[piosenniel]

Belin's post

Farucan left the warehouse with some satisfaction. He cared little for trade, with all its distastefully obvious struggles for gain and position, but this had been a good day, and a certain tactic of his had yielded far more than he had expected, much to the chagrin of the southern caravan leader with whom he’d been dealing, an irritating man who glared at Farucan more fiercely than did any of the native hagglers. At moments like this he could understand the smug bearing of the Gondorian merchants, and, for a moment or two, he amused himself by attempting to imitate it. The parody was a bit too obvious, he thought; a small, graceful man of Harad who has spent his life in the shadows can hardly hope to capture the essence of bulky, unabashed pride the way the Gondorians did, at any rate not without years of practice. Perhaps he would make a study of it if he didn’t hate them so much. He shrugged and continued down the street in his normal gliding fashion until he reached the appointed meeting place, another warehouse of his and one that he hardly used for purposes other than this. After shooing away his servants, a pair of slack-jawed youths he’d picked up on the Osgiliath docks and who really ought to have been more grateful, all things considered, he settled down to wait for the messenger. These meetings still unsettled him, in a way. He had his share of what the Gondorians would call superstitions, and there was something unnatural about these extraordinary messengers. He did not like their silent stares or their graceful disdain. They were more like him than any living creature he’d met in this city and he didn’t like it. But who was he to argue with a queen?

The three messengers, unable to open the door, moved silently around its corner, and Farucan, quickly and politely to the extent that it was possible to be both, closed the door behind them. They wandered around the warehouse for a few minutes, pretending to be interested in boxes of coffee and yards of fabric.

Farucan cleared his throat. “What does the queen have to say to me today?” he asked in his driest and most professional voice. The messengers turned and stared at him, and then at each other. The smallest of them sat down and gazed philosophically into the distance, while the other two moved toward him, silently as ever. He could not suppress a shudder as he took the written message from them. “Give the queen my thanks,” he said, controlling himself, “and tell her that I will send her some fine carpets in the morning. Here, I will write it down.”

The smallest messenger jumped up and ran over to him as he wrote, and it was to him that Farucan gave the message. And then they left, not walking in straight lines the way everything else seemed to move in this city, but wandering through shadows and turning for trifles. To be sure it was clever. Nobody would expect such important news as they carried to be in the hands—or, to put it more properly, around the necks—of cats.

[ June 28, 2003: Message edited by: piosenniel ]