Glen Cook - Water Sleeps

At some point the boy’s black clothing came off, leaving him in the Gunni-style loincloth he had worn underneath. Now he looked like any other youngster, though with a slightly jaundiced cast of skin. He was safe. He had grown up in Taglios. He had no accent to give him away.

It was the waiting time, the stillness, the doing nothing that there is so much of before any serious action. I was out of practice. I could not lean back and play tonk or just watch while One-Eye and Goblin tried to cheat each other. And I had writer’s cramp, so could not work on my Annals. “Tobo!” I called. “You want to go see it happen?” Tobo was fourteen. He was the youngest of us. He grew up in the Black Company. He had a full measure of youth’s exuberance and impatience and overconfidence in his own immortality and divine exemption from retribution. He enjoyed his assignments on behalf of the Company. He was not quite sure he believed in his father. He never knew the man. We tried hard to keep him from becoming anyone’s spoiled baby. But Goblin insisted on treating him like a favorite son. He was trying to tutor the boy.

Goblin’s command of written Taglian was more limited than he would admit. There are a hundred characters in the everyday vulgate and forty more reserved to the priests, who write in the High Mode, which is almost a second unspoken, formal language. I use a mixture recording these Annals.

Once Tobo could read, “Uncle” Goblin made him do all his reading for him, aloud.

“Could I do some more buttons, Sleepy? Mom thinks more would get more attention in the Palace.”

I was surprised he talked to her that long. Boys his age are surly at best. He was rude to his mother all the time. He would have been ruder and more defiant still if he had not been blessed with so many “uncles” who would not tolerate that stuff. Naturally, Tobo saw all that as a grand conspiracy of adults. Publicly. In private, he was amenable to reason. Occasionally. When approached delicately by someone who was not his mother.

“Maybe a few. But it’s going to get dark soon. And then the show will start.”

“What’ll we go as? I don’t like it when you’re a whore.”

“We’ll be street orphans.” Though that had its risks, too. We could get caught by a press gang and forced into Mogaba’s army. His soldiers, these days, are little better than slaves, subject to a savage discipline. Many are petty criminals given an option of rough justice or enlistment. The rest are children of poverty with nowhere else to go. Which was the standard of professional armies men like Murgen saw in the far north, long before my time.

“Why do you worry so much about disguises?”

“If we never show the same face twice, our enemies can’t possibly know who they’re looking for. Don’t ever underestimate them. Especially not the Protector. She’s outwitted death itself more than once.”

Tobo was not prepared to believe that or much else of our exotic history. Though not as bad as most, he was going through that stage where he knew everything worth knowing and nothing his elders said-particularly if it bore any vaguely educational hue-was worth hearing. He could not help that. It went with the age.

And I was my age and could not help saying things I knew would do no good. “It’s in the Annals. Your father and the Captain didn’t make up stories.”

He did not want to believe that, either. I did not pursue it. Each of us must learn to respect the Annals in our own way, in our own time. The Company’s diminished circumstance makes it difficult for anyone to grasp tradition. Only two Old Crew brothers both survived Soulcatcher’s trap on the stone plain and the Kiaulune wars afterward. Goblin and One-Eye are haplessly inept at transmitting the Company mystique. One-Eye is too lazy and Goblin too inarticulate. And I was still practically an apprentice when the Old Crew ventured onto the plain in the Captain’s quest for Khatovar. Which he did not find. Not the Khatovar he was looking for, anyway.

I am amazed. Before long I will be a twenty-year veteran. I was barely fourteen when Bucket took me under his wing... But I was never like Tobo. At fourteen I was already ancient in pain. For years after Bucket rescued me, I grew younger... “What?”

“I asked why you look so angry all of a sudden.” . “I was remembering when I was fourteen.”

“Girls have it so easy-” He shut up. His face drained. His northern ancestry became apparent. He was an arrogant and spoiled little puke but he did have brains enough to recognize it when he stepped into a nest of poisonous snakes.

I told him what he knew, not what he did not. “When I was fourteen, the Company and Nyueng Bao were trapped in Jaicur. Dejagore, they call it here.” The rest does not matter anymore. The rest is safely in the past. “I almost never have nightmares now.”

Tobo had heard more than he ever wanted to about Jaicur already. His mother and grandmother and Uncle Doj had been there, too.

“Goblin says we’ll be impressed by these buttons,” Tobo whispered. “They won’t just make spooky lights, they’ll prick somebody’s conscience.”

“That’ll be unusual.” Conscience was a rare commodity on either side of our dispute.

“You really knew my dad?” Tobo had heard stories all his life but lately wanted to know more. Murgen had begun to matter in a more than lip-service fashion.

I told him what I had told him before. “He was my boss. He taught me to read and write. He was a good man.” I laughed weakly. “As good a man as belonging to the Black Company let him be.”

Tobo stopped. He took a deep breath. He stared at a point in the dusk somewhere above my left shoulder. “Were you lovers?”

“No, Tobo. No. Friends. Almost. But definitely not that. He didn’t know I was a woman till just before he left for the glittering plain. And I didn’t know he knew till I read his Annals. Nobody knew. They thought I was a cute runt who just never got any bigger. I let them think that. I felt safer as one of the guys.”

“Oh.”

His tone was so neutral I had to wonder. “Why did you even ask?” Surely he had no reason to believe I had behaved differently before he knew me.

He shrugged. “I just wondered.”

Something must have set him off. Possibly an “I wonder if...” from Goblin or One-Eye, say, while they were sampling some of their homemade elephant poison.

“I didn’t ask. Did you put the buttons behind the shadow show?”

“That’s what I was told to do.”

A shadow show uses cutout puppets mounted on sticks. Some of their limbs are manipulated mechanically. A candle behind the puppets casts their shadows on a screen of white cloth. The puppeteer uses a variety of voices to tell his story as he maneuvers his puppets. If he is sufficiently entertaining, his audience will toss him a few coins.

This particular puppeteer had performed in the same place for more than a generation. He slept inside his stage setup. In so doing, he lived better than most of Taglios’ floating population.

He was an informer. He was not beloved of the Black Company.

The story he told, as most were, was drawn from the myths. It sprang from the Khadi cycle. It involved a goddess with too many arms who kept devouring demons.

Of course it was the same demon puppet over and over. Kind of like real life, where the same demon comes back again and again.

Just a hint of color hung above the western rooftops.

There was an earsplitting squeal. People stopped to stare at a bright orange light. Glowing orange smoke wobbled up from behind the puppeteer’s stand. Its strands wove the well-known emblem of the Black Company, a fanged skull with no lower jaw, exhaling flames. The scarlet fire in its left eye socket seemed to be a pupil that stared right down inside you, searching for the thing that you feared the most.