The Rat and the Serpent (14 page)

“No, I am not.”

She released me and sat back. There was no need for her to reply; she knew she was right, and she knew I knew.

She asked me, “What will you do tomorrow night when you return to the Forum of Tauri?”

I stood up and headed for the door.

“What will you
do?
”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

With that, I departed.

And think I did, for sleep was impossible. I lay in the doorway full of soot and rags that for years I had called home, silent and still, pondering all that had happened to me since walking inside the Tower of the Dessicators. It was not what I had expected. My simple vow to the image of my totem had not suggested anything so painful as that which afflicted me now.

An hour before I was due at the Forum of Tauri, I made my decision.

I walked slowly to the Forum, arriving in reflective mood, placing my parasol beside a hundred others in the holder provided, then hobbling along the corridors leading to the taurian’s chamber. Everybody was there except Karanlik. The taurian glanced at me, but he said nothing. I sat.

The usher stood, then spoke. “There’s been a change,” he said. “The cimmerian woman has died.”

I was torn apart.

My decision lay in ruins. My speech could not be made.

And Karanlik was dead.

“By her own hand?” asked the taurian.

“No. We don’t know how.”

The taurian looked at me. “That’s unusual,” he said with a shrug. “I do still require a speech of renunciation if I’m to pass you.”

I said nothing.

I was dazed.

“Ügliy? Your renunciation, please?”

A dead anger filled me, the sort of anger that lies underneath the skin waiting for the right moment to burst out.

I stood up and said, “I renounce all nogoth things.”

The taurian’s eyes narrowed. “But you would have renounced the cimmerian had she lived?” he said.

It was an effort, but I replied, “Yes.”

I sat down.

I heard people leaving the court. My gaze was defocussed, a picture before my mind’s eye of Karanlik in her cell.

Somebody sat beside me. “Here’s the third part of your silver ring,” the taurian said, and I felt something cold in my hand.

The taurian departed.

I looked up. “Wait,” I said. “What will happen to her body?”

“Oh, I expect it’ll be stored out the back until one of the ushers can return it to the northern cimmerians.” He smiled. “Probably in a funeral wrapping. We’re not savages.”

I made no reply.

Was it possible that the citidenizenry was a place of horror? Was it possible that they practised torture such as this every day of the month?

If so, why?

If not, why was I in such a dilemma?

I left the Forum and made for the nearest alley, walking along it until I found a hole not claimed by any local nogoth. There, I curled into a ball and tried to make sense of what had happened to me.

I felt I had passed the third part of the test by default. It had not been what I had wanted. I suspected that somebody, possibly the usher, had murdered Karanlik, that my renunciation be made in the most extreme circumstances possible. The Mavrosopolis required much of its citidenizens.

The last hour of the night was upon me. I returned to the Forum, sneaking through a back gate to find the yards behind the building. With a high moon in a sootless sky it was not long before I noticed a single form wrapped in a cloth, and I knew it must be Karanlik. I unwrapped the cloth at her head. It was her. I covered her face again, and wept.

One more task remained. Taking a two-wheeled cart from a nearby lot I hauled Karanlik’s body upon it, then, struggling to find my balance, I shifted my weight upon my good leg and my crutch and began to haul the cart out of the yard. A few silent alleys and then I was on Vezirhani Street, making north. It was slow work. There was an uphill slope and I fought to keep my momentum. Often my crutch would slip on compacted soot, and I would have to turn, pull the cart, find my balance again, then pull some more. There were no citidenizens about, only nogoths, but anyway I was ignored. At the Galata Bridge I paused for breath, then carried on over the water into Necatibey Street, until, at dawn, I arrived at a cimmerian settlement carved out of blackened rock.

An old woman watched me from a high ledge. “Do you know Karanlik?” I called out.

She nodded.

I let the cart lean against a stone. “Tell your people she was a good woman,” I said. Then I turned and hobbled away.

Now that I had offered Karanlik what she deserved, I felt changed. The dead anger was like steel in my bones. I would pass the test at all costs, if only to discover the truth behind my pain. I realised that there must be scores, even hundreds of other nogoths facing similar dilemmas. That was wrong. It
had
to be. Surely nothing offered by the Mavrosopolis could balance the treatment that we had all been dealt.

I felt heedless of danger. I wanted something more than what I had been offered, something different. And, yes, if it was reckless so much the better.

So I found myself at Raknia’s tower. I knocked once on her door. An extraordinary sight awaited me.

She had strewn the floor with jasmine and white lilies, so that the air was heavy with perfume. I stood amazed. The furniture had been pushed to the sides of the chamber, leaving the couch and the table placed centrally, the couch covered with a black velvet blanket, the table set with a single candle that illuminated a small feast. She wore her black gown open to display her pale and perfect body; no slippers, toenails dark as jet, black lace gloves pulled up to her elbows, a circlet of dove feathers arranged over her hair.

She pointed to my sooty boots. “Take them off,” she said. It was more of a demand than a request.

I did as I was told, entering the room to close and bolt the door, then turning to face her. “What’s all this?” I asked.

She gestured for me to approach her, so I took a few steps forward. My toes crushed the blooms into sodden forms, yet in doing so I released the scent of lily and jasmine, further enriching the air. I hesitated. Now she approached me, taking two goblets of raki from the table. This time I did not refuse the liquor, nor did I even think of it. The smell and taste of raki were infused into my body, and I liked it. She giggled, and kicked some of the lily blooms across the floor.

“You’re dissolute,” I said.

“Did your mother teach you that word?” she replied.

“Well, you are.”

“I’m human.”

“You’re tainted.”

“Nothing’s clean in the Mavrosopolis.”

I found no reply.

She grinned. “You like that, don’t you?”

“What do you see in me?” I asked her. “Anything?”

“I don’t need to answer that.”

I walked across to the table. As I passed her she reached out to remove my outer rags, leaving me in my smudged shirt and breeches; and although I knew I ought to resist, that urge was buried so deep in my mind I could hardly hear its call. I examined the food: goat’s cheese, olives and rice, mushrooms fried in squid ink. There were bowls of water to wash oily hands in, cloths, salt, knives of steel. I could not imagine where she had got it all from. But I did not care. At that moment I only wanted to partake.

She stood at my side, her hand upon my shoulder. “Kiss me.”

“So you want me to stay with you and forget the citidenizenry?”

“On the contrary.” She filled two goblets with raki and handed one to me. “Why not live for the moment? What’s the point living for the future, when the future is unknown?”

I said, “I doubt that the Mavrosopolis would allow its future to remain unknown.”

She frowned. She could not grasp my point.

I added, “Perhaps that is why erasure is such a crime.”

She shrugged, then sat at the table, indicating that I should follow suit. So we ate, the raki flowing from what seemed a perpetually full bottle, until I sensed my vision blurring and my limbs becoming uncoordinated.

“I’ve got something to help you,” she said.

“You know something ’bout what I was talking ’bout, don’t you?”

She ignored my slurred question. From one of the boxes at the side of the room she lifted a metal and glass object, the pipe-shaped end of which she puffed at, breathing soft grey smoke from her mouth. She returned to sit at the table. I smelled a musky odour about her.

“Wha’s that?” I asked.

“A hookah. Fun.”

A whisper of irritation flickered through my thoughts. “You can be... infuriating at times.”

“Don’t you love that in me?”

She handed me the hookah pipe and I took a puff. Immediately a sense of euphoria filled me, and I felt as though I was floating, my dizziness gone, though my body felt distant, as if it was fading at the edges. Warmth flooded through me, from my throat through my chest and abdomen to my limbs. I felt heat in my groin.

“Ah, I see,” I said, grinning.

She nodded, her eyes half closed, as if pondering my state of mind. Sitting there, her delicate, pointed chin resting upon steepled hands, she was a vision of beauty, too luscious, almost too phantasmagoric, like some mythological siren. One last defensive thought came to me, and I struggled to speak. “Sorry to dis’point you,” I said, “but I can’t pass th’ test anyway, everybody’s tellin’ me I’ll fail.”

“I know you’ll find a way,” she replied.

She knelt on the floor, gathering the jasmine and lily blooms into a pile, adding dove feathers from another pot. Then she lay back on this bed, her gown loose around her, her legs apart, arms outflung, and I almost fell upon her as my crutch clattered to the floor. And it was better than with Karanlik, in a decadent way, for where Karanlik had been fresh and natural, inspired by a seasonal festival, Raknia was wanton, wild, making me do what she wanted without shame. I followed her lead. It felt wicked, but her inspiration was too strong to resist, her lure too sickly sweet.

I felt no passage of time. Everything merged.

Petals were crushed and feathers rose and fell on draughts as we rolled around the floor, the couch and its blanket forgotten. I found that when I was on my hands and knees my withered leg was no drawback. She grabbed my hair in her hands and encircled my body with her legs; I caressed her and called her the names that she called me. That made her passion all the more intense. My white seed spurted over her ashen body. The hookah trailed smoke, its pipe in a steel tray on the floor beside us; and we would rest to breathe more of that incense in, before returning to one another.

Time was nothing. The Mavrosopolis was nothing. Only the room existed, full of smoke and scent.

And later, when Raknia was on all fours above me and I was lying eyes shut in the blossoms and feathers, I felt I might know heaven. But then I opened my eyes, and, over the twin curves of her buttocks, I saw two ghostly figures staring down at us.

I gave a shout of fear.

Raknia squealed, then looked up. She leaped off me as I rolled away to grab my rag shirt.

Raknia was shouting
loud.
For a few moments my shock was so great I could not grasp the words.

Then they became clear. “Get out! Get out of my room!”

Another haunting. But it was not the masked wraith, it was two lesser shades, not so intense as a wraith, clearer, darker, yet frightening in their own way.

She screamed at them, “Get away! You’re not wanted here, get away and don’t come back!”

They each pointed an accusatory finger at her. “You think you can stop us haunting?” Then they pointed at me. “You think Ügliy is safe?”

“Go away, now!”

“You are a traitor. We will not give up.” They turned to me, drifting towards me on blurred and fading legs. “As for you—we tell you now that if you proceed to the final part of the test you will regret it for the rest of your short life. You will not take the test. You will not take it.”

I felt both afraid and insolent. Because these beings were inferior to wraiths I wanted to retaliate, yet their ghostly power was having an effect on me, making the hairs on my body stand up, making my lip quiver, forcing me to backtrack to the door, as if to run away.

“No...” I said. “You know I can’t pass the test.”

They vanished, satisfied with my answer. Raknia pulled on her gown and folded her arms, as if to hug some warmth into her body. I felt cold, sick. The odour of the room was not so fresh as it had been.

I glanced at her. “They called you a traitor,” I remarked.

She said nothing.

I added, “Perhaps there is an explanation for that.”

She looked at me, a sullen expression on her face. “They implied that you might pass the last part of the test,” she said. “Have you been hiding something from me?”

Suddenly she was fear and shadow incarnate. The room seemed smaller, colder, greyer. “No,” I said. “I don’t know what the last part is. Anyhow, I am a cripple.”

She studied me. Then she poured a glass of raki, hesitated, shrugged, then poured me one and brought it over.

“Traitor?” I queried.

“I’ve no idea,” she replied. “Ask the shades. They’ll know.”

She knew. I understood that some hidden plot had been revealed here. She
knew.
“It is time I went,” I said.

She nodded.

“I will come back.”

A faint smile in reply, then, “Good.”

I dressed, then departed the tower, returning to my doorway in Blackguards’ Passage, where I pondered that strange accusation.

Traitor. To whom?

10.8.583

I now know the depths, the malevolent, callous depths of the thawer masters, and I will never forgive them for what they did to me yesterday.

Oh so casually they asked us to rely upon our cimmerian helpers, knowing that later they would rip us apart for the sake of the citidenizen test. I did not love my assistant like I love my mother, but I did respect and like her, and we had formed a good, noble and true relationship—not one of equals, that could never be, but one of value. Her name was... no, I had better not set it down. I do not want to remember what it represents. If I did remember, I would spit in fury upon this sheet of paper, and the soot impregnated in it would run, and ruin my words. I will not tolerate spoiled lettering.

She was a good woman who has been exploited by the thawers. That should not be. It is wrong. There is so much wrong in the Mavrosopolis, more than I thought possible. How come this wrong has not been recognised? Am I the only man who sees? This question, this torment, will not leave me, this constant desire to find out why nobody before me has seen the wrong in our conurbation. Why, why? Are we not all free?

They are cunning, the thawer masters. Every woman aspirant had a man cimmerian, while every man had a woman. They hoped, they actually hoped that carnally charged relationships would evolve, so that they could be torn apart when the moment came. For them, relationships are of secondary importance compared to the mores of the Mavrosopolis. I am sure that there is a perverted voyeurism in the games that they play with their pre-citidenizens, one that makes their life enjoyable. Enjoyable to them alone. If that is the truth of the citidenizenry, I do not want it.

And yet I must have it. What an appalling dilemma. I must leave the gutters, the sooty streets that run like ink when there is rain, and I must become a citidenizen; yet if I become a citidenizen I enter a world of moral senility, of vile and base behaviour, and sheer wrongness. Is this the way of the world?

I can think of only one answer to my problem. When—I say when, and I have always assumed when, but now I am thinking if—if I become a citidenizen I must become a secret artist, haunting, like a shade, the perpetually twilit alleys of the Mavrosopolis. Only a secret artist could survive the inhumane bureaucracy ofthe citidenizenry. I will become a terrorist poet, handing out my verse with a wicked club and a hidden face, demanding that people read me, telling them—in a disguised voice—that there are many other secret poets about the place. I will demand of them and they will read, and because nobody will be able to find out who I am, I will be both safe and artistically satisfied; even vindicated, if people like my work...

That is another absurdity, surely.

If the streets of the Mavrosopolis are thronging with secret poets, why have I not seen them or heard of them? My ear is fixed to the street, after all. There are nogoth musicians, players of the wondrous, long-necked saz, of the ney flute with its tricky dental mouthing technique, of the tambour and of many percussive items. These are artist folk, if such a concept exists amongst nogoths—really they are folk musicians with a limited vocabulary, albeit with fine technique. I have dealt with these musicians, I have spoken with them and tried to understand their persuasions and their nuances, and not one has mentioned secret citidenizen poets.

I am forced to the conclusion that if I pass the citidenizen test I am in for a tough time. I would wish it otherwise. I hope that I am wrong, but I am so often right.