Chapter Text
The scent was a new one, rich somehow yet leathern. Not the tannery stench that seethed from the factor-dens in Crucible at the top of the Quarter, but blew downgorge in bad winds. Not the stiff ascetic smell of rawhide, or the shadowy svelte scent of the netchskin sheathe on his father’s sword: the one he got out only on Summoning or Naming Days. It was none of those. Even so, it was close to them somehow – not quite kin but nearish-by – though tempered and complicated.
Simra opened his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The scent was strange when he tasted it too. Not bad but illicit perhaps, like he was sampling something never meant for him.
The shop was all but a cave. An almost-tunnel, it never quite dug itself deep enough for long enough to lead anywhere. It was like so many of the homes in the Grey Quarter: a warren hacked into the walls of a gulley that split the city’s bedrock like a wound.
It was familiar for that, almost like Simra’s own warren a ways downgorge. Same broad stoop-ceilinged main chamber. Same irregular walls and tapering passage, tailing back into narrow private places and storage holes, curtained off from the world. It was larger maybe, and it seemed a waste for one mer to live here almost alone. But that left room for strange heady scents, flushes of luxury, shelves stacked with treasure.
Scrolls upon scrolls lay on their sides, jostling together in driftwood racks. Like the bottles stowed in grids behind the Clay Lantern Cornerclub’s rough brick bar. Like the dark glass bottles, they were forbidden special things that Simra longed to taste.
Shallow niches pock-marked the walls, and in them sat leather-covered things, seeping out a smell of white bean-spice and that rich not-tannery scent. Books. More of them than Simra had ever seen in one place before.
Some were thick-spined and majestic, bound in layered patterned dark-lustrous hide, old in the way Simra could tell just by looking and knowing he shouldn’t touch, no matter how he wanted to. Many were smaller and slim, elegant and skinned front to back with gull-coloured creamy paper, and all other colours besides. Some were strapped closed, with buckles or even small clever locks — like what they held would escape if it could.
In the book-shop’s main chamber, Simra looked on with wide eyes. He’d come early into his growth and stood tall for his years, but awkward-boned, with a wiry length to his limbs that he didn’t yet know how to use. Not an uncommon sight in the Grey Quarter – one more thin hungry slip of a mer-child, ashen-skinned, chalk-haired – he belonged here. It was this shop that had lost its way.
“What’re they for?” Simra asked sharply, forgetting his manners. He jabbed out a sudden hand, recently grown long-fingered, outstripping the rest of him. He pointed out a book-niche at random.
“Teaching,” said the shop-keep. A tall mer, dark-haired, straight-backed as a spear and starkly neat in the chaos and filth of the Quarter. “We favour them. Buy them, open them up, read the words on their pages. And in return, they make us happy. And they teach us.”
“Teach what?” Simra followed. His brow was deep-furrowed with questions.
“Oh, anything,” the shop-keep smiled. “Anything there is to know, you can find in a book. That is, if you know the right books to read.”
“And you’ve got the right ones?”
“Some of them, yes. Depending on what you want to know.”
His smile changed his face somehow. It was a small smile, thin as a spider’s web. It slanted and darkened his eyes. Like he knew secrets he’d love to share, if only telling them was sweeter than keeping them for himself. His name was Senvalis, Simra’s mother had said. Be polite to him, she’d said, for the shop had only recently passed on to him. Something sad had happened to his father, the old owner, but Simra’s mother wouldn’t say what.
Simra unknowingly copied that smile. He made his eyes sharp and his mouth a thin curve, as if he knew at least one big jagged fulsome truth. “Mam said books are where your folk keep their stories,” he began carefully. “Why?”
“Why not just remember them, you mean? Like ‘your folk’ do? We have our reasons. Perhaps it’s because we don’t trust our memories like you so clearly do,” Something tart dripped from his voice for a moment and then was gone. “Or perhaps it’s because, if you write a story down and put it in a book, the story will remember itself. A story you remember and tell out loud is like something growing, living, changing. Swimming fish and flying birds and running deer, and so on.”
Simra smiled his own smile at that. A wider smile, more crooked: half sharp little children’s teeth, half strong grown-up ones, all in vying disarray as they tried to fit in the same small mouth.
“But like anything living, those stories can die,” Senvalis carried on. “When no-one remembers them, and when the telling stops, they blink out. Or else they get told so many ways, they twist and change, and aren’t what they are anymore. Life’s funny like that. Chaotic.”
The mer-child’s smile fell. The furrow of his brow crumpled from frown to scowl. A small oil-fiery sputter of anger up-guttered in his belly. He felt cheated. He opened his mouth to object – it wasn’t fair! – but Senvalis carried on speaking, slow and inexorable.
“But a story in a book? That’s not the same at all. It’s not living in the same way, so it doesn’t change, and it doesn’t die. It just is. Constant and stubborn and solid, I always think. Like stone, or the earth under our feet. It doesn’t need a teller, because it’ll tell itself just as well, long after the one who first told it’s gone.”
Simra drew in a deep breath to douse his anger. He couldn’t argue with the older mer. He spoke too well, too surely, and what he said must’ve been right. Powerful things, potent stuff — maybe these were the secrets that made him smile.
“Oh,” Simra murmured.
He pawed at the floor with his feet, and his face fidgetted for a long moment, standing and shifting his weight in silence. He looked around the shop and saw cobwebs in the corners, dust on the floor. But the vibrant solid books remained. He focused and fought hard to remember something, biting his tongue while he tried to catch a slippery fish of a thought. In time, he recalled why he’d come.
“Mam said she needs paper,” he finally mumbled, almost shy now. “Whatever you’ve got, she said.”
“Your mother being…Dunsamsi Ishar, yes?” Simra nodded at his grubby feet as Senvalis glided to a curtained off part of the shop. “How much does she need? What sort?”
“Mm,” Simra made a murmuring ponder-sound somewhere in a backward part of his mouth before answering. “Not much, she said. Only a little. Like this.” He held out his hands vertically, like he was opening a foot or so of scroll between them. Like how he imagined he would, if he was going to read from one of the scrolls, and find out what stony stable story it held. “Whatever you’ve got, she said. Nothing too…”
“Costly?”
Simra nodded. Senvalis opened the curtain and stepped beyond it, to search through shelves of things, boxes of things, stacks of things. Simra didn’t watch. His eyes were drawn behind the shop-keep. An old mer sat there in an old chair, very still. His beard was unkempt and his hair was long, but it was his face which struck Simra. His jaw was too slack, and his eyes were blank except for the smallest touch of sadness that made Simra’s scalp crawl. He remembered why his mother had said he must be kind to Senvalis.
The curtain closed and the shop-keep came back with a foot or so of rough-hemmed rag-paper. “Going to write down your own story on it, hm?” he asked with a shadow of that sly smile.
“I ca—…” Simra began, then stopped himself. “Yes,” he said, lying proud with a touch of mischief. “Maybe.” Be polite, he remembered. “Please, ser Senvalis, how much thank you?”
“For your mother? Oh,” the shop-keep peered into the palm of his hand. “Twopence, no more.”
Simra gave his best wince, and looked sidelong at the length of paper.
“Two’s a fair price to a friend for handmade paper,” Senvalis said firmly.
“Handmade in the Quarter,” Simra mumbled as if to himself. The paper was the product of rag-pickers — he’d worked that job and knew the wage-by-weight.
“The Nords still prefer their pages made from skin…”
“Mam said not to pay Nord-prices for something that ain’t Nord parchment.”
“Then you’ll pay Dunmer prices for good Dunmer paper, made the way my father taught me.” Senvalis’ voice had stretched tight.
“To you, ser,” Simra pushed, just a little, “or to someone else.”
“Twopence,” Senvalis said, trying not to show his irritation, his half-gritted teeth. “And your mother gets ink or another half-sheet.”
“Please, ser,” Simra grinned, “she’ll take the extra sheet, and for one and a half if it’s the same to you. Penny for one, half for a half, hm?”
“I bet she will,” Senvalis almost groaned, and set to cutting the length of paper, binding it with coarse twine. He held out his palm.
Simra brought out a ragged pouch from somewhere unseen, close to his skin, and fished through. He placed three warm clipped half-moons of Nord copper in Senvalis hand, and drew the tube of paper from Senvalis’ hand. The pouch vanished again, and Simra slipped the paper into a sack strapped across his shoulders.
“Blessings, ser!” he grinned, taking one last look at the shop’s treasures, before ducking through the frontmost curtain and beyond.
Senvalis was left in the shade and quiet of his shop. He opened the back-curtain to stow and hide the coin. “Brat,” he sighed under his breath. But he’d spent too long already on haggling and tending the shop, and he could feel it already: the prickling beginning of guilt. Senvalis turned to his father, still but still living – like a tree maybe – in the chair where he spent all his days now. He’d need reminding to eat, he’d need washing — as ever, he’d need help. So, with loving pragmatism, Senvalis set to helping.
Outside, Simra scampered through the precarious creak and windward sway of the Rigs. A bristling forest of timber scaffolds and cargo nets, the Rigs hung and clamped onto the walls of the Gray Quarter gorge like moss. Everchanging with collapses and repairs, they formed a network of haphazard connections between the burrows and warrens and carven shelves that riddled the Quarter’s sheer stony sides.
The day was windless but humid and sodden with Rain’s Hand drizzle. The scent of foot-churned mud and sweating filth rose up like steam from the gulley-floor below. The Rigs were wet today.
Simra kept his footing careful, and turned onto solid rock when he could, through a nameless seam of dark tunnel that curved through the stone and hewed down towards the next level. He’d avoid the danger of the tunnels most days, but in the rain they were the safer option. Still, he hugged his gather-sack close to him. He walked in a deflecting way, putting stress in his stride where he really felt none — all to distract from the hidden stow and telltale burden of his purse. He hurried on without rushing, trying not to show his nerves, until he broke out into daylight once more.
The way home was simple from there. Downgorge one more level. Along Chiming Row, where hanging arrays of reed and shell and wood made rackety-music that drowned out the din from the Eastern Wheel-House, so constant elsewhere in the Quarter. Into a short crack of an alley in the gulley-wall. Then through the rattling beaded day-curtain that covered the threshold, and into the scents and shadows of home.
It was a cave-like chamber, sparse but seeming cluttered for the closeness of its walls and its windowless gloom. A heavy sail-cloth curtain draped over part of the rightmost wall, and continued round to the chamber’s back, where cave tapered into tunnel. A weak long-burning magelight hung drowsy near the central ceiling, throwing out a sheen of dim-red glow.
Simra stepped over the guest’s glyph his mother had daubed on the threshold floor to keep out unwanted visitors. He sniffed and tested the air. Something acrid loomed large over the familiar smells of home. His mother sat cross-legged before the hearth-pit, stirring one of her rendering kettles. Simra braved the fumes and stepped closer.
“You’re first back,” she said, looking over one shawl-draped shoulder. “I expected you all later. Didn’t think anyone’d have to bear this reek but me…” She cracked a salty half-smile: the echoing ancestor of Simra’s own crooked one.
“What is it?” Simra asked, leaning onto his toes too peer into the kettle. The liquid was muddy grey and glue-textured.
“Not dinner thank the ancestors. Alchemy. Crabshell ash and gull quills mostly. Rain’s Hand means little children’ll be coming down with the Damp Lung by the dozen soon enough. This’ll help some.”
Simra made a murring throat-noise, like he understood better than he did, and watched his mother stir the brew. The smell was bad, but knowing his mother could do these things – help people like this – put a small warm glimmering pride in his belly at how clever she was. He didn’t mind the smell, so long as he could watch and share in that.
“I got your things,” he finally said, and took out the paper and pouch. “Penny and a half for half again as much paper.” His mother had turned fully to him and fixed him with her near-black eyes. Simra bit his lip, worrying for a moment. “Is that…good?”
“It’s very good,” she purred, taking the two things from him, wrapping one arm round his shoulders and drawing him close. She pressed a softish kiss to the short downy burr of Simra’s scalp, still shorn to the quick by tradition until he was older. He squirmed and writhed against her hold and her kiss, and bit back a gurgle of laughter. He broke free and stepped back, blushing, rubbing his forehead like he’d been swatted, not kissed.
“What’s it for?” he asked. “The paper.”
“Nothing very much, Sim. A favour. A friend of a neighbour needs a scroll enscribed and’ll pay good coin for it. A full shilling.” There was a tightness in her voice no-one but family would recognise. She said the price like it was a talisman against something. “That’s silver, Sim. Two weeks’ good eating for the three of us and a little left over for a rainy day.”
“It’s a rainy day today,” Simra said. “Does that mean something nice now as well as then?” He watched as his mother’s face went stiff and drawn, papery like birch bark. Her eyes were heavy, tired, dull for a moment. “It’s alright if it doesn’t,” he said quickly. “It’s fine.”
“Sorry, sweet. Soon maybe. Maybe some time soon.”
There were willows that grew up on the crags above the docks, where the Wheel-House crouched over the river. Their trunks were thick and sturdy, but their limbs were twisty-slim and reached out into the wind like they were trying to catch the spray from the big churning water-wheel. But Simra mostly remembered their leaves when they had them: long and straightish and hanging down in thick veils. With her short solid body and long strong arms, her hanging curtains of bleached-bone hair, he thought the willows were like his mother in their way. Or else she was like them — deep roots, outreaching arms ready to catch whatever was falling.
His father came home, quiet and tired from the docks with cargo-hook in hand. If she was a willow-tree he was a willow-branch scarecrow, woven together from thin cords, flexy gnarled switches, but with red-gold dancing eyes deep-set under his scar-dotted brow.
Soraya came after. His fierce venturesome sister, with bruises on her knees and slate-scrapes on her feet and hands from the city-roofs. His brave high-climbing sister, seeing the start of her fifteenth wet Windhelm Spring — those three-and-some years she had on him seemed lifetimes of experience then. She was old enough that her hair was finally allowed to start growing. So it grew in wild twists and curls like weeds tangling up between flagstones, some left alone, some proudly gathered into tied-off tufts by Soraya’s own rough hands.
The rains came on harder the following day. They carried on through the next and the next. The bottom of the Gray Quarter turned to a swamp of sucking stinking mud. Sections of the Rigs collapsed weekly as their foundation-shafts gave way. Simra’s mother set two broken arms and a shattered shin, first from the collapses, then from the scrabbling efforts at repairs. Otherwise, she cared for Simra: one of the older Quarter children to take sick with the Damp Lung.
His father came home one night with news of a cargo-ship fire at the docks and a bay full of jettisoned goods. The morning after, when they were alone, his mother helped Simra from his hammock and over to the hearth.
He’d coughed himself hoarse and had no voice, but managed to be full of words, even if just through gestures, leering vivid exaggerated faces, rolling eyes and sudden lurches of grin. Sitting down by the cold lifeless hearth, he grimaced, and swallowed an oncoming cough, then nodded to the grey light coming from beyond the curtained front doorway.
“No,” his mother said. “You’re not going out like this. Not till you’re well. Doesn’t mean you’re wasting your time though. I’m not letting you. You’re going to learn something, but it’s got to be our little secret. No telling your father, hm?”
Simra nodded eagerly. Even sick, a secret was still a tempting thing to share in.
She knelt by the hearthside and pointed into the blank dusting of white ash that stood out on the blackish stone. Slow and deliberate, she began to trace things: shapes, swirls, lines, horizontally through the cinders.
“This is what I’m going to teach you,” she said. “A Zainab in the Grazelands can go their whole life not seeing a single written word and do just fine. But here in the West? A Dunmer in Skyrim? You’re going to learn their letters, how to write and read them. It won’t make you one of them, but maybe it’ll stop them thinking you’re less than them, hm? Now, sweet. Look, listen, and — oh, well don’t repeat for now, but mouth the sounds, yes?”
The learning was slow, but sped once Simra could speak again. With talking to bridge the gap, the distance between the strange Tamrielic letters and the noises and words of the language he already knew seemed shorter. If he spoke the sounds while he wrote, he remembered the letters better.
Spring drew to a close and the Damp Lung slipped away entirely. But Simra spent part of each day in the warren with his mother, secretly spelling and seeing letters in the cinders. He learnt quickly and hungrily, stealing uptown with Soraya for an excuse to read the Tamrielic signs under his breath.
His mother moved him onto shaping letters with a stick in the ash now, not his finger. So he’d know how to handle a pen, she said. She told him slow meandering stories each day, writing names and words he liked the sound and feel of in the ash as they went. He practised in secret, scritching a twig over the wall by his hammock, writing invisibly, tracelessly.
“You’re ready,” His mother said, one congealing late Summer day. “I’ve been saving this.” She brought out the half-sheet of paper he’d bargained for back in Rain’s Hand, and set by it a stick of charcoal.
Simra’s chest ached proud and giddy, looking at it, knowing.
“It’s yours. Write what you want. Your own story maybe, or anything else. Something smaller to start, hm? Let’s see…in your own time…”
He took up the charcoal, bent and squinted over the sheet, and wrote with slow deliberate care:
Simra. My name is Simra. Simra Hishkari. Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra…
He wrote his name till it turned to mute noise in his mouth and became senseless on the page. And he laughed out loud to see it there, over and over again. Like something important; like a chant. Even in his shaky halting Tamrielic hand, it looked good. It felt better. Powerful, potent — like what Senvalis had said all those months ago, when he spoke about written words.