Another thing happened before we left the city that day. Seemingly unimportant, but, as it turned out, full of meaning. I went to visit Captain Jahldorani in Barmzahva Plaza, met Maetahtild of the House of Song at the foot of the guard tower, and spoke briefly to my son Thaeto.

  How, you might ask, do I have sons, when I have never known the touch of a woman, or a man for that matter? Thaeto and his brother Nolio are my sons because I adopted them as urchins, after they’d been skulking about the garrison for many moons. That was when I was young, just made a lieutenant, and I had a rival in the guard - Pertrahn, who had joined at the same time I had, and wanted my position. More than wanted it, he thought he had a right to it. He had distinguished himself in his first year by catching The Thief of Eaves and Windowsills. Pertrahn probably caught him because he tripped over his own name. The Thief of Eaves and Windowsills! Ridiculous. But there is a type of miscreant who wants to build a myth around their actions, who wants to live within that myth, and have everyone acknowledge it. There’s a type of guardsman who does that, too. Pertrahn was one of this type. He was small and wiry and very savvy. He could walk into a room or down an alleyway and then tell you everything that was there. He was always noting things, as if his mind were a scrap of scrivener’s cheap papyrus. But somehow he never noted the fact that Baetzeton, the old captain, favored me over him, and he was taken entirely by surprise when I was promoted first.

  He took it out on the boys. The other guardsmen had gotten used to them. They liked having them around. Thaeto would run errands for them, and Nolio would sing and tell them stories, since he was blind and not good at fetching a pail of ale from the tavern. We fed them on scraps and gave them our castoff clothing to wear, and when that bastard Sanhandusii started petting them and trying to feel under their robes, we beat him and had him dismissed from the guard. But Pertrahn noted my liking for them, and he began to pick on the boys, and to entice the other guardsmen into his bullying games. Nolio was made to scrabble in the ground for the biscuits that Pertrahn tossed beyond his reach. Thaeto was only given women’s robes, the cast offs of whores. When Pertrahn got drunk, he would try to beat them, and when I wasn’t around he would succeed.

  So I took them into my home. I had my lieutenant’s pay and had rented proper chambers in Tarahnvae, and I gave the boys their own room and told them that they were to be my sons, not my slaves. Thaeto wanted to do menial tasks and run errands for me, but I wouldn’t let him. Our neighbor, Uhlahto, was a scrivener, a big man who could write a lovely, flowing script. I had him teach the boys their letters, and was rewarded when Thaeto showed an acumen for numbers. I apprenticed him to the city clerks. Nolio’s blindness meant that he could only read with his hands, but Uhlahto asked a blacksmith to make a heavy iron needle, and he pressed the letters into the leaves of the sanmatra tree and Nolio learned them by touch. He took to going to Jehaijae Hill and inscribing the many discourses and disputes he heard there. He grew very adept at using Uhlahto’s stylus, and when that fine man died it was Nolio who wrote his funeral poem.

  They each had their own friends. Thaeto caroused with the clerks and talked politics and bureaucratic mumbo jumbo for long hours. Nolio was a favorite of the tinkers, the scholars, and the traveling singers. Sometimes they both would bring their friends home on the same evening, and our chambers would ring with laughter and inscrutable sentences and tabulations. I was very happy in those days. Pertrahn had left the guard to become one of the King’s Rangers, and I had eventually forgiven the other guardsmen for joining him in his bullying.

  Then both boys fell in love. Being a lifelong celibate, this was not something I could offer advice about. Thaeto chose a plump, happy little washerwoman’s daughter, and bought the house we now live in, with space for my hammock in the garden and the solarium, and room for their four children. He was rising very quickly in the bureaucratic ranks. Nolio made a harder choice. But do we really choose who we love? I did not choose to love my boys, or to love Grandahlae, my daughter-in-law. Or my grandchildren, for that matter. Love simply arrived, like a gift, more surprising because I had thought it was a gift I would never receive.

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  Nolio fell in love with Maetahtild, who had been married to the merchant Demirill, and who lived in the House of Song. This house spreads beside the river in Tarahnvae, a quarter mile from my own home. Looking at it made me think of a child taking square blocks and stacking them together in a jumble. There were many roofs with laundry hanging on lines, making the house look like a fish with frilled fins that moved languidly in the river. It was called the House of Song because the women who lived there held odd beliefs, and they expressed them in long, spiraling lines of verse that almost never rhymed. They were always singing as they went from room to room, and picking up on each other’s singing, and carrying a tune and a lyric throughout the house. Wags said that they sang at meals, taking turns carrying the singing so that others could eat. There were maybe twenty women in the house, and there were many who considered it a scandalous place, as several of the women still had husbands and children whom they had abandoned. For good reason, I thought. The merchant Demirill was the worst example of the kind of man who mistreats his wife, but many of the women in the House of Song had fled from similar abuse.

  Maetahtild had been kept in a dry well in a secret garden in the northwest corner of Demirill’s merchant house. Every nineday the merchant would lower a ladder and descend to rape and beat her. On all other days he contented himself with raping and beating his slaves. He only hired clerks and workmen who shared his proclivities, and an evil reputation emanated from his house. But he paid off the guard captain in Viepahrik, and nothing was done.

  Not until Thaeto learned of it, that is. The clerks of our city comprise a great, gossiping community, and when one of their number was dismissed from Demirill’s service he was soon in a tavern, telling anyone who would listen about his terrible misfortunes. From there word wound itself up to the palace, where my dear son was one of the head clerks, and as soon as he heard of it, he came to me. The Captain of Viepahrik District was a miserable man, and I knew that I could find no help there. But the Countess of Saharavin was a wily old thief, and I went to her and asked her to pay a visit to Demirill’s merchant house. Since she was a noble, it was my duty, as captain of the Garrison of the Courtly Palaces, to accompany her. I brought Vaenahma and five picked men with me, and when we went into the house I stood by a window and looked out at the courtyard as the countess and merchant chatted. I pretended to see a thief slipping over the eaves of the house, which gave us an excuse to search every room. Demirill followed us, flapping his arms and trying to stop us. But we pushed him aside and found our way to the hidden garden, where Maetahtild languished in the unused well.

  There was nothing we could do about the slaves, whom we discovered wearing filthy robes in a long room at the top of the men’s wing. Some of them were chained to beds. All I could do was offer to buy them from Demirill, but he wouldn’t sell them. But the countess was wiser. She went home and had a word with her husband, who was serving as the Warden of the Public Good that year. He had signs posted on Demirill’s house, warning of contagion from some hitherto unknown disease. No one could come or go. When Demirill came up the entrance tunnel to howl and complain, he was pushed back with long poles. As if he was a leper. No wagons came or left from his courtyard, and he could see his fortune dwindle away. Some men would have surrendered, but Demirill hung on, and I am afraid that he took out his frustrations on the slaves, so that they suffered even more than they had before. Perhaps it was a necessary sacrifice. They suffered but no more slaves were purchased for that house, and when Demirill’s clerks rose up against him and murdered him, the house fell, ensuring that its tortures and abuses would end forever. The clerks were tried for the murder of their master, and sold into slavery themselves. This is what we call the King’s Justice in Rahasabahst.

  Maetahtild inherited everything that was left. She sold Demirill’s house and bought the House of Song. She made it a haven for other women. The artists and poets of our fair city were always welcome there, and Nolio spent many a happy night sitting in the courtyard, listening to the singing and scratching down words and phrases on his sanmatra leaves. His love was doomed, of course, but he didn’t seem to mind. And there remained a pleasing balance to our lives. Until that day when we took Princess Iyedraeka to the shrine. That was the day that I noticed Thaeto staring at Maetahtild as she walked across Barmzahva Plaza.