CHAPTER THREE

Visitations

He had never seen a gaol before, let alone spent the night in one.

The place was an open affair, and most of its inmates could wander freely within its walls. There was even a taverna of sorts for those with the money to frequent it, and a cantina that sold better food than the gruel slopped out in the yard. On the whole the guards – mostly prisoners themselves – kept out of the way and left the other inmates to themselves.

Nico settled in the corner of a cell, one of many to be found in the labyrinth deep beneath the main yard. He sat on a layer of mouldy, lice-infested straw, a single oil lamp hanging above the doorway for light. The straw reeked of stale urine, and he could see cockroaches scurrying within it.

The same was occupied by other thieves and debtors of various ages, some of them as young as Nico or even younger. His fellow inmates paid him little notice; mostly they came and went and rarely stopped there for long. Nico was grateful for that as he sat in his corner, nursing his bruised and aching body, his thoughts circling like dark flapping birds intent on tormenting him. Try as he might, he could not help but think of home and his mother.

She would be distraught if she ever heard of what he had become: a common thief caught in the act. She would be angry with him beyond words.

But then, his mother was hardly without fault herself. After all, if he traced his present predicament back a whole year or more, then she was as much to blame for it as he. She was the one who had needed to fill her empty life with a string of ill-suited lovers. She was the one who had chosen to ignore the antagonism between Los and her son, causing Nico to be driven out as a consequence; then driven to this.

Los had been yet another in a long line of his mother’s poor choices. On the first night she had brought him home from the crossroads taverna, dressed in fine clothing that was much too loose on him – clearly stolen – the man had eyed the contents of the cottage as if to assess what they were worth, including his mother. It was obvious he had set about catching her that night; the couple had made so much noise in the bedroom that Nico was forced to drag his bedding out to the stable and bed down with their old horse, Happy.

He resented her for it, this weakness regarding men. He knew she had her reasons, knew too that she was hardly the one he should be resenting for what had become of them both, mother and son. But there it was, and he could not help it.

This had already been the worst day of his life, and the rest of it passed in numb shock, timeless and awful. With the falling of night, marked here not in fading daylight but by the snuffing of the lamps and the slamming of distant heavy doors, the stench within the place grew even more fetid, a drifting, clogging miasma that bore with it the smells of the human animal caged too long in its own squalor. It became so bad that Nico tied his kerchief around his mouth and nose. It helped little though, and he would occasionally have to lean to one side and lift it in order to spit from his mouth the rank taste that had accumulated on his tongue.

It seemed that whatever truce existed between the inmates during the hours of daytime vanished during those long ensuing hours of blackness. A fight broke out in another cell, shouts and catcalls and then the long keening howls of a man in pain, which dimmed to the occasional sob and then to nothing. For a time, a dull thudding penetrated the stone wall at his back, as though someone was crashing his head against the other side, while shouting out with each impact muted words that might have been, let me out, let me out.

Nico could not bring himself to sleep in such a place. Still, he was tired, exhausted from the day’s events, and the thought of those still to come. So he lay awake listening to the snores of his cellmates, swiping the odd cockroach from his body, and cursed himself for ever coming to this city, for bringing Boon along with him, for getting involved with Lena and her fool ideas.

He had known that she was not to be trusted, having displayed few signs of scruples in his company. What was she doing now, at this same moment, he wondered? Did she even care that he had been seized by the Guards and thrown in the city gaol to await his punishment? He doubted it.

Nico stared into the gloom, only too aware of what they did to thieves in the city. It was this fate he was trying most of all not to think about. Last Harvest Festival he had seen a thief flogged and branded for his crime, and the young delinquent had not been much older than Nico himself.

Nico did not know if he could bear such punishment.

*

Sometime later in the night he jerked from a daze to find a hand pressed against his leg and a face breathing foul air into his own. He jerked upright, shoved the unseen man’s weight away from him, shouted something that was more a cry of fright than distinct words. A muttered curse in the darkness, the scraping shuffle of someone retreating.

He rubbed his face to wake himself fully, then hunkered back against the wall.

He needed to get out of this place. He could barely breathe, in this airless, roiling stench. The blackness pressed down on him like a blanket of heavy velvet. He felt trapped, knowing that till morning he could not simply stand up and walk outside of his own volition, not even to see the sky, feel the fresh air upon his face. A memory that was more a recollection of sharp emotion came to him then: that time he had found the snare while walking in the hills overlooking their cottage – the tightened loop of wire holding the severed limb of a wild dog, flesh still hanging in shreds from the leg bone that had been chewed clean through.

A sound of shuffling feet in the darkness: someone approaching again. Nico tensed, ready to lash out.

I will tear off your flesh with my teeth, he thought, if you do not back away from me.

‘Relax,’ came a voice. ‘I’m a friend.’

A man sat down next to him, the sound of his hands fumbling within his clothing.

A flame ignited in the darkness, at first too bright to look at. Nico squinted with a palm shielding his face. For a moment the flame sizzled and curled, as the blackened end of a cigarillo burned and glowed red. Then the man blew out the match, plunging them into a darkness even deeper than before.

‘You know, I’ve been lying awake all night trying to figure how I recognize your face.’ The red tip of the cigarillo smeared through the air and crackled into renewed brightness as the man inhaled, lighting up the extremities of his face while casting its hollows into shadow.

‘Your father,’ he said, exhaling. ‘I used to know your father.’

Nico blinked, his eyes still swimming with spots of colour.

‘Of course you did,’ he said, sarcastically.

‘Don’t call me a liar, boy. You’re his spitting image. Your father was married to a redhead by the name of Reese. A fine-looking woman, if I recall.’

Nico let his hand drop from his face, sheathing his anger for the moment. ‘Yes, my mother,’ Nico agreed. ‘You truly knew him, then?’

‘As well as any man. I fought with him under the walls for two years.’

‘You were a Special?’

‘Surely. Though it seems a lifetime ago now, thank the Fool. I make a living now, a small one, playing rash. Rest of the time, when I can’t repay my debts, I’m obliged to linger here.’ The man rubbed a hand across the stubble of his chin. ‘And what of you? What brings you to this condition?’

Nico had no wish to get into the whole sorry affair. ‘My healer said it would be good for my lungs, so I come down here from time to time.’

‘Your father had wit, too,’ the voice replied without the merest hint of humour. ‘It was the one thing I liked about him.’

There was an edge to his voice as he said this. Nico heard it, and waited for him to say more. The tobacco smoke curled about his face for a moment, the scent pleasant here in this foul place. It reminded him of nights sitting around a campfire in some park or empty building, with Lena and the others he had come to know while without home or shelter, Nico cracking jokes and watching the bottles of cheap wine and the tarweed roll-ups pass freely between them, their laughter raw, while the warm circle of light held at bay the hard day that was inevitably to come.

‘We didn’t see eye-to-eye on occasion,’ the man continued in his sour drawl. ‘He accused me once of cheating at rash. Though he couldn’t leave it be at that, of course. Had to go and catch me out in front of the whole squad. Cost me a lot of money, did your father. I got the man back, though.’

A cough followed that might equally have been dry laughter.

‘To be honest with you I wasn’t hardly surprised when he lit out on us, and deserted like he did. The last time I saw those scared eyes of his, I knew what he was thinking. Clear as day I saw it.’

Nico’s jaw clenched tight. His nostrils flared. He took a breath and said, coolly, ‘My father was no coward.’

Again that cough. ‘I don’t mean anything by it. Everyone’s a coward when it comes down to it, save for the crazy ones. Some are just more scared than others, is all I’m saying.’

Nico’s breathing was now loud enough to be heard above the snoring of the other men.

‘Easy now, it’s only talk, and talk’s not worth a damn. Here, have a draw.’

Nico ignored the burning end of the cigarillo held before his face.

He thought of his father instead: a tall, straight-backed figure in his memory, long-haired and kind of eyes, and his words softly spoken. The same man laughing wildly, with a pitcher of ale in his hand, while grabbing his mother by the waist to dance with her, or snatching up his jitar to pluck them some poorly composed song. A hike the two of them had made together in the lonely hills. A sunny Foolsday when he had taken Nico to some beach so that he himself could gaze out to sea while Nico played down by the shore line.

Nico had been ten when his father enlisted with the Specials. The enemy was pushing harder than ever before, it was explained. Every day some new Mannian tunnel was encountered, or the Mannians themselves broke through into the underground works of the defenders. The Specials were taking heavy losses, and they needed volunteers.

For a month at a time his father would go off to the city and fight beneath the walls of the Shield, then come home a slightly different man. With every return he seemed quieter, and less handsome in appearance.

On one visit home he had lost a whole ear, so that only an orifice remained on that side of his head. Yet Reese still embraced him and whispered soft words in his damaged ear loud enough for Nico to overhear, telling his father how relieved she was to see him still alive. Another time, his father arrived at the door with a bandage wrapped all around his head. When he took it off some days later, it looked as though his remaining ear had been chewed by a dog. Over time his eyebrows faded to nothing. His long hair became stubble. Scars criss-crossed his scalp, face and lips. He began to hunch his once broad shoulders as though he was permanently cold.

Nico’s mother would try to hide her horror at these changes in the man that she loved, but often some unguarded expression would betray her.

When his father had finally returned for his first prolonged leave of absence from the Shield, Nico barely recognized the man who eyed his son as though looking at a stranger, and sat by himself out in the rain, and never smiled, and seldom spoke, and drank heavily. An atmosphere developed inside the cottage. His father would shout over the smallest of annoyances, till Nico grew tense and ever-expectant of trouble.

He took to going outside more with Boon, the two of them wandering the forest and the land around their cottage. When the weather was bad, Nico would stay in his room, with the door shut, and recount in his mind the stories that he knew, or recall The Tales of the Fish he had seen in his visits to the city, thus passing the time in idle fantasy.

One night, his father drank himself into a rage so consuming that he attacked Nico’s mother, dragging her around the room by the hair while Nico yelled and begged for him to stop. He struck out at Nico and knocked him to the floor. Then, just as suddenly, stopped, blinking down at his son’s shocked expression, before he stumbled out into the night.

Returning the next morning, his father packed his personal things and left, while Nico and his mother still slept huddled together in his small bed. Nico felt as though his world had given way beneath his feet. His mother had cried for a long time after that.

Nico now clenched his fists in the close darkness of the cell, and sighed. ‘He had his reasons for leaving,’ he said to the unseen man.

The cigarillo puffed, puffed, faded.

‘Aye, well, scared or not, you’d know better than any I reckon.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean to say the blood of the father most certainly runs through the son. What’s true of him will be true of you.’

Nico felt the heat flushing his cheeks. He turned away from the stranger, wanting no more from him.

Shouts echoed from another cell, the words barely intelligible; a madman raving about how the Mannians were coming from across the sea to burn them all alive.

The glow of the cigarillo quickly vanished as the visitor stubbed it out against his palm. He grunted as he rose, and then he paused there, muttering something to himself. As he turned back to Nico, his heavy hand sought his shoulder and patted it once.

‘You’re all right now, son,’ the man said. ‘You can sleep now.’

He left with the lingering flavour of the smoke still coiling where he had sat.

No one else bothered Nico after that.

*

His mother came in the morning, dressed all in black as though attending a funeral. Her eyes were puffy from crying and the red hair pulled tight against her head gave a pinched, determined set to her features. It was the first time Nico had seen her in over a year.

Los was with her, clad in his best, pretending to be piously shocked at this thing young Nico had done. It was Los who spoke first, as they stood facing each other through the bars that separated inmate from visitor, in the dim, cool vault that served for these occasions.

‘You look a mess,’ he said.

Nico was lost for words. His mother and Los were the last people he had expected to see before him.

‘How did you know?’ he asked her, keeping his voice low.

His mother approached as though to reach out to him, but she was prevented by the bars and anger flashed suddenly in her eyes.

In a cold tone, she replied: ‘Old Jaimeena saw you being dragged through the streets by the Guards, and was good enough to ride out and tell me.’

‘Oh,’ Nico said.

‘Oh? Is that all you have to say for yourself?’

Her anger was like a breath of air against his own; it fanned embers that had lain dormant in him since the day he walked free from the cottage.

‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ he snapped. ‘Nor him, either.’

Surprise crossed her face, and Los came to her side, all the while fixing Nico with hard eyes.

Nico stared back. He’d be damned if he would be the first to look away.

His mother made to speak, then faltered. All at once her shoulders dropped, her armour shattered. A hand reached through the bars. Nico felt it slide around the back of his neck, fingers gripping him and pulling his head towards her, into an embrace between the cool metal.

‘My son,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘What have you done? I never took you for a thief.’

He was surprised to feel the sting of tears in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was desperate, starving.’

She made a soothing sound, stroked his face. ‘I’ve been so worried about you. Every time we came to the city I looked out for you, but all I ever saw were people going hungry. I wondered if you were managing to survive at all.’

He took a shuddering breath. ‘Boon . . .’ he managed. ‘Boon is dead.’

Her grip tightened around his neck. She began to weep. He cried with her, his numbness gone now, his emotions let loose in the shared intimacy of their pain.

The door to the visitor’s passage cracked open, and a figure entered. Nico looked up, wiping his eyes clear, and his mouth dropped open.

It was the farlander, the old man he had stolen the money from the afternoon before.

The newcomer stood on the threshold, his head cocked to one side, a leather cup of chee steaming in one hand. He was shorter than he had seemed as he had lain on the bed. With a shaven head and black robe, he had the appearance of a monk, though a strange monk at that, because he carried a sheathed sword in his other hand. Nico’s mother broke away to look too.

The man moved smoothly across the stone floor and stopped before them all, the motion not unlike the swaying surface of chee in his cup: at once contained and settling into itself.

Close up, the farlander’s eyes were the colour of dead ashes, though they were intense in their scrutiny. Nico almost took a backward step. There was no trace here of that confused old man awakened from his dreams, blinking around him as though unable to see.

‘This is the thief?’ he demanded of Nico’s mother.

She swept her eyes dry, drawing herself tall. ‘He is my son,’ she declared, ‘and more a fool than a thief.’

The man appraised Nico coolly for a few seconds, as though inspecting a dog he had a mind to buy. He nodded. ‘Then I will have words with you.’

He took himself to one of the stools positioned in the centre of the vault, sitting down with his spine straight and his sword resting in his lap. He set the cup on the floor. ‘I am Ash,’ he announced. ‘And fool or not, your boy stole money from me.’

Sensing business of a sort, Nico’s mother became her usual calm self once more. She took a stool opposite him. ‘Reese Calvone,’ she told him.

Los approached to place a hand on her shoulder, though obviously wary. She brushed it away and he retreated to the far wall, as close to the door as he could position himself. He watched them in silence, from the corners of his eyes.

‘Your son is to be flogged and branded no doubt,’ continued the old man, ‘as you people do in these parts. Fifty lashes, I am told, is common for daylight theft.’

Reese nodded, as though it had been a question asked of her.

‘It is a hard business that.’

Her green eyes narrowed, and she glanced quickly to Nico before returning her attention to the stranger before her.

‘You are taking it well,’ he observed.

‘Have you come here to gloat, old man?’

‘Hardly. To know the son, I would first know the mother. It might help your boy’s situation.’

Reese looked down at her hands, and Nico followed her gaze. Coarse working hands, covered in the cuts and scalds of many years; they looked older than her face, which was pretty, even now, despite its tears and worry. She inhaled a deep breath before she spoke. ‘He is my son, and I know his heart. I know that he can bear it.’

Nico dragged his gaze from his mother to the old man, whose sharp face offered nothing.

‘What if there were another way?’

She blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What if he did not have to take the whip across his back, or the brand on his hand?’

She glanced at her son again, but Nico was still staring at the figure in the black robe. There was something about this old man . . . something he felt he could trust. Perhaps it was his easy authority – not the authority of one who has been granted it, and learned to adopt it in his ways, but rather something entirely natural, the result of a sincerity, a directness, of spirit.

‘What I have to tell you must stay within this room. Your . . . man must leave, then I can explain.’

Los snorted. He had no intention of leaving.

‘Please,’ said Reese, turning to him. Los feigned a look of hurt pride. ‘Go,’ she insisted.

Los still hesitated; he glanced at the old man, at Nico, then back to Reese.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ he announced.

‘Yes.’

Los skulked from the room, casting the old man a final glare before closing the door behind him. Even as the noise of it slamming rebounded from the walls of the vault, the farlander continued.

‘Mistress Calvone, my time is short here, so I must get to the point.’ But he stopped then, and Nico saw how his thumb stroked the leather binding of his sheathed sword.

‘I am growing old,’ he ventured, ‘as you can see.’ A smile, perhaps, in his eyes. ‘There was a time when a boy such as yours would have never made it through my window without waking me. I would have cut off his hand even as he reached out for my purse. Now though, I sleep through it all, exhausted by the afternoon heat like the old man that I am.’ His gaze dropped to the floor. ‘My health . . . it is not what it once was. I do not know how much longer I can continue in this work. In simple terms, and in the tradition of my order, it is time that I trained an apprentice.’

‘More likely you’re lonely,’ replied Nico’s mother sharply, ‘and in the fancy for a pretty boy.’

He shook his head simply. No.

‘Then what line of work are you in? You dress like a monk, yet I see a sword in your hand.’

‘Mistress Calvone,’ he spread his hands wide, as though indicating something obvious, ‘I am Rshun.’

Nico laughed then, despite himself. It came out tinged with hysteria and, when he heard it echo back from the curving roof of the vault, he stopped just as abruptly.

Both faces had turned towards him.

‘You want me to train as Rshun?’ Nico managed. ‘Are you mad?’

‘Listen to me,’ the farlander said to him. ‘If you give your consent, I will speak with the judge today. I will ask for the charges to be dropped, and I will pay him a sum of money for his trouble and that of the gaolers. You will be saved from your ordeal.’

‘But what you ask . . .’ protested his mother. ‘I may never see my son again. He would risk his life in such work.’

‘We are in Bar-Khos. If he stays here, sooner or later he may be called upon to risk his life on the walls. Yes, my work is dangerous, but I will prepare him for it well, and when I bring him into the field with me, he will be present only as an observer. Once his apprenticeship is finished, he may choose to commit himself to the profession, or to go anywhere else that he wishes. He will have money by then, and many useful skills. He may even return here to Bar-Khos, if it still stands.’

He watched as she pondered this, then continued, ‘Right now, a skyship is waiting for me at the city skyport. In a few days its repairs will be finished, and we will travel to the home of my order. There he will be introduced into our ways, and I assure you, Mistress Calvone, that at all times I will place your son’s life before that of my own. That is my solemn oath to you.’

‘But why? Why my son?’

The old farlander seemed stopped in his tracks by that question. He ran a palm across the shaven stubble on his head, creating a sound like stone rubbing against the finest of sandpaper.

‘He showed skill, and some courage, in what he did. Such qualities are what I seek.’

‘But surely that is not all?’

The old man stared at her for what began to seem a long time. ‘No,’ he conceded, ‘that is not all.’ And he rocked back on the stool, looking once more to the floor, at the space between himself and Reese. ‘I have been having dreams of late, though that will mean nothing to you. Still, they guide me in some way, and I feel they are right.’

Nico’s mother squinted at him, still unconvinced.

‘I’ll go,’ announced Nico suddenly from across the vault. Both heads swung towards him again and he smiled, feeling foolish. His mother frowned.

‘I’ll go,’ he repeated, more firmly this time.

‘You will not,’ she announced.

Nico nodded, a little sadly. He knew what the Rshun were, everyone did. They killed people, murdered them in their sleep in exchange for the money they had been paid to carry out a vendetta. He could not see himself doing that, not for anything in all the world, but, still, he could leave as soon as his apprenticeship was finished, armed at least with new skills and experiences. Perhaps in its own way, this was it, his chance to make something of himself. Maybe the Great Fool had been right, and in the worst of days were laid the seeds for better times.

Then again, perhaps instead of escaping one punishing ordeal, he was trading it for a much worse one.

He didn’t know. He could never know unless he went through with it.

‘Yes, mother,’ he said with a tone of finality, ‘I will.’