Beasts of Tabat (25 page)

What would they have thought of him, back home? He was a Shifter now, a real one. Had something happened in the city to provoke the change, or had it been inevitable? Lidiya had told his mother he would never change, but perhaps that had just been a guess, not certainty.

A thought struck him. He could go home. They’d want him there now.

Murga clapped him on the back. His eyes were amused. “I hear they’ve been giving you a hard time, but you proved yourself, boy.”

Teo ducked his head, feeling his cheeks heat up.

“I get good reports of you.”

Teo smiled. “Thank you,” he said, feeling a wash of camaraderie and pride. The circus wanted him. He could be a valuable addition to it. And if he stayed with it, and didn’t go out into the streets much, surely he would be fine. Then when they traveled up along the coast, he’d accompany them and see the world. Who knew what could happen?

* * *

He had hoped Bella would come to visit, that she’d take time to look after his welfare.

But somehow she never made it. A few times he slipped away to go to her house, but he never managed to encounter her there, though Abernia was always ready to give him chal and to hear his stories about circus life.

He wasn’t angry about it, though. Just a little sad.

He’d expected better of Bella Kanto.

***

Chapter Twenty-Three

Conversations

I say to Skye, “Do you know what city dancing is?”

She does. I can tell it by the way her breath catches and her eyes widen. She says, “But that is something you only teach the best students.”

“Are you objecting, then?” I ask, even though I know the answer. I love the way her cheeks flush when I tease her.

She shakes her head so quickly I think it might fly off. Fervent protests tumble from her lips, almost too quick to understand.

I hold out my hand. “Let us go then.”

City dancing. It is a sport I invented, first as a training exercise for myself. Later, it became the way I made love to the city. I know every stairway, every monument, every tree branch that might offer a grip, every railing that one might leap. I even know the rooftops, the slippery expanse of tiles and timbers. It is a dance you can engage in only when you know what you are doing. When you know not the map, but every inch it represents.

We begin at the top of the Tumbril Stair. She expects me to direct her, but instead I say, “The winner is whoever reaches the docks first.” I take a breath and begin.

The stairs are cluttered with people ascending and descending. I circumvent them by racing along the broad banister that skirts one side.

I don’t look back as my steps slide along the stone, but I am sure she is following. I take the lead, I know the territory, while at best, she knows the map. She doesn’t have a chance of winning. What I’m curious about is how well she runs this race.

Rather than turn where the stair does, leading along the face of the cliff that divides the first and second terraces, I dive forward and hear Skye’s gasp behind me. There is an ancient oak there that the stair loops around, and a broad branch that I’ve used to vault across to the other side of the stairs more than once. I do it now, and even as I let go I feel the thump of wood that means Skye is trusting my lead, rather than slowing herself by taking the longer, better known route.

I move without pausing to think, letting my body and instinct guide me. I hover for an instant in a handstand atop the railing, swinging forward to hit the ground and roll, making my landing part of the motion forward, never stopping, my pulse thundering in my ears, my breath even but strong, feeling alive in a way that I only feel in one other place: the arena.

Most students cannot keep up with me. Skye manages. I knew that she would. In fact as our chase continues, we begin to engage each other. I cartwheel off her shoulders; she uses my arm to swing herself up atop a wall. I have never done this in tandem, a partnership that makes this truly a dance rather than the contest it has always been.

And so we dance the city.

I show her a rooftop shortcut and she follows on my heels, feet sliding over tiles glassed with ice, avoiding the skylight set in the center as though plucking knowledge of its existence from my mind.

This must be fated. This must be something that the Gods have intended for me. Perhaps this is my reward for my service to the city, all these years of fighting for it. All these years of waiting. Everything else is dross beside this golden moment. I feel as though every time I breathe in, more joy enters my body, filling me up like a balloon until I could float and fly rather than run. If only this could last forever. Surely if the Gods will it, it will be so. Surely this is what they want for me.

* * *

I know the way home, lucky enough, for my steps are slow and clumsy. Drinking to this point’s become harder and harder over the years.

The house is dark, its occupants asleep, although Abernia has left a lantern set in the window. Another will be in the hall to light my way up. She knows my habits well.

A shape is huddled on the steps. As I near, it unfolds itself and stands.

Skye.

Of course. Who else could it be?

“I snuck away,” she says defiantly, chin raised. “I won’t go back till morning. I’ll slip into the morning run as it goes along the docks, and no one will know I wasn’t there at the start. You fight as Winter in two days. There’s a chance you’ll be hurt. Let me stay with you tonight.”

I open my mouth. She can take my bed: I will take the couch.

That will keep my promise to Lucya.

But Skye is in my arms, her mouth warm against my Winter-cold lips, making my blood surge, a pleasant ache growing, wanting.

And so I take her hand and lead her upstairs.

This night is mine. I will deal with all the trouble it brings in its wake in the morning.

* * *

Adelina once accused me of having fucked half of Tabat. It was unfair—as accusations usually are. Unfair but not totally unmerited. There are plenty of folk in Tabat who have never shared my bed, and yet are fully qualified to do so. They simply haven’t managed to catch my eye.

Perhaps it makes me sound like something I’m not, someone obsessed by sex. I don’t even know that it’s the sex I desire so much as their attention. In the arena you can drink it in like a sponge, feel it filling like new. So, too, when you lean over a lover and see them looking back up at you, their eyes only for you.

And now a new obsession, but one I’ve never experienced before, this worrying that if I look in her eyes I will not see her looking back at me. I worry that she will change her mind. I worry that she will grow tired of me. I worry that I will do something to put her off.

I hope she shares some of these worries, that they’re mirrored in her. But I fear that’s not how it is. I fear that love is never an even exchange, that it is always pursuer and pursued, always someone who loves the other more, always someone chained while the other is free to walk away.

But what would I do if Skye walked away? I’ve had lovers leave before, but usually when I’m ready for them to do so. Indeed, I have urged them away through prickly disagreements or picking fights over small things. It’s never been a matter of ego, and it’s not a matter of ego now. It’s a matter of something close to breathing, a feeling that without her all the world would be vapid and hollow and gray.

I do not know how I let her past my defenses, the ones that have kept everyone else away for so long.

I am heartless, some have accused, usually those who had hoped to give me theirs. But this is not true. I have simply kept it guarded. Perhaps I was waiting to find someone worthy of it. And even now, how do I know that Skye is the one that I’ve been waiting for?

But I do. I know that as surely as I know the blood that beats in my veins. She’s like a magnet, pulling my thoughts to her even when walls separate us. I go for a walk, thinking to city dance, thinking to run errands, thinking anything but to go to the school, and yet there I am again at the gate, pulling the wrought iron swords toward me in order to swing the gate open and go to her.

The other girls must know what is going on, but I have caught no sly glances, no secret whispers, at least so far. Can it be that Skye has kept quiet about it? It seems unlikely given the gossipy nature of the young, but then again, Skye is so different than any other girl or woman or man or boy that I have ever known.

And yet I could not tell you how.

* * *

Lucya says, “You drive me to some rash action.”

I fold my arms and square myself off with her. She looks as flushed and hot as though she had just come from tending a furnace, but I curb the unkind words that fit themselves on my tongue, ready to be spit out in anger. Instead, I swallow.

I tell her, “I am trying to accommodate myself to your dictates. But there are limits.”

“Accommodate, is that what you call it? It seems rather that circumvention is on your mind. And I warn you now, Bella Kanto, a second time. Be careful what you drive me to.”

I cannot help it. Fury sparks a rising ire that heats my words. “Be careful that you do not make threats that you cannot live up to. This school would not survive without me.”

“This school did well enough before you came along. It will be here long after you are gone.”

There is no point in going round and round about this. I leave with her still hissing words after me, not raising her voice lest students overhear.

* * *

This is all new to me. This bewildered sensation, this constant yearning. This feeling that my heart will tear itself out of my chest. I walk about dazed, wanting to see her, dreading seeing her.

At first it all seemed so certain. I knew that look in her eye the very first day I met her. Someone who had fallen in love with the idea of Bella Kanto, someone who knew all the legends as closely as though she’d studied them in school. Someone who didn’t see me at all, I thought.

And then, somehow, she did. She saw through to the heart of me and fell in love with that, not with the character from the penny-wides. Sure, she still thinks me a hero, perhaps. But she knows the cracks that run through me, the oddness and frailties, the insecurities.

She knows the reason I dread waking in springtime is because that was when my parents died, the first day of spring, a day I’d risen ready to enjoy until slow steps in the hallway came to tell me what had happened, which no one was entirely certain of, except for the fact that my parents were dead. That they were certain of.

I keep thinking she’ll change her mind. That she’ll think the difference between the hero in her head and the person before her too much, after all. For the first time I worry that I am not the true Bella Kanto.

***

Chapter Twenty-Four

More Circus for Teo

He almost stumbled into the man and woman as they were coming into the cook tent. They wore bright blue cloaks, the kind most of the performers here wore. As the woman turned away from him, he saw the embroidery on the back of her cloak, “The Amazing Rappinos.”

Where did he remember them from? Because he did, he was sure of that. He searched through his Circus memories, then further back, then further back still. Oh! He’d seen them the very first time he had entered Tabat, with the guard surrounding them, taking away something they had been carrying.

They looked little less for the wear—although by his calculation it was at least two white moons later—perhaps a little thin around the edges as though they had been living leaner than usual.

He wondered if, like so many others in the circus, they might actually be Beasts, just a type that could pass for Human when people didn’t look at them cautiously, or kind that he had never seen before. They seemed Human enough.

The man turned and caught him looking at them, but he didn’t seem to think it unusual, just beckoned Teo over. Up close, the pallor to his cheeks led Teo to think he had been somewhere where there hadn’t been much sun. The woman’s complexion mirrored it. The man said, “Boy, do you know where the tents for the performers are? We’re acrobats, but we’ve been delayed and are only now arriving.”

“I’ll take you there,” Teo offered. He was curious about the couple and hoped that perhaps he might find out more in their conversation as they walked along. To his pleasure and surprise, they confided much in him as they did so: Their names, and that they had in fact been in jail, although they did not say for what, and what the jail food had been like and what the jail beds and privies and fellow inhabitants had been like. Teo wanted to know more about why they had gone to jail, but he wasn’t sure how to bring it up politely. He wasn’t sure it would be polite at all to bring it up, particularly given how awkward it felt to ask.

But the man finally said, “I bet you’re wondering what we went in there for, aren’t you, boy?”

Teo sort of shrugged and nodded all at once, to convey his nonchalance yet evoke the answer, too.

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have some sympathy for the cause. We were distributing the story designed to wring the hearts of Humans, to twist their emotions into sympathy for the Beasts that they oppress.”

Teo attempted another shrug and nod, although he was not sure this one was quite as successful as the first.

“You’re just confusing him, Amos,” the woman said. She patted Teo’s head and said, “I’m sure you hear this talk a lot. Thank you for helping us find our tent. I’m touched that Murga had it ready and waiting for us.” She gave her husband a smile. “He seems the kind to look after his folks, haven’t I always said that?”

* * *

But Murga seemed less than pleased to see the acrobats. When Teo led them to his tent, the first thing Murga snapped was, “I told you not to come back here.”

“But we had nowhere else to go!”

“You were to go to another circus, begin feeling them out!” Murga’s eyes fixed on Teo, hovering by the tent flap. “Why are you loitering? Go find something useful to do.”

He did not see them again.

* * *

Each morning dray wagons brought the countless crates and baskets of food consumed each day by the circus’s inhabitants. They drew their water and watered the horses and other animals at the enormous fountain nearby, an ice-glazed war memorial to those fallen in the Shadow Wars, crowned with a Dragon and a woman grappling.

Teo stared at the stone woman’s face as he filled buckets to water the lions. It was resolute. She held the writhing lizard at arm’s length, despite the great gouges its claws sought to score in her flesh. She wore a crown of frost-white marble, and water sprayed out from it in a curtain that made it look as though the figures, seen through the curdling foam and mist, truly moved and struggled.

The fountain’s basin was a good ten yards across, and the circus workers continuously hauled water for the kitchen, for the animals, for the steam boilers that drove the shining machines, the tiny Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round and the whining, wheedling calliope.

Circus work was hard, but not so hard he couldn’t keep up with it. Some of it should have felt exotic, he thought, such as tending the striped zebras or the Mermaids, but it was much like mucking out a stable back home.

Horseshit was horseshit, no matter where you were.

He puffed with pride. Here he was, philosophizing as deeply as any roadside Scholar, and a good deal better, what’s more, than some of the political speeches he’d heard over and over again.

He’d seen Tiggy out there in the crowds of speakers in the last few days, although never at a time when he’d had the leisure to go and listen to her words. He liked the speakers who had more elaborate words anyhow. Like listening to poetry, all grand crashing sounds and syllables whose meanings could only be imagined.

If he listened for years, maybe he’d learn enough to follow it all, but even so he thought smugly, he was beginning to savvy enough politico-speak to nod sagely in the borders of conversations.

Most of the Circus cared only about the rights of Beasts, and it was this group that listened the most closely to Mrs. Tiggy. Others paid attention to issues involving property in the Southern Isles, letters of marque, and even how to keep the Shadow Wars from spilling any further on these shores.

Teo stayed on the edge of the endless discussions, knowing they would ignore him if he spoke, but enjoying the feeling of being part of the group. He fantasized conversations in which everyone would pause to listen to his discourse on some matter. Even Murga would look impressed.

But for now, standing beside the fountain, holding a red and white umbrella to protect himself from the morning rain, Murga looked unimpressed, giving him his next instructions: “Scrub the Oracular Turtle’s tank. Get Jonas to help you lift it into the canvas cradle. Then scrub it out with soap and water and rinse it well, very well, before you refill it with salt water from the wash wagon—I’ll send it down to fetch water while you’re scrubbing and it will be back well before you’re ready. Then you’ll need to ride with it to the river and help flush the salt water out.”

It would have been a more pleasant task without the layer of silty turtle feces that had settled at the bottom of the tank. He emptied it out into a bramble-choked ditch and sluiced water at the worst of it, shivering. There was no way to avoid getting wet, and the cold riding the wind took full advantage of his vulnerability. He knew this cloudy water somehow. He swished a hand through it, dream slow.

“I know the sound of the flute,” Jonas told the Turtle, squatting beside the canvas sling filled with water from the tank.

The Turtle said in reply, “I know the sound of the flute but not who plays it.”

Jonas nodded. “A lantern has no wick, no oil, but its flame burns.”

Concentric arcs spread out from where the Turtle nosed at the side of the sling. “A lily floats on the water and does not touch its mud.”

“Jonas, I could use some help,” Teo said.

He swished the brown sponge through the bucket of strong-scented, soapy water, the smell burning at his nostrils. He wiped along the seams of the tank, streaking the sponge with darker matter, slime or mold, he wasn’t sure which, but its sweet-rot smell battled with the harsher ammonia scent.

Jonas said, “It’s not that a single flower opens, but that dozens open on the hillside.”

“Yes,” the Turtle said.

Teo tried a teasing tone. “And flowers will open in the tank, growing there if we don’t clean it.”

The other two just stared at him in silence. Feeble sunlight battled the icy chill in the air, ineffectual as a sick kitten. The water had been hot when he first started, but now it was cold, and his hands burned when they hit the air.

“A moon bird thinks of nothing but the moon,” the Turtle said, its voice haughty.

“Listen,” Teo said, but Jonas interrupted him and spoke over what he was about to say as though he had never dreamed of saying it. “When the next rain comes, that is all the rain bird will think of.”

Teo wondered if maybe the two were just messing with his head. He looked at Jonas, whose face was innocent. On his shoulder the white mouse stared intently at Teo, as though he had never seen the likes of the boy.

The Turtle’s stare was harder to interpret. Its face was a snake’s, a parrot’s, a lunatic calf’s grin. He wondered, not for the first time, at a world where the only creatures that could glimpse the future were pigs and turtles. It said to him, urgently, “Who is it we spend our whole life loving?”

“I don’t know,” he said angrily, and kicked at the side of the canvas tank, although he was careful not to touch the Turtle. “Murga told us to work, Jonas.”

Jonas grunted and took up another sponge. They washed at the great six-sided metal and glass tank, which lay tipped on its side. From inside it, Teo looked out at the world of the circus, distorted and green-cast, smeared with lichen that Jonas had carelessly left in the wake of his sponge. Raindrops dappled the outside glass.

The mouse squeaked as water dripped on it from above, and Teo pointed to the side of the tank. “You need to redo that spot. And there. And there.”

He would have expected Jonas to grumble. It was what he would have done himself if he had been in the other man’s place.

But the janitor just kept on working. The white mouse ran inside his shirt pocket, sheltering from any further drops of soapy water.

As they tipped the Turtle back into the cleaned, rinsed, and refilled tank, it repeated to him in a gravelly voice: “Who is it that we love? We love those that are like ourselves. Who does Murga love?”

Before he could think of an answer, he glimpsed someone near Murga’s tent. The Mage from the docks! Come looking for him? He should have remembered that here on the grounds of the College of Mages, he might meet the man. He hurried away from the turtle’s tank to the depths of the area that held the cages, far away from Murga’s tent, and cleaned the monkey cages, picking away sticky lumps of dried fruit and shit as he kept a wary eye out.

He gave squirrel monkeys bits of apple. Rain beaded the soft grey fur of their arms. They smelled musty and sweet, picking the fruit from his palms with tickling fingers.

The question returned to him.

Who did he love? His parents would say they loved him, and his sister, and the Moons that ruled them all.

Did he love the Moons? He didn’t think he did, but he also wasn’t sure what they were. The Merchants, Abernia had explained to him, did not worship the Moons but rather worshiped a thousand Gods handling different aspects of trades and transactions. The degree of influence each and their intricate families held over one’s life indicated the best path in life to take. The Moon Temples said something similar, but both faiths were careful to say that they were not predicting the future. No Human could predict the future, and even the oracular animals were uncertain and vague.…

He continued about his duties. He gave the Fairies honeycomb and fed oranges to the baby elephant. She crushed each one between her back teeth, juice dribbling along her thick hide.

Who did he love?

Bella Kanto, even though she had deserted him.

* * *

That night he dreamed of the acrobats. He climbed up and up the pole, and when he got to the top, he jumped off and only then realized he had no net or line to catch him.

He fell, but then he was back inside the Turtle tank, but it had been turned over entirely, its bottom now the roof over his head, so although he pushed at the cloudy glass of the sides, inexplicably sticky with dregs, he could not budge it, could not tip it over and free himself.

From inside its depths, he stared outward. He was knee deep in warm, salty water, and orange and crimson jellyfish floated through it, translucent and fine as lace. The sister Mermaids were there, they beckoned to him, they twined around his knees. The Turtle was there, and it said to him,
How lucky you are, how marvelously lucky you are!

He said it, and the words flew out from his lips in bubbles because the water had risen to fill the tank, his eyes, his ears, his mouth. While he wasn’t looking, the words flew out like winged bubbles, rising upward to be caught against the floor of the tank. He said,
What do you mean?

The Turtle said,
You’re going to hear more of the story. Are you going to listen? Are you going to know whose story it is?

Outside, the people were passing, dressed in summer colors like fabulous birds and butterflies. There was a woman with a thousand tiny braids, and each one was a different color. Even though glass separated them, he knew she smelled of rosemary and wine. Fish swam through the water around him and blocked his sight of the crowds, more and more silvery-sided fish, like cleavers swimming in a curtain of flat metallic sparkles. All he could see now were the fish. Each presented him with a single eye, round as a black marble, expressionless, hundreds of them regarding him in a curtain of appraising eyes.

It was the voice he’d dreamed of before.

One day I found a different kind of mushroom.

It was a shelf fungus whose beige gills were mottled with rune-like markings. I reached out and broke it from its hold on the stone wall and turned it open. Each fold was a page, a page with a story, stories that went on and on and on. I could feel them seeping into my fingers, working their lithe way, swimming along the muscles up my arms, my shoulders, climbing the stair/ladder of my neck, and finally lodging in my brain, story after story, of Beasts and blunders and blood.

The mushroom whispered. It told Teo stories he didn’t want to know, stories of his mother meeting men in the woods, of Canumbra’s secret desires, of a corpse washed ashore under the docks. He tried to turn away, to close his ears, but he couldn’t.

I knew the peddler would pay well for it, and so I tucked it apart from the other mushrooms that I showed my father. I did not know if he noticed anything in my manner. Perhaps he was already suspicious and watching, watching for the act that would confirm his beliefs and lead him to ready a spell.