Uptown Local and Other Interventions (12 page)

“Difficult,” Ran said, “oh, I suppose so.” He climbed down from the chair. “Especially with the franc as strong as it is. But taken all together, it’s not so hard. You know what’s really hard?”

“What?”

“Spending a whole night talking without moving my mouth,” he said, and winked again, and slipped away into the crowd in the square, where the shaggy brown-golden pelt got lost behind a screen of about a hundred semi-drunken people.

Blinking, I looked after him. The crowd parted for a moment, just long enough to show a glimpse of him, shambling along, on all fours again, to the delight of the people immediately around him: they applauded, they whooped, one of them bent down to offer him a drink from a bottle. I saw the big golden-brown head swing in that direction, eyes glittering in the light from the nearby restaurant, the expression in them hard to tell from this distance. Irony? Amusement?—Then the head shook from side to side, politely refusing, probably muttering something in
Bärnerdeutsch
: without moving his mouth. A sound of laughter, and the crowd closed again: he was gone.

I got up and went back to the chess game (still in progress, but moving swiftly toward an disastrous endgame reminiscent of that last Kasparov game against the computer). First, though, I asked the waiter who had taken care of us for a glass of 
pflumli,
which I drank fast. A few minutes later the world was wobbling slightly, and the idea of bears who were also commodities brokers didn’t seem so bizarre. It must be nice, when you came right down to it, to have one night a year when you could come out in your own clothes, your own skin, and speak your mind. But that was always the idea, as far as Fasnacht was concerned. There would always be at least one night of the year when, fully masked, you could go up to anybody and let them know what you thought of them: and afterwards, no matter how insulted, the party you had so favored could not retaliate. Except there was at least one Bernese who, on these two or three nights each year, didn’t put the mask on: he took it off. And laughed, showing his teeth.

           
And what about the others?
I thought, rather later, on the train to the plane home at noontime. Other cities have mascots, but few have held onto them with the tenacity of the Bernese, in these times of ruthless modernization and the systematic rubbishing of the “sentimental” and “outdated”. Now I suspected it was because the bears have help—”professional” help. How many other distant children of the Zahringen, wearing skins occasionally alien to them—dark quiet suits, business dresses—have pushed quietly, lobbied, speaking a word in a bar here, a local political committee meeting there, to make sure that the relatives who couldn’t now speak for themselves were properly taken care of? And not turned out into the wild for the sake of political correctness, either, but cared for and companioned by those who walked on two legs, and spoke a local dialect that they could at least partially understand. Bad enough to be a beast with only the distant echoes of humanity left at the bottom of your brain: worse still to be stuck with humanity that didn’t speak
Bärnerdeutsch.

            Let others, outsiders, think what they like. In Bern, at least, the family takes care of its own....and the figs and carrots are extra.

And now a fairy tale… somewhat spatially misplaced from the more typical European milieu. And a chance to indulge, not the Were thing this time, but a dislocated version of the Dragon thing— of which (as the readers of
The Door into Shadow
probably can guess) I have a pretty bad case.

When the dragon came out of the caves of Cumbre de la Vicente and started blackening the hills with its fiery breath, the Queen began to worry. She sat on her throne with her chin on her fist and her elbow on the throne’s arm, watching with mild dismay as her royal house began filling up with heroes. Magnificent specimens they were, none of them less than two yards tall. They came on splendid steeds (which they sometimes rode right into the hall, frequently fouling the sweet rushes strewn on the bright-tiled floor); they came in gold-damascened cuirasses, bearing spears hammered out on icy anvils, or supple swords forged in the fires of lost Toledo. They bore themselves with heroic grandeur, swirling their cloaks in their passing, speaking courtly phrases, bowing themselves double over her hand every chance they got. They drank a great deal of her wine, and, while not at their heroic feasting, they staged mock battles in the fields around the palace, trampling much green corn in the process. The Queen sat in her throne, considering all these things; also considering that it would soon be June, and the dragon, instead of just blackening hillsides and burning down crofters’ cots, would be starting huge brushfires as well. And finally she turned to her most trusted counselor, who stood by her throne chewing his graying beard and thinking similar thoughts. She crooked a finger at him, and Don Escalonzo bent near.

“Get me thieves,” the Queen said.

And since the Don was a prompt and conscientious man, with extensive connections throughout the Twenty Cities, he immediately got her thieves—all of them who were of any note—even making discreet withdrawals from several neighboring dungeons. From Los Encinos to Ciudad de la Santa Monica, the theft rate took a drastic plunge. Several professional fences imperiled their immortal souls by hanging themselves in despair.

The Queen was a noble hostess, no less so to criminals than to heroes when they were guests under her royal roof. She poured out many a bottle of the blood-red wines of the North for them, listening to their qualifications and asking them (with the guarantee of amnesty) many pointed questions about their careers. The thieves answered as courteously as the heroes, but more circumspectly, with much shifting of the eyes. And the Queen noticed that their fingers seemed to twitch a great deal when she wore jewelry. One by one she had them into her throne room, and one by one sent them away again, down the long halls hung with tapestries and ancient heirloom weapons, lined with tables covered with plate of gold and other precious things of marvelous workmanship. The thieves sweated greatly on these long walks, so Don Escalonzo told the Queen—for all that it was cool and shadowy in the royal house, and hardly late May as yet. She nodded at this.

And then came the long afternoon in which the Queen interviewed three thieves, one after the other. The first two came and went, and sweated; and the third came, and spoke with her, and went again. And afterward, by Don Escalonzo’s count, there were found missing from the long hall a crystal cup footed in curiously wrought gold; two opal-encrusted daggers of ancient lineage; a fair unset turquoise the size of a bustard’s egg, carved with strange signs of the Old People; and a small iron horse on wheels with a string in front to pull it, all set with smoke-colored diamonds. And on hearing this report the Queen put her hand to her orange silk bodice, below the great cream-colored ruff, and found that the Most Noble Order of Santa Catalina, in the shape of a winged lion cast in red gold and inlaid with amber, was missing from around her neck, along with its chain of yellow topazes.

“Bring me that man,” said the Queen. And after a brief interval, during which there ensued a hard-run race involving the thief in question and several members of the Queen’s Own Horse, the man was brought before her; dusty, windblown, and (finally) sweating.

“You, sir,” the Queen said, coming down from her throne in a rustle of orange silk, “are the man I’m looking for.” And she led him away by the hand, to her chambers; and the members of the Queen’s Own Horse shrugged their shoulders, and went away to get drunk with the heroes.

*

That was how Churro de las Resedas came to receive a commission from the Queen.

She sat across a green onyx table from him, and told him in some detail of how, earlier in the year, his noble highness the young Prince of Los Encinos had ridden out from his palace north of the mountains, seeking a test of courage to whet his princely valor. And after several bears and lions boldly slain, and several crofters’ daughters wooed and won, and a small earthquake survived, he passed out of men’s knowledge for some days. After a time he returned to the palace at Los Encinos of the Oaks, bearing with him a strange cup or chalice of gold, figured all over with strange devices of winged serpents—manifestly a piece of the legendary Treasure of the Old People, and proof of a mighty hero’s deed on his part, for which all the princes in those parts sent their congratulations.

Churro de las Resedas drank the Queen’s bright wine and began to sweat again. Broad-shouldered, big-handed, stocky and fair, he looked less like a thief than seemed possible. At the moment, he felt less like a thief than seemed possible. “Does your serene Highness mean to suggest,” he said, “that I go find the lost Treasure of the Old People?”

The Queen bent her head gravely to him.

“But madam,” he said, swallowing, “as I read the signs, such action has already angered the dragon that has been guarding the hoard. To steal from it again—”

“No, no!” the Queen said. “Haven’t enough of my people’s houses been burnt about their ears? I want you to go to Los Encinos and steal the Cup from the Prince—
and put it back.”

*

So Churro went and stole the cup.

This was not as difficult as it might have seemed. Since Churro possessed almost none of the traditional attributes of thieves—as smallness, swiftness, litheness, and the like—he had long since learned to make do with wit, and a talent for being quiet. This last alone got him as far as the room outside the room in which the Cup’s guards stayed. When the servant came with their evening’s ration of wine, Churro had time to slip out and pour into it the cactus-and-mushroom powder that a hill-magician friend of the Old Blood had given him; so that within an hour or so, the six guards were sitting around in the guardroom having visions of a religious and mystical nature, and were in no condition to do anything about the tall blocky man who walked quietly in among them. And then there was the room beyond them, where the Cup was kept, and that room was full of hungry rattlesnakes. But Churro had brought along a bag of live mice, which he turned loose in the room; and shortly the snakes left off their hissing and rattling, and became otherwise occupied. Churro put the Cup in the bag the mice had come in, commended their souls to God, and went out of the Palace again to the oak where his horse was tethered. The horse, shod thickly in rags, went quietly away with its rider in the predawn hours, climbing up the pass that lies just to the east of Mont’ de San Vicente.

The rest was not so easy.

When day came, it was no mastery finding the dragon’s den. Churro stood at the top of the pass, looking down the twists and turns of Mandevillia Canyon, and saw a trail of charred manzanita, oak and pine, the brittle skeletons of brush, dead grass turned to charcoal velvet. Here and there, things smoked. His horse stamped, and raised a little cloud of ash, and sneezed from it. Churro rode quietly down the canyon, frequently (though silently) invoking the Virgin and the blessed Saints in Heaven, especially San Jorge and the holy Margareda, who had experience in these matters. No portents made themselves apparent in the sky, however. Only a curl of dismal smoke, black and smelling of sulfur, came weaving out of a cave nearly hidden in a fold of Cumbre del Vicente; and Churro’s horse shied and rolled its eyes a hundred paces from it, and would go no nearer.

“O Heaven,” Churro said, dismounting and tethering the horse, a sable Cahuenga mare borrowed from the royal stables. The mare stood spraddle-legged, tossing her head unhappily and attempting to spit out her bit, and generally letting Churro know in every way possible that she was greatly displeased with the neighborhood. He patted her sweating flank—poor consolation—took the Cup in its bag down from her panniers, and very gently stole into the entrance of the cave, trying not to breathe more than necessary.

Dragon-smell—sulfur fumes and a hard hot scent like scorched steel—hung heavy in the cave’s air. The yellow-brown sulfur-smoke rose to curl and boil against the low ceiling of the cave as Churro crept in, somewhat bent over. This was no stone cave, but all earth, with here and there a random root sticking out of the walls as the way trended downward. Churro prayed the Virgin to keep the earth still for the time being; even a little shake, he reckoned, would bring the whole crumbly place down on him. Meanwhile, the dimensions of the tunnel itself were enough to make him nervous. It was low, but very wide. Churro thought of the country saying, that a snake’s den is no wider than the snake is, and shuddered as he went softly along.

The passage wound, and there were side tunnels. Nothing moved in them but the smoke sliding along their ceilings; though some of them had chimney-holes, and Churro could see indefinite shapes gleaming golden in the downfalling light. He sweated as he had not in the Queen’s halls. Not entirely from fear: the heat grew more and more stifling as he went along, and the brimstone reek sanded his nose raw till he thought he would have to sneeze or die. Churro didn’t sneeze, feeling that death would be certain in that case. Once he started horribly as something brushed his foot in the dark; but it was just a rat, running out the way he had come. He wiped his forehead and set his face once more toward the depths and the heart of the smothering dark, feeling his way along the earthen wall....

Shortly Churro raised his head and found, from the feel of the darkness, that the place had widened around him. And it was not so dim. From tiny cracks in the high ceiling, light filtered down through the smoke seeping out. It fell on more things that gleamed—gold, or silver, it was hard to tell, the light was so pale. It also fell on something huge and long and vaguely patterned, that lay on the great scattered pile of gleaming stuff. Churro squinted at it, wondering what it was—until it moved. And then he shrank back very quietly against the wall, thinking that even good Santa Margareda, who had walked right up to a firebreather, soused it in the face with a bucket of holy water, and then led it around town by her garters, would have taken a look at this thing and hurriedly gone back to her prayers.

The dragon rumbled, a sound like many small reports of cannon one after another. Things piled loosely on one another in the hoard clanked and rang against each other, like knives on a pounded table. The dragon lifted its head, opened its mouth, made a few munching motions. Drops of fiery venom fell onto the hoard, bubbling and smoking; fires rose up from them as they began to melt what they lay on. By the dull red light, Churro could see better. He wished he couldn’t. Twenty yards long, the dragon must have been, from the blunt nose to the end of the thick tail. Small clawed feet struggled to push the creature along the hoard a little ways; then it thumped down on its belly again. The thing was banded and splotched in orange and black—a gaudy hide that looked like the beadwork the Old People did. Little, dim, red eyes glanced in the dragon’s flat head as it peered nearsightedly about. It munched and mumbled and drooled poison-fire for a moment more.

Then, “Dammit all straight to Hell,” the dragon muttered, “but I wish I could get a drink!”

Churro winced at the blasphemy, and crossed himself. Instantly that head swung around, and the tiny red eyes stared straight at Churro. “You again?”

It was no use trying to hide. “No, sir—”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘SIR’?!”

The roar shook dirt down from the ceiling, and the whole hoard banged and jangled like a load of dropped bells. Churro hung onto his wall, going clammy all over, until the shaking stopped. “Uh, uh, uh, your gracious pardon please, senora la Horrida,” he said, desperately hoping that courtesy, or complimenting her on her monstrousness, would do something or other. He had heard that dragons, having so little refinement of their own, cultivated it above all other virtues (with varying degrees of success).

“Better,” the dragon said. Churro swallowed hard, thinking that it was going to be difficult to remember that something with a voice so like a twenty-pounder was female. “And what are you doing here?” Churro opened his mouth, but the dragon gave him no chance to answer. “I swear to everything, the world is going to hell. It’s not like the old days. People walk in without so much as a by-your-leave. And you can’t go anywhere without putting a stone in front of the door. I can remember when I could go out for weeks at a time and come back, and not even a rat had been in here. But now I can’t even go out for a drink without the place being rifled. I’m sitting here dry as a desert, and then you come in and—”

Dry?
“But senora la Horrida,” Churro said, pointing across the cave and hoping the dragon could see the gesture, “why should you be thirsty? Over there behind those shields I see four barrels of wine.”
Stolen from the last caravan of which nothing was ever found but the horses,
Churro thought.

“Wine?” The blunt head swung toward the barrels in question, which were twenty-gallon short tuns. “Is that what those are? I just, mmmnngh, just found them; I didn’t know. Come here, man.” There was interest in that voice. “Show me how to get one of these open. I want a taste.”

Churro was alert for trickery. But he stepped away from his wall and went cautiously down toward where the dragon lay. If she could have breathed fire at me, she would have. It must be true what they say, that the southern breed has to actually bite what they want to burn; they can’t spit the venom—But he still circled the dragon’s head at a respectful distance, aware of the big triangular teeth as he made his way over to the tuns of wine.