Equal Rites

that—”
    “I bet she did,” said Amschat. He looked at the senior wife, who nodded almost imperceptibly.
    “Very well,” he said. “If you can make yourself useful you can stay. And can you play a musical instrument?”
    Esk returned his steady gaze, not batting an eyelid. “Probably.”

    And so Esk, with the minimum of difficulty and only a little regret, left the Ramtops and their weather and joined the Zoons on their great trading journey down the Ankh.
    There were at least thirty barges with at least one sprawling Zoon family on each, and no two vessels appeared to be carrying the same cargo; most of them were strung together, and the Zoons simply hauled on the cable and stepped on to the next deck if they fancied a bit of socializing.
    Esk set up home in the fleeces. It was warm, smelled slightly of Granny’s cottage and, much more important, meant that she was undisturbed.
    She was getting a bit worried about magic.
    It was definitely getting out of control. She wasn’t doing magic, it was just happening around her. And she sensed that people probably wouldn’t be too happy if they knew.
    It meant that if she washed up she had to clatter and splash at length to conceal the fact that the dishes were cleaning themselves. If she did some darning she had to do it on some private part of the deck to conceal the fact that the edges of the hole raveled themselves together as if…as if by magic. Then she woke up on the second day of her voyage to find that several of the fleeces around the spot where she had hidden the staff had combed, carded and spun themselves into neat skeins during the night.
    She put all thoughts of lighting fires out of her head.
    There were compensations, though. Every sluggish turn of the great brown river brought new scenes. There were dark stretches hemmed in with deep forest, through which the barges traveled in the dead center of the river with the men armed and the women below—except for Esk, who sat listening with interest to the snortings and sneezings that followed them through the bushes on the banks. There were stretches of farmland. There were several towns much larger than Ohulan. There were even some mountains, although they were old and flat and not young and frisky like her mountains. Not that she was homesick, exactly, but sometimes she felt like a boat herself, drifting on the edge of an infinite rope but always attached to an anchor.
    The barges stopped at some of the towns. By tradition only the men went ashore, and only Amschat, wearing his ceremonial Lying hat, spoke to non-Zoons. Esk usually went with him. He tried hinting that she should obey the unwritten rules of Zoon life and stay afloat, but a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.
    Anyway, it seemed to Amschat that when Esk was with him he always got a very good price. There was something about a small child squinting determinedly at them from behind his legs that made even market-hardened merchants hastily conclude their business.
    In fact, it began to worry him. When a market broker in the walled town of Zemphis offered him a bag of ultramarines in exchange for a hundred fleeces a voice from the level of his pockets said: “They’re not ultramarines.”
    “Listen to the child!” said the broker, grinning. Amschat solemnly held one of the stones to his eye.
    “I am listening,” he said, “and they do indeed look like ultramarines. They have the glit and shimmy.”
    Esk shook her head. “They’re just spircles,” she said. She said it without thinking, and regretted it immediately as both men turned to stare at her.
    Amschat turned the stone over in his palm. Putting the chameleon spircle stones into a box with some real gems so that they appeared to change their hue was a traditional trick, but these had the true inner blue fire. He looked up sharply at the broker. Amschat had been finely trained in the art of the Lie. He recognized the subtle signs, now that he came to think about it.
    “There seems to be a doubt,” he said, “but ’tis easily resolved, we need only take them to the assayer in Pine Street because the world knows that spircles will dissolve in hypactic fluid, yesno?”
    The broker hesitated. Amschat had changed position slightly, and the set of his muscles suggested that any sudden movement on the