6
BREAKFAST TIME IN the archives: a far cry from the kind of archival slop Tigrallef and Shree had described to us, the stale bread dipped in mutton lard, the leftovers from whatever culinary atrocity had been served up the night before, the lumpy sand-leavened porridge that tasted of dust. The others, Tigrallef included, were eating steadily through a platter of boiled eggs, salted fishpaste, fine fresh bread, and fruits gathered from half a dozen climates, washing it all down with a hot infusion of herbs sweetened with honey. I managed some of the liquid, but between the despair and the hangover, I had no appetite for solid food. I was surprised and faintly resentful that Tig could eat at all.
Catering was not the only aspect of the archives to have changed over the years. The shelves and racks that surrounded us were not cobbled together out of scavenged and mismatched boards, but were inbuilt of hardwood, carved and polished. The work tables were steady on their legs and veneered on top with smooth granite sheets. The stacks had grown to a labyrinth twenty times the size that Tigrallef remembered, room after room of works in all scripts and languages of the known world. The walls were well plastered and recently painted; the floors throughout were covered with plain Flamen-green carpeting that was comfortable on the feet, durable and conveniently easy to clean, as we discovered when Tig dropped his bread on it with the fishpaste-side down. In the spotless and tidy main workroom, the one with the view of the harbour, ten or eleven apprentices or assistant memorians of assorted ages were already hard at their scholarly tasks.
But we were breakfasting in Angel and Mallinna's private workroom behind the stacks, which was a very different prospect. However plush the carpet, and however neatly the books stood on the shelves, it was clear nobody had dusted or tidied in that room for a very long time. Great piles of books, scrolls, tablets and loose papers, some of them rare and ancient, lay in drifts across four broad work tables. They had the look of papers in precisely ordered chaos, like those on the table of the hidden study on the Fifth. At a glance, many of those I could decipher described the landmass shared by Miishel, Grisot and what used to be Fathan.
Tig had wakened about an hour after dawn, ravenous and bizarrely cheerful, and insisted on waking me up too, though I'd managed less than two hours of exhausted sleep. It was, of course, no news to him that the others were on their way to the Mosslines. He embraced Angel heartily, and then Mallinna. When it came to my turn, he looked past my shoulder as if not quite willing to face me, which I did not understand at that point. Then he demanded food. He refused to discuss the others. He wanted to hear all about what Angel and Mallinna had been doing for the last twenty years.
Even weighed down by misery, I found myself watching Mallinna. What was she to Angel besides disciple and, apparently, interpreter? Was she his granddaughter? His mistress? Was she spoken for? How did my father know her? And how, by the Eight Rages, did she and Angel just happen to drop a rope ladder from a particular window at a time when my father and I just happened to need one? I lay prone on the pallet, not saying much, letting the answers slowly come together.
First, I found out who she was. Mallinna's mother was an old friend of the family, a whore named Lissula who had progressed from the Gilgard shintashkr into running a highly successful bawdy house of her own after the liberation, a liberation in which she played no small part. The father was a nameless client, evidently a Storican, from whom Mallinna inherited her dark brown skin and long slender frame. At the age of four, when my father was still the First Memorian in Gil, she became one of his day pupils in the archives; at the age of five she became an orphan and a scholar. It happened in the time of the Last Dance.
Angel told this part of the story in his halting fashion: how for a number of days he had been sequestered in the archives, mourning the departure of Shree and my father for Miishel, mechanically continuing the tasks of reading and annotating and cataloguing. One day it occurred to him that no pupils had climbed the stairs to the archives for some time, that the water barrel was empty, the makeshift pantry critically depleted, the slop pails full, the laundry neither collected dirty nor delivered clean. He waited another day, puzzled, and then ventured out through the silent halls of the Temple Palace, down the echoing stairs, meeting nobody, until he passed through the unmanned gates of Gilgard Castle into the hot reeking streets of the city. Gradually it began to dawn on him that something strange was going on.
Except for my grandmother the Lady Dazeene, the only person Angel knew outside the archives was Lissula. He had never been to her brothel—he had only once or twice left the Gilgard since the day he was born—but he had seen it daily from the window of the workroom, and carried an aerial view of that quarter like a map inside his head. He set off down the broad avenue that led to the waterfront, observing with wonder the abandoned wains and empty byways, the shuttered houses and barred taverns, the deserted scaffolding of a building under construction, the dog-eared remnants of the banners raised for my father's wedding recessional. He began to think it was a holiday nobody had told him about. Until, that is, he turned a corner and came to a cordwood of corpses in a small market square.
There were a few living persons around as well, but Angel was too shy to ask for explanations. Some were desultorily stacking the corpses, a few skulked out of sight at his approach, a few simply stood around with dazed eyes and dangling hands and took no notice of him. As Angel passed, one of these began to shuffle her feet in a little dance, pirouetted straight into the edge of the neat heap of the dead, and fell over to join the others. Angel kept walking.
The other wonder he saw on the way to the brothel was in the mouth of a narrow lane off a street of provisions warehouses, where half-glimpsed movement caught the corners of his eyes as he passed. He thought about it for a few steps and then went back to look. It was a concourse of shulls, leaping, twisting, jerking, falling over, and lying where they had fallen. Angel kept walking, only faster.
Lissula's brothel was a grand one with a guard's kiosk at the door and a fine entrance court equipped with flower beds and a fountain, but the kiosk was empty and a corpse was digging its fingers into the cracked earth around the natch-blossoms. Inside, intimidated by the silken cushions and lattice-work partitions, the job-lot but rather good tapestries on the walls and the overhanging silence, Angel crept from compartment to compartment of the brothel and found plenty that stank but nothing that breathed. Last of all he penetrated the good solid door that led to Lissula's own living quarters, and found Lissula, dead, and Mallinna, alive but hungry and beginning to be annoyed. Her mam, she explained to her teacher, was so tired from dancing that she wouldn't get up and make supper. Angel took his little pupil back to the archives. Twenty years later she was still there.
As for Angel's empire-within-an-empire, the archives had shared richly in the general fortunes of Gil. I learned a startling fact at this point: that the Primate Mycri was in a strange way a man of his word. Promises he made were always kept to the letter—though the spirit was often twisted into shapes the other party had neither intended nor foreseen. Any treaty he signed was honoured with exquisite legalistic nicety—until the other side gave him some excuse, however slight, to piss on it. A satirical catchphrase—"Primate's honour"—had entered the Gillish idiom, though to be heard using it could mean a quick one-way trip to the Mosslines.
Twenty years ago, this honourable Primate had made a bargain with my father regarding Angel and the archives. It was a bargain which the Primate may have been prepared to invalidate when Tigrallef had the apparent inconsideration to die; but my grandmother, the Lady Dazeene, had made a promise to Tig as well. When she struck her own bargain with the Primate after the Last Dance, Angel and the archives came under her patronage and protection, and so they remained.
In due course the canny Primate began to understand the advantages of owning a well-managed national library with a non-political work fiend like Angel in charge—the prestige, partly, the visible guarantee of Gillish superiority in schol
arly matters, but also the access to odd bits of lore that could shore up the Flamens' claims and arguments, to dazzle those who supported them and confound those who did not. Angel, it must be said, had always given some form of satisfaction.
Gradually at first, then rapidly, the archives had begun to grow. Client nations were honoured, in theory anyway, to contribute their holdings to the centre of empire. Treaty nations, like Miishel and Grisot and Zaine, were relieved to pay a portion of their tribute in ancient manuscripts rather than gold palots and grain. As for those nations misguided enough to require being "organized" by the Primate's armies, they had only themselves to blame when their national treasures, written and otherwise, were carted off to a new home in the Gilgard. And thus the archives overspilled the few miserable rooms Tigrallef had first co-opted, and expanded to fill an entire floor of the Temple Palace; one whole aisle was devoted to inscribed Plaviset tortoise plastrons. Angel (through Mallinna) estimated his holdings at more than two hundred thousand documents in a dozen different forms, thirty-two languages or dialects, and nineteen different scripts.
All of this shocked me in a strange and not very reasonable way. The Primate was a major ogre of my childhood, devious, power-thirsty and ruthless. He was the kind of remorseless plotter who would serve wine to three innocent men in one moment, and send them off to be murdered in the next; who was prepared to wipe out an entire family—mine—because he thought one of them bore a chance resemblance to a fraudulently prophesied demigod—his wrongness about us on every conceivable account was irrelevant. We had no way of knowing what other cruelties he had found to be expedient in the last twenty years, but I suspected there was an ocean or two of blood on his gnarled hands. How could Angel, my father's friend, and Mallinna, daughter of the intrepid Lissula, submit to being a part of it?
And anyway, I asked myself bitterly, when were we going to discuss the fates of Kat and Calla, Shree and Chasco? At the thought of them tossing about in the dark hold of a slave ship, I felt my belly and all its contents churn with impatience. Tigrallef's blitheness was infuriating. Mallinna's loveliness was an affront. Angel, frankly, was not measuring up to the heroic image I'd formed of him, and not just because of his age. The three of them were having a pleasant time chatting about the archives and matters of scholarship while our loved ones were being carried farther away from us every moment, probably suffering, perhaps even now beyond our help, and my father did not appear to care. He was being brilliantly snide about a scroll submitted by the Lucian Clerisy, actually chuckling over it with Mallinna, when my self-control snapped.
I flung myself off the pallet and turned on Angel and Mallinna, the easier targets. "I can't listen to any more of this hypocrisy. You can't deny you've profited by the Primate's crimes, can you? You're just as much his lackeys as those bastards in black, or the Flamens, or the drones in dun tunics down by the harbour. You accept his pilfered booty like any picklock thief's receiver—you feed him the lore that helps him lie to the people—you do nothing to protest his tyranny, you . . ."
And so I ranted on in a way that makes me cringe to remember, even then knowing but not caring that I was being unjust. Fortunately it was wasted. Tig carried on skim-reading the Lucian scroll; Angel and Mallinna listened to me with great interest and attention, as if I were stating a position in a scholarly debate. When my words ran down without effect, I glared at the two of them in frustration and turned furiously to my father.
Looking up from the scroll with his eyebrows raised, he quietly ambushed me. "Have you forgotten, Vero, who helped us escape?"
I felt as if someone had kicked me in the gut. "No, I haven't forgotten, but—"
"And who it is that's hiding us in the very heart of the Gilgard, at great peril and inconvenience to themselves?"
Another kick, well-placed in the metaphorical backside. "Yes, I admit that too, but—"
"Did you wonder how they knew where we were, and who we are?"
"I've had no time to think about it, but—"
"Would it surprise you to know that Mallinna eavesdrops routinely on the Primate's councils?"
I gave up. "It wouldn't surprise me at all."
"That her information is then smuggled from the archives to the Primate's opponents?"
"Enough said. "
"That Mallinna's gleanings have more than once prevented bloodshed—"
"I understand."
"—and warned innocents who were doomed to the Mosslines to drop out of sight before the troopers came for them."
"I understand, Tig."
"You should also know that misinformation passed from the archives kept the Primate from finding and plundering the secret holies of the Plaviset—"
"I honestly do understand."
"—and allowed several small mid-kingdoms to sue for better surrender terms, which saved the Omelian silk groves and the oyster communes around Glishor from the Primate's punitive torch—"
"Mallinna, I was wrong," I said loudly. "Revered Angel, forgive me for my foolish doubts. Father, you can stop talking now."
At last I knew why Tigrallef had spent so much time grinning at the ceiling of our well-upholstered prison, and who besides the First Flamen had visited us while I snored in drunken slumber. The Temple Palace had no between-ways, but it was wormholed with air ducts and light wells to supply the large inner warren that was carved into the Gilgard rock, and Angel had learned every twist and turn of them while the Sherank still occupied the castle. Although Tig and Shree had patiently trained him to use the corridors after the liberation, he slipped back into his old habits not long after they left him behind. Eventually he grew too frail and too brittle in his bones to pull himself through the ducts, but by then Mallinna was the heretrix of his knowledge. And a good thing for us that she was, too.
Breakfast over, indeed, and Angel having gone into the stacks to supervise the apprentices, it was almost time for Mallinna to pay her daily informal visit to the Primate's council chamber. Still chastened, I helped her pile the trenchers and empty bowls outside the door of the private workroom for the skivvies to pick up. While being fairly handy with the dishes, I fumbled clumsily with more words of apology. Mallinna said with genuine sweetness, "Your assessment was based on incomplete information," and left it at that, smiling at me as if everything was now explained and excused. I suddenly perceived that a child raised by Angel in the archives from the age of five was bound to have some odd ways of looking at human behaviour. My own upbringing began to look relatively normal.
Back in the workroom, where Tig was sitting at a work table poring over some papers, Mallinna abruptly pulled her robe off over her head and stretched to hang it on a hook. My father did not even look up. I gasped. Swallowed. Sat down, grabbed a book and opened it in my lap. Pretended to read the book. Began to mutter the Zelfic Mathematical Protocols under my breath. I was not being prudish. She was not even naked underneath the robe—there was a garment that might have been a loincloth or else very brief underbritches, and she was wearing ankle-high socks as well. Anyway she was not the first woman I'd ever seen without her clothes on. Clothing was considered a perversion among the sea savages of Itsant; in the hotlands of Storica it was a rarity; in some islands of the Ronchar Sea, all sartorial effort was lavished on astonishing hats.
No, her near nakedness in itself did not shock or embarrass me, but I was well into the Third Protocol before I felt safe in putting the book aside. Then I saw what she was doing; back went the book; I moved on to the Fourth Protocol. She had pinned her plait into a tight knot at the back of her head, and was rubbing oil on to her bare shoulders and hips and . . .
"Perhaps you'd like to come," she said brightly. "Stand up, let me see how big you are."
I groaned. Fifth Protocol. Warily I stood up, keeping the book in a strategic defensive placement. She hovered in front of me, almost pressing against my body—after a delirious few moments, I realized she was directly comparing the breadth of my shoulders against her own.
&nb
sp; "No," she said, disappointed, "you're far too large. You'd get stuck."
While I choked back another groan, she called out a farewell to Tigrallef and climbed the shelves of a pier of books as if it were a ladder, to a wooden screen inset into the ceiling above it. This screen she pushed up and aside, leaving a square hole just large enough for her to wriggle through. Sixth Protocol. I looked away, then back again just in time to see her feet disappear.
I was glad she was gone. I wanted her out of my sight before I ran out of Zelfic Protocols. And I very much wanted to have a firm talk with my father, alone.
It was not easy to start. Tig remained stubbornly absorbed in the papers on Angel's work table, even when I shook his shoulder and tried to catch his attention. Rescue plans, none of them much good, were filling my head: stealing a ship, pirating a ship, even bloody well buying a ship if we could scrape up enough palots with Angel's help. I had little hope of getting the Fifth back.
"Tig," I said decisively, "we have to go after them. We must get a ship somehow."
He bent over the work table, ignoring me as he'd been doing all morning.
"Look at me, Father, we have to talk about what we're going to do. Think about Calla. Think about Kat."
He gave no indication that he even knew I was there. I hovered behind him for a moment or two—until I noticed the splashes of bright red on the papers in front of him. Then I took him by the shoulders and forcibly rotated him on the stool until he was facing me.
Trouble, and not just the blood on his chin. Where he wasn't bloody he was slick with sweat, a shining sheet of it that was far more profuse than the warmth in the workroom justified. His eyes, too lambent, were fixed on the neck of my tunic, his lower lip was nearly healed from being bitten through. I sighed and wiped the blood from his chin, but just as I was launching into the Lucian proverbs, his eyelids flickered.
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 11