A Novel (14 page)

Vestris held her sister's hand and whispered into her ear, so that for a moment Rahvey seemed to bask in the radiance of her attention. Then the elder was straightening up, a motion I recognized for its deliberation and finality. Rahvey tried to keep the conversation going, but Vestris was politely firm. She had to go.

I hovered, desperate to drag Vestris's gaze away from the buzzing watchers. I shifted on the balls of my feet as if poised to step over the gap between two high ledges, and I felt the thrill of childish delight as my sister's eyes found me. She approached and, without a word, enfolded me in a formal but tender embrace. I held on to her, swallowing back childish tears of joy and relief.

Vestris will make it all right—Morlak, the baby, even Berrit. Somehow.

Over her shoulder I saw Rahvey watching, jealous.

“How are you, Ang?” said Vestris. “It has been too long.”

I found myself tongue-tied and acutely aware of the crowd looking enviously on. “I'm well, thank you, Vestris,” I said. “Though not, perhaps, so well as you.” I grinned.

Ang and Vestris together again.

“Little Anglet,” said Vestris, smiling. “You always had such spirit under all that shyness.”

“You came to Papa's grave,” I said.

“How do you know that?”

“Tsuli flowers,” I said. “Who else could afford them?”

She smiled once more. It was a complicated smile: knowing, amused, sad, but still strangely radiant. I felt it again, that sense of sitting in a shaft of sunlight. If she were not my sister, I would have fallen in love with her. Anyone would.

“Where is Rahvey's baby?” she asked.

“Here,” I added, the words low and rushed, feeling the weight of the sleeping baby in the satchel. “I have a lot to tell you, much of it bad. I'm in danger and…” I risked a look at Rahvey, who shook her fierce head once. “I need to talk to you in private,” I concluded.

“I can't, Ang,” she said. “Not tonight.”

“When?” I pressed. “I really want to see you again soon.”

And that was the truth of it. Whether Vestris could actually help, I had no idea. I just wanted to be with her again, like we used to be.

Vestris considered me seriously, then reached into her sari and drew out a silk purse with a silver clasp and a single pearl of luxorite that shone like a gas lamp as she unveiled it. The stone was shaded with smoked glass to soften its brilliance but still cast hard shadows for several feet all around, and in its light, my already beautiful sister became ethereal, angelic.

She handed me an embossed card with gold trim. “You can send me word at this address,” she said. “You can still write, I hope?”

She beamed at me, and I nodded enthusiastically.

“Don't come,” she said. “They won't let you in. But write to me and we will arrange a meeting. Till then—” She took my hand and emptied the contents of the purse—three silver coins—into it, smiling again softly.

“Thank you,” I said, not looking at the money. “There's food—”

Vestris's smile shaded a little, became kindly but also sad. “I cannot stay, little Anglet,” she said. “This is not my world. But write to me.”

“I will,” I said. “I can walk with you now for a moment—”

But she shook her head. “Remember, little sister,” she said, “that I love you.” She leaned forward and kissed me softly on the cheek, bringing with the motion a delicate aroma of violets and sandalwood—and then the unearthly light was gone with the empty purse and she was making her way back to the sedan chair and whatever version of the world awaited her elsewhere.

I gazed after her wordlessly, unable to think, almost overwhelmed by the impulse to run crying after her, to beg that she take me with her.…

The crowd parted silently before her once more, as if she were a benevolent queen visiting her subjects, and some of them peered at me, the nondescript girl who had been so unexpectedly touched by her beneficence.

I pressed her card to my chest.

She had said I could write to her. We would meet. We would talk. Everything would be all right.

I watched her leave as the various well-wishers paid their respects to Berrit's grandmother, though the old woman was probably wishing they were paying her with something more tangible. When it was my turn I pressed one of Vestris's silver coins into the old woman's hand as if I were my sister, elegant and wealthy.

She didn't thank me, but as I was turning away, she plucked me by the sleeve and pulled me back. “Let me see that!” she said. She stabbed with her bony index finger and I winced, expecting it to find my midriff, but it connected instead with the folded newspaper that was sticking out of my satchel.

Baffled, I pulled the paper out and she ripped it from my hands, holding it so close to her face that it almost touched her nose.

“That's him,” she said matter-of-factly, thrusting the paper back at me. “That's the chalker who came looking for Berrit. The one with the fancy shoes.”

I looked at the image in the paper. It was the photograph accompanying the obituary for Ansveld, the luxorite dealer. I stared at it.

So there is a connection.

“Ang, sister mine,” said Rahvey. A summons.

Berrit's grandmother was already beetling away toward the barbecue fires. I turned to my sister.

Rahvey waited for me to approach, her lips thin as she gazed out to where the pyre blazed and the sun set. “What did she give you?” Rahvey demanded.

“Who?”

“Vestris, of course!” she snapped. “What did she give you?”

I showed her the remaining coins that I still had tight in my fist.

She snatched my wrist and helped herself to one of the silver crowns. I tried to wrench away, but she dug in with her nails and hissed, “Call it back payment for services rendered.”

I snatched my hand away, my fist tight around what was left of Vestris's gift, then pocketed it. I drew the sleeping child carefully from my satchel and handed it to her. Rahvey swept it hastily under her mourning black and moved it to her breast with a cautious glance around, as if she didn't want people to see. That bothered me.

“What did the elders say?” I asked.

“We have not spoken to the elders,” said Rahvey, eyes on the flames still.

“What?” I demanded, incredulity raising my voice so that Rahvey gave me a sharp look. “Why not?”

“Florihn said it was best we didn't,” said Rahvey.

“This isn't Florihn's decision!”

“You are right. It's mine.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Nothing,” said Rahvey, looking away again. “It is already done.”

I stared at her, aghast.

“You will raise the child yourself, or you will take it to the nuns at Pancaris,” she said flatly. “I will help feed her when I can,” she continued, as if she were being more gracious than I deserved.

“It's
your
child!” I shot back.

“Not anymore,” she said. “You took the oath. Sinchon says you are to do your sisterly duty.”

I looked over to where Sinchon was talking to one of his tinker friends. He was holding a chicken leg in his hand, and as I watched, he laughed suddenly, then took a bite.

Rahvey read the anger in my eyes.

“So delicate, sister mine,” she said. “So unready for the world.”

*   *   *

RAHVEY, AS IF TO
make a point, refused to take the baby with her. I looked for Tanish, but he had slipped away before the funeral ended. I did not know when I would see him again. The thought pained me.

One by one, people drifted away, and the sun vanished beneath the silhouettes of distant towers and chimneys that were the city proper, until the only light remaining in the old temple came from the embers of the two fires. A few days ago I would have been able to see the Beacon like a star riding low over the city.

Strange.

If the government couldn't recover it they would probably put a gas lamp in its place, which wouldn't be the same at all. Without the Beacon, I felt more than usually lost, stuck in this remnant of my past like a character in a discarded book, unable to move any further through the story. I wandered around the temple, cradling the baby, and found a newly carved statue of Cenu, the Lani goddess of prosperity. It had been cut from soft wood and had yet to be painted, but I knew exactly what it would look like when it was done because I had been looking at this image all my life: it would be brightly colored, an overflowing basket of yellow wheat on one arm, an infant in the other, and the woman herself—ample breasted and broad hipped—would have her head tipped slightly to one side, beaming stupidly at the world. The expression gave her the look of someone who had been smoking servitt through a water pipe, but she hadn't been, because only the men of the village did that. She was drunk on her own beauty, on her usefulness to her family, on the Lani way.

I felt the rising red tide I had managed to suppress as it burst the hinges of one of the doors in my heart. All the injustice and frustration I had been wrestling with streamed out like a jet of molten steel. I seized a rock and smashed it into the statue's saintly face over and over till its features splintered into nothing.

 

CHAPTER

13

THE CHICKEN WAS CHARRED
on the outside but sweet and tender within. I had eaten nothing so good since Willinghouse's goat curry, and I devoured it hungrily, the pleasurable relief of it momentarily quelling all my other frustrations and anxieties. I was still in the temple grounds, sitting close to the barbecue hearth, watching the dwindling flames as they shifted from orange and yellow to blue and green. I had moved away from the defaced statue of Cenu, feeling so stupid and ashamed that I left a few coins at its feet: more than enough to repay the carver for the work he would have to do over. Vestris's coin I kept like a talisman.

Down by the river a male hippo bellowed in the dark, and the females of the pod answered in turn. They wouldn't come up into the temple grounds, but I would need to be careful when I returned to the Drowning in case they had left the water to browse. Their teeth were a foot and a half long and the power of their jaws could break a crocodile in half.… I touched the sleeping child and it stirred, animal-like, without waking, so that I smiled. I had spent so much time wondering about the baby's fragility that I had not allowed myself to register how beautiful she was, how much a thoughtless part of me was glad to be close to her.

Was this how Papa had looked at me, with the same wondering joy? Or had he seen in me the death of his wife? If ever the latter, he got past it or concealed it utterly, and I was grateful for that. Deliberate or otherwise, it was an act of love. I wondered if Berrit had experienced anything similar, or if his hawkish, grasping grandmother had set the tone for the whole family.

I could make no sense of Berrit's death. Why had Ansveld been to see the boy? If the luxorite dealer had wanted to steal the Beacon, it made a kind of sense that he would contract with steeplejacks, but Berrit just didn't have the skills. The boy could have been part of a team, but if so, why was he the only one to die, and who had killed him? Ansveld was unlikely to have been the one hanging from a brace on the chimney ledge, assuming he had still been alive at that point.

It had to involve Morlak. He would have been the go-between, the agent and manager, though I felt sure I would have heard if the gang leader had ever been seen with a gentleman as elevated as Ansveld. They could have met secretly, of course, but Ansveld had taken a rickshaw into the Drowning: not the action of a man who was trying to be inconspicuous.

Something wasn't right.

I wished I could sit down with Willinghouse and talk it through, but as soon as I thought of it, the memory of the pale man with the scar and the fierce green eyes unsettled me. I was no Vestris, shaking the shanty's mud from her immaculate sandals as she made her escape—confident, exquisite, free of the place where she had grown up. She probably spent her life at balls and soirees, exchanging easy banter with the likes of Willinghouse, meeting those piercing eyes of his and holding them, confident, like an equal.…

I would write to her in the morning. She would know what to do. Maybe I could learn something from her about how to deal with men like Willinghouse.

Meaning how to impress them?
said an insidious voice in my head.

No. That was stupid.

I thrust a branch into the heart of the fire. The remaining wood flared and spat sparks into the night. In the flickering light, something in the underbrush to my left shifted.

I froze.

Hyena,
I thought, getting quickly to my feet and edging even closer to the remains of the fire and the satchel where the baby slept. Once when I was a child and the summer had been particularly dry, a rogue hyena entered a hut on the edge of the Drowning where a mother and her three children slept—

The snap of a twig, and my memories were blown away like smoke.

I stared into the shadows where I had glimpsed the movement. There was a roughly plastered shrine, crumbling with age and overgrown with vines, little more than an altar within a miniature apse, wreathed by day in the smoke of a dozen incense sticks. The more I looked, the more sure I was that there was something beside it. Something that had not been there before.

It moved fractionally again, though the trees behind it stayed quite still and I could feel no breeze. Whatever it was, it was alive and watching. I could feel its eyes upon me.

But the darkness was the wrong shape for a hyena.

The figure rose from its crouch and stepped forward, slowly, letting what was left of the firelight fall upon him.

It was the Mahweni boy with the spear I had spotted when I went to see Berrit's grandmother.