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a complex blending of dark brown and black. The butterfly blue of her eyes.
    Their team lost the game comprehensively, but Stom didn’t care. He had hoped to use the opportunity of the period of the first
jou
to ingratiate himself with her, to project himself as witty and man-of-the-world. But in fact he had been rendered silent by the strength of his feeling. Coming back down the course for the second
jou
he made more of an effort, but she met whatever he said with a dreamy indifference. Not rude, so much as removed. The effect on Stom was intoxicating. He could hardly describe her manner. It was oddly spiritual, yet strangely knowing.
    Afterwards, as the servants started laying a trestle table with lunch foods, Polystom summoned his courage and asked Beeswing if she would come with him for a wander. ‘Down to the copse over there, and back for lunch?’ he suggested, almost stammering with nerves.
    She didn’t say anything, but she did accompany him, and she did allow him to take her arm in his. It was their first time alone together. Stom, obviously, should have made only small talk; should have arranged for a second meeting; should have established the common ground on which they could converse and find out about one another. He knew this, somewhere inside himself. But instead of doing this he found himself talking for long stretches, his own voice spooling itself out and out with details of his own family tree, of his status and his place near the upper echelons of the System, of his personal wealth and estate. It sounded like the preliminaries of a proposal of marriage. Stom was, on one level, appalled at himself, but at the same time he was strangely exhilarated. Beeswing gave none of the signals, as another woman might, of being uncomfortablewith the precipitous nature of the conversation. It was as if she, somehow, understood.
    They made their way down to a copse of seven golden-spine trees, grown into interwoven patterns and dressed with carefully manicured nettlemoss. The copse was for display, a sort of living artefact, and it was not possible to enter it or walk between its trees, so Stom and Beeswing walked beyond it, down and up the grassy hillock beyond it and into the Canal Garden, where dozens of little bridges humped over and over the lattice of miniature canals. There was nobody in this garden but an undergardener, trimming the scarlet show-weed from the banks of one of the canals, and of course they ignored his presence. Stom went on talking. They mounted one of the little bridges, and paused at the top of its hump, leaning on the handrail and admiring the view.
    Polystom’s family is one of the most respectably bred in the whole System; one of perhaps only a dozen families to have the same provenance and familial longevity as the Prince of the System himself. His paternal great grandfather was Count Meli, the famous Count Meli, who (Count being a military title of course) formed the very first flying squadron of the Royal Military. His maternal great grandfather had supervised the creation of the canal network that brought ice down from the highlands of the moon of Bohemia. In a touch redolent of the time (this was nearly a hundred years ago, after all) this great man had ground the bones of those workers who died on the job and mixed them in to temper the cement of the canal beds and sides; slightly gruesome, we might say nowadays, but done with the noblest intentions. This way, you see (as the Count might have explained, were he alive to do so) they are forever memorialised by the great work on which they were engaged. Surely burial in a hole cut out of the earth is merely ignominious? Although they were only servants,their deaths are memorialised in stone almost as if they were people of Family. A cousin of Stom’s grandmother’s wrote a tragic operetta on the subject. Very moving. Plangent melodies, and lines beautifully crafted in Old Kaspian, the proper language of opera:
    Paragei tina-a-a-ah