A Novel (11 page)

“Did his advance wages include this?” I asked, producing the sun-disk pendant.

Deveril peered at it and grinned. “Nah,” he said. “Had that when he first came. It was his mother's, he said. Only time I saw him really angry—and I mean serious, animal angry—was when one of the bigger kids took it from him. Boy went off like a cannon. They left him alone after that, I can tell you.”

“And that's all he said. ‘Friends in high places'?”

“Not a word more, like it was his little secret,” said Deveril. “Like he wanted me to know he was moving up, even if he couldn't say how. Ironical, really, ain't it?” he added.

“What is?”

“Well, he did go up in the world, didn't he?” said Deveril with a bleak smile. “Just came down again right quick.”

For a second I just looked at him, then managed to say, “You have his grandmother's name written down somewhere?”

“Written down?” he scoffed. “Nah. Writing is for the slow and clumsy. Me, I like to stay agile.”

“Meaning you can't read,” I said.

He grinned. “Writing makes people sloppy,” he said. “Me, I keep all I need up here.” He tapped the side of his jaunty top hat.

“Including the name of Berrit's grandmother?” I prompted.

“Minel,” he said proudly. “Minel Samar. Didn't think I'd know that, did ya?”

*   *   *

AS I MADE MY
way to the Drowning, I considered what I would say to Florihn and Rahvey. I could not take the child now. That was clear, blood oath or no blood oath. Things had changed in ways I could not have foreseen, and to take the baby would only put it in grave danger.

Surely they will see that?

I wasn't so sure, and the prospect of another confrontation with Florihn and the Lani world she stood for drained all conviction from me. But there was something else I had to do in the Drowning, and I would tackle that first.

Minel Samar was one of those Lani women who was probably only about sixty but looked at least a hundred. She was so hunched over that her toothless, wrinkled face was below her shoulders, but Deveril's assessment of her as a tough old bird was absolutely right. She looked like one of the ancient, scrawny chickens she was feeding with refuse as I arrived, bobbing around the fenceless yard, head twitching on her fleshless neck. I told her who I was and expressed my condolences for the loss of her grandson, but she kept on clucking at the chickens, scattering kernels of grain from the top of her viselike fist so that I began to wonder if she was deaf.

I tried to move into her field of vision, but she turned abruptly. I put a hand on her shoulder and she spun round, not with surprise, but with a baleful stare that made me take a step back, even though she was half my height.

“What?” she snapped. “You got money for me? Whatever Berrit earned is rightly mine now.”

“No,” I said, taken aback. My hand was in my pocket, fingers closed around the sun-disk pendant, but something stopped me from producing it. “I'm just trying to find out more about—”

“I've got nothing to say,” she spat. Her dialect was thick and old-fashioned even for the Drowning. “Useless boy. Always was. Even dead, he's nothing but trouble.”

“Trouble?” I said, doing my best to ignore the outrage I felt swelling inside me. “What kind of trouble?”

“People like you,” she said, prodding me hard in the chest with a bony finger. “Coming around here, asking questions. Not the first, you know. Bothering me.”

“Someone else came to talk to you about Berrit?” I asked. “Who?”

“The chalker with the watch,” she said. “Gave me a lousy penny.”

“For what?”

“Nothing. Didn't tell him anything, did I?”

“What was his name?”

“Never said. Fancy, though. Old feller. Suit. Gold watch. Came in a rickshaw till they ran out of road. Got his shoes all muddy coming down here, I can tell you.” She grinned malevolently, and I had to fight an impulse to get away from her. She was poisonous.

If her visitor had come by rickshaw, I might be able to find whoever brought him.

“What time did he come?” I asked.

“Time? What's it worth to you?”

I fiddled with my purse and produced a sixpence, watching as her eyes got greedy. I held it up, hand closed tight around it. “When?”

“Afternoon,” she said, giving it up as if it pained her to part with something she had not yet been paid for.

“When?” I pressed.

She shrugged. “An hour before sundown,” she said, palm out for the coin. I gave it to her, catching myself only when she had snatched it away.

“Yesterday?” I said.

“No,” she said, her wicked grin returning, her hand reaching out for more money.

I sighed. “What day, then?” I demanded, offering her a single penny.

“Days are bigger than hours,” the old woman returned. “You should pay more for them.”

I checked my purse reluctantly and produced another sixpence. “That's all I can spare,” I said.

She snatched it before I could change my mind.

“Plainsday,” she said, already returning to her chickens.

Plainsday?

But that was three days ago. The day
before
Berrit died.

I looked up thoughtfully, my eyes drifting over the tent peaks and tar-papered hut roofs, and I saw up on the rise toward the old monkey temple a young black man with a spear, wearing the plain robes of the Unassimilated Tribes. He was an unusual sight in the Drowning, and my eyes lingered on him.

“He's been around here too,” said Berrit's grandmother, spitting another racial slur. “Ought to be a law.”

*   *   *

ANGER AT BERRIT'S GRANDMOTHER
drove me through the shanty to Rahvey's hut. There was no sign of Sinchon, but then, there almost never was. I knocked once and stepped in, finding Florihn sitting by Rahvey's bedside, the infant slumbering on my sister's breast.

They were surprised to see me. I saw it in their faces. They had talked about me, how I would let them down, break my word, violate the heart of the Lani way. All my reasoned arguments fell away in the need to prove them wrong.

It was the wrong time. The worst time. But I would no longer be judged by these people. I would leave the Drowning with Rahvey's baby and figure out the rest later.

“Is she ready?” I asked.

The two women exchanged looks; then Florihn began fussing with towels and a basket.

“I'll bring her back when it's time for you to feed her,” I said to Rahvey. My face was set, but a part of me desperately wanted her to say she'd changed her mind, that she would keep the baby, raise it, love it.…

“If you don't, Anglet,” she said, “I shan't ask what happened.”

I stared at her, and I suppose something of my horror and revulsion showed in my face.

“What?” she said. “Florihn is right. Not everything in life is the way you'd like it to be. Sometimes it's best to accept that and move on.”

“Vestris went to Papa's grave,” I said. I wasn't sure why I said it except as a way of stabbing at Rahvey, and I immediately wished I hadn't.

“When?”

“Before I did,” I said. “She left flowers there.”

Rahvey's face closed up.

“It was probably before she got Florihn's message about the baby,” I said, trying to cover the cruelty of what I had done.

Rahvey nodded but said, “She still hasn't been, but then, it really was you two who were Papa's girls.”

I gazed at her, baffled and upset, then looked away. “I didn't mean to suggest she cared more about the grave than about visiting you,” I said.

“No?” she said. “Even if it's true?”

I couldn't answer that, so I looked back at her and responded to her previous remark instead. “Papa loved you, Rahvey. No less than he loved me or Vestris.”

She nodded a little too fast, smiling tightly and not meeting my gaze. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She passed me the baby, then turned away so I could not read her face as I settled the child into the basket of towels.

“What is her name?” I asked.

“What?”

“The baby. What do you call her?”

Rahvey shrugged. “We only thought about boys' names,” she said. “Call her whatever you like.”

I picked up the basket. As I did so, the baby stirred, jaws flexing and closing in a yawn. I gazed at her, then looked up, momentarily still.

I felt the eyes of the world as a presence like the rumble of the ocean or the still, insect-singing heat of the savannah. Outside, the Drowning and Bar-Selehm in general were crouched, waiting.

Fourth daughter. Doubly cursed. The child that should not be
.

I tried to carry the basket as if it were lighter than it was, as if it held nothing of value. I gave my sister one last look, but Rahvey had closed her eyes.

“Tell no one where she is,” I said.

I opened the door and stepped out into the world.

 

CHAPTER

10

THERE WERE A FEW
kids playing out back, and a woman who lived two streets over, a busybody who never actually did anything helpful. The woman rose from her darning as I emerged onto the buckled porch and fixed me with the expectant gaze of one who lives for other people's tragedies.

I felt every muscle tense and had to concentrate to keep my face neutral.

Don't look at the basket,
I told myself.
Just walk away.

So I walked carefully and briskly, face blank, eyes fixed directly ahead, turning toward the crowded industrial skyline. But the city now seemed as different as when I had first noticed that the Beacon was gone. The blown-glass delicacy of the baby changed everything. What had been familiar, even comforting, was now hard edged and dangerous, a walk down a cobbled street suddenly as precarious as scaling a two-hundred-footer. The streets I had known were crowded with skull-cracking brick corners, spear-point railings, and slicing shards of broken glass. The baby's defenseless softness cried out to me every time someone came close, every time the footing felt less than perfect.

I might fall. Not from the sky. Just walking on the uneven sets and cobbles, I might fall, and that would be enough. I braced my arms around the baby, trying to form a cage around its terrible fragility, and my stomach turned.

You can't do this.

At the corner of Old Threadneedle Street, I felt the child stir, and as I passed the entrance to the Northgate underground railway, a noisy belch of smoke burst from the grating in the pavement, and the child began to cry, softly at first, then with real distress. I poked and cooed, but it made no difference. Could she be hungry already? Surely not. We had only just left. I risked taking her out of the basket and holding her against me.

The infant opened its eyes and quieted, seeming to look at me, and when I held it against my chest, I could feel its tiny heart racing so that I felt thrilled, terrified, and so far out of my depth that I could barely see the shore. And then she was crying again, a high cycling wail that closed her eyes and made her face hot.

I'd had her less than an hour and was already failing her.

A white woman in an enormous crinoline-buoyed dress and a pink-bowed bonnet gave me a haughty look as she passed, and as I turned away, I found myself looking up at the implacable stone and high iron railings of the Pancaris Home for Orphaned Children by the canal. It was a hard building, blockish and unornamented save for the thorny rose etched into the stone above the door, which was the emblem of the order.

I knew little of northern religions beyond the fact that for most of them, life was a kind of test, something to be endured before being reunited with the spirit who made the world. They favored self-denial and service, which, for the Pancaris nuns, meant celibacy, teaching, and raising other people's children.

The baby was still crying. I thought of Rahvey saying she wouldn't ask what happened if I never took the child back to her. I wasn't going to abandon the baby, not yet, but I had to see. Perhaps it would be a place of light and happiness.…

I climbed the long, steep flight of stone stairs and entered. The building was cold and dark inside, its hallways narrow and echoing. There was no airy lobby, no bustle, no sound of voices to distract from the squawling infant in the basket.

“Can I help you?”

I turned to find an elderly white woman in a black gown and the hair-concealing headdress they called a wimple looking down on me from a high, backless stool at a desk. The stool was inexplicably mounted on a platform accessed by three wooden steps.

“I was just looking around,” I answered weakly.

“You were under the impression this was a zoo or a museum?” said the woman, peering at me over her reading glasses.

“No,” I said. “A friend of mine has had a baby. I don't think she will be able to keep it. I was wondering, if she were to bring it here, what the place would be like.”

“It would probably be better if your
friend
came for herself, wouldn't you say?” said the nun, eyeing my wailing basket. “Show me the child.”

I did as I was told, hesitant, but desperate for anything to stop the crying. The nun put the baby on one of the towels over her shoulder and patted her spine till she burped, spewing a dribble of milky vomit onto the cloth, then falling promptly, magically silent. The nun returned the infant to me in superior silence.

“Thank you,” I said. “Could I see where the children live? Where they sleep?”

“I fail to see how that is pertinent,” said the nun, “but, very well. Come this way.”

We descended a narrow staircase into a gaslit, windowless, and whitewashed corridor that smelled of antiseptic. The nun took a ring of keys from her rope belt and unlocked a heavy door, admitting us to a room—also windowless—containing six iron bedsteads, six chairs, six desks, and six small cabinets. There were three children inside. They looked to be about Berrit's age or younger, one black, two Lani, all girls. They were working at their desks, but got to their feet and turned to face the door, standing to something like attention.