His mother snorted. “Good luck to you. Fruit? You’ve been living with the nobs too long, boy. Do you know how many people are sleeping in the streets? How hungry they all are? You’d be lucky to find a single wormy apple left in all Southmarch.”
Elan looked beseechingly at him.
“Well, just try to get her something nice to eat, Mother—the best you can come up with for those two coppers. I’ll sit with Lady M’Cory until you come back.”
“Oh? What about me? What kind of son sends his mother off like a Kracian pilgrim without so much as a crab for herself ?”
Tinwright did his best not to roll his eyes. He pulled another coin from his pocket. “Very well. Buy yourself a mug of beer, Mother. It will be good for your blood.”
She looked hard at him. “Beer? Are you mad, boy? Zakkas’ Ale is good enough for me. I’ll put this in the gods’ offering bowl to take a little of the stink of your sinful life off my hands.” Then, before he could even try to snatch his copper back from its journey to oblivion, she was out the door and gone.
He turned to the bed. Elan’s eyes were closed.
“Do you sleep?”
“No. I don’t know,” she said without opening them. “Sometimes I wonder if I did not truly die when I took the poison, and all this is but a phantom of my expiring thought. If it is the true world around me, why can’t I care? Why do I only want it all to go away and let me fall again into dreamless darkness?”
He sat on the end of the bed and wished he dared to take her hand. Despite the fact that he had saved her from Hendon Tolly and that she belonged to no one now if not to him, Tinwright felt that in some way Elan had become more distant than ever. “If your expiring thought can manufacture a gargoyle like my mother out of pure imagination, then you are a more skilled poet than I will ever be.”
She smiled a little and opened her eyes, but still would not look at him directly. Somewhere in the upper stories he could hear a baby crying. “You are droll, Master Tinwright, but you do your mother wrong. She is a good woman… in her way. She has done her best to keep me comfortable, although we do not always see eye to eye on what is best for me.” She made an unpleased face. “And she pinches pennies most severely. The dried fish she brings… I cannot even tell you what it smells like. It must be caught where the residence privies drain into the lagoons.”
Tinwright could not help laughing. “You heard her. She saves money so that she can sneak her extra coins into the offering bowls whenever she gets the chance. For a woman so holy, she seems to feel the gods are as stupid as unruly children and must be reminded constantly of her devotion.”
Elan’s face changed. “Maybe she is right and we are wrong—certainly the gods do not seem to be paying much attention to their mortal children. I would not dare to call the gods foolish or stupid, Master Tinwright, but I must say I have long wondered if they are too distracted to keep order here.”
The idea was interesting. Tinwright felt a sudden urge to consider it—to think of what could take the gods’ attention away from their human creations, leaving men to suffer and wonder without guidance. He might even make a poem of it.
Something like “The Wandering Gods,” he thought. No, perhaps “The Sleeping Gods”…
The door banged open so suddenly that Tinwright jumped and Elan let out a cry of surprise. Anamesiya Tinwright pushed the door shut again behind her with an even louder thump, then fell to her knees on the board floor and began to pray loudly to the Trigon. The infant upstairs, startled by the loud noises, began to cry again.
“What is it?” Tinwright knew, with a sinking heart, that it must be something bad: his mother usually spent more time preparing a clean place to kneel than she actually did praying. “Mother, talk to me!”
She looked up; he was shocked to see her familiar, bony features so pale. “I had hoped you would find time to repent of all your wickedness before the end,” she said in a hoarse voice. “My poor, straying son!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The end, the end. I have seen it coming! Demons sent to destroy us because we’ve angered the gods.” She bowed her head once more in prayer and would not be interrupted no matter how many questions he asked.
“I’ll go and see what this is about,” he told Elan.
Tinwright made sure the door was locked behind him, then went out into the street. At first he followed the anxious throngs who seemed headed to the edge of the harbor, the nearest part of the city’s outer walls, but after a moment he turned against the flow and struck out toward Market Road Bridge, which crossed the canal between the lagoons. If it was something happening across the water in Southmarch Town, he would be able to see it just as well from the outwall behind The Badger’s Boots, a tavern near the end of North Lagoon where Tinwright had spent many a night with Hewney and the others. The alleyway that ran behind the place was not well known, which was why he and his drinking companions had found it a good place to take tavern whores.
As he walked east he listened to fragments of conversation from the people who passed him. Most of them had only heard rumors and were on their way to see what was happening for themselves. Some were terrified, babbling prayers and shouting imprecations, but others seemed only slightly more concerned than if they had been on their way to the Zosimia festivities.
“A sign!” many said. “The earth itself is against us!”
“We’ll throw them back,” others cried. “They’ll learn what Southmarch men are like!” Some of the arguments became fistfights, especially if those who disagreed were drunk. The sun behind the high clouds had scarcely passed noon, but far more people than usual seemed to have started their drinking early.
Was this what it was like when the gods fought their great war? Matt Tinwright wondered. Did some mortals go to the battlefield only to watch it happen, caring not that the world might end?
It was another strange, interesting thought—the second in one day that might make a poem. For a moment he almost forgot that whatever he was on his way to look at had reduced his dragon of a mother to raw terror.
But what could it be? All I saw was mist and smoke. And why should that frighten so many?
He slipped past the Boots, which was even louder than normal with the sound of argument and lamentation. For a moment he strongly considered just going inside and drinking up the rest of the money Brone had given him—after all, if the world was ending, might it not be better to sleep through it all? As far as he knew, nothing in the Book of the Trigon actually forbade being drunk on the Day of Fate.
Ah, but what if he had to wait a long time for judgment? At a moment of universal catastrophe there would doubtless be huge crowds wanting to be judged, as when the king gave away grain in times of famine. Not even drunk, then—by that time I’ll be sobered up, with a dry mouth and throbbing skull. Gods—it was bad enough to face Brone’s bellowing with a clear head: how much worse to stand before Perin himself, lord of the storms, whose very hammer was a thunderclap!