Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (31 page)

Barth Anderson

Here’s what was about to happen: The Scarab would be handcuffed and put in a three-lock safe, and that safe would be sealed in a crate, and that crate would be hoisted by a winch on the marina’s primary pier, and three massive harbor-charms commissioned from the Brotherhood Itself would enchant the winch.

He can get out of anything, but he couldn’t possibly escape that, could he?

We argued for weeks about whether or not the Scarab could
do it. Some people, fortunetellers on the wharf, thought he could actually escape, and hoped he would because they hated the Brotherhood Itself

The rest of us weren’t so disaffected. The Brotherhood Itself wrapped our city and harbor in cocoons of conjured mist. It protected us from conjured diseases spiraling out from the archipelago, ruthless inland bandits, and insurrection. A mouthy foreigner like the Scarab in his silly beetle costume with a red sash across the belly — well, the Brotherhood should trump that.

It was hard to say which magic would prevail, though, because we didn’t know who or what the Scarab was. A Catalan mystic, perhaps? A Micronesian medicine man? Rosicrucian? About three months ago, around the time that plague ship first anchored off-harbor, this escape artist started working the crowds on the wharf, right along with the smokesters, glass jugglers, and lavish dumb shows of Pericles in Delaware. There was a translation problem fouling him up from the beginning. His hand-painted sign announced:

“He disobeys bindings as unto a beetle!”

“You will be unpredictable!”

“Why don’t you instantly probe his desire!?”

The Scarab’s first audiences consisted of passing shark boaters, more interested in that odd sign than his tame escapes.

But the Scarab quickly earned a reputation for squirming out of any headlock. Crouched like a wrestler, he’d call out to passing teamsters, “Come and hold me! You there. Hold me!” Bored, they’d bet him that they could pin him for a twenty count. On that first day, it became apparent that the Scarab might be for real: Small as he was, one or two men weren’t nearly enough to pin him. Five? No good. The Scarab would lie prostrate, his red cape splayed, and ten or eleven beefy gorillas, stripped to their union suits, would get a grip on him. Thrashing and grunting ensued. Bets were placed among the circle of wharf rats that always formed, and, then, from under that scrum of massive buttocks and tree-trunk thighs, the Scarab would slither loose.

Those poor sots paid up their wagers with a grin and a snort, but they hated the Scarab, and all of them wanted revenge. So next their union stewards came down the wooden steps to the wharves from the machine shops and shipwright halls, and the Scarab, in a single, sweaty afternoon, cleaned out the union. He cleaned out management. He cleaned out the Iron Works who made a special livery of soldered gauntlets (palm to palm), a torso in the shape of a giant beetle’s thorax, and legs that were bolted in place after the Scarab was put inside. We streamed down in crowds, flooding into the wharf district to watch the latest phenom. Though, of course, the upper crust from Whale Oil Hill wouldn’t leave the polished, wooden stairs connecting their neighborhoods to the docks. Adventurous ladies with costumed retinues and magicians of the Brotherhood Itself in powdered wigs stood on the bottom landing in distress, as if attending a hanging, not a man struggling out of a metal bug suit.

That one gave the Scarab trouble, and after a painful length of time, the metal bug was pried apart to reveal that the escape artist wasn’t there. The carapace was empty and the eager silence stretched as we stared at the lack of a Scarab. One person in the audience clapped. It sounded sarcastic in the quiet, so we turned to see who this was and found the Scarab standing among us, face bloodied and costume torn.

That’s when we knew he was a force to reckon with, and we were dying to know what would happen next.

As a result, the Scarab was enshrined in the local lexicon, too, because each time he escaped, he’d clap his hands together once and shout in his unplaceable accent, “No, no! I am incorrigible!” This entered
wharfese
almost immediately. Any time you’d get away with something (a hat trick in freedeck, a run-in with your boss) you’d turn to your friends, clap once and you’d all shout, “I am incorrigible!”

About this time, that galley flying its black flag came sailing into our inlet. The whole marina paused as halibut merchants put up their oars, and fingers tarried over unplayed hands of deck, wondering at this sad turn of events.

At the Scarab’s usual spot was a tableau of raised hammers over a hastily lidded coffin, nails pinched in winced mouths. The cluster of seven men almost had the Scarab trapped inside, when they saw the black flag. Too bad for them. As they looked away, a force from below them shoved upward, and suddenly, the men slid from the coffin lid and the Scarab stood alone, in red-caped beetle costume, gazing out at the plague ship.

There was never much to watch when a plague ship arrived. Mysterious infections were always escaping from the new islands forming in the Atlantic and shipped in from far-flung cantons. Disfigured victims apparently told tales to the Brotherhood Itself of plagues carried by merchant marines in mismatched gear, diseases that split feet into cloven hooves, and bent human voices into bleating. When a plague ship arrived, our Port Authority would semaphore the ship to drop anchor off-harbor, away from the shipping lanes, out where the floor of the ocean plunges deep. Then the Brotherhood Itself would sail into position in order to communicate with the crew or whoever was left aboard, saving whom they could. Within a day, the ship would be sunk by canon fire.

So while a member of the Brotherhood Itself stood in the prow of a twenty-foot Port Authority skiff, starboard of the plague ship, the Scarab, still standing in his coffin, started shouting in his native tongue. He seemed indignant to the point of panicked, but then, he fell quiet, looking down at the men he’d just bested and those immediately around him, searching faces perhaps for an expression of recognition or familiarity.

“You half-witted comedians believe this bedevilry? What is desperate for you, wonderers?” He was heard to shout. “Do you know what that boat
is?
”

When we didn’t answer him, he stiffened and muttered to himself in an angry whisper, kicking coffin nails away and walking to the Siren Inn, red cape whipping.

None of us understood his anger. Those near enough to see his face said he was looking at the magistrate in the prow of the skiff, but beyond that, no one could parse his reaction or what “half-witted comedians” meant.

Sensing an opportunity, a smock-maker clapped and shouted, “You are incorrigible!” Which drew an easy, comforting laugh.

But something was different now. The Scarab’s pitch changed the very next day. He continued calling out businesses, unions, or individuals to capture him, but on his sign was now written:

“No half-witted bedevilry can hold him!”

We all passed the marina every day on our walks to market and church, and we saw it out there, the plague ship, its black flag raised against the omnipresent wall of enchanted fog beyond. But no survivors were shipped to shore. No medical boats skimmed out to help. No war galley came to sink it with a blast of cannonballs. We were dying to know what would happen next.

Two days after the arrival of the plague-ship, the Scarab’s sign changed again. The word
bedevilry
had been crossed out and
Brotherhood
Itself
was written above it.

Could the Scarab escape the Brotherhood Itself’s magic? Our doubt was delicious, and we devoured it with griddlecakes in union kitchens and drank it in our bubbling beer.

•

The Brotherhood Itself at last rose to the bait, after the term “bedevilry” had become a synonym for “Brotherhood” in dockside vernacular, and agreed with the Scarab about a wager. The fortunetellers flipped their silver sticks and clucked, “See? The Bedevilry Itself wants to discredit him publicly. He’s a threat.”

Several magistrates met the Scarab on his dockside stage and attempted to hold him down with Brotherhood manacles and leg-shanks. Winter winds were beginning to bite, but the event drew a sprawling crowd to watch the magistrates stand stern as pillories after cuffing the foreigner, their powdered wigs freshly dusted and unmussed by the weather. Once shackled, the Scarab was put into a heavy, canvas sea bag, and then the magistrates sang their all-for-naughts, lock-me-tights, knitknots, and nighty-nights. But the Scarab shrugged the manacles and the spells from his body and bounced before his audience with his barrel chest thrust out.

“I am incorrigible!” We all shouted on cue.

There were three more contests, and at each meeting between the Scarab and the magistrates, the bet was doubled, so that by the time the Big Show was announced, where the Scarab would be suspended in a safe over the harbor, the Bedevilry Itself was into the escape artist for quite a bit of treasure. Which of our two heroes would prevail in the end?

Sadly, the temperature plunged for two straight weeks, and vicious winds from the mountains came shrieking against us. Foreign ships rowed away to avoid ice-lock, and the big contest between the Scarab and the Bedevilry Itself was delayed.

This incensed the Scarab but not for want of the wager. Rather, he seemed afraid of something, confused or angry, though it was difficult to understand why since he had so much treasure. “They can’t arrest that infection,” he told some of us at the Siren’s bar. “Let’s filch a galley and subvert that sick boat with cannon fire ourselves. Come! Who will carry me?!”

A group of toothpullers plied the Scarab with another round of archipelago lager. Certainly, the plague ship was no longer a threat, they told him. Certainly, any plague carried on that boat had devoured its human food supply weeks ago.

“I try to roll you out of bed, because, attend, this Brotherhood Itself has no witchery,” he said. “That black flag outside your harbor, don’t you observe? That ship! There’s true bedevilry out there, a fast threat, but your Brotherhood Itself can’t arrest it.”

“Nothing bad ever happens here, Scarab,” a toothpuller said. “The real question is, can you pull off this escape tomorrow in the Big Show?”

The Scarab laughed in derision. “Oh, I’ll escape,” he said, drinking and slamming down his glass. “But without doubting, I am singular and uniquely.”

He probably said some other things, too, but that saloon crowd was already bored with him and didn’t remember much more. How tiresome the Scarab had become, we decided — just like the fortunetellers and their preachy resentment of the Brotherhood Itself. We liked him much better when he was weaseling out of bug armor.

That night, the eve of the rescheduled contest, with the harbor waters steaming under the frigid winter air, a boy took the Scarab’s dinner to his room at the Siren. After repeated knocking, the serving boy and the decrepit concierge let themselves in, and, as reported in the more reliable broadsheets, the Scarab was gone, his rooms in curious disarray. His beetle costume was shredded, but his clothes were still neatly folded in a steamer trunk. The room smelled dangerous with flammable oil from a spilled lamp, and a little curlicue of blood was written on an unbroken windowpane, while two full glasses of cognac sat sparkling on the mantle. The ancient concierge told the Port Authority that the Scarab had received a visitor earlier in the day, a tall man cloaked in archipelago medicine-man style (bear fur), but beyond that, he couldn’t account for the Scarab’s whereabouts.

The Port Authority immediately barred the roads going in and out of the wharf neighborhood, and the Brotherhood Itself announced that they were dropping two enchantments on us, preventing anyone from exiting or entering the city. Finding the Scarab for his own safety was suddenly the mission of every magistrate in town.

Deep winter frosted our doors shut, and the cobblestone streets became so slippery that only the watch’s heaviest draft horses clopped over the ice. Was this magic? Was this weather built by the Brotherhood Itself, or was this winter? We hoped it wasn’t merely winter. Again.

We woke the next morning to see that the harbor had completely iced over, freezing the last galley in place: the plague ship. The day cleared, showing a cruel, cold sky and a broken sun. No delivery carts rattled in the snow-bound streets, and the docks were rimed with thick blankets of ice and sea salt. That night, a fat moon lit the harbor blue, and a small team of shark-boaters sneaked out into the perilous cold to whittle at a few bottles of vodka together. Their work was summer work, rowing kegs of rum and fresh water from general stores to ships in port, so drinking late, even on nights as cold as this, wasn’t unusual for their lot.

Under the light of this cold, severe moon, one of the shark-boaters looked out at the distant plague ship and saw figures standing near it on the ice.

“Hey, look out there.”

As the shark-boaters watched, twenty or thirty people dropped onto the ice from the plague ship’s high gunwales.

“What’re those idiots up to? Don’t they know that boat is dangerous?”

“I heard the Brotherhood Itself already disinfected that ship days and days ago,” another said.

In an almost ritualistic dance, the figures gathered on the ice, clustering. Then they began walking together across the wide, frozen harbor toward the marina. The cluster drew ever closer, and in the passing swoops of a lighthouse’s beam, their long shadows were thrown like ink across the pale blue ice, again and again.

“It’s a team of priests returning from consecrating the plague ship’s dead,” the captain of the shark-boaters said.

“Maybe they’re shipwrights examining the hull for ice damage.”

“Could they have survived the plague?”

“With no supplies?”

“I wonder what they are.”

The long moment was drawn out as the dense cluster slowly walked past the ice-paralyzed buoys and entered the marina. As these strange figures drew closer, it became apparent that they were wearing the mismatched uniforms and long dress-coats of various foreign navies.