by Tad Williams
Opal scowled back. She was better at it than he was. “Old fool—I didn’t say it had gone off, I said I don’t think it’s much good. I’m asking your opinion. You’re certainly quick enough to give it most other times.”
“Very well, pass it here.” He reached out and took the pot, dipped a piece of bread into it, lifted it to his nose. It smelled like nothing more or less than bilberry jam, but it raised a strange thought: if the old stories were true, and there were Funderlings before ever there were big folk, then who grew the vegetables up in the sunlight? Who grew the fruits? Did the Lord of the Hot Wet Stone create us to eat moles and cave crickets with never a bit of fruit, let alone bilberry jam? But if not, where would such things have come from? Did the Funderlings of old have farms under the sun? It seemed strange to think of such a thing, but stranger still to think of a world with no . . .
“Jam, old man. What do you think of the jam?”
Chert shook his head. “What?”
“I take it back—you don’t have the wits to be a fool, old man. You don’t pay enough heed. The jam!”
“Oh. It tastes like jam, no more, no less.” He looked around. “Where is the boy?”
“Playing out in front, not that you’d notice if he’d gone off to drown in the Salt Pool.”
“Don’t be cross, Opal. I’m tired. It was an uncomfortable piece of work, that tomb.”
She took the pot of jam. “I’m sorry, old fellow. You do work hard.”
“Give us a kiss, then, and let’s not quarrel.”
Opal had gone off to visit her friend Agate, wife of one of Chert’s cousins, and after checking to make sure the boy Flint was still erecting his complicated miniature fortifications of damp earth and bits of stone outside the front door, Chert poured himself a mug of mossbrew and pulled out the mysterious stone Flint had found. A week or so had not made it any more familiar: the cloudy, unusually rounded crystal still matched nothing he had seen or even heard of. Chaven was traveling for a few days, visiting the outlying towns with a colleague to check the spread of the disease that had almost killed Prince Barrick, and now Chert was wishing he had spoken with the physician about it before he left. The stone troubled him, although except for the fact that it seemed like something that might have come from behind the Shadowline he couldn’t say why. He had half a dozen other Shadowline stones right here in the house, after all—those which no one had wanted to buy, but which Chert had found too interesting to discard—and had not given any of them a second thought. But this . . .
I could take it to the Guild, he thought. But he felt strangely certain they would not recognize it either—maybe old High Feldspar would have, a man who had known more stonework and stone-lore than the rest of Funderling Town put together, but Feldspar’s ashes had been returned to the earth three years ago and Chert did not think there were many in the Guild now who knew more than he did himself. Certainly not about Shadowline stones . . .
“When are you going to the talking and singing place?” a voice said behind him, making Chert jump and slosh his mug. Flint stood in the doorway, hands so dirty it looked like he was wearing dark gloves. As if he had been caught doing something wrong, Chert dumped the weird stone back into his purse and pulled the string.
“Talking and singing place?” He remembered the boy’s reaction his first day in the tomb. “Oh. I’m not going to work today, lad, but if you don’t like going there other days, you can stay home with Opal instead. She’d love to . . .”
“I want you to go there. Go now.”
Chert shook his head. “This is a day of rest, lad. Everyone gets their days of rest each tennight, and this is one of mine.”
“But I have to go there.” The child was not angry or upset, merely fixed as a hard-driven wedge. “I want to go to where you work.”
Flint could not or would not explain his sudden interest, but neither would he be talked out of it. Chert suddenly wondered if it had something to do with the stone—after all, the boy had claimed he found it out in the temple-yard, near the tomb. “But I can’t work today,” Chert explained. “It’s Godsday—none of the other men will come. And in any case, clattering away with picks and cold chisels would be offensive to the others having their rest.” Both above and below ground, he could not help thinking. He had become a bit leery of working in the tomb, although he still thought of himself as unmoved by big-folk superstition. Still, he would not be sad when the job was finished and he could move on to other tasks in other places.
“Then will you just come with me?” Flint said. “Will you take me there?”
Chert could not help being astonished. The child was ordinarily well-behaved, if a bit strange, but this was the most he had talked in days, and the only time Chert could remember that he had ever asked for anything, let alone asking this way, with the doggedness of an army laying siege.
“You want me to take you to the tomb?”
The boy shook his head. “To the temple-yard. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Well, near there.” He frowned, trying to think of something. “Just come.” He held out his hand.
Feeling as though he had entered his own front door and found himself in someone else’s house, Chert rose and followed the boy into the street.
“We won’t go through the Funderling roads,” the boy said matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to go near the talking, singing place.”
“If you’re talking about the Eddon family vault, there aren’t any tunnels from here that go there, or even close to it.”
Flint gave him a look that seemed almost pitying. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll go up on top of the ground.”
“Boy, don’t you understand that my back aches and my feet ache and I just want to sit down?” Chert had barely kept up with the child, who seemed able to walk only for a moment or two before breaking into a sprint, then circling back like a dog anxious to be after the quarry. Chert’s only chance to catch his breath had been at the Raven’s Gate. The guards there were now used to the Funderling man with the adopted big-folk son, but they still found the situation amusing. This one time, Chert was grateful that they made him and the boy wait to pass through while they thought of clever things to say.
Finally, as the two of them walked through the winding ways of the inner keep, heading toward the temple-yard and the family vaults, he grabbed at the boy’s shirt to hold him back—he had already had one experience of how fast the child could disappear.
“Where are we going?”
“Up there.” Flint pointed to the roof of one of the residences. “They’re waiting for me.”
“Waiting for you? Who?” It took a moment to sink in. “Hold a bit—up there? On the roof? I’m not climbing that thing, boy, and neither are you. We have no business up there.”
“They’re waiting for me.” Flint was entirely reasonable and very firm.
“Who?”
“The Old People.”
“No, no, and definitely no. I don’t know why you think . . .” Chert did not get a chance to finish his sentence. He had made the mistake of letting go of Flint’s collar and the boy now bolted off across the temple-yard. “Come back!” Chert cried. It was one of the more useless things he had ever said.
“I’ve never taken the strap to a child . . .” Chert growled, then had to close his mouth as stone-dust and mortar and bits of dried moss pattered down on him from his own handhold. You’ve never had a child to take a strap to, he told himself sourly. His backache was worse than ever, and now his arms and legs felt as though he’d spent the entire morning wielding one of the heavy picks, something he hadn’t done since his youth. And you’ll never take a strap to anyone if you fall and break all your bones, so give attention to what you’re doing. Still, he was furious and more than a little startled. He had not known a child could look you in the face like that, then disobey you. Flint had been a child with his own mind and his own secret thoughts since he had come to stay with them, but he had never been troublesome like this.
> Chert looked down and wished he hadn’t. It was years since he had been a scaffold man, and there was in any case something different about looking down at the distant ground when the rock ceiling of Funderling Town curved soothingly above your head. Climbing the outside of a building beneath the naked sky, even this wall with its relatively easy handholds, was altogether different and quite dizzying.
Shuddering, he lifted his gaze and looked around, certain that at this very moment a guard had noticed the intruder climbing the residence wall and was nocking an arrow, preparing to spit him like a squirrel. He had seen no one, but how long could that last?
“I’ve never taken the strap to a child, but this time . . .”
When he reached the top at last, it was all he could do to pull himself onto the tiled roof, gasping for air, arms and legs trembling. When he could at last drag himself up into a crouch and look around, he saw Flint only a short distance away, seated just below the crest of the roof with his back against one of the large chimney pots, waiting calmly and expectantly—but not for his adopted father, it appeared, since he was not even looking at him. Chert wiped the sweat from his face and began to clamber cautiously up the mossy slope toward the boy, cursing with every breath. Heights. He did not like heights. He didn’t really think he liked children either. So what in the name of the Earth Elders was he doing on the roof of Southmarch Castle, chasing this mad boy?
His legs were shaking so badly by the time he reached the chimney that he had to cling to the bricks while he stretched and worked out the cramps. Flint looked at him with the same sober stare he employed in all other places and situations.
“I am angry, boy,” Chert growled. He looked around to see if anyone could see them from an upper window, but the boy had picked a spot where the low roof was blocked by taller parts of the residence, windowless walls that turned this section into a kind of tiled canyon, protected from the view of any of the near towers. In fact, even the top of mighty Wolfstooth Spire was barely visible above them, blocked by the overhang of a nearby roof. But Chert still had a strong urge to whisper. “Did you hear me? I said I’m angry . . . !”
Flint turned to him and laid his finger across his lips. “Sssshhh.”
Just before Chert lost his mind entirely, he was distracted by a flicker of movement along the crest of the roof. As he stared in utter astonishment, a figure appeared there. For the first moments he thought the tiny man-shape must be someone standing on the uppermost point of some distant tower, a tower which itself was blocked from his view by the roof on which he and the boy were sitting—what else could explain such a sight? But as the figure began clambering down the roof toward them, moving with surprising grace and speed along the moss-furred spaces between tiles, Chert could no longer pretend the newcomer was anything but a finger-high man. He sucked in air with a strangled wheeze and the little fellow stopped.
“That’s Chert.” Flint explained to the tiny man. “He came with me. I live in his house.”
The minuscule fellow began to descend again, faster now, almost swinging from one handhold to another, until he reached Flint. He stood by the boy and peered past him at Chert with—as far as Chert could read in a face the size of a button—a measure of suspicion.
“And tha say un be good, so will I believe ’ee.” The tiny fellow’s voice was high as the fluting of a songbird, but Chert could make out every word.
“A Rooftopper . . .” Chert breathed. It was amazingly strange to see an old story standing in front of you, living and breathing and no bigger than a cricket. He had thought the Rooftoppers, if not entirely invented by generations of Funderling mothers and grannies, to be at least so distantly lost in history as to be the same thing. “Fissure and fracture, boy! Where did you find him?”
“Find me?” The little creature stepped toward him, fists cocked on his hips. “What, Beetledown the Bowman but a child’s toy, found and dropped again? Bested me in fair fight, un did.”
Chert shook his head in confusion, but Beetledown didn’t seem to care. Instead, he turned and produced a tiny silver object from the inside of his jerkin and put it to his lips. If it made a noise, it was too quiet or high-reaching for Chert’s old ears, but a moment later an entire crowd of diminutive shapes appeared over the crest of the roof, moving so quickly and silently that for a moment it seemed a small carpet was sliding down the tiles toward them.
There were at least two or three dozen Rooftoppers in the gathering or delegation or whatever it was. Those in the front were mounted on gray mice and carried long spears. Their plate armor looked to be made from nutshells and they wore the painted skulls of birds as helmets; as they pulled up their velvet-furred mounts, they regarded Chert balefully through the eyeholes above the long beaks.
The rest of the group followed on foot, but in their own way they were just as impressive. Although their clothes were almost uniformly of dark colors, and made of fabric too heavy and stiff to drape like the clothes of Funderling and big folk, they had clearly spent much time on these garments—the outfits were intricate in design, and both the men and the women moved with the gravity of people wearing their finest raiment.
All this, he thought, still sunk in the haze of astonishment, to meet Flint?
But even as the tiny men and women stopped in a respectful semicircle behind the mouse-riders, it became clear that the day’s surprises were not over. The fellow who called himself Beetledown again raised his silver pipe and blew. A moment later an even more bizarre spectacle appeared on the roofline—a fat little man just slightly bigger than Chert’s thumb, riding on the back of a hopping thrush. As the bird made its awkward way down the roof toward the rest of the gathering, Chert saw that the creature’s wings were held fast against its body by the straps of the tall, boxlike covered saddle on its back. The fat man below the awning pulled aggressively on the reins, trying to direct the bird’s track down the tiles, but it seemed to make little difference: the bird went only where it wanted to go.
I’ll try to remember that if someone offers me a ride on a thrush someday, Chert thought, and was less amused by his own joke than he was impressed he could even conceive of one under the circumstances. The whole thing was like a dream.
When the thrush had finally lurched to a halt behind the mice, its rider was dangling halfway out of the saddle, but waved away two of the mouse-riders when they started forward to help him. He righted himself, then clambered down out of the covered seat with surprising nimbleness for his bulk. His climb was hampered a little by his clothes—he wore a fur-collared robe and a shiny chain on his breast. When he reached the tiles, he accepted deep bows from the other Rooftoppers as though they were his due, then stared squintingly at Chert and Flint as he stepped closer to them—but not so close as to advance more than a pace or two beyond the protective line of mouse-riders.
“Is he the king?” Chert asked, but Flint did not reply. The Rooftoppers themselves were watching the tiny fat man with wide-eyed attention as he leaned his entire head forward and . . . sniffed.
He straightened up, frowning, and then sniffed again, a great intake of air so powerful that Chert could hear it as a thin whistle. The fat man’s frown became a scowl, and he said something in a quick high-pitched voice that Chert couldn’t understand at all, but the other Rooftoppers all gasped and shrank back a few steps, looking up in fear at Chert and Flint as though they had suddenly sprouted fangs and claws.
“What did he say?” asked Chert, caught up in the drama.
Beetledown stepped forward, his face pale but resolute. He bowed. “Sorry, I be, but the Grand and Worthy Nose speaks the tongue of giants not so well as we men of the Gutter-Scouts.” He shook his head gravely. “Even more sorry, I be, but he says tha canst not meet the queen today, because one of tha twain smells very, very wicked indeed.”
“It was long ago—so long ago,” Merolanna told them. “When I first came here from Fael to wed your great-uncle Daman. You do not remember him, of course—he died long before you
two were born.”
“His picture is in the long hall,” said Briony. “He looks . . . very serious.”
“I told you, dear, you may not interrupt. This is difficult enough. But, yes, that is how he looked. He was a serious man, an honorable man, but not . . . not a kind man. At least, not kind as your father is, or as Daman’s brother the old king was when he was in his cups or otherwise in good cheer.” She sighed. “Don’t take what I say wrongly, children. Your great-uncle was not cruel, and in my way, I came to love him. But that first year, taken from my own family and brought to a country where I scarcely spoke the language, married to a man almost twice my age, I was very sad and frightened and lonely. Then Daman went to war.”
Barrick was finding himself hard-pressed to sit still. He was full of ideas, full of vigor today. He wanted to do things, to make up for the time lost during his illness, not sit here all day listening to his great-aunt’s stories. Merolanna’s earlier talk of madness had caught his attention—almost it had seemed that she was about to confess the same night-visitations that had plagued him, but instead she seemed to be wandering into a story of events so ancient as to have taken place in an entirely different world. He wanted to get up off the bed, perhaps even to leave, but he saw Briony stiffen from the corner of his eye and decided to stay quiet. Everything had been so difficult of late: he couldn’t bear the idea of having to fight with his stubborn sister.
“It was a small thing, just short of war, actually,” Merolanna was explaining. “One of the sea barons of Perikal—a dreadful man, I cannot remember his name now—was harrying the shipping on the western coast, and Ustin sent his brother to the assistance of the King of Settland. Daman went away and I was even more lonely than I had been, day after day by myself in this unfamiliar, cloudy place, all these dark stones, under all these frowning old pictures.
“There is no excuse, as I said to Hierarch Sisel, but . . . but after some months I found myself keeping company with one of the young men of the court. He was the only one who bothered to visit me, the only one who treated me as anything other than an outsider too clumsy with her new language to speak wittily, too removed from the center of court life to have any interesting gossip to share. He alone seemed to admire me for who I was. I fell in love with him.” The old woman sat up a little straighter, but her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She had stopped moving the fan. “More than that. I gave myself to him. I betrayed my husband.”
