Irregular Verbs (10 page)

“But if it’s not even mine, what can I do about it?”

I held my hand out palm down, holding him still. “I think we’re about to find out,” I said. A dark shape had appeared in my office door: a man about my height in a dark coat, wearing a broad-brimmed hat that cast his face into shadow. A gun was in his hand.

“Who are you?” Roger said, turning around.

“Quiet, Roger,” I said, keeping my eyes on the gun. “Why don’t you let this guy go,” I said to the intruder in a carefully level voice. “This is just about you and me, isn’t it?”

The man said nothing but moved closer, keeping the muzzle of the pistol pointed my way.

“Get out of the way, Roger,” I said.

Roger moved aside as the man took another step in my direction. I took a breath, snapped my hand out and jabbed at the switch of my desk lamp. The man blinked in surprise at the sudden light and I saw his face.

He was me.

I had intended to grab the gun while he was dazzled, but I was more stunned than he was. The barrel was level with my forehead. “Who are you?” I asked.

“Open the desk,” he said with my voice. I was frozen. He pressed the gun to my head. “Open it.”

Feeling my sweat run around the ring of cold metal I reached down to my desk drawer, pulled it open.

The man with my face pulled the gun away, just a few inches. “Look inside.”

With effort I pulled my gaze away from the pistol aimed at me, looked down. A jar like those that had been in Roger’s suitcase sat there, a clay tube with a top carved in the shape of a cat’s head.

“What’s going on?” Roger said, his voice cracking. “Aren’t we already dead? Who is this?”

I looked myself in the face, suddenly unafraid. “You’re what I couldn’t leave behind, aren’t you?”

“You said you’d cleared your own suitcase,” Roger said. “That you just stayed here out of compassion.”

“No—not compassion,” I said. “Curiosity. I realize that now.” The man with my face smiled, nodded. “That’s what I couldn’t let go, why I stayed here—the puzzle. Wanting to know how it all works out.” I laughed. “I’m just as much of a sap as you are, Roger.”

The man with my face lowered the gun, tapped it against the jar. I nodded, and he grabbed the lid with his free hand. I took the base and we each pulled, and when it had popped open he was gone.

I took a deep breath, picked up Roger’s suitcase. It was light, lighter than a feather. “Here,” I said, handed it to him.

He took it by the handle. “It’s empty,” he said. “But does that mean you’re—we’re—”

“This part of me stayed here,” I said. “That part of me—the part that couldn’t let go—wound up as you.”

He took a step for the office door. “So we’re—free? Both of us?”

“Come on,” I said. I flipped the sign on my door to CLOSED, stepped out into the corridor and locked up. The two of us started to walk down the street, towards the airport. “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“We have to tell her.”

Kevin shook his head. “We don’t. She’ll never know. It’ll just—she won’t even notice it.”

“We’ll know,” Jen said, crossing her arms.

It was true, of course. He looked over at Heather in the living room, wondering if she was able to hear everything they said. So far as he could tell she was still engrossed in her Ed-U-Tutor, but he always had the feeling that she knew a lot more than she ever showed.

She looked so much like Jen. Jen always said she looked like him, of course; Heather was a backwards mirror, each of her parents seeing the other in her face.

“I can’t. I don’t think I could make her understand.”

“I know. Do you think I’d have brought this up if I wasn’t ready to tell her myself?” Jen kissed him on the cheek, turned away. He watched her, unable to make the few steps that would let him follow from the kitchen to where their daughter sat.

“Heather, can I talk to you a minute?”

“Just a second, mom.” Heather clicked a button on the ’Tutor, saving her work. If she heard the strangled sound in her mother’s voice, she gave no sign of it. “What’s up?”

It was impossible that she was ten. He knew he was biased, but to Kevin she had always sounded as mature and self-possessed as someone twice her age. He didn’t get to see her that much, of course; she was usually asleep by the time he got home from work. He had thought, maybe, that that would change now that he wasn’t working. Now he would never know.

“There’s something I—your father and I have been meaning to tell you,” Jen said.

Heather raised an eyebrow. “If it’s about boys and girls, the ’Tutor already told me.”

Jen smiled, despite herself, and Kevin felt himself doing it as well. “No, that’s not—that’s not it. It’s about—well, you know how your father isn’t working anymore.”

“I know. But Dad’ll find something soon.”

“Of course he will. But for now there are some things, things we were paying for that we can’t afford to anymore. And you—do you know how you came to be with us?”

How you came to be with us; what an awkward way of saying it, Kevin thought. But then, everything about this was awkward.

“I told you,” Heather said. “The ’Tutor—”

“No,” Jen said, an unmistakable choking coming into her voice. “You didn’t, not that way. We—you know your father and I have always been very busy, working very hard. To keep this house, buy you clothes and things.”

“Yes . . .”

Kevin pulled the photo album from the shelf over the phone. The leatherette spine cracked like it was new when it opened; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at it.

“Well, you see we never had quite enough time—for you. I mean, to have you. There was never a time when either of us could stay home, never mind spending a few weeks off my feet.”

“I don’t understand.”

The baby pictures were getting hazy, indistinct. The ultrasound was already gone, replaced by a snapshot of that trip to Algonquin Park they’d never taken.

“We really, really wanted to have you, Heather, you need to know that. So we went to—you know that machine in the kitchen, that makes sure you have a lunch, even if we forget to make you one?”

Heather nodded, not understanding. “You always forget,” she said.

“Yes, I know, honey.” Jen took a breath, plowed on. “Well, when we decided we wanted to have a little girl, we went to someone who had a big one of those machines. Big enough so that instead of making sure you had a lunch, it made sure we had you.”

The picture of Heather on her first bike flickered and disappeared. Kevin could already feel the memory of it doing the same thing, another one rushing to fill the vacuum in his mind. An office, beige wall-to-wall and a pine desk.

“This is one of our most popular packages,” the man in his memory was saying. Light from the window shone off the gold lettering on his coffee mug, TIME SOLUTIONS. “Especially among couples your age. You don’t have to worry she’d be singled out in any way.”

Jen looked over at Kevin, shifted her weight in her chair. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Would she be—different?”

The man frowned, his solid features coming slowly into focus as the memory grew stronger. “No more than—I’m sorry, Ms. James, I forgot this is your first time in here. No, your child won’t be different in any way. All we’ll do is pinch off a little pocket of time—let’s say, five years ago—and make that the time when you had your child; then we re-attach the pocket to our time, and so far as the world is concerned you have a five-year-old daughter.”

“Just a minute,” Kevin remembered saying as he flipped through the papers in front of him. “What’s the monthly fee for, then?”

“To keep that pocket attached to our time,” the man said, a note of impatience in his voice—the sound, Kevin thought, of a teacher explaining something for the tenth time.

Heather’s voice called Kevin back to the present. “So I’m not—not—” He knew she was close to tears, confused and frustrated.

“You’re real, Heather. You have to remember—have to know that. It’s just that—well, once you were in our lives it didn’t seem so urgent to have you. So long as the machine kept working, we forgot that you had come to us any differently from anyone else’s baby. And so long as we could keep paying the man with the machine, it didn’t matter. But now that your father’s out of work—”

“So I’m going to—I’m going to—”

“It’s not like dying, baby,” Jen said. “You’ll just—disappear—but when your father finds a new job we’ll bring you back again. It’ll be just the same as before.”

“What if there’s a power failure?”

“We have enough backup power to run this facility for a month,” the man said. “And if worst comes to worst, we can always start over.”

“But would it be her? The same her, I mean?” Jen asked.

The man sighed; he had, Kevin now remembered, a walrus moustache that quivered when he breathed out. “Ms. James—every child is a miracle. To expect to repeat a miracle . . .”

“But I’ll be—will I be—?” Heather’s voice sounded hollow, somehow. He couldn’t blame her.

“You’ll be you, honey. You’ll be you.” Jen put her arms around her daughter and held her, and held her, and held her, and held nothing at all.

Kevin walked over to her, put a useless hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have helped.”

“S’okay,” his wife said. “It’s—better it was just me. Easier.”

He said nothing at all for a while; then he crouched down so he was pressed against her back, and held her. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t have. I’m glad you could. You’re right; she needed to know.” He kissed her on the top of her head, his tears falling into her hair. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

There was a rush of imploding air, and an absence; just then, he remembered something else he’d never had time to do.

The flames are almost to the river, now, and on the other bank we can see our brothers’ homes burning. We had thought ourselves safe here in the north, far from the enemies of our people, where only wild men live. Who is it here that can hate us so much?

An old man is speaking. He is the only one who speaks the language of the men that live in the forests beyond the river: he, perhaps, can tell us what is happening.

“Once there were three sons,” the old man says. It might be the light of a campfire flickering against his bearded cheeks, and not a city burning. “The oldest was wise, the second foolish, and the third son was wise-foolish.

“Do you know what that means? We call a man wise-foolish when he has a foolish mind but a wise heart. This boy was like that, and his name was Dasat.”

The old man pauses, and we bite our tongues. We are not children, we want to say, to be told such stories, but his are the only answers we have. “The three boys’ father was poor, so he had nothing to give but his blessing. The oldest son did not ask for it, for he was wise enough to know he did not need it, nor did the second son ask for it, for he was foolish enough to believe he did not need it. So it was left for Dasat, wise-foolish, to ask his father’s blessing, and this is what his father said:

“‘Three things I have given you, my son, though you cannot see them. The first is your good heart, the second the good manners I have taught you, the third the earth that belongs to all. With these three things surely you can win everything you seek.’

“‘Thank you, father,’ Dasat said, and set off to seek his fortune.

“As he left, though, his mother stopped him, and gave him a piece of bread wrapped in a handkerchief, saying, ‘Take this, and hungry though you be, always leave a few crumbs tied up in the handkerchief; if you do, it will be a piece of bread again the next day.’

“In those days we Kamanai neither timbered trees nor cleared land for farms, for fear of Mokos whose soil it was. So Dasat followed the crooked path through the woods, and though he went from house to house there was no fortune for him in any of them, nor even shelter; for in those days the men of our land lived apart from one another, and owed one another no obligations. Before long came winter, the time when Birun, the God in the Tree, dies. The time when the Lord of Lightning goes mad.”

The hairy man shhed loudly and then sat cross-legged on the ground. He began laboriously turning a wooden pole so it dug into the earth, stopping every few seconds to fan smoke from the pile of fragrant leaves over the hole, and humming: “A-hmm-a-HM-ah, forgive us, Mokos, lady of dark soil and dark winters, this wound; A-hmm-a-HM, forgive us, Lord of Lightning, our trespass against your daughter.” Finally the hole was deep enough for the pole to stand upright. The hairy man stood and allowed the others around him to begin raising the tent around it.

Guessing it was safe to speak again, Dasatan said, “Still a good bell before sunset.”

Balat stepped hard on the still-smouldering leaves and ground his foot into them. “Door needs to face south,” the hairy man said, in broken Kavatai. “Need the sun to tell east and west; how can you tell south without east and west?”

“In your language,” Dasatan said, shaking his head. “My father wants me to get better at it, since none of you know trade signs. Where I come from, we tell north and south by the stars.”

Balat gestured to the forest canopy above. “If you can see the stars, it’s a bad place for a camp. No shelter from the wind. Nothing to keep snow off your tent.”

“It’s spring.”

“It’s never spring,” Balat said. He grinned, an expression with no mirth whatsoever. “Only winter and summer. But summer pays for all.”

Dasatan said nothing. He had grown up never wearing anything more than a tunic and cloak, and he felt himself slumping under the unfamiliar weight of the jacket Balat insisted he wear. It was a dreadful thing, weighing at least a stone, crudely stitched together from wild sheepskins and still smelling strongly of the piss that had been used to tan it.

He hated it. He hated this whole country—the endless red birch trees that hid the sun for bells at a time; the nameless winds that crept under his jacket and tunic and froze his blood; the mosquitoes that rose in a humming cloud each time he entered a new stretch of forest, ready to suck the life out of him; the constantly expanding list of rules, against everything from breaking the soil to touching steel; the stinking tents and the stinking men he needed to lead him to the only thing that made coming here worthwhile.

That last reminded him of something he could get done while waiting for the tent to be raised. He looked around and saw the other ai Kavatai standing together in a knot, their backs to him. No-one was pushing them to learn the language, and they tried their best to avoid the pale, hairy ai Kamanai. He walked over to join them, braced himself to stand tall under their contempt. “Time to earn your keep, Yavan,” he said.

A short man, clad in a black robe with patchy silver filigree, turned around. The robe failed altogether to hide his stomach, which bulged out of his otherwise thin frame, and he had a head that was nearly bald except for a half-dozen long black hairs. The stone at his staff tip glinted red in the sunlight as he waved it dramatically, drawing his thick eyebrows together in a frown. “Did your father never tell you not to mock a boltforge, boy?” Yavan asked.

“He did, but I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of you,” Dasatan said. One of the other ai Kavatai laughed. Good: if they had someone else to mock they would find it easier to follow him. “If you were any kind of real boltforge you wouldn’t be out here, with us. Do you think Tivakar spent his nights huddled under a skin tent, cheek-by-jowl with ai Kamanai?”

Yavan locked eyes with him, gave him a menacing look—Dasatan felt a moment’s anticipation; a snake with only one fang still has venom, after all—then looked away. “Laugh if you will, but I get a finger from each hand of what we bring home. I’ll be spending my nights with more pleasant companions soon enough. Where will you be?”

He let the question hang, since everyone already knew the answer. His father might have put him in charge of these men, but unlike them he had already risen as far as he could ever go.

His point won, Yavan drew a broad cloth from nowhere and lay it on the ground. “Pour out today’s goods and I shall, as you say, earn my keep.”

Dasatan untied the bag at his belt, emptied it onto the black cloth: a dozen stones, ranging from yellow to dark red. Yavan lowered his staff, amber-tipped and twined with copper wire, to hold it near each of them in turn. This was the reason he was on the trip, the one working he could do well: in his hands the stone at the tip of his staff would glow in sympathy with the stones that were true amber, the blood of the god. If they had even a moderate haul one finger of it would fetch a small fortune from real boltforges, and after that Yavan would indeed have a comfortable life, for a long or a short while according to his tastes. Dasatan, on the other hand, would be here again next spring, or on some other road.

“Come on,” Dasatan said once the stones had been sorted. He would transfer the true amber to his private pouch, the one worn under his tunic, when he was alone. It was nearly dark, and a cold wind had begun to blow. “Let’s get inside. You, too, Yavan—unless you’d like to stay out here to draw the lightning away from the tent?”

“So,” the old man goes on, “Dasat knew there was no fortune to be found in the houses of the people, and if he did not find shelter soon he would freeze. Finally he had no choice but to go into the deep forest, though it is a dangerous enough place in the summer and worse in the winter.

“He made his way slowly into the forest, for the paths were few and overgrown. When the sun was high he stopped and ate nearly all the piece of bread his mother had given him, being sure to save the last few crumbs. Just as he was folding up the handkerchief, though, he heard a cheep-cheep-cheep, and saw above him a tiny bird resting wearily on a bare branch. It was all red but for a single black feather on each wing.

“Remembering the good manners his father had taught him Dasat took off his hat and said, ‘Good day, gentle bird; is there any service I can give you?’

“The bird raised its wings, and Dasat could see it was thin and weak under its feathers. ‘I am one of the Day Birds,’ the bird said, ‘who help to pull the sun across the sky from east to west. I fell from my yoke, and have been chasing after my flock ever since. I am now very close, as they are right overhead, but I am so desperately hungry I fear I will never catch them without something to eat.’

“Dasat, of course, had only those few crumbs left in the handkerchief, and if his mind had been wise he would have kept them; but his heart made him say ‘Noble bird, I would be glad to share with you the little I have.’ He opened the handkerchief, and the bird hopped into his palm and ate up all the crumbs that were left.

“‘Thank you,’ the bird said, ‘for such is all the meal I need.’ With that, he leapt up into the air and shot off away, so that soon he was only a spot on the sun. Dasat continued on into the forest, wondering what he was to eat now that the last crumbs of bread were gone.

“Further into the woods he saw the lights of a house.”

The worst of it, Dasatan thought, was that your feet were always wet. For whatever reason the amber was always found in damp places—swamps, riverbeds, and so on. There were even tales of places, much farther north and west than any Kavatai had ever been, where it was trawled right out of the sea in nets. It would be easier if the ai Kamanai would collect it themselves, so he could just buy it from them, but to them that was sacrilege: they would lead him and his men to where the amber was likely to be, but no more. That meant bells of wading through water and mud, looking for the telltale blue soil in which the stones always sat—just as the Lord of Lightning, whose spilled blood the stones were, made his home within the Blue Sky Lord’s domain.

The memory of the previous day’s exchange with Yavan was still sour, and Dasatan had allowed himself to stray out of sight of the others. He followed a stream, shallow but cold, similar to places he’d made good finds in the past. Looking down at the water he did not at first notice the sudden darkening, but could not miss the thunder that broke the air. He turned—they had all been instructed by Balat to return to camp if they heard thunder—but though it was just past midday it was nearly too dark to see. He felt a cold, wet kiss on the back of his neck, then another. Snow: within a moment it had filled his eyes and mouth, blinding and choking him. Before ten heartbeats had passed the world around him was gone, replaced by a solid white wall. He cursed that he should die here, not at sea like a true Kavatai: killed not by the Wind of Ill Fortune or even the Wind of Roasting Hazelnuts but by a cold, nameless wind—a wind as dirtborn as he was.

Dasatan tried to shout, but the snow held his voice close. He stumbled forward, thinking only to get up and out of the riverbed before his feet froze in the water. Never mind finding the others: he needed to get to shelter before this wind and snow killed him. He ran for the distant outline of a group of trees, hoping there would be some protection from the storm beneath them.

He leaned back against the thin, papery bark of one of the trees, closed his eyes. There was no use even trying to start a fire while the wind was blowing. Far above, thunderbolts cracked as the Lord of Lightning took his strides across the sky. There would be good amber to be found here next year, if he lived that long.

Long heartbeats later the keening in the air faded and then stopped. Opening his eyes Dasatan saw that the storm had passed, only little orphan-winds remaining to blow the fallen snow along the ground. He looked around and saw nothing but tree after tree. The blowing snow had obliterated his footprints, so that he could not tell which way he had come. The sky was still grey, the sun hidden: he fished in his pouch for his skystone before realizing that knowing south, east, north and west would do him little good in finding his way back to the others. All he could do was keep moving, call out often in case he was near them, and hope. Picking a direction at random he set off, making sure to stay in the shelter of the tall birches in case of another storm.

After some time he saw a light in the forest, and began to walk towards it.

“As he got closer, Dasat saw that it was no ordinary house. The walls were made not of wood but of bones, the roof not thatch but hair. There were no windows: what he had thought were firelights were the glowing eyes of the skulls that sat at each corner of the house. A garden lay in front of it, but the plants that grew those were such as Dasat had never seen, and the grass moaned as it waved in the wind. At the foot of the path sat a strange little man, with dark blue skin, a white beard, and a peaked red hat, and so still that Dasat was not even sure he was alive until he spoke.

“‘Who are you, Kamanai?’ the little man said. ‘Do you not know where you tread? Turn back, now, before it is too late.’

“Dasat was surprised to hear the little man speaking, but he remembered his manners. ‘Beg pardon, Little Father,’ he said. ‘My name is Dasat. I am come seeking my fortune, but tonight I hope only for shelter and a fire.’

““You speak properly,’ the little man said, ‘so I will give you a warning: this is a terrible house. Flee now and you may be safe; stay any longer and death is sure to take you.’

“‘If I leave here tonight she will take me no matter what, for I am out of food, and winter is coming,’ Dasat said. ‘If you could spare anything, even the tiniest crumb of bread, I would be on my way.’

“‘I am bound to give nothing away for free,’ the little man said. ‘But here is a bargain for you: if you will gather wood for me you may stay here, and I will bring you some food each day. But you must never, ever go into the house.’”

It was no more than a gathering of tents, each smaller than the one Balat had erected the night before; still there was a fire-glow from them, a draw Dasatan could not ignore. His hand hovered over his sword hilt as he neared the tents, then drew away as he remembered Balat’s warning against drawing steel—an insult to the Lord of Lightning, he had said. Though Dasatan did not put much stock in these superstitions, he needed to make a good impression. The ai Kamanai were wild men, living not in towns but in camps scattered through the forests, and few were even as hospitable as Balat and his followers.