A Lion Among Men (9 page)

He finally managed to startle an old woman who was nearsighted enough not to see him coming. He’d been practicing his inaugural remark for weeks and was pleased with his delivery.

“Beg pardon, madame. I’m enquiring after the garrison of soldiers I’m told is stationed at Tenniken,” he said.

The woman’s crabapple chin bobbed up and she fished for a pincenez in her reticule. “Goodness, a Lion,” she observed, when she could. “Why ever would you imagine you could find soldiers stationed at Tenniken here, of all unlikely places?”

By which he learned he had emerged too far to the east. Not in Tenniken at all, but on the high street of the Gillikinese settlement called Traum.

“You charming idiot, get out of my way,” she concluded. “I’ve a daughter-in-law to annoy, and I must be to it. If you can’t tell the difference between a military garrison and a market town, you’ve got a screw loose, I fear.”

How was he to know? He blushed, though he was not sure if a blush would show in a Lion of his naturally high coloring.

Still, a handsome place, this Traum. The town was prosperous, old enough to boast some architectural character and even charm. Half-timbered almshouses and taverns. Stone guild halls clawed over with ivy and roofed with mossy slates laid in patterns of chevron. Escutcheons of painted wood advertising the trades.

“Do you know the way to Tenniken?” said the old woman. “Someone will tell you, but not I. I must get going. It doesn’t do to be stopped in the street today, not with those ruffians and ragamunchkins about.” She snapped her spectacles into their case and pushed away.

Brrr continued on, curious, feeling braver every moment. Traum must have seen Lions before, to judge by the way its denizens affected a worldly disregard to the visitor in their midst. At least this was how he read it at first. In truth, like the first old woman he interviewed, the citizens of Traum had other matters on their minds.

The Lion paced the merchant arcade, stopping to sniff at a rope of garlic hanging from a peg, or to watch through an archway as a glassblower plied her gassy art. He would ask for directions to Tenniken in a moment, as soon as he could catch someone’s eye again. But Traumanians were deeply skilled at averting their gazes.

In any case, the need to ask for directions seemed less urgent the more he saw of Traum. This was an old establishment, and he was a very young Lion, after all. So much to command his attention! A steam engine on a rail track. Gutters that ran with clear water. A unionist minister in dark leggings and an accusatory beard, pointing its hairy finger at every passing sinner.

“Are there any soldiers in town?” he asked a schoolchild, the only human who didn’t intimidate him. The girl pouted and began to suck her thumb in reply.

“No soldiers when you need them,” remarked the child’s chaperone, a teenage sitter. “The town is crawling with angry trolls, so are we supplied with a military presence this week? No. Of course not. Naturally.” She dragged her charge off into a side street. “Come, Gritzolga. The nasty trolls will eat you if you don’t behave. They like bad children like you.”

The Lion asked a question or two of some jittery shopkeepers who were folding up their shutters early. They didn’t stop to reply. At one emporium, however, where a shipment of porcelain was being unloaded from a wagon, the doors remained open so the workers could haul in the wares. A few of the more chattery of the townspeople were converging there. The Lion stooped to enter.

“Traum: the crossroads to nowhere,” said a young clerk with a voice that broke in midvowel. “Or everywhere: it’s the same thing, en’t it?”

“I don’t know Traum from Tenniken, or a troll from a trolley car,” said Brrr, admiring his own cleverness.

The clerk rolled his eyes. “Looking to buy a good map?” He pulled out a colored chart of the district.

Brrr had never seen a map before. He struggled to make sense of the scraped lines and shaded patches. A wispy gentleman, in looking for some snuff, leaned over the counter to see. “I taught geographics and natural civics to unteachable boys for thirty years,” he said. “Allow me to explain.”

The Lion learned that Traum had sprung up in a gentle valley between folds of forested hills. The valley allowed for a train line originating in distant Shiz, to the southwest, and running to Traum and beyond. To the northeast, the line was built on steep and inhospitable ground. Trellised and buttressed in precipitous style, the tracks climbed upslope until they reached the quays of the famous Glikkus Canals.

“Famous to some but not to all,” said Brrr.

The old fellow took a pinch of snuff. He was warming to his subject.

“The Glikkus channels are carved by some natural event of such mind-numbing antiquity that their origin can be explained only by myth. They serve as a merchant’s route to the emerald mines in the western Scalps of the Glikkus. The mountain natives-called Glikkuns, though none can deny they are anything but trolls, really-take advantage of those natural waterways and our industrial rail line to bring their emeralds to market.”

“Yes, but which way is Tenniken from here?”

“Traum is the trading post for the whole emerald industry. Why do you want Tennikin?” asked the clerk. “We have quite a line of emerald souvenirs, including a kind of fudge peppered with emerald dust.” The lone box of fudge wore a mantle of ordinary dust upon it, suggesting that the delicacy was more a novelty than a necessity.

“Is Tenniken on the rail line?” asked Brrr.

“Look, there’s some stumpyfolk now,” said a burgher’s wife, clutching her shawl about her, as if to preserve her respectability, even at this distance. “Stars and stitches, but they give me the goosey shivers!”

Brrr regarded the Glikkuns through the open door of the establishment. They were stout and stubby. Like many creatures who spend a good part of their lives underground, they were bleached out.

“If we Gillikinese are pale, at least compared to the darker tribes of the Vinkus and the ruddy bloody Quadlings, Glikkuns are downright albinoid,” murmured the doddery gentleman, who apparently couldn’t resist a spontaneous lecture. “Am I right? Am I right about this?”

“They look like walking farmcheeses to me,” agreed the goodwife.

A Glikkun family group loitered outside, deciding whether or not to venture into the shop. A blond moss capped the scalps of them all, from the papoosed newborn to the elders. The eyes of trolls, what Brrr could make out through their perpetual squint, glinted like steel, the pale white irises appearing to rise in blue albumen. Both males and females sported hunches pronounced enough to need wrapping in dedicated hunch-coats, each secured by buttons and straps and elasticized hems.

They carried short, stout dirks in skarkskin sheaths.

“That’s their chief,” whispered the schoolmaster. “A woman named Sakkali Oafish.”

A troll woman in leather leggings and a grey scarf rubbed the belly of her pregnant companion and scowled around her.

“She’s just got wind of the scam-I mean the scheme,” said the clerk. “Oooh, dark night, alley, that carving knife: not for me.”

“When their babies want to suck, the Glikkuns offer the knife instead of the tit,” said the goodwife. “Puts ‘em off milk at once and stunts their growth, making ‘em more Glikkuny than ever.”

“The Wizard of Oz wants emeralds, he gets emeralds,” said the schoolteacher. “The Wizard of Oz makes the laws. In this case, the law of supply and demand. He demands it, they supply it. End of discussion.”

“The Wizard of Oz,” said the Lion, remembering the question of the Ozmists. He wished he had the nerve to say “The WOO” in a superior, derogatory tone, but he didn’t trust himself to be able to carry it off.

“The Wizard of Oz, yes. You just crawl out from under some rock?-the chief potentate, if self-proclaimed, of the whole beloved country, thank you very much. He has recently kicked off a schedule of public works in the Emerald City that requires a goblin-hoard of emeralds. A fourfold increase from the usual amount requisitioned. The Glikkuns have stepped up production in their mines and arranged for transport of the emeralds to Traum. Here they collect their fees in cash and grain and medicine.”

“And vermouth,” intoned the clerk, knowingly.

“You serve trolls in here, don’t you,” said the goodwife.

“Their coin weighs the same as yours,” said the clerk. “Madame.”

“The economy of Traum relies on the trolls,” said the schoolmaster. “And I don’t know why they should be complaining. Business has never been so brisk for them. Ever. But, my dear boy,” he continued to the clerk, “I do think you could make a legitimate argument for barring the door against an angry mob.”

If the seven-person family group outside constituted a mob, it wasn’t entirely angry. The Glikkun baby chortled as it sucked on a sugar stick.

“What’s their gripe?” asked Brrr, going toward the back of the shop, pretending to inspect the wares displayed there-a line of women’s foundation garments. Camisoles, bustiers, smocks, and pantaloons.

“Close the door up, mercy on us,” hissed the goodwife to the clerk.

The schoolmaster rooted through his purse to pay for his snuff. “Sakkali Oafish has just gotten wind of an…an irregularity, shall we say, in the arrangements. The Traum merchants are paying the Glikkuns the going rate for emeralds, fair and square and in conformance with trade agreements-but our merchants are transporting the crop of jewels by rail down to Shiz, and they have begun to mark up the wares fourfold. For the simple job of loading emeralds onto the trains and unloading them several hundred miles south, the merchants are getting fat on the labor and product of the Glikkun miners.”

“The Glikkuns get their due,” said the clerk, “as I hear it told. The guild of traders has never stiffed the trolls a penny farthing.”

“Contracts hold, but contracts can be unfair, too,” asserted the gentleman.

“We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the goodwife. “I’d have been a smarter woman to have gone visiting my sister in Tenniken like she asked me to instead of finding myself here on this day of all days.”

“Tenniken! The home of the soldiers,” said Brrr. “Can you get there by train, do you know?”

“I can. Not certain trains are serving the likes of you.”

“I don’t understand why we’re seeing trouble today,” said the young clerk, whose pink-ham face was going pale and his voice cracking in higher registers than before.

“Aren’t you paying attention?” snapped the schoolteacher. “Sakkali Oafish has just learned about the trade inequities. The merchants taking twenty florins for every five the trolls get. She’s spitting nails. She’s declared she’ll call a strike unless the agents of the Shiz merchants pay double the negotiated rate for the emeralds they take, starting with the current shipment. Today. Before the Glikkuns leave. But the agents for the Shiz merchants are balking, saying that they aren’t authorized to enter into a new agreement, nor do they have the funds on hand to pay an unanticipated surcharge. Of course the Glikkuns are mad as hornets. And like all trolls, stubborn to boot. The whole town is waiting to see if they start to riot.”

“Our husbands are getting their guns,” said the goodwife. “They’ll take care of the matter. The Traum civic militia drills once a week.”

“Drills for ten minutes, drinks beer the rest of the evening,” replied the schoolteacher.

“My Aimil is in the service and he can shoot to kill at fifty yards even when he’s dead drunk.” She sniffed in pride. “Good lad.”

“I hope your Aimil is stopping for an ale then, because there will be shooting here before the moon is up.”

“Mark my words. They’ll show those Glikkuns the business end of a blunderbuss. Do some good, to boss the clammy little pasty-blobs about,” said the goodwife.

“Severity rarely helps in instances like this,” replied the gentleman.

“You setting yourself up as a court of justice all by yourself?” The goodwife raised her chins and rounded her lips as if tasting something unsavory. “Why en’t you going to live underground with the mole folk, if you endorse them so pitifully?”

“I’m not a court of justice-merely a commentator for our ignorant visitor,” said the schoolmaster mildly. In the spark of their little exchange, the Lion had retreated farther into the shadows.

“That petticoat will never fit you. It’s a petite,” said the clerk, either nastily or trying to make a joke and diffuse the situation. “A lady is petite.”

“I’m shopping for a friend,” replied Brrr, as frostily as he could, dropping the garment. He had thought it was some sort of headdress, with its lacy eyelets and scalloped hem.

“I suppose you’re friends with them?” asked the burgher’s wife. “You arrived with them, and all?”

“I never did.” Brrr tried harder for a tone of offense. “I have nothing to do with them.”

“If you’re not their weird bodyguard, then why en’t you chasing them away for us? They’d run from you soon enough.”

“I have nothing against trolls,” said Brrr.

“That’s a medal you got on your chest, en’t it?” She glowered at him. “A medal for what? Valor in the line of shopping?”

“I was hoping to find the soldiers’ garrison at Tenniken. This is all a mistake.”

“What the soldiers wouldn’t do with the likes of you!” She pursed her raspy lips at him and lowered her chin to look out under her brow, like a lizard from under a rock.

He stopped trying to explain. He only wished he could fade into the shadows in the shop the way, so conveniently, he’d been able to camouflage himself in the shadows of woodlands.

Before the Glikkuns outside could move on, the lane was filled with the stutter of drumming. The Traum Defense Brigade, no doubt. The goodwife looked hopeful at the thought of an encounter.

Not yet ready for a face-off-not with the baby troll drooling into its bibbing-Sakkali Oafish turned her group toward the doors of the shop.

“My virtue,” said the goodwife to the clerk. “Shut the door, can’t you?”

The clerk strode forward and said, streetward, “We’re closed to all but residents with town accounts.”

Sakkali put her foot in the door jamb. Her glance betrayed little fear. When she spoke, her voice was low and full of rasp. “Is that so? Then the Lion lives in Traum?” One hand settled on the infant’s scalp, the other one on the hilt of her dirk.