The village was the best of her mother's forethought and her father's ability to turn one silver ingot into three. From the winding path cut into Third Hill's side, Asanda could see the red-gold thatching of every clay roundhouse nestled in the valley between the five hills that made the capital. One wide ribbon of beaten earth split the hundred or so residences from the workshop plaza that was the beating heart of the Hundred Hills great trade network.
Most of the livestock had been driven to pastures, which also meant most of the village boys were away, making noon the most peaceful time of day. Even at a distance, the clang and hiss of Bab' Jali's metalwork shop would nick the village's silence around the edges. Racks of cured hides lined the front of Mam' Jali's tannery, set out like a phalanx of hide shields facing her husband's shop across the tiny street. That street should have been walked by one of the royal Curators, inspecting wares and making orders for supplies running low, or a young man cutting out an unhealthy slice of his moon's wages to take a sweetheart to one of the two teashops in the plaza, letting her know that he meant business. So went Ma's thoughts as Asanda navigated the path with Athi at her side.
As far as Asanda was concerned, the mountainstone solar panels on that provided the village with night lights and heated cooking surfaces needed to be adjusted ten or fifteen degrees to the right to accommodate the changing season. Most houses had one installed, minature versions of the one in her bedroom, but enough to spare light and heat to a household of four or five.
Six or seven when people bother to follow astrological indexes.
"Did you say something?" Athi asked as he knocked some gravel down the hill with his club.
Again the notes in his voice were too bare, too full of layers that made it hard to just accept a question as a question.
"Those panels need to be shifted, or else they won't absorb enough energy to make warm enough hotstones for the coming winter."
Athi flicked a stone up with his toe and batted it away with his club. "All this talk of Mamkhonto making peace with Ndlovu and the nonsense with the kraal, doubt anyone's worried about some stones, Princess."
Asanda looked out at the near-deserted plaza again. "Someone should be."
**
It wasn't hard to find where everyone had gone. The residence side of the main road was split into three parts by wide clearings. The first had been made into a communal garden to make it easier to supply food to the one hostel and three communal houses there. The second served as the quarry to keep blocks of stones in case one of the houses needed repairs. The third was an imitation of the drinking yard back on Third Hill, really just a flat plain of short grass.
Half the men in the village swelled around it, whistling and cheering as the clack of club striking club filled the air in a mockery of the metalshop's clangs. Asanda let Athi lead her around to a small communal building, where some of the older bachelors of the village leaned on balconies to watch the tournament below.
Ma grew alert again, her presence blossoming like a fire crawling across a forest floor. Asanda rubbed her face and tried to keep upright as she entered the wide, cool lobby of the two-story building. Dumani sat on a long grass mat in the middle of the lobby, sharing an urn with two portly, grey men who wiped beer suds from their coarse, grey beards as they talked passionately to one another. Dumani walking among the working men of the village would have been a problem, but most of those men profited greatly from peace.
The twenty older bachelors here, sitting on hide pillows and grass mats on the lobby floor, were relics of a time before her husband's... her father's rule. They were fighting men who were scared of the roundness of their own bellies and the slow march of time that took from them days of fire and passion. Time and good care had left them to lament the half-men that now tended to their few cattle, the women who didn't glance twice at their thinning legs, the Queen who lived above them – the root of all their shortcomings, to be sure – feeding children the soft fruits of a false life. A life where their past "golden days" were theirs to worship alone and, worse than all, a life where the world was doing just fine without them at the centre of it, thank you very much.
And yet, even as they wore loathing like a leopard shawl, they made a good show of drinking deeply of the Queen's beer and living free in the den the Royal Treasury had built for them. Perhaps scared that they wouldn't be heard, they laughed often and talked loudly over each other, until one looked up and saw Asanda.
Once, on an especially cold day in Low Winter, her simple alchemy tutor had taken her to a rock pond by the Wayfarer and dropped a cube of smoke-ice into the shallow waters. At first, crystals had crawled across the water's surface like slow lightning, forming stronger chains as they expanded, until they reached down and touched every part of the depths. At seeing the Queen's daughter, dressed in simple housewear as she stood in their midst, the cold silence of old men shamed even a Northman's smoke-ice.
Ma's spirit shifted then, lathering the left side of Asanda's mind in more calm and assuredness than she had ever managed to muster for herself in anything but her arts. Speak, she almost said.
"General Dumani," Asanda said formally. "It is the third day of guest-rite, yet the chaos you have brought to my mother's house is such that she didn't even have the time to welcome you properly. It is time to leave."
Dumani smiled as he lay on his side on the grass mat, propped up on one elbow. The roars and whistled from the crowd just beyond the building rose; someone had just taken a mighty blow.
"Those who ask cannot do themselves," Dumani said, running his thumb along the rim of his urn. Some of the old bachelors nodded sagely. To Ma, Dumani might have smiled mockingly, acknowledging a game among equals. To Asanda, he had the hard glare of a man staring at a sharp stone that had just interrupted his walk. "By all means, Child of the Absent Queen, convince me that I am anywhere except exactly where I need to be."