10: To Be Water

Around sunset, Serei transforms. The docks close up, market peddlers and merchants melt into the terraced streets, and everyone comes out to enjoy the cooling air. A big part of that are the fountains, which during the day serve as water supply, but at night become public baths, with anyone who wants to cool off or take a soak welcome to do so.

In Polities, we learned this is one of the things Serei is famous for, not just its complicated aqueducts and beautiful fountains, but the general absence of shame about our bodies that foreigners find so strange. Men and women and children and elderly all share the same fountain, usually the one closest to home, and will often lounge outside the water naked, drying off, buying a bag of milk dumplings or plum fritters from the night vendors, their hanging lamps the only illumination as the sky darkens.

Ironically, it’s the thing that feels hardest to me. I didn’t grow up in this city. I grew up in the temple, constantly needing to hide the fact that I’m a girl, especially after my body started to look different. I should be worried about stealing someone else’s clothes in plain sight, but what I’m icing is the anxiety of taking my own off.

I do it quick and get into the water quicker, sinking in to my shoulders. It’s delicious, flowing and cool after the heat of the day. I haven’t bathed in two days or more, and though it’s weird to do it with twenty or so other people around me, I spend the first while just getting clean.

I used to watch these baths from the temple roof, wondering what it was like to be free, to be normal, to just relax at the end of the day with no worry about trainers reading your blind, theocrats plotting against your father, or students gunning for you just because you were a girl. Now that I’m here I don’t feel free at all—rather one eye watches for overseers while I listen to the fountain in watersight. It’s not lost on me that this is a great time to gather information—I know overseers listen every night, but with so many people in the water, and my blind still thick as ever, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make anything out. But with the twentyish people around me so close, I can hear their thoughts clear as a bell.

Like the woman next to me, a cloth merchant and mother of five, nursing an aching hip in the water and dreaming about the cloveleaf she’s going to smoke when she gets out. From what I can gather, she’s been pretty successful. Maybe she knows something about the strange trade depression the city entered into at the end of my father’s reign.

“Nothing like a bath after a long day,” I say, wishing I wasn’t such slop at words.

She grunts. “Wait till you have kids. You don’t know what a long day is.”

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“I can’t really afford to have any, right now,” I say, trying to steer the conversation. I wish Dashan was here. He’d know what to say.

Another grunt. “None of us can, with these new taxes.”

Okay. That’s better. Maybe I can do this.

“Is the temple adding new taxes, then?”

“You could call them that.” She sighs and sinks lower in the water. “More like bribes. If you want your storehouse safe, they say, you’ll want to add a few marks extra. Or we’re stretched thin right now. If you can spare some extra for the overseers, we could keep them closer.”

I read a lot more in the water: theocrats increasing taxes, other merchants complaining of sloppy policing by the overseers, talk of the temple being more interested in money than in its religious duties to the city.

“This is new?”

“Since Stergjon, yes. He never would have allowed this.”

Pride swells in my heart so much I have to ice it. Stay focused. This could be proof some merchants are getting special treatment under the traditionalists. And Nerimes listed collapsing trade as one of the things they blamed my father for. This woman might know different.

“What of the poor trade at the end of Stergjon’s rule? Didn’t he kind of let things fall apart?”

The merchant shakes her head. “Not that I could see. Though they did get better quickly after he left.”

I scan her thoughts for any knowledge of the temple interfering in trade, any trace of the traditionalists, but there’s nothing.

“Do you think the overseers might be busy guarding whoever helped Nerimes into power?”

The woman sucks in a breath, glancing around. “Watch your mouth, girl. That’s not talk for a public bath.”

Floods. I turn the conversation to lighter topics, still reading her thoughts, but there’s nothing else useful. Still, she didn’t deny some merchants getting special treatment, and the way she reacted says there’s probably something to it.

I grimace. Not that it will work as proof. I need to find someone who was involved in helping Nerimes. Who funded the criers. That would be proof.

She wishes me good night after a few minutes, and I remember I’m here to do more than sleuth. I’m here to get my first real clothes.

So I get out, stark naked, blushing despite the low light. People chat on the edge of the fountain, drying in the warm air, kids screaming and playing in the water. I manage to ice my embarrassment, but I don’t think I can stand here naked for long.

So I walk to the benches and take the wrong stack of clothes.

It’s a woman’s blouse and leggings. I walk toward the vendor stands, trying to look casual while I hold them against my chest and pray someone doesn’t come screaming after me. Not that any of them could pose a threat to me, unless they called the overseers, but I’m learning it’s better not to make a scene. To be water, Urte would say.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing out here. Maybe that’s the lesson I need to find my father’s killer, and what’s allowed me to gather as much evidence as I have in the last few days. I don’t know, but as I climb a nearby tailor shop and run the roofs back to Gaxna’s, I feel a strange contentment. As if, for the first time in a long time, everything might be okay.