Among those the tyrant hadn’t had drowned yet there was a great eagerness to be rid of him, and Arkady knew that if he went through with his plan to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter he would not be without support. The tyrant had started off as an ordinary king, no better or worse than any other, until it had occurred to him to test the extent of his power. And once he found out how much power he really had, he took steps to maintain it. A ration system was in place, not because resources were scarce or because it was necessary to conserve them, but because the tyrant wished to covertly observe the black market and see what exchanges people were willing and able to make. Not just goods, but time… How much time could his subjects bear to spend queuing for butter? What about medicine? This was the sort of thing that made life for his subjects harder than life was for citizens of neighboring countries.
—
EIRINI THE FAIR was sure that her father was detested. He was a man who only laughed when he was about to give some command that was going to cause widespread panic. She didn’t doubt that if anybody saw a way to annoy her father by harming her, they might well do it. But she was well guarded, and it escaped her notice that she was being intensely observed by the kind of person who would melt a key.
—
THE TYRANT had orphaned him, had had Arkady’s mother and father drowned in the middle of the night, so that the boy woke up in an empty house wondering why nobody was there to give him breakfast. Young Arkady prepared his own breakfast that day and continued to do so until there was no more food, and then he went out onto the street and stayed there, leaving the front door open in case anybody else had a use for his family home.
Two companions crossed his path — the first was Giacomo, the one who came to depend upon him. Arkady had happened to overhear a grocer trying to make Giacomo pay three times the going rate for a bar of soap. “I know this soap looks just like all the rest, but it’ll actually get you thrice as clean…” Giacomo was cheerfully scraping coins together when Arkady intervened, inquiring whether the grocer was enjoying his existence as a piece of garbage, whether it was a way of life the grocer felt he could recommend. Giacomo was not a person who knew what a lie was or why anybody would tell one; his mind worked at a different speed than usual. Not slower, exactly, but it did take him a long time to learn some things, especially practicalities regarding people. Light felt like levitation to Giacomo, and darkness was like damnation. How had he lived so long without being torn apart by one or the other? He was so troublesome, taking things that then had to be paid for, paying for things that shouldn’t have cost anything; he taught Arkady patience, looking at him with wonder and saying: “Arkady is good.” It was Giacomo who was good. His ability to give the benefit of the doubt never faltered. The swindlers didn’t mean it, the jeerers didn’t mean it, and those who would stamp on a child’s hand to make her let go of a banknote she had been given, those people didn’t mean it either.
Their other companion was a vizsla puppy, now a deep gold — colored dog, who began to follow Arkady and Giacomo one day and would not be shooed away, no matter how fierce an expression Arkady assumed. Since Giacomo’s alphabet and numerical coordination were unique to him, it was rare for him to be gainfully employed, so the dog merely represented an additional mouth for Arkady to feed. But the vizsla’s persistence and tail-wagging served him well, as did his way of behaving as if he had once been a gentleman and might yet regain that state. The vizsla waited for Giacomo and Arkady to help themselves to portions of whatever meals they were able to get before he took his own share, though sometimes Giacomo pressed the dog to begin, in which case he took the smallest portion and not a bite more. Giacomo named him Leporello. On occasions of his own choosing Leporello turned backflips and earned coins from passersby. And yet he couldn’t be persuaded to perform on demand; no, he would give looks that asked Arkady to perceive the distinction between artist and mere entertainer.
—
THE THREE of them settled in a building at the edge of the city. The view from the building’s windows was an unexpectedly nice one, covering miles and miles of marshland so that the mass of drowned flesh looked like water, just muddy water, if not wholly pure then becoming so as it teemed toward the ocean.
—
ONE DAY WHILE ARKADY was out working one of his three jobs Giacomo came home from a long walk, stopped on the wrong floor of their building, and accidentally opened the door to a flat that wasn’t the one he shared with Arkady and Leporello. The tenant wasn’t at home, so Giacomo could have seen or taken anything he wished. But what he sought was a view from a new window, and that was all he took. Ten minutes looking out to sea. And he soon discovered that the same key opened every door in the building; their landlord counted on it not occurring to any of the tenants to try opening doors other than their own. When Giacomo told Arkady of his discovery, Arkady was all for having their locks changed. They could be murdered in their beds! They could be robbed at any time! It was bad enough that they lived under the rule of a tyrant who was slowly but surely squeezing the life out of everybody, but now their neighbors could get at them too…
Giacomo just laughed and pulled Arkady into one of the flats that stood empty between tenants on a floor higher than theirs; Leporello came too, and barked at the moonlight as it washed over their faces. Their fellow tenants continued to identify their doorways with care, and were too busy and too tired to go anywhere but home.
—
HAVING SECURED Giacomo’s assurance that he’d be very, very careful with these trespasses of his, and Leporello’s assurance that he’d help Giacomo keep his word, Arkady’s worries were lessened for a time. One of his jobs was assisting the tyrant’s physician, who did not choose to be known by her true name — or perhaps was yet to discover it — and went by the nickname Lokum. Like the confection she left traces of herself about anybody she came into contact with — sweetness, fragrance. “Ah, so you have been with her…”
Lokum kept the tyrant in perfect health, and perfectly lovesick too. Like the tyrant’s wife, Lokum had no lovers: Anybody who seemed likely to win her favor was immediately drowned. Arkady swept and mopped Lokum’s chambers, and he fetched and carried covered baskets for her, and he also acted as her test subject — this was his favorite job because all he was required to do was sit on a stool and eat different-colored pieces of lokum that the physician had treated with various concoctions. He was also required to describe in detail what he felt happening in his body a few minutes after the consumption of each cube, and some of the morsels broke his cells wide open and made it all but impossible to find words and say them, though for the most part accurate description was no great task for him, and it paid more than his other two decidedly more mundane jobs. “Open your mouth,” she’d say, and then she placed a scented cube on his tongue. He’d warned himself not to behave like everybody else who came within ten paces of her, but once as the lokum melted away he found himself murmuring to her: I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair. Her usual response was flat dismissal — she all but pointed to the door and said, “Please handle your feelings over there,” but this time she took one end of the scarf she wore and wrapped it around his neck, drawing him closer and closer until her face was just a blur. “Listen, listen,” she said. “People have been drowned for saying much less.”