She looked at him for the first time, and whatever she saw seemed to confirm her initial impression. “Let me show you what the truth sounds like, sir— My name is Madame Fulmala Bhata. Do you hear it? How it rings in the ear? Do you feel how the truth quivers through the thread, to your fingers and into your bones? You can feel the honesty of my pulse. The truth is as guileless as a child.”
A bead the size of a walnut slid down a strand from a pipe in the ceiling above. She caught and opened the bead, removed a little scroll of paper, and uncurled the scrap with her thumbnails. “You sold two kegs of good rum to John Hamm not an hour ago,” she said. “How did you come by the rum?”
“Piracy,” Senlin said, his jaw finally loosening.
“An honest answer at last.” She slipped the little note into her robes and resumed her weaving. “Now, we can talk. What is your name?”
“Tom Mudd is the name I have traveled under in recent months. But my name is Thomas Senlin.”
“And was Thomas Senlin also a captain?”
“No, he was— I was the headmaster of a small village school.”
“A teacher?” She seemed to find him more interesting now. When two new beads emerged from the pipe in the ceiling and slid down to her nest of yarn, she let them collect at her feet, unopened. “What did you teach?”
He wanted to pretend they were engaging in small talk rather than an interrogation. It seemed the only way to keep his nauseous fear in check. Of course, it was difficult to sound at ease while tangled up like a fly. “Oh, the usual, I suppose: reading, writing, mathematics, the natural sciences, history—”
She pounced in here. “Which history?”
“Which? The history that happened, I suppose,” he said, laughter in his voice.
She was not at all amused. “History has nothing to do with what happened.”
“How can you say that? It’s apparent to me that you are responsible, at least partly, for the tapestry that holds the cove together. I’ve not been able to make sense of its pattern before, but those beads that slide down to you, they carry receipts, don’t they? They tell you what to add to the record. So, the tapestry is like a ledger. An account of—”
“—of births and deaths, losses and sales, seasons and storms, debts, oaths, black scotches, marriages, adventures, songs, even jokes. Everything that is important to us.”
“Incredible, incredible. You catch all of that with your thread?”
“Yes.”
“Now it makes sense why the tapestry is full of symbols, little pictures, and hatch marks rather than letters and numbers. It’s so the locals can read it, so it is of some use to them. You are their historian.”
“I am not!” she said sharply. She wagged her bone comb at him. “I am a recorder. A recorder takes things down. A historian makes things up.”
He saw that he’d goaded her, and though he was clearly at her mercy, he couldn’t stop himself from arguing the point. “Well, that’s hardly fair.”
“I agree. It is unfair. A historian begins with an ending, and then he concocts a pleasing cause. It’s a fairytale.”
“That’s a ludicrous accusation. History is the narrative of time, and like any narrative, any story, there are some details that are necessarily glossed over, some that are included under the umbrella of anecdote and analogy. But the thrust of the story is not perverted by small omissions. If anything it is clarified.”
“Of course it is clarified! That’s because all the confusing and muddling and disagreeing parts have been removed. It’s clear because it’s untrue! Who are these pious men writing the story of time anyway? To whom are they devoted? Every historian I’ve ever heard of has a benefactor or a master or a duty to his country. History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!” Her former decorum had fallen away entirely now, and Senlin glimpsed in her vehemence her son’s passions. There was a little of that mania in her, too.
Senlin had had many philosophical debates in his time, but never while dangling in the air, safe as a man in a noose. The conversation felt surreal and also oddly nostalgic. He found he was nearly enjoying himself. “It is an unhappy but not a new notion that history is written by the victors. Yet I think it is the height of cynicism to throw out an entire discipline for a few errors.”
“It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.”
“Well that rings a little true.” Senlin frowned deeply. “I was misled by a false account of the Tower, once. I have often wondered why a man would write such a gross fabrication.”
She smiled. It was a kind and sad expression. “You came, didn’t you? You left your life, your school, your students, and you came to the Tower. You brought money, I suppose? You spent more than you could afford, perhaps? You brought your little fortune to the Tower and laid it on the altar, you and scores of other men and women like you. Can you really not imagine why someone would write such glamorous lies?”
It was a revelation, and as is so often the case with revelations, the thrill of discovery was quickly followed by embarrassment. Why had he not come to this conclusion earlier? The Everyman’s Guide, which duped and flattered and dribbled out just enough truth to be convincing, was no nobler than an advertisement. He had been fooled into coming to the Tower and giving up what riches he had, and someone had profited from it.
“You are right, Madame Bhata. I have lost more than I can afford.”
“Ah. So we come to it at last,” she said, and for the first time she set aside all her work and paid him the full weight of her attention. “Tell me what happened.”
Senlin told his tale as briefly as he could, though Madame Bhata interrupted frequently with questions. These, Senlin answered honestly. He laid bare his shortcomings and crimes, his alliances and enemies, and his hope for finding his lost wife. He even shared his strong suspicion that the Commissioner of the Baths had placed a bounty on his head for the theft of a work of art, a confession that invited her to test his worth, to turn him in, as well she could and might.
But what was excruciating at first turned cathartic the more he talked. In telling his story, he discovered that he had developed definite ideas about his own motives and decisions. These ideas seemed to have formed in the ether of emotions and dreams, that wooly fog that lay outside the footlights of the conscious mind. They were not large revelations, but were rather like the little epiphanies one suffers and enjoys over a morning cup of tea.
For one, he had never understood why he had adopted the pseudonym Mudd. Mud was an obscenity and a pejorative in the Tower. It was a joke, and so he had assumed it was only archness and self-deprecation that had suggested the name to him. He had chosen it, after all, in a bleak moment. But that was not it, not really. His associations of mud, unlike the Tower’s, were positive: it was the thing that announced spring, the thing that nursed life into blossom. It was the thing that could be turned into bricks, and those bricks made into homes and schools and libraries. It was mud that Marya had liked to stamp her boots in, just to tease and bait him. He had chosen the name because it embodied the Tower’s unreasonable loathing of the lower world.
This and other little revelations whipped his narration along, and when he w
as done, he felt invigorated and also exposed.
“I hope you understand why I have been careful with my name and my story,” he said. “If the wrong parties found out, my crew and my wife might suffer for it. I hope you will be discreet with what I’ve shared.”
“It is a part of the record now. I will not hide it, Thomas Senlin. But I can console you with the fact that the men you fear never trouble to read the inferior lore of the inferior races. I think the secrets of Captain Mudd are safe enough, even though they stand in the open.”
He knew she wouldn’t offer him a better consolation, and so he moved finally to the purpose of this daring, draining visit. “Now that you know me, you know why I have come.”
“You wish to seek your wife in Pelphia.”
“Yes.”
“You can enter Pelphia by the ringdom above it, by the Silk Reef.”
Senlin was both puzzled and disappointed by the simple reply. “I read that it was sealed up after the war between Pelphia and Algez broke out. All the stairways were filled with rubble.”
“What did I tell you about believing those histories? They are so full of holes! Did your book say anything about the trail of the hods? Nothing? Of course, nothing! Listen. At the heart of the Silk Gardens is the Golden Zoo. It is a relic of the world before the war.”
“A zoo? Are there animals there?”
“Perhaps. I’m not sure. But there is a man there who may help you. His name is Luc Marat. He is in charge of what little there is to be in charge of. He rescues hods, I’ve been told, and has turned the Zoo into a kind of mission. He knows the trail of the hods very well. He can show you a way into Pelphia.”
“Is he dangerous, this Marat?”
“He is a mystic, and they are naturally pacifistic. But he is also a zealot, and they are not slow to anger. His ideas are unpopular, and there are many in the Tower who’d like to see him hanged. So, to many he is a criminal. He is suspicious of strangers, naturally. I don’t know what he’ll make of you. Not everyone is as friendly as I am.”
The information sounded plausible: a hideout, an outlaw of some compassion and influence, and an overlooked entrance into Pelphia. It might be tricky to navigate the portals of the hods, but could it really be any more difficult than piracy?
Senlin's heart began to pile hope upon the possibility, consecrating the rumor, until it seemed to him a virtual certainty: this mystic, this Luc Marat would lead him into Pelphia.
“Will he expect to be paid?” Senlin asked.
“It would be wise to go with a peace offering, yes. I understand his mission has a great appetite for books, all sorts.”
Senlin was surprised. His time in New Babel had shown him how relatively rare literacy was among the Tower’s working populations. A mission that had a need for books could only mean one thing: Marat was trying to educate the hods. It was a noble aspiration, and Senlin wondered if he might not find a kindred spirit in the zealot Marat.
His reverie was interrupted by what he mistook for the cawing of a crow. He turned in time to see a shrieking man plunge past the naked frame of the cove. The spectacle was not sufficient to rouse Madame Bhata’s interest. Her shuttle swam on, cutting through the weft like a fish through reeds.
“I have one more question,” she said, now absently and to an even more absent Senlin, who continued to stare at the sky. He was trying to convince himself that he had imagined the falling man, that it was another hallucination. Then her question brought him back to the present: “Why do you take Crumb?”
He hardly hesitated; it was the scantest whiff of a pause before he got his answer out. “I do not.” He sounded indignant; he sounded convincing. But she was not convinced.
“I am surprised you would lie about such an obvious weakness after telling me so many secrets.”
“Madam, I am not lying. I was exposed to it twice, unwillingly, and the last time was three months ago.”
“And yet you are under its sway now. I recognized it as soon as I saw you flopping about in my web. Oh, you addicts are all the same; you deceive yourself so well you think everyone is deceived.”
“I swear on my life: I am the victim of an overdose. I do not take Crumb.”
She stared at him, her bearing frigid. The blade shears emerged again with a chilling nonchalance. Senlin thought of the six empty coats that turned in the wind; he thought of the six lost souls. She had snipped them from the thread of history to keep their dishonesty from coloring her account.
The shears in her hand rasped open. He was as pale as she was serene.
Then, unaccountably, she stopped. Madam Bhata sighed and said, “Go. Go look for your wife, Thomas Mudd Senlin. What good does it do to punish a man who so stubbornly punishes himself?”
Chapter Eight
“I knew a boy in school who rolled out of his bunk in his sleep, struck his head, and never woke again. I console myself with this terrible memory whenever I look down at the chasm that follows me like a shadow. We are, all of us, living at a deadly height.”
- The Stone Cloud's Logbook, Captain Tom Mudd
A ship's rigging is as expressive as a violin. The jute and block instruments are capable of performing happy minuets when the crew is glad, reveries when they are contemplative, and nocturnes when they are melancholy.
Presently, it seemed to the crew of the Stone Cloud, the rigging sawed at the minor chords of a funeral dirge.
They stood with heads hanging in the furnace glow of the afternoon sun. Their captain paced before them in a state of great frustration. Despite his black mood, they could not help but wonder where the tri-corner hat on his head had come from.
“Over a rat?” Senlin said, coming to a halt before Voleta.
“A squirrel,” she corrected, and with her hair still over her face, raised the little animal in a cupped hand for her captain's inspection. The creature, which had recovered from being bounced upon the floor, blinked its black eyes at him with a quiet sentience.
“So, you stole a squirrel,” he said pointing at her. “Then when the owner came to claim it, you,” his finger turned to Iren,” “threw him through the wall.” Iren looked uncharacteristically abashed. “And where were you during all of this, Adam?”
“Holding a pistol under the table.”
Senlin rubbed the back of his neck. “Of course you were.”
“What would you have had us do? That jobber was threatening her,” Adam said, nodding at his sister. “Who knows what he might've done.”
“This is your justification for killing a man and earning us a black scotch from the one port— the one port— disreputable enough to let us in?” Senlin said, looking to his first mate for support. She stood with her arms crossed, staring resolutely at the distant saw of mountain peaks. She looked like she was holding a bee in her mouth. Senlin frowned and soldiered on, unaided. “Has it come to this? Are we now resolved to either surrender or murder when faced with adversity? Are there no degrees between the two disgraces?”
Senlin turned to Iren who drew herself to attention and stood with her chin raised, basking in the shame like a stoic. “They are young and impetuous, but you are old enough to understand the heavy consequence of decisions lightly made. You...” Senlin’s agitation abruptly crested, and he pulled back from saying any more. He composed himself and concluded, “Iren, we will continue this in my quarters.”
Hoping to make amends, Adam retreated to his formal duties as pilot. “What's our destination, Captain?”
“I'll have a course for you shortly. For the time being, find us a quiet cloud to stick our heads in. And please, let’s all try to keep the killing to a minimum.”
Senlin opened his cabin window to invite the light and the passing chatter of flocking birds. Books and charts, a collage of research, lay upon the table. He stamped two cups atop the sprawl and poured a share of rum.
“There are many pirate customs I do not understand,” he said, inspecting his pewter cup. “For example, the hanging of chimes and
rattles to scare away gremlins, who for some reason require absolute quiet to work their mischief. Or the belief that blue is bad luck, and yellow, good. Or the widespread phobia of whistling, which apparently taunts the wind into blowing harder.” He sipped the potent liquor. “But reconciling disagreements over a dram of rum— that is a custom I can appreciate. If I ever get home again, I think I will introduce the practice to the county school board.”
Iren took her seat like a rockslide takes a road. She looked miserable and defeated, an uncomfortable expression on such a formidable frame. Her iconic square jaw hung loose as a jowl.
“I remember the moment when I decided I liked you,” Senlin pressed on with an amiable tilt of his cup. “We were on our way to see Finn Goll, and you confessed that you might be compelled to strangle me if it turned out I was a thief. If it came to that, you said you hoped I would fight back.
“At first, I thought you were being droll, but then you reminded me of our lessons— you told me not to lunge, told me to keep my head— and I realized you were in absolute earnest. I thought to myself, ‘Here is a person of conscience. Here is a person who believes in fairness.’”
Senlin waited for her to comment, but she only lifted her shoulders and let them fall.
“Iren, you are not a murderer.” Huddling over the table, he tried to interrupt her downcast gaze. “Tell me, what happened in the pub?”
“I lost my head,” she said, her voice full of puzzlement. “He was terrorizing someone I love, and I...”
Senlin sat back in amazement. “Someone you love?”
“Voleta.” She looked up to see if he understood.
Marya appeared at his elbow, the soft curtain of her hair grazing his neck. “Will wonders never cease? Finally, a little romance has bloomed upon your ship, Tom.”
“I don’t miss much about the life I left, but I miss Finn Goll’s children.” Iren spoke in a monotone though the wrinkles on her brow writhed with emotion. “The way they looked at me, that’s how Voleta looks at me. She sees through the scars and the scowling; she doesn’t see the bloody trail behind me. She doesn’t know what I did with my life.”
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 6