“We’ll hear ’em ring soon—midnight bells from over in the Kingdom.”
At midnight, the memory of his promise returned. Gian’s eyes sprang open.
“Ready to tell me what you got to say?” Cianco said. “It’s a long walk.”
Stopping sometimes for Gian to catch his breath, they walked the length of several parishes. When he’d told everything, though expecting to feel lighter and unburdened, Gian felt only tender and undone, none the better.
“Sit here,” Cianco said, with hands upon Gian’s shoulders to urge him down beside some parish well. With satiric looks—inspiring shy smiles—Cianco made a parody of the nuptial rite. He drew up water and gave it to Gian to drink; kneeling, he rinsed Gian’s hands and feet. But whom did the joke mock? Hard to say, with nothing but the real thing in his care. Gian’s heart knocked painfully. He must still carry the past with him and the river might never run clear again. Love doesn’t take the burdens away, only makes them worth bearing.
In a temple across the square, drums of a nighttime bembe had this whole parish bumping; and suddenly they ceased. Behind the walls, a voice spoke in the silence, pure and clear as ocean shallows, that woman’s voice—until it turned, mid-word, to smoke and gravel, the deepest bass of the most ancient grandfather. If they were only just getting to the invocation, this other congregation would be all night, Gian thought. He yawned. And it finally dawned on him to ask, “Pop, where are you taking me? And who we dropping in on, this late?”
“End of the block, right there.” Cianco pointed. “And she’s a nightbird. ‘I’ll be up whenever you get here,’ she said.” He pulled Gian to his feet. “My woman I go see every day I ain’t with you.” Midnight bells rang over in the Kingdom. “About time the both of you met. It’s something all three of us together got to talk about.”
Midnight at the Feet
of the Caryatides
Cory Skerry
When the window was clean enough to reflect the dark shadow of his face and the silver sea behind him, Feetmeat scuttled down the side of the Teeth Tower. Below, he saw a flash of yellow through the trees, moving back toward the Scroll Tower through the connecting garden. He might not be too late.
Feetmeat scurried up the cool stone bricks of the Teeth Tower, his toes splayed out over stone fruit and leaves, his fingers digging into the spaces between gargoyles’ teeth.
Everyone agreed Teeth Tower was the tallest, though Feetmeat wasn’t sure how they’d know. The towers reached so high that no one in recorded history had ever visited the attics. Every expedition, even using the indoor staircases, had turned back when they ran out of supplies.
Teeth Tower was also the easiest to climb on the outside—for fifteen stories, until the baroque style was replaced by austere Greek columns. The vandals who called themselves the Court consistently marked their territory below that line, unable to scale smoother stones the way Feetmeat could.
And the Court’s vandalism was why he was headed for the ninth-story classroom window, where they’d left their latest painted gift. He reveled in how the climb stretched his muscles and the wind tested his grip. He fancied the building knew he was there to clean off the obscenities, that it welcomed his visit.
Even with that imagined benevolence, the ascent had its perils. He edged past a row of spikes placed on the cornice long ago to prevent pigeons from nesting. It worked, but it also attracted raptors from the desert to the east and the sea to the west, swooping in with fish or rabbits and dropping them onto the spikes.
When he reached the ninth-story ledge, he rested for a few moments, his back against a gargoyle. Its claws had been sculpted so that they dug into the cornice; if upon each of Feetmeat’s visits the gargoyle’s grip seemed to have changed, or if sometimes there were gnawed bones lying on the ledge, it was no business of Feetmeat’s.
The school and its Towers held many secrets, and Feetmeat reasoned that he didn’t want to know most of them.
After all, there were plenty of daylight atrocities. Every student was a blue-blooded heir to varying degrees of fortune, and some of them seemed poisoned by it rather than blessed. Feetmeat couldn’t help but wonder if things would have been different with money, with a powerful family. His face was handsome enough, he thought; he had eyes as green and slanted as a cat’s, a gentle hill of a nose, smooth skin the color of the desert to the east. His arms were nearly the size of other men his age, muscled from trips up and down the towers. But the chest that anchored them was the size of a pubescent child’s, and his short legs each bowed inward so severely that if he stood up straight, he must walk upon the sides of his feet.
Most of the school only ignored and avoided him, but four of the richest and vilest students had made it their mission to torment him whenever they could catch him. He was sure it was only his knowledge of the best ways to climb that had convinced these four, the Court, to spare him so far. Otherwise, they might have already beaten him as they did with select students, or even killed him, as they had done with too-friendly cats.
Last night, the Court had scrawled a lewd act on the window in crimson paint: a woman with a crown being used as a conduit between two men, one of whom had a large hat, the other with tiny dashes for eyes. The students didn’t fraternize with Feetmeat, even though they were his age, so the caricatures meant nothing to him, but he had a feeling their identities were clear to everyone else.
He slipped out his flask—not whiskey, but turpentine—and wetted an old sock. The paint came off the glass reluctantly, revealing a Lector in the classroom beyond, flapping her mouth soundlessly. Before her, seated at desks arrayed in a half-moon, the students scratched black wounds into paper with sharp quills and cold fingers. Their disinterest in Feetmeat’s arrival was to be expected—to most of them, he was of no more consequence than the school’s many ghosts.
The door opened, beyond the Lector, and there was a flash of yellow. Feetmeat paused, pressing his face so close that his eyes and sinuses stung from the turpentine fumes, but he couldn’t let the overcast sky’s reflection get in the way.
It was his library aide, the boy with the halo of black curls. The aide handed the Lector a stack of books, as confidently as if he approached an equal. Feetmeat’s heart beat a fierce rhythm, like the drums in the caravan where he’d lived before the school. The aides rarely left the libraries in the Scroll Tower, and he’d never seen the object of his affections venture out before.
If he finished this quickly, he could climb down and…. Well, he was too shy to approach the aide, but the idea of seeing him without glass between them would be euphoric.
Feetmeat scrubbed at the graffiti with reckless fury, as if it was intentionally obstructing him. The vandals had used long-handled brushes this time, and Feetmeat had to climb onto a gargoyle to reach the highest daubs of paint. He strained, because if he had to climb another story and dangle on a rope, he would never make it down in time to see the aide.
His toes slipped off the gargoyle’s pate, and he fell toward the spikes below.
He grasped at the ledge, catching it with both hands. The impact stung his palms, and his fingers slid off.
His descent stopped with a sudden yank, his rope belt digging into his gut. He breathed hard through his nose. Below him, past bare feet that were too warped to fit into any shoes, the spikes waited.
He reached up and grabbed at the gargoyle; his belt had caught on its curled tail. The muscles in Feetmeat’s arms burned as he clambered up the statue and back onto the ledge. If he’d been an average-sized man, he wouldn’t have had the strength to lift himself. It was a thought he held gingerly, because it felt strange in his mind.
His sides prickled with fear-sweat, the sour odor stronger even than the paint thinner. He picked up the sock where it had fallen and began scrubbing again. His cheeks burned, even though no students had come to the window to witness his struggle.
A ghost had. She looked just like all the other phantoms trapped in the school’s towers: pale, hol
e-eyed wisps of young men and women whose hands ended before their fingertips and whose mouths held no teeth or tongues, as if in death they had forgotten some of what they were.
There was no way to tell how she had died, whether it had been inflicted by a cruel classmate or a bad decision. He knew she hadn’t jumped or fallen: no one ever died that way on school grounds. There were dark rumors of past students and even Lectors who had tried, each of them saved by a sudden wind. Saved from death—but not necessarily from paralysis.
When the window was clean enough to reflect the dark shadow of his face and the silver sea behind him, Feetmeat scuttled down the side of the Teeth Tower. Below, he saw a flash of yellow through the trees, moving back toward the Scroll Tower through the connecting garden. He might not be too late.
He hobbled along the path, now angry at his tiny body, as if he hadn’t been glad of it minutes before. Maybe he was light enough to climb well, but his stride fell far short of the aide’s, and the rough gravel abraded his deformed feet.
As he neared the last garden, he heard the Court ahead.
He stopped behind a hedge, one gate away from running into the four psychotics. They’d smell the turpentine, know that he’d just come back from ruining their night’s work. He wished it was anyone else between him and his aide, but there was no mistaking the distinctive honk of Bestra and Bulgar’s laughter.
He would have to turn back and look for a place to hide. Silently. The Court had cat ears that listened for the sounds of hiding and retreating, and they had jackal hearts, their greatest joy derived from the hunt and its grisly end.
“Where’s the key, fussy little mouse?” called another familiar voice, like a badly-played violin. Genevieve.
“We want to improve on those dusty old books,” Bestra sneered.
Feetmeat froze as he realized they weren’t talking to one another, but to a victim. Someone who had a connection to books.
The library aide.
A shriek cut the air, followed by the wet meat noises of impact-tested flesh.
Feetmeat knew he should flee, but instead, he crept up to the gate. Through the iron filigree, he watched the Court brace themselves on their strong, fit legs as they pummeled a blur of brown and yellow.
The aide. His library aide, with the beautiful brown eyes and curly black hair and huge, plush lips. His robes had always looked bright and noble through the windows, but now, in the apathetic daylight, the cloth seemed as dingy as weathered bones.
“Give us your key,” demanded Ansimus King, the leader of the delinquent Court. Even the other spoiled nobles who attended class in the Towers avoided angering King. Whether he was telling a joke or breaking someone’s fingers, he rarely changed expression, like a statue carved from a block of cold hatred.
The aide reached into his pocket—and just as quickly, pressed a glinting piece of metal into his mouth. His throat flexed. He looked up at his captors, smiling a gallows smile.
The Court cackled, as if it was a funny enough prank to get him to swallow a key, except for King.
“We’ll have that back,” he said.
Bulgar punched the aide in his stomach, but he only moaned—nothing came up.
“Not that way. It’s between classes—no one to see if we do a bit of excavation. Hold him,” King said, and he flicked out a blade. Genevieve slipped the scarf from her neck and worked it into the aide’s mouth, drawing back on it like reins so he could only choke instead of cry out.
King sliced away the aide’s robe, baring a smooth brown belly.
“You’ll get blood all over you, and they’ll catch us,” Bestra said. She sounded frightened, and for a moment, Feetmeat had hope.
“I’ve done it before. If you cut slow enough, it all bleeds down instead of out,” King said, and crouched in front of the squirming aide. If the others had qualms, they were too afraid of King with a knife in his hands to mention them aloud.
Feetmeat gripped the ironwork of the garden gate with his fingers and rattled it as noisily as he could. When he turned the handle, the gate swung open, with him riding it at an average man’s height.
The other three turned to stare at Feetmeat, and King stuck the blade in just enough to squeeze out a few beads of blood. The aide stopped struggling, held himself motionless, but quivered with the effort.
“We’re busy, Feetmeat,” King said, as if he was only carving a holiday gourd.
“I have something that might interest you,” Feetmeat called. More than once, he’d traded a secret climbing route for mercy. He hoped they hadn’t tired of his bargains.
“You going to tattle on us to the Administration, Monkeyman?” called Genevieve. She had the same dark brown skin as the aide, but where his was silken, her flaccid cheeks and short forehead held a sheen of grease. Her overbite was so pronounced she couldn’t close her mouth all the way, and in consequence, her own damp breath kept her lower lip and chin slick and shiny. Feetmeat wondered how she could laugh at the way he walked, how she thought his fish-hook-shaped legs were any worse than her shark mouth.
“Leave him,” Feetmeat said, “and I’ll show you a better place to make your marks.”
“We’re bored of your places,” said King. “We want somewhere new, and he’s got it. The inside of the library can’t be cleaned with turpentine.”
“This place,” Feetmeat said, spacing his words out to emphasize each, “is both familiar and unknown. Why paint the books, where only a few scribes will see, when you could paint a place everyone can see, from every classroom in Teeth Tower?”
They dropped the library aide. Bestra and Bulgar stared with dry red eyes while King stepped closer.
“You mean the library windows, the ones held up by those statues who’ve each got one titty hanging out,” he said. He seemed close to genuine reverence.
“Yes. I can take you to the caryatides, but I’m too short to reach what you paint, and no one can climb higher than the windows, not even me, so your marks will remain, even long after you’ve left the school.”
King regained his feet. He commanded the others from the peak of wealth, the peak of cruelty, and the peak of beauty. King had a square jaw with a dust of early stubble, dark-lashed blue eyes, and strangely small but perfectly aligned white teeth. Feetmeat had thought him handsome, the first time he saw him, but a few minutes in King’s company and that changed forever.
“Usually if we want help, we have to catch you,” King challenged, his voice low and soft.
Feetmeat’s story poured out with all the bitterness he would have felt if it had actually happened. “I asked to live in the dorms, with warmth and the other youths, and they said never, not even in the worst blizzard, not even if wolves stalk the grounds and the ocean chews at the front steps.”
“And a good thing,” Genevieve said.
King’s eyes glistened, unfocused as he no doubt imagined desecrating the Scroll Tower, the center tower, which could be seen from nearly everywhere on the school grounds. In all the years the Towers had been a school, no other student had ever managed to paint so high or prominent a place.
In the ensuing silence, Feetmeat thought only of ghosts pressing their spongy noses against the windows, scratching with their stumps. He would never ask to live inside. It seemed absurd that the Court and their ilk, who made the ghosts directly with their hands and indirectly with their words, would believe anyone wanted to trap themselves inside that world.
But though Feetmeat clung to the gate like a frog on a wall in summer, ready to snatch insects that ventured too close to the door lamps, they saw only that he was small—not that he was hungry. To them he was only fragile bones and bumbling steps, a child-sized tragedy.
“We’ll need more paint,” declared King. “We’ll meet you here, four days hence. Veneris, at dusk?”
“Yes, Veneris,” Feetmeat said. “Bring old clothes that we can blacken, and climbing harnesses with the longest ropes.”
“If you’re not here, we’ll break the neck of ever
y cat we see and tell the Administration we saw you do it,” Genevieve said.
“I’ll be here,” Feetmeat said. He tried not to think of the cats who sheltered in the toolshed where he lived, their purring silenced by cruel hands. He remained on the gate, swinging slightly with the breeze, until they dropped the library aide and passed out of sight.
The boy’s soft halo of curly black hair was mashed with mud and stuck all over with twigs and thorns. Normally there was a quill tucked behind his ear on either side, but those tiny wings were missing now. The corners of his mouth bled where Genevieve’s scarf had abraded him.
Sometimes, when Feetmeat washed the library windows on the first seven floors, he would see this aide sneaking short reads as he reshelved books. His long, fine fingers splayed over the lines of text with such grace that Feetmeat had imagined those hands fluttering over his skin, reading him with the same fierce curiosity that drove them to turn pages. He knew that wished-for lust was impossible, that everyone saw him as an animal or a monster, or if he was lucky, as a child.
“Thank you,” the aide rasped. They must have hit him in the throat. “They were going to…like a fish—”
“I know,” Feetmeat said. He reached out a hand, intending to help the aide to his feet, and realized only too late that his gallant gesture was laughable. The aide did smile, but he held out his hand as well, and shook it once in greeting. His fingers were gentle and cold.
“Felipe,” the aide wheezed.
Feetmeat was silent.
“Do you have a name, heroic window-washer?”
Feetmeat had come here as the barely-tolerated freak in a visiting caravan, and when their negotiations with the Administration of the school hadn’t gone well, they’d decided Feetmeat was the cause of all their bad luck. They’d tried to burn him. A long-dead janitor had saved him, but the man wasn’t much more sensitive than the caravan folk. “Feetmeat” was what the janitor called him, and in time, so did everyone else. He couldn’t bear to say this memory-tarnished name aloud. “Not yet,” he said.
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