A thin layer of dust, worn fibers from the rug reaching up to hold it, stretched out under the curtain keeping separate his sleeping nook and the kitchen. It faded into a brighter filmy wash under the table, weaving through the chair legs, out to the whitish grey light slipping in under the door – to outside and the world. If he held very still, it was like a picture, a drawing in chalk and charcoal, and he could pretend it wasn’t real.
But the light was very real, and the outside it heralded from. And the floor was very cold, the rug very thin. He had half twisted out of his blankets in the night; parts of him were flat as stones and might never have blood warm them again if he didn’t move. But if he moved – and his breath stirring the dust caused him to stop – he would have to admit that he was awake. Sleep had been the sort so deep, yet so shallow, that it seemed he closed his eyes at night only to open them at morning. He woke confused, and almost stirred, but now he felt robbed of what should have been timeless, delaying dreaming.
If he admitted he was awake, then the journey was over, and his new life begun.
The bottom of the curtain stirred as a small foot slammed past it; a truncated laugh stopped with a hush – a child’s laugh, so familiar but so achingly clear it wasn’t his siblings’ that it hurt in his chest. Or maybe his chest hurt because everything hurt because the floor was very hard and he refused to move. And he was holding his breath. The top edge of the curtain twitched and an eye shone through, widened, slipped away, fingers quickly and imperfectly tucking away the light it had let in.
He had been hearing the soft susurrus of his father and his uncle (his mother’s second-oldest brother’s wife’s brother-in-law) talking since he woke, comfortingly incomprehensible but for its gentle depth. They must have been up since dawn, which was when he should have been up (so he knew he slept deeply enough to oversleep), and now everybody but him was up.
Drawing in angrily, he thought perhaps he should be allowed to stay asleep – it was his damn life that was changing, his whole future had been decided upon – and his father’s gentle tone undid his anger.
He should be grateful.
He got up.
He didn’t feel grateful.
He went to the small cold basin of water standing on a footstool and washed himself as discreetly as he could.
Sometimes, his father said, feelings needed time to develop.
As if on cue, after his splashing, he could finally understand his uncle saying, “…not worried, Skola, there’s time after, plenty of time after…”
The thought of his cousin returned. When he saw her he always thought of the lines of the Book where it described the Holy Mother, of strength and sorrow, standing tall and straight as a reed at the riverbanks. She was seventeen – a year older than him – and would be twenty one when he finished, and he would be surprised if she waited that long.
But their village needed a Teacher; it had too many Priests, already, and no one to rein them in. It was an odd problem for a place that seemed so much bigger than his village – but that was an illusion of the Ainjir part being so big, because they were so close the Capitol. They had stone houses and sometimes wood floors, and it was because:
1) A lot more trade meant more lumber, more quarried stone
2) They lived weirdly close to the Ainjir – partly among them, even.
But he had heard that’s what the Capitol was like – but he hadn’t thought about it because he didn’t want to think about the Capitol at all. He knew what his uncle thought: the son of a Teacher is almost as good as a Teacher, but his uncle was ignoring the fact that the whole point of this was that he was not going to be a Teacher. No matter what he wanted.
His anger renewed, he pulled the curtain aside and tried very, very hard not to show it.
His father smiled at him proudly; his uncle smiled at him graspingly. His cousin smiled at him for whatever reason, and offered him specially-bought sausage rolls, because he had been sleeping where they normally cooked. Everyone – people he did not even know – had all gone extraordinarily out of their way to make the crushing of his dreams as comfortable as possible.
He should be grateful.
He wanted to die.
In the wild wandered Colm
‘Mid white, be-wintered, withered trees
Through haunted land, o’er trackless sea
And called out for his destiny
He couldn’t quite get the tune, his mind half-full of whistling, while waiting for the teapot to boil. Would the wandering hero whistle, he wondered, as he walked the earth?
Or ‘world’ – ‘walked the world ‘– should it be ‘world’? Nobody committed to the old way of matching first sounds like they used to – but, then again, he definitely liked rhyme. Some of the old songs could drag – a bit top-heavy, if you asked him.
The bubbling changed – he swiped the iron bar holding the teapot away from the hearth – the whistle died in its little metal throat.
Momentous events called for tea, at least for him – his family – well, most of it. Tea called for all sorts of fuss, which he was skipping, but the important part was the pot and the water and the leaves, which were old, but would do. His aunt would be scandalized, but his aunt had a country estate full of servants to pick herbs and gather honey, so she could be scandalized if she wanted.
The tune still wasn’t coming.
But it would, or he would forget about it and wouldn’t care. He had his bag, slumped down by the legs of the table, carefully – even expertly – packed with only things he would be allowed, or things he wouldn’t miss. He wasn’t wearing gray – nothing splashy, but nothing gray. He wasn’t particularly well groomed, but also not scrubby. He would spend the last of his very little money, hide away his scant remaining tokens, neither of which would do him any good for a long while. The gates didn’t open until midday; spending most of the day in town would add a traveled look to his clothes and person that would carry well enough for his purposes.
And he had tea.
That was everything he needed.
The city wasn’t even up yet. The sun hadn’t breached the walls – only the highest got the dawn, in a very literal sense. The thought made him smile, though, because there were different kinds of ‘highest’: the row houses, the bridges, the wall scalers, the lucky who lived low, but around the wide squares, when they were empty. Two stood above all, and one he was locked out of by accident of birth, but the other – arguably, the taller of the two–
The other, he started to climb today.
You could say that it began with his time of Prep, but he wouldn’t. It did, but that wasn’t what was going to matter, when he reached the top of the Academy tower. What was going to matter was that he was the best.
Because that was all that mattered.
At the Academy – unlike at Prep – it ceased to matter where you were born, or who to, or what you had, or what you could get. All that mattered was how well you did. And you had to be the best – not just the strongest, or the fastest, or the smartest, but all of those – to get to the top.
All this preparation – and the tea – wasn’t about that. Being the best was secondary; he could be the best, or he would make himself the best, as a matter of personal pride. ‘Best’ was – or had been, at Prep – a flighty category and he had been told Academy was different. How different? No one could or would say, but different enough to matter. He wasn’t looking down the same well going to Academy as he had been, returning to Prep.
Still miserable, though. Anyway, Academy was, at points, bad for everyone. It would be a very bold lie indeed to deny he was, in no small degree, looking forward to that – maybe miserable, but not alone.
But first – first he had to survive. That’s what the preparation was for.
This time he was eminently better equipped to do that than he was when he went to Prep, which everyone survived, generally speaking. But it wouldn’t do to get overconfident, because the Academy was infinitely harder than Prep. His advantages and disadvantages – the hard lessons of two miserable years with the miserable castoffs of the nobility – were all jumbled, and had to be ironed back out in a new environment.
Not just the environment was new, either; there were ways in which he was new. Partially re-forged by the fires of experience, partially just over the awkwardness of youth. Duly, he had celebrated his majority last year among the Families – the sixteen kisses, one for each year, were free, the discount was due to longstanding credit, but the debt was still being paid off in buttons sewn for his father’s business.
Sweet Fortune smile on him, if he really was the best he would never have to sew another stitch himself for his entire life. He could be daily scandalized by lax tea preparations.
That was enough to remind him to drink said tea, which had gone cold. He drank it anyway; good anything, nevermind good tea, would be out of his reach for a while. The iron squeaked as he moved the teapot close enough to the stove to stay warm and he froze, but his father didn’t wake. Or, at least, the sounds of stirring he heard were from the street, not upstairs, or his workshop downstairs.
This was another preparation. He remembered, being twelve, looking back, waiting to see if his father would see him off. Looking up in desperation at the bedroom window, when, already, it had become obvious his father couldn’t sleep there anymore.
Who knew the last time the bed upstairs had actually been used? Who knew the point of saving the tea! His father wouldn’t touch the pot; every time it was out, he acted like it didn’t exist. This time, though, his father would have handle it, because he wasn’t going to be back – not for some time, at least – and now, as he stared at it, he wondered if he would come back months later just to find it exactly where he had left it, still half-full of tea, its swirls of color, evoking but not quite representing flowers, covered in dust…
And he remembered the tune. Took his hand from the teapot, picked up his bag, and left.
“Only take directions if you know they are Midraeic, Skola.” The wagon driver leaned in to the ‘only,’ which had the effect of making his mules slow down, so he tisked and ‘ya’-ed at them to get them back up to speed. “And even then – only if you’re not on the east side, Skola – the walls are okay – anyone near the walls should help, but there’s an area – there’s TWO areas – Eha! Beasts! Walk as God intended you, you’re not bushes!”
“Dominicus.”
He had learned a lot about wagon driving, and cart driving, and animal pushing-about in general in their long journey down from their village. They meandered from wagon to wagon, from great trains to walking alone – which he liked best – as relatives and friends and strangers in need of a Teacher could house them. It had taken two months. In two months, his observations of animal driving told him that nobody was good at it, and the urge to try to apply one rule learned from one situation with a different driver and different beasts was liable both to not work and to get one moved to the very back of the whole caravan, so you just had to be satisfied you were moving at all and watch them be bad at it.
“Damn sons of donkeys – Eha! Skola, apologies,” the driver patted his lips, the mules turned right, nearly crowding over a woman carrying apples beside them who glared at them. His driver made an apologetic face and a rude sign with his hands.
“Dominicus.”
He assumed it was rude here, too. His mother made it at onions, when they were particularly sharp, and had once knocked Catillia on the side of the head with a spoon for making it at him (she forgot she was holding the spoon; Catillia was more impressed than hurt, naturally, and made hay of the accident for months – until her step-mother carved her a kitchen spoon as a birthday present, since she liked them so much, and Catillia desisted for hope of other presents in the future).
“Dominicus.”
Catillia loved that spoon. She cooked nothing, but left it out like other girls left out favorite combs. Hurt like a bitch if she hit you with it. Maybe that’s why his mother had given it such a long, thick handle… but that was only a memory, and would be only a memory, as he wouldn’t be seeing Catillia or his mother, or his other siblings for many, many months.
“Filice.”
He started and pulled himself up to sitting properly on the board; he’d stretched out like a cat to watch the road pass. His father’s voice was so quiet. Also, this was the noisiest road they had been on in some time.
“Padraf.”
“You are displeased.”
“No, Padraf,” he lied.
“You don’t want to take this path.”
“I’m happy with what you’ve chosen,” he lied even harder.
“You are doing this to please me.”
That… took some air from his lungs. “I am happy to do so.”
It was true, but it elicited a pained and loving smile, and his father’s gentle hand on his, all of which burned like hideous fire for shame over his ungrateful anger.
“Who would not want to please their father?” the driver, his uncle’s butcher’s cousin’s son, who had a friend in town that would buy his crops no matter what they were, for family’s sake (which didn’t include a good price). “If you can talk to my father about it, I would be pleased. Summer beets are fine. They grow, eventually.”
“My son undertakes a great task at the Capitol,” his father said, turning a proud smile towards the driver, “but it is a sacrifice. For all of us.”
Dominicus’ gut dropped. Looking up at the Capitol itself, rising before them, made his breath catch in his throat, in the way that bile did. He had never seen anything so big, except the distant mountains. Though they were probably bigger, they were not this close, and they were made by God, and thus had natural reasons for being so big, and thus were not an affront to all his sensibilities.
“Is it not beautiful?” his father asked, smiling at him, knocking their shoulders together with rare jollity.
Fuck no, Dominicus wanted to say, if the thought of saying such a vulgar thing in front of his father didn’t make him want to fling himself to the road to be trampled to death.
“It’s fine enough,” the driver said, scratching his chin at it. “Not so much for grain – they’re too cheap, the King interferes…” he seemed to realize they weren’t talking about grain, and also that he was about to run down to people who had stopped to trade on the side of the road despite the growing traffic. He maneuvered the mules around them, and turned indulgently back to Dominicus’ father. “I don’t know about for great tasks. What is the great task?”
“He goes to the school,” his father said proudly. “The Ainjir school.”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” the driver said, brows furrowed. “There’s lots of good Skola in town I know. Is there Ainjir skolum?”
“No, my son goes there,” and his father pointed, up, to the tower rising to the west over the great walled city.
“What? I don’t know that district – that’s…” the driver made a small sign, to ward sin, “not that I know, Skola, but on the west side is where the Aijnjir have their places of,” and he searched for a word that might properly disguise his knowledge, that he could still say to a Teacher, “bawdiness…”
“No,” his father laughed – his father who rarely ever laughed – and brought his pointing hand upward, “there! The tower. My son is going to the Ainjir Doirefaleim.”
His father pronounced the word very carefully, not out of unfamiliarity, but because, for an ordinary word, it was very special.
“Eha,” the driver demurred, “that’s good work, but you came a long way for it, Skola. So many good kitchens between here and there.”
“He goes as a student, to Doirefaleim.”
A special word for someone the driver now very clearly thought was a special man. He tapped the mules to speed up, annoying someone beside them walking with racks of dried fished that made salty shushing noises as they got out of the way.
“I see, Skola, I see. That’s very nice.”
Dominicus couldn’t even get angry over the slight to his father’s sanity. His father was too enraptured by the city to notice either the driver’s pity or his son’s misery.
“It is a mighty city, is it not?”
“Yes, Padraf,” Dominicus said.
“You are not a good liar, mea filice,” his father said. He paused. “You may need to practice.”
Dominicus drew back so quickly he nearly fell off the board.
“Skola! Are you ashamed to have an honest son?” the driver asked, grinning.
“No,” his father said, in the same, quiet measured tone that both read out the holy words and asked for more peas. “What he does now is an untrod path – for him and for our people. We must face the idea that he must also try untried methods, and seek unusual answers. He may not prosper if he thinks the stick which aids his step cannot also strike his enemies.”
“Eha, or break over his head, Skola,” the driver replied, “excuse me for saying. The city – wherever you go in the city – is a different place. Be canny.”
“You are canny,” his father said, leaning toward him. “Like your mother. Your sisters would have had it no other way, anyway.”
“You would not have lived,” he reflected, after a moment’s thought.
Dominicus knew his father undersold his own canniness. It was a joke (a true joke – his sisters were merciless – but a joke), about it saving his life, but his father’s canniness had saved his, and his first two daughters’ lives. At great cost.
The same thoughts must have plagued his father’s mind.
“I know you are unhappy, mea felice, but I would not force on you what I thought you could not do. Moreover, what you are doing is important. I know it isn’t what you wanted, but it is a greater calling – a chance for greater things.”
“I know, Padraf,” he said. “I know. And I understand. And I will do my best. It will take time, though. To get used to it. I will, though.”
His father fell silent for a few rocking moments; firm as his belief in his plan was, that Dominicus was unhappy made him unhappy. He again patted his son’s hand.
“I know it disappoints you. But there is also a life of the mind here – and the mission is spiritual, though its effects, its steps, are worldly. That is what I mean by ‘higher,’ my son. You do this for the sake of all of our people, as the kings of old ruled with the righteous word of the Prophet behind them.”
“The kings of old were personally struck down by God,” Dominicus said. The wagon-driver tried to cover his burst of laughter with much-belabored coughing.
“So maybe a lesser saint,” he said, amusement in his tone. Dominicus’ father smiled at him, and turned back to the city. “You feel now that you are being taken away from your true calling, and that may be so – I am neither God nor Prophet – but you will do well, I think, Dominicus. You doubt me, but remember, it is a school, and among the finest of them. You have a thirst for knowledge, and long since outpaced my teaching. You will have the chance to learn more here than I could ever have taught you. The lessons will be different, the means of teaching different, but you know well that they can all be useful, even when you think they aren’t.”
The thought that he had outpaced his father made him bristle, but it was pointless to argue when it was his father saying it. Likewise, he had some doubt he would find anything the Ainjir had to teach illuminating or useful, but it was also pointless to argue with so much unknown. His father had taught him that, and he dared the Academy to match it.
Dominicus looked again at the looming towers. Comidras, the city of the faithful over which the kings of old had ruled, had been torn down by catastrophes wrought by the will of God for the sins of the people. He had then scattered the Midraeic people about the world like seeds, to land on rocks or sand or moist earth, to perish or thrive as ever-wandering outcasts.
The lesson Dominicus took from this, which provided some comfort, was that if he fucked this up badly enough he might take the whole stupid city with him.
“Eha,” his father said, and it might have been the second time Dominicus had ever heard him say such a casual expression in his life, “How beautiful.”
The great walls rose, the towers shrinking behind them as they approached. Like and unlike the hard, deep gray stone of which it was built, at once of the earth, another hill among the many, but sharp and turned and touched by human hands in ways that made clear it was unnatural. When they had been farther away, higher up, he had seen the way it stretched, the twin towers like an old-fashioned distaff and spindle, stretching the city between them and bundling it round. Then, it had still seemed like an unreal place, like the mountains he saw in the distance but never went to at home.
Now that they were near, it squatted, crouched on the ground, its jumbled insides hidden by the great blank walls as if it were one mighty stone. Roof peaks and flags, the flashes of birds, lines of laundry strung high between windows, bright colors and glints of water slowly sank as the approached, until under the shadow of the walls they disappeared, only the tops of the two high towers stretching above.
Standing at the gates, the city looked to Dominicus like the maw of a great beast raised to the sky, where he and all he was would be consumed.