Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse (13 page)

This was my pleasure. It was my punishment.

Three boys made me give up on love. The first may or may not have had a last name; I knew him only as Elef.

I came to feel at home among the urchins and beggars—rats, my mother called them—on the street. While at first they were put off by my title and the way I spoke they eventually came to accept me because of the food I could offer and the stories I could tell about the queen and her attendants. And because I could fight as well as the best of them.

It was towards the end of cheimon when the days were finally getting longer and eiar was taunting us from just around the corner. Because of the civil unrest, my mother had banned us from speaking to any commoner so we snuck out.

Harryet and Bolt sat by the fountain, close enough that they could feel each other’s warmth; not so close it would seem inappropriate. They were oblivious to the sound of bare feet slapping on cold cobblestones or the shouts—“Bread! Bread!”—bouncing off the walls. Bolt was teaching my lady-in-waiting the language of the war-wits. Their hands moved steadily through a silent conversation.

Hero and I gave out loaves of Cook’s steaming warm sourdough and glanced anxiously up the alleys for signs of trouble.

The older children snatched the bread from us with filthy hands before running back into the shadows. The younger, less wary children ignored Harryet and the albino—they had seen them there before—and perched on the edge of the fountain swinging their legs. Though they appeared relaxed, one ear was always cocked for the arrival of the city guard or a clash between rebels and soldiers that might spew into our quiet oasis at any moment.

They ripped off pieces of bread then spoke with mouths full, their breath hanging in white clouds. “Winter’s getting colder, eh?” said a boy with mud up to his knees.

“And summer hotter too,” Hero said.

“Except the other day when it was boiling hot in the middle’a winter.”

“That was Typhon’s last Tempest, I reckon,” Hero said.

“With the drought there’s no scrounging even in the markets,” said the boy.

“What’s a drought?” a little girl asked, scratching her scabrous head.

I missed the rest of their conversation. I was distracted by a young man about my own age who was sitting on the kerb at the end of a slate-coloured alley under the eve of an abandoned candleshop. I nudged Hero and whispered, “Have you seen him before?”

Hero shook his head narrowing dark eyes at the boy.

“I wonder why he doesn’t come and get something to eat. He’s just sitting there.” I dropped my sack of bread. “Come on.”

Hearing us approach, the boy lifted his head and fixed me with the bluest of blue eyes. Raven eyes. Like ice. Like the sky. Like…You get the picture. His were the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. He was handsome but in a rough, unkempt way. His feet were bare. His face was…well it was magnificent. Beneath the dirt.

“Do you mind if I sit?” I said, lowering myself beside him. I was distracted by those eyes so I forced myself to look away and focus instead on Hero, who stood in front of us, his arms crossed, a concerned expression clouding his usually cheerful face. I gave my cousin what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was always wary of someone new. He said that while it was true we ought to show the children our generosity and sympathy, there was no reason to trust them. We could not assume they were good. Not in the way we understood the word “good”. They lived on the streets, after all. Their notion of good was defined by survival rather than courtesy, and we could not understand it without having ever felt hunger. Not the sort that makes you beg. And steal. Any one of them could be a revolutionary, he said.

He had a point and yet my inclination was to trust them.

The boy looked at a spot beyond my shoulder. His arms and legs were bare: the cold was coming on quickly as night nipped at day’s heels. I removed my wool cloak and offered it to him. He did not take it. In fact his eyes did not move from the spot beyond my shoulder. I looked up at Hero, but he only shrugged.

“Here,” I said, shaking the garment.

The boy raised his eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

He was blind.

I placed my himation around his shoulders and he snuggled into the warmth of it. “Thank you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Elef,” he said puffing up his chest like the god of freedom had particularly chosen him as his namesake.

“I’m Verne. This is Hero,” I said, self-consciously tucking a strand of hair beneath my ear though the boy could not see the gesture.

The boy turned his face towards my cousin but his eyes wandered to the rickety doorway behind him. “I have heard that you come into the slums. They call you the princess of the people. But I have never seen you before”—he chuckled at his own joke—“though I see many things.”

“Like what?” I said, glancing between Elef and Hero. Hero looked back towards the fountain, where a mob of children were rummaging through my sack of bread.

“Come on, Verne,” he said.

I held up a finger to request his patience.

“I see all sorts of things. I see the way the city smells at night. I see the sounds of places.”

Hero and I exchanged a puzzled look. “What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean what I say. My eyes might be useless but I have other ways of appreciating this city.”

Hero looked utterly perplexed.

“Will you show me?” I said.

A kylon barked in an adjacent ally. The girl with the scabrous head screamed. Harryet called my name. I looked up but I did not move.

“Tides, Verne. It’s probably the Shark’s Teeth. We’ll be trapped down here,” Hero said. He was poised for flight, a part of him already moving towards the sunlight, the other waiting out of duty.

We could hear the patter of soft leather boots and the clatter of makeshift armour.

“I can’t leave him,” I said, nodding at Elef. “Go. I’ll be all right. I’ll double back by the library and meet you at the gate. Make sure the children get away.”

Hero hesitated. A thousand arguments flickered across his face but he simply nodded and darted away.

Elef got to his feet. “I don’t need your help.” With one hand outstretched he felt his way along the ally. Reaching the end, he groped for a handhold and lifted himself effortlessly off the ground. The whole time he spoke: “Left hand to brick, right foot to window ledge, right hand to awning, left foot to pipe.” Within an instant he was out of sight. His voice reached me from somewhere high above. “If you want me to show you the city, come back tomorrow.”

So I did. Hero said he wanted nothing to do with an eccentric blind homeless boy who was up to no good. He said he’d had enough of running around with the Shark’s Teeth out there. “We only just escaped last time,” he said and he was right. So I went alone.

Though winter had been harsh there had been no rain or ice since the year Callirhoe arrived and the air was dry. The sun was reluctant to poke its head from behind the grey clouds and the city was heavy. It was also relatively empty on account of the recent disturbances. Every second street was teeming with soldiers.

I met the boy in the alley and he took my arm. A rickety timber stairway leading up to a second floor; a face in a basement window at ground level; and a cantilevered building on the verge of toppling: Elef saw none of this. His bony hand dug into my arm. He felt the earth with his toes.

I knew I was safe. Elef could hear people long before I could see them. He would stop, raise his nose to the air like he could smell them then say, “We can’t go that way. City guard.”

Reaching Mines Passage, a wide road which delineated the end of Minesend and the start of Lete, he stopped and said, “Do you feel anything?”

I furrowed my brow in confusion. “No.”

“Close your eyes.”

With my eyes closed I tried to feel something. I felt no hands groping in my pockets, no tug at my purse strings. That was something.

“You have to concentrate. Tibuta has a glow. You must listen for it. You will feel it beneath your feet.”

I tried as hard as I could but the lights flickering behind my lids tempted me to look. I shook my head. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Come back tomorrow,” he said.

So I did.

Over the next few weeks Elef introduced me to parts of the city I never knew existed. He taught me the smell of a sewer you could enter at the top of Justice Way and follow down to the water’s edge. He taught me the sound of the fishermen coming in through the watergate, the feel of them docking in Elea Bay and the flavour of them painting the streets with fish guts. He taught me the smell of smoke from a thousand chimneys, the caress of fresh air against my cheek. Sure, at times we had to duck into a laneway or scuttle up a drainpipe to avoid the rebels but that didn’t bother me. They were on the periphery. My vision was dominated by Elef. He taught me to open my ears and nose. He taught me to really feel Tibuta, to love his city.

But what a short-lived friendship it was. About a month later I returned to the streets with a loaf of hot bread and a pair of soft leather boots but Elef was nowhere to be found. I checked the abandoned candleshop where he sometimes slept. I climbed the building opposite and looked under the awning where he leant beside the chimney if the weather was really cold. I looked for him in the marketplace and down by Elea Bay. I called his name in the drainpipe. I asked for him in the town square and the library where a lot of the homeless children went to beg. No one had seen him.

The next day I found Charis, a boy with fleabites all over his legs, who had run away from the mines. He was stealing squash from an overturned cart on Justice Way. “He’s gone,” he said.

“Gone where?”

He shrugged.

“But how can someone just disappear like that?”

“It happens all the time. He probably crawled into a warm space under someone’s house, fell asleep and never woke up. Or the Queen’s Guard got him.”

“Could he have joined the Shark’s Teeth?”

“Unlikely. What would they do with a blind boy? He’s probably dead.” Charis said.

How could a life be so insignificant? How could a person’s whereabouts be met with a shrug? It made me so
sad
.
I nursed my grief in my room, sliding down the wall to the floor. Violent sobs shook through my body and even Harryet could not comfort me. Poor Elef had died. Not for helping me. Not for acting against my mother. Not for his gift. But because the world is cruel.
It made me worse than sad. It made me hate Tibuta. But only for a while: it was impossible to hate Tibuta for long. Every twisting alley and every stagnant pool reminded me of Elef. Though I never saw him again he gave me a reason to love even the darkest parts of our city.

The second boy, well…I am embarrassed to mention him. He was the son of a distant cousin from one of the remoter islands furthest from Tibuta proper. Ruben was his name and he had an appreciation for fine clothes and even finer cuts of meat. Hog, swan—you name it, he had tried it. I noticed him during the sacrificial bonfire in celebration of Ayfra’s birth. The fire was massive and sat on the flats in the Lower Ward. Smoke and the stench of burning meat filled the air. Sparks rose into the sky and disappeared among the stars. The heat that radiated from the fire was almost too hot to endure.

Ruben had his arms crossed over his thick velvet cape, one shiny boot resting on the other, his gaze disappearing past the flames. His midnight hair was tussled, his square jaw covered in a hint of a beard. He held himself with the air of a Caspian prince who truly believed he might conquer us and sit on the Tibutan throne one day. I cringe to think of it now.

I swallowed, approaching tentatively the way one might approach a sleeping lion and offered him a drink of tank, a sweet spirit made from fermented roses. He looked at my silver flask, looked at me and shrugged. “Why not?”

By midnight we were drunk. My confidence got the better of me and I took his hand and led him away from the fire, past the buildings that glowed orange in its light, through a maze of colonnades and arches to a quiet courtyard. I pushed him against the wall beneath an apple tree and I kissed him. Oh the gods it was awful. The taste was…He had just eaten garlic sausage. I could feel meat residue on his teeth. His tongue thrashed around inside me like a trapped snake.

“Enough!” I said, scrambling to get away. My voice shattered whatever illusion I’d had that this boy might fill Drayk’s place.

I left him without looking back.

I am ashamed to even mention the third boy and so I will do it quickly. His name was Friance. I have mentioned him before. He was an attendant who worked in the gardens and he was not particularly attractive or intelligent. He had a lopsided mouth, a mop of unruly hair and uneven teeth. He was capable of offending almost anyone.

I will not go into detail but I will tell you this: Friance could not control himself — I mean “control” in the least sinister but most awkward way. And this in a society that values men for their self-control above all other qualities. It was humiliating.

At this point, many women of Tibuta would have become predatory or lazy, depending on their personality, giving up on boys their own age and moving onto older men or consorts. They would have started collecting conquests the way one might collect precious stones showing off their most prized pieces at balls and stately functions.