I smiled. From somewhere a warbler called.
I cleared my throat. “Ta-sa-ran-geh,” I chanted. “Ta-sa-ran-geh-ko.”
Kevin was surprised, but then quickly joined in the chant of the Warriors of the Sea. We circled the tomb as the chant rose in the air, the chant so old that no one knew what it meant. But well I knew the words had meaning for my father, and so with the chant I sent my father on to his blue-skinned Pastas, the god he had served all his life, and with whom he had shared food on the last day of his life. Nor did I forget my father’s correction, “Ren-far-el-den-sa-fa-yu.”
Five slow revolutions of the tomb brought the chant to an end. Here the Warriors of the Sea, at the festival, would have started over, but I felt a single repetition was enough, and fell silent. The necropolis was still. I felt my spirits rise, and a strange stirring in my soul, as if I had in some way been touched by the divine, perhaps a blue-skinned god who whispered some half-heard affirmation, and now welcomed my family to their new home.
I wiped the stinging tears from my eyes, blew out my breath, and turned toward the town.
“Shall we bring the cart back?” Kevin asked.
“It may be useful still,” I said. “Our lives are full of ruins that yet need to be shifted.” So, Kevin and I stood in the traces again, and brought the cart back to Ethlebight.
I limped as I walked, a hamstring protesting with every step. Pain wracked my arms and shoulders, and my back was a torment.
There was nothing, I thought, to keep me here. My family was dead, my house destroyed, my master taken prisoner. Kevin had offered a chance of employment, but that was before his own family trade had been brought to the edge of ruin.
I would take the money I had found in the strongbox and go to the capital at Selford. What I had in my box was enough to live on for two or three years, if I were careful, and surely I would find employment in that time, and be on my way to becoming an advocate at the court, or a member of the House of Burgesses, or a judge renowned for my wisdom . . . or all three, as Kevin had said.
Though what I most wanted now was to be the admiral of a fleet, to bring fury and destruction upon the Aekoi.
On the way we passed by Crook’s bookshop. The place had been broken into, and books hurled from their shelves by reivers in search of money, but nothing had been destroyed or burnt.
Without a word exchanged, Kevin and I began to move the books to the cocking cart. I had browsed the shop regularly, and knew the contents well. I chose only the best—tomes on law, rhetoric, and history, the epics of Bello, the entire cycle of the Teazel romances, the love poems of Tarantua, the comic verse of Rudland, the tales of Erpingham. We piled the cart so high that it could hardly be moved.
If Crook were ever ransomed, the books would be returned. And if Crook were never released, the books would form the core of a fine library.
After unloading, we put the cocking cart in the courtyard behind the Spellman house. I had seen Judge Travers’s heavy coach standing in Scarcroft Square, and it occurred to me that my storied legal career might as well begin now as later. I left Kevin with his lists of debtors, and returned to the square to find the judge in conference with Gribbins and various Cobbs. I did not approach, but went to the narrow house where my master Dacket had lived, and climbed the stair to the office. There, amid a riot of destruction, I found my master’s fisher fur–trimmed robe with the reivers’ footprints still on it, and cleaned the robe as well as I could. I cleaned myself as well, and my apprentice cap, and then found some wax tablets in a cupboard and put them in the pockets of the robe. I donned the robe—very narrow in the shoulders, but it must do—took a stylus, and then returned to the square again to approach the judge with as much gravity as I could manage.
Travers was a tall, solidly built man in a judge’s robe of black watered silk trimmed with glossy otter fur. His posture was military, and he took immense care of his own dignity, which was enhanced by his white pointed beard, a curling halo of white hair, and his commanding blue eyes.
“There should be an informal census as soon as possible.” His trained rhetorician’s voice spoke with the accent of Bonille. “Those bringing relief must know how many souls are in need of help.”
Gribbins and the various Cobbs seemed impressed by this argument. Their own thoughts had not reached so far as a census.
“And there should be a fire watch set,” Travers said. “New conflagrations may yet be brought to life by smoldering embers.”
“We have no lack of volunteers,” said Gribbins. “We can set watches—and should, to prevent looting.”
I waited patiently at Travers’s elbow, my stylus poised above a wax tablet, until the judge became aware of me.
I donned my learnèd-advocate face. “My lord,” I said. “I wonder if your lordship is in need of anyone to keep a record of these decisions.”
Travers’s blue eyes surveyed me from cap to shoe, and back again. “Who, sir,” he said, “are you?”
“The Butcher’s son!” called Sir Towsley Cobb in mockery. “The Butcher’s son dressed up like a lawyer!”
I ignored the baronet. “My name is Quillifer, my lord. I’m apprentice to the advocate Dacket.”
“And where is your master?”
“Taken by the reivers, my lord, and his family with him.”
“I already have a secretary,” Travers said, and frowned across the square at a young man—dressed in satins, bejeweled—who was amusing himself by brandishing a pollaxe borrowed from members of a militia company. Laughter trickled from the group.
“Well,” Travers said, and turned back to me. “You may prove of use.”
I made notes of the day’s actions: watches posted, surveys made of all granaries, of all available weapons, of cannon and gunpowder. Plans made for an informal census. Scouts set to keep a watch on the Aekoi. A search made for all surviving doctors and surgeons. Clothing and blankets to be distributed to those without homes. Bakeries to be operated through the night. And bodies to be brought out of the city early the next day, and burned. Gangs were set to work taking apart the temporary stage set up in the square, to be used in the pyre.
I learned much from Travers as I trailed the judge through the afternoon. Not so much about the proper response to a catastrophe, but about how to make oneself heard and, having been heard, obeyed. Outside the boundaries of his courtroom, Travers had no authority in Ethlebight—he wasn’t an alderman, or the Lord Warden or the Lord Lieutenant of the County, or an important noble. But he carried himself with a quiet, erect air of authority, and he spoke quietly and with finality, and what he spoke made sense. His success was aided by the accent of Bonille, which carried with it a suggestion of urbanity and sophistication and the air of the royal court, with its subtle, unspoken promise of patronage and power. By the end of the afternoon, even the Cobbs were eager to run Judge Travers’s errands.
This in contrast with the apothecary Gribbins, who shared a great deal with Travers—the white beard, the blue eyes, the distinguished profession—but who despite his status as alderman seemed unable to get anyone to listen to him. He made some good arguments, but more bad ones, and he tended to wander from one to the other. His ideas clattered with each other and sometimes collapsed in hapless confusion. By contrast, Travers raised his ideas one at a time, reached a decision, and then offered the next.
More people arrived over the course of the day, nobles and gentry with their personal following, among them a pair of aldermen who had been at their houses in the country during the attack. So, a rump town council was able to convene, and once they assembled in the city hall and declared themselves in session, Travers told them what to do.