The Beggar King

by Michelle Barker

  Petsane frowned. “Don’t need one.”

  “Come, Sister, you know the power packed into such words when they’re spoken by a full family gathering. We can’t afford to be petty any longer. The lives of our Cirran folk are at stake — including the high priestess and Jordan’s mother.”

  “All right, then,” Petsane spat the words out. “Bintou and Cantare can be woken. That makes six. ‘Phira will be the seventh.”

  “She don’t qualify,” said Manjuza.

  Petsane scowled at her. “She be close enough.”

  “No,” said Mopu. “We’ll need Willa. Someone must go to Omar to fetch her.”

  Petsane put her hands on her hips. “I ain’t inviting that harpy into this house.”

  “She’s our sister,” Mopu yelled.

  “She don’t even wear the saffron robes no more,” said Petsane.

  Appollonia’s good eye and glass eye were pointing in opposite directions. “She knows what’s what,” she said with her glass eye. “She ruined my good shirt,” she replied, her good eye wide with indignation. “Spilled jam all over the front of it!”

  “That was fifty years ago,” said Mopu. “We’re supposed to see into the future, not wallow in the past.”

  “I tell you one thing I don’t see,” said Mama Petsane, but Ophira put a gentle hand upon her arm and asked if she would please make some of her famous billy grain biscuits to help everyone through the night.

  “They’re famous?” asked Petsane. “Who says?”

  Manjuza nodded. “An old lady could use a cup of mellowreed tea to go with fresh biscuits,” and she rose and followed Petsane to the stove.

  Jordan came to sit at the wooden table where Sarmillion had begun his work. Ophira and Mopu joined them, while Appollonia rocked in the corner.

  “What if these prayers don’t work?” said Jordan. “People have been burning offerings and reciting incantations and it hasn’t done a bit of good.” He rested his head in his hands. “The trip to Ut is at least ten days by riverboat.”

  Sarmillion put down his pen. “There must be a faster way across that blasted land than downriver.”

  “The nomads are quick on horseback, but you can’t trust them,” said Mopu. “They’re thieves and kidnappers.”

  “What if we rode down ourselves?” asked Jordan.

  “Through the desert?” Mopu pressed her lips into a thin line. “You’d never make it. The windstorms down there are strong enough to bury this house in sand. They say a traveler unaccustomed to the landscape of Ut can go mad inside of a week. No, we must put our faith in the Great Light. Arrabel has always relied on the power of Light.”

  “Arrabel isn’t here,” said Jordan.

  Manjuza and Petsane were arguing over how much shortening to use in the biscuits. Appollonia had fallen asleep, both eyes apparently appeased by the promise of food.

  Mopu spoke quietly to Ophira. “Go now, while they’re distracted. Leave by the roof. Run. Come back with Willa as fast as you can. I’ll try to calm them down while you’re gone.”

  “Fifty years of hatred hardens a heart into stone, Mama,” said Ophira. She put on her veil and was rising from her chair just as Petsane wheeled around and said, “Where ye off to now?”

  “You should rest, Jordan.” Ophira kicked him under the table and he feigned a great yawn. “Can he lie down in the guest room, Mama?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but we be waking him the minute we get this business sorted out. You ain’t gonna weasel yer way out of this one, boy.”

  “Show him which room it is, ‘Phira,” said Grandma Mopu, “cuz I don’t want him messing up mine.”

  Jordan followed Ophira up the stairs, tripping on his robe. Ophira led him to the guest room, which was dark and smelled of dried moss. She lit a candle and it sputtered and hissed.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just going straight there and back.”

  He settled himself into a hammock and she knelt before him.

  “You opened the brass door,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you’d be angry.”

  “I could have helped you. Warned you, at least.” She paused.

  “Did you look inside? Did you see anything?”

  Glorious darkness. Jordan remembered the sound of wings, and a shudder passed through him.

  “Arrabel told me once that it was the undermagic, right there,” Ophira said, “and that if you looked, it would open something inside you that is very hard to close again.”

  Jordan picked at the hammock’s rope weaving.

  “I saw him there, on the street, Jordan. I heard what he said to you.” She took his hands in hers. “You can’t risk seeing him again.”

  “I know,” he said. “Will you be all right? Do you think Willa will come back with you?”

  “Yes, and yes,” she said.

  He leaned towards her and kissed her on her veiled lips.

  She kept her head bowed a moment longer. “Rest,” she said. “I’ll be back in no time.” And she slipped out the door and was gone.

  Twenty

  SHADOW UPON DARKNESS

  “CARVER’S SON.”

  Jordan sat up and the candle in his room went out.

  “Have they left you alone?”

  There was no one else in the room. The bedroom was on the second floor, with only one window and no balcony. But someone was there. Or were they?

  “They scribble and scratch on their parchments, Jordan. They think they’re doing something useful with their busy work. Only you can do something useful. Do you not think it’s time to act? Or will you sit here with your hands clasped and your blood ebbing — and do nothing?”

  Jordan was on his feet now and at the window. There was no one. But on the street something moved, and he spied a dark shape stealing off into the night.

  “Come, carver’s son, the time is now. The wanting will not leave you. Wanting requires having. You can have. Get out of there now, while you can. Once they realize you’re alone, they’ll come for you. And then they won’t leave your side for a second.”

  The storm had passed and the moons were out, mere slivers in the darkness — two sly eyes, one darker, a knowing wink.

  “Half-moons rising,” came a great call like that of a Heralder. It startled Jordan. Suddenly he could see the Cirran prisoners lined up on the sand awaiting their turn at the gallows, barefoot and thirsty and chained together so that a person knew by the tug on his leg when the one ahead of him had taken the rope and broken his neck. The desert sun baked the skin of the dead, which gave off a putrid stench. Jordan heard a loud buzz of flies. They were already thick on the bodies, clustering around the unseeing eyes. And in the sky, a shadow of crows circled.

  “The magic of a thousand thousand years,” said the voice. “You could save them, carver’s son. How do you sit idle? Half-moons rising, boy. Best not to tarry.”

  A thousand thousand years. Mountains were a thousand thousand years old. So was the undermagic. It would have to be enough to save them. It was all he had.

  Jordan put on his veil and took the small door that led out onto the roof. Hiking up his saffron robes, he leaped from one rooftop to the next, stole up staircases and climbed lattices, until he was standing beside the palace kitchen windows.

  Two guards stood nearby, their backs to him. He slipped by them without any effort. The kitchen was deserted at this late hour, though the bakers would begin work before sun-up. He took the gloomy corridor at a run, breathing hard, not caring anymore who saw him. He caught the hem of his robes so often that he finally pulled them over his head and cast them off.

  At last, there was the brass door glowing before him. He knelt and pressed his hands to it, and it warmed him, moving beneath his palms as if it were breathing. Resting his forehead against it, he closed his eyes and let the warmth flow through him, the wanting running in him now like a river. His fingers traced the runes engraved
on the door, and he leaned away, for this time — somehow — he could read what they said. “Beware this door, beware your soul . . . ”

  “They’ll say anything to get their way, Jordan,” the voice drawled. “Anything.” A click sounded, and the door fell open, and Jordan stepped inside.

  This was darkness, glorious darkness, and there were no walls capable of containing it. Jordan stood in front of a stone table, upon which sat a large candle. He clasped it. How odd. It didn’t flicker or hiss in the manner of regular candles, nor was there any melting wax.

  “All that fuss, for just a candle,” the emptiness said.

  His skin crackled and his bones hummed, and the darkness bent the sounds around him until they broke into echoes.

  “We’d both be heroes, you know.” That sounded like the undercat.

  “Sarmillion?” Jordan called.

  A piece of parchment sat on the stone table, the paper so yellow and frail it looked like Time itself. Something was written upon it in the old tongue.

  “Allow me,” said the Beggar King, and in the darkness the words rang out: “You, light-bearer, shadow-caster, you bear the candle that wakes the dark side of the world.”

  A great rushing sound came at him, like the fluttering and screeching of enormous birds.

  “I can’t breathe,” Jordan said in a gasp. He tried to drop the candle back on the table but the air was so heavy he couldn’t move his arm or even open his hand.

  And then the air opened like a ragged seam and he could smell the familiar dankness that told him he was no longer in the world of the living.

  “Little boy wearing too-big shoes, little boy wearing too-big shoes.” The chant rose all around him.

  Twenty-One

  A MERRIN DAY IN WINTER

  SARMILLION SPREAD SEVERAL BLANK PARCHMENTS ACROSS the kitchen table and set up his ink bottle. He’d forgotten how many rituals he relied upon before beginning a project. Every one of them was critical. Everything had to be done just so or his thoughts would come out crooked. Methodically he blew upon each of his fingers.

  “What you doing that for?” asked Manjuza.

  “A little before-work ceremony,” he said, fidgeting with his jacket collar. “It reminds my dear fingers to dance.”

  “Oh.” Manjuza pulled out a chair and sat next to him. “I know a few of them desperate prayers myself,” and she stretched out her large-veined, weathered hands and blew so hard upon them she coughed. “Fetch me a feather pen, Mopu.” And while the biscuits baked, she set to work scratching out prayers beside the undercat.

  Eventually Bintou and Cantare wandered downstairs, drawn by the smell of food. Bintou settled herself onto a divan and began to knit, while Cantare lit candles and sang. No one needed to explain to them what was going on. How peculiar and convenient it must be to live with a family of prophets.

  Sarmillion and Manjuza had been working for close to an hour when the front door burst open and in came Ophira, breathing hard, with Willa right behind her. Willa in her stained overcoat and rubber boots, a wide-brimmed hat upon her head, her hair springing out from beneath the brim. She stood in the entrance like a stray dog unsure of its welcome.

  Petsane was busy taking another tray of billy grain biscuits out of the oven, but the moment she saw Willa she set them down and blurted, “Oh, so ye’ve come here to tell us how you been right all these years and we’re just a bunch of toadstools? Well, I ain’t listening. And don’t be asking me to say I’m sorry for the years gone by, cuz — ”

  “I come to help,” Willa said. “Ye don’t want my help? Fine, I’ll leave.”

  “No!” cried Mopu. “Willa, you know how Petsane gets. Ignore her.”

  Willa shifted her feet in their big boots. When her eyes lit upon Sarmillion, she said, “You! I tell you what to do but ye don’t listen, eh? Not much point asking for help if ye ain’t prepared to do the things what’ll help ye.”

  “You stained my good shirt!” Appollonia cried, her good eye open. Then it fell shut and the glass eye took over and she said, “Shut up! Here’s the sister that knows what’s what. Here’s the one that helps.”

  “I always thought you’d be better off with two glass eyes, Polly,” said Willa. She looked at Petsane. “Ye gonna let me stay or are ye shoving me off again?”

  Petsane put her hands on her hips. “Ye can stay, for now. So long as ye don’t spill nothing.”

  Willa removed her hat and hung it on a hook and Petsane curled her lip with distaste.

  “I need ye all to sit down with yer mouths shut and yer ears wide,” said Willa. “There’s something I been wanting to say for a very long time, to every one of you.”

  As the women assembled themselves on various chairs and divans, Sarmillion tried to make himself small at the kitchen table. He did not want to be asked to leave. After years of being a scribe he could sense a good story shaping up — or a disaster, which amounted to the same thing — and he wasn’t about to miss it.

  Willa looked as if she wanted to hide behind her rumpled hair, but she planted herself in the centre of the large room and began to speak.

  “On a Merrin day in winter was the first time I seen him disappear, but it weren’t the first time I seen him. That day was long ago. I weren’t much more than eighteen myself when I been out gathering mushrooms in the woods of Somberholt, like I often do. I walked a long time that day and then it got dark, and I got scared, because I couldn’t find my way home.

  “Soon enough I was hearing a noise — stone on stone, banging out a rhythm, and I ain’t never heard such a thing before. It was late and I was confused and thinking it was the Trades Alleyway in Omar, or some such. To a young girl, confusion comes easy. To a girl who’s lost, even more so. So I followed the sound, reckoning on help, till I came to a grotto. And there amongst the rocks sat a small man dressed in black who seemed neither spirit nor living. Long sharp nose made me think of a raven, a dark bird of wisdom and sorcery. Upon one rock he was banging another, over and over. He didn’t see me. I don’t reckon he saw much of anything.

  “I started thinking maybe he’s a time-keeper, cuz I heard stories about them, though I hadn’t known them to live in the forest. And the banging kept on and on, loud and hard, so hard it made sparks.

  “And then I saw the blackened place where he’d lit a fire, and scores of dead birds strung up from branches. And I could just see the sister moons up between the trees, the lighter and the darker, and he was staring up at them and I knew which one he was watching. “He’s tryin’ to wake the vultures,” was what I was telling myself, “He’s tryin’ to wake those black-winged guardians of the undermagic,” and oh how I wished for one of my sisters to be there with me because now I was petrified. And then he saw me, and he asked me to come to him. And I ran. I ran so fast, I didn’t even care where, and finally I found my path, and I took it home. But I guess I wasn’t fast enough.

  He came to me later, many years later, in the marketplace, on a Merrin day in winter.” Her voice became a low growl. “He told me he was the Beggar King and then he disappeared right before my eyes. Told me to tell you all about it, and so I did, I told it to my family because I trusted ‘em and I knew they would help me if I were in trouble. But that’s not what ye did. Ye called me crazy.” Her bottom lip trembled and her eyes filled. “He figured it’d be like that, that there wouldn’t be a soul in the world who’d believe what I said.

  “It was the brass door he wanted. He knew I could open it if I wanted to. He offered me anything. Offered me the undermagic. Scared me half-silly, it did. But I wouldn’t take nothing from him. I decided then and there, I wouldn’t practice any magic, ever. Cuz I knew it wouldn’t have taken much for him to get hold of me. One taste of that sort of power and yer done for.

  “That was what ye called madness. That was what left me changed, what had Mumma dragging me off to healers and whatnot and them finding nothing wrong with me. You didn’t listen,” she said, pointing a finger at each of her sisters in turn. �
��You didn’t believe any of it. Left me to myself. Sent me yer damned fruit baskets. Blast ye all to the depths. And now he’s come back and found himself another one, a willing one, one with more need of his gifts than I ever had.”

  “Oh wretched gift,” moaned Appollonia.

  Willa scratched her head and wood chips fell onto the floor. Petsane glared at her but Willa didn’t pay her big sister any mind. “He wants his kingdom and he means to have it, no matter what the cost.” She stopped and scanned the room as if something had suddenly occurred to her. “Where’s the boy? Who’s been set to watch over him?”

  They all looked at one another.

  “Blasted bells,” she exclaimed. “No one’s keeping an eye on him? Go and fetch him, ‘Phira, right away. Ain’t safe leaving him alone, not with that sorcerer roaming the streets.”

  Ophira took the stairs two at a time.

  “He’s gone,” she hollered. She stood at the head of the staircase. “I left him in the guest room. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. He promised me.” And she covered her face and wept.

  Willa fixed on Sarmillion. “Has the boy been up there tonight?”

  “Where?” asked Sarmillion with an innocent pout.

  “Ye know damned well where. The brass door. Has he been back since we spoke?”

  “Well,” said Sarmillion, “he might have passed it by. But I had nothing to do with it, I can assure you.”

  Willa stared at him until sweat formed on his brow. “I never met a more careless undercat in all my life.”

  “He didn’t follow the rules,” said Sarmillion. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “You encouraged him, didn’t ye? Isn’t that yer fault? Told him he needed the undermagic, that there was no other way — when I told ye there was.”

  “Yes, well, that might have been a small mistake on my part.” Petsane elbowed her way to the centre of the room, the stew spoon high. “What do ye mean by a small mistake, underkitty?”