Not one but two javelinas were roasting on spits over the fire, and as Kip stared, swallowing, one of the fattest women he had ever seen sawed off a fully cooked leg with a few deft strokes at the joint. The smell was rich, succulent, savory, mouthwatering, lovely, astounding, mesmerizing, debilitating. Kip couldn’t move—until he saw her raise the meat to her lips.
“Pardon me!” he said, louder than he meant. Others around the fire looked up.
“Didn’t smell it,” the fat lady said, then she sank her teeth into greasy ham. Kip died a little. Then more as the hard men and women around the fire laughed at him. The fat woman, leg in one hand, long knife in the other, grinned between bites. She had at least three chins, her facial features disappearing into the fat that encased her like an awkward child surrounded by a crowd of bullies. Her linen skirt could have served as a tent. Literally. She turned away from Kip, slipping the knife back into a sheath and putting her hand back to turning the spit. Her butt was more than a jiggly haunch; it was architecture.
“Pardon me,” Kip said, recovering. “I was wondering if I could buy some dinner. I’ve got money.”
Ears perked up all around the fire at that. Kip wondered suddenly if he’d picked a good fire to stop at. Were the men everywhere in the camp as scruffy as these ones?
Kip looked around. Uh, yes, actually they were.
Oh shit.
He fumbled with the leather money belt holding the stick of tin danars. He’d grabbed the money belt because it already had money in it and would be easier to transport than loose coins. The stick was a great way to carry money. Cut square to fit the square hole in the middle of danars, and of uniform length so people could rapidly count their own money—scales were still used to count others’ money, of course—it was convenient and kept your money from jangling at every step as they did in a purse. Plus the sticks could be bound in leather for attaching to a belt or hiding inside of clothes, as Kip’s was. He’d seen the gleam of this stick and grabbed it.
But as Kip pulled the open end of the money stick out to pull off one tin danar coin, he saw something was very wrong. He froze. The weight had been right, or at least close enough that he hadn’t thought about it, but the coin he pulled out wasn’t tin. A danar was about what a worker would make for a day’s labor. An unskilled labor like his mother would only make half a danar a day. He’d assumed the stick he grabbed was full of the tin coins, each worth eight danars.
Instead, he’d grabbed a stick of silver quintars. Slightly wider in circumference, but only half as thick, and the metal slightly lighter than tin, the silver coins were worth twenty danars each. A stick of silver quintars held fifty of the coins, twice as many as the twenty-five tin coins that would fit on the same stick. So instead of stealing two hundred danars from the Travertine Palace—an already princely sum—Kip had stolen a thousand. And he’d just pulled out one right in front of everyone, making it clear he had more.
Conversation ceased. In the dancing light of the fire, more than a few eyes gleamed like wolves’.
Kip tucked the rest of the money belt away, praying no one had seen how full it was. What did it matter? His life might be worth less than even the one silver quintar. “I’ll take the other leg,” he said.
The fat woman let go of the spit and reached her hand out.
“I’ll need nineteen danars back,” Kip said. A full day’s wages should be more than three times what the javelina leg cost.
She chortled. “We run a charity house here, we do. Look like luxiats, huh? Ten.”
“Ten danars, for a meal?” Kip asked, not believing she was serious.
“You can go hungry if you wanna. You ain’t gonna starve,” the woman said.
The injustice of this whale calling him fat and the impossibility of doing much about it paralyzed Kip. He gritted his teeth, glaring around the fire, and handed over the quintar.
The leviathan took the quintar and held it between her teeth, bending it slightly. If it were a counterfeit, tin coated with silver, it would give the curious crackling sound unique to bending tin. Satisfied between the weight and the