Orson Card - Hart's Hope

"If you don't like it," Orem said, holding his coppers tightly, "find another line of work."

"You hire me as soon as you find work."

It stung Orem that the boy assumed that he would fail. "I will hire you," Orem said disdainfully. "I'll have a job in days, and take you on."

"Oh, yes, and the Queen wears a codpiece." The boy whirled around and flipped up his shirt to show his buttocks to Orem for a moment. Then he was gone in the crowd.

Orem wandered north, where the Great Market empties into Queen's Road. He marveled at the great houses, he gaped at the spider-wheeled carriages, he stared at ladies as naked as they could decently be above the waist and gentlemen as naked as fashion required below it. And he stood at the base of the hundred-stepped pyramid that led upward to Faces Hall, where Palicrovol had stood and ravished the little daughter of Nasilee, spilt her inmost blood and so became her husband and so became the King and then cast her away. The start of all the woes of the world, there at Faces Hall.

"Damn your liver to be eaten by the eagles!" A guard had him by the shoulder, shaking him. "Didn't they tell you at the gate to stay off Queen's Road? The Stone Road? Are you deaf? Have you the brain of a pudding?" More kicks and blows as the guard took him down an alley, bashing him against one wall and then another, until Orem gratefully fell on his face in the dust of a back street. "And don't come back on Queen's Road or I'll have you hung by your ears till they tear!" Orem lay in the street listening to the footsteps as the guard left. He hurt everywhere, yet he was not so much angry as glad that it had stopped. Even glad that it hadn't been worse. He winced and gingerly got to his feet.

"Gentle, an't they?"

Orem turned painfully to meet the face that went with the voice. It was the child who had robbed him, smiling cocky as you please, hands on hips, legs spread, like God astride the world.

"You look pretty poor, you know." The boy smiled at him maliciously. "Had me by the balls and you were rich and fine."

"You were taking all I had," Orem said dully. He winced at the pain of breathing in.

"And you took all I had."

"But it was mine." "Not while I had it."

"What's it worth to you to know?"

"Nothing." Orem looked around. All he could see were the backs of common buildings on one hand and on the other the high garden walls of the great houses, with their cruel spear-topped iron ridges. Except for the alley to Stone Road, there was only one way to go, so Orem set out along the dirt street. The thief padded behind him.

"Get away from me," Orem said.

"I followed you all this way."

"You'll never get my coppers."

"You said you'd hire me."

"If I get a job." But suddenly the boy was not so neatly catalogued as a clever thief. "You

believed me?"

"You look too stupid to lie."

"Then what makes you think I'll get a job?"

"Because you wouldn't let me go when I kicked your face." The boy giggled. "You're a bad

fighter, you know. A girl could beat you."

Orem felt himself flush with anger, but he said nothing. The road was widening, and now there were some sleazy shops fronting on the street. In the middle of the road was a short round wall like a well housing, made of crumbly bricks. Orem made to go around it, but heard a sound. Like singing,

coming from the well. He stopped.

"It's the cistern," said the boy. "All the time singing. Means nothing. Cistern's empty."

"Why? Drought?"

"They're for a siege. There's never a siege of Inwit. Besides, you'd drown the voices."

Orem stepped to the cistern rim and leaned over to listen. Along with the sound he was greeted

by a smell so fetid that he reeled backward and gasped and choked.

"Since it's empty," said the boy, "everybody dumps their slops in. And shits quite direct." As if to demonstrate, the boy jumped up and sat perilously on the wall, his backside leaning far over the edge. Unceremoniously he defecated, then waited with his head cocked. "Hear the splash? It must be half a mile down."

"What about the voices?" "Probably a choir of rats. They live fine on manure. Aren't you a farmer? Don't you know about the magical properties of manure?" While he talked, the boy wiped himself with his left hand, then spat on it and rubbed it in the dirt till it was dry. "Here," he said, gesturing at Orem's bag. "Let us have a little water." Orem shook his head. "Oh, won't share even water, is that it?"

"What are you, a pilgrim? You have a priest's face. Like a hungry rat."

"I studied with priests."

"That's it, then." The boy nodded wisely. "I knew you could read. I can read a little. Taught myself."

"The voices from the cistern. How long have they been going on?"

The boy shrugged. "All my life."

Orem recited the Seventh Warning of Prester Zenzil: "Do not learn the songs of voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells."

The boy looked at him quizzically. "You can't learn them. They got no words. An't no one understands them, anyway."

Orem pulled his wrap halfway down and hoisted himself to the lip of the cistern to empty himself. The voices came more clearly, an echo of wails and high singing that suddenly filled him with fear. Why should I be afraid? he wondered. Then he looked at the young thief and thought he saw murder in his eyes. Yes, murder, and what better time than now, with Orem helplessly over a pit that went deep into the earth where no one would find the corpse even if anyone bothered to look for a scrawny young man with a pauper's pass. The boy could just run up and push him and he'd be dead. And there—yes, the boy was poised, wasn't he? And leaning in! "Stay back, or by God—" And then his bowels opened and emptied and he sprang from the cistern wall and backed away from the thief.

"Just a fancy," the boy said, smiling. "Didn't mean nothing. Meant just to put a scare in you."

Orem did as the boy had done, wiped himself and then his hand in the dirt. Then he pulled up his wrap. He was trembling. Not just because the child had thought to kill him, but because the voice in the cistern had seemed to warn him so. Was this, perhaps, a touch of true magic? For the first time in his life had a spell touched him?

"I'm sorry," said the boy, watching Orem's face. "It was a joke."

Orem said nothing, just walked from the cistern and out into the road. Only a few steps and he knew where he was, Piss Road, with Piss Gate at the western end of it.

"Don't leave me," said the boy.

Orem faced him angrily. "Don't you know when you're not wanted?" "My name is Flea Buzz."

"I'm telling you anyway. It was the name my mother gave me. She's from Brack, it's ever so far to the east, she was stolen by sea pirates and eventually ended up here as a pisser. She got a pass. They give names like Flea Buzz there, because it was the first thing she saw and first thing she heard after I was born. Her husband is dead at the bottom of the sea. He has pearls instead of eyes."

"What makes you think I care?"

"You're listening, aren't you? Anyway, it's all lies. My father, he's alive enough. He calls me Pin Prick, and worse things when he's angry. He's got no pass, so he has to hide in the Swamp when the guards come. I get no pass until my mother marries another pass man. So I steal. I do all right. I'll

steal for you, if you like."

"I don't want you to steal for me."

"The truth is my father's dead. My mother killed him when he went at her with a club. We buried

him in the garden. He'll be flowers all over if the dogs don't open him up. Only last night."

"It's a lie."

"Only partly. Let me come with you."

"Why? What do I have that you want? If you think I'll give you a copper to leave me alone

you're going to weep at the tale I have to tell."