She smiled and I turned away, going to a small map table set into the woodwork below the porthole. “There are a dozen men on this ship who will happily mete out all the correction you require,” I said, reaching into my bag and extracting the first scroll to hand.
“I’ve no doubt,” she agreed. “Will you watch? My dear husband liked to watch when the slave girls were whipped. He’d often pleasure himself at the sight. Will you do the same, my lord?”
I sighed, biting down a response and unfurling the scroll. An Illustrated Catalogue of Volarian Ceramics, Brother Harlick’s precise but overly florid letters provoking me to an amused grunt. Even the man’s script is pompous. Although I couldn’t pretend any liking for the brother, I had to concede Harlick’s draughtsmanship was excellent, the illustrations possessed of a flawless exactitude, the first depicting a hunting scene from a vase dating back some fifteen hundred years, naked spearmen pursuing a stag through pine forest.
“Ceramics,” Fornella said, peering over my shoulder. “You think the Ally’s origins lurk in pots, my lord?”
I didn’t look up from the scroll. “When studying an age often bereft of writing, decorative illustration can be highly informative. If you can enlighten me as to another course, I would be grateful.”
“How grateful?” she asked, leaning close, breath soft on my ear.
I merely shook my head and returned to the scroll as she laughed and moved away. “You really have no interest in women at all, do you?”
“My interest in women varies according to the woman in question.” I unfurled the scroll further, finding more hunting scenes, some images of ritual worship, various gods, and creatures of bizarre design.
“I can help,” she said. “I . . . would like to.”
I turned, finding her expression cautious but earnest. “Why?”
“We have a long voyage ahead. And whatever you may suspect of my motives, I am keen to see this mission succeed.”
I looked again at the image on the scroll, naked revellers frolicking before a great ape-like creature, mouth agape and vomiting fire. Kethian jug fragment, read the inscription below the image. Pre-Imperial.
“When exactly,” I asked her, “did the Volarians give up their gods?”
• • •
“It was all long before my birth,” she said, “long before my mother’s birth in fact. But she was ever a studious woman and keen for me to learn the history of our most glorious empire.”
