Those Above by Daniel Polansky

Author:Daniel Polansky [Polansky, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2015-02-25T18:30:00+00:00

18

The first week Thistle worked for Rhythm he was given three Salucian drachms, a month’s salary for a bonded porter. Thistle had spent some of it that night getting Rat and Felspar drunk on corn mash at one of the bars on Bristle Street they’d never had the balls to go to before, and spent most of the rest the next morning on a brimless hat that the tailor told him was all the rage upslope. What was left over he’d given to his mother, told her he’d been doing odd jobs around the neighbourhood. She’d looked at him long enough to let him know she knew he was lying but not long enough to make an issue out of it, then patted him on the head and secreted the coins away. That night they’d had a hock of ham in their stew, and Apple had sat at the table and laughed some.

This had remained, roughly speaking, the ratio by which his wages were spent. A third for revelry, a third for dress, a third for home. Wasn’t long before he had acquired a costume that anyone who’d ever had the money to develop taste would recognise as unbelievably garish, and his sisters had put on enough weight so as to obscure the outline of their ribs.

In exchange for his three drachms, Thistle was required to keep himself on hand at Isle’s from mid-afternoon to late evening, and to carry things that Rhythm wanted carried, and run the occasional message, and now and again to spend the day keeping an eye on someone Rhythm wanted an eye kept on. Watching the army of porters wind their way upslope every morning, Thistle found it very difficult to call what he did work. Not that he felt guilty – the way he saw it, any of those unfortunate beasts of burden could have had his position, if they’d been possessed of a little more by way of balls. A man had to go out and seize his fortune in this world, not just wait around hoping that it would pluck him from obscurity. Thistle had come to a lot of these insights recently, along with his weekly three drachms.

His friends were in no hurry to call him on it, however, because if he was more generous with his newfound wisdom than he was his hard coin, still enough of the latter got passed around to satisfy Rat and Felspar and the rest. That was what they did most of that winter, drank their way through Thistle’s money. That was what they were doing that afternoon, when things all went to hell.

They were at the pumphouse, waiting for him to get out of work with his coin, and they made quite the show when he did. Treble was up quick from his seat, passed over a bottle of potato liquor that Thistle obligingly nipped from. Rat slapped him on the back and Felspar complimented him on his new coat and even the younger

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