by Jay Lake
Afterwards, I lit two small fires to him and made a speaking in the manner of the Stone Coast. I had nothing good to say of the scruffy dead man except that his mother had probably loved him once, so I commemorated his shade to her. Then I took his stale flatbread and his good sandals and the knife that I had wedged into him and went on my way.
Killing wasn’t easier the second time, even though I’d had cause that no one would dispute. The act was so final. Even now, I cannot look back with anything but sorrow. Nothing was left for forgiveness or vengeance when a person has breathed their last. Papa had been just as dead, but his body had not yet received the message.
I moved on, with no purpose except the habit of walking. Even my bells were forgotten. Eventually, I came to travel three days with a trio of old women who did not say a word for most of that time. They wore pale robes and carried wilted lilies, in honor of the goddess whom I would soon come to serve. They shuffled slowly, but they had food and seemed to know the increasingly busy road. Best of all, they did not try to drive me away when I fell in with them. A few hours later, I flashed my knife at a young man who looked too closely at us. The oldest of the women smiled at me for that. I had no idea then that she was one of the most accomplished killers in this land.
We crested a rise the afternoon of the third day, and there was Kalimpura. It did not look like a city to me. I was used to Copper Downs, first as a place of close walls and distant noises, then as rooftops and sewers, and finally in my last days there, a city of pale stone and slate and copper, squared lines, and narrow windows.
Kalimpura, seen from the Landward Road where it crosses Five Monkey Hill, is a riot of colors and curves and silvered spires topped with the sacred thunderbolts of Rav to ward off the lightning that comes with summer storms. Not that I understood as much when I first followed my feet west out of Bhopura.
So I strode over the hill amid the thickening traffic of the previous days and saw a city that at first looked like a giant tent encampment. The Kalimpuri did not measure their buildings with rulers and plumb lines. Rather, they built in the curves of billowing silk and the lines of prayer flags straining before the monsoon wind.
It was as if the gods of this place had dumped several hundred acres of masonry and precious metal and silk lengths to earth, but forgotten to assemble their toy.
“Ai,” said the oldest pilgrim, a woman bent nearly double, who walked with two sticks. The first word I’d heard from any of them.
I was struck by the whim of politeness. It seemed better than drawing my knife and killing again. “Yes, Mother?”
She stopped moving and stamped her sticks into the road three times. A cart behind her swerved to avoid the little knot we four made. The driver began to curse, saw the look in my eyes, and suddenly found great interest in calming his team.
“The Lily Goddess welcomes me home,” the old woman said.
“And blessings on you, I am sure.” Blessings, I thought. A mockery. I followed no gods, not at that time. Copper Downs had provided me with none, and Selistan had proven hollow.
“Blessings.” She peered close at me. “You’re a girl beneath that awful hair, I warrant. You need help, come ask around the temple for Mother Meiko.” She cackled, but a strange light filled her eyes. “There’s always a place for a woman of a certain bent.”
“Thank you, Mother.” I let my stride lengthen away from hers quickly enough. Company was good, but I did not want pity. One last hot meal and an hour to work on forgetting my sins, and I would be pleased to leave this turn of the Wheel behind. A line of bearers with huge orange cloths on their heads passed me. I slipped in with them.
People thronged toward the gates of Kalimpura. The portal that admits the Landward Road from the east is shaped like an orchid, tall and graceful and pointed with a set of doors within a larger set of doors. Traffic came in for a while, until the gate warden had seen enough of the flow; then it went out for a while. The gate was too narrow for two laden donkeys to pass one another, I later learned. What I learned that day was there was a terrible jam outside, which created a thriving business in paid line-standing, guard-bribing, and general intimidation.
“You, boy, get away from my patch,” grumbled a fat man with no fingers on his right hand.
“I’m not on your foolish patch,” I told him as the flank of a horse pushed me within his reach.
His left hand, complete with fist, snatched at me. I tried to slip away, but the fat man was strangely fast. He tugged me close, his breath foul in my face. “My father, and his father, and his father, worked this patch. You are wanting to be here, you are paying me, or you are in my pay.”
I slipped the knife from my sandal straps and slid the point between his arm and his body. “How much do you pay, then?”
He dropped me, laughing. “That’s more like it.” Leaning close again, he added, “If you are ever pointing steel at me again, boy, you shall be shitting your own knife out your ass while learning to breathe water through the hole in your throat.”
“So?” Reckless, crazed, caring nothing, I stood my ground.
“So go find a few eunuchs to bully, and take their copper paisas to stand in line. Then bring it all back to me.” He grinned. “Or I’ll have you killed.”
Thus I spent my first weeks in Kalimpura without ever passing within the walls of the city. Little Kareen, as my bully-master was known, lived on his patch. At night, one or another of the boys brought him a cotton shelter and his sleeping pillows, while more of us fetched hot wine and cold rice from the carts that never stopped circling out here.
It was an education. I saw every kind of pilgrim, prince, and trader, as well as the endless lines of qulis carrying food, bamboo, hardwoods, and bundled or basketed goods. All of Selistan moved on the backs of little brown men, I realized. Carts were used for longer distances, or loads too bulky and heavy to be carried, but if something could be moved in a day by a man, it was.
Women did not work so.
Some kept their husbands’ carts, and many followed as servants of the few wives who passed. There were none who labored on their own.
I had no real sense of how much choice the women of Copper Downs had in their lives, but I’d been raised by Petraean women. Except for Mistress Tirelle, they had come and gone freely from the Factor’s house. They gossiped of the city as if they moved about it at will. In my short time of freedom there between my escape and my flight, I had seen women in every crowd. Not under arms, surely, but carrying about the business of their lives as openly as men.
Here women were to be owned, either playpretties much as had once been intended for me, or as servants and tools. Only the poorest women-the cart vendors’ wives, the dung-pickers in their ash gray robes and drooping veils, the elderly sweepers who walked before the wealthy to ensure their feet trod on no shit-only they seemed to move with any freedom.
Copper Downs had been a prison for me, but Kalimpura was a prison for all women insofar as I could tell. No wonder Shar had been afraid for my papa’s land. There would have been nothing else for her except to be a servant in deepest poverty.
The bullyboys gave me a wide berth at the first. The story of me pulling a knife on Little Kareen was hot on their lips for a few days. Some of them feared my scars, wondering what I had done to earn them from some vengeful judge or village hetman. I made sure they saw my knife, which was better steel than their cheap, brittle iron blades, and I kept my eyes sharp and mean.
The teasing started soon enough. One boy, Ravi, bumped me as we carried food back to Little Kareen’s patch for the evening meal. I dropped a pot of warm millet, and was nearly beaten for it. I found him afterwards when he was peeing and thumped him on the back of the head with the butt of my bandit’s knife. He fell in his own puddle, from which I dragged him back to our little fire.
“Kareen, Ravi is so drunk, he cannot hold himself,” I announced, dropping the boy and rolling him over. Everyone but Kareen laughed. He looked thoughtful, then ordered Ravi
dumped in a ditch and banished for three days.
After that, the cuts became more sly, but deeper. I was tripped twice in the dark. Ravi and two friends tried to thrash me, but I danced away from them. Later I slit the soles of their shoes, so they would have blisters on their feet.
Little Kareen did not like this. “It is one thing for boys to tumble and rough one another,” he announced one night over a badly made stew of some pale rubbery fish. I could have done so much more with the food here, though the spices were often divine. “It is another for hatred to grow.” He looked more closely at me. “Green, step forward.”
I did as he bade me.
The bully-master nodded, and someone crashed into my back. Ravi, and his two friends, and then most of the other boys besides. They pummeled and kicked me, the weight of them pushing me down so I could not dance away or draw my knife. I felt my teeth loosen, my ribs ache with sickening pain, as they smacked into me.
Even curled, crying, I knew they were not trying to kill me. Otherwise they would already have done so. On the ground amid my pain and humiliation, I swore I would never be caught beneath a mob again.
“Enough,” Little Kareen said. “Green, you are forgiven. Are you to be forgiving your fellows?”
I staggered to my feet. Something was wrong with my right knee, and my breath came with a jagged, burning pain in my chest. I wanted to cry out, No, by all the sleeping gods, may they burn upon the Wheel! But there was not enough fight within even me to win what would come next. “All is forgiven,” I lied, and cast my eyes down so he could not read them.
“Then lend me your knife,” he said. “I have need of it awhile.”
“I…” I drew a painful breath. “I was told never to bare steel before you, sir.”
“Ravi, his knife,” Little Kareen called out.
Ravi slid my knife from my legging and carefully gave it to the big man, hilt first.
I went to retch awhile and sleep off my pain behind a compost pile we sometimes used to hide valuables of disputed ownership.
Everyone left me alone for two days. So thoroughly alone I got no food, and had to limp for my water, but alone.
The third day I was back before Little Kareen. The boys were out chivvying the lines and rolling unlucky beggars. Ravi had shouted to me where I slept to see the big man before noon. So there I was, with the sun less than a finger’s width from the top of the sky, standing before him.
Today Little Kareen sat on a throne cut from an old wine barrel. His perch was lined with brocade that had come from somewhere across the sea, for it was nothing like the textiles of Kalimpura. He let the sun beat down upon his head as he faced the moving, shoving line of traffic behind my back. His jaw was set, and his eyes drooped as he stared at me awhile. We might as well have been in a closed room, walled as we were by silence.
“If I were a wiser man, I would probably kill you now.” His wrists flexed as if his remaining fingers wished for my neck. “As it happens, I am widely accounted a fool.”
I knew that was very far from the truth, but I held my tongue. If nothing else, I could outrun him, even with so much tender and sore within me.
“But…”He stopped, shifted. “I do not hold the Death Right. Those who push souls along the Wheel guard their privileges jealously.” Little Kareen leaned forward. “You have never been among the young, have you?”
“No,” I admitted. I’d said not a single word of my history, but somehow he knew.
“I can tell. You lack the way of winning trust. You do not know enough to see when others are showing you their way.” He sighed. “You are perhaps the most fearsome boy I have seen since I myself grew to full height. Quick at your work, persuasive of the foolish, rough where needed. But you do not know when to let go of it and be a boy among boys. You will not grow to be a man among men, I am afraid.”
I knew why that would be, of course, for I was no man at all, but I was curious as to his thought. “What do you mean, sir?”
“Because someone will kill you for anger or in defense. Given your nature, they will likely be able to argue past the Death Right. If the question is even asked.” He pulled my bandit knife from beneath his thigh. “I release you, and suggest with some urgency that you leave the gate. Otherwise Ravi and his little friends might well choose to test the Death Right for themselves.”
I found that I sorrowed at that. The regret surprised me. This was the first time since leaving Endurance behind that I’d felt anything besides despair or anger. I savored the emotion like a rare spice as I reached to take the knife from him, hilt first.
“Indulge me in a question.” His voice was low with my closeness. “I have already guessed you were raised alone, across the sea. You are like a tiger born in a cage. You know nothing of hunting, or other cats, though your claws and teeth are mighty enough. But tell me this: Are you a boy at all?”
I stared at him, the knife in my hand. “Does the Death Right apply to women?”
“Well…” Little Kareen smiled broadly. “You may live awhile after all, Green. Oh yes, it does not apply to women of our city.”
The knife fit into my leggings. I tried not to let my stiffness from the beating show. Nodding at Little Kareen, I took up my satchel with my belled silk and walked into the crowd, striding purposefully toward the gate. I knew how to move through this mess now, when to swagger and when to slide quietly sideways. He was right-I did not want to meet Ravi again, not away from the bully-master’s protection.
A few weeks’ decent food had passed through my gullet, while a few paisas sat in my purse-not to mention I had a purse for my paisas. I even wore clothes fit for the endless heat here. All I lacked was a penis in order to be well set for life in Kalimpura.
The city within the walls was packed just as close as the mob outside. The pinch of the gate itself was gone, but the sheer mass of humanity beyond made up for it. In Copper Downs, people walked as if they expected a path before them. Here everyone pushed like water in flood, and lived within earshot of each other’s business.
Buildings were fanciful to the point of foolish, at least to my eye. A great number of people seemed to live their entire lives upon the street. I saw families on little mats surrounded by pots and bundles, as oblivious to the people around them as the surrounding crowd was oblivious to them. There were oxcarts here, too, of a type I had not seen on the road. They never left the city. They moved with a slow and aimless pace. A dozen little shelves were visible inside their open backs. Men of the poorer classes would hand the driver a broken sliver of a paisa, then climb within and arrange themselves for sleep.
These were hostels that roamed the city without ever stopping. Such a strange thing that was, yet curiously practical.
Animals, too. Chickens roosted penned in wicker baskets that took but a small square of pavement while towering dangerously high, so the birds lived in levels and shat upon one another. Dogs ranged free with patchy fur and missing ears. Skinny mules and haughty camels mingled with women carrying snakes upon forked sticks while people cast coins in buckets suspended from the bottoms of their poles.
All classes thronged, too, everyone I’d seen in the multitudes outside the gate and many more besides. Beautiful folk in diaphanous wraps, their trains supported by crab-scuttling servants. Tradesmen in their tunics followed by heralds crying their business with slates waved high-I soon realized an entire commodities market functioned amid the chaos. Laborers, clerkish sorts, men with bundles of scrolls, maids carrying armloads of someone else’s purchases, soldiers in studded harnesses and feathered turbans with swords strapped across their backs.
Everyone seemed to have a place, and know their path, but the signs they followed were invisible to me.
I let the swirling movement of the bodies draw me along. It seemed pointless to push in a direction I had no reason to pick anywise. I was dressed well enough like a Kalimpuri not to draw stares, even with my scarred cheeks and notched ears. My gaze was sufficiently fierce that the scuttling cut
purse children avoided me.
As for the smells of this place… I closed my eyes for a step or two, to let it into me. My nose found a curdling mix of the steam of tea, the tickle of curry, the damp darkness of cardamom, the sweat of men, the dung of a dozen species, the scent of fires. Where Copper Downs had smelled of stone and saltwater and fires of coal and hardwood, this city was redolent of food and traffic and the overwhelming concentration of people and their animals.
I followed, wondering what I would find that I could do with myself.
I circled the city in the course of that day. Two paisas bought me a roasted pigeon wrapped in banana leaves with a pile of reddish rice and a spill of some strangely orange pepper powder that threatened to burn my lips. I had been both overcharged and mocked, I knew, but I accepted it as the price of my education.
The road followed the wall before eventually meeting the docks. There the bizarre architecture settled somewhat, for there are only so many different ways a person can build a warehouse, no matter how creative they are. The docks were crowded with a mix of people, not all of them Selistani by any means. I saw Stone Coast folk, Hanchu, men with skin the red of a tomato, gangrels, massive shambling brutes, and fierce, compact, copper-skinned sailors who wore thin daggers slipped through flaps cut into the skin of their foreheads.
None of the Dancing Mistress’ people, though. Just every size, shape, and color of human, mixed through the brown shades of my countrymen like spice in a stew.
Though difficult to judge with certainty, the docks were close to twenty furlongs from end to end. There seemed to be more trade here than what I’d glimpsed in my two trips to the harbor in Copper Downs, which made me wonder why the Stone Coast considered itself the hub of commerce for this region of the world. Beyond, the street was narrower, uncrowded by local standards, though still a near-mob, as it passed before the towering homes of wealth and privilege wrought in the strangest forms of all-high domes and spiraled walls and things that looked like dreams made of ironwood and colored glass.