10 - Dzur by Steven Brust

Author:Steven Brust [Brust, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780765341549
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2006-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

9

Chilled Defrina

Mihi removed the wine and replaced it with a new bottle, providing us with new glasses, as well. Again the feather, the glove, the tongs.

Defrina is a white wine with just a hint of, of all things, cherries. The sweetness, which would normally have been too much for me, was cut by an extra chill that Mihi had put on it just for me. The first sip said a merry hello to the flavors already dancing around my tongue, and then it slid down my throat still leaving behind it the taste of the trout, but brightened just a little, if that makes any sense.

I leaned back and studied my dinner companion. “Fun,” I repeated. He grinned and nodded.

The first several things that came to mind were all sarcastic, but sarcasm didn’t really go with Valabar’s trout and a good, chilled white wine. I said, “Can you explain that?”

He frowned and considered for a moment, then said, “You know, I don’t think I can. I’ll try.”

I drank some wine and nodded.

“You see,” he said. “There’s this feeling you get when things are happening almost too fast for you to handle, and if you make a mistake, you’re dead. You’d be scared out of your mind if you weren’t too busy. Do you know what I mean?”

“Well, I know how I feel at times like that. I don’t much care for it.”

“Don’t you?”

I ate some more fish and drank some more wine.

“In fact,” I said, “I don’t remember enjoying it, or not enjoying it. Like you said, I’m too busy.”

“Well, there you are.”

I grunted. “Afterward, though, I hate it.”

He grinned. “I guess that’s the difference.”

“As long as there is one.”

“That’s just what I was thinking, Loiosh.”

“Of course,” he added, “the cause enters into it as well.”

“The cause?”

“The reason you’re fighting.”

“Oh. It isn’t just to fight?”

“Well, sometimes it is.”

“You mean, most of the time it is?”

“Yeah, most of the time.”

“Uh huh.”

“But not the important times.”

“Mmm. Care to explain that?”

“It isn’t difficult. When you do something big, you want it to matter.” He looked at me. “Well, don’t you?”

“I don’t usually get into things by my own plan. I get dumped into them, and then I’m too busy trying to stay alive to think about the importance of the cause.”

He nodded as if he understood.

I had another bite of fish, and another sip of wine.

I remembered a friend I’d had named Ricard—one of the few people I knew who weren’t involved with the Organization. He was an Easterner, a stocky fellow with thin hair, and we’d eaten dinner together, gotten drunk on his boat on the bay, and argued about matters great and small. He worked ten hours a day, four days a week, doing what I pretended to do—keeping the books for a slaughterhouse—and two or three evenings a week would play obscure music on the cimbalon at an obscure house in South Adrilankha. Every couple of months he would have saved up enough silver to take me out for dinner at Valabar’s, and I’d take him a month later; we might or might not have dates with us.

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