The Nameless Account: Childhood (3)
As I said before, my father was never around much. This wasn’t something we spoke about much, either, between ourselves. My brothers and I took over the bulk of the work before I began to put on height, though there was not much work to be had in that part of town. Most of the time, we weren’t formally employed, instead living through begging and theft from those living deeper in the city.
It was not wrong, not to us. Just as the upper classes stole our families, we would steal their resources. I learned quickly about moving quietly and doing tricks with my knife, how to lift an item from a merchant’s stall without being caught, get into places I wasn’t supposed to be in, how to appraise and sell other people’s handiwork as if it was my own. These were things that would serve me well once I was in service to your Patriarch, not that I knew that at the time.
It wasn’t all about hard-lined survival while I was a child; even the akor’mari sometimes play. My kin was a gang in more than just profession, and the children of the poorer families often roamed together in great rambunctious groups through the Great Den. Some of your games are like to ours; every race learns how to hunt, how to obey, how to fight, and how to lie, though it never ceases to amuse me how you Surfacers innocuously dress it up as playing tag or throwing dice instead.
A favorite among my kin was Surfacers and Spies. There were combat roles and there were espionage roles, and the combat roles were the most favored. I remember my brothers and their friends going at it, and I always wanted to join in. Is being left out a common experience for your kind, too? I was too little and loud, more so than anyone but little Neddy, and they would push my face into a pile of garbage until I promised I wouldn’t bother them anymore. They told me I could barely hold a sword straight, let alone keep pace with akor’mari bigger and stronger than me. I would be Surfacer meat if the game were real: an irony considering my predicament among you, now.
So I learned to get sneaky. I would hide behind a stalagmite and wait until the perfect chance, then jump out and jab the nearest Surfacer with my rod—right under the ribs, where it hurt. Of course, no one really approved of that either, at least until I managed to “backstab” Myrddrin. Myrddrin was the biggest and strongest of all those boys, and everyone was a little afraid of him. After that, they were all a little afraid of me, because I had bested him.
There were other games, less focused in war. Ah, yes... Sometimes we’d pack up our bags like royal scouts—using sand and rags because there was nothing else to spare—and hike out into the caves. In the poor areas especially, there were still many caverns not touched by the hands of the akor’mari. Some of these were left intact for their natural beauty, others had been overlooked and ignored. When we were younger, my brothers and I were still able to fit inside the narrower spaces. We would spend hours, even days, exploring the beautiful caverns, touching the different formations and making echoes in the chasms as it suited our tastes. We would even sometimes steal a tongue of the forbidden Fire, just so we could watch its orange reflections on the crystals and water-smoothed rock. I remember those times fondly; the world belonged to us, then.
