“Animal-talking. It’s not talking to animals, it’s making animal sounds.”
“What, urf-urf, like a dog?”
I now made exactly the whine of a frightened dog, then turned it into a perfectly credible growl.
“Bolnu,” she said, weighing something invisible but pleasing in her supinated hand, a very Ispanthian gesture. “Is it magic?”
“No, just training.”
“Do you have magic?” she asked.
“Not much.”
“I have a little magic, too. Also not much.”
“I didn’t think the bird fell out of your arse.”
She took a sip of wine and looked at me seriously.
“That would be very dark magic,” I said.
She squinted at me, waiting to see where this was going, but not hopeful.
“But not black magic.”
She waited.
“Brown,” I said.
She searched brown magic for any possible meaning besides juvenile scatology. Finding none, she closed her eyes and shook her head in disappointment.
It wouldn’t be the last time.
8
Bully Boy
Galva told me she’d made plans for us and that I should meet her by Haros’s tower the next morning at sunrise. Unfortunately, not an hour after I left the Stag and Quiet Drum, I got arrested.
It wasn’t my fault.
First thing I did, having left my bow and pack stashed in the inn’s attic so I could move light on my feet, was make my way to the town square, where the town mouth had cried the coming of giants to Oustrim. Now mouths of a different sort were crying. A group of mummers had come in a wagon all hung with bells and tattered banners and bits of stained or stolen silk. The side of the wagon had folded down and rested on legs to make a small stage, a yard off the ground. Letters on the Wagon spelled DAMS OF LAMNUR, and indeed there didn’t seem to be a man in the company.
Several dozen lookie-sees had gathered near, but only about a third of them sat on the benches the players offered—most lingered at the margins, keeping their options open should they grow bored and wish to leave. These would make the easiest prey.
The troop was performing a Crowning Play. These were little farces, half an hour long, meant not only to make laughter but to teach the names of foreign kings and queens. Foreigners were fair game in these shows, but I doubted I’d see the likeness of good King Conmarr of Holt on the boards.
Indeed, the subject of today’s mummery was the Mad Princess, the Ispanthian infanta Mireya, played by a comely lass in a red dress. She sported with the pet monkey Mireya had as a girl, the very one she later claimed spoke to her and told her the future. The role of the monkey fell to a lady dwarf very talented at making monkey noises and who capered with great energy.
MIREYA: Pray, tell me, monkey, what you see!
MONKEY: Your uncle comes to shake your tree
And paint his name with villainy.
MIREYA: Pray, tell me, monkey, what you think!
MONKEY: Your uncle comes to creep and slink
And kill your da with poisoned drink!
Now a player in an outsized King Kalith mask, complete with foot-long mustachios, sauntered onstage, sloshing a giant goblet of wine. I looked around to see if the Spanth were watching this mockery of her home court, but I did not see her. Kalith splashed wine on the king and queen players, who had been dancing unaware just off the stage. They both sputtered and fell, and Kalith took a large painted crown and set it on his own head.
MIREYA: Pray, tell me, Uncle, what you chance!
KALITH: I stopped them in their foolish dance
And now I am the king of Spanths!
Mireya cried out while her monkey capered.
MIREYA: Pray, tell me, Uncle, what you’ll do!
KALITH: If I would speak and tell it true
My niece, I have to murder you!
MONKEY: Help! Help! The villain means to slay her
Will no one save the fair Mirey-er?
Some had a chuckle at that. The largish woman whose purse I cut with my nip-knife certainly seemed to enjoy it. When Kalith came at Princess Mireya, she held the monkey up before her and claimed the monkey had warned her of Kalith’s treachery. At that, the mummer playing the dead Ispanthian king, Mireya’s father, stood up long enough to speak. He cautioned his brother, Kalith, that the gods always revenge themselves on those who harm the mad and that nobody in their right mind talked to monkeys. When Mireya heard this, she began to caper about madly with the monkey, even down to throwing pretend feces at the crowd. Most of them howled, including the young lady I bumped into in my own feigned laughing fit and relieved of a silver earring.
Looking back, I’m glad the Spanth wasn’t there to see the infanta of her homeland reduced to throwing poo—she’d have likely dry-beat the players with the flat of her spadín and caused a brawl. I hadn’t heard of the Dams of Lamnur before, but they weren’t half-bad. I didn’t see the end of the Crowning Play, though. It’s best to be away once you’ve got what you think you can, so I moved on to other quarters. I knew the rest of the play, anyway.
Mireya, her life spared by her feigned madness, was married off to a king sufficiently distant from her home and from the treacherous uncle who meant her ill. Married off to a Gallardian king, who got eaten by goblins at the Kingsdoom. At the close of the farce, all the players would take up little props shaped like goblin heads and bite the Gallard king offstage. It was only in the last year or so that players had the nerve to represent goblins in mummery, and I choose to look at that as a sign of returning strength.
You can’t make fun of something everyone’s still terrified of.
Manreach was starting to heal.
These mummers supposedly did pretty well for themselves lampooning the woes of our neighbors to the south and east. I later heard the dwarf would swallow any silver or gold coin given to her, which made me wonder if the others let her go alone to the privy.
* * *
I wandered next through Sparktown, the old blacksmith’s streets just off the river-docks, until I reached the market. Near the eel stalls, I came to notice a gang of cats slinking about like cats do near fish stalls, but one stood out. He was a bone-skinny gray-brown tabby, slower than the rest and he never jumped, but scraped the walls near the bridge with his whiskers, staying out of open spaces. When the old lady’d whack off a fresh eel head, she’d toss it in the gutter, and the other toms would slink over and fight, but not this one. He’d sort of nod in the air, finding the scent, and then amble over in his own good time, content to lick the spot where the head landed after his fellows dragged it off.
He was blind.
That’s when the cat-catchers came.
About a dozen years ago, during a round of the plagues the goblins sent us, some old geezer at a Gallardian university worked out that one sickness, the whip-cough, was being carried by cats—so off everyone went drowning, clubbing, and otherwise dispatching anything with pointy ears and a saucy look on its face. Eventually, the plague died out, like all the goblin plagues eventually did, and everyone stopped cat-catching. Except the baron of Cadoth, whose son had died after a cat-bite went sour. Rumor was that the boy had been doing something mean and weird to it—not what you’re thinking, weirder than that—and that nobody deserved an unlucky death more than he. Still, the rich hold grudges the poor can’t afford, and the baron left the edict in place. Fortunately for cats, inflation made the bounty so small nobody much bothered anymore, and the baron didn’t care to adjust it, so cats mostly came back.