This next part is difficult to admit, even silently written down. Words on a page are a strange thing, I’m discovering. When they move from behind your eyes to in front of them, they become more real. Dreadfully real.
Here’s what I’m scared to write down: I think I’m getting tired of telling stories.23
No, that’s not quite right. I’m getting tired of telling stories to people. And there are so many people in this city—that’s why I’m writing things down now, because I can’t tell stories out loud as I walk through the streets without being overheard, without someone taking an interest, without them eavesdropping—stealing from me, taking from me, just like Chant was afraid they’d take it if I put it on paper. Write it down, and you can keep it secret. You can make it yours and yours alone.
There. There you have it. There’s the truth. I’m tired of it.
I think my audiences have been able to tell, lately. Fewer and fewer people have been listening to me, like they know I don’t want them to, like they know I begrudge them every word I’m obliged to give them. The meals I get in payment have grown scantier in turn—a crust of day-old bread and a flat look instead of a bowl of stew and a smile. People want a performance; they want you to give them something of yourself. I ache for the day I speak the best story I have and no one listens to me.24 I dream of it sometimes, of standing in a crowded room and having no one look at me, no one pay any attention at all, as if I were a ghost. I’m getting close, I think. I’m nearly there.
But I still have to eat.
So I’ve had to find something else to do, as much for the practical purposes of having money for food as it was from a growing surliness with the whole idea of sharing myself like they wanted me to. I wonder why I never noticed that when I was younger—that audiences snap and snatch at you like ravenous dogs, that they’ll consume you if they can, that they can suck even the marrow from your bones and leave nothing behind. Once you open your mouth and give them a piece of yourself, some of them think they’re entitled to the rest of it.
It takes too much heart, and my heart now is as empty as a desert.25
But I still have my brain. I still have years of experience traveling the world and all the practical knowledge I’d gathered or that my master-Chant had seen fit to bestow upon me.
Heyrland is governed by the guilds, the most influential of which is the Guild of Merchants. The city has a very nice harbor, well protected by the dikes, and they do a sprightly trade as an intermediary stop between the nations of the Amethyst Sea to the north, and the Horn of Puihajarvi to the south, and beyond that the Green Gulf, the Gulf of Dagua, and the Sea of Serpents. In short: many ships, from many places. They even send ships out to the Ammat Archipelago from time to time, far off over the eastern horizon.
Lacking any better ideas, two weeks ago I went to Stroekshall, the headquarters of the merchant guild, and offered myself up as a translator for hire. They weren’t at all convinced, at first—such an established institution has translators aplenty, but most of them speak only three or four languages at most. Five is considered very good, and six is impressive.
I’m fluent in eight, conversational in another twelve, and can recognize and make myself generally understood in nearly thirty more. My master-Chant said that I had something of a knack for it, and I guess that’s true. I used to pick them up as quick as anything, when I was young—I think I was chattering comfortably in Nuryeven within four or five weeks of our arrival, and Umakh only took me three. The language they speak here, the Spraacht (which is a word that literally just means “speech”), took me a little longer, mostly because both the grammatical and social gender systems are particularly complex. (I’m not sure how I’m going to represent that in this language. I’ll figure that out later.26)
The merchants wanted me to prove my competence, of course, so I had to pass their tests. They brought in some of the other translators, and they turned them loose on me.
I should write about that, shouldn’t I? That’s a proper Chanty kind of thing to write about.
Hah. “Proper” Chanting. As if it matters to anyone but me.27 What have I got to prove, right?
* * *
20. Apt choice of words.
21. Ah, at last! At last we approach the important part! It only took thirty-five pages to get here, counting the ones I threw in the fire!
22. I’ve asked you this before, but really, why don’t you have any money saved up? Why haven’t you invested in a horse and cart? Why walk everywhere? Why was your master so obsessed with eschewing material possessions? The ancient Chants owned all kinds of things.
23. Oh for heaven’s sake. This is ridiculous. You’re a human being. Humans don’t get tired of stories, and if they did, they’d stop being human. Get over yourself.
24. You should have been more careful what you wished for.
25. This is a poor metaphor. The desert is full of things. Oases have insects and fish and small creatures, and in the rest of the desert there’s the beasts beneath the ground, and the Ondoro and the Urts in their walking huts with their flocks of goats. And the dragons, which you should have known about considering you spent twelve pages crying about them.
26. Yeah, why did you pick Xerecci as the language to write in? You’re sacrificing a lot of the nuance of the Spraacht for the sake of your whimsy.
27. Sigh.
EIGHT
Stroekshall is an immense yellow-brick building by the Vasa Canal, five stories tall, with a giant carved door on each of its four sides. It’s one of the only buildings that you can walk laps around. There’s a wide swath of cobblestones surrounding it, dotted sparsely with a few trees and tiny grassy areas, like miniature parks. It’s always packed with little groups of people rushing around and making business happen.
I went in through the south door, sky blue and twice as tall as I am. A burly vrouw at the door asked for my weapons, but all I had on me was a small personal knife, the sort everyone carries for any trivial task that might require it. I mostly use mine for trimming my nails or skinning rabbits I’ve snared when I’m traveling. It’s nothing that might be dangerous, but even so, she took it from me, and gave me in exchange a leather disk with a number stamped on one side.
The inside of Stroekshall was cavernous and terrifying. It was like one of the huge cathedrals in Vinte—the middle of the hall was vaulted all the way to the roof, with galleries on every side, like you see in some taverns or theater-houses, and people were hanging over the railings of the galleries and shouting at other people above or below them. On the main floor, there were people running about everywhere, their arms full of papers and ledgers. The din was incredible, as was the sheer amount of frantic energy.
I only realized I’d stopped on the threshold when someone jostled me and snapped for me to move out of the way. I stumbled into a young vrouw who was flying past, and a couple of the account books in her arms slipped and fell to the floor.
“Oh, shipwreck!” she snapped.
I scooped up the books for her as quick as I could. “I’m looking for employment,” I said, speaking quickly as I helped balance the ledgers in her arms again. I had a feeling she’d run off if I took too long to ask. “Where would I inquire?”
She jerked her head towards the stairs. “Top floor. Mevrouw van Meer.” And then she was gone. No one stopped me as I went up the steps. The upper stories were somewhat quieter, though they weren’t at all separated from the noise below, and they were no less busy.
I found Mevrouw van Meer at a horseshoe-shaped desk, occupied but not as frantic as those around her—if anything, she seemed . . . weary? Perhaps just bored. She did have a great amount of paperwork arrayed about her, but her hair was neat and tidy, without the wisps falling in disarray around the edges, like that of the agitated folk running around the main level of the hall. She didn’t at all believe me when I told her how many languages I had, and when I offered to prove it, she sent an aide below to gather up all the translators who were availabl
e.
Within twenty minutes, I found myself in the midst of a crowd of people, all shouting at me at once in their different tongues—Araşti and Xerecci and Echareese and Bramalc and Vintish and Tashaz and Botchwu.
Though the noise and intensity dazed me, my tongue was quick, and I had been keenly trained for something like this since I was barely out of childhood. I answered again and again, flashing back and forth from language to language like a minnow in the shallows.
And it helped. I felt more awake than I had in months—it was all the parts of reciting stories to myself by rote, with none of the ravenous audience. It didn’t involve my heart at all, nor did it require me to give anything of myself away. It was just my brain and my tongue and my ears. I could relax doing that.
Some of the translators hated me, or seemed to—a couple of them stomped off grumbling about smug upstarts. I don’t see how I could have been smug; all they’d been shouting were questions or declarations about the price of grain or fish or cloth, which I relayed from one person to another, as I had no idea how to guess such things.
And at the end of it all, Mevrouw van Meer looked at me and said, “You know the manners to go along with those tongues too, don’t you?”
“Yes, mevrouw,” I said. She would have seen—and I’d noticed—my body language shifting with the words without my even needing to think about it, which was only sensible: Language is as much physical as it is verbal. You can’t use Vintish gestures with Xerecci words—it wouldn’t flow right; the rhythm would be all wrong. And besides, it wouldn’t make sense to anyone listening. She knew that; she’d seen how I folded my hands neatly in front of me when I spoke Botchwu; how I dropped my eyes politely for Tashaz; how I reached out for Xerecci, anchoring the exchange with a touch to the speaker’s arm or elbow to indicate they had my attention.
“Hm,” she said. “You’re too good to be here,” which was kind—she did seem like a warm person when she wasn’t trudging through all that paperwork she hated. She sent me off with a letter of recommendation and directions to the offices of her friend, Mevrol Sterre de Waeyer, a merchant who was headquartered only a street or two away. But by the time I found it, the day had already waned away to evening, and the only person at the offices was a clerk, who told me to come back the next day.
I collected my knife from the guard at the door and returned to the inn where I’m staying to help the innkeeper, Mevrouw Basisi, with whatever she required of me. Sometimes it’s mopping the public room, or sweeping the innyard, or scrubbing the front steps, or repairing the shingles, or fetching and carrying deliveries from the street to the cellar or from the cellar to the kitchens, or emptying chamberpots into the canal. Sometimes it’s just sitting by the fire and turning the roast on the spit while her cook, Stasyn, does the more complicated dinner preparations.
That day, the person who usually minded the bar was sick, so it fell to me, though I would have preferred to be emptying chamberpots. The public room was busy, full of loud foreign merchants and louder local regulars. I’d already had more than my fill of noise and shouting at Stroekshall, so of course I ended up getting strongarmed into Chanting for a new group of merchants who had just arrived from Pezia—two weeks now, they’ve been here, and they’re as obnoxious and excitable as they were when they first arrived. Mevrouw Basisi has been letting them play music every night in the public room, which I suppose is her own decision—and it is better they entertain themselves than call on me to do it for them.
I would have just kept silently pouring drinks for them, not saying a word, not volunteering myself at all, but Hecht Neeltje, one of Basisi’s regulars, was there, solidly drunk on one glass of beer. He’s very small and slight, and has no tolerance whatsoever, and he gets gregarious when he drinks. He gave me away—started chatting with the Pezians, and when they asked him what sort of entertainment there was to be had that late at night, Neeltje (immediately and with great excitement) pointed right at me and said they should ask me for a tale.
He’s only ever heard me tell stories when he was deep in his cups; I don’t mind him so much, because when he’s like that, he doesn’t have the attention span to stick around for more than a minute or two, but he is annoyingly convinced that I say interesting things, and he’s always ushering people towards me.
“Go ask him for a tale,” he burbled to the Pezians. I attempted to demur, but Neeltje insisted and insisted, and my resistance began to draw attention. I caved; I had to. I told them a short one, “Oyemo and the Ghost,” which was all wrong.28 I was telling the story in a warm, well-lit inn, surrounded by convivial people and noise, with the smell of good beer and better food in the air—even if I’d bothered to tell it well, it wouldn’t have worked. It was wrong for the setting and it was wrong for the audience too: a bunch of people newly arrived in town, excited to be here, but maybe a little homesick too—I overheard a few of them asking Basisi if she knew how to make a particular famous Pezian dish.
They didn’t want ghost stories about broken promises. They wanted something warm, maybe something heroic. Something about home and hearth and hospitality.29 Even better, something Pezian. I could have told them “Marsilio’s Gift,” but even thinking of it now makes me want to leave the room.
So I gave them Oyemo, and watched with a dull, resigned kind of satisfaction as their eyes glazed over and their attention drifted away, one by one, until the only person left listening was a young man about my age or a little older, with curly dark hair cropped just under his ears and arranged with wax or oil in artful dramatic sweeps, and gleaming dark eyes that didn’t waver from me for an instant, even when my voice dropped to a mumble and I rushed through the ending. Something about him screamed flirt, a guess that held up as he spent the rest of the evening trying to buy me drinks and talk to me. There was a time, long ago and half the world away, that gleaming eyes and dramatic hair might have been enough to turn my head, and if that hadn’t done it, then his unabashed interest probably would have.
I didn’t want to hear him flatter me pointlessly and insincerely. He would have said how good the story had been, how fascinating it was. Clearly it wasn’t—it was wrong on every level, by design. He had no idea what the story could have been, if I’d scraped the barnacles off my heart and given the story to him as it should have been, like this:30
* * *
28. No shit.
29. At least you’ve got that basic skill. At least you can tell what the right story is and isn’t—I’d love to be annoyed with you about picking the wrong story on purpose but . . . Hell, even I have to admit there’s reasons to do that every now and then. I’ll content myself with being annoyed with your reasoning, then, since I can’t in good conscience be annoyed at your actions.
30. Oh gods, please tell me you’re not about to write it down.
NINE
Oyemo and the Ghost31
This is an Oyemo story, and like all Oyemo stories it begins at sunset, with the last light fading from the tops of the acacia trees.
Oyemo was traveling by themself again, on the trail of an abomination that had been plaguing a nearby village. Every month, when Mzuzi, the quick moon, was fully dark, the abomination came, passing through (or over, perhaps?) the acacia-thorn fence as if it were nothing but a loose array of sticks, and sucked the life from someone in the night, leaving them to be found the next morning, a withered husk, mottled with bruises.
After three months, they summoned Oyemo, and Oyemo came.
It was a night when Mzuzi was full dark, and Jida waning gibbous. The skies were clear and cold, and Oyemo wrapped their famous tale-blanket closer around their shoulders, waiting and listening.
They spotted the abomination quite suddenly. It slunk about the thorn fence, patting it and crying softly, and Oyemo got to their feet and strolled across the empty sward. They went right up to the fence.
“Please,” it said, and Oyemo saw immediately that it was no [[p25]]abomination, just a common ghost.
“What do
you require?” Oyemo said.
“Please, I’m so thirsty. Please.”
“For what do you thirst?”
“Please, give me water. You promised. You promised.”
“I don’t promise anything to anyone,” Oyemo said kindly. “You’d best move along. Look how clear the sky is, how open and easy your path is. Go into the heavens and find a lantern that has burned out.”
“I’m so thirsty.”
“You are needed above. There are flames to be lit and tended.”
The ghost moaned and wailed and pleaded, beating its hands against the thorn fence, clawing at the branches, and though its hands went right through the wood and thorns, it didn’t seem to notice, trapped by its own belief that the fence was impassable. Every time it pleaded, Oyemo denied it, until at last its anger grew too much and it flowed through the fence and flung itself on them. But Oyemo flung up their right arm, covered with swirling patterns of scars, places their flesh had been cut and packed with the ashes of certain magic herbs that protected them from all manner of dangers both mundane and supernatural. The ghost could not hurt them. Oyemo wrestled the ghost into submission, but it was a wild thing by then and could not speak to tell Oyemo its name. When the dawn cracked over the horizon, the ghost vanished, and Oyemo yawned and went to bed.
The next month, when Mzuzi was dark again and Jida was too, Oyemo waited by the thorn fence, idly braiding a length of rope made of grass-fiber and starlight. The ghost appeared again, moaning and crying, begging for water. There was not enough moon- or starlight to see clearly, even with Oyemo’s eyes, but they could see the ghost was thin, terribly so. It looked withered. Like the bodies? Oyemo wondered.
A Choir of Lies Page 2