The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [147]
By midday, his ordinary business concluded, Supaari was ready to hire a skimmer to pole across the bay to Fatzna Island, the glassmakers’ quarter. As the shallow-drafted boat slid onto fine white sand, the thought occurred to him belatedly that he might have done well to bring Chaypas with him, to advise him on the selection of a vacuum flask. Too late, he thought as he paid off the poler and asked the woman to return for him after first sundown. Then he began a systematic hunt through the shops. In the end, he bought not one but three small presentation flasks, each the finest of its type in his judgment, ranging from the classically ornate to a pure crystal simplicity.
When the poler returned, he asked to be let off near Ezao. Noting with satisfaction the large number of people already wearing the waterfall of ribbons, Supaari tracked Chaypas to one of the cook shops and, explaining briefly, asked her opinion of the flasks.
Chaypas stood. Leaving her meal and Supaari behind, she walked outside and then a short way uphill to a vantage point that gave her a view of Galatna Palace, with its twisted marble columns, its finely wrought and silvered gates, its silken awnings, its glazed tile walls gilded and sparkling in the reflections from the paired three-sided fountains sending droplets of precious scented oils like fire sparks into the sunlight.
"In flood, the heart longs for drought," Chaypas said when she returned, and set the simplest of the flasks before him. Then she held out both her hands to him and said, with a warmth that touched him to his soul, "Sipaj, Supaari. May you have children!"
HLAVIN KITHERI WAS a poet, and it had always seemed especially outrageous to him that his title, Reshtar, had such a grand significant sound to it.
Reshtar. When spoken, it emerged in two pieces, slowly, with dignity. It could not be said quickly or dismissively. It had a kind of majesty that the position itself had never matched. It meant, simply, spare or extra. For like the merchant Supaari VaGayjur, Hlavin Kitheri was a third-born son.
The two men had other things in common. They had been born in the same season, some thirty years earlier. As thirds, they existed in a state of statutory sterility—neither was allowed to marry or have children, legally. Both of them had made more of their lives than anyone could have expected, given their birth positions. And yet, since their honor derived not from inheritance but from accomplishment, they both existed largely outside the bounds of their society.
There the similarities ended. In contrast to Supaari’s decidedly middling ancestry, Hlavin Kitheri was the scion of Rakhat’s oldest and most noble lineage, and he had once been third in line to succeed as the paramount of Inbrokar. In a reshtar’s case, being a third was not a family scandal but the unfortunate consequence of a poorly timed aristocratic birth. Traditionally, noblewomen were bred frequently because their sons died in high numbers. Supaari’s parents had no such justification for their lapse. And while men like Supaari often wondered why they’d been born at all, a reshtar’s purpose was explicit: it was to exist, as a spare, ready to step into an elder brother’s place if he were killed or incapacitated before an heir was born. Reshtari were trained therefore to versatility, prepared equally for war or for governance; either or neither could be their fate.
In the old days, the probability of succession by a reshtar was high. Now, in the enduring peace of the Triple Alliance, most aristocratic thirds simply lived out their lives in pointlessness: softened by servants, dulled by ease, blunted by sterile pleasure.
There was, however, another path open to reshtari, called, appropriately, the Third Way: the way of scholarship. History and literature, chemistry and physics and genetics, both pure and applied, formal architecture and design, poetry and music, all these were