His Majesty's Elephant Read Free Page A

trying to embroider when she had to stop every few stitches to let someone climb over her.
    She knew perfectly well that she should find a maid to run the errand, or ask one of her sisters to go with her. But that had always been her chief rebellion: to go out alone.
    There was silver in her purse, and a fistful of copper. It would do.
    She put on her plainest gown and tied up her hair in a bit of linen. Her heart was racing, which was silly. She went alone to the market all the time. But it never quite stopped being an adventure.
    oOo
    With the Caliph’s men in the city, and now the Byzantines, the market had swelled out of its square and into the streets round about. Merchants came from everywhere to show their wares, and people came to buy them or to trade for them.
    Cooks and bakers came in to feed the crowds, and sellers of wine and ale, and butchers and poulterers, cheesemongers, spice-merchants, greengrocers and fruitsellers; and for those who ate too much, apothecaries with their stalls full of wonderful things. Rowan could follow her nose through the market, pork roasting here, cheese aging there, bread baking, wine spilling, and once a sweetness so strong that she staggered: spices whose names she barely knew, steeped in honey and mixed in cakes or wine.
    She was not looking for things to eat. Simply smelling them was enough. In among them she found the other things: gold and silver and copper, bronze and iron forged into shapes as noble as weapons or as lowly as buckles for a harness, perfumes as powerful as the spices, flowers as potent as the perfumes, the good pungent smell of well-tanned leather, the warm oily scent of woven wool, the dusty-dry smell of linen.
    She found the thread she was looking for, woven gold and dear enough to all but empty her purse, but the woman who sold it to her slipped in a twist of silk, too. “To match your eyes,” she said.
    The silk was an odd color, which was probably why it came unpaid for: not quite grey, not quite green. Rowan liked to think that her eyes were greyer than that, or at least less muddy. They would not ever be pure clear blue like Bertha’s or Gisela’s. Her hair was no-color, too, beside Bertha’s wheat-gold and Gisela’s wonderful almost-silver: neither brown nor gold but somewhere between.
    She was glad of the thread, for all that, and she said so. The way the woman looked at her, Rowan knew her name was no secret, or her rank, either. But people in the Emperor’s city had a courtesy. They let the Emperor’s children go unnoticed if they wanted it.
    oOo
    With her booty in her purse next to a lonely copper penny, Rowan took the long way back to the palace. She skirted the walls and meandered for a while through the narrow twisting streets, now up toward the great tall tower that was her father’s chapel, now down around the crumbling Roman pillars of the baths.
    There was a garden in back of that. The gate had a latch and a bolt, but it opened when she tried it. She slipped through.
    Her father’s garden was young yet. There were trees that would be lovely when they were older, and beds of flowers that needed to thicken a little, like hair on a baby’s head. But the little orchard that had been there since the palace was a Roman villa was thriving handsomely.
    Rowan could feel the cool of the trees even before she came to them, blessed in the day’s heat. There were bees singing in the grass, and a flock of sparrows squabbling in the branches.
    Her favorite tree stood in the middle. It was ancient but sturdy, and it bore a good crop every year.
    The best of it, aside from its apples, was the way it branched, making a seat just the right size for Rowan. If she rested her back against the rise of the trunk and stretched her legs along the twining of two branches, only someone who knew where to look could see her from below. She had eluded nurses so when she was small, and officious callers-to-duty when she was