meet Pinchlin, the boy whose struggles prove a catalyst
Pinchlin went home that night, walking wearily but not warily. No more squinting into shadows or peering over his shoulders. It felt like there was just no sense trying to be safe in this new world he inhabited, defined by all the reassuring structure that had been stripped from it.
Delal and his mother had wanted him to stay with them, and at first he had been too ill to fight back against their solicitude. He hadn’t been awake long enough to form an opinion for a day or two. Tonight was different. He’d left while they were making supper; he didn’t want their concern. He wanted his own parents, and failing that, he wanted—He wasn’t sure, but the question was like a sore, too painful to touch, too gruesome to ignore.
A part of him was hoping another gang of combative young people would find him and hit him.
He hadn’t encountered them by the time he reached the door to the building where he lived. He didn’t feel disappointed, only numb. With a shrug, he let himself inside.
Every last baby in the building was silent, which was startling; usually, at least one of them was crying at any time of day or night, as if making a ruckus was their calling and they arranged a schedule with one another in advance. Even the people who fought all the time had ceased their shouting. When he reached his own door, he pushed it open: he hadn’t locked it when he left.
The lamps were already lit, casting an unflattering clarity across the fine carving on the furniture, catching at the brass of the candlesticks beneath their layer of dust. It made the jumble of hoarded, once-fine things seem especially pathetic. Their stuff wasn’t the only item it illumined: a man stood in the middle of the room, straightening from the chest of drawers he had been rummaging through.
Pinchlin had gone out looking for trouble, and all along, it had been waiting for him.
The man was surprised, but only sort of. There was no gasping, no hasty movement. No reaching for a weapon or trying to make a run for it, like it just really didn’t trouble him that he’d been caught breaking and entering. “Well here’s an interesting coincidence.”
Pinchlin had recognized him by then and staggered back onto the landing. This was the Azhkan Soubir he’d almost walked into on the day he last saw Da. It had been stupid to tell himself he was indifferent to his fate, foolish and wrongheaded, but only now it was too late did he realize he didn’t want to die.
“You might as well come in, I’m not going to eat you.”
That’s not what I heard, Pinchlin wanted to say, but now fear had resurfaced from the numb fog into which he had been plunged the last two weeks, it had hold of his tongue.
The sorcerer chuckled as if he had thought of something not entirely amusing, beckoning. Pinchlin moved as instructed, and he was sure he hadn’t meant to. He didn’t want to. The door swung closed behind him.
The man moved to an armchair, where he seized a crate off its seat and tossed it aside. It landed elsewhere with a smash and avalanche of further crashes, everything in the piles around it tilting and falling. Pinchlin thought to be grateful for the noise, but who was he fooling? Their neighbors would never have come to rescue him, and you had to think there was a reason the place was so miraculously silent. If he could make Pinchlin walk helplessly into his reach, he could make a fussy baby go to sleep.
He had settled into the armchair by then and was scrutinizing him. “Tell me about your father.”
“He’s gone.”
“What had he been doing lately, is what I’m asking you. Who had he been meeting with? Strange visitors, strange behavior? Curious objects brought into your home?”
As if he had sensed the flash of outrage Pinchlin felt, he added, “He’s gone where neither you nor I can hurt him now.”
He hadn’t meant to answer, so it was startling when he did. “He was really secret about it. We lived here since Mother died. We couldn’t live in the old house anymore, not after Da lost his job. I don’t know how he lost his job, he owned the shop, him and Mother together, but the day after the funeral there were all these people coming round, all these men in dark serious clothes with stacks of papers.
“It’s still there,” he added, “just where it was, but now it’s my uncles working the counters, and when I went in, they pretended not to know me and threatened to fetch the polismen. So we moved here, and Da started drinking all the time and crying, and selling off the silver to pay rent when work was hard to come by.
“A while ago, he told me he might have thought of a solution, something to take us back to our house in Hannibal. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, though, only that it was a great trade and he had to be careful, it had to be a secret between us. He came home one day, um… the first of Comox? He came home with his pockets full of gold, but he was very sad, more sad even than usual, and he sent me away. When I came back—when I came back—“ He couldn’t speak the words. “The druda said—”
The sorcerer sat erect with a jerk, depthless black eyes burning. “You spoke to him?”
“Of course I did. I came home and he was here, I guess he’d come to tell me. He said Da—He told me about Da.”
“What, exactly, did he tell you?”
“Nothing. An accident. Nothing.”
For a time, the man just looked at him. When he stood, he asked conversationally, “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know, I guess just wait until the druda comes back for me.”
The sorcerer had been adjusting his coat, clearly about to leave, but he went still. “Excuse me?”
“He said once he had time, he would come back and take care of me.”
The man gave a loud shout of laughter, but it was mad instead of jolly. “By the blood of the divine, boy, do you have no sense? The man told you he’s going to kill you as soon it’s convenient, and you’ve been waiting patiently for him to do it?”
“What? Why would he do that? He’s a druda, a, a holy man. He’s not a killer like—” His sense of self-preservation caught that sentence before the rest could emerge, although probably it was obvious what he had been going to say.
If so, it didn’t insult the sorcerer. He approached, touching the backs of his fingers so-slightly to Pinchlin’s cheek. His face was thoughtful, maybe a little sad. “Your parents never explained?”
When Pinchlin just looked at him, he sighed.
“You wondered why your mother’s Malisaat family cast you out while the dirt was settling over her grave? Your parent’s love was forbidden: the hatred between our two peoples is a thing of deep passions and long history, as deep as the roots of the mountains of Soubrál and as long as human memory. And the druda? No one hates like druda.”
“He said he would help me,” Pinchlin protested.
The sorcerer drew the hand away from his cheek and slapped him with an open palm, not hard, but hard enough to rouse him. “Wake your head, boy. I have no desire to wait here until the druda come, and I will not leave you tied like a lamb for slaughter, so I make this one-time, generous offer: you may come with me, and I will care for you.”
“What will you do with me?” His voice shook, but a grown man would have been as terrified.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. It has to be better than being murdered for your parents’ crimes.”
From The Three Faces of Dissatisfaction
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