“I’ve changed?”
“Yes, I’ve said that already.” Cadimon stopped potting lilies and stood up, examined Dradin from crown to stirrups. “You’ve been to the jungle. A pity, really. You were a good student.”
“I have come back from the jungle, if that’s what you mean. I took fever.”
“No doubt. You’ve changed most definitely. Here, hold a lily bulb for me.” Cadimon crouched down once more. Pull, pot, pull.
“You seem … you seem somehow less imposing. But healthier.”
“No, no. You’ve grown taller, that’s all. What are you now that you are no longer a missionary?”
“No longer a missionary?” Dradin said, and felt as if he were drowning, and here they had only just started to talk.
“Yes. Or no. Lily please. Thank you. Blessed things require so much dirt. Good for the lungs exercise is. Good for the soul. How is your father these days? Such a shame about your mother. But how is he?”
“I haven’t seen him in over three years. He wrote me while I was in the jungle and he seemed to be doing well.”
“Mmmm. I’m glad to hear it. Your father and I had the most wonderful conversations a long time ago. A very long time ago. Why, I can remember sitting up at his house—you just in a crib then, of course—and debating the aesthetic value of the Golden Spheres until—”
“I’ve come here looking for a job.”
Silence. Then Cadimon said, “Don’t you still work for—”
“I quit.” Emphasis on quit, like the pressure on an egg to make it crack just so.
“Did you now? I told you you were no longer a missionary. I haven’t changed a bit from those days at the academy, Dradin. You didn’t recognize me because you’ve changed, not I. I’m the same. I do not change. Which is more than you can say for the weather around here.”
It was time, Dradin decided, to take control of the conversation. It was not enough to counterpunch Cadimon’s drifting dialogue. He bent to his knees and gently placed the rest of the lilies in Cadimon’s lap.
“Sir,” he said. “I need a position. I have been out of my mind with the fever for three months and now, only just recovered, I long to return to the life of a missionary.”
“Determined to stick to a point, aren’t you?” Cadimon said. “A point stickler. A stickler for rules. I remember you. Always the sort to be shocked by a Living Saint rather than amused. Rehearsed rather than spontaneous. Oh well.”
“Cadimon…”
“Can you cook?”
“Cook? I can boil cabbage. I can heat water.”
Cadimon patted Dradin on the side of his stomach. “So can a hedgehog, my dear. So can a hedgehog, if pressed. No, I mean cook as in the Cooks of Kalay, who can take nothing more than a cauldron of bilge water and a side of beef three days old and tough as calluses and make a dish so succulent and sweet it shames the taste buds to eat so much as a carrot for days afterward. You can’t cook, can you?”
“What does cooking have to do with missionary work?”
“Oh, ho. I’d have thought a jungle veteran would know the answer to that! Ever heard of cannibals? Eh? No, that’s a joke. It has nothing to do with missionary work. There.” He patted the last of the lilies and rose to sit on the bench, indicating with a wave of the hand that Dradin should join him.
Dradin sat down on the bench next to Cadimon. “Surely, you need experienced missionaries?”
Cadimon shook his head. “We don’t have a job for you. I’m sorry. You’ve changed, Dradin.”
“But you and my father…” Blood rose to Dradin’s face. For he could woo until he turned purple, but without a job, how to fund such adventures in pocketbook as his new love would entail?
“Your father is a good man, Dradin. But this mission is not made of money. I see tough times ahead.”
Pride surfaced in Dradin’s mind like a particularly ugly crocodile. “I am a good missionary, sir. A very good missionary. I have been a missionary for over five years, as you know. And, as I have said, I am just now out of the jungle, having nearly died of fever. Several of my colleagues did not recover. The woman. The woman…”
But he trailed off, his skin goose-pimpled from a sudden chill. Layeville, Flay, Stern, Thaw, and Krug had all gone mad or died under the onslaught of green, the rain and the dysentery, and the savages with their poison arrows. Only he had crawled to safety, the mush of the jungle floor beneath his chest a-murmur with leeches and dung bugs and “molly twelve-step” centipedes. A trek into and out of hell, and he could not even now remember it all, or wanted to remember it all.
“Paugh! Dying of fever is easy. The jungle is easy, Dradin. I could survive, frail as I am. It’s the city that’s hard. If you’d only bother to observe, you’d see the air is overripe with missionaries. You can’t defecate out a window without fouling a brace of them. The city bursts with them. They think that the Festival signals opportunity, but the opportunity is not for them! No, we need a cook, and you cannot cook.”
Dradin’s palms slickened with sweat, his hands shaking as he examined them. What now? What to do? His thoughts circled and circled around the same unanswerable question: How could he survive on the coins he had yet on his person and still woo the woman in the window? And he must woo her; he did not feel his heart could withstand the blow of not pursuing her.
“I am a good missionary,” Dradin repeated, looking at the ground. “What happened in the jungle was not my fault. We went out looking for converts and when I came back the compound was overrun.”
Dradin’s breaths came quick and shallow and his head felt light. Suffocating. He was suffocating under the weight of jungle leaves closing over his nose and mouth.
Cadimon sighed and shook his head. In a soft voice he said, “I am not unsympathetic,” and held out his hands to Dradin. “How can I explain myself? Maybe I cannot, but let me try. Perhaps this way: Have you converted the Flying Squirrel People of the western hydras? Have you braved the frozen wastes of Lascia to convert the ice cube–like Skamoo?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“No!”
“Then we can’t use you. At least not now.”
Dradin’s throat ached and his jaw tightened. Would he have to beg, then? Would he have to become a mendicant himself? On the catafalque, the Living Saint had begun to stir, mumbling in his half sleep.
Cadimon rose and put his hand on Dradin’s shoulder. “If it is any consolation, you were never really a missionary, not even at the religious academy. And you are definitely not a missionary now. You are … something else. Extraordinary, really, that I can’t put my finger on it.”
“You insult me,” Dradin said, as if he were the gaudy figurehead on some pompous yacht sailing languid on the Moth.
“That is not my intent, my dear. Not at all.”
“Perhaps you could give me money. I could repay you.”
“Now you insult me. Dradin, I cannot lend you money. We have no money. All the money we collect goes to our creditors or into the houses and shelters of the poor. We have no money, nor do we covet it.”