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He was early, but not too much, and in truth Maia was looking forward enough to visiting Idra in his new quarters that he withheld his reservations about invading the prince's time and space. Still, it was with embarrassment that he attempted to insist that even if the prince had no duties it was he who was early, and that he did not want to disturb anyone; his attempt failed, the page ran off to find the prince, and Maia ended up in one of the wing's many drawing rooms, waiting somewhat sheepishly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Beshelar, lips pursed, but Maia knew that his eyes were exasperated and not angry.
Only five or so minutes had gone by, Maia looking absently out of the window onto one of the circular courtyards, when Idra burst in.
'Cousin Maia,' Idra said, pink with embarrassment, and Maia's ears twitched forward in surprise.
'Idra,' he said, 'what on earth wert doing?'
Idra flushed even harder as he attempted to hide his soaking wet sleeves behind his back. 'Tending to my aqua-vivariums,' he said. 'I was so absorbed I completely lost track of time. I'm very sorry for keeping you waiting.'
Maia shook his head, a faint smile on his lips, but predominantly confusion. 'Please, no need to apologise, I am the one who is early. And – thine aqua-vivariums?' He stumbled slightly over the word.
Idra did not react in surprise; he was used to his cousin's ignorance by now, Maia thought wryly.
'Oh!' Idra said. 'Didst want to see them? I just introduced a new snail into the sea-water tank; it has been getting too much sun, I think, and the algae is growing far too fast.' He halted as he realised that Maia had no idea what he was talking about, and smiled, chagrined. 'They are glass ponds,' he said, 'and I have two, one for river creatures, and one for sea creatures. They're all the rage right now. I had to import the sea salts, weeds and creatures all the way from Barizhan. It's very hard to keep them going; I'm still very new at it, but I've had a lot of help.'
'I would love to see them,' Maia said, not feeling enlightened at all by Idra's description. How on earth could a pond be made of glass? And sea creatures? Salts?
Idra lead them out of the drawing room and down the corridor, into a sunroom, lit on three sides by large windows. Dominating the room were two contraptions on opposite walls.
Each contraption – an aqua-vivarium, Maia presumed – consisted on three containers, each perhaps half the size of a bath-tub. One sat on the ground, one was raised on a pedestal, and the third perched high up on a reinforced shelf above them. Pipes connected them. The bottom and top were made of wood, but the middle was glass-sided, obviously the centrepiece – hexagonal, almost two feet tall and three in diameter, with a small fountain in the centre. Maia walked to the one on his left; the ironwork was elegant, depicting leaves and vines and resting on great clawed feet, and the glass was of perfect grade, clear and free of smoke and bubbles. What cast all of that into insignificance, however, was that it was filled not only with water but teeming with water weeds, several different kinds of varying colours and shapes, all swaying in some gentle current. Maia forgot everything about propriety and crouched down to better look into to it, peering into the depths from the side.
'It is fascinating,' he said, without thinking, and now that he was looking closer he could see there was more than just weeds inside – sand and shells covered the bottom, and rocks arranged to cover the base of the fountain. And on the rocks were strange things, some kind of mushroom perhaps, or something else he could not tell: a deep red colour, round and squat with dozens of short vine-like tendrils emerging from the top, moving in the current. As he was staring, utterly perplexed, something else caught his eye: a snail with a pointed shell, but it wasn't a snail, it had spider legs and eyes on little stalks, hauling itself across the sand. And then, another spider-like creature, or possibly more like what Haru called sow-louse, darting between stalks of the weeds, propelling itself through the water with its legs. A snail was crawling across the glass – and Maia was reasonably confident that this was indeed a snail, though he had never seen one from this angle before – and he watched the ripples of its belly as it moved, and the motion of its mouth. It wagged its head back and forth as it ate, and left behind a zig-zag pattern of clean amongst the green tinted glass.
Another creature stuck high up on the glass – or a plant, or something entirely different altogether, Maia couldn't tell, and the total alien absurdity of it made him laugh out loud. It was something like a hand with five boneless fingers emerging evenly around the circle of the palm, and that the upper surface was rocky and red, and the base against the glass had a valley running along each finger where – something? what where they? – emerged. Hundreds of tiny, translucent, stubby fingers, waving around where the larger fingers curled up into the body of the water, and holding the thing to the glass where the larger fingers laid flat.
Maia laughed again, freely, and turned to look up at Idra, who had come to stand next to him. 'Idra,' he said, 'I have never seen anything like it. Merciful goddesses, cousin, what are these creatures?'
Idra's face was a picture of proud delight as he crouched besides Maia. 'This one, cousin,' he started, pointing at one of the water-weeds, pausing to make sure Maia knew which he meant. 'That's Ulva, the first thing I introduced, oh, five months ago. And this one is Dasya–' He continued, and so Maia learnt about the sea-weeds, the little winkle and periwinkle, and sun-snail, and the various types of squat flower-nettle Cnidaria – which in truth, or so Idra promised, were animals and caught their food with the tentacles crowning their heads – and the shrimps of four different kinds, each with their own, odd name. There was the stately tops, and Strawberry crabs, the Eurynome, and sea-worms hidden in the sand. Idra barely paused in his explanation and very quickly lost Maia to the endless names and short, enthusiastic descriptions and digressions, but, as Maia followed Idra's finger and they moved around the aqua-vivarium for the best position to see a particular creature, he thought that he did not mind so much.
'There's been debate on whether the red or the green weeds work best,' Idra said. 'But Osmin Notherin insists that chlorosperms are superior, so I followed her advice, even though Osmerren Tarin swears by the red. And I'm going to have to take the star-fish out and give it to someone. It's been eating my snails. And the flower-nettles are eating the shrimps but I don't want to get rid of those, and the shrimps are doing well enough despite it, I think.'
'It is certainly magnificent,' Maia said, straightening as his knees started to ache. 'Thou must be extraordinarily proud of it. I know I would be.'
Idra beamed at him, lost to the enthusiasm, more carefree than Maia had ever seen him before. 'Thank you! I've learnt so much. Osmin Notherin designed them herself, with the three compartments, and they're so much better than the single tanks with little carbon pot filters. I had one of them earlier and it was so hard to keep anything longer than a couple of months.'
'Speaking of which,' Maia said. 'How does this all work?'
'Oh!' Idra looked slightly puzzled by Maia's questioning for the first time. 'It's very simple. The water starts at the top, in the upper tank, and flows through this narrow pipe to work the fountain. And once in the show tank it drains through the sand down to the lower tank, where it has to be pumped back up to the upper tank every morning. Well, twice a day, preferably.' He paused, then predicted Maia's next question. 'To be honest, I don't truly understand why all the water movement is necessary. It's not to aerate the water, because I know you only need to do that when something has gone wrong. And I know that the animals produce carbonic acid and the plants consume it, and the plants produce oxygen gas which the animals consume, but I don't see how it all ties in. I asked Osmin Notherin and she just said a whole lot of scientific things I couldn't make head or tails of, whilst somehow being very vague at the same time. Something about the water being ammoniated, and how the sand functions as another weed? Only it's not a weed and there can't be any in there because they need light to grow.' Idra looked thoughtfully down at the aqua-vivarium. 'To be truthful, I don't think she knows either.'
Maia laughed. 'Well needless to say, knowest worlds more than I do. I do not think I would have the first idea of how to care for a potted plant, let alone this.'
'Dost not give thyself credit,' Idra said, with a sly smile. 'I am sure the Ethuveraz is much more complex than an aqua-vivarium.'
Startled, Maia floundered for a response, then, ears lowered, he shrugged in good-natured defeat. 'Just a touch,' he said, grinned as Idra grinned. 'Now, wilt show me your other aqua-vivarium? The river-water one?'
Idra all but bounded to the other side of the room. His sleeves were still dripping, Maia saw, but he didn't seem to notice at all.
'This one,' he said confidently, 'should look more familiar.'
It was, though not, perhaps, as much as Idra had assumed. There was plenty of water around Edonomee, marsh-land and rivers and lakes, but Maia had never visited any of it. Only had the vaguest of memories of Isvaroë and the river-side picnics his mother had taken him on remained.
The notion, more than memory, of sun and grass and cold, clear water, washed through Maia, and the smile fell from his face before he could stop it. Idra was looking at the tank, facing away, and for that Maia was achingly glad. His chest was tight.
Had Sheveän listened to Idra tell her about the denizens of his little empires? Had she been proud of him, his intelligence and enthusiasm?
'It makes sense when you think about it, that everything needs to be entirely different in the two systems, but I hadn't known that when I started. Especially when some of them look so similar.'
Maia stepped forward and crouched down next to Idra. 'So,' he said. 'Tell me what's in here.'
There was less of a variety in the river-water tank, and Maia had the distinct impression that Idra was keeping to common names rather than the formal ones: he pointed out the water milfoil, and starwort, and water lobelia with long stalks like a field of flagpoles. 'They should flower soon,' Idra said. 'I hope so, anyway. Mireän insisted I got them after she saw them in bloom in the pond in the forest walk gardens, near the birch grove. I wasn't so sure but they've done very well.'
There were little snails, curling ramshorns and speckled tadpole-snails with shells so delicately thin the soft body of the snail could be seen through them. There was Asellus the water-louse, and many slug-like flatworms, and minute, twitching water-fleas. The royalty of the tank, however, was undeniably the sticklebacks – Gasterosteus aculeatus, Idra slipped in, unable not to take simple pleasure in his own knowledge – tiny fish barely over an inch long, olive-green on top and silver on the belly, brighter than any polished jewellery. As they flickered in the water, moving between the strands of weeds like cats in tall grass, the silver glimmered in the light like light off a mirror.
'Osmin Notherin has such a large tank. Over six-foot. I am a touch jealous,' Idra confessed. 'She has grass carp.'
Maia didn't know what grass carp were, except that in Edonomee they had, on occasion, eaten them fried whole, sweet and salty and delicious. He wondered who Osmin Notherin was, and decided to ask Vedero about her.
To Idra he said, 'It is wonderful,' and meant it. The water weeds swayed like dancers, like an enchanted wonder-tale forest, the stickleback fish flickering bright and bold amongst the green. A whole little world inside this glass, so alien and incomprehensible and heart-achingly beautiful.
'Thank you, Cousin Maia,' Idra said, softly, still watching his aqua-vivarium. A silence fell over them, broken only by the gentle sound of the fountains. 'I want to learn more; I'm still getting things wrong even with a lot of help, but I know I'm improving. And I am happy thou likest them.' He smiled up at Maia, bright as any stickleback. 'It means a lot to me.'
A knock on the door; Maia realised abruptly that he hadn't meant to spend this long, and no doubt Csevet was on the hunt, about to politely drag him away to his other obligations.
Maia half-opened his mouth, but Idra was cannier. 'Come back whenever thou wantest,' he said. 'There were a few things I didn't get to show thee.'
Maia grinned, and nodded. 'I would like that very much,' he said.