City of Stairs (10 page)

“Perhaps so. Perhaps I’ve traveled solely to find backtalk
some
where. But I wonder—what could have beaten you so badly that it’s formed and honed such a sharp edge, my little battle-ax?” He swooped back around, redoubled his defenses. (Some student nearby grumbled, “When are they actually going to start
playing
?”)

“You are mistaken, sir,” said Shara. “You are merely sensitive. In fact, I would expect that to sit upon an uncushioned chair would surely score your princely buttocks.”

While the students laughed, Shara began to quietly construct a trap.

The Continental boy did not appear insulted; rather, there was an odd gleam in his eye. “Oh, my dear,” he said. “If you really wished to check, I’d not stop you.” He made a play.

“What does
that
mean?” asked Shara. She made another play, appearing to withdraw inward, while in truth layering her trap.

“Don’t claim to be so innocent,” he said. “You brought the subject up, my dear. I am simply yielding to you.” He made another play, blindly.

“You don’t
seem
to be yielding,” said Shara. She withdrew farther, adding bait, thinking,
Why is he suddenly playing so poorly?

“Appearances,” said the boy, “can be deceiving.” He rolled the dice, thrust out again.

“True,” said Shara. “So. Do you want to end it now?”

“To end what now?”

“The game. We can just walk away now, if you like.”

“What, as a draw?”

“No,” said Shara. “I just won. It’ll take a few plays for it to happen, but. Well. I did.”

The other students glanced at one another, perplexed.

The Continental boy sat forward, looked at her pieces, and reviewed the last few plays: evidently, he’d simply not been paying attention. Shara realized he hadn’t looked at the board at all in the last plays, but only at her.

The boy’s mouth fell open. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. I see.”

“Yes,” said Shara.

“Hm. Well. No, no. Let’s do the honorable thing and play it out, shall we?”

It was a formality, one extended by a few lucky rolls of the dice, but soon Shara was picking his pieces off the board. Yet to her irritation, the boy didn’t seem shamed or abashed: he just kept smiling at her.

She made what she knew to be the second-to-last play. “I must ask—how does it feel to be beaten by a Saypuri girl?”

“You,” he said as he laid his game’s neck below her blade, “are not a girl.”

She faltered as she made her play—what could he mean by that?

Shara picked off his final piece. The students around them erupted in a cheer, but she barely heard them.
Another of his mind games.
“Before you ask, I’ll play you again anytime.”

“Well, honestly,” he said cheerfully, “I’d much prefer a fuck.”

She stared at him, astonished.

He winked, stood up, and walked away to be joined by his friends. She watched him go, then gazed around at the cheering students.

Had anyone else heard that? Had he actually
meant
that? Could he
really
?

“Who was that?” she asked aloud.

“Do you really not know?” said a student.

“No.”

“Really? You really didn’t know you were playing Vohannes Votrov, the richest prick on the whole of the damnable Continent?”

Shara stared at the empty board and wondered if the boy had been playing yet another, different game all along: neither Batlan nor Tovos Va, but a game with which she was totally unfamiliar.

* * *

The numbers are going to shave years off of Shara’s life.

She has translated much of the professor’s code. It now reads:
_ _ _ _ h_gh st_ _ _t, sa_nt m_ _ _v_ _va bank, b_x _ _ _ _, gh_v_ny ta_ _ _kan _ _ _ _ _ _.

A security box, in a bank. A bank that bears the name of some saint. Ordinarily this would narrow her choices down quite a bit, but High Street is a very long street in Bulikov, and nearly every bank is named after a saint of some sort.

Actually, Shara knows almost
everything
on the Continent is named after some saint or another. Saypuri historians gauge there were an estimated 70,000 saints before the Great War: apparently the Divinities considered granting sainthood an irritating formality to be signed off on without thought. When the WR were enacted, the idea of trying to remove sainted names from polis structures—as well as attempting to completely rename entire cities and regions, each named after some Divinity or Divine creature—proved overwhelming, and in what was considered to be a very big concession, and a very big shrug, Saypur simply gave up trying. Shara wishes they hadn’t. It would make her job much easier now.

Names,
she thinks.
Names are always such a problem.
After all, the South Seas are actually
northeast
of Saypur—they’re only called such because it was the Continent that named them first, and any name, as Saypur has learned over and over again, dies hard and slowly.

And the numbers … Shara has not gotten to them yet, but she has glanced at them. Numerals and digits of any kind are always incredibly difficult in ancient languages: one particularly fervent cult of the Divinity Jukov refused to acknowledge the number 17, for example, though no historian has been able to figure out why.

She remembers a conversation she had with Dr. Pangyui in their safe house in Ahanashtan:

“The amount of dead languages,” he said, “are like the stars.”

“That many?” she asked.

“The ancient Continentals were not stupid—they knew the best way to control what other nations thought was to control how they talked. And when those languages died, so did those ways of thinking, those ways of looking at the world. They are dead, and we cannot get them back.”

“Are you one of those academics who keeps trying to revive the Saypuri mother tongue?” Shara asked.

“No. Because Saypur was a big place, and had many mother tongues. Such vain, jingoistic missions do not interest me.”

“Then why waste your time looking at all?”

He lit his pipe. “Oh, well, we all reconstruct our past because we wish to see how our present came to be our present—do we not?”

And yet Pangyui had lied to her. He had used her to further his own secret ends.

She returns to work, knowing she has many hours ahead, and also, perhaps, to try to keep herself from remembering more.

* * *

It was two months into term when she met him again. She was in the library, reading about the political exploits of Sagresha, lieutenant to the Kaj and celebrated war hero, when she noticed someone had sat down at the table by the window.

His head was bowed, his curly, red-gold hair eclipsing his brow. He never seemed to sit in a chair right: he was sideways and almost on his back, with a tome in his lap about Thinadeshi, the engineer who had introduced the railways to the Continent.

Shara glared at him. She thought for a second, then stood up, gathered her books, sat down opposite him, and simply watched.

He did not look up. He turned a page and after a moment said, “And what would you want?”

“Why did you say that to me?” she asked.

He looked up at her through his curtain of messy hair. Though Shara was no drinker, she could tell by his puffy lids that he had what the masters at Fadhuri called a “morning head.” “What?” he asked. “From the tournament?”

She nodded.

“Oh, well.” He winced as if embarrassed and returned to his book. “Maybe to get a rise out of you. You seemed such a serious thing, after all. I hadn’t seen you smile all day, despite your admirable record.”

“But what did you
mean
?”

This provoked a long, confused stare. “Are you, erm, serious?”

“Yes.”

“What did you
think
I meant when I asked you for … a fuck?” he asked, slowly and uncertainly.

“No, not
that
.” Shara waved her hand. “The part about me … not being a girl.”

“
That’s
what you’re mad about?
That?
”

Shara simply glared back.

“Well, I mean,” he said. “Well, here. I have seen girls before. Many girls. You can be a girl at any age, you know. Girls at forty. Girls at fifty. There’s a kind of flightiness to them, just like how a man at forty can have the impatience and belligerence of a five-year-old boy. But you can also be a
woman
at any age. And you, my dear, have probably been the spiritual equivalent of a fifty-three or fifty-four-year-old woman since you were six years old. I can tell. You are
not
a girl.” He again returned to his book. “You are very much a woman. Probably an
old
one.”

Shara considered this. Then she took out her own study materials and began to read opposite him, feeling confused, outraged, and strangely flattered.

“That biography of Thinadeshi is shit, just so you know,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yes. The writer has an agenda. And his references are suspect.”

“Ah. His references. Very important.”

“Yes.”

He flipped a page.

“Incidentally,” he asked, “did you ever give much thought to the thing I said about fucking?”

“Shut up.”

He smiled.

* * *

They started meeting in the library nearly every day, and their relationship felt like a continuation of their Batlan game: a long, exhausting conflict in which little ground was ever ceded or gained. Shara was aware throughout that they were playing reversed roles, considering their nationalities: for she was the staunch, mistrustful conservative, zealously advocating the proper way of living and building a disciplined, useful life; and he was the permissive libertine, arguing that if someone wished to do something, and if it hurt no one, and moreover if they had the
money
to pay for it, then why should anyone interfere?

But both of them agreed that their nations were in a bad, dangerous state: “Saypur has grown fat and weak off of commerce,” Shara said to him once. “We believe we can
buy
our safety. The idea that we must fight for it, fight for it every day, never crosses our minds.”

Vohannes rolled his eyes. “You paint your world in such drab cynicisms.”

“I am right,” she insisted. “Saypur got to where it is through military strength. Its civilian leadership is far too permissive.”

“What would you do? Have Saypuri children learn yet another oath, another pledge to Mother Saypur?” Vohannes laughed. “My dear Shara, do you not see that what makes your country so great is that it allows its people to be human in a way the Continent never did?”

“You
admire
Saypur? As a Continental?”

“Of course I do! Not just because I wouldn’t catch leprosy here, which I can’t say of the Continent. But here, you allow people … to be people. Do you not know how rare a thing that is?”

“I thought you would wish for discipline and punishment,” says Shara. “Faith and self-denial.”

“Only Kolkashtani Continentals think that,” Vohannes said. “And it’s a bastard way to live. Trust me.”

Shara shook her head. “You’re wrong. Fervor and strength is what keeps the peace. And the world hasn’t changed that much.”

“You think the world is such a cold and bitter place, my dear Shara,” said Vohannes. “If your great-grandfather taught you anything, I’d hope it’d be that one person can vastly improve the lives of many.”

“Saying something so admiring of the Kaj on the Continent would get you killed.”

“A
lot
of things on the Continent would get me killed.”

Both simply assumed that, as educated children of power, they would change the world, but neither could agree on the best way to change it: one day Shara would wish to write a grand, epic history of Saypur, of the world, and the next she would consider running for office, like her aunt; one day Vohannes would dream of funding a grand art project that would completely remake the Continental polises, and the next he would be shrewdly planning a radical business venture. Both of them hated the other’s ideas, and gleefully expressed that hatred with unchecked vitriol.

In retrospect, they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.

But it was more than that. Deep down, Shara knew she had never really had anyone else to talk to, to
really
talk to, until she met Vohannes, and she suspected he felt the same: they were both from famous, reputable families, they were both orphans, and they were both intensely isolated by their circumstances. Much like the game they’d played in the tournament, their relationship was one they invented day by day, and it was one only they could understand.

When she was not studying in her first and second year of college, Shara was engaged in what she would later feel to be a simply unfathomable amount of sex. And on the weekends, when the academy maids would stay home and everyone could sleep in, she’d stay in his quarters, sleeping the day away in his arms, and she would wonder exactly what she was doing with this foreigner, this boy from a place she was supposed to hate with all of her heart.

She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.

How stupid are the young,
Shara would later think,
that they cannot see what is right in front of them.

* * *

Shara sits back in her chair and studies her work:

3411 HIGH STREET, SAINT MORNVIEVA BANK,
BOX 0813, GHIVENY TAORSKAN 63611

She wipes sweat from her brow, checks her watch. It is three in the morning. And once she realizes it, she finds it feels like it.

Now the real difficulty,
thinks Shara.
How to get at whatever is in this box.

There’s a knock at her door. “Come in,” she says.