Farlander (50 page)

‘We are in danger every moment we remain here, Nico. Now listen to me. As long as we are here you will do as I say, without argument or hesitation. If we fall into trouble, your only concern should be your own safety. If anything happens to me, get out.
Leave.
’

These words did nothing for Nico’s confidence. As they walked on, he could not help the occasional glance over his shoulder, until Ash told him to stop being so obvious. They grew wetter by the moment.

‘This rain stings my eyes,’ complained Nico, catching up with Ash again, after swerving out of the way of a passing cart. ‘And it tastes foul on the tongue.’

‘The sky itself here is polluted. It is all the coal they burn. When it is not raining foulness, the city is usually covered in a reeking fog. Baal’s Mist they call it, in memory of an old king famous for his flatulence. I have heard it said you get used to it, given time.’

Nico doubted that. For an hour he dogged the old man, taking in the strange city sights while trying, with increasing effort, to ignore the gnawing in his empty stomach, for they had missed breakfast.

At last they stopped at a hostalio, a squat building of tired grey brickwork, its windows dull with grime, the paintwork flaking from their rotten frames. The building sported an oversized sign some thirty feet above the street. It read ‘Hostalio el Paradisio’ in Trade, above a picture of a bed.

It would do, Ash declared. One such place was as bad as any other in this district.

Inside, they gave false names at the desk, as they stood dripping on to the tiled floor. The attendant barely looked up from his newspaper as Ash signed the register. He only interrupted his reading long enough to recite: ‘Rooms still available on the fourth floor. Try there. No visitors after nine. No food to be cooked in the room. Absolutely no fires, not even candles. Oh,’ he added, looking up at last, ‘and no disposing of waste from the window. There’s a privy hole on every floor for such purposes. This is a respectable establishment and we’d like to keep it that way, understand?’

‘Then I will show it the respect it deserves,’ remarked Ash, and squeezed his fist until water dripped on to the open register, staining the paper with spots of sooty grey. With a snap the attendant closed the book from further harm, and announced their transaction finished with a loud sniff. He returned to reading the newspaper, as Ash and Nico carried their bags up the stairs. All the same, the attendant watched them from the corners of his eyes.

Finding an empty room was a matter of finding a door, any door, with the key still protruding from the keyhole. They located one on the fourth floor as they had been told they would. Nico, being in front, took hold of the key and turned it. The key refused to move.

‘Move aside,’ instructed Ash.

The keyhole wasn’t fitted to the door itself. Rather, it was located in a stout metal box that in turn was fitted to the doorframe. Before the key would function, Ash had to deposit a coin into a slot in this box, an entire marvel of silver it turned out, since the smaller quarters merely popped out again from below.

With his ear, Nico tracked the heavy marvel rattling away inside it, the coin sounding as though it was tumbling downwards through the wall itself. Then something clicked inside the box, the key turned in Ash’s hand, and he plucked it out and shoved open the door.

The room was an irony of the word, having barely the space to lie down in. It contained two beds which folded down from the wall, one on top of the other. At present they were both folded away. Ash deposited another coin into another coinslot fitted against the hinging of one of the beds and swung it down. He sat heavily, leather pack in his lap. He sighed like the old man that he was.

Nico closed the door and crossed the few strides to the window opposite, where he set down his pack against the stained plaster beneath it. The room smelled of tarweed, old sweat, dampness, and was in bad need of an airing. He tried to open the shutters covering the tiny window, but they refused to budge.

‘Nico,’ interrupted Ash, gloomily handing him a quarter. Nico noticed the coinslot fixed to the window frame. Incredulous, he dropped the coin into it, heard an interior click as the coin tumbled away. Finally he pulled open the shutters, only to cast his eyes upon a brick wall, sooty and guano-stained, not more than seven feet away on the other side of an alley.

The windows opposite were mostly open, framing the backs of people resting in chairs, pale faces looking out, dim flashes of movement, an argument. The air pervading the alley was worse than the air inside the room. Sounds of the city tumbled in, and Nico leaned out to examine the alley far below, filled with rubbish and puddles of water; when he looked left he could see along a whole series of similar alleys leading all the way to the bay forming the First Harbour.

He again surveyed the windows opposite as his companion unpacked behind him. Through the window directly across, he could see an old man sitting on a stool, building something out of a heap of matchsticks.

Nico turned away from the view and leaned back against the sill. He noticed how the weak daylight only made the room’s disgrace more apparent.

‘When do we meet with Baracha and Aléas?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Ash, as he carefully lay his wrapped covestick and soap next to the washbasin. ‘Though first we must meet with the agent to make certain they have arrived safely.’

‘We could go now.’

‘No. Better to wait for dark.’

Wonderful
, thought Nico. He did not cherish the prospect of sitting in this room all afternoon with nothing to do.

‘You’ve been to Q’os before. May be you could show me some of the sights?’

‘Here,’ said Ash, handing him one of the tiny books he carried in his pack. ‘You can read this to fill your time. It is written in Trade. As for myself, I will take a nap.’

Nico looked at the book being offered to him, but did not reach for it. Poetry, he presumed. Ash was always reading the stuff.

‘I’d rather spend the day pulling out all my fingernails, to be honest.’

Ash shrugged a single eyebrow, set the book on the bed. He had displayed the same neutral reaction during the voyage, each time he had offered Nico something to read and Nico had declined. This time though, he added: ‘You cannot read, can you, boy?’

Nico straightened. ‘Of course I can read. I just choose not to.’

‘No. Perhaps you can read single words, but I do not believe you can read properly.’

Nico snatched the book from the bed. ‘You want me to read something? Here, it says . . .’ He squinted again at the words on the binding. ‘
The – Heron’s – Call,
’ he recited, and opened the book to look down at a page of fine black print. ‘
A coll – ection of mus – ings from – from . . .
’ the words began to swirl before his eyes, as they always did. He lost focus, blinked trying to regain it. But it was no good.

Disgusted, he tossed the book on to the bed.

‘It isn’t as though I’ve never tried,’ he said. ‘The words lose themselves in each other. They jump around, change when I’m looking at them. At least with plays I can follow what’s happening. But not books.’

‘I understand,’ said Ash. ‘I have the same problem.’

‘But you read all the time!’

‘I do now, yes. But as a boy I had difficulties, and it made me fearful of words. Some of us are born that way, Nico. It does not have to stop us from reading. It just makes it harder. You need to practise, and take it at your own pace. Come, sit with me and I will show you.’

Nico would have backed away if he could. Instead he felt the windowsill press against him. Ash sat on the bed, opened the book on his lap. He noticed Nico’s resistance.

‘Trust me, Nico. To be able to read is a worthy thing in this life.’

‘But all you have is poetry. Poetry bores me.’

‘Nonsense, poetry is what we live, what we breathe.’ The old far-lander opened the book at random. He studied one page for a moment, then licked his thumb and flicked to another. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘This is how we sometimes write poetry in Honshu. This is Issea, writing of sitting alone at night.’ Softly, he read:

He looked to Nico. ‘Do you sense it? The solitude?’

‘I think you’d better read it again. It’s so short I hadn’t realized it had begun.’ But even as Nico said the words he was drawn to sit beside Ash, and to look down at the printed words.

Ash lay the book on Nico’s lap. ‘Try reading something – at your own pace.’

Nico read each word carefully, mouthing their sounds as he did so. As soon as they began to change and shift, he forced himself to relax. He could read when he wanted to. It was the draining effort of the process that he hated, and the frustration at his own ineptitude. It was easier with these short poems, the language simple, bordered amply with white space. He flicked through the pages, choosing poems as they came to his eyes. He found himself reading one aloud:

‘You see?’ said Ash. ‘You read fine. It is hard, but not impossible.’

‘These poems – they either come to you in a flash, or they don’t at all.’

Ash nodded. ‘Here, you may keep this book. Consider it part of your education.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nico. ‘I have never owned a book before.’ He stared at it. Brushed the leather cover with his fingers.

Nico stood up, the book in his hand.

‘Now please,’ he said, ‘for the love of mercy, can we go out and do something?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was almost three in the afternoon, according to the clock mounted on the pinkish façade of the local Mannian temple. Nico and Ash ate at a side-street eatery, perched on tall stools by an opening in the wall where the customers’ orders were taken, and through which the sweaty cooks could be seen at work in the tiny, steamy kitchen. They ate in silence, working eagerly at noodles in a spicy sauce, as they watched people scuttle past through the drizzle falling from a low sky, water dripping constantly from the corners of the canvas awning extending above their heads. Ash remained alert despite his obvious weariness. Nico knew him well enough by now. He could tell that the old man was observing those around them from the periphery of his vision, no doubt looking for any sign that they were being watched. If he noticed anything, he did not share the fact.

The temple across the street attracted Nico’s attention. It was not just the people going in and out of it but the structure itself. It was unlike any temple he had ever seen before, being basically a stone spike that thrust up from the squat surroundings of the neighbourhood; a smaller version of the skysteeples found elsewhere in the city. He wondered again how steel and liquid stone could be impressed to stand in such a way, so tall and thin.

Quietly, he mused: ‘I sit here, eating soft noodles in Q’os itself, and I realize I know nothing of these people at all, save that as a Mercian they are my enemy, and therefore to be feared.’

Ash chewed slowly. Swallowed. ‘They are just ordinary people,’ he said, ‘save that their ways have become extreme, and likewise their hearts, so that they are ill in a way – ill of spirit.’ Ash slurped another strand of noodle into his mouth, as he glanced over his shoulder towards the temple. ‘If you knew their priests, you would fear them more.’

Nico wondered if that was true. The stories of human sacrifice by the priests of Mann and the lesser depravities of its followers – sitting here now on a street corner in the very heart of the Empire – began to seem like so much myth and nonsense. He was quiet for a time. Then once more, he found himself thinking out loud. ‘Perhaps we would have less to fight over,’ he ventured, ‘if we did not have all these differing faiths in the first place.’

‘Perhaps,’ replied Ash, licking his fingers clean. ‘But think further on that. Do you really suppose we would wage war on each other any less if we all shared the same faith, or even had none at all?’ Ash shook his head, a curiously sad gesture. ‘It is our way in this world, Nico, to pretend that our beliefs mean everything to us. But wars are seldom fought over beliefs. Wars are fought for land and spoils, for prestige, for foolishness. They are fought because one side wishes dominion over another. If there is a difference in faiths between opposing nations, all the better for concealing the very things they share in common. Only rarely does genuine belief come into it. The Mannians are no different, despite appearances. Dominion is their deepest creed. At heart, they desire to rule all things.’

Across the street, the temple clock chimed out the hour. A priest emerged on the tower’s high balcony and called out through his bullhorn to the people below as other similar calls sounded across the city. At his muffled words the strangest of sights confronted Nico. The entire population of the street ceased what they were doing and knelt on the ground as one, holding their faces and arms up towards the distant Temple of Whispers.

Nico felt his arm being tugged, and he was drawn down on to his own knees as Ash did the same. Looking around he could see he was not the only one to have been slow at genuflections to Mann, nor the only one who seemed unhappy about it.