Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (3 page)

The merchants, each one thinking that he has had the advantage over all the others, latch up their strong boxes, load their goods in carts or on mules, cover their stalls, and head away from the keep. They leer with impish eyes and thin, hollow smiles, congratulating their peers while mocking them in the shadowboxes of their greedy thoughts.

•

The king fidgets on his throne, uncomfortable and alone, save for two statuesque guards who could be asleep, for all he knows. The great hall is cold and stinks of cinders from the previous night’s fire. He almost wishes he could rescind the decree that no foreign entertainers would enter the keep. Fire-eaters and acrobats would warm the walls and provide entertainment — heaven only knew where his own dwarf was. Besides, such a decision would likely have prevented the prince from succumbing to the draw of the carnival. But the signs were clear, the Black Death was spreading. And though the gypsies might bring their curse to the countryside, the keep would not be breached.

The king brings a small bouquet — posies, marigolds, roses — to his nose, driving away the foul miasma that he somehow senses has entered the castle.

•

Tanner, on his way home, spits into the bucket of milk outside the butcher’s door. Moments later, a burly arm reaches out and pulls the bucket indoors.

•

A sticky puddle of humours pools on the floor next to Andretto. In a moment, the mass congeals and stands upright in the form of a tiny, misshapen man no larger than the dwarf’s hand. Between a feathered beret and a brocaded doublet bulging to obesity, the homunculus’s face bubbles, gurgling forth barely recognizable words.

“Anblethlo, thlee time isss neaharr.”

The dwarf groans.

“Leave me.” Tears sting Andretto’s face, evaporating with fever before reaching his chin. The cool rivers left in their path do little to soothe the burning.

“I cannoth leeef youa, mai frendth. Not unthil thee ent.” The voice turns jocund, or as jocund as the voice of a creature that perpetually drowns in its own juices can sound. “I weel bee yor combanyunn. W-hen I leef youa, youa weel no thet thee tie-mmm hass rann ot.”

“Will I die then?” Andretto is sad, but resigned.

“I ham a halloooshinashun, not a proffet.”

Distant laughter trickles into the room like the sound of a burbling brook far away in the distance.

•

The merchant is the only person in the guardroom who is not laughing.

The laughter is mirthless.

The echoes in the merchant’s bruised and bloodied ears resounds with pain and his own agonized cries.

The road is a canyon, empty save for settling dust, the muffled sounds of laughter and screaming from the guardroom, and the unrestrained peals of laughter and screaming from the carnival.

For all practical purposes, the keep has moved to the carnival. The most ambitious merchants have moved, with their customers, away from the un-inviting stone walls of the castle to the brightly-bedecked open arms of the tent city. Locals and foreigners mingle indiscriminately, shared drink and song and proximity melting the barriers between them. All is merriment and merriment is all at the carnival.

Boecker’s men sprint ahead of him, an occasional coin flinging out from one of their purses to litter the King’s way with wealth. The Prussian limps behind, the wound of the past, aggravated in the present, hindering his way to the future. It is futile. His men push the few remaining pedestrians (those alert enough to hear the clank of ducats on hard-pack) off the road and onto its sloped embankments. Peasants filter off to their farms in the evening sun, some holding enough coin in their hands to carry them through several poor harvests, come what may.

•

The prince bends his head down as the bodyguards ride their chargers beneath the portcullis. His bowing is, however, not out of respect, nor is it done to avoid the steel gate, a full six feet over his royal brow. It is purely involuntary, and it is only moments before he slides off the bloodied saddle. The rider catches him before he hits the ground and holds him above the dirt with one powerful arm. It is not long before the heir apparent is surrounded by attendees who clean his gore and staunch his wounds with whatever materials are at hand. Even the blanket around his shoulders is stripped into bandages to bind him up.

The anonymous ancient one walks boldly into the king’s hall, striding up to the throne of the brooding monarch. The guards, lulled by the silence that has covered the room since the bodyguards set out after the prince, only slowly come to an awareness that the figure approaching the king is not the queen. The king, eyes cast to the floor, does not see the figure until the old man — an assassin, for all the guards know — doffs his cowl and speaks.

His voice is warm and comforting, like dried flower petals carried softly aloft on a zephyr. His words, however, betray the soothing voice, revealing it as a mere tool, an instrument.

“His majesty does well to bury his face in flowers. Still, that will not be enough.”

The king looks up, flinching as his guards seize the man less than a sword’s length from the throne.

The voice continues, only slightly perturbed by the guards’ rough handling.

“Pestilence has already found its way into this place. His brothers, famine, time, death, will follow soon.”

He stops silent, staring, with a satisfied grin at the king as he is dragged away.

“I have delivered my message, oh lord” precedes the closing of the door.

•

Chilled shivers wrack Andretto’s frame. He catches stuttering glimpses of the homunculus through blinking eyes. His tears feel suddenly hotter against the clammy skin of his face, a shocking temperature reversal.

Sound comes to him as if piped in through a series of tunnels, one for his breathing, one for the screams in the distance, one from a whistling tea kettle left unattended in the kitchen below, yet another for the voice of the homunculus, thinning to a whisper.

“Thee tie-mmm iss heer, my friendth.”

Each tunnel suddenly blares like an army of un-tuned trumpets. His head explodes in a demon-song dirge of agony.

•

The guard room falls silent. Suddenly disinterested soldiers ebb from the tower, black-cowled grave diggers flow into it. The merchant has sold his final wares.

A murder of crows descends on the deserted road to peck at crumbs and tidbits left behind by the evaporated crowds. A wild dog lopes up the ditch-side and scatters the birds. Then, losing interest, the mongrel saunters off into the country once more. The jackdaws return as soon as the dog is out of sight.

The crowd’s energy wanes. Even the acrobats have had their fill. The party loses its savor as several attended wander home, heads in hands, though the drinking has barely begun. The musicians are spent, the dancers victims of vertigo. The celebratory mood has gone akimbo, succumbing to a subtle, yet sinister pall. Soon, the carnival is a desiccating starfish, lines of celebrants dissipating into the purple evening. From all directions, a cough, a sniffle, a groan, like the distant snapping of a small fire at the edge of a field of tall, dry grass, the sound carried on the wind of omen, an expectation.

Boecker hears the low mumble of the crowd from far behind him, pierced by the occasional sharp cough. As he reaches the keep’s portcullis, he is struck by the odd notion that the coughing has increased in regularity and intensity, like a series of war drums inevitably leading up to the army’s charge. As the gate lowers, his consciousness rises, and a realization strikes him in the heart and spine.

“Bar the gate! Let none enter, on pain of death! Bar the gate!”

Boecker turns from the falling gate as the king’s own guards rush out from the keep, hurling, like a human ballista, a roll of rags that the sergeant barely recognizes as a man. The rag doll-man tumbles through the portcullis at the last possible moment, the sharp point of the gate pinning the edge of his cloak like an angry dog. The soldiers have no time to laugh, so focused are they on shutting the double-door oaken gate behind the portcullis. A huge crossbar, three arm widths thick, is set into place on iron rungs bolted firmly into the doors.

The soldiers lean up against the gate, wiping their brows. They look at each other and laugh, relieved to have locked out the worries that plague their sergeant so.

•

The prince, with assistants, hobbles into the king’s chamber. The king runs to his son. The queen, hearing the arrival, also runs to her son. They three embrace, unashamed tears shed before lesser nobility
and servants.

“Father, mother,” the young man chokes, “I am so sorry”.

“No, I must apologize, my son,” the king humbly declares. “I was, ah…”

The king stops short, looking down at his bosom.

The queen screams at the sight of the blood that covers the triumvirate. The bandages have not held.

Boecker steps in through the doorway, the worry on his sweating face encrusted with a certain finality. He shakes his head and begins to weep.

The remaining audience scatters like mice before torchlight.

•

It is night, but Andretto cannot sleep. His energy has come back to him and the homunculus has melted through his floor, down into the kitchen beneath. He gets to his feet — still a little sore in the joints, but alive and recovering — and tests his legs for a walk. They hold, and the dwarf decides to go get some fresh air.

He descends to the kitchen, where midnight cooks ply their trade in grim silence, chopping with purpose, but without hope. The servants are fretful, preparing for the morning meal as if it will be their last.

Andretto walks past the king’s hall, eerily silent, even for this late hour. He then ascends a spiral staircase, up a tower to the balustrade.

He emerges into a moonless night. It is devoid of sound, save for the distant bark of a dog and the scattered caws of crows. Even the carnival in the distance is silent. He thinks that the tents may have already been taken down, but it is difficult to tell in the dark.

He breathes in the cool air and coughs a little. His chest aches, but his lungs do not burn as they did earlier. A light breeze blows, but does not elicit chills as it would have at the height of his fever. The bumps have already subsided, and though he is sore, he can feel his health seeping back into him.

“I will survive,” he says out loud. His voice sounds awkward on the wind, his announcement unheard by any ears other than his own.

•

Somewhere near the castle someone lights a fire. Another appears a little further out, then another even further. Andretto smiles to see the little camp and cottage fires ignite like stars throughout the keep and to the countryside, to the very limits of the horizon. Around those fires, he thinks, are philosophers and laborers, whores and soldiers, kings and princes. It looks to him as if everyone in the world is connected, warming themselves, together, by their fires.

•

…away astream, a babe asleep, alone by babbalong of riveron. By sumer falls and hinter springs, we finned a wolfchild in invernal wildwoods. Where?

— See, there? we say.

A marblous youth carved out in white and green of mirror-moon and veins of vines: a singer slain. Muses and furies dance around him in an Amazon of maize. The winged horse of his sylph sups at the water lapping, slapping, at his feet. Flowers and leaves form almost a blankout over him.

— What is his name? we quiz. If we could kissper it in his ear, he might arise out of the night, into the mourning.

— Away, we scoff at our others.

— A way? A- wait! He is awakening.

Opium smoke on Lethe water drifts, gold with the touch of day’s first light. A wake of shifting serpents in his streams slaps up a wash of water over this narcotic drowned in hyacinths and lotus petals. Ah, he thinks in slow stir, rousen in his slumber, ah, to be an angel in the arms of others, gifting freely the communion of the cock. And now, in a wakening to sounds of rhapsody and rapture, of a piper at the gates of dawn, the songliner stirs in laze, takes in a breath of haze, and yawns. He notices the song and knows, as the sound fades, it is only an echo of a shadow, a reflection of a memory.

•

The wake and wash of amber and umber dreams recede with slumber, dying embers of the night’s ephemera, drifting from the young man’s dazing thoughts. He opens his eyes to glimmerings of dawn, and draws himself out of his dreams as he draws down the linen sheet.

His naked skin beaded with sweat, raking his fingers thru his crow-black hair, he tries in vain to hold on to the flesh of flux of what he knows he’s dreamt. But, O, the song…it was a song so sweet that to remember it would cause too great a sorrow, too deep a yearning for return.

•

Bleary and blinking in the gloam of daybreak, the songliner rolls in bed to face his lovers, still asleep, serene — in their own forest streams of dreams perhaps. He misses the moment already, but…they say the greatest gift the god of wilderness and music ever gave to our trapped animal souls was to forget each time we hear that song in sleep.