Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

  But she is not there.

  Was she ever there, Berklum?

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he mumbles. He has proof, doesn’t he? Something more reliable than his own memory: a feather.

  He lifts sheets on the table, sending their numbers tumbling again, but the feather isn’t there. Was it ever there, Berklum?

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  He kicks the rolls on the floor, then wonders if the feather might be inside them. He picks up each one and peers at it with a single, fat eye searching for colour. The jumbled, tumbling, rolling black lines mock him: his failure to bring a simple impossibility into the world. We can all imagine wings, can’t we? The biggest wings we’ve ever seen – we can picture those. And we can imagine them sprouting from the back of a person. It’s not so hard, once we try. It almost feels natural, as if we should have wings. Perhaps they were taken from us? That’s a comforting thought, Berklum; you aren’t trying to create, but reclaim.

  He lifts everything in the workshop that isn’t bolted down. Some things he lifts twice. He shakes out his blankets, searches the gaps in his old slipdog hide chair, runs a hand along the high shelves.

  In defeat, he looks about his workshop, taking in the disarray.

  But there’s one place you didn’t look, Berklum.

  ‘No, not there.’

  Yes, there.

  ‘It can’t be…’

  Burnt up in the hearth? It can, it might, it probably is. Though knowing will be the challenge – those brilliant colours won’t bleed into the feather’s own ashes, surely? Like so much in the Rusting Mountains, the hearth’s colours are fixed. Who can tell one set of ashes from another? But first you have to look.

  That’s right, slowly, Berklum. That way the feeling can grow. It spreads from the pit of your stomach, going deep into your bones and turning them to lead – those not already turned by your own hand, of course. Leaden steps for a leaden heart.

  ‘No one touches the heart,’ Berklum says.

  Oh, Berklum, if only you could hear yourself. How sad you sound, and how right you are.

  Unable to stop himself, he peers into the hearth’s embers, looking for what he doesn’t want to see. He can accept the shades of grey, the cores of black, and the colour that fidgets from deepest red to sharpest yellow. He tells as much to the Beholder. Tells a story of the beauty found in low flames. Beauty enough for anyone. It doesn’t need anything more. Let that be a separate story.

  ‘Look up,’ Newsands says, her small voice unmistakable despite her being nowhere to be seen.

  He doesn’t want to, fearing his feather will just be ash scattered about the chimney of his hearth.

  ‘Look up,’ she says again, but more encouraging this time.

  There! See? All the colours of the rainbow on a single feather, bobbing and weaving in the black chimney flue. Is it stuck? That is our first thought, but not yours, Berklum. Yours is joy. Something pure, unburdened by reason or rationale. You are so happy to see it. Your eyes, Berklum, they’re no longer dry. So happy.

  You don’t want to hear it now, but you’ll know this later: you’re happy because you believe this is proof.

  Of what? Well, that’s still to be decided, isn’t it?

  ‘Do you see it, Berklum?’ Newsands says. ‘Do you see my gift?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What’s it doing, do you think?’

  ‘Floating,’ he says.

  Floating.

  ‘That’s right,’ she says, still hidden. ‘And you know how it’s floating. Berklum, you know.’

  He is too distracted for such serious thoughts. The effect of colour on him is a kind of enchantment, a state of blissful befuddlement that causes children to get into trouble. But there’s nobody to call Berklum a daydreamer, to call him idle, or to roughly pull him away from distraction. There’s no parenting an old man. But the little girl tries.

  ‘You know how, Berklum. Say you know.’

  ‘Hot air,’ he says. He feels it on his face, and on his hand as he reaches up for the feather: the heat of the hearth. It doesn’t come as a constant, instead it buffets him, one moment soft the next strong. He imagines the fire breathing, in-out, in-out, soft-strong. He changes his breathing to match it.

  Now holding the feather over the fire, holding it by the thin shaft, he watches the rainbow vanes ripple in the hot air. He has to hold it tight; it wants to be away, up and up, away through the chimney.

  ‘It wants to find the sky,’ Newsands says, appearing at his side. She leans in over the hearth. ‘You can feel it.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘To know such a freedom once, to then have it plucked from you, is to know a life of wanting. Rustans know this.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says again. Is he listening? Perhaps on a deeper level than we can appreciate.

  ‘Show them you understand, Berklum. Show them all.’

  The girl looks up at him, and disappointment pinches her perfect cheeks. He hesitates. He still doesn’t believe – maybe he understands, but he doesn’t believe. And that’s what a girl with rainbow wings needs from him.

  ‘Come see, Berklum,’ she says. ‘See for yourself.’

  With a few dainty hops, she is at the workshop door. She can reach the handle, just about, but not all the locks. She pulls at them with a child’s simple determination. And it opens an old wound, doesn’t it, Berklum? To see a girl paw uselessly upwards – such a sight splits that scar tissue.

  Without tears, but an undeniably deep aching, he clicks and clatters open each lock. The tears, they come when she smiles up at him. That’s too much. Looking away, he wipes his eyes, and just in time.

  ‘Palla?’

  Unun is at the house door. Picture it with us now: one street, one house, two doors side-by-side. So, the street has one door for the workshop, for the use of all, and one for the house to be used only by family. She is coming, you’re going. And yet, and yet, look to her now, Berklum. How does she seem to you?

  ‘Stealing,’ he mumbles.

  ‘What’s that, Palla?’

  What’s that indeed. She does look like she’s stealing into her own home. She was hunched over the keys in the lock, as if they weren’t hers even as they turned. And now she’s flushed – not just her cheeks, but her neck. Poor Unun, she’s burning up with her guilt.

  ‘I-I’ve just been to see a friend,’ she says. That’s the lie of a much younger girl, a lie that relies on a seed of truth. You remember that one, Berklum, and back then the ‘friend’ was a boy. Could it be a different boy? No, her love for Nibalt is too big; there’s no room in her for another.

  She’s been four doors down.

  ‘Four doors down?’ Berklum says.

  She flinches, as if stung. ‘My friend. She… Where are you going, Palla?’

  Clever girl. That cleverness is your fault, Berklum.

  ‘I-I just…’

  Oh, this is a merry jig, isn’t it? Two dancers caught in their own special guilt.

  He feels something nudge his hand. His field glasses; Newsands is giving them to him. Their heft, their weight, steadies him. ‘I wanted to watch the tatterwings.’

  Until he says it, he didn’t know it. But Newsands nods – that’s right, that’s where they were going all along, to watch the tatterwing bats.

  ‘You haven’t done that for years,’ Unun says.

  ‘Tell her you know that,’ Newsands says. ‘Tell her you wish you hadn’t worked so much. That you’ve missed too much.’

  He glances at the girl, then at his daughter.

  ‘She can’t hear me, Berklum. She can’t see me.’ Newsands flaps her wings. ‘That much should be obvious.’

  Oh dear, Berklum. This is all getting rather crowded, isn’t it? How will you cope?

  ‘I’ve missed watching the tatterwings,’ he says carefully. ‘Too much working.’

  This, at least, is the right thing to say. Unun brightens. ‘That’s good, Palla. You should be enjoying yourself at your age.’

 
You let that comment pass, just to be away. It’s hard to say who’s more relieved as you part.

  Walking up the street towards the rope boxes, Newsands takes your hand. It’s nice, holding someone’s hand. When was the last time you did that, Berklum? No, not a steadying hand, that doesn’t count.

  ‘She didn’t want to come with us,’ Newsands says.

  ‘No. She’s never liked watching the bats. Doesn’t like the heights.’

  ‘A Rustan who’s scared of heights.’ She shakes her head. ‘That’s one for the Drunkard.’

  ‘There’s more of them than you might think.’

  ‘Not for long,’ she says.

  He doesn’t understand what she means, but he’s given up trying to understand everything she says. Some riddles just aren’t worth the effort; the answers are so often disappointing.

  *

  Unun closes the house door behind her, not too quick, not too hard. And then she collapses against it. She rarely has stories for the Liar; lies aren’t easy for Unun, and they weren’t even as a younger woman. But this isn’t an outright lie. This is more of a scheme, a longer form of deception. For some reason, she takes no solace in that.

  She wishes there was another way.

  Unun tries to distract herself until someone comes home, but she’s no good at this. She eats without tasting. Drinks something hot, just for the heat, and lets it grow cold. She stares at nothing. Eventually, because she doesn’t know where else to go or what else to do, she drifts into the workshop. Berklum didn’t lock it in his haste. His haste to be away from her, away from her lies – her schemes.

  It’s warm in the workshop, with the fire more than embers. But she can’t see anything in the forge, or in the hearth itself, to suggest what her palla had been working on. Instead, she sees the rolls of paper scattered about the floor and the tables. He doesn’t usually draw so much, unless he has a particularly demanding client. He must have made every bone and every modification ten times over by now. So why so much drawing, she wonders?

  She wonders a lot more when she finds the papers blank.

  Even those scrunched up into balls and tossed aside, blank. She presses the papers flat, holds them up to the candlelight, turns them this way and that. There’s a riddle here, in her palla’s workshop, and we’ve said all we need to about riddles, haven’t we?

  ‘Unun?’

  She drops a piece of paper, as if caught in the act.

  ‘Yes,’ she admits, but too softly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ah, here you are.’ Nibalt stops at the doorway from the house to the workshop: a threshold he knows not to cross. She goes to him, hugs him fiercely.

  ‘I’m glad you’re home,’ she says.

  ‘So am I.’ He kisses the top of her head. ‘So many using the boxes, you’d think Fenest had come here for the election.’

  Careful, Nibalt, careful with such heresies.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ she says, her face buried in his chest.

  ‘Should I be sitting down to hear it? Better yet, with a drink at the ready?’

  ‘If you pour me a glass too.’

  That surprises him. His wife doesn’t drink, everyone knows that.

  She follows him back down the corridor to the kitchen. For the first time, perhaps in all her years, she feels glad to be away from the workshop. And that doesn’t bode well now, does it?

  He finds a bottle of something at the back of a cupboard. A Seeder blend, and expensive by the look of it.

  ‘How long have you been hiding that?’ Unun says.

  He raises the bottle to the light. It’s half full… or half empty, depending on where you’re sitting. ‘Not long enough,’ he says. ‘But then I’ve only myself to blame, isn’t that so?’

  He’s only half asking, but Unun nods regardless. Neither she nor her palla have touched a drop, not since her meiter joined the Audience. That she had a seat beside the Drunkard was a given, but who else would her meiter have stories for?

  ‘Only a little for me,’ she says.

  ‘Only a little, for a little problem.’ He pours himself considerably more.

  ‘Problem? Is it so obvious?’

  ‘From the moment I walked in.’

  ‘Oh, Nibalt.’ She sips from her cloudy glass, surprised but pleased with the heat. ‘Why does doing right sometimes feel all kinds of wrong?’

  ‘Usually because that sort of right is hard. No one doubts themselves when the right is easy.’

  ‘I started something today that can’t be stopped,’ she says. ‘I’ve been avoiding it for so long now, I feel… I don’t know what I feel. Scared? Relieved? Or just confused.’

  ‘It had to happen eventually. Your palla can only keep working for so long.’

  She smiles weakly at him. Of course he knows what this is about, likely knew well before she was ready to admit it – likely as soon as he found her alone in the workshop. For better or worse, he’s a husband who really knows his wife.

  ‘I hoped,’ she says, taking a deep breath, ‘I hoped he’d be the one to start it. That he’d give me the workshop, rather than me taking it. Does that make me a coward?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it does.’

  ‘Hoping for an easy path away from your troubles doesn’t make you a coward. Taking it does. Now, do you want to tell me what you actually did today?’

  ‘No.’

  He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t push the matter, and a silence settles comfortably over them. But remember, silence is the one thing the Audience abhors. So, to their satisfaction, we turn again to an old bonesmith and his young friend with rainbow wings.

  *

  When Berklum reaches the end of the street, intending to take the vertical ropebox higher up the spire, he finds himself joining a queue. It’s as Nibalt said – a lot of people out today. At least Berklum doesn’t recognise anyone about him; another moment of peace to tell the Luminary. At his age, few things spark his gratitude quite so much as avoiding polite conversation.

  He shuffles forwards when appropriate, but is too distracted to be impatient. He clutches his field glasses in both hands and tries to recall the last time he went tatterwing watching. Three years? Five? Ten? He used to keep a diary – sizes, colours, wing patterns, going so far as to name those he spotted regularly. Another life, lived by another Berklum. A man more together, perhaps.

  ‘Just younger,’ he grumbles.

  Younger, yes, less prone to grumbling, yes, yes.

  He glares at no one and everyone, knowing he can’t win this argument. This argument is with time, as much as with us, and both are inexorable.

  But look, Berklum, see those children scampering up the ropebox shaft? Two boys and a girl. Anonymous in their youth: faces so smooth and lacking the character of years; voices unbroken; shoulders that don’t know the weight of responsibility. They climb the vertical shaft with the same ease and gait of a Wayward horse on the flat. Wouldn’t you want to feel that again? And no, not as a part of yourself that is already lost, but a part regained? Taken back, by your will alone. Look at the men and women about you. Look at their faces as they watch the children too. Look past the grimaces, the disapproval, to what’s beneath. What do you see?’

  ‘Want,’ he says.

  ‘What do you want, Berklum?’ Newsands asks.

  ‘Not just me. All of them. We all want that back.’

  ‘You understand,’ the girl says. ‘You will help them, Berklum. Together, we’ll help them.’

  Help them you might, but they’re staring at you now. Staring at the old man talking to himself as he holds his hand at an odd angle, almost as if he’s…

  ‘We all want more ropeboxes,’ he says to them, ‘more like the cone has.’

  This elicits the expected tribal response: yes, more like the cone has, this old man understands. He’s seen the problem right away, damn the cone to Silence, seen it right away despite his mumbling to himself and his stale smell. That’s the kind of insig
ht you get from experience.

  And although they might not know it, they’re thinking just the same as you, Berklum. They see those children with their hairy hands and feet, the freedom they have, innocent enough to make the Nodding Child sit up and listen. And then they see you. An old man. Fine, he may have plenty of stories for the Audience when he gets there, but for now it’s only the Widow listening. Listening and waiting. She’s patient; she waits for that same old story. So, they feel caught, Berklum, just as you do – caught between the Child and the Widow.

  ‘More boxes,’ he says again, those nearby mollified. ‘The cone.’

  When their turn comes, Berklum steps into the box as confident and steady as any man of the Rusting Mountains. For her part, Newsands sits on the side of the box, her feet dangling over the edge. He’s surprised she gets in at all.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘Why bother flying when I can take the box up?’

  This makes him laugh. After all that serious talk of freedom and innocence, youth and age, the girl with wings rides in the box too. And her expression, so earnest, only makes it worse. He laughs so much that everyone else looks away, looks anywhere but at him.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ Newsands says, which does nothing to help.

  By the time the box reaches the top of the shaft – the children climbing it long gone – Berklum is out of breath from his laughing. He clutches the side of the box and is the last to get off, under the glare of those impatient to go down.

  ‘I hope you’re quite finished,’ she says.

  He wipes his eye. He has no idea when he last laughed until it hurt. No idea at all.

  Newsands pointedly walks on. There’s something imperious in the set of her shoulders and how she looks ahead. No more handholding, Berklum. She looks as if she knows where she’s going. He doesn’t hurry to catch up but notes she is indeed going the right way.