Aloren (20 page)

Twenty

A month passed.  I wove Leode’s shirt steadily and tired too quickly to do much dancing, and Wille Illinla caught me stealing plums. 

Without bothering to look at my face he snatched my hand away and instructed I steal a whole basket to make a profit instead of taking just enough to fill my stomach.  I began laughing.  His face turned white, purple and red. 

“First you consort with humans,” he said, “then you disappear, and now you show up in a gale of laughs.  Least
I
wasn’t the one nicking like a crippled sparrow.”

“Have your nicks graduated to new heights?”

“To be honest,” he said, still shaken up, “I ain’t nicking much.”

“Because of Sal?  Are you polishing shoes and giving the proceeds to the poor?”

“Something like that, being as I’m the poorest.”  Then he said, “Where ye been?  Abducted by roving folk and dancing all over Eastern Estralony, was you?  Did you dance up to another dimension where the people laugh at poor boys tryin to give advice to young rogues?  While you was up there did the emperor crown you as his queen, so now you feel you got to bring them awful foreign habits here?”

“A vein’s like to pop in your forehead.”  I took a bite of my plum.

“Ain’t going to tell me?” 

He was wearing a shirt I hadn’t seen before, brown and clean.  “What’s this shiny thing?” I gave it a tug. 

“Georrch!” 

“What?”

“Nothin.”  He kept his back well away from my hands. 

I moved behind him and saw the dark bleeding through the cloth.  I reached up to press it––it was wet.  “Have you just been flogged?”

“It didn’t hurt, until you poked around with your fishhooks.”

“Have you even bothered to clean it?”

“I didn’t want Sal to see,” he said stupidly.

I stole a soapy rag from a window-washer, pushed him into a recess, and took off his stained shirt. 

His back was a cobweb of welts.  Every time I touched them he tensed in pain.  My hands trembled until I couldn’t steady them, and I dropped the bloody rag on the stone.  “What did you do, Wille?”

“Stole a handful of fruit from that boy you was after,” he said, inching away from me. “I spat grape pips at two soldiers.  You saw them, probably––fat ones at the corner didn’t look like they was having much fun.  So I gave them a bit of fun, but they ain’t accustomed to it, I guess.  Foreigners.  Yellow, nasty and big, and more and more’re come up from Omben-beyond-the-Sea.  I’ve been told the humans are horrible in Omben-beyond-the-Sea.”

“They did it?” I said.  “The maggots.”

“Sort of.  One of them got me by the neck and I grabbed his wallet––don’t tell Sal––and I tucked it up me sleeve.  But he still had a-hold of me neck so I belted him in the gob, and the three of us got in a pretty knot, until this other human walks by and tells them they’ve no business knocking around a Noreme, as Noremes ain’t subject to Ombenelvan humans.  Now I says to this misinformed booby that Noremes ain’t subject to any humans.  And I called him an imposter and a whoreson and a gooch, and he got unreasonably angry.  Two more soldiers came and the owl tied me up and wished me well.  Didn’t stick around to watch.  The bigger owl was happy to take charge.” 

I grew uneasy.  “What’d he look like, Wille?”

“Round and fat with a pasty face and a nasty grin.  Won’t be grinning when he finds his wallet missing, though.”

“No––the one you called a gooch.”

“He had great big golden eyes.”

“Helpful, that.”

“Tall. Young. Big hands and feet.”

“And?”  My stomach sank.

“Skinny face, brown hair, charming smile.”  I began walking away.  “Where’re you going?  Don’t leave the rest of these for Sal!”

***

I didn’t expect to accomplish much, but I was eager for an argument.  Eager enough to climb the wall that very evening and have a talk with Andrei’s horse. 

After I gathered loose bricks from the path to stand on, I stuck my head through the stall window and clicked my tongue.  Sandal looked at me with a brown eye.

“Is your master cruel?”

What master?
the horse said, and farted.  I rolled my eyes and went to look for Trid

I knew where his room was.  I’d seen him climb through his window and slither down the roof––and where there was Trid there was usually Andrei.

I climbed up a lattice and over a steep roof, then stepped onto a string line where the mouths of copper serpents poured rainwater from a gutter.  I shimmied up between the gutter and the wall, and pulled myself over a cornice. 

I walked toward Trid’s casement, flung wide to the cool night air. 

His desk was pushed up against the sill, and he was sitting at it, putting together a set of tiny bones that looked like the skeleton of a bat.  He looked up, scattered the bones with his forearm, and swore.  “Works that well, does it?” He pointed to my leg.

“Where’s Andrei?”  I didn’t move to climb through.

“Why?  You’re well shut of him.”  Trid picked bones off the rug.  “He’s grown cross since the Ombenelva showed up, and the mere thought of you two squabbling gives me a headache.”

“Go get him.”

“I’m not moving.”  But he turned his back to me and shrieked Andrei’s name a few times.

Andrei poked his head round the door. He was wearing a nightshirt, and his hair was mussed.  “Is someone murdering you?”

“She wants a lovers’ spat.  Not in here, though––I’m working.” 

Andrei saw me and tugged his shirt down. Then he climbed out the window and bumped his head on the lintel, and I started right off: “Wille’s got thirty scores on his back because he called you an imposter?”

“I can hear you,” called Trid.

Andrei picked a route down to the ledge with the copper serpents.

“That tall Gireldine?” he said, looking over his shoulder.  “Called me more than that.  A whoreson, and other things too coarse for your feminine ears, and you want to know what he made with his fingers?  Why’ve you turned my tunic inside-out?” 

“You left.” I sat on the ledge a good five feet away from him.  “Like you were shamed, or something.”  I took a breath and said quickly, “You’re not that bad, you’re not so cruel as you’d like people to believe.” 

He stared at me as though I were about to run him over with a cart.

“What’s the act for?” I said.

“What act?”

“Why d’ye act so cruel?”  I looked at the ground, which was a very long way down, and grabbed hold of a copper serpent.

“I don’t know.  Self preservation?”

“What d’ye mean?” 

“I don’t know.” He sounded frustrated.  “Right, here’s what I think––”  He scratched both sides of his head, and his hair stuck up everywhere.  “Humans have to repress their feelings.”  He spoke like it was a lesson he’d memorized.  “You let them out they’re likely to kill you.  Kindness, compassion, empathy: Good as poison.”

“God and the Lady.”

“People are nasty,” he said.   “And they don’t change.  You’ve got to be cruel to live past childhood.”

“Deep wisdom,” I said. “Did yer nurse tell you that, or’d you pull it from her breast with the milk?”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Nobody’s here to be nasty,” I said, and then remembered something our old nurse had told us.  “Humans are supposed to make doors.”

“Doors?  Why
Doors?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to know. 
Simargh say mores, Elde build shores, humans make doors
.”

“A nursery rhyme?”

I slid back and put both hands on the serpent, and he eyed them and said, “Do you think I’m going to push you off the roof?”

I shrugged.  “You enjoy watchin it, don’t you?  All them floggings?”

“Yes, very nice, a flogging.”

“Is it?”  I was growing warm, and I let go the serpent to roll up my sleeves.  “D’you get a rush when the skin gets so ripe with blood it can’t hold no more, and the stuff spills down the back in red ribbons, when the bone shines through––”

“Shut up.”  He stared at my arms.

“Or you’ll have a poor girl trussed up and whipped?”

“Who did that?”

I’d forgotten about the welts crisscrossed up and down my arms. I rolled my sleeves back down. “You’re supposed to be repressing that feeling.”

The concern left his face. “Duly noted.”

“Your argument’s a goner.”

“How, exactly?”

“It’s broken its knees, Andrei.  Your argument’s a sour, sick old man.”

“My argument’s made my life as uncomplicated as humanly possible.”

I laughed.  “Got it down to a couple rules?”

“One.  With no one to stop me I’ll do as I please.”  He grabbed the gutter above his head and swung himself to his feet.  He walked along the edge and disappeared around a corner. 

“He forgot the other half,” I said quietly to the serpent.  “Folk’ll react however they please to whatever he does.  And if people don’t change, how the hell did I change from the King’s daughter to this?”

The stars glinted around a thumbnail moon.  I made to leave and checked myself.  I walked up the roof to talk to Trid, thinking he would leave me less sick to my stomach.

The slates were still warm under my feet.  But a chill went through me when I saw Trid sitting on his windowsill, feet on the slate, eyes staring at the copper trough of a gutter.  I knew at once.  He’d heard me.  My voice had sounded up through the gutter.

“You were the old King’s daughter?” he said.  “I heard he had a bunch of sons.” 

I dropped to my knees and fled.  My legs tangled, and suddenly I could find no grip with my hands, and I started rolling; and Trid sprang up, ran in a crouch, and leapt over my body just as it was about to slide over the cornice. 

He blew the air from my lungs, bruising my elbows.  “Were you wanting to fall to your death?” he said, and I struggled, pummeling and scratching at him.  He pulled me away from the edge.  “What’ve you been doing to your hands?”  He pinned them down.  “I don’t know if you’re crazy or telling the truth, Aloren, but I suppose it would explain the tapestry, wouldn’t it?”  I freed a hand and slapped him over the mouth.  “And if it were false you wouldn’t be clawing like this.”

“This in’t good,” I said. “Let go.  This in’t good.”  He released me, and watched as I crawled three feet from him and sat down again.

“You needn’t act so frightened,” he said, and I put another foot between us.  “I won’t repeat what I heard, if you don’t want me to.”

“Yes you will.”  I pressed my palms against my eyeballs.  “How could you keep something like that to yourself, and watch the dancing, or the––”

“I
won’t
.  You can trust me.  When have I ever lied to you?” 

I kneaded my feet and snorted.  “You were just eavesdropping.”

“By accident.  Look where my desk is.  And why should I tell?  No one would believe me.”

“A human couldn’t do that.  A human would”––I rocked and choked back sobs––“try to pull as much misery, as much torture, out of a situation, because he don’t hold with something as dangerous as goodness.”

“Gracious gods.”  Trid sat back on his hands.  “Why do you hate us so much?”

I stopped rocking.  “Three guesses.”

“We’re not all like Andrei.  Have you never met a decent human?  And it’s not completely his fault.  He’s in a trouble spot.”

“What?” I said hysterically.  “What’s
he
got to be troubled about?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you,” he said.  I stopped to think.  Trid kept his friendships guarded.  I failed to remember any ugly or alarming things coming from Trid’s mouth, and my heart slowed.

“Swear on your silence?”  I slid farther from him and rose to my knees.

“Yes.”  But he frowned, remaining seated.  “I haven’t much to go on, anyway.  And you won’t tell me more, will you?”  He looked down at the slates, and then up, scowling a little.  “I don’t like this,” he said, “and you’re right.  I won’t be able to watch the dancing.  This hurts my stomach enough right here.  Listen––and clean the pride out of your ears––can’t I have someone take you in?  You’re a very small girl, and even if you weren’t––whoever you said you were, I should like to think you’re fed regularly and warm in the winter.” 

I began to cry.  “No, don’t, Aly.”  He climbed to his feet, and I followed suit, backing away.  “Don’t make me feel worse,” said Trid miserably.  “I could help you, if you’d stop refusing it.”

Ashamed of my tears, I scrambled over the slates, keeping in the shadows.

Twenty-One

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself afterwards, and I jumped at small noises and kept out of direct sunlight.  I visited none of my regular haunts, making it very difficult for anyone, including Floy and Mordan, and Trid, to track me down.

Padlimaird and I were catching up one day, sharing a smoke.  We’d stolen Wille’s old pipe and a bit of Nefer’s leaf to ‘calm my nerves’, as Padlimaird put it.  He’d seen me slide beneath an overturned boat to hide from what looked like Trid’s brown horse; and he pulled me out, saying I was like to grow a shell like a turtle.

So we sat beneath a magnolia on the harbor’s eastern bulwark, and I was drawing the sweet smoke from the wood when Trid and Max crept up behind Padlimaird. 

Max held a fish above Padlimaird’s head.  He squeezed, and muck snaked out from a hole below the tail and dribbled all over Padlimaird’s orange hair.  The pipe fell out of my mouth. 

Paddy felt the goop on his neck and jumped to his feet.  He turned white as the spring sun on the water.  Max collapsed into laughter, and before I had the chance to smile I clenched both sides of my head and scowled. 

“Explain yerself,” I said.

Max wiped his eyes and sat up.  “A bet.”

“Do you ever stop betting?” I said.

“Do you ever stop wilting things?”  He glanced at the tree. 

“Hasn’t wilted,” I said.  “There, you won.”

“No, I bet Trid I’d be the first to make you bloom something.”

“You tom-fool,” said Padlimaird.  His hair was sopping, as he’d just dunked his head in the water.  “Why would
that’ve
made her happy?  What ye really need to do is give her a swollen ass, or anyone, really, to yell at.  She loves yellin.  Or y’should make an idiot out of yerself instead of me.”

“By now,” said Trid, “she should’ve bloomed every tree in the city.”

“Don’t work like that, m’lord.”  Padlimaird wiped his face on his shirt.  “You gotta be touchin them, and it’d be a mighty wondrous thing to see Aloren touchin every tree in the city.  She probably can’t get her arms all the way around this one.”

“But I
did
give her someone to yell at,” said Max.  “That tree didn’t move.”

“This little tree?” said Padlimaird.  “Too small.  Don’t work with trees like this.  Give her time to make up an insult for everyone she knows and she’ll unfurl an avenue of oaks.” 

“I thought she had to be touching them,” said Trid.

“That’s a fine looking thing you got there.”  Max nodded at the pipe.

“Have a drag,” said Padlimaird brightly.  “Wille won’t mind human slobber all over it.  Not like he uses it anymore.” 

Max picked it up and took a big draw.  He coughed and buckled over with a green face, and soon everyone was laughing except him.

***

“What’d it taste like?” said Max’s twin brother.  “Poxy rat arse?”  The swallows played tag, zipping in and out of cracks between the stones set where the river poured into the harbor.  The boys had found me swimming in my old chemise, diving for mussels.  It was hot, and Luka insisted the harbor was off-limits for swimming and threatened to tell the nearby guardsmen. 

At this Andrei ripped off his shirt and ran out on the nearest pier.  But he stopped and came back when Max began describing his handsome smoke rings.  I climbed out and dropped my mussels on a rock.

“Everyone has the same saliva,” said Trid testily.  I cracked a mussel and ate it.

“Not really.” Pulling his shirt back over his head, Andrei sat next to Trid.  He scrunched his nose at me.  “Depends what the person’s been eating.”

“Not exactly a person, is she?”  Luka watched me crack another.

Trid stared at him. “What’s your mother been teaching you?”

“I don’t know,” said Luka to Trid.  “What’s your uncle been teaching you?”

“Nothing.  My uncle’s in Dirlan.”

“Yes. How convenient for him that you’re here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re reporting back to him, aren’t you?”

“What in the seven hells are you talking about?”  Andrei frowned at Luka.

Max flicked his brother’s ear.  “One of his ‘Trid’s a spy from the enemy state’ theories.” 

I sucked on my third mussel and wondered when it was that Lorila had become an enemy state.

“Natridom’s almost old enough to be investigated,” said Luka, shrugging.  “Old enough to be an informer for Caveira, anyway.  I’ll bet he’s writing
mountains
of letters about these soldiers from Omben.”

Trid rolled his eyes, but his ears went red. 

“Luka,” said Andrei, “go fling your shit around with the other monkeys.”

“A couple more months, Natridom, until you’re sixteen.  Can’t wait to see what they find.  Herist isn’t very happy about Caveira’s military.  I can’t see him any happier with you, if it turns out––”

“
If
he’s questioned at all”–– Andrei was standing up now––“it won’t be by Herist.  He’ll be questioned by me.”

“That’s unlikely,” said Luka, smirking up at him.  “How are you going to turn sixteen before he does?”

I looked up.  “How could Herist be any more likely?  Interrogating Trid about Caveira, his old accomplice?”

“Aloren, be quiet,” said Trid.

“It’d be so easy to shut him up, why are you still––?”  I glanced at Andrei and threw my last mussel into the harbor.

“We need to talk,” Andrei said to Trid.

“About what?  How silver is more grey than white?”

“Maybe.” 

Without another word the two boys walked down a side street, leaving their horses roped to a poplar and grazing on the grassy levee.  Max stretched his neck after them.

“Poxy rat arse?”  He turned to his twin.  “
You
taste like poxy rat arse.”

“Me?” Luka idly cracked a snail under his boot.  “Andrei’s the poxy rat arse.”

The boys laughed and the laughs sounded identical.

“A perfect monster.” 

“I say we leave before they come back in horrible moods.” 

I shivered, even though the sun was out and baking the stones.  One of them said something to me, but I turned my back and they walked away, voices fading. 

The chips of the swallows filled the silence.  Then a great shrieking and howling came from beneath the boulders to my left.

I jumped up and clambered over the stones, where a pool of silt collected before the water found the harbor.  A crew of older boys, workmen’s sons by the clean look of their shabby clothes, most of them Gralde, crowded round the strip of muck.  They were torturing a saebel. 

She was made of mud and river, slimy, squirming, shimmering like an eel.  Algae hung from her fishbone teeth.  The boys, stupid as they were, knew at least not to touch her, and they held her in place with sticks. 

I wormed through the group and kicked at the sticks.  “Stop it!  She’ll give you a lifetime of bad luck, you dolts.” I pushed them back, and the saebel fixed her green eyes on me. 

Before I could leap away, she slipped her weedy hand into mine and pulled me through the water and into her eyes. 

My hair waved about my chin, green-black.  My hands reached for a surface that wasn’t there, swirling the murk. I panicked, struggling, but it was no use: she held me by the broken strings of my spirit, unhurt by the flame, grinning with her bony teeth.

Helping, you who ask no help?

You shan’t allow us the return of favors?

Half acts weaken earthly balance;

Bargain is the language with which

We soothe our skins.

“You can’t help,” I said.  “Let go.”  Instead, she yanked at my spirit threads.  The pain slammed up and down my body, and she seemed to delight in it.

Tell me, daughter of clay, who is alone?

We are alone.

You are caught in a circle.

We are alone, standing

Like trees in a wood, rushes in a pond.

The balance can tip no further.

The river runs the wrong way,

Taking us from this side

To weigh heavy on the other.

We haven’t a circle, or a net,

But gifts we have,

So the spheres

Don’t roll from their foundations.

“I don’t want your gifts.”  The gifts of the saebelen were double-edged swords.  “Leave me alone.”  But she didn’t like being refused; it hurt like a needle through the eyeball. 

No gifts, warm heart?

A lesson, then.

The roots groan

And the green fades,

But the earth musn’t roll away. 

A lesson, flowing through seasons,

With heartbreak beneath,

For spiritbreak

Dappled on the surface,

Isn’t enough for us who are alone and fading,

Daughter of clay.

She let go of my fire and disappeared. 

I stood in the sunlight, shaking from the pain, ankle-deep in mud.

“A lifetime of bad luck?” said one of the boys.  He was almost grown, his chin patchy.  “You wouldn’t give us the same, would you?”

“She’s an angel,” said another boy.  He took a pull from a jug.  “And almost naked in that thing.”  He smiled.  “A sweet little angel, wet as a snat.”  He gave my hair a yank.  His breath stank of whiskey.

“She wants it.  Look at her, so eager,” said one.  His face was pointy, like a rat’s.  They crowded round me, heads knocking together. 

I stepped back and felt rock against my shoulders.  I wondered at my stupidity––I wondered where Floy was.  Bile burned in my throat.

I jumped at Rat-face and ripped his shirt.  Laughing, the others caught my arms and pushed me into the rock. 

“Look at those forearms on her,” said one. “Taming lions, sweetheart?” 

Rat-face fished for a handful of mud.  “She’ll do for a bit of taming.” He squeezed my jaw open and pushed the stuff into my mouth.  I jerked back and bit his fingers.  He howled and the boys laughed appreciatively.

“Now he should be made to kiss her.”

“Graic had a fine idea.  Let’s mark her up,” said another one, shoving Graic away and dipping his hand in the mud.

“No,” I said, wrestling with their hands.  “Let go.”

“Shush.”  He drew something big and lewd on my chemise.  “Looks pretty.”

“What’re you doing?”  Andrei’s voice came from the back.  “I’ll call the greys.”

“The greys?” drawled the boy in front of me, turning round, taking his hand back.  “What are you, Herist’s arse fuck?”

Andrei laughed, and it made me positively sick.  “He’d prefer your mother over me, I’m sure.” 

The boys in front of me stiffened––caught sight of his broach, probably.  I was shaking in huge, wet jerks, sick with disgust and so angry I felt I must scream or melt.  The boys gaped like fish.

“Move,” he said, and they went right enough, and I pushed after them, eager to be gone. 

I slapped into his front, imprinting the lewd picture on his stomach.  I collected my limbs and wiped the stomach with an arm. 

This did nothing for it.  He pushed through the water with leaping strides.  I dived and grabbed his ankles, and we both fell into the mud. 

“Where’re you going?” I shouted.  He tried to get up but I pushed him down.  “Take all ten o’ em single handed, would ye, you great, stupid fuck?”  I lost my senses, and began pounding on him, kicking, punching and slapping. 

He dragged himself to his feet, covered in mud, and I drummed fists on his chest and ripped at his hair.  My rage was a fire in the head.  He caught me by the waist, and all I could see was a monster, Herist, the Queen. 

I bent over to bite his arm; he flung me away.  My back slammed against the rock, and I fell in the mud, legs sticking out.  He turned at the noise I made, and my mouth was already open, so I said, “Go after em, then.” 

“Are you sane?”  Big drops fell into the water around him.  “I’ll have bruises over every inch of me, I expect.”  He wiped mud from his upper lip.  “I wanted to make certain they knew my face.” 

“Ugliest face in the city.”

“Well it is now,” he said angrily.  “I’m sorry.”  He took my arm and pulled me up.

“You’re a brute, that’s what y’are.”  

When we climbed up to the horses Trid was sitting on the grass.  “You were frightened,” said Andrei to him, “that when all was said and done she would’ve called you a brute.”

Trid looked up, and tossed me an embroidered bit of red wool.  “Wear your tunic.”

It was scarcely my fault. But I didn’t tell Floy.  And the mere thought of my brothers finding out made me sick.