Child of the River

Chapter Eleven Prefect Corin

Lob and the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns were arrested before Yama had finished telling his story to the Aedile, and the next day were tried and sentenced to death for kidnap and sabotage. The Aedile also issued a warrant for the arrest of Dr. Dismas, although he confided to Yama that he did not expect to see the apothecary again.

Although it took a long time to explain his adventures, Yama did not tell the whole story. He suppressed the part about Enobarbus, for he had come to believe that the young warlord had somehow been caught by Dr. Dismas’s spell. He kept his promise to Beatrice, too, and said that after he had escaped from the skiff and had been helped ashore by one of the fisherfolk, he had fallen ill after being attacked by Lob and Lud amongst the ransacked tombs of the Silent Quarter, and had not been able to return to the peel-house until he had recovered. It was not the whole truth, but the Aedile did not question him closely.

Yama was not allowed to attend the trial; nor was he allowed to leave the grounds of the peel-house, although he very much wanted to see Derev. The Aedile said that it was too dangerous. The families of Lob and the tavern landlord would be looking for revenge, and the city was still on edge after the riots which had followed the failed siege of Dr. Dismas’s tower. Yama tried to contact Derev using mirror talk, but although he signaled for most of the afternoon there was no answering, spark of light from the apartments Derev’s father had built on top of his godown by the old waterfront of the city. Sick at heart, Yama went to plead with Sergeant Rhodean, but the Sergeant refused to provide an escort.

“And you’re not to confuse the watchdogs and go sneaking out on your own, neither,” Sergeant Rhodean said. “Oh yes, I know all about that trick, lad. But see here, you can’t rely on tricks to keep yourself out of trouble. They’re more likely to get you into it instead. I won’t risk having any of my men hurt rescuing you from your own foolishness, and think how it would look if we took you down there in the middle of a decad of armed soldiers. You’d start another riot. My men have already spent too much time looking for you when you were lost in the City of the Dead, and they’ll have their hands full in a couple of days. The department is sending a clerk to deal with the prisoners, but no extra troops. Pure foolishness on their part, and I’ll get blamed if something goes wrong.”

Sergeant Rhodean was much exercised by this. As he talked, he paced in a tight circle on the red clay floor of the gymnasium. He was a small, burly man, almost as wide as he was tall, as he liked to say. As always, his gray tunic and blue trousers were neatly pressed, his black knee-boots were spit-polished, and the scalp of his heavy, ridged skull was close-shaven and burnished with oil. He favored his right leg, and the thumb and forefinger of his right hand were missing.

He had been the Aedile’s bodyguard long before the entire household had been exiled from the Palace of the Memory of the People, and had celebrated his hundredth birthday two years ago. He lived quietly with his wife, who was always trying to overfeed Yama because, she said, he needed to put some muscle on his long bones. They had two married daughters, six sons away fighting the heretics, and two more who had been killed in the war; Sergeant Rhodean had mourned Telmon’s death almost as bitterly as Yama and the Aedile.

Sergeant Rhodean suddenly stopped pacing and looked at Yama as if for the first time. He said, “I see you’re wearing that knife you found, lad. Let’s take a look at it.”

Yama had taken to hanging the knife from his belt by a loop of leather, with its blade tied flat against his thigh by a red ribbon. He undid the ribbon, unhooked the loop and held out the knife, and Sergeant Rhodean put on thick-lensed spectacles, which vastly magnified his yellow eyes, and peered closely at it for a long time. At last, he blew reflectively through his drooping mustache and said, “It’s old, and sentient, or at least partly so. Maybe as smart as one of the watchdogs. A good idea to carry it around. It will bond to you. You said you were ill after using it?”

“It gave out a blue light. And when Lob picked it up, it turned into something horrible.”

“Well now, lad, it had to get its energy from somewhere for tricks like that, especially after all the time in the dark. So it took it from you.”

“I leave it in sunlight,” Yama said.

“Do you?” Sergeant Rhodean gave Yama a shrewd look. “Then I can’t tell you much more. What did you clean it with? White vinegar? As good as anything, I suppose. Well, let’s see you make a few passes with it. It will stop you brooding over your true love.”

For the next hour, Sergeant Rhodean instructed Yama on how to make best use of the knife against a variety of imaginary opponents. Yama found himself beginning to enjoy the exercises, and was sorry when Sergeant Rhodean called a halt. He had spent many happy hours in the gymnasium, with its mingled smell of clay and old sweat and rubbing alcohol, its dim underwater light filtered through green-tinted windows high up in the whitewashed walls, the green rubber wrestling mats rolled up like the shed cocoons of giant caterpillars and the rack of parallel bars, the open cases of swords and knives, javelins and padded staves, the straw archery targets stacked behind the vaulting horse, the battered wooden torsos of the tilting dummies, the frames hung with pieces of plastic and resin and metal armor.

“We’ll do some more work tomorrow, lad,” Sergeant Rhodean said at last. “You need to work on your backhand. You aim too low, at the belly instead of the chest, and any opponent worth their salt would spot that in an instant. Of course, a knife like this is really intended for close work by a cavalryman surrounded by the enemy, and you might do better carrying a long sword or a revolver when walking about the city. It’s possible that an old weapon like this might be proscribed. But now I have to drill the men. The clerk is coming tomorrow, and I suppose your father will want an honor guard for him.”

But the clerk sent from Ys to oversee the executions slipped unnoticed into the peel-house early the next morning, and the first time Yama saw him was when the Aedile summoned him to an audience that afternoon.

“The townspeople already believe that you have blood on your hands,” the Aedile said. “I do not wish to see any more trouble. So I have come to a decision.”

Yama felt his heart turn over, although he already knew that this was no ordinary interview. He had been escorted to the Aedile’s receiving chamber by one of the soldiers of the house guard. The soldier now stood in front of the tall double doors, resplendent in burnished helmet and corselet and scarlet hose, his pike at parade rest.

Yama perched on an uncomfortable curved backless seat before the central dais on which the Aedile’s canopied chair stood. The Aedile did not sit down but paced about restlessly.

He was dressed in a tunic embroidered with silver and gold, and his sable robe of office hung on a rack by his chair.

There was a fourth person in the room, standing in the shadows by the small private door which led, via a stairway, to the Aedile’s private chambers. It was the clerk who had been sent from Ys to supervise the executions. Yama watched him out of the corner of his eye. He was a tall, slender man of the Aedile’s bloodline, bareheaded in a plain homespun tunic and gray leggings. A close-clipped black pelt covered his head and face, with a broad white stripe, like a badger’s marking, on the left side of his face.

Yama’s breakfast had been brought to his room that morning, and this was the first chance he had to study the man.

He had heard from the stable hands that the clerk had disembarked from an ordinary lugger, armed with only a stout iron-shod staff and with no more than a rolled blanket on his back, but the Aedile had prostrated himself at the man’s feet as if he were a Hierarch risen from the files.

“I don’t think he expected someone so high up in the Committee for Public Safety,” the foreman, Torin, had said.

But the clerk did not look like an executioner, or anyone important. He could have been any one of the thousands of ordinary scribes who plied pens in cells deep in the Palace of the Memory of the People, as indistinguishable from each other as ants.

The Aedile stood before one of the four great tapestries that decorated the high, square room. It depicted the seeding of Confluence. Plants and animals rained out of a blaze of light toward a bare plain crossed by silvery loops of water.

Birds soared through the air, and little groups of naked men and women of various bloodlines stood on wisps of cloud, hands modestly covering their genitals and breasts. Yama had always loved this tapestry, but now that he had talked with the curators of the City of the Dead he knew that it was a lie. Since he had returned, everything in the peel-house seemed to have changed. The house was smaller; the gardens cramped and neglected; the people preoccupied with small matters, their backs bent to routine labor so that, like peasants planting a paddy field, they failed to see the great events of the world rushing above their heads.

At last, the Aedile turned and said, “It was always my plan to apprentice you to my department, Yama, and I have not changed my mind. You are perhaps a little young to begin proper apprenticeship, but I have great hopes of you. Zakiel says that you are the best pupil he has known, and Sergeant Rhodean believes that in a few years you will be able to best him in archery and fencing, although he adds that your horse riding still requires attention.”

“I know your determination and ambition, Yama. I think that you will be a great power in the department. You are not of my bloodline, but you are my son, now and always. I would wish that you could have stayed here until you were old enough to be inducted as a full apprentice, but it is clear to me that if you stay here you are in great danger.”

“I am not afraid of anyone in Aeolis.”

But Yama’s protest was a formality. Already he was dizzy with the prospect of kicking the dust of this sleepily corrupt little city from his heels. In Ys, there were records which went back to the foundation of Confluence. Beatrice had said as much. She and Osric had shown him a slate which had displayed the likeness of an ancestor of his bloodline; in Ys, he might learn who that man had been. There might even be people of his bloodline! Anything was possible. After all, surely he had come from Ys in the first place, borne downstream on the river’s current. For that reason alone he would gladly go to Ys, although more than ever he knew that he could not serve as a clerk. But he could not tell his father that, of course, and it burned in his chest like a coal.

The Aedile said, “I am proud that you can say that you are unafraid with such conviction, and I think that you truly believe it. But you cannot spend your life looking over your shoulder, Yama, and that is what you would have to do if you stayed here. One day, sooner or later, Lob and Lud’s brothers will seek to press their need for revenge. That they are the sons of the Constable of Aeolis makes this more likely, not less, for if any one of them killed you, it would not only satisfy their family’s need for revenge, it would also be a triumph over their father.”

“It is not the townspeople I fear, however. Dr. Dismas has fled, but he may try to revive his scheme, or he may sell his information to others. In Aeolis you are a wonder; in Ys, which is the fount of all the wonders of the world, less so. Here, I command only three decads of soldiers; there, you will be in the heart of the department.”

“When will I go?”

The Aedile clasped his hands and bowed his head. It was a peculiarly submissive gesture. “You will leave with Prefect Corin, after he has concluded his business here.”

The man in the shadows caught Yama’s gaze. “In cases like this,” he said in a soft, lilting voice, “it is not advisable to linger once duty has been done. I will leave tomorrow.”

No, the clerk, Prefect Corin, did not look like an executioner, but he had already visited Lob and the landlord of the tavern, who had been held in the peel-house’s oubliette since their trial. They were to be burned that evening outside the town’s walls, and their ashes would be scattered on the wind so that their families would have no part of them as a memorial and their souls would never have rest until the Preservers woke all the dead at the end of the Universe. Sergeant Rhodean had been drilling his men ever since the trial. If there was any trouble, he could not rely on the Constable and the city militia for aid. Every bit of armor had been polished, and every weapon cleaned or sharpened. Because the steam wagon had been destroyed in the siege of Dr. Dismas’s tower, an ordinary wagon had been sequestered to transport the condemned men from the peel-house to the place of execution. It had been painted white, and its axles greased and its wheels balanced, and the two white oxen which would draw it had been brushed until their coats shone. The entire peel-house had been filled with bustle over the affair, but as soon as he had arrived, Prefect Corin had become its still center.

The Aedile said, “It is abrupt, I know, but I will see you in Ys, as soon as I can be sure that there will be no more trouble here. In the meantime, I hope you will remember me with affection.”

“Father, you have done more for me than I ever can deserve.” It was a formal sentiment, and sounded trite, but Yama felt a sudden flood of affection for the Aedile then, and would have embraced him if Prefect Corin had not been watching.

The Aedile turned to study the tapestry again. Perhaps Prefect Corin made him uncomfortable, too. He said, “Quite, quite. You are my son, Yama. No less than Telmon.”

Prefect Corin cleared his throat, a small sound in the large room, but father and son turned to stare at him as if he had shot a pistol at the painted ceiling.

“Your pardon,” he said, “but it is time to shrive the prisoners.”

Two hours before sunset, Father Quine, the priest of the temple of Aeolis, came in his orange robes, walking barefoot and bareheaded up the winding road from the city to the peel-house. Ananda accompanied him, carrying a chrism of oil. The Aedile greeted them formally and escorted them to the oubliette, where they would hear the final confessions of the prisoners.

Again, Yama had no part in the ceremony. He sat in one corner of the big fireplace in the kitchen, but that had changed, too. He was no longer a part of the kitchen’s bustle and banter. The scullions and the kitchen boys and the three cooks politely replied to his remarks, but their manner was subdued. He wanted to tell them that he was still Yama, the boy who had wrestled with most of the kitchen boys, who had received clouts from the cooks when he had tried to steal bits of food, who had cheeked the scullions to make them chase him. But he was no longer that boy.

After a while, oppressed by polite deference, Yama went out to watch the soldiers drilling in the slanting sunlight, and that was where Ananda found him.

Ananda’s head was clean-shaven; there was a fresh cut above his right ear, painted with yellow iodine. His eyes were enlarged by clever use of blue paint and gold leaf. He gave off a smell of cloves and cinnamon. It was the scent of the oil with which the prisoners had been anointed.

Ananda knew how to judge Yama’s mood. For a while, the two friends stood side by side in companionable silence and watched the soldiers make squares and lines in the dusty sunlight. Sergeant Rhodean barked orders which echoed off the high wall of the peel-house.

At last, Yama said, “I have to go away tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“With that little badger of a clerk. He is to be my master. He will teach me how to copy records and write up administrative reports. I will be buried, Ananda. Buried in old paper and futile tasks. There is only one consolation.”

“You can look for your bloodline.”

Yama was astonished. “How did you know?”

“Why, you’ve always talked about it.” Ananda looked at Yama shrewdly. “But you’ve learnt something about it, haven’t you? That’s why it’s on your mind.”

“A clerk, Ananda. I will not serve. I cannot. I have more important things to do.”

“Not only soldiers help fight the war. And don’t change the subject.”

“That is what my father would say. I want to be a hero, Ananda. It is my destiny!”

“If it’s your destiny, then it will happen.” Ananda pulled a pouch from inside his robe and spilled hulled pistachios into his meaty palm. “Want some?”

Yama shook his head. He said, “It has all changed so quickly.”

Ananda put his palm to his lips and said, around a mouthful of pistachios, “Is there time to tell me all that happened? I’m never going to leave here, you know. My master will die, and I will take his place, and begin to teach the new sizar, who will be a boy just like me. And so on.”

“I am not allowed to go to the execution.”

“Of course not. It would be unseemly.”

“I want to prove that I am brave enough to see it.”

“What did happen, Yama? You couldn’t have been lost for so long, and they couldn’t have taken you far if you said you escaped on the night you were taken.”

“A lot of things happened after that. I do not understand all of them, but one thing I do understand. I found something . . . something important.”

Ananda laughed. “You mustn’t tease your friends, Yama. Share it with me. Perhaps I can help you understand everything.”

“Meet me tonight. After the executions. Bring Derev, too. I tried to send a message to her by mirror talk, but no one replied. I want her to hear my story. I want to . . .”

“I know. There will be a service. We have to exculpate Prefect Corin after he sets the torch to . . . well, to the prisoners. Then there’s a formal meal, but I’m not invited to that, of course. It begins two hours after sunset, and I’ll come then. And I’ll find a way of bringing Derev.”

“Have you ever seen an execution, Ananda?”

Ananda poured more pistachios into his palm. He looked at them and said, “No. No, I haven’t. Oh, I know everything that will happen, of course, and I know what I have to do, but I’m not sure how I’ll act.”

“You will not disgrace your master. I will see you two hours after sunset. And make sure to bring Derev.”

“As if I would forget.” Ananda tipped the pistachios into the dirt and brushed his hands together. “The landlord of the tavern was an addict of the drug that Dismas used, did you know that? Dismas supplied him with it, and he’d do anything asked of him. It didn’t lessen the sentence, of course, but it was how he pleaded.”

Yama remembered Dr. Dismas grinding dried beetles and clear, apricot-scented liquid into paste, the sudden relaxation of his face after he had injected himself.

“Cantharides,” he said. “And Lob and Lud did it for money.”

“Well, Lob had his payment, at least,” Ananda said. “He was drunk when he was arrested, and I hear he’d been buying the whole town drinks for several days before that. I think he knew that you’d be back.”

Yama remembered that Lob and Lud had not been paid by Dr. Dismas. Where then had Lob got the money for his drinking spree? And who had rescued him from the old tomb, and taken him to the tower of Beatrice and Osric? With a cold pang, he realized who it must have been, and how she had known where to find him.

Ananda had turned to watch the soldiers wheel out on the parade square, one line becoming two that marched off side by side toward the main gate, with Sergeant Rhodean loudly counting the pace as he marched at their head. After a while, Ananda said, “Did you ever think that Lob and Lud were a little bit like you? They wanted to escape this place, too.”

Yama wanted to watch Lob and the landlord of the tavern leave the peel-house for the place of execution, but even that was denied him. Zakiel found him at a window, staring down at the courtyard where soldiers were harnessing the stamping horses to the white wagon, and took him off to the library.

“We have only a little time, master, and there is so much to tell you.”

“Then why begin to try? Are you going to the executions, Zakiel?”

“It is not my place, master.”

“I suppose that my father told you to keep me occupied. I want to see it, Zakiel. They are trying to exclude me from it all. I suppose it is to spare my feelings. But imagining it is worse than knowing.”

“I have taught you something, then. I was beginning to wonder.”

Zakiel rarely smiled, but he smiled now. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a long, heavy-browed face and a shaven skull with a bony crest. His black skin shone in the yellow light of the flickering electric sconce, and the muscles of his heavy jaws moved under the skin on either side of the crest when he smiled. As a party piece, on high day feasts, he would crack walnuts between his strong square teeth. As always, he wore a gray tunic and gray leggings, and sandals soled with rubber that squeaked on the polished marquetry of the paths between the library stacks. He wore a slave collar around his neck, but it was made of a light alloy, not iron, and covered with a circlet of handmade lace.

Zakiel said, “I could tell you what will happen, if you like. I was instructed in it, because it is believed that to tell the prisoner exactly what will happen to him will make it endurable. But it was the cruelest thing they did, far crueler than being put to question.”

Zakiel had been sentenced to death before he had come to work for the Aedile. Yama, who had forgotten that, was mortified. He said, “I was not thinking. I am sorry. No, do not tell me.”

“You would rather see it. You believe your senses, but not words. Yet the long-dead men and women who wrote all these volumes which stand about us had the same appetites as us, the same fears, the same ambitions. All we know of the world passes through our sensory organs and is reduced to electric impulses in certain sensory nerve fibers. When you open one of these books and read of events that happened before you were born, some of those nerve fibers are stimulated in exactly the same way.”

“I want to see for myself. Reading about it is different.”

Zakiel cracked his knuckles. They were swollen, like all of his joints. His fingers looked like strings of nuts. “Why, perhaps I have not taught you anything after all. Of course it is different. What books do is allow you to share the perceptions of those who write them. There are certain wizards who claim to be able to read minds, and mountebanks who claim to have discovered ancient machines that print out a person’s thoughts, or project them in a sphere of glass or crystal metal, but the wizards and mountebanks lie. Only books allow us to share another’s thoughts. By reading them, we see the world not through our senses, but through those of their authors. And if those authors are wiser than us, or more knowing, or more sensitive, then so are we while we read. I will say no more about this. I know you would read the world directly, and tomorrow you will no longer have to listen to old Zakiel. But I would give you something, if I may. A slave owns nothing, not even his own life, so this is in the nature of a loan, but I have the Aedile’s permission.”

Zakiel led Yama deeper into the stacks, where books stood two-deep on shelves that bent under their weight. He pulled a ladder from a recess, set its hooked top on the lip of the highest shelf, and climbed up. He fussed there for a minute, blowing dust from one book after another, and finally climbed down with a volume no bigger than his hand.

“I knew I had it,” he said, “although I have not touched it since I first cataloged the library. Even the Aedile does not know of this. It was left by one of his predecessors; that is the way this library has grown, and why there is so much of little value. Yet some hold that gems are engendered in mud, and this book is such a gem. It is yours.”

It was bound in a black, artificial stuff that, although scuffed at the corners, shone as if newly made when Zakiel wiped away the dust with the hem of his tunic. Yama riffled the pages of the book. They were stiff and slick, and seemed to contain a hidden depth. When he tilted the pages to the light, images came and went in the margins of the crisp double-columned print. He had expected some rare history of Ys, or a bestiary, like those he had loved to read when he was younger, but this was no more than a copy of the Puranas.

Yama said, “If my father told you to give me this book, then how is it that he does not know he owns it?”

“I asked if I could give you a volume of the Puranas, and so I have. But this edition is very old, and differs in some details from that which I have taught you. It is an edition that has long been suppressed, and perhaps this is the only copy of that edition which now exists.”

“It is different?”

“In some parts. You must read it all to find out, and remember what I have taught you. So perhaps my teachings will continue, in some fashion. Or you could simply look at the pictures. Modern editions do not, of course, have pictures.”

Yama, who had been tilting the pages of the book to the light as he turned them, suddenly felt a shock of recognition.

There in the margin of one of the last pages was the view he had glimpsed behind the face of his ancestor, of stars streaming inwards toward a dull glow.

He said, “I will read it, Zakiel. I promise.”

For a moment Zakiel stared at Yama in silence, his black eyes inscrutable beneath the bony shelf of his brow. Then the librarian smiled and clapped dust from his big, bony hands. “Very good, master. Very good. Now we will drink some tea, and talk on the history of the department of which, when you reach Ys, you will be the newest and youngest member.”

“With respect, Zakiel, I am sure that the history of the department will be the first thing I will be taught when I arrive in Ys, and no doubt the clerk will have some words on it during our journey.”

“I do not think that Prefect Corin is a man who wastes words,” Zakiel said. “And he does not see himself as a teacher.”

“My father would have you occupy my mind. I understand. Well then, I would like to hear something—of the history of another department. One that was broken up a long time ago. Is that possible?”