Beauty and the Criminal

[Andros]

Searing, 4600

Dorothea saw the man before he saw her. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She should have been prepared, but Sven’s presence at the well caught her off guard. She wasn’t out here much, and somehow she forgot men drew water too, sometimes.

It’s not that she wasn’t allowed out in the town square, right on the other side of her wall. It’s just that when she hit puberty the daily task of collecting water was given to younger sisters, so there was no reason. It’s the same with most of her chores out of the house. She used to spend mornings up in the pasture as a girl, and she’d help clean the Men’s House after a festival, but not in years. Now it was all spinning every day unless there was a special reason to be out and about.

Her father stressed how dangerous men can be and that she needed to be protected. She’d felt enough stares and fended off enough pawing hands to know he was right, but she still felt like she was being punished for being pretty. Anthea’s assurances that she’d have her pick of husbands to compensate rang hollow. The parade of worthless second cousins her Baba brought to the house for a formal introduction did not inspire confidence. They weren’t all stupid, necessarily, but none had anything interesting to say. They were boring. She felt she could do better, but she couldn’t imagine what better might be like.

What she’d heard about Sven was fascinating, by contrast to the local talent. Tall and strange looking, a skilled storyteller and musician, he could read and write and had a “noble bearing”, everybody said. He’d already made the family an exquisite set of dishes, free of charge, so his talent as a ceramicist was apparent. He was someone worth meeting.

It didn’t hurt that she’d spied him bathing in the sea and saw his tattoos. A set of waves that made her think of music for some reason, and a golden spiral. She’d love to ask about them somehow, if she could manage it without anyone else knowing she’d seen him undressed. That would only get both of them in trouble.

Dorothea thought of him frequently, but on this particular trip to the well she was only thinking about her water pump. She’d been called to set it up because the water was low and it was taking too long to use the bucket. Her water pump, a screw in a long wooden tube really, could make the whole thing a lot faster and easier, and no one else quite knew how it worked. So when the water was low, she got a knock on the door.

At home she typically wore a simple shift on a hot day, light and airy. Today, not thinking she’d see anyone except the family, she put no effort into her appearance. She hurriedly threw on a dress, tied on her headscarf, and walked out of the house. No make up, hair leaking out from under the scarf in every direction, dress looking untidy. Not a good look.

When she saw Sven and realized she’d rather look her best, it was already too late. He smiled at her as she approached and she nodded in acknowledgement. She didn’t return the smile in a flirtatious way but looked at him confidently before blushing and breaking eye contact. She gripped the water screw a little tighter in her hands.

“Out of the way,” she told the children and old ladies who were gathered around the rim of the well. Then she bent over the edge and started lowering her contraption down towards the bottom.

[Mimi Pidders]

It had been ten days since he arrived to the island of Micronisi, something Fell was still unsure of how to spell. No one here knew how to read, either, so when he asked them, they just reacted with befuddlement. The days here were, well, fine. It was scorchingly hot during the day, so Fell tried to spend that portion of the day digging for clay, which really meant finding an out of the way location on the island with a nice deposite he found via Parsing the earth, making sure no one was around, and then using Divide to tunnel into the earth. It was cooler several feet underground, and while his one outfit was taking a beating from all the dirty, clay, silt, and sand, it was no worse than would happen if he'd actually had to use the crude shovel he'd been given to dig. After that, he'd haul back a load of clay on a rickety little wooden cart he'd found in a shed behind the old potter's shed. He fashioned each load into a carefully misshapen mass so that it looked like he'd actually dug it out instead of just relaxing underground for far longer than such a task warranted when using magic.

He was careful to ensure that no one discovered his magic. He was cheered by the fact that the Watch hadn't shown up just yet, but he had not relaxed. He had to assume they were coming, and that they just had not made it here yet. He did not have a strong understanding of the geography of Teos, and there was no map to speak of on the island, but he was given to understand that this island was under the governance of Evrotai, so it could not be too far from the large port city where his would-be captors had expected him. They would make their way here. It was just a matter of time. He had to be ready when they did.

To that end, his efforts to ingratiate himself within the local populace was going alright, to the best of his knowledge. The shepherds and farmers he found himself living among were poor, ignorant, and barbaric in their treatment of women, but they were not bad sorts. They were generous with their time, they enjoyed listening to his stories, and they were willing to help him with most things if he asked. He still hadn't gotten a pair of shoes, but apparently, some local footwear -- sandals -- were in the works. In the meantime, he washed his feet twice daily and tried to enjoy the feeling of muck between his toes. He was rarely successful, but he tried.

The one major stumbling block with enjoying himself here so far was the lack of feminine company. He'd learned there was a brothel in the Lower Village, but based on the derision even the young men talked about such a place, he had to assume it was not going to provide him with the sort of company he sought. Fell was not above the idea of paying for a quick thrust, but he preferred to do it with women who would not give him sores on his cock afterward. Especially now that he was no longer in a Tower where qualified healers would remove such things for nothing more than a scolding lecture about how he had to stop letting this happen to him.

Besides, officially, he had no coin. His stash of the rest of his possessions remained in its stone cache on the beach. He could hypothetically ask Andros for some kind of loan, but the thought of doing so to engage the service of a prostitute struck him as unwise. Due to the inability to access his money and his geographic isolation, he was officially penniless, the poorest he had ever been. He hated it, but the fact that he was finally free of the blighted Tower compensated, somewhat.

The other compensating factor happened while he was waiting to draw water from the well so he could wash up before supper. The line seemed to be long, and was moving quite slowly. He recalled a few days ago hearing two of the old women complaining about this. Apparently, it happened every year at around this time, and only Dorothea's Device could save them from the tedium of drawing from the well ten times to fill a single bucket. He had wanted to ask what this meant at the time, but so far when he'd introduced himself to any woman on the island, they were very polite but also looked scared of him, like he was a wild beast that might at any point attack. He wasn't sure why this was, but he thought it best to end such conversations quickly, so he hadn't bothered.

This time, though, he couldn't help himself. The most beautiful woman he'd seen in years came bustling out of the big house that he recognized as Andros' family compound and put... was that a well screw? .... into the water. Without thinking, he parsed it, but no parts of it seemed to be made of metal or stone. Presumably, its interior was of carved wood, then. Impressive. He watched the radiant creature struggle to lower it into the water and then to pump the water for the person at the head of the line, a young man who seemed quite content to let the woman do it for him. With a snort of contempt, Fell, pushed to the front of the line.

"The point of such a device is that we are not here all day," he said to the lad, not bothering to disguise his annoyance. His tone softened somewhat when he addressed the young lady who had brought out the device.

"With your permission, Miss, I'd like to be of assistance" he said, making it clear that he wished to take over for her.

She said nothing in return but stepped back slightly and handed the well screw to him. As he held it and turned the crank, the water came out at a prodigious rate, faster than such things usually worked from his time of using Divide to dig irrigation ditches for the farmers of Jorikford. Either the village had gotten quite lucky with such a thing or someone in this village had customized the pump to this particular well, taking into account things like accumulation of the water and distribution of it at the bottom of the well and the intake angle to maximize intake and efficiency. Someone who knew quite a bit about mathematics, if so, even if none of them were literate. It also was quite easy to turn. The woman doing it had been a tiny slip of a thing, even for this island where most people barely came up to his chest, and she'd had no trouble using it. With him at the helm, he was working through the line at quite a clip.

"I don't believe we've been introduced, Miss. I'm Sven Felman. I'd be delighted to make your acquaintance, and also to learn where you bought this well screw. It's very well made!"

[Andros]

Dorothea stuttered. That hadn’t happened in years, not since she was a little girl. She knew it was going to happen. She could feel that the D wouldn’t want to come out before she even started to make the sound. She fought with it under her breath. D..D..D… Her tongue was against her teeth in the right position but she couldn’t summon the breath to make it audible.

She stopped trying and took a deep breath. She was a capable person, she thought, not a little girl. She was the daughter of the leader of the whole village, the most important man on the island. She was clever and quick-witted and wasn’t going to get flustered because a dashing stranger said hello to her. She turned to face Sven and spoke around the letter that was giving her trouble, the same strategy that always worked before.

“Chrysostephanou, Dorothea Chrysostephanou. I'm pleased to meet you. You know my father Andros, the village headman.”

With that out of the way, rather painfully, she was able to respond to the rest of his question.

“I didn’t buy the screw. I came up with the idea and my sisters and I built it. We have this trouble every year and it’s the only way to get water out of the well without it taking all day. It’s really quite simple, just a screw that pulls the water up continually when you turn the crank. I don’t know why no one built one before.

She was being modest, but really she was quite proud of herself. It wasn’t her first invention but it was one that got the most sincere appreciation from the villagers. She felt like her father took her more seriously once she had that under her belt. It didn’t reflect well on gun that he needed the approval of other men to recognize her accomplishments, but at least he got there and that meant the world to her.

“Thank you for your help,” she added hurriedly, realizing she’d been rude. Sven was quite the gentleman, it seemed. A crowd of people around and all content to let her do the hard part except for him. “It’s sweaty work in this heat.”

[Mimi Pidders]

Fell's first response was incredulity. Did she think that he had never seen a well screw before? He'd name it as such in her question to her. Then he dismissed that possibility. This woman did not know him. If she were a young man, he would assume the obfuscation was to make fun of the city boy, make him believe something obviously false.

Then, as he continued to turn the pump, he realized that she might be telling the truth. For one thing, she had no particular reason to lie to him. For another, this village was quite isolated and everyone was illiterate, and as best he could tell, women were largely not allowed to leave their family compound until they were married off, at which point they were allowed to travel back and forth between their family home and their new one. Even if she had seen one to mimic, if for instance a merchant had come to the island with one for sale, how would she have seen its mechanism and then devised a way to make one? No, then, this was far more to do with necessity driving people to invent such things.

"It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Chrysostephanou," he said, trying his best not to mangle her surname. "I do not mean to doubt such a charming young woman as yourself, but how did you come to make such a good one? This wellscrew seems customized to what exactly is needed for this well. How did you measure the entry angle? How did you devise the screw contouring of the interior? You can't ev-- I mean," he stopped himself from blurting out that she couldn't possibly calculate such things due to her lack of education. She had apparently made this thing. Who was he to tell her what she could or could not do?

The line was more than half gone, but a few older women had remained behind, watching the two of them. He supposed that meant Dorothea was unmarried, then, or she'd be allowed to be with a man unescorted.

He tried again: "To make something so optimally as you have would require pages and pages of calculations, exact measurements, skilled hands to craft the screw, and an advanced knowledge of geometry. If I am not mistaken, you do not have the means to calculate such things, nor the education. I can see the proof of your accomplishment with my own eyes, so I am not doubting you have done it. I am fascinated as to how you did this, though. Did you really just... conceptualize this pump so perfectly?"

As he talked, he finished retrieving the bucket for the last person in line. All that was left to fill his bucket and leave. He didn't want to leave, though. He wanted to keep talking to her.

[Andros]

If Sven hadn’t been so overwhelmingly exciting, Dorothea would have been more than capable of filling out that sentence. “You can’t even…read.” Everyone on the island was aware of the existence of writing, of course. It was common enough in Evortai, her father said, that even craftsmen and domestic servants were literate. But there was no one here to teach Dorothea, and no one else seemed to care about that glaring absence. She had begged to be brought to the mainland to study but it was a complete nonstarter at home.

She felt that inferiority keenly. If she had been thinking clearly, the little unintended dig would have ended any interaction with the foreigner before it started. But she wasn’t. She simply tuned it out. Her brain decided it wasn’t interested in being insulted. It was interested in being flattered, and that’s all she heard.

She took his odd line of questioning as praise. Perhaps it was impressive that she designed this all by herself, even if others in more learned places had done the same, probably many times. She didn’t have any training or special tools.Her complexion doesn’t really allow her to blush, but she reddened slightly as Sven spoke.

“Yes. It took some doing. We measure angles for fences and walls with a little triangular piece of wood and guesswork, but that was much too crude for this. I made up a system for doing math using pebbles that most of the villagers use. With my rocks, I could calculate that if a circular angle is 360 stones, a straight line is 180 across, and a perfectly aligned right angle is 90 stones. I was able to transfer that onto the measuring triangle with little markings, then use that to calculate the angle we needed for the screw.”

She was rambling, which made her turn a little redder.

“Sorry, I’m going on. Anyway, once the angles and measurements were ready, my older sister Theodora - we call her Theo, oh and you’re welcome to call me Doro, everybody does - she handled most of the woodworking. She’s got a talent for it - makes all kinds of decorative things and things for the house. I think the screw looks beautiful, not just functional.”

The conversation had gone on too long. She noticed people were looking at them. Any longer and word would get back to her father, who would tut-tut at her in his gently condescending way and then she’d find herself locked up even more securely. She should make an excuse and go, but she found she didn’t want to. Not one person in this worthless village had ever expressed enthusiasm like this for something she’d done, and she didn’t want the moment to end. Instead she took a gamble.

Looking Sven in the face, she flashed him sincere, enticing smile. “It’s nice to meet someone with a head for such things. I hope you will stay on in our village. We need more men like you.”

It wasn’t a come on, because Dorothea didn’t know enough to flirt. She didn’t even know that she wanted Sven in the way women always want men. But she knew she wanted to see him again, to talk freely to him. She had a lot to say, and a lot to learn. And a man like Sven would know it.

[Mimi Pidders]

Fell listened with rapt attention. She had recreated a system for measuring angles and devising radians. She had functionally invented trigonometry, and this crew of illiterate dunderheads had not even seen fit to recognize her genius as such? There should be parades in Dorothea's honor. He didn't want to come on too strong, however, so instead he responded to her flirting with some of his own.

"I'd love to see other things you have invented, Miss Doro. And if your father will permit it, I will happily teach you what I can during my time here. If you have used pebbles to become numerate, I think you deserve to learn a written system of recording numbers. We can use sticks in the dirt if we must, and I will gladly submit to being supervised by whosoever your father ordains as necessary for such an interaction to take place. I'll teach you whatever else you would care to know, as well, so long as it is in my power to teach." He said.

Then he saw the disapproving glare of one of the older women watching this interaction.

"Whatever else you wish to know about mathematics," he amended, and that seemed to mollify her somewhat.

Her brow remained wrinkled, but her brows were not drawn in close together any more. If mathematics was witchcraft, well, at least he was not offering to dance naked with Doro in the village square. Though he'd do that, too, if she were interested.

She wore a headscarf and her dress covered her from her slender neck to her dainty ankles, but Fell was more than capable of devising the figure kept hidden under there, and he liked what he saw in his mind's eye. She was so tiny, too -- he was fairly certain he'd be able to hold her up while they -- he colored a bit. These thoughts were best kept for another time.

He filled his bucket and handed the wellscrew back to her.

"Thank you for allowing me the use of it," he said. "Truly a pleasure to use it, and to meet you." He'd worked up a bit of a sweat seeing how it worked, but it had been worth it.

Maybe there were things worth finding out about on this island, after all.

[Andros]

Sven had overstepped. It was unfortunate because Dorothea was enjoying the conversation and his flattery made her feel weak at the knees. But there was only one way for a woman to act when a man made such a bold proposition, if she wanted to keep her honor.

So she started to cry. Fake tears, mind you, but convincing. She quickly ran off to join the older women, one of whom was her aunt.

“I’m such a mess,” she complained to them loudly as she walked away. “And I’m supposed to be taking over for Anastasia with the flock in a few hours.”

The women comforted Dorothea and brought her back to her home where she told her father everything. She explained how she’d just been out to use the screw like she was supposed to and how the foreigner had made conversation and she thought it was all innocent. Then all of a sudden he was trying to get her off on her own and got scared and ran, feeling so stupid, like she’d led him on.

It was a good show, and Andros was extremely tender and comforting with his daughter. He seemed certain that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, but praised her for getting out of a possibly dangerous situation right away. When Dorothea turned off the tears, he went off to get to the bottom of things with Sven.

What the older women couldn’t have seen and what Andros wouldn’t know, however, was what Dorothea had done in the instant before the waterworks started. For just a moment, she turned to look directly at Sven, her back to the onlookers. They must have imagined she was staring in horror or fear. She wasn’t. In fact, she was giving Sven a broad grin followed by a wink, then a slight incline of her head indicating the west pasture uphill, where she’d be later that day. Alone save for her sheep.

[Andros]

Andros was not convinced it was a misunderstanding. Dorothea was just so upset. She wasn’t usually a crier, even as a little girl, so she must have truly been disturbed by Sven’s come-on. He pretended for her sake that there was no real danger, no threat to her honor, just a harmless foreigner whose thick accent must have gotten them confused.

He put his anger aside for as long as it took for Dorothea to recover. He brought her a glass of wine and sat next to her on her bed, an arm around her as she cried onto his shoulder. When she calmed down, he called in her older sisters to chat with her and excused himself to find Sven.

The second he was out of her room the placid mask fell. He pounded his fist on a wall. He’d extended hospitality to Sven and how was it repaid? By making an attempt on his own daughter of all the women in the village? It was outrageous.

Andros briefly considered escalating the situation. He could have grabbed a few burly villagers to come with him and put an end to the problem on the spot. Certainly flirting with your host’s daughter severed the sacred bond of guest friendship, did it not?

But as he left his cool, shaded courtyard and walked out into the heat of the day, he thought better of it. It was a come-on, surely, but perhaps Sven didn’t understand the seriousness of his offense. Perhaps he could be educated and this could be settled with an apology. Andros has solved worse conflicts than this with words. When he got to the potter’s shed and rapped on the door, he was relatively calm.

“Sven Fellman,” he began, “My children are good girls. They don't go off with strange men for lessons or for any other reason. Poor Dorothea is crying in her room at the affront to her honor. You frightened her and you insulted my household. What is the meaning of this?”

[Mimi Pidders]

Fell was still not entirely sure what in blazes was going on. Dorothea had smiled at him and jerked her head toward the hill where he knew the women tended sheep, then had burst into tears and ran for the comforting(?) of the older women, who had clucked their tongues at him as they walked off with the young girl.

For his part, he'd gone back to his meager home and used the water to wash up before making one of the items on his commission list for this week, a two-handled wine jug. He added a bit of fluting to it because he thought its recipient might appreciate some ornamentation, and changed the base color of the jug handles and the lip of the pitcher so that it shone a metallic bronze. When he was finished, he put it in the shed behind his house. He wasn't stupid; he knew he had to craft his pieces and then "fire" them in the kiln, even though they were already complete, so toward the end of the week, he would gather wood and then run the kiln. The pyre he built was not nearly hot enough to actually fire clay, but that was fine since it was all for show. He just needed to ensure that no one in the village wondered how these pieces appeared with him never seeming to use the kiln.

One of the downsides of being in a village like this was that it was a bit like being back in the Tower: Everyone knew everything about everyone. And so it was that scarcely an hour after his puzzling encounter with the most beautiful woman on the island (he was not certain, but he was convinced), her father came to call.

He crossed his arms at Andros' invective. His invitation to teach her math had been taken as... some kind of come on? Her "honor" was mentioned. They couldn't possibly mean -- oh. Of course. Any society that hid their women away for fear that men might ruin them may not look too kindly upon an unmarried man proposing he spend unlimited private time with that same woman. It was barbaric, and backwards, and idiotic, but it was the way of things, here. He'd made a mistake, and he needed Andros to forgive him.

So he had the good grace to look abashed.

"I beg your pardon, Archon. I did not mean to make your daughter upset. We were discussing the well screw she made -- she said she invented it, and I complimented her on its form. I am not aware if you know, Sir, but for her to have made something like this, she may be a genius. There are skilled craftsmen in Radenor who make such things, and they do not do half so well as she did, and they are working off of blueprints. She made it up with no instructions whatsoever! It is remarkable, truly remarkable, how much intelligence such an undertaking would require."

"I did not mean for my offer to mean anything... untoward," he said, coloring slightly. He had certainly thought some untoward things, but his invitation to teach her mathematics had been chaste in its intention. "It is a misunderstanding, Sir. I would not impugn her honor, nor presume upon her," he groped for a word that he had little use for in Radenor: "chastity, I believe? In such a fashion. The fault is mine, and I take full responsibility."

[Andros]

Fell looked confused, then properly apologetic. Andros was red hot with anger when he showed up, but it dissipated pretty quickly. By the time Fell was done speaking, he couldn’t quite remember why he was so mad in the first place.

“Yes, yes, very well,” he said, his tone much more gentle. “It may not be fashionable where you come from, but we take chastity very seriously here. You’d do best not to talk to the marriageable women at all. A girl who gets a reputation can’t find a match, and it’s a sad thing for her and her family. No husband, no children, a tragedy. I had a cousin, you know, they found her with a boy down by the beach at midnight…”

He was rambling. His mind wasn’t in this conversation any more. He pulled himself back before he finished the story.

“Where was I? Anyway, yes, Doro is a remarkable girl isn’t she? None of the others give me half as much trouble, but - and I didn’t say this, by the way - none of them are half as bright either. Anthea has a head for business and Thea makes a good assistant for Doro, but it’s not the same.”

This was comfortable territory for Andros. He really was immensely proud of his third daughter. She wasn’t his favorite. That would be little Irene, still his baby, and everyone knew it. But she was the only girl who could hold her own in any dispute with anybody, including her father.

She was stubborn and brilliant, not an easy way to be a woman, but Andros admired her for it. His people skills could diffuse a conflict with almost anyone in the village, but when Dorothea knew she was right, she’d dig in her heels and give you reason after reason to prove it. And often she won, even with him. Boasting about her came second nature to Andros.

“You know she came up with a way for us to do math, all on her own - when she was, what, six? She makes straight lines in the dirt with a stick, then puts rocks in them to count. In the right column each rock is 1, in the next one its 10, in the next one its 100 and so on. You can do all kinds of math that way, much easier than using your fingers. Everyone in town picked it up.”

He laughed. “We call the rocks Doro’s Dots. And you saw Dorothea’s Pump, and there’s half a dozen more I don’t even understand.”

Sighing, he stopped the mental train and returned to his original purpose.

“She’s special, and I know she’s beautiful, too. But leave her be, and the other women too.” He pat Fell on the shoulder. “You’re new here and you don’t know our ways. I’ll chalk this up to a misunderstanding. All right?”