A smile played behind Errol’s eyes. “I do remember. Aye.”
“Excellent. I’m relieved to hear it. Someday it will behoove you to use that skill.”
* * *
—
When Marek was gone we took up the work of Thebes’s roof: rags to grease; herbs to grind between mortar and pestle; scripts to memorize for plays we were staging; lists to make of the morning’s chores; shatranj moves to inflict upon one another; guild exams for which to study.
There was, on the roof of Thebes, a particular mix of circumstances that was an elixir to all of us. A snapping bucket fire was part of it, and the math of sixteen runners and our roof master, all in. The noctis—that is, midnight—stars had not yet risen above the wall. And Ping Thebes, our cook, passed bowls of roasted hazelnuts out of his mysterious roof kitchen. Nobody ever said it aloud, but we relished the times when we were all here, and our talk ranged from the tasks in our hands to issues of love and all its lesser forms. This was that kind of night.
It was that kind of night until, that is, Faisal stood in front of Errol, drew himself up, and began the conversation that would change our lives forever.
“And anyway, as Marek said, you shouldn’t have come for us, Errol Thebes. If you hadn’t interrupted, we’d have got up to the fly and come in on our own.” We all snorted at Faisal’s bravado, to which he added, “And by the way, we still plan to beat you in the Long Run.”
Seppo groaned from where he lay, still under the bedrolls. “You are brain-rimed, Faisal Thebes. I was dead on the lines till Errol Thebes came for us. We can’t possibly race with all these wounds.”
Faisal kicked Seppo. “I’ve waited all my life for that run. We’ll all go against one another. You and I will win it. We’ve won every race in the guild.”
“Don’t be a fool,” I said, keeping my eyes on my book. “The Long Run is no kelp’s footrace up the stairs of a guild tower. To be the first to tag every roof of this vast city in one night—Marathon House to Athens—well, every runner in the race will be sweating blood. You two look like a sale on body parts. You’ll be lucky if you can brush what’s left of your teeth by Winter Ship.”
Faisal glared at me. “Odd Thebes will only drop out of the Long Run like he did last year. Everyone is counting on it.”
I shut my book. “I didn’t drop out. I was wounded.”
“Ah. I remember now,” said Faisal, his tone falsely soothing. “We heard about it down in the guild. You wounded your—what was it?—your hair.”
A shudder of laughter ran around the fire, and Errol coughed into his shoulder.
“Scalp,” I said. “I wounded my scalp. I was in the sack for a week. Anyway, how did this news reach the guild? Is there no roof thick enough to contain gossip in this city?”
Faisal grinned at me. “And now you won’t run again, in favor of not reinjuring your scalp?” Everyone was laughing now.
Seppo said, “I’m not running.”
“Don’t be a kelp, Seppo,” said Faisal. “Think of it. The prize can be anything you want. Anything. Remember that oily little foundling who haunts the edge of the laundry? You can have it!”
“That was for your ears only!” Seppo said, his eyes flitting nervously to Errol’s.
Errol said, “Look around. Do you see any foundlings here?” Seppo shook his head. “That’s because they’re foul thieves. With a iosal stench. If you run the lines fast enough to win that race, you can have anything or anyone. Why would you want a foundling?” He handed the restrung mam-line reel to Faisal, who tossed it in his pack.
Faisal cleared his throat and said in a silky voice, “Did you take anyone you wanted, Errol Thebes? When you won the Long Run last year? In your very first week on the roofs?” Errol reached for Seppo’s reel to restring it. I waited. No first-year runner had ever before taken the Long Run. “What would be the point of running again,” Faisal pressed, “if you already got what you wanted? This year you can just leave the winning to Seppo and me.”
Silence.
“Yes. What prize did you claim, Errol Thebes?” I said. “A guild house? But, wait. You have that already. Girls? Money? The first choice of apprenticeships in the city? What could the son of Margaret Thebes, the most prestigious guildmaster in this city, possibly need or want? We’d all love to—”
“You should be able to guess, Odd Thebes. We’ve spoken of it together for as long as I can remember.”
Faisal kicked the bucket fire into a spray of sparks, and we all jumped. He said, “Did you not hear me, runners of Thebes? Seppo and I will win! The whole guild awaits our victory down below.”
“Congratulations, then, in advance,” said Errol, handing Seppo his reel. “A word of advice? Remember to stop this time when you get to the end.”
Faisal went to the edge to sulk.
“Speaking of prizes,” I called, agitated as I was with Faisal about the scalp thing, “what was your trophy tonight?”
“What trophy?”
“You two ran a gut run, did you not? I just wondered what object you stole. Or did you forget the point of a gut run?”
Faisal narrowed his eyes at me. “Nothing,” he said.
“You went all the way to Pliny and took no flag? No tooth, no claw? Not even some woolies off a runner’s clothesline?”
“We forgot,” he said.
“That’s a shame! Nothing to send mam-home for the other pelts? Dragomir says there was a challenge—”
Seppo said, “Actually, we did find something.”
Faisal kicked him. “Shut up.”
“Ow!”
“What was it?” Errol said.
Faisal shot Seppo an irritated look, but he reached for his pack and pulled a leather sheath from it. The sheath looked like a navaja case, the simple kind to wear on a belt. But its hinged lid was barred, a cage constructed to restrain the object inside. Faisal turned the knob, flipped the lid, and slid a felt cloth out of the case. He unrolled the cloth.
I burst out laughing. “You stole knotting spikes?”
“We thought it was a dagger,” said Faisal. He handed Errol the cloth and its contents, a pair of thin black-iron sticks, each eight inches long, tapered on the ends.
“You thought knotting spikes were a dagger,” I repeated. “Yes, it’s a common mistake. No, wait. Errol Thebes, remind me again, what does Thebes Guild produce? Because I always forget.”
“Cnyttan spican,” Errol said, giving the ancient name. He was distracted by the spikes.
“Right! Knotting spikes. Cnyttan needles. Famous the world over for making socks, right? And sweaters! There’s a gut run for you. Such courage this took. Well, don’t worry, we can never have enough knotting spikes here at Thebes. Where we make them.”
Errol slid his fingers up the length of one spike, feeling for burrs. Fast, he pulled his hand away and put it in his mouth. I felt something in my chest, a kind of fluttering that was not without pain.
“Put them away,” I whispered, suddenly unnerved. His finger was bleeding. “I said, put them away. Where did you two get those? At Ghent House, or right here in Thebes?”
“Neither,” Seppo said.
“Nobody would want these for knotting,” Errol said, wiping the bloody spike on his tunic. “Too heavy. Too coarse. They’d put rust on the wool. Did you go to Bian Pao? Maybe they use these to tamp fireworks.”
“We got them at Fremantle,” said Seppo.
The entire circle of runners turned to stare. I was sure Seppo had misspoken. But Faisal pointed. One district away, Fremantle House and her neighbor Al-Razi towered over the rest of the city, some thirty strata higher than any guild around them. Al-Razi was lit by bucket fires and runners’ lamps. Fremantle, seat of the city’s government, was a dark shadow with one light at the top.
“Fremantle is our rival, right?” Seppo said. “We got these from a r
oom on the top strata.”
I had never seen Errol so stunned at anyone who wasn’t me. “You went inside Fremantle?” he said. “To the top and in?”
Seppo nodded. “That one light at the top,” he said (we all certainly looked), “is the window of a room with a hundred lamps in it. More, even. So bright it was blinding.”
“That window,” I said, “is the regnat’s quarters.”
Seppo looked back and forth between Errol and me. “What?”
Errol rolled the spikes in the cloth. He rubbed his face in his hands and asked the two runners if anyone at Fremantle had tried to stop them. Seppo said no. He said the roof and the room were both empty, and the case was on a table under the lights.
“You lie,” I said. “You both lie.”
“No. It’s all true,” said Seppo. “We thought you’d be impressed. Short of the fact that it’s knotting spikes. Did we do something wrong?”
Errol laughed. “You bested us! For a year and a half, Odd Thebes and I have been crawling up the flies to Fremantle, trying to grab a pair of wools off their clotheslines. Guards, everywhere. Now you two just run up there on your first night, slip right into the guild, and take a pair of knotting spikes off a table. What were the chances?”
“It was more of a desk, actually,” said Seppo.
“Whatever it was, it was insane. And a felony.” Errol grew sober. “Of course you do realize what it means.”
“What?” said Faisal.
Errol and I exchanged glances.
“We’ll have company tonight,” I said.
“Nobody saw us!” Faisal argued. “They’ll never know we took anything!”
“Similarly, I was alone when I wounded my scalp in the Long Run,” I said.
Seppo shifted. “So it’s war?”
“It’s always been war between Thebes and Fremantle,” said Errol. “Tonight, it’s battle.”
Faisal shrieked and said he didn’t want battle and couldn’t we throw the spikes over the edge?
But Seppo said, “Can I have them?”
Errol slipped the cloth and its contents back into the case. “You don’t want Fremantle in your tent.”
Faisal burst out, “Please! I didn’t have anything to do with this! Seppo took them! I was waiting down on the ladder. I didn’t even touch Fremantle!”
We all looked at Seppo, the recent corpse who had single-handedly infiltrated the weapons arsenal.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t look like much.”
“Why would you want an old pair of spikes?” Errol asked.
But he didn’t need to ask.
Home was the Thebes tower beneath our feet, 151 strata of work and life. Our families, our old friends, workrooms full of familiar guilders carving and forging spikes such as these, but finer, the best in the world. Most of those people were born in that tower, and most would never leave. We were above them all now. Daresay, we missed them. For most of us would never return to Thebes. I swear, if we dumped out every pack, we would have among us a bucket’s worth of knotting spikes. Errol looked at me and I shrugged. He handed the spikes to Seppo.
Caput Mortuum
“I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS,” Marek said, rising from the table in the yurt, his pack and tent slung over his shoulder. “Nothing. I’m staying at Mildenhall tonight to negotiate my apprenticeship. If I were to be associated with this mutiny you have just described, I’d lose hope of a contract.”
“We had hoped you’d help us,” Errol said.
“Nothing to do with it.”
“It would be a tale to savor when you’re living down in a dull guild,” I said. “Getting thick around the middle.”
“Tidy,” said Marek. “Every toque on its peg by morning. Errol, the roof is in your care.”
I bristled, for I was at least as competent as my cousin.
Marek paused before he stepped out of the yurt. “I mention in passing that the guilders of Thebes have sent us several buckets of caput mortuum in the ash bins, for disposal. Also, it looks like rain.”
Errol and I looked out at a clear winter sky.
“Buckets,” Marek said. “Buckets and buckets of rain.”
We grinned, even Marek, and he was gone.
Errol and I enlisted Thebes’s runners, who rigged black buckets of water and of caput mortuum on lines mounted high over the usual planks and lines coming onto Thebes tower. We set trip wires that would spill the buckets in pairs—water from one, mortuum from the other. Then we removed ourselves to neighboring Bamako House and pitched travel tents between our friends’ tents there. Errol was the last off Thebes; he lit a lamp in every tent and a fire in the yurt. From across the plank, Thebes looked like a busy roof.
Caput mortuum is the powder residue of iron processing, a byproduct of the forging of knotting spikes. In combination with water, it stains everything it touches an indelible, deep purple.
* * *
—
We were in high spirits as we stood with Bamako’s runners that evening to join all the runners across the city, all home on their roofs, to sing down the sun as usual in a round that began at Cairns House at the west wall and ended at Visby at the east. The earth is in darkness like the dead, or some cheerful dirge from the other side of the wall.
Careful not to trip the purpling buckets, Errol and I met for sausages and cider on the plank between Thebes and Bamako. All the towers in the city were massive structures, rising into the clouds. But Fremantle was a behemoth, nearly twice the size of Thebes. Home not only to the regnat, she housed the weapons guild and nearly a thousand guilders of master skill in metallurgy and smithing. She had no runners. Instead, her staggered roofs were patrolled night and day by armed guards. And yet our youngest runner had crept up a ladder, slipped through a window, and taken a pair of iron spikes off the regnat’s nightstand. Oh, aye, Fremantle would come our way tonight.
There was the slightest grin on Errol’s face as he warmed his sore hands around the canteen of cider.
“What?” I said.
“Finally,” he said, “something to do.”
Sacked
TALWYN WAS NOT SINGING.
I sat up.
It was past dawn, with a gray sun leaking through the vents of my travel tent. Talwyn Thebes was always the first of us, up and out for the rising of the sun and the singing. I came out of my tent to listen. There was only the wind. I sat on the cold roof and spoke through Errol’s tent flap. I asked him, yawning, whether the roofs had already sung, whether Fremantle had come for the iron spikes. How had I missed it? I could smell Bamako’s cook burning our breakfasts, I said, and we ought to get up and have pokerounce before it was charred beyond recognition. I slapped his tent with the back of my hand. “Hey. Are you up?”
From behind me Errol called my name. He was standing at the north edge of Bamako, staring over the abyss toward Thebes. I rose to repeat with some agitation everything I had wasted my breath saying to his tent flap, but an unsettling sight caught my eye. A book lay open on the edge of Thebes’s roof, thirty yards from us, its bone-colored pages fanned open, blowing one way, then the other.
“Aren’t you going to get that before it—” As I spoke, a gust of wind swept the book off the tower. The book rolled over and over in its plummet to earth. It was Ovid.
Like a man waking to consciousness, I took in the rest slowly. The plank to Thebes was half gone, where Errol and I had sat last night. It jutted from the edge of Bamako but came to a burned end half across the abyss. Smoke and flames billowed from heaps of rubble on Thebes’s otherwise empty roof. I spun around. All the other guilds were in place: Gamin House, Perlew, Phrygia, Catalhoyuk. Runners had gathered at those edges.
“Fremantle, right?” I said. “What, they removed everything from our roof and set fire to our trash?”
“Look again,” said Errol.
“No one sang,” I said stupidly.
The runners of Thebes had come up behind us. Grid pointed. Xerxes, the massive iron crow that had hung from a chain on the yardarm at the top of our mast, had been cut loose and dropped on his back on the fire heap. As we watched, his wings drew back in the heat, and his head twisted toward us, as if to seek from us some answer. Errol rubbed his hand over his face.
“Are you crying?” I said, fear gripping my innards.
I was relieved beyond measure to hear someone sucking his teeth.
Marek opened his mouth as if to say something but stopped himself. In the end, “I suggest we order out,” he said. “Ping, send word to Derbent for dinner. Talwyn, ask our good friend the roof master Itsaso Bamako for a crossbow. Hello? Talwyn? Are you with me? Grid, check Seppo’s ribs. Odd, find a quill. We have lists to make.” And then to himself he said, “Tidy. Did I not say, ‘tidy’?”
When Talwyn returned with a bow and bolt, Marek knotted a fly to the bolt and shot it hard into the mast on Thebes. He crossed, hand over hand on the line, to what was left of our roof. We followed. We rummaged through the ashes. We stomped out the small fires, threw soot-blackened pots and silverware where the kitchen had been, and marked our old tent sites so we could toss Talwyn’s blackened flute, Ping’s ruined apron, and the charred remains of game pieces, soup bowls, and tent stakes into their rightful places.
Two runners from Lascaux arrived on Marek’s temporary line, bringing with them a pack heavy with the tools of their guild. They would supervise the splicing, worming, and serving of new lines, restoring Thebes’s connections to its neighboring towers and the rest of the city.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 3