubbles on poles. Do you know, I once saw a Uman blowing glass and she—”
“Those are wyrmlight lamps. Artificial wyrmlight.”
Uncle Jey actually stopped beating his wings for a moment.
Smiling inwardly, Corvinalias dipped one wing and began spiraling into the main square of Good Market, toward a big inn with a courtyard for stagecoaches. Ha ha. That impressed you, old boy.
“All right, Uncle Jey. Here’s what’s special in this town. Let’s perch in this blackbud tree. Now look at that inn. Do you see the male Uman there on the veranda, the one with the silk shirt and the doeskin breeches and the boots with embroidered tops?”
“He looks like a fool.”
“That’s right, he was a Fool. Malfred Murd, the one who belonged to the family that brought us here. He lived in their hive on our Isle for twenty years. Hocka, Bocka, Dominaka—Ta daa.”
“Why, of course I see it now, Vinny. So this was your pet? The one you used to show off to us? But he had a hat then. A hat with…” and here Uncle Jey shivered in delight. “…thirteen jingly silver shinies.”
“The hat’s gone. Now he’s got a badge. See it? Hanging from his neck on a chain?”
“Oh! It’s so wonderfully shiny! Come, Vinnie. I wish to steal it.”
Instinctively, without considering respect for age or title, Corvinalias snatched at Uncle Jey’s wrist to prevent him from leaping out of the tree and down into the square. But his fingers closed on nothing; the old Duke had moved surprisingly fast and was falling toward the inn like a black-and-white leaf, wings flaring, ready to reach out and grab the badge of office that extolled Malfred Murd as His Honor, the Esquire of Good Market.
