The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (32 page)

“Who dares claim this woman?” snarled Wu, her bamboo cane restored to her.

“Um, me,” said Flybait. He had been carried from his “family home” to Next One’s “family home” on the shoulders of a troop of monks led by Leaftooth, who for luck bore the bewildered Innocence in his arms. This really meant they had gone out the kitchen door, made a perambulation around the temple, and returned through the main door.

“Have you any riches?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Then you must fight for her.”

“You know, this is really supposed to be symbolic . . .”

“Fight!” Wu cracked her cane upon the stone floor. The monks lowered Flybait, who, from Gaunt’s vantage behind a huge statue of a drunken sage, wore a betrayed look.

She knew how he felt.

“Hold steady,” Next One complained. “I can’t see.”

Gaunt huffed and tried to better balance the girl on her shoulders. “‘Some minor duties,’” Gaunt muttered.

“I have no weapon!” Flybait was yelling.

“That is not the concern of the bridal guardian!” Wu swung the cane in front of Flybait’s nose.

“You are just using this occasion to get back at me.”

“The bridal guardian has no idea what you are talking about. Fight!” Wu chased Flybait around the foyer to the hoots of the monks, whacks resounding through the temple.

“Perhaps you should stop this?” Gaunt said, back aching.

“This is fun,” Next One said, peeking through the red scarf over her head. “Besides, Wu needs to work out her anger.”

“I think the baby is crying,” Gaunt said.

“He is in good hands.”

“Ow!” yelled Flybait.

“Ha!” crowed Wu. “And this one you will take in place of Imago Bone! And this one for Eshe! And this one . . .”

Eventually honor was satisfied, though it took a degree of pleading. Gaunt brought out the bride, literally, and traded her for the baby. Gaunt led the procession as both Next One, shrouded by the red scarf, and Flybait, bandaged around the head, were carried back around the temple to the sound of firecrackers. They returned through the kitchen door. The monks set down Flybait and waved Next One over a lit oven, to burn away any evil influences around her. The sage painter lay down a red carpet, and the monks deposited her there. “Welcome to the ‘groom’s house,’” the portrait said, and gave back to her a string of copper coins she’d loaned him for the purpose.

Flybait stepped forward and raised the red scarf from Next One’s face, revealing an impish smile.

“You enjoyed that,” he said.

“Thank you for fighting for me,” she said, and Gaunt saw how he was overcome by that grin and by the notion of being gallant. She thought of her own thief and held her baby tight as the lovers kissed.

Because the Lord of All Kitchens was important to weddings, the couple bowed first to his statue by the window before returning to the foyer and honoring the gathered immortals, sages, and images of the Million or One. They spoke the names of ancestors, even ones hated, even ones little known.

The couple bowed to each other, and the gathering cheered.

Wu surprised everyone by saying, “Lightning Bug sent me on my way with a flask of rice wine. Let it be my gift to you, for it is sometimes the custom for the newlyweds to drink from the same cup.”

The couple thanked her (Flybait somewhat sullenly) and drank the wine in turn.

Leaftooth came forward. He gave them a scroll. “This is from our library. A gift from the assembled monks.”

“This doesn’t take us anywhere, does it?” Next One said warily.

“Only in a manner of speaking.
The
Ninety-Nine Passionate Positions
has been known to distract the young from their surroundings.”

Flybait seemed quite ready to exit for the nuptial chamber, but there were other gifts.

“I tried to compose a poem in the manner of the sage,” said Gaunt. She handed them the scroll of characters she’d inked that morning, and recited:

Upon a cold mountain, I found a coin shed by snow

Treasure of realms far beyond or below

And in its icy faces, back-to-back

I glimpsed the warm riches I now lack.

Not of wealth—for that spreads out high

In the trees and waterfalls, peaks and sky.

Not of glory—for that I have

In a gurgling voice that learns to laugh.

But of bodies back-to-back that brace to fight

Or turn about to frame delight.

“Here is the coin,” Gaunt said, holding it out.

Next One reached out to take it, but paused and withdrew. “No, the poem is our gift. Keep the coin, and think of Imago Bone.”

“I am glad Persimmon Gaunt wrote a poem,” the sage painter’s portrait said, “for I have been taking up painting. My gift is something else. You will see.”

Gaunt was surprised to find that all were invited to the nuptial cave, though any potential voyeurism was dispelled by the jokes of the crowd and the drool of the baby. That was as well; Gaunt still felt such rawness from giving birth that her only desire for that part of herself was rest. At last the party left the newlyweds to their sport or their exhaustion, however it would be.

Gaunt’s only clue as to the sage painter’s gift came when Next One and Flybait slipped into the monastery, naked and laughing and covered in dirt and twigs, babbling about a taotie blowing them into a bottomless pit at an artistically mischievous moment. She did not understand it, but took note of the sage’s smirk.

Innocence became mobile. Before he learned to crawl, he learned to roll and skitter and twist like a windblown leaf. He loved to moan into jars, making an echo like the wind. He laughed when Gaunt dropped one thing into another—tea leaves into water, oranges into a bowl, a handful of coins into a jar.

“This,” she said, running her hands among the coins, mementos of Palmary, Amberhorn, Maratrace and other unreachable places, “is all Mama has to remember Papa by.” The other coin, the one from Qiangguo, she kept on a cord around her neck.

“Mmmaaa . . .” he said, thinking hard. “Ma . . . ma . . .”

It was his first word. It was apt, that Bone’s son learn to speak beside the jingle of mismatched coins.

After an endless short time, Innocence was a year old, and Bone was still not there.

Innocence still could not understand her stories, but she kept telling them, and he paid keen attention to her voice.

He heard many tales, of emperors and thieves, and made new ones of his own.

The four-masted Kpalamaa galleon was called the
Anansi
, which Eshe said meant Spider-Storyteller, or something like that. “A figure from legend,” she had explained. “The trickster who cajoled the first stories from the Creator’s hands.”

It might take a spider, Bone reflected, to scale the high cliffs of Penglai.

Months had passed, months in which the Kpalamaa mariners had found gainful employment for the thief, much to his relief. His hands proved cunning at the endless knot-tying, his body limber amongst the complex rigging, his camp recipes a novelty for the galley, his voice enthusiastic (if not sonorous) in the
Spider-Storyteller’s
shanties. A few were even in Roil:

The Starborn Sea is deep and wide

We’ll meet the lost on the other side

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

The Starborn Sea is dark and cold

Chills the flesh but not the soul

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

My father sought the Starborn Lands

To eat the fruit and walk the sands

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

And so I journeyed out to sea

Where the lost and found may be

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

Captain, row the gig ashore

Then you’ll hear the ocean roar

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

Ocean, sound a jubilee

For the lost and you and me

(Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Ojo!)

“This shanty sounds somewhat familiar,” Bone commented once.

“We adapt songs as we find them,” the shantyman said, resplendent in a hat of interwoven blue, green, silver, and black. “A good line can be made from many fibers.”

A good line
was what Bone needed, he thought, at last getting a close look at the steaming isles, soaring mountainous and forested from the foam like the green-bloodied fragments of some titanic splintered insect. The islands were intricate with cliffs and spires, emerald jungle clinging to any place remotely flat. Such places were far above the sea. He would have to climb well above the normal haunts of a second-story man.

“Our fleet scholars,” Eshe said, stepping beside him at the prow, “believe this archipelago a limestone remnant of a larger landmass. Legend, however, says this is an abode of sleeping dragons.”

“Which do you believe?” Bone asked.

“Both, of course. The sleeping dragons are the forests, the limestone their bed.”

Bone looked up and down the great ship. It was not so large as
Passport/Punishment
, but with its bewildering pattern of rigging, its cheery brown-and-brass decks, its bustling, professional, laughing crew, it too seemed the work of keen minds, considerably in advance of his own people’s. “Your folk are rather dedicated to the rational arts,” he said. “I feel like a superstitious primitive among you.”

“We love you anyway.”

Bone chuckled, looking upwards again toward his objective. There was something light in his step, these recent days. Despite everything, to accept his likely doom and still strive for something worth the striving—that made an unnaturally old man feel young again. Just a little.

“In any event,” Eshe said, “I am not much better in their eyes. I ‘went native,’ so to speak, in Swanisle.”