He bowed, stumbled, banged his head on the edge of the table and sprawled across the floor. For a minute or so he lay there, too apathetic to move. Then he giggled. There was a puddle on the floor and beer was dripping from somewhere.
‘Nice, Syannis,’ said a faraway voice. ‘I’ve met him now. Don’t bring the boy back here again.’
Arms reached under his shoulders and hauled him up into the sky. He was in a room full of lots of people and they were slowly spinning around him. He closed his eyes, but the spinning didn’t seem to want to stop. He was starting to feel a bit sick.
‘Boy, you’re going to hate the world this evening.’
‘Are we going to fight pirates now?’ he slurred. His tongue was suddenly too big for his mouth and none of his words came out properly.
‘No, boy. You’re going to bed. You’re going to be sick and then you’re going to clean it up. And then in the morning, we’re going to start you on learning your letters. When you’ve done that, you can fight as many pirates as you like.’
10
LETTERS
They marched in sullen silence away from the Eight Pillars of Smoke. Berren staggered in the thief-taker’s wake, occasionally pausing to retch. His stomach was empty before they even reached the other side of Four Winds Square, and yet just when he was sure there was absolutely nothing left, the next wave of nausea would hit him. They barged through Weaver’s Row and back into the thief-taker’s yard. Someone from a neighbouring window leaned out, shouted a warning without bothering to look and then emptied a chamber pot as they passed, spattering the thief-taker’s boots. He didn’t flinch, but when they got back he tore them off and threw them at Berren.
‘Sit outside and make them clean, boy!’
Berren had already polished Master Sy’s boots once that day. First thing before breakfast, one of his daily chores, and yet here they were, covered in mud again. Mud and worse. Master Sy disappeared into his room and came out wearing a second pair. ‘Spotless,’ he growled, and then he stormed away back into the city, leaving Berren sitting on the doorstep on his own. He hardly dared to move. Alone in the thief-taker’s house for a second time, left to look and pry as he pleased. Left to take whatever caught his fancy and run away… except this time he felt so sick that he couldn’t bring himself to move. Hands trembling, he picked up the thief-taker’s dirty boots. The smell of sewage wafted over him and his stomach began to heave again. He turned away, took a deep breath and then stayed exactly where he was, cleaning and polishing until the thief-taker’s boots gleamed like the golden towers on The Peak. When he was done, he crawled back inside and stumbled into his room and lay down. He thought he might doze for a few minutes and then sneak a peek into the thief-taker’s room, but he must have fallen fast asleep. The next thing he knew, Master Sy was back, stomping on the floor, tearing off his second pair of boots and throwing them across the house.
‘Those too,’ he snapped as Berren emerged, hollow-eyed, peering down from the doorway of his room. The thief-taker didn’t even look at the first pair. Instead, he threw down a stack of pieces of paper, most of them torn and all of them written on. Then he took out a pot of ink, fumbled, and spilt half of it over the floor. He let out a violent curse, threw Berren a grimace of unfettered rage; then he took a deep breath and stormed out into the yard in his stockings.
Berren crept down the stairs, wincing at every creak from every step. He still felt like he was going to be sick at any moment and now his head had joined in too. Some slave-galley drum-master was thumping away on the inside of his skull. Even his eyes had largely given up. He stumbled to the outside door and peered into the yard. Master Sy was leaning against the wall a few feet away, pulling furiously on a pipe. Without a word, Berren cleaned up the ink, slowly and painfully. Then the thief-taker came back inside, and that was when the real horror started. The horror of Master Sy trying to teach letters. He stuffed a quill into Berren’s shaking hand and told him to write his name. Berren hadn’t the first idea how. Master Sy snatched the pen off him and wrote on the paper, in a perfect script that would have made a scribe weep: Berren.
‘Like that.’ He handed back the quill. Berren dipped it in the ink pot and dripped ink all over the paper. He tried to ignore how Master Sy clenched his jaw and how the veins stood out on his temple. He did his absolute best to copy what Master Sy had done. The result was such a blotted mess that neither of them had any idea how well he might have done.
‘Again.’
Berren tried again. Second time around was, if anything, slightly worse. So was the pounding in his head.
‘Again.’
This time Berren made absolutely certain that he didn’t take too much ink. The result was that he didn’t take nearly enough and kept running out halfway through each stroke. Still, he thought he’d done quite well. You could see some of the letters were almost the same as some of the letters Master Sy had drawn. Admittedly it looked as though someone had cut his name up into lots of different pieces and then put them back together in slightly the wrong order, but at least there were lines this time, instead of just blobs.
Master Sy closed his eyes and swallowed.
‘Again.’
Berren tried again. Too much ink again. By now his hand was trembling too much to draw a straight line.
‘Are you doing this deliberately, boy? Are you trying to make a fool of me? Because children learn to do this. And if children can master a quill and ink, I fail to see why a young man who has such a high opinion of himself as you do should have any trouble at all.’
‘I…’ I’m sick, he wanted to say, but the thief-taker’s face left him in no doubt that saying anything at all would be bad. Flustered, he tried again. This time his hand was shaking even more. He took far too much ink and dripped all over the paper again.
The thief-taker clenched his fists. He closed his eyes and took three long breaths. ‘You will stay here until you get it right,’ he said finally. And that was what Berren spent the rest of the evening doing. Writing his name. Badly, and with a splitting hangover. He was writing well into the evening, by candlelight with his stomach rumbling loud enough to set the walls to shaking before the thief-taker finally relented. With a scornful sweep of his arm, he swept all the paper off the table and thumped down a plate with a slightly stale half loaf of bread and a mug of gruel that had gone cold enough to grow a crust of fat on the top. Berren gobbled it down. Master Sy watched. He was frowning so much that his eyebrows met in the middle.
‘More tomorrow, boy,’ he said curtly as soon as Berren had finished. ‘And we’ll work on you manners too. To your room now.’
The next morning, the table was covered in paper again. He’d almost come to look forward to practising bowing to Lilissa, but just like yesterday, she didn’t come. There was no sign of breakfast. Maybe that was a mercy. He felt rotten and in no mood for either.
What there was, was Master Sy standing by the table, one hand on his hip, the other pointing a pen at Berren as though it was a sword.
‘Write, boy.’
By the end of that day, Berren was starting to think he had the hang of it. By the end of the next he was feeling better again and was copying any word that Master Sy showed him. Not well, but well enough that you could see it was the same. Now and then he still took too much ink and ended up with an illegible smudge and a clip round the ear, but on the whole, he thought he wasn’t doing too badly. On the next day he was even allowed a break; Master Sy took him out in the afternoon, out towards the Courts District this time and then down the Avenue of Emperors that ran right up from the river to Four Winds Square and down the other side to the sea in one dead straight line. There weren’t any trees but there were a lot of statues. Master Sy started to tell Berren all about them, but after the third one, when it was obvious that Berren wasn’t listening, he stopped.
‘History doesn’t interest you eh, lad? Well it’s not my history. I suppose I shan’t be offended.’ He led the way down to the sea-docks in silence and then bought them each pickled fish in a bun. He stared out to the sea and Berren could see his eyes flitting from ship to ship, mast to mast, flag to flag. Looking for something and not finding
