Errol was still lowering himself from his long-line when we reached him in the abyss. He put a brake on his line and the three of us, four, with Eikthyrnir, dangled thirty strata over the earth. My chicken stuck his head out of my pack.
“Préférerais tu,” Jamila said, breathless. “Which do you prefer, to be trapped here with your friends forever or escape and never see anyone here again?”
“I have no choice but to go,” he said. “And you have no choice but to stay and lead.”
“I don’t want to run a guild tower.”
“Not a tower, Jamila. A city.”
“I don’t want that. I live with foundlings. I steal food and work gossip like a puzzle while nobody sees me. I dump bog pots. I wear an invisibility cloak.”
Errol stared at her, a grin spreading on his face. “See it a new way. You’re a guildmaster’s daughter who knows the morgues. You love these towers. It is not a decision. It’s a duty.” Jamila dismissed him with a wave. He said, “When I thought the regnat would lead an army into gaol, I was wrong. You led the army.”
“A herd.”
“So? An army with fur. You went to Al-Hazen, with its thousand lenses trained toward the sky, and turned one lens downriver to find that the ships were burning our work. Plus, think of it, Jamila. You have the devotion of a city of foundlings. You believe in the tales of the library. You are fearless. Disciplined. Enduring. You tell only the truth.”
“I’m not permitted to lie.”
“That’s a ruse. You tell the truth because you believe in it.”
“Margaret Thebes can lead the city.”
“When you come out of hiding, she will forward your name to the guilds. I know her. Despite what she said, she would do this. There would be strength in her recommendation.”
Jamila was silent for a moment. Then, “I would move the regnat’s quarters. I hate Fremantle.”
“Where would you go?”
“To every guild. I would build a yurt and live at one guild and then another. A moveable yurt. I would begin in the streets.”
“And what would you do about the foundlings?”
“Imagine a city where the regnat is marked with the naught and everyone wears a tellensac. We all have some deficit. We all have tales to tell.”
“And what about the ships?”
“A large-scale attack on us will take them some time. We need a scout.”
“Dispatch a scout, then.”
“Fine. But I would want you to take Odd with you,” she said. “He would learn their tongue in five minutes.”
“But he can’t go.”
“Wait!” I howled. “Since when is my life in your hands? Either one of you!”
Jamila continued as if I were not there, “Take Jago,” she said. “Jago needs to find the cat of his. She is on the ships. He is worse off, the farther she goes from him. Odd will go back down into the guilds with Leah.”
“Jago!” I yelled. “Jago! The felon! Why Jago? And why do I go down into the guilds where Errol Thebes won’t go? I am gallus! Harbinger of the dawn? And anyway, you are nothing now, Errol Thebes! A foundling! Why should you go downriver on the first expedition out of this city while I stay here and rot in a tower?”
Errol said, “Odd, I would go anywhere with you and that would make a heofon of any hel. But you have spun your own line and bound yourself with it.” I swung at him hard, but he ducked and I bloodied my fist on the side of a tower instead. He kept talking. “What kind of a bound-husband would leave—”
This time I did hit him, hard enough to feel my bones crack against his jaw, and we both spun wildly. I was punching and kicking, and I grabbed his pack and yanked it off him. Was I trying to kill him? Of course not. Yes. He grabbed the stag’s line to keep from falling.
“Damned arrogant foundling!” I yelled. “You! You are the Banhus-theof! You stole Jamila from me, and now you steal yourself! This is a perfect city. Nothing needs changing! All you do is leave!”
“What is this about?” He grabbed my line and held me at arm’s length.
“Nothing.” I was holding his pack behind me. “Nothing. I’m not you.”
“Who are you, then?”
“I’m Odd. I tell your tale. That’s all I ever do.” I put my head back. “I’m odd.”
“Odysseus.”
“Yes.” I was defeated. “Ironic. I’m Odysseus who can never leave home.”
“Go to your bound-wife.”
“She can’t bear the sight of me. She has to take beads just to spend the night with me. And don’t look at me that way, Jamila. That pity is iosal.”
Errol’s expression changed as if a lamp had turned on. “Wait! Jamila! Odd doesn’t know—”
“Know what?” I said.
Jamila reached for him. “Stop, she’s not ready for him to—”
“Know what?” I shrieked, petulant.
“Your bound-wife is thick with child.”
“What?” I flailed. I yanked my line away from him. There was a high-pitched screaming in my ears and my line was spinning out. I was falling out of the sky. Ovid squeezed himself out of my pack and gripped my shoulders, flapping and flailing as if he were my wings.
Opening Lines
I STAGGERED BETWEEN THE TOWERS, disoriented. Was this Thebes or Bamako? Had I come so far as Pliny? I could hear the great hero Errol Thebes calling my name, trying to find me before some ill could befall me. The last thing I wanted was to be rescued by him, hauled back up the lines to my guild roof, to my bound-wife. The streets were less terrifying to me, at the moment, than the thought of returning to the guilds, only to become a father and to rot in a furnace-room job for fifty years. I tore around street corners, the chicken flapping and sliding behind me. I slipped into an alley, down a stairwell, sliding on slime-covered steps, losing the two of us in one of a thousand underground tunnels.
Preoccupied with getting the rag over my nose, I misjudged the size of a rut in the tunnel floor. I thought that I would hear the slap of my hands and knees on the ground. Instead, I felt air in my hair and my stomach in my throat, for I was falling. I slammed against the walls of the shaft, my head lamp flashing wildly on the surfaces of stone for what must have been a mile. Or fifty feet.
I passed out. When I came to, my lamp was still pulsing and Ovid had fallen in with me. I felt sure Ovid was thinking that Errol would do better, but in fact Errol had made all the same mistakes. The floor was piled high with femurs, kneecaps, skulls, teeth, fur, shreds of clothing.
Whether I slept next or lost consciousness again, I don’t know. And for how long, I don’t know. When I came to, my lamp was still pulsing.
I dug through Errol’s pack and found all manner of useless paraphernalia: brake clips, his navaja, the wrappers from ma’amouls, his tellensac, his copy of the book of laws.
“No quill,” I growled. “Of course not. Never, ever does a hero write his own tale. Leaves the telling to the lowly bard. My plight, to scratch and jab at the truth. Jot it down, Odd. Get a quill, Odd. Empty our tellensacs. Tell us our tales.” The feathered dawn-bringer eyed me, for I was eyeing him. I grabbed a feather from his wing and yanked it out. He shrieked and jammed his beak into my hand. I used Errol’s blade to cut a nib in the quill. There was no paper. The only thing I had was the parchment of the scroll. I scraped the ancient ink off the first section, using the blade, and I spit into the handful of scrapings, to sop them and reconstitute from them a dark-enough liquid. I dipped the nib of the quill in that salvaged ink and began my going-story.
I will never be Errol Thebes: hero, foundling, outlaw, guildmaster’s son, Banhus-theof. I will never have Jamila, the winged horse, the likely regnat. Already I hate the facts of this tale. I spit into the ink supply again and wrote: I am nothing but a chicken. And my bound-wife, I’ve seen it, is cattus. A house cat. Orange with black stripes. What hope is the
re, for that kelp of ours?
I put the quill feather down and sat with my face in my hands. What was I doing? I was wasting my tiny palmful of ink, the irfelaf, in a fit of whining. Out of nowhere, a single thought occurred to me: Did she ever wish she was not bound to me?
My head ached as I picked up the quill again.
“Sing, Muse!” I yelled. “Sing, that I may tell my city glorious, that I may—I don’t know—not come out of this looking like a complete idiot.”
Be warned. A fragrance rises off this ink. The recipe is equal parts blood, gall, sewage, tears, the spit of a dying bard, and the soot from a sputtering head lamp. This day has not gone well.
These words felt to me like a tiny pile of wool from which I could pull and spin the long thread of a tale. After these I wrote of a near fall of two pelts, and of a girl with a crow tattoo, and using every drop of spit-ink, of a city under siege, of the herd in our rib cages, of the quarantined lives in a thousand iron vaults, of an uncommon thief and the fiends who sought rare things or made monsters of us, of a runner who dismantled the power of fear, of a foundling who held the welfare of the city above its own.
My spit made more ink. Ovid’s blood made more ink, for I needed five more feathers to finish the tale. My tears made more, when tears came. In the telling of that season of Beklemek, in the tale of that beast in our room. Finally, because the chicken and I could not weep enough or spit enough or bleed enough, I added seepage I found in the skulls and kneecaps and foul, stinking liquid I squeezed from pieces of frayed clothing in the pit. The attarh would certainly have a name for such a gangrenous concoction.
I realized, as I wrote, that I had spent this whole tale obsessed with a rare thing who did not belong to me.
How different was I from that fiend Utlag?
I had a choice to make. I preferred to rise on a line right now and return to Terpsichore. I preferred to ask, as I should have asked a hundred times by now, how I could bring cheer to her. How she feels about that kelp of ours growing in her belly. And whether I can get her a little plate of ma’amouls and some tea. I prefer to teach her my strategies in games of cards and assure her that I would pull us out of debt and, on hard days, I will ask what is troubling her.
I will even find the courage to go back down into the guilds, to make a living, plying silk lines, in Lascaux House, so that Terpsichore—no, Leah—can live with her family.
The rooster, in many parts of the world, is a sacrificial bird.
Someday, when we are very old, I will remind her of her days on the roof, when she herself forgets them, wildly embellishing the night we met, so that our kelp will believe it was love that bound us from the start, and not blinding lust on their father’s part.
Speaking of fathers, I prefer to not be a drunk. Just because I see beasts when I look at people, I would not do to my kelp what my da did to us. A righteous chaos he was, and we suffered for it. I would be better. I would read the poet Ovid to Leah and dance with her in our guild quarters. I would be her Parsival.
How many more pages do I have, of unrelenting self-interest? None.
I am dying in a pit alone—which, I admit, is iosal timing, for I am finally ready.
Signed,
Odysseus Thebes
Epilogue
THIS IS LEAH LASCAUX, alias: Terpsichore.
I found the bard here on a ledge near the bottom of one of these shafts in the place they call gaol. I’ve covered him with a blanket, him and the chicken, and given them water, and I’ve read his going-story from beginning to end.
It took me three days to track him here. The mines are worse than I thought. Like everyone else on the roofs, I am accustomed to the heady life of high places, surprised by the mayhem of low. But tracking is a skill of mine—many siblings, many hiding places in a guild tower—and so is stealth. I make rope. That, too, came in handy.
Three corrections, where my character is concerned:
Orange feline with black stripes: yes. House cat: no. I have the banhus wound and a big cat by my side to show for it.
Shoes: yes. Debt: no. I work hard and there’s a stash of gold in my accounts that the guild banks say is uncommonly large. I know Heimdall said the opposite. Tell me: Why does anyone believe Heimdall Thebes?
And third: the very idea of Odd and me staying in Lascaux House for seventy years is enough to make me take a screamer. A fleet of ships. A crew of kelps. A map. Those are my ambitions.
In Lascaux, the master guilders speak of a boatswain who left the sea to find a dark city. They say she taught our kelps to trust with fearlessness the fly, the knot, the rag, the sky. I am a skeptic. If she is so important to us, what was her name? Who are her children, her grandchildren? Where is the written record? Sometimes, though, I do feel her ideas in my hands, when I am tying her knots and running the rigging of a city. When I dream of a fleet.
Jamila has returned to the towers to lead—Jamila, who says I smell of starlight, bowline knots, and feline, and who knew before I did that I was to bear a kelp. Errol is waiting for us at the south wall, building a raft with Jago, urgent to find his cat. We’ll need Odd for his skills with the word. He wants to be my Parsival but I don’t need a knight. I prefer Odysseus Thebes: translator, bard, seer. A player in his own tale. We are citizens of a thieved, burned, gutted city; we are bound with the sinew of uncommon wounds. I’ve packed our tents, bedrolls, tools, boots, gold, navajas, ma’amouls for Errol, eyrouns for Odd, the twin marlinespikes, beads for myself, which our medic gives me to cure aazein. Aye, we all have something that unsteadies us.
I’ll need a midwife by summer. This kelp of ours will come when we’re on a ship somewhere. If Odd can run the lines and win at maw and bard in pit-ink across thirty yards of lawless parchment, he can probably catch a baby.
Enough. There’s an Odd runner who needs to rise: a quill for his tellensac and this tale is done. We have a fleet to catch. I’m ready.
Leah Lascaux
EX LIBRIS LB:
Notes on the Library at Thebes
The author is indebted to librarians from ancient Alexandria to the ethereal stacks of Perseus and Gutenberg for safeguarding the books and scrolls of the 151st strata of Thebes; to the skilled bards of the Aegean Sea for detailed reports of the Muses, the Argonauts, Achilles, Penelope, Theseus, Ariadne, Sisyphus, and on; to Publius Ovidius Naso aka Ovid, for love and all the gossip, even from exile; to Hesiod, for the dark side; to Homer, for the travels of the magnificent, flawed Odysseus; to Edith Hamilton, who threw the ancient myths in her pack and carried them over the lines to us; to the bard of Avon, whose line 70, spoken by Mercutio in Act I, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet, is delivered in this book by Talwyn Thebes; to Pliny for his roving (that is, insane) Natural History, Book VIII, quoted by Odd Thebes on the night of the striped infant bear; to the anonymous writer whose description of Beowulf’s arrival to kill the monster provides a tellensac tale for Dete; to Shirazad, whose incidental tale of a magpie and a beaker of jewels supplies the elements for an urgent encodement at the scriptorium; to Luo Guanzhong, aka Luo Ben, whose massive Three Kingdoms includes a frightening line redirected in this book toward Slyngel Thebes; to the collectors of the tales of sugar houses and infinite bean plants, of princesses who lose their shoes, sleep ten decades late, complain about small vegetables in their beds, and double as pond birds; to the writers of the Narmada River, who left us the Markandeya and a name for Durga; to the bards of the northern sagas who stoked the fires of Yggdrasil, Valhalla, Eikthyrnir, Bjarki, Uxafot, Gylfi, and gave us the recipe for the chain of Fenrir; to von Eschenbach, Malory, and T. H. White for their reports of King Arthur’s nights and the road trips of the self-involved Parsival. The author would also thank the poet who wrote the six lines of Sanskrit Jamila Foundling reads exclusively, but the author has no idea what that text was; such is Jamila. Many thanks, though, to the collectors of the ancient hymns, publick house cum
ulatives, rambling ballads, nursery rhymes, and sailor shanties sung or in some cases screamed in this book; to Lully, for Errol’s favorite gavotte; to Ajam, whose “Bandare Landan” is a close approximation of the first song on the set list on the night of Ship; to the obsessed guilders of every world who publish, for example, the complete rules for extinct card games, the specific colors of a thousand particular seas, the slander of medieval bestiaries, the ingredients of ma’amoul, the record of occurrences of animal others, the names of constellations nobody on earth can actually identify, the parts and function of ancient timekeeping devices, the odd practice of filing teeth; to Turin and Sanchez, whose roving (that is, brilliant) reviews of perfumes would be of keen interest to the attarh; to Lindahl, McNamara, and Lindow for the chilling concept of the outlaw; to Ashley, for 3.2 billion knots and the mention of a sailor who knit a hammock on two broomsticks; finally, to the deranged among us, and before us, who conjure uncommon things in order to explain the news on any given day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Most of a writer’s life occurs in isolation. This has been truer than ever since March, with the world locked down in a global effort to contain a pandemic. We are now also in the throes of a Civil Rights uprising in the United States: a mighty roar of outrage against acts of racism we witness daily in our Instagram feed. Masked, gloved, six feet apart, we protest in the streets. In the middle of an epic reality, I pause to remember the work behind me and to raise a Beklemek glass and say thank you:
To the people who do the real work of rescue in a dark world, by saving the victims of sickness and sorrow, the real foundlings and discarded animals. I am a fan of the organizations Partners in Health, for people, and Best Friends, for animals. A percentage of the profits from this book will go to them.
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