City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “I don’t know her name, I only know the sawol in her chest.”

  “Her soul? I think you mean her tits.”

  “Shut up, Odd Thebes. The kitchen is héafodstede now,” Errol said.

  “Sacred? I shall bow when I enter and belch. And did the kitchen girl leave a shoe when she ran from the ball? Your little Aschenputtel?”

  “We were barefoot.”

  “Then how will you ever find her?”

  “We carved our names, in the dark, on the underside of the table.”

  “Ah. Excellent idea. With a million other pairs of names no one can read.”

  “Aye. And we swore not to look, until we meet in the kitchen again someday.”

  “A logistical nightmare. As reliable a tool of detection as the shoe left by the cinder girl. A twelfth of the world would fit into such a shoe, not including small men and boys.”

  “I gave her a black faras piece from Woody Thebes’s shatranj set.”

  I made a gagging sound. “What! You what? You broke up the new set?”

  “I had to.”

  “Black is me! You gave my horse to the ugly, married Kitchen Girl?”

  “You can use a quarter-uur piece in its place. Anyway I’ll be gone tomorrow to the roofs, and you’ll be here alone in the tower. So there will be no more beating me at shatranj.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “For leaving me for a girl, before you even leave me for the roof.”

  “Well, and I hate you for staying behind with that girl in this guild house,” he said. “I have just enough time to pummel you, to keep you from coming near my faras.”

  He launched himself from his bedroll and landed on me. I bit him. Straightaway my brothers yelled from their quarters that the two of us should just kill each other so they could live in peace. But we lived and fought on, marking Errol’s rising to the roofs with a night of warfare.

  When I pretended to sleep, later, I watched Errol put the black baidaq into his tellensac. Barely had he known her. Known her? Could he pick her out in a crowd?

  Yes, well. I read all the same books he read, and I grew up on all the same tales of King Arthur and all of those idiots. I know what he was thinking. He was thinking that, if the kitchen girl was the faras, then he wanted to be a mere foot soldier in her service. Her servant. Her slave. Her pawn. Her baidaq.

  “Why didn’t you give her the queen?” I said.

  “The queen is of no interest to me. The horse has always been my favorite.”

  “That explains why I always beat you at the game.”

  “That, and you move the pieces when I am not looking.”

  Two years later, on the sixth of Ganso, when the roof of Thebes was sacked by Fremantle, the shatranj set Woody had made burned in Errol’s tent. All except for this baidaq piece, this pawn in my hand. Well, yes, and somewhere in Thebes Guild a girl is carrying a black horse.

  * * *

  —

  When I was done with this going-story, Ping stirred and said, “In Thebes Guild or perhaps on it. Isn’t that right, Odd? Kitchen Girl could be any one of the girls who came up after you two did. It could be Talwyn here. Or Eluned. Or Mirembe.”

  All three of them shrugged, knowing, as I knew, that they were not the one.

  Birth-Night

  THRICE THE BELL STRUCK from High Berfrei—flat and echoless, damped for the night. “An, twa, pri . . .” Errol was shaking. He waited for feower, hoped for it.

  “How can it be only the baker’s bell?” he slurred. “Bakers, fakers, undertakers, law breakers, matchmakers. Will the sun never rise on this city?” He tried to turn over to find warmth, but his foot was stuck and he couldn’t figure out why or on what. The foot must have been numb by then or he would have remembered. He tried again to roll over, to sleep, to find that kitchen girl again in his dreams. But pain spiked in his shin. The night was evil cold; sweat had frozen in his hair, on his shoulders. “Odd Thebes,” he said to me. “I have done the math. I am seventeen times around the sun. Would it be so much to ask, on my birth-night, that you light the bucket fire? Ideally before my body freezes to the roof.”

  I did not reply, for I was not there. No one was there. Errol Thebes stared at the lack of me, and then, slowly, at the lack of a bucket fire, the lack of his sleep-sack, the lack of a tent. I wonder how long it took him to realize his clothes were gone.

  A grin spread over his face. “Well done, Odd Thebes,” he said. “I deserve this. Well done.”

  On any other night, in some higher time, it would have made sense to think what he was thinking: that I had crept into his tent while he slept, worked him out of his sack and wools, hauled him across the roofs, drooling and mumbling state secrets, tethered him by a foot to some fly, and winched him into the sky with makeshift pulleys. This is what he thought, for he had played that same small-uurs prank on me on my birth-night, and on every runner on the roof of Thebes. And on those sacked-and-plundered mornings we, each of us, had awakened disoriented, only to find ourselves bound, naked, suspended by a silk thread so high we could see the arc of the earth. Our finest wares on display for every roof to see. Crowds. Applause. Cheering. Certain formerly private things never to be forgotten.

  “Oh, aye,” Errol said, grinning. “I definitely deserve this.” He rubbed his bound hands on his face and laughed. But his laugh was cut short, for the moon shone on his palms, which were wet with blood.

  He sat up so fast he pulled at the muscles all the way down his spine and legs, and cried out at the pain in his foot. He reached to rub away the pain and found the blade of the navaja, driven through his sole and into the earth.

  He became aware that, from behind a heap of rubble, the snake was staring at him, unblinking, licking the air between them. It was the color of fire and it, too, was wounded. They studied each other until finally the snake withdrew into nothing. Errol lay with his face in the sop of the street till the tower bells rang feower.

  Purgamentum. They were heaving the trash from the roofs.

  The Three of Spades

  FROM THE EAST there came singing and I realized, disoriented by my own barding and the timelines I had spun, that Visby was rising and we had survived our first night without Errol. I tossed the relics back into the bag, counting on the sunrise for a distraction.

  “Wait,” Faisal said, turning back. “One last tale. What about the playing card?”

  I yanked the cords tight on the bag. “Playing card?”

  “The three of spades.”

  “I can’t remember the story.”

  “But you said you knew all his tales.”

  “I was mistaken.”

  “‘Our stories ran together—’ Is that not what you said?”

  It was unheard of, not to tell every tale in a tellensac.

  “Let me see that,” said Sa’id, reaching for the bag. He loosened the cord and pulled out the card. “Think, Odd. The three of spades. Not much value there. It must be some sort of code.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “There! We’re all done.” Marek was staring at me.

  “Or perhaps,” said Talwyn. “Perhaps the card was given to him by Woody Thebes? Errol would cherish anything Woody gave him. Woody or you, the two he loved most—”

  I shrugged. “I hardly think he had favorites.” Did she have to carry on like that? Did I not feel the guilt enough already?

  Marek took the card from Sa’id and pushed it across the roof to me.

  “There is nothing so constant in guild life as a playing card,” he said. “So useful in relieving the tedium of these towers. In a sense its value is immeasurable and yet, look, it weighs hardly anything.” He caught my eye this time and I flinched. Without breaking his stare, he said, “Ping, make us some breakfast, will you? If we require this last tale, we should offer more sustenance to Errol Thebes’s bar
d.”

  Errol Thebes’s bard. Was that a promotion or did I just vanish completely?

  Ping obliged and cooked breakfast for us: waffres and thick tea with butter spiraling in it. It can’t have been an uur since we had eaten the guild stew but we were hungry again.

  The other going-stories in that tellensac had been hard enough to tell, but this one was impossible. In those others, there had been players onstage. Errol and Woody or Errol and the rumor-mongering guild tower or Errol and Kitchen Girl or Errol and his own stunning reflection. The three of spades was Errol and me. Under other circumstances, this would be little more than a tale of a long and uncommon friendship. Now it was a snake I was being forced to conjure and then hold in my hands until it writhed and bit.

  “I think, I think this spade is from our first day on the roofs—” I began, as if I didn’t know. My voice was quiet, barely audible over the sounds of 999 roofs of runners singing up the sun.

  Errol Thebes could never win at any game—not shatranj or thimblerig or dice—as you all know from having beaten him and taken his money since you were kelps. But he lost with particular magnificence at games of the deck. Maw, piquet, ombre. Conversely and for reasons involving mathematical skill, highly refined strategy, and a complex understanding of the guild mind, I generally win.

  “Also you cheat,” Grid whispered.

  On the morning Errol rose to the roofs, he and I were packed and waiting in our quarters for the order to come to the 151st strata. We played a round of maw on our trunks and I beat him for old time’s sake, but neither of us cared. He was rising and I was suddenly rising with him. My luck had turned in the night, and we could be together for three more years. An infinity.

  “But tell me, Odd Thebes,” he said in high spirits. “Now that you will have a thousand roofs’ worth of runners to challenge you at the deck, and I will be the dull cousin you never bother to play anymore, what is your strategy? How do you always win at these games? You can trust me to keep trade secrets.”

  At first I refused. Why would I give him any more advantages over me than what he already had? But he carried on about it, and in the end I said he could bribe me with his copy of Ovid.

  “You want to know? Fine,” I said. “I’ll tell you. The face cards? They weigh more than the rest of the cards in the deck. The kings are heavier by an infinitesimal fraction than the queens, and both are more than the jacks. The numerical cards can be sorted by ink weight in descending order. Red? Red pigment is lighter than black, which sorts the ranks in half. And there you have it! Simply put, I have memorized the weights. I draw a card from the stream and know what it is before I turn it. What? Yes, I’m brilliant indeed. Give it a try.” Errol weighed a card in each hand, like a balance scale. “Can’t you feel it?” I whispered, a conspirator in my own ruse.

  “I think so. Yes,” he said. “This one is extremely heavy.” But when he turned that card over it was the three of spades.

  “There! You see? It weighs more than that deuce!” I said. “You, Cousin, have sensitive fingers for this.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Of course. And . . . if you study card weights your whole life, as I have done, in many years you’ll be able to tell exactly which cards your opponent is dealt, even facedown, by how heavily they land upon the table.”

  “I hear it already,” he said.

  Feh. Was he really buying this? Weigh the ink? With my eyes closed, even now, I couldn’t tell the difference between this three of spades and a whole suit in my hand.

  Errol spent the next uur playing with that deck, dropping cards facedown, comparing in two hands the weight of the lean one-eyed jack with the stone-heavy hatchet-bearing king.

  The absurdity came to an end when a messenger finally came for us. When we passed our trunks up and stepped from the stagnant guild into high air, the furthest thing from our minds was a hand of cards.

  It was the month of Hlyda. We were fifteen. Pale as lard. The sky was so big we staggered around, squinting in the sun, losing our balance on this swaying, monstrous tower. Guild flags billowed from the masts of every house. Lamps, pennons, and laundry caught the wind from every yurt and tent line as far as our eyes could see. The legendary Marek Thebes was our roof master. Every time he turned his back on us, Errol and I laughed at our great luck. Here, finally, we were! Finally! On top of the world! With the infamous runners of the city, who worked harder than even the guilds did, stayed up all night for nights on end, pranking one another and putting on glorious plays and running the lines in the light of a moon we had yet to see. The great web of silk fly-lines was more vast than we even we had imagined. We raced over to knock the mast of the iron crow Xerxes, aching to be part of every tradition we had grown up hearing.

  At that moment Errol sobered. “Where”—he pointed—“are the crossed needles, the knotting spikes, that belong in the crow’s talons?”

  Marek shrugged. “Those have been gone for years.”

  “Who took them?”

  “Suffice to say I know where they are. It’s the crow that’s the luck.”

  “So—stolen,” said Errol.

  Marek sucked his teeth, judging whether to give the answer. “Your brother Rip, when he ran the roofs, lost them in a round of maw on Gallia House. He was notoriously unlucky at cards. If crossed spikes are important to you, the guild can reforge a set.”

  “Forget about it,” I said. “It’s not important to us.”

  “Yes it is,” Errol said. I couldn’t believe he was going to make this an issue. What bothered him was that his own brother had lost that game and marred the enduring symbol of Thebes.

  We dropped the subject. Marek had brought the two of us to the edge of Thebes. We were 151 strata, 900 fathoms, to the earth. More than a mile. Bamako, Phrygia, Gamin, and Catalhoyuk swayed in the high winds, throwing shadows against us. We couldn’t see to the street, at the bottom of the abyss.

  Marek pointed to Bamako House. “The specific breakfasts you requested in your paperwork await you there. It will be the best food you ever ate.”

  Errol grinned at me. “You first,” he said. And then, for the first time, “Stay high.”

  I put my rag over the line, over my head. Just that small maneuver set me off-balance. My hands sweat like spigots. A dozen runners waited behind me to get on with their errands. It would be better to die, I thought, than to lose courage here and be sent back down into the guild. With my fingers clenched so tight on that rag my nails were cutting into my hand, I let myself fall from the edge. I slammed my tailbone hard. I was thrown into a bounce and was going down too fast, utterly sure half the rag had slipped from my grip. Or maybe the line snapped, how would that sound? “Here’s good luck to the quart pot and luck to the ballymow—!”

  “You’re not dropping, Odd!” Marek yelled. “Don’t sing!”

  Even with all the gossip everyone tells you, no one ever thinks to mention that the flies are invisible when you look up at them from underneath, into the shimmer of sun.

  “The fly is there!” yelled Marek.

  “I’m going down!” I yelled. I had come to a stop and was dangling in the pit of the line. “It’s too thin!”

  “We brought Xerxes in on that line. Two tons of iron.”

  “Was that wise, do you think?” I screamed. “Could you have frayed the—”

  Marek lifted the Thebes end of the line high with a y-stick and I slid across the rest of the abyss, opening my eyes in time to watch my nose crash into Bamako. My sharps stuck to the tower. I yanked my foot and the left sharp came off, and I watched it spiral out of sight. Marek trotted across a plank, climbed down the wall, got me into a pair of dry leggings, and up we climbed.

  Errol had requested drageoirs for breakfast—theobromas in the various shapes of the planets. He swung his rag and turned to look at the runners behind
him with a huge grin. Grid kissed him for luck. He turned and leapt. He whooped when he hit the pit of the line and swung his feet up so he flipped over the fly as he was vaulted onto Bamako. The runners cheered from every roof around.

  After we ate, I made my way hand over hand back across the line to Thebes. Errol had gone his own way.

  When he returned to Thebes well after sundown, he stopped at the crow. He unstrapped his pack and pulled out a huge pair of ornamental spikes. He climbed the mast, shimmied across the yardarm, and dropped down a line to jam the spikes back into Xerxes’s talons.

  I came out of my tent.

  “So that’s where you went. Thieving the spikes from Gallia House so everything can be perfect.”

  “There was no thieving. I won at maw,” he said.

  I hesitated. “I don’t believe that for a second. You’re terrible at cards.”

  “Not anymore. Obviously.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you have to ask, Cousin?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I used your secret.”

  “What secret?”

  “You know. Ink weight. The high cards weigh more than the rest. And on down the line. I could wager my life on it.”

  * * *

  —

  I returned the three of spades and the rest of the relics to Errol’s tellensac. I couldn’t remember when, in the telling of that tale, I had begun to shake. Or when Grid had drawn her lightning cloak over my shoulders.

  “Impossible,” I whispered.

  “What? The card trick? He was just lucky,” she said.

  I nodded. But I wasn’t talking about the card trick. It was Errol who was impossible. It was his unflagging belief in me, so huge and absurd that even my lies became truths in his hands.

  We were done here. He was gone. His stories had taken him from us. I put the card in the bag, tied a reef knot in his tellensac cord, handed the sac to Marek, who would present it to Margaret Thebes, and removed myself to the solitude of my tent.