The ground floor made up a butcher shop owned by my father, and the family lived in the storeys above. My father shared my name of Quillifer, and I had been named after his own father, and his father after his, the name stretching back into antiquity.
For all that I was wary around my father’s weighty authority, it has to be said that I greatly admired my senior. My father was not only Dean of the Worshipfull Societie of Butchers but a respected alderman of the city, entitled to wear a gold chain on formal occasions, and often mentioned as Ethlebight’s next lord mayor. He shared my height and the broad shoulders developed from years of wielding the cleaver and pollaxe. He kept his hair short, and shorn up around the ears, which kept it from being spattered with blood. He wore the cap and leather apron of his profession, though in fact he made most of his money from moneylending, speculation, and land-dealing.
My paternal grandfather had been the first in our family to learn to read, and my father was the first to learn to write. I myself had been to a dame school for my letters, and to a grammar school for writing and recitation, after which I apprenticed with Master Dacket. I was raised with books and the beauties of poetry and the sonorities of ancient languages—for now with printed books, education was no longer the domain of monks and nobles with private tutors. What would come of that change, I felt the whole world would soon see. The profession of the law would allow me to travel, perhaps to the capital and the court of the King. For our family was rising, and I intended to rise as far as my talents would take me.
At the moment, my father was serving a well-dressed Aekoi, an older woman who had powdered her golden complexion white and painted on her face an expression of fey, perhaps even malevolent, interest. She had come with a human girl servant, who stood in the center of the room and stared down the long hall behind the counter, the hall that ended in the open courtyard at the center of the big house. I, standing behind her, could see a calf that had been slaughtered and hoisted head-downward by a chain. Its blood was draining into a large basin even as two apprentices, naked from the waist, were taking off the hide.
None of the calf would be wasted at the House of Quillifer. The hide would be sold to a tanner, the bones to a button-maker or handle-maker. The hooves would become glue. The meat would be sold, to become roasts or steaks or chops, and miscellaneous organs put into pastry for kidney or umble pie. The tripes would be cleaned and turned into sausage casings or fried chitterlings or white tripe for soups and stews. The stomach would become rennet and would be sold to a cheesemaker. Tongue would be roasted, lungs poached or stewed. The edible parts of the head would become a gelatinized loaf known as brawn, and the bladder used as a container in which other parts of the animal would be cooked. The heart would be cut into strips and cooked on skewers, the liver fried or made into pâté, and the blood itself cooked down with spices to make a kind of pudding, or mixed with oats and turned into blood sausage.
None of which was likely of interest to the servant girl, who probably ate meat only rarely. Instead, she watched the apprentices at work, the fit young men, nearly naked, who worked up and down the carcass with their sharp skinning knives.
I didn’t interrupt the girl’s reverie, or my father at the counter. Sweetbreads were wrapped in paper, the result weighed, and the Aekoi woman’s payment accepted. The Aekoi woman turned to the daydreaming servant, observed her woolgathering, and slapped her briskly across the face. The painted expression on the Aekoi’s face did not change. The girl yelped an apology, took the package, and followed her mistress out.
I waited for the customers to walk out of earshot. “That fair painted face charmed me not,” I said.
My father shrugged. “Well. Not human.”
“I’ve known humans to behave worse,” Kevin offered.
My dad nodded in the direction of the departing Aekoi. “Her name’s Tavinda. Her daughter’s the mistress of Lord Scrope, the Warden of the New Castle—the daughter may be earning the family’s living on her back, but it’s Tavinda who looks after the pennies.” He tossed the coins in his hand. “She’s always trying to barter me down.”
Kevin was curious. “Have you seen the daughter?”
“Oh, ay. Fetching enough, if you like ’em golden.”
“I’ve never”—Kevin searched for the word—“experienced an Aekoi.”
“They are as other women,” said the older man, and then—hearing his wife on the stair—added, “or so I am told.”
My mother, Cornelia, came down the stair, her white apron starched stiff and crackling, and she stood on her toes to buss me on the cheeks. Graying blond hair fell out of her cap in corkscrew curls. I basked for a moment in the warmth of maternal affection. “Why are you dressed like that?” she said. “Are you not in the office today?”
“I’m delivering a writ to a man who would run if he saw me dressed as a lawyer’s apprentice,” I said. “Kevin’s taking me in his boat.” I smiled. “And I arranged for Mrs. Vayne to send you three baskets of pearmains, just come down the river!”
“Pearmains! Oh, lovely!” She kissed my cheeks again, and I allowed myself a moment of pleasure in my mother’s benevolence.
There was a clattering on the stairs, and my two younger sisters, Alice and Barbara, appeared. They were twelve and fourteen, and had inherited the Quillifer height: both were beginning to overtop their mother.
They were both attending the grammar school, the first women in our family to learn to read and write. My father had initially been opposed to this innovation, but my mother had convinced him that it would get them husbands from the better classes.
“We’re going to the Fane to help decorate for the festival,” Cornelia said.
All the fruits of the year were to be laid at the feet of the god. “Don’t give him too many of our pearmains,” I said.
“He gets a basket of sausages,” said Alice.
Actually, the god Pastas got two baskets, which my father handed to the girls. He kissed his wife and daughters, and sent them on their way, then looked at his son in an expectant way.
“Are there any sausages for us?” I asked. “Sailing is hard work.”
“Help yourself,” said my father.
From the pantry I took some smoked pork sausages, slices of ham, a loaf of bread, a brined goat cheese, and a hard yellow cheese. The food went into a leather satchel. I took also a jug of cider from the buttery, and carried it and the satchel into the front room.
“I hope you find your quarry,” my father said. “Otherwise, I’ll have been looted for nothing.”
“Charity to the wandering sailor is accounted a fine virtue,” I said. “No doubt the god will reward you.”
“Just possibly he may.” My father regarded me with a careful eye. “Though I hope you have been doing your duty to Pastas as well.”
I looked at Kevin. “We have learned our lines.”
“Let’s hear them, then.”
“Ta-sa-ran-geh,” I recited obediently, and then Kevin joined me in the next part of the chant. “Ta-sa-ran-geh-ko.”
The chant was ancient, so ancient that no one any longer understood the words or their meaning. But it was known that the words honored Pastas Netweaver, god of the sea and principal god of Ethlebight, whose great round temple stood four leagues above the town.
The temple of Pastas had once crowned the center of the city, but as the muddy River Ostra filled in its delta, the city had followed the water and crept downstream over the centuries, and eventually the huge temple was stranded in the country. Major ceremonies were still conducted at the great old building, but a newer, smaller temple, called the Fane, had been constructed on Scarcroft Square for everyday use.
The Autumn Festival, coming just after the Assizes, was one of the great festivals of the city, and featured a ceremony at the old temple featuring the Warriors of the Sea and the Mermaids, each impersonated by young folk from the city’s leading families. Both Kevin and I were Warriors this year, and obliged to wear antique bronze armor, carry weapons, dance, and chant the incomprehensible words that honored the deity.