The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  “It’s the key to the room where the tech is kept. In the Underhold.”

  “And what else?”

  If she was asking, it meant she knowed the answer already. “It’s the key to our storeroom,” I said. “At the mill.”

  Catrin give a nod. I seen in her eyes she was happy I told the truth. “Yes, it is,” she says. “It’s that key, not the Underhold key. I keep the Underhold key on the ring at my belt, and it never goes from me. You want to know where I got your storeroom key from? Your mother was here, Koli. This afternoon. She was sitting where you are now, though we give her a chair and a cup of mead for she’s not accused of anything yet.

  “You see, it had been puzzling me how you got into that room. Getting into the Underhold is not too hard, but that room is kept locked the whole time and we made sure the lock was a good one. Then I remembered how that locksmith was billeted with Jemiu at the mill, all them years ago, and I wondered. So I asked her to bring her keys with her, when she come, and as soon as I got a look at them I had my answer.”

  “If the bitch bites, drown the litter,” Fer said, from where she was sitting off in the darkness behind Catrin.

  Anger rose up in me, and I didn’t try to push it back down again. It was so much better than the fear! “My mother’s no bitch, Rampart Arrow,” I said. “But looking at your litter, I guess I know what you are.”

  Mardew swore an oath, and I guess either he or Fer jumped up, for Perliu snapped, “Keep your seats!”

  “Whether he speaks the truth or not, he’s got to pay for that insult,” Fer said.

  Again, Catrin didn’t offer no answer. Her eyes was still on me, with that same hard look in them. “So here we’ve got a key that belongs to Jemiu,” she said. “And you used it to steal from us. If we were minded to, we could arrest your mother too and call it conspiracy.”

  “What’s conspiracy?” I asked, my voice going to a rat squeak again.

  “It’s when bad people come together to do a bad thing. It might be two people, like you and your mother. Or four, if Athen and Mull was in it too. Was they, Koli?”

  “No!”

  “Was anyone?”

  “No! No! I come on my own, Dam Catrin. I done it on my own. They didn’t even know until the wedding. You seen their faces! You got to know it’s true!”

  The lantern flame guttered. Catrin paused a moment to tap the glass, knocking a grain of soot off the wick, and it went up straight again. She kept on looking at me the whole time she done it.

  “I’d like to think so, Koli,” she says. “This is a bad enough business as it is, with just you having to abide our judgement. I’d hate to draw any more in if it can be helped. You understand me?”

  I nodded again, though I guess I didn’t understand at all. Why had she said that about my ma and my sisters if she didn’t mean to do no harm to them? It seemed cruel, when she had not been cruel up to then.

  “One more question, Koli. Not the last one, but the next to last. Do you know what a faceless man is?”

  I opened my mouth, but no word come out. Of course I knowed it.

  So I knowed what was to become of me. And though it was not death, it was as near to death as didn’t make no difference.

  “I see you do,” Catrin said. “Listen to me now, and mark me. Nobody has come looking for you this whole time, because they thought you was already gone. The story we told was that Fer got a better look at that music player when you was walking to the mill alongside of her, and she seen it for what it was. She knew it was tech that had been ours, and was not found but stolen. So then she tasked you with how you come by it, and you run away. You got to the grass-grail before she could stop you. She might have ordered Mardew to strike you down with the cutter, but she forbore to do it, and through her mercy you got away. And that was the last anyone seen of you, though we sent out some searchers the day after, and the day after that. Wherever it is you went to, it don’t seem likely you’re coming back, for if you did it would be to face a trial and a whipping at the very least.”

  She stopped to let that sink into me. I knowed at once it was the truth, and the pain of it went all through me. That everyone thought that of me – that I was a thief and a coward and a liar and every other bad thing you could think of. It may seem strange to you, that I could care so much what people thought of me with my life still hanging like that grain of soot in the lantern, half in and half out of the flame. But I did care, and hot tears come into my eyes with the shame of it.

  For it was mostly true, what Fer told the village. I did steal the DreamSleeve. And I did stand up in front of everyone at the wedding and say I found it in the woods. So thief was right, and liar was right, and I guess coward was right too since I knowed what I knowed and never spoke it.

  “So that’s the story,” Catrin says. “And yet here you are. Your family’s living shame and a problem we got to manage.”

  “It’s your family’s shame we’re talking about though,” I answered her through those tears. “If you got a sense of shame left to you. You Vennastins set yourself over everyone with tricks and stories, and then you—”

  Catrin give me a mighty slap right across my face. The bitter blood taste in my mouth let me know she split my lip with that slap. There wasn’t no anger in her face though. What she looked like was more kind of afraid, or worried maybe. She had shut me up the quickest way she knowed.

  “Talk like that is apt to make people change their minds about you, Koli,” she says, “and wish you ill where they wished you well. You be quiet now, and listen to me. One more word out of you and I’ll put it to the vote again.”

  “It should go to the vote again now,” Mardew said. But Catrin didn’t give that no heed, nor seem to hear it. She was talking just to me. Looking just at me, and not ever taking her eyes off of mine.

  “When a man or a woman has done a bad thing,” she says, “but there’s reason to forgive some part of it – like that they’re young, or they done it by accident, or not properly meaning it – then we got another way than hanging them. We take their name away from them and we push them out of gates. We don’t have no more to do with them after that. They can’t ever come inside again, or talk with any of ours, or be within a bowshot of the fence, else the death they was spared will come down on them right then and there.

  “That’s what we’re offering you, Koli. You’re to be a Woodsmith no longer, but a faceless man, and make your way in the world as best you can. Alone, and a long way from here. You go away tonight. You never come back. If you agree, then that’s an end of it. No harm is going to come to your mother or your sisters. I’ll watch over them and make sure of it. You got my word.

  “That’s the one way. The other way is this. Four gallows on the gather-ground. You up there first, with a gag on your mouth in case you’re wondering, so you won’t be hurling no accusations at nobody. Jemiu and Mull and Athen going right after you, for the taint of what you done. And everyone will cry, and many will speak against it, but Ramparts will carry it, don’t you doubt. The Count and Seal will approve it, for to do other would be going against our will and they’d fear to do that in case our punishment fall on them next.”

  Her eyes was on mine all this time, driving the words into me. I thought I seen that fear in her again, though I know that don’t seem likely when she was trying so hard to put fear into me.

  And she done that well enough. I was all filled up with terror at that picture she drawed inside my head, of them I loved most in the world brung to a rope’s end on account of me. I would do anything I could to stop that. Of course I would. If the choice was to put the rope on my own neck and tighten it, I would of done it. I think I would.

  But that wasn’t the choice she offered.

  The others all went away, one by one, excepting only Fer and Catrin. Perliu wagged his finger at me as he went. “I hope you’ll learn a lesson from this, Koli Makewell,” he said. “I hope you’ll do better in times to come.” I wondered at them words. What ti
mes did he think would come for me when I was throwed out of gates to fend alone. I wondered how much of what had passed he understood, and how much had just flowed around him like a stream around a stone.

  Catrin give me a bundle. It was the same bundle I took from the mill, only she had put some bread and dried mutton in there alongside of the few clothes I brung. She give me a waterskin too, a length of rope with a tight braid, a short knife and a compass. It was a good compass, that Wardo Hammer had made and put inside a little case of iron with its own lid to it.

  All this while, Fer stood by with the bolt gun, ready to shoot me down if I run. She had already pointed it at me, so it had choosed me as a target and would follow me as far as was needed. I wasn’t going to run, not after what Catrin said, but I could see why they wouldn’t want to give me the chance.

  I wasn’t crying no more. I was sort of numbed to what was happening. I knowed I was leaving Mythen Rood that night, and never coming back. That this was the end of who I was up to that time – the end of my life in every way except the stopping of my breath. I would be Koli Faceless now, and go away from everything I ever knowed. Nor I couldn’t say goodbye to my mother, to Athen and Mull, to Haijon or Spinner or Veso Shepherd.

  There was one other though. And I couldn’t keep from asking, since there wouldn’t be no other chance. I waited until I had got the bundle on one shoulder and the waterskin on the other, and was ready to go. I done everything they wanted me to, in other words, and showed I was falling in with their plans. Then as we went up the steps of the Count and Seal, with Fer walking behind us, I asked my question.

  “Catrin, what about the music player? It woke for me so the law says it’s mine. Even if I stole it, doesn’t that hold? And since I’m the onliest one who can make it play—”

  I stopped there, for she was shaking her head hard. “Put that out of your mind, Koli,” she says. “You ain’t going to be rewarded for taking what was ours. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to reset that thing, and maybe we won’t, but either way it’s staying here in Rampart Hold.”

  “Then can I have a moment alone with it?” I asked. We was come to the double doors. There was just the hallway now, and then the front door of Rampart Hold. The gather-ground, the grass-grail, me gone for ever. “I just would like to hear one last song.”

  “Is he a simpleton?” Fer asked. “One last song!”

  “Whistle it as you go, Koli. Only wait until you’re outside the walls.”

  Once we was through the door, they walked on either side of me. Fer watched me close and kept the bolt gun resting on my shoulder, the end of the barrel touching my neck from time to time. It was not a comfortable feeling to have it there, and to think about what would happen if her finger tugged just a mite too hard on the trigger.

  Once we was on the gather-ground, we was in full view of the lookout, and the moon give more than enough light to see by. Every step I took, I expected to be challenged and made to give my name – such name as I had got left to me. Then I throwed a glance over there and seen that nobody was in the lookout. Catrin must of thought of that one and stood the watch down for an hour. Of course she would not of missed something so obvious.

  We come to the grass-grail sooner than I expected it. Everything seemed to be going too quick, like it does in a dream where you think of someplace and then you’re suddenly right in the midst of it. Catrin and Fer was both looking at me without a word, waiting for me to go.

  “You said you’d see they was well,” I says. “My mother and my sisters. They’ll be short-handed at the mill without me. There’s enough work for four, or more than that. You’ll let them off their share-works a while, until they reckon a way to do it?”

  “They’ll do their bounden duty like everyone else,” said Fer.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Catrin said. “When the cold weather comes, I can make the mill be a third choice. Like we done for the tannery after Molo died.”

  “And you won’t let nobody speak ill of them on account of me.”

  “I won’t.”

  Fer give a click of her tongue like she was impatient to be done with this. But now I was come to it, I couldn’t climb that fence. I seen now that dying wasn’t just one single thing that happens one single time. A little of it comes with every ending, collecting in the heart of you like rainwater in a barrel. This was a big lot of dying all at once, and it daunted me.

  “Pretend you’re coming back,” Catrin said. “Though you know it won’t be so, you can somewhat trick yourself and believe it anyway. Pretend you’re only going out the way you gone before, to be back betimes.”

  I seen she was right. And that is how I done it. But I didn’t trick myself for long. As soon as my foot touched the earth on the outside of the fence I fell down on my knees and then full length on the ground. I just lay there for the longest time, feeling myself already more lost than I had ever been.

  Far wide, a million miles or more, and the way home many years forgot.

  34

  Most things in a story got to stay in their right place, or they won’t make no sense at all. But there’s other things that only come to make sense a long time after they’re done with.

  I believe that day, that night, was a thing of the second kind. Some parts of it was anyway. I thought I seen plain enough what the Vennastins was doing to me, and why they was doing it, but I done wrong to see it as the same thing for all of them, with the same reason behind it.

  Fer was clear enough about what she wanted: it was to turn away the threat she seen in me and keep her family in the high state they always enjoyed. Mardew was simpler still, for he was just all desiring to spite me on account of the DreamSleeve being mine and not his, even when it was in his hand. And Perliu, I thought, had woke out of a dream for just long enough to show willing.

  But that fear I seen in Catrin’s eyes showed her different than any of them others. I thought then that it was a fear for me, her being disinclined on account of a mother’s soft feelings to see someone she knowed from the cradle kicking his heels inside of a noose, or burned, or shot, or whatever else they might of done to me.

  But I have thought more on the matter since, seeing it in different lights at different times, and I believe I was wrong. It wasn’t a fear for me, like I thought, but for something else. Or maybe a part of it was for me. The rest was for that thing she drawed in words for me, of the Count and Seal bowing to the Ramparts’ naked will, and Ramparts lording it through threats and intimidations and the spilling of blood. She was afraid of what Ramparts would become if their lies was knowed and they still had power. If instead of tricks, they ruled by hurting and forcing. She seen in her heart what awful things that might bring, and she could not bear the thought of it.

  That was why she bent so far and worked so hard to give me the choice of going faceless. Her saving my life was the smallest part of it, for how long would I live outside the gates on my own? It was Mythen Rood she meant to save, and the twice times a hundred people that was in her care.

  Out of all of them, I think she was the one that knowed what Rampart meant.

  35

  Though I was full of despair and empty of ideas, it was too cold to stay long on the damp ground. By and by, I picked myself up and moved away from the fence, into the half-outside. A freshet of wind blowed up in my face that seemed to have some threat of rain in it, though the rain did not come down right then.

  The forest was a mass of shadow that started a hundred steps ahead of me and went on for ever. In between, there wasn’t nothing except for that lookout tower I told you of so many times already.

  I turned slowly to look in all quarters to see if anything was already stalking me. I had forest-lore enough, from my few times on hunting parties and many more occasions with my mother’s catchers, to know what danger I was in. It was full night, of course, and with the Salt Feast done we was in Winter now, but only just the start of Winter. If the next day brung a clear sky, the trees would be waked and hungry and
I would be in a sorry state indeed. Until then, my fears was mostly for beasts. There would be many.

  I turned to the lookout again. I had helped to build up those walls and clear that ground, so I knowed it was solid enough to give me shelter. But there was a reason why we didn’t yet set a sentry in that tower, though we finished the work months before. That morning stink I told you of, from some night-time visitor we never got to see, had not faded. And then Woodrue Hunter found some dried-up shit at the foot of the wall he said was most likely dropped by a bear – after that we decided to let the whole thing rest until a Winter and a Spring had come between.

  My needs now was more pressing, but if there was a bear sleeping in the lee of that tower, I was not going to nudge his shoulder and ask him to make room for me. But I was not fool enough to go into the forest in the dark neither, and the half-outside didn’t offer no other shelter. We kept it clear for good reason. So it had got to be the lookout, or else a hollow in the ground and a hope that was hollower still.

  I made my way up the hill, turning my head all ways at once in case something heard or smelled me and come barrelling at me out of the thick dark. The lookout was a black blot against other black blots. I could only just make it out. I moved towards it slowly, with my arms out in front of me, until I touched the cold stone. Then I feeled my way around to the bottom of the steps.

  I waited there, listening. Nothing was moving inside, or if it was then it didn’t make no sound when it moved. There was lots of deadly things that could come on you quiet, though, so I didn’t feel much cheered. I stayed there as long as I could – and when I moved at last it was because I heard tree-cats calling and answering a ways off on the shoulder of the hill. They was said to see in the dark, so maybe they was crying each to other that they seen me coming.

  I went up the stairs, treading as softly as I could.