2 Spring 519
Committing the city to memory had not come without its misrememberings. Caspian had a fair excellence for the exercise, Sunberth having had its share of winding lanes, doorways only known by ducking, counterintuitively placed dead ends and industrial stopgaps in place of renovation. With time, he had in the course of his errant employments and middling meanderings wound through the lanes whenever they led, ducked and chucked past thresholds hung low and wide, seen the dead ends’ designs through to their intuitive intentions - or circumvented them entirely, because it takes a fool to find themselves in the crook of one in a pinch - and learned how best to pitch himself over crumbling walkways and canals alike. It had taken more than one ill-timed mistake to make apparent the errors in his recollection, Taalviel soaring to his aid more frequently than any self-respecting transplant Sunberthian has any room to admit. In Ravok, now, the stakes are considerably lower - one is less likely to find that some unsavory someone’s taken up decrepit residence in said such dead ends - and Caspian’s discovered a delight in the act of turning a corner and suddenly finding that his surroundings fail to meet any of his expectations.
The joy of it comes less in the backtracking - it’s an opportunity to learn something about the city, when he comes across paths that fork and twist in ways he hadn’t predicted, and observe himself, as if from some detached, third-person perspective, take it all in turn.
The surprise that meets him on the second day of spring is much along these lines. The self-instilled freedom he’s found in Ravok has him dressed in his cheery, cherry-red linen, a convenient shade for someone who partakes in wine and flowered liquors as often as he does - thought that had recently been a point of contention, because he and Thance had gotten fairly into it at the Silver Sliver the other night, rife with enough argumentative gesticulating to have knocked a goblet clean across his right sleeve, and it had been a hell of a third of a bell getting the subsequent stains out - but a bright blazon is what he is today, one who’s realizing that the bridge that leads directly to a certain milliner does not, in fact, rest just beyond the canal upon which he’s just turned.
Instead of the bridge, and regarding Caspian with the same type of scrutiny someone might lend to a bucket of scraps abandoned in a kitchen corner, is a scruffy man dressed in wrinkled swaths of fabric that might have once been beige, had they not been so covered in splatters of plaster and paint. From here - which, frankly, is quite close enough - it’s hard to tell what articles of clothing the man is wearing. All kinds, possibly, one ragged pair of slacks over a halved other, a tunic thrown atop a shredded blouse, with the barest remnants of a quilted cloak across his shoulders like a holy mantle- but also none, possibly, because it also looks quite like he’s wrapped a bedsheet across himself, tied the lot with a length of sailor’s rope, and let the whole of it rot until it molded into the divets and crevices of the form he sees now.
And Caspian’s the one getting eyeballed like he’s the hot mess?
“Good. You’re here,” the man says, with a clarity of tone greatly exceeding the alcohol-laced slur lined with a smoker’s rasp that Caspian had expected.
“Excuse me?” Caspian replies - and that’s the mistake, the point at which he ought to have known better, because idling is what starts things that one might not necessarily have the time or fortitude to lend, especially when strangers are involved. The second mistake is reciprocating eye contact; the third is losing the momentum he’d reserved for shoving his hands into his pockets and simply walking past.
“I’ve been waiting. All morning,” the man goes on, with such a steadiness and surety that for a split second Caspian does hesitate, and wonder if this is an appointment he had made and is by some chance keeping. “Tardy. You are. Infernally. Yes-“
His eyes have left Caspian’s, and he seems quite taken with the shade of his shirt. There’s a blotch of similar hue across his own heavily splattered tunic-shawl, robe... sack? of which he’s taken impeccable inventory, and finding it reflected on Caspian appears to bring him great satisfaction.
“Here now, though, aren’t I?” Caspian replies. If this were Sunberth he certainly wouldn’t entertain this any further - but it’s not, and he can afford a little frivolity, though he can imagine just what Taalviel might say if she saw him now, the absence of frivolity in her vocabulary and philosophies then you substituted for a designation less genial. “Better late than never, hmm?” he adds for good measure, his love for pursuing amusement making him curious to see where this might lead, and also, if things go south - it’s just a hop and a skip over a canal to safety for him, and he can’t picture this man in his ramshackle tatters doing very much about it, even if he tries.
This appears to mollify the stranger, who with a businesslike affectation - because, it seems, the two of them are in business? - produces a roll of canvas tied with twine from a satchel at his side, the fabric forming the satchel equally warped and stained, so as to have camouflaged against the rest of him.
Gingerly, unwilling to draw to any more intimate of a distance, Caspian accepts the canvas, eases off the twine binding, and unfurls at length what ends up being a modestly sized oil painting, depicting a sea against land, beneath an expanse of sky. Puzzled, Caspian looks back to the stranger, who has the gall now to look impatient and tap his foot with incensing rhythm.
“Well?” the man says, as if any of this should mean anything. “What are you waiting for?”
It’s not a bad painting. A little derivative in the subject matter, but handsome, as these things go -
“You must forgive me,” Caspian replies, “for deciding to give you the runaround. But I’m now quite certain you’ve got me mistaken for someone else.” He proffers the painting back, but the stranger only squints at it, up at the sunlight bearing down, then towards the crimson in which he’s draped.
“Mistake? No. A making-do.”
He hem and haws - and Caspian chooses, that moment and the next, to linger.
—
WC: 1,098
