Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (10 page)

Cat Sparks

The woman nestled amongst the cushions would have been considered beautiful had her right eye not been torn from its socket. The scarring was brutal, hideous. From the moment Mariyam entered the bar, she had been drawn to the scarred woman and her entourage. As fate would have it, the man she had hoped to meet at the Starfish that afternoon was one of the scarred woman’s friends.

“Haptet, at your service,” he said, smiling and pressing his lips to the back of her hand.

“My name is Mariyam,” she replied. “Behameed said I was to seek you out. He promised you would be my guide, should I ever find myself in Sammarynda.”

Haptet’s eyes widened. “Behameed! The old dog. He is like a brother to me. Please join my friends, let me buy you a drink.” Haptet could not wipe the smile from his face. “Behameed! It’s been years. Is he here with you? I’ve not seen him on the peninsula for a decade at least.”

Mariyam settled herself amongst the cushions and smiled. News, it seemed, did not travel quickly in these parts. The old trawler captain Behameed had been dead five years, but he had said she could always use his name, and that it was as good as currency along the peninsula. About that, at least, he had not lied.

Alcohol pulsed warm currents through her veins as she surveyed the room while listening to Haptet tell stories of his troubled youth, spent crewing on Behameed’s yacht back before the war. Mariyam laughed along with the rest of them — and some of her laughter was genuine. This was not the Behameed she had known. This one seemed like a reckless idiot rather than a hero of Maratista Plain.

The décor of the Starfish echoed its name. Five-pronged motifs, both painted and woven, covered the walls. Above the tables stretched a fishing net laden with desiccated creatures, each one tinted in
pastel shades.

Mariyam tried not to stare at the woman with the missing eye, whose name she now knew was Jahira. A difficult task. She was, simultaneously, beautiful and hideous. She’d be used to the whispers and stares;
the pity in the faces of strangers, Mariyam thought. She turned her attention to the others: handsome, well-groomed men and women whose names she would not need to remember. She noted their familiarity;
the brushing of skin against skin, the way they leaned in on each other when they spoke. So much intimacy. She felt a sudden swell of emotion. Her eyes moistened, but she fought the feelings down. These were not her people. This was not her home.

“Tourists everywhere!” exclaimed Haptet suddenly as he dragged on his water pipe, causing the coals to flare. Both Jahira and Mariyam watched the smoke dance in the glass chamber as he exhaled. He gestured to a group seated at the far end of the room. “They come only for the jousting season to fill their pockets with baubles and poke their noses where they don’t belong.”

“But surely you welcome the money
we
tourists bring,” said Mariyam, casually feigning hurt as she waved for the waiter’s attention. “You may have been born here, but you were educated inland, same as me, Haptet. Same as me. Your accent betrays you. Perhaps there’s more similarity between us than you’d like to admit?”

A young boy in a white linen smock approached, proffering a drink on a tray. Mariyam took it as the coin Haptet tossed spun and clattered on the shiny metal plate.

“You have caught me out,” said Haptet, winking at her slyly, “And now you must tell us — which of the grand inland cities are you from?”

“I was born in Makasa,” said Mariyam. “I’ll bet you that boy is destined for Allamah University, or any one of a dozen others in the ancient city.”

“Perhaps,” said Haptet, “or perhaps not. Sammarynda is a port of many choices. If the boy wants to go to Allamah, his father will find a way. But few of our people settle permanently in other cities — did you know that?”

Mariyam didn’t, but then there was much she did not know about Sammarynda and its inhabitants. How easily these people had accepted her amongst their number. Haptet was right. She was a tourist, and not a very well-researched one. She had come to Sammarynda to put an end to her nightmares. When she’d left home, nothing else had mattered.

“Why have you come to Sammarynda?” Haptet asked. “What is it you are seeking?”

“Something different,” she replied after a considered pause. “Isn’t that what all travellers seek?” She looked to Haptet as she spoke, but he had become distracted by another man seated at a table near the door. An Inland trader, a Bedouin, dressed in thick desert robes.

As she watched the men talk, Mariyam realised that Jahira was watching her, staring intently with her one clear eye. Mariyam sipped her drink, a reflex action. Where to look? The damage to the woman’s face was so visible, so obvious. Why did she not wear a patch or a veil? Mariyam longed for Haptet to rescue her, but he had become deeply absorbed in conversation with the desert man, so much so that the mouthpiece of his water pipe rested idle between his palms. When she looked again, Jahira was staring right back at her. Mariyam smiled, a feeble gesture laden with unintentional condescension and sorrow, then she looked away too quickly. Damn, she thought, but I couldn’t help myself. She studied the patterned fabrics of her companions’ garments, waiting for the tide of conversations to envelop her once more.

A soft hand pressed upon her shoulder. Mariyam looked up at Jahira’s ruined face as she positioned herself to nestle beside Mariyam on the cushions. Up close, the wound was infinitely worse that it had appeared from a distance.

“Please,” Jahira said, “let me explain.”

Mariyam stared into the empty socket, and then into Jahira’s whole eye, which shone as clear and bright as sapphire. Only then did Mariyam notice the heavy makeup the woman wore to enhance the beauty of the one eye she possessed. Her lips were painted, her cheeks rouged, her eyelid rimmed with ebony kohl and dusted with fine gold powder.

Mariyam drained the last of her honey vodka.

“You are Haptet’s friend?” Jahira asked.

Mariyam nodded, wondering immediately who this woman was to him. A lover? Surely not. A sister, perhaps?

“My missing eye,” Jahira said, gesturing to the mass of pink scar tissue, “It is my honour.”

“Your what?”

Her lips parted as she prepared to explain, but her words were drowned out by a commotion amongst the camels hobbled together a few feet outside the doorway. Men shouted to each other across the low tables and brightly coloured cushions. Mariyam watched Haptet as he watched the Interior men leap up and tend to their disgruntled beasts with the same amount of caring and focus that they would expend upon an injured child.

•

“We do not speak of these things amongst strangers,” Haptet remarked later as he and Mariyam strolled along the bank of an artificially constructed lake. Both moons were out, and the constellation of Kashah the Dog-Headed Warrior sat directly overhead. Mariyam gazed up at it, as if trying to determine its shape and meaning. Haptet studied her face in turn.

“Jahira said her ruined eye was her honour but I don’t know what that means,” said Mariyam.

Haptet nodded. “Sammaryndan honour is a private matter. Not something we would usually explain to tourists. But as you are a friend of Behameed’s…” He looked upwards at Kashah for inspiration. “When one attains true adulthood in Sammarynda, one must render upon oneself an honour. It may be small thing or a great thing. The choice is entirely one’s own.”

Haptet stopped walking. He grabbed the fabric at the base of his shirt and pulled it over his head, turning to reveal the naked flesh of his back. A thick scar snaked from his left shoulder blade almost all the way to the base of his spine.

Mariyam stared. “From the war?”

“No,” said Haptet, releasing the fabric and turning back to face her. “That scar is my honour. When my time came I asked two friends to hold me down and a third to wield the scythe.”

The light of the moons cast a pearly luminescence on her skin. Mariyam frowned. “You
chose
to be scarred? Surely you can’t be serious?” And then the truth of his words hit home. Jahira’s eye. Mariyam gasped, bringing her fingers to her lips.

“I don’t expect you to comprehend our ways,” he said, gesturing to the path ahead. “For some, honour may be a scar. For others, it may be a sacrifice. Giving up something of great value. Do not waste your pity on Jahira — she is in no need of it. You may find her honour hideous, but I assure you, the people of this city do not.”

They continued their stroll along the lake in silence, enjoying the ambience of the night.

“Mariyam, why have you come to Sammarynda?” Haptet asked suddenly. “Is it for the water jousting? The season is just beginning, but you seem so incurious about it. So distracted.”

Mariyam looked up at Kashah again, as if seeing the face of the dog clearly for the first time. “Yes,” she said, “the jousting. I have come to watch the men fight.”

Haptet could hear the half truth in her words.

•

“There is an island to the north where the women weave the most exquisite cloth. You must buy some to take home with you — it is unlike anything else, I promise.”

Mariyam nodded, allowing Jahira to guide her through the morning markets. They did not hurry. No one hurried in this part of the world. The Sammaryndans made time for the little things. They were keen listeners, astute observers. Details were valuable: the difference between living and merely existing.

Now Mariyam could see the Sammaryndan’s honour everywhere. Scars were popular, although few were as brutal or as visible as Jahira’s. She had learned that the peninsula sported a whole caste of medical practitioners whose only work was to inflict damage on healthy individuals as they entered adulthood.

Mariyam picked up a length of cloth and twisted it in her hands. The silver fibres woven within shimmered in the light.

“I have always wanted to visit Makasa,” said Jahira as she reached for another bolt of fabric, shooing away the saleswoman with a flick of her hand. “Was that where you became friends with Haptet? In Makasa?”

Mariyam feigned distraction as she scanned the crowd in search of a particular familiar face. A futile exercise, she knew. The man she sought would not be strolling through a marketplace like this.
He
would be preparing himself for the evening’s festivities; practicing his balance or his swordsmanship if, indeed, he was here at all.
I should have made this journey ten years ago. Even if I find him now, it’s too late
.

Mariyam observed a man with a limp, a girl with a cleft lip, another so thin that her clothes hung off her bony frame like rags. How could she not have noticed all of this when she had first arrived?

“Perhaps there is something else you would like to see?” Jahira had noticed Mariyam’s gaze wandering away from the embroidered cloth on the table. “Leatherwork? Jewellery? I’ll take you to the silversmith quarter if you think you can stand the noise.”

Mariyam smiled. “I’m happy to wander through the market.”

Jahira nodded. “Then let us walk this way. I have some purchases to make.”

Mariyam felt sunlight on her skin as the two women pushed their way through the throng of shoppers and hawkers, tourists and tradespeople. Now and then she was shoved or jostled by the compact, hurtling forms of children absorbed in their games of catching and chasing, refusing to let the thickness of the crowd slow them down. The sharp tang of unfamiliar aromas assailed her. Spice sellers crouched in doorways beside woven baskets deep with the many-hued ochres of their wares.

Images from the ocean touched everything: fish carven into doorways, serpents embroidered onto coats, shells painted with precious metals, looped onto gold and silver chains to rest on slender necks.

Most fascinating of all were the apothecaries, their windows festooned with the twisted forms of desiccated creatures, the origins of which Mariyam could only guess at. Some seemed monstrous amalgamations of fang and bone. Surely such unnatural fusions could not occur in nature? Mariyam placed one hand upon Jahira’s shoulder, gesturing with the other at a malformed shape dangling from red string beside a net of dried frogs.

Jahira shrugged. “It is from the Sammarynda Deep. Some of the curiosities thrown up from the crevasse have medicinal properties. Others are fierce poison. Many apothecarists make their living solely from determining which is which.”

Mariyam longed to step through the cool darkness of the doorway, to be enveloped by the multi-fanged strangeness within, but Jahira had moved on already, keen to get to the fresh produce section before all the best choices were gone.

With her mind filled with images of scissor teeth and warped bone, Mariyam turned a corner and saw a group of black-shrouded women squatting in the shade of a crooked awning, their wares spread before them on a square of faded cloth. Jahira had gone ahead with her basket. Mariyam glimpsed her through the archway that led to row after row of laden fruit barrows.

The squatting women ignored her until she crouched down before them and pointed a slender finger at the row of glass vials lined up along the cloth. The vials held a substance that glittered and shimmered even in the shade.

“What are these?” she asked.

The women eyed her coldly, not bothering to mask their contempt. Mariyam asked again, this time in Barter using the accompanying hand signs. Reluctantly the nearest of the women answered, but the words she uttered made no sense. A name, probably, in a local dialect. Something with no equivalence in any other tongue, certainly not Mariyam’s.

Gently she lifted a vial from the cloth and held it up against the light. Inside the glass, colours shimmied and swirled. Whatever it was, it was beautiful.

A shadow fell across Mariyam’s face.

“Tourist junk,” said Jahira, looking down on the old women with an air of annoyance. “Let me take you to the artisan quarter if it’s trinkets that you want.”