As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  Of course, the spider might not mean ‘eggshell’. It might mean ‘past egg’ or ‘future bird’ or ‘white’ or ‘concave’ or ‘convex’ or even ‘are you still hungry’.

  But she repeated, “Eggshell,” as clearly as she could.

  “This is madness,” Ferdinand said, rubbing his scalp. His close-cropped hair, like Benjon’s, had grown out some way in their travels. His was more thoroughly peppered with grey, and lay more closely to his head even after growth. “This is the madness of the dying.”

  “Eggshell,” Hajar repeated, gazing at the spider. It gazed back at her, with its eight black eyes shining. “Eggshell.”

  The spider replaced the eggshell, and pointed a limb emphatically at the leech. The other spiders set up a high-pitched squeaking, but the first silenced them with a hiss.

  It was, Hajar thought, very like sitting in the laboratory and listening to her colleagues trying to discuss some feature of air movement through the engine tubes without falling into a violent row. It was also alike listening to Benjon, Rill, and Waremansdöttir bickering in their tiny cramped shared room. The university buildings seemed to exist in another life, in another world.

  Click, the spider enunciated, indicating the leech.

  The leech whistled a petulant whistle.

  Click, the spider repeated, with even greater emphasis before.

  “Leech,” said Hajar, as if she had known all her life.

  “Leech,” Benjon echoed helpfully.

  Click, the spider repeated, apparently satisfied. It turned the pointing limb with certain awkwardness in movement to indicate itself, and made a sound like a mouse in high spirits, rising to a peak.

  “Spider?” Hajar hazarded.

  Squeak-squeak-squeak, the spider repeated.

  “Spider.”

  With alarming speed, the spider extended its leg to Hajar, stopping a foot from her chest, and offered no sound at all.

  “Hajar,” Hajar said.

  The spider made a growling-click which presumably sounded to the arthropods an approximation of her name. The other spiders echoed it, and from the channel behind her the leech made a doleful whistle which mimicked at least the cadence of her speech.

  Now the spider turned its limb to Ferdinand, who said, “Ferdinand,” in quite a sullen tone.

  Their approximation of Ferdinand was even less exact, although the leech gave a mellifluous and almost musical rendering of it.

  At last the spider extended a leg to Benjon’s occupied body, and as Benjon’s mouth was opened and its voice uttered the phrase, “I’m borrowing this for a while,” Ferdinand muttered under his breath:

  “And that is a very complicated matter.”

  Chapter 16

  Hana gave greater attention to the matter of mutual back-scratching after her daughter took the unusually wilful action of departing for the Frankish territories without warning.

  Hajar would not require her assistance and she could not call upon hers, and therefore she might well tend exclusively to her one strong strand that connected her to the Dardanelles. Now that Hilda was confined to bed with a chill and the season of vote-counting had taken over from the season of vote-taking, rendering her efforts of no further use, she was forced to apply herself to the art of waiting.

  Five days had passed since her daughter’s abrupt leave-taking for the mainland. Within them Hana had been required to make good the household finances with translation and amendment to propulsion design. She chafed at the delay but noted that in these five days she received nothing else to which to turn her mind.

  Cold set into Albion-of-the-Britons with penetrating fingers: the Winterzeitwinde slackened but the chill had taken to the ground, and Hana was piqued to discover that she might no longer for the sanctity of her sanity place the finches outside, without losing the whole flock. She was forced to layer over her silks with woollen dresses of the Albion sort, and then to augment these with furs and fleeces while walking in the city. She continued do to this regardless of the penetrating blades of the cold weather, for it would not do to be forgotten.

  Radigis’s initial offer of information had been scant, little more than rumour, but fleshed enough with fact that Hana knew he retained some further for future use. On this sixth day hence the offer, Hana weighed herself with coats and underskirts until she felt sure she had come to resemble more a building than a woman, engulfed her feet in so many stockings that her slippers seemed those of a giant-footed man, and took her leave of her flat.

  She maintained a routine in these wanderings, the better to accidentally encounter the correct people.

  Today was the turn of the book markets, on the far side of the University’s Kernowist buildings. In winter the Kernowists, a strange and muddy-seeming lot with an eerie predilection for all things that toiled in filth, had naught to do with their time as their subjects were prone to dying in the cold. They could therefore oft-times be found slaking their boredom as much as their thirst upon the cellars of their School’s foundation.

  Passing by the building made for a great study in the debilitating effect of fermentation upon the man’s soul, but was elsewise safe as sitting at home, for the ‘frog-botherers’ kept to their cellars and toasted in reverberant voices that rose through the vents. They molested no one with their drunkenness excepting each other and their equally-sodden Dean, a man who resembled little so much as a vast newt himself.

  Hana passed through the narrow, frosted field that stood beyond the Kernow School, and over this most tractable barrier from University land into the private warren of book sellers.

  Among these men she was well-known, for it was chiefly from her pen and that of her daughter that Albion-rune translation of Moorish texts came first newly available to the presses. It was a labour Hana made sure was wide and well-seeded knowledge.

  As a consequence, she was greeted with enthusiasm and politeness by those who might otherwise have shunned an old woman in a headscarf passing into the mouldering scent of the Bookwarren.

  The Bookwarren had once been an open square, but the sellers had conferred and determined that the selling of books might be more easily achieved were the time in which they could be sold extended to the year-round. Without applying to any Body of works they had come together and thatched it.

  Beneath the thatch hung a great carpet of oiled seal skins, and beneath this a great many old fishing nets stung together, each filled with excess stock. From the nets hung a starry night of glass-sided candle-lanterns of the old sort to augment the gas lights which cast only a little light from each wall, and further lanterns were placed upon the end of each bench.

  Across the cobbles lay in perpetuity iron-framed, wooden-bodied benches each fourteen feet long. Every bench was piled and stacked and ranked with books, scrolls-in-bottle, and sheaves of maps. Some of their stock was so old that the articles were kept instead in glass-fronted boxes, away from the greedy fingers of students, while some were so new that the ink had only dried on their journey down from the presses of Edinburgh.

  Amid the tables passed the book sellers, men as worn and wizened as veteran sailors. They were bundled up in layers of wool and linen, screwed-eyed and ale-scented, and came at least one to a bench. Almost all had with them half-gallon vats of coffee and short-lived fires with which to continually reheat this repast.

  The bookmen were not accustomed to inside work, the rents of the surrounding buildings being deemed too high for those who carved out a living hawking knowledge at a pfennic for three volumes.

  Hana was not greatly surprised to see a familiar face sitting on the step of a clothmonger’s at the north wall of the Bookwarren. He had drawn his coat about him and warmed his hands inside a muff of what looked very much like bear, and Radigis of Yeavering spotted her immediately she came into the cold warren.

  He did not acknowledge her, but kept his attention to the dispute between a bookseller and a man carrying a box of what appeared to be dog skulls. They had buried themselves deep
in negotiations.

  With her foremost interest elsewhere Hana could not discern if the bookseller was buying dog skulls, or if the whelp-hunter was buying books. Both looked like savages, with their matted locks and unkempt beards, and the whelp-hunter bore the mark of his class under the skin of his face in lines of blue.

  Flicking through books and enquiring after the price, the health of the sellers, the wives of the sellers (few had them) and the health of their business (always poor), she came to him as if by chance. They feigned surprise at their meeting.

  “Emira,” Radigis said with an ostentatious bow. “It is a fortunate day indeed and one unsurpassed in levity that I have seen your face.” He added rather less pompously, “I was hoping I’d find you here.”

  Of course you weren’t, Hana thought, smiling politely with her unblemished teeth on display, you made a careful study of my habits so you knew you would find me here.

  Aloud, she said, “Yeavering, you are a credit to your hall. Can I give you aid in some way?”

  He let his face fall into a sadness that Hana thought every mind in the vicinity must surely see was calculated, but she had long since accepted that most people simply did not look.

  “Alas there is a tiny trifle with which I would beg your indulgence…”

  So-saying, he made as if to embrace her, and in the movement slipped a folded sheet of paper into her coat pocket. Hana nodded her understanding of his plight, and listened to an entirely fabricated and irrelevant tale of domestic turmoil, to which she then gave some facile lines of advice.

  Radigis gave her his grave thanks, and they fell to pacing through the Bookwarren as old friends might.

  “We have it by the wires,” Radigis added, without care or caution, speaking as he might of the weather or the untranslated Frankish texts they passed, “that the Zonguldak garrison moves, has moved, or is moving soon, to Kerch. There is no notion yet as to their meaning in this deployment –” he lifted up a volume of Frankish poetry and pretended a fascination with the binding, which did not deserve the scrutiny, “– but this comes with cousin movement of garrisons from Hellas toward Yalta. Should the emptying of all able warriors to the Kerch straits continue, many prisons would be under very lax guard.”

  Hana digested this without expression, fingering the snapped cords of a book in Isǽland-Albion rune as if in search of missing pages.

  Radigis nodded and said it seemed to have been subject to the attentions of a black-spirited decrier of knowledge, and it should not be bought.

  They came to the fore of the Bookwarren once more, and Hana inclined her head in farewell.

  “May your house be fruitful and harmonious,” she said.

  “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” Radigis answered, using what was surely the most infamous of Albion-of-the-Britons’ specific homilies, for it had little use elsewhere even in the dominions of Albion that Hana knew. He kissed her cheek in farewell, and strode away in the freezing air with his bear-skin muff drawn close to his chest.

  * * *

  Hana was compelled to exercise patience another five days before she could attend to the content of Radigis’s request.

  It was a simple enough quest, a figment concerning the way the wind blew with the Magister of Lower York, for whose appointment Ioan Twelling was part-responsible, but Hana had to bide her time in enquiring until Hilda’s sickness was past.

  It was no mere figment of enquiry, however, for Hana saw its cunning on a second read, and was much impressed by it.

  The enquiry ran to asking not only for the leaning of the Magister of Lower York on the matter of the replacement of Durham. This was now a known operation and one in which the Prefect had been hampered in his first choice by not only Ioan Twelling but also, mysteriously, the Winedryhten-Prefect, Hermegliscus Redwaldsson of Cumbria. Radigis asked also after the support which the Lower York Magister might give to the reappointment of a former Magister of the Cam, far to the south, and to the ‘delicate personal discomforts of Hrothgar, Magister for Durham’.

  What a clever creature you are, Hana thought with some approval. It would lead Twelling, at least, to make enquiry as to what the delicate personal discomforts of Hrothgar were, for Ioan Twelling was a man to whom the with-holding of any knowledge was an itch that must be scratched until it bled, then scratched free of the scab. Thence it fell to Hrothgar’s well-placed assistant to make denials of any such discomforts after a fashion which would suggest most strongly what those discomforts were.

  She had seen the dance enacted before, one time or two times in Albion but with far more regularity in Fihriana and her neighbours.

  Someone, Hana thought, as she began her letter with salutations and fervent good wishes for Hilda’s continued good health, has Naim al-Wassid’s poems of politic, and has been making good study of them, o Radigis.

  It bore the comfort of a warm fire on a cold day to find that there was another soul within so close a proximity who took his advancement to be a matter of art, more than mere chance, loyalty, and blood.

  * * *

  Within three days Hana had her answer. She had also no word of any kind from her daughter, who had evidently given way to her single-mindedness. The girl was so like Qadi al-Fihri in this vision which took in none of the periphery and saw only that goal which lay before it and how it might be achieved, faugh! And so Hajar it seemed saw no reason to write back from the Frankish territories with any useful rumour or fact that might have passed into her typically unlistening ears.

  Ioan Twelling’s missive told her much but was characteristically curt. He had written himself, instead of Hilda, whose chill had (he thanked her for her concern) passed but left her weak and disinclined to conversation at present.

  There was much of the Albionman who disliked to write. Hana believed it was the rune script, which required irksome, tiring blunt lines instead of the effortless calligraphy of her own native script and flowed in movements harmonious to the hand and arm that wrote it.

  Ioan Twelling wrote:

  Hana, it is bloody nice to see you’re not pestering me about Emirs I’ve never heard of for once. Hilda is skulking in bed making the most of her cold and using it as an excuse not to talk to those dried-out bitches the Witegamot keep trying to seed, but she’s no more unwell than I am.

  Gemis is behind the first choice of Durham, because he’s an idiot with shallow pockets and Durham has flicked coin in his direction; he yearns for the return of Freothogar to Cam, like most of us who have had to exchange two words with Wig The Unbearable.

  Hana if you can persuade Freothogar to return to Cam I will charter your ship to Hellas myself. Neither Gemis nor I know of any great discomforts to Hrothgar but since you see these things coming before me I am going to look closer. If he is behaving like a randy goat again he will be in for it, not sure who to replace him with as Geoffrey of Durham doesn’t have any more second cousins who haven’t annoyed him and Durham isn’t allowed to choose

  This last was Twelling’s humour, and she knew that there was no doubt some thought to who might replace the unfortunate Hrothgar. If her suspicions were correct, Radigis already knew who that might be. They must be some great ally of his, for under Hrothgar he had near-total control of the Magister in Durham.

  Hana made time, and folded Ioan Twelling’s condemning letter into a crane.

  There were few pastimes of the Moors which enjoyed love among the people of Albion’s dominions, or the Franks, or the Romish lands, but origami seemed to appeal across the lines of many nations. Perhaps it was the folding, and folding, and folding, which concentrated the mind so perfectly. Hana could not see how that might dispose kindly most who engaged it, for they seemed so rarely to use their minds at all.

  It was, however, an elegant and tidy way to store future blackmail material.

  * * *

  Two days hence from this, Hana made it her business to pay a visit to the University, and renew her acquaintance with the Dean of the Non-Occult Sciences. Th
e man’s isolation in status from the rest of the institution made him talkative on occasion, and his access to restricted record had been of use in the past.

  “When’s your bloody daughter coming back?” he asked with mournful eyes, as he leant against the walls outside the building door.

  The Dean rarely entertained her or indeed anyone else in his rooms, preferring according to Hajar to reserve their sanctity for the province of ‘bollocking students, and Ben’.

  “The money men from the rails have been nagging us about their engines and Gooddaughter Charlomagne won’t do a damn thing because she ‘misses Hajar’ although if you ask me what she misses is having someone who can put a valve thingy together without destroying the lab bench and blowing out the windows –”

  He had a hangdog face, thin and red-eyed, with a nose glowing with the cold. The Dean never seemed to dress for the weather, and was in a constant state of near frost-bite in the winter and terrible sweats through the summer. Today he shivered in his linen tunic and hawking gloves, his lips turning blue as he spoke.

  “I’ve heard nothing from Hajar, Goodman,” Hana said, watching the way beyond him for visitors, as she kept both patience and time in her mind, “she writes not.”

  “—This is that bloody Silverstein’s fault,” the Dean complained, his aspect as gloomy as always. “Bloody Silverstein and his bloody illnesses. He’s probably tried to make a meal of his experiment in forgetting and left himself scitten. Horrible man. You know he shouted ‘bollocks’ during one of Divinator Jeppesen’s speeches? Actually shouted it. The bloody fool. Top of his voice, as if it was a debate.”

  Not only had the Dean imparted this scurrilous information to Hana several times before, but so had Hajar, and indeed two or three of the porters at the university. Benjon’s slander and public flogging in punishment were wide-known stories about the town, for the spectacle of a man of the university being subject to such a humiliation was not to be forgot. And for heckling the Divinator to the Governance at that, well, there was little hope of the incident fading from memory.