The Sea Peoples(43)
Or historical novels, she thought, with a slightly snide edge to her mental tone. Whereas in Oz, we call it a mail shirt or a fence-wire jumper.
The man they were following went through the part-glass door, giving a glimpse of a long dim hallway ending in a stairwell. The entrance rang a bell as it opened. On its heels came a hearty voice crying:
“Come in, Mr. Castaigne!”
Then a continuing murmur of voices as it closed, ringing the bell again; she thought she could hear another voice, a man’s, and then a woman’s, but too muffled to catch what was said.
Pip slowed, dawdling, watching the street for a little until she could see out of the corner of her eye that their target wasn’t loitering just inside, then held up two fingers and went through the door. Deor followed, while Toa leaned on his shovel and held the box so that it shadowed his face, while Thora pulled a piece of paper out of her handbag and pretended to read it . . . or possibly really did.
It would help if I knew what I was supposed to do with this thing once we catch it, Pip thought. As the dog said when he took out after the stagecoach!
The dim hallway within had a door to the armorer’s shop, left slightly ajar; the distinctive tinka-tinka-tinka of a metalworkers’ hammer sounded within, absurdly familiar in this alien place, and then voices. On the wall opposite was a list of other establishments, not terribly different except in detail from Townsville or Cairns or Darwin or even Hobart; tailors, cobblers, a used and antiquarian bookshop, a maker and repairer of musical instruments (at which she could feel Deor twitch with interest) and one truly strange one reading:
A. Wilde, Repairer of Reputations, 3rd floor.
Deor didn’t twitch at that one; he stared at it fixedly, then slowly lifted his gray gaze to the stairs.
“Carefully,” he said, his voice almost a murmur. “We’re in the right place, but gang very carefully from here. There is that here which might know what we are, and destroy us if we’re unwary.”
Pip nodded.
“That is a lovely piece of embroidery,” the voice of the man they’d been following said through the doorway to the armorer’s shop.
“It’s the arms of the last Duke of Burgundy,” a woman’s voice said. “See, I’m doing it from this colored plate in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of European royal families’ arms; it will go with a suit my father has restored.”
Someone about my age, Pip thought. And sounding genuinely enthusiastic.
Pip had a better-than-nodding acquaintance with heraldry, through her parents. The Abercrombies had a perfectly genuine and rather complex coat from the College of Heralds which they’d brought with them to Queensland when Queen Victoria was middle-aged; the Balwyns’ was so old it was simple, a red lion rampant dexter. One of her ancestors had worn it on his shield when he followed Godfrey de Bouillon over the walls of Jerusalem in 1099 in steel cap and hauberk, screaming Ville Gagne! with the best, slaughtering anything that moved, wading ankle-deep in blood and looting the place bare.
Embroidery, though . . . I’d rather fight giant squid in a bathtub full of large-curd cottage cheese.
“See, it’s Philip the Bold’s.”
“Complex arms,” the man said again.
“Yes, they became very elaborate then, towards the beginning of the Renaissance. One and four quartered azure, semé-de-lys or, a bordure compony of argent and gules; two per pale, bendy of six or and azure, a bordure gules and sable, a lion or, armed and langued gules; three per pale, bendy of six, or and azure, a bordure gules and argent, a lion gules, armed and langued or. Overall, or, a lion sable armed and langued gules. Distinguished from his father’s because it’s brisured by a label argent.”
Heraldry attack! Pip thought. Then: She’s nervous, but chattering because she’s trying to hide it.
The young woman spoke under the sound of the other man’s hammer, and then a metallic clicking and rustling; adjusting tiny bolts and rivets, she thought, and the jingle of mail, and the scuffa-scuffa of a polishing cloth and emery used to remove rust.
“Who is this for?” the first man asked.
The deeper voice replied, listing a complex search for a suit that was apparently of historic value to some collector; it all sounded a bit old-country and odd, since Pip had been brought up in a world where armor was a new craft patterned on designs pulled from books, and valued for its ability to keep your hide unpunctured by the slings and arrows and lances and spears and boomerangs and whatever of outrageous fortune. As embodied in your more outrageous neighbors.
And he’s nervous too. An older man . . . and he’s got a different accent. Rather like Mummy’s or mine, in fact. English, and very wellborn. Odd, here in New York, and working at an artisan’s craft. But then again, Mummy spent most of her life after the Blackout until she married Daddy on the opposite side of the planet from England, doing some rather déclassé things, or ones that would have been if buccaneering weren’t such an old tradition in our family. The girl sounds the same way; the Yank sounds like a Yank, except a bit plummy and old-fashioned, like a book talking. No contractions.
Pip knew what pre-Blackout American accents sounded like; Auntie Fifi had a twanging one that she proudly described as Original Western Trailer-Trash, and there were a variety of others sprinkled thinly about the parts of Oz she’d seen, mostly rather elderly by now. The people with John mostly had very distinctive and different patterns of speech, apparently grown up since the Change, though Captain Feldman’s was more like the pre-Change standard.