The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (22 page)

At some point, Tully had cut his forearm. He sucked deep red blood from the wound.

“Sorry,” he said, insincerely addressing the sack, “for the hard knocks.”

Muted protests.

Tully looked over and down. Already Kirk Gate Alley was miniscule, the people there no bigger than those damned cobali that were so fucking hard to trap. Well, not today. No frustrated efforts today.

He could not see the shed where the kholic and child had been. Maybe on the way back, he told himself, if the girl was still there—

Nowy Solum was a mess of chimneys and roofs, extending as far as the low clouds would allow Tully to see. He discerned South Gate, and the smudge of the Crane, as it left the city. He saw big houses on the hill, barely visible, and the markets at Hangman’s Alley.

Turning, he noticed the approaching light coming at him from above before he heard the sound, the growing roar. With his mouth hanging open, he watched two shapes come down from the clouds, white and travelling fast, their arms swept back, their wings blurred. He caught a glimpse of long, taciturn faces, the dull gleam of light off smooth flanks. Wide, knowing eyes that seemed to look right at him.

Then the goddesses were gone, leaving spiralling contrails, and a clap of thunder.

The bag thrummed and thumped against his back.

Tully went down on his knees.

Gods had returned!

He stayed in that position, kneeling for a long while, as people in the city below exclaimed faintly and shouted and eventually subsided to a state of less audible shock.

Gods had returned to Nowy Solum.

But as Tully stared at his own knuckles, and the sac writhed between his knees, and he wondered what to do next, he thought: gods have returned and vanished again and I’m still hungry.

Short, sharp jabs of Tully’s elbow stopped the activity in the bag.

He got to his feet, grumbling. “Come on. A fucking miracle.”

The city and the clouds appeared, once again, as they always did from up here. There was no reason Tully should not continue with his plan. Had he really seen the gods—goddesses, more likely? Had he seen them? They had not lingered or even slowed. Now Tully chuckled. There would be turmoil in the streets this evening. Maybe rubes, ripe for the picking. Nutters would come out.

From the temple roof, the remainder of the ascent was vertical, heading past—sometimes through—the makeshift hanging homes and hammocks of the people who lived on the lower reaches of the tower. He saw the heads of a few citizens now, gawping from their abodes. Above them, the tower continued through a zone where no structures were permitted, toward the dungeon where the castellan had sought refuge many years past. Distant windows were visible, almost obscured by the mist. Low clouds blew past.

“Friend,” Tully said to the sack, which was moving again, “you’ve made this day one to remember. An omen, I would say.” He laughed again. “Fucking gods have come back. Did you hear them?”

Then he reached up and took hold of a plank, anchored in place, to be used by tower residents as a first step.

“End of the world,” he bellowed, grinning up at them all. At the sound of Tully’s deep voice, and the sight of his burgeoning ascent, faces vanished back into their homes. Latches clicked. Belongings were pulled up on ropes. Most of the people living here were familiar with Tully and his heavy hands and feet. He had climbed past numerous times, up and down through their precarious homes. Sometimes he paid them visits.

“You pieces of shit,” he called, though people were no longer visible. “End of the world! Stay in your fucking shitholes ’cause I’m comin’ up. Make way, make way!”

Scraps piled to overflow in a basket so heavy that several times, on her return trip to the fecund’s cell, Octavia needed to rest, using her knee as a prop while her arms throbbed and spasms twisted her lower back. Warm liquid dripped onto her calf, though from the basket or from her earlier encounter with the chatelaine she could not be certain. Looking down, she saw the globe of her white knee, appearing as she imagined the moon might appear, based on stories she’d heard as a child about this orb lost in the skies.

Directly after fucking, almost asleep on the opulent bed, Octavia had been told about the second visit. The chatelaine, whispering in her ear, ran her finger over Octavia’s belly, and down, between her legs. The news caused Octavia to sit up.

Another visit
?

Thinking about possibilities for this encounter, Octavia tried to regulate her breathing, tried to remain calm; not much got her rattled.

Scrawny Cyrus, fellow kholic, rat catcher who worked the kitchens, had given her four dead rats in exchange for a glimpse of her thigh.

“Let’s have a little look, girlie, let’s have a little look?”

Cyrus did not live in the dorms of Jesthe, like she did; he shuffled to and from the ostracon every day with others who tended the sewers, chamberpot chutes, vermin, and general garbage disposal for the palace. The old kholic’s tag was pale, with poor definition, similar to her own. A man of Cyrus’s age had been alive during times when being melancholic meant beatings, even death for many.

But the old man grinned his toothless grin and shook with obvious desire (the way a good deal of men did, and a fair amount of women—kholic or otherwise—when they stood this close to Octavia). Licking his finger, he dragged it along her skin.

Then he laid the rodents lovingly atop the heaped refuse, holding each by the tail, as if this act were a form of physical contact between himself and Octavia. His breathing was audible all the while. He stood so close, trying with his milky eyes to look inside her shift or otherwise get near enough to feel her body’s warmth against his own frame . . .

Octavia hoisted the basket again and continued moving down the hall.

These rats, it seemed, were already beginning to decay, skin pulled back from yellow teeth, hair missing in clumps. The corpses and the refuse they lay on emitted a stench rich and stupefying and wholly nostalgic.

She stopped to catch her breath once more only when she realized that she was very near to the fecund’s cell.

That squeal again, the monster’s high-pitched giggle.

Illuminated by the torch she had earlier jammed into the sconce by the cell door and left burning there, she looked down at the contents of the basket: the four rats; potato peelings; egg shells; numerous bones (with as much gristle and fat attached as possible); rancid offal; four unwashed sanitary towels (from hemo girls who shared the room with her, and who were having their bizarre red flow); three pairs of breeches stolen from the adjacent room, where male staff slept, and which were obviously impregnated with their dried and crusty seed (spilled, no doubt, each night, while imagining her own body, pinned, sweaty beneath their thrusts).

Octavia forced her way through the opening.

Directly on the other side of the portcullis, the slitted nostrils, so close, turned her way and began to work. The fecund was very visible this time, sitting up in her pond, near to the bars. For a second, it seemed that the monster did not recognize Octavia, but suddenly she clapped her huge, scaly hands together.

“So quick,” said the fecund. “Nice work. I
do
like you, my melancholy friend! Much better than that other silly old cow. I was thinking, you know, I feel I’m emerging from a dense fog. Why was I so attached to that old woman? Though, at first, I must admit, when you were right outside, I
swore
it was her approaching. Very strange: you smell almost exactly like her. Come closer, kholic, as close as you can, right up to the bars. I won’t bite.”

But Octavia stood her ground. “You look different.”

“Nonsense. I have indigestion. Pregnancies are like that. Reflux, I suppose. I’m only in the first few hours but my hearts have a horrible burning sensation. You know? Or maybe I’m just hungry. Show me that fabulous basket. Do I see rats? My favourite! Lay ’em on me!”

Octavia leaned forward and tossed the rats by the tails, one at a time, through the bars of the portcullis, pulling swiftly back each time though the fecund did not try to strike, not once, or even move toward her. The fecund gobbled the rats whole. Octavia threw the handfuls of kitchen scraps, the bloodcloths and breeches, faster and faster, until the basket was emptied and mercifully light, and she just stood there panting. Her fingers bled from the sharp edges of the rattan and dripped with slimy waste. All the garbage had either been caught in the air by the snapping mouth or had been scooped out of the swamp before it had much of a chance to get wet.

Octavia licked her fingers clean.

Insects in the cell hummed and buzzed and gyrated; she brushed aside the ones that came at her through the bars.

Chewing the last scraps, the fecund watched Octavia. The monster’s sharp teeth had made quick work of the meal. She swallowed, burped. “You’re a cool customer, girl. I’ve been doing a little research on you.”

“Research?”

The fecund showed her teeth. “You’re very fascinating. Would you like to hear what I have to say? No? I can see you don’t want to talk. Very well.

“While I digest, and gestate the little gift I’ve been forced to gestate, how about I tell you a story? Would you like that? To pass the time.”

Octavia nodded, leaning against the damp wood of the door, the empty basket hanging from one hand.

“Well. All right, then, all right. Hold onto your knickers, this one’s going to be creepy.”

She nodded again.

“Long before people like you were tested for melancholy and whatever else officers of the palatinate look for, I think kids with black in their veins were just squashed at birth. Maybe a magistrate stuck a pitchfork in you. I don’t recall. Brutal times, I suppose, but simpler in a way.”

Octavia had been thinking the very same thing.

“Personally,” continued the monster, “I’ve never wanted to be worshipped like a god. That’s too obvious. Though I could have been, of course. I’m a creator, but a humble one.”

“This is not really a story,” said Octavia.

The fecund held up one long finger, for patience. “Naturally, I watched the pantheon descend, as did we all, burning through the sky as they came, thinking at first that they might be huge rocks thrown down to pierce the atmosphere, and that they would burn up upon entry, like other rocks do. I was just a young fecund back then, maybe a bit naïve. I watched the gods swoop down and land in forests and deserts and oceans.

“In those days, I should add, I could come and go as I pleased. There were not many humans around, certainly no city for you to live in. And, of course, you had not yet been chosen, so you were as mortal as you are today. The main difference—” she spat out a rat’s skull, intact, which fell into the water with a plop “—is that you didn’t know what you were missing. Following? Yes? Or am I boring you?”

“I’m following.”

“Expansive territories I had painstakingly established—and which should still be mine today—were visible from the blue heaven you used to call the sky and from which your gods had recently tumbled. Poor girl, I can see by your reaction that you’ve never laid eyes on this celestial field, have you? Cerulean blue on clear days, the colour of wistfulness, of self-assurance. Ah, most likely my romantic soul recalls the skies as more beautiful than they really were.

“Some days, I’m sure, were pretty crappy.

“One thing for certain: the structure known as Jesthe existed, way back then, but as a small, almost quaint dwelling. A cute little cottage compared to the present monstrosity that towers over our heads.

“Living inside this version of Jesthe was a couple with red blood in their veins. One of each gender. A brother and sister.”

The fecund laughed to see Octavia’s reaction.

“I’m kidding. They weren’t siblings. What kind of story do you think this is? How dull would it be to hear about the exploits of
siblings
? Are they attracted to each other? Will they sleep together? What’s their special bond? Who cares! These people were fine sovereigns of their land and of their people. Proud specimens. Your friend, you know, the chatelaine, is a descendant of this couple. That’s right, girl, the drunken sadsack you call your boss.” Another white rat skull, clacking hollowly against the stones. “Anyhow, the young couple—and Jesthe, of course—eventually became
very
well known to me.

“The first castellan and chatelaine. Carolus and Anna. They had recently been wed. Anna was brought in from a neighbouring family, a miniscule village that today has been subsumed and forgotten. She was almost as crazy as Carolus.”

“You never said he was crazy. You said he was proud.”

“Well, he was crazy. Did I tell you Anna was twelve years old?”

“No.”

“Why do people like that end up together? Have you ever wondered? I’ve seen it happen again and again. A strange phenomenon. Lunacy attracting lunacy. Then, of course, they encourage each other, I suppose, validate each other.

“But I digress.

“Carolus and Anna had three children, two boys and a girl.