The Crippled God

I should tell you, the entire company of Bridgeburners has not the strength to haul it.’
    ‘Really? Well, er, just how many kittens you got stuffed in there?’
    ‘It’s the raw ingredients, sir. Bottles and casks and vials and … er, tubing. Condensers, distillation apparatuses. Um, without two cats of opposite gender, sir, making kittens is not an easy venture.’
    Hedge stared for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Oh, ah, of course, Alchemist. Just so.’ He glanced to his right, where a squad of marines had just come up alongside them, but their attention was on the wagon loaded with food and water that they were guarding, or so Hedge assumed since they were resting hands on hilts and looking belligerent. ‘Well, keep at it then, Bavedict. Never can have too many kittens, can we?’
    ‘Precisely, sir.’
    Six paces behind the two men, Rumjugs leaned close to Sweetlard. ‘I had me some kittens once, you know.’
    Sweetlard shot her an unsurprised look. ‘Errant knows, you’ll take coin from anybody, love.’
    He had a swagger, I remember that much. And how I’d get sick, my stomach burning like I’d swallowed coals, every time he came into the house. Ma, she was a bird, really, the kind that flits about as if no branch gives comfort, no leaf makes perfect shade. And her eyes would leap to him and then away again. But in that one look she’d know if something bad was on the way .
    If it was, she’d edge closer to me. The jay is in the tree, the chick is in danger. But there was nothing she could do. He weighed twice as much as she did. He once threw her through the shack’s flimsy wall. That time was something of a mistake for old Da, since it took outside what went on inside, so people saw the truth of it all. My little family .
    There must’ve been a neighbour, someone on the street, who’d seen and decided he didn’t much like it. A day later Da was dragged back to the house beaten close to death, and there we were, Ma and her two boys – that was before my brother ran away – there we were, nursing him back .
    How stupid was that? We should’ve finished what that right-thinking neighbour had started .
    But we didn’t .
    That swagger, and Ma darting about .
    I remember the last day of all that. I was seven, almost eight. Quiet Ginanse, who lived up the street and worked as a knife-sharpener, hadbeen found strangled in the alley behind his shop. People were upset. Ginanse had been solid, an old veteran of the Falar Wars, and though he had a weakness for drink he wasn’t a violent drunk. Not at all. Too much ale and he wanted to seduce every woman he saw. A sweet soul, then. That’s what Ma used to say, hands fluttering like wings .
    So people were upset. He’d been drunk the night before. In no shape to defend himself. The rope that had killed him was horsehair – I remember how people talked about that, as if it was important, though I didn’t know why at the time. But they’d found horsehairs in Gin’s neck .
    The old women who shared a house on the corner, three of them, seemed to be looking at us again and again – we were outside, listening to everybody talking, all those emotions running high. Ma was white as plucked down. Da was on the bench beside the shack’s door. He’d gotten a rash on his hands and was slowly melting a lump of lard between them. There’d been a strange look in his eye, but for once he wasn’t offering any opinion on the matter .
    Horsehair. A tradition among the outliers, the wood-cutting camps east of the city. ‘How adulterers are hung, aye?’ And the old women nodded. ‘But old Ginanse, he ain’t never—’ ‘No, couldn’t, y’see? Got burned down there – was on a ship that caught fire when they took Falar Harbour. He couldn’t do nothing .’
    The drunk seducer with nowhere to take it. How shit-fouled miserable is that? Breaks the heart .
    And he’d always a kind word for Ma, when she went to him to get the one knife we owned sharpened. Hardly charged a thing either. ‘That blade a mouse couldn’t shave with, hah! Hey, boy, your ma ever let you shave a mouse? Good practice for when one shows up under yer nose! Few years yet, though .’
    ‘ So,’ said someone in the crowd, ‘a jealous man – no, make it a jealous, stupid man. With wood for brains.’ And a few people laughed, but they weren’t pleasant laughs. People were working up to something. People knew something. People were figuring it out .
    Like a bird in a thorn bush, Ma