Xeno the Foreigner
When Xeno the Foreigner was accused by the Overseer’s nephew of embezzlement, all the scriveners looked up from their desks long enough to shake their heads and mutter their displeasure.
Xeno was strange certainly, what with his long scraggly beard and incomprehensible way of speaking, but he was unfailingly honest.
No one believed it.
Besides, everyone knew it was the nephew himself who was stealing money from the till to pay for his nightly debaucheries out in the Vinegar District.
The little shit had even bragged about it.
When Xeno stood from his desk in indignation, his face red and his beard waggling, going so far as to knock over his quills and his jar of wyvern’s blood ink, some scrivener even went so far as to mutter an audible approval:
Hear, hear!
Of course, all heads were bent down, hard at work, no one spoke a word not us, when the Overseer’s nephew’s eyes shot their direction.
Xeno sputtered, not shouting exactly, even angry scriveners didn’t shout, but close enough. The nephew just smiled.
When Xeno actually left his desk and marched past the nephew, head held high like a general, like a prophet, with his beard streaming behind him, straight toward the Overseer’s office, more than one scrivener actually ceased their ceaseless scribbling.
“No, Xeno!” someone may have said.
They all thought it.
This was a mistake only a foolish foreigner from the mountains could possibly make. No good could come of this.
Indeed, no good came of it.
Work practically stopped altogether (well, nearly — the old-timers had long ago learned the art of scroll-scratching without looking) as the scriveners listened to Xeno’s demands for a retraction, as he oh so stupidly accused the Overseer’s nephew of being the embezzler himself!
As if the Overseer did not know!
As if the Overseer, that fat goblin, did not himself embezzle any chance he got, and carouse his bulk through the fleshpots of Vinegar Hill to spend the Holy Corporation’s coin on whores and drink and gambling, and call it a business lunch!
Yet all agreed that despite his foolishness, Xeno was treated more unjustly than he deserved. The Overseer shouted like a bullhorn:
And he burst through the office door, sweaty and lumbering, one meaty green fist dragging poor Xeno out by that long beard.
Everyone knew the mountain foreigners prized their beards, gods knew why, and took them quite seriously. Religiously, even.
This was too much.
The Overseer threw struggling, pitiful Xeno to the floor, never releasing the beard, and bade his nephew hold him down.
The nephew, eager to learn the arts of overseeing, complied with rapidity.
With his heavy body pinning the gangly foreign scrivener to the floor, the Overseer snatched his knife from his belt and sliced through Xeno’s beard.
He had to saw at it a bit as if it had been made of wire and not hair. Everyone knew the mountain-folk were tougher than leather.
One could see in his eyes that Xeno would much rather the Overseer had taken a hand instead. Even his scrivening hand, which was silly, of course, but nevertheless one felt for him.
The cry that came out of him was truly awful.
Even the Overseer seemed surprised and he stepped back quickly, dropping his knife. “Yes, well. You’re lucky I leave you with your life, hill-worm. Nephew, get him out of here.”
In a daze, the nephew did as he was told, and Xeno, in a daze, did not struggle and allowed himself to be thrown out of the building. But in a moment all could hear him begin to wail, and it was said later by witnesses that he tore at the remains of his beard in agony, ripping it out by the roots.
The Overseer, realizing he still held the bulk of Xeno’s beard in his hand, cast it angrily and quickly to the floor as if it were a snake wrapped around his arm. Then he turned to the scriveners and shouted (Overseers could shout, not being scriveners): “Get back to work!” He withdrew to his office.
The scriveners, for their part, DID go back to work. What else were they to do?
But they muttered — oh how they muttered! — heads down but shaking: “Unjust! Unjust! Most unjust!”
Let us leave the scriveners to their impotent mutterings and find our wailing protagonist.
Xeno, as it turned out, did not rip the remains of his beard out by its roots, though he may have pulled out a few chunks in his agony.
Neither was he distraught solely over the loss of his beard.
The mountain people did put a great deal of stock in their soup-catchers, but they weren’t crazy.
It wasn’t the beard, but what the Overseer’s act represented that struck him to the heart. It was the cruelty, the injustice of it all. That morning he’d gone to work with a smile on his ruddy face, ready to fill the Holy Corporation’s scrolls with his scratch scratch scratchings.
And now?
He had nothing.
So much can change in a few unfortunate minutes.
A small crowd had gathered to watch the foreigner wail. Their faces were not unkind; they did not know enough to choose sides just yet. And though the city folk had an inborn distrust of mountain-folk, they hated the Overseer class even more.
Eventually, Xeno stopped his wailing and pounding on the door, encouraged no doubt by the stern looks of the Corporate Men-at-Arms coming to investigate (who tended to react slowly when they had not been given specific orders: on the one hand Xeno was obviously making an untoward scene, but on the other here was
a known scrivener allowed
on the premises).
Seeing they weren’t going to get any more entertainment out of him, most of the crowd dispersed, but one or two came to help him up and give him some encouragement:
“Buck up, hillbilly! It can’t be all that bad,”
and
“You’ll be back on your feet in no time, I’m sure,”
and
“It’ll grow back, friend — looks better this way anyway,”
and other such kindly meant nonsense.
Xeno said, to himself really — his only friends, if they could be called that, being inside
the building, scribbling their lives away.
Most of the city folk just shrugged: they didn’t even know what had happened to him.
But someone, with a woman’s voice or maybe a girl’s, whispered to him, just next to his ear so that he could feel their breath tickle:
Though he whipped his head around to see who had spoken to him, Xeno couldn’t tell — there were no women in sight. But truth be told, he didn’t think much of it at the time. Just then, he tried to pull his shirt closer around him but found he’d torn it asunder in his lamentations. So he held it together and walked off in the direction of his home. Dignity, he thought. I must get my Dignity. And for that, he required Justice.
He stumbled to his apartment building (close enough to Vinegar Hill to hear the drunkards most nights), creaked his way up the stairs to his home on the top floor, changed his shirt to his only other garment
(a kind of robe no longer fashionable even in his mountain home), and fetched his hidden reserve of coin.
He knew the city ways. It would take money to make justice.
But his dignity was worth it.
Then he was down the stairs once more in a flash, a prophet again (though with shorned beard),
his time for lamentation over.
He went to the magistrate.
Naturally, the “local” magistrate’s office was not located in Xeno’s neighborhood.
But the streets were sparsely crowded at this time of day (it was difficult for Xeno to believe it was still mid-afternoon and the workday had not yet ended — it felt to him like it should be night, cruel deeds were usually done in the night, was it not so? But not to Xeno. Cruelty had been done to him before tea-time!)
While he walked, he nursed his (entirely justified) aggrievement. Was he not an honest worker? Had he ever cheated his employer? Had he ever shown up to work late, or left early? No! He had done nothing to deserve this treatment. The magistrate would surely see that. He was there before he knew it.
“Xeno, sir. My lord magistrate, sir.”
“Sir, is fine, Xenon, I’m not one for titles. You can be at your ease. Sit down, sit down!”
Xeno sat, his hand unconsciously straying to his purse, tucked away inside his robe in an interior pocket.
This was not lost on the Lord Magistrate, whose eyes followed the gesture quickly before flicking back to Xeno. He seemed more interested now.
The Magistrate was a middle aged goblin, but looked like he kept himself in good shape.
He looked, in fact, like he’d come up through the guardsmen ranks himself. He was the type: tall, wide-shouldered, square jawed.
He looked like he could snap the gangly ex-scrivener like kindling if he so chose.
His manner of speech made this unlikely, however.
Xeno wasn’t particularly adept at distinguishing the various city accents and dialects, but even he could tell that the magistrate had some minor aristocracy running in his green blood.
Xeno found his facility with the strange tongue of the city, always tenuous, slipping. Why were written words so much easier? Though of course most of his work at the scriptorium was copying, and Xeno had always had an excellent artistic eye. He rarely needed to read the words he wrote.
“I see. Well, tell me your complaint, Zendo.”
Xeno did, putting particular emphasis on his stolen dignity. The magistrate listened for a while, then interrupted.
"Well, to be perfectly honest, my boy, I let you in here because I thought you might be the kind of foreigner with money. No offense.” (And he was the kind of person who truly meant no offense while saying the most offensive things.)
He continued, “You just never can tell with foreigners — I mean your clothes are no indication, I met one just the other day — no it was a month ago at Skreeb’s party, you always meet the strangest people at Skreeb’s, you know — anyway I could have sworn he was a beggar! But no no, Skreeb assured me he was rich, owned half of Tangier Isle! Amazing. So. Have you any? Money, I mean. Justice, I’m afraid, requires an investigation, and investigations cost. Cost money, I mean."
“How much investigation this buy me?” Xeno said, beginning to withdraw a few coins.
Xeno had anticipated this, though he had no idea how much the magistrate’s involvement would cost. He took out his purse and opened it, right there where the greedy official could easily see how few coins Xeno’s life savings represented. This was not the sort of foreigner with money, but the other kind. The kind good enough for cheap labor, but not much else.
The magistrate softened a bit and he took pity on this strange, distraught man. Of course he had no intention of doing any investigation, even if the man had been the right sort of foreigner. He was a magistrate, but justice really wasn’t part of his job description. He had enough trouble arresting unruly drunks. And anyway, an investigation into a Corporate Overseer was political. It would probably only end with the foreigner himself hanging from a gibbet.
Xeno looked down at his purse, unable to meet the magistrate’s eyes as his own filled with angry tears.
He said, louder than he meant to.
“No, I must have justice! This cannot be. It is not fair. It is not...correct. Am I not a man? I must have my dignity! Take my money! I give it you! You take! You make investigation!” And he thrust the open purse forward.
Well, even softened, the magistrate couldn’t refuse an offer like that. Money was money, after all. His conscience, such as it was, prevented him from taking the whole purse, but he selected a few coins, hmm, maybe just a few more, yes that should be enough, maybe just one more? No, no leave the man something to drown his disappointment with.
When he got outside the many-columned Dragon Temple (which housed the magistrate’s office), Xeno sat down hard on the marble steps. Unconsciously, he reached to stroke his lower beard (a nervous tic), but found it missing.
He angrily thrust his hands together instead, almost as if he was praying. Perhaps he did pray then, to his foreign mountain gods: perhaps he prayed that he had not given half of his life savings away to a corrupt bureaucrat who would do nothing for him. Or at least for the strength to believe that he had not. At any rate, his head was bowed.
“They won’t help you in there,” a woman’s voice whispered to him. “They don’t help anyone but themselves."
“I do not know any witches! And anyway, how could old woman with big pot help me? Is fairy-tale. Is nonsense. Men do not go to witches,” Xeno said, with his eyes closed and his head bowed. When he got no response, he opened them and looked up, and found himself alone on the steps, except for a few pigeons.
he shouted (he was, after all, not a scrivener anymore). The pigeons, quite used to odd human behavior on their steps, didn’t even bother to fly away.
Xeno next took his long, beardless carcass to visit his Burgess.
mostly how they could appease the Holy Corporation and the Imperial Lord Mayor so that they could be allowed to continue to meet.
The Burgesses were the elected representatives of the city, and met regularly to discuss very important things
Xeno’s Burgess was the first non-goblin to become so in the city’s history (since it was conquered, that is), and represented not just Xeno’s neighborhood, but all the humans of the city.
Well, technically speaking he was a non-voting member, but he was a ground-breaker nevertheless.
Xeno however, despite being human, was (as has been mentioned) a foreigner, and therefore could not vote.
But showing his keen grasp of city politics, he made sure to emphasize that he would have voted for the man if he could have.
I will not bore you with the details of their conversation, because I’m sure you can guess.
Xeno pled his case, putting all the emphasis he could on his DIGNITY and his PRIDE as a man and fellow human being.
He asked for help in attaining justice, once again.
The burgess was sympathetic, but he had a “meeting” to go to in the Vinegar District, and anyway his political position was tenuous at best.
He promised he’d look into the matter, and oh by the way Xenode my boy, have you any coin to spare? — elections are coming up and I couldn’t possibly do anything to fight the good fight against the Corporate Overlords if I don’t get elected. It takes money to move the wheels of justice, you know.
Xeno pulled a few coins out, thought for a moment, then in a fit of angry apathy tossed him the purse instead.
He decided to take the magistrate’s advice and his few remaining coins and go get drunk. He didn’t even stop walking when a voice appeared to whisper to him on his way out:
he shouted over his shoulder.
A few hours later the setting sun was sinking below Vinegar Hill and the torches and glowlamps were being lit to illuminate the way for the city’s revellers and drunks, officials and patrons, foreign visitors and wage-slaves escaping their dreary lives for a few hours before bed.
Their orange, red, and green lights mingled together on the back of Xeno’s head — his face pressed down into his table, a bottle of the cheapest liquor he could find next to him.
Its nearly flavorless sour sting reminded him of the cornmash from home. This bottle, unlike Pappy’s shine, had cost him all that remained of his savings. It was enough. He could not buy back his dignity. But he could buy this.
He’d been a serious scrivener and had rarely indulged. He never could drink like his pappy, his grandpappy, and all the pappys of his ancient tribe stretching back and back and back to The Great Collision or even farther, maybe.
Good drinkers all.
Not Xeno.
He had never understood.
But he did now.
Head on the table, flickering lights all around, acrid smoke in his nostrils, the buzz of loud laughter, the undercurrent of desperation — it all made sense to him.
It was too much and not enough all at once.
The barkeep was a fat hobgoblin with red skin and a scar across a milky white eye that he didn’t bother to cover with a patch.
He had muscle under that fat and was well practiced in using it to toss out trouble. But his other eye had a kindly resignation to it — like he’d feel bad for you as he tossed you into the street.
Xeno rolled his head over without picking it up from the table and opened a squinty eye of his own.
The barkeep nodded, though his attention was on the door and the need to get this early drunk out so as not to discourage new customers, just beginning to flock to the street outside.
"Döm is what makes a man. Not just man: mountain woman too, sometimes. But always man. It is ‘dignity’ but more, you see? What is word? Is ‘honor’, too. ‘Brave.’ Without döm, man is nothing. Empty."
"My pappy back home, he say coming to city take döm away from me but NO!"
"Not true!"
"Was full of döm on that day."
But I have lost it, this day.
What I do now?”
The barkeep gave this foreigner his full attention then, looking over his lanky frame, his rough patchy short-beard. His own father was from the mountains, though a red hobgoblin and not a human, but he knew the type. He even knew the word. Döm. Dignity. Honor. Pride, maybe. He didn’t often think of his old Dad — that rough-handed bastard — with kindness, but he felt a twinge of pity now. His dad had lost his döm for sure and it had cost him. Cost them both. A stirring in his guts. He leaned in close.
Xeno staggered through the crowded street outside: full of revelers, yes, but also winesellers, food vendors, hawkers of wares of all kinds.
He must get his döm back, but how? How?
Xeno was not naturally prone to violent thinking, but he was, like everyone else, a product of a violent age.
Violence may be the last resort, in his opinion, to regain döm but it was also the easiest to imagine.
And so he needed, he decided, a weapon.
He had a belt knife, of course, but it was small and he doubted it would pierce far enough into the Overseer’s fat belly to do any real harm.
He thought of his pappy’s hunting rifle, hanging over the fireplace back home in its place of honor. But humans, and even most Gobs, were not permitted dragon-powder weapons in the city. Indeed, they were not even permitted swords, bows, or other such deadly devices.
“We have only the finest blades here my foreign friend! Do you need a new knife for cooking, an axe for chopping wood? Perhaps a razor for that shoddy looking beard? You need look no further. We have it!” the shopkeeper said.
Yet, no one could deny even the lowliest peasant a knife, essential as it was to the tasks of daily life.
And as it happened, just as he was having that thought, he was passing a merchant’s stall specializing in the sale of all manner of knives, axes, and other bladed tools.
Xeno replied cheerfully.
the shopkeep said loudly, glancing around for signs of the city guard.
But of course, he did not set his shop up on Vinegar Hill for nothing, and motioned for Xeno to follow him around the back of the stall to an out of the way alley.
It wasn’t until Xeno had selected a plain but fine looking blade (just short enough to pass for legal, though clearly made more for violence than for chopping vegetables) that he realized he had no money left.
But inspiration struck him just as despair began to creep its way past his alcohol-fueled defenses: he did have a ring of purest gold.
It was a reluctant gift from his pappy — an old family heirloom, earned by a service an ancestor had once performed for the ancient High King of the Commonwealth.
Now there were no such kings, and no Commonwealth either, but the ring remained.
It was to be his inheritance, but his father had given it to him on the day he left for the city, thinking perhaps that he would need it, or thinking perhaps that he might never see his son again and wanting to make up for hard words spoken.
Xeno wore it on his toe, so as not to seem ostentatious among his fellow scribes, but he always wore it.
Was he really contemplating giving this away, this connection to his home and family?
This constant reminder of where he had come from, of who he had been?
After all, what was a piece of dull metal to his döm?
Without his döm he might as well throw the ring away anyway.
it would only remind him of all he had lost.
He was about to remove his shoe, when he saw further down the alley, illumined only by a single flickering green glowlamp, a kind of tent.
An old woman was standing outside of it, silently but intently gazing at him.
Sensing he might be about to lose a sale, the shopkeeper shrugged dismissively.
"Now, let me just say you have selected quite a fine item. I’m loathe to part with it, truth be told. Perfect for self-defense, or self-offense if you take my meaning. It’s dwarf-craft, it is, from the Undercity of Allegheny beyond the western rim..."
But Xeno was no longer listening. He retied his boot and began walking toward the woman as a man entranced. “I need to think,” he said to the seedy merchant.
“Hurry back! I may not be here when you return, what with the shifting nature of market forces! The invisible hand and all that. You might not get another chance!”
Xeno walked up to the old woman.
And Xeno followed the old woman into the tent.
The inside of the tent was exactly as the outside advertised, which surprised him.
He’d expected it to be larger on the inside, or full of weird skulls, or at least have a giant bubbling cauldron.
Something magical or like a fairy-tale.
But no.
It was a spacious tent that was large enough to block off the alley, but he could see that from the outside.
And there was a pot, right in the middle, but it wasn’t really that big, it wasn’t thick and black but polished and shiny, and judging from the smell it was full of a simple rabbit-stew.
It, and the small fire it hung over, was being tended by a young human woman with braided brown hair who looked, if there was such a thing, the opposite of a witch.
It was still dark inside, but there were more lamps in than out, and he could now see that even the old woman didn’t look much like a witch — no scary warts or big nose or bloody teeth or whatever else he’d thought a witch might look like — and wasn’t even that old.
She was a pleasant looking plump(ish) woman who might have been in her middle to late 60s.
She looked nothing like his own granny, who had died when he was about ten, and who (come to think of it) looked a lot more like an old crone of a witch than this woman. Yet there was something in her eyes that reminded Xeno of his granny. Like she’d seen that the world was hard, had seen hard days, but chose mostly to meet them with laughter anyway.
She had a twinkle. That was it. Just like Granny.
So, though he was mystified by the whole experience and part of him still thought either they were crazy or he was, he sat down and told the two women his story.
They didn’t seem to mind his accent, his odd sentence constructions, and they asked questions from time to time for clarification.
When he had finished his tale, the older woman looked him directly in the eyes.
Hers were deep brown, almost black, but flecked with phosphorescent green, like the glowlamps.
In the dim light of the tent, they too seemed to be glowing.
Xeno had to think about this for a moment. What did he want? What would make this right?
His still drink-addled thoughts drifted to the knife-seller outside. He thought of his döm. Was there anything that could make this right?
“I go to kill the Overseer. Nephew too, if I can.”
The young woman chuckled slightly, and the older shot her a stern glance.
“That sounds more like retribution than justice. Revenge. Not that I object, morally speaking. No doubt your Overseer does not deserve to live. But then, who among us deserves anything?”
“You digress, mother,” Senne said.
“But if we are to enter into a contract, we should clearly define our terms,” the older woman continued, shifting those strange eyes back to Xeno.
There was an intensity to her gaze that was uncomfortable, but not threatening.
Xeno tried to blink his stupor away and rubbed his temples. How had he even gotten in here? What was he doing with these women and what, in the name of the true gods, were they even talking about? A contract? To do what?
“What is justice, mountain man?” the older woman said, fixing him in place with her stare.
“He doesn’t know, mother, I was wrong about him.”
“What is justice?”
She said again, louder.
This struck at Xeno, somehow, lanced the boil of his drink that had shielded him and sucked out his despair. Tears filled his bloodshot eyes and he gripped at the remains of his beard.
he looked around as if to find the words he needed somewhere written on the walls of the tent, or in the smoke of the small fire that floated up to the hole in the roof. He stared as he sometimes did at a complicated scroll he was copying — stared blankly, unfocused until it would tell him just where to put his pen or his brush. Then the words came to him.
“He’s close, mother, but not there yet.”
“Still your tongue, girl.”
“Justice is everything back before today! A job. A thing I can do. That I am good at. I make the letters. I make them beautiful. I am paid to make them so. It is not easy work, like people say. My hand, it hurts. All the time it hurts, but it is okay. A little money no one takes from me and some that I take home to the mountains. To show my pappy that I am a good son. I have döm not like he said. And, and, something else too...,”
But here he ran out of words to say.
His mouth was open wide, as if in agony again, as it was when the Overseer had taken his beard, but now no sound would emerge.
Yes! He wanted to say.
Yes!
That was justice — no fear.
But he could not admit that he was afraid. So afraid. That, yes, he had been afraid before too. His sense of pride had shielded him from it, but he knew that this could happen, could have happened any day to him. It lived in him always, ate at him.
The fear.
“You’re cheating, mother.”
“He deserves special treatment. He is a foreigner.”
“‘But then, who among us deserves anything?’” the younger woman quoted back, smiling devilishly.
“Shush, girl.”
Then to Xeno: “What would you give to live without that fear?”
Mechanically, Xeno reached down and began to untie his shoe in order to get at the ring he wore on his toe. But the younger woman laughed at him — a beautiful sound that pleased him and made him ashamed at the same time.
“I will explain in plain terms then, but you must promise to listen to the whole proposal before you reject it out of hand. We know it is a hard cost to pay for men, foreign or not. Well, for anybody, but men just aren’t used to it. You promise? Very well, then.
"You must go home and shave your beard. Wait, there’s more.
Then you must return to your employer and you must beg him to give you your position back. He will accept. Weeks will go by, and you will suffer, for the Overseer is no doubt a man who enjoys making others suffer. That is, in fact, why he will allow you to return. And of course because he knows that you work well, that it will cost him more to replace you, and that you are in fact innocent of the crime he has accused you of.
The rest you must leave to us. I assure you, this is for your own safety. It is to make them forget you. One day, one day soon, things will change. And your patience — ”
Something about the woman’s glowing green eyes —
— were they greener than before? most curious! Most entrancing —
and her demeanor made Xeno want to say yes.
The very strangeness of it all made him want to say yes.
The very idea that he could be free of fear would be worth any price, any price at all.
Wouldn’t it?
But who were these women, and what kind of way to talk was this? How could they possibly help him?
He stared back into her unblinking eyes, feeling like he would burst into tears, agonized and grateful too, but just as the “yes” was bubbling up in his throat, struggling to be free, he wrenched his gaze aside, to the flickering fire. It was like forcing oneself awake out of a dream.
He stood up quickly and left the tent before they could say anymore.
He did not look back to see if the tent was still there or if it had disappeared into a puff of witchcraft.
He did not look back when he pulled off his boot and traded his ring for the dwarf-crafted dagger.
And he did not look back as he gripped it tightly within the folds of his robe and strode off into the crowded street.
One can easily imagine how this display of bravado might have gone for Xeno.
The beanpole scrivener had never used a knife in violence before in his life.
(There was that one time that he’d fought Otho Clubfoot until, exhausted, they’d mutually agreed to call it a draw, but considering the gravity of his current situation and the small stature and younger years of Otho, it was probably not wise to call upon that experience to bolster his valor.)
And though he’d been involved in his fair share of fisticuffs (one can hardly avoid it, growing up in the mountains), he’d never actually won such an altercation.
The dwarf-crafted blade felt strange in his hand. Not at all like a quill pen. Not even like the styluses he had sometimes used for writing in clay, however much he had imagined plunging them into the Overseer’s nephew’s chubby green neck.
And anyway, the longer he gripped the blade, the more he began to doubt its dwarf-crafted authenticity. Yes, there was a definite...wobble between blade and hilt. That was rarely a good thing in one’s tools, even if one’s life does not depend on them.
No, even a drunken Xeno could see that his cause was doomed.
He would march to the home of his former employer and...what?
Knock upon the gates?
The guards would not only gut him, they would laugh at him as they did so.
He would need a pretext. Something that would let him get close or bring the Overseer out to him.
He needed a lie.
But Xeno was ultimately an honest man.
Lying did not come easily to him.
And deception was not döm any more than fear was.
As he walked, he created and rejected several scenarios, each less plausible than the last.
Could he pose as a messenger?
A chimney-sweep?
A freelance night-soil man?
He said aloud, not caring who heard him.
Dying bravely, even foolishly, certainly was döm.
And if that was all he had left, he would use it.
Someone said from behind him, then hit him over the head with a rock.
It was a blow that likely saved his life.
He awoke in the morning laying on his back in a ditch, shoeless, and with the worst headache he’d ever had.
But he was alive.
As he struggled to his feet, caked blood on the back of his head and neck, he noticed something glinting in the pinkish light of the rising sun: the blade to his dearly purchased weapon.
The hilt was gone, taken by the (very likely) disappointed thief, who must have known a worthless weapon when he saw one. Or perhaps it had simply broken in his fall.
Xeno picked it up, tucked it into his robe (carefully) and stumbled home.
His nearest neighbor, a former prostitute and supremely competent mother of six, brought him to her apartment when she found him dizzily climbing the stairs.
Against his protestations she worried over him, tended his broken head, and sent her older brood to bring water to his apartment and draw him a bath.
She applied ointment and wrapped his head in a tight bandage while the littlest ones begged him to say words, any words, with his mountain accent, giggling uproariously whether he said:
He found he didn’t mind.
After a time, the mother walked him over to his room, and he had to make several assurances that he was recovering and that he would be careful before she would allow him to bathe himself.
She smiled and shrugged:
When she had shut the door behind her, he stripped off his battered robe and undergarments and sank into the bath, submerging himself entirely.
When he reappeared, he leaned over to his robe and found the broken blade.
He tested its edge on his thumb, accidentally drawing a slight cut, a drop of his red blood falling into the water.
For a broken weapon, it was surprisingly sharp.
He sucked at his thumb for a moment, then got up naked and dripping to fetch his small looking glass.
Looking in the mirror he brought his blade up close to his throat.
And began to shave.
Xeno begged for his job back and received it.
And received torment in exchange.
Humiliation.
Mockery for his beardlessness such as he’d never had for his mountain man’s beard.
and worse became his name.
Though they muttered, and some looked at their now-shorn comrade with pity, his compatriot scriveners shunned him even more than before.
They were afraid, most likely, that his humiliation was catching.
But each day he came home and called on his neighbor and said words for the little ones.
There was friendship and kindness where there had only been polite distance before.
And he found he could bear more humiliation than he’d believed possible.
He gave up his pride and found he could live without it.
A few weeks later, the Overseer and his nephew both died mysteriously in the Vinegar District.
There was little investigation, for investigations are expensive.
They had been carousing most epicly, and so it was said that they had simply overindulged.
Privately, the magistrate suspected that they had been poisoned, for no marks were found on their bodies and they had just finished a meal of rabbit-stew.
But proving that would be a headache and a bother, and so the investigation ended there.
Others whispered of witchcraft.
All the scriveners agreed that whatever the cause, their deaths were just.
Most just indeed.
THE END