Page 42 of The Second Marriage
Taral sent a message to Simra the very day he arrived in Banuri, and she sent a message back saying she would be delighted to visit with him at her shop and show him her latest acquisitions. The morning after the welcoming feast, he rose and dressed before breakfast, so that he could eat as soon as their food arrived and be on his way.
“It’s so early,” Sejun complained, still lounging in the bed, his hair spilling across the pillow as if he had artfully arranged it that way. “Why are you leaving already?”
“I’m going to visit my friend Simra. The curiosities dealer.” Taral peered at his reflection in the mirror. After years of exchanging letters with Simra, he felt unaccountably nervous about meeting her in person. Well, at worst, they would have an awkward encounter and never meet again, although he would be sorry to lose the pleasure of her correspondence.
“I remember, but why do you need to go before the sun’s even risen?” Sejun groaned and turned his head toward the window. “I suppose it’s over the horizon now. But only barely.”
“Poor Sejun, abandoned to his own devices.” Taral determined he had no crust in his eyes and no blemishes on his face. He turned away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed, and ran his hand over Sejun’s head, fingers sliding through the dark silk of his hair. “You could come with me.”
Sejun scrunched his nose, considering. “No, I think you should go by yourself. I’d only be a distraction.” He smiled at Taral. “You can tell me all about it later.”
So Taral went alone. Simra’s shop was in the market district, a dense tangle of narrow streets lined with tall buildings, apartments above and shops below. The early morning streets were quiet but not deserted, and he caught many curious looks from people passing by on their own errands. Although he couldn’t read the signs above the doors, Simra had given him detailed directions, and he knew her shop at once when he saw it, from the large fossil of a fish prominently displayed in the front window.
The door was locked. He applied himself to the heavy bronze door knocker. He heard a scraping noise from inside, and then the door opened to reveal a woman of about Abiral’s age, her dark hair streaked with silver at the temples. Her draped red gown was printed in a pattern of small white dots. She looked him over, taking in his attire that marked him as a foreigner, and then her face broke into a wide smile.
“Taral?” she asked.
Taral felt his own smile stretching his cheeks. He clasped his hands together and bowed to her. “Simra, I’m so glad to see you.”
They stood there looking at each other. Taral wondered what she thought of him in the flesh after so long of knowing him only as a faceless letter-writer. He knew about her work, her wife, her beloved tabby cat, and her opinions about the taxonomy of bony fishes. How strange to finally have a physical form to attach to this person he knew so well.
Simra laughed a little. “Well, come in, then. Would you like to see the shipment I got yesterday? From Absou. I haven’t opened it yet.” She spoke Dirang with a thick accent, but Taral made sense of the words after a moment, and was very pleased to accept.
The interior of the shop was dim so early in the morning, with the sun still below the hills to the east. Taral had never been inside a curiosities shop—there were none in Tadasho—but it was less cluttered than he had pictured, although he did have to duck a large skeleton of a fish mounted onto a wire frame and suspended from the ceiling. Rows of shelves contained neatly arranged specimens with labels written in Simra’s familiar hand. Simra was no eccentric, and she wouldn’t tolerate disorder.
Simra had stashed the crate behind the long counter along one wall of the room. Taral lit an oil lamp and held it at her shoulder as she crouched to pry off the lid. She had been born without her right hand, as she had told him in her message—I want to safeguard you from staring or asking silly questions, she had written—but she had no trouble using that arm to help open the crate. Inside, a nest of sawdust held an object wrapped in batting, which Simra removed and lifted onto the counter.
“I’m not sure what it is,” she said as she removed the batting with her one hand. “The merchant said he bought it off a dealer in the capital, who said he got it from a farmer near the coast who dug it up in her field. What do they grow there, cotton?”
“I think cotton,” Taral said with more authority than he felt. Absou lay even beyond Skopa, not unfathomably distant but distant enough that Taral had never given the country much thought. “And you bought it without knowing what’s inside the crate?”
“Apparently the dealer couldn’t identify it. So of course I had to purchase this mystery.” She drew the final layer of batting away, and they both leaned in to peer at the marvel contained within.
It was a jaw bone, Taral saw at once. There was no mistaking the shape, or the teeth. But what sort of animal it had come from, he could only guess. The fearsomely sharp teeth suggested a predator’s diet, but the long, slender corpus and upright ramus made him think more of a deer. With a glance at Simra for permission, he lifted the jaw in his hands to examine it more closely. In the light of the lamp, the teeth gleamed like opals.
“I assumed the dealer was simply a fool,” Simra said. “But I don’t have any idea what manner of creature this might be.”
“A dragon,” Taral said, remembering his conversation with Sejun at the quarry.
Simra snorted, but she didn’t say he was wrong. “Well, I planned to sell this, but maybe I’ll keep it instead and write it up for the journals. There’s a man in Nirawi who likes to send me very argumentative letters about all of my treatises, so I’d like to hear what he thinks it might be.” She took the jaw from Taral’s hands and wrapped in it the batting. “Can I offer you some tea? My manners are appalling.”
“Tea is the one thing Chedi and Tadasho have in common,” Taral said, and Simra laughed.
She led him to a room in the back that seemed to serve as an office, cramped and cluttered to Taral’s sensibilities. The Chedai didn’t like to sit on the floor, and their dwellings were crowded with chairs and divans and large stationary desks. Shelves mounted on the walls held a library’s worth of books. Simra motioned to an upholstered chair pushed into a corner by the window, and Taral sat, perched upright at the edge of the seat. He didn’t understand how this was meant to be more comfortable than sitting on a cushion, where one could sprawl at leisure.
Simra went out for a few minutes and came back with milky tea and sweet bean cakes. “So tell me,” she said as she laid the tray on her desk, “how was your journey here? The passage through the mountains?”
“Uneventful.” Taral watched Simra pour even more milk into her tea from a tiny pitcher. “And very interesting, I thought, seeing the landscape change. That’s an impressive boundary fault between here and Ripuk.”
“Oh, I don’t know much about geology,” Simra said, a modest but false statement based on references she had made in her letters to monographs Taral had never managed to find. “But the merchants always do complain when they bring me your latest treasures. Tadasho is too far, they tell me, and yet they go back again.”
“You must make it worth their while.” Taral held his cup in both hands, waiting for the tea to cool to a reasonable temperature. Simra was watching him, and he found he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.
She set her cup on the desk. “It’s strange to hear your voice after so long. I’m discovering that I don’t say some words correctly. I learned Dirang from a Chedai man, and it seems he misled me to some extent.”
Taral smiled at her. “You speak very well. Dirang is the common tongue, but it’s not my first language. We speak our own tongue in Tadasho. And we all have our own dialects of Dirang, too, so I don’t speak the way someone from Samtse would. You shouldn’t take my pronunciations as the standard.” He sighed. “And anyway, your Dirang is much better than my Chedai.”
“You have interpreters, don’t you, for your work in the palace?”