He sat down.
“I was waiting for someone, but not for you,” tegeus-Cromis told him. “Do I pay you for my moth?”
“You rode over the passes on some old nag,” said the boy. “I heard.”
He put his hand to his mouth. “Did that sound awful? I always say something like that, I don’t know why. Do you ever say something you don’t mean like that? I expect it’s a beautiful horse, isn’t it, probably a thoroughbred, and now you’re hurt. I’m sorry.
“Look, here’s a live one: try again. Fast but not so rough. There! You’re getting the idea.” He shivered. “I was in Vriko once,” he said. “Artists’ Quarter. Phew! That’s no city for a lad like me. Six in the morning a smell so foul came up from the Yser Canal you thought it would rust the lamp-posts. Everything was filthy, but if we wanted a wash we had to go to the baths in Mosaic Lane. Do you know Mosaic Lane, my lord? They had some famous pictures there but you couldn’t see them for dirt; the boy I was with scratched it off and saw a face just like his own. Really. Sometimes the water isn’t like water at all; it smells of perished rubber.”
He stared ahead thoughtfully. His hair, very dark red and cut in a “coup sauvage” once popular in the Tinmarket, made his eyes seem very large and young. Ribbons of various colours were tied to his clothes. His throat was bare, the skin smooth and olive-coloured.
“We lived in a house near Ox Lip Lane.” tegeus-Cromis laughed.
“It’s a long time since the Artists’ Quarter looked like that,” he said. “The Yser Spa fell into its own cistern; that was the end of the murals. There’s a courtyard there now with an apple tree in it, and Ox Lip Lane is all little shops which have tubs of geraniums outside them on the pavement. If you saw it now, I suppose, you’d love it.”
“Would I?” said the boy quietly. “I’d hate it. It would have no soul.”
“Soul!” said tegeus-Cromis, who had often thought the same thing. “I don’t believe you were ever there anyway. How old are you? Thirteen?”
They smiled at one another.
For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Then the prince, looking over the ruins of his dinner for some offer he could make, held out his pewter snuffbox. The boy shook his head slowly, but after some thought pulled apart a piece of bread and ate it. He drank some wine too, tilting back his head and gasping. Someone came up from the group round the fire, put a coin contemptuously on the table in front of him, and said, “Well then?” The boy shrugged. He got up and went into the middle of the parlour, recited rapidly three times, in a high voice devoid of expression or implication,
Johnny Jack all hung with rag dolls
Although he is small his family is great and began to dance in a way which managed to be both clumsy and graceful. There was no music. His big wooden shoes thudded on the bare boards; he frowned with concentration and effort, breathing noisily through his mouth. The ribbons on his arms whirled in the lamplight, leaving coloured spiral afterimages. “The effect was quite touching,” tegeus-Cromis would say to him later: “But your arms are too thin.” There was no applause. When he had finished, the boy simply stood where he was until he had got his breath back, then went round the parlour again, catching moths, collecting money, laughing and chattering affectedly. It had not been an entertainment, the prince saw. Put out that the boy had not come straight back to his table, he opened his book and pretended to read:
“Make him a bed of earth bark, ewe daisy, five-finger blossom.”
He looked puzzledly at the cover of the book, put it down, and closed his eyes. He was tired. He saw quite clearly the great seracs collapsing up among the Monar icefields. He crossed under them, once, twice: again.
There was a red flush under the boy’s cheekbones when he did come back to the table, and he was still panting a little. “I’m older than that,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted. Then: “What have you come here for?” tegeus-Cromis opened his eyes.
“What do they say by the fire?”
“To hunt. I knew that, too.” He leaned forward suddenly and took the prince’s hands between both of his own, which were warm and had a kind but papery touch. “Look, my dear,” he said, “why let it kill you, too?” He glanced round the room. The fire had burned down, the parlour was emptying, someone was collecting the empty pots. A door opened towards the back and a smell of urine came in on a cold draught. He let go of the prince’s hands and made a gesture which encompassed not just the parlour, or the inn, but the cobbled square outside it, and the town beyond that. “It belongs here. It’s their responsibility. No one would want to see you killed.”
At this the prince caught his cloak a bit closer round him. “Some people are coming to help me,” he explained. “They should have been here by now. When the door opened, I thought that was them.”
Later the boy asked him: “Which House are you from?”
“The Sixth.”
“What’s your emblem?” tegeus-Cromis showed him one of the rings he wore.
“The Lamia. Here. See?”
The boy shrugged.
“It doesn’t look like anything.”
In the end only the potboy was in the parlour to see them get up and leave together; the prince’s friends had been delayed.
The boy went in the night.
“You’ll always be able to find me,” he said.
In the morning the prince was woken by an altercation at the back of the inn. He had been given one of the rooms there as soon as he arrived. They were sought after because they were large, but this in itself made them seem cold and empty; and while they were supposed to be quieter than the rooms at the front, which faced Replica Square, they had the disadvantage of looking obliquely onto the stableyard. The stables, unlike the rest of the inn, were built of brick-a warm red kind more often seen in the South-and now stood bright and sharp under the blue winter sky. In the yard he could see, if he pressed one cheek against the glass and twisted his head to look out at an angle, two or three heavily laden ponies and a horse of some quality, short-coupled and powerful, with good “ends” and plenty of bone, about nineteen hands high. They were framed by an arch or passageway which further limited his vision, but which amplified the shouts and exclamations of the people gathered round them.
There had been a frost: it lay thickly on the setts in the corner of the yard the sun had not yet reached. The air was cold and transparent, giving to the scene-or that part of it the prince could see-a distinctness, a vigour, which amounted almost to gaiety. The big horse was plunging, striking out in a temper. It sent a bucket rolling across the cobbles, spilling water in a spiral in the morning light. Figures bobbed panickily under the animal’s hooves, trying to secure it; or lounged laughing and giving advice; or went hurriedly to and fro across the arch waving their arms, vanishing before he was able to identify them.
One of them was dressed in a meal-coloured cloak: did the horse belong to him? tegeus-Cromis knew it did, but now everything had vanished into his breath, which lay on the cold windowpane like the bloom on a grape. He wiped it off, then, growing tired of the uncomfortable position he had to maintain to see anything, tried to open the window. When it resisted he shrugged and went back into the room, barefoot across the chilly oak floor, to the things of his he had arranged on a table by the bed-the pewter snuffbox in need of a polish, his rings scattered like dice, one or two books. The sword, which had been his father’s, was propped in a corner. He dressed quickly, feeling elated for no reason.
In the south, especially in the Mingulay Peninsula where the caravans are full of fortune-tellers and their greasy tarot cards, a woman will often stunt the growth of her first child so that the lucrative career of dwarf is available to it in later life. This she does by confining it to a black oak box they call the “gloottokoma” and by feeding it discriminately, while with the help of the cards she stares paralysed into an uncertain future. The dwarf who now stood on one side of the parlour hearth, warming his deformed spine at a few newish reluctant flames, had made a great success in the arena at Uriconium as a clown and a tumbler. For a time a figure so well known on the Unter-Main-Kai that he had been painted in a red and purple doublet as “Calabacillas, Lord of Misrule” by Audsley King (then at the height of her own brief fashion), he was a founder member of both the Yellow Paper Code and the Cheminor Stilt Walkers, under whose aegis he had killed-in and out of the ring, and more or less fairly-a score of opponents larger than himself.