Woody grunted again. “First you will learn not to carve excuses. Second, you’ll not thieve from me.” He reached out his hand, and Errol produced the stolen plane. “Third and fourth, you will bathe and eat. I won’t have you smelling like a fart in my shop. After all that, I’ll teach you about wood.”
* * *
—
A shipment arrived from Albacete House, two dozen glistening knives Woody laid out on a workbench. A choice. He was surprised, delighted, to watch the kelp point instead to a knife on another bench, to Woody’s favored blade, with its perfect edge and worn leather haft. Woody instructed Errol to use the navaja to free any creature from any scrap of ironwood or heart pine he could find in the shop.
“I left a fold of muslin at my bench,” he said. “Bandage the wounds you inflict on yourself. The midwife will sew you, when it comes to that. And I’ve set a fire in the oven, which you’ll keep stoked with your errors. Look at some scrolls or books to remember what beasts look like. Any of my apprentices can show you how to carve an eye without gouging it out, a tail without lopping it from a rump. Sit here at my bench. When you do finally carve some fair approximation of a beast, a month from now or a year, I will teach you from there.”
My heart leaps even now, to think of this offer. Woody Thebes was second in this tower only to the guildmaster. He oversaw the work of the guild. He never ate with the guilders, played cards or danced with us, listened to our gossip, or even attended the guild meetings where work shifts and apprentices were assigned. If he slept, it was in a bed none of us could find. He was known within the city and, rumor had it, even outside the wall, for his uncommon skill. What I—what any of us kelps—would have given to be taken into his tutelage, we did not own.
Woody turned to go, his broad shoulders filling the doorway.
Errol called out, “I’ll give you a stag, Master Wahid.”
“Overreaching,” Woody said. “The antlers will snap off in your fingers. The ripples of the chest will be surgical mishaps. Half the apprentices who begin with an antlered beast can salvage nothing more than the form of a wild boar with a misshapen head and stub legs. When the boar also fails to materialize, half of those can reduce the wood to a serpent. Even a stiff spike of a serpent will be a trick for a kelp of eight.”
Errol bristled. “A guildmaster’s son should be able to carve a stag.”
“The guildmaster’s son will be a skinny, old, dying man before he begins his training, if he sets impossible tests for himself.”
But Woody Thebes had no idea how fresh those beasts were in Errol Thebes’s heart. The kelp, his little feet dangling from the rungs of Woody’s high stool, sat at that bench all day and night while Woody was gone to oversee the forges and the workrooms. Twice, food arrived on a tray from the guild kitchens. Twice, Errol ate nothing—well, nothing but the ma’amouls, for he had an insatiable sweet tooth.
The apprentices working their shifts down the hall were mad with jealousy. They had not come to Woody until they were fifteen, and even then their parents had had to pay, and they had been required to carve scrap beasts on their own time, in their own quarters. Not one of them came close to Woody’s workroom, never mind his own bench. In faith, all them now rather hoped Errol would appear at their benches for help, so they could work him over and send some diminishing gossip about him up to the shops. But all was quiet in that workroom. So they gave themselves false errands that would take them, instead, to him.
They stood at the bench and stared, gape-mouthed.
Soon enough, a different sort of gossip buzzed in the tower, and the whole guild began to file past Woody’s door to see this thing for themselves. When Woody Thebes himself returned long after the somnium bell, he pushed through a crowd.
“Begone, you foul things,” he said. To himself he muttered, “What? Have they never seen blood before?”
There was no blood. The room was neatly swept, and a tidy fire burned in the stove. A thick pile of sketches lay on the workbench. The drawing on the top of that pile was a rendering of the joint between the skull and the antler of a red deer, with a tuft of fur indicated. Woody held the page in his big hands. He could not help but feel pleasure rise in his chest. None of his apprentices appreciated the work of drawing their carvings beforehand. Across the room, on a shelf, something like movement caught his eye. A tiny wild boar trotted across the shelf—not literally, of course, but in a posture so real Woody Thebes swore he heard the racket of tiny hoofs. A snake was coiled around the boar’s neck, an ornamental collar, the diamonds in its scales tinier than heads of pins.
Woody heard a murmur and looked behind him. The kelp was asleep in the corner on the floor, wrapped in Woody’s own ragged work sweater. He had something in his hand.
The heart-pine stag was so tiny the master could close his fingers around it and make it disappear in his palm, and yet it gave the appearance of massive bulk. Its legs were spread wide as though to support the heft of its chest and antlers, which rose in a flourish over its noble head and splayed over the shoulders and tail. Woody set the tiny stag down on the bench. “Level,” he whispered. The beast surveyed the room as if it owned them all.
“Look at you,” Woody said softly to the kelp. “You are more even than Rip or Fenn.”
“’Tis not your place to judge,” a woman’s voice boomed behind him. Woody flinched and turned to see Margaret Thebes blocking his doorway. “He will not rise, Wahid Thebes.”
“You’ve always been iron on him,” said Woody. “He will make an able apprentice, even this early. Look—”
Margaret took the stag as though to admire it, but crushed it in her hand and threw it in the fire. “I’ll not lose another son,” she said.
“You’ll lose Errol Thebes either way,” said Woody, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “A guildmaster’s son rises. You knew that at the start of this—”
“He’ll live with my sister.”
“That’s a fool’s judgment. Your sister’s a rag of a woman, and she’s got nothing but the drunken husband. From Heimdall the liar to Odd the eavesdropper, they do half an uur of work a month. Errol Thebes will be neither a guilder nor a runner, raised by that lot. He’ll amount to nothing.”
“That is precisely the point.”
“I won’t stand for it. We’ve made a bargain, you and I. You’ve already robbed me once, and you won’t have another chance.”
Margaret raised her hand fast to hit him, but he grabbed it. She hissed, “I’ll drop you and the kelp if you speak of a bargain again.”
Oh, but he was her match. “I am caged in this guild with you, Guildmaster. The only pleasure I have is to raise this kelp, who can already free a beast from a scrap of wood. Drop me if you will. I’ll relish the quick freedom before I meet the earth. But let him rise. You owe it.” I gasped, in the hall. Could anyone talk to the guildmaster that way? “Get out,” he said.
“If you’ll have me gone,” said Margaret, “let go of my arm.”
Woody reached into the fire to remove the pieces of the stag. He pressed his fingers on each point of the broken antlers, to extinguish tiny flames. In a low voice, he said, “Forget what you’ve heard, lying there awake, Errol Thebes. No doubt your cousin in the hall will remember it for you. Fetch our breakfast. Your nights belong to you, but your days are mine now. I’ll raise you to run this guild. This guild is yours if only you live long enough.”
Purgament
CONCEALED IN THE BROWN MURK, in the stench of the streets, Errol lay still. He was a runner of movement and high air, accustomed to the sway of towers, to the force of clean winds. He spat the bloody cloth from between his teeth, wrenched the black-iron helmet off his head. Blood returned to his legs, and that hurt. The armor shifted on his skin. His broken ribs expanded, and that hurt. He knew neither what day it was nor how long he had lain in purgament. He heard bells ringing, a mile o
verhead, before the world went dark again.
The Shard
“THAT BIT OF GLASS,” said Talwyn.
I accepted another cup of Marek’s elixir and held it to warm my hands. “The shard,” I said, “is a story of what did not happen.”
Thebes Guild contained more than a hundred kelps when we were young. We ran as a mob: were fed, whipped, and worked as one. Guild life lacked the quotient of drama we required, so we lived through tales from books and scrolls, acted them out from epistola to dulcibus, reviewed them in our sacks, arguing over which of us was Parsival or Jason or Odette till we fell asleep. Our grandmothers did not refer to us as boys or girls. We were just wuscbearns to them. Dear little ones. And we were just kelps to our mams, and we were all Icarus and we were all Helen, and we stepped easily over such borders that would soon be silken screens and then iron walls.
“You be Icarus today!”
“Naw. I been Icarus all week and I’ve a bruise on every bone to show for it.”
I was conjuring Talwyn and Ping, from when they were kelps. Everyone was laughing. So I kept it going, our childhood selves—
“Hey all! Sa’id Thebes won’t get out of the sack if he isn’t Robin Hood.”
This was Faisal—
“Fine. Tell him to bring his own felons.”
This was Ping. Do I need to name them all? You get the idea. I was going around the fire—
“And I shall be Lancelot and I shall be wild for Helen from Troy.”
“That’s rot, Grid! Lancelot was wild for Gwenhwyfar.”
“Not after he rubbed his eyeballs on Helen.”
“Then Odd Thebes shall be Helen, to rile you.”
“Nah. Odd has to be Homer or we forget the gruesome kissing.”
“Fine. So Eluned will be Helen. And Talwyn will be the faithful Penelope and she’ll wait twenty years for Odysseus to stumble home from refusing to look at a map.”
“Forget it! I wouldn’t wait twenty seconds for any of ye foul wens.”
“Lucre and rot, Talwyn! Be Mabh, then, and wait for none.”
“Aye. I am Mabh. And in that state I’ll gallop night by night, through lovers’ brains and then they’ll dream of love.”
“Quit it, Talwyn. We didn’t start yet.”
“And Errol Thebes is Beowulf again.”
“Feh! I just saw him, quill to the page at Woody Thebes’s, and he demands we make him Daedalus the Inventor. And make me the bee wolf.”
“Naw, Odd. Errol must be Beowulf, for he is the only one who remembers to go back for the dying warriors and to unfurl the flags. And you cannot be Beowulf, for you are Homer on all shifts.”
“Feh. Give him a iosal horse, then. He says he’ll be Beowulf if you give him the horse.”
“There wasn’t a mount in Beowulf. Tell that iosal news to Errol Thebes.”
“Shut it, Faisal. There wasn’t a ship on the beanstalk last month, nay, but we hauled it up the stalk, didn’t we? Aye, because you all said you always had to have your ship with you, even on a dry bean.”
We all were laughing now, at the kelps we had been.
These tales of ours unspun for days and years, stopping only when our mams and das called us up to be thrown in a tub or a sack.
One day, when we were pretending to be Beowulf and the Argonauts, Errol sent me down to storage on the thirteenth strata to find fletching feathers for the archers’ arrows. We were fully nine now, the two of us.
I was alone, the dim light of my head lamp flickering in the storage rooms. I opened a closet and reached past crates and cartons for a box in the back.
I screamed, for a skinny, horrifying creature startled me from the back of the closet. He was nearly my size. Bony and angular. Short on chin, with a hurricane of black hair over bead eyes and an enormous nose. He stared back at me from the neck of green robes as baggy as my own. I reached my fingers toward him. He reached for mine. When we touched, I smiled and he smiled back broadly, with great black gaps between his teeth. Have I mentioned his nose?
In the yurt, my fellow runners all laughed. For they knew I was barding, likely embellishing, and they knew what was coming.
“Are you the bogle of Thebes Guild?” His lips formed words when mine did, but he was silent. I had my fingers up against glazing. Was this a portal to some other world? I brought my knuckles up to rap on the glass and stopped, for his hand did the same. I moved my fingers and watched his same fingers move as mine did.
“No! Feh! It is naught but my own self!” I yelled. I turned up my lamp and he turned up his. “No!”
I had never seen a mirror before. None of us had. By decree, as long as Margaret was guildmaster, there were none in Thebes. So we lacked a way of seeing ourselves. Except here was this mirror someone had forgotten. I moved closer to the glass to see who I was.
All along I had thought I was a wild thing. A warrior! With fervor in my face, the great chest, my powerful limbs, and the play of my hips in the knife belt I slung over them. Every morning, when all you kelps cast Errol as Beowulf over and over again, and I was yet again the bard or Helen of Troy or some nameless Argonaut, I thought to myself that it was just charity on your part. Charity toward Errol. He never bothered to order his men around as I would do. He didn’t yell or carry on the way captains ought to. I had always told myself that you secretly thought I, Odd Thebes, should be Beowulf, with the wild-haired, warmongering look about me. Terror of Grendel, I had thought. Terror indeed. There was this huge nose in the middle of me. No wonder I was Homer on every shift.
I looked behind me at Grid, who was braiding my hair, and said, “I am able to tell this story now, by the way, for the midwife told me when I left for the roofs that I am now taller than all of you and proportional in every way: big nose, big hands, big feet, very big—”
To which Grid whispered, “Mouth.”
In front of the mirror, I thrust my jaw forward and made muscles in my sinewy little arms. This is what I was doing when Errol found me. His hand lay on the hilt of Fragarach, his lie-sniffing sword.
“We thought ye lost at sea, Odd Thebes,” he said. “What bogle has caught ye?”
“Nothing! Nothing caught me.”
“Then where are the fletching feathers?”
“In some cursed box.”
“What are you staring at? Wait—is that a mirror? But mirrors are felonies in Thebes—” He came toward it.
“There’s just this one and only mirror,” I said, blocking him from it. “It’s mine. I’m in the middle of pillaging it.”
“I must see it.”
“No. You mustn’t.”
“I just want to know—do I look like my brothers? Or my gone da? Or like you, even? We’re cousins, so perhaps—”
“No. No, you don’t look anything like me,” I said. “You don’t look like anyone.” He tried to see over my shoulder into the glass, but I stood on my toes. “You have to pay. Are you carrying a thousand uurs with you?” He shoved me aside. I yelled, “Here’s the truth! You have wens!”
He put his fingers to his face. “I don’t feel wens.”
“They’re flat. And blue.”
“I want to see them. It’s better to know.”
“Fine! Fine. Take your chance, then. Go ahead. You are no Bee Wolf. You’re a foul thing. But don’t worry about it. I will still be your friend, pathetic though ye are. And wen-covered.”
He studied me now. “You’re lying to me, Odd Thebes. Why? Consider yourself. Ye look like—”
“Grendel, I know it,” I said. “I’ve just seen myself.”
“Not Grendel. You’re the spitting image of your da.”
I stabbed at him then, with my wooden dagger and he unsheathed Fragarach fast and hit me full in the chest with the broadside. I doubled over, the bre
ath robbed from my lungs. I kicked him between the legs and felled him. We rolled around on the floor, slapping and punching each other till we were winded. Finally we stood up, both of us stunned and gasping. He turned yet again to look into the mirror, but I grabbed Fragarach from him and crashed the sword hard into the silvered glass, which shattered into a thousand pieces. He grabbed my shoulders and swept his foot under both of mine and dropped me to the floor, pinning me on jagged shards.
“Ow?” I said.
“What is this about?” he said.
“Nothing. I’m not Slyngel. I’m not my drunken da or any of my brothers. You’re hurting me.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Who’s asking? Who are you?” I demanded.
“Errol Thebes, of course. Your cousin. The guildmaster’s son. Brother of dead men.”
“A kelp with his da gone missing,” I added, digging into him.
“Aye. Long gone,” he said. “And you?”
I closed my eyes hard. The picture of that creature in the mirror would not leave me.
“Feh. I don’t know. Let me up.”
I marched ahead of him for thirty strata. Back at Argo, I threw myself in with the rest of the oarsmen, pretending to row up the forty-third strata of Thebes. We were fools. Beowulf never rode in Jason’s flagship. And what was Errol doing standing in the bow like that, with his foot on the hull, the flags unfurled in the dead air of a guild hallway?
If he had seen himself, he would have been unbearable. The strength of him even then. The warrior, he was. Or the warmonger. All that’s left from that mirror now is this shard of silvered glass, too small even to see his whole eyeball. A fragment of his own self. He never knew the whole of what we saw when we looked at him.
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