with porcelain skin and ruby lips, her delicate fingers curled around a cup of green tea. Their robes were as varied as the flowers in a garden, of all different colors and textures, the patterns sometimes overpowering the women beneath them so that the subject resembled nothing so much as a ghost dressed in the most extravagant finery.
Alcibiades picked one up and examined it as though he really was trying to decide whether or not to lick it, specifically because he’d been told not to. The artist watched him with keen eyes, not altogether liking his delicate prints in the hands of such a large and foreign bear. From his perspective, I couldn’t precisely blame him, since Alcibiades had the sort of hands that were clearly meant for destruction and not the careful handling of art.
“Does it remind you of dear Yana?” I asked.
He rounded on me with such sudden ferocity that for a moment I was certain the picture would be destroyed. The artist cried out plaintively, and Lord Temur cleared his throat.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it would be best to move on to another stall.”
“Fine by me,” Alcibiades muttered. He put the picture down and stuck his hands into his pockets like a child who’d been scolded.
I clucked my tongue in disapproval and threaded my arm through his in order to keep a closer eye on him. It was rather like having a large and angry pet, one whom you needed to keep on a leash at all times.
“If you will,” Lord Temur said, and he wore his peculiar version of a smile. “There is much to see yet, not to mention my own personal favorite.”
“Oh really?” I couldn’t imagine what sort of pictures would be Lord Temur’s favorite. He’d said that his family had originated in the countryside, so perhaps his inclinations favored natural landscapes? Or perhaps he would surprise us both by enjoying something more risqué. One could never tell with these Ke-Han warlords, for they kept everything hidden beneath the sash.
We stopped at countless booths, some of which did indeed seem to specialize in natural landscapes. There were drawings of the Cobalts, done all in inky blues, with the Ke-Han name for them written in their fascinating script underneath it. There were drawings of the Xi’an coastline, with trees that grew bent-backed in the wind, and fishermen who grew bent-backed from years of hauling up their nets.
My very favorite was a picture of the lapis city at springtime, every street seeming to blush with the pink of cherry blossoms, and two women standing gossiping under a parasol to ward off the sudden rain of petals.
I was horribly disappointed that we hadn’t come to Xi’an in the spring.
I glanced at Lord Temur as if to question him, but he merely shook his head. The natural landscapes were not his favorite.
Next, we came to a section of stalls that seemed entirely devoted to the supernatural. There were women with the tails of foxes, and small imps that crouched in a merchant’s carriage wheels, waiting for the perfect opportunity to send him and his wares sprawling. One booth had another ocean scene, but this one showed that the cause of the fearsome wind was a creature with golden scales that blew the fishermen round in their boats until they were forced to return to shore. I saw the picture that Alcibiades had in his room, of a water goddess with fish spilling from her dark hair.
It seemed to me that Lord Temur was much too stolid to appreciate tales of the fantastic, but since I was curious, I glanced at him again. Once more, he merely shook his head, though this time he was smiling, and I felt tremendously pleased with myself.
“This is rather like a game,” I murmured happily to Alcibiades, who was looking increasingly like one of the bored husbands you saw in the Volstov shopping district, dragged by their wives from hat shop to dress shop to hat shop again. He’d even given up trying to shake me off his arm.
“Wonder if we’ll be able to have another stop at that dumpling stand on the way back,” he said, looking suddenly hopeful at the prospect of more fried food that didn’t contain any fish whatsoever.
“Oh honestly,” I said, pouting only slightly. “You aren’t even trying to guess.”
Alcibiades sighed like a dying man. “Maybe it’s that one,” he said, indicating a stall at the very back. While most of the artists seemed to jostle for a good