Kai walked three circles around Makawe’s Rest in the pre-dawn mist, but saw no sign of Mako. Late night for him, then. New poets, perhaps, or a lover, maybe both. Eve would be furious either way.
She found a few stones in the morning surf, returned to the bar, and threw the stones up against the ceiling as hard as she could, one by one. They left white marks on the heavy boards. When she exhausted her ammunition without provoking a response, she collected the fallen rocks and tried again. Four volleys later she heard a foul groan and a scramble of limbs against wood. A hatch in the ceiling opened and Mako’s face appeared, surrounded by a gray seaweed tangle of hair. “Get outta here, we’re closed.”
“Shame,” Kai replied, hefting another rock. “Even closed for conversation?”
“Kai! This is a bad time.”
“I need to talk. Who is it you have up there that you can’t bother later?”
“Bothering’s what the kids call it these days?” He cackled, or coughed. Kai wasn’t sure which. “Not a who. A what. Dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“War dreams.”
“Figure I just did you a favor, pulling you out of nightmares.”
“These aren’t nightmares.”
“I’ve never heard of good war dreams.”
“You’ve never seen a war. Don’t talk as if you know.” He beat a tattoo on the hatch with his fingers. “What are you here for?”
“We need to talk. In private.”
He spit, and the spit splashed into the dust on the floor beside her. “I’ll be down.” His head disappeared, and Kai watched the hole, wondering if he’d stumbled back to bed.
Wood groaned; metal screeched. A ladder appeared in the hatch, tipped down, and fell, unfolding. Metal feet clapped against the stone floor. Mako descended the ladder like a drunken spider, feeling each step with his toes. She spotted him with her hands. He hadn’t fallen yet, not in all the years she’d known him, but he was an old man, getting older.
“You ever think about taking a room on the ground floor? Or moving out of the Rest?”
He stepped off the ladder, touched a glyph on its side, and nodded in satisfaction as the ladder shuddered and rose, retreating back into the ceiling hatch. “Eve would kill me. You have any idea how much she spent putting that thing in?”
“More than you’re worth.”
“Hah.” A dirty brown earthworm scrunched over Mako’s bare foot. He plucked it up and threw it underhanded onto the sand. “Maybe so. To what do I owe the pleasure of your interruption?”
“I’d like your advice. In private.” She glanced down the beach toward the Penitents standing guard. They weren’t looking her way, but they listened well.
“I know a spot.” He groped, found the corner of a table, and used the graffiti carved there to orient himself toward the bar. From beneath the locked liquor shelf, he retrieved his crooked stick, leather handled and brass shod. “Follow me.” She walked with one hand around his arm, the other on her own cane. His skin felt dry and loose beneath her palm. He’d been larger, once.
Mako guided them away from the beach, north three blocks, and west down an alley of shuttered laundries and closed convenience stores, most long since taken over as outbuildings for the great gleaming coastal hotels.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Kai asked.
“Another block down, at the corner, on the left.”
There, true to Mako’s word, they found a small diner, a grimy place with plush booths upholstered in green fake leather. When Kai opened the door a smell of cigarettes and bacon wafted out; stepping inside, she noticed the lack of ashtrays and the NO SMOKING sign. Behind the counter, a round cook slid plates through a slit window and called an order number. No one looked up.
Mako lowered himself into an empty booth. His bent knees cracked and popped, and when he sat they pressed against the underside of the table. Kai ordered a cup of coffee and dry toast when the waitress came. Mako ordered coffee, too, black.
“This,” he said after the waitress left, “was the first place I ate when I came home from the Wars.”
How to answer that? “Because you knew it?”
“No. Any place I knew would remind me how much the island changed since I left.” He rapped his forehead with a knuckle. “Or how much I had. I wanted somewhere it wouldn’t feel strange to be a stranger.” The waitress returned with coffees. Mako drank all his in a gulp, then grabbed Kai’s, drank half, and set the mug back down in front of her. Steam rose from the black liquid. “Course, even someplace new gets the old familiar stain in time.”
She grabbed her coffee in both hands. Still too hot for her to drink, but safe at least from further theft. “Why come back, if it hurt you to be here?”
“Firstways, didn’t know it would hurt so much. Secondways, you can’t escape yourself, and you’re the only thing that hurts you in the long run.”
“That and rocks.”
He laughed. “And rocks. And knives and swords. Lighting, thorn, paper cuts, fire, acid, teeth, claws, ice, drowning. Well. Drowning only sort of hurts.” He banged his empty mug on the table, and the waitress looked over. Her sallow, up-all-night expression made her seem ten minutes’ hassle short of serial murder, and with Mako she was counting down the seconds. “What do you want from me, Kai?”
She removed the red book from her purse, and untied the binding ribbon. The vellum sheets crackled when she unfolded them. For the hundredth time this morning she read the list of names, hoping they had changed. No such luck. “What can you tell me,” she said, “about Edmond Margot?”
“You talked with him at the open reading a few weeks back.”
“I talked with him. But I don’t know him, and you do, and I’m buying breakfast.”
“He came to the island a few seasons ago, after the rains. Lives alone. No lovers Eve’s figured. Good voice. Reminds me of some Iskari I knew back in the Wars. Ones as fought in the deltas, or in Southern Kath, when they came back from the jungle they were only echoes of what they’d been up-country.”
“He was a soldier?”
“No. He had that same aftermath feel though, an echo looking for the noise that made it. He found the noise here.” Mako grunted thanks as the waitress filled his coffee. She rolled her eyes and strutted off.
“What do you mean, found the noise?”
“He showed up at the Rest for the first time back after the rains, you know, with a sheaf full of poems, made a righteous thud when he set it down on the bar. Asked for, what’d he say, the right to perform. So I listened to some samples and I said no.”
“I didn’t think he was that bad.”
“You didn’t hear him then. His work had skin, but no bone, no marrow. All art, no.” He groped across the table, found Kai’s arm, squeezed hard. She grimaced and slapped his hand away. “You see.”
“And you told him no.”
“I’m not cruel. I told him start on the open stage, nobody likes some big shot they’ve never heard of coming in from abroad as if he’s gods’ gift to poesy. Perform with the others, quality will out, and they’ll clamor for Eve to give you a show.”
“That’s not cruel?”
“Maybe I was a little mean.” Mako scratched his head, and a moth flew out from his hair. “Anyway, he needed himself taken down a peg. Not his fault. Iskari don’t have natural rhythm. Comes from all the squid-goddery, you know. Worship something that doesn’t eat, sleep, screw like you do, do that for a few thousand years, and see if you don’t lose your rhythm. Even in bed they work funny: all straps and ties and games.”
Kai’s hand hurt where he’d grabbed her. The waitress brought her toast, cold, and topped up her coffee. The toast crumbled in her mouth as if baked with sand instead of flour. “Margot didn’t do well on the open stage, is what you’re saying.”
“First night, he was up against some Gleb boys, and a pair from Alt Selene that throw their lines back at each other. He stumbled through a sestina and got a weak hand off the stage. Come back next week, I said. And he did. Surprised the hells out of me. You know what happened then?”
“Same thing?”
He nodded. “Same thing. He barely got words out of his mouth that time. Doggerel about flowers or some shit like that. Even worse reaction from the crowd, but he grinned like an idiot at the end, as if he knew he’d gone bad along the way, and having someone tell him so was the highest order of compliment. Next week, same poor show, bigger smiles. The boys got fresh with him. You ever meet Cabe and them?”
“No.”
“Big fellows, work down dockside. Old-style Kavekana boys. You know.”
Kai knew.
“Time was, they’d all be off on a ship hauling rock or salt pork or oil or whatever cross the ocean, with a captain’s whip over their heads. Which would have been good for them.”
“Because beatings make better men.”
“Hells no. Just that bad times pull folk together. Mad captain, he builds a crew. Ocean does, too. And age—age’s harsher than a whip. Point is, if you’re a young man and you have nothing harder than a clock to fight against, ’fore long you make up things to do with your time. And one of those might be, you know, find a poet you don’t like and jump him in an alley while he’s drunk and taking a piss, and beat him until there’s a stain on his pants and he bleeds from the nose and mouth.”
“Gods.”
He raised his hands. “Well, yeah. I mean. I saw what was going to happen, too late, when Eve told me Cabe’d settled up their bill early. I walked out after, to stop them.”
“You?” She tried to keep the surprise from her voice.
“They aren’t bad kids, understand. Bored. Young. Angry. They wouldn’t jump an old vet.” He slapped his sagging left bicep with his right hand.
“Awful lot of trust to put in thugs.”
“Nobody’s a thug from birth. So out back I went, and found them.”
“How bad was he?”
“They were all bad.”
“You mean Margot fought.”
“No. Margot was beat up proper. Face swollen, lips busted. The kids, though, they were cringing. Scared. Most unconscious. One awake and babbling. I say pain can make a man: those boys got scars that night they’ll wear with pride one day, once the fear fades enough to let pride back in. That’s the last mugging they’ll ever try.”
“Margot beat them up?”
“Margot didn’t do nothing. No blood on his hands, nor under his nails, neither. When he came round, though, I heard rapture in his voice. Like I hadn’t since the war, you understand? Like he’d found something he never knew was lost. He thanked me. I took him back, cleaned him up with cheap rum, and he didn’t flinch when I poured it on his cuts. The Penitents came by to see if he could name his attackers, and he said no. So they left, and he left, and I thought that was the end.”
“But he came back.”
“He did. The next week, at the reading, he spoke thunder words with a hurricane voice. When he was done they screamed for more. Eve dragged him into the light. He had other poems he hadn’t finished yet; he said them, and the crowd roared. The next week we gave him his own gig, and he killed again. Two weeks later, folk came in raincloud masses.”
“And I missed all this.”
“That’s what you get working so hard, as if that’d save you from what soured twixt you and Claude.” He wound his broken fingers together, then unwound them as if scattering water drops on the table.
“Thanks for the editorial,” she said. “I saw Margot a few weeks back. He was good. I wouldn’t say genius.”
“I’m talking then, and you’re talking now. He’s had a bad run the last couple months. A curse broken. The voice took him up, and he wrote in its grip for two seasons, and it set him down as fast. Hurts, but hell, six months is more than most folks get out of love. I’ve known men who chased the line for decades after one night’s grasp of what Edmond Margot held for half a year. He doesn’t need your pity.”
Six months. Kai frowned. “This started, what, eight months back?”
“I can count. And I can feel the seasons change.” He opened his mouth wide, baring yellowed teeth. The point of his left incisor was missing, snapped off, casualty of some God Wars fight. “Eight months it was.”
“Where does he live?”
“Why do you care?” He drank his coffee again in one long gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and sighed, heavy and wet and sated.
“I want to talk to Mister Margot,” she said, “about faith.”