Steven Brust - Teckla

The woman I married would have done so, too.

I finally stole away from the building and had some klava.

She'd changed sometime in the last year, and I hadn't noticed. Maybe that was what bothered me the most. I mean, if I really loved her, wouldn't I have seen that she was turning from a walking death-machine into a… a whatever she was? But then, turn it around. I did love her; I could tell because it hurt so much, and I hadn't noticed, so there I was.

There was no point in wondering why she'd changed. No future in it, as Sticks would say. The question was, were we going to change together? No, let's be honest. The question was, was I going to pretend to be something I wasn't, or even try to become something I wasn't, in order to keep her? And when I put it that way I knew that I couldn't. I wasn't going to become another person on the chance that she'd come to love me again. She had married me, just as I was, and I had married her the same way. If she was going to turn away from me, I'd just have to live with it as best I could.

Or not. There was still Quaysh, who'd agreed to kill me, and Berth, who would try again if Quaysh failed. So maybe I wouldn't have to live with it at all. That would be convenient, but not really ideal. I ordered more klava, which came in a glass, which reminded me of Sheryl, which didn't cheer me up.

I was still in this gloomy frame of mind an hour later when Natalia came in accompanied by an Easterner I didn't know and a Teckla who wasn't Paresh. She saw me and nodded, then thought about it and joined me, after saying something to her companions. I invited her to sit and she did. I bought her a cup of tea because I was feeling expansive and because she didn't like klava. We just looked at each other until the tea arrived. It smelled better than the klava, and it came in a mug. I resolved to remember that.

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 graying; the thin gray 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."