PART II
8 - Orphans of Yartha
On the western side of the river, south of the towers where the large majority of the population of Yartha resided, life in the lowborn districts had been especially difficult as the summer crept through a second year of severe drought. Food shortages and high prices for that food had become the norm, and the heat had done little to ease the rising tempers or alleviate the misery already permeated throughout the crowded city. Starvation was on the horizon for the most unfortunate of the city if rain didn't arrive soon, and many feared that even then it would be too late. A number of the wealthy or desperate had already left Yartha, but many had no choice but to remain behind and await whatever fate lay in store for them. The boys Syatt and Pox were no exception.
He was named Syatt Velias, not by his mother or father- he’d known neither- but by the Clerics of Slybbon at an orphanage on the west side at the foot of Velias Bridge. A plague had killed their parents as well as a large part of the adult population when they'd been less than a year old, and the Church of Slybbon the Water Goddess had taken them in as orphans, then turned them out at ten. Now somewhere close to the age of thirteen or fourteen, all they'd ever known about their lineage was that their mothers and perhaps fathers had likely been refugees- those who had fled the rule of some king, queen, or warlord of the borderlands for the free city.
The plague which had taken their parents, called elder’s fever, had predominantly claimed the lives of poor adults in the slums and tenements of Yartha, and had left many of the orphans with no known names or identities. The dead were unknown as well, and it was a time before documents would become common for the underclass. In the end the boys, along with scores of others, were given the last name of Velias- the name of the bridge the orphanage stood next to, and its builder, Helena Velias, whose matriarchal line had died out during the reign of the tyrant king. One hundred years later the name would become synonymous with the orphans, and in that way the two were brothers.
The orphanage, now in partial ruin and in a slow process of falling into the river with each passing season, was built from red bricks like many structures in Yartha and the river clay from which they were crafted. Its disrepair, overcrowding, and a general lack of resources was why the two had been released into the city at only ten years of age. They were only two of many, now teenagers, set loose on the dangerous streets of Yartha four years prior, all at once in the autumn of 792.
The ones who survived in the end were either lucky, or they became criminals of some sort, alone or with one of the many gangs or apprenticing for thieves guilds of the city. Pox and Syatt had become independent, petty crooks, but they also considered themselves lucky. They were together. They'd entered into the confusing, often chaotic, sometimes overwhelming maze that was the city, and had been inseparable ever since, side-by-side, depending on one another for survival as well as for the good laughs and comradery that they already shared.
They sat next to each other on the brick steps which led to the long porch and entrance of The River Sister- a three-story inn of red brick there in the lowborn district of Tabby Square. A woman called Millie owned the well-known establishment, and the two considered her a friend and confidante. She'd helped them and other orphans a great deal during their sudden transition from the orphanage to the streets of Tabby Square, offering a meal or spare room when they were hungry or the weather inclement, and the two were grateful and loyal to her, and would on occasion run an errand or help out around the often busy inn and tavern.
They had no duty or obligations, currently occupying a sort of limbo for the orphans and street children of the city; they were too young to work in the mines or some other unskilled station, but too old to need looked after, and it was a surprise to no one that many turned to crime during this window.
Tabby Square was an old district. Its cobblestone streets seemed to go whichever way they wanted to at times, but it formed a vague grid if one knew it well enough. Sometimes a rich scholar or merchant from up north would get lost and hand the boys a copper bit or two to get them headed in the right direction. Most of the structures there were built up, not out, but the River Sister did both. It had twenty rooms, Millie told them, and its common room was huge and often crowded.
Beyond it on the other side of Whistler Street towered a row of even larger concrete tenements. They were the Towers answer to rampant overpopulation, and had appeared all across the slums within the last few years. Pox thought they resembled fortresses, with their narrow and uniform open-air windows looking to him like slightly larger murder holes, but inside they contained a multitude of individual dwellings which were owned by the highborn and rented to the underclass- each six floors in which hundreds of people could and did live- often addicted to alcohol or opium, often violent. The boys did their best to avoid the buildings, but the nature of their livelihood sometimes required their visitation.
Hardly anyone who lived in the southwest quarter owned anything there, dwelling or business. According to the old-timers, there had been a time not that long ago when that hadn't been the case. Land in the southwest quarter had been divided up among the underclass following the fall of a man called Solomon Pyne, infamous to those in Tabby Square, but in the last fifty years many of those same properties had been purchased back by the highborn, often for a pittance. The River Sister was an exception, a fact which Millie was proud of. The inn was hers, and her lowborn and matriarchal family, the Bryngartens, had been involved with it in some fashion for its three century-long existence.
Syatt stared at his ruined shoes as Pox stood and stretched and they discussed their plans for the day. It was only mid-morning, but the heat portended a sweltering day ahead. They wore the simple garb of the underclass- ill-fitting trousers with twine belts that secured them to their bony hips, shirtless more often than not during the hot months but loose cloth tunics otherwise. Each had red kerchiefs around their necks with a charcoal "X" on them, the sigil of a gang of children they belonged to called the Tabby Rat Bastards, completely unorganized and mostly harmless. Their hair was shoulder-length, dark and wild, Pox with strands beaded here and there.
Syatt had a serious look about him for one just out of childhood; a face often mistaken for being beyond its years. His skin was naturally dark, and darker now from the summer sun. He wore a collection of cheap bracelets he had found or made himself on his left wrist- colorful scraps of fabric or leather and small wooden beads. He was the quieter and less reckless of the two, always observing, slower to anger or elation.
Pox was taller and lankier at that age, but his frame suggested he would fill out in later years. He'd outgrown Syatt in height since just the previous summer, and hadn't shown any sign of stopping. He had a lazy left eye, and often told people it was because he had "seen a naked lady walking out of the bathhouse on Chatter Street, and it just got stuck that way."
He had been given the nickname Pox by the other children at the orphanage because he had almost died from a case of chickenpox when they were four or five. The orphans tended toward callousness when it came to such near tragedies, and the moniker had stuck. He didn't seem to mind, though. Syatt was one of the few people who knew the actual name he'd been given at the orphanage, and he'd been sworn to secrecy.
The orphans had scattered to all parts of Yartha upon release, but many of them stuck around its vicinity in the underclass localities of Glass Avenue, Fiddlewood, and Tabby Square. Various older folk, both those with a roof over their heads and those without, had taken part in mentoring them over the past three years. Their mentors would disappear, sometimes months at a time, only to return later; some were imprisoned in the dungeons beneath Roost Tower, and a few of them died from complications of their lives. It was an unstable sort of upbringing, but they had protected the boys from the truly depraved, and taught them the ways and customs of the forgotten and neglected citizens of Yartha.
Since being released from the orphanage, the pair had amassed a vast network of people- some they could even trust, they would joke. These contacts were spread all across the city, but the majority lived or operated out of Tabby Square. Ultimately, adapting to the streets hadn't been as difficult as they had thought it would be. They were far from alone. They had found a community, as rag-tag and anarchic as it was, and although the small comforts of the orphanage were behind them, they soon came to wonder how they had ever lived without the freedom.
In the past months, however, the two had quarreled where there would have been no quarrel before. There was something in the air, Syatt thought. It showed itself on the haggard faces of the poor and the dispossessed- a seismic shift. To him it felt as if something momentous was building, terrible or joyous, because what else was the prolonged misery and slow starvation for, if it all led to nothing? The summer and the drought crawled on without mercy, and the city functioned as it did. It had survived droughts before, and floods, great storms and blizzards, and the boys held a subliminal belief that the city, and the society which had propped it up all those years, would continue forever, unimpeded.
***
The city’s workday was ending as they dodged carts and rickshaws and hurried through the human packs, the two of them still closer to boyhood than manhood and full of energy despite the heat. They made plans to meet at the intersection of Current and Raccoon streets as they split up and disappeared into the crowds. It was always a race between them even if a race had not been declared. Attempts to stick together through the major thoroughfares of the city were futile at that time of evening, and becoming separated in the crowds was almost a guarantee, so they made their separate ways through the thick, sweating chaos, motions swift and smooth and with the well-honed guile of two having grown up dodging anonymous legs. Soon they arrived at the river landing of the southwest quarter, and Pox celebrated yet another victory. Since his growth spurt he’d been unbeatable.
A shirtless old merchant had lost his voice and held above his head a warped plank with words painted for those able to read, while others cried their wares with ritualistic intensity. Officers of the scimitar-armed Yarthanguard stood sentry and filled their leather armor with sweat beside a stand of sun-bleached cucumbers and two scrawny hung and gutted deer carcasses swarmed with flies. As the turbaned merchants sold their goods, the guards' hands were never far from the handles of their blades. There had been looting in recent days. The vegetables and fruits that lined the stalls and carts were pitiful looking and three times their normal price.
Everyone was yelling- the merchants, the customers, and the guards. Even the merchants' companion dogs- pit bulls wearing pocketed harnesses packed with goods and essentials, snarled and snapped at one another in the miserable heat. A number of alleged thieves had been killed without a trial by the Yarthanguard since the summer began- in broad daylight. The boys hadn't picked any pockets on their way to the river; they weren't suicidal, but their eyes instinctively darted to purses and belts, and hands fell loose in readiness as they navigated their separate paths to the riverfront.
***
High above the river, as dusk approached, they walked along Velias Bridge as they'd taken to doing that late spring and summer. Their eyes were drawn naturally to gaze upon the sight of the western horizon. The Slybos River was still majestic, even in its weakened state. It was both the longest and widest river on the continent, over twenty miles in some places far south of the city, and the drought had revealed many of its secrets: previously submerged islands, jutting rock formations, even now-accessible caves.
The perpetual rippling water reflected the wispy clouds above, the sky the color of a pale rose, horizon streaked orange and violet, the silhouetted parapets and steeples, skyline aimed to the bottomless skies in the river's reflection. The moon, pale, pock-marked, and called Lun- a ghostly apparition in the darkening sky. Beneath that sky all manner of river vessels were docked along the shores of the Slybos, and the creeping human web of wooden planks and walkways that were the dockyards made the once wild river look like something man-made within its borders.
They gazed out onto the bridge and embraced a merciful breeze which lingered across it. Around dusk each evening the boats would collect and form into great archipelagos of boat cities that would twinkle along the black river at night, where everything the streets had to offer and more was available on their buoyant markets and lodgings, where liquor-fueled merriment and debauchery would last long into the night. Further upstream, the upper class practiced something similar if not more refined, but that summer the revelry had been subdued, muted, for the blight of drought had disheartened all manner of citizens.
"We have to find something tomorrow," Pox said. He spat off the bridge. "We ain't cut out for thievery the way things are now. We've got to find work somewhere that'll hire us."
Syatt nodded. They moved out of the way for a young officer of the Yarthanguard as she and a partner on the other side of the bridge methodically lit the braziers of Velias Bridge. Soft spots of torchlight illuminated the way they'd been, from west to east. "Maybe The River Sister will have leftovers tomorrow," Syatt said, but knew it was unlikely. It had been over a month since Millie had been able to give a handout. She'd been tearful over it as well, despite the boys' reassurance that they knew it was beyond anyone’s control.
They watched the ships on the Slybos. Pox pointed out a favorite of theirs- a three-masted sloop with green and white striped sails. The vessels passed silently through the massive arched channels beneath their feet- the bridge with which they shared a name. Velias. A good name, thought Syatt. The five towers rose in the sky to the west. To the east, the rising bluffs, the quarries and hills tunneled through with mines and natural cave systems, and a city on top of it all. Nothing uninhabited. Nothing untouched. Everything visible was the metropolis.
The boats on the river settled to their resting spots as night began to fall on the city, and Syatt and Pox began the trek back across the bridge to Tabby Square and a supperless camp. The bridge was nearly empty of pedestrians when they came upon a bearded, long-haired man in the distance, gazing out at the northern river as the boys had been. He was dressed in ragged toga and filthy. His dark hair lifted and fell in front of his face in the breeze. As they continued their walk across, the man swung a leg over the stone railing.
He saw them then, and his eyes locked with Syatt’s. The look on his face was like that of a child caught in a misdeed. Syatt’s heart leapt, but they both realized what he was doing too late. Pox shouted "wait," but the man had stepped from the bridge and was gone.
The two rushed to its side- watched helplessly as his shrinking form toppled through the air. About halfway down, the robe left his body and was taken by the wind to flutter away from him. After a freefall which seemed to Syatt impossibly long, there was a flat smack, as if the body met with some inflexible surface, then nothing but a dark effervescent variation in the distant current, and then that too was gone.
