City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “‘Don’t ask me, Odd Thebes. You’ve awakened the kelps now and the bound-wife. Get out of my bedchamber before you wake the dead,’ said Heimdall.

  “‘Wait. Must I ask an uncle? I haven’t got an uncle.’

  “‘Any guilder.’

  “Finally I understood. Every year a handful of altruistic pelts happened to ask the Parsival question of a handful of guilders. And those guilders, all of whom know the secret, reported those names to the guildmaster, and those pelts rose to the roof of Thebes.

  “I jammed my foot in the door before Heimdall could shut me out. ‘Tell me Errol Thebes didn’t just walk up to some guilder and say, What troubles you? That would be utterly pathetic.’

  “Heimdall snorted. ‘Five hundred times a week. Altruism is Errol Thebes’s middle name. Whereas your middle name is—’ I slammed his door.

  “I went to my mother that morning before breakfast in the Great Hall. She was mending a kitchen towel and I waited, knowing my chance would come.

  “‘Ow,’ she said, and put a needle-pricked finger in her mouth.

  “‘What is it that troubles you, Mam?’

  “Gudrun Thebes burst into tears, pressed my face to her neck, and sent me down with a note to Margaret the guildmaster, who made me sign a contract that, among other things, swore against my own life that I had no idea how I had been chosen. Three thousand uurs lighter, I was rising. Exactly like Errol Thebes.”

  Jamila was waiting with her arms crossed.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well what? Are you done?” she said.

  “Yes. Didn’t you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I don’t deserve to be here, on the roofs.”

  “That’s what this is all about?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Everyone else up here is worthy. I’m not.”

  “Please. Confess this to someone who cares. I’m not even allowed to read your library books. I sleep on a coffin. If I didn’t steal your food, I would be dead by now.”

  “But I’ll never be like Parsival.”

  “You’re exactly like him. You just have one thing left to decide.”

  “What?”

  “How many more pages do you have of unrelenting self-interest?”

  Sallanen

  WE WERE SILENT FOR A WHILE, listening to the bakers kneading loaves in the roof kitchens of all the guilds around us. The crews were hauling purgament to the edges, tossing it over before the mail came on the lines. For the moment I didn’t care about iron spikes or my cousin or Slyngel Thebes or whether I was Parsival.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jamila said.

  “I was just wondering what I would look like with buck teeth.” She laughed. “No really. I was wondering who your mother is,” I said.

  She looked up at me, surprised. “What made you think of that?”

  “Well, who could ever leave you?” Jamila touched her foot to mine. “Someone must know who she is. You can’t keep a wart a secret in this city, never mind a child. And if you found out, then you wouldn’t be a foundling.” I laughed as casually as I could. “And you would suit me then.”

  “Whoever she is, I don’t want to find her. She’s a horrid mother. Worse than Oedipus’s mam. Worse than any of the bad mams we know. Worse than Margaret Thebes.”

  “Feh,” I said, insulted that she had trodden over my tender proposition. “Worse than Margaret? That’s impossible.”

  “Margaret told everybody Errol had been the ugliest kelp anyone ever raised. Whiny and fearful and always losing things. She said that when he would run after everyone with his arms up, nobody would pick him up. It was better, she said, that he lived with Gudrun Thebes.”

  I remembered watching my cousin Errol, listening to his mam say all those things about him. He was so small.

  “Back when he was a kelp, he used to draw. Remember?”

  “Aye. His drawings were all over our walls.” I was willing to talk all night about Errol Thebes if I could just be with Jamila. She was lean and strong and infinite, and I wanted her. Still, that memory she had conjured, of Errol’s drawings, reminded me of another post on our wall. Errol hated that the name of our city was lost. Not carved in stone or written in our books. Nobody even bothered to jot it on a scrap of parchment. So Errol posted a list on our door, for everyone to see. New Camelot, Ithaca, Nirvana, Zerzura. These were his suggestions, I suppose, if anyone was listening. Shangri-La, Valhalla. I suggested Cloud Cuckoo Land. His lists grew pragmatic. Noreia, he wrote, because we also had iron. Colophon, for the spindles. Thebes, where they farmed dragon’s teeth. For the better part of one year his list ended with Taygete, after the nymph who kept charge of wild animals. On the day the regnat dropped Rip and Fenn from Fremantle, he wrote Hel. Weeks later I passed by the list and saw that he had crossed that out and written Nostos. In Pliny’s tongue: a homecoming. Then Sky-rim. Iron-forest. Roof-sea. And so I knew he was reading Beowulf. Finally, on the day before we left for the roofs he finished the list. Hrof-gestas. From our grandmothers’ tongue. Literally, strangers in the sky. Not so literally, high exile.

  “And he had all these ideas for things he would build to make life easier in the guild,” said Jamila. “And Margaret Thebes used to hold up his papers in the Great Hall and say, ‘Would any of you actually plant a forest in a soil-less guild? Or build a hot-rain bath? Who would buy these ideas?’ And nobody would say anything.”

  “Woody bought all of Errol’s drawings.”

  “Woody saved him, I think.”

  I rubbed my neck, trying to ease an ache that had been there all week. Jamila stood on her hands, flipped upside down, passed below me, hand over hand along the plank, swung herself up again behind me and sat down. All this risk, just so she could press her fingers into the muscles of my shoulders.

  “Grazia dolce,” I whispered. Imagine that nobody wanted to be touched by a foundling. If only they knew. “Well, but,” I continued, “we have seen Margaret in a different light. Do you remember when we staged Odysseus as a play, after the guilders did? We were kelps, five or six times around the sun. Errol was Odysseus. Talwyn played Penelope. Grid was Athena.”

  “You were Homer.”

  “Aye,” I said. “I can’t believe you remember that. We had slaves and oarsmen and heroes and sirens and Polyphemus and a pile of suitors and a ridiculously huge flock of sheep because everyone wanted to be sheep. We were too little to know what the lines meant, but we shouted them at one another anyway. ‘What’s my name? It’s Nobody!’”

  Jamila yelled, “‘Fine! I’ll eat Nobody last!’”

  She took a long swig of the tea. “Remember when Grid spoke the last lines of the play? Margaret was sobbing.”

  “Aye. ‘Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return home. I held the dawn for them so they could be together long through that night.’” Jamila’s fingers pressed into my back and neck, and I longed for anyone to hold the dawn for us.

  “All right. Enough,” I said. “I will do you now.” I turned around on the plank and slid her backward so she sat between my legs. I undid her plait and put the tie between my teeth, and re-plaited her hair. I put my hands on her back, and she flinched.

  “I only just touched you. Did that hurt?” I said.

  “No. But nobody has ever touched me before.”

  “Feh. Prepare for a good thing.”

  I pressed my fingers into each notch of her spine. Pressed my hands around her shoulders, like we runners did for one another after long days on the lines. And then? Then she was crying. And she lifted the back of her shirt and pressed my hands onto her ribs.

  A moment ago we were Nobody.

  “Corona borealis,” I said.

  “What?”

  “In the birthmarks on your back you have the constellation.”

  “You’re making fun
of me.”

  “No. All seven stars of it. The crowning jewel, Alphekka, and next to it, Nusakkan.” I was touching these marks on her.

  “So there is at least one good thing about me. One beautiful thing.”

  “Feh,” I laughed. “Are you jesting?” But then I realized that of course she was just like the rest of us. She didn’t know what she looked like. She was beautiful. She smelled of seed spices and oiled flowers and smoke and hard work and suddenly I had to know, as I had that night on Al-Razi, how she tasted.

  I pulled my blanket from my pack and wrapped it around us. I started to take my tunic off. “In the darkness you can be mine. On a plank. Right? So long as we don’t go into a tent. No paperwork.”

  She pushed my blanket off her and got up fast. “I have to go.”

  “Wait! Why?” We were both up now, balancing over the abyss.

  “Why?” she said. “Because it isn’t fair, what I’m doing to you.”

  “What you’re doing to me?”

  “I seek relief.”

  “Me too. If you want to call it that. Wait, I don’t want to bind myself to you either, if that’s what you mean. You can tell all the foundlings you had a runner. That’s worth something.”

  She opened her mouth. Closed it. Finally she said, “And would you tell your friends you had a foundling?” I said nothing. I was actually thinking to myself, What friends? But she said, “Go away.”

  “This is my roof. You go away.” Oh, why didn’t I just close my mouth? “You know, Jamila, I could just have you bound to me. Just like that. Nobody would stop me.”

  She stepped away from me, as if she were nine again and we were in the library. “You could try,” she said.

  “I might do it someday,” I said blithely. “Iosal foundling.”

  She wiped her face hard now, finished with crying. “You wouldn’t bind yourself to a foundling. You’d have to live in a morgue.”

  “What difference does it make now?” I said. “Errol Thebes is gone. I might as well live with you.”

  “You wouldn’t survive it for a night.”

  I made a dismissive gesture with my chin. “I’m a runner. I can survive anything.”

  “You’re sallanan.”

  “Unstable? Don’t make me translate, Jamila. All I wanted was ten minutes on a plank.”

  “It’s hard to imagine a less compelling offer. And now you have a hundred and twenty-two pages left.”

  “What?”

  She turned and leapt from the plank. My heart seized in my chest. But she arced through the sky below us, caught the wall of Bamako in her hands and feet, disappeared around the corner of the tower, and was gone.

  Gaol

  EIKTHYRNIR SHIFTED HIS WEIGHT and exhaled in the solitude of Rip’s warren. Massive stag, tiny room. This wrongness of proportion set him on edge.

  Wide-spaced eyes, ruddy hair, broad chest, an arrogant lift of the chin. He and Errol looked much alike. They smelled of game and the cold sweat of high air. Rip said it wasn’t possible for any such things to be true, but it was hard for him to deny what he could plainly see.

  There was no way to pull the stag through Rip’s narrow door without sawing off the antlers. Errol held little regard for his brother’s quarters or for the purgament that seemed to materialize from nowhere even in the short time Errol had been here. But it did occur to him, as he watched Rip destroy the jamb of the doorway, and as a chilling mob of shadow creatures appeared in the sewer main, the contents of Rip’s quarters would be pillaged as soon as they were gone. His brother had no plan to return.

  * * *

  —

  I can write what came next with only the most meager detail, for I, Odd Thebes, was on the high roofs of the city when all of this occurred and later I was able to extract only shreds of scenes and never the whole thing. It is better, told scant.

  * * *

  —

  Rip held up his lantern and pointed uneasily toward a downward slope into the mines. Why did they ever go this way, instead of up and out into the streets? I don’t know. There were no passages wide enough for Eikthyrnir, Rip told Errol. It was my theory, bard that I am, that some gravity, some pull of plot, called them down.

  The tunnel drove deep into the earth in the form of a spiral. The way at first was wide enough for Rip, Errol, and the stag to walk abreast, but narrowed as side tunnels branched away. They fell into single file and came to pinches through which even a kelp could not have fit, and the stag had to be backed out and a new route chosen. By the time they were an uur down, they were disoriented and could not have turned back if they tried.

  Rip grew sullen. He kept asking whether the iron spikes in Errol’s pack were sheathed. They were low on lamp fuel.

  They came to a broad arch with a frame around it, carved with codes, the entrance to some section of the mines. Crudely hewn granite stairs led farther down. Nothing remained of the labor that had once thrived in this ancient mine, except barrows abandoned in some rush to leave, and here and there a pick or shovel left in a crevice. The passages now were filled with a fine mist of an underground river. When they came abruptly upon the water, the current was too wide to see across in Rip’s light, and they could not hear each other over the torrent.

  Rip yelled, “This will carry us out of here!”

  “Are you sure?”

  They waded into the deep and were carried fast along in the cold current in silence. Rip and Errol held on to the stag, careening around stone and slipping down water chutes. When the current gathered too much strength, they let the stag tow them to the side.

  They were soaked through and cold, and moved along passages, trying to find some path broad enough for the stag’s antlers or some route that turned upward. Were they moving deeper into the earth or up out of it? Was it morning or night?

  A sensation overcame Errol that the shape of the body of air was larger. He slowed. Rip was behind him with the lamp, which made his own shape a shadow in front of him. He stepped forward, falling into a complete lack of stone or earth. He grabbed at air, slamming his flailing shins on a shaft of bedrock. He felt a quick jerk to his shoulders as his fall came to a halt.

  Rip pulled him up and they lowered the lamp into vast emptiness of the hole. Thirty feet below lay the body of a young man, staring up at them. Errol yelled down into the shaft, but the body did not stir. Errol yelled again, louder. Rip put his hand over Errol’s mouth. The man was gone and, too, the lifeless bird next to him.

  A few strides from this hole there was another like it. A human form curled against the wall at the bottom of this one as well, and a sheep lay next to it, their legs and arms out like kelps. Errol yelled, “Stay high.” It was foolish, an old habit. The figure shifted and yelled at them to go away. Errol held the lamp high. Shafts like this one were everywhere, as far as he could see. Like a pox. Some were covered with stone disks. Some disks had a hole drilled in the top or a set of bars. The mine smelled of the grime of dung and urine and decomposition.

  At one pit, a ghoulish face appeared at the hole in the disk without warning, its teeth bared, its eyes bulging and white. The girl, his age, opened her mouth, her tongue flapping like a nightmare, her breath sick. He felt a pinch and looked at his fingers. A thick-legged white spider, the size of his fist, was clinging to him through the bars. He pulled back his hand, and the spider tore away and dropped into the shaft. The girl said they needed water, they were all waiting for water. That someone went to find the spikes and everyone was starving. Errol couldn’t understand her, but he promised water and said he had the spikes with him. Rip yanked him away. “Shut up. Don’t promise anything.”

  Then? Then. From the far end of the cavern came a slow, piercing cry, as though the air itself had been rent in two. Rip said they needed to get the stag out of gaol. It was the first Errol had heard that word.

  Errol edged along th
e wall to see where they were going. He hid behind an outcrop of stone, then moved to a ledge and dropped to a crawl. Twenty feet down, a crude arena stood empty. It had been cut from the bedrock and enclosed with iron bars. They could make out the shadows of men dragging some silhouette along the ground. A struggle.

  Iosal

  MUCH LATER, when I saw Errol, he could not speak without weeping about what he saw. He sat with me, his knees to his chest, hiding in the morgues from a memory he could never escape. Nothing had prepared him. No guild. No workbench. No book. I demanded, when I did see him, to know what had happened to him. I insisted until he relented.

  “They dragged that cat into the arena,” he said.

  “What cat?” I asked.

  “The blackness I had seen. That silhouette.”

  “A house cat?”

  “It was a wild cat. Fierce. And so black it looked like a hole in the air. It took four men to haul it in. The animal was writhing and clawing at them. They caught its legs in snares and pulled them out to the sides. A cat’s legs don’t move that way. They don’t.”

  “Why were they at this? Had the cat harmed them?”

  “No. I don’t know. They tethered it to four posts. It was struggling like a demon. Teeth and claws everywhere. The mob in the stands was cheering. I don’t know why. It was just like the pub. They wanted something to die. And then—” He sat silent, his hands over his mouth.

  “Then what?”

  “They left the cat there alone.”

  “Iosal,” I whispered.

  “When the bell went off, the mob started to throw things at the cat, over the bars. Purgament from the roofs. Rot, rusted metal, anything they could find.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And then one of them pulled out a crossbow and a bucket full of bolts.”

  “This is low—”

  “Aye. The first bolt from that archer hit the cat in the thick of the back leg. The cat went down, tangled in the tight tethers, and got up again, struggling. Howling, but more like a kitten, although what do I know about kittens. All the while they were cheering. Hitting it in the face and the head. I was so fixed on the cat that I didn’t realize there were men behind us. They were running around to the shafts of gaol and prying the lids off with sticks, dropping a line in, grabbing anything, anyone, still alive. A beautiful dog, a goat, that sheep I had seen. There was terror in those animals and those foundlings in the pits. All of them were crying out, for one another’s sake. As we watched, the men dragged those animals into the arena, threw them at the cat, and then cheered as it tore into them, even bound as it was. And then came Jago.”