A Novel (3 page)

A vulture had settled in the alley and was watching us, waiting. I shouted at it, and it flapped a few paces away, bobbing its bald head.

“Pictures,” I blurted out.

“What?” said the policeman again.

“Photographs,” I said, eyes down, abashed. “You've started taking pictures at crime scenes. I saw them in the paper.”

“So?”

“They haven't taken any,” I said, risking a look into his face.

“Crime scenes,” he echoed, as if I were unusually stupid. “This was an accident.”

“But…” I hesitated.

“But what?”

I took a breath. “The body. There's a knife wound on the back.”

“Expert, are you?” said the policeman, giving me a sour look this time. “Steeplejack
and
detective, eh? Impressive. I thought girls like you had other ways of making your money.” He smirked, then gazed off down the street again. His eyes were straying to where the Beacon should have been, but wasn't. For all his casualness, he looked troubled.

And that, I thought, was that. There would be no investigation, no real questions asked, not for a Lani street brat, particularly on a day when the city's most recognizable landmark had vanished. I put my hand in my pocket and was surprised to find the copper pendant on its leather thong. I took it out. It was a small thing, and for all the care of the workmanship, it was close to worthless.

The thought sent a shard of pain through my chest, and I had to pause and breathe again before squeezing my eyes—

and the dam

—shut, and I pocketed it once more.

Tanish was waiting for me, sitting in the shade, his knees drawn up tight to his skinny chest. He got to his feet as he saw me push through the huddle of gawkers craning for a glimpse of blood. I elbowed aside a man in fancy shoes and a linen suit, who turned abruptly and walked away. Even in my haste to get to Tanish, I noted the speed with which the man left, the focus, the economy of motion, and found myself wondering how long he had been watching and why.

I didn't have the heart to tell Tanish to go home. Sarn had come, he said. Tanish had given him our tools. He would come back soon with Morlak. I didn't want to be around then, so I set off for my sister's house, Tanish trailing silently at my heels like a lost dog.

Everyone was rattled by the absence of the Beacon. You could see them gazing at the spire on top of the Trade Exchange, and there was a more than usually frantic crowd at the newspaper stand on Winckley Street. I scanned the headlines, which brayed the obvious: that the Beacon was gone. Beyond that, the papers knew nothing, and the report was more hysteria than news.

“You gonna buy that?” demanded the street vendor, a black girl with her hair pulled back so tight that her forehead looked strained.

“With what?” I asked with a hollow smile. The girl glared unsympathetically, and I let go of the paper, backing away from the throng and moving around the corner and into Vine Street.

“My mother taught me to read,” said Tanish. It was just something to say, I think, but once he got it out, it sounded forlorn.

“My sister taught me,” I answered, trying to sound cheerful. “Not Rahvey. Vestris.”

“How come I've never seen her?”

“She's too fancy for the likes of you,” I said, unable to suppress a genuine smile now.

“Fancy?”

“Glamorous,” I said. “Rich.”

“I'd like to see her one day,” said Tanish. He had heard me talk of Vestris before and had caught a little of my reverence for her. “What does she do?”

“Do?”

“For, you know, a job?” he asked. “I mean, why is she so rich if she grew up like you?”

“Oh, she's just sort of special,” I said airily. “She's not rich because of where she works.”

“Why, then?”

I laughed, waving the question away. “She's just different from the rest of us,” I concluded.

“Special,” he said, uncertain.

“Exactly.”

And I felt what I always felt when I thought of Vestris: a kind of vague privilege that I knew her. It was like sitting in a shaft of sunlight on a cool day, a private warming glow that made me the envy of everyone around me.

“One time when we were little,” I said, “the mine where Papa worked had been closed, and he had no work, which meant we had no money. Vestris brought food home every night. Rahvey asked her how she was paying for it, and you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘I just ask nicely. I explain that my sisters are hungry, and people give me food.'”

“So she was begging.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn't like that. She's just the kind of person people want to please. I can't explain it.”

Tanish looked at me for more, but I said nothing.

The city was walled, and though urban sprawl had long since outgrown the old fortifications, the walls still marked the limits of Bar-Selehm proper and they were routinely patrolled. It was clear as we approached the West Gate, however, that something different was going on this morning. One of the ancient iron-bound doors had actually been closed—the first time since the city had quarantined itself during a cattle death outbreak three years ago—and people were being funneled through a gamut of dragoons. The soldiers wore their scarlet jackets and feathered helmets in spite of the mounting heat, and they carried rifles with sword bayonets. Two were mounted on striped orleks—local, zebralike horses—which stamped and tossed their heads restlessly. The troops on the ground were white, but there were members of one of the black regiments up on the walls.

This too was about the Beacon. Not Berrit.

The soldiers checked papers, but the only people they detained were those carrying bags, baskets, or crates. Me and Tanish they practically ignored, though I flinched away when one of the orleks stooped toward me, its nostrils flaring. I'm a city girl, and am not good around large animals. Once through the checkpoint, I increased my pace till Tanish was almost running to keep up.

The residential streets of the Drowning had no official names and did not appear on any map, rather coming and going from season to season as the river dwindled and flooded, shifting its course and turning what had been a bustling tent city to marshland. There were no sewer lines but the river in the Drowning. The street corners sprouted ragged produce stands, huddles of itinerant laborers hoping to be hired for a few hours, and makeshift barbecues fashioned from scrap metal and fueled by homemade charcoal. This was where I had grown up. The hut in which I was born had long since turned to firewood, and no one could remember exactly where it had stood, but this was, I supposed, home.

Once
.
When Papa was still alive.

The Drowning smelled different from the industrial heart of the city where I lived now, a sour smell of bodies and animals and rotting vegetables. I preferred the bitter tang of the chimneys, even if it left me hacking till my throat burned, and coated my face and arms with soot. The Drowning stank of poverty, ignorance, and despair.

I hated it.

The Lani aren't indigenous to the region. We were brought here almost three hundred years ago from lands to the east by the whites from the north. My ancestors came as indentured servants, manual laborers and field hands, living separate from both the indigenous Mahweni and the whites. They were never slaves and believed they had settled in Feldesland by choice, keeping to themselves as the northerners conquered, bought, and absorbed more and more of the land from the native blacks. The Lani were neither military nor political, and reasoned that as long as they were left to their own devices, they were better staying out of the disputes and skirmishes during the white settlement of the region. By the time they looked up from their cooking fires to find that they had turned into a squalid and itinerant people living peasant lives, it was too late.

Most of Morlak's gang came from here or somewhere similarly ragged and decaying. Some of them, like Tanish, still thought of this place as home, and his mood brightened as we reached the first outlying huts and tents.

“I see Mrs. Emtiga's ass got out again,” he said, amused. “That thing needs an armed guard and a castle wall.”

I laughed, then risked a question. “Berrit was a Drowning boy too, right? You must have been almost the same age.”

A Drowning boy.
That's what they called them, proudly and with no sense of the bitter irony.

Tanish didn't look at me. “I didn't remember him till we spoke a few days ago,” he said. “But, yes. I think we played together when we were little. Then he went to the Westside gang and I stayed here till…”

Till Tanish's mother died.

“Why did he leave Westside?” I went on quickly.

“Got traded,” said Tanish. “Part of a deal involving the Dock Street warehouse and some building supplies.”

So Morlak bought him. That wasn't supposed to happen, but it did.

“How did he feel about that?” I asked.

Tanish shrugged. “Didn't seem to care,” he said. “Said he was going to be something big in the Seventh Street gang.”

“He'd been a steeplejack for the Westside boys?”

“Nah,” said Tanish. “He said he'd been a pickpocket, but I think he was really a bootblack. Might have done a bit of thieving on the side, but that wasn't how he earned his keep. He'd never been up a chimney, inside or out. He pretended not to be, but I think he was scared of heights.”

“So why did he think he was going to be big in the gang?”

“Optimist,” said Tanish bleakly. “Always going on about what he was going to do when his ship came in.”

I nodded thoughtfully, and as Tanish's face tightened with the memory, I decided to switch direction. “What about you?” I asked, ruffling his hair affectionately. “What will you do when your ship comes in?”

“Ships don't come in for the likes of us,” he said.

“Sure they do,” I tried, not believing it.

“Then they'll be rusted-up pieces of
kanti,
” he said.

I laughed. “Full of rats,” I agreed.

“And holes,” he added. “And sharks would swim in through the holes and live in the hold, ready to bite your legs off as soon as you went aboard.” He grinned at the idea, and that, for the moment, was as good as things were going to get.

Inside the tent city, a gaggle of local women and their kids had already gathered outside the hut. There was a sense of drama brewing in the air, and they paused in their chatter as we approached, nodding at me with caution and watchfulness. Sinchon's look as I opened the hut's juddering door was, however, loaded with accusation.

No surprise there.

Sinchon shared his wife's disdain for his antisocial sister-in-law. He was a hoglike man who scratched a living panning for luxorite in the river above the Drowning. He had found a couple of grains five years ago, but nothing since, and lived mainly off the scraps of minerals he turned up from time to time. The kids laughed at him because everyone knew there was no luxorite being found anymore, but he still thought I was beneath him.

“Where have you been?” he shot, pausing in the whittling of a stick. “The baby is almost here.”

“I'm here now,” I said.

“Your sister needed you earlier.”

“I was working,” I replied, avoiding his eyes.

And Rahvey hasn't needed me a day in her life,
I added to myself.

“Who's that?” he asked, gazing past me to where Tanish was loitering on the steps.

“Someone I work with. Used to live here. He'll help you get some water.”

There was a snatch of conversation from the room beyond the thin lattice door, a woman's voice. Sinchon looked at the door but did not move. Lani men didn't go into the delivery room until it was over.

“Hope to the gods it's not a girl,” he said as I crossed the room.

I said nothing, but I felt the chill grip of the idea inside my chest. Rahvey had had a son who she lost to the damp lung when he was two. She had three girls already. She would not be allowed a fourth.

They dressed it up in other words, but the bald truth was that Lani girls were not considered worth raising. They were married off—expensively—as soon as possible, but the problem wasn't really about cost. Lani culture was made by men. They were the leaders, the lawmakers, the property holders. Women raised the children, cooked, cleaned, and did as they were told. If they worked outside the home, they were paid less than men for the same job by their Lani bosses, and working for anyone else meant turning your back on your people. Though Morlak and most of his gang were Lani, the mere fact of working in the city proper meant that to most of the people I had grown up with, I had abandoned them. At their best, girls were pretty things used to ally families. At their worst, an annoyance.

Poverty and ignorance have a way of clinging to bad ideas. The worst among what were sanctimoniously clustered as “the Lani way” was the rule that said that no family could have more than three daughters. The first daughter, it was said, was a blessing. The second, a trial. The third, a curse. As a third daughter myself, I felt the full weight of that last piece of wisdom, which was why I spent as little time among “my people” as possible. Rahvey had three girls already. If she gave birth to another, the child would be sent to an orphanage. In the old days, if no suitable mother could be found, more drastic steps would be taken—a grim little secret the appalled white settlers had made illegal. Such practices had, supposedly, ended, but there were accidents during the birthing of unwanted daughters, which people did not scrutinize too closely.

“Is it true, what they are saying?” Sinchon asked, his hand on the door handle.

“About what?” I replied, thinking of Berrit.

“The Beacon,” said Sinchon. His usually impassive face looked uncertain, hunted. “We can't see it. They are saying someone stole it.”