"Well, you'll need something to get you around once the nails fall out of those boots." The armsman spat between his teeth. "Maybe you could saddle up a dog."
"Go to hell," Dante blurted. He turned his back on the laughter that followed, eyes stinging. At the next yard, a smaller, louder and more crowded affair, he hung on the edges, watching the exchange of money before he asked any questions. He thought he'd robbed his way to a respectable sum, but the traders tossed purses so bloated they could crush a cat. For a while he just wandered, browsing past a half dozen houses of prohibitive expense. The sun climbed. He began to sweat. Hollow-stomached, he came at last to the freelancers, the few too feeble to represent the name of the guild of arms. Dante'd seen plenty of healthy, battle-hardened men this morning, but if he'd never seen a soldier at all he'd still know at a glance why these men were on their own: they ranged from the doddering old to the beardless young, sixty-year-old men with gray in their hair and weakness in their arms mingling with needle-thin boys who looked like nine-year-old girls. The handful of fit age would have been put down if they were horses—patches over scooped-out eyes, pinned-up sleeves, bouncing limps where their tendons had snapped in a battle and never mended. Where the men of the guild proper had spoken through the clash of their swords, these rejects called to him in phlegmy voices like common marketeers.
A young enough man peeled from their ranks and swiped a few left-handed cuts in the air in front of Dante's face. His right arm stopped just below the elbow. When he gestured the smooth ball of his stump swung as dumbly as the blunt head of a turtle.
"What's your price?" Dante said, skipping the formalities he'd seen the merchants make. Decorum ended the moment you considered hiring an armsman who only had one.
"Two chucks," the man said, and Dante rolled his eyes, "per week. Plus board."
"Is that so." He sighed through his nose. He could actually afford that, so long as he kept up his late-night rounds rolling drunks, but he had the notion he'd be getting exactly what he paid for. He glanced around the freelancers, searching for a stone in the rough—not a diamond, but maybe he could find a decent quartz, a smooth piece of glass. In some way, the presence of a bodyguard was more important than his skill at guarding. If nothing else, it would give Dante a few seconds to run while his man was being stabbed to death.
Still—they were so damned old, so damaged, and the couple who were young and whole didn't look like they'd be any better in a fight than he was, and that wasn't much at all. Risking his life in the alleys for their pay seemed counterproductive if the help he hired were entirely decorative.
"What's crushing your junk? That's a bargain by any measure." Dante turned to the voice and met a pale boy whose face was apple-smooth.
"How old are you?" he said, making no effort to conceal his frown.
"Fifteen and a half," the boy said.
Dante burst out laughing. "And a half? What are you, five?"
"Plus ten and a half."
"A real veteran," Dante said. "You don't look like you'd know the sharp end of a sword if it were stuffed up your ass."
"Yeah, well your mother's still got teethmarks on her tit. And not all of them are yours."
With nothing else going on in their overlooked yard, the other unguilded men chuckled, gazing on Dante with bloodshot eyes. He flushed and gave the boy another look. He had an inch and several pounds on Dante despite being a year younger, though that still left him smaller than most boys his age, but he had a broadness of shoulder that might someday make him a decent soldier if he could grow past his ludicrous wiriness. He had close-cropped blond hair and obviously didn't need to shave. His clothes were time-torn, worse than Dante's old set, thick with the black stitches of mending and too short at his wrists and ankles. With a decent diet and another two-three years he might be in the yard of a real house. But Dante wasn't a horse-broker making investments, he was a kid with a price on his head. If he hired this bodyguard and waited three years for the boy to grow into himself, Dante had the sense he'd spend two years and 364 days of that wait in the grave.
"What's your name?" Dante said, readying himself for something to seize on. An odd gleam entered the blue of the boy's eyes.
"Blays Buckler," he said.
"What?"
"I said it's Blays Buckler."
"Blays Buckler?" Dante said. He'd meant to win the crowd with a big laugh, but found a real one instead. He chortled stupidly. "Did your dad read a lot of the romances, then? When your mom heard that name, how did she not murder him? Just strangle him with your birth cord?"
The kid's hand settled on his hilt. "My dad earned his name with his shield. I'll live up to mine."
"With your belt, maybe. But for that you'll want to head a little farther toward the docks."
Blays' face went red from brow to chin and he pressed his lips together so hard they disappeared. The whisper of steel cut the men's laughter short. Dante stared at the boy's drawn blade. Far too late to call for the watch. They might be out for him anyway. Blays raised his arm and threw the sword behind him and before Dante had time to look past the hand he'd lifted to protect his face (as if it would help against killing steel) Blays sprung, tackling him to the ground. They rolled in the dust, grappling too closely for their punches to dole out any real hurt. Blays landed a sharp sting to Dante's nose and his mind blanked with rage. He got a grip on Blays' waist, meaning to drive him into the ground, but the boy dropped his knees and turned his hips and flung Dante onto his back. The boy's knees pinned his shoulders to the ground. He wriggled back and forth, kicking his legs and bucking his shoulders, but he couldn't free his weight, could only slap weakly at Blays with arms he couldn't move above the elbows.
Instead he fell limp, breathing hard. Blays jerked his head at Dante's face, as if he meant to batter Dante's brains in with his own skull, then caught himself and leaned back. He got to his feet, brushing dust from his knees and back.
"Do you even realize how stupid it is to try to beat up your clients?" Dante said from the ground. Blays bent to pick up his sword and laughed through his nose.
"Wasn't much trying involved."
"You took me by surprise."
"So take another shot."
"Two weeks," Dante said despite his anger, speaking from an instinct he didn't understand and would have overruled with another moment of thought. "Longer, if you execute your service well."
"I'd hate to disappoint your lordship," Blays said. He scratched his ear and gazed down on Dante as if he were considering whether they were actually bargaining for his dignity, then offered Dante a hand and hauled him to his feet. He followed Blays inside their cramped office and signed a paper, had it stamped, and parted with half his cash. A week's food and lodging in a single room on the edge of the dock slums wiped out the rest. But he had his guard, someone to watch his back while he studied and roamed, and he bent back to his book, alive for a while yet.
* * *
He moved from the book's first section to its second, allowing himself one new page of the Cycle for every chapter of the background and supplemental works he plowed through so the men and places of the book might make sense. He deciphered a foreign word that cropped up on more pages than it was absent from: "nether." His spelling could be off, and lords knew he had no idea how to pronounce it in the original, but it was the antonym of "ether," at least, the word the priests used when they yakked on about the celestial firmament while everyone else twirled their fingers beside their ears. Now that he had this word, certain passages that had been hopelessly obscure were now just uselessly mystical:
The ether stretches to the nail of the sky and meets itself in the dim caverns below the Earth. In the time before time it was the substance of all things, the water that suspended the stars, the air that made the breath of the gods, the same in all the four corners of the world. Men lived without hunger or death. But the ground grew heavy with their teeming number: and when the mill of the heavens cracked from their weight the waters
broke forth and dashed them upon the peaks.
Arawn took up the mill once more and set it upon the pole in the north, but when he tried to patch the cracks he tore his fingers on the shattered stone. He reset its course, but when he made it grind he found it would grind only nether. When he mingled this dust with the dust of men they rose with murder in their hearts, remembering how they'd doomed the sky.
On the surface that was just a crazy pile of words, no less arbitrary than any of the other explanations he'd heard through the years for why things were the way they were (bad, usually), but as he read and reread, patient and disciplined in a way he'd never been—taking his time not because some daft instructor insisted he should, but because he knew he'd always been a sloppy reader and this was the only way to penetrate the book's hoary legends and lessons—Dante had the unflagging sense he was moving toward a higher understanding, though he didn't yet know what shape it would take or even exactly how he was getting there. He was taking more from the book than a base memorization of its tangled narrative, that was for certain. It was like the very act of confronting the confusion the book was stirring in his mind was making the view of the world he'd held before he started reading it seem laughably small. However naked it might leave him, he felt ready to leave it behind, to throw it away like a pair of pants that had grown too small.
Dante looked up from its pages and into the mildewed timbers of their room, giving his eyes a moment to rest before he turned back to the beginning and started over again. Blays worked something loose from his throat, spat it from the window, and leaned out to see if he'd hit anyone.
"Boredom doesn't bleed, you know," the boy said.
Dante went on staring at the ceiling, lost in whether the book meant the ether and nether as real things, or if they were more of a metaphor of some sort, and if so, of what. Take their names: was "nether" more important because it encompassed "ether"? Or was it less important because it depended on it? Or were they meant more as antonyms or complements? Already he'd read them so often they'd begun to lose all meaning. He glanced at Blays, realizing he'd said something a minute ago.
"Is that what you needed a bodyguard for? To protect you from dying of boredom? Boredom doesn't have a heart. Well, other than church. But I can't stab boredom's heart, I mean. So if it was all this boredom you were afraid of," Blays went on in the leisurely manner of someone used to long days of sitting around killing time while he waited to be hired, "I don't think I can help you."
"I'm not afraid of anything," Dante said, squinting at him. "And it's not boredom I'm concerned about."
"Maybe you hired me to fight that chair that's sunk its teeth into your ass."
"I'm in danger." Dante dropping his eyes back to the page.
"Of bedsores, maybe." Blays leaned back in the windowframe he used as a recovery nest from the late-night sentry duty he pulled in the common room keeping close eye on the beer. He let out a long breath. "Four days cooped in this room and whispering in libraries. I haven't seen a thing. I think my sword's rusted to its scabbard." He planted his hands on its grip and mimed being unable to pull it free. "Gods no!"
"You're being paid for it, aren't you?"
"Is someone chasing you? That it? From whatever village you ran off from?"
"No."
"Probably a priest's son," Blays said, tugging at his lower lip. "Nobody cares that much about scripture unless he needs to prove Dad wrong. He's probably trying to drag you back to the chapel and bring you up right."
"I am not a priest's son," Dante said, going back to the beginning of the paragraph he hadn't been able to read through Blays' prattle.
"You're right. A priest would come with lawmen, not daggers in the dark." He squirmed on the sill, staring at Dante through the dusky room. "You stole something."
"Bread, maybe," Dante said, bringing a hand halfway to his chest. He kept his eyes on the text.
"Oh, more precious than bread. No baker's got the time and money to be chasing after some kid. Not that he wouldn't hang you if he had the chance."
"I'm trying to read."
Blays made a thinking noise. "It's just money, isn't it? You've been rolling drunks in the alleys. Everyone's got to eat, I guess, but if you've got the watch after you I think I've got a right to know."
Dante looked up. Blays' face was blanked by the light shining behind him through the window.
"Why do you think that?" Dante said.
"You are! You're stealing. That's rich. No pun."
"How did you know?"
"I guessed," Blays said, prodding the sill with a small knife he kept around for apparently no more than paring his nails. Dante laid a finger in the book to mark his place and swiveled in his chair.
"No you didn't."
"You're right. I followed you."
"You followed me!" The chair banged against the boards of the floor as he stood. Blays regarded him a second, then turned back to his nails.
"The money had to come from somewhere. It's not like you do any work."
"You followed me."
"Isn't that what I said?" Blays stood up and met Dante's eyes. "Gashen's swinging balls, you spend all day in here reading, then the one time I can be any use you're out sneaking around by yourself? What am I protecting you from, papercuts? What am I doing here?"
Dante frowned, his self-righteousness draining away. He hadn't thought about what Blays would think about their arrangement, but he sounded awfully proud for a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old beanpole who Dante knew he could probably beat up in a fair fight.
"It's not just stealing," Dante said instead.
"What else? Robbing? Maybe some larceny?"
"You talk a lot for hired help, you know that? You're not paid by the word."
Blays rolled his eyes and sat back down in the window. "Whatever. It's your money."
"You see this book?" Dante said, not caring he was shouting. He leaned over the windowsill and shoved the image of the white tree in Blays' face.
"No, why don't you bring it a little closer."
"I took this from one of the old temples of Arawn. They want it back."
"Looks spooky enough, doesn't it?" Blays flicked the cover with his nail. "Who's after you, a bunch of ghosts? That would explain why I've never seen them."
Dante glared at him. A dark speck swam over his right eye and he blinked until it went away. He no longer knew what he was trying to prove. Conversation had always felt like a strange art, and in the weeks since he left the village he'd spoken no more than was necessary to buy things—that and the threats he'd made about the book to the guard.
"You're being stupid," he said.
"You're the one talking about getting murdered over a book."
"Just be quiet," Dante said. He righted the chair and sat down and opened the book. He stared blankly at its first page, massaging his temples with one hand.
"So what's so special they'd want to kill you for it?" Blays said at half the volume of their last exchange. He dropped from the sill and craned over Dante's shoulder.
"Get off me."
"I'm not on you."
"Well don't breathe so hard."
"Stop breathing? Have fun dragging my corpse out of here, then."
Dante smirked into the clean white pages. If the book had been there since the Third Scour it had to be a century old or more. Other than a bit of residual dust, it showed no signs of age.
"It wouldn't be the first."
"Oh, sure," Blays said, pulling upright. He wandered back to the window. "And I'm the queen of Gask."
"I killed two people before I hired you," Dante said. He realized he'd meant it as a boast. His hands curled into fists. "Well, one. One of them must not have died when I stabbed him. And the other was a neeling."
"You killed a neeling and stabbed some guy? Why haven't you been knighted?"
Dante half-heard him through a memory of the pain-clenched face of the man he'd left for dead in the grass beneath the clouds. Blays saw his expressio
n and gave him a sharp look.
"What was it like, then?" he said, voice lined with irony in case Dante was kidding.
"I don't know."
"Come on, tough guy."
"They both tried to kill me first."
"That's not what I asked."
"At the end," Dante said, rubbing his finger along the pebbled leather of the book's cover, "there's a kind of gurgle, a bubble of their final breath, and you wonder how they lived so long at all."
"Sick," Blays said. He drew his sword and swushed it through the air. "Why do people have to die at all?" he said, but he kept swinging his sword, slashing the space between himself and Dante, air whistling over his steel like the wind in the pines.
* * *
The sun had dropped into the jaws of the western mountains before the monks kicked them out of their cloisters a few nights later, suggesting if Dante had such interest in their order, he should speak with them rather than poring over old manuscripts that really didn't reflect the modern understanding of Mennok. Dante thanked them and made vague noises about doing so. Crazy old idiots. How could the gods change when they were already perfect?
The door to their room at the inn creaked open while Dante was still trying to insert the key. His breath caught. Blays shouldered him out of the way, side-sword ringing as he wrenched it free. He edged into the room, leading the way with the point of his blade.
The only room Dante could afford was little bigger than one of the monks' cells and even before he lit a candle it was obvious there was no one else inside. Their few possessions were scattered on the floor, the table tipped on it side, books thrown from the shelf, lying face-down with their pages spread like the bodies of birds. The pallets had been gutted, scattered from corner to corner.
"Funny," Blays said, stirring the spilled straw with his sword. "I don't remember wrecking up the place."
"They were here," Dante said.
The kid shuttered the window and turned to face him. "For the book?"
"Do we have anything else worth a pair of pennies?"
The White Tree Page 3
