He pointed to Faisal, who was gnawing on a piece of bread over by the yurt, and said, “I’m guessing a rodent.”
“Ha! Indeed. Sorex,” I said. I could see the shape and fur of a shrew, gnawing on Faisal’s pack laces. “And Seppo? What’s your guess for him?”
“He doesn’t look like much but he has courage.”
“Aper,” I said. “Wild boar.”
“Grid must be something that soars?”
“Aquila.” I pointed to the sky over our medic’s head, where I could see an eagle circling. “Do you really not see that?”
“I sense it but I can’t see it. You are the seer, Odd Thebes.” He lowered his voice. “What about Marek? Some edge beast. Capra? The goat?”
“No. Can’t you feel it? The predator? Panthera. Which, interestingly, is the same as your new best friend, Jago.”
Later that night I overheard Errol talking to himself at the fire. “Same beasts. One raised high. One, low.” As if this explained a great deal.
Scars
THERE WAS REVELRY ON THE ROOF OF THEBES. Bowls and platters appeared out of Ping’s kitchen, heaped with hand pies, pickles, cheeses, drageoirs, and we built a bonfire and stoked it all night. I watched the girls talking with Jago. Grid. Talwyn. Siwan. Even Terpsichore, nauseous with a stomach complaint, came out of my tent. Was it not enough that I was raised in Errol’s shadows? Now here was Jago to take their attention?
Rip came up on the same line that had brought us Jago. He and Errol left us to sit on the plank between Bamako and Thebes.
“You are somehow unafraid of the heights,” Errol said.
“Look at me. Is heights what I should fear?”
Errol laughed.
“However, I should shove you off this plank for sending me up to the belly of that crow. It was an insane plan.”
“If you’re going to shove me off, make it for something I deserve. Try this: I didn’t stop even for a moment to think what would happen to you when the abbot died and Utlag came undone.”
“Someone had to put an end to it.”
“Then you could throw me off for the insults I leveled at you in front of your friends at that pub. The Bluebird.”
“What you said was true. I am low.”
“I didn’t understand that you took care of kelps on the street, or Fenn. I wouldn’t have cared for him. I’d have hunted him down.”
“That’s what he wanted you to do.”
* * *
—
Later I was next to Jago around the fire. He was staring at Grid.
“Get in line,” I said.
He didn’t hear me. He said to her, “How did you get those scars on your neck and arms?”
She lifted her shirts and showed him the rest of it. He touched the scars and I could see that he knew his way around her. He had never seen a lightning wound, though. Such things did not happen in the streets. What did it feel like to be hit? He wanted to know. How had she gotten over her fear of the sky? Was this in her tellensac?
I was irritated that I had never asked her these questions.
Of course, once anyone shows a scar, all the scars have to be shown. Seppo held up his hand so we could see the absence of the small finger he lost to frostbite. Faisal had broken his nose and teeth. Ping had scars from the hot ovens. Among us there were rope burns, tower collisions, marks from kelpish blade work in Thebes’s workrooms. Jago was responsible, I knew, for the stab wounds his men had inflicted on Errol; Errol was responsible for the finger subtracted from Jago’s hand. Neither of them mentioned these stories or the irfelaf scars, but Grid pointed to white slashes on Jago’s neck and shoulder that looked to me like scrawled fragments of some mad alphabet.
“From the last fight I lost,” Jago said. “A knife. And I was held down in a fire.”
“Who was your opponent?” Grid asked.
“My da.”
Her eyebrows went up. “How old were you?”
“Five or six. I don’t know. No one keeps records.”
We all fell silent at the thought of a kelp treated in such a way.
Rip was healing, but his scars ran across his face and down his neck and chest and to the nether reaches of his body. I watched the girls look him over. I, too, looked him over. He was half gone. What was there to say? Grid said she could rub oil into him to relieve the pain. He said that any remedies so far only added to it.
“There’s always me,” I said. “If you’re looking to rub someone.”
“You have Leah,” she said, nodding at Terpsichore, who had fallen asleep behind me with her head in her folded arms.
“All she does is sleep,” I said.
“What did you expect?” said Jago, as if he knew something I didn’t. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I have beaten my own men and murdered others in their sleep, whereas you call yourself the bard. Does it concern you at all that I, and not you, have heard the stories from your bound-wife’s tellensac?”
“Are you threatening to take my wife?” I whispered back.
“If I was threatening you, you would already be gone.”
“Are you showing off, then?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Tell me what you know about her.”
“Ask her yourself.”
“I will. When I’m ready.” I couldn’t stand it. “Tell me the relics at least.”
He made a sound of irritation but he whispered: “A scruple weight. A cube of sea salt. A piece of hemp twine tied in a boiling knot.”
“Bowline,” I corrected him.
“A black feather, this little piece of stag fur. A seed. A diagram of a court game on a scrap of paper. A notebook of the names of ships in a fleet.”
Familiars
CHAUNCE, THE TUFUGA, sat with us for an uur to bring news from the streets. He had stayed long enough there to tatu anyone who had an idea of their mark and would return to do more. He said the most common request was to finish, or to correct, the naught brand on the foundlings’ necks, by adding the directionals of a compass or astrolabe, the rings of Saturn, the rays of a rising sun, the workings of a gear, the spokes of a ship’s wheel, a crown, a bloom, the strokes of an alphabet letter from one tongue or other. It was not uncommon to see people walking the streets with the mathematical symbol of infinity on their necks.
Bede the apothecarist had refused to rise. Instead he had sent for a tent and sacks full of beads and barrels of food and teas, and one of the guild flags of Raepteek House. He opened a sick house for the streets on the banks of the river. The last Chaunce had seen of him, the apothecarist was sitting at his tent flap with a line of malignant life-forms, human and animal, stretching down the riverbanks and through the streets, farther than anyone could see.
“And Arthur?” said Errol.
“We brought him up. My bound-wife has taken to him, and to his men. She sent them down into the guild for baths and bed, where they’ve slept since yesterday without waking.” The tufuga looked at the clock tower. “My bound-wife gave birth while I was on the streets. We have named the child Sitembile.”
The monk Nyree came up the lines and appeared in the yurt, where we all sat around the fire. She laid the sheath in front of Errol. He opened it and removed the iron spikes. Who would think such plain tools could do such damage to a city?
“I promised Fenn I would destroy these,” Errol said.
“It’s impossible to destroy them,” said Rip. “And they cannot bear to stay hidden.”
“Listen to yourselves. We’re talking about two bits of iron,” I said.
“With an iron will,” said Rip.
“An equal will was required re-forge them,” said Nyree. “You’ve heard that on the streets some speak of an ancient boatswain.”
“What did you say?” said Terpsichore. “Pass those to me.” I had thoug
ht she was asleep. Errol passed the spikes around the circle to her. She rolled them in her fingers and held up to the light of the fire. “These aren’t precisely cnyttan spican,” she said.
“What else would they be?” I said.
“Hold them to the light. Anyone can see they each have a tiny hole bored in one end. For stringing a lanyard through the iron, so it won’t get lost at sea. This hangs round the neck of a sailor, for the constant knotwork of rigging.”
Errol laughed. “How did we miss it? These are marlinespikes.”
* * *
—
I left the yurt and went to the edge of the roof. The flies appeared to me now not as just a web of lines that could carry us to the edges of this city, but as the riggings of a thousand ships in the vast harbor of an abyss. Pulleys and chains clanked against the iron masts. I had the sensation that someone or something had long ago imprisoned us in guild towers; someone else, perhaps that boatswain, had given us a glimpse of freedom by rigging a high world. I shivered. Till that moment I had not noticed in my own tale the repeated appearances of ropes and masts, knots, splices, bells, or my bound-wife’s obsession with a fleet. For a fleeting moment I could see a larger tale rising, like a ship surfacing from under the sea in a gust of salt spray, shimmering with light. That glistening ship slipped back under the waves and left me alone with the tale I knew.
A Binding
THE BRIDE KEPT A THOUSAND WITNESSES WAITING.
I could name names from the roofs and the streets, and from the guilds, but the most remarkable guests were the beasts: Eikthyrnir the noble stag; my gallant rooster, Ovid; the winged horse Jamila had named Tulak; Arthur’s little dog, whose name was Arrow; and of course Dagmar’s Roban. All of them sat waiting for the binding, their feathers and scruffs lifting in the warm westerlies, as if they had spent their entire life politely attending bindings and funerals.
I stood next to my bound-wife, wondering why she had chosen to wear a gray dress, a sack really, to the wedding. She was thick, and rashy around her mouth and on the back of her neck, and she ran her hands over her belly as if to soothe her intestines. She met my eyes, but I turned away from her. The rooster pecked at my foot, siding against me in this minor marital standoff. I was at odds with myself.
And then came Jamila. Errol had not seen her since they’d risen, and he pushed through the crowd now to get to her. She was barefoot, in a thin red silk gown with a damask belt slung around her hips. Red roses had been embroidered on the belt. When she passed by Terpsichore, they clasped hands and spoke for a moment, out of earshot.
I barely noticed Dagmar had come out of Rip’s tent, in gossamer robes of white, green, and brown and a crown Rip had woven for her of river grass. The two of them stood in front of us all, wild creatures, uncomfortable with the attention. Marek read a few words about the laws of bindings, official jargon that no one ever bothered to listen to at bindings, and the two of them stepped out on the plank. Roban pinned himself to Dagmar. Marek shrugged and bound the three of them together. Noticeably missing from the plank was any beast of Rip’s.
I thought for a moment that Rip would reconsider, given his terror of falling. But instead he turned to Errol.
“That foundling met the spikes in the abyss, did she not?”
“She did,” said Errol.
Rip reached out his hand. “I’m ready,” he said.
“If you’re sure,” said Errol, who took the sheath from his pack and handed it over. Rip tipped out the spikes, handed the sheath back. He kicked the release on the plank and the threesome dropped out of sight.
First, silence. And then there came a piercing scream from the abyss, as though a firework had been shot off Bian Pao House, and a streak of red light burned up through the darkness and over our heads and exploded in the sky. From the center of the fire rocketed a spray of crimson and violet flames, with a ragged tail and wings whomping big and hard at the smoke with gale force. The bird steadied itself in the sky, as hot and bright as a fragment of the sun, then dove down to return to Rip.
Errol laughed. “Of course. What else would it be?”
“See,” I whispered to Ovid, “I told you there would be other birds.”
An Assembly
ERROL AND HIS STAG were summoned by the assembly of the guildmasters, held in the Great Hall at Fremantle. The regnat’s guards were now following the orders of a council led by Margaret Thebes. Errol was made to give an accounting of himself and all he had done. A great many subjects were gone over, particularly the burning of the guild work, whether the ships were still downriver waiting for beasts, and how the city had come to be under such a state of siege. The meeting ran on while the guild towers slept.
In the small uurs, Errol spoke his mind, telling what he had known and seen of the streets and the scriptorium and gaol. The guildmasters wanted to know whether it was the knotting spikes that had caused the quarantining of the city. Errol did not know. But he said the spikes were uncommon, which meant they had the capacity for great ruin or great good, depending on whose hands they were in. They asked after the double walker, Utlag. Errol said his whereabouts were unknown. Then Errol described the great emptying of gaol, the release of the frightened, worn inhabitants of the pits.
“I am nagged by a question,” he said. “I asked it of the double walker, and got no answer. I ask it now of you.” A thousand guildmasters held silence, waiting. “What makes us rise?”
“Lines, of course,” said one of the guildmasters.
“I don’t mean it literally, friend. What makes us people of high thought, high action? Rather than low.”
The guildmasters conferred among themselves.
“A steady balance of work and sleep,” called out one.
“Festivities, to break up the work year,” said another.
“Meat pies.”
“The presence of children.”
“Private bedchambers.”
“Praise for work well done.”
Margaret Thebes, who led the assembly, remained silent as she had been through it all, neither joining the rising support for Errol nor detracting from him. When the room was done, she asked, “How do you answer your own question, runner?”
Errol said, “It is all new to me. I am far from understanding.”
“Tell what you know,” said Margaret.
Errol put up his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I believe a stag will fail to thrive under the same conditions in which, for example, a snake will flourish. A stag cannot do a snake’s work, or a snake a stag’s. Or eat what a snake eats. Or live where she does. Or spend his day in the same way. Or learn what she learns, not even how she learns it. But under the right conditions for each, in the right habitat, they both thrive.”
Someone said to go on.
“I have seen that any beast can be turned low by fear, or rise with courage, if—”
“If what?” said Margaret Thebes.
Errol hesitated. “I don’t think I know,” he said.
“Tell it,” called out a guildmaster. “Don’t keep secrets from us.”
“It is not stubbornness that keeps me from saying it.”
“Think in a new way.”
“All right, then. I am thinking of Theseus and the labyrinth, and the Minotaur and the ball of string. The thread saved Theseus, for it led him back out. I, too, was saved by a thread.”
“The thread to your stag?” a guilder asked.
“Yes and no. I could not live without the stag. But it was another thread, a binding thread as strong as silk rope, a thread to someone else—” He hesitated. “There are no words to describe this, none that I know. It was uncommon. It was a pulling force.” He seemed now to be talking to himself. “I felt pulled by her, somehow, pulled home like I had never been before.”
“Ha! The word you’re looking for is love!” roared a guildmaster, and the
room burst into laughter and hoots of appreciation and calls for the name of the runner he loved.
Errol met Margaret’s gaze. He thought he saw anger in it, and dislike. He wondered what he could ever have done that would make his own mam find him so repulsive.
“How could such a small thing as knotting spikes be such a great force?”
“The tiniest thing can carry great power,” said Errol. “It is what we do, when we come upon something that has uncommon power, which tells us who we really are. This is not confined to the knotting spikes. Or to the uncommon objects in the tales in our libraries. It is also true of the uncommon powers of invention, of work, of the written word.”
“Of love!” a young guildmaster yelled out. This was Cwym Teifi, the coracle guildmaster.
“It seems to me the high triumphed this time,” said a guildmaster standing in the doorway. “Thanks to a runner of skill.”
“If I understand your remark, then I must thank you for the compliment. But I am reminded of lost men and women who might disagree with you.”
When it was over, the assembly asked Errol to wait on the roof. In less than a quarter uur, they called him back to the hall, and offered him a position in Fremantle. The position in Fremantle.
She
ERROL AND I RAN THE LINES TOGETHER after that meeting and took our breakfast to Al-Hazen, where he could borrow the long lens of that telescope to see what the ships were doing. From the roof of Marathon, he pointed the lens south and let me look first.
“There are no ships,” I said.
I have known Errol all my life but had never seen that expression on his face. One part fear, two parts anger, and three hundred parts responsibility. If he were to be regnat, the gone-ships were his problem. Someone was waiting at the other end of the river, expecting a delivery of monstrous wares. Nothing would arrive but ships with vacant cargo holds. Surely that someone would be angry enough to come at us for a reckoning. If so, then a thousand guilds in this city would depend upon Errol to know what to do.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 39