Agnes knelt down and brushed a golden curl from his forehead. “I will return soon, my dearest love, and I am not going far. Perhaps you can practice your numbers in the meantime. Count as high as you can, and I will be back before you reach the limits of your knowledge. Yes?”
Tisander’s lip stuck out and trembled. He looked into Agnes’s eyes, even raised a hand to touch each of her cheeks. Then at last, he mumbled, “I can countveryhigh.”
“Of course you can. You are the cleverest boy. Now go to Waltrude.”
Reluctantly, Tisander turned and went to Waltrude’s side. He leaned into her, and Waltrude patted the crown of his head. “We will be fine here, lady,” she said. “Go to your business.”
Agnes nodded, wincing once more. Waltrude could not tell precisely what was causing this pain in her; perhaps it was nothing that could be perceived by the naked eye. Perhaps a knife had been turned inside her. Perhaps the blade had been stuck so deep between her ribs that it had vanished.
Without another word, she turned, gray skirts swishing over thefloor. Pliny, however, cast one last glance back at Waltrude. There was a weariness, too, on his face, making the wrinkles seem more apparent than ever. Whatever he had seen had aged him.
As Waltrude led Tisander over to the table, she found that she did not feel weary herself. There was a tension in her old muscles, a stiffening in her ancient bones, and a cold rush in her veins. She was no prophet, no wise woman such as lived in the Outer Wall; she could only look backward, sifting through the sand of nearly a century of memories.
She had seen such things before. Injustice, dishonor, secrets kept at greatest cost. And so she knew—even without a seer’s power—that the order of the world could not be resettled without sacrifice.
XVIII
An Immodest Proposal
Corks. Stones. Twelve eggs, twelve apples. A lamprey, swallowed without chewing, the bones crunched between his teeth. Bull’s lungs and bull’s liver, the latter filched from the chef’s chopping table, for there were some others who hungered for these innards, someone else in the castle who had a formidable appetite. Though none like him. There were no others like him.
He had been turned out of his house before he could grow the first hair on his chin, his mother beating him black and blue with her frying pan, for he had once again eaten all six of the pork pies meant for dinner, and the turnips, and the bread. For years—how many, he did not know—he had roamed the Outer Wall, begging for coin on street corners. His only honest work had been when he discovered that many would pay to watch him devour oddities and refuse. He could consume a yowling alley cat in a matter of moments, ripping open its throat with his teeth. He was especially fond of snake meat. It had a most sublime flavor.
He was forced to cease this act abruptly when a child went missing, but he did not like to think of that.
Now he sat slumped against the rubbish heap, a fish bone digging into the small of his back. Unlike other creatures, he was not made weary by his hunger; instead it imbued him with an impossible strength. It was a sort of transcendent power, one that allowed him to brawl with the stray dogs and make them cower and turn belly-up; one that allowed him to go many days without sleeping, kept awake by the keenness of his senses, gaze sharp as a kestrel’s, ears pricked like abloodhound’s. The scraping pain of his empty stomach seemed to him a gift bestowed by an unearthly force, akin to the future-sight of Madame Sosostris.
He had liked the wise woman, and now he missed her. Weeks he had spent shut up in the castle’s cold dark halls without so much as a glimpse of the sun. He even longed for the company of the street dogs. Lying with them in a greasy, flea-bitten pile, he could keep warm at night.
Listlessly, he plucked up the fish bone and ate it. Then the rotten pit of a summer peach. He licked the sour juice from his fingers. He scratched at one of his scabs, the one in the crook of his elbow, which scabbed and bled and scabbed again by the day, for he could never suppress the niggling urge to pick it. He was opening up the cut again when two figures appeared in the threshold.
“Oh,” he said. “It is you.”
The short one, Rosencrantz, stepped forward, out of the shadows and into the pool of oily torchlight. His familiar, Guildenstern, remained back a pace, nose wrinkling under the hood of his robe.Symbiotes, they are,he thought,not two leeches but a leech and its host.Who was the host? And who the bloodsucking stooge?
“I see you continue to enjoy the profits of your labor,” said Rosencrantz. “A worthy reward for your services, yes?”
“Yes, oh yes.” He dug his nail into the scab. “There is never an end to the feasting here. Always morsels left behind. Always fed. Never deprived. No longer too hot or too cold. Starved only of sunlight, but what do I need of that? I can smell as well as I can see.”
“Indeed,” said Guildenstern dispassionately. “You must be quite grateful, then, to whoever plucked you from the Outer Wall.”
He nodded in an eager, fervent manner. “Grateful forever and ever. I do not forget a thing. Neither a compliment nor a slight. Neither a boon nor a burden.”
“That is good to hear,” Rosencrantz said. “It will make our task far easier.”
Guildenstern gave him a pointed look. “How many times did I tell you—a soft touch is to be employed here? You are too hasty always.”
“He will not understand a soft touch. He is half mad, listen. We must be forceful.”
“Too forceful and our cause will be miscarried. We were ordered to work in whispers.”
“Whispers need not be subtle. Only quiet.” Rosencrantz dovetailed his fingers and began to twist them restlessly, as if kneading dough. “I should not like to linger overlong here.”
“Very well,” said Guildenstern, with a revolted breath. He turned away from his companion and cast his gaze over the rubbish heap. “You are a loyal creature, that much I can see. One who does not easily forsake his oaths, too. That is why we do not come to you beseeching or threatening, with pleas or with demands. We come to you with promises.”
He had begun to grow impatient with this intercourse. His hunger was reasserting itself. He fished for a morsel in the pile and retrieved the soggy pink shell of a crustacean. It was rubbery on his tongue, and he savored the rotten tang as he chewed and then swallowed.
“I have been promised many things before,” he said, briefly serene as his hunger was, for a moment, sated. “Since I was but a mewling child. Their vows always wear thin when it is discovered that my appetite never does.”
