Jay Lake - Green

“Enough,” Little Kareen said. “Green, you are forgiven. Are you to be forgiving your fellows?”

I staggered to my feet. Something was wrong with my right knee, and my breath came with a jagged, burning pain in my chest. I wanted to cry out, No, by all the sleeping gods, may they burn upon the Wheel! But there was not enough fight within even me to win what would come next. “All is forgiven,” I lied, and cast my eyes down so he could not read them.

“Then lend me your knife,” he said. “I have need of it awhile.”

“I…” I drew a painful breath. “I was told never to bare steel before you, sir.”

“Ravi, his knife,” Little Kareen called out.

Ravi slid my knife from my legging and carefully gave it to the big man, hilt first.

I went to retch awhile and sleep off my pain behind a compost pile we sometimes used to hide valuables of disputed ownership.

Everyone left me alone for two days. So thoroughly alone I got no food, and had to limp for my water, but alone.

The third day I was back before Little Kareen. The boys were out chivvying the lines and rolling unlucky beggars. Ravi had shouted to me where I slept to see the big man before noon. So there I was, with the sun less than a finger’s width from the top of the sky, standing before him.

Today Little Kareen sat on a throne cut from an old wine barrel. His perch was lined with brocade that had come from somewhere across the sea, for it was nothing like the textiles of Kalimpura. He let the sun beat down upon his head as he faced the moving, shoving line of traffic behind my back. His jaw was set, and his eyes drooped as he stared at me awhile. We might as well have been in a closed room, walled as we were by silence.

“If I were a wiser man, I would probably kill you now.” His wrists flexed as if his remaining fingers wished for my neck. “As it happens, I am widely accounted a fool.”

I knew that was very far from the truth, but I held my tongue. If nothing else, I could outrun him, even with so much tender and sore within me.

“But…”He stopped, shifted. “I do not hold the Death Right. Those who push souls along the Wheel guard their privileges jealously.” Little Kareen leaned forward. “You have never been among the young, have you?”

“No,” I admitted. I’d said not a single word of my history, but somehow he knew.

“I can tell. You lack the way of winning trust. You do not know enough to see when others are showing you their way.” He sighed. “You are perhaps the most fearsome boy I have seen since I myself grew to full height. Quick at your work, persuasive of the foolish, rough where needed. But you do not know when to let go of it and be a boy among boys. You will not grow to be a man among men, I am afraid.”

I knew why that would be, of course, for I was no man at all, but I was curious as to his thought. “What do you mean, sir?”

“Because someone will kill you for anger or in defense. Given your nature, they will likely be able to argue past the Death Right. If the question is even asked.” He pulled my bandit knife from beneath his thigh. “I release you, and suggest with some urgency that you leave the gate. Otherwise Ravi and his little friends might well choose to test the Death Right for themselves.”

I found that I sorrowed at that. The regret surprised me. This was the first time since leaving Endurance behind that I’d felt anything besides despair or anger. I savored the emotion like a rare spice as I reached to take the knife from him, hilt first.

“Indulge me in a question.” His voice was low with my closeness. “I have already guessed you were raised alone, across the sea. You are like a tiger born in a cage. You know nothing of hunting, or other cats, though your claws and teeth are mighty enough. But tell me this: Are you a boy at all?”

I stared at him, the knife in my hand. “Does the Death Right apply to women?”

“Well…” Little Kareen smiled broadly. “You may live awhile after all, Green. Oh yes, it does not apply to women of our city.”

The knife fit into my leggings. I tried not to let my stiffness from the beating show. Nodding at Little Kareen, I took up my satchel with my belled silk and walked into the crowd, striding purposefully toward the gate. I knew how to move through this mess now, when to swagger and when to slide quietly sideways. He was right-I did not want to meet Ravi again, not away from the bully-master’s protection.

A few weeks’ decent food had passed through my gullet, while a few paisas sat in my purse-not to mention I had a purse for my paisas. I even wore clothes fit for the endless heat here. All I lacked was a penis in order to be well set for life in Kalimpura.

The city within the walls was packed just as close as the mob outside. The pinch of the gate itself was gone, but the sheer mass of humanity beyond made up for it. In Copper Downs, people walked as if they expected a path before them. Here everyone pushed like water in flood, and lived within earshot of each other’s business.

Buildings were fanciful to the point of foolish, at least to my eye. A great number of people seemed to live their entire lives upon the street. I saw families on little mats surrounded by pots and bundles, as oblivious to the people around them as the surrounding crowd was oblivious to them. There were oxcarts here, too, of a type I had not seen on the road. They never left the city. They moved with a slow and aimless pace. A dozen little shelves were visible inside their open backs. Men of the poorer classes would hand the driver a broken sliver of a paisa, then climb within and arrange themselves for sleep.

These were hostels that roamed the city without ever stopping. Such a strange thing that was, yet curiously practical.

Animals, too. Chickens roosted penned in wicker baskets that took but a small square of pavement while towering dangerously high, so the birds lived in levels and shat upon one another. Dogs ranged free with patchy fur and missing ears. Skinny mules and haughty camels mingled with women carrying snakes upon forked sticks while people cast coins in buckets suspended from the bottoms of their poles.

All classes thronged, too, everyone I’d seen in the multitudes outside the gate and many more besides. Beautiful folk in diaphanous wraps, their trains supported by crab-scuttling servants. Tradesmen in their tunics followed by heralds crying their business with slates waved high-I soon realized an entire commodities market functioned amid the chaos. Laborers, clerkish sorts, men with bundles of scrolls, maids carrying armloads of someone else’s purchases, soldiers in studded harnesses and feathered turbans with swords strapped across their backs.

Everyone seemed to have a place, and know their path, but the signs they followed were invisible to me.

I let the swirling movement of the bodies draw me along. It seemed pointless to push in a direction I had no reason to pick anywise. I was dressed well enough like a Kalimpuri not to draw stares, even with my scarred cheeks and notched ears. My gaze was sufficiently fierce that the scuttling cutpurse children avoided me.

As for the smells of this place… I closed my eyes for a step or two, to let it into me. My nose found a curdling mix of the steam of tea, the tickle of curry, the damp darkness of cardamom, the sweat of men, the dung of a dozen species, the scent of fires. Where Copper Downs had smelled of stone and saltwater and fires of coal and hardwood, this city was redolent of food and traffic and the overwhelming concentration of people and their animals.

I followed, wondering what I would find that I could do with myself.

I circled the city in the course of that day. Two paisas bought me a roasted pigeon wrapped in banana leaves with a pile of reddish rice and a spill of some strangely orange pepper powder that threatened to burn my lips. I had been both overcharged and mocked, I knew, but I accepted it as the price of my education.