Vihra Kylliat also had no army; she had a bunch of men and women who wouldn’t work for her anymore because she couldn’t pay them. Not through any particular lack of loyalty, but because almost all these people had families they needed to provide for. And even if they didn’t, they had their own stomachs to fill.
There was some bloodshed, yes, that happens, and certain neighborhoods barricaded themselves off from the others. . . . Look, I’m telling you all I know, but I was locked in one room or another for the entirety of the interesting events, and I heard about them all secondhand, so you’re hearing about them all thirdhand. I’m doing my best here. If you wanted more gory details, you should have asked Ylfing about it; but then Ylfing was with you for the worst bits of the revolution, so there you are. Take your thirdhand stories and be grateful for them.
I had no more prophecies to give Taishineya then: you’d attacked Semynsk, you’d attacked Czersdo, you’d attacked Derisovet, close enough to the schedule I’d given you that I could have worked with it, if I hadn’t been catastrophizing like a spooked horse.
But it didn’t matter, because Taishineya Tarmos drafted a decree that she was ready to hire professional soldiers to go forth and meet the invading barbarians as they came west. Order came to her side in a steady trickle, threes and fours.
Within the day, Vihra Kylliat surrendered herself at last. She did it with dignity, too. Some people would have locked themselves in the Tower of Pattern until they starved to death. She only did it until they ran out of food, and then she admitted defeat with as much grace as could possibly be expected in a situation like this.
The Thieves standing siege at the Tower of Pattern took her straight to us at the bank. She was locked in a windowless room on the same floor as mine, the closest thing we had to a cell.
I went to see her as soon as I could. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to see me—in fact, I was more certain she wouldn’t want to. But . . . I needed to. For the sake of my soul, I needed to.
Her door stood open, flanked by guards, but they didn’t seem to care if I went in.
There was a surreal feeling to it, this mirroring. I could have dragged in a chair and a bottle of menovka, could have done it up right and proper, but that would have felt like petty mockery.
I edged through the door. She looked worse than the last time I’d seen her. She had huge dark bags under her eyes, and she’d gone thin, like most everyone else in the city. Roughly shaped wooden limbs had replaced her fine and elegantly crafted artificial ones—I expect that she sold them for money to feed herself.
The ravages of broken hallucinations touch even the highest of the high, in times of trouble.
She looked up at once when I came in. It was like she didn’t recognize me. I don’t know—she didn’t react, is what I mean. She just sat there and stared at me with dull, glassy eyes. She had resigned herself to death at that point, and she knew it would come for her in its own time, not on her schedule. She wore Order’s red, still, the cloth old and faded. And though her clothes were threadbare and shabby, the boot on her good foot was polished to within an inch of its life. A soldier’s habits never completely leave her, I supposed.
“Well, hello,” I said to the woman who had shut me in a miserable, damp, filthy cell for weeks. Who had denied me heat and personal cleanliness. Who fed me slop. Who, in anger, had poured that bucket of filthy water on me and left me in the dark to freeze. Who would not have cared if I had taken sick and died. Whose so-called kindnesses had been incidental and self-serving at best. Who had taken clothing away from another prisoner to clothe me, likely leaving them as helpless and naked as I had been—but they weren’t as important, were they? They were just a debtor.
Two people can have a connection, as we did, but a connection doesn’t require caring. When she was extending mercy to me, when she was delaying my execution, it wasn’t because of her own good intentions. It was because I influenced her. And before I’d done that, she was very equitable—she treated me the same as she treated all her prisoners: filth, misery, abuse. She did not deserve mercy. She didn’t deserve kindness.
“So you were on her side all along, then?” Her voice was crackling-dry, her lips pale and chapped.
I shrugged. “No. She took me from the prison, fed me, clothed me. Offered me that and a job, or death.”
“You’re the worst person alive. I kept you safe as long as I could. I would have set you free eventually. I tried to help you. It was all stupid. I see that now.”
Words are cheap; I know that better than anyone in the world. She could have just been bullshitting to disquiet me. It was probably what I would have done. Maybe she had learned something of storytelling in all those drunken nights she visited my cell.
Despite everything, I felt sorry for her. Taishineya Tarmos seizing control of the bank had been a fatal blow, but a slow one—the moment that Taishineya had crossed the threshold, Vihra Kylliat’s fate had been sealed. She would have ended up here in this room one way or another, eventually. I think she knew it. I think she may have known it when everything started going wrong. Who knows? She’s not around for anyone to ask now.
She had tremors in her hand. I wondered how long she’d been able to keep herself supplied with menovka after I’d been kidnapped. We didn’t have anything that strong in regular supply. Taishineya Tarmos had some kind of prejudice against hard liquor. Velizar, Consanza’s husband, had taken over duties as quartermaster, and he had a prejudice too, except his was the straightforward belief that it wasn’t an essential supply and that we had no call to be spending money on it, particularly when we didn’t need beer as a source of clean drink, free from pestilence. We had the well pumps in the alley and the courtyard, he said, and all the snow we could want besides.
She didn’t seem willing to talk, and I was overcome with a fit of shyness—sort of like when Ylfing or someone starts crying. Sometimes I just don’t know what to do with people. Can’t help it. I understand why people do it, and it’s not that I can’t identify their emotions. It’s just that other people’s feelings are as uncomfortable to have shoved in my face as their privates would be. For one thing, I’m too old for that nonsense, no matter how much of a hound I may have been in my youth. I like to decide for myself whether I want to deal with someone else’s business or not.
After a long, long silence, I left, and I wandered, and I wondered if any of the Fifty Thieves had a liking for menovka, if any of them might have smuggled some back into the bank, and if a measure or so of it could be poured off for me to share with her. I felt sorry for her, and even if her kindnesses had been incidental, there they were: she’d offered me drink once or twice, though it was too rough for me to stomach, and she’d let me keep the clothes and comforts that Ylfing and Consanza had brought me, had allowed the brazier in my low cell and the firepot outside my isolation cell. Trivial, meaningless gestures that cost her nothing. She didn’t deserve kindness.
But she did deserve understanding, and that’s what a Chant can offer. That’s the only thing a Chant can offer.
There was menovka, of course—I mean, have you met men and women like the Fifty Thieves? There’s always drink around them, sooner or later, regardless of the prejudices of their commanders. It’s just that they wouldn’t give me any, so I had to plead with my current guard to bring back some for me when next they went out. Seems there had been some unspoken agreement that if someone wanted drink, they went to get their own and no one else’s. Independent lot, these people. I had a nation’s worth of gold just a flight downstairs that I could have bribed them with, if only they’d cared a whit about it, so I had to barter with something else.
Fortunately, I carry a lot of tradable material with me in my head. Also fortunate, the Thieves were ridiculously bored by then.
THE FOURTEENTH TALE:
Skukua and the Twelve Travelers
A band of twelve was walking through a forest one day when they met Skukua, the trickster. He stopped them and asked th
em what they were doing, and they said they were mercenaries, on their way to the sea to find a boat that would carry them off to seek their fortunes.
“Fortunes!” Skukua said, howling a great bellowing laugh and slapping his thighs. “Your fortunes are written on your faces plain as day. Why do you need to seek for them?”
“A person without an occupation might as well lie down in the street and die,” said one of the twelve.
Skukua jabbed his finger at her. “Your fortune lies behind you, stupid woman, not ahead.” He pointed at another of the mercenaries. “Yours, stupid man, lies three weeks hence at the bottom of too many pints of ale, and in the glint of your coin on the table and in the eyes of the men who saw it and thought some thoughts to themselves, and in a dark alley where you stop to piss.”
“Who are you, to say such things?” said the leader of the mercenaries.
(“Damn right,” said Nine-Fingers. “I’d punch him.”)
“A fellow traveler,” said Skukua, “from a land I left long ago and half the world away.”
“A sorcerer, too, to know our fortunes,” said one of the twelve. “Or else a fool yapping into the wind.”
“Why not both?” said Skukua. “Take me with you.”
The twelve were all unsettled, but it was terrible bad luck to turn away another traveler met by chance on the road. “You may join us if you wish,” said the leader. “But we travel at our own speed, and we will not slow down for you.”
“Fine with me,” Skukua said. “I can match anyone’s pace!” And indeed it seemed that he could, for he bounded up and down the pack train with an unflagging energy, speaking to everyone, never staying still for long.
There was a young person who had more patience than the others, a woman by the name of Hesera, and she managed to tie up Skukua’s attention and draw him away from the others for a time, to give them a rest. “And where does my fortune lie, stranger?” she said, when they had talked and boasted for a time.
“In the arms of someone called Nge Olutenyo,” Skukua said immediately.
“Ha, I know no one by that name.”
“You will,” he said. “In N’gaka.”
“N’gaka, you say? That’s a ways off.”
“Closer with every step we take,” he said, cackling. “As are all fortunes. With every step and with every heartbeat.”
“And what if I tried to escape my fortune? What if I didn’t go to N’gaka?”
He looked up at her with his oddly luminous eyes and said, “Then N’gaka would come to you. Or bring you to it. You cannot escape fortune.”
“I disagree,” she said. “The rope of the future frays into many strands.”
“No,” said Skukua with a smile. “It doesn’t.”
“Nge Olutenyo, then,” she said. “In N’gaka.”
“In N’gaka,” he agreed.
When they stopped to make camp for the night, Hesera could not keep Skukua occupied, and he got into a conversation with one of the other mercenaries that almost ended in a fistfight. Skukua taunted him until his temper snapped, and then danced back, shaking a finger at the young man and warning him off with reminders of Skukua’s sorcery. “Touch me not, for you are as a snail to me and I could crush you beneath my foot if I so desired.”
(“Are any of them going to punch him?” Nine-Fingers asked, incredulous. “Never known a soldier with the patience these ones have.”)
“The pointless babble of a fool,” said the man, whose name was Perun. “If you will not fight me fairly, then still your tongue! We are all sick to death of you.”
Skukua’s eyes glittered strangely then, like the glow of molten gold. “No,” he said, “but that is your fortune.”
“Peace,” said Hesera, pulling Skukua back by his shoulder. “As travelers, we owed you safety in our company when you asked for it, but as our companion, you owe us something too.”
“Do I indeed?” said Skukua.
“Courtesy,” said Hesera, “and an attempt to make yourself as little of a burden as possible. There are miles to go yet before we reach the sea and part company. Let us strive to make them at least reasonably tolerable.”
“I’m not yet satisfied,” said Perun, his hand on the hilt of his knife. “I’ll have it out with him here and now, or I’ll have an apology from him.”
(“Good man, Perun,” Nine-Fingers said. “Forget punching him—cut his throat.”)
Skukua’s eyes glittered again, like emeralds at the bottom of a cup of wine, and then smiled. “I take back my offensive remarks. Consider them unsaid, with my regrets for saying them at all.”
Perun nodded and cleared his throat. “Fine then,” he said. Then he turned and stomped through the camp, calling for something stronger than water to ease his parched tongue and hoarse throat.
In the morning, he had a fever. He moved as if half-drunk, staggering through camp only by steadying himself against the trees. They could not stop to nurse him, and they had no horses or wagons to let him ride. He lagged behind, trailing at the end of the company as they collected themselves and pressed onward.
By noon, there were blisters rising on his skin, tight white-yellow pustules inflamed with a halo of scarlet. He coughed incessantly and gasped for breath, and groaned or whimpered with every step he took. Some of the blisters beneath his clothes ruptured, dribbling blood and pus in streams down his tunic and trousers.
(“This wouldn’t be happening to him,” Nine-Fingers said, “if Perun had cut his throat when I said so. Men!”)
Skukua took no notice. He was as unburdensome as a traveling companion could be. He kept himself to himself, he spoke to no one unless he was spoken to, and he didn’t even whistle but restrained himself to a soft and near-tuneless humming.
(“There’s that, at least,” said Nine-Fingers.)
Perun stumbled and fell before the sun was halfway down the sky, and the other eleven travelers and Skukua stood well back and watched him shuddering on the ground. “Can anything be done for him?” someone asked. “It’s too late for medicine, I suppose.”
“Much too late,” said Skukua.
Not since the first blisters started rising on him that morning had anyone willingly come within fifteen feet of him, out of fear and disgust, and they wouldn’t get any closer now. While Perun sobbed and begged and coughed up blood, they stood back and argued, and then at long last they drew straws, and a woman named Maliye was chosen to raise her bow and shoot Perun, to put him out of his misery. Skukua grinned from ear to ear and clapped his hands.
(“Holy shit,” Nine-Fingers said flatly.)
His pleasure did not go unnoticed.
(“Damn right it didn’t!”)
That night when the travelers set up camp on the banks of the Black River, they welcomed him to the fireside and plied him with every ounce of hard liquor they had with them—a not insignificant amount!
(“Damn right it wasn’t,” Nine-Fingers said, and took a healthy draft of her own hard liquor.)
They let him drink until he was giggling and flushed, and then they waited until he rolled onto his back and began to snore as loud as earthquakes and avalanches.
They had to do something, they agreed. He’d killed Perun right in front of their eyes, and he’d do the same to any of them that crossed him next. And him so capricious and changeable? It was only a matter of time.
Perhaps others would have fumbled about in the woods, trying this trick and that until Skukua killed them off one by one, except for the man whose fortune lay in a dark alley two weeks thence, and for Hesera, whose fortune waited for her in N’gaka. But these men and women were clever, and they had little reason to spare Skukua any mercy. So they attacked him while he slept, dead-drunk, and they garroted him with their shoestrings, and chopped him to pieces with their knives and hatchets, and threw all the parts into a river. But as they did this, they noticed that wherever they cut him, Skukua did not bleed. They could see the blood; if they touched a cut, their hands came away bloody. But it did
n’t run out into pools on the ground or flow like clouds in the river water.
In the morning, they woke up, and they found Skukua sitting by the campfire, poking sticks into it and rubbing his head.
(“Gods damn it,” Nine-Fingers said.)
“I have the worst hangover today,” he said to them. “It feels like I’ve been beaten to pieces and drowned.”
So they set upon him again and immediately hacked him to pieces.
(“Yep,” said Nine-Fingers. “Good.”)
He laughed all the while, and even his head continued laughing after they’d dragged his hands and feet and arms and legs off to the river. They threw his head into the fire and it sang:
On a log in the forest old Skukua sat,
He chewed on roots and he chewed on fat,
He ran six times round the sun and back.
Twelve fortunes he saw, twelve sets of dice.
They killed him once and they killed him twice.
They drowned their sins in the River Black.
They burned his eyes and made him lame,
And still they could not burn his name,
You cannot burn a thing you lack.
So they fished the head out of the fire and carved S K U K U A into what skin was left across his forehead, and tossed it back in. The head sat in the fire all morning, the flesh burning and cracking and finally flaking off the bones, the eyes shriveling in their sockets until the only thing left was the skull clattering around, laughing and singing. The mercenaries argued about what to do with it, and finally they quenched the skull in the river and stuck it in a bag and smashed it against a tree until it fell to pieces and went silent.
Just as they were ready to stop for the evening, they saw a glint of firelight in the wood, and one of them—Hesera—went to scout ahead.
In a little clearing just the right size for their band, Skukua crouched next to a fire, singing to himself.
’Twas long ago and far away,
and half again the world away.
A flower grew in golden sprays
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 37