One night I held the foundling’s scroll in my hands and stared at it until my eyes crossed and the letters lifted off the page, shimmering with some kind of light that poured off onto my fingers. I rolled it backward and forward. Finally I turned to the very back of the scroll and found, attached with old bookmaker’s thread, a list of letters of her tongue and the common tongue, the sounds they made, and a key to the meanings of various words one could find in the text: bija for “seed” and simhah for “lion.” In two uurs I spoke a sentence in the language of red curls of thread, and the foundling informed me I had demanded to eat her cat. By Langesonne that year, I read a poem in the language of the red threads and watched in surprise as the foundling wept.
The foundling would never herself read more than the six lines of poetry from which light poured down her fingers, but I didn’t ask her permission to read aloud to her, and she didn’t protest. As I had found with her scroll, I next found a primer for the language of Ovid. Amo, amas, amat. After another month in the library I could read my favorite bard aloud in his mother tongue. I sat next to the foundling and let Ovid pour onto her. After that I poured Hesiod, in his tongue. Luo Ben, in his. I poured the writings of the nameless scribes who tailed Beowulf and Siegfried. And then, and on.
Often, when I read, the foundling repeated my words silently, her eyes closed and her lips forming the shapes of sound. I moved my chair to sit across from her and lifted my book so that, from underneath it, I could watch her do this.
From time to time the foundling would disappear for several nights, and I was afraid my drunken father had been right, that my foundling had been paid in tax to the regnat. I would go to the library and wait for her, for I would have this or that to tell her or some new scroll I had found to read to her. Eventually she always returned.
One night she asked, “What do you smell when I am here?”
“Nothing. Sheep skin from the scrolls,” I said. “Iron and gall, in the ink.”
“Can’t you smell me?”
“Cardamom in your hair maybe.” If she expected poetry, she would have to look elsewhere. I was only nine.
But it wasn’t poetry she sought. To her I smelled mustily of quills. Ovid’s prose tasted thin and yellow in her mouth. Hesiod was heavy and fleeting, like firewood. The bread I gave her sounded of drumming. The number three, in any language, felt like a sharp pinch. She had long suspected she was alone in these ways and I told her to keep such things to herself, or the guilders would throw her off the roof.
“But then who would clean their pisspots?” she said. “No one.” She was quiet for a long while, then said, “Why are you coming to the library every night?”
How much did I want to tell her? “My da named me after someone in the books. I need to know who it is.
“I see. And why are you learning all these languages?” she said.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Feh,” she said. “As if you are too complex for me?”
I told her I was learning the tongues in case the wall came down and we opened the city to the world.
These explanations had once been true, but they were lies now. I came here to be with her. I learned the languages for her. Could she be trusted to know that? To know that I left my guild and my city every night, on sky-worthy carpets woven for me of alphabets and runes I had learned for her?
Definitely not.
She said, “Well. You do talk a lot. I’m sure you would have a lot to say to anyone outside the wall.”
“How do you know how much I talk? You never see me anywhere but here.”
“I see you with your cousin and all those kelps who want to be with him. Today he said merely ten words and you said more than three thousand before epistola.”
“As if you watch me from the walls and keep count,” I said.
She made her voice sound like mine: “‘I call that I am playing Beowulf today! No, me! Errol is always Beowulf! Listen, you felons and thieves. My great-grandmother was from Camelot and that is only five leagues from Geatland—’”
I put my hands over my ears. “Stop. I hear myself. Stop now.”
“That was just the first thirty-two—” she said.
“Stop.”
She smiled at me. “I love listening to you talk, Odd Thebes.”
This stunned me. My whole life, my family just told me to shut up: my father, my siblings, even my own mam. I said, “And somehow you know my name, also. So I must know yours, if a foundling even has a name.”
“Find it out for yourself,” she said. And she closed her eyes and slept, with her feet in the air: the skinny, impermeable one.
I was outflanked. So I did what any man would do in my situation.
“Well,” said my mother, later that night, wiping the grease from her hands and leaning against her cookstove. “You have met the great Jamila Foundling. Margaret Thebes found her in a scrap bin. Sent her to be raised with the foundlings in the morgues. Which was a good thing for them, as Jamila Foundling steals food and blankets for them, and once a month or so she is called up to the guildmaster’s quarters to explain why the foundlings are dancing on the caskets again, to fiddle music, and flute, which she teaches them.”
“Foundlings are filthy, are they not? And contagious.”
My mam laughed. “This, from my son who refuses to bathe.”
“It sleeps sitting up,” I said.
“Aye, well. For a month Jamila Foundling refused to open her eyes. And then for a fortnight she went everywhere on her hands. And then she would not touch the floor at all. Leapt from the rafters over our heads. She is what you might call mul-heafod.”
I don’t know where my mother got that word, mule-headed. There were no living animals in the guilds of this nameless, placeless city. Skins. Feathers. Wool. Bones. All the parts of former animals. But nothing alive. How would my mam know how a mule’s head acted? And can you blame me that, from then on, I assumed a mule head was a glorious thing—a winged horse, or some kind of fairy.
* * *
—
As I lay in my tent on the roof of Thebes, eight years later and nearly seventeen times around the sun, on the first night of the new year with six lines of stolen poetry from a torn scroll pouring light on my fingers while I was dying of starvation, my mam’s words were a relief to me. The foundling who could walk on her hands for a fortnight and dance on death’s luggage—such a mule head would survive Beklemek.
Ice
A FEW WEEKS AGO we had been high with excitement over Beklemek and Winter Ship. Now our bellies were concave. Breathing was our one chore. I woke in the night, licking the iron roof under my pillow.
Grid came around each morning. “Are you making water?” In faith, I had no spit, no tears, no piss. What could she do, but give me a larger ration of water from ice she had melted under her body in her bedroll in the night?
Marek put Dragomir in my charge, and Faisal, too. He was too busy to notice if they fainted or lost faith. What could I say to them? The three of us were barely alive, lying side by side each night in my tent, exhaling foul stenches from empty innards.
On every roof and in every guild the scene was the same. The city was being driven to its knees.
* * *
—
On the fifth morning of the month of Rhagfyr, I rolled out of my sack, thick with coats and hides and joined a line of Thebes’s runners at the west edge. Marek was not there.
Grid carried Emem to the edge because he was too weak to walk. Emem had a lens and was watching something on the earth. A black form, some shadow fathoms and fathoms below us, chased a smaller form through the streets and to the river, a narrow ribbon of silver we could see between the towers. We had never seen a beast before, save once, in a far-gone time. The smaller one was panicked, angling back and forth.
“Isan. Nnwoon,” said Em
em, unaware he had reverted to his mother’s tongue.
Everyone looked at me. “He says they can walk on the water.”
“Emem, no,” Grid said quietly. “They are running on ice. We are iced in.”
The first shadow was faster and it overcame the small one.
Emem said, “Wait, where did it go?” But no one answered.
I lay in my bedroll late into that night, running my fingers between the ribs under my shirt, wondering where Marek was and where Errol was. Wondering where I would be when I took my final breath and who would be left to tell my going-stories. I had thought it would be Errol Thebes and he would rest me in my mother’s bed. The thought of this undid me, and I laid my elbow over my face and ached with homesickness for my own self.
* * *
—
I lay half sleeping, restless, in my tent like that.
“Odd Thebes,” said a voice at the flap. “Are you awake?”
“I’m up. Yes. Just finishing some astronomy calculations. What is it?”
“Are the kelps still with us?”
“What kelps?”
“Dragomir and Faisal.”
“Marek—is that you? There’s ice on the river. Where were you this morning?”
He did not answer but rather whispered, “Emem has—” He could not say it. “Emem is gone.”
“Gone gone?” I said.
“Aye. We’ve lost him.”
Emem was gone? Nobody was gone! Nobody died at eighteen! Emem knocked the crow every morning! How could he be gone?
I pressed on Faisal’s shoulder. He yawned and asked if it was time for breakfast. Aye, I said. Let him dream. But Dragomir would not wake. I shook him. I pinched his cheek hard enough to bruise it. I leapt out of my sack and jumped on his chest. Nothing. I put my face next to his and blew a great hot gush of foul breath up his nose. His eyes opened, the stone-cold look of a corpse.
“Odd Thebes, you are beyond all help,” he said.
I fell back into my sack with my heart beating wildly. I cried out, “Both pelts are with us still.”
“Would you come out?” Marek’s voice cracked. “I have Emem’s tellensac.”
“Of course. Yes.” I laid my head back on my pillow. “What time is it?”
“Crust,” he said. “By the stars.” Three in the morning. Festivum, somnium, crustum.
“So early?” I said. I thought of the baker’s bell for a long while—of bakers, and bread, and how when we were kelps we used to steal precious white flour from the kitchen and spew it at each other and pretend to be fire-breathing wyrms. I thought about all this until I could not remember what I was thinking about and I forgot Marek outside my tent and sank into sleep.
A Conjuror
“THERE WAS ONE GRIM WINTER the ships didn’t come,” said Marek. I sat up. How long had I been asleep? Was he still talking to me? “I only know of it from hearsay,” he went on. “None of us were born yet. First they ran out of food and fire, then water. They reversed the flags. They burned the lines. And then they ran out of restraint. Few survived. This will be that winter again.” He was outside my tent.
A new voice, lower and muffled, said, “We have sufficient lines to drop to the street, to go for food. Why don’t we ever consider that? You and I could go.”
“No,” said Marek. “There are terrors on the street far worse than starvation.”
“To die of starvation is also a terror,” said the other. “Ask Emem.” Marek was quiet. “What is it, on the streets, that we fear so much that we agree to be kept locked in these guilds for all of time?”
“You don’t want to know.” That was Marek’s voice again.
“I do want to know, Marek Thebes. You might even say we are all dying to know.”
Marek answered tersely, “What I do know, I am unwilling to say, even to you.”
“Are they going to burn the lines?”
“Yes. At dawn. The fire will melt this ice. It will buy us a day of drinking water. I don’t know what purpose that serves—” Marek paused. “I cannot tell all these going-stories.” He stopped, overcome. Finally he cursed and said, “I dread the stench of silk ablaze.”
The second speaker said, “Don’t let them burn. Wait one more dawn.”
“You’re a dreamer,” said Marek. “Margaret Thebes is burning the workbenches to keep the guilds warm. The whole guild is packed into the dining hall.”
“Tell her to wait. Tell her that’s an order from Fremantle.” The speaker scrambled to his feet. “Or, as she’s my mother, tell her I asked her to wait. They’re looking for me. I must go.”
I untangled myself from the bedding and came flying out of the tent. It was snowing hard. Errol was already on the fly. I ran after him, stumbling across planks and fumbling with lines laced with ice for three roofs before he heard me. He turned to face me on some plank at some tower I no longer recognized. I took a step back. He was lean from starvation, like all of us, and there was a danger about him.
“Stay high,” he said. I barely recognized his voice.
“I plan to,” I said, panting. I spat blood. “What are you—a ghost? Rumor said you were dead.”
“An exaggeration. Are you all right?”
“Look at me. The answer is in front of you. I’m a thousand years old. I’ll be dead tomorrow. Where have you been? What are you doing here?”
“I came to ask Marek to go down to the streets with me.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
“Will you go?”
“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well then. Can I rely upon that foundling to keep the cnyttan spican safe?”
“What—? Nobody is thinking about those stupid knotting spikes anymore. Stop!”
“Someone is thinking about them. Guards tracked me yesterday from Fremantle.”
I threw up my hands. “Emem is dead. The whole city is starving while you and the regnat squabble like kelps over a pair of knotting spikes.”
“The regnat isn’t starving. I saw him on his roof. He is thicker than he ever was.”
“He—what?” A fat regnat in a starving city? I was too sick with vertigo to think. I said, “Are you leaving again? If so, this is the last time we will speak.”
We were silent for a while, and then he shifted. “No, it’s not the last. I will be everywhere. I’m coming to hear Emem’s going-stories. And to watch the Long Run. And to the Winter Ship party you and I planned to attend together. Tell me your costume so I can find you. Are you Homer?”
I looked at him, incredulous. “You’re joking! There won’t be a iosal party. And no Long Run. By the end of this week the city will be a morgue.”
“Still I’m asking. What is your costume?”
I stared at him blankly. “I—I cannot remember.”
“Fine. Be that way. Then I won’t tell you, either. And you’ll not know me.” When I shook my head, confounded, he said conspiratorially, “You know this is my only chance to find that kitchen girl.”
There was play in his voice. I threw my head back and groaned. “Wait—not Kitchen Girl!” And now there was play in my own voice. “You haven’t spoken of her once since we came up to the roofs. I thought you didn’t love her anymore.”
He laughed, and we were together in this now. “How could you say such a thing? Kitchen Girl is everything. Everything!”
I sniffed. “I see. And here I thought those iron spikes were everything. And how will you even know which girl she is, should you meet her on Al-Razi? Considering it was pitch-black in that kitchen and you never actually saw her.”
“You know who she is. I could ask you anytime.”
“In faith, there were many names carved on the underside of that table. Easily a thousand pairs. Also, wads of chewn-up mastiche.” I shrugged. This was an old routine of ours. “Whatever. M
aybe I know, maybe I don’t.” I kicked at the edge of the plank. “Incidentally, if I could have told you who Kitchen Girl is, would you have given up everything, just to have her?”
“Yes. Of course,” he said. “Why?”
I paused. “Well, girls seem to like that. The giving-up-everything thing.”
Errol’s eyes darted to a point over my shoulder. “Stay high,” he said, and he was gone.
I was run down then by two Fremantle guards. They didn’t want me; they wanted him. I was left clinging to the underside of a plank.
Back in my tent, lying in my sack, I wheezed with laughter. The whole city was trapped in a high and ancient quarantine. Starvation was upon us. The river was ice. Fremantle was coming for Errol. And there he and I had been, out on a thin plank, speaking of death. And in the middle of all that, Errol had managed to conjure the image of a party and a girl, and his conjuring was better for me than bread or water.
Ships
ERROL DID NOT COME to Emem’s going-stories. Marek called us into the yurt without notice, and the stories had been quick.
The two pelts were asleep, one on each side of me: Faisal and Dragomir. They were fifteen. Old enough to run fly-lines a mile over the earth, to apprentice themselves to a guild for life, to be bound and wed, to father kelps, and now to hear the going-stories of their friend. Let them dream.
In my thin state I hallucinated the faraway voices of men shouting orders. Their voices were small and they yelled in the cadences of a language I didn’t know. My disoriented mind could twist languages. Guilders? Were there guilders on the roofs, come to burn the lines? I sat up, the tent spinning. A hallucination of sound, I told myself. Was I dead? Was this heofon? Please tell me the afterlife was not three stinking runners in a rancid tent.
Faisal sat up. “What?”
Not even in a hallucination could I summon what came next. The tower shook so hard I thought it would collapse with the gongs of the bells of Berfrei tower. I had forgotten the sound of bells. Faisal and I clutched for the tent, for Dragomir, for anything to hang on to. Then came the wild clamor of more bells from the compass points—Athens at the north wall and Marathon at the south. Visby and Cairns were answering.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 8
