Shaman's Crossing (60 page)

The dance went on and on. Long after I had wearied of it, I was trapped there. The crowd behind us pressed us close to the cage bars. Rory especially seemed enraptured by the woman and her song. He gripped the bars with both hands and hung on, as if he were the one imprisoned by her wildness. I saw the keeper look at him twice, and feared the man would come to bang his knuckles, but the press of the mob trapped the man as effectively as it did us.

The woman’s song and the men’s chanting built to a crescendo. Their shuffling dance became a swift walk, then a jog, and suddenly they were running round the edges of the cage, even the old man, even the limping Speck, and they flung their dust in handfuls that drifted out over the crowd. People suddenly cried out as the dust stung their eyes. Coughing and sneezing, I turned my head away from the dance and tried to push my way back into the gathered folk, to no avail. The dust I had inhaled burned in the back of my throat and left a fetid taste in my mouth. The keeper was shrieking at the Specks to stop, stop, and suddenly they did.

Without a glance at their keeper, all of them gathered silently in the middle of their enclosure. The men upended their little dust bags and shook them, but nothing fell out. The woman stood in their midst and briefly set a hand on top of each of their heads, almost like a benediction. Then they turned, and with no acknowledgment to the crowd at all, nor to the rain of coins that were showering onto the straw, they retreated to their crude shelter and huddled there, showing us only their striped backs. Their heads bent together as they conferred about something.

Almost immediately the crowd began to break up, but it was some moments before we could move away from our spot. “I never saw anything like that before,” Trist said. He knuckled at his eyes, reddened where the dust had hit them. I turned a little aside from my fellows and spat several times, trying to clear the foul taste from my mouth. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief, and almost immediately had a violent sneezing fit. Around me, other people were coughing.

Rory clung to the bars still. “She is, well, she is somethin’,” Rory agreed. His mouth hung slightly ajar as he stared at the woman huddling in the shadows of the crate.

“You want her?”

We all turned, startled, at the keeper’s lascivious offer. Somehow he had crept close to us. Now he spoke to Rory in an undertone. “I seen her looking at you, fella. Fancies you, she does. Now, I don’t usually do this, but—” And here he looked from side to side as if fearful of being overheard. “I could ’range for you to see her. Alone. Or maybe with a friend or two, long as there’s no rough stuff. She’s a beauty, and I got to keep her that way.”

“What?” Rory asked blankly.

“You know what you want, fella. Here’s how it works. You give me the money now, so we know you’re the one. Then you come back, round midnight when the crowds are less. I’ll take you to her. All she’ll want from you is your ’baccy. Specks do love ’baccy something fierce. She’ll probably do anything you want. Anything. And yer friends can watch, you want ’em to.”

“That’s disgusting,” Oron said. “She’s a savage.”

The keeper shrugged and brushed at his striped shirt. “Maybe so, fella. But some men, they like a woman a bit on the wild side. Give you a ride you won’t never forget. Not an ounce of shame in that one, there isn’t.”

“Don’t do it,” I said quietly to Rory. “She’s not what she seems.” I could not have explained my foreboding.

He jumped as if I had poked him, and looked startled to find me there. He had been so completely focused on the keeper’s base offer. “Well, course not, Nevare. What sorta fool do you take me for?”

The keeper laughed, low. “Listen to him, you’ll be the fool that missed the chance of a lifetime, young feller. Do it now, while yer young, and the memory will keep you warm even when yer old.”

“Let’s get away from here,” Oron said. He didn’t seem to care that he sounded prissy. I was just glad that he had said it, instead of me. We all began to turn away.

“Come back later, without your friends!” the keeper called out after us as we pushed our way through the crowd. “You can tell ’em later what they missed.”

It was not Rory but Trist who glanced back as we left. Would they go back? I strongly suspected they would. “Let’s see the rest of the freaks and get out of here,” I suggested.

“I need a beer,” Rory countered. “I got dust down my throat what needs washin’ out. I’m leavin’ now.”

And so he left us, and I feared he had gone back to speak to the keeper. I told myself there was nothing I could do about it. I abruptly recalled I was supposed to be looking for Epiny. As the current of the crowd washed us along, I watched for her chimney hat in vain. By the time we had seen the firewalker, the tall man, and the bug eater, my fellow cadets had somehow melted away from me in the crowd. Despite myself, my mind pictured Rory tangled with the calico woman, and I knew an odd mixture of both envy and disgust. I made myself walk on.

I moved to a less congested area. I spat again, feeling queasy from the foul taste of the Speck dust in my mouth. I tried to clear my throat of it, and ended up coughing instead.

When I caught my breath and looked around me, I found myself standing in a backwater in the freak tent. I’d seen the main spectacles. Here, at the outer edges of the tent, were the secondary attractions, the ones that seemed trivial after the greater shocks of the main stages. A woman wriggled her deformed yellow feet at me while she cackled like a chicken. The insect man sat within a tiny tent of mosquito netting while roaches and beetles and spiders crawled about on him. Laughing, he set a caterpillar across his upper lip as if it were a mustache. It was too tame. The crowd shuffled past him, unamused.

The fat man stood up from his stool and wiggled his shoulders to set his naked gelid belly dancing. I stared at him. His bulk dwarfed Gord’s. He had greased his pouched flesh to make it glisten in the lamplight. He had hanging breasts like a woman and his bare belly drooped over the waistband of his striped trousers like a fleshy apron. Even his ankles were fat, I noted, the flesh puddling over the tops of his feet. Beside him an obese woman dressed in a short pleated skirt and a sleeveless bodice reclined languidly on a divan. She had a box of candies on a low table before her. As I watched, she ate the last one, and sent the box to join its empty fellows on the floor around the table. Her mouth and eyes were painted, and when she lifted her gaze and saw me staring at her, she pursed her lips at me in a kiss.

“Look, Eron. A soldier boy. Did you come to see sweet Candy?” She beckoned to me. The way her arms wobbled put me instantly in mind of the tree woman of my dream. I took an involuntary step backward, making her laugh. “Don’t be scared. Come a little closer, lovey. I won’t bite you. Not unless you’re as sweet as sugar.”

The fat man had resumed his seat on his stool. He turned his head to look at me and smiled. His face was wreathed in fat; even his brow seemed heavy. I was, for the moment, the sole gawker. He spoke to me. “Soldier, eh? You a soldier lad? Oh, yes, I can tell. It’s in the bearing. What branch are you? Artilleryman?”

He spoke in such a friendly way that I would have been an oaf to ignore him. Yet I was suddenly uneasy to have the spectacle turn into a person. I glanced over my shoulder. Most of the crowd seemed to prefer the more lurid offerings of the tent and shuffled past his little stage with scarcely a glance.

“I’m cavalla. I’m a cadet at the King’s Academy,” I said, and then I stopped. Was I? In a few more days, I was certain, I’d be culled. The fat man didn’t even notice my abrupt silence.

“Cavalla! You don’t say! I was cavalla myself once, though you’re not like to believe it now. Jensen’s Horse. I started out as their bugle boy, I did, no taller than a flea and skinny as a whippet. Bet you don’t believe that, do you?” He spoke as casually as if we had met at a cabstand, as if there was nothing strange about him chatting with someone who had come to gawk at him as an oddity.

I felt embarrassed for him, and smiled awkwardly. “It’s a bit hard to believe, sir, yes.”

“Sir,” he said softly. Then he smiled, the expression pressing lines into his doughy face. “Been a long time since a young soldier has called me that. I was a lieutenant when this happened to me. I was on my way up, too. They told me that in a month, perhaps two, there would be a vacancy and I’d be a captain in my father’s old regiment. I was so happy. I thought it had all been worth it.” His face was transfigured by some memory, his eyes staring into the distance. He glanced down at me abruptly. “But you’re an Academy lad. Bet you wouldn’t think much of some ranker like me. My father had been a ranker before me, but he’d never risen higher than master sergeant. When I got my lieutenant’s bars, he was over the moon about it. He and my old maw sold just about everything they had to buy me a commission. I was shocked to hear they’d done it.”

He suddenly fell silent and all the old glory faded from his face. “Well,” he said, and laughed harshly. “My dad was always a good trader. I bet he got top dollar out of that commission when he sold it off.” He saw me staring at this revelation, and laughed again, more harshly. He gestured rudely at his body. “Well, after this happened to me, what was I to do? My career was over. I come back west, hoping my family would take me in; they wouldn’t even speak to me. Wouldn’t even admit it
was
me. My old dad tells everybody that his son died in battle with the Specks. Close enough to truth, I guess. It was the damn Speck plague that did this to me.”

He lumbered over to the edge of his stage and sat down heavily. The whole process of lowering himself looked awkward. He dangled his legs over the edge. His low shoes were run over and tired, near bursting at their seams. His feet looked fat and run over, too, wider than they should have been. I wanted to leave, but could not simply turn and walk away from him. I wished other spectators would come to distract him from me. I did not like that he was being so friendly and talkative. I had to force myself to look interested in his words.

“So I come to the city. Took up begging on the street corners, but no one believes a fat man who says he’s starving. I would have starved, too, if I hadn’t taken on this duty. It’s not that different from the cavalla, some ways. Get up, do your shift, eat, go to bed. Watch each other’s backs. Stick together. That’s what they say about the cavalla, isn’t it? That we always watch out for one another. Right, trooper?”

“Right,” I said uneasily. I felt he was building up to something, some declaration of brotherhood that I didn’t want to hear. I needed to leave, now. “I have to be on my way now. I’m supposed to be looking for my cousin.” The words came to me with a sour taste of guilt. They were merely an excuse, and a stark reminder to myself that I had completely forgotten about Epiny and Spink and the danger she might be in.

“Yeah, right, he has to go.” The Fat Lady spoke from her divan. From somewhere she had drawn out another box of candies and was untying the blue ribbon that bound the creamy yellow box. She spoke without looking at either of us. “He knows you’re gonna touch him for some coppers. ‘I was in the cavalla, gimme a coin.’ Bores me to tears. I heard it too often.”

“Shut up, you fat old slut!” the man told her angrily. “It’s true! I was cavalla, and a damn good soldier once. Maybe I was a ranker, but I’m not ashamed of that. Every promotion I got, I earned. It was never give to me because I was some noble’s son, nor bought for me. I earned it. Earned these lieutenant’s bars. Looky here, trooper. You recognize the real thing, don’t you? And you wouldn’t mind giving an old comrade-in-arms a few coins so I could buy me something a bit stronger than a beer? Gets cold working in here in the wintertime. A man could use a good stiff drink after what I go through.”

The fat man had managed, by much effort and with several grunts, to haul himself back to his feet. Now he took a folded cloth from his trouser pocket. He opened it carefully, to show me the lieutenant’s bars that shone inside it. I stared at them, knowing they might not be real, knowing that, like the jewelry that many folk wore for Dark Evening, they might be paper or enamel over dross. The fat man unpinned the gleaming bars from the rag that wrapped them and polished them a bit. Then, as he refastened them to the rag, he made the “keep fast” charm over them. I felt a chill up my back. True, he might have learned it from watching others, as Epiny had, but there was something so habitual about the way he did it that I doubted it.

He glanced over at me and saw the dismay in my face. He smiled, and it was a cruel smile, one that mocked himself. “I’m just an old ranker, son. Never sent to the King’s Academy like you; never had the guarantees that you have. If the plague hadn’t done me in, I’d be serving out near the far east still. But it did, and here I am. I get food, and work, if you call this work—parading around half dressed in a drafty old tent so young blighters can look at me and laugh and stare, so sure they’ll never be me. I get a bed and blanket every night. But that’s about all I get. No extras in this life. But once I was a cavalla man. Yes, sir, I was.”

I found my hand thrust deep in my pocket. I pulled out my money and pushed it into his hands and then turned and fled. He shouted his thanks after me, and added, “Don’t you let them send you to the forest, boy! You find yourself a nice post in the west, counting sacks of grain or keeping tally of horseshoe nails! Stay away from the Barrier Mountains.”

I could not find the exit from the tent. I pushed through a crowd of people packed around a girl juggling knives, not caring how they stared at me, nor even for the one woman who cursed me roundly for stepping on her foot. My path led me back past the Specks’ cage, but there was no crowd round it that I could see. The male Specks were there, wandering listlessly about the enclosure. The woman was gone. I estimated the time at midnight, and guessed that Rory and Trist had returned for her.

I made my way to the tent door. I didn’t want to think of them with the wild Speck girl. The fat man and his tales of being a ranker had soured the circus for me. The weight of my recent misfortunes descended on me once more. I was to be culled, for no more reason than to keep the Academy in political balance. It would be seen as shameful, no matter what they wrote on my papers. I doubted my father would buy me a commission. He’d probably sternly tell me that I’d had my chance, and that now I’d have to enlist as a common soldier, alongside all the other common sons of common soldier sons. There would be no arranged marriage for me, no officer’s commission, and no glorious future commanding troops for the king. I wondered if I would run back to Maw tomorrow and beg to be a scout.