The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [146]
Driven early from his natal compound, Supaari had been drawn to Gayjur as a two-moon tide is drawn to shore. He took passage downriver on a Runa freighter bringing huge baskets of carmine and violet datinsa to market. Pride was an expense he could not afford: he helped the Runa cook prepare the sailors’ meals to work off his fare. He expected humiliation and rejection; it was all he’d known. But in the four days he spent on that boat moving past the sea-carved filigree of the Masna’a Tafa’i coast, Supaari experienced more kindness and friendship than in all his childhood. The Runa were despised but so was he; by the time he tasted the harsh metallic vapors and oily scents of Gayjur as they hove into Radina Bay, the cook had called him brother and Supaari felt less a youth condemned to exile than a man about to find a treasure, if only he has the wit to recognize it.
Within a season, exhilarated by the challenges and risks of trade in the world’s largest commercial city, Supaari knew he had found his place and had formally taken his landname, VaGayjur. He began as a runner, working for another third who had come to Gayjur only five years earlier and who was already prospering beyond Supaari’s youthful ability to imagine wealth. He learned the universal laws of trade: buy low and sell high; cut losses and let profits run; smell the emotion of the market but don’t give way to it. And he discovered his own niche: a willingness, an eagerness to learn from the Runa, to speak their language and respect their ways and deal with them directly.
His fortune was founded on a chance remark by a Runao from the midlands, visiting Gayjur to find a better market for her village’s weaving. There had been unusual rain in the high plateau of Sintaron, she said and commented, "Rakari should be good this year." Later that day, Supaari checked with several shippers who worked the Pon riverway. They were making the trip in under five days. The river was high, they told him, with a good, fast current. Using everything he’d saved and pledging two years of his labor against default, Supaari contracted to deliver rakari for three bhali per bale at the end of the season. He quit as a runner, traveled inland to the rakar fields, where the bumper crop was being harvested, and arranged to buy every bale at half a bhal. The pickers were pleased to get so much, the rakar processors were forced to pay the contract price, and Supaari VaGayjur bought his first yard on the profit.
He developed a reputation for knowing what was happening among the Runa, and while his knowledge was profitable and his wealth envied, its source was disdained and he remained an outsider among the respectable Jana’ata of Gayjur. His world consisted of other thirds, who were his competitors, and the Runa, who were, for all that he enjoyed their company, his prey.
His exclusion from society galled him, but there was a more fundamental source of discontent—something which sucked the savor from Supaari’s life, which made him wonder what the point of all his effort was. His brothers, whose inheritance tied them to the small and backward town of their birth, seemed less enviable to him now as he looked around his large and well-managed compound, with its servants and warehouse workers, its runners and office staff, its bustling purposefulness. And yet his brothers had what every third was barred from: descendants, heirs, posterity.
There were ways out of this trap. The death without issue of an older sibling would open the way for a third child, providing it could be proved that the heir had not assassinated the first- or second-born. Sterility, if the older was willing to declare the condition’s permanence publicly and yield status to the younger, could also make a family possible. And, in exceedingly rare cases, a third could be rendered Founder and establish a new lineage.
On this last