10
LETTERS
They marched in sullen silence away from the Eight
Pillars of Smoke. Berren staggered in the thief-taker’s wake,
occasionally pausing to retch. His stomach was empty before they
even reached the other side of Four Winds Square, and yet just when
he was sure there was absolutely nothing left, the next wave of
nausea would hit him. They barged through Weaver’s Row and back
into the thief-taker’s yard. Someone from a neighbouring window
leaned out, shouted a warning without bothering to look and then
emptied a chamber pot as they passed, spattering the thief-taker’s
boots. He didn’t flinch, but when they got back he tore them off
and threw them at Berren.
‘Sit outside and make
them clean, boy!’
Berren had already
polished Master Sy’s boots once that day. First thing before
breakfast, one of his daily chores, and yet here they were, covered
in mud again. Mud and worse. Master Sy disappeared into his room
and came out wearing a second pair. ‘Spotless,’ he growled, and
then he stormed away back into the city, leaving Berren sitting on
the doorstep on his own. He hardly dared to move. Alone in the
thief-taker’s house for a second time, left to look and pry as he
pleased. Left to take whatever caught his fancy and run away . . .
except this time he felt so sick that he couldn’t bring himself to
move. Hands trembling, he picked up the thief-taker’s dirty boots.
The smell of sewage wafted over him and his stomach began to heave
again. He turned away, took a deep breath and then stayed exactly
where he was, cleaning and polishing until the thief-taker’s boots
gleamed like the golden towers on The Peak. When he was done, he
crawled back inside and stumbled into his room and lay down. He
thought he might doze for a few minutes and then sneak a peek into
the thief-taker’s room, but he must have fallen fast asleep. The
next thing he knew, Master Sy was back, stomping on the floor,
tearing off his second pair of boots and throwing them across the
house.
‘Those too,’ he
snapped as Berren emerged, hollow-eyed, peering down from the
doorway of his room. The thief-taker didn’t even look at the first
pair. Instead, he threw down a stack of pieces of paper, most of
them torn and all of them written on. Then he took out a pot of
ink, fumbled, and spilt half of it over the floor. He let out a
violent curse, threw Berren a grimace of unfettered rage; then he
took a deep breath and stormed out into the yard in his
stockings.
Berren crept down the
stairs, wincing at every creak from every step. He still felt like
he was going to be sick at any moment and now his head had joined
in too. Some slave-galley drum-master was thumping away on the
inside of his skull. Even his eyes had largely given up. He
stumbled to the outside door and peered into the yard. Master Sy
was leaning against the wall a few feet away, pulling furiously on
a pipe. Without a word, Berren cleaned up the ink, slowly and
painfully. Then the thief-taker came back inside, and that was when
the real horror started. The horror of Master Sy trying to teach
letters. He stuffed a quill into Berren’s shaking hand and told him
to write his name. Berren hadn’t the first idea how. Master Sy
snatched the pen off him and wrote on the paper, in a perfect
script that would have made a scribe weep: Berren.
‘Like that.’ He
handed back the quill. Berren dipped it in the ink pot and dripped
ink all over the paper. He tried to ignore how Master Sy clenched
his jaw and how the veins stood out on his temple. He did his
absolute best to copy what Master Sy had done. The result was such
a blotted mess that neither of them had any idea how well he might
have done.
‘Again.’
Berren tried again.
Second time around was, if anything, slightly worse. So was the
pounding in his head.
‘Again.’
This time Berren made
absolutely certain that he didn’t take too much ink. The result was
that he didn’t take nearly enough and kept running out halfway
through each stroke. Still, he thought he’d done quite well. You
could see some of the letters were almost the same as some of the
letters Master Sy had drawn. Admittedly it looked as though someone
had cut his name up into lots of different pieces and then put them
back together in slightly the wrong order, but at least there were
lines this time, instead of just blobs.
Master Sy closed his
eyes and swallowed.
‘Again.’
Berren tried again.
Too much ink again. By now his hand was trembling too much to draw
a straight line.
‘Are you doing this
deliberately, boy? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Because
children learn to do this. And if children can master a quill and
ink, I fail to see why a young man who has such a high opinion of
himself as you do should have any trouble at all.’
‘I . . .’
I’m sick, he wanted to say, but the
thief-taker’s face left him in no doubt that saying anything at all
would be bad. Flustered, he tried again. This time his hand was
shaking even more. He took far too much ink and dripped all over
the paper again.
The thief-taker
clenched his fists. He closed his eyes and took three long breaths.
‘You will stay here until you get it right,’ he said finally. And
that was what Berren spent the rest of the evening doing. Writing
his name. Badly, and with a splitting hangover. He was writing well
into the evening, by candlelight with his stomach rumbling loud
enough to set the walls to shaking before the thief-taker finally
relented. With a scornful sweep of his arm, he swept all the paper
off the table and thumped down a plate with a slightly stale half
loaf of bread and a mug of gruel that had gone cold enough to grow
a crust of fat on the top. Berren gobbled it down. Master Sy
watched. He was frowning so much that his eyebrows met in the
middle.
‘More tomorrow, boy,’
he said curtly as soon as Berren had finished. ‘And we’ll work on
you manners too. To your room now.’
The next morning, the
table was covered in paper again. He’d almost come to look forward
to practising bowing to Lilissa, but just like yesterday, she
didn’t come. There was no sign of breakfast. Maybe that was a
mercy. He felt rotten and in no mood for either.
What there was, was
Master Sy standing by the table, one hand on his hip, the other
pointing a pen at Berren as though it was a sword.
‘Write,
boy.’
By the end of that
day, Berren was starting to think he had the hang of it. By the end
of the next he was feeling better again and was copying any word
that Master Sy showed him. Not well, but well enough that you could
see it was the same. Now and then he still took too much ink and
ended up with an illegible smudge and a clip round the ear, but on
the whole, he thought he wasn’t doing too badly. On the next day he
was even allowed a break; Master Sy took him out in the afternoon,
out towards the Courts District this time and then down the Avenue
of Emperors that ran right up from the river to Four Winds Square
and down the other side to the sea in one dead straight line. There
weren’t any trees but there were a lot of statues. Master Sy
started to tell Berren all about them, but after the third one,
when it was obvious that Berren wasn’t listening, he
stopped.
‘History doesn’t
interest you eh, lad? Well it’s not my history. I suppose I shan’t
be offended.’ He led the way down to the sea-docks in silence and
then bought them each pickled fish in a bun. He stared out to the
sea and Berren could see his eyes flitting from ship to ship, mast
to mast, flag to flag. Looking for something and not finding it.
After a while he shrugged and turned away. Berren took a hungry
mouthful of raw fish and vinegar. The taste was strong and good. He
ate it slowly, savouring each mouthful, the tang of it. A breeze
was blowing in off the sea, taking the edge off the sultry
afternoon heat. The air smelled of salt and waves. Master Sy, for a
moment, looked quite content.
‘Who is she?’ Berren
asked and then held his breath.
‘Who is
who?’
‘Lilissa.’ The same
ritual they went through every time Berren asked. Get her out of your head, lad, the thief-taker
would say, and that would be that until the next time.
Except this time
master Sy grinned. He pushed the last piece of bread into his mouth
and swallowed. ‘Like her, do you, lad?’
Berren nodded. He was
beginning to understand that when the thief-taker called him ‘lad’,
he was safe. If the thief-taker called him ‘boy’ then he’d best
keep his mouth shut and his head down.
‘Yes, I thought you
might. She’s her mother all over. Easy on the eye,
eh?’
Berren nodded again
and then bit his lip. This wasn’t quite what he’d
expected.
‘Well, all right.
Since you’re my apprentice now. She’s a seamstress. She lives a few
streets away, just off Weaver’s Row. Her mother did me a very great
favour once. After she passed over to the Sun, I took it upon
myself to look after Lilissa.’ He shrugged. ‘Really she’s old
enough to look after herself. I just watch out for her. And if you
don’t keep your hands to yourself with her then I’ll cut them off
and dump them in the sea and the rest of you with them. Got that?’
His mouth was smiling but his eyes weren’t. Berren had the
uncomfortable idea that Master Sy meant absolutely every word of
what he’d said.
‘She’s nice,’ he
said, fumbling for something to say and silently cursing himself
for not doing any better.
‘Yes, she
is.’
‘Is she going to come
back?’ There, that was what he wanted
to say.
The thief-taker
chuckled again. ‘You’re as bad as each other. When you’ve learned
your letters, lad. When you can bow to her as though you’re a
gentleman and speak to her like she’s a lady, and have found at
least a few table manners, then yes,
maybe I’ll have some time for her lessons too. Kelm’s Teeth! When
you can do all that, you might even start to be useful.’ He walked
over to the edge of the docks and sat on the harbour wall,
beckoning Berren to sit beside him. Their legs dangled in the air
above the lapping waters. Now and then the wind blew spots of salt
water into Berren’s face. The ships out in the harbour were all
facing the same way, sterns towards him, bows to the wind, swaying
on their anchors. The thief-taker looked up at the
sky.
‘Reckon the wind’s
going to spare us the rain this afternoon? ’
Berren nodded. ‘Night
rains later, that’s all.’
‘Be heavy, though.
Some nervous sailors out there tonight. ’ The thief-taker grinned.
‘Start pulling their anchors and they’ll drift right into the
shore. That’s the trouble with this harbour. Nice and safe except
for two things. Sea-wind and pirates. Tell me, lad, if you were a
pirate, which of those ships would you pick?’
Berren licked the
last pieces of fish and bread off his teeth and belched. The ships
all looked much the same. They had different flags, none of them
ones that he knew. A lot of them had no flags at all. Some of them
were bigger than others. Apart from that . . . ‘The biggest one, I
suppose?’
‘Oh? The one with the
most sailors on guard?’
‘The
smallest?’
‘The smallest?’ The
thief-taker laughed. ‘Don’t lie to me, lad. You wouldn’t chose the
smallest. Come on, think. You want the ship with something easy.
Nothing too big, nothing too heavy, nothing too valuable but something worth having. Something
you could sell in the city nice and quick. Or small, so you could
get it out without anyone seeing. That’s what you want. How do you
know where to find it? How do you know which ship carries what you
want? Oh, and while you’re thinking about that, even if you knew
which ship was worth taking on, how would you know which one was
which in the dark?’
‘They all look
different, don’t they?’
‘Not in the dark,
lad.’ The thief-taker sighed and stretched and stood up again. ‘You
think about that and tell me when you come up with anything useful.
Now back. Letters.’
Berren walked back up
the Avenue of Emperors in the fading sunlight, the heavy warm
sea-wind blowing him up the hill. He looked at the faces carved
into the white marbled stone. Strong faces, all of them. He had no
idea who they were, whether they’d been good men or bad men, but he
wasn’t sure if that was how emperors should be measured. Strong
kings fought wars and won them. Weak ones lost their crowns.
Somewhere along here was the Emperor Talsin, who’d lost his throne
a few months before Berren had been born. Somewhere else was
Khrozus the Butcher, who’d taken it.
‘Which one is
Khrozus?’ he asked. Master Sy actually smiled. It sat awkwardly on
his face, as though happiness was something that didn’t come to
visit often.
‘Up the top, of
course. Right slap in the middle of Four Winds Square, riding his
horse. He’s up on Deephaven Square at the top of The Peak too,
outside the Overlord’s palace. Khrozus on one side, his son Ashahn
on the other. We’ll go to visit them one day, but not today. They
don’t let people like us so close to the Overlord’s palace except
on festival days.’
A drop of something
wet slapped Berren on the nose. He looked up, and heavy drops
spattered his face. They’d both been wrong about the rains. As the
daily downpour began, he laughed and started to run.
That night Berren
went to sleep with a smile on his face. It was a little over a
twelvenight since the thief-taker had ripped him away from
everything he knew, and for the first time he went to sleep without
thinking that tomorrow might be the day he would run
away.
It wasn’t. He lasted
three more weeks.