The River
“HERE’S GOOD LUCK to the quart pot and luck to the ballymow!” Errol’s singing voice pitched wildly as he fingered the hilt of the navaja. His foot had swollen around the blade. “To the quart pot, pint pot, gill pot, half-a-gill, lilliget, ben, benmow!” He wished for Grid. He shifted the blade in the swelling and then cursed and pulled it hard. Yelling now. Not singing. When it was done, he looked at the blade in his hand, forgetting that he knew better. Don’t look down. He slid backward into nothingness.
* * *
—
He woke. He pulled himself out of the cold sewage and pitched his body forward on two hands and one foot. The streets were dark again. Or dark, still. He could feel the river’s presence before he could see it. Along the banks he saw the glimmer of an eye of a man gnawing on some creature that was still writhing in his hands.
Errol lay on his belly on the bank and felt for the water, drank it, and dragged himself down into the shallows. The muck and rot of the banks smelled of eggs and bread mold, but the water itself whirled under a thin crust of ice, and rushed and smelled of cloud. He let himself be carried out. The cold current stretched his ribs and made his muscles itch in a terrible way. Out farther, it swept him downriver and he then felt his body scrape against sand. There he lay, half in the water and half out.
More than once, men on the bank stood and watched him, out on the sandbar. They waded into the shallows. Finally they turned and went back. Errol drifted like a corpse, and slept.
* * *
—
He dreamt that our mams came to him, scrubbed him with soap that turned the river red. He dreamt that the foundling reached out to him, and he watched her tatu rustle its wings and fly off her arm. He dreamt of one other woman, though he did not know her. She was sinewy and tall, with unwieldy hair knotted on her head and tipped eyes. She was the age of a roof master and shouldered a bow and quiver. She had pulled her skirts up through her legs and twisted them into her belt. She pressed ointment into the wounds under Errol’s ribs and on his foot. The grease frothed hot and white like a pot boiling over into the river, and in his dream he begged her to stop. A half dozen long, silver snouts pressed into his face. Lank beasts and cold furred. Even on all fours they were nearly as tall as the woman. They splashed in the water and shouldered one another out of the way to sniff Errol’s breath, the part in his hair, his armpits, his nethers. He lifted dripping fingers to touch one of them, but the beast tensed and pinched a low growl from black lips.
“Roban! Sitte!” ordered the woman. The wolf yawned and feigned interest in something else.
“Nu,” the woman said. The wolf sat now.
Errol whispered, “Beorht Roban.” The woman looked down at him in surprise. The competence of her hands made him want to tell her everything. “I fell down” was all he could think to say.
“I watched you. And then you saved the snake. Saved me from getting involved. You’re lucky. I thought you were dead.”
Why was she pinching his foot? The current ran bright red with his blood.
“Right. Yes. I’m feeling very lucky.”
* * *
—
He knew it was morning, because when he woke on the sand, the sky was brown instead of black. He was alone.
“I’ve fallen from the towers and lived,” he said to no one. “Been beaten by thieves and lived. I can find some clothes and food and fight them off if they come back. There have been none of the terrors the guilders fear; only humans, and I’ve seen the worst they have to offer.”
As I’ve said before, he was naive.
The Khazarite’s Journal
OUR STORIES RAN TOGETHER, Errol’s and mine. I was as gone as he was, when his tellensac tales had been told. Back in my tent I emptied the contents of my own tellensac, swept my hand through the relics, and reached for a folded page torn from the journal of a Khazar horseman.
In the late summer of a time he recorded only as the Year of Ardabil, the Khazarite vexillographer Amman Busir set off on an expedition from Balanjar to Sardinia, intending to settle once and for all a dispute with his master silk dyers over the exact meaning of the word azure by pointing to the Tyrrhenian Sea. The expedition ran off course, first in Balanjar and then in the Carpathian Alps. It ended prematurely in a tempest on the Marmara Sea, which was neither azure nor, unfortunately, shallow. Busir’s journals were later found, stained with salt foam and ale suds and worked over by rats, in the floorboards of a pub in Cairo.
An unknown number of years later (fifty? five thousand? How could I ever know?), I was a first-year runner on Thebes. Around a bucket fire one night, a runner from Dannebrog House challenged my skills with a vexillography journal, a copy of that original from Amman Busir. This one was worn thin from constant use in Dannebrog for reference. The breathtaking drawings of flags and pennons were instructive, but none of the guilders in that tower could read or speak the ornate language of the text anymore. (Most guild translations, like guild cooking, are a grim affair, with glossaries too rudimentary to describe anything more than your boot size or how to find the bogs.)
What did I care about the work of Dannebrog, or all those flags and pennons they designed? Not at all. But I was obsessed with the remnants of alphabets. I talked the runner into lending me the book and promised I would do my best to translate it in a month. Dannebrog’s guildmaster got wind of my offer and presented an incentive: two months’ salary if I could really do the job.
Amman Busir arranged his runes like rows of fishing hooks on the page. His was like no other language I had seen or heard. I pored over the text, using repetitions and references to illustrations to unlock the codes within the hooks. Dannebrog was delighted with my first scribbled returns, for the writing ascribed new history and artisan vision to the designs of flags. I was delighted, for although Busir wrote mainly of his constant search for silks and pigments, in so doing, he wrote also of his travels to every known settlement on earth. In such uncommon writing I escaped my quarantined tower.
I made not only two months’ salary but nearly a full year’s pay, for there were more volumes than one.
I never told Errol Thebes, or anyone else, about this work. It was mine. All mine. Plus, there was one entry, unrelated to those around it, that I kept to myself—
“My men came undone this morning,” Busir wrote, “as they rowed our expedition barges downriver toward the west wall of the ancient guild city of a thousand iron towers. An unwitting course.”
Imagine the first time I had turned to that page.
“The shadows of the wall and the towers behind it slid cold over us and froze idle chatter. Were we in a trance? Why did we not we stop to portage? The brisk current carried us through an arch in the wall, an act that placed us inside the city where an internal harbor flowed into a series of narrow canals and along shadowy streets. We were, that morning: twenty men, eleven stallions, three barges.
“We paddled in silence, but for the river dripping from our oars and the shifting of our horses. We tilted our heads back to take in the infamous guild towers from which magnificent wares are exported. [Busir’s exact expression was “monstrous wares,” which I translated as “huge” or “magnificent”, for he certainly meant a compliment to the grand size of our guild products.] These guilds were not the squat and buzzing work-hives we have seen in our expeditions over other folds of the map. Rather, enormous black-iron stalagmites, a thousand of them, each an eruption from under the earth, each rising insanely into the clouds, behemoths of proportion. Each tower sways in sky winds we cannot feel, pings and creaks under its own heaving weight. Each emits an occasional spray of smoke or squirt of filth from orifices we cannot see. One is covered with iron beasts that cling to its turrets and ledges. The air reeks of excrement and of blood.
“With long lens and this journal in hand, I lay on the barge while we moved downriver and sketched w
hat I could of the banners on the roofs—ten thousand pennons and silks in charges and tints that took my breath away. Reds that broke my heart. A blue deeper than any sea. And designs whose perfection made my own look like a child’s scribblings. I have sketched them here. In all my travels I have never seen such glory unfurled in any sky.
“My men were not interested in silk, for the flags on every roof were hung upside down, a sign of a city gripped by plague or by mutiny or—if I can judge by the world’s use of this place—by abomination.
“I have been followed before by felons on the road. I know the shiftings and shadows of trackers. We were at a disadvantage here, on the water. My men whispered their own names backward, a fool’s incantation their grandparents had taught them, to render themselves invisible. The stallions rolled their eyes in fear.
“Something watched us. I felt its presence. I cannot describe it except to say that there was a force of some intention coming behind us. We paddled hard for the south gate and found it closed. We saw a man moving along the river—not a man but something like one. Its joints bent in both directions. We used our oars to hammer the stiff levers from a small arch in the south gate. Unlike the gate, which was broad and high enough to accommodate a dozen warships in full sail, this arch was too small for anything but one of us at a time. We leapt into the water and through that door, left behind our barges and our stallions floating helplessly upon them.
“Tonight we made camp a league downriver from the iron city, high in the mountains. I smell the city on me, a filth that cannot be scrubbed away with soap. I regret my cowardice. It cost me my horse and companion, Ardabil. I am unwilling to describe here the screams of the horses in full panic, and, worse, the morbid silence that followed.
“It is too dark to see the towers and the wall from where I sit, but the roofs are lit with fires. Even from this distance I can see men leaping, flying, between the towers. Either I have lost my mind or they have.”
* * *
—
For the thousandth time, I willed Busir back down that mountain, back to my city. Why did he not describe that folded map of his in more detail? Hint at his whereabouts on it and, therefore, hint at mine? With Errol gone and a morbid silence enshrouding our roof, nothing could distract me from the weariness of not knowing where we are, or when we are, or who we are. But these three pages torn from the journals were all Busir wrote of the city before he discovered a high pass through the mountains and was gone.
I returned the pages to my tellensac. I was the only one to know about them. But if Errol had survived the fall, he already knew the fear of eleven slaughtered horses.
A Pub Squall
IN THE REEDS at the edge Errol lifted his foot to find a scrap of a submerged tent twisted around his ankle. He dredged it from the water, scraped the river ice from it and wrapped himself in it, like a kilt. Whatever thin starlight there was, was drowned in the torrents of rain. He was not alone and hadn’t been for a while.
“Who’s there?”
There came no answer, and this was the fifth time he had called. But a sudden scuffle and then someone hit him in the back, and he was dragged out of the water, up an embankment. Through the streets. Down a flight of stone steps, and tossed, sprawling, into a room underground. He got to his feet in time to see his captor turn for the stairs, the skeletal remains of human grime with thick yellow nails and more gums than teeth. “Another one from the river,” the grime called over its shoulder.
The mob pressed in on him. Forty of them, maybe? They smelled of sweat and grease and ale, the familiar attarh of guilders at day’s end. A small man was hurrying over. “Lookit! Lookit what Pollux fished from the river! Roof treasure! Not a foundling, no. A runner! Stay high!” With the familiar smells of work and a greeting of the roofs, Errol thought he had been dragged here to safety. But then that street fighter Jago stepped out from behind the barkeep, and from behind him came that other one, Dete, still crusted with the blood from the snake bite.
“You were dead,” Jago said.
“You were mistaken,” said Errol. The crowd murmured with laughter.
The ceiling was low and hewn of dirt, a reversal of the floor, with reed roots dangling from it and bolstered by wet planks wedged between it and the floor. It sagged under the weight of the river.
Errol said, “What are you doing here, the two of you, in public with decent people?”
“Decent?” Jago laughed. “Look again.”
The barkeep grinned, a thin pair of lips pulled back over peg teeth. “I am Null. You be—?”
“An outlaw,” Errol said.
“He’s an exiled runner from Thebes,” said Jago. “He owes Dete a guild mark.”
“I see. Well, Thebes, how it goes in this place is Dete here will finish you. All you must do is stand for it, long as you’re able to stand. You won’t do harm to him or to these fine patrons who have paid to see it.”
“Finish me at what?” Errol said, glancing around the room. “Are we to compete?”
Jago rubbed his chin in amusement. “Are you really such a fool? Guess again.”
“I assume you wish us to wrestle. But anyone can see a fight would be unfair, as he and I are both wounded.” A shudder of laughter moved through the mob again.
“If you won’t fight,” said Null, “Dete maybe will have some luck, then.”
Dete grimaced at the insult. He thrust his hand in his pocket and tossed open a navaja.
“That’s my blade,” said Errol, keeping his voice steady. “I left it on the street. If this is a test of knife skills, I’ll take my own knife and he can find his own.”
“‘Knife skills’?” Null yelled grandly to the room. “And that, my friends, is the fine lips of one of them sky runners you watch from your box seats in hel. Shall he have a knife?” Null turned to Errol and shrugged. “You heard them. They’d rather ye die. To be one blade short in a pub squall is forfeit for trespassing in the streets.”
“And what’s the forfeit for murder?” said Errol. “And will he pay it now or after he’s finished with me?”
Null laughed. “Fine looks and a brain! Shame, really, trading all that for ugly old Dete.”
Dete had had enough of Null. He charged at Errol, who grabbed for the blade and felt the edge slide across his palm and heat his hand with blood. Errol swept his foot under Dete, dropped him to the floor in a clatter of elbows, pinned him with his face to the dirt and an arm behind his back. He twisted the knife from Dete’s fist and held it to his throat.
“I read this in a book,” Errol said. “We’re done here. I’ve bested him.” But Dete was grinning, and Errol turned in time to see a woman behind him. She held a plank high. Before he could understand, she brought it down on his head.
Dete was standing over him, kicking at his head to return him to consciousness. His knife was gone. “Will you all murder me?” Errol groaned. “Does it really take more than one of you?”
“They want to see you fight,” Dete roared.
Jago pointed to Errol’s wounded foot. Dete stomped on it. Errol roared and leapt up limping and charged with his head down, crushing Dete’s ribs. They stumbled into the mob.
“Remember! Remember, Thebes!” Null laughed. “You mayn’t harm our beloved Dete!”
Errol pummeled Dete’s broken chest. Dete dropped to his knees. Errol stood gasping, waiting for someone to call the fight over. Was a man not down on his knees? But Dete was up again.
Over the cheers, Null yelled, “Halloo! Lookit! For Thebes! Here comes a weapon!”
Null shoved a girl toward him. She was Errol’s own age, pale, thin. Her hair was cut short like a kelp’s; it fell over a bruised face.
“Never seen a woman before, Thebes?” said Jago. “This is Sabine.”
“Does she have some weapon for me?”
Laughter.
Null grabbed Errol
’s right wrist and the girl’s left, spit on his bar rag and bound them together with a wet knot.
“She’s the weapon,” Null said.
“How is she a weapon—?”
Jago crossed his arms. “More of a shield, really,” he said.
Dete threw a hard fist at Errol’s broken ribs. Errol threw his right hand up fast to stop the blow. That reflex yanked the shield into the way. She took Dete’s fist full to the jaw, and she was down on the floor.
“An outlaw!” yelled Jago, triumphant. “See! No heroes on the roofs. I told you!”
Errol pulled the girl up, steadied her. She spat at him. “Go ahead. Keep on with your fight. Get this over with.”
“I didn’t understand! That won’t happen again!” Errol yelled, shoving her behind him. Dete came at him this time, grabbed his left arm. With the arm held out straight, with a shove and swipe of his foot, he dropped them both. Errol heard the sucking sound of his bones twisting out of the shoulder joint and he howled with pain. Before he could reconsider what had to be done, he threw himself backward against the floor, to set the joint. He got up, delirious with pain, flailing his free fist anywhere it would go, keeping Sabine behind him. Dete came for his ribs, pounding.
Null called out, “There’s your hero! Nobody in the history of this illustrious place saves the shield!”
A man in the mob yelled, “Kill Dete!”
Dete spun in a spray of sweat. “Isn’t anyone here for me?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Errol saw Jago hand Dete the navaja.
Now Dete grabbed Errol’s throat with his left hand and pressed the blade against it with his right. Errol went down on his knees, the girl—Sabine—with him. The room was chaos. Cheering and banging chairs on the planks.
In this moment Errol knew he would lose. The point of the blade was cutting him now.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 17