What's in a Name (ch2.1)

[igenlode]

And here's another chunk, or at least as much as I can get typed tonight (the clock is ticking...) We are now up to 31 pages of the 43 in the manuscript, and the total predicted word-count is down to 6500 words according to the current average -- given the large quantities of crossings-out that come with (a) trying to write action scenes (b) trying to write Erik, the ultimate unreliable narrator/viewpoint character, I can't imagine that end total is going to increase very much in practice. So that may be a reasonably workable story, although I'm still tempted to post just the first half... especially if the three thousand-odd words of that 'first chapter' actually *is* around halfway, rather than only being a chunk out of the beginning!

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The road from Rouen, in the years that followed, was to take him further —and to far stranger places— than the poor provincial child he had been could ever have believed possible. In the course of those travels he went through half a dozen names or more, picking them up and discarding them as casually as he acquired possessions when it proved convenient.

The name of Kolzhak had appealed to his childish taste, but he’d had to leave Guntram’s show in a hurry near the Belgian border, and it had seemed a wise precaution to leave that identity behind.

There had been trouble with Mazzini the conjuror — his magic had been tawdry enough, in hindsight, nothing but sleight of hand and a few bits of simple apparatus, but he’d seen no reason to take on an apprentice of any sort, still less to pass on the tricks of his trade to a half-dead freak. When he’d caught the boy practising to duplicate the basics of his art through nothing more than eagle-eyed observation, he’d accused him of being a spy, a thief, and worse. Simmy, who’d seen the writing on the wall for his own Living Skeleton act, had been quick to take Mazzini’s side against the interloper, and between them they’d made a good deal of unpleasantness. And so it had all ended in an accident, like the various pointed mishaps that used to befall boys at home.

Only... Simmy had turned out to have a weak heart, and when he’d dropped the lamp and the whole wagon had gone up in flames it hadn’t been only Mazzini to point the finger, after. There were some things you could get away with on the road as a ten-year-old boy, and some for which you were judged as an adult, no matter how many allowances had been made. Even if Simmy hadn’t been meant to die. Even if the fire hadn’t been part of it, and the other wagons burning had been completely beyond control.

The worst part had not been the angry voices, or the threat of a knife. The worst had been the look on Linnea’s face when she understood; the look of complete betrayal, from someone who’d come closer to being a surrogate mother than anyone else ever had, or would.

So Kolzhak had vanished across the border in the shape of Henrik, his features muffled in the mask that allowed him to enter town without revealing the nature of his act to the audience. He’d spent a few days on the road unseen, stealing food and warm clothes when he could, then fallen in with a drunken card sharp who could see the possibilities — once he’d finished throwing up at the first sight of the boy’s face.

Mauritz had worked the sideshows with him for a year, running the three-card trick and serving as barker to Henrik, the Living Corpse. But he’d drunk too much one night in the wrong company and ended up with a knife in the gut, and that had been it for the partnership... and for Mauritz, as well.

The boy had worked up a new act. Found travelling shows that would take him on, and drifted across Europe more by hazard than intent, taking on a new name whenever it served his purpose and performing in booths and fairs everywhere from tiny villages to the courtyard of some great mansion. After Linnea and then Mauritz, he had taken care to guard himself against careless attachments. The deformity and intellect that set him apart from the common run of humanity served more as a passport through life than any kind of handicap — at least, that was, until he attained an age to become conscious of girls, and to understand that their warm, rounded flesh would forever cringe from the prospect of his.

At sixteen, fresh from the bitterness of this discovery, he had fallen in with the Szigane in Bohemia, and against the odds won their trust. The face and body that barred him from the brutish fellowship of other men made him an equal outsider, and if they did not accept him into their tight-knit fold then they saw his undoubted gifts as a sign from powers beyond. In his travels he had learned more than Père Lejeune’s lessons could ever have taught him, his fertile mind soaking up knowledge like rain on parched soil even as he acquired the skills of the road. With the arrogance of youth, he had considered his education complete. Among the Szigane, he came to understand that all he thought he knew was only the start.

In the secret language that they disclose to none he received a new name, and began to attain the almost miraculous mastery over his voice that few others would ever rival. It was no longer the pure treble of his youth, but an as yet undeveloped instrument of soaring range and almost heavenly power.

At this time also he first acquired the trick of casting the sound so that it seemed to come from thin air, and the initial rudiments of mesmerism. He had taught himself the violin with the aid of a fairground fiddler, but it was only now that he learnt to refine his tone and gained true technique, profiting by his quick ear and gift for mimicry until he could have passed himself off as one of the most dazzling virtuosos of the era.

Nowhere else could he have learned more of music and the magical arts —illusion, conjuring, and the greater arts that could not be explained— and he flung himself into their mastery with all the frustration of his young manhood and with contempt for the outside world. When he left the Szigane, two years later, it was only for the call of the still-greater unknown of the far East.

In Indochina he had seen horrors and wonders both, and come to savour both with equal detachment; of death also, it seemed, one could become a connoisseur. In the wanderings that followed along the branches and byways of the ancient Silk Roads, among merchants and bandits alike, it was to be an almost constant companion.

Just at present, in the muddy backstreets of Nizhny-Novgorod, the concept that concerned him most was that of his own death — a prospect in danger of becoming all too close and personal. He turned a corner, slid back into the shadow of overhanging eaves, and schooled himself to calm, in an attempt to silence the pounding in his ears and the sound of his own gasping breath. He had outdistanced his pursuers, he thought, at least for the moment. His hearing, trained to an almost uncanny level of perception, brought him distant sounds from all over the city, from the lowing of animals on the far bank to the muffled stovetop snoring just audible through the wooden wall against which he leant, but he could no longer detect the pursuing footsteps of Yuri Black-Hand’s men.

It did not mean they were not coming, or that the dark streets were any kind of refuge. This part of the city was Yuri’s home ground, and nowhere would be safe. He’d made the mistake of refusing to give up his proceeds to the local boss, and the further mistake of leaving the enforcer’s corpse outside the hovel that served Yuri’s men as a meeting-place; it was stupid to underestimate one’s opponents, even if they consisted of low-life like the specimen who’d delivered the initial threat. Anyone here could be in Yuri Black-Hand’s pay, as he had already discovered to his cost, and the gang knew the city’s underbelly far better than he did as an outsider.

After the splendour of the great cities of the East, Nizhny-Novgorod, squatting astride the vast river-road of the Volga with its walled fortress crouched bleak above, seemed little more than a muddy encampment, for all the dazzling colour of its Great Fair. But men like Yuri were to be found all over the world, and they did not welcome competition from newcomers with fresh ideas.

The greatest mistake of all, with hindsight, had been that of remaining behind in Russia after the Great Fair had ended. For a few seething weeks Nizhny-Novgorod had been host to merchandise from immeasurable distances, with travellers from across the East meeting and mingling in one vast bazaar where streets of booths were laid out in a market-place that resembled a small town in its own right. The whole city, from the Governor himself and the troops from the citadel to the boatmen and vendors of cabbages, had poured itself down into that ferment of commerce, among traders who had spent months on the road —Persians, Kalmyks, Jews, Indians, Armenians and Ottomans, Greeks and Germans, all gathered in a great commingled crowd at the crossroads of the continents— and among the stalls were the entertainers who were drawn in likewise by the prospect of money to be made.

His own act, unknown as he was, had become the talk of the Fair. He had long since ceased to frighten peasants at a few coppers per head; these days he performed as a voice masked in mystery, a lithe dark figure who performed amazing tricks of conjuring and ventriloquy that set the audience gasping in astonishment, and who sang with a beauty like nothing else on this earth.

He’d travelled up the river with a party of Pathans under the unremarkable name of Said Ali, but takings had been so good he had discarded that identity and chosen to stay on in the city, with the half-formed intention of perhaps returning to Europe thereafter. What he had —inexcusably— failed to consider was that Nizhny-Novgorod without the glamour of the Great Fair would be a completely different proposition.

It had soon become clear that music and juggling tricks fit to entertain an Emperor were not going to be enough to bring in the kind of money he’d counted on. The hard-drinking, hard-fighting men who laboured on the docks or in the glassworks had little time for fancy foreign circus acts, and after the open-handed weeks of festival the whole city was busy drawing tight its belt. Earning an honest living wasn’t going to be an option... and when he’d got too ambitious in deploying his less-honest talents —he had long since ceased to regard the world he inhabited as anything other than a passing resource to be harvested by those with sufficient initiative to do so— he had fallen foul of Yuri Black-Hand and his thugs, to whom the city was likewise a resource divided up bitterly amongst rivals, and not one they were willing to share.

He had no intention of paying Yuri’s cut. Yuri had made it clear he had no intention of tolerating defiance, and after the first confrontation things had escalated fast.

He’d got away —barely— from the men who’d come after him tonight. But they’d been waiting for him at his lodging, they’d chased him down into the heart of their territory, and he knew better than to fool himself that right now he had won anything more than a few minutes’ respite. One hand, in his pocket, slid around the only lethal weapon he carried, the length of cord he’d learned of late to use to wicked effect in his travels through northern India. But it was a toy: swift, silent, seemingly innocuous, capable of breaking a man’s neck at arm’s length faster than the eye could follow, more elegant and attracting far less attention than a pistol-shot... but of no avail at all against the brute force of a dozen armed men. His pursuers did not need to be subtle about it; they could beat him to a pulp in the open street and no-one here would so much as dare unbar a shutter to see what was going on.

They knew where he had gone to ground. They would be coming from all sides, seeking to drive him back against the river and corner him on the water’s edge. It was a matter of only minutes before he would need to act.