by Geoff Rodkey
Big Nose gave Guts a helpless shrug.
“Okay, man. Ten gold. Hope you can pay. ’Cos we got big friends.”
I whispered to Guts again. “How are we—?”
“Shut up. Gonna be fine.”
He was still smiling. In fact, the grin hadn’t left his face since he’d first heard the music on the street almost an hour before. In the whole time I’d known him, I’d never seen him smile for more than a second or two.
It was kind of unsettling, to be honest.
The guitarist sat up straight, put the guitar across his lap, and played a short run of notes, his fingers skittering over the strings. Then he paused for a moment, fiddled with a couple of the tuning pegs, and launched into a song.
Like the rest of the music I’d heard that day, it had a hypnotic, chugging rhythm, over which he played a dancing line of notes that I would’ve found beautiful if I weren’t so worried about what Guts had gotten us into. As the Cartager played, I looked around at all the happy strangers and wondered how many of them would help beat the ten gold out of our hides when it was over.
Some of the men were pretty huge.
The guitarist finished his song, and the crowd clapped and hooted their approval. He stood up, handed his instrument to Guts with a wink and a smile, and motioned for him to take his place on the steps.
Guts sat down. A hush fell over the crowd. I took a quick look around to figure out the best direction to run when it was over.
Straight back, toward the far corner of the courtyard.
I waited for Guts to look up at me so I could signal the getaway route.
But he kept his head down, focused on the neck of the guitar, where he was testing the straight edge of the hook against the strings. It was just long enough to cover them all, and as he ran it down the length of the neck, it made a squeaky noise that didn’t sound much like music to me.
There were titters in the crowd. Big Nose shook his head and sighed, half-amused and half-pitying.
Guts stretched out the fingers of his right hand. Then, with the hook pressed against the strings on the neck, he picked out a few tentative notes.
One of them struck false. Guts stopped smiling.
There were a few more titters, but also some pained looks.
I hoped I could run on a full stomach without throwing up.
Guts pulled Lucy away from the guitar’s neck. Reached under the cowl to loosen the strap. Readjusted the hook. Tightened the strap one more time.
Then he took a deep breath and began again.
It started with a single note—a long, keening wail that shimmered in the tropical air before it slowly fell away into silence.
Then another. And another. And another, rising to a patter that slowly built into a flood, the notes sliding in and out of each other as the hook flashed back and forth across the neck while the fingers of Guts’s good hand tripped the strings in a fast-rising blur of movement.
I don’t know what he played, what kind of music it was or where it came from, but it was gorgeous and ecstatic and terrifying, sometimes all at once, ranging in size and shape from towering shards of barely controlled fury all the way down to delicate, plaintive whispers so quiet I could hear the rustle and creak of people in the crowd rising up on tiptoe as they strained to hear.
There was a moment of silence when he finished, followed by a roar of pleasure like I’d never heard before. People were stamping and cheering, crowding around Guts to congratulate him. Even the guitarist he’d beaten couldn’t stop himself from flinging his arms around Guts in a friendly hug.
In the middle of the celebration, Guts caught my eye. His grin widened as he gave me a knowing look that said, Gonna be fine.
THE LETTER
Dear Millicent,
A lot has happened since the last time I saw you.
It was only a sentence, but it took me two hours at a desk and ten pieces of parchment just to get that far. Part of the problem was that I’d never written a letter before, or even seen one, so all I had to go on were the ones I’d read about in books.
The greeting alone gave me fits. Dear seemed much too fussy, like something an old lady would write.
I tried Cheerio, luv, which was how Eustace started his letters to Gwendolyn in The Crisps of Upper Mattox, but I didn’t know what it meant. And since I’d always thought Eustace was full of himself, I decided it was a bad risk to copy him.
I started again with My darling Millicent, but that looked too gushy.
And To she for whom no sacrifice is too great and death is not to be feared should it hasten our blessed reunion felt like overkill. Besides which, the character who wrote that (Miles Cavendish, in A Storm Upon the Heath) wound up jumping off a cliff, and I didn’t want to give Millicent the wrong idea.
So I was stuck with Dear.
Then there was the opening sentence, which had chewed up even more parchment. First I tried:
I love you.
But I was afraid that might scare her off.
I think about that moment when you kissed me a hundred times a day.
Too honest. Also likely to scare her off.
There are a lot of pretty girls in Pella Nonna, but seeing them just makes me miss you more.
That felt wrong for a bunch of reasons. Once I crumpled it up, I decided to avoid the whole subject of my feelings for her, at least up front. So I started again with:
How’s the weather on Sunrise?
But that just seemed chatty. And the truth was, I didn’t care what the weather was like on Sunrise. I just wanted to let her know what was happening with us. So after a few more failed attempts, I decided to just do that, and to quit tossing out parchment left and right, because it didn’t come cheap and I was running low on it.
A lot has happened since the last time I saw you. Guts and I have been in Pella Nonna for two weeks, and although we’ll be leaving soon to get the map translated,
I hoped that was true. The question of when we were going to leave had been a real sticking point between me and Guts.
it’s been amazing to visit here. You know how in books, Cartagers are always villains? Well, the ones back in Cartage might be, but in Pella, they’re not like that at all. They’re friendly, and easygoing, and they like to listen to music and eat and drink and have a good time.
No one works very hard, which they can get away with because there’s gold everywhere—the Cartagers bring it in from mines somewhere in the southern hills, and there’s so much of it lying around that traders come here from all over the world to sell their goods, and even the servants seem to be pretty well off.
Guts and I were definitely well off. I was writing the letter with a peacock quill and a silver inkpot, which I’d found in a drawer of the fancy hardwood desk in the huge living room of the apartment that Salo—he was the tall, friendly, big-nosed band member who spoke Rovian—had helped us rent using the money Guts made from playing music.
There are people here from all over the world, including places I never even knew existed. Mandars, Gualos, Ildians, Umbergians…pretty much every kind of people except Rovians. I’m not sure why there aren’t more Rovians, because everyone’s been very nice to us in spite of our ears.
I’d asked Salo about it. He agreed it was odd that there weren’t any Rovians around, but he’d never heard of the Banishment Law. And when I told him about Racker’s warning that we’d be killed if we set foot in Pella, he laughed.
“That captain smart, man. He lie to crew, keep them on ship. Crew stop in Pella, crew never leave. Pella booya!”
Booya meant good, tasty, delicious. Pella was definitely booya.
There are tons of Natives, too, from a dozen different tribes, and I was surprised to find out they’re all as different from each other as Rovians are from Cartagers. Some of the ones in Pella are laborers, but a lot are traders and businessmen, and some are even richer than the Cartagers.
The problem for us is that none of them are Okalu. When I got here and
started asking around, people kept telling me “Okalu grawa.”
It turns out “grawa” is Cartager for “dead.”
You know some of the history already,
Millicent had once told me the story of the Fire King’s tribe, but I’d forgotten most of it. It took a lot of walking around and awkward conversations with people who didn’t speak my language before I managed to track down a Fingu shopkeeper who not only knew Rovian, but could fill me in on what had become of the Okalu.
but the Okalu are blood enemies of another tribe, the Moku. They both come from the mountains north of Pella, and back when the Fire King was alive a hundred years ago, the Okalu ruled the Moku (and most of the other tribes, too). After the first Cartager invasion, the Okalu Empire fell apart, and ever since then the Okalu have been fighting with the Moku for control of their territory in the north.
A few years back, some Continentals (the man I talked to wasn’t sure if it was Cartagers, Rovians, or someone else) started helping the Moku by giving them guns and cannon. After that, the Moku won the war—they took over the Okalu’s territory and killed almost all of them.
People say there might be a few Okalu left, up in the northern mountains, but nobody seems sure of it. I’m going to go there to look for them with Guts just as soon I can get him to leave town.
Oh, one other thing: it turns out Guts is the greatest guitar player anyone in Pella Nonna has ever seen. And that’s saying a lot, because there are tons of guitar players here. Anyway, he’s famous here now, which is
I almost wrote really annoying. But I didn’t want to sound bitter.
And to be fair, Guts being famous had its advantages. We were staying in this amazing apartment, and he gave me all the money I needed to buy things. And I had to admit the days were pretty good, because the band played in the square, and I could lounge on the palace steps and listen to them, and eat tasty food, and take in the sights.
But at night, he went out to play at private parties for rich people, and I wasn’t invited. After a while, it got boring sitting home alone. I couldn’t even read, because all the books in the apartment were written in some weird squiggly language that I think was Mandar.
So I’d go to bed early, because I was alone and there was nothing else to do, and I’d fall asleep thinking about Millicent.
And then in the middle of the night, Guts would come home, along with half the band and the giggling teenage Cartager girls who followed them everywhere, and they’d have a party in the living room that was impossible to sleep through, and sometimes went on until dawn.
Even worse, now that Guts was famous, and making good money from playing his music, he didn’t seem all that worried about finding the treasure anymore.
But I didn’t want to get into any of that with Millicent. So I just wrote:
interesting. He uses a steel hook to make the notes. I’ve asked him how he learned to do that, and whether he started playing back when he still had two hands, but he won’t talk about it. Although he did say that before he got his new hook, he sometimes played with a knife strapped to his forearm.
I guess sometimes it’s better not to know things. And I’m glad I was never a cabin boy for Ripper Jones.
Speaking of things I don’t know…if there’s any way you can get word to me about what your father is up to
I stopped writing in midsentence, because I’d just realized there was no point in going on.
I couldn’t send a letter to Millicent. It was madness. And not just because I wasn’t sure how to send one in the first place—I knew from books that people got letters “in the post,” but I wasn’t too clear on what that meant, or how you went about finding a post, or what you did with the post after you’d put the letter in it.
I couldn’t send it because the chances were better than good that her father would intercept it. And then he’d know exactly where I was, and what I was doing.
Not that it would have been too hard for him to figure out I was headed for Pella in the first place.
My heart started to thump, like it always did when I thought about Roger Pembroke and how long it’d be until he came looking for me and the map.
Along with the fear came another emotion—a dark, nagging guilt that had been eating at me the whole time we’d been in Pella, and that lately had started to haunt me even more than the fear.
It had to do with my family.
They weren’t the greatest. Dad had always been a mystery, gruff and distant and impossible to read. He didn’t treat me ugly like my brother and sister did, but he wasn’t exactly kind, either.
Venus and Adonis were pretty horrible all around—vicious and stupid, each in their own special way. When she wasn’t insulting me, Venus used to spend her time fantasizing out loud about how some day a Rovian prince was going to pluck her from the muggy stink of Deadweather and make her his princess. If anybody suggested the odds of that were awfully long, she’d screech like a howler monkey and try to claw their eyes out.
I’m not sure Adonis was smart enough to even have fantasies. But if he did, they probably involved stomping on people who were smaller than he was. It was the one thing that never failed to put a smile on his face.
Both of them blamed me for our not having a mother, because she’d died birthing me. Pointing out that I was only a baby when it happened just made them more convinced I was evil.
So it wasn’t like I missed having them around.
But as nasty as they were, they didn’t deserve what they got from Roger Pembroke, which was death by drowning once the hot air balloon he’d tricked them into boarding finally dropped from the sky somewhere in the Blue Sea.
And he’d gotten away with it. He murdered three people, the only family I had, and nobody—not on the islands or the mainland or anywhere else—was going to come after him for it. Nobody was going to make him pay.
Unless I did.
I wasn’t sure how to avenge my family. But I knew I had to try. I’d always known it, even on the Thrush, when I was so scared I wanted to bug out and run away. At times like that, the fear was strong enough to push that dark, nagging guilt to the back of my head for a while.
But it always came back. And the longer I stayed in Pella Nonna, the worse it got. After a while, lying in the sun and listening to music with my belly full of food didn’t make me happy so much as anxious. And not just because I was sure Pembroke was still looking for me, but because I had a job to do and I wasn’t doing it.
I put aside the half-finished letter to Millicent and started to practice the map again—not on the parchment, because I was afraid to leave a physical copy for someone to steal, but traced with my finger on the dark wood of the desk.
I was halfway through the map when the front door burst open and Guts entered, along with Salo, Illy, two other band members, and half a dozen of the gigglers.
“WHOOOOOOOO!”
They were in high spirits, which was annoying.
Salo slapped Guts on the back. “Tell Egg man big news!”
“Playin’ the palace tomorrow!” Guts said with a grin and a twitch. Lately, he only twitched when he was excited.
“We get you in, too, Egg man! You gon’ meet Li Homaya! Eat his food! Se booya!”
“Who’s Li Homaya?” I asked.
“Big man in palace! Leader of Pella. Been two months gone with army. Tribes in south give trouble, so Li Homaya go make them know who is in charge.” Salo pounded the air with his fist.
“I thought Cartagers got along with all the tribes,” I said.
“Ones that don’t give trouble, yeah. Other ones…pow.” Salo swung his fist again.
It was news to me that the Cartagers and Native tribes weren’t totally at peace, and I might have asked Salo more about it if I hadn’t had other things on my mind.
“Guts—can you not have the party here tonight?” The band and the gigglers were starting to settle into the overstuffed couches in the living room, and I knew once they made themselves at home,
there’d be no getting them out.
“Wot’s yer problem?”
I lied. “I’m sick. I think it’s catching.”
Salo looked concerned. “Hey, Egg man—don’t make band sick. Big show tomorrow.”
“Well, maybe you should—HUUARCH!” I broke off the sentence with a loud, hopefully not too fake-sounding cough.
That did the trick. They were out the door in seconds. Guts was going to go with them, but I managed to get him to hang back.
“Wot’s yer pudda problem?” he asked once we were alone.
“We can’t keep putting it off. We’ve got to go find the Okalu.”
“Gonna. In a bit.”
“You said that last week.”
He shrugged. “Good week, tho’.”
“I’m glad you’re having fun.” That probably sounded a little too sarcastic.
“So’s you! Good here! Good fer you, too.”
“It’s nice and all,” I admitted. “But I’ve got to get on with finding that treasure.”
“Been missin’ a hundred years. Ain’t like it’s—”
“He’s going to come looking for me!”
Guts winced. I didn’t have to tell him who I was talking about.
“I don’t want to go it alone,” I said. “But if I have to—”
He shook his head firmly. “Ain’t gonna have to. Partners.” His eyes twitched a couple times. “Can I just play the palace ’fore we go?”
“When is it? Tomorrow night?”
He nodded. “Go the next day. First thing. Awright?”
“All right,” I said. “And…thanks.”
“Don’t gotta thank me. Partners.”
LI HOMAYA—THE TITLE meant “The Highest One” in Cartager, and it made me wonder how the King of Cartage felt about one of his colonial governors calling himself that—returned to the city late the next morning. An hour before he arrived, a pair of soldiers on horseback galloped into town through the city’s big double gates and started barking orders at the merchants in the marketplace. As the merchants hurried to pack up their tents and wagons, clearing out the courtyard, I asked Salo what was happening.
