“We live in a hive,” I said.
“I forget there are places where it’s quiet sometimes.”
I wondered where we would go from here. Though I felt closer to Gareth now that he’d told me the secret that weighed on him, I also felt that the past had been awakened, and it was reaching for the future with dead fingers. I imagined the succession of future nights, groping for each other in the shadows as acrid Siltspar filled our nostrils and the sounds of riotous nightlife disturbed our peace.
Then Gareth said something, surprising me, reminding me how separate and individual we still were.
“Let’s run,” he said, pointing ahead of us, where the street angled down the far shoulder of Soddenside’s hill, to the district’s beach. And, releasing my hand, he took off. I stood a stunned two seconds, then dashed after him.
In the dark, running downhill, I felt like I was flying. I laughed and remembered that we were young and healthy.
We arrived breathless on the beach and splashed to a halt in the water. The beach was washed by the same sea as the docks, but silence and clean sand made it feel like a different world. We took off our shoes and kneaded the warm sand with our toes.
The chain had shifted in my pocket as we ran, and I could feel the hard knot of it against my thigh. We began to walk along the beach, which would eventually take us around Soddenside and back to the docks. Gareth’s silhouette was sharp against the sea and dark purple night sky.
“I also have a confession,” I said.
Gareth didn’t respond; just continued walking beside me, receptively.
“I’ve killed people. My parents were Almohetians. Almoha granted their prayers when they were caught in the plague that struck Nazeer, and they made it out alive. They decided they owed it to Her to consecrate their firstborn. So when I was born, they gave me up to the Almohetian priesthood. I was raised to handle the knife. An altar boy, they called me. I must have slit a hundred throats. I would catch the blood in silver ewers.”
“That’s even worse than what Desmoth made me do,” said Gareth, in a low voice.
Maybe it was, I thought, or maybe not. I wasn’t sure how you could weigh these things against each other.
“I was killing people before I was old enough to think about whether it was right or wrong,” I said. “I remember their faces, down where I could see them while the priest stared at the sky chanting the ritual. They were all volunteers, but sometimes they regretted it, at the last moment, after they were trussed up like cattle on the altar. I could see it in their eyes, wild, right before I killed them.”
We walked around the curve of the beach, and Siltspar came back into view, smoky and bright-lit in the distance.
“So, you ran away,” said Gareth.
“No,” I said. “When I came of age, the Almohetians let me choose whether to complete my training and join the priesthood or go my own way. They gave me their blessing when I left. Not that it mattered at that point, they’d already done their worst.”
Gareth took my hand. His deft torturer’s fingers wrapped around my blood-stained executioner’s.
After our mutual revelations, it made so much sense to me why we had been attracted to one another. Somehow it must have shown on our faces, and we recognized it before we really knew one another. It almost seemed inevitable.
“We shouldn’t use the chain at all,” said Gareth. He shivered. “We don’t deserve it. We’re overdrawn against the world. We’ve used up all our grace.”
The despair in his voice was like the ground falling out from under me.
“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “We’re still young. We could still do anything. You make it sound like we’re dying.”
But I knew he would never change his mind, and that I didn’t want him to. This was exactly what I had been dreading. His vision of a cosmic balance sheet and a hopeless debt had infected me.
We brought the chain to the office of the watch. The officer on duty eyed us as we explained how we had come into possession of it. I could see the question forming in his eyes: whether we had killed the man it belonged to. If so, why would we give up our prize? He found us unnatural, operating by no known principle of life in Siltspar. An act of voluntary law-abiding was almost more suspicious than natural self-serving criminality. But he had no grounds to detain us. He would probably just take the chain for himself.
Afterward, we trudged silently down Siltspar’s alleys, back toward The Southern Anchor. The crescendo of a shore-leave night was approaching its midnight climax. Drunken sailors lurched past us, shouted from the windows of taverns and inns, spilled into the street embracing or fighting.
Gareth and I retired to our room, knowing that another day of lifting and carrying, ache and sweat, lay before us, and another and another. I wrapped my arms around him, and we lay with both our faces turned toward the moonlit window.
“Thank you,” he said, in the dark with his hoarse voice.
“For what?”
“For understanding that some debts have to be paid.” And he fell asleep in my arms, somehow more at ease now that he had given up the hope that briefly dangled before us.
I thought of the money beneath the bed, the coppers I had been saving from my weekly pay, the little stash I had crouched above in snatched moments over the past week when Gareth was briefly absent, multiplying it with the power of the sacrifice in the chain, even though each priestly incantation I murmured brought back horrifying visions of terrified eyes and bleeding throats and gave my nightmares greater power. I had done this furtively, guiltily, suspecting beforehand that Gareth would never agree to use it or sell it.
Secrets were stealing back into our relationship already. Yet with them came those cracks of light, those filaments of hope that make the future bearable. As I held Gareth in my arms, moonlight through the dirt on our window illuminating his tired face and roughened skin, I thought how I would offer him all that money, someday, and pretend I had saved it up. He would accept it from me, and study healing, and begin, I hoped, to pay down the debt he thought he owed. And it would ease my own guilt to give him that.
© Copyright 2020 Robert Minto
Robert Minto - [BCS296 S02] Page 2
