Beasts of Tabat (14 page)

She paused in her speech as another woman pushed forward through the onlookers, trailing a pair of twins, six or seven years old. They were dressed alike in blue and umber uniforms.

The photographer arranged them on either side of the moth-eaten Gryphon. “Mind your fingers!” she admonished. The children stood trustingly, hands tangled in the desiccated, dry-weed mane while the animal clacked its beak irritably. The photographer disappeared beneath the tent of draped black gauze.

Soon afterwards, a puff of acrid smoke set everyone in the vicinity to coughing and made the Gryphon clack its beak even harder.

The photographer gave her customer a card—“Ready by tomorrow, noon, at that location!” she said as she removed the twins from the Gryphon’s striking range.

“Who’s next then?” she said to the crowd. “You?” She beckoned to Teo. “You?”

He backed away, holding up his empty hands. “No money, ma’am.”

“Sit down,” she ordered. “I’ll do it for free, and add you to the gallery. You have good bones.”

He tried to step away, but she pounced on him. He found himself perched on the stool, waiting for the puff of smoke, being snapped at not to move. The Gryphon rested its heavy head on his knee and contemplated him. He sat there for an eternity before the smoke puffed and the coughing began anew.

“Here’s my card. Come by the shop tomorrow, and I’ll show you what you look like,” she said when the process was done. It read “Jilla Clearsight, Photographer.” The Gryphon clacked its beak in reprimand at him as he stepped away.

He paused. “Say, ma’am,” he said. Her face seemed as though it might be kind now that she was no longer scolding him for not sitting still.

“Yes?”

“You don’t know anywhere a fellow could swap chores for a place to stay, do you?”

Her gaze was as piercing as the Gryphon’s. “What sort of chores?”

“Well, I can chop wood, for one,” he said. “And clear a trap line, but I don’t suppose you have much call for that sort of thing. I can cook stew though—peel potatoes and make flatbread, too.”

“Come back in an hour and help me pack up,” she said.

He wanted to grin, to stammer out thanks, to dance in celebration, but he coolly nodded and went wandering across the plaza. Easy enough to kill an hour and then return and help. He wondered if she needed an assistant, some sort of permanent arrangement. Perhaps she’d take him in. If he had a place to live, he could claim he had always been here, that he had no connection with any northern boy, that he had never been promised to the Temples.

Circling the plaza like a curved comb set on its spine were the tall iron poles of the aetheric lights, each plastered with a new orange bill advertising a rally for the Friends of the Beasts Party. To the southwest stretched pines and summits of the buildings of the College of Mages, covered with complex contraptions: many-limbed lightning rods and contradictory weather vanes against a spider web of silver wires securing a tethered zeppelin.

Past that, the Duke’s Road climbed its way towards that distant, pine-edged point. The sun was high overhead, and the light hit the waterfall full on, rendering it into an immense, sparkling construction.

Directly underneath the waterfall, the roar of the water was thunderous. He stood with head tilted back. The water ended with a knife’s cleanness. The writhing spray formed odd lines and curves.

“Can you see them, then?” A voice beside his elbow.

He turned, startled. A stooped figure, all wide skirts. It straightened, and he took in the kerchiefed head, the hedgehog bristles barely betrayed at its edges, her blackened snout. A Beast of a kind he’d never seen. Tabat was full of them.

“Can you see them?” the old woman repeated. Her voice had a peculiar whiney, snuffling sound to it. “See their faces?”

He squinted upward. “It sort of looks like faces, yes.”

“That’s how they get their power.” She pointed her non-existent chin towards the College. “Here. Tiggy will keep you safe from their notice.” She fumbled in the basket that she carried, a profusion of paper flowers, and took out a purple and white blossom. She reached up to pin it to his collar with stubby fingers.

“I be a political speaker here most days,” she said. “You come and listen, boy, maybe you’ll learn something.”

She smelled like home, somehow, with her sharp animal scent.

She chuckled, and his embarrassment burned. Could she
smell
his thoughts, like an animal? He backed away hurriedly and went to sit on a bench at the edge of the plaza.

“You come listen sometime!” she yelled after him. “You’re always welcome, boy!”

* * *

“Where did you get that?” Jilla said, pointing at the flower pinned to Teo’s collar.

“Some old woman,” he said.

“You want to be careful which political party you ally yourself with.” She gestured at him to pack the equipment crates. Together they folded the black cloth as darkness sliced across the plaza.

The Gryphon hobbling at their heels, they stepped off the plaza just as the aetheric lights began to blaze behind them, illuminating the waterfall.

“Where is everyone?” Night fell early this time of year, but the streets seemed empty.

“The riots,” Jilla said. “There’s still plenty of unrest.” She made a sour sound. “But I don’t know why they bother. Kanto wins, Winter continues. That’s how it’s been as long as I can remember. It’s a waste of money.”

“Oh.” He followed her along the icy street. He couldn’t imagine sounding that blasé about the Battle. The penny-wides made it sound as though it was the event that kept Tabat running. Was this what city life did to you, jaded you to this point? He wondered if he’d ever be this calm about it all.

Her house was nearby. As he followed her into the hallway, he saw paintings filled it, placed everywhere there was wall space. Paintings of ships, ranging from large ones bristling with masts to smaller clipper ships, all depicted in painstaking detail, down to the names on the prows and the faces of the figureheads.

“Are these yours?” he asked.

“My father’s.”

“Does he live here too?”

“He died a year ago.”

He murmured something abashed but she didn’t say anything more. She fixed him dinner, an omelet made from strong cheese and leathery little eggs from a reed basket sitting beside the sink, and a mug of cider, sweet and hard enough to make his nostrils twitch.

Hunched over the table, Teo ate as though it was his sole occupation, a job he’d been bred for. He made a determined, steady progression through the omelet, three slices of heavily buttered bread, another half omelet, and then more bread, this time with citron marmalade as well as butter. He ate himself into a happy, gluttonous daze, sitting in the small kitchen with paintings on every side. He could hear the distant roar of the waterfall and the occasional cart clatter outside the curtained windows.

“So all of these are by your father?” He gestured at the nearest trio of paintings, each showing a different ship at anchor, labeled
Primrose
,
Cowslip
, and
Peaseblossom.

Beside the door a tin tray sat on the floor, laden with a tiny empty cup and saucer, no bigger than his thumbnail. The boxy wooden cupboard beside the sink turned out to house a block of shiny ice. Jilla took out the pitcher on the shelf beneath it and poured a drop of cream into the saucer, not looking at him. “They’re all by my father, aye. He was a Recorder for the Duke’s Navy.”

“What’s that?” He pointed at the saucer.

“Sssh,” she said. “I’ll tell you another time.”

He shrugged and crammed the last of the bread in his mouth. He peered sadly into his empty mug until she laughed and poured him more. Under the influence of the food, the hot liquid, the fever faded away and he felt steadier, the coughs and ache seeping away. He settled back in a happy stupor. Maybe the city had sent him a savior.

“There’s a cot in the studio,” she said. “I’ll make sure there’s linens for you.”

* * *

Despite the scratchy wool blanket Jilla fetched, it was chilly in the studio. He had taken off his cloak, but now he draped it over himself, trying to maximize his warmth.

It was quiet, an almost ghostly silence. Purple and silver moonlight struggled for supremacy, washing in through the bull’s-eye window glass to be reflected in ghostly rounds by the camera lenses on every side. On the table was a stack of red-bound books, their spines in precise alignment, and the moonlight battled over the embossed letters,
Narrative of a Beast’s Life, by the Centaur Phillip.

He lay on his back on the cot and tried to get comfortable. Every time he shifted his weight, the legs beneath his head gave out a ghastly creak. If he tugged the blanket up around his neck, it left his toes cold, and vice versa. He sighed as the cot creaked again.

The wind was so loud now. He’d never heard it howl so loud at home. He tried to relax. This was much better than sleeping outdoors, but he still twitched awake at any sound that might signal someone creeping up on him.

Over the wind’s moan, he heard a man talking in the kitchen where Jilla was washing up. He hadn’t heard the outer door open.

Blanket shrugged around his shoulders, he crept towards the door. It was glass-paned and securely closed. He set his hand on the chill metal of the handle and tested it. Unlocked.

The man said, “Three moons, red and white and purple, that’s how many will shine.”

“Hush,” Jilla said in a gentle voice accompanied by the watery clatter of dishes.

“When we think we can let the moons control us, that’s where we go wrong.”

Teo tried to ease forward, and the door let out a shrill squeak. There was silence from the kitchen before Jilla said, “Go to sleep, Teo.”

His cheeks burned, but he pushed forward. Jilla was alone in the kitchen, standing at the sink. The Gryphon was curled around her feet. Teo’s gaze swept the small space. Could the voice have come from the icebox? That blue jar set on a high shelf? The covered basket beside the hearth? He frowned and shifted from foot to foot. His toes were cold on the cracked white tiles underfoot.

“Who’s here?” he asked.

“No one. You must have been dreaming.”

“In the morning, can I help you with the studio? Or I could set up the booth.”

“Tomorrow I’ll be sorting and developing pictures. It’s easy enough. I can train you to do it quickly.”

The assurance in the words warmed him. Finally someone had a place for him. A place in Tabat.

He returned to his cot and curled up. It seemed warmer now, even with the wind shrieking outside the windows. He thought about the future.

He would become Jilla’s assistant, and eventually—though quickly—work his way up to partial ownership of the shop. They’d replace the Gryphon with more splendid, picturesque Beasts—a little Dragon, perhaps, or a four-armed bear, or a beautiful Mermaid. Nobility would come and be photographed there.

He’d pay off the Temple for his apprenticeship. Surely he wouldn’t be the first to do such a thing. It would be a simple transaction. How could it be difficult? Jilla would help him.

He let the thoughts of her become erotic and drifted to sleep, cushioned by hope.

***

Chapter Thirteen

Bella’s Test

I gauge Skye’s guard. The wooden practice blade
clacks
quick, and again, down at the hip then up across the chest, deflected each time.

“Good,” I say. “You’ve been practicing.”

“Enough to make you break a sweat?” the girl challenges.

I mime disdain, dance back, sword raised between us. I bend right and left in parody of the training exercise every student learns their first day. “Hardly that.”

Skye snorts and presses forward, boot soles sliding for purchase on the well-worn planking of the training chamber. A great mirror against the western wall reflects the last of the day’s dim sunlight across the room. Aetheric lights, newly installed and still shiny and unscathed, blaze from either side of the entrance on the same wall to overpower the sunlight. They cast an unforgiving light across the neat racks of wooden weapons on the northern end and the three-row set of stands facing it on the south.

I prance sideways. I like to irritate my students. Moons know they’ll face enough of it in the arena. That might make a fine pamphlet for Adelina. Advice on irritating opponents, with illustrative anecdotes. I’ve been running out of adventures, and Adelina is too fond of making up wild stuff to fill in the gaps.

Skye isn’t paying enough attention to my expression. I sweep in, catch her across the left calf, deliberately angling to catch the soft flesh rather than the shinbone. Some would say I coddle them. Lucya would. But Skye will have a nasty enough bruise as is.

“Come on,” I taunt. I flip hair out of my face and grin at Skye. “Make me sweat.”

Narrowly avoiding a swipe, I pull back and wait, watching Skye’s face.

At these moments, I both love and hate my students.

Love, for how can you not love someone you’ve taught to move, to strike? Someone who you give, freely, everything ever given you and some things that you’ve had to acquire on your own?

It doesn’t happen with every student, certainly. But the ones with the spark, the ones whom you glimpse yourself in, the self that was once all angles and insecurity and terror that someone would expose them.

A mask of challenge over an uncertain core.

The ones that have the same potential that you once had. The potential you lived up to, now skills engrained in muscle memory, now realized.

And that is why you hate them too. You are only sharpening the dagger that will depose you. You look at all of them, wondering which would be the one.

Decades now, student after student has thought her- or himself ready, has met me in the ring, only to be thrown down, securing Winter’s grip on Tabat.

Is that actually what the Gods intended? Have they chosen me for such a purpose? I would like to think so.

Otherwise things seem far too random.

* * *

After I’ve put her to the test and delivered a precise chain of bruises along her forearm, while we sit in the hot baths beneath the school, Skye says, “Some girls say you live on the Fourth Terrace, near Eidolon Canal, because a lover of yours died there years ago, a suicide.”

“Who says that?” I ask. It always amazes me what a hearty interest the girls take in my life.

“Jenna. And the little Khentor girl.”

The little Khentor girl has at least two hands in height on Skye. But she says it in the same tone I would, and she’s started affecting several of my mannerisms, like chewing anise seeds to sweeten the breath and whiten the teeth.

I use a pumice stone on my feet, sanding down rough skin, steam-hazed into a fleshy outline. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say between strokes. “Given what you know of me, why would I choose the Fourth Terrace?”

“Not because it is convenient to a tram or canal boat.”

“One cannot set oneself enough such challenges in a day. If the breath I earn taking the Twelve Stairs will win me an advantage in a fight, it is effort well spent. You cannot rest on what circumstances you have—you must always be looking for chances to develop your edge.”

I’ve delivered this lecture before.

Skye says, “But such inconvenience might be true of many neighborhoods. So convenience or its lack is not a criteria.”

I splash my feet through the water trough that runs between the benches before toweling them and beginning to rub in peppermint and beeswax salve. Lucya makes it in great batches each spring when the mint fields on the northern bounds of the city yield up their first crop, but this time of year, it’s starting to run out. I smear the last fingerful from the jar onto my sole.

Watching me, Skye says, “It’s because of the bakeries near the grain market.”

I tap my nose with a fragrant finger. “And the cheese shops only a level down. Remember there’s food booths all along the Twelve Stairs.”

“And Eidolon Canal? There’s nothing particular about it?”

I consider how much to say. “I like the trees along it. They remind me of my parents’ summer house.”

Skye’s sudden interest is like a sponge, sopping up all enthusiasm. It surprises and repels, this attention. I wonder what forms my life takes, told and retold by (generations of them now!) students. Who is encouraged by the story of a girl a year too old to be admitted at fifteen, insisting on fighting teacher after teacher until Lucya finally agreed to admit her provisionally?

Do they mention that I didn’t win any of those matches, that it was perseverance, not talent, that won Lucya over? Judging from the hero worship I see so often in student eyes, that part of the story has escaped history.

I tell Skye, “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. People like to talk, to pretend they know secrets, so they can trade them for attention.”

Skye shrugs, an impatient twist of her shoulders. “I know that.” She rises, shaking off sweat and moisture, and goes to the rack mounded with towels. “You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Sometimes she acts like a girl wanting me to court her. She wouldn’t be the first, and usually I’m not tempted. But Skye is alluring, with her firm young length, her slender calves and forearms, lean and muscular.

I sigh. “There are willows along Eidolon Canal,” I tell the steam hanging in the air. I can feel the girl listening. “I can see them from my window. When I was little, we used to go out to the country, where there was a pond and willows and ducks. My parents died a year later, and that’s my strongest memory of them.”

The girl considers what to say. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not anything you or I can help.”

Skye hovers on a foot, awkward as a colt, eyes a green that belies her name. She is the best of her year; the best of the last decade. I won’t tell her that, lest it go to her head. I grunt and hoist myself off the stone bench, taking the towel that Skye hands me. She turns away to go into the cooler, clearer air of the changing room.

My mother died when I had barely reached the age of eight.

I do remember her somewhat. But I am unconvinced that the figure of my memory, smelling of fresh towels and peppermint, is not actually a confusion with my favorite nurse, an efficient woman whose efficiency did not allowed her to escape the fate of my parents: dead in a carriage accident on the road north of Tabat.

I imagined my mother’s presence for a long time after the deaths, hearing her voice in conscience’s scoldings, or comforting, cajoling. When Jolietta took me as an apprentice, though, that voice faded to a whisper, then just a hum, a thought, and finally silence. I did my best to re-summon that maternal presence, but with Jolietta around, there was no pretending that my mother still watched over me.

But it’s there that I learned the determination, the force of will that brought me here. The will that carries me through, with or without working at the school.

* * *

Snow softens the rigid outlines of the clock tower near the Brides of Steel. In the summer, ivy shrouds its walls; now only the skeletons of the vines and gnarled clumps of leftover leaves are there, holding the snow in what deceptively resembles a handhold but is quick to give way under a climber’s grasp.

This tower was built by Alberic’s grandfather. Tabat is full of such buildings, commissioned by Dukes and Duchesses. What will the city be like when decisions are made differently? Even now it’s changed, filled with an angry bustle of a sort I’ve never seen before.

I keep a sharp eye on the students gathered with me at its foot. This exercise gives rise to a broken limb or two as often or not.

The intricate brickwork on the northern side is a web of holds. Skye goes up as nimbly as a squirrel. The rope around her waist, reaching over the roof, shifts a slab of snow sideways; it slides off the tiled roof, revealing a gleaming expanse of mottled green and purple, like a turtle’s shell emerging from cloudy water. She glances back over her shoulder, seeking me. I try not to smile.

Lucha dances sideways, head cocked back to watch above herself. She’s a small, compact girl. Like all of the students here, she’s one my considering eye has chosen, marked for extra lessons and advice that will ensure that she, like the favorites before them, emerges as a prime Gladiator, bound for splendor in the ring.

“Up, Valia,” I say. Valia freezes like a rabbit who’s spotted an eagle on the horizon.

“What is it?” I’m cold and want chal. It’s not as though I’m doing this for my own good.

“It’s so high,” Valia says. She fell from a lesser height three months ago and snapped a rib. Ever since then, she’s balked.

I consider her. Pale and straw-haired, a charity case, lucky to escape the warrens near the Slumpers.

This weakness can’t be tolerated. Enough is enough.

“Well,” I say, “I suppose you can always find work as a kitchen maid.”

Valia blinks. Snow drifts down and tangles like woolly burrs in her hair. Like all of them, she wears no coat, only a thick doublet. I keep them active enough on these sessions that I’m not worried about losing anyone to cold.

Someday at least a few of these will face me.

Perhaps not Valia.

“Think on it,” I say. “But not for long. Then go up or find some employment other than Gladiator.”

“You don’t have the authority to remove me from the school!” she protests.

“’Deed, I might not. But I will give you lessons no longer, and how well will you do without them, girl? You’ll never gain the ring—you’ll become someone’s bravo or bodyguard, wielding your sword for coin rather than glory, an adjunct to some burly Beast, like a Cyclops or Minotaur.”

Beside her, Lucha makes a tiny sound, a gasp. Valia’s face goes white as the snow sweeping between us. Her hands seek the rope around her waist as though searching for a lifeline. Tears and snowflakes mingle in her eyelashes, the hairs so fine and blonde they’re barely visible.

Pathetic. No wonder I’ve stood undefeated so long. None of them have the backbone I had, the iron determination that carried me to my current position, foremost Gladiator of Tabat. I travelled across the world to test my blade against the Gladiators of other cities, other continents. I am the foremost of my generation.

Perhaps even of all time, I sometimes think.

Valia begins climbing.

On my third victory, I commissioned my own set of Winter’s armor, dedicating the whole of the purse to it. Lucya called me vainglorious for it. But I lived up to that splendid set of crystal and silver, so heavily ornamented that it sparkles like a snowflake in the sun. Now I can do no wrong.

Except win. There’s more and more pressure for Winter to lose, for the seasons to return to their sometimes-yes, sometimes-no, cycle. But throwing a fight goes against everything I believe in.

Valia is high above, parallel with Skye. Both rest against the wall, their lines momentarily slack.

“You may begin.”

As Skye feints and Valia recoils, scrambling sideways, snow bounces off my upturned face, soft animal kisses, unquestioning, unjudging, uncaring of the weather. Lucya wants me to help the Brides of Steel’s Beast Trainer, merely to save a few coins. It’s what I dislike most about the woman who was once my teacher and now is my business partner.

Skye misjudges, scrabbles for a new hold, regains herself just as Valia makes her move in turn and bounces off Skye’s upraised forearm. More snow slides from the roof above, falling mainly on Lucha, though none of us escape it entirely.

Perhaps I’ll find some student with an interest in Beasts, train them up, rather than hire someone. It’ll seem enough to Lucya like I’m doing it myself that she won’t protest.

Not Skye, though. I have better things in mind for Skye than cleaning stalls and tending inflamed frogs.

Valia slips, falls perhaps ten feet before the rope brings her up short. She’s breathing oddly. I signal to her to descend. She does so in jerks, rappelling off the glassy bricks.

When she lands with a thump, I demand, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Tears glaze Valia’s face as she lifts it to my gaze.

“Please don’t stop teaching me, Gladiator Kanto!” The words are almost lost between sobs.

I’m at a loss. I reach out my gloved hand and pat Valia’s elbow. She keeps sniffling, a warbling snort that reminds me of a Clovian rabbit’s wail.

The lugubrious sound reminds me, that to others, the Brides of Steel may be as important as it was for me. It was arrogant to assume Valia ready to reconcile herself to anything other than the path her teacher has forged.

I have no words for it so I wave the next pair of students to go up, but keep my hand on Valia’s arm as the snow swirls around us and the other students battle in the sky.

* * *

Skye manages to disarm me in practice, and I have promised a trip for chal with any student who manages that. The girl opts for Berto’s, the same choice any student in the school would make.

She sits across the round table in the watery, green-tinted light, licking seaweed and broth from her upper lip. I feel warmth that has nothing to do with the heat of the spices Berto’s uses, and force myself to look away.

This time of day the late morning sunlight pours in through the eastern windows to splash against the wall of plants, red-flowering sage and lucky ivy, its heart-shaped leaves filling the tun-sized planters, glazed red in Hijae’s honor. The air is full of the smell of sage and tea and the noise of the singing birds swinging in cages above the plants. They were quarreling last time I was here, but now all seems harmonious.