The Burning City (16 page)

Girls
. Suddenly they snagged at Whandall's eyes. The sight of a pretty girl held all of his attention. If he was talking to Lordkin or gathering from a kinless, a clout across the head might be his first return to sanity.

What had changed? Whandall's loins worried at him like a bad tooth.

Girls weren't eager to go with a scarred thirteen-year-old with no tattoo.

He'd avoided Wess while he was healing. He didn't want her to see him that way. Now Wess was avoiding
him
, and Vinspel wouldn't let a man near her anyway. The other boys found ribald amusement in the ring-shaped scar at his eye. Maybe it was even worse than he'd guessed.

Other boys talked about girls they'd had, and Whandall joined in, telling stories as Tras Preetror had taught him. You didn't doubt another boy's story. If he needed to prove himself a man, he might do it with a knife.

Whandall could do that. The first time a Bull Pizzle challenged him, Whandall had startled him and everyone else. The fight was over before it started, the Pizzle disarmed with a cut across the back of his hand. Whandall could have killed him easily, but that would start a blood feud. Instead he took his knife. The next day two more Bull Pizzles challenged him. They were both young, with knives but no face tattoos. In minutes Whandall had two more knives. Then Lord Pelzed and the Bull Pizzles met, and Whandall was told to stay out of Pizzle territory, and everyone left him alone.

His skill impressed his uncles but not the girls. What did impress them? No man knew.

Girls were never found alone. They were with older, tougher boys, or even men; a few had brothers who guarded them fiercely. Whandall spoke of trying his new skill with a knife. The next night he was summoned to speak with Resalet.

“So you're able to fight all of Bull Pizzle, and possibly Owl Beak as well,” Resalet said. “Alone, without help. It seems we taught you well.”

Whandall at thirteen thought he was immortal, but part of him knew better. There was a black pit in his stomach when he said, “Only kinless are abandoned by their kin.”

Resalet said, “Now think on this. You will fight for a woman. You will win, and her man, or his brothers, or
her
brothers, or all of those, will fight you. You are skilled, but you're small. Blood will flow. Someone will die. When you are killed, the Placehold will demand blood money from those who killed you.” He eyed Whandall carefully. “For fools we don't need
much
blood money.”

Whandall shuffled his feet, unable to reply.

“You're too young to fight for a woman,” Resalet told him.

“I feel like I could,” Whandall said.

Resalet grinned, showing wide gaps in his teeth. “Know what you mean. But the Placehold can't start a war over getting you a woman. Shall we buy you a woman for a night?”

Whandall understood that the word
buy
was an insult. Still, he considered the offer….

There were women who lived with their children but no men. Some were always popular. Others might have a suitor for a few days after Mother's Day; then they were around for a jewel or a shell or a skirt, or a shared meal and a place to sleep, or for nothing. What would any of them do for soap? But Tras's soap had near killed Whandall, and Tras was dead or gone, and what kind of woman would look at a strange, scarred boy this soon after Mother's Day?

“Not just yet,” he said, “but thanks.”

Resalet nodded sagely. “You'll be a good Lordkin, someday. But you're not one yet. Grow more before you take a tattoo.”

“You won't take my knife!”

“No. But carry it softly while you grow.”

Ask!
But who could he talk to? Boys his age were afraid of him, and older boys laughed because he knew so little. His mother had no time for him.

He used a shell Samorty had given him to buy a melon—fruit soft enough to eat without teeth—and brought it to Mother's Mother. Dargramnet hacked it with her sleeve knife and ate it noisily.

“Girls,” Whandall prompted, and waited.

The thin lips parted in a smile. “Yes, yes, I see them now. Not like they
were when I was a girl. Go with anyone now. They'll learn. Too late, they'll learn too late. I warned them, I warned them all. It's very hot today, isn't it?”

She didn't always hear or remember what Whandall said. Whandall wasn't sure she knew who he was. Still, the stretch of years within her mind must be worth exploring. What had the girl Dargramnet wanted in a man?

He asked, “What were the men like?”

Mother's Mother spoke of the men she'd known. Strif, Bloude, Gliraten—old lovers came and went in Dargramnet's mind as they must have in life, interchangeable inside broken stories, until Whandall couldn't tell one from another. Her second son Pothefit, strong enough to lift a wagon, stubborn as a Lord. Wanshig and Whandall, her first grandsons, Thomer's sons by Pothefit and Resalet, cousins who shared everything. “Most of them dead, now. Killed in knife fights. Burnings. Just gone.”

Whandall nodded. Many of the boys he'd grown up with were dead. They'd survived the forest, but not the city. Tep's Town killed boys. Did other cities? Did boys die so young in Lord's Town or in the Lordshills or Condigeo?

One could watch and try to learn.

Unattached women without kin to protect them were hard to find, and they wanted big men to be with… except on Mother's Day. The Lords didn't give their gifts to women who had men. Women went to Peacegiven Square alone, and one need only listen to learn who had a man waiting.

Most girls wanted to marry. Most men didn't, but they wanted their sisters married. One or two of Whandall's sisters' friends might be ready to marry, but that was too big a bite for Whandall at thirteen.

Not that he'd reasoned any of this out, exactly. But every Lordkin knew that there was a time when a man need not ask. Whandall remembered a high optimism, a firelight feast for eyes grown bored with daylight, frenzy and excitement, couples pairing off, when he was seven years old….

“Shig, when will the Burning come?”

Wanshig laughed. “You're a looker now?”

They were at dinner in the Placehold courtyard. The sky was red with sunset. Speech ran softly round the circle of adults and the smaller circle of children.

Wanshig was eighteen now. He'd watched Whandall practicing with his knife and twice had joined him on the roof, not ashamed to learn from his younger brother. Whandall liked him best of all his kin.

Now Wanshig set his spoon down and said, “Nobody knows. Long ago it was once a year. Now, every four or five. Even when Mother was a little girl, they couldn't tell anymore. Maybe gods sleep, like your Uncle Cartry
after a Lordsman whacked his head. Maybe Yangin-Atep isn't dead—he just never wakes up.”

“Did Yangin-Atep take you?”

Wanshig laughed again. “No! I was only… twelve, I think.”

“Someone
, then.”

“They say Yangin-Atep possessed Alferth and Tarnisos. You don't know them, Whandall. They're crazy enough without help. All I know is, we see fires south of us, smoke blowing our way. Resalet whoops and dives into Carraland's Fine Clothes, and we all follow. Carraland runs away shouting out looker gibberish—”

“What happened to Pothefit?”

That snapped Wanshig out of his wistful nostalgia. “Whandall, do you remember when they came in with the cook pot?”

“Yes, Shig.”

Pothefit and Resalet were shadows against the dancing blaze from the granary, carrying the cauldron through Placehold's main door while Wanshig and another brother pretended to help
.

“We gathered it out of a wizard's shop on Market Round. We piled stuff in the cook pot too, but we went back for more, and to burn the place. An Atlantis wizard, a stranger, he didn't know any better than to come back to his shop during the Burning. He found us. Pothefit was trying to set the shelves alight. The wizard waved his hand and said something, and Pothefit just fell over. Rest of us got away.”

Lord Samorty's courtyard… “I saw him. Morth of Atlantis.”

“Me too. That shop on Market Round, he built it again after the Burning.”

“No, Shig, Morth of Atlantis was too old for that. He was almost dead.”

“Right, and cook fires burn inside. Whandall, that is Morth of Atlantis, the shop on Market Round.”

“Where does he go at night?”

Wanshig cuffed him hard enough to make the point. “Don't even think it. Never remember a killing after the Burning.”

Whandall rubbed his ear. “Shig, you've killed.”

“Barbarians, lookers, kinless, uglies, anyone who's insulted you… you can kill. But that's only during the Burning, Whandall, and it's not a big part of it. It's only… it's bad to hold your anger locked in your belly for too long. You have to let it go.”

Something in the conversation had attracted Resalet's attention. “Whandall, how do you reckon we keep the Placehold when everybody wants it?”

“We watch. We can fight—”

“We can fight,” Resalet said. “But we couldn't fight everyone.”

“Serpent's Walk,” Whandall said.

Resalet nodded gravely. “But Serpent's Walk can't fight Bull Pizzle and Owl Beak and Maze Walkers all together. And what happens if Lord Pelzed wants to live
here?”

Whandall had never thought of
that
.

Resalet grinned, showing as many black spaces as teeth. “We're smarter than they are. We have rules,” he said. “And the first one is, don't start fights you can't win. Don't even start fights that will cost you strength. But once you do get in a fight, win it no matter what happens, no matter what it costs. Always win! Always win big. Make an example of your enemies, every time.”

“Lords do that too.” They'd done it to Whandall. “What if you can't win?”

Resalet's grin widened. “You never think about that once it's started.” He went back to his soup.

Whandall was about to say something, but Wanshig put his bowl aside and stood up. “Show you something.”

“What?”

“Come on.” Wanshig pulled a burning stick from the cook fire and ran, whirling it round his head.

He was through the courtyard's narrow entrance with Whandall just behind him. The flame gleamed pale in the dusk. Wanshig skidded around another corner, crossed the street diagonally, and…

Whandall, running behind him, saw Wanshig hurl the torch through the window of Goldsmith's wire jewelry shop. The owner was just about to pull the shutter down for the night. He screeched as the torch went past his ear—

And the flame snuffed out.

Wanshig kept running past the store, whooping. Whandall followed. In the shadow of an alley they stopped to breathe, then to laugh.

“See? If the Burning isn't on us, indoor fires just go out. Then maybe you get laughed at and maybe you get beat up, depending.
So don't be the one to start the Burning
. Let someone else do it.” Wanshig grinned. “You were about to get a beating,” he said.

“I just wanted to know—”

“You wanted to know what happens if so many come after us that we can't win,” Wanshig said. “Whandall, you know what would happen. We'd run away. But Resalet can't say that! Not even inside the Placehold. If the story got out that you could take the Placehold without killing every one of us, that any of us even thinks that way—we're gone.”

One day a fire began in the brush behind a kinless house just outside Serpent's Walk territory. All the kinless in that area turned out. They brought a big wagon pulled by the small kinless ponies. It had a tank on it, and kinless men dipped water from it and threw it on the fire until it was out.

Whandall watched from behind a flowering hedge. On the way home he gathered an apple to give Resalet.

“Why do they bother? The fire would go out. Wouldn't it?” Whandall asked.

Resalet was in a mellow mood. “Kinless don't believe in Yangin-Atep,” he said. “So Yangin-Atep doesn't always protect them. Against
us
, yes, unless there's a Burning. Sometimes against accidents. Not always, and the kinless don't wait to find out.”

“Those wagons—”

“They keep them in the stable area,” Resalet said.

“What if the fire is too far away?”

Resalet shrugged. “I've seen them turn out with buckets when there's water in the River of Spirits.”

The River of Spirits flowed out of the forest and down through Lordkin territory before it reached the kinless area. It stank. Whandall thought he'd rather see Placehold burn than have a fire put out with what was in that river.

There was much to learn about Yangin-Atep, and one could ask. Mother's Mother told him some. When she was a girl she had heard a tale that the kinless
had once been warriors with a god of their own, before Yangin-Atep and the Lords brought the Lordkin to Tep's Town. She couldn't remember who had told her the story, and she thought the days were hotter than they used to be.