Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The trouble with asking a beetle to be still is that a beetle, once asked, takes it very seriously.

“Not like that,” said Brannoch.

It was an hour before dawn on the sixty-eighth floor, and the whole world was the color of ash. The mist had stopped hissing. The waterfall muttered to itself in the dark. In the garden on the roof of the hourglass, the ruined beds lay in long grey rows, and in the very middle of them, between the cabbages and the stripped tomato vines, sat Old Clatter, with his legs tucked under him and his wings folded flat and his great horned head lowered to the flagstones, doing his very best to be a rock.

He was shaking.

It was a small, steady, high-pitched shake, from the tips of his feelers to the last of his six feet, and it made a thin sound, like a plucked wire. His whole enormous body was vibrating with the strain of not moving. Every one of his eyes was fixed on Brannoch, who crouched in front of him with one broad hand on the black plate of his forehead, and a handful of honeyed oats in the other, and a look of the most grave and patient tenderness.

“Still,” said Brannoch, very softly. “Like the mountain. Breathe.”

Old Clatter breathed. A great slow shudder went through him, and a leaf from a nearby pear tree dropped off in sympathy.

“Good,” said Brannoch. “Good boy. A little less.”

“He’s humming,” whispered Thara.

She was lying on her stomach behind a barrel of rainwater, fifteen feet away, with her chin on her fists and a wild light of joy in her face. Beside her, flat on the flagstones, with their cloaks pulled over their heads, lay Fel and Veyra and Orrin. On the far side of the terrace, behind a pile of sacks, Torren Ballast was sitting up against the wall with his enormous hat tipped over his eyes, snoring peacefully, with Brek beside him, wide awake, his arms folded, like a very large guard at the door of a very large child. Nerissa stood in the doorway to the stair, in a long grey robe with her hair bound back, and a pot of tea on the sill, with the expression of a general watching the last charge of a doomed campaign.

“He is humming,” said Veyra, in a thread of a voice. “Birds can hear.”

“They can hear nothing,” said Nerissa quietly. “They are morning doves. They have wonderful eyes, and awful ears. Be quiet, all of you, and do not move, and for pity’s sake, someone stop him breathing like that.”

“He’s trying,” said Brannoch.

The mountain turned. The sky behind the plain went from black to grey, and from grey to a thin, cold, brightening green, as the first light climbed the long slope of the east. The stars died one by one. Far down in the city, a bell began to toll the hour, a deep slow note that came up the mountain on the wind, and was answered, ring on ring, by the furnaces of Karzhul. And the light touched the lip of the terrace, and laid a pale gold line along the rail, and the garden began, very slowly, to show its colors.

Which was when they came.

Fel did not see it. That was what he would remember, afterward. He was watching the sky, and the east, and Old Clatter’s shaking horn, and there was nothing, nothing at all, no whisper of wings, no sound, only the quiet and the cold. And then there was a dove on the rail.

It sat there as if it had always been there. It was small, and grey, and round, with a soft pink breast and a black-ringed eye, and its head turned in quick little jerks, a half inch at a time. It looked at the cabbages. It looked at the pears. It looked, for a long moment, in the direction of the water barrel, and Fel held his breath until his chest hurt, and it looked away.

And then there were three. Then ten. Then there were forty, in a long grey line along the rail, shoulder to shoulder, as soft and still as a row of folded handkerchiefs. They did not coo. They did not flutter. They simply waited, with a terrible and patient courtesy, like a congregation at a funeral.

“Now,” breathed the water nymph, from the doorway. “Oh, now. Now.”

The first dove dropped to the ground.

It landed on the flagstones about five yards from Old Clatter, and walked, with brisk little steps, toward the nearest cabbage. The cabbage was already hollow. It looked into the hole, and thought about it, and moved on. The rest of them followed, in a rippling grey wave, down off the rail and onto the beds, and in a moment the whole garden was alive with the soft quick patter of tiny feet and the small, polite sound of pecking.

They were frighteningly efficient. Within a minute, a plum tree that Fel had thought was safe was stripped to the bough. Within two, a melon had vanished. A fat grey male marched up the path to a clump of lettuce, took a leaf in his beak, and, with the air of a tax collector, began to carry it away.

He walked straight past Old Clatter’s front leg.

He did not even look. His small bright black-ringed eye slid across the great black wall of the beetle’s shell as if it were a patch of nothing at all. He took one step, two, three, with his lettuce, along the length of a body the size of a cottage, and went on his way.

Old Clatter did not move.

He was trembling, from end to end. His antennae were bent double with the effort. A single huge tear of pure concentration ran down the side of his face, and fell on the flagstones with an audible pat. But he was being a rock. He was being the finest, stillest, most blameless rock that had ever sat in a cabbage patch, and Fel, lying with his face on the cold stone, thought, with a pang of love so strong that it nearly hurt, that he had never been more proud of anything in his life.

A dove landed on his back.

It was a young one, very light, with a bit of white down still at its throat. It fluttered down out of the air, folded its wings, and stood there, on the gleaming black curve of the great shell, with its head cocked, and looked around. And then, as if it had come to a decision, it hopped down the slope of the shell to the front, onto the black plate of the forehead, and picked a crumb of oat out of the groove of the horn.

Brannoch’s hand, ten feet away, had gone entirely white.

Another landed. And another. They came in a stream, now, a quiet grey stream, because a rock that did not move was a good place to sit, and a dove that has found a good place to sit tells his friends. They perched on his legs. They stood on his wings. A pair of them stepped, with the greatest unconcern, along the line of his mandibles, which were open, and slightly trembling, and a foot and a half from their delicate feet, and began to peck at a stray crumb of honey that had stuck there.

“Oh, gods,” breathed Thara. “Oh, gods, oh gods, oh gods.”

“Be quiet,” said Veyra, without moving her lips.

“He’s going to explode.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin faintly, “that I am not sure I am going to be able to watch.”

Brannoch had not moved. He was kneeling, with his head bowed, as still as the beetle itself, and his whole massive back was shaking. His eyes were closed. His lips were moving. Fel realized, with a sort of wonder, that he was counting. He was counting the doves. He was waiting, with the immense and terrible patience of a man who had once held a stone arch against an army, for the exact moment when the last of the flock should be in the right place.

The dove on the horn pecked once, twice, and gave a small, contented, round-bellied sort of shuffle.

Brannoch’s eyes opened.

He raised one hand. It was a small gesture. It was no more than a lifted palm, like a priest at an altar.

And Old Clatter, who had been waiting for it, who had waited with every fiber of his great and joyful and entirely undisciplined being for a very long hour, with his whole heart, and his stomach, and the memory of honeyed oats, opened his jaws like a pair of barn doors and ate breakfast.

It was, they all agreed afterward, extremely fast.

It was a snap, a bright, hard, wet, clean sort of sound, like a man closing a very large book. There was a puff of grey feathers. There was a single, small, startled prrt. And the two doves who had been standing on the black wall of the mandibles were simply, abruptly, not there.

The forty doves in the garden went up like a handful of ash.

It was the first sound they had made. It was a great, soft, panicked whirr, forty pairs of wings together, and the whole grey cloud of them rose into the dawn at once, with a rush like a wave. Old Clatter swung round with a roar of pure rapture. His wings burst open. His head went left and right and left again, in great scooping sweeps, like a man catching peas in a ladle, and each time his jaws closed there was a snap, and a fresh puff of feathers, and a short silence.

Snap.

“Gods!” screamed Thara, leaping to her feet. “Get the one by the pear tree!”

Snap.

“Left,” said Brannoch, without raising his voice. “Left, boy. Left.”

Snap.

The doves wheeled. They had, as the water nymph had said, a very great deal of cleverness, and they used all of it. They broke into three groups, and scattered, and tried the rail, and the stair, and the open air over the cliff. Veyra stood and drew, and did not loose, but her bow tracked the lead dove with an eerie calm, and the lead dove, who saw her, and did the arithmetic, veered off with a shriek and led the whole flock straight into the mouth of the Mountain’s morning wind.

They never came back.

It was a most remarkable thing. For a long moment, the grey cloud hung against the green of the sky, wheeling, a little knot of panic. And then it broke up, and dissolved, and streamed away over the plain, a long scattered ribbon of wings, until it was gone. And there was only a quiet garden, and a great deal of feathers floating down on the flagstones, and in the middle of it all, an enormous black beetle with a very small contented burp.

Old Clatter looked about with an air of great modesty.

“Eleven,” said Thara, in a hushed voice, after a time. “Brannoch. He got eleven.”

“Twelve,” said Brannoch. His voice was very strange. He had put his hand over his mouth. “There was one on the horn.”

Then Fel looked at Veyra, and she looked at him, and neither of them could help it. It started as a snort, and became a gasp, and was a full, helpless, aching laugh, the kind of laughter that has been dammed behind a long dark year and comes through all at once. Orrin had folded in half on the flagstones and was chiming like a bell. Thara was rolling on her back, beating the ground with both fists. Brannoch, who did not laugh, who had not laughed once in all the time that Fel had known him, was shaking, with tears running down his broad face and his big hand clapped to his mouth, and a long, low rumble coming up through his fingers like a stone settling at the bottom of a lake.

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Behind a pile of sacks, a hat slid off an old man’s face.

“What’s happened?” said Torren, sitting up, with feathers in his beard. “Has somebody died?”

“Doves,” said Brek.

“Eh?”

“The beetle ate the doves.” The boy’s voice was perfectly flat. But his mouth, Fel saw, was doing something quite remarkable. It was not a smile. It was something much more rare, a very small crack in a very high wall, and what was behind it was bright. “Twelve of them. I counted.”

Torren Ballast looked at the garden, and at the beetle, and at the glittering mess of feathers, and at the water nymph standing in the doorway with her robe hanging from one hand. And his whole face crumpled, and he lay back on the sacks and roared.

Nerissa Dewhollow did not laugh. She was too elegant for that.

She walked through the ruined garden, very slowly, with her wings folded and her hands clasped and her silver hair stirring. She stopped by the hollowed cabbages. She looked up at the empty rail, where the doves had sat, and at the sky, where they had gone. She looked at Old Clatter, who had lowered his enormous horned head to the flagstones before her in a posture of such huge and shy and breathless hope that it looked like a puppy. And she lifted one long white hand, and set it, very lightly, on the top of his black plate, between the horns.

“You,” she said, in a low voice, to the beetle, “are a magnificent creature.”

Old Clatter hummed so hard that the pear tree shook.

“And you,” she said, to the rest of them, turning, with her chin high and a bright, strange gleam in her eyes, “are the most ridiculous people I have ever met. You plan like children. You fight like cats. You have a drunkard for a master, and a beetle for a plan, and a boy of seventeen for a champion, and I do not understand in the least how you have all stayed alive.” She drew a breath. “I shall be joining you.”

There was a very small pause, and then a very large noise.

“Quietly,” said Nerissa, and put her hands over her ears.

They had tea in the ruins, because it seemed the proper thing.

It was a slow, strange, golden morning. The sun came up over the shoulder of the plain, and the mist on the ledge lit with rainbows, and the garden lay in the light with its stripped beds and its white scatter of feathers, looking, in spite of everything, rather peaceful. Old Clatter had been given the whole sack of oats, and lay in the middle of the cabbage patch with his head on his front legs, humming in his sleep. Brek, with the grave air of a man who has been entrusted with an enormous responsibility, was passing out cups. The old man sat on an upturned bucket with his head in his hands and said, at intervals, oh, my head, and Nerissa, who had a bottle of something clear and green in her pocket, refused absolutely to give him any.

“There’s one more thing,” said Fel. “We need a name.”

They all looked at him.

“The charter. The Rotunda won’t stamp it without one. Marigold said so. A guild has to have a name, and we don’t have one.” He turned his cup in his hands. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. I couldn’t think of anything good.”

“The Dashing Turnips,” said Thara, at once.

“No.”

“The Gilded Beetle.”

“No.”

“The Order of the Luminous Thara.”

“I would like it noted that this is worse,” said Orrin.

“You are all against me. I have only ever tried to help.” She sulked. “What does Brannoch want?”

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“That’s not a name.”

“Something quiet.”

“Something with a bite,” said Torren, from under his hands. “The Iron Ones. The Gate Keepers. Something that makes a man pay his bill.”

“Torren, you could not name a goldfish.”

“I named Maude.”

“Yes, and look how that went.”

The talk went round and round. It was quick, and warm, and foolish, and full of laughter, and Fel sat in the middle of it with the sun on his face and a feeling in his chest he could not quite put a name to. He looked from face to face, around the long wet flagstones and the hanging glass. Veyra, with her bow across her knees, her violet eyes half closed. Orrin, with his crest glowing. Thara, on her back with a cabbage leaf on her head. Brannoch, quiet as a hill. The old man and the faerie, side by side on their bucket and their bench, not touching, with nine years of silence between them and the beginning of something else. And Brek, beyond them, standing at the edge of the circle with the teapot in both hands, and watching them all with a very quiet, very careful, very hungry look.

It was Nerissa who said it, in the end, so softly that for a moment nobody heard.

“There are seven of us.”

They all stopped.

“I counted. It is a habit.” She turned her cup in her long fingers, and looked into it. “Seven. The boy, the girl, the singer, the thief, the wall, the old ox, and myself. And I do not think there is one of us, in the whole company, who has not lost something.” She did not lift her eyes. “I have lost a great many friends, who were mostly mortal. Torren has lost a gate. And I should think, looking at you, that each of you has lost something rather more than a gate.”

Nobody said anything.

It was not a heavy silence. It was an honest one. Veyra had turned her face away, toward the mist, and Fel saw her hand go to her throat. Orrin’s light had dimmed, quite gently, like a lamp turned down in a quiet room. Thara had stopped smiling, though she had not stopped looking at the sky, and her fingers, among the cabbage leaves, had closed into a fist. And Brannoch, who had never in all his life said what he carried, bowed his great head and said nothing, with the vast, patient, unbending courtesy of a wall.

Fel thought of a girl called Pim. He did not say her name. It did not seem to need saying.

Veyra spoke, without turning round. It was only two words, in a low, clear voice, and they sat in the air above the tea like smoke.

“It is not a good name,” she said. “It is a true one.”

For a time nobody moved. Then Orrin, who had been looking at his own long hands, let out a slow, quiet breath, and the gold came up in his face, warm as a candle.

“Yes,” he said. “I think that is the one.”

“It’s a bit grim,” said Thara, in a small voice. “It sounds like a funeral. Or a band of very serious bards.” She sniffed, and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist, quickly, as though it had been a gnat. “I love it. I hate it. Yes. Fine. Whatever.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, and it was the gentlest mm that Fel had ever heard.

Torren said it over to himself, slowly, tasting it. He took his hands from his head, and looked at the rim of the sun on the plain. “It’ll look very well on a banner. It’ll look even better on a tombstone. We’ll try to put that off.”

“Torren.”

“I said we’d try.”

Fel looked around the little ring of them. Seven people. He had been alone on a road not so long ago, with a sword and a knife and a hole in his life, and he had thought that this was the only way a person could be. He put down his cup. He found that his eyes had gone hot, and that he was smiling.

“Then it’s settled,” he said.

And from the edge of the circle, behind the teapot, a gruff and stifled voice said:

“Eight.”

They looked round.

“With the beetle,” said Brek, to the teapot. “Old Clatter. That’s eight.”

There was a short silence. Then Thara began to laugh again, helplessly, and the water nymph put her face in her hands, and Orrin chimed. And Old Clatter, who had been dozing in the cabbages, hearing his name, lifted one huge drowsy eye, and hummed.

The Rotunda was at its busiest at noon.

It was a great, round, roaring bowl of a room, three stories of dome and glass, with the rings of the floor all filled with a rising sea of people, and the pneumatic tubes shooting canisters overhead with a noise like a flock of tin geese. There were queues at every desk. There were clerks on ladders. And at the heart of it, under the great dome, behind the central desk with its rubber stamps and its brass plate, on a stool two feet higher than anyone else’s, sat a small, round, russet-furred person with enormous black-rimmed eyes and ears like a pair of velvet cups, going through a stack of forms.

She looked up as they came across the white marble. Her ears went straight up. Her whole face lit like a lamp.

“You came back!” cried Marigold Tufton.

She said it so loudly that a clerk on a ladder dropped his pen. She was off her stool in a bound, and across the desk, and had caught Thara’s two hands in her small black paws before anyone could take a breath. “Oh, I knew you would! I told Hemlock, I said, they will be back before the week is out, they have that look. The look of people who have been to see the Peacock! And you did, didn’t you? You did. I heard. It was all around the Hall by supper. The slap! I have had six people describe it to me. One of them did the sound.” She drew a breath, with a rising squeak, and her ears turned slowly pink. “I should not be so pleased. It is quite unprofessional. I am a very serious clerk.”

“You are a very serious gossip,” said Thara.

“I am both,” said Marigold, with warm dignity. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and turned, and saw the rest of the party, and stopped. Her whole small body went still. Her ears turned slowly toward the great bronze-skinned man in the stained coat and the battered hat, who stood a little behind the others, leaning on a dark iron staff with a ball at each end, and looking at the ceiling with the air of a man who has come in a hurry to a place he has been avoiding for years.

“Master Ballast,” breathed Marigold.

“Marigold,” said Torren.

“Torren Ballast. In the Rotunda. On your feet.” She put a paw on her heart. “I have not seen you stand in this room for nine years. You were here, I think, for a wager. You have never come near my desk on your own.”

“I’ve never needed forms,” said Torren. “I’d rather been avoiding them.”

“But you…” She looked from him, to Fel, and back. Her eyes grew wider, and wider, and rounder, until they were nearly entire. “You didn’t. The Anchor. You are going to be their…”

“I am their Guild Master,” said Torren, heavily, “gods help us all.”

There was a pause. A canister went whistling overhead. Marigold Tufton took off her little round spectacles, and polished them, and put them on again, and drew a deep breath through her nose, and her whole face became suddenly, completely, wholeheartedly professional.

“Then I must,” she said, in a small trembling voice, “begin at once.”

She did. She became, within a minute, a different person. The forms came out of a drawer in a flood. The pens came out of a jar. The great stamp, the one with the brass handle, was lifted from its stand and held in the air like a sword. She asked, and they answered. Name, age, race. Rank, which was none, seven times, and Diamond, First Tier, and, to a loud and delighted squeak, Platinum, Second Tier, in the fine looping hand of the water nymph, who added, under Years of Service, a figure that she put her palm over before anyone could read. Occupation. Weapon. Previous guild. A quick, sharp question, put to Fel, on Next of Kin, that he answered with his eyes on the desk, and which she blotted with a very gentle hand.

“And the beetle?” she said, at the end.

“He is outside,” said Thara. “He is very big.”

“A mount. A familiar. A companion beast.” Marigold was writing rapidly. “There is a fee. Two glims. It covers feed, stabling, and what the Rotunda calls structural damage.”

“I would like it noted that he has already eaten twelve doves,” said Orrin.

“Then it is three glims.”

“And Brek?” said Fel.

They all turned. Brek was standing a little apart, at the edge of the marble, with a very large satchel on his shoulder that was a good deal heavier than it looked, and the fixed, bleak, stoic expression of a person who is making a determined effort to be invisible.

“Ah,” said Marigold, and her voice softened. She leaned across the desk and looked at him over her spectacles, with her small russet face quite serious and her ears tilted forward. “Staff. Personal attendant to the Guild Master. He is not to be entered on the roll, nor to sign anything, nor to be charged for a thing, and he is to be given the proper badge.” She took from a drawer a small round brass pin, stamped with a lantern, and held it out. “I have put it in the regulations. A boy of twelve may not be sent into the dark. But if there is a door, and he is at it, with a lantern, then I think the Pits would be glad to have him.”

Brek took the badge. He looked at it, in his big hard hand, for a long time.

“Thanks,” he said, in a very low voice.

And then, because he was twelve, and because he was a long way from home, and because the great old drunken lumbering man beside him had, without anyone asking, stepped half a pace nearer, until his elbow rested against the boy’s shoulder, he added, without looking up, in the kind of voice that is not meant to be heard:

“Pops, can you hold the satchel?”

It was a very small thing. In the roaring room, with the canisters shooting overhead and the clerks calling, nobody even noticed.

Except for the Guild Master, who had gone quite still. His mouth opened. His mouth closed. And his large bronze face, under the beard and the beads and the battered hat, did a number of things in quick succession, all of which he plainly hoped nobody saw.

“Hm,” said Torren Ballast, very gruffly. He took the satchel. His hands, Fel noticed, were not entirely steady. “Hm. Yes. Of course. Quite right.”

He did not say anything else. He did not need to.

It took forty minutes, and a great deal of ink, and in the end it came down to a single page.

It lay on the desk under the dome, a long sheet of cream-colored paper, rich and heavy, stamped across the top with the seal of the Rotunda in green, and below, in neat black lines, the names. Seven of them. Ballast. Dewhollow. The two lines Fel had written himself, and then Veyra’s, and Orrin’s long careful hand, and Thara’s Ilthara Quickthorn, with a defiant flourish at the end, and a small, square, heavy X, which was Brannoch’s, pressed so hard that it had nearly gone through.

Marigold looked at it for a long moment. Then she lifted the great stamp, and held it over the page, and did not bring it down.

“There is only one more thing,” said Marigold. Her small voice had gone quite soft. “A guild must have a name. It must be unique in the Rotunda, and it must be agreed upon, in full, by every member of the company, and once the stamp comes down, it is stamped for good. It cannot be taken back. It will be written on your charter, and on your badges, and on the door of whatever hall you take. It will be spoken in the Pits, and in the taverns, and sung, I hope, by bards.” She swallowed. She looked up. Her great dark eyes went from one face to another, around the circle of them, and rested at last on Fel. “Have you chosen?”

“We have,” said Fel.

“And what is it?”

Veyra told her.

Marigold Tufton did not say anything for a moment. She wrote it, in her fine small hand, at the top of the sheet. And the great stamp, in her little paw, hung a hair above the paper, with the whole dome silent above it, and the seven of them, and the boy with the badge at the edge, waiting, in the colored light.

She read it back once more, softly, to herself. Then she raised her eyes. “Then I must ask it, as the Rotunda requires, of each of you, before the stamp comes down. Master Ballast, Lady Dewhollow, Miss Quickthorn, Master Brannoch, Master Orrin, Lady Veyra, Master Fel.” She drew a breath. “Do you all agree to take the name of the Seven Sorrows?”