by Peter David
Nor did I think much of my mother’s frequent male visitors. In retrospect, it is amazing what children will take in stride. I shared my mother’s small room. She had her cot, and I had a bedroll shoved off in the corner. If it was night and I was in bed (or on floor, as the case may be), and the back room was being used for some other private function, she would think nothing of bringing customers to our quarters. I would lie there in the darkness and occasionally be lulled to sleep by the rhythmic creaking of the cot. It meant nothing to me. It was simply what my mother did. I just assumed that everyone’s mother behaved in a like manner.
I was disabused of this belief when I was about six or seven. I had been working in Stroker’s since I was old enough to walk, or at least what passed for walking. I did whatever needed to be done, be it cleaning tables or mucking out horse stables. I didn’t have all that much contact with the rest of the kids in the town, though. I was either too busy with my chores, or simply watching from a window and seeing the speed and alacrity with which they moved, knowing I couldn’t possibly keep up. This particular day, though, Stroker had sent me on an errand, to fetch a new mug from the silversmith to replace one that had corroded. I limped past a group of young boys who were gallivanting fecklessly in the middle of the street—if a wide swath of dirt can reasonably be called a street—and they took notice of me. They stopped their ball game, and one of the larger ones stepped forward in what could only be called a challenging manner. His name was Skrit, and he was easily a head taller than I was. Still a child, of course, but to me at that time, he appeared a behemoth. Skrit had a broken nose and scarred lip from an earlier fight, and it was possible that he was looking for easier pickings.
I, in the meantime, was paying no attention to them, for I had found a coin lying on the ground. It wasn’t much, but it was sitting there dirty and forgotten. I wrapped my small fingers around it and grinned. I had money of my own.
“Hello, Whore’s Son,” he called.
I glanced over my shoulder to see who was being addressed. It took me a moment to realize I was the addressee. What threw me was the deceptively pleasant tone in his voice. To him, it was sarcasm. But I was relatively friendless, knowing only the love of my mother the cot-creaker, the sympathetic looks of Astel, and the gibes and cuffs of the patrons of Stroker’s. I had no experience with peer attitudes.
My hearing was also not the greatest.
“My name isn’t Orson,” I corrected him politely, or thought I had. I slid the coin into the pocket of my tunic without its being noticed. “It’s Apropos.”
” ‘Whore’s Son’ is apropos,” replied Skrit.
“But that’s not my …” I decided I was being unclear and started again. “Are you sure you’re talking to me?”
“Are you the one whose mother is a whore?” he said with a sneer.
I leaned on my cane and scratched my head. “I don’t know. What’s a whore?”
Skrit stared at me, clearly trying to figure out if I was being coy or just stupid. But the expression of polite confusion on my face was probably too difficult to fake. “She’s a woman what sleeps with men and gets paid for it, that’s what! And the men what sleeps with them, they’re whore-lovers!”
I thought of money clinking on the table next to the bed when the men would depart, and instantly knew that that indeed described my mother perfectly. Still, to me, that was the norm. Plus, I remembered times when my mother and Astel would be talking, and they would say things such as money was the only reason men were worth being with, and that what Madelyne did was no different than what the most respectable of women did. There were just different measures of what they were willing to sell themselves for. For other women, it was respectability, titles, land, gowns, and dresses. Astel would opine that Madelyne was more honest about what she did than those others. “It all comes down to money,” Astel said. “The only thing that’s different is where and how it gets spent.”
With those thoughts ringing in my ears, I said to Skrit, “Does your mom get a place to live and food and clothes from your dad?”
Skrit blinked in slow surprise. He glanced at the others and they shrugged, uncertain of what direction this conversation seemed to be going. I wasn’t responding to their taunts, as they would have wished, apparently: with rage or tears or some other thing they could reasonably lampoon. Instead I was simply earnestly confused and inquiring. “Yeah,” Skrit said guardedly.
“Well, then … she’s a whore, too, so I guess we’re both whore’s sons,” was my cheerful response.
In retrospect, it was probably not the brightest answer I could have given.
For this comment was something that Skrit could easily understand. He saw it as an insult, and acted accordingly: He charged.
Alarmed that the conversation had taken a violent turn, I backed up, bumping up against a house. The much larger Skrit loomed over me, and he hit me hard in the stomach. I gasped, feeling my stomach tighten into a knot of pain, and then he hit me again on the side of the head. I went down, dropping my cane. Skrit took the opportunity to kick me full in the face. I felt my nose crack from the impact and knew immediately that it was broken. I rolled onto my back, blood fountaining from my lip and nose. One side of my face was covered with blood.
I had no idea what was going on, for it had all happened so fast. I heard the hooting and hollering of the other boys, and shouts of “Get him again!” and “Show him what-for, Skrit!”
I felt abandoned and alone, as if I didn’t have a friend in the world, as if the entire universe had arrayed itself against me. I was unable to focus on a simple street fight: to me, it was a cosmic condemnation. My face stung, partly from physical pain, partly from humiliation and embarrassment.
I grabbed up my cane, gripping it firmly, gritting my teeth against the agony of my face that seemed on fire. Skrit was making no further move at that moment. Instead he stood over me, laughing, his hands on his hips. I had never desired much as a child, but at that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to wipe that insufferable smirk off Skirt’s face.
I swung the cane around. Cane? “Bludgeon” would be the more appropriate word, for it was large and thick and could serve as a weapon as easily as a means of aiding locomotion. The former was the capacity in which I used it at that point. I swung it as hard and as fast as I could, and it caught Skrit squarely in the side of the head. He staggered, not going down, but clearly surprised. A look of pure, glorious stupidity danced across his face.
I jammed the cane between his legs to trip him up, and succeeded. He went down onto the dirt and I was immediately upon him. I got in a couple of good whacks with the cane before the other boys converged upon me, dragging me off him.
They bashed me with whatever they could get their hands upon. Sticks, stones, rods, feet, made no difference. All I could do was curl into a ball and try and shield myself from as much damage as I could. Unfortunately that wasn’t particularly easy. As poor a walker as I was, I began to wonder somewhere in the midst of all that punishment if I would ever be able to walk again.
Then a voice started shouting, “Stop!”
They didn’t hear it at first, or chose not to. Above the raucous shouting of the boys, I could barely hear it myself.
Suddenly someone started yanking the boys off me, one by one. Before I knew it, I was suddenly clear of them. I had been crying in pain and humiliation, but considering my face was bruised and dirty, tears probably weren’t especially noticeable. Still, I shielded my face until I heard a voice say, “It’s okay.”
I looked up.
It was an older boy. Rakishly handsome, a large hank of brown hair hanging down and in his face. He was grinning lopsidedly. “You okay?” He was dressed in a green tunic and brown leggings. He had several armbands, all of them multicolored in green, brown, and flares of orange. He looked like a giant leaf. “You okay?” he asked again.
It was a staggeringly stupid question, but I wasn’t feeling up for sarcasm at that moment. “Ye
ah,” I managed to get out. I paused a moment to spit, because my mouth felt full, and I was annoyed—although not surprised—to see a tooth land on the ground.
Skrit, however, didn’t seem particularly inclined to let me off that easily—if a severe beating can be termed “easy.” He pointed a quavering finger at the newcomer and shouted, “Get outta here, Tacit! This ain’t none o’ your business.”
“It is now,” Tacit said with quiet confidence that seemed far beyond his years. “This how you amuse yourself these days, Skrit? Beating up on crippled kids?” Tacit couldn’t have been more than ten, but he used the word “kids” as if he were an adult.
The side of Skrit’s face was already swelling up where I’d struck him. He rubbed it indignantly and said, “But … but he …”
“Come on, Skrit,” Tacit said slowly. Skrit’s protests didn’t seem to have registered on him. “If you’re that hungry for a fight … take a swing at me.”
“Now … look, Tacit …”
But Tacit wasn’t looking. Instead he struck a defensive pose, brought his fists up, and said nothing. No more words were required. It was time for Skrit to rise to the challenge or not.
Skrit appeared to consider it for a time, although it’s difficult to know whether he really considered it, or just paused a good long time to make it look as if he was giving it serious deliberation.
I realized that Skrit was afraid of him. But not being willing to admit that, Skrit suddenly squared his shoulders and, for just a moment, I thought he was going to go after the newly arrived Tacit. Instead, however, he snorted derisively and said, “If you want to be pals with some crippled whore’s son, ain’t no never mind to me. You ain’t worth wasting the skinned knuckles on.”
It was an elegant means of saving face. If Tacit had pressed the issue, of course, Skrit would have had to run for it. But Tacit did no such thing, instead simply standing there, fists remaining cocked until Skrit and his cronies had swaggered off. Then Tacit turned to me and looked down. “Can you walk?”
“Kind of,” I said.
He hauled me to my feet. I was amazed at the strength in the slim arm; it was as if I had no weight, he pulled me up so easily. “I’m Tacit,” he said.
“I know,” I said, partly leaning against him as I steadied myself. “I’m Apropos.”
“What did you do to get on Skrit’s bad side there, Po?” Tacit was the first person to call me by anything resembling a nickname. There was an implied instant friendliness there that I found appealing.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I admitted. “He called my mother a whore.”
“Oh,” Tacit said sympathetically. “That got you angry?”
“Not especially. She is a whore. But when I called his mother a whore, that got him angry. I guess it’s not good to be a whore, huh?”
“Well … that depends who you talk to,” Tacit said thoughtfully, scratching his chin. “If you ask a man who needs a whore, then it’s probably a pretty good thing to be. Anyone else …” And he shrugged as if the sentiment wasn’t worth pursuing. “Where do y’live?”
“Stroker’s.”
“Come on, then.” He looked at my leg in fascination. “What’s wrong with your leg?”
“I dunno. Born that way.”
“Oh.”
He guided me back to the tavern, and when we arrived there, Madelyne let out a shriek and—for a moment—thought that Tacit was the one who had been responsible for the beating I’d taken. I quickly set her straight on that, but when she asked me what sort of words had passed between the bullies and me, I found that I couldn’t tell her. I sensed—correctly, I think—that she would have been hurt by it. So I said, “They made fun of my limp.” I caught Tacit’s eye, but it wasn’t really necessary. He was fast enough off the mark to know that utter candor with my mother wasn’t a necessity.
Stroker, who was behind the counter pouring out mead, called out, “Well, you better get used to it! And where’s my mug! The one you were supposed to bring from the silversmith, damn your eyes!”
Before I could explain that I’d never quite made it there, Tacit stepped in. “I’ll fetch it for you, sir,” he said, and he was out the door before Stroker could utter another word.
Madelyne, bandaging my bruises and clucking over my ruined nose, looked out the open door through which Tacit had just passed and said in admiration, “What a nice lad. You were very fortunate, Apropos, that he stepped in to help you.”
“I know, Ma,” I said.
She wiped away the blood with a cool, wet cloth. “Making sport of a child’s imperfections. Children can be so cruel.”
“I know, Ma.”
“Well … don’t you make mind of none of them,” she told me firmly. “Because you … you’re a child of destiny. You’re going to accomplish great things, Apropos. Great things.”
“I know, Ma.”
But I was looking at her with different eyes that day. From the things that the others had said … even from the tone that Tacit had adopted … I knew that somehow my mother was lower in the eyes of people than other women were. Lower because of what she did. It was as if my eyes had been opened, even as they’d swelled shut. I watched over the next few days the way that others treated her and truly saw it for the first time as degrading. I felt anger beginning to swell within me … but oddly enough, not for those that were doing the treatment, but rather her for letting it be done to her.
A week later, matters came to a head one night when my mother was entertaining a customer. I’d taken to sleeping in the stables, claiming that the room was a bit too cold for me, and I found greater warmth covered with straw and drawing warmth from the bodies of the animals that were clustered about. Madelyne thought it odd, but didn’t press the point. Consequently, I wasn’t there when her bed collapsed in, I presume, mid-coitus. But I heard about it not too long afterward when I heard her angry voice calling, “Apropos!” I wasn’t used to hearing that tone from her. There was generally very little I could do that got her truly angry. “Where are you?”
“Over here, Ma,” I called from the pile of hay I’d staked out.
She approached me, waving one of the legs that I recognized as having been from her bed. For a moment I thought she was going to use it to club me. Then she pointed to one end of it. “What is this?” she asked, her voice steady.
“I dunno.”
“It’s the leg of my bed, Apropos.”
“If you knew, then why did you ask?”
“It’s about three-quarters sawed through. And now it broke. Why do you think it broke, Apropos?”
I stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “It broke because it was three-quarters sawed through. You just said so, Ma.”
“The point is, who sawed it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.” She tapped it gently into her open palm. “I think you sawed it, Apropos.”
I shook my head so vigorously that the room seemed to spin around me.
As if I hadn’t even offered protest, she continued calmly, “Why did you do it, honey?”
I started to tell her that I hadn’t, but I found that I wasn’t able to look her in the eyes as I did so. It is a rather disconcerting and annoying thing to discover that one cannot lie to one’s parent. “I felt like it,” I said, which was certainly true enough.
“All right, you felt like it. Why did you feel like it?”
“Because when you’re with those men in bed, you’re a whore, and you shouldn’t be a whore because that’s a bad thing.”
Slowly she put the wooden leg down. I wasn’t sure, as the words had all come spilling out of me, how she was going to react. I anticipated anger, or hurt. But she just seemed a bit sad. “Why do you think it’s a bad thing?”
“Because …” I hadn’t actually been able to wrap myself around the concept fully, and so I fell back on having my world defined by peer groups. “Because the other boys say so.”
“I see. And do you always believ
e what the other boys say?”
“If they believe it enough to beat me up over it, I kind of do.”
She shook her head sadly and sat down on the straw next to me. “And that’s why you’re sleeping out here now.” It wasn’t a question, and I nodded my head. “Apropos, you’re going to have to learn sooner or later that you can’t just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn’t be.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to make of the world what you want to make of it.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she said for what seemed the umpteenth time, “you have a destiny.”
I sighed and flopped back down on the hay. It was quite clear to me that we weren’t going to get any further that night. The destiny business was what my mother always trotted out when she had no answers. She tended to trot it out a lot.
To her credit, Madelyne didn’t endeavor to press the point. Instead she simply sat next to me, running her fingers through my hair as if she wanted to reaffirm for herself that I was still there. When morning came, I awoke to find that she had fallen asleep next to me. And I realized that, as the sun shone down on her face, I still loved her, even though I vaguely understood that I should by rights be ashamed of her.
She’d slept with me, and I loved her. I pulled the coin out of my tunic, the one that I’d found on the street a week previous. I’d been trying to decide what to do with it, and at that point I knew precisely what it should be used for. My mother’s hand was lying open, and I pressed the coin into her palm. Her fingers automatically wrapped around the coin, even in her sleep.