Traders' Coming (last part)
How Lili ended up being mightily confused and with an unexpected gift.
I looked on, confused, as the trader brought out a several big lumps of copper. Then proceeded to ask, again rather off-handedly, as if it didn’t matter much: “How much Bisuar will you need, young man? Plan to make something specific out of it?”
The tone had changed entirely, compared to the one he’d given me. Like… this one was a real question. One that actually meant what it asked. What he wanted to make of it, maybe, in the sense of judging quantity, nothing else.
“Suni might help you with that, depending on what it is,” he added almost as an afterthought.
Wait a minute.
Suni was the one… we’d just come from, wasn’t she? I was sniffing the first hint of a trail of … something there. They had some kind of… arrangement, did they? Stuck together after all? Oh Anur, I wanted to say, be careful. If they’re just playing all of us like the crooks my parents claim all traders to be… They did come in as a group after all. If Anur thought he’d get better here… he might actually get a worse deal than the first one, if they stuck together like that. No? I did get that about right, didn’t I?
I wasn’t sure. Maybe I was making it all up and it was about something else entirely.
“Enough to make two good soles or a small bag, roundabout,” Anur replied. “Nothing too much. We can do with scraps to stitch together, too. Is that copper pure all the way through, mind you?”
He changed his tone a bit into the skeptical range at the latter, having been rather neutral on the first one. The leather didn’t matter much to Anur, after all.
Wait. Did it? I sent him a sideways look. That had just seemed… rather strange, for some reason. Almost as if he actually were interested in Bisuar, after all. For some of his own, too. Had he thought of something he wanted, after all? Something worth cutting a larger piece into shares for? My mind scrambled for how the hell we’d sort that out, losing the next bits of back and forth entirely.
.
Tay was suddenly pushing me over to the third of them. The one who wouldn’t even talk to me; making me even more confused, while Anur stayed over in the middle, still haggling, apparently. My brain was now split in two. Trying to make sense of why the hell Tay had grabbed me as well as still occupied by Anur’s words in the back.
“Split that open for me? And don’t tell me it’ll be worth less after. Gotta have to be melted down, anyway. I’m no novice to the craft. Got a smith here of our own, you see.”
I didn’t quite get the protest of the man past the tone of it that followed, because Tay was interrupting me with a question now. One I didn’t get either, in that situation. I mean, I heard him talking. Even replied with a muttered ‘yeah, mhm’, but… then I was suddenly left with the realization I couldn’t remember a lick of what he’d just said.
“Come again?” The words just slipped out, my face heating up, realizing I had spoken them. Emperor’s tits, Liliana. At least don’t tell em! You know what follows if you don’t shut yar trap on something like that.
.
Tay did no such thing, however. Just kindly repeated: “I asked, was this the one you meant?” Holding a piece of leather under my nose.
“Oh. Yes. Yes, that’s the one.” I hurriedly nodded my head up and down, grateful that he wasn’t angry about my obliviousness. Now quietly annoyed by the loud haggling next stall over. And worried about what the hell we’d do with two pieces of the leather, if both Anur and Tay got one. I didn’t need more than one small scrap! Well, that and enough to make a good string. For which a long, unbroken strap would actually be better, but… I guess fat chance of getting that, right?
“Tay.” I tugged on his sleeve, as quietly as I could. “Tay. What are we doing? Isn’t Anur already getting some?”
Tay just smiled at me, ruffling my hair. “It’s okay, Lilly. I know what Anur wants.”
He bent down then and whispered in my ear while the trader’s back was turned, apparently to get some more variety to choose from, judging by what he turned back with right after. “Don’t worry. He’ll need more than just that, anyway.”
Losing me entirely again. He patted my hair once more, not helping to undo the confusion. “It’s okay. His mum and sisters already asked me to play middle-man.”
They did what? For what, by world’s sake?
He wouldn’t say. Turned back to the trader instead, inspecting the goods, while the trader was lecturing about different colors, different traits. Apparently, some were made to withstand being dunked in water; others he claimed could withstand a fire or even acid. That was… I hadn’t known. What the hell is ‘asseed’?
.
“What have you two found?” Jannai chimed in from the side, all curious, if somewhat mumbly, due to the fact that she was now munching down on some sugary-looking big puffball of a fluffy bun that seemed to taste heavenly, according to the bliss on her face. She didn’t offer any of us a bite.
Must be her first. She never offered on her first, the one she would still eat very, very slowly—though she was always generous with what came after. If not as slow by half… The sight made my mouth water, wondering what the buns would taste like. This time around had brought us three traders. Three! With stuff I’d never seen before. It almost made me want to spend some of the dull iron things, if I’d get back some. But I’d better keep them…
My belly gurgled, obviously disagreeing.
Jannai sent me a look and landed a meaty hand on my shoulder that seemed stuck somewhere between pity and worry at that. Her other hand went fishing in the pockets of her big apron-dress, drawing forth an apple that might or might not be stolen from the inn’s backyard. It surely had to be from there, no matter the manner of acquisition. And we could never quite tell with Anur. She’d likely gotten that from Anur. Unless she’d gone climbing herself. As climbing training, of course.
Sometimes apples did find their way into her pockets along the way down, though. Often though, it was only the ones lying on the ground already. No use wasting, you see? If the sisters didn’t have enough time to pick em up to use in the kitchens before they wasted… The sisters, because Anur would always hand us some, anyway, if he was sent for such chores. He always did, kind soul that he was. Or maybe that was just because it was sure to entice some of us to help pick them up, less strain on his own back from all the bending. They had quite a lot of trees, you see.
.
“Can any of them be dyed more easily?” Tay was asking meanwhile. “Fire and water protection would be nice, but we most definitely need the dye application. For the bigger parts, at least. If you got some scraps, it wouldn’t hurt. For later mending, you know. Don’t even need to be dyable, those.”
“Tay.” Jannai used that scolding tone when he’d done something wrong.
“What?” He half-turned around to stare at her.
“You should’ve let me,” she said. Then took another small bite from her bun, mumbling: “Not much to be done about it now, I guess.”
“Done about what?” I asked her.
“The price, obviously,” she answered. “Tay is very bad at haggling.”
She said it both as if that were a simple fact, if one that made her sigh, inwardly—and also a flaw of character. I flinched a little at that. I don’t think I had much of a talent for that, either. She didn’t seem to notice, lost in her bun bliss. Which was, maybe, better that way, I thought.
“I don’t need to haggle,” Tay replied indignantly at the next chance, when the trader turned around to rummage some in his cart. Probably digging for the scraps Tay had mentioned, seeing whatever he could bring up for that. “I’m a noble, you know.”
“Yeah. You go waving around that flag. Sure everyone’s real grateful if the price they gotta pay goes up because of that. Because you’re playing the in-between when you shouldn’t. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to ask you of all people to do that?”
It was a small wonder how Jannai could pronounce something that clearly while her mouth was full as a hamster’s bringing home whatever they’d found for winter. She was very obviously starting down phase #2 now.
“Want a bite?” she graciously offered to me, even as she shook her head at Tay, who was turning back to the stall to take a look, sorting through what seemed to be the scrap pile container.
So they did have scraps. And the man didn’t wanna sell a single one to me? Seriously. He hadn’t even asked how large of a scrap. Maybe he just didn’t want iron…
.
Yeah. I still didn’t realize what I must’ve looked like to him. More street urchin than even fisher child, the way I was spattered with mud, and how tattered the cloth on my thin body was. And that, too. My thinness, I mean.
I never gained any girth, not even when Anur or Ferrick’s family seemed insistent on force-feeding me, whenever I was around near meal times. The carpenters were very nice. Though maybe they were just happy if Ferrick stayed around a bit longer or had some friends to bring home at all, other than Anur. They fussed about him a lot. He didn’t like staying at home but always got in trouble outside. Didn’t help that he was all opposite-like as my mum used to say. Admittedly, Mamma said a lot when the day was long, and it wasn’t always true–but that one was. I saw it myself most every day. At least every day Ferrick was around. All his boasting and endless competitiveness didn’t exactly earn him a lot of laudations. Though he didn’t seem to pick up on that fact. Which always made sticking around for meals with the carpenters a double-sided affair. On the one hand… I always got a belly not grumbling. On the other… now it would be burping for days instead. And also… I always kinda felt strangely ashamed of all that. And worried. Despite all the stuffing—what if they decided I accepted too much? More than they wanted to give? What if they really wanted me to politely decline? I never quite knew which was which. People were so fucking hard to read when they didn’t quite say what they wanted. Sometimes people offered only to be polite but expected you to be polite back and decline. I’d fallen into that trap more than once, with our neighbors. Now they muttered behind my back and gave me those glances that came along with bad feelings.
I sighed.
.
Jannai patted me on my back. In a way that said she’d just taken the sigh as contentment, of all things. Ugh.
“Viveka,” Tay replied, when next he got a chance to turn around. Which, this time, meant he made the chance, by stalling the trader—a much older man, compared to his youth—by holding up a hand. Effectively shutting the Older up, by simple status play. Gods. Why? He wasn’t Truthteller—or Truthmouth, in fact, being what Warmun meant literally—he was just his son. Not much older than me or Jannai, in fact. That one always got me. Especially if it happened even with strangers to the village.
His single-word answer kinda got the same reaction from me, other than that, as from Jannai, though. Ugh. I exchanged a short glance with my bestie. Yeah. Why did you even ask? Of course it was Anur’s oldest sister. Couldn’t be anyone else. Only Viveka was that kind of a spendthrift. Ivory-tower, my Ma would call it. Whatever the heck that meant. Obviously that she didn’t know much about the world. At least she’d said something of the like around dropping that about one of the neighbors when they’d done something she didn’t like. She did that … a lot, really. But in the case of Viveka… yeah. I bet more or less the whole village would agree. — Just like they would agree that I had my ‘head in the clouds’ a whole lot... Still better than the nose up in the sky—as they also said about Viveka—if you asked me.
I hadn’t understood either one expression during my first few years.
Then Jannai had taken pity on me, once I opened up enough to start bothering her about things, and explained what it really meant, which was not at all what the words seemed to say–which had seemed rather impossible, anyway, so in that case I’d been kinda prepared already that they must mean something else. I just didn’t know what. Which, in actuality, didn’t bother her at all. The me asking. Jannai just… liked talking, really. She rarely minded being asked stuff. Even when she didn’t know the answers. Then she just shrugged. And started asking around. And a good thing one of us did because I would’ve never dared. But she could. And she did. Had no fear of nothing, that one. Well. At least nothing I’d found out about yet.
.
“And if I haggled badly, they won’t have to pay anything more than they think fair,” Tay added, interrupting my thoughts and drawing my gaze to him once more.
“How?” I mouthed, my voice small while my confusion was large. Then it dawned on me: Noble. Again. Really, Liliana. You should’ve understood that by now.
Not noble enough to take care of the sick in the village, though, my mother’s voice ran scathingly along the back of my skull’s inside like a razor drawn across skin. Ouch. Really, mom? Why can’t you just be grateful he’s helping in ways he can? He cannot take so much, he’s just his son. He can pay for small things, but that… I was sure he couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t think something like that about my friend. My own milk brother. Suggesting he could’ve stopped Feréll’s and Ommá’s illnesses somehow, and everyone else’s on top, was … that was simply too enormous to bear. He couldn’t. You must be wrong, mum. It can’t be.
Or maybe it just must not be. I didn’t know which. The thought caused me nearly physical pain, making my hand go to my belly. I hurriedly readjusted my grip on Ommá’s silver. How was I supposed to hide that from my friends now? I was increasingly losing hope about it. And if any of them talked, it would get right back to my own Olders and that… Maybe my belly was clenching for quite a different thing, after all. I knew what would follow if Ma found out about Ommá handing me silver. Even if it was just a single one.
Silver is more precious than you’ll ever be.
That one made me seriously flinch. Enough that I startled Jannai.
“Lili?” A big hand landed on my back, gently. Jannai was just one year older than me—and one year younger than Tay—but her hand was already bigger than either one of ours. “Everything alright there?”
I could hear the worry in her words even, not just behind them. Naturally, I forced a smile, as I had learned to do. “Yeah. Sorry.” I waved my hand as if pointing at something. As if something had zipped along and startled me. Stuff like that happened all the time, anyway.
Jannai patted me once and turned away again, listening intently, now that Tay and the trader were talking about price and amount. Even interfered once after all.
I heard … sounds.
They didn’t make sense in that moment. Didn’t form any coherent words. Neither did Anur’s triumphant smile as he turned from the other stall more or less around that same time, though it should have. That one was supposed to be easy–he’d gotten what he wanted and thought he got a good bargain, too. But I only understood it quite a lot later; much too late, stuck inside my own head for a moment. It felt like an achievement that I had succeeded to lay Jannai’s worry to rest. It also felt… hollow. And somehow… lonely? Bad. But I knew I hadn’t done a bad thing. I wasn’t supposed to make people worry. I knew that by now. Surely putting people’s worry to rest was a good thing then? It had to be. My fist clenched around the silver once more as if I could hold that truth closer by doing so. Pressed it into me. It didn’t help much.
.
My smile was still off when Tay turned from the stall. Too rigid. I knew it.
But he didn’t seem to notice either. “Anur’s gonna be so happy,” he declared.
This time I got the words.
Still didn’t understand them, though. Couldn’t yet connect them to his previous talk about how Viveka and her mother had sent him out to do … something. Get the leather for Anur, that meant. The very best leather they could get. To dye it. I only understood what all those pieces had meant when they finally fell into place of their own, weeks later: It was a gift for Anur. For his naming day. Juggling balls, like he’d been clamoring for, for over a year by then.
On this day, though, I only understood two things.
One: Anur had gotten leather enough to let aunt Caeda make exactly one ball for himself. And enough surplus to make a slingshot as gift for Ferrick and for the tiny bag I wanted.
Two: Tay had obviously… gotten more than planned and paid a far worse price.
.
Three, they were now effectively arguing with each other about who would pay for what, including the scraps for me—though I didn’t understand one bit of that; besides that I had just gotten very, very lucky, more or less by happenstance, because both had already had their own reasons to want leather, good leather, even the best there was. Everything else… made very little sense at all.
In the end, they settled on one giving me the thin thong that would make the strap and the other the scrap that would make the bag through which to wind the strap, by making a few small holes in its rim, just wide enough to fit the leather thong through with effort. That had been Ferrick’s idea when they heard they were making a bag from one piece, but didn’t quite know how to make it close, in a way that seemed safe.
Jannai had wheedled out of me that I needed a secure bag, of course. I still didn’t quite know how, but she had. She had also not told the boys about why. She hadn’t even asked about why. And told them in a way that implied it was for her, and not me at all. But of course she handed it over to me when it was done. She was the one to make the holes anyway. Ferrick had contemplated using carpentry tools on it, almost causing Jannai a hissy fit about it, exclaiming those were the entirely wrong tools to try that and that he’d just ruin very precious leather that wasn’t cheap at all. Not even scraps of it. They had a whole half-screaming match about it, too. But of course Jannai won that one. She always did, when she really put her mind to it, and will in it.
.
Made her father fit it with tiny metal rings, too, from the scrap metal of the new pot for the inn. Some of them were crooked and a bit strange. Turned out, she’d been using the opportunity to try her own hand on making tiny rings. Her Da didn’t often make things as small as that. Though he did have some tools for the odd job that would’ve fit a jeweler or locksmith better. Not quite the right ones, though. And we most certainly didn’t have either job in our village. Wouldn’t have had much use for it.
Someone had helped her Da though, while we’d been watching the games, nothing else to do but wait, which continued all through the traders’ visit, only leaving of after they’d gone, every time. Probably Ferrick’s dad. Carving tools being better for some things despite what Jannai had said. Especially making those small runnels in the rings, so they could fit left and right of the leather in between. I marveled at how they held at all, when we went back after the games, and Jannai handed me the little purse, keepsake for whatever treasure I might want to put in there. String long enough to hide it under my shirt and hair, no one the wiser.
Hammered and pressed together, according to Jannai. I’d just trust her on that. Knew shit all about smithing, after all, and less of making tiny rings to fit inside of the tiny holes punched out of the small leather piece to wind the thong through. She also said I was one lucky gal, for them to have the copper ready like that—though it wasn’t that unusual. Still got used for a lot of cooking utensils, seemingly, even with how iron had taken over for many in our region, according to her Da. Copper was easier to hammer and bend into shape, and took well to heat and water both, he claimed. Or so she said. I’d trust her on that as well.
I tried to thank her for all that work, happy to finally be able to unclench my fist and put the silver in there, still intact and not exchanged for whatever coppers would have remained at all. She told me to go stick it somewhere, and bother the boys. That’s Jannai for you in a nutshell.
.
Of course I went to do just that. Didn’t get much of a better reaction from them, either, truth be told, when I tried to thank them profusely, as best I could, still not good with my words. Though they worded it more politely, of course, less directly. Anur told me “not for a single string” and to take it as a small part of what he supposedly still owed me, for the flute lessons. That was how I’d got to know him—been playing the reed flute at one of the old jetties at the lake, those that were disused and already falling apart; and he’d come crawling round the corner.
Anur was a bit younger than me, you see. And still his words were much better by now than mine. No chance of arguing against that, even if I thought my fluting rather bad, and not much of a lesson at all. I’d just shown him that one needed to cover the holes with fingers, could cover varying ones for varying effect, and the rest was blowing air in. Couldn’t even quite show him how to get that right; he’d learned it of his own, by trying around, just like I had. But you couldn’t get a word in with Anur, if he didn’t want you to. At least I couldn’t.
And Tay? Don’t even get me started. I should’ve had better cards there, what with him paying for most of it. But he just turned it all back on its head. Said that part had been in the inn’s general bill, couldn’t quite be extracted, worth less than it would take to try and calculate all that, and most of it had been in the discount they’d given him because, you know, village head. They wanted to stay on good terms with his father, to be allowed back and get the drop on any competitors for the Mist’s Tears that they’d truly come here for, all the stuff they were selling—which was little enough, according to him—only a threadbare cover for that. Told me they got rich enough on the fish.
My head was swimming from it all, trying to follow. I also had rather big trouble believing that last one. We fished all day, all year after all—or rather, Da and the rest of the fishers did—but we didn’t get any rich by doing so. Sometimes didn’t even bring home enough to stop my belly grumbling. But of course I didn’t say that. There was no sense arguing with Tay, when he was stuck on his own point of view. He just rolled all over me with his big words, and that was that.
So, somehow I was left with a bag no one wanted to be responsible for, for free. Silver still intact, keepsake saved. That’s Traders’ Coming for you.
Or maybe just my friends.