“Rip who? Are you talking about Rip Thebes?” I said. Even under these circumstances I could be caught by a story. “And who’s Utlag?”
“I don’t know what he is. He does this thing with his throat.” He opened his mouth like a gaping hole and exuded a strange clicking sound at me. “And the regnat is as foul as anyone—”
“You’ve been to see the regnat?”
“Don’t worry. The regnat won’t find us,” said Errol. “His guards went to Thebes.” He looked at the flask thoughtfully, and then at me. Now his eyes were running with tears. “They tied that cat down, Odd Theebsh.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How can you stand to exist, knowing what we know about the streets? How much has to be ignored just so we can live here in this high place?”
“You’re bringing me down. Just get off the plank.”
He was silent for a moment.
“There’s a girl in that tent, isn’t there?” he said.
“None of your business.”
“Don’t spend the whole night in there. What’s her name?”
I hesitated. “It’s Terpsichore.”
“You don’t know her real name, do you?”
“Shut up.”
“You love that foundling.”
“I said, shut up. I’m not spending the whole night with this one.”
I couldn’t solve him. I turned and walked away. Went to the door of Terpsichore’s tent and crawled into the sack with her.
She said, “Who was that?”
“No one.”
“You’re not staying.”
“Of course I am. Not. I don’t know.”
I forgot about my not-dead cousin out there on the plank, who would return or fall. One or the other. I forgot about the foundlings in the morgues, the regnat, my insane father, the horrors of the streets, the date, the year, the city, my name. And the time.
Sunrise
SOMEWHERE IN MY BONES, I knew the sun was rising. But the muse’s kisses were an elixir, and after I had pulled off her leggings, desperate to climb onto her, it would have been easier to stop two falling bodies in a screamer than to stop us. I had waited my whole life for the relief of that moment. And then, without much warning, I would never be twelve again.
There was no yesterday. There was no tomorrow. There was now.
* * *
—
It was impossible to miss the silhouette of the roof master from Lascaux, his hair tied in elaborate knots. I could tell from his shape that his arms were crossed. I felt like a kelp caught stealing.
“She likes Parsival,” I said stupidly, realizing I was wearing the helmet.
He invoked, as he was obliged to do, that law of prudes and scriveners: “Should the night meet the dawn while two are together alone, they shall be bound as one, as the woven rays of sun and moon.”
Like everything else that begins as poetry and ends in paperwork, this law was written to ruin lives. Mine, specifically.
Her parents were brought up, though they would not look at me. My own mother was carried over the lines, wiping her hands from kitchen work, fussing about my dirty tunic and leggings. Why hadn’t I written, and no one had told her I was with a girl or such a beautiful one.
None of my friends were there. All of Terpsichore’s were, almost as if they had been expecting this.
What was her real name?
They bound us facing each other around the hips and chests. Wound the lines around the dropping apparatus. Terpsichore insisted on tying the actual knots. The brakes lifted and we heard a loud chunk, like a gallows. My stomach hit the top of my throat, our heads flipped back, and we fell: stones plummeting into the fog. Nothing was in my mind all that way. No hope of dying, no fear I could name, not even the song I had always planned to sing when I was dropping. I wrapped myself around her so that it was my ribs that broke in the bindings and not hers. I was the Grail knight, Parsival, after all. It was the least I could do.
Her real name was Leah, but I had never yet called her that.
Master Guilder
ERROL HAD ENOUGH EXPERIENCE carrying body bags across the roofs, in his years as a runner, to know he was in one. There was an occasional “Heave!” It was a command his stomach was obliged to obey.
They dropped him, and somebody unstrapped the bag and opened it. A furred muzzle punched his jaw and, behind the muzzle, three foundlings stared down at him in overbright lamplight.
“Leave him be,” said a man’s voice, and a big plate-sized hand pushed the stag and the foundlings away and shielded Errol’s eyes from the lamp.
“Woody Thebes,” said Errol.
“Errol Thebes.”
“Where am I?”
“Fiftieth strata of Thebes Guild. My quarters. You’re a lucky one, runner. The list of things that happened to you last night would fill a kelp’s diary.”
“Aye. Lucky. That’s me.” Errol’s head felt like someone had set the bog pots in it and was exploding them one by one with fireworks. “Oh no—”
Woody put a pot under Errol’s chin.
“’Twas a long night,” said Woody. “I believe whiskey was involved.”
Errol fell back on the bed while Woody went to rinse the pot. “I’m so sorry for this.” Woody turned in surprise. He had known a more arrogant pelt once. “I dreamt I fell from a plank.”
“There’s not so much cleaning up to do, in dreams.”
Errol looked at his hands, which appeared to be made of wax. “I hope nobody saw me like this.”
“Just us. Jamila Foundling, of course. I doubt you know her. She’s accustomed to foul things, though, being a foundling. She—acquired—your tellensac for you, from Margaret’s quarters. Here.”
“What did I say to it?” said Errol, reaching for the sac. “To the foundling.”
Woody raised an eyebrow. “How much time have you got?”
Errol groaned. He drew himself back into the body bag and held the flaps together. “An eternity.”
Errol had gone on at length about the quality of his private parts. He had tried to show Jamila all his scars and had talked about a fight he lost against a pack of street runners, and was more upset about a fight he had won.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” said Errol.
Woody scratched his chin. “You said the foundling reminded you of the guildmaster, who was lonely and spiteful and had bound herself to a monster. And then you tried to kiss her. That rather killed whatever festivity was left.”
Errol remained in the bag till noon.
* * *
—
When he woke again he was alone in the room. He was able now to move his eyeballs.
The bed was made of cedar planks. The pillows and blankets smelled of pine; the dressers and desk and chairs were maple. Tables, bowls, spoons, cupboards. Pencils. Everything had been ornately hand-carved. A spike of heartwood had been left on the desk in the middle of becoming a pair of knotting spikes. Errol picked one up and saw that Woody had carved a minuscule cage, and in the cage, an ironwood cricket.
Woody came from the hall and handed him a cup of tea.
“I thought you lived in the workshop,” said Errol.
“In another place and time, the forest would be home for me,” said Woody. “This is the irfelaf of a forest. I smell the woods in the wood.”
“Right now I just smell this foul bag and the stench of my own self. So you met Eikthyrnir, I see,” said Errol. The beast was sprawled on his back by a fire in the hearth. “He’s a stag.”
“Aye. Well. He barely fits in the guild tower. I had to bind him in ropes to lower him through the hatch. He’ll have to stay here in my quarters. Fremantle is searching for the spikes again and surely would be interested in finding you here.”
Errol sat up fast. The last tim
e he saw the iron spikes they were unsheathed and strapped to the stag. They were gone now and he had lost all memory of the night.
“. . . thought you were gone, Errol Thebes,” Woody was saying. “It’s an uncommon thing, to have you back in this guild. Aye, but I must be off to work or Margaret will come find me, and she’ll find you. I’ll be back at midday. By then some toast will go down all right. No one but the foundlings knows you’re here. And the hatch-guilder.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “By the way, it was a drop for your cousin Odd today, as well. He was bound this morning to the runner he calls Terpsichore.”
Errol lay back and put his hands over his face. “What a fool.”
“Don’t be iron on him. ’Twas noble. He didn’t argue or dispute the dawn the way some do.”
“I didn’t mean him. I meant me.”
* * *
—
Errol slept fitfully until all that was left of the whiskey was the headache.
Woody had rigged up a rain shower from black leather sacks of water suspended by a wire bucket outside the vents of the tower, heating in the winter sun. Errol scrubbed himself and his wounds clean under a pure rain of hot water. When he got out and dressed in the foundling’s gray tunic and leggings Woody had left for him, he turned to look again at that water system. Guilders took only cold baths. Where had he seen such a device before? Next to this contraption, there were a dozen tiny trees growing in the band of light from the air vent. Trees? He spun around. On Woody’s desk he saw a rolled quill holder made of wool felt. Next to it, a fan spun in the heat from a tiny fire fueled by wood shavings, warming the room. Woody’s quarters were full of things Errol already had seen somewhere. He laughed suddenly, for it came to him. These were ideas he himself had sketched as a kelp on scraps of paper and tacked to the walls of our room.
Bound
WHEN I SAID “GOOD MORNING” to my bound-wife, I tried to hide my panic at having such a thing. The weight of her hung on me like a stone. Could I step out of her tent without telling her where I was going? What if I met some other girl right away who was better? Terpsichore sat in her bedroll watching me dress, taking a handful of the beads she had from the apothecary. I missed my own tent, my books, my roof. She gave me a long list of the things I would have to do today to satisfy her guild’s requirements for apprentices. I would not have to take exams to be accepted, she said, because I was wed to her, as if it were some great honor to make rags and flies. On and on she went like a roof master. Had I said I would apprentice here? Had I agreed to subject myself for life to the infinite ropewalks of Lascaux? Feh. Was I to provide for her or was she able to make her own work? Could we stay on the roofs? I went dismally with her to breakfast in Lascaux’s yurt. She and I looked like guilders now, rumpled and committed.
The girls elbowed one another and flirted with me. They were safe, now that I had a bound-wife. The boys stuffed their shirts with two buns each and rolled their eyes at me and winked. Idiots. I’d have done that myself the night before.
And then, worst of all, they all picked up their plates of breakfast and left us alone. They thought what? That I would undress her here and now if I could. But I wanted the opposite. She was attractive enough. However—oh, I could fill a book with however.
* * *
—
When I passed Grid later in the morning on the plank at Thebes, she looked me over and said, “Congratulations?” She asked me if the muse was happy and I shrugged, and said, “Of course she is. She has me.” But the joke fell flat. Truth: I didn’t know how my bound-wife was. Parsival might have checked in to see how his new bride felt after such a hasty binding, whether she looked at him and felt her spirits rise. But I was not, in fact, him.
The Apothecary
ERROL STARED, agitated, at the apothecarist’s door on the eighth strata of Thebes, wondering how an apothecary could be closed for business during the day in a busy guild.
“Pull the string” came a voice from the other side of the door. Errol reached over his head, found a string in the air and pulled it. He heard a bell tinkle just behind the door. The door opened immediately and a wiry man in a red apron stood in front of him, pressing his fingertips together in the shape of a tent.
“And?” he said.
“I must have something for an unrelenting headache,” said Errol.
“‘Unrelenting.’ That’s new.” The man spun on his heel. Errol ran to keep up with him, immediately lost in a maze of hallways, each hall lined from floor to ceiling with shelves; each shelf organized with crocks, tins, and jars. The air smelled thickly of reeds and earth. It reminded Errol of the river, where he had been washed of the blood of a street fight, and of Dagmar’s yurt, where her boiling salves had killed the infections in his wounds. He was surprised to feel a longing in himself to be back on the streets, on the riverbanks where he realized, at this random moment, he had felt at home.
The apothecarist led him to a room with a high table, a stool, and wood burning in a hearth in the wall. Behind the table were a dozen barrels, covered with slate lids. Errol took the stool while the apothecarist produced a mortar, which he rubbed with the corner of his apron.
“I find myself thinking, a whiskey headache,” the man said.
“That’s remarkable. How did you know?” said Errol, wincing at the volume of his own voice.
The apothecarist shrugged. “The pallor of the skin. The distended veins in the eyes. The restlessness in the legs. Also the flask in your tunic pocket.” The man opened a barrel marked KASTE OP. Inside was a mound of thousands of tiny, waxed beads, a dozen of which he expertly flipped into the mortar.
“Take six now and six more in six minutes.” He covered a yawn with the back of his hand. “Relief comes in twelve minutes.” He tapped rainwater from a steaming pot in the fire and set a cup of it on the table. Errol poured the first six beads into his hand and swallowed them with the rain. The apothecarist reached into the drawer under the table, took out a pair of sand timers, and set one of them on end. He and Errol watched the sand flow through the tiny funnel.
By and by the apothecarist yawned again. He pulled a thick leather logbook from under the table and opened it. “The apprentice’s name?”
“Uh. Bayard. That is, Bayard Phrygia. Bayard Thebes,” Errol said. “It takes a while to get used to the name change.”
The apothecarist studied him closely, then returned to the page. “You’re not registered here.”
“Registered with an apothecary?” said Errol. “For what purpose?”
“For your ration of these,” the man said, tapping his quill on another barrel behind him, labeled SIS. “We give them to all the new apprentices, the runners coming down off the roofs. They call them ‘sissies.’”
“What are they for?” said Errol.
The apothecarist shrugged. “After three years on the roofs, all runners have trouble living in the guild houses. Restlessness, wanderlust, a longing for high places, et cetera.”
“I won’t have those troubles. I’m glad for the safety of a guild tower.”
“Just wait. You will have trouble. And when you do, these will make you forget the things that you wish you had: the roofs, the sky, your old friends, the exuberant work on the lines, all the exciting things you used to do on the roofs. They ease the transition.” The apothecarist put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Otherwise you’re up all night roaming the hallways, carrying on about a kind of homesickness you can’t describe. Spending all your money on whiskey. Frightened of the infinite thirty or forty years ahead of you in a quarantined guild.” He patted the barrel with his hand. “Unless I give you these beads, no one in this tower will get any sleep.”
“Keep them for someone else. I don’t need them,” said Errol.
“You are all, I think, like wild animals, discovering the bars for the first time, of your cage.”
“�
��Sissies’ sounds like an insult of some kind,” said Errol.
“I suppose. The apprentices gave it that nickname. The original name had to do with an arrogant king.”
Errol paused. “Sisyphus?” he said.
“One and the same. Pushing the stone up the mountain every day for infinity.”
Errol thought of the foundling Jamila. She had said she would prefer to be Sisyphus. She would never agree to take these beads, Errol thought. Stubborn. He pointed to the next barrel. “And what are those?”
“Pasione Ritorno? The Return of Passion. For falling into love.”
Errol laughed.
The apothecarist tipped his head. “Is it funny? Perhaps laughter is assent. Perhaps you need them already?”
“I think I can manage to fall in love on my own, with all due respect to your beads,” said Errol.
“I’m sure you can, the first day. And the second. But a year later? Or two? Most often they’re used for falling back into love.”
The sand in the first timer ran out, and the apothecarist flipped the second one. Errol swallowed his next six beads. “Do they work, those passion beads?”
The apothecarist bristled. “This is not quackery, Bayard Phrygia. Or Bayard Thebes. Let us say your wife is bored of you. Are you bound? Not yet? Well, imagine a wife, then. She once loved even the way your breath smelt after sleep. That same wife, five years later, is tired of the annoying way you assume she wants breakfast in bed. There is nothing for the two of you but the same four walls, nowhere to go in this iron tower, nothing new to discuss. Perhaps you married her when the sky was your world. But now”—the apothecarist shrugged—“perhaps you come down to see me, and I put two of these beads on the guild’s tab. You melt them in the bottom of her tea cup and I don’t see either of you again for weeks, except maybe walking the guildhalls at night making eyes at each other. Maybe she even pinches you in the backside when she thinks I am not looking.” The apothecarist tipped his head to the side. “Just be sure not to put it into another woman’s cup, by accident. Then, instead of love, we’ve got theater.”
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 28