The Purple Book

  She pulled a long knife from a scabbard under her cloak and held the blade behind her. Doubtless, the one running was a thief or else someone trying to outrun a thief or mugger or muggers or perhaps a throat-slitter. If it was a thief who was getting away from the site of the crime, she would be safe. He’d be in no position to stop to see what he could get from her. If he was being pursued, the pursuers might shift their attention to her.

  If they saw her.

  Suddenly, the pound of feet became louder. Around the corner came a tall youth dressed in a ragged tunic and breeches and shod with buskins. He stopped and clutched the corner and looked behind him. His breath rasped like a rusty gate swung back and forth by gusts of wind.

  Somebody was after him. Should she wait here? He hadn’t seen her, and perhaps whoever was chasing him would be so intent he or they wouldn’t detect her either.

  The youth turned his face, and she gasped. His face was so swollen that she almost didn’t recognize him. But he was Benna nus-Katarz, who had come here from Ilsig two years ago. No one knew why he’d immigrated, and no one, in keeping with the unwritten code of Sanctuary, had asked him why.

  Even in the moonlight and across the street, she could see the swellings and dark spots, looking like bruises, on his face. And on his hands. The fingers were rotting bananas.

  He turned back to peer around the corner. His breathing became less heavy. Now she could hear the faint slap of feet down the street. His chasers would be here soon.

  Benna gave a soft ululation of despair. He staggered down the street toward a mound of garbage and stopped before it. A rat scuttled out but stopped a few feet from him and chittered at him. Bold beasts, the rats of Sanctuary.

  Now Masha could hear the loudness of approaching runners and words that sounded like sheets being ripped apart.

  Benna moaned. He reached under his tunic with clumsy fingers and drew something out. Masha couldn’t see what it was, though she strained. She inched with her back to the wall toward a doorway. Its darkness would make her even more undetectable.

  Benna looked at the thing in his hand. He said something which sounded to Masha like a curse. She couldn’t be sure; he spoke in the Ilsig dialect.

  The baby above had ceased crying; its mother must have given it the nipple or perhaps she’d made it drink water tinctured with a drug.

  Now Benna was pulling something else from inside his tunic. Whatever it was, he molded it around the other thing, and now he had cast it in front of the rat.

  The big gray beast ran away as the object arced toward him. A moment later, it approached the little ball, sniffing. Then it darted forward, still smelling it, touched it with its nose, perhaps tasted it, and was gone with it in its mouth.

  Masha watched it squeeze into a crack in the old adobe building at the next corner. No one lived there. It had been crumbling, falling down for years, unrepaired and avoided even by the most desperate of transients and bums. It was said that the ghost of old Lahboo the Tight-Fisted haunted the place since his murder, and no one cared to test the truth of the stories told about the building.

  Benna, still breathing somewhat heavily, trotted after the rat. Masha, hearing that the footsteps were louder, went alongside the wall, still in the shadows. She was curious about what Benna had gotten rid of, but she didn’t want to be associated with him in any way when his hunters caught up with him.

  At the corner, the youth stopped and looked around him. He didn’t seem able to make up his mind which route to take. He stood, swaying, and then fell to his knees. He groaned and pitched forward, softening his fall with outstretched arms.

  Masha meant to leave him to his fate. It was the only sensible thing to do. But as she rounded the corner, she heard him moaning. And then she thought she heard him say something about a jewel.

  She stopped. Was that what he had put in something, perhaps a bit of cheese, and thrown to the rat? It would be worth more money than she’d earn in a lifetime, and if she could, somehow, get her hands on it… Her thoughts raced as swiftly as her heart, and now she was breathing heavily. A jewel! A jewel? It would mean release from this terrible place, a good home for her mother and her children. And for herself.

  And it might mean release from Eevroen.

  But there was also a terrible danger very close. She couldn’t hear the sounds of the pursuers now, but that didn’t mean they’d left the neighborhood. They were prowling around, looking into each doorway. Or perhaps one had looked around the corner and seen Benna. He had motioned to the others, and they were just behind the corner, getting ready to make a sudden rush.

  She could visualize the knives in their hands.

  If she took a chance and lost, she’d die, and her mother and daughters would be without support. They’d have to beg; Eevroen certainly would be of no help. And Handoo and Kheem, three and five years old, would grow up, if they didn’t die first, to be child whores. It was almost inevitable.

  While she stood undecided, knowing that she had only a few seconds to act and perhaps not that, the clouds slid below the moon again. That made the difference in what she’d do. She ran across the street toward Benna. He was still lying in the dirt of the street, his head only a few inches from some stinking dog turds. She scabbarded her dagger, got down on her knees, and rolled him over. He gasped with terror when he felt her hands upon him.

  “It’s all right!” she said softly. “Listen! Can you get up if I help you? I’ll get you away!”

  Sweat poured into her eyes as she looked toward the far corner. She could see nothing, but if the hunters wore black, they wouldn’t be visible at this distance.

  Benna moaned and then said, “I’m dying, Masha.”

  Masha gritted her teeth. She had hoped that he’d not recognize her voice, not at least until she’d gotten him to safety. Now, if the hunters found him alive and got her name from him, they’d come after her. They’d think she had the jewel or whatever it was they wanted.

  “Here. Get up,” she said, and struggled to help him. She was small, about five feet tall and weighing eighty-two pounds. But she had the muscles of a cat, and fear was pumping strength into her. She managed to get Benna to his feet. Staggering under his weight, she supported him toward the open doorway of the building on the corner.

  Benna reeked of something strange, an odor of rotting meat but unlike any she’d ever smelled. It rode over the stale sweat and urine of his body and clothes.

  “No use,” Benna mumbled through greatly swollen lips. “I’m dying. The pain is terrible, Masha.”

  “Keep going!” she said fiercely. “We’re almost there!”

  Benna raised his head. His eyes were surrounded with puffed-out flesh, Masha had never seen such edema; the blackness and the swelling looked like those of a corpse five days dead in the heat of summer.

  “No!” he mumbled. “Not old Lahboo’s building!”

  Under other circumstances, Masha would have laughed. Here was a dying man or a man who thought he was dying. And he’d be dead soon if his pursuers caught up with him. (Me, too, she thought.) Yet he was afraid to take the only refuge available because of a ghost.

  “You look bad enough to scare even The Tight-Fisted One,” she said. “Keep going or I’ll drop you right now!”

  She got him inside the doorway, though it wasn’t easy what with the boards still attached to the lower half of the entrance. The top planks had fallen inside. It was a tribute to the fear people felt for this place that no one had stolen the wood, an expensive item in the desert town.

  Just after they’d climbed over, Benna almost falling, she heard a man utter something in a raspy tearing language. He was nearby, but he must have just arrived. Otherwise, he would have heard the two.

  Masha had thought she’d reached the limits of terror, but she found that she hadn’t. The speaker was a Raggah!

  Though she couldn’t understand the speech—no one in Sanctuary could—she’d heard Raggah a number of times. Every thirty days or so five or six
of the cloaked, robed, hooded, and veiled desert men came to the bazaar and the farmers’ market. They could speak only their own language, but they used signs and a plentitude of coins to obtain what they wanted. Then they departed on their horses, their mules loaded down with food, wine, vuksibah (the very expensive malt whiskey imported from a far north land), goods of various kinds: clothing, bowls, braziers, ropes, camel and horse hides. Their camels bore huge panniers full of feed for chickens, ducks, camels, horses, and hogs. They also purchased steel tools: shovels, picks, drills, hammers, wedges.

  They were tall, and though they were very dark, most had blue or green eyes. These looked cold and hard and piercing, and few looked directly into them. It was said that they had the gift, or the curse, of the evil eye.

  They were enough, in this dark night, to have made Masha marble with terror. But what was worse, and this galvanized the marble, they were the servants of the purple mage!

  Masha guessed at once what had happened. Benna had had the guts—and the complete stupidity—to sneak into the underground maze of the mage on the river isle of Shugthee and to steal a jewel. It was amazing that he’d had the courage, astounding that he could get undetected into the caves, an absolute wonder that he’d penetrated the treasurehold, and fantastic that he’d managed to get out. What weird tales he could tell if he survived! Masha could think of no similar event, no analog, to the adventures he must have had.

  “Mofandsf!” she thought. In the thieves’ argot of Sanctuary, “Mind-boggling!”

  At that moment Benna’s knees gave, and it was all she could do to hold him up. Somehow, she got him to the door to the next room and into a closet. If the Raggah came in, they would look here, of course, but she could get him no further.

  Benna’s odor was even more sickening in the hot confines of the closet, though its door was almost completely open. She eased him down. He mumbled, “Spiders…spiders.”

  She put her mouth close to his ear. “Don’t talk loudly, Benna. The Raggah are close by. Benna, what did you say about the spiders?”

  “Bites…bites,” he murmured. “Hurt…the…the emerald…rich…!”

  “How’d you get in?” she said. She put her hand close to his mouth to clamp down on it if he should start to talk loudly.

  “Wha…? Camel’s eye…bu…”

  He stiffened, the heels of his feet striking the bottom of the closet door. Masha pressed her hand down on his mouth. She was afraid that he might cry out in his death agony. If this were it. And it was. He groaned, and then relaxed. Masha took her hand away. A long sigh came from his open mouth.

  She looked around the edge of the closet. Though it was dark outside, it was brighter than the darkness in the house. She should be able to make out anyone standing in the doorway. The noise the heels made could have attracted the hunters. She saw no one, though it was possible that someone had already come in and was against a wall. Listening for more noise.

  She felt Benna’s pulse. He was dead or so close to it that it didn’t matter any more. She rose and slowly pulled her dagger from the scabbard. Then she stepped out, crouching, sure that the thudding of her heart could be heard in this still room.

  So unexpectedly and suddenly that a soft cry was forced from her, a whistle sounded outside. Feet pounded in the room—there was someone here!—and the dim rectangle of the doorway showed a bulk plunging through it. But it was going out, not in. The Raggah had heard the whistle of the garrison soldiers—half the city must have heard it—and he was leaving with his fellows.

  She turned and bent down and searched under Benna’s tunic and in his loincloth. She found nothing except slowly cooling lumpy flesh. Within ten seconds, she was out on the street. Down a block was the advancing light of torches, their holders not yet visible. In the din of shouts and whistles, she fled hoping that she wouldn’t run into any laggard Raggah or another body of soldiers.

  Later, she found out that she’d been saved because the soldiers were looking for a prisoner who’d escaped from the dungeon.

  His name was Badniss, but that’s another tale.

  Masha’s two-room apartment was on the third floor of a large adobe building which, with two others, occupied an entire block. She entered it on the side of the Street of the Dry Well, but first she had to wake up old Shmurt, the caretaker, by beating on the thick oaken door. Grumbling at the late hour, he unshot the bolt and let her in. She gave him a padpool, a tiny copper coin, for his trouble and to shut him up. He handed her her oil lamp, she lit it, and she went up the three flights of stone steps.

  She had to wake up her mother to get in. Wallu, blinking and yawning in the light of an oil lamp in the corner, shot the bolt. Masha entered and at once extinguished her lamp. Oil cost money, and there had been many nights when she had had to do without it.

  Wallu, a tall skinny sagging-breasted woman of fifty, with gaunt deeply-lined features, kissed her daughter on the cheek. Her breath was sour with sleep and goat’s cheese. But Masha appreciated the peck; her life had little expressions of love in it. And yet she was full of it; she was a bottle close to bursting with pressure.

  The light on the rickety table in the corner showed a blank-walled room without rugs. In a far corner the two infants slept on a pile of tattered but clean blankets. Beside them was a small chamberpot of baked clay painted with the black and scarlet rings-within-rings of the Darmek guild.

  In another corner was her false-teeth making equipment, wax, molds, tiny chisels, saws, and expensive wire, hardwood, iron, a block of ivory. She had only recently repaid the money she’d borrowed to purchase these. In the opposite corner was another pile of cloth, Wallu’s bed, and beside it another thundermug with the same design. An ancient and wobbly spinning wheel was near it; Wallu made some money with it, though not much. Her hands were gnarled with arthritis, one eye had a cataract, and the other was beginning to lose its sight for some unknown reason.

  Along the adobe wall was a brass charcoal brazier and above it a wooden vent. A bin held charcoal. A big cabinet beside it held grain and some dried meat and plates and knives. Near it was a baked clay vase for water. Next to it was a pile of cloths.

  Wallu pointed at the curtain in the doorway to the other room.

  “He came home early. I suppose he couldn’t cadge drinks enough from his friends. But he’s drunk enough to suit a dozen sailors.”

  Grimacing, Masha strode to the curtain and pulled it aside.

  “Shewaw!” (A combination of “Whew!”, “Ugh!”, and “Yech!”)

  The stink was that which greeted her nostrils when she opened the door to The Vulgar Unicorn Tavern. A blend of wine and beer, stale and fresh, sweat, stale and fresh, vomit, urine, frying blood-sausages, krrf, and kleetel.

  Eevroen lay on his back, his mouth open, his arms spread out as if he were being crucified. Once, he had been a tall muscular youth, very broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, and long-legged. Now he was fat, fat, fat, double-chinned, huge-paunched with rings of sagging fat around his waist. The once-bright eyes were red and dark-bagged, and the once-sweet breath was a hellpit of stenches. He’d fallen asleep without changing into nightclothes; his tunic was ripped, dirty, and stained with various things, including puke. He wore cast-off sandals, or perhaps he’d stolen them.

  Masha was long past weeping over him. She kicked him in the ribs, causing him to grunt and to open one eye. But it closed and he was quickly snoring like a pig again. That, at least, was a blessing. How many nights had she spent in screaming at him while he bellowed at her or in fighting him off when he staggered home and insisted she lie with him? She didn’t want to count them.

  Masha would have gotten rid of him long ago if she had been able to. But the law of the empire was that only the man could divorce unless the woman could prove her spouse was too diseased to have children or was impotent.

  She whirled and walked toward the wash basin. As she passed her mother, a hand stopped her.

  Wallu, peering at her with one half-good eye, said
, “Child! Something has happened to you! What was it?”

  “Tell you in a moment,” Masha said, and she washed her face and hands and armpits. Later, she regretted very much that she hadn’t told Wallu a lie. But how was she to know that Eevroen had come out of his stupor enough to hear what she said? If only she hadn’t been so furious that she’d kicked him…but regrets were a waste of time, though there wasn’t a human alive who didn’t indulge in them.

  She had no sooner finished telling her mother what had happened with Benna when she heard a grunt behind her. She turned to see Eevroen swaying in front of the curtains, a stupid grin on his fat face. The face once so beloved.

  Eevroen reeled toward her, his hands out as if he intended to grab her. He spoke thickly but intelligibly enough.

  “Why’n’t you go affer the rat? If you caught it, we coulda been rich?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Masha said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Nothin’ do wi’ me?” Eevroen bellowed. “Wha’ you mean? I’m your husband! Wha’ss yoursh ish mine. I wan’ tha’ jewel!”

  “You damned fool,” Masha said, trying to keep from screaming so that the children wouldn’t wake and the neighbors wouldn’t hear, “I don’t have the jewel. There was no way I could get it—if there ever was any.”

  Eevroen put a finger alongside his nose and winked the left eye. “If there wa’ ever any, heh? Masha, you tryna hol’ ou’ on me? You go’ the jewel, and you lyin’ to you’ mo…mo…mama.”

  “No, I’m not lying!” she screamed, all reason for caution having deserted her quite unreasonably. “You fat stinking pig! I’ve had a terrible time, I almost got killed, and all you can think about is the jewel! Which probably doesn’t exist! Benna was dying! He didn’t know what he was talking about! I never saw the jewel! And…”

  Eevroen snarled, “You tryna keep i’ from me!” and he charged her.

  She could easily have evaded him, but something swelled up in her and took over, and she seized a baked-clay water jug from a shelf and brought it down hard over his head. The jug didn’t break, but Eevroen did. He fell face forward. Blood welled from his scalp; he snored.