City of the Uncommon Thief

by Lynne Bertrand

  “That fright from the streets? What was he doing to the cat?”

  “No. No. The opposite. Listen. He was outside of the bars, running at the bars, jerking and screeching and trying to get them to stop. When that archer started to pull the string to lock again, Jago raced to attack him. Too late.”

  “This is that same Jago who told that fighter to murder you in that pub?”

  “Aye.”

  “He wanted to save the wildcat?”

  “Aye. When it was finally over and they’d cut the ties on the cat, they opened the gate and Jago went in there.”

  “Was the cat dead? Was it?”

  “You would think. But it dragged itself across the dirt, straight to him. Even then, that archer put another bolt into the cat’s flank, right on top of the first. The power of it threw the cat ten yards. Jago leapt onto the cat to protect it and the cat was on him, pushing its face into his face. I thought the beast was biting him, killing him. But it was struggling to climb into his arms.”

  Suddenly I realized—“It was his cat, wasn’t it? It was Jago’s cat! What do you call it? His other, his fetch.”

  “His fylgia. Aye.”

  “Did it die?”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t meant to die. That archer was a perfect shot. The bolts could have hit anywhere—heart, skull—but they were aimed for the leg. One after the other.”

  “But the other animals were all dead. Why not the cat?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The two of us sat in silence, rendered kelps. I could see no way this tale could end, never mind end well.

  “There’s more,” he said. “You know how it is in dreams when something happens and you see only a fragment of it? Someone walks through the dream and vanishes? I know I saw the regnat walk through the mob.”

  “That cannot be. What would he be doing in such a place? No.”

  “He was there.”

  And then I asked the most obvious question. “How did you rescue them, Errol Thebes? What did you do?”

  Errol flinched as though I had hit him. “Nothing.”

  I was silent. Stunned.

  “Jago saw us. He was on his feet and running toward me from inside the cage. He climbed the bars without realizing he couldn’t and pressed his head through them. Screaming at me, ‘Stay high! Stay high.’ Mocking. He turned and pointed to the cat. Two shafts jutting out of its back end. ‘Look at what you did!’ In truth? I ran. The mob was coming for us.” Errol made a helpless gesture. “Look what I did, Odd.”

  A Going-Story

  ERROL AND RIP RAN HARD, following the stag. When the echoes of the stag’s hoofbeats stopped, Errol thought he had been separated. But when they rounded a corner, there was Eikthyrnir, staring through the bars into a pit. Errol took Rip’s lamp. A young woman looked up at him. Her arms were wrapped around a frail hoofed animal, red as Errol’s deer. The stag bayed into the pit, and the tiny animal answered with a bleat.

  “Let it go,” Rip said. “By the time you get that hatch off—” The stag turned and with one kick from his hind hoofs, he sent the stone cover crashing against the walls of the cavern.

  How little the two of them weighed, the girl and her doe. Together they were lighter than his pack. Rip pulled them up and took the doe, and they were running again. Errol noticed the mark on her forearm of the guild Albacete.

  “You must keep talking. Stay with me.” She was so frail. “I wonder if you made my navaja. You’re from Albacete?”

  “No. We’re foundlings here. I paid for the mark.”

  “Why are there so many foundlings here? What offense did you commit?”

  She ignored him. “Go back for my brother. Promise me.”

  “We’ll go together, you and I! Tell me all about him. Tell me his name.”

  “It’s Arthur.”

  “Like the king!”

  “Aye. He’s half my age. His fylgia is a white dog.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  She was quiet for so long he thought she hadn’t heard him. She said, “I can’t remember.”

  They could hear the mob in pursuit, pouring through the tunnels above or behind or in front of them, it was impossible to tell. When Errol turned to listen, Rip was setting the body of the doe on the stone floor of the tunnel.

  Rip glanced over Errol’s shoulder at the girl. “She doesn’t need to get to the river now.”

  “What? Yes she does. She’s coming with us.”

  I must pause to fathom what my cousin was doing here. He was trying to find his way back onto the pages of a tale he could understand. He had to save someone.

  “I won’t leave her.”

  “Her fetch is gone.”

  The girl reached for Rip, who took her from Errol and held her. The stag was nosing the tiny body of the doe.

  Rip moved in and out of the shadows of the tunnel, singing an old tune from the guild nursery. “Slippen ye, en ’tis a darky night but a gude night and a soon-rising sun—”

  The girl said, “I’m not ready—”

  “We’ll do this together,” said Rip. “I’m here.”

  She touched his face. “I wish I had known you,” she said. “I’m leaving before I’m ready.”

  Rip let out a little laugh. “Aye, well. If this helps at all, I’m not worth the staying.”

  Errol grabbed the girl’s foot. “What are you talking about? We can take her if we go now—”

  Rip set her on the floor of the tunnel and knelt over her.

  “Too cold,” Errol protested.

  Rip kissed her, and fiercely. Errol may as well have been invisible. He watched as the girl put her hands up to pull him in and make of the kiss an infinity. Rip said, “Once upon a time there lived a young woman. Too young for such troubles as she had known—” His tears were falling on her.

  “What?! Stop it, Rip!” yelled Errol. “Don’t tell a going-story! She is still here with us!” But the girl put her hand out for the deer, whose body lay next to her.

  “She was breathtaking, with a young whitetail as her fetch. And a little brother we’ll find. I promise my heroic brother over there will find him. The young woman could have anything she wanted. But all she really wanted in the end was a frog—” The girl laughed, gasped, and was gone.

  “Was that for you, or for her?” Errol growled. “We could have saved her!”

  Rip put up his hands, then dropped them. “The doe was gone. The fetch. The fylgia. No one can live long after that.”

  The stag was grunting, showing the whites of his eyes. They saw what he saw—the lamplight of the mob flickering from up the tunnel. Rip stood where he was, staring at the granite of the tunnel’s ceiling.

  “Where are you?” he roared. He kicked at the wall. He threw himself against it. “Are you somewhere in this place? Was she not worth saving? Is there no one here worth saving? I am calling for help!” Errol was confounded. Was Rip yelling to Utlag in the ceiling of a tunnel? To the mob? Was he calling for Marek? Errol could make no sense of it. Nor can I.

  * * *

  —

  The first of the mob appeared around the corner, and in the chaos of it, Rip and Errol and the stag were crashing into stone walls, tripping over rubble, stumbling so fast into the mist-filled tunnel they had already gone over the bank and headlong again into the river before they heard the sound of it.

  * * *

  —

  They nearly drowned in the current this time, kicking to stay high in the water, gripping the mane of the stag. They squinted into brightness and knew it was the moon.

  Any relief for having seen it was short-lived, for beyond the opening of the tunnel, beyond the edge of the river, there was nothing but sky. Two rivers collided in high air here: the underground current of the mines and the overground river that ran through the city.
Rip turned to swim against the current.

  “We can’t go back!” yelled Errol. “We jump!”

  “No! Look at the drop!”

  Errol was thinking of Roban, Dagmar’s wolf, who could catch those arrows that came at his pack from the roof of Fremantle. He dug the fingers of one hand into the mane on Eikthyrnir’s neck and clutched Rip’s shirt with the other. With a scrambling of legs, the stag set his back hoofs on the ledge of stone. He recoiled and leapt straight up, high into the moonlit spray. Errol felt his feet go out behind him. They hung in the sky for a moment and then began to drop; they could see, far below, the river and the south wall, so tiny it all appeared to be a minuscule map of itself.

  “Here’s good luck to the quart pot, and luck to the ballymow!” Errol bellowed. He looked over his shoulder and saw Rip’s eyes closed, his teeth clenched. Errol kicked his brother and began the song again, louder: “Here’s good luck to the quart pot—!”

  Rip yelled back: “Good luck to the ballymow! To the quart pot, pint pot, gill pot, half-a-gill, lilliget, ben, benmow!”

  If the stag had not leapt away from the ledge, they would have perished in the field of stones below the falls. If he hadn’t hit the iced river first, the other two would have hit it like aegru on flett, as my mam would say. Eggs on the floor. Rip and Errol came up gasping and panicked and fumbled to the banks to drag themselves out.

  The stag was nowhere to be seen.

  Eikthyrnir had let himself sink down and farther down, until his hoofs touched the sand at the bottom. He swam there for as long as he could, his great legs pumping, his lungs churning bright bubbles in the moonlight. Then he rose in a silver torrent of river water, his broad chest aching with grief and with joy.

  The Muse

  “FEH. My sawol is bounded by this roof. Do you know what I mean? As though my soul is the precise shape of the roof of Thebes? A rectangle of the same dimensions. I am imprisoned by this place.”

  Faisal and Seppo nodded sagely and then burst out laughing. Faisal said that it was lucky we didn’t live on one of the triangular guilds or I would wound myself on my own pointed soul.

  Marek came over to tell me to cut it out.

  “Then write me that order for fresh fly-lines,” I said sullenly. “I’ll go see that girl.”

  This went against Marek’s grain. He wasted no money on errands invented to keep runners busy. But he must have calculated that, if it was between my soul being a rectangle all night and my meeting up with a girl, a girl would cause less trouble for everyone. “Back by purgamentum,” he said, handing me the slip. “I don’t want to be looking for you in someone else’s tent at sunrise.”

  “Nobody else gets a curfew. You sound like my mam.”

  * * *

  —

  Terpsichore, that muse from the party at Al-Razi, was from Lascaux House, where they make flies for the roofs. Rags. Mam-clips. All of that. I loitered, waiting until she came in off the lines with her friends. They were runners now, not muses. They had recovered from starvation like the rest of us and had the look of strength about them. She was absentmindedly knotting a clove hitch in one hand.

  “I was wondering when you’d get here,” she said. I was admiring the silk moth on her arm, the guild mark of Lascaux.

  We ran the lines for cod kulebiake on the edge of Derbent House. Late, we danced at a party at Chakra House. I asked her if she thought I was a murderer, for what I had done to Errol on Fremantle. Apart from Jamila and the foul guard, she was the only one who knew about it.

  “Murderer? I think the regnat played that role. Errol himself has to take some part. The stolen spikes, the black-iron ruse. He set himself on a course. You were the fool in a plot that required a fool.”

  I waved my hand in dismissal. She hadn’t heard all the foul things I had said to the black-iron guard I didn’t know was Errol.

  She showed me a letter the Lascaux cooks had found, sewn into a sack of lentils that had come in on the ships. In three dozen languages someone had written, I can help with what troubles you.

  “Help with what?” I said.

  We came back to Thebes and I found that Parsival helmet buried under the clothes in my tent and put it on.

  “A relic game?” she said.

  “Maybe later.” My voiced echoed in the helmet.

  “Maw?”

  “I’ll only beat you.”

  “What, then?”

  I looked out of the tent flap, into the night sky. “It is a little-known fact that when Venus rises over the wall, the first one to see her gets to say what happens next.”

  “And?”

  “And I have seen her.”

  There was play in her voice when she said, “And what happens next, in this lie of yours?”

  I pulled off the helmet and kissed her, is what happened next. And she pulled off her shirt and kissed me back. She was better than anything I had ever imagined, and let me pause for a moment to say that I had spent the majority of my time imagining. I was unable for the first time in known history to form a word. Maybe that’s why I ran.

  No Reflection

  THEY FLUNG THEMSELVES ON THE RIVERBANK, their hearts flailing, and so did the stag, rolling around on his back, kicking dirt and snow into the air. They were south of the towers, on the banks of the river at the south gate.

  Rip reached into his pocket for his flask and said, “Here’s to Eikthyrnir. And to you. Where the hel did you come from?” Errol pointed to the roofs. “I mean, did you hear yourself in the mine? ‘We’ll jump!’ Like it was nothing. You’re like those knights you used to carry on about all the time when you were a kelp.”

  “You’re from the same places I am,” said Errol.

  Rip shook his head. “I would have left everyone in gaol.”

  “We did leave everyone in gaol.” Errol sat up. “What are you drinking? Give me some of that, will you? Or will you lie there having the whole thing while I die of thirst?”

  Rip handed the flask over and Errol put his nose to it and handed it back. “Smells of fire.”

  “Tell me you’ve never had whiskey,” said Rip.

  “A fool’s drink, on the flies. I prefer the juice squeezed fresh from a cloud.”

  “Kelp.” Rip grinned at him. “Lytling.” It means “baby.” Errol grabbed the flask back, swallowed a thick mouthful from it and sat up, coughing. “Slow down, right? It’s not mother’s milk.” Errol felt the liquor melt his innards.

  Errol raised the flask. “To my hero, my gallant brother.”

  Rip flinched. “In my defense,” he said quietly, “I had not seen the pits of gaol.”

  “But you knew about it. You knew what we would find there. They’re all foundlings, aren’t they, in those pits?”

  “And the children of foundlings. And their children. It’s been a long time.”

  “What were they doing to Jago, in that arena?”

  “They bet on the winner. Like your fight in the pub.”

  “No. It was different. It wasn’t a fight to the end. Something else was going on there. I keep wondering, why did that foundling with the spider say they were waiting for the spikes? Did she mean these spikes? In my pack?”

  “I have no idea,” Rip said.

  “And what foul thing were you doing to the girl?” Errol said. “Kissing her like that.”

  “I listened to her. Instead of carrying on about the way things ought to be.”

  “If that was told in a book, you would sound like a fool.”

  “There are no books here, Errol Thebes. No bard to make sense of what is happening here. And certainly no heroes. We are off the page.”

  * * *

  —

  When Errol awoke on the riverbank, Rip was gone. It was nearly dawn. He waded into the shallows. The stag followed. A woman stood in the river, out farther. He couldn’t see h
er face in the waning moon, but the low pitch of her voice gave her away, as she called to the wolves who were fishing on the far bank. He could see her reflection in the ripples of the river, and the moon’s, and the reeds’. He was just wondering why he could see no reflection for the stag when something shifted in the reeds. His brother crouched there, watching Dagmar.

  Errol’s thoughts turned to that foundling he had met on the roof of Samoa, and the game of Préférerais tu they played that rainy night. The tufuga had asked if they would prefer to be trapped in the guilds, or escape the city forever. He had said escape, but he would do anything to be back in the guild towers, safe from what he knew now.

  A Guest

  HIGH IN A TOWER at the northeast corner of the city, the abbot Lugius made tea. By his own decree, this was the one chore he performed, for no one in the scriptorium could get it right, not even the monk Nyree, who kept a close eye on him and in other ways knew everything she should and probably more. The precise color of the flame, the weight of the tea leaves, the length of the steep. The abbot’s red damask robes swept around his ankles as he moved.

  He was tall and lean and tight, with vacant eyes. His teeth were long and so yellow after all this time that they were nearly green. His hair was thin, and he always told Nyree to tie it in a knot on the top of his head like she did for the monks.