He reached across the table and took his boy’s hand. “But until it yields up, you and me, we have to stay together. I don’t mean just under the same roof. I mean up here.” He tapped the side of his own head. “We have to get set on the same plan. And more than just that, we have to get set on the way we’re going to see that plan done. Understand?”
Roth nodded.
A long silence stretched between them. Malen was about to break the uncomfortable tension when Roth lowered his eyes and spoke words that broke his heart.
“Da, do you remember Bryen?”
“Sure I do. Good lad, as I recall.” He tried to lighten the mood, and said with a small smile, “Not much with a song, though. Boy sounded like a drunken loon.”
Roth didn’t see the smile, still looking down the way boys do when they share things that scare them. “When spring season began, his da lost their house. Couldn’t pay the chamberlain. One day, they came—”
“Who came?”
His boy shrugged. “The chamberlain’s men? Or maybe the mayor’s? Could have been the League, I guess. But they came, and his da couldn’t pay, and so they took him to the stocks.”
Malen kept the cringe off his face. The stocks were a debtor’s prison.
Roth’s voice thickened with grief and fear. “Bryen does wharf games to get plug money for his ma and sisters. Sometimes… sometimes he gets caught… and beaten down hard. And his oldest sister, Mery.” His son finally looked up, eyes glassy with tears, but holding on to some thin measure of boyhood toughness. “She got taken, too, Da. But not to the stocks. Someone got her. They make her go wharf-door knocking.”
His boy looked past him to the door where the drab had just eaten Malen’s bowl of mash before going to the next house. When Roth’s eyes returned to him, they were plaintive and needful. They pleaded for him to make a shim of sense of these things.
Malen didn’t have an answer for this. Not one the boy would want to hear or understand, anyway. Work was scarce. And itinerant laborers needed a solid skill if they hoped to succeed when moving to a new city to find work—word was that crowds of men waited on what few jobs came along. Which meant moving inland wasn’t really an option for Malen. And finding another port to scrub decks… that wouldn’t make a life any more than it had here. In Malen’s silence, Roth pushed on, seeming to think his da needed more information to offer a solution.
“Her ma can’t stop it. The mack-men threaten to do the same to Bryen… and his little sister, Jemma.” Roth’s words grew sharp with anger. “And the mayor’s men don’t seem to care, since she’s not paying tax. Bryen and his family sleep in the nook beneath the Dyer’s-side pier. His ma’s afraid to leave her family to go find work. She’s worried about what might happen while she’s gone.”
Roth stopped, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and visibly holding down a sob. “She’s got a tin cup. She sits outside the taverns along the lower harbor. Clean-boot places.” His son looked down again. “She begs, Da. She says mercies to passing folk, so that her other kids don’t get taken. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen a plug or two drop in her cup. I’ve seen mean, drunken men lash her face for sport. Mostly,” and his eyes returned again to Malen, begging some relief, “mostly they ignore her. Mostly they walk by like she’s wharf-drift. Like she’s not there. Like they can’t hear her or see that she’s got kids… like me.”
Malen got up, went around the table, and put his large, rough hands on the boy’s shoulders. He meant to offer some reassuring words. Fathers do that. They stand between childhood and the harsh ways of greedy men, whether those men wear uniforms or leathers with week-old meal-stains. Except that it was too late for reassurance. All this had already gotten inside his boy. There was nothing to be done about that. And Malen wouldn’t lie or try to refashion hard truths his son had learned too young.
Instead, he hunkered down so he could look up into his son’s face. “Listen to me. Your da won’t let that happen to us. It’ll be rough. But we’re rough men, aren’t we? We can handle anything. And I have an idea for us. It’s going to mean parting with some things that will be hard to part with. But things aren’t family. And your da knows a way—a hard way, mind you—but a way to keep us going a while.”
He tried a smile, and coaxed a return grin from Roth, who sniffed and nodded.
“Trust me a league more.” He squeezed the boy’s leg to instill a smidge of confidence. “We’re going to get through.”
And he did have an idea. A painful one. Risky, too. And it meant breaking a promise. But he’d come to believe that sometimes oaths and laws ceased to apply, like when stealing bread for a hungry child. Even the abandoning gods, who’d forsaken this world rather than govern it, wouldn’t condemn a man for that, would they? Even they, whose charter of principles had led them to believe the world was lost, even they would have shown him some mercy.
Malen knelt beside his bed, his elbows resting on the thin straw mattress. Across from him, Roth had done the same, looking like nothing so much as a younger Marta. Between them, neatly laid side by side, were Marta’s nice things. They were the small tokens that had made her feel pretty, made her feel more than a scullery maid.
One was a thin silver ring, something she’d carried with her into marriage. It had been her mother’s wedding ring. Marta’s father had been lost at sea—a deep-water sail-fish man—and so her mother had graciously given it to Malen to present to her daughter as her betrothal ring.
Beside it lay an ivory pinch-comb. Pinch-combs were a fashion for folks with clean boots. Not wharf-drift. He smiled fondly at the memories of Marta wearing it. She’d always put her hair up most delicately when she wanted to feel feminine, allowing a curl or two to fall out of the comb to gently caress her neck. He half-believed the whole purpose was so that he could softly remove the comb when their talking was all through. That was a fine moment, feeling her hair tumble down over his rough hands and across her neck and shoulders. What he wouldn’t give to feel it one more time.
Next to the pinch-comb lay a thin rosewood flute. Recorder, Marta would always correct him. It might have been a hand and a half in length. Plenty big for her small, delicate fingers. The instrument had six holes on top, two beneath, and held a bit of luster still. No surprise. Every full and perfect moon, Malen took out the flute and with slow and deliberate care rubbed it with a rose-oil rag. He never tried to play, or even put his lips to it to touch where Marta’s lips had been. Pity that Roth had never gotten to hear one of her evening tunes. Never rushed, they seemed to keep the meaning of the instrument’s name—Marta had liked to remind Malen that recorder also meant rememberer.
In some ways, even more than the pinch-comb, the recorder alluded to a life they’d only ever dreamed about. While scops played taverns all along the wharf, talented musicians found their way to courts, or better still, conservatories. Marta had enough of an ear to understand the value of well-played notes. Enough of an ear to know that well-played notes were more than music. And there were colleges in Masson Dimn, Vohnce, and elsewhere that taught the truths inside those notes. When she’d played her little flute, Malen had heard her poet’s heart reaching out for that understanding.
The last of her nice things was the hardest to look at. And would be the hardest to part with. He gave Roth a long look, trying to keep the regret from his face. With trembling hands, he fingered open the tiny clasp and drew back the lid. The pleasant smell of cedar filled the small space between him and his son as they looked down on a used pen set. Used, as in not new. Marta had never had the chance to put it to her own use.