Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (4 page)

I'll Gnaw Your Bones,

the Manticore Said

Even Duga the Prestidigitator, who never pays much attention to anything outside his own hands, raised an eyebrow when I announced I’d be hooking the Manticore up to my wagon.

“
Isn’t that dangerous?” my husband Rik said. He steepled his fingers, regarding me.

“
The more we have pulling, the faster we get there,” I pointed out. “And Bupus has been getting fat and lazy as a tabby cat. No one pays to see a fat Manticore.”

“
More dangerous than any tabby cat,” Rik said.

I knew what he meant, but I kept a lightning rod at hand in the wagon seat in case of trouble. Bupus knew I’d scorch his greasy whiskers if he crossed me.

There is a tacit understanding between a Beast trainer and her charges, whether it be great cats, cunning Dragons, or apes and other man-like creatures. They know, and the trainer knows, that as long as certain lines aren’t crossed, that if expectations are met, everything will be fine and no one will get hurt.

That’s not to say I didn’t keep an eye on Bupus, watching for a certain twitch to his tail, the way one bulbous eye would go askew when anger was brewing. A Beast’s a Beast, after all, and not responsible for what they do when circumstances push them too far. Beasts still, no matter how they speak or smile or woo.

At any rate, Bupus felt obliged to maintain his reputation whenever another wagon or traveler was in earshot.

“
Gnaw your bones,” he rumbled, rolling a vast oversized eyeball back at me. The woman he was trying to impress shrieked and dropped her chickens, which vanished in a white flutter among the blackberry vines and ferns that began where the road’s ground stone gave way to forest. A blue-headed jay screamed in alarm from a pine.

“
Behave yourself,” I said.

He rumbled again, but nothing coherent, just a low, animal sound.

We were coming up on Piperville, which sits on a trade hub. Steel figured we’d pitch there for a week, get a little silver sparkling in our coffers, eat well a few nights.

It had been a lean winter and times were hard all over—traveling up from Ponce’s Spring, we’d found slim pickings and indifferent audiences too worried about the dust storms to pay any attention to even our best: Laxmi the elephant dancing in pink spangles to “Waltzing Genevieve,” the pyramid of crocodiles that we froze and unfroze each performance via a lens-and-clockwork basilisk, the Unicorn Maiden, and of course, my Manticore.

Rik was driving a wagon full of machinery, packed and protected from the dust with layers of waxed canvas. He pulled up near me, so we were riding in tandem for a bit. No one was coming the opposite way for now. We’d hit some road traffic coming out of Ponce’s, but now it was only occasional, a twice an hour thing at most.

“
You know what I’m looking forward to?” I called over to him.

He considered. I watched him thinking in the sunlight, my broad-shouldered and beautiful husband and just the look of him, his long scholar’s nose and silky beard, made me smile.

“
Beer,” he said finally. “And clean sheets. Cleeaaaan sheets.” He drawled out the last words, smiling over at me.

“
A bath,” I said.

A heartfelt groan so deep it might have come from the bottom of his soul came from him. “Oh, a bath. With towels. Thick towels.”

I was equally enraptured by the thought, so much so that I didn’t notice the wheel working loose. And Bupus, concerned with looking for people to impress, didn’t warn me. With a sideways lurch, the wagon tilted, and the wheel kept going, rolling down the roadway, neat as you please, until it passed Laxmi and she put out her trunk and snagged it.

I put on my shoes and hopped down to examine the damage. Steel heard the commotion and came back from the front of the train. He rode Beulah, the big white horse that accompanies him in the ring each performance. Sometimes we laugh about how attached he is to that horse, but never where he can hear us.

The carts and caravans kept passing us. A few waved and Rik waved back. The august clowns were practicing their routine, somersaulting into the dust behind their wagon, then running to catch up with it again. Duga was practicing card tricks while his assistant drove, dividing her attention between the reins and watching him. Duga was notoriously close-mouthed about his methods; I suspected watching might be her only way to learn.

“
Whaddya need?” Steel growled as he reached me.

“
Looks like a linch pin fell out. Could have been a while back. Sparky’ll have a new one, I’m sure.”

His blue gaze slid skyward, sideways, anywhere to avoid meeting my eyes. “Sparky’s gone.”

It is an unfortunate fact that circuses are usually made of Family and outsiders—jossers, they call us. Steel treated Family well but was unwilling to extend that courtesy outside the circle. I’d married in, and he was forced to acknowledge me, but Sparky had been a full outsider, and Steel had made his life a misery, maintaining our cranky and antiquidated machines: the fortune teller, the tent-lifter, and Steel’s pride and joy, the spinning cups, packed now on the largest wagon and pulled by Laxmi and three oxen.

The position of circus smith had been vacant of Family for a while now, ever since Big Joy fell in love with a fire-eater and left us for the Whistling Piskie—a small, one-ring outfit that worked the coast.

So we’d lost Sparky because Steel had scrimped and shorted his wages, not to mention refusing to pay prentice fees when he wanted to take one on. More importantly, we’d lost his little traveling cart, full of tools and scrap and spare linchpins.

“
So what am I going to do?” I snapped. Bupus had sat down on the road and was eying the passing caravans, more out of curiosity than hunger or desire to menace. “I’ll gnaw your bones,” he said almost conversationally, but it frightened no one in earshot. He sighed and settled his head between his paws, a green snot dribble bubbling from one kitten-sized nostril.

The Unicorn Girl pulled up her caravan. She’d been trying to repaint it the night before and bleary green and lavender paint splotched its side.

“
What’s going on?’ she said loudly. “Driving badly again, Tara?”

The Unicorn Girl was one of those souls with no volume control. Sitting next to her in tavern or while driving was painful. She’d bray the same stories over and over again, and was tactless and unkind. I tried to avoid her when I could.

But, oh, she pulled them in. That long, narrow, angelic face, the pearly horn emerging from her forehead, and two lush lips, peach-ripe, set like emerging sins beneath the springs of her innocent doe-like eyes.

Even now, she looked like an angel, but I knew she was just looking for gossip, something she might be able to use to buy favor or twist like a knife when necessary.

Steel looked back and forth. “Broken wagon, Lily,” he said. “You can move along.”

She dimpled, pursing her lips at him but took up her reins. The two white mares pulling her wagon were daughters of the one he rode, twins with a bad case of the wobbles but which should be good for years more, if you ignored the faint, constant trembling of their front legs. Most people didn’t notice it.

“
She needs to learn to mind her tongue,” I said.

“
Rik needs to come in with us,” Steel said, ignoring my comment. “He’s the smartest, he knows how to bargain. These little towns have their own customs and laws and it’s too easy to set a foot awry and land ourselves in trouble.”

Much as I hated to admit, Steel was right. Rik is the smartest of the lot, and he knows trade law like the back of his hand.

“
I’ll find someone to leave with you, and Rik will ride back with the pin, soon as he can,” Steel said.

“
All right,” I said. Then, as he started to wheel Beulah around. “Someone I won’t mind, Steel. Got me?”

“
Got it,” he said, and rode away.

“
I don’t like leaving you,” Rik said guiltily. It was a year old story, and its once upon a time had begun on our honeymoon night, with him riding out to help with the funeral of his grandfather, who had been driven into a fatal apoplectic fit by news of Rik’s marriage to someone who’d never known circus life.

“
Can’t be helped,” I said crisply. He sighed.

“
Tara…”

“
Can’t be helped.” I flapped an arm at him. “Go on, get along, faster you are to town, faster you’re back to me.”

He got out of his wagon long enough to kiss me and ruffle my hair.

“
Not long,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

“
We’ll leave Preddi with you,” Steel said, a quarter hour after I’d watched Rik’s caravan recede into the distance. It had taken a while for the rest of the circus to pass me, wagon after wagon. Even for such a small outfit, we had a lot of wagons.

Preddi was Rik’s father, a small, stooped man given to carelessness with his dress. He was a kindly man, I think, but difficult to get to know because his deafness distanced him.

We pulled the wagon over to the side of the road, in a margined sward thick with yellow loosestrife and dandelions. A narrow deer path led through blackberry tangles and further into the pines, a stream coming through the thick pine needles to chuckle along the rocks. I tied Bupus to the wagon, and brought out a sack of hams and loaves of bread before making several trips to bring him buckets of water.

Preddi settled himself on the grass and extracted a deck of greasy cards from the front pocket of his flannel shirt. While I worked, he laid out hand after hand, playing poker with himself.

The day wore on.

And on. I cleaned the wagon tack, and repacked the bundles in it, mainly my training gear. Someone else would be tending my cages of beasts when they pitched camp, and truth be told, anyone could, but I still preferred to be the one who feed the crocodiles, for example, and watched for mouth rot or the white lesions that signal pox virus and clean their cage thoroughly enough to make sure no infection could creep in under their scales or into the tender areas around their vents.

Bupus gorged himself and then slept, but roused enough to want to play. I threw the heavy leather ball and each time his tail whipped out with frightening speed and batted it aside. Fat and lazy, he may be, but Bupus has many years left in him. They live four or five decades, and I’d raised him from the shell ten years earlier, before I’d even bought the flimsy paper ticket that led me to meet Rik.

I hadn’t known what I had at first. A sailor swapped me the egg in return for me covering his bar tab, and who knows who got the best of that bargain? I was a beast trainer for the Duke, and mainly I worked with little animals, trained squirrels and ferrets and marmosets. They juggled and danced, shot tiny plaster pistols, and engaged in duels as exquisite as any courtier’s.

The egg was bigger than my doubled fists laid knuckle and palm to knuckle and palm. It was coarse to the touch, as though threads or hairy roots had been laid over the shell and grown into it, and it was a deep yellow, the same yellow that Bupus’s eyes would open into, honey depths around clover-petaled pupils.

I kept it warm, near the hearth, but could not figure out what it might contain. Months later it hatched—lucky that I was there that day to feed the mewling, squawling hatchling chopped meat and warm milk. I wrapped the sting in padding and leather. Even then it struck out with surprising speed and strength. A Manticore is a vulnerable creature, lacking human hands to defend the softness of its face, and the sting compensates for that vulnerability.

He talked a moon, perhaps a moon and a half later. I took him with me at first, when I was training the Duke’s creatures, but a marmoset decided to investigate, and I learned then that a Manticore’s bite is a death grip, particularly with a marmoset’s delicate bones between its teeth.

Some Beast trainers dull their more intelligent Beasts. It’s an easy enough procedure, if you can drug or spell them unconscious. The knife is thin, more like a flattened awl than a blade, and you insert it at the corner of the eye, going behind the eyeball itself. Once you’ve pushed it in to the right depth, perforating the plate of the skull lying behind the eye, you swing back and forth holding it between thumb and forefinger, two cutting arcs. It bruises the eye, leaves it black and tender in the socket for days afterward, but it heals in time.

It doesn’t kill their intelligence entirely, but they become simpler. More docile, easier to manage. They don’t scheme or plot escape, and they’re less likely to lash out. Done right, even a Dragon can be made clement. And those beasts prone to over-talkativeness—dryads and mermaids, for the most part—can be rendered speechless or close to it.