Sketch: Meno
from "Our Better Wolves."
The streets of La Pianura were dead midday—a bright midday. Meno Calu trudged along a flat, treeless lane cutting the neighborhood. He passed unnoticed by stuccoed houses and cul de sacs on his way to Temples. Perta loomed over him, indomitable and bright. Tomorrow, after sixteen years, he would be well-shot of this place.
He slumped along in his grey temple cape, wrapped over a crisp white tunic. He was taller by a head than his father now. He hadn’t bought new pants in a year. He spent his wages on a dirk and a rucksack, which he had loaded with fifty pounds of stones and his schoolbooks and strapped to his back for this march. His ankles were cold.
He had done this for the past year—four times a week, loaded down, he made the long walk and climb to the schools at Temples where he studied history, geography and philosophy from the Brothers. La Pianura had its own primary school, but it only taught reading and maths—all he really needed to join a counting house or some such. He had learned everything he could, so it had been time to go to work.
So, when he was thirteen, he got a job at the Baracca di Gamberetti as a steward.
Maybe he’d be a chef one day he’d thought—better than some clerk—then he could travel to other cities, or out to the vineyards. Or just find somewhere better in Perta. His father used to tell him hard work would get him anywhere. If he wanted things, that was the only way. He never entirely believed it, but he worked, because what else was there?
Three years in the Baracca slipped past him in a haze of fingers deftly peeling shrimp and muscling open oysters while Gilberto, one of the other kitchen stewards, kept him stoned. They would sit out the back door, overlooking the Ocean, passing a pipe as they peeled and shucked. Gilberto would tell him stories of his travels to the other Free Cities, the jobs he did there, the women he’d bedded, the trouble he’d gotten into. Meno had learned a lot since Gilberto was free with advice and liked him.
Alas, Meno had already embarrassed himself too many times in front of the girls from La Pianura. So, he’d have to get out.
Last summer, pointed shoes and blousy, short-cut tunics were fashionable. He worked a month to buy a pair of black shoes, the tips slightly curled and stuffed with moss, and a purple shirt he belted at the waist. He turned up alone on the Lungomare for an evening passeggiata. He felt like he was walking in parsnips, and though he was wearing green hose, he still felt like his parts were hanging out beneath his tunic.
The girls from his old school were there and he could feel them laughing—maybe his colors were all wrong; his tunic was too short; he was too small. Nobody had told him. The only people who said anything were Maffeo and his cronies. They noticed everything—cheap dye around his sweaty neck; the points of his shoes turned awkward because he didn’t know how to mince like the rich boys who didn’t have to work for a living. His package became a target.
His hands smelled like shrimp and fish guts, as they always reminded him. They still reminded him. He told them it was the stink of their mothers, but he knew the fish-whiff was permanent.
He shoved the rest of that day from his mind and kept walking towards Temples. He was trying to be one of those men who looked forward, who wouldn’t wallow like he had done most of his life. What good would that do him?
When he could, Meno would watch the cooks at their fires, or at the long tables dicing through mountains of vegetables. They taught him some knife skills when he was free of peeling and shucking. They’d let Meno remove scales and fins from the day’s catch. He’d be in charge of the stock and, sometimes, on a cold morning the herbal steam would warm his face, and he’d stand entranced, eyes closed in the morning light streaming through the tall windows at his back and the heat of the fire on his loins and the sea washing through the silence of the empty restaurant.
In the dining room, whole tuna, splayed to the spine, were filleted with straight swords to the delight of the customers. They’d let him try once—the sword slid in easily enough, but it wouldn’t glide through flesh as he thought it would, easy as they made it seem. They kicked him off before he made a mess of it. The guests cheered politely for him.
He’d returned to his crate out the backdoor with Gilberto, the best shucker they had. They no longer talked much. They peeled and shucked and smoked.
After almost two years of peeling and shucking, Meno was passed over for kitchen apprentice in favor of the owner’s nephew, who cooked shrimp to rubber and salmon to raw.
Gilberto tried to cheer him up, but he was a thirty-something dogsbody. It struck Meno then that Gilberto’s sage equanimity toward life was in fact defeat. He was one of those men who, underneath that boisterous hunger and licentious yawp, accepted what was proffered and asked no more; and wasn’t that La Pianura all over. Meno was about to turn fifteen and was beginning to see this burb from a greater height.
Look closer. The concrete holding the cobbles was chipped and weeded—sometimes he kicked up stones from the roadbed. Among the monotony of houses, cracks in the plaster showed where the foundations were weak. These houses were new by pertani standards, not fifty years old, but they were already being cleaved in two by the years. Sometimes, the pipes rattled, and sewers would back up into the street. Yet the superiority of La Pianura persisted.
Meno had still clung to the skirts of La Pianura and what it might offer, he admitted to himself now. Meno’s heart still stuck at the shimmer of the westering sun on the water, the shadows of La Pianura’s houses stretching, the repetition of a task in hand, and the heady smell of erba. He had known vaguely all along, that La Pianura was a slow maelstrom sucking him down. His legs and arms were too weak to keep his head above water, so, for a long time, he had sunk.
There were more things he needed to let go of. He wasn’t a child anymore. At fifteen, Meno knew he needed to get out.
Before that, he had never given much thought to stories of his grandfather, a capitano in the Cagne. Meno’s father never talked about the man, his sire. Meno had one memory of the old capitano, a stern and proud and solid image; a stone monolith engraved in his young mind. It didn’t speak but was wreathed in light from a parlor window. He had heard stories from soldiers who had served with him, and from his uncle who had passed a couple years ago:
He rode a destrier, alone, into a mass of men to break his soldato out from encirclement. When other units balked at a job, he rallied his men. He once led his small unit and a gang of peasants against a cadre of druids in The Purges. He upheld the code of the Cagne: he defended the interests of his condottiere and the honor of Perta and the Vericanti people; he honored his soldiers and his dead; he fought for victory; he never surrendered; he never boasted.
The Cagne was a place that honored hard work, they all said—never mind what they did to his grandfather.
In the end, the old capitano had crossed a ranking officer, some High Family toff. This was before Condottiere Pigozi, who would never let such a thing happen. His uncle never spoke of it other than that the old man had been done wrong, a bitterness in his voice that went deeper than injustice for his father—something to do with the fact that his uncle was infirm and could never join up to set things right, Meno surmised when he was older.
His grandfather had served as a man of the Cagne, and earned the loyalty of his men; he retired as a man of the Cagne, and died as such; but he was not buried in the Grove of Libitina. Not officially, at least.
The family received his skull which now sat in an unopened cabinet at the dead end of the hall by Meno’s bedroom. He had seen it, of course—stared at it for hours when he was just a boy. But it grew in his mind, an unbearably present absence he could only contain behind that cabinet door. A silence at his back as he trudged to that useless job. An eye as he’d furtively try to please himself. A fist on his chest. Only when Meno had considered his course did the ghost relent.
And so, finally, one night, he opened the door.
He’d tried and tried but couldn’t finish himself. He went limp under the weight of his clogged head. He tucked himself back in sticky, then tossed and turned, thinking everything therefore a cacophonous nothing. Finally, he rose, he paced. He cast about for something to anchor him but there was nothing and his lungs grasped at it. He got hard again (he didn’t know why but that breasts and asses now crowded the field) so he raced his worst thoughts to finish this time and so, spent on the floor, naked, his mind finally ebbed. He rose. He went into the hallway. He communed in silence with his grandfather in that darkened house in that dead end hall. His parents snoring in their rooms; the leaky tap tinking out the night’s minutes; his cavernous eyes.
The old man’s body, his bones. His bones had disappeared under the care of his old comrades—a story Meno had heard once and now that he stared into those two black pits he understood: the old capitano rested with the 6th Division. His silence was absence, he could not live here, and Meno would only find him in the depths beneath Perta, among the long line of Calu men and women, an unbroken line of service through the millennia; finally broken by Meno’s father, a shipping clerk.
Meno’s eyes worked beneath a furrow as if the broken street puzzled him. He checked the streets he crossed—Maffeo and his boys would be heading to Temples as well. There weren’t bravi down here, no one carrying swords, there were just assholes around every corner.
By this time tomorrow, Meno would be a soldato of the Cagne with a sword of his own, and none of this would matter.
The Via Niccolo was a straight shot to the lifts up to the Fifth Mount, a thirty-minute walk. But Meno did not take the lifts. It took forty-five minutes to climb the Scala Sud and then ten minutes to get to his class.
He reached the lifts, trundling up and down the sheer cliff on their rails with a full cart. A crowd waited below for the descending lift. They already breathed heavy from their unladen walks and dabbed their foreheads in the unusually warm day. Not too many braved the Scala or even thought to try. They preferred the rickety lift, even though it was frequently busy and broke down often.
Meno had pushed his limits this past year, getting stuck on the lift, however, was a test he didn’t need. Meno took the stairs—eight hundred and thirty-two steps, fifty pounds of stones.
The stairs rose in a cleft between the mounts. He had to keep his legs moving or they would lock up, he’d learned. A year ago, he could barely make it up the first quarter, his legs aching and chest heaving—his body betraying him in ways he’d never known possible. On his second climb, he Collapsed in a heap; he unloaded half his stones right there at the second landing, and over the year added them back in—no one bothered to remove them in all that time. His muscles hardened and the climb became easier.
He calmed his breathing easily enough now; he straightened his back as he climbed step number three hundred and thirty-one.
A landing opened out to a view of the neighborhood, little more than a collection of terracotta squares along winding streets and a few palms in the yards. The midday sun left hardly a shadow on the landscape. He could see it for what it was, bleach white and gray streets.
Though it was barely sixty years old, La Pianura seemed more unchanging than the ancient city in whose shadow it dozed. Where Perta was steeped in history on which one must build carefully, La Pianura was simply self-satisfied. A paralysis in the bright of day; and a whirlpool into oblivion.
Meno hated La Pianura with a passion he only dimly understood. He felt his years there weigh in his chest. He felt his years stretching before him, taught and dragging, as if his anchor had been cast into the maelstrom. He was sawing at the chains.
Eight hundred steps, fifty pounds of stones, ten pounds of books, three times a week for the past year. He was climbing. He was almost out.
By the time he got to the top of the Scala, his thighs were hard, aching knots; his heart hammered his sternum, but he breathed and felt it ease. Beyond the temples, glimpsed through their columns, Perta opened up to him. A psalm marked the hour. He marched into the Temple of Cassiana.
“And so, I put the question to you,” Brother Sacro intoned to the class, “you troglodytes.” He swung his belly around in the narrow aisles, his wide grey sleeves softly slapping his students in the face as he gesticulated his points. “Since you’ve done the reading: What is virtue?”
Silence shuffled pages, as thoughtful as dirt. A fire guttered on a hearth on the dais. Torpor among the students in the heat of the classroom. Meno had done the reading—Hastibane was as dry as bones, and skeezy to boot. He stared at a passage he thought contained the answer Brother Sacro fished for.
He was just as reticent to answer as the rest, but that was something he was working on, just as he had worked on his body. The others didn’t like it when he answered. Most of them, like Maffeo, were forced to be here, high marks were expected. Meno didn’t mind stealing their glory. It was easy to steal in this classroom.
As much as he valued the education, Meno also found some of the material trite. The history was good, but the ponderings of dead Vericanti over mute points provided little more than frustration. It was as if he screamed questions at the gods—what good is virtue when it profits nothing anyways? Did he have to do everything under his own power? And if so, why bother with gods or men? What if he failed? But Meno only received simple geometry problems in response. Meno’s ancients and supposed betters seemed dim and the gods stayed quiet. Meno found himself agreeing with Hastibane’s reluctant interlocutors more and more, men who actually did things, fought wars and governed.
Brother Sacro’s temperament would only sour the longer he went unanswered. But it was also Meno’s last lesson—he would be leaving these troglodytes to their own ends soon enough.
“I’m not asking you for a taxonomy of bees. I want only one definition.”
He had given them all enough time, Meno’s hand finally went up. “Virtue is the ability to govern men.”
“What, eh?” Brother Sacro, half deaf as were many of the inhabitants of the Fourth Mount, cocked his ear toward him—though Meno suspected it was partially an act with Sacro.
“I said, signor, that virtue is the ability to govern men.”
“Ah, Meno half-read, which is twice as much as the rest of you.”
The scowls that turned toward Meno told him he should get out of Temples quick. Maffeo held his glare extra-long. He hadn’t liked Meno showing up in Temple classes, as if he should’ve been left behind with the children. He hated it more when he realized Meno wasn’t a dullard; at least he was smarter than Maffeo. Meno would have to watch himself once he got out of Temples.
“Tell me, Meno, would you consider Imperator Zino to be a virtuous ruler?”
The correct answer was no. Imperator Zino confiscated property, foisted his debauched proclivities on the masses, and, despite victories abroad and conquering a series of domestic catastrophes, he left the Vericanti exposed, not least to themselves. A dynasty killer, and his reign marked the decline of the First Empire.
Two thousand years hadn’t erased his infamy. But there was an argument to be had here, a parting shot at Brother Sacro. “He won wars, fought a plague, and he eradicated poverty. Is that not virtuous?”
Brother Sacro let out a bellow, his red face reddening more. His eyes flashed for a moment before receding back into peanuts within his fleshy face. “He fed his political enemies to cats and redistributed their wealth. Then he fed the remaining poor to the cats as well. Then he launched the plague-ridden cats over the walls of his enemies. I’m sure your vicious minds recall that from Teneberro.”
That got the class on Brother Sacro’s side. They didn’t know what was coming, but they understood his tone—Meno was very wrong. “Do you call his governance virtuous, Meno? Or what of the man himself? Are they one in the same, the man and his deeds? How could we weigh his virtues against his sins? Do we count only outcomes and, if so, how do we measure them?”
But Meno had already put thought into this. It was a stick in the eye of everything they were taught in Temples about the Court of Cassiana—the divine conclave that ordered the Vericanti soul with love, poetry, and stalwart defense and all that.
“But Zino was a devotee of Bellorix,” Meno said. Bellorix was their god of fire and war, iron and the forge—not one for the moral quandaries of the rest of the Court. From him the Vericanti got their martial discipline and wanderlust. He was a god of action. “He followed his god, our god.”
“And so, we have the saying given to the god. Bravo, Meno. But the other gods protest against Bellorix all the time and it is the Court which orders us, not a single god.
“Recall Tutretto: imbalance is the consequence of zealotry, and zealotry the consequence of a myopathy of the soul. That aside, one might find Cassiana’s hand in Zino’s strange death. When the gods cannot agree, then what is virtue?”
In Meno’s head, a thought formed: maybe virtue didn’t come from the gods. He was ambivalent at best about them. They didn’t live in an age of myth when they walked around and were of actual use to their people. He prepared to say so, a whole cannonade against Brother Sacro and the Temples, but the other students plucked up their courage and chimed in. His moment had passed.
The day groaned on as Meno marched out of Temples toward the Fourth Mount. This close, the call to prayer pierced Meno’s ears, his head like a great bronze bell into which dropped needles of piety. The Great Censers swung within the Temple of Gifts—lavender and cinnamon at this hour, the herbs of Cassiana, masked the smell of blood. Even she, goddess of passion and fertility, demanded sacrifice in Perta. Everything is sacrifice.
Meno’s gait fell in line with the pendulous air, as if he were a supplicant priest traversing the temple floor toward the altar, measuring his steps to pass between the censers dragging smoke, processing against the flow of blood in the korbanos, bringing oblations.
No. He followed the blood. He followed it away.
Meno was out of Temples and entering the Fourth Mount, the residential quarter quiet at this hour. He was ravenous. He had a couple coppers in his pocket so he could stop in the Mercato for a piadina. There was that stall with the old man and his granddaughter. He hadn’t talked to her yet, but they would catch eyes sometimes and he’d get a little jolt up and down his spine. He could ask her to marry him before he left.
A fist popped out of an alley and racked his jaw. He went sprawling. The buckles on his rucksack ripped open and stones toppled out over his head as he splayed onto his chest, his palms scraping as he kept his face from collision. The dirk went skittering across the cobblestones.
Maffeo stood over him, at his back. “Where’s your money, Fish-whiff?”
“Nifty knife,” another said—Tumo. “What do you think it’s worth?”
Meno hadn’t looked back yet, but he knew there were three of them: Maffeo, Tumo and Adralt. They were good at what they did—Meno had never gotten in more than a stray punch before being subdued. Meno was done with it today. Tumo stepped around him, going for the dirk.
Meno pushed himself forward with one leg, reached out, grabbed the dirk even as Tumo leaned down. He twisted and cracked Tumo across the jaw with the butt-end.
Tumo, howling, stumbled across Meno, and fell to his knees. It kept the others from coming directly for him. Meno scrambled to his feet as Adralt dragged Tumo up. Tears were streaming down Tumo’s cheeks and his howls died to a moaning whimper. Blood poured between his fingers where he clutched his jaw. Adralt looked terrified.
Fear and glee rushed Meno’s head. This wasn’t La Pianura. This was Perta. Boys bled in these streets all the time and no one batted an eye.
Meno ripped the dagger from its scabbard. Back on his feet, his rucksack emptied, he felt light and fast. But he wasn’t going to run this time. Maffeo and Adralt would though. They gaped at Tumo and his blood. The boy lifted his hand to reveal a gash to the bone from ear to chin, an odd angle mid-jaw. He let out a weak moan then immediately clamped back down on the gaping wound. They’ll run.
“You [fucking] psycho.” Maffeo picked up a stone and Adralt followed.
Meno stood his ground and Maffeo and Adralt hesitated. They’d never met this much resistance from him.
Window shutters flew open above them. “You! You boys!”
Meno glanced up to an old man wagging his finger. It was a glance too long. A stone clipped Meno’s shoulder. His arm went up fast enough to block another to his head. He ran and Maffeo and Adralt gave chase.
His feet pounded the cobbles. He was vaguely aware he should sheath his knife. He was faster than them, however, could hear their panting after three blocks. His legs were launching him along, and fatigue had disappeared with his rising blood. Meno turned and turned, not sure where he was in the residential quarter other than the vague sense that he was heading away from the Mercato.
He turned right to try and get himself back toward the crowds. But he found himself at a dead end, rushing unthinking toward a small shop with no signage, faded green façade, and lights burning within. Too late to turn back except to face Maffeo and Adralt. He could only hope the door was open.
You have the knife, but you’re running, he half-thought to himself, not looking back, as he flung open the door. A cluster of brass bells tinkled wildly as he rushed across the threshold, then stopped dead in his respectful tracks. At a quick glance he saw no one in the shop. The light was dim and the air hazy—maybe some old man dozed behind one of the piles of books on tables and even the floor. Books lined shelves as well, but all he could see was the chaos of stacked leather spines.
Meno turned. Maffeo and Adralt had skittered to a stop half-way up the alley. They weren’t going to follow. They had always been clever enough to keep their tortures out of view of adults. Meno closed the door. He turned for another quick glance for the shop owner or a customer, then quietly slid the bolt.
He was breathless, suspicious-looking should someone be lurking within. Maybe they’d taken him for a robber. He steadied himself and breathed. He sheathed the dirk and tucked it in his belt beneath his tunic. Maffeo and Adralt retreated back up the alley and around the corner. Meno wasn’t going to take that bait if he could find a back exit.
He inhaled incense. “Hello,” he called out. A clock ticked somewhere. There was daylight toward the back, obscured by the maze of printed materials. A back door perhaps? At least a window he could shimmy out of—an easy proposition now that he was fifty pounds lighter and less bulky.
He unshouldered his rucksack and checked the damage. The straps had ripped from the flap. It wasn’t a complete loss, but it wasn’t squared away like it should be. It was the least worry he had right now.
He angled around several stacks and tables, heading toward a windowed partition that might be an office. A candle seemed to gutter there.
Indeed, on a desk, among a clutter of books was a rushlight beneath a small, angled mirror. It looked as if it were recently lit, but the worn cushions of the desk chair seemed to have been assless for some time. No cologne nor perfume, nor pipe-smoke lingered, only the incense—some spice, dragging him backwards when his mother would bake on Santa Lucia’s day at the winter solstice—and the books like almonds and vanilla and oak.
On the table, in a halo of rushlight, lay a small volume, bound in blue cloth, its title in faded gilt lettering. Though the alphabet was like vericanti, the title was in some other language. He opened the title page, though he had no reason to linger here. How long before Maffeo thought of finding the back door for himself?
Il-Belt Illuminatau d-Dlam Tagħha: A Tretys on the Natyre of Lyght and the Worlde Beneat by Urbano Costruttore, the 1st Royal Architect of Perta. Despite the title, the rest of the book was in the old imperial vericanti, as Brother Sacro had forced them to read in Teneberros.
He flipped its pages—prose that expounded the ontologyes and causalités of architecture. Poems on the mythic origins of the geometry that built Perta in the mind of Cassiana, violent and necessary struggle, and collective memory—recollection but as if of an eternity, told in the voice of a woman but not the goddess’. And there was always mention of darkness in the city, always skulking on its fringes. The land itself was diseased, once upon a time. Oure grete reclamacioun, the Royal Architect called it.
There was a map of the old Empire and his ancestors’ exodus out of the far north. It was covered in diagrammatics linking sites in the Vericant—Perta and Nedo—the Obêt, Estruey, Curael—there, the Puzzlewood—and the forest of Turael figured as a vast menagerie of imps and demons.
There were cut-away sketches of the necropolis. It stretched deeper beneath the earth than Meno had ever thought, an entire geography of rivers falling into its halls of glittering stone smoothed and polished. Ritual symbols lined the margins and scaffolded mausoleums. It was said magic was woven into the mortar beneath their feet, to make the dead of the Cagne stand and fight when called upon.
Is that what he was looking at, the first formulations of that ancient spellwork and the Eternal Lists? No, he flipped back and forth between maps and text—it was a catalogue. And the First Royal Architect fully intended for the Perta which shined in the light to mirror that which was already in the dark. Or perhaps the other way. Up and down didn’t seem to matter as runes inundated geometric equations beyond anything he learned in Temples, which wasn’t much he supposed.
There were sketches of Perta, an older Perta as Meno had never considered—as seen from above, in detail. Everything was there, the Seven Mounts, the Palazzo and Temples, Dockside and all, but smaller and in different arrangements as it seemed to him; and with more bare rock exposed on which sat cathedrals and palaces that must now be buried in the Ways. La Pianura had yet to metastasize onto the city’s ass-end. Meno laughed to himself. He was dizzy, in fact, still reeling from his flight and fight.
It was disorienting to think of himself as a bird above the old city, the way he saw La Pianura. It felt wrong—he should not be so high and moving so fast over the pages—but there was too much to learn from such a height. He was giddy with what the book showed him.
Meno was plunged deeper into the book, the rough-edged pages slipping from his thumb with the rushlight burning down. He delved deeper. The text transformed. Paragraphs retreated into tighter margins, blocks of prose, poetry and arcane equations became blocks of city, the blank spaces between like streets and alleys. The letters seemed to wrap around spaces, crowding into make-shift roof lines and jutting towers. The text became a map of Perta, the map became Perta, living and growing. No. yes of course it did.
Or at least for as long as he had been reading. His stomach rumbled for food; his head felt drowsy.
He flew down into streets of poetry and diagrammatics. That woman’s voice: In the citee we neen no belles, thou and I, oh Eternitee. Meno skimmed over the lines in the rushlight now guttering its final breaths—shal witnesse oure brethren-sistren crawlen forth from the belly of oblivion—exhaling lavender and cinnamon. Not knowing what he had read, where he had read it—the yellowed pages so much like naked stone walls beneath his fingertips. Shining citee, Eternal Champion, forfend that catastrophous day—the day was bright and he must return to it—and commend me to my sister.
A breath exhaled somewhere in the shop. Meno startled around. No one. Panic rose in his clinched throat. He stood in near darkness except for the waning daylight. He turned from the desk, fled out the back door. The tinkle of little bells chased him into the alley.
Maffeo and Adralt seemed to have given up. No one waited in the alley, not even a shopkeep who had forgotten to lock his door. Meno was relieved because he had wandered to the Mercato di Cenzao in a daze. His vulnerability dawned on him as the late afternoon crowd ebbed and flowed before him, standing on the edges of the wide circular piazza. The feeling he’d had in the bookshop was heady but sickening, not unlike the erba sometimes when he wasn’t really in the mood to smoke but didn’t want to say no; and he already knew he wouldn’t want to face Maffeo and Adralt while high.
In the Mercato, particolored canvas stalls ran in concentric circles around a great oak tree sprouting from a bronze fountain. Figures of the Four Saints for the four seasons circled the fountain’s edges.
He found the book still in his hand. He eyed it suspiciously, tempted to open it again, but wary. He was not superstitious, nor was he one to trust gut feelings for no reason. He should toss it away, but that seemed disrespectful to books in general, and he would be too embarrassed, no point, to return it now, not in person. It went into his rucksack, like dropping a pebble in a well. He would slide it through the mail slot on his way back, or before he left the city for good. Just a couple days more.
He dived into the crowd. The afternoon catch sprawled out on tables; bags of spices ladened the air along with half-sung calls for wares clambering up and over the chatter. Somewhere, a baritone sang an aria to his sides of beef. Several stalls away, a couple enacted an argumentative recitative over their clayware, some of which they smashed dramatically. Entertainment sold wares. The throng of noise and heady fall spices threatened to lull Meno back into passivity.
The Cagne’s recruitment office was on the opposite side. He could lose himself in the crowd, though he wasn’t sure why he needed to now. Still no sign of Maffeo and Adralt.
The recruitment office was in a small corner shop at Strada Beloritzi. It was not even the 10th hour, but the recruitment officer was sliding the gate over the door. He was an older man, soft in the belly, in a navy-colored uniform, his hair thinning. His cheeks and nose were red with broken capillaries beneath rheumy eyes. By the single wolf’s head on his epaulettes, Meno could see he was a maggiore.
“Excuse me, maggiore. Are you closing early? I was looking to join up.”
“Huh.” The man turned. “What? Oh. You’re already packed to go.” There was a bit of amusement in his croaky voice. “Well, sorry kid. We’re pausing recruitment for now.”
“What? Why?” How could they with a war on? “When are you going to start back up?”
His amusement turned to annoyance. “Eager, huh? Well, our new class starts in two days. You could’ve signed if you’d gotten here this morning, but the High House didn’t pass the war bill this afternoon, so there’s no money for more recruits.
“Well, there probably is.” The officer mused. “This is more of a protest really, I guess, shutting us down. It’ll be at least another week before we start back up—if they pass the bill.” He seemed to calculate something. “And we aren’t training a new class for another two months. So come back next week and we’ll have a spot in two months.”
“But. I don’t have time to wait.” [more reaction here.] “What’s one more recruit now?”
The recruiter laughed to himself. “What, kid? You in trouble with the polizia? You got gambling debts with the Oscura?”
“No.” Why would he? Why would this man assume anything about him. Meno had come here to do an honorable job, just to find out that dishonorable, toffs didn’t care and this maggiore thought he was some ne’er-do-well. “I was… it’s not about the money.”
This time, he openly laughed. “Kid, little cucciolo, trust me, it’s about the money. What’s your name?”
Finally, his grandfather’s name could pull some kind of favor among the Cagne. “Calu, Menotti. I’m sixteen.”
“Okay, Calu Meno, you come back in a week. The High House would be stupid to not pass a bill for a war they started. You’ll have a spot. Don’t worry. Everybody will have a spot before this is all over. Guaranteed.”
Meno shifted and looked away.
“If you just can’t wait.” He sounded almost conciliatory now. “Your old man still beats you; you got the bravi looking to stick you; whatever mess you’re in, you just can’t wait and the money doesn’t matter—then the Sarks are heading out to the Western Front in a couple days. Western Front is way better than the Northern right now anyways.
“I can’t sign off on it, but any capitano will gladly let you die for free on the frontlines. Does that sound like a good plan to you? Then go for it.”
Any capitano will gladly let you die. Darkness tided over La Pianura. Meno felt the lurch and descent of the lift. He shared it with one little old lady who had huddled in the corner far from him when he got on. He had even stepped aside for her to get on first. There was nothing he could do about anything. He had crested and was falling back down to La Pianura.
Lights flickered on in the twilit expanse below. Orange glows from firelit houses—the air filled with coal smoke. Starlight blue from the castlight streetlamps—some flickered, some were dead. Paper lanterns and torches lit the Lungomare and, just beyond, the Ocean was losing the last of its color as the sun disappeared and the Catha moon had yet to rise in the far north. The sea wind gusted lightly. He was cold at this height without his temple cape.
Below was warmer when Meno stepped out. He didn’t look around for Maffeo or Adralt. In the back of his mind and creeping forward, he told himself he would simply kill them if they came after him again. The dirk was tucked ready in his belt. He let himself wallow in those fantasies for a bit.
The street home stretched before him. He turned left, towards the Lungomare. Gilberto was at the Baracca as always. Meno gave him his last copper for a roll. Meno didn’t stick around to smoke it with him. He could feel Gilberto watching as he walked into the night down the boardwalk.
Meno walked to the far end of the boardwalk, where the promenade gave out to the rocky coast that bound La Pianura to the south. He climbed atop an outcropping and sat on the cold rock. He smoked and that familiar haze heavied his eyes and emptied his thoughts. His body sank into itself and relaxed, as if he had been living his whole day shivering in the sea, thrashing at the current.
Catha was finally peering over the far northern rim, as much as she ever would, as close as he would ever see her. Her bare head passing. Soon, the tide would follow her like a wedding train, washing up the beach. He took off his shoes and lowered himself to the sand, waiting. It cooled his feet from their aches, and he buried his toes. His mind wandered—he didn’t know where. Down a hall, some hall, could be any. The little hall in his father’s house, the reliquary at its far end by his own room. A bare white skull loomed in his vision, but Meno finally felt nothing.