Episode 00
A is for Affe
There's a boy on the long walk, on his knees, with a cloth, and I've decided he's going to be my friend. He doesn't know yet. I'm going to tell him in a minute.
I'm Chuan. I'm eight. I'm the prince, which means I'm the only boy in the family, which is a bigger thing than it sounds and I'll get to it. I'm sitting on the edge of the pond in the east garden with my feet in the water and my hat on, the blue one with the brim, and I've been watching him do the floor for the whole length of the walk, which is a hundred and twelve tiles, I've counted, and he does every one the same. Most pages skip the ones under the benches. He doesn't skip.
"Do you want to play?" I say.
He looks round for who I'm talking to. Pages do that. It's like a rule.
"You," I say. "On the floor. With the cloth. Do you want to play?"
And then the thing happens that I like best about being me, and I watch it go down the whole walk like wind going through grass. The tutor at the far end opens his mouth and shuts it. The guard looks at the wall. The woman with the tray, who had stopped to look at the page the way they all do (I'll get to that as well), starts walking again. Nobody can say anything. If the prince wants to play with the page, the page plays, and the city rearranges itself round the fact, and the rearranging takes about a second and a half. I've timed it.
"Yes," says the page.
"Good," I say, and take my hat off, which I do for nobody, and put it on his head. "It's too big for you. Come on."
About the hat, because people ask.
I always have one on. A nice one. Never the same one two days running; I have a shelf, and a woman whose whole job is the shelf. Chanel, my sister, says I wear them the way other children wear a face. I don't know what that means, but she said it in the voice, so it's true.
The page is smaller than me. He doesn't know how old he is, not exactly, because where he comes from they started counting on the wrong day, and I'll explain that, it's the best story I know and I've heard it four times now. He has long hands. Too long, like somebody made them for a bigger boy and he's growing into them. And his face is the thing everybody notices, and I noticed it too, and I'm going to say it the way it is: he looks like a boy, and like a girl, and mostly like neither, and people look at him twice and then a third time to work out which twice they meant. The women in the palace stop when he goes past. Not all of them. Most of them. The one with the tray. The two at the well. My own sisters, once, on the stair, both at the same time, which I've never seen them do about anything.
"I like girls," he told me, on the second day, in the garden, when a woman had gone past and stopped and gone on. "For the record."
"I didn't ask."
"Everybody asks. I'm saying it first."
I asked my mother's ladies why they stop. One of them said, "Which one is he?" and I said he's a page, and she said, "No, I mean which," and went red, and I've stopped asking my mother's ladies things.
I've worked out why they stop, and it isn't only the face. It's that he listens. That's what a page is for. You're the boy in the corner with a cloth, and the door shuts and the grown-ups talk and you're not there, not in any way the room understands, and you hear everything. He says it's the best job in the world for a child who's decided to find out what he is. He recommends it. I told him nobody has ever recommended being a page to anybody in the history of anything, and he said, "I know. I'm doing it now."
You should know about the city, since I live in it and you don't.
Everyone here gets twelve thousand years. That's the first thing. Not the poor people outside; us, inside the walls. You have an account, and the years are on it, and every year you use comes off, and other things come off it too: the physician's fee, a fine, a bad hour. The men who keep the accounts are in the Kanzlei on ladders, all day, writing, and they don't look down, ever. I've stood underneath them for a whole hour to check. The book they write in is the ledger, and it's very old, and there's a saying in the city about it that grown-ups say when a child is careless: a four instead of a nine ends a family. Meaning a clerk once wrote one. Meaning a family ended. Nobody tells me which.
The page has a different first thing about the city and it's the drains, and he's right, and nobody's ever said it to me before because nobody else spends the day on the floor.
"Look down," he said. We were in the street outside the east gate.
I looked down. There's a ditch. Down the middle of the street, where everything goes. It's always been there.
"Somebody dug that in a hurry a very long time ago," said the page, "and nobody's ever been paid to think about it since. In summer the streets go bad. You know they do. Some years there's sickness standing in them like water, and the men on the ladders write it down, and the physicians cure it, one person at a time, for a fee, off the account. Twelve thousand years each. The best physicians who have ever lived. And nobody's said, we could fix the ditch."
"You could say it."
"I'm a page."
"I could say it."
He looked at me from under my hat. "You could," he said, and we both knew I wasn't going to, because I'd have to explain why I'd been looking down, and princes don't. You can live twelve thousand years in this city and step over the same puddle for all of them. He says a place can be the cleverest place there has ever been and still not want to look at its feet. He says a lot of things like that. I write them down and pretend they're mine.
Here's the story. The one about the wrong day. I'm telling it the way he tells it, in the garden, with his feet in the pond, and if I get a number wrong it's because he changes them slightly every time and I've picked the ones I like.
He was born in a temple. Up. That's what they called where it was: up, in the mountains, further than anyone from here has ever been, stone, old, and monks. There wasn't food. Not the way there's food here, where you assume it. Somebody had a bowl, and the bowl went round, and the rule was that it went round fairly, and the monks had made fairness into a science, because that's what you do when there isn't enough of anything except time.
They had a serum. This is the good part.
Mercury, and a plant that grows on one side of one mountain in one month, ground together, in warm water. Every child got it. The idea was that everyone got the same chance. Same start. Same length of road. They had tables for it on the wall of the kitchen, worked out over centuries: this much at one year, this much at four, this much at nine. And they measured it with a spoon, and it had been the same spoon for longer than anybody could say, and they were precise. The page says they were the most precise people he's ever met. I said, "You've met the men on the ladders," and he said, "I said people."
Then somebody changed the tables.
"Who?"
"Nobody knows. A new method. Better, they said. More exact. All I know is that in the year I was weaned the numbers on the kitchen wall were different from the year before, and the spoon was the same spoon, and they gave me what the new wall said."
"Which was?"
"For a child my size?" He put his hand flat about a foot over the water. "Enough for a horse."
He doesn't remember it. He was told. He went grey, and then blue, and then a colour they didn't have a word for, and the monks dug the hole. He always stops there and makes me sit with it. They dug the hole. Two of them, with the small shovels, in the ground behind the kitchen where the other ones were, and they said the words, and they wrapped him up, and they went to bed, and they came back in the morning to put him in.
And he was sitting up.
Sitting up, in the wrapping, in the kitchen, looking at the wall with the tables on it. The monk who found him said he was reading it. At eighteen months. The page doesn't know if that's true. He says it's the kind of thing that gets said afterwards about a child who's supposed to be in a hole. I think it's true. I think he'd read anything.
"And then what did they do?"
"What monks do. They were surprised. Then they were concerned. Both of those wore off. And what's underneath surprised and concerned, when they wear off, is arithmetic."
"What's the arithmetic?"
"A thing like that is probably worth something."
So they sold him. Down the mountain and a long way east, to the palace, the rich one, the one with the twelve thousand years and the ledger and the men on ladders. To us. He came in through the east gate in a cart with some cloth and a lamp, and he cost, he says, about what the lamp cost, and I've decided not to look that up.
That's why he doesn't know his age. They counted from the morning he sat up. The day before that he was dead, on paper, and the monks don't cross things out.
Now me, because he's had a whole section and I'm the prince.
In this city everyone is twins. It isn't luck. It's fashion. There's a thing that glows, and they keep it in lead, and it can take one child in the belly and make it two, and for a few thousand years nobody who could afford it has had one of anything. And it went further, the way fashion does: the daughters are made to look like the mother. Exactly. You pass the Queen and her girls in a corridor and you don't know which one to bow to, so you bow to all three, and that's the point. Three of the same face. And the city's mostly women, three or four to every man, and nobody thinks that's strange, and the page noticed it in about a minute, because he's from up.
I was going to be twins as well. Everyone was.
But when my mother was carrying, an aunt kicked her in the belly, in a doorway, over a thing nobody will tell me, and it took three days of the best physicians who have ever lived to get anybody out of her at all, and they got one. Me. One boy. In a city of pairs.
That's the first thing anyone ever knew about me, before the hats: the one who came out alone.
I don't mention it. I don't have to. The whole city does it for me.
My family, since I've started.
There were five families in the beginning, and everything in this part of the world that's worth coming from comes from one of the five. Ours was the least. That's not modesty; it's in the ledger. What changed it was a woman called Tsunade, a long way back, so far back there was still a war on between the ninja and the gods, and the tutor says that sentence with a straight face and so will I.
The kingdom was called Aktzen then, and it was losing. And Tsunade did the thing a losing kingdom with daughters can do, and she did it without a sword, which my grandmother says is the only way anybody has ever changed a war. She made bonds. Marriages. A whole season of them, one daughter of the house to every kingdom that would take one, the way you'd spread money across banks so no one bank could lose all of it.
But the most precious daughter, the one she'd have kept if she could have kept any, she sent across the border that isn't a border, to the safest kingdom of the other worlds, the one place the war couldn't reach. And the safest kingdom, to support its new relations, sent a dowry. A Mitgift. We still say the word; it's stayed in the family like a spoon.
It was an army of dragons, and the use of their power.
Four hundred of them walked in through the eastern gate behind the bride. The war between the ninja and the gods ended in a season. And that's how the dragons came to this city: not captured, not bred, not found. Given. In a marriage contract, the way you'd give a bride a set of plates. Nobody ever called it anything else and nobody ever asked the dragons. I asked the page if you could ask a dragon. He said you could ask anything anything. It's the answers that cost.
After her the land took our side. The ground gave up a fortune, the workshops gave up things nobody had asked for, and the twelve thousand years started. Inside the walls they call it destiny. The page says from outside it looks like a woman who did one thing right at the one moment it counted, which is what destiny generally looks like from outside. I told him he'd never been outside. He said, "I'm from up. Everything's outside from up."
How close Tsunade is to me, I can't tell you. The ledger has it, and I'm not allowed to look, and I've tried.
The marriages weren't only hers. You need this bit or nothing after it makes sense.
Nobody in this part of the world marries for themselves. There's a layer between the ancient kingdom next door and everybody else, a second skin, and the thing that decides who crosses it, and which way, and holding whose hand, is a system. The Kaiser of Japan made it. Or Chanel did; some people tell it that way, and she doesn't correct them, and she's seventeen, so it isn't possible, but she likes it. Whoever made it was a monster of a particular kind, the tutor says, and was married to a djinn, and could walk through the djinn's fantasies as he pleased, the way you'd walk through rooms, and came back from them with the most paranoid arrangement anyone has ever folded a continent into.
My grandmother does origami. Real paper. She sits with it in the evening and she says every family is a sheet, and every marriage is a fold, and there are twelve hundred years of folds planned out in advance, whose daughter to whose son in which decade, so that when you let go of the whole thing it holds its shape. Penibel, she says. Fussy past the point of sense. And nearly every monarch on either side of the layer signed up to it, because the other choice was to mess things up, and nobody in this world has ever been forgiven for messing things up.
The Kaiser doesn't call it origami. He has a kaleidoscope, a brass one, and he turns it, and all the little pieces fall into a pattern, and that's the marriages. I've seen it. He let me hold it once and I turned it and he took it back quite fast.
Not everybody signed. The trolls didn't. The troll exchange kingdom, which is what it calls itself and which I'm not going to explain because I can't, believes in the old way: you meet someone, you fall, it's a disaster, everybody sings about it afterwards. My grandmother says that's tragic, and romantic, and that the origami had already calculated for it. The romantics were a known quantity. There's a fold for them.
What the folds hadn't calculated for was us. We don't trust it. This city has never trusted anything it hasn't measured itself. So we take our science and apply it inside the folds, quietly, to improve them, and Gucci, my other sister, says it breaks nearly every rule the system has and makes chaos inside a thing that only works if nothing inside it moves, and then she says, "So I'm going to fix it from the inside," and goes back to her tables. She says that about most things. She's usually right.
The sisters. Everyone watches the sisters. That's what they're for, in this city; you watch them the way you watch weather.
Chanel has black hair, up, and it takes forty minutes of somebody's morning, and she looks at a room in a way that tells the room what it's for. The page says she's stunning. Not beautiful, though she is; stunning, the way a door slamming is stunning. He said that on the third day and I've been using it since.
When Chanel comes down the long walk the tiles line up. I don't mean that. I mean it's how it looks.
Gucci has gold hair and a laugh you can hear across a courtyard and she likes everyone. Not people; everyone, one at a time, individually. She does the lamps in the evening, all along the long walk, though there's a woman for it, and she's the cleverest person in the city, and everybody knows it, and it's why she's let off governing: she has better things to do, and everyone agrees, including her. Chanel governs. Gucci understands things. That's the split.
Same face, both of them. Same as my mother's. That was the point.
The page kissed one of them. On the cheek, in a corridor, on the fifth day, because she bent down to fix my hat on him and it was there. And afterwards he said he didn't know which one it was, and everybody pretended with him. The guard pretended. The tutor pretended. I pretended. That's the sort of thing three of the same face is for, and nobody decided it; it's just what you do.
He knew. It was Gucci. She's the one who bends down.
Something my grandmother told me, at the origami, because I'm nearly nine and nine is when it happens.
The wolf challenge is for boys. It's always been for boys. Every son of this house goes out at nine, alone, up into the hills where the wolves are, and the ones who come back are princes and the ones who don't are mourned, and no daughter had ever been sent, because no daughter had ever asked.
Sakura asked. She was the first daughter of the clan, in the generation that matters. Not Tsunade's daughter; same blood, same walls, and how far apart they are, the ledger has that too. She asked at eight. Her mother said no. And she went anyway, on a night with no moon, and came back four days later, walking, with something in her hand that my grandmother won't describe, and after that nobody in this city ever again used the word princess in the tone they'd been using it in.
"What was in her hand?"
"You'll find out when you go."
"I'm going to the wolves?"
"You're nine in the spring," said my grandmother, and folded.
There's a thing she says about Sakura, and about eldest daughters in this clan, that I don't understand yet: that once every few thousand years one of them gives up her existence to the world, like weather. I asked the page what it meant. He said he'd only been here a month. I said that was a page answer. He said, "Yes."
We play at the ledger. All of us, the palace children. I want to tell you about the games because they're the best games there are and nobody outside has them.
Everybody here is paranoid about time. Of course they are; it's the money. You'll hear two women at the well arguing about whether a thing took forty minutes or fifty, because forty minutes is forty minutes off the account, and it's fashionable to be careful about it, the way in some places it's fashionable to be busy. And so we play at it. Doors, and who owes what, and the ladders, and one of us is the clerk with the four, and somebody's family ends, and they have to go and sit under the bench till the round's over. The page thinks it's a strange thing to play at. I told him children everywhere play at shops. He said, "Yes. Shops."
We made him play. He's bad at it. Here's how it went, the first time, on the long walk, with the tiles for the ledger.
"You're the clerk," I said. "Get on the bench. That's the ladder. Don't look down."
"What do I write?"
"Whatever we owe. I've had forty minutes of the cook's daughter's morning. Write forty."
"Fifty," said the cook's daughter.
"Forty. He's the clerk, he decides."
The page looked at the cook's daughter and looked at me. "Forty-five," he said, and wrote it on the tile with his finger, and everybody stopped.
"You can't do that," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because it isn't a number anybody said." And it isn't. The clerk writes what the account has, not what's fair; fair's the monks' thing. He didn't understand that and I don't think he ever will, and I'm putting it in because it's the only game in the city he loses, and I like having one.
And I have a system. Mine. I made it when I was five, in this garden, and I've shown it to nobody except the page, and now you.
Every person in the city is a letter, so you can keep track. A is for Affe. That's the funniest thing in any language and I won't be argued with. Then B, and on through, and it goes the same every time, I've said it so often it comes out like a song, and every time it goes from G straight to K.
No H.
"Why not?" said the page.
"We struck it."
"Who's we?"
"We," I said, and he waited, and I didn't say, and he didn't ask again, because he's a page and I have a hat and you don't. You skip the two after it as well. You go from G and you land on K like jumping a puddle.
K is for Kralle.
That one's the best after Affe. It means a claw. It's what you'd want in your hand, up in the hills, on a night with no moon.
I'll say something about this year while I'm on it, because it's the first strange thing I've noticed on my own instead of the page noticing it and me writing it down. Nobody wants twins any more. Just like that. Last year the whole city was pairs and this year the fashion's over and nobody can tell you why. My mother's ladies talk about it at the well and even they don't know. And a man from the Kanzlei came to the garden last week, a clerk, and asked me to say my alphabet again, slowly, and wrote it down, and when I got to K he asked me to say the bit before it once more, and I did, G and then K, and he nodded and went back up his ladder. I don't know what that was. I'm putting it here in case it's something.
It's early. The morning after all that, and the light's on the pond and the page is already on the long walk, because he starts before the birds, and I've come out in the grey one with the wide brim because we're riding today.
Horses. The whole family, and the guard, out through the east gate and along the border road to the ally's side and back before dark. Chanel's coming, which means it's an occasion. Gucci's coming, which means she's bringing a book. Pages don't ride. I asked. Nobody can say no to me except about horses, apparently, which I'm putting in the alphabet under N.
He gets up off his knees when he sees me and he's got the cloth in one hand and the hat I gave him on the first day in the other, the blue one, because he doesn't wear it working. He never wears it working. He hangs it on a hook in his room and he puts it on for the garden, and it's still too big for him.
"You'll be back before dark," he says.
"Before dark. Then the garden. Then I'll tell you what the ally's side looks like, and you can tell me it's outside."
"It is outside."
"Everything's outside from up."
He almost laughs. He doesn't laugh much. It's a page thing.
Below in the yard they're bringing the horses round, and I can hear my mother's ladies, and Chanel's voice telling the yard what it's for, and I take the grey hat off, which I do for nobody, and give it to him to hold with the other one.
"Two's too many for you," I say. "I'll want that one back."