Skillful Death (19 page)

“This is the best one yet,” Sasha’s father said. “Are you sure it’s big enough for my son? He grows wider by the day.”

Constantine had already started to figure out that Sasha’s father meant to take this suit from him, but this last question sealed his understanding. He flexed his fingers and willed his hand to stay in his lap. Grabbing for this suit would do no good. The man was easily stronger than him. Nor could he simply steal it from Sasha; he had no doubt that Sasha’s father could track him down and take back anything Constantine stole. What he immediately determined was that the only way he could keep a suit was to make the next one secretly. If they didn’t know about it, they wouldn’t know to take it from him. He wasn’t disappointed or deflated by this turn of events. He was glad. As he watched Sasha’s father fold the suit over his arm, he thought about all the mistakes he’d made when constructing it. He thought of all the things he would do differently on the next one, the one he’d be able to keep. His greedy mind turned to the best part of the snakeskin that he still possessed. He’d used it sparingly on the first suit.

“Four more,” Sasha’s dad said, holding up his fingers to Constantine as he exited the farrier’s room.

Constantine’s idea of budget had never been so taxed. When it came to food, he knew how to save enough for the evening so he wouldn’t have to hunt again until morning. When it came to fur, he used what he wanted, always knowing he could find more. But the snakeskin was of limited supply. His brain struggled to comprehend the remaining snakeskin divided amongst four suits. He stared at the folded skin and tried the puzzle it out.
 

Math was a series of shapes. Four meant a square, or two pairs of sticks. Five looked like a square where someone had pulled the top into a point on the roof. It was the number of fingers on his hand. It was a person with their limbs spread and the head sticking out the top. Six were the sides of a honeycomb. Seven and eight were fuzzy ideas. Now he had to turn this remaining snakeskin into two pairs of sticks, or a square, so he could fashion four more suits. His brain swam with the problem.

Once he spread the skin out on the floor, the solution became apparent. He could take the skin, fold it in half, and then in half again, and he would have four versions of his snake. With that picture locked in his head, he folded the snake into fourths, and then back flat again until he was convinced. Constantine smiled. The solution was only seconds old when the bottom of his logic fell out. He didn’t need four pieces of snake. If he wanted to make his own secret suit, he’d need five more pieces. Constantine clasped his hands to either side of his head, trying to rein in his panic. He set his jaw and decided to attack this new problem in a different way. He would take the best parts of the remaining skin and set those aside for his suit. Whatever was left, he would divide for the four suits to be delivered. With this issue solved, Constantine’s understanding of mathematics had begun.

D
OM
ATTEMPTED
TO
STAY
in his room built onto the back of Denpa’s house, even after Denpa’s son came to take over the property. Dom never met him. The man, old enough to be Dom’s father, didn’t address Dom or ask about his relationship with Denpa. One day, Dom returned home to find his blankets and meager possessions in a small pile on the street. Dom collected the artifacts and walked them across town to Pemba’s apartment. The landlady didn’t have any other rooms to rent, but she pointed Dom across the street to another house with an empty room. It took all of Dom’s money to secure two weeks of lodging and water.
 

Dom stopped looking for plumbing work, and went to work with Pemba in the mine. He enjoyed the hard labor, and dim light, and close walls, and regular pay. Pemba complained every second he was underground.

They dug under the direction of a foreman who received instructions from the surface. Up there, well-dressed men claimed to know which direction to dig to find deposits of metal. Dom wondered at this process as he dug. He tried to imagine their techniques. The machines around him held no mystery. When he saw a machine, he always understood how it worked just from inspection. In contrast, the process of guessing after veins of metal seemed like magic.

As the weather grew hotter, Dom spent much of his free time up at the lake, practicing his swimming. Each time, he would swim out to where the bottom dropped away and he would sink. He reached for the lake bottom with his feet and watched the world disappear into a circle of light. He was practicing for the dream, which he re-lived every night. The beginning of the dream was always the same. He walked across the water towards Tara. Then, regardless of how carefully he stepped, he plunged under the surface. But, as he got better at swimming, his dream-self got closer to reaching the surface before he woke.

Dom never tried to strike up a conversation with his co-workers. Underground, amidst the hammering, loading, and hauling, conversation was impossible. People pointed and grunted instruction, or sometimes sang monotone songs which you could barely hear beneath the constant rumble of work.

On the surface, during breaks or midday meals, the men shouted about their wives, or children, or girlfriends, or mistresses, if they were so lucky. Women were not allowed to work in the mines. Perhaps that’s why they were the frequent topic of conversation. Perhaps these men just used any excuse to talk about women. They shouted because after working in the mines, most of the men had significant hearing loss, and couldn’t read each other’s lips while they ate.

Dom sat on the outskirts of the group and ate a simple lunch he’d brought in a cloth sack. He ate pieces of dried meat and listened to a group of older men discuss their children. The tall man had always been strong, ever since he was a boy. He didn’t understand his son who couldn’t even carry two bags of rice to the larder in one trip. How could this boy be the product of himself and his sturdy wife? One man made a joke. “Perhaps your neighbor’s husband is weak in the arms, but gifted in the hips?” All the men laughed, and Dom smiled at the joke. When the men saw Dom smiling, they found an excuse to move their conversation across the lunch yard.

At the end of Dom’s lunch, he passed Pemba. The workers took their lunch in shifts, so the same platform could lift a group of men to lunch and take another group back down to the digging. Dom appreciated the shifts as an optimization of space and resources, but hated that it meant he and Pemba never got to socialize.

Dom wondered if Pemba felt the same way. Pemba had a large group of friends, and was always talking, or laughing, or telling an outrageous joke whenever Dom passed him on the way to the lift. Perhaps if they shared a lunch, Pemba would be ostracized like Dom. Because of that concern, Dom never attempted to change his shift, even when an opening appeared in Pemba’s group.

After work, Dom and Pemba walked back to their apartments together and talked about everything. Pemba told stories about the other miners, and Dom occasionally relayed some information he had overheard in the lunch yard. Whenever Dom had a story to tell, he never mentioned that it was something he’d overheard.
 

Sometimes Dom went back to Pemba’s room, and talked with his friend while Pemba changed and readied himself to go out. Pemba spent almost every evening either eating out, gambling, or shopping. Dom saved his money. His apartment cost more than Pemba’s and he didn’t earn as much at the mine. Each evening, Dom ate a simple supper after going up to the lake to practice his swimming.
 

When Pemba left to go spend money, and it was too dark or too cold to swim, and he’d eaten his simple dinner, Dom retired to his room. His muscles ached too much from the mine for him to find any solace in stretching. His mind raced too fast for him to enjoy meditation. Candles were too expensive to waste on reading. Dom sat on his bed and thought.

He spent hours dreaming up different childhoods and imagining himself in them to see if they fit. He combined stories he’d heard of children raised by dogs, or lost in caves, or hit on the head until their memory was erased, and tried them on to see if they resonated. He spent even more hours plotting how he would escape the little village and find a part of the world where he could feel at home.
 

The idea grew in his brain until it felt like something he could actually do. He could save up surplus money since he often had a little left over at the end of the week. He could stash some supplies, and then just leave. He set his goals and then fixed a date. He would leave on the last day of summer. By then, he would be able to swim across the river down in the valley if he couldn’t afford to charter a boat. By then, he would have enough money to purchase some extra food, pay to exit his apartment lease, and still have money left over for traveling. Dom made a special pouch for his savings, and sewed it into his bedding to keep it safe. That night, when he slept, he kicked his way almost back to the surface of the water, and his fingers touched the hem of Tara’s dress.

W
HEN
C
ONSTANTINE
MADE
HIS
other suits, he’d worked alone, shutting out the world and wasting away until the garment was finished. His body would shed ten pounds, only pulling nutrients from the edges of skin that he’d chew to soften the material. This time, he remained well-fed and sedentary. His body grew in all directions as he worked. A layer of fat padded his midsection. Creases of skin appeared at his ankles, and sides, and neck. Only his fingers remained lean and boney as they fiddled with the furs, melding them together.

Sasha’s father criticized his new shape. “Something about my house makes you boys go soft. When I brought you here, you were hard as a leather-covered stone. Now you look like a pastry puff. My Sasha looks tough compared to you.”

Constantine looked down at his own body and couldn’t tell much of a difference, but he felt his extra mass when he did his chores. Wheeling the big cart around was easy on his first day. Now he gasped for air by the time the cart was overturned at the mushroom patch. His old suit barely fit. It tugged at his shoulders, waist, and thighs.
 

Sasha’s father spread out the five new suits on the cedar chests and stood back to look at them. Each was beautiful in its own way. Each had a well-placed accent of snakeskin that caught the sun. Each was comprised of several different skins, yet each had a theme based on a predator of the forest: bear, fox, wolf, lion, and owl. The owl suit contained no feathers and yet still conjured the animal with its intricate pattern of grays.

“This is good work. My Sasha will be proud to present them at Moon Dance,” Sasha’s father said. Constantine didn’t care about what happened to these five suits. He only cared about the final suit he’d created. The secret, perfect suit, which he’d hidden in Baron’s stall and ordered the horse to guard was what he cared about.

“You’ll stay here with us, until the elephant appears, if you believe in that sort of thing,” Sasha’s father said.

Constantine didn’t think anything about the elephant one way or the other. Sasha had bragged about the elephant many times and how he would chase off the enormous creature when it came to menace his sister. Sasha could never describe the elephant in a way that made sense to Constantine. Sasha had seen pictures in the books they had at school, but he lacked the descriptive powers to convey the images to Constantine. He’d gesture with his hands, waving them in big circular motions at the ceiling while Constantine worked on the suits.
 

Constantine had grown to enjoy these one-sided discussions with Sasha. At some point, after Constantine had been working in the farrier’s room for a couple of weeks, Sasha either grew bored of bringing his friends over, or his father had prohibited it. Whichever the case, Constantine was pleased when the other boys stopped coming over. For one thing, he was forbidden to work on the suits when the other boys were around. They were not to know that he was the boy constructing them. He was supposed to merely be Sasha’s helper on the task as far as other boys were concerned. Also, they always expected Constantine to answer their questions, and Constantine never gathered the confidence to speak freely with those boys.