“Well, of course. But if you don’t fix her, then you and I will just have to meet up here next week, because you’ll be demanding that I save her from some new trouble she’s gotten into. Your friends are a handful, really.”
“No they’re not. It isn’t fair what happened to Errol,” I said. “The dragon. All that. Errol didn’t ask for that.”
“On the contrary. Errol Thebes specifically asked for it. ‘What beast did you see when you looked at the regnat?’ he said to you. Remember that conversation in the morgues?”
“I remember.”
“And did you not say, ‘It’s a wyrm’?”
“I did. Yes. So your point is that he brought this on himself. But what about the things he didn’t bring onto himself: I’m speaking of gaol.”
“I wasn’t necessary there. Marek found Errol. Sitembile saved Eik from the pit with Jamila Foundling and a thousand beasts. And that tufuga turned out to be useful. I didn’t do any of that. Listen, if you want me to fix Errol Thebes, I will. If you want me to fix everything, I will. No exchange required. But you’ll hate me when it’s done.”
I sat sulking. Finally I said, “If you fixed everything, you would be like one of those guild mothers running around making sure nothing happens to her kelps.”
“Yes, or like a bard who won’t let the story unwind.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I think we both know.”
“Jamila punched me when I kissed her at the party on Al-Razi. I admit I left that out.”
“That will not surprise anyone.”
“All right. I caught my hair in the line and lost the Long Run.”
“Everyone knows that already.”
I sat brooding.
“Fine,” I yelled. “Fine! Slyngel’s letter to me said she. ‘i cannot protect the geld master an yore cuzin wen the crawling feend finds out she es alive.’ In the common tongue: ‘I cannot protect the guildmaster and your cousin when the crawling fiend figures out she is alive.’ She.”
“There you go. That’s the bit you’ve been avoiding.”
“Because I don’t want to tell it.”
“Characters are not puppets, Odd Thebes. You’re bound by this, and so am I. They own their scripts. If I get involved in the plot, what chance does the apothecarist have of being heroic?”
“He’s not going to be heroic. He’s going to prescribe dittany, which will cure Errol of a werewolf bite, which he does not have.”
“I just saw him digging madder root in the mud flats, with Dagmar.”
“Is that the cure?”
“Do you want me to kill the plot for you?”
“No,” I said sullenly. “No I don’t.”
“This place, this city, this map contains everything you need. That was the last-minute agreement. In the attics, the cellars, the fields, the rivers, the mines, the streets, the guts of plants, your hands, your minds, your banhuses—”
“To save Errol?”
“Gea. To save everyone. I don’t do things healf-ears, as your mam would say.”
“Wait, you know my mother?”
The other paused, waiting for me to catch up.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I, too. How are we leaving this? Am I fixing anyone?”
“No. But it was a long way up here. I have to warn you. Did it ever occur to you that, if you don’t fix things, people will stop coming?”
“Did I say that I never fix things?”
“All right, then,” I said. “Because what good would you be? In fact, what are you at all?”
“I am a bard. I carry their tellensacs with me.” The mearc-stapa paused and I felt, in that pause, the weight of all the tales we two carried. “You tell me. You’re a bard. What purpose do you serve?”
I had no other answer to give. I thought of Errol, Jamila, Margaret, Rip, Fenn, Sitembile, Dagmar, my mam. “I love them,” I said.
“Bingo,” the voice said.
“What in hel is bingo?”
In a Tent
JAMILA HAD WRAPPED HERSELF in the blankets with him and was telling him tales from the foundling passages of the tower. My ribs ached. I loved them more than anything in the city. I sat outside the tent flap to hear her talk to him.
Just after midnight, Errol cried out so loudly that I woke up confused, thinking that his screams were my own night terrors.
Marek came running with Nyree.
“This is all,” said Nyree. “He’s done. Rip should be here for this.” She looked at me. “You’re his cousin, right? You should go in there with him.”
I opened the tent flap. Jamila was kneeling next to him. His eyes were closed.
“Stay,” she said to him.
He waited so long to speak, I thought he was gone. Finally he said, “Why?”
“Why? A thousand reasons.”
“One.”
“Because you’re in love. That requires your presence.”
He could barely speak. “I am. Yes. But with whom?”
“With a foundling.”
“No. No. I love someone who keeps a feathered horse in her ribs. I met her in a dark kitchen.”
“I know her.”
“I bet you do.”
“Also, Rip needs you. Odd needs you. The city does.”
He rolled his eyes and smiled. “I don’t care about them right now. You,” he whispered. “Do you need me?”
“That will depend upon who you become.”
He smiled.
As she leaned over, reaching to push the hair from his face, his hand came up and he grabbed her wrist. I stepped back at the force of it. He pulled her to him and sat up at the same time, his mouth open as though he would devour her. He held his mouth to hers and one hand behind her neck while he got up and came over her, and was on top of her, reaching around her to hold her hips, her ribs, to him with this press of strength. I watched her pull him to her with her hands on the bones of his hips. He was hungry for her, like no one I had ever seen, certainly no one I had ever been.
He paused finally to breathe and said to her, “Aye. This is heofon.”
I whispered, “Stop committing poetry.”
He did not have to look to know who was behind him. “Stay high, Odd Thebes.”
“Just wondered if you need more madder root,” I said. “Or anything.”
When I turned to go I bumped into Chaunce, the tufuga. I was far from home and couldn’t place his face at first.
“Ovid, isn’t it?” he said.
Dawn
I FOUND JAMILA sitting outside his tent. The stag and the winged horse were sleeping in the riverbank grasses with their muzzles in each other’s shoulders.
“Have you seen the chicken?” I said.
“He’s in Errol’s sack,” she said. “He snores.”
“Why aren’t you in that tent, Jamila Foundling? Get back in there and get what belongs to you. Make Errol commit to this. Happily bound and dropped.”
She studied me as if to solve some puzzle. She said, “I’m not ready. And Errol is barely bound to his own stag. Why would we want to be bound?”
“Move over. Let me talk sense into him.”
“He’s not in there.”
“You’re false.” I pushed away the flap of the tent and found only Ovid. “But I thought that’s what you were doing last night? All that kissing.”
“Why does this matter to you?” she said. “You were ready to be bound. I’m not.”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t ready. If I’m bound with this noose, so should you be, the two of you.” Jamila was looking at something over my shoulder. I turned to look. I put my face in my hands.
“Are you coming to our tent?” Terpsichore said.
“Do you still want me?” I said, unable t
o look up.
She sniffed, as if she was thinking about it. “I have a noose your size. Be a shame to waste it.”
Gauntless
ERROL RETURNED LATER and fell asleep in his tent. He awoke when a dog was licking his face.
“Arthur?” he said.
“Of course it’s me. How are you? Are you recovering?”
“Aye. And nay.” Arthur wore one of the tufuga’s red bandages, all the way up his arm.
“What guild house did you choose?” Errol asked.
“I thought of outlaw, of course, or the crow of Thebes, to be even more like you. But then the tufuga said the choice had to be true, and I am not from a guild house. And the opposite of outlaw, really, with all due respect. And I miss Sitembile. So.”
The fire-colored snake was wrapped from his wrist to his shoulder. When he held his bow-arm straight, an arrow, under the snake, aimed straight off his arm.
“She would love it,” said Errol. “It captures her great skill.”
“Sitembile was gauntless,” Arthur said.
“Dauntless,” said Errol.
“That’s what I said.” Then, soberly, “My sister also died. In gaol.”
“I met her there. She asked us to care for you,” said Errol.
“I see.”
“My brother Fenn also died,” said Errol. “And I cannot find my brother Rip.”
“I’m sorry for your losses.”
Errol considered the face of this kelp who had inspired so much of what happened in the days that just transpired. It was a good face, strong and friendly and ready.
Errol said, “I must apologize, for I underestimated your valor, Arthur, and that of Sitembile and your men. You’ve been fighting for years all of the foul business of gaol. You should have heard how Jago feared you. I misunderstood.”
Arthur took out his bow and a cloth to wax the bowstring. “You thought we were kelps. It was an easy mistake to make.” It will be another five years till Arthur is old enough for his voice to crack.
One Relic
DAGMAR FLOATED IN THE RIVER, out in the middle, her wolves sprawled in the usual heap on the far shore.
“I know you’re there,” she said.
“I’m hardly here,” said Rip, from the shadows on the riverbank.
She ran her finger at the surface of the water like the fin of a fish, and watched the moonlight gather in its wake.
“There’s nothing I can do about this now,” Rip said. “But I loved you once. Fenn and I both did.” He adjusted the bandage on his hand. So much pain.
“That cannot be true,” said Dagmar. “You’ve ignored me since we met on the roofs, and avoided me for years on the streets.”
“How could you understand?” Rip said. “You, with an entire pack of wolves, and me, empty.” She could see in his silhouette, as he paced, the remnant of his swagger. He would be gone soon, as Fenn was gone. From the darkness Rip threw something. Dagmar caught it before it hit the water and sank.
“Which story can anyone tell, from an empty tellensac?” she said.
“There’s one story to tell,” said Rip.
“What about all your other tales? What about the roofs? And Fenn’s gifts. And all these kelps you feed. Your friends at the Bluebird—where are those relics?”
“My one relic is the weight and shape of a quarantined city. What my father did. I’m sure you know the tale. Everything we need is here. Right? Tales included. I know you’ve asked every denizen of this city. I must hear the story before I go.”
Dagmar did know the tale. Bored sailors gossip from ship to ship, is how she knew it. She lived on the bank of a harbor and listened, once a year. She didn’t speak their language when it first happened; she did now. They feared a blade of iron so aggressive it leapt from the forge to attack its own smith. That was its origin, a thousand years ago. Or ten thousand, depending on the sailor barding. What is a calendar in a quarantined city? The smith had gone too far, wandered the mines and descended into the shafts in a restless search for irfelaf iron. A pair of eyes looked out from the gashes the knife made in the smith, and from the cut in his apprentice. Cuttlefish, the both of them. He used the blade on everyone. Sheep. Loons. Cattle. The wall was thick but the word got out and the world had to have this blade. Nothing was left of the city, after the invasions. A remnant population, not even a name. There are gaps after that. Some say a sailor or a petty officer visited the city a decade later, or a century, seeking line from Lascaux for rigging. Some say she climbed light-footed it to the roofs. Others add that a parasite had by then invaded the smith’s bonehouse, that the blade was reforged and lines were rigged across the abysses, and ships came every year to take the assassins. And one sought rare things. But Dagmar never spoke of any of this—not before now, and not now.
“A pair of rare sons,” she said aloud.
“Rare,” Rip snorted. “You mean half human. That’s all you’ll tell?”
“I never speak it, so you will never leave.”
“Look at me. I’m leaving either way.”
An ancient presence moved over the surface of the river.
“Tila hami,” it said, in the language of Bamako House, whose mark Dagmar wore. “Stop crying.”
“You first,” Dagmar said. The thick fragrance of tuberose filled her nose. She slipped underwater and came up for air. “I cannot help him. I can do anything in this city. But I can’t help him.”
“But you are kunna, then. This is what I do.”
“Kunna? I am many things, but not lucky.”
From the shadows Rip demanded, “Who is there, in the water with you?”
A voice startled him. “Let me see you.”
He turned fast, his bloody hand already raised.
It was Dagmar, standing next to him, with the river running off her. Her wolves nosed at his bandages. “You should go away,” he said to her. “I am the dying son of a parasite. I have no fylgia in my rib cage. Remember me as I was on the roofs. There is no cure for the vacant thing that I am.”
But Dagmar ignored him.
All his life Rip had longed for this, longed to be known, even for the diminished thing he was. Now, finally, he let her unwrap the linens and let her see.
PART V
The Streetcat
WE HAULED UP JAGO on a drag line a day after we ourselves had returned to the roofs. He was blinking in the bright light of the setting sun, pacing and agitated. He was sure we had lured him up here to punish him in some guild court for war crimes. But curiosity about an invitation from the high roofs had snared even him.
When his gaze fell on me for a moment in the yurt, I could only think about what his hands had done. Foul with mud and sewage and all his clothes fitting too tightly, he was out of place here. He had brought a piece of junk rope with him that he’d found in the streets, and I realized he’d brought it up on a kelp-like impulse to seem like one of us, to appear that he knew what he was doing. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him he had found that rope in the streets for a reason, that some runner had dropped it because it was frayed, and it was fatally dangerous. It would drop him.
We rang the bell to tell Errol that Jago had arrived; from his errands, Errol and Eikthyrnir came back to Thebes. The two of them, Jago and Errol, stood facing each other. Errol absentmindedly rubbed the stag’s nose.
Jago spit off the edge. “So this is where they store all the heroes,” he said.
“’Tis a rare privilege for us, your visit,” Errol said. “We will do well by you.”
Jago lifted his chin, defiant. “I see for myself the hatches into the guilds have been locked in preparation for my visit.”
“The guildmaster has kelps to consider, and elders. However, as you can see, we are neither kelps nor elders here on the roof.” Jago did take a look. We were a strong lot and sky-worthy and we outnumbered him,
ten thousand to one. “Also, we thought you’d like the sky.”
Jago looked at him sharply. No doubt he wondered what Errol could mean. I wondered the same thing. Errol reached for something from his pack, and Jago braced himself, expecting to be pushed off the edge. Instead Errol handed him a package wrapped with the striped twine from Lascaux House. It was perhaps the first thing Jago had acquired in his life without first knifing its owner and stealing it. He barely knew how to open a gift. He chewed through the twine and ripped the papers.
“Is it a flying line?” he said.
“It’s a rag. For twelve stones’ weight. That’s what I use. You and I are the same.”
“This is for me?”
“I thought you would like to run the lines.”
Jago looked out across the city, at the roofs of a thousand towers’ banners furled in the sunset as far as he could see, vihuela music drifting from the edges, lights hanging on strings from every yurt, the fragrance of steaming tagines rising from the roof kitchens. These were the silk-lines he had had to watch from a mere mile away all his life. They were our roads, as strong as iron; they were our seaways, as mysterious as the curve of the earth. They were soaked now in red light from the setting sun. I knew Jago missed his fetch, the streetcat, and could barely stand to live with her wounded and trapped somewhere on a ship heading downriver. Still, some light went on in his eyes.
Second Sight
RUNNERS SURROUNDED US at every bucket fire Errol visited, to hear the stories again, whatever he was willing to tell of the streets, the vault, the mines. I found myself complaining to Jago about it.
“It was always this way. And now, again. They can’t even remember my name now that he’s back.”
“Which one of your many acts of self-sacrifice did you want to be remembered for?”
* * *
—
One night at Thebes, Errol and I sat along at our own bucket fire.
“What?” I said.
City of the Uncommon Thief Page 38
