Twenty-One: The Yellow Butterfly

Writing about how I met Eleen got me thinking again about Tam, and a part of the story of how I got here to Star’s Reach that I meant to write earlier and didn’t. It’s even more out of place here than it was when I was explaining how I became a ruinman and how Berry and I left Shanuga, but it’s got to go in here somewhere, and – well, Eleen and Tashel Ban are muttering to themselves over a computer screen three rooms away, and the rest of us are trying to find something to do while they figure out whether we all came here to find a message from the stars or just to salvage Meriga’s last big heap of undiscovered scrap metal, so it might as well be now.

It might as well go here, too, because I met Tam pretty much the same way I met Eleen, at the beginning of the rains. I was sixteen then, and one of Gray Garman’s senior prentices. We’d just finished hauling everything back from the Shanuga ruins at the end of the digging season, racing the rain clouds as they marched up from the south. That was hard work, and there was plenty more of the same just ahead, getting all the tools and gear cleaned up and repaired for next season and getting them packed away in the cellar and the attic where they belonged.

Still, the end of a season’s always a glad time unless the season’s been a mother of a mess, and this one had been pretty good. We’d only had three prentices get reborn that year, and two of them brought it on themselves, getting cocky enough to take one too many stupid risks. The building we stripped had plenty of metal, and it also had a bunch of old broken computer gear in a room we had to dig our way into, three levels down into the underplaces where looters hadn’t gotten, back when the old world was ending. Best of all, I’d found a couple of metal chairs buried in rubble, and small finds like that are a prentice’s to keep or sell if he wants to; I sold them for the metal, and ended up with a nice bit of money in my pocket.

So I was feeling pleased with myself that day, as we sorted out the shovels and picks – this one’s fine, that one needs filing, that other one needs a trip to the blacksmith – and the clouds we could see outside the windows turned from white to gray to dark gray to that inky blue-black that means Mam Gaia’s about to cut loose on you good and proper. It took an effort to pay attention to the tools, and when the thunder finally rolled and a first flurry of fat raindrops spattered against the windows, we gave up trying and pounded down the stairs to the street.

The younger prentices stayed right there around the ruinmen's houses, splashing each other with water and getting into half-playful scuffles with the other misters’ prentices. The half dozen of us who counted as senior prentices, though, headed toward the town gate and the buildings clustered just outside it. We couldn’t go in, not without some good reason the guards would believe, but there were taverns where a boy of sixteen could get small beer if he was polite to the tavernkeeper, and shops where you could buy any number of little useless things, and prentices from some of the other crafts that were outside the walls; and there were also girls.

That’s one of the things about being a ruinman’s prentice. Most of the crafts only take boys as prentices—well, boys and tweens, who count as boys according to Circle and the priestesses; with girls, there’s always the chance they can have healthy babies, in which case they go into Circle and whatever time the mister’s put into their training goes dancing down the wind. Mind you, there are crafts that will take women past their twenty, but the ruinmen aren’t one of them. What that means is that if you’re a ruinman’s prentice, nine months of the year you’re someplace where the only woman you’re likely to see is one failed scholar three times your age. When I was ten, that didn’t matter to me a bit, but by the time I was sixteen it was starting to feel like an inconvenience.

So when the senior prentices go to the buildings piled up around the little southern gate of Shanuga that nobody else likes to use, girls are one of the things on their mind. You find them there, too, and not just the ones who can be hired for the afternoon for a dozen marks or so. There are crafts besides ours that have their place outside the walls for the same reason we do, because other people think they’re dirty or shameful or toxic; some of those are family trades, and the girls from those families won’t get into Circle no matter how many babies they have, so when they get old enough to get interested in boys they make friends with prentices from the ruinmen, the chemists, the burners, and so on. You also get girls who aren’t born healthy but whose families, for one reason or another, won’t let the birth women put a pillow over their faces when they’re born; there are trades that take them young and train them, the way the crafts take and train prentices, and most of those are outside the walls too.

Now and then, though, you also find girls from good families who come there because they want to feel like they’re being wild and taking risks, and that’s more or less what happened on the day I was talking about. Conn and I were inside one of the taverns with a couple of glasses of small beer we’d wheedled from a friendly barkeeper, having spent a good two hours splashing and shouting and getting into a friendly fistfight or two with a couple of prentices from the burners – there’s an old rivalry there, since they burn the bodies of dead people and we handle a lot of bodies from the old world. There we were, and the rest of the tavern was full of wet happy people, but it was a bit quiet for the day the rains come, and after a while I saw why. There were two girls sitting at a little table up against the wall in a quiet corner, one looking excited and embarrassed and the other just looking embarrassed, and from the clothes they were wearing nobody in the tavern had any reason to doubt that their mothers could buy the tavern and everyone in it with spare change from their pockets and not notice the difference.

I turned my chair so I could look at them, and after a while Conn noticed where all my attention was. “You’re not,” he said with a big grin, all but daring me.

“You watch me,” I told him, and got up.

So I walked up to the two of them and asked if they’d like a beer. The one who was just embarrassed, a little dab of a thing with a good bit of brown in her hair, gave me a look like I’d offered to cut her throat, but the other one, the excited one, smiled and said “Sure.” I managed to wheedle three more glasses out of the barkeeper, which took some doing; carried them back over and asked, “Mind if I sit?”

They didn’t, or at least the one I was interested in didn’t. Her name was Tam, short for Tamber, and the other one’s name was Shen; they’d been good friends since, oh, always, and was I really a ruinman’s prentice? So I sat, and we talked, and talked, and talked some more. It was starting to get dark outside by the time Shen insisted that they had to get back home, and would Tam please listen and come? So they left, and I left a little later, feeling pretty thoroughly dazzled by my luck. Conn followed me – he’d been doing something else in the tavern the whole time, probably toss-the-bones, and probably winning, as he usually did – and proceeded to push me into the deepest puddle he could find. So we had another fistfight, one of the kind where both parties are laughing too hard to do much damage to anybody but themselves, and stumbled back up the stairs of Mister Garman’s house late enough that we got a week’s worth of the grubbiest cleaning chores Gray Garman could find for us.

I figured that was the last I’d see of either of them, but it didn’t work out that way. A week later, I think it was, I was back at that same tavern, and damn if she didn’t walk in the door, spot me, and come right over to the table where I was sitting. She was alone this time, and we talked again for what must have been a couple of hours; she had someplace she had to be at sunset, and I made good and sure she left the tavern in plenty of time, because I’d started to get hopeful and didn’t want to make it any harder for her to get outside the gate again. That time, before she left, we’d already settled when and where we’d meet next.

I think it was the fourth time we met, or it may have been the fifth, before one of us worked up the courage to suggest going somewhere less crowded than a tavern, and I honestly can’t remember which of us made the suggestion first. There were places outside the gate where you could take a girl, or a girl could take you, and a mark or two would buy a bed that wasn’t too dirty and a couple of hours of privacy. That’s what we did, and things proceeded from there. Afterwards, though, she nuzzled her face into my shoulder and suddenly started to cry, and after she’d finished crying I asked why; we talked, and I began to figure out what she was doing in a cheap rented bed with a ruinman’s prentice.

She was from one of Chanuga’s important families, as I’d guessed, with a mother who was a big name in Circle, and grandmothers and great-aunts who wore the red hats that only Circle elders get to wear. Of course they’d expected her to follow after them, and let her know once she’d gotten old enough that she needed to get a baby started, and she’d gone out and found a likely boy and done the thing, except that there wasn’t a baby. Of course that meant she had to keep at it, and she’d done that until every boy in Chanuga’s wealthy families got to thinking of her as free for the taking, and there still wasn’t a baby on the way.

That was when she realized that she wasn’t going to follow her mother and her grandmothers into Circle. She told them so, and there was a big fight with the grandmothers and great-aunts and everybody involved, and at the end of it all Tam’s mother told her that if she didn’t have enough sense and pride to do the right thing by her family, then she might as well go off to the ruinmen. “She used to scare my brothers when they were little and misbehaved,” she told me, laughing through the tears, “by telling them she was going to send them to be ruinmen’s prentices. I couldn’t believe that she’d say that to me, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed at her.” Then, three days later, the rains came and she teased and bullied Shen into coming with her to the nameless street where the ruinmen live, where she met me.

“I can’t exactly get you into the ruinmen’s guild, you know,” I told her.

That got another laugh. “I know that. Still – Trey, I’ve got just over three years before my twenty, and then I’ll have to find a life for myself, you know. I need to know what it’s like out here, outside the gate where you live. And —” She pressed her face into my shoulder again and said something that I couldn’t figure out at all; so I eased her back from me a bit and she said it again, and we did some kissing and then pretty soon we were going at it again.

“I want to be a butterfly,” she said later. I made a wing-flapping motion with my hands, and she laughed. “No, I mean it. You know how butterflies start out as little green worms, and spend all their time on one tree, until finally they turn into a whatsit and then hatch out and go fluttering off into the world?”

I’d learned that much from the priestesses. “Yes.”

“When I have my twenty, I’ll hatch out, and then I want to fly.”

It was late by the time she left to go back into the city, and later still before I got back to Mister Garman’s house, but nobody made a point of it this time and I made sure to get my share of the work done and then a bit for the next few days. I had a lot of thinking to do. Even then I wasn’t quite slow enough to think that Tam had met me and fallen giddy in love, and that was all there was to it. Partly, I guessed, she was getting back at her mother and grandmothers and great-aunts by doing something that would have them turn gray with horror if they ever found out, and partly she was right about finding something else to do with her life. Once she got to her twenty – her twentieth birthday, that is – if there hadn’t yet been a baby or any sign of one on the way, the door to Circle would swing gently shut and her family would close up around itself with her on the outside. That’s the way Circle works, and if you want to know why, I’m not the person to ask; one of the old women in red hats might be able to tell you, but probably won’t, because Circle has its secrets and holds onto them good and tight.

Still, after thinking all that through a couple of times on a couple of nights where I didn’t get much sleep, I decided that none of it mattered, because whether or not she was in love, I was, and I’d just take my chances. We’d arranged to meet again a week later, and a day or so before them I went up to one of the little shops outside the gate where they sell little trinkets and things. I knew what I wanted to find, and found it after most of an hour of looking through little bins and cases of bright bits of cheap metal, the sort of thing that boys give to girls and girls to boys.

There’s an alley back behind the tavern where we first met, and the grubby little place with rooms and beds for rent has a door that opens onto it. That’s where we met, with rain pelting down from a sky the color of cold iron, and we laughed and kissed, scampered into the rooming house and hurried up the stairs to the room I’d already rented; we’d settled on that as much to have a quiet place to talk as for the obvious reason. We were both soaked, as everybody is during the rains, and so of course we had to get our wet clothes off and hanging on the pegs next to the door; she sat on the bed, brown and plump and glowing in the dim light, and smiled up at me.

“Close your eyes,” I told her, “and hold out a hand.” I put what I’d found into her palm. “Go ahead and look.”

She looked at her hand and then at me, and her eyes were round and wet. “Trey,” she said. “Oh, Trey.”

There wasn’t much I could say in response, and we didn’t do much talking for a while after that. Later, when she was lying on her back and I was propped up on one elbow, looking at her, I took the gift and perched it on her nose: a little butterfly of yellow metal. “That’s your butterfly,” I said, “and it’ll take you someplace you can’t even imagine.”

She laughed, moved the butterfly to her lips and kissed it, and then set it on the bedside stand and pulled me down to her.

I have the butterfly out on the table where I’m writing these words. It’s one of the few things I took with me when I left Shanuga to start looking for Star’s Reach, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever get rid of it, even though our roads went veering off in different directions all those years ago. If we survive this and make it back to Meriga, I don’t doubt that she’ll hear the news, but I wonder if she’ll ever guess that her butterfly made it here. I hope she does, but one way or another I’ll never know.