35. My new tutor

Actually, only one new recruit came to us: in the afternoon, after working all day, we returned to our cell and found a new convict. And how surprised I was when I recognized Alvon. The Black Dagger was easily recognizable with his green boots, blue cape and red hat. If he had looked at me, at that moment I would probably have let out without thinking: thunder, ayo, sir, what a good surprise! But he paid no attention to me: his eyes were fixed on Le Bor, and especially on the Raiwanese, who, by his strong and imposing appearance, stood out among the others.

“Blasthell,” Le Bor swore. “Usually when one goes, two come. You wouldn’t happen to be short of boarders, would you?”

He mockingly asked the jailer who opened the cell for us. The jailer replied in a rather friendly tone:

“Complain and we’ll bring you five more, ruffian.”

So we went into the cell in single file. My left fingernails were bleeding from handling the tarred ropes, and I was smearing them with saliva. I went to sit on the Crooked Foot’s bed, wondering whether I should talk to Alvon and say “ayo” or pretend I didn’t know him. He hadn’t noticed me yet. Maybe he didn’t even remember me: after all, he had only seen me twice.

The Black Dagger was sitting on Heretic’s bed, and crossing his arms, Cuckoo leaned against the wall just beside it.

“Well, well,” he said. “Let me guess. With those jester’s clothes on, I’ll bet a fivenail you’re a hustler.”

Le Bor laughed, dropping onto the Raiwanese’s bed.

“You see trade brothers everywhere.”

“Do you take the bet?”

“I do.” He gauged Alvon with his eyes. “Ayo, friend. Let me introduce myself: I am Two Hundred and Three, nicknamed Le Bor. And you, you are…?”

Alvon did not answer immediately. His eyes lingered on Farigo and me for a moment before turning to Le Bor.

“Twenty.”

His cold voice did not invite much conversation. Le Bor shook his head.

“Oh. So they reset the counter. What’s up? Is it my impression or are you a little tense, Twenty? Maybe you’d like a cigar.”

He offered him the cigar. Alvon refused curtly:

“No, thanks.”

As Le Bor tried to figure out what kind of new companion fortune had bestowed upon us, I wondered what the hell Alvon was doing there. Wasn’t he supposed to be off with Yerris on some task? It was likely that they had already returned, but then… why was he at Carnation? Could it be that he got caught with some forbidden magara, like the year before? Who knows.

Farigo sat with me on Crooked Foot’s bed. If we bent our legs a little, the two of us had enough room to lie down. I was glad of that. It was better to sleep on boards than on the stone floor. I leaned against the wall, bent my knees, and continued to suck on my bloody fingers.

“You are less talkative than my friend the Raiwanese,” Le Bor observed, and he smiled, “but, as long as you are as quiet with everybody, I shall not feel offended.”

I understood his fears: he did not want to put the escape plan into practice unless he was sure that this new intruder would not sell us out in exchange for some better diet or other rewards which the jailers promised to those who behaved particularly well.

The meal was brought in, and after dinner, as he received nothing but dry, monosyllabic replies from Alvon, Le Bor decided to ignore him, took out the cards, and sat down with the Raiwanese and Cuckoo. As Crooked Foot was gone and Pockmark had declared himself an anti-player, Le Bor turned to me.

“Join us, Four-Hundred?”

It was not a proposal, but rather an injunction. I walked over, picked up my cards, looked at them, and objected:

“I don’t have any money to bet.”

“Ah, and who needs it when you can borrow it?” Le Bor replied. He gave me four fivenails. I hesitated, but he insisted: “You’ll pay me later.”

Knowing that I owed him a lot more than four fivenails for the karuja anyway, I figured that at this point it wouldn’t make much difference, so I agreed and played with Cuckoo as my partner. We won. After an hour, we had collected a nice sum of four siatos. Le Bor was snorting.

“You’re a brigand, Four-Hundred. Where did you learn to play forks?”

“In the taverns of the Cats,” I replied.

When I saw the Cuckoo pocketing the fruits of our labor, I let out an incredulous exclamation.

“What on earth are you doing, Cuckoo?” I protested. “A gentleman shares the winnings equally. Two siatos for me, two siatos for you.”

Cuckoo’s expression became mocking.

“A gentleman?” He looked over his shoulder, theatrically. “I don’t see a gentleman anywhere. Come on, kid,” he added as I glared at him. “Calm yourself. I’ll give you the four fivenails Le Bor lent you. But don’t throw a tantrum: I have a very low tolerance for spoiled brats.”

“No, no, don’t give them to him,” Le Bor interjected, amused. “He already owes me anyway more than ten goldies. I’ll spare him the peanuts.”

And as I looked at him in distress, he laughed. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious. Either way, my attention was focused on Cuckoo.

“That’s not being a hustler: that’s behaving like a scaluftard,” I said. “When you play with a partner, you share, you filthy demorjed.”

I added the last words to let off steam, because I knew that Cuckoo wasn’t going to listen to me anyway. Although the insult was unfamiliar to him, the tone was sufficient. With a speed I would not have suspected, the hustler grabbed me by the shirt and bellowed in my face:

“You little rascal! Is this how you treat your elders? Ten years! You should spend ten years in this mousetrap to bring down that demon character! Or maybe you’d better push up daisies! Even a devil is good at that! You want my money? Well, steal it from me if you’re such a scoundrel, rogue!”

While he shouted theatrically, evidently to frighten me and make me desist from my legitimate aspirations, I tactfully swallowed a whole string of insults and pretended to see reason. A jailer arrived shouting to impose silence. Satisfied with my apparent submission, Cuckoo let me go, and I returned to Farigo, lay down with my back to them all, and began to count the stars. I did it on days like this, when Cuckoo had a tantrum, or when my desire to get out of this hole made me taciturn. It was a hobby like any other, and the funny thing was that I could count the stars lying on my side, and even on my stomach: they were everywhere. That’s why I never managed to get to the last one. One, two… twenty… one hundred… one thousand two hundred… I sighed in the silence of the cell. It was time for lights out, and all that could be heard was throat-clearing and murmuring.

“One thousand two hundred and one,” I whispered.

And I rolled my eyes. Frankly, I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t losing my mind a little.

The next morning, wanting to check whether Alvon had recognized me or not, I spent a good while staring at him during breakfast. Receiving nothing but a frown, I concluded that he didn’t remember me. In any case, he didn’t seem to pay any more attention to me than the Raiwanese did, which is to say, none at all.

The Black Dagger was sent with Le Bor, the Raiwanese, and the Cuckoo to work on the construction of a new building in the Carnation compound. And he must not have been used to so much effort, for in the evening he came back with dark circles, and no sooner had he had dinner than he lay down and fell asleep on his bed.

“The rookie’s life is tough,” Le Bor declared, mockingly, without looking away from his cards.

“Damn tough,” Cuckoo muttered with a crooked smile. “It seems that those who put on airs of solid men are the ones who fall first.”

“Bend a flower, and it will rise again; bend a rock, and it will break,” Le Bor recited.

I looked at him, fascinated, and Le Bor, noticing my gaze, looked amused and threw a card.

“Not only bards can be poets,” he remarked.

I smiled.

“Dead round, dead round,” I agreed, and I played my turn. That day, by mutual consent, we did not bet any money, and consequently Cuckoo was much more bearable.

“Have you already thought of a prank?” Cuckoo asked.

He was referring to the inevitable hazing that every good new prisoner had to undergo to enter our brotherhood of inmates. I rolled my eyes and glanced at the sleeping Black Dagger.

“He doesn’t seem like the type to take pranks well,” I said.

“You said it,” Le Bor approved. “But it’s not our cell that’s going to break tradition.” He exchanged a smile with the Cuckoo and turned to me. “This time it’s your turn, Four-Hundred. What do you propose?”

I opened my eyes wide. Me? Playing a trick on Alvon, a Black Dagger… Yerris’ master? I huffed, nervous.

“No, no, I don’t do that kind of thing.”

“I promise you, if he throws himself at you, I’ll help you out,” Le Bor scoffed.

And he looked at me sharply, as if to remind me that, although he was quite well behaved with me, he was the one calling the shots, not me. I gave in, bit my cheek and tried to think of something. I played a card.

“How about I sing him something? The insult ballad?” I suggested. And when I saw that neither Le Bor nor the Cuckoo seemed to be enthusiastic about the idea, I went on, “I can hide his boots, put a dead cockroach in his bowl, or… or… make a tie with his pointed red hat?”

But nothing convinced them. Le Bor opined:

“Surprise us and don’t tell us.” He showed his cards with a sigh. “This time I would have won the bet. Bad luck.”

When I saw that no one was talking about my mission anymore, I left the maps and went to sit on the bed with Farigo. I cursed sajits and their crazy ideas. I didn’t want Alvon to get angry with me. Yerris said he wasn’t a violent person… but if I played a trick on him, no doubt, the chances of getting along with each other would fall to zero. After turning the matter over in my mind, I finally resolved not to listen to them, and when the lights went out, I made sure that Le Bor noticed that I was getting up to file the horizontal bar. He should see that I was still useful and not ask me to do anything I didn’t want to do, devils. I spent three hours working. That’s why when the whistle blew in the morning I almost didn’t hear it. It was the Cuckoo who really woke me up by clapping his hands to my ear.

“Rise and shine, gwak!”

Half asleep I picked up my bowl and stood by the bars. The jailer with the pot was already passing by. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alvon holding out his bowl in turn. He also looked half asleep. Cuckoo commented:

“Maybe the new guy needs a tonic to wake him up.”

The Black Dagger gave him a cold look in reply and went to sit on his bed to drink his bowl… I caught Le Bor’s gaze, and my resolve to do nothing wavered. Blasthell. What if Le Bor decided to finish filing the missing bar himself and leave me without my karuja supply? I made a weary pout, and his expression changed. I read his thought clearly. It was a: demons, Four-Hundred, you’re not going to chicken out now. He was testing me, I realized. I gritted my teeth. And I reaffirmed my decision. I took the full bowl to Le Bor as usual, looked him in the eye in silence, and he warned me:

“Don’t look me in the eye, rascal.”

I looked down, but I could see his mocking smile as he accepted the bowl. We had lunch. I was scraping my bowl for the third or fourth time with the tenacity of one who hopes to see more soup pop out of nowhere when a jailer appeared, escorted by two guards, and said:

“Four-Hundred. Come out of the cell.”

That gave me a fright. I had to get out of the cell, it runs, but why me alone? I left the bowl by the bars and walked out. They didn’t put the handcuffs on me, so I figured I wouldn’t get very far. Le Bor asked in surprise:

“Where are you taking him?”

The jailer and the other guards ignored him, which made me even more nervous.

We walked down the hallway past the other cells, past several gates, and they ushered me into a small room with a desk, two guards, an official, and… to my surprise, there was also Zoria—the Blue One—and the bearded man with the braided hair and purple headband.

“Thunders,” I muttered. They hadn’t come here to ask me about the alchemist in front of the flies, had they?

“Is it this boy?” the official asked.

“Let me see him more closely,” the bearded man replied. “Come closer, kid.”

Making several faces of surprise and amazement, I approached. The Blue One was staring at me. That annoying habit of trying to read my mind…

“You… recognize me, don’t you, kid?” the bearded man asked.

I nodded and smiled.

“I do. The one from The Ballerinas. You stole my pendant.”

The bearded man smiled back and nuanced:

“You left it behind, which is different. Here you go.”

He took the pendant out of his pocket and handed it to me. I took it, more and more surprised. Had he come to Carnation Prison only to give me the pendant back? I checked that it was the same metal plate, and as I put it around my neck, the bearded man straightened up and said:

“It’s him. Although he’s a little skinnier. You don’t feed him much, do you?”

“You are here in a house of correction, sir, not in a fancy inn,” the official replied. He slid a form across the table. “Sign here, please.”

The bearded man examined the form as if he wanted to learn it by heart. Finally, he dipped the tip of the quill into the inkwell and signed.

“You better not make me regret that decision, kid,” he commented.

I shook my head, increasingly perplexed.

“I don’t understand,” I admitted. “What’s all this about?”

It was the civil servant who answered with a kind smile:

“In two weeks, when you have served your sentence, if all goes well, you will be on probation. And Mister Malaxalra has decided to pay your fine and take you under his tutelage until you find an occupation that will give you something to earn your keep.”

I looked at him and then at the so-called Mister Malaxalra and then at the Blue One. I huffed.

“For real?”

The bearded man smiled.

“For real and in Drionsan, kid. I have reason to believe that… Well, I’ll explain it to you when you get out,” he said, seeing that a guard was already grabbing me by the shoulder. He made a saluting gesture and joked, “Take advantage of these two weeks to put on some weight.”

As the guard pushed me with unusual gentleness towards the open gate from which I had come, I turned my head and met the disturbing gaze of the Blue One. I frowned, uncomfortable. Well, okay, great: the bearded one had taken me under his tutelage, that was wonderful, but… did I have to accept it? Because, well, by accepting it, I implicitly felt like I was also accepting to tell the whole truth about the alchemist. And information like that didn’t just depend on me: it depended on thirty-two gwak sokwatas. Unless the Alchemist has already found the final cure, I thought as I walked down the hall. The thought filled me with hope.