The Last Stormlord (23 page)

“You went to see Madam Opal?”

“I sent a friend to inquire. I was wondering if I could afford to pay off your debt. I can’t. I must conserve what meagre wealth I have for my old age, once I can no longer dance.”

Terelle’s spirits sank. She had wondered if Amethyst could—or would—be prepared to buy the debt; it had not occurred to her that the dancer could not afford it.

“Then what will I do? I could run away, but where could I go? I might have just enough tokens to pay for a caravan seat to Breccia City or Pediment, but what would I do in another city? It would be the same there!”

“Opal can’t
force
you into prostitution.”

“No, but if I can’t pay the debt, I can be forced to work it off. It would take my whole life if I was doing work that didn’t involve the upper rooms.” Even as she said the words, she hated the bitterness she heard in her own voice.

“And if you refused to work it off, you’d have to go to court and they’d sentence you to the city’s labour force. Which would mean something far more unpleasant, like the lye-makers. I know.”

Terelle nodded miserably. “It’s not fair.”

Amethyst looked at her in compassion. “Have you told Opal you don’t want to be a whore?”

“Of course. She dismisses it as—as girlish qualms. She thinks I’ll ‘settle down’ once I’ve had a few men.” She shuddered. “I’ve seen the men who want me now. Watergiver have mercy, I don’t want that! It’s just not
fair
.”

“No, it rarely is.” She pondered, then added, “There are people who live without allowances or regular jobs, you know. Down on the thirty-sixth. Have you ever been there?”

Terelle shook her head.

“I was born there. There are ways to live. People who want casual labour often employ workers from the lowest level. It’s worth a try. If it doesn’t work out, well then, you can always go back to the snuggery.”

“They’ll come looking for me. I know it.”

“Yes, no doubt. The important thing is for them not to find you for a while. If you can hide out for half a year, they may not bother to look any more.”

“Is it possible to hide there?”

Amethyst gave a derisive laugh. “Every second person on the level is hiding from something! Go there. Have a look for yourself. Then decide. For now, let’s forget your woes. We’ll dance together. It will make you feel happier.”

But later, when it was time for Terelle to leave, she added, “Be careful, my dear—don’t trust anyone who lives on the thirty-sixth until they have proved themselves, and be careful of the highlord’s enforcers as well. Those men love an excuse to use their swords on the waterless. However, there are better things to be found on the thirty-sixth level, too. It all depends on whether you want to take the risk involved in finding them.”

I do
, Terelle thought.
I’ll risk anything.

It was true, Terelle decided as she looked around the main thoroughfare of the thirty-sixth. Bad and good, all mixed up. Freedom, of a kind. That was the good. But then there was the poverty. And the dirt. And the
smell
.

She had never been curious to visit Level Thirty-six, believing what she had been told: that this was the lowest level not only of the city, but of humanity; here were the dregs that had sunk down from the city above. Thieves, criminals, murderers, the waterless, the undeserving. They clung to the hem of the city’s robe like grime, impossible to brush off. They received no free water allotment, yet still they survived. They sucked up the city’s moisture and held on to life.

Terelle had heard tales—the young bloods who came to the snuggery were full of stories of how they’d survived a night of debauchery down in the dregs—but nothing had prepared her for the reality. The lack of order, the commotion, the stench, the untidy milling movement of it all. She had never seen so many people in such a small space, never heard so much noise, never been assaulted by so many different odours all at once.

Yet it was the absence of colours that she noticed first. The drabness. The dreary shades of brown seeping into everything. Skin, clothes, buildings—all coated with the misery of a hue that had no spirit, no animation. The shade of dust, of dead leaves, of detritus, of a life sucked dry of beauty. The colour of dirt.

On the other levels, each homeowner paid taxes and in return the streets were kept clean, the tunnels and cisterns were kept in good repair, and the nightsoil was collected each morning and carted outside the walls to be dried and processed into manure. On the thirty-sixth, none of that happened. Street urchins collected rubbish uplevel to bring downlevel, where it was sold and re-used, and there were piles of it everywhere. Privies stank. Rats scampered up and down walls and through lanes, heedless of the daylight or the throng of people.

Houses were made of ancient mud-brick or woven bab palm leaves; some were hardly more than lean-tos against the city wall. It would have taken no more than one carelessly discarded ember to set the whole place on fire. Worse, the poor could not afford the seaweed briquettes brought into the city by the packpede load. They used instead a volatile mixture of pede dung and dead palm fronds for fuel. She understood now the plumes of smoke she had seen from time to time curling from the foot of the city. Here, buildings often burned.

Everywhere she looked, there were people. Bare feet, ragged clothes, skeletal thinness, skin diseases. Sunlord save them, such
poverty
. Men and women and children even lived at the edge of the roadway, their pitiful heaps of belongings next to them. On a corner, for a price, a waterseller dispensed water from a transport jar. Not far away, a woman lounged against a wall, eyeing the men in the street. Terelle had never seen a street whore before, but she didn’t need to be told the woman’s trade. Snuggery women may have had a veneer of class, but the signals were still the same.

A group of children sat in the dust behind her, weaving mats from palm fronds; another two children pounded bab kernels in a single stone mortar, each with wooden pestles as large as themselves. They had built up a rhythm: whump-whump, whump-whump, like the beat of a drum. A man walked past, bent double under a load of palm fruit. Another two hefted a body wrapped in a tattered mat that wasn’t long enough to cover the skinny bare feet of the corpse. Several wailing women followed, with barefoot children trailing behind. Someone pushed past with a bucket of liquid that smelled like stale urine. Another man was hanging sinucca leaves to dry on a line. Terelle was familiar with those: the snuggery bought them to make the paste that the handmaidens used to prevent pregnancy.

A child with no hair came up to her and tugged at her robe, holding out a grimy hand in supplication. It was a gesture she remembered from her childhood—an action of her younger self? She rather thought so, but the memory was vague and shameful—and she almost responded by digging into her purse. Then instinct told her that it wouldn’t be wise to show she was willing to give up tokens to a beggar. She shook her head, her act of rejection bringing a lump to her throat.

As she turned away from the child, she saw that the whore on the corner was in luck: a young blood from the upper levels had come by, and he was leaning over her, staring down her blouse while he negotiated a price.

Terelle shuddered.
Oh, sweet water, is this how I will end up?

She blundered away, the street blurred by her tears, and she had to stand still for a moment to try to regain her composure. She was next to the waterseller now, and he was eyeing her with interest. “Water?” he asked.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak, wishing she could stop the tears before anyone saw. A woman came up to buy water. She was carrying a standard dayjar, designed to contain a full day’s water for an adult. To fill it would cost exactly one token. And yet as Terelle watched, she saw the woman hand over a full quarter as much again in payment. She blurted out, “How much is it?”

The waterseller replied as he poured, without looking up. “One and a quarter tokens for a dayjar. Regular price.”

Terelle was incredulous. “Regular price? Since when has a day’s worth been more than one token?”

This brought the full attention of both the seller and the buyer. The woman snorted. “Where you been all your life? On Level Two maybe? The poor pay more, don’t y’know that?”

“But—that’s illegal, isn’t it?”

This naive remark resulted in a loud guffaw from the seller. “Nothing’s illegal here, lass; you’re on the thirty-sixth!”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

He finished filling the jar, handed it to the woman and put away the money. “No uplevel reeves will sell water to the waterless,” he said as the woman left. “It’s against the law. Water is only sold to licensed sellers like me—at one token a dayjar—direct from the waterhall on the first level. But I have to rent a packpede to bring the water down thirty-six levels, once a day. And I got to live. So I sell it at one and a quarter. That’s business, lady. Here you got to have business, or you die. Course, if you piss for the watermaker, then you save a couple of tinny.”

When she looked blank, he said, “Collect your pee every day; take it to the watermaker outside the groves. He heats it on top o’ the smelters, it evaporates and he collects the water, which he sells. The rest becomes manure for the gardens. There ain’t nothin’ you can’t do here, if it keeps you watered. Uplevel law stopped the moment you took the last step down to the thirty-sixth.” He gave her a calculating look. “And what’s an upleveller like you doing mixing with the likes of us, anyway?”

But she had already turned away, her heart settling like a stone within her. She’d have to sell her
pee
to survive? If she had to pay a quarter as much again for water, her tokens were worth less than she had anticipated. She felt ill.

She walked on a little further and found a quiet spot against a blank wall. On one side, she was blocked from the bustle of the street by a pile of broken hampers of the kind used to carry bab fruits. On the other side, an oil seller sat cross-legged on a palm mat, his clay jars of bab oil heaped in front of him. He had his back to her, and his customers were few and far between, so she had a moment to adjust, unseen. She wanted to gather her wits; instead she found herself crying, tears sliding down her face, unstoppable. She was not sure what was causing her such grief. Unattractive self-pity? Empathy for the people here whose problems were even worse than her own? Guilt because she cared more about her own problems than theirs? Despair because she was not sure she was hard enough to survive outside the confines of the snuggery? Everything melted into a pointless welter of desperation and hopelessness. And that made her angry. She was better than that.

She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, willing herself to be inconspicuous while she strove to gain control. She would
not
be weak. Weakness was for people who gave up. Who settled for less.

I will never be like that!

What was it Amethyst had said?
It all depends on whether you want to take the risk.
Well, she would take the risk. She took a few deep breaths, slowed herself down. Calmed. Stopped the stupid tears.

And opened her eyes.

There was a man seated on the ground between her and the oil seller. He hadn’t been there before, surely, had he? Or maybe she had just not noticed him. He was staring at her. She stepped away from the wall and returned the stare, but her heart was thudding. Where had he come from?

He was elderly, wizened, small. By no means decrepit, though, or stupid. The eyes that gazed at her were deep blue-green and knowing; shrewd, assessing eyes. Quickly she brushed away the remaining tears.

Like the oil seller, he was seated cross-legged, but his seat was not a simple brown palm mat; it was a multi-coloured carpet. His clothes were woven from a type of thread she did not recognise, of varying colours: deep blues and greens, reds and yellows. They were strangely cut and appeared to have been wrapped around him, rather than sewn, so that he resembled an odd-shaped parcel out of which arms and legs emerged. Even his head was wrapped. The backs of his hands were painted or tattooed in intricate patterns that then snaked up his arms and disappeared under his wrappings.

At his side a dozen or so earthenware pots were lined up in a row. Each was as large as a pomegranate; each contained a spoon. If the stains around the pot lips were any indication, the contents of each were a different colour. In front of him sat a tray, perhaps twice the size of a normal serving tray, with a raised edge about three finger-widths high all the way around. It was two-thirds full of water.

Terelle’s stare turned to one of astonishment. She had never seen anyone do such a thing—spread water out under the sun so that it could evaporate. Scarpen jars were always as narrow-lipped as a potter could make them. And all water containers were kept covered.

She looked up from the tray to meet his eyes once more. With one hand he beckoned, and against her will she found herself taking one step forward, then another and another until she was standing in front of him. With a simple gesture of his hand he indicated that she should sit at his side, facing the tray.

When she hesitated, he made the gesture again. She sat, not quite knowing why, except that she was touched by an odd sense of excitement, of childlike wonder. She wanted to know what he was going to do.

He filled one of the spoons from its pot and gently sprinkled the contents onto the water in the tray. Indigo-coloured powder spilled on the surface. It did not sink, and he spread it evenly with a spatula. When all the water was covered with a film of indigo, he followed it with other colours: yellow, then red, brown, white, black. These he applied with more precision and deliberation and yet with a fluidity of gesture, as if he knew exactly where each colour should go and his certainty lent him confidence of movement. Occasionally he used a small pointed stick to mix a top layer of colour into a lower one; other sections he left undisturbed. Some parts of the water had only one layer of colour sitting atop the indigo. Terelle was spellbound, although she couldn’t have said why.