The circus had most definitely come to town. They just didn’t know which town it happened to be. Another half an hour of walking brought them to a sign, hanging from a sun-bleached stake in the ground. Dax, it said, before taunting them with a few more miles for their feet to tread—as if they needed any more.
Yet with every step, their pace quickened. Especially that of of Lurker and Merion, each for a slightly different reason. For the former, it brought back fond memories, and they were so hard to come by these days, he didn’t mind them holding sway. For the latter, it brought hope, and that too was tough to find in the desert. So it was that they both found themselves racing without breaking out of a walk, a silent little game to shorten the miles before them.
Lilain hung back, holding a sleeping Rhin, still cradled in the hat, with both hands. Faeries will always sleep deeper when wounded. There is a magick in them that works best when their eyes are closed, one which knits them back together quicker than any bandage or stitch.
Soon enough, the music and muted rumble of crowds reached their dust-ridden ears and even Lilain walked a little faster. The coloured lights grew more visible now. They could pick out the lanterns dangling from poles, and the red bunting that was strung between them. They could even hear the shouts from various stalls and attractions, the roars of various creatures behind bars, and even the clink of coin here and there, between the voices.
The circus had parked itself just outside the town, on the western side, and the town had emptied itself to come and greet it. Only a few lights shone in the dark town of Dax, just sufficient to keep the windows lit and the night at bay. The pull of the lights had proven too powerful. A circus weaves its magic on all sorts of people, in all sorts of different ways.
That very same magic was currently going to work on Merion. He could already smell the sawdust in his nose, and the paint and musky whiff of animals on the night breeze. He could smell food too, strange spices and odd meats, crackling somewhere in pans between the tents. It set his stomach to rumbling and his mind to buzzing.
Merion looked up at the main tent, towering above the rest. It was a brightly lit cone of spiralling black and red tarpaulin, patched here and there to show its years. It was the hub of the glittering wheel that was the circus.
In no time at all, the last mile fell away and soon enough they were standing at the circus’s entrance, like stubborn rocks in the flow of people, staring up at a banner that had been stretched over the entrance.
‘Cirque Kadabra,’ Merion read aloud.
‘Bigger than any I ever seen,’ Lurker replied.
‘Only in London, have I seen bigger,’ Lilain chimed in. ‘And even then, I doubt they were
much
bigger. Everything seems larger when you’re small and when it was long ago.’
‘You
are
gettin’ on a bit,’ Lurker smirked. The excitement had obviously got to him. He even dared to smirk at her, as she realised what he had said. She smacked him on the arm and he winced.
‘Don’t test me, Lurker.’
‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ Merion asked.
‘Here, give me that hat,’ Lurker said, gaze flicking to the hat in Lilain’s hand. He prodded Rhin gently as he took it from her, and after a flickering of the eyes, Rhin got the hint. He held on tight as his temporary sickbed was pressed firmly onto Lurker’s head. ‘Little small, but it’ll do.’
Merion smirked to himself as the man strode briskly forward, eager to get at the wonders. For all the bandits, twisters, and murderers the scarred old prospector had fought, for all the hardship in his life, who knew it would be a circus that could turn him into such a child.
The young Hark took it in at his own pace. For all the dread and hardship the desert had brought him since he had first stepped off that locomotive, he felt he deserved a little excitement for a change. Somewhere at his core, he felt the tension die away, and leave him lighter than before, if even just for a little while. Merion rolled his shoulders and let himself bask.
The main tent beckoned to them with its open mouth, blurting out the cheering coming from within. They entered it, squinting. Lanterns burned hot everywhere they looked, backed with mirrors and smeared with translucent paint. Blues, greens, oranges, purples, reds—every lantern shone a different hue. There must have been a hundred of them just hanging from the mighty wooden poles that held the tent aloft.
A thick crowd had gathered all around the edges of the tent, craning their necks to watch the mind-boggling show taking place in its sandy centre. Merion found a box to stand on, while Lurker just stood on tiptoe. Lilain hopped up and down to catch the odd glimpse over the countless heads.
A heavily muscled man stood on a barrel, half-naked and painted with all sorts of different colours. He stood as still as a statue, holding his arms out to the side, a wooden board in each ham-sized hand. There was a third hanging from a rope around his stomach, dangling just over his groin. The crowd cheered him on as he stood there, still as a gravestone.
Merion followed his vacant gaze, and spied the main attraction. This was a woman, dressed in long, overlapping orange skirts that spun as she strode back and forth, working the crowd into a frenzy. Her long red hair hung in myriad curls over her shoulders. The skin of her arms was whiter than snow, and in each hand she held a long knife with a zig-zag edge. A third was clamped between her grinning teeth. Merion grinned, realising what sort of show this was.
Only when she had worked the audience to its fever pitch, making it chant its lungs out, did she begin. First, she faced the man on the barrel head on, standing almost thirty feet away. With a deft flick of her wrist, the first knife flashed through the air. There was a collective gasp, then a
thud
as the blade buried itself in the board in the man’s left hand. Next, she turned side on, looking straight up at the hollow cone of the tent. Without switching hands, or even sneaking a look, she threw the second knife.
Whack!
And there it was, quivering in the second board.
‘Almighty, this man is brave!’ Merion hollered over the roar of applause and whooping.
‘Or she’s just that good!’ yelled his aunt.
Lastly, the woman turned her back on the man. She took the last blade from her mouth and flashed the audience a wink and a smile. Without even pausing to let the clapping die, she tossed the knife over her shoulder. No gasp this time, just a horrified silence as it all looked to go wrong. She had thrown too high! The knife soared across the circle in a high arc, catching every colour of the lanterns as it spun. It was an awful flash of a moment, where eyes were either covered or glued in place.
Thunk!
The blade struck the centre of the last board—much to the man’s evident relief, it seemed. The audience was beside itself, throwing their hats in the air and clapping until their hands were sore. It was impossible not to get caught up in the waves of excitement. Merion whistled through his fingers as Rhin had taught him to. Lurker applauded with heavy thwacks of his gloved hands. Lilain cheered as loud as anyone else.
‘I would not want to get on the wrong side of her, that’s for sure,’ Merion smiled, as they made their exit from the main tent, in search of other spectacles.
‘Nor me, boy. Though the right side of her might be interestin’,’ the prospector chuckled, before sniffing the air. Lilain smacked his arm again.
‘Have some respect,’ she admonished him.
‘I’m hungry,’ Merion suggested, and the others had to agree.
There was almost too much food to choose from: pies, cakes, hot broths, strange red sausages wrapped in buns, and a myriad of sweet things to rot teeth and stick lips together. Merion of course, went for the latter, spending some of his last coins at three stalls before deciding he felt sick and needed something more substantial.
They ate as they walked, touring the circus’s spirals calmly, taking in all the sights and sounds, one by one. There was almost too much to see in one night. There, a strong man lifted huge iron balls and their chains with barely a grunt. Here, a fortune teller waggled his fingers over lanterns and decks of foreign cards. Just a little further on, a contortionist and an acrobat vied with each other from two opposite stalls, turning heads this way and that with every somersault and leg-knot. And a mound of a man, an explosion of fat, sat on a stage, tipping his hat and winking at his gawpers. All the while, jugglers and fire-eaters wandered in and out of the milling crowds, juggling stolen hats and blowing fountains of flame.
After the banality of the desert, it was intoxicating. Whether it was the sugar that had gone to his head, or the lights, the smells, or a sip from Lurker’s freshly filled flask, Merion felt dizzied and entranced by it all. Even the thick press of people was bearable. Fingers bent towards him from every stall as he wandered in circles, staring and gawping until he felt drunk on spectacle. The deeper he wandered into the circus, the more drowned in noise and lights he felt.
He did not know how, but at some point he lost Lilain and Lurker in the crowds, and wandered off by himself. He clutched nothing but a cup of sickly sweet liquid to his chest; a gift from a passing circus girl draped in strange furs.
Whilst busy staring at a clown with a tattooed face spin plates on pointed sticks, somebody gripped him by the shoulders, and Merion whirled. He was met with a wild-eyed woman, clearly in a state of upset, who had discovered the boy was not who she thought he was.
‘Have you seen my son?’ she cried, motioning his height. ‘Blonde hair. Little scar on his nose!’ Several heads turned and, like Merion’s, they shook. No, they had not. The young Hark bit his lip as she retreated back into the milling crowds.
Merion soon found himself behind the main tent, where the crowds were thinner and the attractions smaller. There he found a strange little circus, with cages lined up in wandering rows, with a roof of draped curtain and blanket, a maze filled with all manner of beasts.
Leopards he had seen before. The monkeys seemed too tired to offer any sport. There was a mottled bear that wore a glum expression. A wolf paced in circles, snarling at anybody that got too close to its bars.
With each cage he passed, the creatures grew slowly stranger. There was a peacock with eyes in its tail that seemingly moved around, staring at him whether he dodged left or right. There was a lemur that changed colour every time it moved. There was even a tortoise with a miniature castle for its shell.
When he reached the end of the snaking path of cages and cloth, where the shadows were at their darkest, Merion found a very odd creature indeed—odd to be kept in a cage, that is, especially one in the middle of a circus, where he had no right to be.
Merion stepped up to the bars and stared, his mouth agape. Here was a Shohari warrior, in full war-paint and dress, sitting quietly on a stool with his head wallowing in his hands, as if he had been in that cage for decades. Merion tapped his cup on the bars, and the Shohari glanced up, spat something in his own tongue, and looked back down again.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked him, but there came no answer. Merion scratched his head, trying to make sense of it all. There was a sign above the cage that read:
‘Witness the fearsome Shohari Warrior, in all its glory! Marvel at its long limbs and painted skin. Wonder at its feathers and sharp teeth. Don’t come too close!’
Merion found himself becoming angry.
How could a circus keep a Shohari locked up like this?
‘How dare they,’ he said aloud. They were not animals. They were people. Proud people. He remembered their fire, and their dancing, and their strange drink. He remembered their wisdom, and how Mayut had knocked him to the ground, only to laugh and welcome him to his tribe—him, an Empire boy, far from home.
The boy began to strangle the bars. He ground his teeth together and tried to rattle them, to test their strength. The Shohari looked up again, a confused look on his face this time. He watched Merion cast about for a lock, or a latch, and something to pry it open with. The Shohari got to his feet and stepped forward, babbling something in his own tongue.
‘
M’san an wey? Te ya
?’ he said.
Merion shook his head, trying to dig up a memory of the words Lurker had spoken that day in the desert, when the piebald horses and feathered spears had surrounded them. Merion bit his lip, and tried.
‘
Wa. Shana say
,’ he mumbled, and the Shohari leapt to the bars. Merion stumbled back, but the Shohari had an earnest, pleading look in his eye, not one of anger or murder. Merion came forwards again, and clasped the hand the Shohari stuck out between the narrow bars.
‘
Wa shana say
,’ he repeated, and the Shohari nodded fervently. ‘Give me a minute,’ the boy mumbled, finding the padlock at the bottom corner of the cage door.
Merion had no idea what he was actually doing, but somehow he knew it was right. For all the wonders that this circus held, this one did not belong here, and he would see that changed. Merion looked around for something, anything, that would help. Fortunately for him, this corner was too deep and dark for the average circus-goer. He was alone.
Merion spied a shovel in the corner, smeared with dung. He seized it, head still spinning.
‘Stand back,’ he warned, motioning the Shohari to stand back. He raised the shovel high, trying to focus in the darkness with his bleary eyes.
Merion took a breath and made to bring the shovel down, but it did not move, as if it were stuck in mid-air behind his head. He yanked again, and found his feet slipping out from under him. He sprawled gracelessly in the dust, utterly confused. With one hand still on the shovel, he looked up to find a woman standing over him, glaring down at him with piercing green eyes. The woman calmly ripped the shovel from his grasp and threw it back into the corner. She moved a strand of red hair from her face before she spoke.
‘Now tell me, young man,’ she said, in a voice as sweet as honey yet as dangerous as thin ice. ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing?’