“Was that humor?” said Errol.
“I find myself laughing.”
“What about that one—Taedium Absentis?”
“The remedy for boredom. An uur after taking one of these beads, you will find that even congealed eggs are fascinating. The History of Head Lice, volume four, exceeds, in pure excitement, the tales of Virgil.” The man put his hand on his stack of books, which included all four volumes on lice.
“Why don’t people just find something to do? Play games, like we used to when we were kelps? Act at theater?” said Errol.
“Right. And after four decades of theater, you’ll come see me, too, for a few of these beads.”
“I won’t.”
The apothecarist contemplated Errol’s face. “No. Maybe you won’t. You are, no doubt, made of stronger iron than everyone else in the history of this city.”
The apothecarist put his fingers on the next barrel. “These evoke memories of glorious things in your life, things that perhaps never actually happened. Take two and you’ve been a warrior; five, a victorious one. Ten, you’re bound to Helen of Troy.”
“Why not take the whole barrel?” said Errol.
“Everyone says that. When it comes down to it, no one dares. These,” the apothecarist continued with his fingers on the next barrel, “make for long, glorious dreams. Those? Are for removing fear. And those—”
“Stop,” said Errol. “I don’t want to know any more.”
The apothecarist paused in mid-sentence. “I see.” The two of them were silent for a long while. “I cannot lie,” the man said quietly. “It is not a high life, in Thebes House, but it is a middling good life. The work can be interesting if you put yourself into it. Beautiful things are made here, and the world waits for them with anticipation. You live maybe four or five decades out of the sunlight, and if you are restless during those decades, or bored, or afraid, or devoid of certain necessary feelings, I am at your service.”
The sand on the second timer ran out. Errol stood and drank one more cup of the rain. “Thank you,” he said. “My headache is gone.”
“It is nothing,” said the apothecarist. “Literally. In faith, the water was the cure. Whiskey dries you out.”
Errol laughed. He turned to go and then turned back. “I have a question of a personal nature.”
The apothecarist was writing something with his quill in the logbook. “‘Confidential’ is my middle name.”
“I wonder what the remedy might cost, to cure a case of the ague.”
The man did not stop writing. “Quinine and artemisia are easy enough to come by. Inexpensive. I find myself wondering, why do you ask?”
“I have a friend with it,” said Errol.
“Ah. A friend.” The apothecarist put down the quill. “Who is your so-called friend?”
“It’s not me, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know it’s not you.”
“How do you know?”
“Where to begin? The ague, known also as malaria, is an illness borne in the spit of insects of swamps and lowlands, and we have few swamps in the guilds, or lowlands. Or, for that matter, insects. Occasionally we have the rumor of head lice.”
“I have carried tons of beads, including artemisia and quinine, from the ships to Raepteek House, from Raepteek to other towers of our district,” said Errol. “Are you telling me we have none of those beads, here in Thebes?”
“Do not insult me, apprentice. Follow me and I will put my hands on the bottles of those beads before you can forget your name again.”
The apothecarist stopped abruptly, lit a lamp, picked up a thin white bottle, and dusted it with his apron, although it was already clean. He poured a formula of five brown beads and two green-and-white-striped ones into Errol’s hand.
“Artemisia,” the apothecarist said. “And quinine. I didn’t say we don’t have them; I said we don’t need them. We don’t need ninety percent of the medication in this apothecary. We’re quarantined.” He patted the iron wall.
“Aye. Well, a kelp would require a great deal of this remedy, more than we have here, am I right?” said Errol.
“I have enough for sixty-five or seventy children here, and can order more from Raepteek. How is it that you know a child with the ague?”
Errol stepped back. “Pardon me. Did you think I said ague? It must be the accent I carry from Phrygia House. Not ague. Ache. Sorry.” Errol poured the beads back into the bottle and wiped his hand on his leggings. “Ache,” he said again.
The apothecarist studied Errol closely, his forefingers tapping his apron. At length he said, “I am just as interested in helping people as you are. And I am obviously better at it or you wouldn’t be here, planning to steal what I myself have made and can prescribe. I would find a case of the ague fascinating and would be honored to treat a child. Shall we continue this ruse, or do you want my help?”
A Contract
MY BROTHER HEIMDALL was out of place in the yurt on the roof of Thebes. “So,” he said. “Bound are you, then? May as well be dead.”
“What of it?” I said. “You don’t belong here. A nightmare, come to summon me.”
“You don’t belong here either, Parsival. Time to come down, now you’re wed.”
“I belong now. And I’m not dead, brother. Only bound.” I lit a lamp on the table and watched the shadows play off his face. “Bound pairs are allowed to stay high.”
“I give you nine months on the roofs and you’ll be down there with the rest of us, tending a skinny, puking baby. Can’t raise a kelp on the roof. It’ll slip right over the edge.”
“Did you come up here to practice your soothsaying?” I said.
I hadn’t seen him in two years. In that time I had grown lean and strong. He had grown thick pads of fat on his shoulders and black stains on his teeth. We sat at the table across from each other. He ran his fingers over three pieces of parchment before him, neatened them into a squared stack and stared at me.
I said, “Did you need to borrow money from me?”
“You’ll be the one needing money, now that you’re bound to Leah Lascaux,” he said.
“You don’t know anything about her,” I said, aware that for all I knew she was probably waking up at Lascaux right about now and wondering where I was.
Heimdall slid the top piece of paper across the table and I looked at it from a distance.
He said, “If I don’t know anything, then I don’t know Leah Lascaux is in debt twenty-three thousand uurs. And I don’t know that her parents were paying it off. But debt, as you know, is transferred to the bound pair on the day of the binding. I wonder if she chose you for this reason, so she can buy shoes and festive things to put in her hair. In any case, I’m afraid you will not be able”—here he grinned lecherously—“to satisfy her. You don’t make anywhere near enough money.”
“I’m well paid and so is she,” I said, although I had no idea how much money she made, and this was the first I’d heard of her debt. Twenty-three thousand was a staggering amount, more than I could earn in any apprenticeship I was considering.
Heimdall pushed the second piece of parchment across the table.
He said, “If by ‘well paid’ you mean that you earned a thousand three hundred thirty-two uurs since you rose to the roofs, you are correct. Except, as you must know, the money you earn before you are bound, everything up until this morning at dawn, returns to your family. I have had it transferred to my accounts.”
I steadied myself with a hand on the edge of the table. “How did you gain access to my accounts without my consent?”
“I’m family.” He tapped his fingers on the third piece of parchment.
“What is that?”
“This document once belonged to Errol Thebes.” I felt my jaw tighten. He slid the page over to me. It was an apprentice’s contract. I igno
red a hundred hereafters and whenceforths in the language of Virgil and dropped to the end. There was an offer: “An apprenticeship in the documents room in the Guild House of Fremantle on a per annum salary of twenty-five thousand uurs with the expectation of guild work for the duration of: One (1) Lifetime.”
The regnat had signed the bottom of the page with a flourish.
“I don’t understand. This is a contract Errol received, to work in Fremantle. But someone crossed out his name and wrote mine.”
“Not someone. Heimdall Thebes. I wrote your name there today after the regnat came to see me.”
“Why? Why would the regnat come to see you?” I looked at the date at the top of the contract. “This contract was not written today. It was written two years ago. Errol and I had just come up to the roofs.”
“Aye. Look at the date. It was a big night for Errol Thebes.” I stared at the page, drawing a blank. “Think about it. It will come,” Heimdall said. “It was the night he had done that Big Run, and suddenly he could have anything he wanted—”
“It’s called the Long Run.”
“Aye.”
“He won it. The prize was anything he wanted, anything at all. He never told me what he requested. He wanted to go to Fremantle?”
“Aye. And read the small print,” Heimdall said, a grin spreading on his face. Several boxes had been X-ed in the Addendums section, entitling Errol to huge food allowances, access to the libraries of all the guilds, a room in his quarters just for card games. There was a diagram of the floor plan of his quarters, which would make his mam’s at Thebes look like a broom closet.
“Read the last bit,” said Heimdall.
I dropped to the bottom. Someone had handwritten: The apprentice is permitted to bring a single foundling to Fremantle. The foundling will be Jamila Foundling, Thebes House.
I looked up. “He didn’t even know Jamila. Why would he bargain to take my foundling with him?”
“I can’t imagine,” he said, playing with me.
My mouth opened and closed in surprise and pain. “He found out about her somehow,” I said. “And he realized that I had kept her from him. This is why he never told me the prize he had chosen—”
Heimdall chuckled. “Well, but think of it now. Now you can take it all back. Even the foundling can still come with you, as she has no choice in the matter and she can—shall we say?—read to you, even if you’re bound to someone else.” My heart was starting to race at the thought of a life near Jamila.
I stared at Heimdall, trying to find the card trick he was playing on me. “Did you pay to put my name on this contract, with my money?” I said. It was all I could think of.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, putting out his thick hands in a gesture of goodwill. Then his eyes shifted and there was a shadow in the pale flesh at the sides of his face.
“What’s in this for you?”
“Nothing! You fooled yourself to think that Errol, or any guildmaster’s son, would have anything to do with you. I have just showed you how a family truly watches out for its own. When the regnat visited me today, I urged him to put your name here.”
“The regnat,” I murmured. The pain obscured the fact that the contract made no sense. Errol had won the Long Run. He was the star of the roofs. Why would he ask for something he was going to get anyway? All I could think was that Errol struck that deal with the city in order to take everything I had.
“. . . I would do this because I am your brother,” Heimdall was saying. “But the regnat is not so generous. Errol Thebes is back in the towers.”
“In Thebes,” I said, before I had a chance to keep my mouth shut. In a split second I realized what was going to be demanded of me.
“It’s a small exchange for what I’ve done for you today. Lure him in with a girl, like you did the first time.”
“That was an accident,” I said.
“Have another accident. When you bring him to me, all of this will be yours. You’ll have uurs coming out of your—”
I raised my hands to stop him. I stared out the door of the yurt, into the night. “What has Errol Thebes ever done to you?” I said.
“Done to me,” Heimdall said. “Do you have any idea what it is, to be the son of Slyngel and Gudrun Thebes, when your aunt is the guildmaster?”
“I have some idea,” I said, under my breath.
“Fenn and Rip—they had everything. I was an obscure kelp in their kingdom.” He paused, remembering. “You are aware of the boredom contained in this tower?”
I nodded imperceptibly.
“But those two didn’t care for the kingdom. They showed no interest in running their mother’s guild. So, what does Heimdall Thebes do? He watches. He waits. He is between the two sons, agewise, and invisible to both. Their mother will not speak to him. She tracks her own two pelts, trying every night to get them to come back to their quarters, to do their work. She longs for their father, a creeping bound-husband who comes and goes at night and climbs walls. Heimdall Thebes thinks to himself: Margaret Thebes is a rising guildmaster in this city. Even the regnat comes here to meet with her, to seek her council behind closed doors. If her sons are fools, Heimdall Thebes will step in and run the guild. He will rise.”
“All you’ve ever done is stoke furnaces,” I said.
He flinched. “I came to Margaret Thebes with calculations showing how much better the guild would fare if we opened the flues to capture the winds outside the tower. She liked that. Then I found a clever way to store extra firewood, to hang it from the rafters so we could forge at full capacity straight through Beklemek.”
“And she fell in love with you.”
“One day Margaret takes Heimdall into her quarters. She teaches him the books. Just the books for the furnace rooms, but a month later she puts him in charge of the disposal of the ash, through pipes he has commissioned, which dump directly onto the street instead of into the earth as the old ones did. The old ones clogged with the sewage, and overflowed.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“I was rising. But then, one day and without warning, Margaret Thebes is thick with child again. Our uncle, the air-licking freak, has not been here for seven years, and I suspect every man in the guild. How can there be a third? But sure enough, she is in labor. And there comes of her a third son. And now I, I who have already been patient, I have to wait while that kelp grows up. And as luck would have it, he grows up more arrogant than his brothers. And perfect in every way—agile, inventive, calm, attentive to detail. When his brothers go to the roofs, he looks like the young prince. Perfectly suited to the work of running a guild. I hated him.”
I said, “Errol Thebes’s mother didn’t even like him. And his brothers left him. And he had no father. How could you be jealous? He was more miserable than any of us.” I already knew the answer to that question. Heimdall had not been the only jealous one.
Heimdall slumped. “When Margaret sends Errol to our quarters, tells our mam to raise him, I think to myself, ‘Good. As long as he’s with us, he’ll become nothing.’
“But I didn’t factor in Woody Thebes. One afternoon Woody and Errol come to look at the books. I am working now in the guildmaster’s offices, but Margaret asks me to step away from my desk. Remember, I am eighteen times now around the sun, and the young prince is eight. When he is done with the calculations she gives him, using my pen, Margaret says five words to me: ‘Return to the furnaces, Heinrich.’ And when I steady my knees, I find the words to tell her my name is Heimdall.” His jaw twitched. “Which means I will strive for my entire life in the low places of this cold guild tower, scraping the stink out of the pipes I myself have invented.
“What do I have against Errol Thebes?” He spit, a brown gob slipping down our yurt wall. “When the regnat contacted me this morning, I leapt at the chance to find Errol. For once, one of us should rise.”
&
nbsp; I pulled the papers closer to me on the table, stared at them. Errol had planned to leave me behind. What kind of a friend would take what little I wanted and have it for himself? Would leave me behind with a wife and her debt?
“What will the regnat do to Errol?” I could barely hear my own voice.
“It’s unlikely they will let him wear a drop-line this time.” A grin played at the corners of his eyes. “You know this will happen with or without you. You may as well profit.”
A Stranger
ERROL CLIMBED OUT of the foundlings’ wall through a hole under the stairs at the thirty-fourth strata. He stood at the shadow of the arch to the Great Hall, smelling root stews in the midday kitchens. He had not expected to hear the workaday chatter of the first lunch shift. Some kelps ran past him on the stone stairs, charging into battle with their wooden swords.
“I em Beowulf! Heer me RAAAAR!”
“And I em Grendel, so ye should watch your hind parts!”
A voice behind Errol made him jump. “That game was my son’s favorite.”
Errol said nothing.
“Are ye deaf, foundling?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, putting his hand up to his neck, to cover the lack of a mark. “Wil ye wesh my to mak the kelpies te halt spillen pain on ye?”
“Nay. If I wanted the game banned, banned it would be already. Do you know who I am?”
“Aye. Mam. Margaret Thebes, guildmaster of this very tower.” He kept his back to her still. He saw her move in the corner of his eye. “I am sure that son misses you,” he said.
“Are ye besting me? In what square inch of your foundling head did you find that idea?”
“I miss my own mam, is all, and she had nearly as many concerns as you do.”
“I pity her. Let me guess. A man is the cause of the trouble?”
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 29