by Lynn Abbey
Or had he?
… Visit the Broken Mast, get the box, push the leaves apart …
Cauvin snatched the box and brought it closer to the lamp. In addition to the broken scrollwork there were clusters of leaves on what he’d taken for the box’s bottom. He prodded them gingerly, in various combinations. On the fourth try the box sprang apart. There were pieces of wood falling to the floor, coins bouncing everywhere, and a sharp pain at the root of Cauvin’s right forefinger. He stood transfixed, watching a bead of blood well up from his flesh.
“Ki-thus, I must return home—to the land of my mothers. My people need me; and I need you.”
The woman who spoke in Cauvin’s mind was a soft, tiny creature—no taller than Bec—wearing a snug gown that widened her hips threefold and bared a woman’s ample breasts. For a moment, there was nothing in Cauvin’s mind save those breasts, then he managed to look at her face. Fortunately, he’d seen a fish before, else he might have dropped to his knees when the glistening membrane flicked across her eyes.
“And that is precisely the reason I cannot sail with you, Shu-sea. We could be together while we dwelt in Sanctuary, but nowhere else. We were each born with obligations we cannot avoid—and now those obligations are calling us, both of us and at the same time. You must return to your Empire and I to mine.”
The man who held the woman’s hands between his own had bright gold hair and guileless eyes.
Cauvin blinked. He looked past the embracing couple and recognized—barely—the angles of the palace roofs. The man, his memory told him—though Cauvin couldn’t understand how it could be his memory—was Prince Kadakithis, last of Sanctuary’s Imperial governors, who’d left Sanctuary for Ranke seven years after its sack in the faint, futile hope of saving the Empire from anarchy—
Seven years! In his own life Cauvin had listened to old Bilibot and the charlatan-hazard Eprazian tell the tales of the Rankan Empire’s collapse and how the Kitty-Kat prince had vanished one day, never to be seen again, but the details—where the prince had gone or when or why—None of that was part of Cauvin’s memory.
And what, exactly, was “anarchy”?
Suddenly—as if the pair had heard Cauvin asking his sheep-shite questions—they unwound and looked his way. The woman—her name was Shupansea and she was the ruler-in-exile of the fish people—ran toward him, rouged breasts bouncing. She embraced him. Cauvin felt the surprising strength in her arms and smelled her perfume, familiar in memory though he’d never smelled its like before.
“Lord Molin—Thank you for coming so quickly. Can you speak sense to him?”
Cauvin gasped. He wasn’t himself; he’d become Lord Molin Torchholder, or a few of his memories.
“What’s wrong?” the prince asked.
“It’s too late,” Molin replied.
Or Cauvin replied; or it didn’t matter because the words all flowed out of memories that had been old and meaningless long before Cauvin had gotten his froggin’ self born.
“What’s too late?” the woman asked.
Cauvin felt a sense of relief as strong as his anxiety had been a moment earlier. Molin had always gotten along well with the Beysa. She understood expediency better than her naive husband ever would or could. If she’d been a man, not a fish, he—Molin, not Cauvin—would have backed her all the way to the Imperial throne in Ranke.
“A messenger just arrived from the capital. Your cousin was deposed five days after he was made emperor. He did not survive.”
There was more in the scroll the golden prince took from his hands. Molin had already read it through. Cauvin recalled the details: a battle in the streets around the Imperial Palace, a new emperor proclaimed—the third since the year began, a ten-year-old boy hacked apart for the crime of being his father’s last surviving son.
Cauvin had his froggin’ answer. He’d learned the meaning of anarchy—it was just a sparker word for his own childhood and adolescence.
“Go with your wife, my prince, or stay here in this gods-forsaken city, but set aside all thoughts of returning to Ranke. Your presence there will not bring peace. The capital has gone mad. The mob will hail you one day and tear you apart the next.”
“Ki-thus, come with me. My people will welcome you—”
“Your people need their Beysa; they do not need a foreigner as her consort.”
The prince wasn’t the fool people thought he was. He was merely a man who’d been born at the wrong time—a man of grace and wit and justice trapped in a moment when those admirable qualities were worthless.
“I must return to Ranke. That is where I belong, no matter what fate awaits me there.”
Molin—Cauvin—watched the tide change in the Beysa’s glistening eyes.
“What of our children, Ki-thus? Our daughters? What will become of them?”
The prince’s face became a mask that could not hide his anguish as he said the little girls would be safer far away in the Beysib Empire than they’d ever be in Sanctuary.
The two should never have jumped the broom together, Cauvin judged, and in the echo of memories not his own, the old man—Molin Torchholder—agreed.
“Cauvin! Cauvin! What’s wrong with you!”
Cauvin looked into the eyes of Prince Kadakithis, who’d left Sanctuary but never arrived in Ranke—
No, he wasn’t looking at a prince’s face, he was looking at Leorin, who could have passed for the prince. Or his daughter? No. No. The years were wrong. Kadakithis had vanished more than thirty years ago. His daughters would be Mina’s age, not Leorin’s, and decades gone from Sanctuary. Still, the resemblance—
“Sweet Sabellia.”
“Since when do you swear by Imperial gods?” Leorin demanded.
Cauvin shuddered from his feet all the way to the top of his head. A ghost had touched his soul—that’s what Batty Dol would say. And this time, maybe she’d be right. The ghost of the old pud he’d left in roofless ruins outside the walls? The ghost of Prince Kadakithis? Or the ghost of his daughter?
Whatever it had been—Whatever had possessed Cauvin’s life for a moment and stirred its memories into his, it was gone. He was alone with Leorin in a room above the Vulgar Unicorn.
“Look at these!” She held her cupped hands where Cauvin could not help but see them and the shiny coins they contained. “Look at them! Not a mark on them. There’s fifteen silver soldats—I don’t even recognize the face on the—and a gold coronation! A coronation, Cauvin—Look at it! Have you ever seen a coin so big and bright? And more tumbled under the bed!”
Leorin emptied her hands into his and dropped immediately to her knees. Cauvin couldn’t explain what had happened to him, but coins—uncut and as shiny as the day they’d come from the mint—needed no explanation.
“I can’t take these to a scribe asking for quills and parchment.” Cauvin’s mind stumbled from one consequence to the next. “He’ll say one soldat’s as good as another and rob me blind. I’ll have to go to a changer first. With one soldat. I’ll get a better price for one good soldat than twenty—”
Clutching more coins in her hands, Leorin looked up from the floor. “Forget the old pud! We’re rich, Cauvin. Rich enough to leave Sanctuary and start over somewhere else. Mother’s blood, let’s leave! There’s a merchant downstairs; he’s leaving for Ilsig city tomorrow morning. We could travel with him. Oh, Cauvin.” She spilled the coins onto her bed before wrapping her arms around Cauvin. “Please, love, please? Let’s run away from Sanctuary before it’s too late. Come. Let’s go downstairs and talk to him. Right now. There’s nothing keeping us here. Grabar’s no more to you than the Stick is to me.”
Leorin tugged Cauvin’s sleeve. He took one step toward the door and became unmovable. “I left an old man alone outside the froggin’ walls. Easy money says he’s dead by morning—I’ve never seen anyone as old and frail as him. I’ve got to see to him, Leorin. I’ve got to know that he’s dead, if he’s dead, and bury him, if he is. I can’t leave him to rot. I’m done with t
hat. My—” Cauvin’s stomach sank. The old geezer was right: “My sheep-shite conscience won’t let me.”
“Sheep-shite is right. What’s one more, Cauv? Do you think almighty Ils is keeping count after what you’ve done? What we did? You can buy a new conscience when we get to Ilsig city. Cauv—”
She tugged again. The coins spilled between his fingers.
“One day—one morning, that’s all. I swear it. I’ll go to the red-walled ruins—”
“And if the froggin’ pud’s alive—what then? Mother’s blood, Cauvin—listen to me: If I don’t run away tonight, I won’t have the strength to run in the morning. I swear that.”
“You’ll have the strength,” Cauvin assured her. “It’s just one night—one last froggin’ night in Sanctuary. Summer’s over. Autumn, too. I felt it in the air this afternoon. There’ll be froggin’ frost on everything by morning. Everything, including the old man.” He hugged her close, but there was a stiffness in Leorin’s spine that hadn’t been there before. “One night, love. What’s one more night after all the others?”
There was only one law in Sanctuary: Stay out of the past, and they’d both broken it. They were even, but the price was high.
Cauvin hugged Leorin tighter than she wanted to be held and caressed her wavy golden hair. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s too late.” Leorin wrestled free. She collected coins from the mattress and the floor. “Visit your old man. Buy him parchment and ink. We’re never getting out of Sanctuary, Cauv. Never.”
Leorin stuffed the box pieces into the sack, then dribbled the coins atop it. She wrapped the bulging cloth and string around Cauvin’s hands like manacles. There were tears in her eyes. Cauvin couldn’t be sure—there was so much he didn’t remember—but he didn’t think he’d ever seen Leorin cry before, at least not when she was awake.
“We’ll go,” he assured her. He would have given her a hug, but he could not untangle the cloth.
“It’s too late.”
“It can’t be. It’s just one more night.”
“One too many. One week too many. One month, one year. Mother’s blood, it’s always been too late. Go, Cauvin. Go, now.”
“One night, Leorin. Even if the geezer’s not froggin’ dead, I’ll make arrangements, find someone else to dig his grave.”
Leorin shoved him toward the door. “You’re blind, Cauvin. You always were. You’re strong because you can’t see what’s there.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow night. We’ll find another—”
“Come if you want, or not. It was a dream. Now I’m awake, and it’s gone.”
“I don’t—”
“Just go, Cauvin.”
He was powerless to fight her, powerless to remain in the room to comfort her.
The air was past chilly when Cauvin left the Unicorn. The fog had been transformed into ice crystals that glistened in torchlight. The yard dog barked once as he came through the gate, then slunk away before Cauvin got the bar down. It wouldn’t come when Cauvin whistled; it just hunkered in the shadows, whining.
Who would have thought that he—froggin’ nobody Cauvin—could have more gold and silver than he could measure and be miserable, too?
Chapter Five
Five piles of four coins or four piles of five coins, either way they added up to more soldats than Cauvin had called his own before. And froggin’ bright silver soldats, as shiny as gold by the light of the little clay lamp he’d set on the floor beside his pallet. They must have been sealed tight in the wooden box since they’d been struck. There wasn’t a mark on them, not even a speck of black tarnish. The emperor’s profile was sharp, and Cauvin could have read the man’s name in the ring of letters around his portrait, if his name had been Cauvin.
The stoneyard didn’t encourage payment in bright, uncut coins. Grabar couldn’t give them to Mina because the honest merchants on Pyrtanis Street wouldn’t take them, and the rest insisted on exchanging them for face value—which was a froggin’ bad joke. So when an Ender paid in bright silver, Grabar hied himself down to his changer in the Shambles—an honest man, they hoped, who’d barter anything on the counter of his cavernous shop. For a price, Bezul would convert bright soldats or shaboozh into purses of Sanctuary’s greasy, clipped coins that turned black the day they were minted.
But the treasure in the Torch’s box went beyond silver. Cauvin had spread three froggin’ gold coronations beside the silver piles. They were bigger than the soldats, nearly the size of an uncut, sixteen-padpol shaboozh. Froggin’ sure even one of them was worth more than all his soldats. The three of them together might be worth more than the froggin’ stoneyard. Cauvin didn’t know how froggin’ much more. He’d never actually seen a gold coin before.
Froggin’ sure, Cauvin thought he’d seen more than three coronations tumble to the floor of Leorin’s dormer, which meant—probably—that she’d froggin’ palmed one for herself. Shipri’s tits—he didn’t hold the theft against her. Probably, he’d have palmed one of the froggin’ huge coins himself, had their positions been reversed. Froggin’ sure, he could buy a year’s worth of Mina’s affection with a coronation, maybe two, or make her think twice before selling the stoneyard out from under him.
Leorin had wanted to use the coins to run away from Sanctuary …
Cauvin had thought he knew the woman he’d decided to marry, thought he’d come face-to-face with all her moods and demons, but he’d never guessed she wanted to leave Sanctuary. Froggin’ sure, he threatened to leave all the time—leave the stoneyard, anyway. In his froggin’ heart of hearts, Cauvin couldn’t imagine out-and-out leaving Sanctuary. Miserable though it was, Sanctuary was home: not loved, but familiar.
When strangers moved into Sanctuary—and froggin’ odd enough, there was always a steady stream of strangers moving into Sanctuary—they sooner or later came to the stoneyard to resurrect whichever ruin they’d claimed for their own. While he and Grabar figured out how much and what kind of stone the reconstruction required, the newcomers would complain about the city’s flaws: the rank smell of its sea air, the bitter taste of its water, the grating sound of the Wrigglie language he and Grabar spoke as they worked, the coarseness of their clothes.
Cauvin had no desire to live where everything would be as unpleasant to his senses as Sanctuary was to its newcomers. No, all Cauvin wanted from his froggin’ life was Grabar’s stoneyard when Grabar no longer needed it. But if Leorin wanted to leave—
“Cauvin! What are you doing?”
Cauvin was a spark in dry tinder when taken unawares. He was on his feet with his fists clenched in front of him before his thick wits found anything familiar in the face peeking up through the ladder hole in the floor and needed a good long moment before he could trust himself to speak to Bec. By then the boy was in the loft and had gotten a glimpse of silver and gold.
“Furzy feathers!” Bec exclaimed, and fell on the treasure. “Where’d you get these? Did you find them out at the red-walled ruins or did you steal them from that merchant you said you helped today?”
(Cauvin didn’t know what a furzy feather was; no one did. They—him, Grabar, and Mina together—didn’t want the boy cursing, so he made up oaths of his own.)
“I froggin’ sure didn’t steal them,” Cauvin snarled, and seized Bec’s wrist for good measure. The boy yelped and shed the coins onto the floor.
“So, you held out on him! You gave Poppa a pittance to keep him happy and held out the rest for yourself. That must have been some load of moving you did this afternoon.”
“It was,” Cauvin agreed, gathering the coins.
“Bet he was stealing—the merchant you helped, that is. I’ll bet everything you helped him move was stolen fresh from the palace, from Arizak and his ladies—or maybe from the Dragon. I’ll bet he stole what the Dragon stole first. I’ll bet you half of these coins—”
“Don’t go making bets you’re going to lose, Bec.”
The boy’s imagination and his recklessness wo
rried Cauvin. He foresaw Bec falling in with men who’d squeeze him dry.
“How, then? Poppa would bust his froggin’ gut if he knew you had this much silver-and gold, too!”
“Mind your mouth. You’ll have Mina down on me, if she ever hears you talking like that.”
Bec rolled his lower lip. “Momma will come down on you twice as heavy if she thinks you’re holding out on her and Poppa. Poppa, too, if I tell them you’re hoarding a hundred shaboozh.”
“They’re soldats, not shaboozh,” Cauvin corrected as he grabbed Bec’s ear. “And you’ll keep your froggin’ mouth shut.”
The boy howled and Cauvin released him, lest he draw his parents to the loft.
“Froggin’ froggin’ froggin’—I will if you tell me how you really got them. Wasn’t any merchant, was there?”
Cauvin shook his head. “There wasn’t—”
“So you did steal them!”
“No, gods all be damned, I didn’t steal anything. There was—there is an old man—”
Cauvin’s mind raced. Did he dare tell his foster brother the truth? Did he dare tell the boy anything less? The boy was too froggin’ clever by half. He’d picked up the scattered pieces of the carved box and started putting them back together again, as sure as if he’d done it every froggin’ day of his life. Could a sheep-shite stone-smasher possibly put together just enough of the truth to satisfy Bec’s demanding curiosity?
“This is what they came in?” Bec concluded, as the box grew in his hands. “You found it, maybe? Found it so you can say you didn’t steal it, but you found it with the merchant’s goods—or left behind in the place where you were moving them—”
“I didn’t steal anything! It’s complicated, Bec. I don’t hardly understand what’s happened today myself, but you’ve got to swear you’ll keep your mouth shut—”
Bec mimed placing a strip of cloth over his mouth and tying it tight behind his ears.
“There is an old man. He lives in the palace; and he’s an important man there. He’d gone to the old temples and got himself attacked.”
