* * *
—
He’d put a single iron spike in the gut of Xerxes. He’d sent the other to the master fletcher at Strael House with a note (yes, I read it), in which he instructed the fletcher to split the enclosed chicken feather, the one my fetch had given him, and tie it on the spike—like any other bolt—and send it to Fremantle for testing. It was an idea, the note said, for putting flawed knotting spikes to use. He signed his mother’s name.
That night I rigged a long line off the south edge of Mildenhall and dropped sixty strata to the twenty-third. A kelp at the vent was surprised to see me there, staring in at him like Zeus. When he finished screaming, I sent him to find Marek.
I couldn’t remember a day when Marek loved me so much as this moment. We talked at length through the vent about Errol’s situation. I asked him what he would do, if he were Errol. He sucked his teeth.
“Press for war,” he said. “The roofs are one commander shy of an army. And every kelp in the city is trained. Wrestling. Archery. Blade work. Ten thousand runners, as strong as the warriors in any scroll. I myself would return to the roofs if Errol called for help.”
I gave him the bad news, that Errol had left his blade behind in his tellensac, that he had told Jamila that he himself had been wounded by it more than he had wounded anyone. “You would have to convince the general of the need for weapons,” I said.
“If I know anything about Errol Thebes,” Marek said, “the hardest part will be to convince him of the need for an army.”
When Marek was called back to his work, I knotted a hamac to the fly outside Marek’s tent and fell asleep, dangling in the wind in a gossamer cylinder. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself—a war, a city, the work. I wanted so much to know how it felt to be Errol. Instead I awoke to nightmares of being stalked by a bogle. The dreams were a kind of tax I had to pay, for doing nothing.
A Delivery
WHEN I RETURNED TO MY TENT the next morning my bound-wife was in it, reading. She was more beautiful than I remembered. I sat across from her on the bedroll and stared at her. She was mine. I had a right to look.
“A foundling was here, to deliver this,” she said, tossing me a copy of Homer. “It said the book was a binding gift to us from Slyngel Thebes. Who’s Slyngel Thebes?”
I cringed at the thought of Jamila actually meeting Terpsichore. “Slyngel was my da,” I said. “He’s dead. Did you speak with the foundling?”
“It offered congratulations. I thanked it.”
“‘It,’” I repeated, flatly defensive.
“Yes. It. What do you call your foundlings?”
I would be hard-pressed to explain the mind of the human male, even my own mind. I longed for Jamila. So I put my hands on Terp. She turned her back on me and I came around and kissed her, harder than I should have. I grabbed at her shirt and pulled it off her and kissed her, and she pushed me down on the bedroll and took off all my clothes. I wonder, as I tell this, if she was trying as hard as I was to forget someone. As we lay next to each other afterward, she reached for her pack and took her beads from it.
“What?” I said.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
Feh. I am a translator. Nothing, in the dialect of bound-wives, means “everything.”
I was relieved when she spoke. She asked me about Errol, what I thought he would do next. I told her what I knew—the two spikes, the apothecarist, and the tufuga. I said that if Errol’s strategies were anything like his card playing, he was in trouble.
“Maybe you underestimate him,” she said. She was playing absently with the loop of junk line she carried around with her. “As he has no army and no power of his own, he has to find a way to set his enemies on themselves. I imagine he will reunite the spikes at the moment when they’ll do some damage. The foundling thinks the same thing.”
“Feh,” I said. “That’s dyslic. I thought you said you didn’t talk to the foundling?”
“I said no such thing.”
“I know Errol better than either of you. Dyslic. He could never think of such a strategy.”
She stuck her tongue out at me in a way that, although I doubt she intended this effect, made me need her again. But she was getting up to leave. “I speak your guild’s tongue, Odd Thebes. If you want to call me stupid, find a language I don’t know.”
When she left, she left the junk loop on her side of the tent. She had made of it a trefoil knot that, technically speaking, was impossible.
An Odd Letter
HOMER’S WRITINGS CONTAINED WITHIN ITS PAGES a torn bit of parchment. I could smell the whiskey on it. Here it is, in my tellensac:
“od. theebes,” it begins, “wantin and rekless men now posess the citee, the werst of them al crawls up our tower en drags me from my sack. opressing me to tel him wat i see, wether i see a grefin any where or a feenix or a rosinol. i see everything but cannot hide from the feend anyware. with wiskie i cannot see beests. he leves me alone wen i am on the drink. nobodie wil help slingl theebs. i well die this nite for the feend put vitriol en my wiskie and made me drink befor i new wat it was. od. theebes, ye must do wat i cannot. i cannot protect the geld master an yore cuzin wen the crawling feend finds out she es alive. ye alone see whet i see. eevin as a wee kelp ye reeched for something behined my sholder an i no ye saw my byrd, as shore es i see yors. i wil leeve this note in homer and i no ye wil find it wen ye rede. win the cittee bak. protect yore cuzin. i cannot. thiss is from slingl theebs”
I was shaking. “Wanton and reckless men,” I repeated. Where had I read that before? I had read it here. The very book was in my hands.
I flipped through the pages of the book and came to the near end, where the old King Laertes tells Odysseus, the son who’s been gone twenty years, the son he does not yet recognize, “Stranger, verily thou art come to the country of which thou dost ask, but wanton and reckless men now possess it.”
There was a hole in the page. I turned the page to see what had been torn from it. The name Odysseus had been hollowed from a line on the other side. My heart seized like a fist. I dropped the book on the roof, pressed it open hard. In the gutter of the book there was a tiny mark, a mere smudge of dirt in the gutter of the page. Gal., it said. Gallus. Gallo. The cock of the yard. The harbinger of the dawn. I had been reading Homer for years. I was not an oddity, as my brothers had told me, some freak in a long line of rats. I was Odysseus, the hero of the greatest tale I knew.
If one man can be the ruin of a city, one could be its victor. That is what my insane father wanted when I was born and he named me, and he wanted it again the day he wrote this note as he lay, murdered, and put it in a book I was sure to read.
PART IV
Regrets
“WE ARE FOLLOWED,” whispered the tufuga.
“There is no way out of here,” said the apothecarist.
They had come to the place where Errol had first met Jago, Dete, and Clegis. And now they faced a ragged gang of rogues. A voice called out, “Why would you ever return, outlaw?”
“We came to help, Jago,” Errol yelled.
The mob parted and the taut, pale, black-haired figure of Jago came at Errol. He looked like a corpse. Vacant. Someone grabbed Errol’s shirt, kicked the back of his knees, and took him down.
“Lovely to see you, too, Clegis,” Errol said. He turned his face in the muck so he could look at Jago. “You’re alive. I’m relieved to see it.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Jago.
“I thought the cat was dead. I thought you were gone.”
“Don’t ever mention her again.”
“We’re here to help.”
Jago’s head jerked back as if someone had swung at his face. “You’re late,” he said. He held up his hands, crudely bandaged.
Errol thought he would vomit. “What happened?” he said.
“You happened. When they were done with me in gaol, they brought me up to the scriptorium. When you disappeared from there with the iron spikes, they extracted this fee from me. It was a long night.”
“I had no idea,” said Errol.
“Exactly,” said Jago. “You have no idea.”
“Where is your cat?”
“I told you never—”
“The abbot wants you all to be afraid,” Errol interrupted. “So does the regnat. They want fear to rise in all of you so they can keep this city nameless and quarantined, so that you and your fylgias, your others, will all be monsters they can load onto the ships, to sell outside that wall.”
Jago kicked him. “Do you actually believe you discovered all that? That none of us know? Look at me, outlaw. I am fear risen. I am the monster.”
“They took the cat,” said Clegis.
Errol gasped. “She can’t be gone. Where is she? How can you bear it?”
“Bear it? Look at me. What are my choices?”
Clegis blurted out, “The farther she gets from him, the worse off he is. She’s in gaol.”
“Shut up, Clegis,” said Jago.
“Or she’s on the ships,” Clegis said.
“How did you get away from the scriptorium?” asked Errol.
Jago reached a finger in to pick something from the back of his teeth. “Suffice to say they created a monster. Possibly they regret that now.” Jago saw Errol’s horrified stare. “There’s an abyss between us, isn’t there, runner?”
“Where is my brother?”
“Rip is in gaol. So I’ve heard.”
“If we work together, we can take the streets back. We can empty gaol. We can find your cat.”
Jago knelt next to him. Errol glanced at the apothecarist, who was staring wide-eyed at the stolen tattoo on Jago’s arm. “Work together? Ah. If only I had thought of this years ago, it would have saved me a lifetime of trouble.” The mob behind him was silent.
“I have a plan,” said Errol.
Jago pulled Errol’s hair so his neck bent back and his throat scraped the ground. “Your plan is nothing. Less than nothing. You cause more damage.”
The tufuga cleared his throat. “We came to help a sick kelp. The three of us did. Four, with the deer. Let us help him. We won’t bother you.”
From where Jago dropped his face on the street, Errol saw the group’s attention turn to the bizarre form of the tufuga, tatued as he was even on his bald head.
Jago stood. “What are you?”
The tufuga drew himself up. “I am the lead apprentice from the guild house Samoa. A kelp named Arthur Bluebird wants a tatu. And I, like my colleague the apothecarist here, make house calls.”
Jago said, “You came to help one kelp? One? And how will you choose which one of all the kelps on the street to help?”
The apothecarist said, “I brought extra beads.”
Jago looked at Errol. “That’s your plan? A tatu for a kelp? Some beads?”
Out of the corner of his eye Errol looked up into the planks and lines a mile over his head. There was safety, if he’d only stayed high. Instead he was going to die a fool’s death. Embarrassment first. Then pain. Then death. And the stag would die, too. And the apothecarist. And the tufuga, with all of those marks they would take.
Errol heard the apothecarist saying frantically, “Now look here! No one needs to harm anyone! I have enough beads for everyone.” Clegis had pulled a knife from his pocket and was carefully unfolding it. He handed the knife to Jago, then cleared a place in the muck of the street and held Errol’s fingers down on the cobbles.
Jago knelt down and pressed the tip of the blade into Errol’s longest finger at the knuckle joint. Errol could feel it scraping the bone and saw his blood running onto the street.
“The streets are not for heroes, runner. And if they were? You would not be one of them. There are children here who are more heroic than you are, who rise against me every day. You save a snake and you think you’re a hero. You draw a knife across Dete’s ribs and think you know how to do it. Let’s see if you can withstand any of the pain we know here.”
“I’m sorry,” said Errol. He watched the knife on his hand.
“Shut up.”
“I’m sorry I killed Dete,” Errol said. He held his hand still. The stag moved closer and laid his great muzzle on Errol’s shoulder.
“If you’re begging in hopes of pardon, that only proves you are a coward,” said Jago.
“I’m not begging,” said Errol. “And I’m not a coward or I’d have never come back. I’m telling the truth and you know it. What do you want? You said I left you here, and now I’m back. We both know I’m a murderer and I will never be free of that.”
“Shut up,” whispered Jago. “If I say you’re a coward, you’re a coward. These are my streets.”
“Cut my fingers off,” said Errol. “What are you, afraid to do it? Min utlagend handa.” This was his mam’s tongue, the ancient tongue of the guild, and tears were running, falling into filth of the street. “I am begging you, cut my hands off. For I cannot get Dete’s blood from them.”
“I could do better than that. I can kill you for it. Everyone here would see that as a fair exchange.”
“Do it, then! I sent him, unsafe, to places unknown. His beast came to fetch him. I was there, remember? And I can’t think who to tell of my regret, for where is his mam? Where is his da? I have only you, Jago. And you were a foul friend to him, and you know it. You cheered me on in that pub. I will never cease to wonder what Dete might have been, nor fail to meet him in my nightmares. My hands are bloody with him. I will be glad to have them gone.”
Jago took the knife away. The mob had wanted to see a runner bleed, and they saw it. But it was not the pain of knife in muscle that affected them. They all knew something of regret.
“Clegis,” said Jago. “Do we know this kelp Arthur?”
“He’s my cousin. The archer.”
Jago turned in surprise. “This is that Arthur? With the dog fylgia?”
“That’s him.”
“A pit cur! If I had an uur for every arrow that kelp and his men, and Sitembile, sunk into my men—”
“Men?” said Errol. “He fought real men?”
“Fought, killed, maimed, blinded, unmanned—there’s the hero you’ve been looking for, right there. An eight-year-old kelp.”
“Nine,” said Errol. He could not help but smile at the thought of little Arthur, with his dirty fingernails and that cowlick, fighting real monsters with a real bow.
Jago closed his eyes and threw back his head to think. “Does Arthur live, still?”
“He was no longer waking,” said Clegis.
The apothecarist cleared his throat. “I can still save him.”
“No one is going to save anyone,” said Jago. He shifted his gaze to the tufuga and said, “But before that kelp dies, you’ll put a mark on him, if that’s what he wants. And you?” he said to Errol. “Get up. I’ll do you a worse favor than taking your hand. I’ll set you free on the streets, and Utlag will come for you.”
Parting
“AND?” whispered Bede.
“And what?” said Errol.
“You’re not going with us, are you?” said Chaunce.
Errol watched Jago, readying his mob to move toward The Bluebird, heaving the sacks of the apothecarist onto their shoulders, reining in the stag. The stag would be safer with Jago. That was irony.
“No. I’m not,” said Errol.
The tufuga said, “Everywhere you go, they perforate you. You need us.”
Errol raised his eyebrow at the tufuga. “That’s an odd thing for you to say, as Chief Perforator.”
Errol had business with Utlag. When it was over, he said, they would all meet at Thebes and rise together on the foundlings’ ropes.
“And if Errol is in heofon,” said the apothecarist, “he would smell you coming from ten fathoms.”
Errol felt his chest swell with admiration for these two guilders who had risked everything to come to the streets with him. He watched as they set off without him, all the way down the street with Jago and his mob. The great stag was with them, for the mob had him by ropes. He reared up and turned and stood staring at Errol.
Errol said, under his breath, “I am ready.”
The Gauntlet
AS ERROL MOVED ALONG THE RIVERBANK, a man came toward him with his head held forward and down like the ram at his heel. A woman had the same restless eyes as her ferret. An old toothless woman limped along, with a disheveled starling hopping on her shoulder. More than before, he was aware of the similarities in the eyes, gait, and the sounds between the people he saw on his path and the beasts who trailed them.
“I have a pair of iron spikes in my pack,” Errol said, as he had said to everyone he had seen.
“Who cares?” the starling’s woman said.
“I’m sure you know someone who cares,” said Errol.
He saw her twitch. He left her and walked to the riverbank. He sat in the grass and waited for news to travel.
As he waited, he played with something in his pocket. He took it out and saw the shatranj piece—the faras, the horse—the one he had given to the kitchen girl. Who had put it there?
Out of nowhere he was hit from behind. He spun around. He had known this was coming. He was curious to see who they had sent.
“Pollux.” Errol could hear himself talking as if his head were underwater.
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