The regnat’s voice boomed as he emerged from Fremantle behind his torchbearers, his guards, his pennons, and furs. A scribe was speaking into his ear, telling him everything. The scribe had his arm around one particular guard, who lifted his visor and, from across the abyss, gave me the gladiator’s thumbs-up, for I had just made him the regnat’s favorite. I turned my back to him, terrified that everyone on the loft had seen that gesture.
The guards stood Errol up, to face the regnat. Instead he turned and looked at Al-Razi. He found me in the crowd. I don’t know what he was thinking. He had no idea what part I had in all of this. Still, I kept Parsival’s visor down for I was sure he would see the guilt on my face.
Préférerais tu
“TELL THE WHEREABOUTS OF THE BLACK-IRON SPIKES,” yelled the regnat. “We are all ready for the truth.” Marek had led the movement across the lines so Thebes could stand with Errol.
“Yes. I wonder about the truth,” said Errol. “What is the value of those spikes? What is their power?”
“You are owed nothing,” the regnat seethed. “Least of all, answers. I protect this city. You attack it.”
Errol’s eyes settled on something. I followed his gaze down and saw Jamila, alone on the north corner of Pitcairn. Errol turned to the regnat. “The spikes are mine now. They go where I go.”
The scribe said, “The spikes are not on him, Your Honor.”
The regnat paled. “Well, the devil can have you, then.” Or had he said double? “And so you shall drop. Here are the lines. Which do you prefer?”
“I don’t understand.”
The Fremantle guard stepped up—the regnat’s new favorite. “Fremantle offers a one-in-three chance. A choice.” There were three massive coils in a hut on the edge of the roof. These were nothing like the silk and iron flies; they were old-fashioned hemp, thicker than a finger. “Only one is shorter than the distance to the earth. The other two lines are fatally long. We change them daily.” He was enjoying this. Errol nodded matter-of-factly, as if the guard were describing a banking errand. The guard said, “Which do you prefer?”
Marek was standing next to Errol now. “The third and second are the smallest heaps of coil,” he said. “One of those, perhaps—”
Terpsichore whispered, “Take the first.”
“With all due respect, I’ll take the first,” Errol said.
Marek nodded. “What shall I tell your mam?” he said.
“Tell her to send me some soap,” said Errol.
“And where is your pack? We will have going-stories to tell. We’ll need—” This was unbearable for Marek.
“My tellensac? Xerxes ate it.”
Marek laughed grimly. “The iron crow? On Thebes? But you’ve been gone—” Marek’s mouth twisted and I realized he was trying not to weep.
“Thebes is home,” said Errol. “And always will be.”
“Stay high, runner,” Marek said.
“En ye, also,” Errol said.
With ten thousand witnesses, the guard yanked Errol out onto a plank that led from Fremantle into thin air. He pulled the navaja from a leather sheath on Errol’s belt, thought about where to put it, and dropped it down the breastplate of Errol’s own armor. A joke? Or was even the guard nervous? I couldn’t tell. There was a commotion in the crowd and a tufuga was brought out—the same one who had tatued a crow on Jamila’s arm. He was in his nightclothes and red in the face, carrying a bucket of coals, sizzling in the snowfall. I had no idea why he was here, but Errol knew and removed the vambrace that protected his forearm. The tufuga approached him gingerly across the plank. He put on a thick furnace glove and flinched and whispered an apology as he pulled a branding iron from the bucket, but Errol grabbed the iron and pressed it on his own arm, above the beautiful crow with his outspread wings. There was a hiss and stench of burnt skin, and the tufuga gasped and pulled the brand away.
Errol turned his arm for the regnat to see. Utlaga, it read. Outlaw. The tufuga reached into his bag to bandage Errol’s arm, but the guard shoved him away and asked what would be the point of that.
Errol put on the helmet, strapped it under his chin, and let the guard bind his wrists. I kept waiting for some sort of mutiny. Were we afraid they would throw all of us, too? Did we accept this as the natural order of the roofs? But this was Errol Thebes! Three guards dragged Errol’s chosen rope out onto the plank. The bitter end of it was bound in marline, dyed an ominous bloody red. A guard ran it through the hook on the fly above the plank and harnessed Errol to it.
The first blow of the axes made us cry out. Talwyn shouted, “Idiots!” and Ping wept in Grid’s arms. Five more strokes and the plank gave. The message was so final. We don’t want you. Errol slipped on the plank, slid into the abyss.
The rope spun off its wheel, a mile and a half of hemp, give or take. I put my hand on it and let the friction burn, punishing myself for guilt that sat like a knife in my ribs. After an eternity the line jerked to a halt.
There was no movement. Would we see the movements of a single human being on the other end of a rope that heavy? The guards began to roll up the line. I dreaded the idea of what would be dangling on the end of it, how my cousin would look, crushed by a blow with the earth. A similar thought must have occurred to the regnat. He must have known that thousands of runners would finally turn on him if Errol’s body came up broken.
He yelled, “Cut the line.” The guard threw his rag over the fly and went out to the middle to saw at the hemp rope that held whatever remained of Errol Thebes.
* * *
—
When everyone was gone, I glimpsed a movement on the roof of Pitcairn. Jamila. She walked to the edge and dropped the sheath where Errol had dropped. I remembered then what she had said to him. In the ancient tongue of our guild, a language no one but Thebes’s own runners would understand: Wiltu hem to ganganne mid thu? Do you want them to go with you?
At first he hadn’t understood. And then he hadn’t wanted to think what was about to happen to him. And then, Gea, he had said. Yes.
What I witnessed next, I cannot explain. Jamila leapt from the edge of Pitcairn. She used no line. No plank. I screamed, helpless to stop what I thought was a fatal act. Before I even knew my own mind, I was leaping for a fly to get to her. But a few moments later she appeared on the roof of Djibouti, having dropped a very long way. She leapt from that edge, threw herself off. Again, no rag. No line. Her grace and certainty in leaping exceeded anything I had ever seen. She hit the side of Pliny hard and slid down the wall, sliding and scraping until she caught herself on some small ledge, scaled the wall, dragged herself onto the roof. I lost sight of her.
I arrived first at Thebes and watched her come in. Bruised and bloodied by towers, she came up over the edge. She said nothing to me as she passed.
She knew what I had done. She and that muse Terpsichore and the black-iron guard. I watched her pay the guilder a bribe for passing down into the guild, lift the hatch, and drop into Thebes.
Jamila Foundling did not care whether it bloodied or broke her. She did not care if she fell one strata or ten. Never again would she rely upon a runner or any plan a runner had made or any line a runner had tied or cut.
PART II
Relics
THEBES’S RUNNERS MILLED ABOUT in the yurt, stunned by what we had just witnessed. They spoke of irrelevancies: where Sa’id had stacked the kindling from the ships; whether Seppo had left his hoofs at Al-Razi; whether the snow on the streets could cushion a runner from a fall of more than a mile. I was sure they were making small talk so I would go mad and blurt out the one relevant fact: that it was my advice to the guard that had killed their prince.
Marek blew into the yurt and set Errol’s pack on the table. He had retrieved it from the iron crow.
“Settle in. We’ll be here till dawn,” he said.
We fell into restless heaps around
the yurt fire. Grid, next to me, was wiping her face on the sleeve of her lightning suit. She looked away when she caught me staring. How could I stop from staring? I had never before seen her cry.
Marek set a kettle on the flames and steeped a remedy of strong herbs he’d make for us when we were sick.
“Stay high.” He raised his cup.
“High,” we said.
His eyes found mine across the fire. “I have never understood how it happened that you were called to the roofs, Odd Thebes.” I felt the blood drain from my face. “Tonight, I believe I will come to know.”
He poured out Errol’s pack in front of us: a water sack; three ma’amouls wrapped in parchment; a brake clip; a pair of heartwood knotting spikes; a copy of Pliny’s Natural History; a heavy copy of the laws of the city; three balled-up errand slips; and a small linen bag, embroidered plainly with Errol’s initials and with the crow and crossed spikes. Errol’s tellensac. Marek passed it to me across the fire.
“No.” I put my hands up. But he waved away my objection.
I spread my rag on the roof, put the tellensac on it, and reached to loosen the cord. With my fingers on the knot I met Errol’s her-ongean for the first time—his gone-presence.
How to explain? It was an old habit of Errol Thebes’s to tie a kitchen knot in this cord. He got the idea from the footnotes of a ship’s cook in a book we read once. To detect the work of a common thief in the galley, she would tie her own knot—a kitchen knot—instead of a standard reef knot. Any sailor thieving from the rations would miss the ruse and tie a reef knot to close the bag. They looked alike unless you paid attention. An alarm of sorts. Like that cook, Errol had possessions to guard.
I loosened the cord and spilled out the handful of relics: a three of spades; a sliver of glass; a charred twig; a black-stained wad of muslin; and a baidaq piece from a shatranj set.
“I can’t believe he kept that iosal thumb,” I murmured to myself.
“So you know his stories,” Marek said.
“Of course. Our stories run together—” I put my head back. “Don’t ask me to do this.”
“Odd Thebes.” In my name was the command.
“Talwyn knows him well. Grid. Ping. They all grew up with him.”
“He was your cousin,” said Grid.
“He was your best friend,” said Talwyn.
“I hate you all.” My eyes watered. I was sure they only wanted me to use those relic tales to spin a line and entangle myself in it. And yet I didn’t want to listen to some other fool tell my cousin’s stories. I knew him better than any of them did, and I am the bard of this tower.
Fine.
Fine, then.
“We sitton on thone hrofe usseran huses ond onginnon tha gangende-yeddu Errol Thebes, se the is—” I began, in the ancient tongue of Thebes House. “We sit on the roof of our home and begin the going-stories of Errol Thebes, who is—” My voice broke as I searched in vain for an end to that sentence.
Grid moved to sit behind me and wrapped her long lightning-flash arms and legs around me. “Bewrecen,” she whispered in my ear.
“Bewrecen,” I said gratefully. Exiled. It was better than any other word I had conjured: crushed, dead, devoured. “Listen, Errol, as you rise up—” My voice cracked. “One by one your tales will lift you from us.”
This was the way runners wanted their going-stories: around a fire, from a bard, and with no end in sight. I leaned back against Grid. The runners lay, too, with their hands resting on one another. They drank of Marek’s remedy as they drank of mine. They wanted the irfelaf. The remainder. Whatever I still had of Errol Thebes.
Falling
IT WAS A LONG WAY DOWN. Errol ignored the sick feeling that his feet were coming up through his intestines and the urge to curl into a ball to prepare his bones for impact. The towers were a blur in the falling snow. His wrists were still bound.
He could never climb fast enough to remedy the problem of—what had the guard called it?—a fatally long line. Still, with the wind whipping, he dropped the navaja into his bound hands, from behind his breastplate. He cut the binding on his wrists and slashed pieces of his tunic and stuffed them into his mouth and into his helmet, to brace his spine.
The street was coming up at him, coming so fast, looking impossibly small—tiny white pools of moonlight spilled on brown wetness. He closed his eyes.
It took so long to fall. There came a colossal screaming in the rope, and he felt the crushing force of the harness on his ribs and heard himself yell out, the air punched from his lungs. And then he was flung upward, weightless, thrown at the sky. Now he was plunging again, and then again back up. Finally the line was still. He dangled five strata over the street, shaking, his mouth thick with blood.
The problem was ironic. The rope had not been too long, but too short.
The line jerked. Errol flailed. Far above, the regnat’s guards had begun to wind the rope up. He rose till he was eight strata from the earth and rising fast. If he came back to the roof alive, they would drop him with no line.
His hands shook as he fumbled for the rope over his head. Sawed and hacked and yelled until finally a few strands of frayed hemp held his weight, and he slashed those. He plummeted ten strata, staring up into the sky. At some unbearable speed, he hit the earth.
The world spun. He watched the rope and harness twist above him, the clips clinking, disappearing up and up into the falling snow. In a moment the rope reappeared, and he knew they had cut it. It was falling like a great serpent attacking from the sky. He knew if it had landed fully upon him, it would crush him. His last conscious act was to hurl himself out of its way.
The Twig
“THE BURNT TWIG, FIRST,” said Grid.
“Fine,” I said, picking up the fragile char of wood I had spilled from Errol’s tellensac. I drew in my breath and wandered around in my mind, looking for the beginning of a thread of a tale.
We import fleece and tallow from outside the walls of this city, and bristles and gall and down, I began. Even this yurt we inhabit now is sewn of the skins of former beasts. But we lack a single complete animal in these towers. A silence pervades this city. Aye, nothing clatters on hoofs down our halls, or howls or rises on beating wings into any sky.
When I paused to consider whether this beginning was overly dramatic, they all looked at me with nothing more than expectation, so I went on.
Errol Thebes felt the lack more acutely than any of us. Even when he and I were three, I would find him in his rooms in the guildmaster’s quarters, tracing with lead the drawings he found in books and scrolls, of lions and cockerels, wyrms and deer and winged horses. His tracings became drawings. His drawings grew in complexity. The walls of our quarters teemed with wild things.
I once found him weeping at his wall in our room. This was later. We were maybe seven or eight times around the sun.
“Heft ye lost at maw?” I asked him. No, I shall tell it in the common tongue: “Did you lose at cards again? Your face is sopped.”
“Nay,” he said, shaking his head.
“Then what?”
“I will never know equus,” he said.
“Equus?” My mind ranged for the translation of that old word. I looked at the wall and saw it. “A horse?”
“Aye. I’ll never even see one, never mind hold one in my arms or tame it or ride on its back holding its mane.”
“A horse is what you’re sobbing about? You’re the guildmaster’s son. How bad can it be for you?”
He shrugged his small shoulders. “I would rather have the horse.”
“Are you insane?”
“Aye, so the rumors have it. And nay.”
Such were the beginnings of Errol’s longings, for, as you all know, beasts were not his only deficit.
When his brothers were dropped from the roof, his mam, the
guildmaster Margaret Thebes, had sent her last son, Errol, to live with my family, her sister’s kin. I followed him nightwise and knew his secret, that after Mam slept, Errol snuck out to wander the halls of the tower. Down he went to the woodshops, where he buried himself in wood shavings and could sleep. One night, I kicked the shavings and woke him up.
“We all know you’re better than us. Too good to sleep in our quarters,” I said. “Do you have to rub it in?”
“I miss my brothers,” he said.
“They’re gone. Dead and gone.”
He pointed to a beam where Fenn and Rip Thebes had carved their names. Even their vandalism was héafodstede. Sacred.
“Don’t you hate them for being utlaga? Wicked outlaws? For leaving you behind?”
“Aye,” he said. “And nay.”
One night the master guilder, Wahid Thebes, known to us as Woody, discovered Errol in his shop. The kelp was running one of the woodworkers’ planes along the edge of a bench, producing a thin curl of ironwood. When Errol realized Woody was watching him, he hid the blade behind his back.
“I won’t have you whittling the furniture down to a toothpick,” Woody said. He had hands as broad as dinner plates.
“Don’t throw me out,” said Errol.
“Find me any reason not to.”
“I’ve no place to go in this guild. I’m lower than a foundling.”
Woody grunted. “You’re the guildmaster’s son. The whole tower is yours.”
“Nay. Margaret Thebes is grievous. My cousins hate me, save Odd. I miss my dropped brothers. The aunt is weary. The uncle frightens me.” Errol’s voice went so quiet I hardly could hear him from the hall. “And my own da is extinct.” Woody ran his big hands over his face. He barely ever spoke to kelps. Errol kicked the workbench. “Also I will never see a horse or any beast, jammed forever as we are, in this tower.”
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 11