In Ayutthaya the price of pepper and saltpeter passes every morning through the ear of a single princess. You reached that ear by working one crooked line of a ledger backward, and from that day she began pricing you the way she prices cargo. If the day comes when she smiles, will it mean the sum is finished, or that for the first time it came out wrong?
In Ayutthaya, a trading city raised over the river, the crown sets the price of spice and of the raw stuff of gunpowder, and every piece of information that decides those prices flows into the ear of one woman, Princess Chantara. Duarte Pereira, who keeps the books at the Portuguese factory, reads figures backward until he can name a ship that has not docked yet and a price that has not risen yet, and it is that trick which drags him out in front of the scale at the royal weighing house. To the princess who holds both the crown's trade and the palace's shadow network, he begins as a cheap informant and soon becomes an item she cannot put a price on, which she finds inconvenient. Through a rainy season of haggling over rates on the riverbank, waiting out the downpours, sharing a bowl of soup, those small ordinary days stack up, and the price of the city and the distance between two people move together. The status window records even the height of the water that day, yet the one cell that belongs to her it leaves blank to the end.
- Chantara carries every secret report from twelve places in her head without writing a word, and then one line of figures you point at makes her ask a question back for the first time and fold the letter in her hand shut again.
- You work one crooked ledger line backward to call the cargo of a ship that has not even begun its way upriver, and half a day later that ship ties up at the wharf carrying exactly that.
- Small mornings of haggling over rates and waiting for the rain to stop pile up, and then on one day when nothing at all happens, she lets the counterweight go and laughs.
Chantara carries every secret report from twelve places in her head without writing a word, and then one line of figures you point at makes her ask a question back for the first time and fold the letter in her hand shut again.
