The Scroll of Years: A Gaunt and Bone Novel (36 page)

Time passed strangely, and whether this was the influence of the Peculiar Peaks or simply the strangeness of motherhood Persimmon Gaunt could not know. But it seemed to her that suddenly she looked up and Innocence was three years old, a sober splasher in puddles and investigator of bugs, wise mentor to two-year-old A-Girl-Is-A-Joy, she who worshipped him in between tussles.

And Bone was not there.

More, Gaunt turned to a mirror and saw a single grey hair, and traces of wrinkles at her mouth and eyes. Nothing of import. Marks of character. But it came to her then that three years of her child’s life was three more years of hers.

For the boy, each year was a titanic passage, a personal aeon. It was not so for her, and yet it was as if some of that small immensity was transmitted by the blood-tie, so that those three years weighed upon her like five, or eight, or eleven.

Gaunt was hardly old, but no longer young.

And Bone was not there.

Even should he come, a long chapter in her life was done. Grey bore down upon her mind even when the sun blazed above the Peculiar Peaks.
What have I done?
she thought more than once. To raise a child seemed now more doom-fraught than seeking the World’s Edge.

Yet even in the worst days there were moments when a light seemed to pierce her worry like sun-shafts through thunderheads. Once Gaunt stopped with Innocence for a quick game of hide-and-seek in the courtyard, and the serious puddle-splasher was suddenly her gleeful and giggly Innocence. It would not last, of course. She had to give up thinking of him as a baby. He patted his hair, then reached out to pat Gaunt’s, suddenly enthralled by the idea that they both had hair on their heads. His was coming out red like hers, and he had her eyes; but his chin and frame were his father’s.

When he tired of this game, and pounced upon her, she said, “Your father would be proud of you.”

“Where is my father?” said Innocence, for what might have been the hundredth time, and the serious boy was back. He was a skilled talker for a three-year-old, and all the pagoda commented on it. He badgered the monks and the self-portrait and Wu, who gave him confusing answers. He preferred chattering to Flybait and Next One, but those two were thoroughly occupied with the business of family, and after eight or thirteen or twenty-one questions they would shoo him away.

So he used his skills to vex Gaunt with difficult subjects. Living in a place of monks and exiles, Innocence knew little of ordinary life. He knew his father only through stories, only slightly embellished, of the greatest second-story man of the Spiral Sea.

“Your father is in another world,” Gaunt said.

“Can we go there?”

“Some day,” Gaunt said, “either he will come here, or we will go there.” She hoped it was true.

“Is there a pagoda in the other world?”

“There are many pagodas in that world, and castles, and mausoleums, and aqueducts, and cathedrals, and coliseums, and treasuries. Your father could tell you stories of the most wondrous architecture and its weak points.”

“Will I be a thief when I’m bigger?”

She pictured Innocence falling from the top of the pagoda. “You must understand, things were difficult for your father and me. Also, one tends to apply the skills one knows to any situation . . .”

“I will be a thief. I will steal things!” Innocence ran in circles. 

“That outcome would not surprise me,” Gaunt murmured.

Innocence kept circling. Soon he said, “I’m a horse! Look, Mommy, I’m a horse.”

“That outcome
would
surprise me. However, it is a strange world. Come, Innocence. I will show you something of your father’s world.”

In the library, she opened scrolls filled with twisting calligraphy framing paintings of emperors and courtiers and sages, gowns all flowing.

Innocence studied the pictures. “Those are humans.”

Gaunt asked, “Humans?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think of humans?”

“They scare us.”

“But we’re humans.”

“We’re horses too.”

Innocence commenced to galloping around the small room. Gaunt searched for another scroll. “I have a story to find for you.”

Innocence ran up. “I have a story!”

“Yes?”

“Yes! It goes like this. Once. Upon. A. Time.”

Once Upon a Time, number 12

A boy and his family, his mother and his father, they went to a pagoda. It was a pagoda in a strange world. They were horses. The father climbed up to the top. There was a book there. He wanted it. He was a thief. He started to fall. The boy jumped up REALLY HIGH and catched the father. They fell into the pond. The mommy got them out. They all had dumplings. Dumplings are good, but I don’t like the meat inside. I think that’s the end.

Gaunt clapped. “I am proud of you. You are telling real stories. Would you like to hear another one? There is an important story I have been meaning to tell you.”

“What is it?”

She told him about Meteor-Plum the artist and Emperor, as she had learned it from the hints of the monks, and the scrolls of their library. She told him how Meteor-Plum had discovered his child, his blessed child filled with the Heavenwalls’ chi, had been a girl—to his dismay.

“Are there lots of girls in the other world?” Innocence said.

“There are.”

“What are they like? Are they all like A-Girl-Is-A-Joy?”

“Girls are much like you,” Gaunt said, “except when they are not.”

“What is dismayed?”

“Upset. Mad. Ready to run around and hit things.”

“Like this?” Innocence gallivanted and gleefully struck the earth, the trees, the grass.

“Yes. But for grownups, especially grownups from Qiangguo, the running around and hitting things mostly happens inside their heads.”

“Like this?” Innocence stood perfectly still, arms folded, as he’d seen the monks do every day of his life.

“Quite. So Meteor-Plum might have looked on the day he met his baby girl.”

“Why was he . . . dismayed?”

“That is complicated. As I said, girls are much like boys, but as they grow up, they become a little more different. I believe the world makes far too much of the difference, but it is real. Girls often grow up to be mothers, Innocence. In some places, that earns women great honor. In others, it earns them barely concealed scorn.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I hope your understanding of the scorn is always incomplete, Innocence. Just know that Meteor-Plum had wanted a boy so much, he never even imagined having a girl.”

“That’s dumb.”

“It was the grownup kind of dumb. We might call it a tragic flaw.”

“Dumb. Mom?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a Meteor-Plum who lives here. The one who paints.”

“I know. Shall I go on?”

“Yes.”

She told him the story of the girl Snow Pine, and how she began the society of the Forest, and how she confronted her father atop a Wall, bringing about both their downfalls.

“Why?” Innocence said.

“Why did they fall? Why did the power of the mark travel so far? Why did they have such different ideas of the Way?”

“Why were they mad at each other?”

Gaunt hugged him. “Alas, sometimes a parent is very cruel to a child, because the child does not fit into the world the parent has made. Often a world built of very hard work indeed.”

“Mommy? Where is your mommy?”

“She is somewhere in the world your father is in, far away in Swanisle.”
If she and my father are still alive
, Gaunt thought.

“Why do you not see her?”

“She gave me away to Swanisle’s bards. I suppose I am angry about that.”

“Maybe if she said she was sorry, you would be friends again.”

Gaunt laughed. “How simple! How impossible! And yet, Innocence, for you, I might make that journey, if only so that I can show her her grandson and let her see her own eyes in his face.”

“When will we go?”

“I do not know, Innocence. There is so much I don’t know.”

He hugged her back now. “Well. That’s okay, Mommy. That’s okay.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m hungry.”

Before she could respond, there was a scampering of feet outside, and Next One and Flybait burst into the chamber. “The self-portrait says Imago Bone is coming!” they said in a combined hubbub.

Gaunt’s feet were taking her outside before her brain had truly absorbed the words. They echoed with each footfall, until finally when she reached the clearing where the monks had already assembled, she thought she understood.
Bone is coming.

The self-portrait of Meteor-Plum was already speaking.

“I have made it possible for him to manifest here atop the mountain . . .” he said. “Wait . . .”

A-Girl-Is-A-Joy was sitting on Wu’s shoulders, studying the sky.

Innocence ran up to the self-portrait, hunger forgotten. The boy stared at the man, having recently seen his image on a scroll. Innocence looked as though he would speak, but then turned his face toward the clouds.

“Look!” A-Girl-Is-A-Joy said.

The face of Imago was forming, sketched in vapor and light.

“Hello,” she whispered.

“Father!” Innocence shouted.

Imago Bone had the sense of awakening from a dream in which life had gone rather differently from reality, as if he’d experienced a life as an bureaucratic Underseer, managing the Eldshore’s crumbling metropolises; or had sailed the pirate vessel
Sea-Glare
, acquiring swag and prosthetics; or had been a barbarian of the Bladed Isles, wearing body parts as jewelry. He shook himself, for seeing his three-year-old boy within the world of the scroll, leaning on Persimmon Gaunt’s leg, was every bit as disorienting.

“
Bone!
” called Gaunt. “
Imago! Are you coming through?
”

“We are in danger yet,” Bone said. She seemed different as well: not so thin, not so fierce, yet strangely more determined-looking for all that. Sadder? Happier? Both, neither . . . He told her, “Lampblack has fallen, but Hackwroth is mad for our
auditing
. Hello . . . boy.”

The boy hid behind Gaunt’s legs. “
He is called Innocence, or Kuang Nu You
.”

“As long as it is not Lamprey,” Bone said, and quickly added, “Hello, Innocence. You’re right, I’m your father. Sorry I haven’t been around. Gaunt—can you fight?”

She grinned. “
I’ve been waiting
.” She turned to one of the robed men nearby. “
May I?
”

“
Simply wish it,
” Meteor-Plum said. “
You may transit from this spot.
” He nodded to a monk, who dropped a heavy backpack beside her. “
Here is your gear, as you long ago requested.
”

“Our location is precarious,” Bone began, and suddenly he was holding Gaunt’s hand, keeping her with her heavy pack from toppling into the void.

“Isn’t it always?” She settled into position beside the altar. She took in the battle of Hackwroth and Lightning Bug and Walking Stick, the eerie cavern, the gouts of fire spurting through the ceiling.

“Life is so much more interesting with you,” she said.

“Wait—I feel someone else coming . . .” Suddenly Bone held Flybait’s hand, and helped him find his footing, and then Next One was there too.