* * *
—
Back on the roof of Thebes, at the runners’ fire, Marek had gotten up to pace the edge. I was distracted by him.
“I warned you,” I said. “It’s a long thread of a tale.”
“Not just a thread. A knot. A serpent tied in a tight knot,” he said.
“I can leave it untold. There are other relics.”
“No.”
“You doubt my telling.”
“No.”
“What bothers you, then?”
“Errol would be with us now if this had been solved.”
“Nay. This tale was kept in a locked guild.”
“Aye,” Marek said. “Similarly, Errol’s possessions were kept in a locked trunk.”
From then on Errol and I haunted Thebes’s halls, on the prowl for anything that took the shape of his fear. After one such night we returned to the nineteenth strata to find a throng of guilders crowded at the hall door to our very sleep quarters.
“There be summat carrying on in your room,” Mam said when she saw us. “What have ye hidden in there? A girl?”
“Never,” I said. “Well, I mean, not so far—”
“They think it’s Cerberus.”
We heard a crash on the other side of our door. The mob stood silent, waiting.
“It’s the bogle,” Errol whispered to me. He put his key in the lock, held up his lamp, and shoved the door open. “Show yourself!” he yelled.
The laundry guilder beside me was the first to scream. A fierce, black blur shot from our room as if from a catapult, hissing and slashing with claws and fangs as it passed my head.
The hall was chaos. I was thrown against a wall. Most of the mob fled. A half dozen guilders cornered the beast and pinned it with brooms. One beat its head with a shovel. Errol plunged into the crowd throwing guilders out of his way. I thought he was going to join the killing. Instead he pulled the leather belt from his leggings as he ran. “Draw back!” he yelled. When they withdrew their brooms, the beast lunged. Errol was faster. He yanked the animal by its tail with one hand. The beast whipped around with unnatural speed and sank its jagged teeth into the belt Errol held in his other hand.
“There, now,” Errol said, to a hall gone silent. “Everyone step away.”
No one needed to hear the order twice.
Errol dragged the creature through the crowd to our rooms on the strength of its own grip on the belt. The guilders cleared their throats and murmured as we passed. They were embarrassed for having delivered such a beating. None had seen a beast of any kind before.
We calmed the beast, which is to say I stood on a chair reading the volume of Pliny’s Natural History and his descriptions of all the beasts of the world, while Errol scratched under the animal’s chin.
“Stille,” he said. “Stille, wael-geuga.” Hush, little wild beast. Finally Errol pulled its fangs out of the belt and washed the blood from its head. With its mouth closed and its fur no longer standing on end, the beast appeared significantly smaller than when it was trying to murder us all. It was the size of a soup cauldron. Its eyes were black beads on a long, flat triangle of a head, with a black nose at the tip and a stripe of pure white between its ears. As it limped around the edges of the room, its claws clicked on our stone floor.
“Pliny says here, fangs are typical of the beast known as catoblepas,” I said. “Which carries its head down, as this animal does. ‘The catoblepas will prove the destruction of the human race,’ Pliny writes, ‘and all who behold its eyes will’”—I turned the page—“‘fall dead upon the spot.’” I looked up from the book. “How are you feeling?”
“We already beheld its eyes,” said Errol. “And apart from the wound you received from running into a wall, we’re fine. What does Pliny have to say about bears?”
I thumbed through the pages. “‘There is magical poison in the brain of the bear that, if drunk, induces rage in men.’”
“Aye. We saw the beginnings of rage,” said Errol. “Does he mention the stripe?”
I read down the page. “Nothing here,” I said.
“I wish there were drawings. What do you think? An infant bear, with a stripe?”
“Absolutely. Here we have a perfect specimen of a striped infant bear.” Errol nodded, as if I were serious. But I said, “How, in the towers of a quarantined city, would I know what a striped infant bear looks like?”
Errol held out small things for the animal to inspect: a lock and key, a handful of quills. No doubt he was testing for a bogle. But it made no sense that this wild creature, now licking the salt sweat from his fingers, could pick a lock and find its way to the kitchens, fire up the ovens, and set two dozen chisels on fire.
We sat with the beast all night, under the spell of its otherness. We wanted to know its stories, how it had gotten into our walled city, climbed up the long stairwells of an iron tower, and chosen our room.
“The beast wants to speak with us,” said Errol.
“Aye. But it lacks an alphabet,” I said.
“Or we lack its alphabet,” said Errol. We were all three silent as the animal curled in Errol’s lap, its head tipped sideways. The pain seemed to be eased by Errol’s fingers working the fur over its neck and shoulders. The beast slept.
After a while Errol said to me, “When it was afraid, the striped infant bear attacked everyone. It came after me, though I was helping it, as fast as it came after the guilders who delivered those blows.”
“Aye. I was there. I saw the whole thing,” I said.
“It clung to the belt in fear,” Errol said. “Its own fear made it possible for me to trap it.”
“Aye,” I said. “I was there. I can see you’re a fine trapper, like everything else you do.”
But he said, “No. I have become like the beast, out of fear. I am so full of fear and rage I cannot separate friend from foe.”
I sat up. “In faith—”
“You don’t have to disagree. I know it to be true,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to disagree.”
I awoke in the night. Errol was cradling the beast. The animal was spasming, as we had seen guilders do after a blow to the head, and then it lay stiff.
When my mam came to bring breakfast to us, Errol fell into her arms and wept. He would never see another beast again, he said, or feel that wildness that had inhabited our quarters for one night. I had never seen anything like this. Mam carried the striped infant bear away, to be thrown from the roofs like the carcass of any foundling.
In the chaos of that night, no one noticed an old woman wandering in the morgues deep under Thebes. She was a tunnel knocker, a useless old foundling whose name, when they looked it up for the death records, was Durga. The younger foundlings who happened upon her carcass found her wounded inexplicably, a hairline incision in the chest, still wet and badly bruised, as though someone had opened her chest with a rough blade, put something into her ribs or taken something out, and tailored the seam. The tunnel was strewn with the things she had been carrying. A certain foundling with whom I was acquainted made me look at the body when they carried it up to be thrown off.
“Foundlings die all the time,” I said.
I didn’t tell this part, but in that odd moment, I was trying to ignore the sensation that I could see the striped bear curled up next to that murdered foundling.
“Foundlings die all the time, aye, but your da never made it a point to attend a foundling’s death till now.” In her hand was my father’s whiskey flask, broken at the neck, sticky with blood.
After the striped infant bear, Errol was different. He began to run the flights of the guild tower. Half the night, up and down, down and up. I could hear him passing our room. In the mornings he went to work with Woody.
The bogling did not end, but it had a
new effect on him. He was humbled by it and had a new understanding of fear. He had a new respect for the guilders’ endurance and their work, and he asked questions and talked to them in new ways. The guilders began to like their prince. On the first calm evening in our bunks in seven years, Errol said to me that he would either lead the guild or be called to the roofs. Either future would be acceptable.
I was changed, too. Whenever I smelled Slyngel Thebes coming toward me in the stairwells, I took a turn so I would not have to see him or to ever ask him what he had done to a tunnel knocker with the jagged edge of a flask.
Then? Then.
A month before Errol was called to rise to the roofs, Margaret Thebes descended to my family’s quarters and told me to fetch my mam.
“Gudrun, you and that foul man and your pack of idiots are moving. Gather your things,” Margaret said. Margaret did not belong on this strata. We were beneath her in every possible sense of the word.
“Why? But we didn’t do anything wrong!” Mam said. Then she looked at my brothers and their girlfriends, my sisters and their men, lying in a room full of unfinished chores. We were lazy and we were multiplying. “Nothing that I know of.”
“I am not moving you down, Gudrun. Rather, up.”
“But we didn’t do anything right, either,” Mam said.
“Cease talking,” said Margaret Thebes.
I should have wondered why Margaret Thebes would give our slouching clan the finest quarters of the tower, on the coveted 130th strata. But I didn’t care. Errol and I would now have a room big enough not only for beds but for desks and workbenches. When he left for the roofs, I would have it for myself. I ran up and down the 111 flights from our former rooms, dragging our old chairs and beds as fast as I could, lest Margaret change her mind.
On my last run down to the old rooms, I was stopped short by a strange sight. A pack of foundlings was moving into our former quarters.
Foundlings?
They were my age, all of them. There was no mam in their midst and no da. I had to look twice because, I swear it, I thought one of them was Errol. He had Errol’s build and gait and his head of dark red hair, although the foundling’s hair went all the way to his waist.
I was still standing in the hall staring at these facts, when Margaret called that same foundling into the hall. I stepped back into the shadow of the stairs.
“So you’ve moved in. Good. If anyone tries to harm ye, Feo Foundling,” she said, “merely tell them you are my son. Aye, tell them you are the son of the guildmaster Margaret Thebes. Yell it if you must.” She paused. “You may even say you are Errol Thebes if you think it would help.”
“Mam?” said the foundling, confused. Who, on this strata, could mistake him for Errol? But for him, to question her sanity would be a step over the edge of a tower roof.
There was nothing insane in Margaret’s voice that day. I am a bard and a translator, able to hear a script’s worth of desires and intents buried in the pitches and draw of even a single word. When Margaret ordered Feo to masquerade as her son, I heard the distinct timbres of fear and regret.
That night I awoke with Errol’s salt-sweaty hand over my mouth.
My father was mewling out in the hall. “I don’t care what ye say! I will not drink that! Dinna bite me! Nawww! I see swine and rooks and stinking rats when I don’t have the whiskey. Give me the whiskey!” There were the scuffling sounds of a struggle, and then Slyngel was gurgling and spitting and coughing.
I pushed Errol’s hand away and got up. “He’s just drunk. Stay here.” I went through the great room of our new quarters and flung open the door to the hall. Someone or something ran like a shadow up a wall. It shot down the hallway. My father lay sprawled on the stone floor in a pool of black liquid.
“Locking me from my own fine quarters, are ye, then?” he said, wiping his chin with his sleeve.
“Stop bogling Errol Thebes,” I said.
“What? Nay! What? I must see him—” His eyes darted down the hallway.
“Come back when you’re sober. Which is to say, never,” I said.
He craned his neck to look over me. “He’s here, then?”
“Errol Thebes wants no part of you.”
“It’s my last chance!” He ran at me. “For I’ve drunk that poison—”
“Of course you have drunk it. You always have drunk it.” I moved to shut the door, but my father lowered his head and rammed into me. I was surprised as much by the fact that he had done anything as the amount of force with which he had done it, and I threw him across the hall.
“I’m ashamed of you!” I yelled.
He was up again and coming at me, his eyes flitting to the open door of our quarters. “Which one of my nine demons are ye?” he said. “I have drunk too much of the double’s vitriol to see—” Had he said devil? Or double—?
“Ragnar,” I lied. “I’m your son Ragnar Thebes.”
“Not the one everyone calls Odd? That one would help me.”
“No. I’m not Odd.”
“But you’re feathery—”
“Stop it! Stop with the feathers! I don’t have feathers!”
“Sh!” He stopped and listened over my shoulder. “I hear him. Is Errol Thebes coming out? I must tell him. I must.” He looked straight at me. “I must warn him.”
“Fine. I’ll warn him,” I said. “I’ll warn him you’re here. But he already knows it.”
“No!” he panicked. “I’m not the one to fear!”
But I slammed the door on him and bolted the lock. For a long while Errol and I lay awake in our bedrolls, listening to Da’s fingers playing at that lock.
The night was not done with us. We were awakened before the next bell by an echoing in the walls, far below us. Someone was running up through the north wall of our tower, in one of the hollow, stone-and-iron passages foundlings use. They came our way, passed our strata and our rooms, then we heard them above us, one of them screaming and begging: “I am the guildmaster’s son! The guildmaster’s son, I tell you! The guildmaster is my own mam!”
We lit our bed lamps.
“I am right here, am I not?” said Errol.
“Aye,” I said.
“Who is that, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. That was a lie. I knew exactly who it was.
Higher the pitch rose, full of a fear I had never heard: “What are you doing to me?! Let go! No! Stop! I am Errol Thebes himself!” I heard the clatter of hoofs in that wall. (And how would I know that sound, having never heard it before?) The screams grew fainter above us until, finally, silence.
When Errol appeared in the hall for breakfast, guilders eyed him like a ghost. He and I ate breakfast alone. Margaret Thebes called him into her quarters.
“We’re done,” she said. She was pale.
“I don’t understand,” said Errol.
“You don’t need to,” she said. “I am guildmaster and I say we’re done. There will be no more.”
Feo was gone. The rest of the foundlings in our old quarters moved back to the morgues where they felt, in a twist of irony, safer. The quarters stood empty, and remain so even now, having been the temporary home to a raging striped infant bear and, for one night, an insane foundling.
Errol threw his old list of suspects in the fire in our room. He told me that Feo must have been the one bogling him since he was seven. Not Slyngel, not the infant striped bear, not me.
I shrugged. “No tumors, then?”
“I never thought a foundling would have the courage to bogle me,” he said. “Can you believe the audacity? The last thing it stole was my name. Did it really look like me?”
“Aye. He did. He was older. Thinner, as you might suspect, with his being a foundling and you being, well, you.”
“To look like the g
uildmaster’s son, yet to have none of my privileges, must have driven it over the edge.”
Errol’s explanation did not fit the particulars. Men did not scream for help on the way to a suicide. And I did not tell Errol that his own mother had urged Feo to steal that identity. I myself needed to be done with the whole business.
He and I visited our old rooms on the nineteenth strata one last time, to see what was left of that night. When he picked a human thumb off the carpet, my stomach heaved. The nail of it was outlined in blood. A white bone—well. Errol wrapped it in a strip of muslin and put it in his tellensac. I pointed out how disgusting this was. But Errol said Feo’s thumb would remind him forever not to trust a foundling, prone, as they were, to jealousies.
I saw my da that night, the great Slyngel Thebes, staggering into the stairwells, holding his right hand in his left, protecting that amputation wound.
I didn’t have to worry that Errol would ever see the nine-fingered Slyngel. My da lost his sight that same night, and his liver hardened like a scroll wedged up under his ribs. From the door of the midwife’s rooms, I watched my brothers drag a keg of whiskey to the dying-bed so Slyngel did not have to see the end coming, or hear it. He had no tellensac, no going-stories he wanted Mam to tell. It was the third night of the month of Faol—spring somewhere outside the guild but winter in it. They folded him in his trunk, poured the last of his whiskey on him, and sent him to the morgues.
Truth is slippery. Here’s everything I know: The bogling ended after Feo was gone. Slyngel was gone, too. Errol Thebes left for the roofs a month later. He was stronger for all that had happened to him. A runner of extraordinary endurance for all his time running the stairs. A guildmaster’s son who actually loved his guild and its work and its city. A bogled kelp who had risen, fearless.
A Rescue
ERROL THEBES HELD HIS HANDS OUT to his sides like a baby learning to walk. What time of night was it? Or was it night at all? He felt an impulse to reach for a rag, to run a fly and get away from the pain. There was no rag. No fly.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 14
