The human dress, p.1
The Human Dress, page 1
Copyright 2018 Graydon Saunders
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9937126-3-0
Copy editing courtesy of the inestimable Jennie Worden, who has made it through the awful great lump twice. Any surviving errors are entirely my own.
Cover design by Gilly Rosenthol
A DIVINE IMAGE
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
The human dress is forgèd iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, by William Blake
Guide
Table of Contents
Start of Content
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 1
“I will not help you kill the King.”
The speaker’s hand rises, and the man across from him subsides, words caught behind his teeth and held from their escape.
“Less than that, shall I raise gold or name or word beside you in some wit-shredded loose-thumbed madness of desire to slay Galba in his pride or his bath or his treasure house.”
Belmar’s voice is low, slow, and considered; heads turn from louder nearby conversations anyway. He is that sort of man, the sort who can wear silk tissue into a drinking house where the other patrons wear, with a draped ease, bearskins and nothing, and have no ill come of it. Moreover, he is the sort who can get a corner table by squinting at it. More, and darker, squinting got the host to bring him a hat stand, and the host did not know that the house had a hat stand.
Belmar’s hat needs a hat stand; he and Lugan have taken a table suitable for six large wide-elbowed men, and the hat covers a generous half of it. Men who hunt in marshes have hats that size, loose wide reed-weavings meant to shade from above the full stretch of their arms, and those they might risk to puddles of drink on a table without a qualm. Those hats face rather worse in the normal course of their business, and their owners are not careful of them; a neat hat is an obvious marker of a man among the reeds. Better to have reeds flopping loose, and to have some variety of new-plucked green vegetation on it, also.
Belmar’s hat is unquestionably clean, and could be new, for all the wear it shows. It is also doubtless esteemed by him as something unfortunate to place in puddles of drink, being made of some heavy leather that glistens with the colours that can be found in red earth. That red colour is made the richer by an undertone of nearly a metallic gold, though whether that is a character of the leather or a product of the tanning would be hard to say. It perches on the hat stand and the table both like a raptor mantling triumphant over its kill.
The crown of the hat may or may not be high; one would have to move the feathers to discover this, and that does not seem wise. They are near enough to four feet long, broad, coarse, thick-quilled and springing from the whole front of the crown to droop over the rear brim of the hat in an arch only half again as wide as it is high. They are each either red or yellow, these feathers, but even in the tavern’s dimness these words do them little justice. The red is that crimson got by heating pure copper in the dark, until it trembles, liquid and glowing, on the brink of a heat that will set it burning. The yellow is not so strong a colour as that, nothing that seems to glow of its own light; it is only that colour that gold might bleed if any knife were sharp enough to cut it so. Take the hat outside, into the bright day, and that yellow will flare and fume and fill with the trembling brilliance of a mirror of glass and gold turned to hold the sun.
It is perhaps a fault in Belmar that today the yellow matches his jacket, cuff to cuff and hem to collar, down to the burnished citrine buttons, forty to each sleeve and ninety to close the double placket front. His hose, which match the crimson, are less in evidence, safely hidden behind high dark grey boots that reach a hand span short of his jacket hem.
Lugan is not a man who cares much about clothes.
“Why ever and forever not kill him? Galba taxes, Galba tariffs, Galba strangles trade and commerce, nullifies weddings, tears down buildings by his whim, prisoned a grove-spirit, and could well hope him to beat a hornface to death by butting ere the thickness of his skull bone broke.”
Lugan’s voice is lighter, faster, flown on a gusting and errant wind that skirls it round his words in odd half-catching stumbles of inflection, a strong tenor voice in the way a strong man with both legs broken remains a strong man.
Lugan wears russet leather, scraped light and tanned supple. His quilted cap has stayed on his head. Neither coat nor cap adequately conceal the lumping bulk of his frame nor the asymmetry of his features, and coat and cap must both struggle with the sheer breadth and depth of him. The seams of a nearly new and tailored coat are half-started where his gestures have strained muscles at them, and a hat ten inches across its inside surfaces is gone lifted and tipped with lack of quite sufficient width to match Lugan across the ears when the muscles of his jaw rise beside his temples.
Belmar’s answer waits on a small pause, and comes in level, deep tones, as things of an old and impersonal history might them be spoken of. “Last news came to me, Galba had seven sons of his name and forty and three of his body, and doubtless by now one or two more have arrived or are on their way. Kill Galba, and one such of these shall rise, and be no change of betterment from Galba.
“Grown great enough to kill all these, each and every, would be some conspiracy of note and breadth and competence, such as has not been in the world since ever it came to be. But do that by some miracle or untaught sorcery, and there are Galba’s cousins and Galba’s kin by breeding and Galba’s gold and gain for a prize most entirely worth some small quantity of devastation.”
“Then you counsel me to wear this insult, Cousin? To care nothing for Rain newly dead, nor for our child that might have been, dead under her heart?”
“Care for them? Aye, care for them, and tell me why you blame Galba for them. Secret murder is no way of Galba’s, and he could have set your marriage to nothing if he chose.” Chose that, and chose with it a small battle or six over the matter, outside courts, but that too Galba-King could have done and thought to win his point.
The scarred men in bearskins have stopped pretending to talk to one another, and some in the further corners of the room are shifting forward over the hard packed earth of the floor so that they might them hear this conversation better. The host is not normally a nervous man; he looks less and less like one not normally nervous, passing out fist-sized glasses of strong drink and not checking carefully for those who might not have paid their house-fee at the door.
Belmar, half turned, puts out the full length of his arm for his drink, a reach that passes over the whole splendid width of his hat with stretch to spare.
“Well, Lugan? Is this rage of yours a thing of words, or the mute fury of a beast?” A deep collective chuckle rolls through the audience, a dark mirth chasing the words to the smoke-smudged eaves of the house.
Lugan takes his glass very delicately between thumb and finger, and sets it down like some small and inconveniently dead furred thing, for all that he paid for himself and Belmar. It takes more gold than a handful to really get Lugan’s notice with money, and a half-eighth of silver each might cross his palm but would never cross his mind. He looks up, finally, meeting the eyes of his cousin, and Lugan’s answer drags out of him, trips on his teeth, catches in the unevenness of his breath, and comes out loud anyway.
“Rain was powdered with our house. Blown to nothing, a blast that left no pieces and scarce paste, a blast that lifted the roof of our house and broke it and let if fall again within the riven walls.
“Who but Galba could have that done, Belmar?”
“Almost anyone with five of silver, or thrice an eighth of gold.” Belmar’s voice is light, his eyes distant, his hand round his drinking-tumbler loose and relaxed. Wreakings that destroy things are easy; the great skill lies in being skilled enough to not share in the destruction. That is not common skillfulness, but there are those who can, and will do so for a fee. Some of them even take their fees in material goods, and not inconvenient favours.
“Or some sludge-stirrer has found something other than powder or fumed fluff or fast wax useful to such purpose; you kept your house well, but no charm can prevent the action of some substance of which the chanter was ignorant.”
Lugan looks up again at that, from where he stared at his drink like he might drink it and be done with life.
“There were four charms against fire, Cousin, three of the usual kind against fire and spark and tinder-stuffs, and one meant to keep soot-stuff from lifebreath, come what may. No scorching touched the walls, and there was no soot nor mark of burning to find after. It was power, and not powder, did this thing.”
Eyebrows rise round the ring of listeners, and even Belmar looks briefly impressed. Such a general wreaking would not come cheaply, even by the standards of Lugan’s wealth.
In the quiet, there is a faint sound of scritching. It is not likely that more than a few of the folk in the long room hear it.
“Excuse me, Cousin; I shall be back most directly.”
Belmar rises, donning his hat, which is neither a whisker more nor a whisker less wide than the width of his broad shoulders, and walks briskly into the kitchen, ducking far down under the low door lintel with no sign of either discomfort nor indignity.
A murmur of his voice comes, a clattering, and a slam. Hard behind the slam comes the sound of a heavy wooden door opening, and being shut with gentleness.
Some minutes pass; everyone in a bearskin is on their next glass, and Lugan has made it half way down his first and called for water, when Belmar returns by the front door.
He stops by his place and grants the host a hard look. “Who was it, whom you hired to wash glasses and decant the drink?”
The host looks from side to side, at his boot-toes, everywhere but Belmar. “A man of the town.” The Queen’s town, Braemor, ten miles to the west and maybe five miles more southerly than this place, that is either a tavern, or a temple, or the lodge of a mystic brotherhood, depending on the day and season of one’s arrival.
“You will need another one.” Belmar’s voice is offhand, light, and he is picking up his glass after setting his hat back on the stand that waited for it, forlorn sticks upon the table’s surface.
Lugan looks either amused or appalled; the men in bearskins look amused.
“What did you do to him, Cousin?”
“I set his face in the fork of a tree, in the hopes that it will cure him of making notes while listening to the conversations of gentlemen.”
“A small fright,” a man in a bearskin says, quietly enough.
The grin that comes over Belmar’s face shows his teeth, strong and white and square, down to their roots. “His face will stay there until he decides if he will leave his ears; those I nailed to the forks of the bole.”
The host’s eyes go wide, in a room full of grinning. “For truth?”
Belmar’s head snaps round, eyes narrowed.
“For truth? Of course for truth. Think you I said to that man ‘Fie, you have angered me so that I should in this fit of wrothfullness nail your ears to a tree, and have done,’ and did not that thing and walked away, or gave him a blow or two and left?”
Belmar’s voice stays low, and still, and soft, it comes out of him not faster, and still it is a harder thing than it was. “I tell you now, he is still nailed to a dwelling-tree to wait full night and the grove’s uses. By well-clinched silver nails through the thick of his ears I nailed him, and the wretch, he struggled so, I smote my thumb.”
Lugan snorts, just a little, as the host scuttles off. The host most often strides, but just now, that pride does not call itself to his attention.
“The clutchfeet are like to have him long before any spirit wakes to find him, Cousin; it is yet four hours of dark.”
Belmar shrugs, an expansive rolling. He can stand fully upright, here, between the rafters, though he must set his hat back on the hat stand to do it. “He is some distance up the tree.”
“Facing out?” Lugan’s voice has something in it like the memory of how to chortle.
“From one side of the tree.” Belmar sits down, picking up his glass, and draining it neatly. “Less struggle would have served him better; he is fastened somewhat high.”
Belmar looks contemplative, for a moment, and then irritated, at his empty drink glass, then contemplative again.
“If his toes slip, it will be well for him to have thick ears.”
If the man’s feet do slip, off a branch not over-wide and wet which he must strain to stand with his toes upon, the weight of the fall will go on his chin before his ears, which will only choke him a little. It would not do to deny the hungry grove spirits their sacrifice, torn off its ears and fallen to the earth, where the children of giants will have out its guts and what life the fall has left, and Belmar is in such things a careful man.
The host has scurried back, with a drink pitcher, and makes to fill Belmar’s held-forth glass again.
Belmar’s left hand thumb is indeed going black in the nail bed, where it is wrapped around one side of the glass, held up before eyes that widen further, roll, and vanish with the fall of the fainting head of their host.
Belmar catches the drink pitcher.
Chapter 2
The room is long and bright and wide, half the top of one wing of a great broad house. The windows are open to the spring air, letting in birdsong and the smell of warm earth and new growth with the light.
Much of the smooth wood of the floor is covered in cushions, the smallest some four feet square and a resilient foot thick. The larger ones might be three yards on an edge and seem little more resilient than the maple wood of the floor, for all that they are stuffed with something soft. Most of them are cased in linen, though some wear silk, and all of them are plain and unembroidered. A dozen of them have linen sheets on them, and quilts or blankets, variously rumpled, and some fading memory of a dent in them, where someone was once, but the hour is well after dawn, and all of these are empty.
Aside from the main extent of such cushions, where the pillows are heaped highest, there is also a strew of richer quilts, and from that strew emerge, at different angles, two heads that are very blond.
One of these persons stretches, yawning, and the other groans.
Galba grins at her; Narial scowls back, and staggers to her feet, dumping blankets and cushions. She is tall, strong-shouldered, full-, high-, and heavy-breasted, deep hipped, and thoroughly pregnant. It is her pregnancy’s advanced state that saves Galba-King from being kicked; Queen Narial doesn’t trust her balance enough to stand on one foot.
