Close Kin (16 page)

"The burial
place of Chaucer," grunted Ruby. "And most of
the
English kings." Emily waited, but Ruby said nothing more. She took that to
mean no.

"What about Saint Paul's
Cathedral?" she inquired. "You can't tell me that wasn't
astounding!"

"Designed in the baroque style
by Christopher Wren," intoned the teacher, "who died in 1723. The
dome is higher than the goblin King's throne room. Of course, Wren wasn't
trying to fit it under, ground. It pleased the eye, I suppose, but it's nothing
like what the dwarves could have made."

"Ruby, that's just it!"
exclaimed Emily in annoyance. "The dwarves didn't build it, and magic
didn't, either. We humans made it with our own hands and tools, out of our own
minds. We made it the hard way. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"I'd say
that one fine building out of all this mess is hardly worth
tears
of joy," snapped the old goblin. "You humans run around all day long
creating chaos and trouble, and then you want credit for every little good
work."

"But you
don't know what it's like to be a human," insisted
Emily,
shouldering her way past a chestnut vendor's stand. "We aren't like you
goblins. We don't have a magical king to make sure we do the right things. You
do whatever you're told, but we have to
decide what we
should do. It's a hard life, and no one looks after us.
If we do any good at
all, that's saying something."

The goblin woman stopped walking,
struck by this line of reasoning.

"I hadn't thought about
that," she said slowly. "You don't have anyone to help you. I don't
think I'd want to be a human. It sounds terribly lonely."

"There, you see " began
Emily in triumph, but she didn't have time to finish. Ruby gave a cry of fury
and caught a passing boy by the hand.

"This is exactly what I expect from
humans!" she exulted with
delighted
wrath. "Just as soon as I begin to see good in them, a
smelly
little thief pops up. Come here, young man," she ordered,
dragging the culprit to the edge of the crowd.
"I'll teach you to pick
my
pocket! I'm going to give you a lesson you'll never forget!" And,
standing
close to a lighted window, she threw back her hood.

Her victim gave a squawk of surprise.
Then he burst out laughing. He reached up his free hand and plucked the big
battered hat from his head.

The boy might
have been around ten, but it was hard to be sure.
His
grimy face and ragged frame were terribly thin, and he was
twisted over by a badly hunched back. His greasy
hair looked as if it
might turn out to be white, and his eyes were a
penetrating golden-gre
en. His sharp ears
flipped over at the tips, and his widely grinning
mouth showed one fang, the matching fang having
fallen victim to a
fistfight. The hand holding the hat didn't end in
fingertips. It ended in inch long claws.

"You're ugly as me, ma'am!"
he crowed joyfully. "You're ugly enough to be my mum!"

Ruby
stared in amazement at her elated captive, almost unable to
move.

"I don't know
what this means," she muttered in shock.

"I do," volunteered Emily,
examining their find. "Your smelly little human thief is a goblin."

The two bemused
women took their prisoner to the nearest pub
lic house and watched him wolf down a plateful of
sausages. Emily
had never seen food
disappear so fast without the aid of magic.

"What's your name?"
demanded Ruby in her sternest classroom voice. "Where are your parents?
Who's your mother?"

The child studied his empty plate
philosophically and pushed it away with a sigh. "The name's Richard,"
he answered. "I've got no parents. Never did have, as a matter of
fact."

Emily nudged her companion. "His
father must be one of the goblin men from the trading journeys."

"Impossible!"
declared her former teacher. "Goblins don't
behave
like that! At least, they almost never -- well, I didn't think they did--oh, I
don't know what to think."

"Don't mind
me," recommended the urchin in mollifying tones.
"No need to get upset. Thank you kindly for the
fodder. I'd better be
getting back."

He stood up to
go, but Ruby came to herself with a jerk. "You sit
down," she ordered firmly. "I have to decide
what to do. I'll need to
send a message to
the King at once. Oh, dear! I've almost forgotten how to do that."

"The
king!" Richard's pale green eyes widened in distress.
"There's
no call to involve the authorities, is there, now? I've not
harmed you, you've not harmed me, it was all just
a bit of convivial
good sport."

Emily smiled at the youngster's
appealing tone. "We're not talking about the same king you know. We--or
rather, you and Ruby -- you have a different king."

Richard digested
this information. A whole new world opened up before him.

"You
mean ugly people have a king all their own?" he whispered.
"Yes,
we do," confirmed Ruby. "He doesn't know about you yet,
but he'll want to
see you right away."

The skinny boy couldn't contain his
astonishment. "You don't
mean meet
me?" he marveled. "Me? A king and all? Standing in the
same
room? 'Hello, Richard, how's the lad,' and a friendly slap on the back?"

"I hardly
think he'll slap it," said the teacher with a frown.
"He'll want to start mending it right away. I've
never seen such a bad
back before. It's
going to take months before you can stand up straight."

Richard gawked
at her for a few seconds, but he was a wise boy.
He
didn't waste time on questions.

"All
right," he announced in a businesslike tone. "If a king's that
anxious to see me, I won't be the one to say nay. But I
have to go get
my
family. I'm not leaving them behind." He stood up and made for
the
door.

"Family!"
exclaimed Ruby.

"You said
you didn't have parents," protested Emily, catching up
to
him.

"No more have I, but a man's got
to have a family." He led the way through the crowd outside.

They followed Richard up narrow
streets and down little alleys and through the closed lanes that led from one
tangle of decrepit buildings to another. He dragged them through a tiny
opening, up
some steps, through an attic that
connected several apartments,
down a
ladder, along a cellar wall, and then up more dangerous
stairs into
another little attic.

There, in the dusky twilight glow
coming through a tiny, paper,
covered
window, the two women found the goblin child's family. A
little human
boy and girl lay asleep on a filthy blanket, twins no more than six years old.
Ruby knelt down and lit a goblin flame to
study
them. It accented their strawberry blond hair and played up
the rosy
color of their thin cheeks.

"I found
Jack and Martha crying in a cellar," Richard
explained. "I've taken care of them since they
could barely talk. I'm
teaching
Jack the trade because a man's got to have a profession, but I
don't let 'em run any risks. Say, Jack," he said,
nudging the boy, and
the children awoke,
blinking at the newcomers gravely.

"What's
up, Rich?" asked the little boy. "Who's the green lady?"

"Guess what
I've found!" said Richard in excitement. "A bunch of people just like
me!"

"Pretty
hair," said little Martha with a happy smile. She stood up
and stretched out one small hand to pat the astonished
Ruby on
her bun.

"That's my
family," announced Richard to his new companions
.
"Aren't they beautiful?" he added wistfully.

"They certainly are," said
Emily. "They're as nice a family as anyone could want."

Ruby put her arms around the young
twins, and the sleepy children cuddled up to her, sharing the warmth of her
cloak. She held
them close in breathless
wonder. Ruby had finally found something
in the human world to love.

Sleet fell outside the elves' cave,
and an icy wind blew through the
bare
trees. Although it was twilight, the forest was already very dark.
Thorn
was angry at Sable because she had had another nightmare and had woken them up
with her screams. At the evening meal, he once again made sure that she had no
food.

The meal finished, each found some
indoor activity to do. Wil
low continued
scraping hides, Thorn began cutting out leather
pieces for a new pair of
boots, and Rowan sat cross legged, sewing
another
patch onto his heavily patched tunic. Sable continued
stitching rabbit skins together, probably to make
the lining of a new
winter cloak. She wouldn't be the one to wear it,
Seylin thought
gloomily. Her own clothes
were so old and tattered that they would
have been little use as rags.

Irina knelt by
the cave wall, weaving the shuttle of a hand loom
back and forth. The loom was nothing more than two long
rods
with holes bored in them. Coarse yarn had
been threaded through these holes like the many strings of a harp. Irina pushed
the shuttle
across the row, over one string,
under the next, pulling yarn between
them.
At the end of each line, she tamped her yarn down against all the other lines
below it, and the cloth was bigger by the thickness of
that piece of
yarn. Watching her drudge her way through the slow work, Seylin realized why
the elves' clothing was so frightful.

Seylin himself
had no work to do. His clothes didn't need patch
ing,
and he didn't need to repair anything. He didn't really want to
learn
how to scrape a hide, either, so he decided to oil his boots. He
buffed
off the dirt with a towel, took a small flask from his pack, and
began to rub oil
into the leather. When it came right down to it, he thought, he was just
playing at being a member of this band, pre
tending
to take part in a lifestyle that meant survival or death to
them.
There's no place for you here, Sable had said. He knew that she was right.

"Seylin?"
He jumped guiltily, but it was only Irina speaking
from
her loom. "Did your band know any new stories?" She turned around to
look at him, her smudged face eager and her green eyes
bright. "Do you know something different? We just know the same
old
boring stories we've always told."

"He hasn't heard our stories,"
observed Rowan. "How's he supposed to know if his stories are new or old
and boring?"

"Don't be
mean," pouted Irina, missing the point entirely.
"Come
on, Seylin, tell us something new."

"And make sure we haven't heard
it before," prompted Rowan, grinning at Thorn.

Now, this was
something that Seylin could provide. He recalled
his
favorite tales. What might they not know?

"Do you know the story of the
last elf King's Wife?" he asked.
Irina
shook her head. That was a nice story, then, and gracefully told
in the
elvish chronicles.

"This took place in the reign of
Marak Whiteye and Aganir U-Sakar, the elf King named New Moon. New Moon, the
last elf King, was handsome and vain, a moody and fickle King. Born not from
love, but from the hatred of his father and mother, he had no interest in the
trials of marriage and long remained alone. Condemned, as all the Kings before
him, to marry a human bride, he rebelled against the thought of bringing home
someone with such imperfect looks, and his advisers proposed different women to
him without success. So went the battle, year after year, until the eighteenth
year of his reign, when the master of Hallow Hill brought home his own bride to
wed in the chapel on his estate.