The Dragons of Babel (16 page)

The voice came from a booth whose brightly painted arch read rock! the! fox! At the end of a long canvas-walled alley, a vixen grinned at me from an elevated cage, her front feet tucked neatly under her and her black tongue lolling. Seeing she'd caught my eye, she leaped up and began padding quickly from one end of the cage to the other, talking all the while. “Faggot! Bed-wetter! Asshole! Your dick is limp and you throw like a girl!”

“Three for a dollar,” a follet said, holding up a baseball. Then, mistaking my confusion for skepticism, he added, “Perfectly honest,
monsieur,”
and lightly tossed the ball into the cage. The vixen nimbly evaded it, then nosed it back out between the bars so that it fell to the ground below. “Hit the fox and win a prize.”

There was a trick to it, I later learned. Though they looked evenly spaced, only the one pair of bars was wide enough that a baseball could get through. All the vixen had to do was avoid that spot and she was as safe as houses. But even without knowing the game was rigged, I didn't want to play. I was filled with an irrational love for everyone and everything. Today of all days, I would not see a fellow creature locked in a cage.

“How much for the vixen?” I asked.

“C'est impossible,”
the follet said. “She has a mouth on her, sir. You wouldn't want her.”

By then I had my wallet out. “Take it all.” The follet's eyes grew large as dinner plates, and by this token I knew that I overpaid. But after all, I reasoned, I had plenty more in my carpetbag.

After the follet had opened the cage and made a fast fade, the vixen genuflected at my feet. Wheedlingly, she said, “I didn't mean none of them things I said, master. That was just patter, you know. Now that I'm yours, I'll serve you faithfully. Command and I'll obey. I shall devote my life to your welfare, if you but allow me to.”

I put down my bag so I could remove the vixen's slave collar. Gruffly, I said, “I don't want your obedience. Do whatever you want, obey me in no matters, don't give a thought to my gods-be-damned welfare. You're free now.”

“You can't mean that,” the vixen said, shocked.

“I can and I do. So if you—”

“Sweet Mother of Beasts!” the vixen gasped, staring over my shoulder.
“Look out!”

I whirled around, but there was nothing behind me but more booths and fair-goers. Puzzled, I turned back to the vixen, only to discover that she was gone.

And she had stolen my bag.

S
o it was that I came to learn exactly how freedom tastes when you haven't any money. Cursing the vixen and my own gullibility with equal venom, I put the goblin market behind me. Somehow I wound up on the bank of the Gihon. There I struck up a conversation with a waterman who motored me out to the docks and put me onto a tugboat captained by a friend of his. It was hauling a garbage scow upriver to Whinny Moor.

As it turned out, the landfill was no good place to be let off. Though there were roads leading up into the trashland
there were none that led onward, along the river, where I wanted to go. And the smell! Indescribable.

A clutch of buildings huddled by the docks in the shadow of a garbage promontory. These were garages for the dump trucks mostly, but also Quonset hut repair and storage facilities and a few leftover brownstones with their windows bricked over that were used for offices and the like. One housed a bar with a sputtering neon sign saying brig-o-doom. In the parking lot behind it was, incongruously enough, an overflowing dumpster.

Here it was I fetched up.

I had never been hungry before, you must understand—not real, gnaw-at-your-belly hungry. I'd skipped breakfast that morning in my excitement over leaving, and I'd had the lightest of dinners the day before. On the tugboat I'd watched the captain slowly eat two sandwiches and an apple and been too proud to beg a taste from him. What agonies I suffered when he threw the apple core overboard! And now…

Now, to my horror, I found myself moving toward the dumpster. I turned away in disgust when I saw a rat skitter out from behind it. But it called me back. I was like a moth that's discovered a candle. I hoped there would be food in the dumpster, and I feared that if there were I would eat it.

It was then, in that darkest of hours, that I heard the one voice I had expected never to hear again. “Hey, shit-for brains! Aintcha gonna say you're glad to see me?”

Crouched atop a nearby utility truck was the vixen.

“You!” I cried, but did not add you
foul creature, as my instincts bade me
. Already, poverty was teaching me politesse. “How did you follow me here?”

“Oh, I have my ways.”

Hope fluttered in my chest like a wild bird. “Do you still have my bag?”

“Of course I don't. What would a fox do with luggage? I threw it away. But I kept the key. Wasn't I a good girl?” She
dipped her head and a small key on a loop of string slipped from her neck and fell to the tarmac with a light tinkle.

“Idiot fox!” I cried. “What possible good is a key to a bag I no longer own?”

She told me.

T
he Brig o' Doom was a real dive. There was a black-and-white television up in one corner tuned to the fights and a pool table with ripped felt to the back. On the door for the toilets, some joker had painted
Tirna bOg
in crude white letters. I sat down at the bar. “Beer,” I told the tappie.

“Red Stripe or Dragon Stout?”

“Surprise me.”

When my drink came, I downed half of it in a single draft. It made my stomach ache and my head spin, but I didn't mind. It was the first sustenance I'd had in twenty-six hours. Then I turned around on the stool and addressed the bar as a whole: “I'm looking for a guide. Someone who can take me to a place in the landfill that I've seen in a vision. A place by a stream where garbage bags float up to the surface and burst with a terrible stench—”

A tokoloshe snorted. He was a particularly nasty piece of business, a hairy brown dwarf with burning eyes and yellow teeth. “Could be anywhere.” The fossegrim sitting with him snickered sycophantically. It was clear who was the brains of this outfit.

“And two bronze legs from the lighthouse of Rhodes lie half-buried in the reeds.”

The tokoloshe hesitated, and then moved over to make space for me in his booth. The fossegrim, tall and lean with hair as white as a chimneysweeper's, leaned over the table to listen as he growled sotto voce, “What's the pitch?”

“There's a bag that goes with this key,” I said quietly. “It's buried out there somewhere. I'll pay to find it again.”

“Haughm,” the tokoloshe said. “Well, me and my friend know the place you're looking for. And there's an oni I
know can do the digging. That's three. Will you pay us a hundred each?”

“Yes. When the bag is found. Not before.”

“How about a thousand?”

Carefully, I said, “Not if you're just going to keep jacking up the price until you find the ceiling.”

“Here's my final offer: Ten percent of whatever's in the bag. Each.” Then, when I hesitated, “We'll pick up your bar tab, too.”

It was as the vixen had said. I was dressed as only the rich dressed, yet I was disheveled and dirty. That and my extreme anxiety to regain my bag told my newfound partners everything they needed to know.

“Twenty percent,” I said. “Total. Split it however you choose. But first you'll buy me a meal—steak and eggs, if they have it.”

T
he sun had set and the sky was yellow and purple as a bruise, turning to black around the edges. Into the darkness our pickup truck jolted by secret and winding ways. The grim drove and the dwarf took occasional swigs from a flask of Jeyes Fluid, without offering me any. Nobody spoke. The oni, who could hardly have fit in the cab with us, sat in the bed with his feet dangling over the back. His name was Yoshi.

Miles into the interior of the landfill, we came to a stop above a black stream beside which lay two vast and badly corroded bronze legs. “Can you find a forked stick?” I asked.

The tokoloshe pulled a clothes hanger out of the mingled trash and clay. “Use this.”

I twisted the wire into a wishbone, tied the key string to the short end, and took the long ends in my hands. The key hung a good half-inch off true. Then, stumbling over ground that crunched underfoot from buried rusty cans, I walked
one way and another until the string hung straight down. “Here.”

The tokoloshe brought out a bag of flour. “How deep do you think it's buried?”

“Pretty deep,” I said. “Ten feet, I'm guessing.”

He measured off a square on the ground—or rather, surface, for the dumpings here were only hours old. At his command, Yoshi passed out shovels, and we all set to work.

When the hole reached six feet, it was too cramped for Yoshi to share. He was a big creature and all muscle. Two small horns sprouted from his forehead and a pair of short fangs jutted up from his jaw. He labored mightily, and the pile of excavated trash alongside the hole grew taller and taller. At nine feet, he was sweating like a pig. He threw a washing machine over the lip, and then stopped and grumbled, “Why am I doing all the work here?”

“Because you're stupid,” the fossegrim jeered.

The tokoloshe hit him. “Keep digging,” he told the oni. “I'm paying you fifty bucks for this gig.”

“It's not enough.”

“Okay, okay.” The tokoloshe pulled a couple of bills from his pocket and gave them to me. “Take the pickup to the Brig-O and bring back a quart of beer for Yoshi.”

I did then as stupid a thing as ever I've done in my life.

So far I'd been following the script the vixen had laid out for me, and everything had gone exactly as she'd said it would. Now, rather than playing along with the tokoloshe as she'd advised, I got my back up. We were close to finding the bag and, fool that I was, I thought they would share.

“Just how dumb do you think I am?” I asked. “You won't get rid of me that easily.”

The tokoloshe shrugged. “Tough shit, Ichabod.”

He and the fossegrim knocked me down. They duct-taped my ankles together and my wrists behind my back. Then they dumped me in the back of the pickup. “Scream
if you want to,” the tokoloshe said. “We don't mind, and there's nobody else to hear you.”

I was terrified, of course. But I'd barely had time to realize exactly how desperate my situation had become when Yoshi whooped, “I found it!”

The fossegrim and the tokoloshe scurried to the top of the unsteady trash pile. “Did you find it?” cried one, and the other said, “Hand it up.”

“Don't do it, Yoshi!” I shouted. “There's money in that bag, a lot more than fifty dollars, and you can have half of it.”

“Give me the bag,” the tokoloshe said grimly.

By his side, the fossegrim was dancing excitedly. Bottles and cans rolled away from his feet. “Yeah,” he said. “Hand it up.”

But Yoshi hestitated. “Half?” he said.

“You can have it
all!”
I screamed. “Just leave me alive and it's yours!”

The tokoloshe stumbled down toward the oni, shovel raised. His buddy followed after in similar stance.

So began a terrible and comic fight, the lesser creatures leaping and falling on the unsteady slope, all the while swinging their shovels murderously, and the great brute enduring their blows and trying to seize hold of his tormentors. I could not see the battle—no more than a few slashes of the shovels—though I managed to struggle to my knees, for the discards from Yoshi's excavations rose too high. But I could hear it, the cursing and threats, the harsh clang of a shovel against Yoshi's head and the fossegrim's scream as one mighty hand finally closed about him.

Simultaneous with that scream there was a tremendous clanking and sliding sound of what I can only assume was the tokoloshe's final charge. In my mind's eye I can see him now, racing downslope with the shovel held like a spear, its point aimed at Yoshi's throat. But whether blade ever connected
with flesh or not I do not know, for it set the trash to slipping and sliding in a kind of avalanche.

Once started, the trash was unstoppable. Down it flowed, sliding over itself, all in motion. Down it flowed, rattling and clattering, land made liquid, yet for all that still retaining its brutal mass. Down it flowed, a force of nature, irresistible, burying all three so completely there was no chance that any of them survived.

Then there was silence.

W
ell!” said the vixen. “That was a tidy little melodrama. Though I must say it would have gone easier on you if you'd simply done as I told you to in the first place.” She was sitting on the roof of the cab.

I had never in my life been so glad to see anybody as I was then. “This is the second time you showed up just when things were looking worst,” I said, giddy with relief. “How do you manage it?”

“Oh, I ate a grain of stardust when I was a cub, and ever since then there's been nary a spot I can't get into or out of, if I set my mind to it.”

“Good, good, I'm glad. Now set me free!”

“Oh, dear. I wish you hadn't said that.”

“What?”

“Years ago and for reasons that are none of your business I swore a mighty oath never again to obey the orders of a man. That's why I've been tagging along after you—because you ordered me not to be concerned with your welfare. So of course I am. But now you've ordered me to free you, and thus I can't.”

“Listen to me carefully,” I said. “If you disobey an order from me, then you've obeyed my previous order not to obey me. So your oath is meaningless.”

“I know. It's quite dizzying.” The fox lay down, tucking her paws beneath her chest. “Here's another one: There's a
barber in Seville who shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself, but nobody else. No—”