The Book of Jhereg (75 page)

Natalia’s life was crudely sketched on her face. I mean, I couldn’t see the details, but the outline was there. Her hair was dark but greying; the thin grey streaks that don’t seem dignified but merely old. Her brow was wide and the furrows in it seemed permanent. There were deep lines next to her nose, which I’m sure had been a cute button when she was younger. Her face was thin and marked with tension, as if she went around with her jaw clenched. And yet, deep down behind it all, there was a sparkle in her eyes. She seemed to be in her early forties.

As she sipped on her tea and formed opinions of me that were as valid as mine of her, I said, “So, how did you get involved in all of this?”

She started to answer and I sensed that I was about to get a tract, so I said, “No, never mind. I’m not sure I want to hear.”

She favored me with a sort of half-smile, which was the most cheerful thing I’d run into from her yet. She said, “You don’t want to hear about my life as a harem girl for an Eastern king?”

I said, “Why yes, I would. I don’t suppose you really were one though, were you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Just as well,” I said.

“I was a thief for a while, though.”

“Yeah? Not a bad occupation. The hours are good, anyway.”

“It’s like anything else,” she said. “It depends on your stature in the field.”

I thought about Orcas who will knife anyone for twenty Imperials, and said, “I suppose. I take it you weren’t at the top.”

She nodded. “We lived on the other side of town.” She meant the other side of South Adrilankha. To most Easterners, South Adrilankha was all of town there was. “That was,” she continued, “after my mother died. My father would bring me into an inn and I would steal the coins the drinkers left on the bar, or sometimes cut their purses.”

I said, “No, that isn’t really the top of the profession, is it? But I suppose it’s a living.”

“After a fashion.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Yes. Once. We’d agreed that if I was caught he’d go through the motions of beating me, as if it were my own idea. Then when I was finally caught, he did more than go through the motions.”

“I see. Did you tell what really happened?”

“No. I was only about ten, and I was too busy crying and screaming that I’d never steal again, and I’m sorry, and anything else I could think of to say.”

The waiter returned with more klava. I didn’t touch it, having learned from experience.

I said, “Then what happened?”

She shrugged. “I never did steal again. We went into another inn, and I wouldn’t steal anything, so my father took me out and beat me again. I ran away and I’ve never seen him since.”

“You were how old, did you say?”

“Ten.”

“Hmmm. How did you live, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Since all I knew about were inns, I went into one and asked to sweep the floor in exchange for a meal. The owner said yes, so that’s what I did for a while. At first I was too scrawny to have any trouble with the customers, but later I had to hide during the evenings. I was charged for oil, so I’d sit in my room in the dark, covered with blankets. I didn’t really mind, though. Having a room all to myself was so nice that I didn’t miss the light or the heat.

“When the owner died I was twelve, and his widow sort of latched on to me. She stopped charging me for the oil, which was nice. But I guess the biggest thing she did for me was to teach me to read. From then on I spent all my time reading, mostly the same eight or nine books over and over again. I remember there was one that I couldn’t understand no matter how many times I read it, and another one of fairy stories, and one was a play, something about a shipwreck. And one was all about where to grow what field crops for best results, or something. I even read that, which shows how desperate I was. I still didn’t go down to the common room in the evening, and there wasn’t anything else to do.”

I said, “So there you were when Kelly came along, and he changed your life, and made you see this and that and the other, right?”

She smiled. “Something like that. I used to see him selling papers on the corner every day when I ran my errands. But one day, just out of nowhere, I realized that I could buy one and it would be something
new
to read. I had never heard of bookstores. I think Kelly was around twenty then.

“For the next year I’d buy a paper every week, then run off before he could talk to me. I had no idea what the paper was about, but I liked it. After a year or so, it finally began to sink in and I started thinking about what it was saying, and what it had to do with me. I remember it coming as a shock to me when I realized that there was something, somehow,
wrong
when a ten-year-old child had to go into inns to steal.”

“That’s true,” I said. “A ten-year-old child should be able to steal in the streets.”

“Stop it,” she snapped, and I decided she probably had a point so I mumbled an apology and said, “So, anyway, that’s when you decided to save the world.”

I guess her years had taught her a certain kind of patience, because she
didn’t glare at me cynically as Paresh would have, or close up as Cawti would have. She shook her head and said, “It’s never that simple. I started talking to Kelly, of course, and we started arguing. I didn’t realize until later that the only reason I kept returning to him was that he was the only person I knew who listened to me and seemed to take me seriously. I don’t think I ever would have done anything about it, but that was the year the tavern tax came down.”

I nodded. That had been before my time, but I could still remember my father talking about it in that peculiar, hushed tone he always used when talking about something the Empire did that he didn’t like. I said, “What happened then?”

She laughed. “A lot of things. The first thing was that the inn closed, almost right away. The owner sold it, probably for just enough to live on. The new owner closed it until the tax fuss settled, so I was out on the street without a job. That same day I saw Kelly, and his paper had a big article about it. I said something to him about his silly old paper, and this was
real
, and he tore into me like a dzur after lyorn. He said that was what the paper was about, and the only way to save the jobs was this and that and the other. I don’t remember most of it, but I was pretty mad myself and not thinking too clearly. I told him the problem was the Empress was greedy, and he said that no, the Empress was desperate, because of this and that, and the next thing I knew he was sounding like he was on her side. I stormed off and didn’t see him again for years.”

“What did you do?”

“I found another inn, this one on the Dragaeran side of town. Since Dragaerans can’t tell how old we are anyway, and the owner thought I was ‘cute,’ they let me serve customers. It turned out that the last waiter had been killed in a knife fight the week before. I guess that should have told me what kind of place it was, and it was that kind of place, but I did all right. I found a flat just on this side of Twovine, and walked the two miles to work every day. The nice thing was that the walk took me past a little bookstore. I spent a lot of money there, but it was worth it. I especially loved history—Dragaeran, not human. And the stories, too. I guess I couldn’t tell them apart very well. I used to pretend I was a Dzurlord, and I’d fight the battle of the Seven Pines then go charging up Dzur Mountain to fight the Enchantress all in one breath. What is it?”

I suppose I must have jumped a bit when she mentioned Dzur Mountain. I said, “Nothing. When did you meet Kelly again?”

My klava was cool enough to pick up and just barely warm enough to be worth drinking. I drank some. Natalia said, “It was after the head tax was instituted in the Eastern section. A couple who lived downstairs from me also knew how to read, and they ran into a group of people who were trying to get up a petition to the Empress against the tax.”

I nodded. Someone had come to my father’s restaurant with a similar petition years later, even though we lived in the Dragaeran part of the city. My father
had thrown him out. I said, “I’ve never understood why the head tax was even instituted. Was the Empire trying to keep Easterners out of the city?”

“It had to do largely with the uprisings in the eastern and northern duchies that ended forced labor. I’ve written a book on it. Would you like to buy a copy?”

“Never mind.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “my neighbors and I got involved with these people. We worked with them for a while, but I didn’t like the idea of going to the Empire on our hands and knees. It seemed wrong. I guess my head was just filled with those histories and stories I’d read, and I was only fourteen, but it seemed to me that the only ones who ever got anything from the Empress had to ask boldly and prove themselves worthy.” She said “boldly” and “worthy” with a bit of emphasis. “I thought we ought to do something wonderful for the Empire, then ask that the tax be lifted as our reward.”

I smiled. “What did they say to that?”

“Oh, I never actually proposed it. I wanted to, but I was afraid they’d laugh at me.” Her lips turned up briefly. “And of course they would have. But we had a few public meetings to talk about it, and Kelly started showing up at them, with, I think, four or five others. I don’t remember what they said, but they made a big impression on me. They were younger than a lot of those there, but they seemed to know exactly what they were talking about, and they came in and left together, like a unit. They reminded me of the Dragon armies, I guess. So after one of the meetings I went up to Kelly and said, ‘Remember me?’ And he did, and we started talking, and we were arguing again inside of a minute, only this time I didn’t walk away. I gave him my address and we agreed to stay in touch.

“I didn’t join him for another year or so, after the riots, and the killings. It was just about the time the Empress finally lifted the head tax.”

I nodded as if I knew the history she was speaking of. I said, “Was Kelly involved in that?”

“We were all involved. He wasn’t behind the riots or anything, but he was there all the time. He was incarcerated for a while, at one of the camps they set up when they broke us up. I managed to avoid the Guards that time, even though I’d been around, too, when the Lumber Exchange was torched. That was what finally brought the troops in, you know. The Lumber Exchange was owned by a Dragaeran; an Iorich, I think.”

“I hadn’t known that,” I said truthfully. “You’ve been with Kelly ever since?”

She nodded.

I thought about Cawti. “It must be difficult,” I said. “I mean, he must be a hard man to work with.”

“It’s exciting. We’re building the future.”

I said, “Everyone builds the future. Everything we do every day builds the future.”

“All right, I mean we’re building it
consciously
. We know what we’re doing.”

“Yeah. Okay. You’re building the future. To get it, you’re sacrificing the present.”

“What do you mean?” Her tone was genuinely inquisitive rather than snappy, which gave me some hope for her.

“I mean that you’re so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you’re blind to the people around you. You’re so involved in creating this vision of yours that you don’t care how many innocent people are hurt.” She started to speak but I kept going. “Look,” I said, “we both know who I am and what I do, so there’s no point pretending otherwise, and if you think it’s inherently evil, then there isn’t anything more to say. But I can tell you that I have never,
never
intentionally hurt an innocent person. And I’m including Dragaerans as people, so don’t think I’m pulling one on you that way because I’m not.”

She caught my eye and held it. “I didn’t think you were. And I won’t even discuss what you mean by innocent. All I can say is that if you really believe what you’ve just said, nothing I can say will change your mind, so there isn’t any point in discussing it.”

I relaxed, not realizing that I’d been tense. I guess I’d expected her to lambaste me or something. I suddenly wondered why I cared, and decided that Natalia seemed to be the most reasonable of these people that I’d yet met, and I somehow wanted to like, and be liked by, at least one of them. That was stupid. I’d given up trying to make people “like” me when I was twelve years old, and had the results of that attitude beaten into me in ways I’ll never forget.

And with that thought a certain anger came, and with the anger a certain strength. I kept it off my face, but it came back to me then, as a chilly, refreshing wave. I had started down the path that led me to this point many, many years before, and I had taken those first steps because I hated Dragaerans. That was my reason then, it was my reason now, it was enough.

Kelly’s people did everything for ideals I could never understand. To them, people were “the masses,” individuals only mattered by what they did for the movement. Such people could never love. Not purely, unselfishly, with no thought for why and how and what it would do. And, similarly, they could never hate; they were too wrapped up in
why
someone did something to be able to hate him for doing it.

But I hated. I could feel my hatred inside of me, spinning like a ball of ice. Most of all, right now, I hated Herth. No, I didn’t really
want
to hire someone to send him for a walk, I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to feel that tug of a body as it jerks and kicks while I hold the handle and the life erupts from it like water from the cold springs of the Eastern Mountains. That’s what I wanted, and what you want makes you who you are.

I put down a few coins to pay for the klava and the tea. I don’t know how much Natalia knew of what was going on in my head, but she knew I was done talking. She thanked me and we stood up at the same time. I bowed and thanked her for her company.

As I walked out, she picked up her two companions by sight and they left
the place just ahead of me, turned, and waited for her by the door. As I left, the Easterner looked at my grey cloak with the stylized jhereg on it and sneered. If the Teckla had done it I’d have killed him, but it was the Easterner so I just kept walking.