As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  There was, in accordance with the invitation roll she had talked from the porters, no special person she must ensure she made pleasant for: as Harald had said, with a dismissive jerk of his bovine head, it was “The usual suspects, and yourself, Goodwife al-Fihri”.

  In Hana’s long experience, this was no reason to let her guard down. Many an unexpected alliance was born by chance marrying cunning, and much fruit borne of the most unlikely union.

  Hana replaced the tin and removed from the chest (whose gold and silver inlay had long ago been pawned to pay for its passage to Albion-of-the-Britons, leaving grooves in the wood) the last item of her perfuming ritual: a blue glass bottle with a stopper in the shape of a galloping horse, with one leg missing.

  She took the bottle to the kitchen where, upon the table, there sat a tin bowl with the same cheap lead paint upon it as used by any other Goodwife in Albion, full of warm water to three quarters of its capacity.

  The quarrelling of songbirds continued loud enough to penetrate both windowpane and kitchen door. It might be that they were pecking the weakest of their number to death again.

  Hana unstoppered the perfume bottle and listened for half a moment for signs she needed to rush out and demonstrate care she did not feel. If the finches were committing fratricide once more, it did not travel to her in their chirps, and she stirred a few drops of the oil into the warm water with the tips of her fingers.

  Hana patted the solution onto her face and arms with great delicacy, until she was shrouded in the scent like a protective cloud, and with the finches crying indignant murder, she returned the bottle to the chest, and shook the flowers from her clothes.

  * * *

  By the evening the weather had thickened and warmed under its insulating blanket of cloud, keeping the streets dark between the sparse-placed gas lights, and ensuring that whatever else might occur to Hana al-Fihri al Auda Bedu Ird she would arrive without wind-reddened cheeks. Hajar had yet to return to their rooms when Hana departed, and she spared only a brief thought for her daughter’s whereabouts; no doubt she strained the bounds of acceptability again and was enjoying entirely chaste and vehement conversation with the ugly Israeline-Semite doctor she seemed to devote all her time to.

  But Hana had no time to spare on thoughts of potential impropriety, and she swathed herself in the thick woollen coat against what the weather had to threaten: with the rehoused birds twittering sleepily to each other with fluffed feathers somewhere up above, she stepped out into the night.

  The streets were still and empty as the grave, for this was the hour in which What’s My Purpose? was usually broadcast. Like a flock of lapwings following each other as mindless as slaves, the people of Durham as the people all over Albion settled into their homes, hunched by their Wireless receivers, and listened to an old man poking sanctioned fun at his own country through the medium of parlour games. It failed to move Hana, as many of the more frivolous traditions of Albion did, but like any good guest, she held her tongue and feigned the correct level of enthusiasm.

  This careful timing of egress would ensure that few impeded her passage, that the porters at the university gate would be disinclined toward a rigorous examination of her letter of invitation (though this time it was quite genuine, albeit originally intended for an acquaintance unable to come) and it would be a quiet but distracted moment to enter the great hall. She did not wish to make an entrance.

  Though the streets were largely empty of Albionmen and their cousins, their lengths were patrolled nonetheless: cohorts of fallen leaves skipped and danced like dervishes, pattering after Hana’s footsteps; rats, a great nuisance in a society which regarded their wildcats as pests and resisted the Frankish use of dogs as unpatriotic, scurried squeaking from sewer to sewer; and in unlit alleyways illicit deals were struck and liaisons enacted by those of Durham who had more pressing concerns than the wit and the canary impressions of Hugo Waldren.

  Hana kept to a dignified but brisk pace, avoiding the canal path. Although it was the quicker way to the University buildings, it was barely safe during daylight hours and after sunset to walk alone alongside the dank, oily waters was all but suicide.

  Along her route the lights of houses and flats glowed dull behind drawn curtains, like torches viewed through mist.

  Fly-by-nights, the tiny airborne arthropods with no Gated cousins, swept past her, unable to hold their own in the breeze which whipped every loose end of scarf and skirt into an endlessly-fluttering display of cloth. With each more forceful swirl of leaves at ankle-height, a small procession of fly-by-nights tumbled past closer to her mouth, caught for a moment in the dim pool of light between the scattered gas lights.

  The gatehouse to the great hall of Durham University lay alongside one of the many buildings in which divinatory studies occurred, and about which Hana’s daughter had occasional, vehement words to offer. Hana was hardly impressed herself, but knew, unlike Hajar, when to hold her tongue. The study of ornithomancy might be foolish, but it was a foolishness which was easy to manipulate and simple to guide along paths more favourable to oneself.

  As Hana had suspected, the gatehouse was filled with the sound of a subdued voice asking, “—Five limbs and a hank of wool, what’s my purpose?” and with the laboured breathing of three winter colds wearing gray woollen uniform tunics, and not a single head turned to look at her as she passed through the high gateway and into the courtyard beyond.

  At the door to the great hall, Hana was finally stopped by a rather more elegantly-dressed gatekeeper (although he was elegantly-dressed after the fashion of Albion, which favoured woollen garb, linen shirts, and embroidery which to Hana’s Moorish Empire-raised eyes was clumsy and poorly supported by the proliferation of blank tin buttons), who dipped his head with a mutter of, “Goodwife,” and made an impressively subtle indication that he should like to see her letter of invitation.

  Hana smiled and, in spite of the cold and the wind, took her time hunting for the letter. It was safe and dry, tucked deep into the folds of her pinned shift, but the delay afforded her the opportunity to ingratiate herself.

  “They have you out here missing Waldren’s Canaries again, Gull?” she asked, meeting his eyes as she made contact with the corner of the letter. “Did you lose a bet?”

  “Three bets,” Gull grunted, sounding sorry for himself. “Luck’s terrible, Goodwife al-Fihri, I think I’ve been cursed.”

  It was altogether more likely that Gull’s simpleness was under exploitation again, but Hana smiled in sympathy and presented him with the letter.

  As Gull always did, he merely glanced at the seal, and let her tuck the letter back inside the folds of her shift. “Can’t bloody believe I’m missing it again,” he muttered, with a fatalism that suggested he very much could believe it and didn’t want to.

  The great hall was speckled here and there with the second-and-third-tier Men of Good Standing, all pretending to talk to each other while they leaned toward the open doorway on the other side of the hall, whence came a thin, reedy trickle of man recounting the sound of a drunk canary. Their faces bent and lined with suppressed laughter, and Hana wove her way among them as invisibly as a ghost, to shake her coat from her shoulders and present it to the equally-distracted young redheaded woman peering out of the entrance to a room so small it was more of an alcove, surrounded by the damp dangling bodies of cloaks.

  While the guests were thus distracted, Hana took the opportunity to see which had arrived, which were missing, and which had sent replacements in their place, eager to be seen to be absent for reasons of hard work, rather than merely being seen as lazy. Among the few shadows cast under the high vaulted ceiling walked an assistant to the Prefect of Durham, the Prefect of Notts himself – an admission of how far he had fallen in the good graces of society – and the Magisters of Woden and Orn, all but clinging to each other in their conspiracy of two, unliked by the majority and unable to turn down the invitation. The Magister of Durham was uncharacteristically missing, a
nd the Dean of the School of Non-Occult Sciences was, as was his wont, crushed into a corner of the vast room with a bottle of distilled wine no doubt stolen from the kitchens. He looked sour and uncomfortable as ever.

  There was no profit in swapping words with the Dean of Non-Occult Sciences, and he was far better wooed on other days, without the crowd reminding him of the low status of his School, and with some facile question about her daughter’s researches.

  Some faces were unfamiliar; in place of introductions, which they were expected to conduct themselves (an informality which still chafed at Hana’s sensibilities after almost thirty years in Albion), it was often safest to assume that they were replacements for invitees. There, by the fire, warming his hands and looking out-of-place and awkward, was a man taking his role of ambassador for the Prefect of Wolves so seriously that he had come wearing the insignia of the Prefect House and looked like nothing so much as a nervous footman, barely out of his teens.

  The closing music of What’s My Purpose? began (the violin was a little out of tune today) and around the great hall the assembled men shook themselves from their torpor and continued their truncated conversations with greater energy, their smiles fading slowly from their bearded lips. As ever, the only other woman in the room was the redheaded girl hanging cloaks, and she seemed bored enough by the proceedings that she might fall asleep at any minute.

  The great hall was a large, flagstoned room upon whose echoing floors a number of wide, thick-woven rugs had been unfurled. They were quite without design or real colour, and had clearly seen use elsewhere in the university buildings when not doing their duty at the Gala-Fest of the Deans. The effect of this open room was that it made undetected approaches almost impossible, and so it was that Hana saw her conversational partner coming quite some time before he arrived at her side.

  “Good evening,” he said with a bow that might have been taken straight from a book on the etiquette of Moorish court – it owed more to the Iberian Moors than those of what was once Fihriana, but the thought was evident, and he had even the peculiar, practiced turn of the wrist with him. He was, once he had straightened up, handsome after the fashion of Albionmen: pale-skinned, fair-haired, pale-eyed, with his beard and hair worn in the manner expected of a man of his age, his garb the same uninspiring woodsman hues as every other man in the room. “I trust I would not be making too great an assumption to think I am addressing Emira Hana al-Fihri?”

  “No assumption,” Hana said, imitating the gruff, curt introductions the Albionmen practiced with each other when they believed themselves equals, even as he retained the bent-back position appropriate to a subordinate at a Moorish court. “Who’re you?”

  It was an ugly form, but it was the form of the hall, and she knew with a certain bitterness that there were those who were entertained by the spectacle of an older Moorish woman making herself fit the form of the city as they might be by a dancing beetle or chained bear.

  “This one,” he said, lowering his head, “is pleased to be known as Radigis of Yeavering, assistant to the Magister of Durham, though not so pleased as he is to be known to the Emira.”

  Hana inclined her head as he lifted his. “And where did you learn that?”

  “Reading,” Radigis said in a form more fitting his Northman’s face, with a curt smile. “Never know when it might come in useful, am I right? Better to know than not to know.”

  “One might say the same of almost anything,” Hana said, imitating his fall back onto native form. He was only a half a head taller than her, while most men took at least a full head, and his neck was not so thick as theirs. “It is with regret I must know, if you are graciously keeping Hrothgar’s appointments for him, why he is unable to do so himself tonight. I long for his good health.”

  Radigis said, with a smile that seemed ill-concealed, and deliberately so, “He has a bad back.”

  They took a mutual pause, in part to allow a braying laugh from one of the other guests to ring out across the great hall like an intruding draft, and caught each other’s eye in a silent refusal to be the first to say, that bad back of his is plump and nineteen, with fair hair she wears so long that she trips on it. The sole fire flickered in its grate, and as one uncommanded military unit, the guests moved a little closer to the warmth and a little farther from the doors, which opened to admit another rural Magister.

  “And you, Emira al-Fihri,” Radigis said, when the moment had passed, “are invited, or standing in for some Man of Good Standing whose guts trouble him?”

  Hana favoured him with a coy smile laced with conspiracy, though she knew that if he knew her name and former title he knew who she came for, and had come to her with a purpose. She said in a mock-whisper, “I come for Ioan Twelling, who has once more succumbed to the ravages of labour and finds himself unable to leave his station.”

  Of course she would not need to tell him who Ioan Twelling was; the Prefect of York was an important enough figure that those who worked for Magisters and the more observant of the men who worked the city (and the women who ensured they could work at all) knew his name without prompting. It was no doubt for Ioan Twelling that this Radigis came to her at all.

  “A great tragedy,” said Radigis, with a quirk of his eyebrow that implied he was rather gladder to have found her instead than his words decreed. “Though perhaps a tragedy with a hidden treasure, at least for me.”

  In his corner, Hana noted, the Dean of the School of Non-Occult Sciences was watching them with his eyebrows drawn together and his stolen wine clasped between both hands. She affected to stand a little closer the fire, placing the Magisters of Woden and Orn between the Dean’s line of sight and her conversation, and Radigis followed her without question.

  “Indeed, every new acquaintance is as a ruby to the treasure house of the Emirs,” Hana quoted, watching his eyes for some sign of recognition. If he had been reading the books she suspected he had, he would know this for the lie it was.

  “I have heard otherwise,” Radigis said softly, “but some new acquaintances are rarer gems than others, or more pertinent tools.” He checked the lie of the room in the reflection of the glass-fronted map which hung above the fireplace (very smoothly, Hana noted with approval), and added with an expression that looked as though he were merely passing a scandalous comment on the Woden and Orn pair, “I may be of assistance to you, Emira.”

  “Is that so?” Hana asked gravely, pretending a horrified reaction to his supposed remark, “And in what could a woman of my standing possibly require assistance?”

  A log popped in the fireplace, and someone’s voice outlined the words fat bugger at greater volume than their owner had perhaps intended. As the room erupted in hearty, forced laughter at the unfortunate speaker’s ill luck, Radigis said, “Though the Magister I assist is best acquainted with his bad back,” with a smile to match the smiles traversing the hall, “I am myself in the favourable place of being related by wyflock to the Prefect of Cumbria.”

  There was a hot silence in the wake of the laughter, and during it Radigis watched Hana’s face, almost certainly groping for signs of recognition.

  “Alongside the many home concerns of my father-by-wyflock,” said Radigis, when the murmur of fatuous social grappling had resumed, “he also conducts, and allows me the honour of assisting him in the conduct of, a number of friends of Albion in the Dardanelles, and the congruent peninsula.” He spoke casually, as if commenting on the furnishings, but it was only with an effort of will that Hana stayed the sudden acceleration of her heart.

  A lone figure emerged from the door to direction of the kitchens, bearing with it a basket of dark bottles, and the guests began surreptitiously to surge toward this fresh repast. Hana, who did not partake of anything fermented and kept her wits about her all the hours she woke, followed in their wake as if as eager as they.

  “No man offers his hand without he looks to his purse,” she said, with an apparently guileless smile.

  “Emira Hana al Fihri al A
uda Bedu Ird,” Radigis said, with the same practiced, Moorish flourish as he had greeted her, “I ask only that I be remembered in kindness, and in kind.”

  With the vulgar brevity that was the core of his native form, the spoken equivalence to his adopted flourish in return, Hana looked into the icy pale eyes of the assistant to the Magister of Durham, and said, “You scratch my back...”

  Chapter 6

  Each of Aberdeen’s forest of squat, industrial spires housed a selection of oft-emptied single-size rooms and an unending stream of oilmen, prostitutes, commercial travellers, sailors, and more sinister figures. They, and the dreary economy that surrounded them like crows circling a corpse, retreated behind the ship with the unsteady dip and peak of a nightmare.

  Because El Alacrán was an old hand and a professional, he did not succumb to a staggering wave of regret at leaving the ugly city with its one overpowering positive feature tucked inside one of those non-descript towers.

  Because El Alacrán was a stow-away, he did not rush up onto the deck, seize the skipper with four of his eight legs (leaving aside claws, which would do more harm than good) and shake the little human like a tree while hissing send me back I’ve made a terrible mistake I can’t leave him there yet he’s on shore for three, two and a half days yet, I don’t want to go like a petulant little mammal juvenile.

  Most of all El Alacrán neither pined nor panicked because he was already abominably sea-sick, and had to concentrate on not responding to his nausea in the manner instinctive to his kind, by chewing off one or two of his own limbs and quelling the fictitious poison with his own flesh.

  I need these limbs, El Alacrán reminded himself, trying not to grip the frame of the lead-edged window too tightly. Is there anything more pathetic in this world than a sea-sick scorpion—does anyone but me even know this is possible—I hate ships.

  Arthropods did not sail: it was a matter of faith for the mammalian kingdoms and one of the reasons Albion-of-the-Britons, an archipelago of related islands, was such good place for undercover surveillance. Their guard was lax, their eyes lazy, and their Secure Guardians less frigidly efficient than Albion-of-the-Danes or the mad new Prussian state with its strange weapons and stranger government. Arthropods did not sail, and El Alacrán at least was in a good position to explain why.