Pyrebound - 1.4

Chapter 1.4 – Pyrebound
Yet Ram’s prayer was answered almost at once—after a fashion. It was only a brief walk from the god’s tower to his house, but by the time he stood before his own front door he found his head had cleared, and a terrible inspiration had come to him, out of nowhere. Haranduluz had lit his way; he knew what he had to do. Whether he would have the courage to do it was another matter.

Mother and Father were both sitting up at the courtyard table when he came in, around the oil lamp from the bedroom. Father had the chair now, in deference to his weakness, while Mother sat on the bench with a smaller piece in her hands than Mana’s mantle—a kerchief, or something similar. Neither looked cheerful. “Father, shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I done rested enough already,” Father grumped back. “I ain’t in no hurry to get back to sleep.”

Few people would be, on this night. Nobody got any real rest on the eve of a white day. But he would rather have spoken with Mother privately, and he couldn’t figure out how to finagle it. He hesitated too long after setting down the beans and beer, and the problem was taken out of his hands. “What’s eating you, boy?”

Ram took a deep breath. “Ganteg, Kirishi, and Tarnash all refused to apprentice me today.”

“You asked Tarnash? Boy, what are you—“

Mother held up a hand. “Belemel, please. Clearly our son has given the matter some thought. Let him speak.”

Ram gave her a quick smile, then went on, “I can’t support the family here. I don’t know enough, and Father, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re in any shape to teach me. Or work yourself.” There. He’d said it. But Father didn’t argue, only nodded somberly at the table. “Right. Well, if you can’t work, and Mother won’t be able to work soon, and nobody here will take me on or teach me any more … well, I guess I can’t stay here, can I?”

Father looked up again. “What are you thinking, Ram?”

“The pyre. Dul Karagi. I think I need to go find work there, where they don’t all hate us.” Neither of them said anything. They only stared at him. “They like Erimana there, right? Even if she is kind of weird. And she’s a handmaiden. That might be enough for me to get an apprenticeship there. I can send money back here from time to time, can’t I?”

Mother and Father exchanged glances, and Mother said, “I am not convinced that we are ready for anything so drastic, Rammash. You are only fourteen.”

“Fifteen in two months,” he corrected. “Close enough. You’ve been telling me I’ll be an adult soon for ages now, haven’t you? I might as well get started now.” She still looked skeptical. “Okay, then, do you have any better ideas? Because I don’t, and I’ve been thinking all day.”

Father snorted, and a smile spread slowly across his face. They’d trimmed a lot of the hair off the right side of his face where the corrupted blood had soaked in, so he looked bizarre. It was still good to see him smile. “He’s got us there. This hearth’s been trying to screw us since the day I met you, little girl. Now they’re fixing to get their wish. At least if he’s gone, they can’t go putting him in bond too.”

“He cannot be put in bond here,” Mother corrected. “There is nothing to prevent the same thing from happening at the pyre, or worse. He will be a boy, alone in a pyre for the first time in his life. There will be no shortage of other rootless young men looking for work, and as you may recall, Belemel, competition for work can be fierce.”

Father’s smile grew bigger. “Hey, I came out of it all right. Even Tarnash did. Eventually.”

Mother almost, but not quite, rolled her eyes, and turned back to Ram. “What do you intend to do, if you cannot find work? You know your father was fortunate, to have done as well as he did here. It will not do to count on fortune any longer, given what it has done to our family lately.”

He wished she hadn’t asked that question. He only had one honest answer. “From what I hear, the pyre is always looking for strong young men. Even if it isn’t looking for masons.”

The long, cold silence that followed was broken by Father slapping his one good hand down on the table, nearly knocking off the beer-pot. “Militia? Ain’t no son of mine going in for soldier work!” Mother only blanched, and gripped the table to steady herself.

“I killed a resh today,” Ram said.

“You damn well know that’s different! You know what they have them doing! Anything too low for the flamekeepers to bother with. You think that’s any kind of job for a real man to do?”

“No, Father, I don’t,” Ram answered quietly. “I asked Ganteg if I could help him run the quarry line today, and I don’t want to do that either. But I really don’t want us starving, and I don’t know what else we’re going to do.”

“I raised you better than that,” Father growled.

“Belemel,” Mother reproved him. “I am afraid the boy is right.”

“What! Woman, you know what I—“

“I am aware of your past, Belemel. You have reminded us often enough. This is not our first choice. We will have to take what little we are offered, and make the most of it.”

Father muttered a string of profanities into his beard. “How much more do I have to give, woman? Ain’t I paid enough? I give my daughter, then my arm, now my son! How much more is your yellow god going to want, before he lets us live in peace?”

Mother’s nostrils flared, and her eyes squeezed shut. “Rammash,” she snapped. “To your bed. Now.”

“Yes, Mother.” He all but ran into his room, shutting the curtain behind him just as Mother’s first hissing whisper cut into the silence. Father was not slow to grumble back, in the pathetic defensive tone Ram knew well and hated worse than Mother’s coldest rebuke. He threw himself down on his cot, shut his eyes, clapped his hands over his ears, and tried not to listen as the argument ran its inevitable course, through muted groans and wounded retorts and Mother’s steadily rising sardonic cruelty.

The fight ended with a series of long, loud sobs that the blanket and his hands together couldn’t hope to block. Even after Mother had coaxed him off to bed, Ram found himself perversely listening, wondering if every ghost of a sound his ears caught was the last echo of a cry from a drunk and broken man at his very lowest. So he lay with his back to the door, and waited.

A long time later, a hand touched his shoulder. “Yes, Mother?” he said, not turning over.

She stood silent for a long time, and he felt her hand tremble on his shoulder. He twisted around. “Mother, are you—“

“Softly, Rammash,” in the same stern tone as ever. “Your father is finally sleeping. I had to give him more of the tincture than I liked. Don’t wake him now.”

“Yes, Mother,” he murmured.

“And enough of that. Sit up, we have much to discuss.” Ram had been awake for at least eighteen hours at that point, but obeyed. “Good.” She reached into her gown, and pulled out a little metal hoop Ram could barely see against the moonlight through the curtain. “Take this, and hide it. Quickly.”

He obeyed, plucking it out of her hand and moving toward his clothes-chest. Then he paused; the tanbir’s weight was off. “I said quickly!” He stuffed it in with his underwear, and closed the lid. “Thank you. You are not the only one who has been busy, Rammash.” She sighed. “I went to see my father this afternoon, while yours was sleeping.”

“Your father? But … isn’t he, you know?” Ram knew his grandfather by sight, but had never spoken with him. He, too, sat on the Council, and lived right next to the tower, with five personal bondservants. Mother hadn�t spoken with him either, since her wedding day.

“I told your father that we would all have to do things we would rather not. That was one of them. He agreed to a one-time loan of ten silver tanbirs, one of which you have just deposited among your undergarments.”

“Oh.” Ten silver was probably more than the family had ever had at one time. But his mother’s father would barely miss it. He skimmed more than that off the herdsmen’s payroll every month. “When does he want it paid back?”

“We did not trouble to specify. Why should it matter? He would never shame himself, and the family, by claiming it. This was a loan only in name. But there will never be another.”

“Right. So, you’ll be good for a while?”

“For a while. But not forever. I’m afraid you were right, Rammash. Dul Karagi is our best hope, however pitiful. Are you still willing to go?”

His heart skipped a beat. “I think so. I mean, I’ve thought about it before, but always, you know, for later.” When he was married to Ninnara, and a full master in his craft, and ready to leave this wretched hearth behind him for better things. Probably a lot of Urapu boys had that dream. One of them might live it out for him, to the letter. “But, yeah. We don’t have much choice. I can do it.” He thought he sounded even less confident than he felt.

Mother took him by the shoulders, pulled him in for a long, tight embrace. They were the same height now; when had that happened? “You will do well, Rammash. You have to.”

“The assessors will arrive for first-quarter taxes in the next tetrad, or shortly after. It should be possible to return to the pyre with them, if you are clever about it.”

“A tetrad? Just four days? I guess I should call that lucky, huh?”

Mother didn’t laugh. “Indeed. When you get there, you will need to visit with your sister first. You can take her mantle with you. The sooner you are known to someone at the pyre, the less easily you can be made to meet with unfortunate accidents.”

Ram swallowed. “Yeah.”

She stepped back, and took a long moment to survey his face in the gloom. “Your father is not entirely wrong. The men of the pyre are still less friendly to outsiders than men here. Take particular care not to annoy the flamekeepers.”

“I know.” The flamekeepers were the elite defenders of the pyre, personal retainers of the Lugal himself. The few Ram had encountered were armor-plated bullies and thugs to a man. He considered himself lucky to be beneath their notice.

“You will need to speak with them once, of course, to secure passage. But after that, for the light’s love, have as little to do with them as possible.”

“Mother.” He grabbed her hands; they were still trembling. “It’s going to be four whole days, right? Or a little more. You don’t have to tell me all this now.”

Now she laughed. “No. No, I do not.” But she didn’t pull her hands away, or move to go.

What else was there to say? “Are you going to be okay, just you and Father?”

She squeezed his hands. “It is a man’s job to be strong, and a wife’s to make him that way. You leave your father to me, Rammash im-Belemel. You will have more than enough to deal with on your own.” She pulled him in for another, tighter hug, kissed him on the cheek, and was gone.

Ram went back to bed, feeling more lost than ever. For all his reassurances to Mother, he’d just had the ground cut out from under his own feet, and the fact that he’d done it himself didn’t help. But Father had survived worse, when he was Ram’s age. To hear Father tell it, he’d spent half his youth running from flamekeepers. Or militia. Or acolytes, or town watchmen. Other hearthless gangs. Blackbands. Reshki. Rampaging moonchildren. Every wild and corrupted beast Ki or Kur could offer. Even the odd bazu looking for a test subject for its blasphemous experiments. There were plenty of things in the world more dangerous than being a newcomer at Dul Karagi.

Of course, Father hadn’t faced any of those dangers alone, had he?

A long night awaited, filled with even darker dreams than usual. And in the morning, he’d have to get up and walk the walls under the white sun, assuming they could talk or drug Father out of doing it himself. Eight hours or more dragging himself in circles under that cold dead light! And yet the prospect didn’t trouble him half so much as where he would be at the month’s end.