“Aye.”
“‘Oft hath even a whole city reaped the evil fruit of a bad man.’”
Errol nearly turned to her. “Are ye quoting from Hesiod?” He had never known his mam to read.
“Aye. And how would you know that? Apparently I’ve met another scholar taught to read by Jamila Foundling.”
“Aye, Mam. I’m sorry to be so well-informed. If it relieves you, I cannot read the crisis in this city.”
“What do you mean by that?” Margaret said, drawing nearer to him.
“Which one is the bad man in this city: the fiend who lived here once, or the regnat who cannot exist apart from bright light?”
“Who are you?” she said. “How do you know that?”
“No one. But rumors spread in the morgues. How far does the evil spread, Mam?”
“The whole city pays taxes in foundlings. That cannot be stopped. And the streets are foul. But this hardly concerns you, foundling. I’ll not pay the tax in foundlings till my body is cold. When the regnat came last week and did not find the particular knotting spikes he wanted, I gave him gold. He cannot take his eyes off gold.”
“I would prefer to fight the regnat.”
“Too many of the guilds would take the side of Fremantle. To keep the regnat in office, to keep the guild exports leaving the city. Guilders fear even good change.”
“Why did you let a creature so foul as Utlag into the guild in the first place, Mam?”
She raised her fist, as if to strike him, but withdrew it and wiped at her eyes. “Remember who you are, and who I am.”
“I remember,” he said.
“I had no idea he would turn the city upside down, seeking something he digs from our ribs. Feasting on us. A predator.”
“Could you not tell from looking at him that he was foul?”
“He was far from foul when he was young. He was uncommon.”
“As hel is uncommon.”
She stiffened. “You are too bold, foundling. Show me your face.”
Errol turned slowly. She eyed him as she would a sack of wool she was considering for purchase.
“Well, my son was a far better-looking thing than you are. Beowulf, as I told you, they made him every time, and not just because he was mine. There was the noble in him, and something else as well. A rare thing. Not anymore, but he was.”
“He misses you, Mam. I am sure of it.”
They were quiet for a long while, and Errol realized how often he had seen Margaret in the company of foundlings. Her secrets were safe with them. She shook her head as if to shake off all they had just said to each other.
“Flattery will not free you from rubbing the stairs, foundling.” She pulled herself up to her full height, and still looked up at him. “Didn’t you have something to do?”
“I lack a rag,” he said.
“We hide them in that bin over there, says rags. You might be done now and onto some more useful chore if ye didn’t waste my time carrying on about things that’ll not change.”
Knotwork
JAMILA LIFTED HER HAND to cover the glare of a stranger’s head lamp at the foot of her makeshift bunk in the morgues of Thebes. This one smelled of cold fur.
“Foundling,” he said to her.
She put down her knotting work and reached out. Errol thought she was going to strike him; he caught her wrist.
“Outlaw,” she said. “It’s a good thing I can read.”
“Ah,” Errol Thebes said. “A past insult returns, that I may regret saying it again.”
“What do you want?”
“Woody said I had to—or rather, I myself wanted to—apologize. I said things last night that were foul. I am not accustomed to whiskey. I didn’t mean at all to—I must have sounded like a fool—”
“You’re not doing much better this time,” said Jamila.
She twisted out of his grip and pulled him up as if he were a kelp. Her strength surprised him. He knelt at the end of her high bunk, aware that dozens of foundlings were sleeping around them in warm bunks, with tiny lamps over each of their heads. Bunks? These were coffins, stacked along the walls, and Errol had the fleeting realization that there were twice as many bodies in the room as the live ones he could see. So small, these foundlings all were, under the crushing weight of the iron tower that was Thebes.
She had a scroll on her pillow. A worn fiddle and its bow hung from a hook. A rag tunic lay folded at the foot of her rag blanket. This is everything she owns, Errol thought, and then realized he now owned even less. Next to her lay a small heap of knot work, still on its spikes. He picked it up.
“What are you doing back in the guilds?” she said.
“I came to teach you to knot,” he said, holding the edges of her handwork. “Aye, word reached the streets that you were trying to knot some sort of a blue question mark with lips, and I was the only one who could help. This is a disaster. Comes of working in the dark.”
“I can hardly knot in the light,” she said.
“Then it’s lucky for you I’m here.” He sat next to her and turned his head lamp so he could examine the knotted thing. He felt the edge of the spike in it and saw blood on his finger. “This is Banhus-theof,” he said under his breath. “Where did you get these spikes? They’re without their sheath and yet you were just knotting with them, in the darkness.”
“Yes,” Jamila said. “I have lit the foundling kelps, so they will be safe.”
“But what about you? Have you already met the knotting spikes in the dark?” Errol could see now she was bandaged under her thin rag of a shirt.
“Aye,” she said.
He spoke slowly, as though waking. “You were there at Lascaux House last night. I remember it now.”
“Somebody has to protect Odd, with you gone to the streets.”
“I wish you had done your job better. Why didn’t you keep him from meeting the dawn in that tent with that girl?”
“Why didn’t you help him?” Jamila said.
“He told me to go away. The whiskey blurs it. Then I was talking to that muse. I was on a plank and I saw you. I yelled out. I—”
“You threw the spikes at me.”
Errol cringed. “Aye. And then I was falling. How is it, then, that I am alive?”
“It’s best if you don’t remember.”
“No. It isn’t best. The parts are coming back to me. When you saw me fall, you dropped off the plank. You were reaching for the spikes while you fell.”
“The spikes were also coming for me. Luckily the abyss is dark.”
Errol furrowed his brow. “This can’t be real. Somehow you knew that whatever was going to happen to you, with those spikes, would happen on the fall from that plank—”
“I didn’t know it would happen. I thought it might.”
Errol felt the sensation of falling, even now. “How did you know it would happen before you hit the earth?”
“It was a guess,” she said.
He reached up to touch her bandage.
“It hurts,” she said.
“Of course it does. How on earth could you have known that whatever came from your banhus, from your ribs, could catch you and me in the air?” He shook his head in disbelief. “And that it could bear the stag as well?”
“That wasn’t a guess. I’ve smelled the beast for years, in my palms and fingers. Hoofs and feathers, both. Of all Pliny’s animals, what else could that be?”
“The winged horse. A rare beast.” Errol felt a thrill in his ribs at the bravery of such a leap.
He considered now his history with Jamila. His meeting her at the tufuga’s and the way he had grabbed her that night and told her she would never amount to anything. At the party on Al-Razi, accusing her of collaborating with the regnat.
“Why would you ever save me? I have never been anything but foul to
you.”
“It was an otherwise dull night,” she said. He laughed. And then he pulled up a corner of her blanket and looked under it. He shone his lamp around the room.
“And where is that beast of yours now?” he said. “No doubt he, or she, wants to be with you. My stag is likely thrashing Woody’s quarters as we speak.”
“She could not be contained by a tower. Or a wall. She is gone. Safe, elsewhere.”
“Jamila Foundling. You are a whole city unto yourself.”
He picked up her knotting again. “Well, and who is this half-knit beast taking up precious real estate in your sack?”
“He is a wyrm I’m making for one of the foundling kelps.”
“Name of the dragon?”
“I haven’t named him yet. He isn’t done.”
Errol winced. “There are rules concerning this, Jamila Foundling, and you are in flagrant violation of them. You must name all wyrms before their heads are knitted, or incur stiff penalties.”
“No name fits him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Wyrms are the easiest beasts to name. Ask anyone.”
“I’m asking Errol Thebes,” she said.
He caught his breath when she said his name. “And Errol Thebes shall reply,” he said. “There are the traditionals: Fafnir. Bullar. Tiamat. Kukulkan. Ying-long. Also one cannot forget Lagarfljotsormurinn or the Laidly and Lambton Worms.”
“Those are not names,” she said. “The Lambton Worm was just from Lambton. Same with Lagarfljot. And laidly means ugly. The Ugly Worm.”
“Then you could call him Saint George’s, after the famous dragon by that name,” he said.
“I protest,” she said. “That’s is not a name, either. It’s the name of the slayer of the dragon. Hardly an appropriate name for the dragon himself.”
“I beg to differ. When that little dragon was born, just a tiny wyrm scorching his cradle, and long before his neck started to fall over like this one’s, his mother named him Saint George’s. Can you believe that he was later slain by Saint George? Huge coincidence, really. I mean, what are the chances?”
Jamila petted the dragon’s half-knit head. “I thought Flicker would be good,” she said.
“You must be joking. How can he hold his head up at dragon gatherings—how can he hold up this head at all, really?—when all the other fanged fire-breathers are going around as, you know, the Dreadful Biter. Listen, this is simple. What is your nightwatch’s name, that small fellow sleeping over there, shirking his duty to protect you from me?”
That foundling was a tiny kelp, who sat asleep on the floor under the dim light that burned in the tunnel. He had a book open in his lap.
“He’s Hrothgar, named after the king in Beowulf,” said Jamila.
“There’s the perfect name,” said Errol.
“Well, you could give Hrothgar a blanket so long as you’re planning to steal his name.”
Errol dropped to the floor and carried the kelp to an empty bed. He pulled a blanket over him, lit the lamp with a flint that had been left next to it, and set the kelp’s book next to his hand.
“Did you teach him to read?” Errol said, returning to her.
“Aye.”
“Did you teach them all?” he said.
“Anyone who wants to know,” she said.
“And dance? Do you teach them that?” he said. “The rumor of you is circulating on the streets of this city.”
“It’s not much of a story,” she said.
“I do wonder if you ever have danced the gavotte in the guild kitchens,” he said.
“Nearly every night, when you important guilders go to sleep. Listen, why did you come here, back to the towers?”
“To forget what I’ve seen,” said Errol. “The repair of this blue dragon is all I’m prepared to think about at this moment. That, and eyrouns. Let’s go steal a pair of real knotting spikes from somebody’s workbench and get something to eat, and I’ll teach you how to do the one thing you can’t seem to do.”
Waiting
A SHORT LENGTH OF STRING slipped through the bars in the overhead disk in the mines of gaol and fell to the floor of the mine shaft.
“What’s this for?” yelled Rip.
“You’re trying to climb out. That should help,” said Utlag. “That, and a thousand more like it.”
Rip slumped on his knees in the dirt. The stone walls were marked where he had tried to climb. He, and a thousand before him.
“I feel sure the spikes will come back to us soon,” whispered Utlag. “The regnat is searching the guilds for that runner who has them. I look forward to knowing what beast lives in you.”
“I am an empty banhus like Fenn. Thanks to you.”
“Well then, a half beast will be of interest, too. A curiosity.”
“In the interest of fatherly love, could you show some mercy?”
“In retrospect I probably should not have been a father.”
Mine
IF ERROL’S FYLGIA was that gawking stag Eikthyrnir, with its antlers raking every wall it passed, certainly I had to be something. Something that could sign a contract with Fremantle. Something that would appeal to the foundling who was about to be mine. Something that could turn on a friend who had turned on me.
My bound-wife, who had witnessed a rescue on the planks, told me Jamila had caught the iron spikes.
For the third time, I broke into my own guild and slipped down through the walls to the bottom of the tower. Right in front of a dozen foundlings, I pulled the needles from Jamila’s bunk.
The iosal hatch-guilder made me pay this time, to return to the roof. I crossed the lines to Corinth House, as far as I could get from Thebes and Lascaux, and checked the log to see which runner would be gone for the night.
It was someone else’s tent, someone else’s sack, someone else’s life. I sat in it for a long time, before taking the spikes from my pack and waiting for something I didn’t believe would happen. When the moon went behind the clouds, I extinguished my lamp.
A Question
ON THE PLANK FROM TEIFI HOUSE TO SHOU, on the east edge of the district, Errol took off his boot to show Jamila how Dete had pinned him to the street. He lifted his shirt to show her where Clegis had stabbed him. He told her of the pub squall and what he had done to Dete. And how the bear came, that fetch. And how Dete had wanted a going-story. Here, high off the streets, checking constantly for the regnat’s guards, it was hard to believe Dete had been anything more than a pelt, just someone as surprised as anyone by what was happening to him. Errol told her of the cold thickness of the winter river. He told her of Rip and watched her face broaden in a grin, that the wild second-son of Margaret Thebes was yet alive. He told her of the first appearance of Eikthyrnir, of Dagmar and the wolves who went out to catch arrows. He described The Bluebird and the kelp Arthur, who lay dying not so far from where they now sat. Last he told her of Utlag, who lacked a reflection, and the abbot. And of Jago’s cat. And despite all of that he said, “I miss the streets and the life around that river. Curiously, the stag is at home there.”
They sat out on the plank for a long while, watching new stars rise.
“I had thought the regnat would lead an army into gaol, so sure hope would come in the form of a great leader. I’m a fool. Nobody believes the stories you and I do. When you have nothing to eat, when your children are dying, when evil is at large, a story is irrelevant.”
“Take it from a foundling, the stories are relevant. Perhaps only your choice of leader is wrong.”
“Who else could lead this city, but the regnat?”
“The leader sits on this very plank.”
He shook his head. “I am an outlaw.”
“See it a new way. You’re a guildmaster’s son who knows the streets. You love these towers. Think of it as your duty, not your decision.”
“Then let’s get that over with,” said Jamila. “First, I have a question I cannot answer. I understand that many are perishing in gaol, victims of the pits and the arena. But where do the survivors go, the ones who win the fights?”
Mercy
THE PAIN WAS A SURPRISE. It was a sharp cut to the chest at first and I tried to spread my arms to face it. One spike ran up the center of my ribs, the rough edges of it worked like serrations of a knife. And then I felt as though someone were grabbing the two walls of my ribs and pulling them open like a book. I begged the sky for mercy. I screamed for my mam. I felt myself falling. Just before I left the world, something vast and magnificent convulsed and exploded from my split ribs.
Mirrors
THE GUILD HOUSE AL-HAZEN kept a storeroom on the roof, of silvered glass plates—mirrors that its guilders cut and angled in the making of telescopes. Errol stood in front of one of those now.
“Open your eyes,” Jamila said from the other side of the storeroom flap.
“Your eyes would be closed, too, if you had seen what I’ve seen. Utlag cast no reflection. Imagine if you spoke and no sound came out. Or if you weighed nothing. The only worse fright was to see the reflection Rip cast: half there, half gone.”
“Just look.”
“Half eaten. Like a man dying of gaping battle wounds but still wandering about the field.”
“Sh.”
“When we first met, you and I, in the tufuga’s tent, you said my mother had had another man.” Errol put his hands to his face. “Was that true?”
“Yes.”
“The first was Utlag, was it not?”
“Aye. Utlag was her bound-husband. He came and went at night when your brothers were young, and then left altogether. Before you were born.”
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 30