The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (7 page)

Not labour, and neglect.

Octavia lay back down, to try sleep one more time, even for a few minutes.

But she heard someone come into the dorm. She listened to the soft footfalls getting closer. She did not open her eyes. Whoever it was stopped by her pallet. And stood there. Still she did not open her eyes.

“Hey, sleeping beauty?” A woman’s voice—Hetta, the night matron? “Hey, wake up. Our lady wants to see you.”

A toe, prodding her, so Octavia could no longer pretend. She rolled over, glanced quickly up—and, yes, Hetta stood there in the gloom—and looked away. “Who wants to see me?”

“Who do you fucking think? You know where the sun is really hiding? Not above the clouds, but up yer kholic arse, that’s where. It’s a fucking disgrace.”

“The chatelaine wants to see
me
?”

“Yes. And you’d better hurry. She’s in a bit of a state.”

Left with instinctual cravings and not much else, seeking concessions to dignity and a sense of peace, yet struggling with the means to accomplish this (let alone understand the drive), Pan Renik was more animal than man. From an early age, the situation of existence had been pretty clear to him: he could not live within the narrow parameters established by those who defined the norms of his society. Pan Renik had been an outcast even in his earliest memories. Now, in the treetop settlement, he was know simply as
the exile
.

He built his nest in the upmost branches, high above the huts and nets and concerns of the others, high above the padres.

Cut off from the hunts, without access to buckets of water patiently collected, Pan Renik was also desperate, hungry, and thirsty most of the time. Loneliness was a given.

Filthy, on skinny haunches he listened to the fading moan of the padre’s horn. The instrument had sounded for the third consecutive night. Pan Renik decided right then and there that he would descend (albeit very cautiously, of course) to investigate.

The night was clear, with steady wind. Moon illuminated the cloudscape. Dreamlike. A triad of notes played over three nights indicated to Pan Renik—if memory served correctly—that an errant soul, teetering on the edge for some time, had now fled its corporeal home; the emptied husk could be sent on its way, to fall beneath the clouds, where only the dead could go.

Pan Renik, bug-eyed apparition, who once tore out his own matted hair, in dreads, to expose his white skull to the sky and unsuccessfully release unwelcome visitors from his beleaguered brain (and then lay bleeding and feverish in his nest, without help, for weeks), climbed quietly, hand over hand, lower and lower, nearer to the settlement.

Perched on a bough, body hidden by clusters of big leaves, he paused. A large crowd had gathered on the main branch. He hoped for an easy opportunity to rob an attendee or two—dash in, maybe get a few nuts or other treasures, then scurry off and up—but there were far too many padres and citizens on the branch for that: almost everybody in the settlement had gathered. Rows of people lined the bough, mostly on this side of dead man’s run, extending out to the end of the huts, their hollowed faces illuminated by well-guarded candles, and by the moonlight as it filtered through the rarified mists blowing overhead. Surveying this, Pan Renik grunted. Decrees must have been passed. Padres had wanted, for arcane reasons, full congregation.

Pan Renik wondered, for the first time since hearing the horn, who might have died.

Glimpsed between the forms of the citizens, he saw the corpse, tethered to a raft. No details. Pan Renik waited. He was good at waiting. That was another of his gifts. His life, it seemed, had been nothing but waiting.

Finally, caught in the orange glow of the guttering candles as they flared in the wind, he discerned the profile of the dead man’s face and he understood the turnout, the decrees.

The oldest man in the world had finally died.

While winds picked up, Pan Renik hunkered against the bark, clinging tight, not sure what he felt. Remote memories churned, memories of when he had still been a citizen, when he had known this dead man and had lived in the settlement, among his people. (But already an exile, he reminded himself: already stared at, talked about behind his back, mocked and derided.)

Back then, Pan Renik had slept in a forked branch, not too far from the dead man’s hut. Images rose and burst in procession. Once, he recalled, as punishment for a forgotten transgression—for breaking some ridiculous rule—he had been forced by padres to clean out the dwelling of the oldest man. Pan Renik remembered the stench of dried garbage, caked to the woven floor, and chunks of yellow phlegm, hardened at the side of the man’s cot. Even in these memories the old shitheap had been ancient. Yet padres, of course, loved the man, then as now, in death, because the dead man had been a toady, devout and unquestioning, a symbol of the padres’ success.

Pan Renik spat between the gaps in his rotten teeth.

As a young boy, he had heard that the oldest man in the world was born before the great branches of the world first kissed the sky—

Thwack!

The swing of the settlement’s sole metal knife caught Pan Renik by surprise; one of the attending padres—ironuser, it looked like—had cut the raft free.

Pan Renik craned to get a better look.

The old man’s lemurs, clearly terrified—not yet ready to leave this elevated plane of existence—huddled low against the corpse, growling and staring about wide-eyed as the raft began to roll down dead man’s run.

From the crowd—most holding candles aloft—came muted sounds of encouragement.

Beyond the limit of the last hut, where the great bough dipped and the safety nets ended, the raft picked up speed. Light of the moon was strong enough beyond the canopy that the shroud of leaves over the corpse seemed to glow with a light of its own. Despite his disappointment at the lack of opportunities here, and despite the sour sensations remaining from his reflections of the past, Pan Renik’s mood was briefly distracted, buoyed almost to amusement by the spectacle of the raft as it launched over the edge of the world, hanging there, suspended for a moment against a backdrop of night and endless clouds, small lemurs pinwheeling slowly out, shrieking into open air.

He grinned and bobbed his head and scratched at his scalp (which was and forever would be patchy, scarred and itchy).

Distant lights flickered under the clouds, illuminating the skeletal ghost of another treetop a great distance away, though Pan Renik saw this apparition as the fiery hand of a man who was trying to wake up before sinking under the poison for a third and final time.

He made a low hooting sound, like a little monkey he had once seen, as the death raft plummeted out of sight, lost forever—

But here came padres, walking the branch in two groups of three, chanting and swinging their braziers. Tiny red eyes glinted inside their cowls. They scrutinized the gathering. Maybe they were looking for him? Pan Renik sniffed the wind. Dawn approached. He lifted his eyes skyward, saw his lonesome nest.

Sun started to limn the clouds.

Reluctantly, Pan Renik clambered back up, empty-handed, his brief enjoyment gone, replaced now by the more familiar longings and sparse trappings of his solitary life.

In times of crisis such as this, the chatelaine found herself wondering about moments immediately before and after tragedy. Though her world had crumbled this morning, and she was distraught, she managed to cast her thoughts back to her waking moments, just before
the
discovery
, to see if there had been a clue that the burgeoning day would soon take an awful turn. Had there been portentous dreams? The fecund, rambling about time and the city from her cell? No images lingered or stood out. Certainly nothing that would make the chatelaine reach bedside for any cotton wadding.

Regardless how much she reviewed the early part of her morning, it seemed there had been no hints, nothing amiss. Just aches and dull pain and the regrets of a regular hangover. Minor issues, quotidian and insignificant—no longer of any consequence—had nagged her when she opened her eyes at the door’s knock.

The day someone was to die in an accident, did they have premonitions? Seconds before a huge chunk of stone, say, fell from an archway overhead to crush a man where he stood, was he
truly
unsuspecting? Or had this man, for that second, given up, surrendered to his fate, knowing that inevitable destruction hurtled closer?

For the chatelaine, the idea that tragedy could strike without any indication, no matter how subtle, must be impossible.

But she’d had none she could recall.

She took a deep breath, thought for a second that she might cry. She did not.

Her morning, thus far:

A lifetime ago, she’d been awoken by knocking, both at the doors to her bedchambers and from within the confines of her own skull. Her muscles and nether regions throbbed. Her mouth was very dry, sinuses swimming with the fumes of her dirty room. Without opening her eyes or even moving, she had done a quick inventory of her body, as was her norm on mornings after such excesses, searching herself for injuries other than the usual, such as sprains or cuts, or ruptures and other sources of discomfort that might run even deeper.

Then she’d cracked one eye open, examining the bed for guests. Seeing none—nor any on the floor—she felt a moderate sense of relief.

Her chambers were a disaster.

Banging again at the door.

Memories of the previous night were incomplete, but physical evidence of her activities had left her with a strong need to remain alone for as long as possible. Yet she was never allowed to stay alone for long. There would be parchments to sign, meetings to attend, her father and the citizens and the entire damn city to worry about.

She sighed.

Noises from Nowy Solum came muffled through the parchment over her windows. Judging by the light, it was well past dawn.

Banging, a third time, at the door.

Then the squawkings from her pets. Was that the sign things were amiss? Had her creatures been more upset than usual, or were these regular cries for food and affection now they knew she had woken?

“Please,” the chatelaine had whispered, holding onto her forehead, where an invisible knife twisted. “Please, my little babies, please. Momma has a
splitting
pain. Give me a second . . .”

Breakfast was pears and quince jelly, a croissant, black coffee. The tray was left abandoned in the doorway, on the wooden planks of the Great Hall. Nobody around. A glass of fizzy water for her stomach, which she sipped before returning with the tray in one hand to her bed. Once there, picking at the meal, propped up against her pillows and listening again to the sounds of the morning outside and to the protests of her pets, she tried hard to recall details from the latter parts of the night—faces at least—forcing herself to steer away from further guilt or regrets, or at least staving off these feelings for as long as possible. Clinical, she told herself. Be clinical. This is your science, your study.

Several people had been in the room. Evidence was widespread: empty and half-filled glasses; a broken bottle; discarded garments. The son of a barker from Soaper’s and Candles, a man she had taken a liking to—Jonas, was it? And maybe he had brought a friend. And a dark-skinned girl, from goodness-knows-where, possibly outside Nowy Solum, who had sat on the mattress for the longest time, fiddling with her hair and frowning before finally crawling over. Her lips and tongue had been black, rough. There were oils flowing, endless spiritus, the smell, and crack, and taste of leather.

At one point, two cobali had watched the activities—she remembered an isolated and crystalline image—laughing at the exertions from the foot of the bed.

Then the chatelaine lay thinking about the kholic girl, the one from Hot Gate. She pictured her pretty face. The poor thing had been brought inside with the best intentions and then left, alone, somewhere in Jesthe. Was she still in the palace? The chatelaine had no idea. Not that she ever wanted to involve the girl in an orgy, but neither did she intend the child to become lost in the huge halls and empty rooms of her home, just another servant. Today, she vowed, on this very day—or perhaps the next, at the latest—she would seek the girl out.