The Beggar King

by Michelle Barker

  “I told him,” Willa said. “I warned him well, so don’t blame me.”

  The undercat pressed a pointed tooth against his lip as Petsane stood next to her little sister and shook her head. “Ye can’t trust them undercats for nothin’. I could have seen it coming. Now we’re into it with both boots on.”

  “But I’ve almost finished writing out the prayers,” said Sarmillion. No one seemed to be listening.

  Ophira had found her way down the stairs and grasped Willa by the arm. “I can go after him. They let me into the palace without question. I know where he’s gone. Maybe it’s not too late.”

  Willa gently loosened her grip. “That ain’t our way, dear ‘Phira, to go running after things. A seer thinks things through, and then she sees. At least we got our gathering, and that’s something.”

  “I’ve done a good job, remembered all the words and everything,” said Sarmillion.

  “How about ye do yer thinking with a billy grain biscuit?” Petsane said to Willa. And she went to the stove, cut a hot biscuit in half and buttered it, and brought it to her sister.

  “Not all magic is the undermagic, Sister,” said Petsane in a hushed tone. “We got good power at our fingertips, power we can use to help folk. You, too. Ye got to take back what ye were born with.”

  “I been so afraid of it,” Willa said.

  Petsane patted her gently on the back and said, “Foolishness, girl. You got a good heart. We all know that. Even if ye do wear them damned boots.”

  The two sisters studied each other openly now and Willa swallowed hard.

  “Bring the candles over here, Cantare, and start singing,” Petsane said. “We got a long night ahead.”

  Twenty-Two

  JUST A CANDLE

  WHEN JORDAN OPENED HIS EYES, HE was on the dirt path and the candle was no longer in his hand. He coughed and almost gagged. There was an intense smell of garbage, or maybe it was a decomposing animal, he couldn’t be sure. As his eyes adjusted to the scant light, he could make out the black skeletons of bare trees. They lined either side of a track that was slippery with greasy-looking water.

  “On your feet, boy. They’re waiting. Quickly now. They’ve waited a thousand thousand years for this.”

  Jordan stood, and had to grab hold of the Beggar King’s arm to keep from falling over. The older man laughed. “It’s like high altitude,” he said. “You’ll grow accustomed to it. Before long, it will be the world you left behind that will sicken you.”

  Above them were no moons or stars, no light at all. Ahead lay darkness. The living world was far behind, like a dream Jordan had had but couldn’t quite remember.

  “Let go my arm, now. Stand on your own two feet and be a man. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, carver’s son? You’re a Loyalist. Buck up.” He wrenched Jordan’s hand away and Jordan stumbled to the side of the path and retched.

  “You milksop! Are we going to flinch, then, when it comes down to it? You disappoint me, boy. You told me you had the blood for this. We’ll make a man out of you before the night is done. Any wood can be turned if you push hard enough.”

  Jordan’s feet seemed to know where they were going even while he didn’t. Every step forward was frightening; every step blind, yet sure. He did not walk the path, yet it moved beneath his feet.

  The darkness was now so thick it was a stifling blanket, but it brought no warmth. There was frost in the silent air and Jordan could see every puff of his breath.

  Once when a horse had died at his Uncle Eli’s farm, its death had somehow gone unnoticed, and flies had gathered and the crows came and the living horses stayed on the far side of the pasture. His father had warned him not to look but he had to, and there was a rancid stench of decay that had taken him days to wash out of his clothes. It had been there, too, on Jordan’s sixteenth birthday when he’d placed sasapher flowers at the holy tree and said a prayer for a dead man whose eyes had been plucked by crows.

  The Beggar King stopped. “Here is your Cirran mystery of death — not quite the way they teach it to you in school, eh boy? The truth is pitiless and it lasts forever.”

  Jordan’s sandal-shod feet were sinking into freezing mud. He sensed a crowd nearby but it took his eyes a moment to make it out. At first he thought they were vultures, but then no, they were more like people, lined up single file. Soon he could make out bald red heads with a fringe of long hair, and on their backs beneath tattered black robes were bumps that might have been wings. And yet they were people: two arms, two legs, bare human feet. And each held an unlit candle.

  “They’ve slept for an unconscionable long time,” said the Beggar King. “The Great Light has not been merciful to these poor folk. Look how they’re drawn to our steady light — like moths,” and it was true, the vulture people drew ever closer and Jordan could smell oily feathers. Some of them reached out and touched him with sharp claw-like hands.

  “They want life, Jordan. In exchange they will allow us a share in the undermagic, for they are its guardians. It’s a fair bargain, wouldn’t you say? They serve us, we serve them. You always serve something in life, isn’t that so? Whom do you serve, carver’s son?”

  Jordan tilted his head in confusion.

  “Watch. I shall light their candles and wake them. See if they do not give you the power you desire. Then you can decide how to answer my question.”

  One by one the vulture people came to the Beggar King and he lit their smaller candles with his bigger one until the entire place glowed with unmoving light. Jordan now saw that he was standing beside a river so wide he could scarcely make out the far shore. Objects floated in the water. He couldn’t tell what they were until a bloated human head bobbed up and went under again. And then he knew — they had come to the River of the Dead.

  A vulture person approached, holding an unlit candle towards him.

  “I can’t — I can’t light it,” he said.

  “He’s giving it to you,” said the Beggar King. “It’s the undermagic. It’s your power. Take it. Go save your people while there’s still time.”

  The candle shook so badly in Jordan’s hand the Beggar King could not even light it.

  “Not a man yet, I see,” said the sorcerer, his small black eyes glowing in the candlelight. “Hold still.” And he gripped Jordan’s arm so tightly to steady it Jordan cried out in pain.

  Once the candle was lit, Jordan’s sickness abated immediately. He stood for a minute, while his lungs eased, and just breathed.

  “What are you waiting for?” cried the Beggar King. “Move along. And keep that candle hidden in your pocket. Don’t let anyone see it.”

  “But . . . ”

  “It won’t burn you, carver’s son. It’s not that sort of light. Safe passage,” he said with an odd smile, as Jordan returned to the world.

  Twenty-Three

  A YELLOW SQUARE OF CAKE

  WITH THE LIT CANDLE IN HIS pocket, the world changed. Jordan could see the hard-shelled beetles that hid between the cracks of stone in the palace walls. He could hear Brinnian Landguards singing their drinking songs all the way over in the dining hall. He set off down the corridor at a run, reveling in the sweet effortless flight of his feet over the rough stone floor. Somehow he’d have to get out of the palace unseen. It wouldn’t do any good if he were captured now, after all this. No sooner had Jordan formed the thought when before him appeared a door which opened onto a deserted courtyard.

  “Command it, and it shall be done for you,” said a voice inside him. Jordan laughed. Very well. Take me to the Omar Bazaar. And it happened, he was in Omar. The light from a still-open tavern formed a shimmering rectangle on the cobblestones.

  “Great Light!” As soon as he spoke those words, his lungs felt tight and he gulped for air.

  “Take me to Utberg,” he sputtered. “Speed my journey and bend every natural law to get me there at once.” In an instant, his feet were sinking into dry brown sand.

  He took a minute to rest, doubled over in
cramps. It felt as if he’d been squeezed through a small hole. He was standing in a bleak, barren landscape made of sand dunes and broken only by the occasional patch of rough yellow stubble that might once have been grass. Not a single tree could be seen in any direction. In the endless early-morning blue sky, not one bird.

  “They say a traveler unaccustomed to the landscape of Ut can go mad inside of a week,” Grandma Mopu had said, and now Jordan understood why.

  “Utberg, I said,” he spoke into the emptiness, but nothing happened. “The prison camp. Where are they keeping the Cirran prisoners?” Perhaps that was where he was, five miles northeast of Utberg. Now what? He chose a direction at random and set off with long, swift strides.

  The furrows and stubble made him feel as if he were walking across the face of an old man. He scrambled up one dune, down another, as the sun rose higher and the heat grew more insistent.

  He learned to stay away from the yellow grass, for the snakes hid in there, and they were long and colourless and as silent as thoughts. Jordan’s ears were alert to other movement too, for he remembered Grandma Mopu’s warnings about the bands of nomadic thieves.

  Finally he saw a familiar silhouette: one lone black tree, leafless and pressed against the sky as if branded into it, upon a hill that rose higher than the others. He increased his pace until he’d reached the top and leaned against the dead tree to catch his breath.

  And there, stretched before him, was a substantial view of the landscape with the blue waters of the Octavian Ocean shining to the south. Sunlight gleamed off metal roofs at the shore. It was a town. He also saw a trail through the sand and dry grasses that seemed well traveled.

  He picked his way down, while crows perched upon thorny bushes fixed him with their black beady eyes. After an hour’s descent, he found himself on the outskirts of the town, where the clay houses had rounded roofs that didn’t look strong enough to withstand a rainstorm, if ever it rained here. A street shimmered in the distance and Jordan could make out two Brinnian Landguards.

  He reached the centre of town, which consisted of one dusty main street with a stone barrier on the ocean side and market stalls made of sheet metal along the other. It was a busy place, and every single person milling about was dressed in uniform.

  Jordan glanced at the clothes he’d borrowed from Sarmillion and realized he would have to change.

  He closed his eyes, imagining himself into Brinnian black, and felt at once the transformation in the fabric. The uniform was hot and itchy against his skin. He sighed in relief, reached into the pocket of his trousers to make sure the candle was still there, and continued on his way.

  The late morning heat shimmered off the metal market stalls and lifted a rusty blood-stench of raw meat to Jordan’s nose. He sauntered along the street in an attempt at Brinnian bravado. At a nearby stall, two soldiers were fingering with their soiled hands the lightweight white fabric from which most Uttic clothing was made. An older woman in a white kerchief and long white robe who stood behind the table was watching them, her bright blue eyes glowing in a sun-beaten face. A couple of undernourished dogs sat behind her.

  “You gonna buy or no?” Jordan heard her say.

  The men chuckled.

  “No buy, no touch!”

  That only made them laugh harder.

  She raised a long thin stick in warning and the dogs behind her backed away. As the guards leaned into each other, Jordan caught a glimpse behind them of a small child sitting on a wooden stool in the shade, wearing a loosened headdress and long white robes. The gentle dark eyes might have belonged to a boy, but only Uttic girls wore the tiny jewel pierced into the side of their nose. Hers was a ruby. But it was her hand that kept Jordan’s attention. In her tiny dark-skinned hand she held a yellow square of cake with crimped edges. It was one of Tanny’s sasapher cakes. He had to bite down on his lip to keep from crying out.

  One of the soldiers took a corner of the white fabric for sale and used it to wipe his sweating face.

  “Leave off, friend,” Jordan snarled in his best attempt at a Brinnian accent.

  Both guards glared at him. The woman lowered her stick.

  “Fresh face,” said one in a gust of mug-wine breath. “A young’un. You’ll sing a different tune about these lowly folk before long, friend.”

  Both men reeked as if they hadn’t washed in a month, and one was now blowing snot from one of his nostrils onto the dusty ground near the clean white cloth. An image came to Jordan’s mind of boils, red and oozing. The undermagic flowed through him with a jolt, jerking his arms up, and suddenly the two men screamed, clutched their faces, and ran off.

  The Uttic merchant woman was staring at him, eyes wide with fear. Jordan turned back to speak to the child, but she was gone.

  “Your little girl,” he said to the woman. “Could you please tell me — ”

  “Leave this place,” she hissed, and then said something in Uttish that Jordan could not understand.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said in a soothing tone. He took a step toward her and she moved back. “Please — that cake she was eating. Where did she get it?”

  But the woman just stared at him, worrying the thin stick in both hands. Jordan was certain she understood what he was asking. His hands balled into fists. He could make her talk. It wouldn’t take much — she was already afraid, and she’d seen what he could do. He was about to will it into being, but then he stopped himself. The woman was cowering behind the table in terror, holding one of the dogs against her while the other growled at Jordan from a corner of the stall.

  No, he decided. He would find the child himself.

  Beyond the market was a maze of narrow streets that were strewn with garbage and lined with small clay huts. The girl was nowhere to be seen. Find her. As he moved effortlessly down darkened alleyways he felt so light his feet skipped over the ground. He was almost disappointed when he came to a crumbling clay hovel and knew he had to stop.

  A torn piece of coloured fabric served as a door. Pushing it aside he poked his head in. The little girl stood pressed against the skirts of a tall woman who had the same wide dark eyes. When the two of them saw Jordan’s uniform they backed against the far wall of the room.

  Jordan held up his hands to show they were empty. He took one tentative step forward. “I’m not a soldier. Here, take these.” He drew from his belt both the dagger and the long black stick that were part of the Brinnian attire, and laid them on the floor.

  “Nothing good comes from those uniforms,” said the woman in a thick Uttish accent. “Speak your business and then leave.”

  Jordan bowed and said, “Your little girl was eating a cake today at the market. It was a special type of cake that I know is not native to Ut.”

  “What do you know about our country?”

  “Very little, feirhaven, but I know about this cake. It comes from my land.”

  “Oh?” the woman said flatly. “And where might that be?”

  “The Holy City of Cir,” said Jordan, and he saw the woman’s shoulders relax slightly. “My mother is a baker. She was taken prisoner one year ago with many others from my land. The Brinnians brought them here. I’ve come to free them.”

  She studied Jordan. “Your mother is Mistress Tanny.”

  At the sound of her name Jordan sank to his knees and covered his face with his hands. He couldn’t speak. He felt a rough hand touch his, and he let his own hands drop and looked up.

  “You’ve seen her?” he asked.

  “My daughter and I go to the camp to shine the boots of the Brinnian guards.” The woman frowned with distaste. “It’s a poor job but we are poor folk and it is how we live. They are pigs, those men. They . . . ” but she didn’t finish her sentence. “One morning my daughter wandered into the kitchen and there was Mistress Tanny. They have her cooking for the Brinnians. I don’t believe they care if the prisoners starve, but the guards must eat. Of course she only agreed to cook for them if she could also prepare meals for her
own people. That morning when my daughter saw her, she gave her one of the small lemon cakes she was making. She’s been giving them to her ever since.”

  “Not lemon,” said Jordan. “The cakes are made with sasapher. I wonder where she got it.”

  “She has a garden. It was one of her demands, if she was to work for them.” The woman stroked her daughter’s hair. “She is kind, your mother. She has often fed us when we were hungry. Here,” and the woman took down something from one of the shelves and handed it to Jordan. “One of hers.” It was a small square of sasapher cake.

  Jordan took a bite. Here was that flavour with the mud on its feet and courage in its belly, and it wanted something from him, oh yes. He held the sweet piece of cake on his tongue before swallowing it.

  “Could you lead me to her, please?”

  The woman pushed the Brinnian weapons towards Jordan with her foot. “Come back tomorrow at sunrise. The midday sun is too hot for such a journey.”

  She took Jordan to another one-room home — her brother’s — which was empty while he was away working on the fishing boats. There was dried fruit in the cupboard, and a hammock hung in one corner. Jordan knew he should rest but he couldn’t sit still for long. His legs should have been tired but they ached to move and his chest felt broad under the black uniform. He was eager to use his new strength upon the people who had kept his mother captive for so long.

  “I do hope the undermagic will come when you call for it,” he heard the Beggar King’s taunt. “The prisoners are unarmed and it will take nothing for the Landguards to subdue them. I doubt they’ll mind hanging them a few days ahead of schedule.”

  “What?” Jordan gasped.

  “The undermagic is not a mongrel mutt, friend; it doesn’t always come when it’s called. And it will want feeding. Mind you don’t let it go hungry for long.”

  Feeding? Jordan’s eyes flitted from the grimy jars sitting on one shelf to a long tattered coat hanging on a hook. He told himself this feeding issue was nothing to worry about, but his eyes wouldn’t stay shut and the night dragged on.