I was knocked over by the two pelts, and then we all three were swept up in a mob of runners and carried along off the edges, over the lines, all running the flies toward the towers along the harbor.
I found Marek at the edge of one of the Makhazin storehouses. He handed me his lens. The fleet of ships was below us, so enormous it filled the river from the north wall to the south, the hulls so heavy with supplies that river water and thin slabs of ice sloshed over their decks. Their crews were lowering the sails and fixing the hawsers to the quay bollards. Fires burned in the lanterns in their rigging. Easily three hundred sailing ships. In the early light, the crews were already unloading and, from a mile above, runners were dropping lines to hoist firewood up to the flies in canvas tarps as wide as our yurts. The harbor smelled thickly of the pitch of fir kindling.
What a morning that was! Barrels of herring rising into the sky. Thousands of sacks of cornmeal. Tarps heaped with salsify, pignut, cassava, breadroot, tubers—swinging and rising on pulleys over the harbor. One longship had to be unloaded, two enormous cheese wheels at once, one from port and other from starboard, or the vessel would have foundered. Barrels and casks came up out of the holds, filled with wheat, cubebs, hard sausage, dates, rock salt, saffron, walnuts, galangal, sorghum, honey, olive oil, on and on and on. The sky ripened with clouds of spikenard and cinnamon dust.
Marek Thebes wiped his face with his hands and turned to us. “There. What were you worried about? Petroc, gather the first-years. They’ll need to see this done. Odd, get a quill and parchment. Really? Are you barefoot? Ironic to die now, don’t you think? Slipping on the planks? Go get sharps. Do I look like your mother?”
“Quite a bit. Yes.”
“Well, she’s a lucky girl.”
An Odd Remedy
I WAS TRYING TO FIND A SOCK under all the filthy bedding in my tent.
“Odd Thebes. Come out of there. Ping is down.” It was Dragomir.
“What?”
“Aye. He fainted in the yurt.”
“And?” I said, one sharp in my hands. “Name one of us who hasn’t fainted twice already this morning.”
“He’s going to die, Odd. The ships are here but Ping is dying.” Dragomir pushed my tent flap aside. “Can you go any faster?”
The circle of runners parted for me and there lay our cook, bundled in wools at the first bucket fire with the first wood. We all looked like stick figures but he was particularly gaunt, working to breathe. Grid knelt by him with a cup of melted snow.
“Odd Thebes,” she whispered. “Ping has given up.”
“But the ships are here,” I said. “He’s a cook. Give him, I don’t know, something to boil.”
“He won’t drink.”
Ping’s eyes shifted balefully toward me. He whispered, “Odd Thebes. What do you make of this?” He stopped to draw a breath, his sides heaving with the effort. “I even had my plan. But now I am going.”
I looked at Grid. “You’re the medic,” I said. “Do that thing that brought Seppo back from the dead. What do you want from me?” I had begun to walk away through the circle when it occurred to me—“Wait, did you just want a going-story?” But Grid shook her head and shifted uncomfortably. They were all staring at me now. I realized that they had called me because Marek was not here and Errol was not here, and I was the closest thing they all had to the two who could talk a runner out of dying.
“Fine,” I said. I pressed my way back to Ping and squatted next to him. “I forget,” I said. “What was your plan, anyway?”
Ping closed his eyes and shook his head.
“He hasn’t the strength for this,” Grid said. I took the cup of water from her and drank it myself. She frowned at me.
“What was your plan, Ping?” I demanded.
“I was to be bound,” he whispered. “Bound to Ella Gallia after Beklemek.”
“So—that’s now.”
“Aye. I am to apprentice in her parents’ guild. To make barrel staves.” He opened his eyes and rolled them. He coughed hard and lay back. “Tell her I loved her, Odd? Tell her I loved . . . her eyes.”
“Feh. Don’t be ridiculous, Ping,” I said. “Everybody loves everybody’s eyes. Is that really the message you wish me to bear?”
Grid kicked me and Ping flinched. “Say anything, then. You’re the bard.” His voice was raspy. “Get it from one of your books.”
They were all watching, waiting for me to do something.
I got up. “Write your own iosal poetry,” I said to Ping. Then, to Grid: “I don’t know what you want from me. I have to look for my left sharp.”
Every runner standing in that circle would have flung me off the edge at that moment, but Ping whispered something and I turned back to him.
“What did you say?”
“The way she licks her fingers after she eats what I cook for her. I loved that.”
“That’s good. That’s something. But you’ll have to give me more than that, to take to her.”
“Talking with her hands, lively as she is,” said Ping. “While she washed my dinner pots.” He winced. “I loved that. And I will miss hearing of her day.” His voice broke, and he coughed into a rag Grid held for him.
“This is much better,” I said. “This will please her. You’ll need to give me more, though. The poor girl’s got to go her whole life in a locked guild on whatever sentiment you form here and now.”
“Her two big—uh—turnips get me—uh—”
I put up my hands and a rumble of laughter rolled around the circle.
“I get it, Ping. I’ll clean that up for you. ‘Dazzled by your beauty, excitement rises in me.’” Everyone laughed now, even Grid.
I sat next to Ping and sighed with as much drama as I could muster. “Well, and how I wish I could tell all this to Ella Gallia.”
“What?” Ping turned his head to look at me.
“Well, I don’t want to trouble you, but—”
“Trouble me with what? Is she all right?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what, Odd Thebes?” He grabbed my leg.
I pulled a piece of parchment from my pocket.
“What is that?” Ping said. He reached for it, but I flicked it away from his fingers.
“It is not good news,” I said.
“Tell me!”
I admitted to Ping that I had gone through his mail this morning. He was near death, after all, and, well, everyone knows me: I like to know what’s going on. I looked around at the runners in the yurt and demanded to know why anyone didn’t tell Ping what was in this letter. They all stared at me blankly, as if they had no idea what I was talking about. Which, of course, they didn’t.
“At any rate, it says here, ‘Dear Ping Thebes, I am writing to you in dismay, et cetera, et cetera . . . I am at odds with my guildmaster, et cetera, et cetera . . . Ah, here it is: ‘My guildmaster promised in Langesonne to bind me to another runner. I did not know of it when we made our oath, you and I. All this past month, I thought we would not live through Beklemek. Now that we will, I regret that I shall never see you—blah, blah—I am binding myself to another, et cetera . . . I remain yours forever, Ella Gallia of Gallia House.’” I looked up at Ping. “So you see—”
“What’s his name?!”
I studied the paper. “Do you know someone named Phineas?”
“Phineas?!” Ping squealed, like someone had stuck him with a pin. “Phineas Thieus? He makes forks! They promised Ella Gallia to a fork maker?!”
“Now, now. Everybody needs forks. Let’s not poke fun.” I looked at Grid. “I’m sorry. My timing is foul.”
Grid was staring at me as if I had just turned inside out.
Ping was up on his elbow, gasping. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone that Ella loved him? Aye, we all said, it was obvious. He hacked and fell backward.
Didn’t everyone know for a year they were going to be bound? Yes. A violent spasm overtook him, but he ended up on his knees.
“Of course Ella wants you,” I said, picking at some lint on my tunic. “But there are connections in these guilds. Politics. It isn’t always love that binds us. Anyway, you obviously aren’t well, so everything will no doubt work out for the best.”
“‘Not well’? ‘Not well’! Get me up, Grid. And get a fire going in my ovens. I need a meat pasty. No. A tagine. She likes a tagine. Get me some salt cod. How long does a cook have to wait for a salt cod around here?”
* * *
—
Grid followed me back to my tent with her hand on her hip. She demanded to see the parchment, which I produced from my pocket. It was a list of chores Marek had given me.
She sniffed skeptically. “What am I supposed to tell Ping when he finds out there’s not a letter?”
“How is this my problem?” I said.
She laughed.
“Ping doesn’t want to go down into the guilds. He doesn’t want to make barrel staves for the rest of his life, with his bound-wife’s father breathing down his neck. He wants to cook. But that isn’t my problem either.”
“Right,” said Grid. “Who’s Phineas?”
I shrugged. “I made it up. Which is to say, I stole the name from Ovid. From the tale of Andromeda.”
“Then who’s the fork maker named Phineas Thieus.”
“No idea. Somebody Ping knows. A coincidence.”
She shook her head, confounded. “So ‘Phineas’ was a stab in the dark?”
“Yes. And no.” And now I grinned. “Ah. So there is something even our death-defying Grid doesn’t know. I shall savor this moment.” I stared at her until she shifted uncomfortably. “Ping is male, Grid. Any male name on earth would have brought him back from the dead.”
“Brilliant,” she said.
I had only ever wanted a kiss from Grid Thebes, better yet an uur in the sack. Hard to explain, but her approval was more satisfying.
Exports
IF ANY RUNNER touched any part of any ship or any sailor, a cry would go up and the fleet would weigh anchor, still loaded with a year’s worth of our provisions, and sail south. Every year, at least one runner attempted to escape the city in this manner; anyone who saw it had to cut the runner’s line before all was lost. Today there were no such idiots. Every last runner worked high in the frigid winter air, a mile over the fleet on rigged lines and pulleys to pull up everything they had brought us. Within half a bell after the gates had opened for the fleet, there was wood to burn in every tower. Flints were struck by thin and shaking hands in a thousand guilds and on a thousand roofs, and plumes of smoke rose as they had before, from guild vents and yurt roofs. Ovens roared into service. The first yeast of the year arrived in kitchens, and the first flour, salt, and olive oil. Before Berfrei tolled erratum, dough was rising in pantries all over the city. Everything else went to storehouses—every ounce of food and drink and every raw material we needed to begin a new year of work—all to be meticulously sorted and meted out according to the time and day of the calendar. It was snowing again. We shoveled and threw on more coats and kept on.
By midafternoon, we began to lower our exports to their decks. From our district alone, for which I had done the paperwork: abacuses, astrolabes, attarh, balances, barrels, beads, bellows, bestiary wares, bobbins, burkas, buttons, candles, carpets, chests, coracles, cricket rooms, damask, dice, ditty bags, dohols, dyes, fireworks, fishing nets, flails, fletching, flints, fly-line, formulae, grain sacks, hamacs, incense, kilnwork, knobs, knotting spikes, lace, locks, maps, monmouths, navajas, planets, playing cards, quill ink, sailcloth, sledges, spindles, toques, vexilla, vihuelas, weights and measures, wheels, willow baskets, wool felt.
A Girl
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, with the ships loaded and the winds driving snow sideways across our roofs, we stretched out around Ping’s fire. We gouged chunks of sweet butter out of crocks and dropped them into hot tea, dredged them out on our fingers and poured honey on them, dipped them in theobroma powder and sucked on them. We ate doughy bread as it came out of the ovens, and fell into one another’s laps—sticky, shaking with exhaustion, delirious.
We sang the sun down for the first time since the start of Beklemek—thousands of runners, our voices new to us. It was a shanty we sang in a round:
The wind it blows from east-nor’east,
our ship will scud ten knots at least,
the purser would our wants supply,
so while with life we’ll never say die.
From far below us came the sounds of pulleys again, the great iron gates of the south harbor lifting, the whistles and bellows of ships’ captains, urging their crews to tack into the blizzard to escape our heinous walls before nightfall. We came out to watch them go.
I wished, at that moment more than ever, that we had never seen the foul pair of black-iron spikes. Without them, Errol would be here, singing. I hated the thought that they waited in the depths of this tower, in the foundlings’ hiding place, to do whatever work they were forged to do.
Marek brought me back to the present, for he was pacing the edge, delivering an elaborate malediction regarding those hated ships and their free sailors—a curse on their mothers, their rigging, their king, their rats, their private parts.
“Careful,” Grid said. “We might need those ships in a year.”
He turned to her, teeth flashing rage. “I’d gouge out their eyes with their own marlinespikes, given the chance. Do you know why the ships were late?”
“Ice?” she said. “Weren’t we iced in?”
“No,” said Marek. “The ice was thin still.”
“Floods?” said Ping.
“A battle upriver?” said Talwyn.
“No.”
“It was a girl,” I said.
Marek spun around to look at me. “Who told you?”
I shrugged. “No one. Everyone. It’s always a girl.”
Marek could barely spit out the tale, so bitter he was. Apparently the pilot of the fleet had a sister in the first port where the ships all anchored to collect the last of our provisions. The pilot mentioned to the fleet captain that his sister was something to see, as much as Helen. Every ship in the fleet had weighed anchor, loaded down with our food and supplies. It didn’t matter that the captain was a bound man already. Or that a whole city was waiting, starving. Weeks he spent, searching door to door to find that girl while his ships bobbed in that port, while we wasted away in a city blotted from all maps but his. They finally realized the girl had long ago left the port town for parts unknown.
Now I was the sober one. “Who told you this?” I said. “No one but the regnat speaks the language of those ships.”
“The regnat. The regnat told a guard, who told Itsaso Bamako, who told me. It was confidential.” Marek shook his head and looked across the fire at me. “This entire city was nearly lost because of a girl. Odd—how did you know that?”
I shrugged. “Like I said. Ask Menelaus. Or Paris, for that matter. Sigurd. Lancelot. Odysseus. Artemis. The Robbing Hood. Ask anyone. It’s always about a girl.”
Al-Razi
BEFORE OUR SONGS HAD CEASED TO ECHO in the abyss, packages arrived at every roof, one for each runner. At first the objects inside the packages appeared to be flickering lanterns. But in fact each one was an invitation in the form of a tiny scroll enclosed in a flame-shaped capsule carved of garnet, once more encased in translucent soap, cast in the form of a lamp. The soap had been scented with the oil of cypriol. After three weeks of frigid cold and starvation, the thought of a steaming cypriol bath in a sky of driving snow was more perfect than we could have asked.
Each scroll read:
The honor of your presence is requested by the
esteemed guilders of Al-Razi House
on this night
of the departure of the fleet at Winter Shipment
of this unknown year, that we may convey on
behalf of the Masters of the Guilds of this
city our Gratitude to the Intrepid
Runners without Whose Daring the export of All Guild Work
and the import of Sustenance would not have been
Possible.
Al-Razi. Al-Razi was the one guild tower in the city that had been built as high as Fremantle, her great neighbor to the east. While Fremantle was a massive shadow over the city, Razi was gorgeous, a veritable sky full of light turrets, bonfires, and flags unfurled. Al-Razi’s exports in any year filled the cargo holds of ten ships of the fleet, with bricks, flakes, crocks, bins, barrels, and bars of soap of every fragrance and shape imaginable. As kelps, we used to scrub in our troughs with little Al-Razi schooners that smelled of the salt sea or creamy white sheep that smelled of lanolin.
For runners, Al-Razi was more than the soap makers’ guild. She was the queen of parties, and tonight was our night with her.
We were called by the beat of a sky full of dohols—ceaseless booms of the drums, a beating too loud to allow for human speech, a pulse to which our own hearts adjusted. Every roof extinguished its fires so that Al-Razi shone alone against the stars.
In the yurt on Thebes we changed into the costumes we had made on the second night of Beklemek. These transformations were so thorough that, if we had not painted and adorned one another, we would have thought we were among strangers.
We unfurled Thebes’s red silk banner, emblazoned with Xerxes, our crow, and a pair of crossed knotting spikes, and ran the flies. Runners from every other guild tower were doing the same.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 9