by Peter McLean
The Gutcutters might know the Wheels but they didn’t know the Stink, not like we did, and some of them were young. They weren’t all veterans, that was for sure, while most of my crew were.
I was back in Messia, right then. I remembered the close fighting in narrow alleys where numbers counted for nothing, with daggers and the volleys of crossbows that left no one standing.
We had no crossbowmen that day, but we had Billy the Boy.
We caught some Gutcutters ahead of us in an alley between two crumbling warehouses. I pointed, and Billy raised his hands and sent a wash of flame down the alley that turned half of them into screaming, burning travesties of life. I had seen men burned like that before, in Abingon, and I knew there was no coming back from it.
We led them on a wild chase through the alleys of our own neighborhood, splitting them into small groups to break up their strength. Jochan, Anne, Billy, and me stayed together, harrying a group of Gutcutters down toward Fisher’s Gate.
“Take them down the narrow to the river!” I shouted to Jochan as we headed into the warren of alleyways behind Hull Patcher’s Row. “Cut them off!”
We needn’t have hurried, as it turned out. When we rounded the corner it was to see the remaining Gutcutters surrounded by thin, sick, angry people with barrel staves and kitchen knives in their hands. They looked at Jochan and me, these people of the Pious Men streets, and they fell on the intruders like a pack of wild animals.
When they were done, there was nothing left alive.
Was that shocking?
I supposed that it wasn’t, in Our Lady’s eyes. When people have run out of food, and hope, and places to hide, do not be surprised if they have also run out of mercy.
When it was done I walked among them, and they bowed their heads and competed with one another to kiss my hand.
“Mr. Piety,” someone said, and there was a sort of reverence in his voice. “We don’t want their sort down here, not on Pious Men streets we don’t.”
Pious Men streets.
That was where we stood, and there could be no more argument about that.
FORTY-SEVEN
“It’s enough now,” Ailsa told me, after I had finally managed to get some sleep, and her tone brooked no more argument about that, either. “No more, Tomas. No more violence, not with you involved. I had to spend a lot of money this morning to turn the Guard away from you and your streets.”
“Aye,” I said. “I thank you for that, Ailsa, and I hear you about the violence. I remember the other things you said too. Did you mean them?”
We were in my room above the Tanner’s Arms, where no one could overhear us, and this was Ailsa the Queen’s Man I was speaking to now.
“Oh, I meant them,” she said. “We will marry, and soon. This Godsday afternoon, in fact.”
I stared at her.
“That’s only five days away.”
“Yes,” she said. “Captain Larn and his men have to return to Dannsburg next week, and the timing must be right if you’re not to be implicated in what they do.”
“I see,” I said. “I’ll need . . . everything.”
“Everything has been arranged,” she said. “Your tailor has our clothes ready, and suitable outfits for Jochan and Anne and Enaid as well. Your family have to be there, and I assumed you would want Anne to be present as well.”
I nodded. She was right about my family having to be there, and Anne as well. This wasn’t just a matter of propriety or respect, I knew. This was deadly serious now. It felt like I was back in the army again, with orders to follow and all the planning done for me. The decisions had already been made and the supplies arranged, and there were no choices left.
“She’ll not wear a dress,” I cautioned Ailsa.
“I know,” she said, “but Rosie will and I need her to be there as well. They will make a handsome couple, to bear witness to our union.”
Our union. I barely knew the woman, even now, and I had no way of telling if what little I did know of her was true. Ailsa was a master of the false face, after all.
“What about the Gutcutters?” I asked. “If they attack again before Godsday . . .”
“Billy says they won’t,” she said, “and my spies and Luka’s agree with him. You hurt them badly last night. Very badly indeed. Now let them wait on our wedding day, and my justice.”
Ailsa’s justice was the queen’s justice, and I knew that was even harsher than mine.
That was good. Once justice was done, all of the Wheels would be mine for the taking and the Skanians would be without their foot soldiers. Whether marrying Ailsa was good remained to be seen. She was certainly pleasing to the eye, but what use is that in a stranger?
“You said something about a house,” I reminded her.
“Would you like to see it? It wouldn’t be proper for us to move in until we are married, but it’s ready now.”
I paced over to the window and looked out into the street below. This was the Stink; this was my home. I’d lived all my life in Ellinburg save for the war years, and all of it in these streets. Even when I’d had money before, I had never felt a need to move up to the area around Trader’s Row. That wasn’t for people like me.
I tapped my fingers against the windowsill and realized I was nervous. Not about the marriage, as I knew that didn’t truly mean anything. I was nervous about moving, and about society, and how I wouldn’t fit into it. I listened to Ailsa talk about this house she had arranged for us, but I wasn’t paying attention to her words. I was listening to the sound of her voice, the way she spoke and how she turned her phrases. I didn’t talk like that, and I couldn’t see that I ever would. Oh, I could dress like a lord, and spend money like one too, but I would never sound like one. I had seen nobles in the army. Most of the senior officers had been nobility, after all. They didn’t even walk like normal people.
And then of course there was my brother. I wondered if Ailsa had given any thought to how we were going to explain Jochan. Truth be told, I didn’t care. If this let me do what needed to be done without being dragged off to see the widow afterward, then that was good, to my mind.
I would worry about everything else later.
* * *
• • •
The house was splendid, I had to admit. We went to look at it the next day, Ailsa and me, with Jochan and Luka in tow. It was set on the far side of Trader’s Row from the Stink, in the shade of the hills below the convent, and with a view of the magnificent Great Temple of All Gods where we were to be married. The house must have had thirty rooms, and all the ones we saw were elegantly furnished and decorated in what Ailsa told me were the latest fashions.
I wouldn’t know.
“Fuck a nun, Tomas,” Jochan said, turning around and around in the hall and staring up at the gallery and the high ceiling above him. “This is a fucking palace!”
“Aye,” I said. “That it is.”
The servants were lined up in the hall to greet us, and if any of them thought anything of Jochan’s language or of my accent they had the grace not to show it. That was wise of them, to my mind.
Ailsa had them introduce themselves to me, the steward and the housekeeper and the cook and the undercook and the valet, the lady’s maid and the scullery maid and the three footmen and four household maids and two housemen. What I was supposed to do with them all I had no idea, but I assumed Ailsa would. I was paying more mind to how many guards I would need to put on the house, and where best to station them.
“I’ll have a few of the lads come up,” Luka said, as though reading my mind.
I nodded.
“Have them bring crossbows, and plenty of bolts,” I said. “The high windows have a good position over the approaches.”
Ailsa cleared her throat and gave me a look.
“Tomas,” she said.
“No,” I said. “No
, it’s not that simple. Business doesn’t stop just because I buy a fucking big house, Ailsa. We’re still Pious Men.”
“We’re getting married,” she said pointedly. “You know what that means.”
“We are,” I agreed, “and I hear you, Ailsa, but that won’t change everything. Not in one day it won’t, not in Ellinburg.”
Jochan frowned at me in obvious confusion, but I ignored him. He would see what she meant, in due course.
Everyone would see what she meant, on Godsday afternoon.
FORTY-EIGHT
Godsday came at last. My wedding day.
Pawl the tailor had come by in his cart the day before and delivered all the fine new clothes Ailsa had commissioned from him, and that Godsday morning I didn’t hear confessions. We were all too busy getting ready. The place was packed, and almost everyone was there apart from Larn and his men, and Cutter. They had all gone off together the night before, and they hadn’t come back.
Ailsa had been gradually changing her voice over the past week, slowly becoming less common, but she did it so smoothly that I didn’t think a soul had noticed. The barmaid act was almost a distant memory now, and I suspected it would stay that way. I wanted to see her, to make sure everything was in hand, but that would have been ill luck on the morning of our wedding. I wouldn’t see Ailsa again until we stood before the priest together, so all I could do was trust to Our Lady that everything was going to plan.
I was eating an early lunch with Jochan and Anne and Luka, all of us dressed up for the occasion in our magnificent new coats and doublets and britches. Even Billy the Boy looked like a young lord. He would be coming too, of course, as my adopted nephew. Everyone had to be there, and more importantly to be seen to be there.
Aunt Enaid would be joining us later at the Great Temple of All Gods, and Brak with her. She had pitched a fit when I told her I was marrying Ailsa, and all but thrown me out of her house, but I had insisted that she come whether she liked it or not. I had insisted very hard indeed. I couldn’t tell her exactly why she had to be there, of course, but my aunt was no fool and eventually she got the general idea about what I meant. All my family and my top table had to be seen to be there around me. That was very, very important. Even Sir Eland was coming, to escort Rosie from Chandler’s Narrow and give my retinue a bit of class.
Fat Luka was to play the ceremonial part of Ailsa’s father, as he sadly couldn’t be with us in person. Truth be told, I had no idea if her father was even still alive. She had said that he was and I accepted that, but I knew that it might well not be true. Still, Luka had learned the ceremony, as had I, and that was all that mattered at the time.
It was hot in the common room with the fire burning and all of us wearing too many heavy clothes, and after I had eaten I took my glass of brandy and walked out the back to the stable yard to take a breath of air. Anne joined me a moment later.
“Congratulations on your wedding,” she said.
I looked sideways at her, unable to gauge whether she was making fun of me.
“I wanted you beside me, as my Closest Man,” I said. “I hope you understand that I had to ask my brother. Appearances.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted it to be you.”
“I know,” she said again. “Appreciate the thought.”
I nodded and put my hand on her shoulder for a moment. Anne grunted and swallowed her brandy.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “No.”
Bloody Anne put her empty glass down on the wall beside the back door and silently examined her fingernails, giving me the moment I needed.
“I know what I’m doing today,” I said. “Today is vitally important, Anne. You’ll see why, this afternoon. A thing will happen, this afternoon, and then you’ll understand. After that, though? No. I don’t think that I do.”
She sucked her teeth for a moment, then turned and spat over the wall into the stable yard.
“Didn’t think so,” she said.
* * *
• • •
The air in the Great Temple of All Gods was thick with incense and overly hot from the sheer number of candles that burned in there. I knelt briefly to pay my respects before the shrine of Our Lady, one of many shrines in the temple to the great number of gods and goddesses who were held to in Ellinburg. That done, I made the long, echoing walk to join my brother in front of the altar. The worst of the incense was burning there, on that huge stone slab under the tall windows with their thousands of leaded, diamond-shaped panes. I looked briefly over Jochan’s shoulder and out those windows. My eye was drawn to the shapes of the great waterwheels turning in the haze from the factories where the river ran along the eastern side of the city. From its vantage point on the hill at the end of Trader’s Row, the Great Temple of All Gods commanded an impressive view of the Wheels.
That was going to be interesting.
A moment later the priest joined us there, a Father Goodman, who, if the word of the Chandler’s Narrow girls was to be believed, was nothing of the sort. There were several of the women among the wedding guests, in fact, sitting in the row of pews behind Anne and Rosie. Each had the bawd’s knot proudly displayed on her shoulder, and I could see them looking at the priest and giggling to each other as they waited. Father Goodman was holding his face very still as he made a point of not looking at any of them.
“Is it time?” I asked him.
“Almost,” he said.
There was no clock in the temple, of course, and good clocks were a rare enough thing anyway. I fidgeted, wondering what was keeping Ailsa. This had to happen at the right time. Everything did, or we were done.
“Getting nervous?” Jochan asked me.
He winked and passed me his pocket flask. The priest wasn’t looking, so I took it and had a swift gulp of brandy. Truth be told, I was nervous, if not for the reasons Jochan thought. Ailsa would have understood, I knew, but no one else did yet. I wished I could have confided in my brother, and in Bloody Anne even more so, but it had been out of the question. The fewer people who know a secret the more secret it stays, to my mind, and there was too much at stake today to risk a wrong word or an overheard conversation anywhere.
I pressed the flask back into Jochan’s hand and he pocketed it, and a moment later the doors at the far end of the huge temple opened and the drummers took up their beat.
Ailsa looked breathtaking as she stepped into the Great Temple in a magnificent dress of cream silk that set off her dusky brown complexion perfectly. At that moment I wished with all my heart that I were marrying her for real, in a way that would mean something between us as man and wife.
Her gown shimmered in the light of a thousand candles as she walked slowly down the nave with Fat Luka at her side. She stopped the requisite five paces away and dropped me a low curtsey. Jochan and I bowed respectfully to her in return, and again to Fat Luka, in his place as her father.
The forms obeyed, Luka brought her to my side in front of the priest who was waiting with his back to the altar. Luka and Jochan, my Closest Man, both took two steps backward, leaving us there together. We turned to face the priest, so that we were looking directly out the great windows behind the altar. The drums stopped all at once, leaving an echoing silence that seemed to portend what I and Ailsa alone knew was to come.
“Faithful of the gods,” the priest proclaimed, “you have come together in this temple so that the most holy ones may seal and strengthen your love in the presence of the temple’s ministry and this community. The gods most abundantly bless this love. Let them now bear witness so that you may assume the duties of marriage in mutual and lasting fidelity. And so, in the presence of the gods, I ask you to state your intentions unto one another.”
There was a flash of light somewhere over in the Wheels, and then an almighty bang sh
ook the glass panes in the windows behind the altar. It sounded like a siege cannon firing, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew exactly what it was.
It had begun, and right on time.
Father Goodman almost jumped out of his robes, and I could hear startled whispering among the congregation behind us.
“Thunder,” I muttered. “Carry on.”
“Ailsa and Tomas, have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?” he asked.
“I have,” Ailsa said.
Another roar rattled the glass, and this time I could see flames rearing up in the distance as the first row of factories caught fire. A column of thick, choking smoke rose into the air and spread over the Wheels like the shadow of Our Lady.
This is what happens, I thought, when you cross me.
“I have,” I said.
“Will you love and honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?”
“I will.”
Smoke boiled up from a dozen places in the Wheels as merciless fires tore through the timber-and-daub buildings. Another almighty explosion shook the lead in the stone mullions and a warehouse collapsed, sending clouds of dust over the water.
“I will,” I said.
“Will you accept children lovingly from the gods and bring them up according to the laws of the temple and the land?”
“I will.”
A factory exploded like the wrath of the gods. I could see the beams and burning laths raining down onto the surrounding streets, spreading the fire and the carnage. Our Lady herself walked those streets that Godsday afternoon, and Our Lady has no love in her heart.
