City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  He would lose because he was fighting as we wrestled on the roofs: fairly, and without intent to wound. The bodies of runners were too precious to squander. But here in this foul room under the river, wasting was the whole game. If he didn’t change, he would die, as would the girl.

  Errol wedged his free hand between his throat and the blade. He could feel the navaja cutting him again. He gripped Dete’s blade hand and turned the fist and the knife toward Dete. Errol’s fingers were blue. Dete was crushing his windpipe with his other hand. Errol could no longer hear the mob calling for death. He couldn’t see. His vision was going black. He could only feel that he had Dete’s right fist in his hand and he knew the navaja was there, and he drove the blade fist into Dete’s ribs and dragged it sideways, with no mercy. None. Then he let go and fell back.

  Dete released his grip on Errol’s throat and leapt into the air, hopping and kicking in a panicky dance. He thought he had won. But the girl on the floor was staring up at him, and Errol, too, was staring. And the eyes of the mob were fixed on his chest. Dete looked down and saw the great gaping wound in himself. He pinched the skin with his fingers, as he had seen men do on the streets to stanch their own bleeding.

  “Jago?” he said, his voice sounded like it came from some other room.

  Jago spit, “You’re finished, Dete.”

  “But—”

  Null said, “Ah well. You’ll not be cleaning up after yourself, then?” He grinned.

  Dete fell backward into a woman, who shoved him away. He rocked forward, his toes clumsily turned in, and fell onto Errol and Sabine. “Day,” he struggled. He ground his teeth together, for now he was feeling the pain. “Stay.”

  Errol was shaking. He said, “You want us to stay with you?”

  Dete grabbed Errol’s hair and yanked him close to his mouth. “They tell gone-tales at the end, up there on the roofs.”

  Errol hesitated in the chaos, then said, “Going-stories? Yes, we do. We tell going-stories.”

  “Tell mine.”

  “I don’t know you,” said Errol. “The teller must be someone who knows you.”

  “Do it!” screamed Jago. He was barely human now.

  “You tell it, then, Jago, if you are his friend,” said Errol. “Come over here and hold him at least.” Jago did not move.

  “You tell it,” whispered Dete, his teeth red with blood, his breath thick. “Use your own story. No one will know.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Tell something about me.”

  “Listen, Dete, as you rise up—”

  “Up,” said Dete, sucking in air as pain gripped him. “Is that what they say? What are the—” He cringed. “What are the odds that I will rise up? Same as Null’s ass, I expect.”

  Errol snorted. “Are you making a joke?”

  Dete spread his lips in a red grin.

  Errol propped himself up on his elbow, with the girl bound to him. What story to tell? What did he know? Not his own tales. They did not belong here. He reached for something else—

  “‘The road was stone-laid, the path directed. The men together. The war-burnie shone, hard and hand-locked. The bright ringed iron sang in the armor, when they to the hall in their war-weeds at first approached—’”

  “Is the burnie their river?” whispered Dete.

  “Aye,” whispered Errol. “The armor shone like a silver river. And we think the war-weed is their spears.”

  “Go on.”

  “‘Sea-wearied they set their broad-shapen shields against the hall’s wall. War-armor of men; their long spears stood—’ Dete, are you with us still?”

  “Tell it,” mouthed Dete, his eyes open in a stare.

  Someone behind Errol said, “Tell it.” The room stood silent now, waiting.

  “‘Ne’er saw I strangers, so many men, with prouder looks—’”

  Errol knew the bee wolf’s tale from memory in the common tongue and in the tongue of the bard Anonymous. He could have gone on and on.

  Dete’s throat-rattle sounded. He grabbed at Errol again and pulled him to his face. “Geddout,” he whispered. “Get away from Utlag.”

  Null kicked Dete in the head. “State secrets,” he said. He reached into his apron, pulled out a rusted piece of a mirror, and put it in front of Dete’s mouth. Errol watched the mirror steam from Dete’s breath. Errol smelled the river again and turned to see where the smell was coming from. He saw a furred black snout come around a low doorframe. Then a broad, round head and small ears. The beast found Dete in the crowd, stared at him.

  “What is that?” said Errol.

  “My fillg—” Dete said. “Fil— My bear. Come to fetch me.”

  Null held Dete’s mouth shut and pinched his nose.

  “No! Stop! You felon!” yelled Errol, shoving Null’s hand away. But Dete was gone, and the mob was cheering.

  Errol struggled to his feet. He tore at the knot from the girl’s wrist and pushed through the room to get out, but Null grabbed him. He raised Errol’s fist. “Any who bet on this one can come get what’s owed. And don’t rush all at once. I’ll not have all hel brekking loose in my place.”

  High Poetry

  I LONGED TO BE RELIEVED of the burden of the gone-prince: to find my way from grief to relief, solitude to festivity, darkness to light. I decided, in short, to get myself a girl.

  Thebes offered nothing. Talwyn preferred solitude. Mirembe had laundry. Siwan was with Petroc. Yael wanted a nap. Grid wasn’t interested in men, least of all me. Eluned was down with a vile, snot-producing, rag-sopping allergy and, anyway, she also said no.

  By festivum I would have done anything to get away. I found the hatch-guilder asleep on duty below his grate. I picked the lock and slipped past him, down the iron ladder and into the guild tower. I was looking for a kelp named Odd Thebes.

  The tunnels of the guild were claustrophobic to me after two years in an open sky, and smelled of cooking grease, armpits, and wood dust. I found my way through halls of the 151st strata to the library, lit a lamp, and sank into my old leather chair to wait for a girl.

  My tales were Errol’s tales. Was there not a single one that belonged only to me? I spilled my tellensac, seeking a relic from the years I spent here. It was a page torn from Anonymous.

  I was eleven times around the sun, old enough to eavesdrop on my brothers’ exploits in the lesser forms of love. One morning, I was reading King Arthur’s tales over a plate of frytour when I overheard Ragnar tell Heimdall that he would gladly fling himself on the tines of his fork for a night in the sack with the new apprentice Augustina.

  “Don’t bore me with this,” said Heimdall with a yawn, who was already bound at twenty-three. “Bore her. She is sitting right there.”

  Augustina had just been shipped to Thebes from the guild house Bacalhau. She was as strong as any of my brothers. She had a mesmerizing overbite and fine hair on her arms and her upper lip. She laughed in a husky low voice that had the attention of every male in the hall.

  “I can’t speak to her,” said Ragnar. “She won’t understand me.”

  “No one understands you,” said Heimdall.

  “I mean, she doesn’t yet speak the common tongue.”

  “So? Make Odd Thebes tell her,” said Heimdall.

  “Odd Thebes?” said Ragnar, looking over at me as if he had never seen me before. “What does he know?”

  I placed a marker in my book and strolled over to Augustina, who was surrounded by her new girlfriends. She raised her eyebrows—sim?—and I nodded my head in the direction of Ragnar. “Você é tão bonita, ele quer morrer,” I said. You are so beautiful, he wishes to die.

  Augustina smiled gloriously at me, then at Ragnar, and said in that velvet voice, “Quer comer comigo?”

  I looked over at Ragnar. “She wants to know if you wish to eat
with her.”

  “Tell her I wish to eat her,” said Ragnar. Heimdall blew soup through his nose, laughing.

  I turned to Augustina: “Deseje comer . . .”

  “Don’t actually say that, you fool!” Ragnar scraped back his chair and landed on me hard. I was about to take a beating when Augustina did me the favor of laughing. And all her girlfriends laughed. And then she crooked her finger at Ragnar and called him to her, and he got off my head.

  “Hoje à noite?” I asked her on the idiot’s behalf. Tonight?

  “Sim,” she said. Big smile.

  Ragnar lifted me onto his shoulders and paraded me down the hall, his tuneless singing echoing off the stone-and-iron walls: “This is my worthless bro-ther, my worthless little bro-ther!” I agreed to translate his first meal with Augustina for a fortnight of his salary. If that seems exorbitant, I extracted an extra fee for eleven years of oppression.

  The three of us met in the library—Ragnar, Augustina, and me—where I would have at my fingertips all the volumes of complex expressions of love. I even tore this page from one of the troubadours of Augustina’s tongue in case Ragnar was insufficient. It was something about the parallel exuberances of spring love and birdsong, et cetera.

  Ragnar: Tell her my favorite color is blue.

  Me: Minha cor favorita é azul.

  Augustina: Minha cor favorita é azul também! O mesmo lindo azul dos seus olhos, minha querida!

  Me (yawning): Blue, too.

  Ragnar (jaw hanging open): What are the chances?

  Ragnar did not have to fling himself on any silverware to get what he wanted. With such a vast set of mutual interests, they went directly to the main one. Their kisses were wet, with tongues and hands pressed into service in ways I had thought I was the first to imagine. It was all utterly disgusting to me; however, I forced myself to watch.

  Over time the word got out, of my skill as a translator. When a cook in Colophon House needed to know which jar was the poison sumaq and which was the secret ingredient of za’atar, labels, jars, and recipes would be carried over the lines and down into Thebes for my consideration. When the Lascaux fly-mongers uncovered a fid in deep storage, it was sent to me, along with a marlinespike and the directions for forging the one and turning the other, for I alone could read texts that had long been dry-docked on their shelves. A midwife called for me when a new apprentice refused to come out of her quarters in Flanders. As it happens, the midwife had offhandedly said the apprentice shouldn’t be embarrassed about a rip in her tunic. I told her embarazada meant “pregnant” in the tongue of six guild towers.

  Thebes guilders began to think that I, who could decode their city’s languages, could also make sense of them. They hauled their tired selves to this chair in the library and begged me to interpret their waking fears, their rogue dreams, the tangled lines of their tales. Why Petra will never speak Sa’id’s name, why Ciaran wears pieces of black yarn tied around her fingers. I didn’t expect to be so interested in such yammering. And yet these stories were as compelling to me as the tales I consumed day and night in the library.

  One night at supper I said offhandedly, “Pay a quarter-uur, anyone? And listen to what Emile does at dulcibus every night.” The first coin clinked into my cup. Within a minute my cup overflowed with uurs and the table was full of company. I began in a stage whisper, “He writes a letter and stuffs it in the kitchen drain, hoping it will reach his sister in the street.” And everybody was listening, even Emile, who was ninety-one times around the sun and had outlasted three guildmasters.

  I never had to waste another day in a guild workroom.

  “Have you no scruples?” Errol once asked me, as I poured the nightly contents of my bard’s cup into a hole in the floor of our chamber. “Turning a profit on the guilder’s private, miserable tales—does it not seem wrong to you?”

  “What is a scruple?” I said. “Can I eat it? Will it keep me warm at night?”

  Fylgia

  THE STEPS OF A GUILDER IN THE HALL yanked me back to the present. I squatted in the corner behind the writings of Hesiod, where no one ever went. The guilder trudged into the library and sat at a table, twenty feet from me, unhurriedly relighting a lamp. It was too dim to see but I heard him retrieve a book from the shelves, flip through the pages of it, toss it aside, and get up to search for another. And another. This went on and on. After two bells, I was crossing my legs, afraid I would piss on the floor.

  The guilder said, “I’m not alone in this room, am I?” It was a woman’s voice.

  Reluctantly I said no, but, at that same moment, a new voice said the same no. That speaker leapt from a beam in the rafters, lit upon the table, and dropped to the floor.

  “Trespassing,” said the guilder. “Foundlings are not permitted in the library. Not permitted to read. Not permitted to eat from the same tables as the guild. I see you’re observing guild law with all your usual reverence.”

  Jamila took a bite of something. “If I had known you were coming, I would have brought enough for you.”

  The guilder snorted. “You knew I was coming here before I thought of it myself. Sit down. If I wasted my time trying to enforce guild law on Jamila Foundling, I’d have to hire someone else to run Thebes.”

  To run Thebes? I had never once seen Margaret Thebes in the library.

  Jamila took a seat at the far end of the table and set her book down. “What brings you here?”

  “I’ve come to save the guild,” said Margaret. “Yet I can find nothing I need in these books and scrolls. There is nothing about a pair of iron knotting spikes. Iron swords and daggers, aye, and war hammers. All manner of weapons. But the lowly tools that bind us together are absent in the texts, unlike the exalted tools that tear us apart.”

  “There was a spindle,” said Jamila. “In the tale of—”

  “Everybody knows about the spindle.” Margaret made a dismissive gesture. “On a spinning wheel that pricked the maiden’s finger and induced a hundred-year sleep. By definition, the spindle was a weapon.”

  “Same with the distaff of Zeus’s fates.” Jamila was smiling, I could hear it in her voice.

  “Yes. Same. Clip the thread of fate and die,” said Margaret. “That’s a weapon if ever there was one. The regnat insists I have a pair of black-iron knotting spikes that belong to him. They consume his thoughts. If we cannot produce them, we will be required to pay.”

  “How much?”

  “The question is not how much, but whom,” said Margaret.

  “He can’t have even one foundling,” said Jamila. “Pay him double, in gold.”

  “We can sit here in the obscure safety of a guild library in the middle of the night and carry on forever about how I will stand in the way of a regnat. Here’s the question: Do I have the iron spikes, foundling? Are they concealed in this tower somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “Can they be retrieved?”

  “No.”

  Margaret leaned back in her chair. “Errol Thebes was dropped three nights ago. It is rumored you were there.”

  “He asked me for protection,” said Jamila.

  Margaret looked away. “It’s more than a mile to the earth from the top of Fremantle. If by chance he survived the drop, the streets murdered him before a bell.” Margaret was strident but her voice broke on her own sentence, and she put her hand to her mouth. “How could you ever have protected him from the regnat?”

  “I wasn’t there to protect the runner. I was there to protect the spikes.”

  “I see. And did you?”

  “Aye. I dropped the spikes with him, to the streets.”

  Margaret pushed her chair back so fast I jumped. “What purpose could that possibly serve?”

  “Errol Thebes believes the tools to be uncommon. It appears the regnat believes the same. Of the two, I trust Errol. The sp
ikes were unsafe here in the guild.”

  “Nothing seems to be safe in this locked iron tower, despite my efforts,” said Margaret. She was quiet for a long while. “And about the word uncommon. I ban the use of that, from here on. We both know there is nothing uncommon within the walls of this city.”

  “Then what were you seeking in the library tonight? Information regarding a set of common knotting spikes? I doubt it.”

  Margaret sighed. “Five hundred men, women, children, and a throng of foundlings depend upon me to sustain them. I am a leader in a city that has fallen into oblivion. So I must always consider all possibilities. If the iron spikes are uncommon, what property could they possible have?”

  “They’re sharp. They wound.”

  “They are spikes.”

  “They’re aggressive.” Jamila had had her hands in her lap under the table. Now she held them out to Margaret. Even in the dim lamplight I recoiled, for I could see they were covered with cuts, some of her fingers wrapped in rag bandages.

  Margaret reached out to touch Jamila’s fingers but then withdrew. “Perhaps someone should teach you how to knot.”

  “The spikes reek of mayhem, Guildmaster. Of human flesh and marrow. Of the pelts and feathers and claws of beasts. More so, they sound of two forgings, not one.”

  “What were they first?” Margaret said.

  “I doubt it was a spindle.”

  “Your imagination is big enough for the whole guild, foundling. Still, I am aware that your senses are attuned to things no one else can taste or smell or hear. Tell me where your mind wanders on this subject.”

  Jamila turned her book absentmindedly in front of her on the table. She said, “What do you recall of the tales of fylgias from cold places?”

  “Fylgias,” Margaret Thebes repeated. “Something to do with beasts.”

  “Aye. Fylgias are uncommon beasts that appear as an animal shadow, to help under duress, to fetch their person at death. An other. Such incidents of humans and beasts bound together, one a reflection of the other, exist in nearly every language in this library.”