All day and late into the second night of Beklemek, we cut up old clothes and skins that had been sent up from the guild, and fashioned them into costumes for the party of Winter Ship. Sixteen elaborate disguises hung in the yurt when we were done, lacking only Errol’s: Helen of Troy, Menelaus of Sparta, a djinn, a bolt of lightning, Achilles, Patroclus, a she-goat such as one was described in Pliny’s field guides, a bonnacon, a white bear (with a fanged bear mask from Pliny House), a troll, a wild boar, an E-minor chord, Sir Parsival (most excellent Knight of the Round Table and Purveyor of the Grail), a master chef, Brunhilde, and a foppish fleet commander with a toy ship foundering on a ring of high waves about his hips—a weird lifesaver, held up by a pair of suspenders. No one said a word the next morning when the real fleet commander did not appear under any disguise.
On the third night we ran the lines to Teifi House, to throw ourselves in the rectangular sea of the coracles guild. I had proposed this idea but, now that the time came, I regretted it. We had read a thousand books that included men and women who swam in every imaginable sea and river, but no one had ever taught us to swim. So we crowded into the water and stood, shivering, then clambered out and wiped the water off with our tunics. Inside our wall, we were the strongest civilians; outside we would barely survive. Further disappointment in the morning: no ships.
By the fourth night, we were anxious with hunger. We stayed home for a night of petit jeux, the games we had played as kelps: forfeits, botticelli, charades, and the like. Each of us drew a specific instruction from a bin: Talwyn had to play with her eyes closed. Sa’id had to sing every word. I was required to lie, but no one could tell the difference. Here was a lie: The ships arrived at dawn.
On the fifth night we played flying disc games across the city under a waxing moon and then hung the long hamacs from the flies and slept the night dangling in the winds under the lines. Seed pods hanging lightly over the earth. Speaking of dangling in the wind: There were no ships in the morning.
Fremantle devised a distracting challenge for the sixth night of Beklemek. Every guild had till a random trumpet blast to build a lorry from whatever materials or exports its guild produced, and to race the lorry on the lines. That night the heats of those races filled the sky. Chakra House took the prize with a frictionless spinning wheel from which all six of its runners hung, three on each side, as the wheel ran along the lines. This insane run was the idea of Siwan Chakra—not our Siwan, but another. This feat caught Grid’s eye. I noticed later that she was wearing Siwan’s toque.
The races invoked a late-night discussion back at Thebes, of the regulations Fremantle imposed. Dragomir quoted verbatim: Precept the Twelfth: The reckless, high-speed racing of lorries or cargo buckets on the fly-lines is considered the sole purview of the third-year runners, who shall be reminded, cadavera innumera.
They all turned to me for the translation. I swallowed some ice I had broken from the rain barrel. “Lots of corpses,” I said.
The first-years wanted to know how many of the rules we each had broken, in our time on the roofs. Marek objected, but Talwyn interrupted him to say that she had been the one in the month of Langesonne to remove Marek’s tent, intact and with him asleep in it, from Thebes’s roof and to re-suspend it from the lines over the river. I had never seen Marek laugh till that moment, his sharp teeth flashing. He had credited Errol Thebes and some of his old friends from Perlew for that prank, and had spent all his nights retaliating against the lot of them. He regarded Talwyn with new admiration. Marek’s laughter was read as a general amnesty, and it induced a spate of confessions. We lay in each other’s laps around the yurt, braiding each other’s hair as our mothers used to do. Seppo said he wished he had never seen Fremantle, for it ruined everything about the roofs to have Errol gone. Dragomir proposed pranking Fremantle for the month of Rhagfyr in memory of the felon Errol Thebes.
“Assuming,” he added, “that any of us survive Beklemek.” Marek sent Dragomir to his tent for that grim remark. There were no pranks in the morning, or ships.
On the seventh night, Gallia House, the seat of our district, took down its yurt and tents, and set up one great tarp that held off the snow, to host an evening of Beste Bat, which meant one more. It was a night of odd talents. A runner from Arawak House could repeat any sentence spoken to her in perfect reverse, rettel rof rettel. That Catalhoyuk runner I had met on the roof at the tufuga’s, the one who now had a tatu of the bloody map on her arm, drew on a cheroute and blew smoke through her ears. A runner from Ghent could bend over backward and sit on his own head. One from Gallia sang a song by herself in three-note harmony. A Kazbek runner shot an arrow from a bow and hit a bull’s-eye at the other end of the roof; he used his toes to do this, and stood on his hands. Grid offered to call up the dead but we pretended not to hear her.
For my part, I announced I could translate from any guild tongue to any other, and found myself in the middle of a proposal—a pair of runners from Albacete and Arawak, binding themselves together in what felt more like panic in the face of starvation than an act of love. Someone made the joke that any marriage would probably be better if the members spoke two different languages. The roof master bound and dropped the couple from the plank off the north side of the tower and hauled them up. The girl’s ribs had broken in the drop and her new husband vomited. We were all unnerved until someone thought to call for a tune in honor of the new couple. Talwyn got out her fiddle and we danced, light in the head and on our feet. The gavotte she played was my cousin Errol’s favorite, a tune to which we had often, as kelps, danced in the kitchens. As I turned near the edge with Grid, I watched Marek stepping with Itsaso, the roof master of Bamako House, their hands together and raised high. I was light-headed and kelpish and found myself in a strange state of missing Marek although he was right there in front of me. Roof masters were chosen like apprentices; they rarely came from the guilds whose roofs they led. Which meant that, although Marek had been living on my roof long enough to have known my cousins Rip and Fenn, I knew nothing about him. Just then he looked over at me and I felt our frailty for the first time.
This frayed night, these silly games, were the last of what we had prepared for diversions. On the eighth morning, there were no ships.
Body Count
MAREK STOOD SOLITARY WATCH that morning while the rest of us slept past sudore and well into evening. Without fire to melt ice, we slaked our thirst by sucking on bits of frozen water we chipped from the rain barrels. We knew that soon after the high places froze, so followed the low, and ice would make the river impassable for ships. We pulled extra toques onto our heads and burkas over our wools. When Ping discovered a crate of slime onions he had thrown under the stove we cut off the rot and sucked on what was left. Dragomir said he felt like he had swallowed a crate of nails.
The days passed in a smear of gray hunger and exhaustion. By the thirtieth of the month of Boreal, we had gone without food for fifteen days. We were wasting weight.
Marek sent me to Fremantle on that morning to deliver Thebes’s body count. He made me wear a mam-line as he knew I would faint on the way. “Tell them Thebes contains now only four hundred twenty-one guilders, fifteen apprentices, eighty-nine kelps. Three elders have died since Beklemek began, their bodies sent to the guild morgues. And tell them”—here Marek hurled his quill over the edge—“seven foundlings are gone from the unnumbered throng. We have fifteen runners on the roof, plus myself. One of my runners is too ill to rise. We could put feverfew to good use.”
Marek would not let us look when he brought seven burlap sacks up and rolled the foundlings over the edge. Five were small—the size and weight of tiny kelps. Two were our size.
We told no stories that day, gave each other no lessons in knotting, rehearsed no lines for any plays, and did not study. I stayed in my sack in my tent, trying to stop shaking.
* * *
—
The next day we moved the st
one to Rhagfyr, and it was a new year. The sun arced lower in the sky and snow came. My tent sagged and dripped during the day, froze into a solid triangle at night. Marek Thebes shoveled the paths himself and came around to our tent flaps in the mornings, whispering tendernesses.
“Get the hel out of bed, Odd Thebes.”
“Why? Is there hope?”
“You worry about your breath. I’ll worry about hope. Do I have to come in there and drag you out like a kelp? Do I look like your mother?”
“A bit. Yes.”
“Come out here and say that.” I didn’t care that he was trying to cheer me.
“I don’t want to come out. When did they reverse the flags?”
“In the night.”
“I hate it.” He did not answer. He hated it, too. “We ate a fool’s meal, that Beklemek feast. We would still have food if we had meted it out—”
He was into my tent in a split second, his face in my face. “We were never fools. You know why we did it,” he said, his teeth bared.
“I forget. Tell me again.”
“We can’t tell the damned ships when to come,” he said. “We’re at the mercy of a fleet of strangers from a world that walls us in. And so we hold that feast and eat everything we have because it is the one decision we have agency to make.”
When had my ears begun to ring? They hurt so much. “But—” I put my face in my hands.
“But what?” he demanded.
“Was one of those foundlings Jamila Thebes?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I could not look.”
Six Lines
WHEN MAREK WAS DONE WITH ME, I drew a leather pouch from my runner’s pack. Embroidered shoddily by my mother with my name and a pair of dice, this tellensac contained the relics of my life so far. I spilled it out on my bedroll and picked from among a half dozen folded wads of paper a scrap of old parchment. My fingers were shaking. On the scrap were written six lines of poetry, in an alphabet that looked like red threads dangling from a tiny clothesline.
I was nine times around the sun that year, living on the nineteenth strata of Thebes House, the guild of my birth. I was the same age as my cousin Errol, as always. At that time he had begun to work with the master guilder Wahid Thebes, learning to run his mam’s guild. With Errol gone, all of our “mutual” friends disappeared, and even my own brothers and sisters would not play with me. I was younger than they were; I should have known better than to beat them at maw and take their uurs. More than once they chased me down the guild halls, yelling, “You are nothing without Errol Thebes! Your name came from none of the books! And no one wants you!” Even by guild standards they were an unaffectionate lot.
I fled from them on one such night to the guild library, on the 151st strata, knowing they were far too lazy to climb 132 flights just to dislike me in person.
The library was silent, its lamps extinguished for the night. I crossed to the corner where Homer’s tales were shelved, running my hands over the scrolls and books. Long before even our oldest guilders were born, someone or something had discarded the motherlode once contained in this room, which spanned the entire top strata of Thebes tower. So many shelves were empty. I wondered often what books and scrolls had been discarded and why. Still, the irfelaf, the remnant, the treasured last bit, was more than sufficient for me. Thousands of volumes, all full of news from the world outside our wall, had been kept: tales of men who were fauns from the hips down, of tiny guild cottages built out of sweets, of trolls living in exile under drawbridges, of wars against beasts with multiplying heads, of uncommon swords whose glint would kill a man. Of all the hidden passages and secret strata, this was my favorite place in the tower. I removed Homer from a shelf and sat breathing in the thick smell of parchment and leather and tale.
Next to me, a human form shifted in the shadows. A high-pitched voice screamed in fright, and I realized the voice was my own. When I fumbled to light my lamp I was mortified to see I had been frightened by a mere kelp of my own size and age. She sat in a chair with a scroll in her lap, her finger pressed on a line of red-inked text.
“Ye dinna friten me,” I said, my heart pounding in my ears. “I yelled te friten thee.”
“Oh. And I am terrified,” she said flatly. She had black hair and blacker eyes.
“Who are you?” I said, my back still to the wall. “And why are you speaking in the common tongue? You’re no one I know.”
“I’m no one at all,” she said.
“Feh. Was that a riddle?”
She pointed to the naught brand on her neck, an empty circle. “I’m nothing,” she said.
“Foundling,” I whispered. I had never seen a foundling. “You are not allowed—I—could throw you out of this library.”
“You could try.”
I hesitated. If I tried to take her on she would probably thrash around and bite me. I said, “If I felt inclined, I would do it, here and now. What is your deficit? Something must be lacking or you wouldn’t be a foundling. Is it your eyes? They’re strange. Show it to me. Is it your mind?”
“I was found by Margaret Thebes herself,” the foundling said. I was young but not too young to know that my aunt, the guildmaster, kept strong ties to the foundlings.
“Found where?”
“In a trash bin.”
“So you lack a mam, then,” I said.
“Aye.”
“And a da.”
“Aye.” Foundlings were forbidden to lie, but this one, my first foundling, certainly wasn’t forthcoming.
“And why are you sitting like that, with your feet up in the air? As if there’s an invisible footstool? Are you a dullard?” I said.
The foundling sighed as if I was the stupid one. “All I want, at this moment, is to lower my feet,” she said. “But I’ll not do it. When I am past thinking I can endure the hardship, then I will lower them. Much later. Do you understand?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I just said, “And what? You read that scroll so you can stop reading it later?”
“The light spills off these six lines of text, and pours down my fingers,” she said, as if such an explanation made everything clear.
“That,” I said, “is my lamplight pouring down your fingers.” I craned my neck to see her scroll. I wanted to know what those six lines said. The words were nothing to me but tiny pieces of red thread dangling from a clothesline. I said, “That is an idiot’s writing. You should read something else.”
“This is the only text I allow myself to read this year.”
“Feh. Then you should also read that scroll over there on the table. Look at it. It is written in your tongue, see? Aren’t you dying to know what it says?”
“Yes. I am. That is my point in not reading it.”
“Well. And I will not tell you what it says, for I am extremely busy.” I strolled over to that table and casually picked up that other scroll. Of course I wouldn’t tell her what it said, for I could not read it if our two lives depended on it. I knew only my own language at that time, and the common tongue. I sat down next to her, though, and pretended to read that scroll, laughing at what I imagined were key plot turns in it, pressing certain words of feigned interest with my finger. “Ah,” I said. And occasionally, “Aha!” I went on like this all night, making myself comfortable in a heap of cushions while the foundling kept her feet just off the floor, her thigh muscles spasming. I forgot my wastrel siblings. I forgot my cousin Errol Thebes. This foundling had my attention.
At the end of the night I said, “I’m going home now to my kin. I order you to go home to your—bin.” I had worked on that rhyme all night and regretted it the moment it left my lips.
“Make me,” she said. She stood up.
I dropped the scroll and eased myself around her, heading for the door. “That’s an excellent tale
, in that scroll,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll sneak in and read it, after I am gone.”
She said, “Incidentally, you were reading it upside down.”
I yelled from down the hallway: “I always read upside down. For the challenge of it!”
The next night, I crept back to the library and discovered the foundling in the chair with her feet up. I arranged myself in the chair next to her, expending a great deal of time finding a thick footstool to shove under my feet, and pretended to read yet another scroll in the letters of her language. I even remembered to turn it upside down.
After this, I went every night to the 151st strata.
Nobody missed me. My own mam, who worked in the guild kitchens, failed to notice I did not appear from meals. She had no idea I spent my time pretending to read the flourishes of a foundling’s alphabet, trying to imagine what it was like to be unimportant.
I knew little about foundlings at that time, only that for reasons too complicated to explain to us kelps they were required to move in separate hallways from ours and to sleep in the morgues. At night they crept along the edges of our workrooms, spilling our pisspots out the vents, and scavenging whatever food we had dropped on the floor. They owned neither quills nor paper, beds nor clothes. They fashioned tunics from our rags. They did not wear tellensacs, as they had no stories worth telling. I once overheard my father say at one of his card games that the guilds paid taxes, to the regnat of Fremantle, in foundlings. But my father had reeked of whiskey, and I had corrected him in front of everyone, saying taxes were paid in the most valuable thing the guild had, and only a fool would think that was anything but uurs.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 7