City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “This will hurt.” She pressed her thumb into Errol’s foot to crack the wound open. A thick mass of green pus wormed its way out. Errol gasped. The pain was violence and its remedy in one. She wiped the pus away and threw the rag in the fire.

  Errol reached up to touch Roban. “I wouldn’t,” Dagmar said. “He smells Utlag on you.” She set a pot under his foot and poured the liniment into the wound. It hissed and burst into a boil. He yelled out and the wolves yipped and whined and Dagmar said something to them.

  “They share my pain?” Errol said.

  “Not exactly. You’re a wounded animal and they’d like to eat you.” She packed felt into the wound and wrapped the foot tightly in strips of the rag. When she was done, Errol put his hand out. Dagmar removed the bandage. His hand was swollen and dripping with infection. Dagmar sighed irritably.

  “Your brother. Is he utterly helpless?”

  “All the evidence points to that,” Errol said.

  Errol could not take his eyes off Dagmar. “You’re more animal even than your wolves,” he blurted.

  “Everyone is,” she said. “Is your brother in a similar condition?”

  “He was nearly drowned, earlier today. Or yesterday. What day is it?”

  Errol pointed to the knife wound at his ribs and she dressed that and bound his chest to steady the ribs that had broken in the fall. The smell of oils and herbs in a pot in the fire made his stomach churn. She took the lid from a cauldron. A golden puff of a pie was baking in it.

  “Cwae,” she told the wolves, who trotted reluctantly in a line up to the loft of the tent.

  The pie was thick and crusted with chives. Inside were two river trout, slabs of potato, and roasted field carrots. Dagmar carried him to one of the string hamacs, set him in it, and a bowl of the pie in his lap. She watched him devour it.

  “This is heofon.” He wiped his face on the sleeve of his tunic. “I have never eaten fresh food. What do you call this?”

  “Roban’s dinner.”

  Errol laughed. “Did this come in on the ships?”

  “Ships? No. I fish the river, farm the banks. Why are you here?”

  Errol made a quizzical face and pointed to the foot. His mouth was full.

  “Why are you here on the streets?”

  Why did he want to tell her everything? He began with the roofs of Thebes and the gut run and the iron spikes and the sacking of his roof. He told of the foundling who betrayed him, the regnat’s punishment, the fight on the street, the fight in Null’s pub, the near drowning of Rip.

  At the end of it Dagmar said, “So you didn’t come to help.”

  “I was thrown off a plank. I would like to help the guilds, yes.”

  “And what about helping us?”

  “I had no idea you were here. No one knows you’re here.”

  The comfort of the string hamac, the pie, the salves she had packed into his wounds, the fire snapping, the smoke and fragrances of the fields, all contributed to Errol’s sense that it would be all right to close his eyes for a moment.

  When he was almost gone, she said, “Tell me about him.”

  “Him?” said Errol. In slurs and half dreams, he told her what little he knew of Rip. The father they didn’t know and a mother who didn’t like any of them, the rogue life Rip and their elder brother, Fenn, led in the guilds and on the roofs. Thefts and gut runs, unbefitting of a roof master and a runner. Finally, their punishment. The sewer Rip lived in now, far below the street. His interest in low women and whiskey. His failed dealings with Utlag.

  * * *

  —

  Errol awoke with a start. The fire was out. How long had he been asleep? He leapt from the hamac, lifted the flap of the yurt to leave. But something caught his attention. On the floor next to the hamac were clean wools, neatly folded in a pile, and a pair of soft leather boots he had not seen before. On top of them lay the spikes in their sheath.

  Wolf Work

  ERROL TOOK THE STAIRS four at a time to the loft of Dagmar’s yurt. She was curled in a heap with the wolves in the winter air.

  “Where did you get these?” he said. He was taking off Rip’s clothes and hopping into these new leggings. “Turn around, will you?”

  “I’ve seen you naked.”

  “Aye, but at that time you were a dream. Where did you get these clothes and the iron spikes? You’re a witch. There is conjuring in it.”

  “Everything we need is here. I know that. If that’s witchery, then yes.”

  He followed her down the ladder, pulling the new boots on.

  “I can’t understand how you sleep in this yurt without being attacked, how you survive the streets.”

  “I know what I am. What I can do.” The wolves moved with her as if they were a furred barge on which she rode.

  “I know what I can do, too, and look at me. I’ve nearly been killed twice already.”

  “You have no idea who you are. Watch this.”

  She went to a hook on the yurt wall, removed an ironwood bow, and handed it to him. He was weak from the infection, but he pulled the bowstring and sighted the door. She took out a red quiver and set it over his shoulder. The wolves watched every move.

  “Stand over there,” she said and she walked across the yurt in the opposite direction. “Take aim.”

  He set the arrow and raised the bow and said, “At what?”

  “At me,” she said.

  “I certainly will not,” he said, lowering the bow. “If you mean to insult me, you should know that I’m a good aim.”

  “I’m sure you are. Think of this as the beginning of our friendship.”

  “And the end of it, all in the same moment.”

  She threw up her hands. “I have things to do, then. Give me the bow. You’ve no more courage than your brother.”

  He raised the bow. “Don’t move,” he said. He pulled back the bowstring hard. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw the ears on the entire pack of wolves prick up and turn to him. Movement, a tautness. When he released the string, he expected to be attacked. He saw the gray figure of Roban, leaping into the air, jaws narrowly open, teeth a white streak across the room. The wolf’s great head was jarred sideways by the force of the arrow and Errol thought the animal had been hit. But before the bowstring had stopped vibrating, Roban dropped the arrow and was coming for him, followed by the pack. Errol raised the bow again on reflex and reached over his shoulder for a second arrow, but she had given him only one.

  “You fooled me!” he said. But just as Roban leapt at his throat, Dagmar called, “Sitte!” The wolf swam away from him in midair and hit the earthen floor at a gallop. The rest of the pack floated up and down after him and thundered around the yurt until they came to a stop at Dagmar’s feet, panting.

  “Wuldorlic,” Errol said. Roban looked away from him. “That must have terrified him, the first time you made him catch an arrow in his teeth.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” she said, taking the bow he handed to her. “Fremantle tests weapons from Strael House on anything down here that moves. Thousands, in some weeks. They killed three of my wolves. They even name the arrows, as if it’s amusing.” She pulled two arrows from her quill and rolled the shafts in her fingers. Doom, Iron Rain. “Roban trained himself to catch these, and the others followed. Wolves like to work. Now it’s their idea of a fine day.”

  “What do you do with the arrows?”

  “I keep the best ones for my own. I, too, am in constant practice, should the need arise. The rest I reforge into pots, hoes, hooks, nails, whatever is required.”

  “Knotting spikes?”

  She laughed. “An interesting theory, but I lack skills in knotwork.”

  Errol suddenly remembered. “I’ve kept my brother waiting.” She took her cloak from a peg and gave it to him.

  “Will this make me invisibl
e?” he said, stuffing more pie into the pockets.

  “You read too many books. Is it not enough that it keeps you warm? By the way, you’ll want to be careful with those spikes in the dark,” Dagmar said.

  “What do you mean by ‘careful’?”

  “Darkness is their workroom. Keep them in their sheath. Though I wonder if you should be reckless instead. I bet you’d be something worth seeing. It would be painful, though. You don’t seem to like pain.”

  “Do they knit an uncommon garment? Should I try knotting with them?”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Well, thank you. You’ve left nothing at all to guesswork.”

  “They belong in the scriptorium vault, where all this city’s irfelaf should be.”

  “That which remains,” said Errol.

  “Exactly. These are said to be the last of the iron this city produced. Uncommon. Obviously. I certainly wouldn’t give them to Utlag. But if you don’t, then Jago will not survive. So you’ve made a trap for yourself.”

  “Jago’s no good,” said Errol.

  “We’re all no good, outlaw. And we’re all good.”

  * * *

  —

  Rip had buried himself in purgament to keep warm.

  “Three bells,” he said. “Three long frozen bells. I despise every inch of you.”

  “Here’s something for you.” Rip fell upon the pie like the starving man he was. “And here’s something else.” Errol held up the sheath and tipped the pair of spikes out of it.

  Rip jumped and was fifty yards up the river before he turned to yell, “Put them away! Now! It’s dark! Don’t you know anything?”

  “I thought you’d be glad. You might live now, right? And Jago, too.”

  “Glad? No. I’m not ever glad to see those.”

  As they stole through the streets, staying alongside the towers to hide in the shadows cast by the moon, Rip said, “Tell me all about her.”

  In the Gutters

  I WAS PLAGUED by the sudden recollection of something the foundling had not said to Margaret Thebes a night ago in the library. Over and over I recited the lines to myself, looking for what hid there. Margaret had asked, Is there nothing written of the black-iron needles, in all these scrolls and books? Jamila Foundling had paused, then replied, There is no mention of the black-iron needles in the text of any tale.

  Jamila had paused.

  A pause, in the dialect of Jamila Foundling, was a pivot. Whatever came after it would be the mathematical opposite of the truth, and yet not a lie.

  I bribed the guilder at the grate and crept back into the guild.

  The library was deserted. I went to the book Jamila had been reading in the rafters, the first volume in the set of The Three Kingdoms, the tale that contained the crescent sword smelted from the remains of a single pale green dragon that had been shoved into the forge.

  I examined the covers, stared down the shaft formed by the spine and the binding. Flipped through a thousand pages. Aside from a small, upside-down set of greasy thumbprints on one spread of pages, I could find nothing worth the month’s salary I had just spent to come here. Well, of course, there were a half dozen holes my father had cut out of the book. In this library such deficits were commonplace.

  I should make some attempt to explain Slyngel Thebes. My da followed the custom of the city in naming his offspring from the library books and scrolls. Names, words, ideas—anything from outside the wall had value to us. However, as with all matters in which Slyngel involved himself, his particular version was lost in the labyrinth of a drunken mind. Whenever Mam announced that she was with child, Slyngel would stagger up to the library, a climb that took him half a night, weak as he was from serving no useful function. Book by book, scroll by scroll, he worked over the collection with a blade he reserved for this purpose. His excisions were perfect, tiny rectangles. He cut any name that caught his eye. Some pages were riddled with “hollows” as he called them.

  As he cut the names, he stuffed them into his socks, where they could ferment while my mother grew thick with child. When Mam issued the first bellow of labor, Slyngel bellowed, too, digging the names out of his socks in a foul-smelling roll call. In the end he gave each of his kelps the name that “provoked it,” he said, “from Gudrun’s innards.”

  I was the last of nine to be provoked, so it was impossible for me to have borne witness to the hollowing. My brothers told it to me. The name “Odd” appears in a handful of texts, mainly in the northern tales, but I knew, from having gone over and over these volumes, that never were any Odds cut from any page. Heimdall took pleasure in telling me that Slyngel never bothered to venture to the library when he heard Mam was pregnant for the last time. Upon seeing me as a newborn, Slyngel said, “The socks are empty. Well, that’s odd.”

  * * *

  —

  I held volume one of The Three Kingdoms in my hands, setting my mind to wander on the subject of the warrior Liu Bei.

  My father had hollowed the name Liu Bei from the center of the 389th page of the book. Ultimately he had not used that name on any one of his own children. (Least to best, we were Heimdall, Ragnar, Ketill, Bellona, Bergusia, Alekto, Megaera, Tisiphone, and Odd.) However, there was a Liu Bei in Thebes guild. A woodshop accountant, five years older than I was, a twitchy guilder who pilfered food from the guild pantries and hoarded it in his bench.

  I opened to the page with Liu Bei hollowed out of it and stared. My vision wandered from the hole to something I had not seen before. Deep in the gutter of the book, where the two pages met, was a minuscule smear of dirt. I flattened the book and looked closely. The smear was not dirt at all. There were four tiny letters—SCIU—written in lead along the stitch line between the pages. Tiny letters, squared off at their corners. My father’s hollow. My father’s handwriting. A shiver went up my spine.

  Sciu?

  I reached for the volume containing the tales of Odin and Freya and looked for my siblings’ names. There was a hole in the text where “Ketill” had been cut. And there, in the gutter of that book, across from the hollow, tiny letters spelled ratt. I found the same minute designation—ratt—where Ragnar’s name had been cut. And ratt again, next to the hollow at Heimdall.

  I whispered, “Ratt, ratt, ratt, and sciu.”

  Alone they meant nothing to me. Together they were abbreviations from the language, not to mention the field guide, of Pliny: rattus, rattus, rattus, sciurus. In the common tongue: rat, rat, rat, and squirrel.

  “What did you know about beasts?” I growled at my dead father. What on earth did you know about anything?

  I went to a shelf and grabbed a copy of Beowulf. I had visited this book and this page a hundred times as a kelp, jealous that Errol had a real name from a real tale, more jealous that my da had once cut that name from one page in the book, while he never managed to remove my name from anywhere. Erol, in the ancient tongue, meant the “earl.” The knight. I found the hollow. When I pressed the book open, I saw, for the first time, my father’s handwriting in the gutter. He had written cerv.

  “Cervus,” I said. “So there, Errol Thebes. Not a tiger or a bear, not an eagle. Merely a deer.” It was foolish to feel smug about this. What was I even talking about?

  I was suddenly reminded of a night in the guild tower. I grabbed the tales of Ovid, Virgil, and Apollonius from the shelves and flipped through their pages, seeking a hollow at the name Orpheus. It’s harder than you might expect to find a name that is gone. When I finally found that hollow, I pressed the page open and saw, in that tiny squared-off handwriting, Xov. I could think of no beasts in Pliny’s tongue that could be abbreviated in this manner. Xov. But when I looked closer I saw that only the X was written in ink, the rest in lead. It was not Xov but X ov, separated by a hair’s space.

  “Ovid?” I whispered, unsure of myself. I knew of course that it was not Ovi
d. Not a bard. A beast. Pay attention, I ordered myself. Ovis. A sheep.

  But what was the X? The location of a treasure? Pliny’s numeral ten? A kiss?

  I was on the edge of knowing something. I was also hot. I pulled the toque off my head and pushed up my sleeves. I glanced down at my arm, at the tatu of the crow with crossed spikes in his talons, spikes that formed an X. And now I was shaking.

  Why? It was because, in Thebes guild, Orpheus was not just the lute-playing hero from an ancient text. He was Orpheus—Feo—the suicidal foundling. The clatter of hoofs. The screaming leap. Mayhem. Was the X for death? Could I go so far as to think it was a pair of crossed spikes?

  I ran through the stacks. There was another unsolved murder in our tower. Jamila had questioned Margaret about it. That old tunnel knocker, Durga, had died with a fresh scar up the middle of her chest.

  I yanked the scroll of the tales of Markandeya from its pigeonhole and rolled it open, spun the rolls until I found a hollow in the parchment where Durga’s name had been. A scroll was not a book; would there still be a hidden beast? In the margin outside of the text there was my answer: mel. Or rather: X mel.

  “Mel?” I said aloud, thinking. “Melea? In the common tongue: badger.” And, as if that whole incident had happened yesterday, I said, “So, not an infant striped bear. A badger.” I shoved the scroll away. A badger, dead from a beating; an old foundling found dead with a bizarre wound. I could never forget that my father had been there when that foundling died.

  “Did you murder them? Feo and Durga?” I yelled to no one. “Just how miserable were you?!”

  I went wild now, pulling scrolls and books from the shelves and finding Slyngel Thebes’s gutter scribblings everywhere, connecting guilders to beasts at the point of a gone name. Horses, lizards, beetles, cats, skunks, dogs, sheep, pigs, snakes. This went far beyond the naming of his own kelps. Every name he had cut from the tales had been used in this guild to name someone, a foundling or a guilder.