Sideshow (34 page)

Nela gulped and shut her mouth, seeming determined to keep it that way.
“Less talk, more action,” said Curvis. “There should be a table on the platform for the high mucky muck Houdum-Bah. Get him up there in everyone’s eyes instead of us.”
Jory nodded in agreement. “Of course,” she said. “Someone should tell the Murrey. Asner, will you take care of that?”
He stumped off to do so, speaking softly to several of the Murrey folk who paused in midscurry, looked fearfully about them, then ran to hoist one of the long tables onto the platform.
“I told them they’d forgotten,” whispered Asner when he returned. “Told them I was making a friendly reminder. Poor things, they believe someone forgot to tell them. So, we’ll put our things over there to one side, near the platform, but not on it. The light’s better there. The boss chief can see us, and so can everyone else.”
“What will Houdum-Bah think?” demanded Nela.
“What would you think, if you were the boss chief and arrived at your own banquet to find a table set high upon a platform?” asked Jory. “You’d think it was for you, wouldn’t you?”
“How about music?” Asner asked. “Nela, you and Bertran are the experts. What can we do about music for our show?”
The twins went with Asner to talk with the musicians. Coins changed hands. The two drummers nodded as the twins described drum rolls, clashes of cymbals, and when both should occur. After further explanation, the almost trumpeter attempted an almost fanfare, with some success.
Very soon thereafter the Houm and High Houm began to trickle in, each wrapped in gay fabrics and glittering with beads. Blue boys ran back and forth bearing platters of meat from the pits outside the doors and loaves of bread from a store against the wall. Pitchers were filled and emptied and
filled again. All was dash and froth and noise. Against the wall, the sideshow set itself in readiness.
“Now’s the time to work the crowd,” said Bertran. “Curvis, let’s work the tables.”
“Work the tables?”
“Come on. Let’s do some magic.” The twins signaled the musicians and moved to the nearest table where they began pulling coins from behind ears, scarves out of women’s hair to the accompaniment of drums and bugles and the occasional whang of a timely gong. After watching them for a moment, Curvis followed.
Fringe said, “They’re right, Danivon. We’ll want the crowd on our side if there’s trouble.”
He shook his head over her naiveté in thinking Houm or Murrey were capable of taking anyone’s side but their own, but he followed her as she tugged the bulky machine to a clear spot near another table.
“Your fortune, ma’am,” she chanted. “Your fortune, sir.”
Danivon busied himself as her assistant, wafting the incense, summoning the powers of the future.
“Lost … Treasure … Returns,” cried Fringe, reading the shining capsules as they fell into the bin.
“What is it you have lost, ma’am?” begged Danivon, his nose twitching as he held out his hand toward the High Houm woman in her bright green gown. “Was it a pin? No. A ring! Your mother’s ring?”
The green-gowned woman responded with cries of delight.
“In the garden outside the window where your washstand is,” said Danivon. “That’s where it is. You laid it on the sill when you washed your hands, and you forgot it.”
“I did!” she wept. “Oh, yes, I remember now.”
Her escort dropped coins into Danivon’s outstretched palm while others at the table laughed and demanded their own fortunes be told. Fringe worked her way around the table, stopping when she reached the side of a child, a girl of some eleven or twelve years who was looking at her, half in terror, half in delight.
“What’s your name,” Fringe asked.
“Alouez,” the girl whispered. Her eyes were huge and shadowed in the pallor of her face under a misty cloud of hair. She was already beautiful, promising greater beauty to come.
Fringe pivoted, throwing her oracle’s dress into a dramatic
swirl and taking the opportunity to glance at all the tables. No other children. No other children at all.
“Would you like to hear your fortune, Alouez?” she asked, keeping herself from scowling with some difficulty. Why was this the only child?
The woman sitting next to the girl put her hand to her face, hiding her eyes, not quickly enough to hide the gleam of tears.
“Yes,” breathed the girl. “Tell my fortune!”
She picked her own levers, pulled them, listened as bells rang and capsules fell. When they had done, Fringe picked them up, palming one or two to substitute others she had in her pocket. She wanted no message of fear for this child, no matter what the machine said.
“Riches, years, joy,” she read, putting the capsules down in front of the child. The tearful woman turned her head away and blotted her face on her sleeve.
“May I keep them?” the girl asked eagerly. The message had erased the anxiety from her face, but Fringe, watching the woman next to the child, knew the reason for that anxiety was still present.
She frowned as she went on to the next table, where Danivon came up to her and asked: “Who’s the girl child you were spending such time on?”
“Her name is Alouez,” she replied, glancing back at the child over her shoulder. “She’s the only child here, have you noticed? She seems very much alone, more than a little frightened. The woman with her is crying, trying to hide it. Something she knows the child doesn’t.”
“Nasty,” said Danivon, catching a whiff of the old familiar stench.
“She seems familiar, somehow.”
“The girl?” Danivon grinned fiercely. “Of course. She looks like you. Or as you probably did when you were that age.”
It was true, not in the coloring, but in the shape of the face and features. Perhaps in the expression, as well. Fringe had often been fearful at that age. And since, she admitted to herself, trying to think of something that would change the subject. “About that lost ring,” she murmured. “That was fortuitous. They were amazed.”
“I smelled it, even through all this stink,” he said. “Sometimes I do.”
“What happens if you smell imminent destruction?”
“I’ll scream loudly and we’ll all run.” He seemed half-serious as he said it, but then he winked at her and caressed her cheek, making her flush. No point in telling her he’d been smelling imminent destruction all day.
Behind them, Curvis and the twins were busy being amusing. Their hands darted and turned, hiding and disclosing, their teeth flashing, they made jokes, people laughed, though warily. By the time the two groups had worked their way around half the tables, many of the High Houm were calling them by name and jesting with them, as were the Murrey folk.
The mood of enjoyment did not last long. From some distance outside came a wavering howl that was taken up by the chimi-hounds at the gates and built into a screaming wail. The assembled diners fell silent in one breath, and into that anxious quiet the clamor of a monstrous drum toppled like an avalanche of stones. Reverberations echoed and died slowly as dust fell from the rafters in spiraling clouds. It was the end of any jollity. The Houm pressed in upon their tables, faces blank, voices stilled, faceless as flowers in a garden. The sideshow members strolled casually back to the corner where Jory and Asner awaited them, managing to get settled into anonymity just as Houdum-Bah’s entourage came through the gates.
A dozen drummers first, thundering on balks of hollowed timber, each carried by four men. Armed men second, big men all, laden with weapons, eyes white all the way around, like panicked animals, sleeveless shirts open to the navel, arms and chests tattooed in patterns of red and violet and black, each finger a different color, those fingers weaving an intricate pattern of signs as the hounds spoke to one another in their secret hand language.
The translator in Danivon’s bonnet saw the signs and whispered into his ear what the fingers said. “Who put the damned table up there. Houdum-Bah’s table? Of course, Houdum-Bah’s table! Whaddoyoumean, who?” Then more quick signals. “Are they here? There they are. Well, well, won’t they be surprised!”
Danivon, intercepting hostile or amused glances, believed this last interchange referred to the members of the sideshow, and his wariness deepened.
Houdum-Bah himself seemed to find nothing suspicious about the high table. He waved his drummers into a line at
the foot of the platform as he heaved his huge bulk upon it and sprawled into the central chair. Murrey ran at once with meat, with drink, with bread. Half a dozen of Houdum-Bah’s men mounted the platform and seated themselves on either side of him while Houm got up from the nearest tables on the floor and moved slowly away as the remaining members of the retinue took their places. Within moments, all the entourage was seated and the displaced Houm were edging toward the gates, smiling vacantly as they went, attracting as little notice as possible, leaking through the open gates in twos and threes, vanishing without a word.
Tentatively, the orchestra began to tootle and bang once more, very softly.
“What now?” asked Bertran. “Back to the tables?”
“Not yet,” said Jory. “Let them start eating. Then start where you left off. Stay away from the boss chief’s men unless they ask you to come over.” She sounded very crisp, very young. Danivon peered at her curiously, and she returned the look, winking at him. “I’ve been in similar situations before,” she said. “It’s important to look unruffled. Show fear, and they’ll be on you in an instant.”
“Enforcers know that,” said Fringe stiffly. “We’re taught that.”
“Well, of course you are, dear,” Jory murmured. “Of course you are.”
More fortunes, more coins from behind ears, more scarves from unlikely places, more transport of pocket munks from one place to another. Now, however, the Houm were not entertained, though they very quietly pretended to be, clearly eager to do nothing or say nothing that might attract the attention of Houdum-Bah or his men. Meaningless smiles. Meaningless nods. Words spoken too quietly to be heard. The orchestra went on tootling, plucking, drumming, but even that sound was subdued, attracting little notice.
“Here, boy,” called one of the entourage to Danivon. “Over here.”
Danivon bridled.
“Hush,” hissed Fringe. “Go, bow, be a sideshow, Danivon.”
“I wan’ my des-tin-ee,” demanded a tattooed giant, a man almost as big as Curvis. “Bring the girlie to tell my for-toon.”
“She cannot tell fortunes,” Danivon intoned. “But the
Destiny Machine may, if it chooses. She does not control it. It does as it will.”
Fringe bowed, chanted, lifted her hands, then stood away from the machine, pointing at the levers, saying, “The machine is in your hands. Pick what levers you will.”
A bright orange finger flicked at the levers, two, three. The machine began to whir. Fringe went on chanting, standing well away. She wanted no allegations of interference. At last the capsules fell into the bin, and she gestured for the man to pick them up.
“Read it,” he cried, his eyes fast upon her face. “You read it.”
She picked them up at arm’s length and ostentatiously laid them upon the table so they could be seen. Perhaps this animal couldn’t read, but someone at the table probably did.
“Great … Dragon … Comes,” she read to her own amazement.
“Wha’s that mean?” the man asked between dirty teeth.
She bowed, spreading her arms wide. “I do not know, sir. Only the machine knows, and it will not tell me. Something or someone like a dragon approaches, so I would say.”
“Bring her here!” trumpeted a voice. Houdum-Bah himself, beckoning to Fringe. “Here, come give me my destiny, woman! Be sure it is a good one.”
Danivon helped her onto the platform and leapt up behind her. Together they moved the machine close to Houdum-Bah. Again Fringe chanted and stood aside.
The man leaned forward, finicky, picking this lever and that. The machine began, lights moving, bells sounding. Silence fell in the great room. There was only the sound of the bells and the tap of the capsules that fell, one, two, three, four.
He read them himself. “Comes … Now … Great … Dragon …”
Fringe could not keep the astonishment from her face. “Wha’?” the boss chief cried, seizing her by the shoulder. “Wha’?”
“It doesn’t … it doesn’t usually give the same fortune twice,” Fringe said, biting her lip. “This dragon business must be something important.”
“Wha’ is dra-gone?” he asked.
She shook her head helplessly.
He bellowed the same question to the assembled diners. “Wha’ is dra-gone?”
The orchestra fell silent. Every head was bowed, as for the headsman’s axe. No one had an answer for Houdum-Bah. Then, from her place beside the platform, Jory cried in a hag’s shriek: “Oh, great Houdum-Bah. There are dragons upriver. I have seen them myself.”
“Wha’?” he demanded again.
“Big creatures,” she said, coming out into the open space before the platform, curving her skinny arms, extending her bony old fingers, glaring her eyes. “With fangs and spines and plates of hide upon them. And claws, of course. Very fearsome, they are.” She shivered all over, making a sound as though her bones clacked.
The man stared at her for a moment, his nostrils twitching, hanging between amusement and annoyance. Then he roared laughter, and his retinue laughed with him, a howled cacophony.
“Houdum-Bah is not feared of beasts, no matter wha’ fangs it has,” cried one.
“True,” said Jory, capering about as she shrieked laughter. “Great Houdum-Bah need fear no beast, no matter when it comes.”
“Great Lord Chimi-ahm will deal with beasts,” the boss chief declared, rising from his chair. He thrust his arms high and trumpeted into the suddenly silent room. “Great Lord Chimi-ahm will hear of this dra-gone. Now call the priests, so Chimi-ahm will hear!”
The drummers looked expectantly at the doors and pummeled their instruments, making an earthquake summons. The Houm silently left their tables to press against the walls, turning their faces away as though they wished to become invisible. The Murrey ran, falling over one another in their anxiety to get the tables tugged aside to make a cleared space below the platform. Fringe and Danivon pulled the Destiny Machine off the end of the platform and settled among the others of their party, as intent upon being inconspicuous as were the Houm.
“He’s playing at something, is Houdum-Bah,” muttered Jory, barely audible under the thunder of the drums. “He’s violent and arbitrary toward everyone, but I sense an especial animosity toward us. One he’s covering up for the moment.”
Danivon sniffed. “True,” he admitted. “The man means a
particular violence toward us. Of course he means enough violence toward the world at large to get a great many people killed. So, what happens now?”