Donald Moffitt by Feat of Clay

Author:Feat of Clay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-05T14:36:49+00:00

The shop of Lugal-kan, the seal carver, was in the next street, as the boy had said, next to a rather disreputable-looking tavern. It consisted of little more than a cluttered workbench under a seedy awning, not the tidy establishment that Nabu-zir would have expected of a free artisan.

The man squatting at the bench looked up warily at his approach. He was a scrawny fellow with the one-eyed squint of someone who has done much close work over a long period of time.

There was something else about his face that interested Nabu-zir: a faded rough patch on his forehead where a slave mark might have been removed. If so, the man might have good reason to be wary of strangers. He would have been questioned by busybodies many times through the years. The law decreed the death penalty for illegally removing the slave mark, both for the runaway slave and the person who performed the operation, unless he could prove that he had been deceived into believing that the slave had been legally manumitted.

“Ah, Lugal-kan,” Nabu-zir said genially. “I was told I might find you here.”

The fellow looked at him suspiciously. “And who might it be who told you that?” he said.

Nabu-zir lowered his voice, as though they had a secret in common. “Why, my fellow scribe, the estimable Puzar-il.”

At the mention of Puzar-il’s name, a peculiar expression that might have been fear flashed across the seal maker’s face and disappeared so quickly that Nabu-zir could not be sure that he had seen it.

“What is it that you wish of me?” the man asked cautiously.

Nabu-zir lowered his voice again. “What else but a seal? Puzar-il had great praise for your skill and artistry.”

That provoked a snappish outburst. “It is not Puzar-il’s custom to praise anyone for anything. Rather it is his way to find fault and threaten.”

Nabu-zir had decided that the seal maker was not a crony of Puzar-il, as he had thought, but rather someone over whom Puzar-il had some kind of hold. “And yet,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “he praised you as a man of discretion. He said that I need have no fears about trusting you.”

Apparently that struck the right note. Lugal-kan leaned forward and said, “Perhaps we had better talk inside,” and Nabu-zir knew that he had been provisionally admitted to the circle of scoundrels.

He followed Lugal-kan into the mud-brick hovel behind the awning. Lugal-kan closed the door behind them and cast a furtive look around the place, as if to assure himself that some mischief-making demon had not flown in ahead of them.

Nabu-zir took stock of his surroundings. The single room was mean and shabby. A smell of stale beer hung in the air, and the only food he could see in the larder was an open sack of grain bearing the label of the ordinary citizen’s ration, as well as a few onions and a couple of discs of unleavened bread. But the workbench was another story. The array of sculpting tools beggared the meager equipage outside, and there was an ample supply of marble and other fine stone.

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