Felix Jongleur had not joined them in their search. Sam had been grateful, although she thought it odd that such a sour, cold-eyed man would choose to remain in the Gypsy camp, surrounded by living stereotypes of carefree amusement. Now, as they came back through the outskirts of the camp, she saw him sitting by himself on the steps of one of the wagons, watching a trio of Gypsy women in long shawls dancing to a busy fiddle. She pulled !Xabbu in another direction: at the moment, she thought their hearts were both too heavy to deal with that terrible old man.
Azador had spotted them making their way across the camp and came to meet them. He had traded his travel-worn clothes for new ones, a colorful vest and puffy-sleeved white shirt. His black boots shone. He had even combed and oiled his hair, which gleamed nearly as brightly as his boots. With his splendid smile and chiseled jaw, he looked like something from a not-very-convincing netflick.
"There you are!" he called. "Come! There is music and good talk. We will wait until the Lady comes to us, then we will be saved."
As he led them through the settlement, which was made up of many little family camps, Sam wondered at how quickly his anger at even being thought a Gypsy had been replaced by a belonging that was almost religious. As she stared at the gathered Romany, and was occasionally stared at in return, she couldn't help feeling that they were all a lot like Azador—so extremely . . . Gypsy-ish, for lack of a better term . . . as to seem almost a joke. There were men with huge curling mustaches pounding out horseshoes on small anvils, and old women dressed entirely in black gossiping like crows on a wire. At the edge of the camp some of the others had set up games of chance and were busily fleecing all the interested non-Gypsies in the vicinity with dried peas hidden under fast-moving thimbles.
I guess this is what you get when you make your Gypsies out of old fairy tales, she thought.
Azador led them down close to the banks of the Well, where his own extended family had made their place. As he introduced his relations to her, most for the second time, a Romany parade of chats and chais and chabos, all dark flashing eyes and white flashing teeth, Sam found herself in danger of falling asleep on her feet. !Xabbu saw and took her by the arm, then asked Azador for a place where she could sleep. She was guided to one of the wagons by a clucking Gypsy granny who led her to a tiny bed scarcely bigger than a bookshelf. Sam wanted to protest that it was !Xabbu who needed the sleep even more than she did, but somehow she wound up lying down. Within seconds, it was too late to say anything.
If Sam dreamed, she did not remember the dreams when she awoke. She stumbled out and nearly fell down the wagon's steep steps. The old crone was gone. All around, Gypsies lay sleeping on the ground, as if the party had raged so long that they had dropped where they stood, but the sky was unchanged, still the same murky, bruised gray.
I miss time, she thought sadly. I miss mornings, and the sun, and . . . and everything.
Someone was singing, a low and quiet wandering in a minor key. She walked around the edge of the wagon to find !Xabbu squatting beside a guttering fire, drawing in the gray dust with the end of a piece of charred firewood as he sang. He looked up and offered her a weak, almost ghostly smile.
"Good morning, Sam. Or good evening."
"You can't tell, can you? Sometimes it feels like that's the most impacted part of this whole thing." She crouched on the ground beside him. "What are you drawing?"
"Drawing?" He looked down. "Nothing. I was only letting my arm move while I was thinking. Like dancing, perhaps, but not so tiring." He couldn't muster another smile, even for his own small joke,
"What are you thinking about?" She was fairly certain she already knew, but he surprised her.
"Jongleur." He looked around. "But before we talk, let us go somewhere more. . . ." He searched for the word.
"Private?"
"Exactly. Where we can see for a distance around us." He stood and led her between the wagons, past more smoky embers and more sleeping Gypsies, toward the bluff that loomed above the encampment, they climbed until they could sit on a small headland at the end of a long slope with the wagons a hundred meters below them. There were still people nearby, some even camped along the slope—not Gypsies, but fairy-tale folk, as Sam thought of them, talking cats and gingerbread children—but they seemed listlessly uninterested in the newcomers.
"What are you thinking about Jongleur?" Sam asked as they settled themselves.
"That there is some mystery between him and Azador I do not understand." !Xabbu frowned. "First there is the way he helped Azador lead us here. Then there is his interest in the Gypsy camp—this man, who has nothing but scorn for the other people and creatures he has met here."
"I know." Sam shrugged. "But maybe there's a simple explanation. He did build the network. It makes sense he might know some things about it we don't, and not want to tell us. He's not, like, Mister Generosity."
"True. But there is still something about it that puzzles me."
They sat watching the movements of the awakening Gypsy camp, as well as the larger crowd of people and semi-people surrounding the Well, a tent city of the not-quite-human. The weird, lunar landscape brought back Sam's fierce sense of homesickness.
"So are we really waiting here for the end of the world?" she asked.
"I do not know, Sam. But there is always hope. Have I told you the story of how the All-Devourer came to the kraal of Grandfather Mantis? That is a story about hope. I told it to Renie, because she is the Beloved Porcupine."
"What?" Despite the heaviness of her spirit, Sam was startled into a laugh.
!Xabbu nodded his head. "Yes, that is what Renie also did when I told her. Porcupine is the daughter-in-law of Grandfather Mantis, his favorite of all the First People. And she was the bravest of them all as well—even when Grandfather Mantis himself was overcome by fear, she kept her head and did what was necessary. That sounds like Renie, does it not?"
Sam looked at him fondly. "You really love her, don't you?"
He did not speak for a moment, but a complicated set of emotions played across his face. "My people do not have a word that has so many meanings as your English word 'love' Sam. I care for her very much. I miss her badly. I am very, very frightened and unhappy that we cannot find her. If I did not see her again, my life would always be smaller and more sad."
"Sounds like love to me. Do you want to marry her?"
"I would like to . . . to try to have a life together, I think. Yes."
Sam laughed. "You may be from somewhere else, !Xabbu, but you've got the single-guy stuff down pretty well. Can't you just say it? You love her and you want to marry her."
He growled, but it was only mock-irritation. "Very well, Sam. It is as you say."
She guessed that his light-heartedness did not go very deep. "We'll find her, !Xabbu. She's here somewhere."
"I must believe it is so." He sighed. "I was going to tell you the story of the All-Devourer. It is frightening, but as I said, it is also a story of hope."
Sam settled in. "Go ahead."