Farlander (8 page)

Everywhere, colours shone sun-soaked in the heaving spaces. Nico swiped flies from his face, inhaled the damp reek of sweat, pungent spices, animal dung, perfumes, fruits. His stomach was on fire now. It was eating itself, and the rest of his emaciated body, with every step that he took. He felt dizzy, unreal. His eyes were interested only in the foodstuffs all around him, on the stalls already half empty of goods. Thoughts of snatching an apple, a stick of smoked crab, filled his mind. He fought against such thoughts, since he knew he did not have the strength to run if it came to a chase.

For a time, simply to distract himself from these rising temptations, he stopped in the lee of one stall to listen to some street traders singing out with gusto over the heads of the passers-by. Their melodies were pleasing to hear, even though they sang of nothing more profound than goods on offer and prices for the day. On a whim, Nico asked several of them for food in return for work. They shook their heads: no time for him. They were barely surviving themselves, their expressions said. One old woman, on a stall selling sheets of gala lace next to baskets of half-rotten potatoes, chuckled as though he had made some kind of joke . . . though she checked herself when she noticed his brittle gaze, his gaunt appearance.

‘Come back in a few days,’ she told him. ‘I’m not promising you anything, mind, but I might have some things needing done. Come and see me then, yes?’

He thanked her, though this was of little help to him. In a few days he might be too far gone.

Maybe, Nico reflected moodily, it was time to go home. What was left for him in the city now? The Red Guard wouldn’t have him; he’d tried more times than he could remember to enlist like his father before him, but he looked his youthful age and could not pass for being any older. And there was little casual work here in Bar-Khos. Over the past year he had been lucky if he had gained a few days’ labour here and there, mostly on the docks sweating under heavy loads for a pittance. In between, nothing but daily desperation. There were simply too many people available for too few jobs. Along with the worsening food crisis due to the siege, it was becoming ever more difficult to survive here.

The loose confederacy of islands known as Mercia was still free, certainly, but it was effectively besieged by Mannian sea blockades, in the same way that Bar-Khos was besieged by the Imperial Fourth Army. No safe passage existed anywhere in or out of the isles themselves. Since every nation of the Midèr
s had fallen save for the desert Caliphate in the east, all foreign waters were patrolled by imperial fleets. Only a single foreign trade route remained open to Mercia, and that was the Zanzahar run, as perilous a route for convoys as could be, hard fought over every day and with their shipping harried constantly by the enemy.

The blockades were slowly choking the life from the Free Ports and, as a consequence, many survived now on nothing more than the free keesh handed out by the city council, or what they grew on their rooftops or in small vegetable plots, or by resorting to crime and prostitution, or by masquerading as monks of the Dao, the only ones still legally allowed to beg in the streets. Or else they starved, like Nico.

At least back home he would have some food in his belly, a roof over his head. Besides, knowing his mother, by now she had likely thrown Los out of the cottage after finally opening her eyes to him; or, if not, then Los would have run out on her, no doubt taking everything valuable she owned, and either way some new man would now be occupying the place of his absent father.

Still, he loathed the thought of returning to his mother as a failure, having to admit he was unable to stand on his own two feet.

But you are a failure. You couldn’t even take care of Boon. You just let him die.

He wasn’t ready for that thought. He swallowed it down, blinking hard.

It was now almost noon, and the asago had begun to lift the canopies with its hot breath. It came always at that time of year, and especially at that hour. Soon enough the rising heat was driving many people into the cooler environment of the surrounding chee houses, where they might sit out the siesta in moderate peace and comfort, and compare business or play games of ylang while they sipped from tiny cups of thick chee. Nico barely noticed the heat, as he made the most of the dwindling crowds and struck out unimpeded for the south-west corner of the vast square where, like a great exhalation of relief, it opened out on to the wide expanse of the harbour.

It was there that Nico found the street performers set up for the day. They stood or sat in whatever spaces they had found between the steady flow of longshoremen that passed from harbour to bazaar. Many were packing up for the siesta, though the hardier – perhaps the more needy – were opting to stay on in spite of the heat. Nico scanned the jugglers and the tongue readers, and the begging monks seated before their bowls – fake monks, his mother had always claimed – until at last he came to a group of per formers barely visible for the surrounding crowd. He pushed closer for a better view of them.

They were a troupe of actors, two men and a woman he had never seen before. Without further thought, he squeezed through the crowd until he stood at the fore.

The play was a simple affair, the story of a poor seaweed farmer and his love for a beautiful witch of the sea. It was
The Tales of the Fish
, and narrated by the younger of the two men, himself no older than Nico, in that simple style of prose that was increasing in popularity these days over the long-winded sagas of old.

In a shaky, high-pitched voice the young man was recounting the story, while the woman and the older man played their parts in mime. It was obvious why they had attracted such a large audience. The woman, tall and lithe and wonderfully bronzed, played the sea-witch in appropriate costume, which meant she was naked, save for her straight golden hair and the strips of seaweed wrapped around a few select parts of her body. They were distracting, those delicate flashes of thigh and nipple, and kept snagging Nico’s eyes as he tried to focus on the performance itself.

Nico liked to watch performers wherever he could find them, and he judged this woman a fine actress, whose subtle skills contrasted noticeably with her partner’s lesser talents, which seemed few. The man was too pronounced and swaggering in his role, and few of the audience seemed to be paying him much heed. They were all ogling her flesh, like he was.

Nico was still gazing enraptured when a round of applause heralded the tragic end to the story – the seaweed farmer having swum to his death while pursuing his beloved out to sea. As the young narrator moved round the crowd with an empty hat, in search of donations, Nico found that his mouth was hanging open, and closed it with a snap. The actress meanwhile slipped a thin robe over her shoulders, and shucked the seaweed off from underneath it into a wooden pail. As she swept her hair back, she glanced around the crowd and caught his eye. Her gaze lingered.

A year ago Nico would have lowered his gaze straight to his feet in embarrassment. This past year, though, living in the city, he had gained more practice in meeting such glances, for he had received his fair share of them. He did not know why. Nico did not consider himself particularly handsome; even properly fed he had always been thin. And his face, whenever he had studied it in his mother’s tarnished vanity mirror, had always looked strange to him: his nose turned up slightly at the end, he had lips too wide and full, his skin was freckled like a girl’s, and, if he looked closely enough between his eyebrows, where once he had scratched at the childpox, he would see not one circular scar, but two.

In truth he did not understand why the actress’s long-lashed eyes stayed fixed on his for so long. At least he was able to meet her calm appraisal for a while, sufficient time at least to be counted in seconds, before her confident gaze wore down his own and, his courage breaking, he looked away.

‘You’re blushing,’ came a voice nearby.

It was Lena, standing right behind him in the crowd, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight. She looked pretty like that, without the usual frown cooling her Pathian features.

‘It’s hot,’ he told her, and Lena’s thin lips curled at the corners. With a tone of suspicion in his voice, he continued: ‘I didn’t notice you standing there.’

‘I was following you,’ she admitted, matter-of-factly. ‘To make sure . . . you know . . . that you were all right.’

He did not believe that. So far, Lena had not shown herself overly concerned with the welfare of others. He wondered what she was after.

‘Listen,’ she continued, ‘I’m sorry about your dog. Really. But we need to do something, Nico. We need to eat soon.’

He shrugged. ‘They won’t be handing out any more keesh until tomorrow. Anyway, I’m thinking it might be time for me to go home.’

‘You don’t really want to do that, do you?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Good, because I have a much better idea, if you’re interested. A way for us to make some money.’

Ah
, he thought.
Here it comes.

She was standing close enough for one breast to brush across his front. That shocked him, physically, even more so because he suspected it was no accident. Nico studied her from beneath the brim of his hat, wondering, not for the first time, what it might be like to kiss her.

‘Why do I have a feeling I won’t like this?’ he asked, his voice sounding coarse.

Lena swiped a lock of dark hair aside from her face, and spoke softly, intimately. ‘Because you won’t. But we don’t have many choices left to us, do we?’

*

The asago rasped across the rooftops of Bar-Khos, bearing with it the fine grains of the Alhazii desert six hundred laqs to the east. The dust stung Nico’s eyes and he squinted, grimacing, wanting to be down from here. He was not comfortable with heights.

Nico could clearly see the Shield from his rooftop vantage, and the Mount of Truth topped with its scalp of parkland, amid which rose the tall, many-windowed bulk of the Ministry of War. For a few welcome moments the breeze dropped, giving the sensation of an oven door closing. From the distance, he heard the regular percussion of cannon fire, followed by a scream, barely audible.

‘This is crazy. What if we get caught?’

‘Look,’ she snapped from behind him, ‘it’s either this or I go down to the docks and lift my skirt for whoever will pay me. You’d rather I did that instead?’

‘You don’t even own a skirt.’

‘Maybe after a few hand shanks I’d be able to afford one. You could become my pimp then. I’m starting to think you’d even like that – standing back, doing nothing.’

He sighed, and kept moving.

Nico had taken his shoes off, to carry in his hands, as suggested by Lena for better footing on the roof tiles. It worked, for sure, but the tiles were blisteringly hot against the bare soles of his feet. He was almost dancing across them. ‘My feet,’ he complained, ‘they’re burning.’

‘You want to fall and crack your skull?’

‘I want to get off this roof, Lena. That’s what I want.’

She didn’t respond.

They were working their way across the sloping roof of a taverna, three storeys above the streets of the city. The taverna encompassed two buildings, one taller than the other, and the remaining two storeys of the second rose up ahead, a wall of crumbling whitewash punctuated occasionally by narrow windows. Some of those were shuttered tight; others were open, flowing with curtains of fine gala lace.

Around Nico’s feet, lizards sprawled across the hot tiles, casting ancient, baleful stares as Lena took the lead, her own eyes quick and nervous. She peered through one of the open windows, ducked away at the sound of voices inside. Crouching, she padded up to another, checked inside and rejected it, padded on to yet another.

Nico hopped from one foot to the other, the pain too much to bear. He slipped his shoes back on, wondering what in Er
s he was doing here with this girl, wondering too if she had done this somewhere before. They were risking a public flogging if they were caught.