House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  The food was about as expensive as the tavern had been in King’s Path, and this for much less hearty fare, though the fruits were more diverse and interesting.

  One of the pickpockets stepped out in front of them as they got close to the train.

  “We don’t like unsettled scores,” the man said.

  “Was there something unfinished about it?” Palk asked, easing his weight more evenly across his feet in a familiar motion. That something about it felt familiar was distracting, and he almost missed the count of men around them as he searched for something else, something fluid that would lead into or lead out of that balancing motion that was also familiar. The feeling was fleeting, and his focus came back to its edge.

  Eight of them, this time, including two who were much larger. Palk was unworried, and he felt no air of stress from Starn, either, as she resettled the bag on her arm.

  “You don’t want any trouble,” she said.

  “What?” the man asked. She shrugged.

  “You don’t,” she said. “This is a bad town for you to get into trouble. Enough money moving around that they’re going to be trying to establish a good reputation, but far enough away from the city that they have to work hard at it. I’d be willing to bet our lunches that the law enforcement here is pretty eager, am I wrong?”

  The men looked at each other.

  “Empty your pockets,” the leader said, taking another step toward Palk.

  The man had a scarry face, but he had a lot of small bones there under thick, tough flesh that would give way well enough to an elbow or the heel of Palk’s hand. The joints in his arms were well-muscled and unlikely targets, but his fingers, slim and quick for taking things that didn’t belong to him, those would be sensitive, and likely break easily as well. He was too short-legged to be really quick, but he would be hard to knock over from that height.

  “I don’t think so,” Palk said. The man brought out a thin blade, the length of Palk’s hand, and tipped his head to the side.

  “Care to reconsider? I can do a lot of damage to you and your girlfriend before anyone knows what happened. We’re very good at disappearing.”

  Starn sighed.

  “This again?” she asked. “You’re trying to look tough in front of your men. Even we can understand that. But you’ve picked the wrong people. If he wanted to, he would take you apart. You need to understand that,” she said, indicating Palk. “He has violence in him. Real violence, not the stuff that you use to keep people in line. More than that, your men don’t need to fear you to respect you. They already do respect you, and a few of them, I’m not going to tell you which, are most concerned about your tendency to overreact. It’s going to get all of you arrested or killed at some point, and they know it. They’d rather just be invisible than do this whole dance about no one gets to ever make you look bad. That’s how you make your money, after all, isn’t it? You aren’t muggers. You’re pickpockets. For heaven’s sake, do what you’re good at. This is silly.”

  Palk could see the truth in what she said, and so could the man with the knife, but Palk could also see the pride in the other man’s eyes, pride that was stung too badly to back down now. Palk got himself ready. Starn shook her head again.

  “I told you I won’t marry your brother, I don’t care how much money you promised my daddy,” she screamed. “I’m in love and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Heads turned everywhere. People nearby, ones that Palk hadn’t even noticed, stopped talking to see what was going on.

  The spotlight was too hot.

  The green man’s gang vanished, and he stood alone with a knife in his hand.

  And then Palk had the knife in his own hand. The series of motions had been as natural as tying his shoe, but he couldn’t remember what they were after he did them.

  “Walk away,” he said quietly to the other man. “This is over.”

  “People love a show,” Starn said, shuffling the bag to her other arm and starting toward the train again. “You’re too smart for this. You’d make a much better living just opening up a business and telling people what to do, like that. There’s going to come a day when a little voice in your head asks why you’re taking all these risks to make the little money you get. Listen to that voice.”

  Palk flashed the man another warning with his eyes, then followed after Starn.

  “Who are we?” he asked.

  “Hungry, that’s what,” she answered, then grinned. “That was fun, though. Too easy, but still fun.”

  He shook his head and peeked into the bag. He was hungry, she was right.

  “I have a knife,” he said, impressed by the novelty of that. She laughed.

  “You feel better, armed?” she asked. He frowned, looking at it.

  He did. But now he had to figure out where to put it.

  *********

  Dinner was small and frugal. The train moved on. They would reach the city of King’s Port by morning.

  The world outside rolled past in increasing darkness as Palk and Starn settled in to sleep.

  *********

  King’s Port was a very large city compared to anything they’d yet seen. Palk was prepared for that, intellectually, but the press of people, the size and condition of the buildings, everything was new and bewildering. The place smelled of too-many-people and there were languages and accents all around them that he found indecipherable. The train would be several hours loading and unloading all of the cargo, and they would be trading out the fuzzy blue animals with ones that weren’t so tired, so Palk and Starn had time to wander.

  It was a port city, and they quickly found the harbor, standing to watch as boats came and went with nearly as much frequency and intensity as the people and their means of transportation within the city themselves. Animals called out to each other, and birds squawked over dead fish that were rolling up on the beach, or the half a loaf of bread that someone threw out of the back of a building along with a bunch of other scraps. There were growls as some kind of larger animals fought nearby but out of sight.

  “It’s too much,” Palk finally said.

  “It’s a lot,” Starn agreed. “Glad we’re moving on, then.”

  “Yes.”

  He felt on edge, buzzy with too much input, too many things he was trying to keep track of. Too many people whose motivations he couldn’t take the time to decode.

  “We should be in Transit tonight,” Starn told him, “but I don’t think there are any stops along the way. We should bring enough food with us to make it there.”

  He nodded agreement and they continued on, looking for places that seemed like they would have good food at fair prices. Their stack of coins was rapidly dwindling, and Starn was guessing that they would need to be able to find an inn for them to stay at for at least a few days in Transit. They were only halfway there, and the expensive part hadn’t happened yet. Palk watched as Starn counted out money for the bag of bread and dried meats, concerned.

  They were so close to running out, to not having anything.

  “We could stay here just for a little while,” he suggested as they sat at a bench and ate their breakfast, watching children play on wood structures in a small open space. “It’s not that bad, and we could save up a little more money.”

  Starn took out the four coins she had left, letting Palk see them.

  “This is what it costs to find a place to stay for a week, here,” she said. “There were signs at the train station. If we stay, we are out of money, our train tickets are no good any more, and we may never leave. This is our opportunity.” She paused, putting away the money. “You’re right. We could stay and then do something else later, but it would be much later than you think. Maybe a lot later than that.”

  He braced himself.

  “So we have to go on.”

  “We can either stop here or stop there. I don’t see that we have another choice, and neither did Whalk,” Starn said. Again, Palk wished he could read. Wished he had all o
f the information Starn did. Wished he felt less like a passenger on this trip. She ran her arm through his.

  “We’re wanderers,” she said. “This is just how it’s going to feel for a while. We’ll find a place and we’ll settle there, and then things will start being familiar again. This is just the hard part in the middle.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Palk said, mostly just to have said it out loud.

  The park was overcrowded, and the place still smelled of people, but sitting on a bench and eating smoked meat on bread was hardly the worst thing he could imagine for a morning.

  “There will be people who have never seen a city before,” Starn told him. “Ones who grew up in Transit, or who have never left one of the ranches, even, I think. We may not want to live here, but we may as well see it. It’s an experience, and we don’t have a lot of them.”

  He finished his meal and stood, helping her up and tucking away the leftovers as they continued to wander.

  The city was full of poverty. That was obvious everywhere. People in threadbare clothes, children begging for coins, many of whom didn’t appear to make any effort to help themselves. There were men standing at street corners talking and looking around in a territorial kind of a way, ones who eyed Starn in an unpleasant way, and nowhere did Palk seen cleanliness like they’d found in King’s Path.

  There should have been money here. With the amount of goods the port seemed to be moving, plus the train and its source of commerce, someone had to be making money, somewhere, but he instead heard languages he didn’t know and saw gauntness and shrewd fear.

  “Starn,” he said at one point.

  “I see it,” she answered. “Whalk has no idea how bad it is here.”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to find someone to pay me, here.”

  “I could get a job,” she mused. “These buildings have to have owners somewhere, and those owners need people who are good with numbers. But the number of people here who used to be wanderers is staggering.”

  He nodded.

  No wonder Whalk hadn’t made more of a big deal about them sending the money back. Most people probably never did. They just got lost in this swirl of desperate.

  “Do you want to go wait on the train?” he asked.

  “There has to be a better side to the city,” she said. “I’d like to see it. You up for pushing the pace some?”

  That didn’t bother him at all.

  She picked her way through the city as if she had a map to read. Eventually, the pressed-in crowdedness eased, and they started to see larger forms of transportation. Carts pulled by bigger animals, and then closed-in carts. There was a word for those that Palk had forgotten. The style of the animals, the style of the carts, the style of the clothing and even the people gradually improved, and the looks that the people gave Palk and Starn changed from evaluating them as targets to suspicion that they were, themselves, up to no good.

  Still, nothing looked familiar.

  Starn stood under his arm for a few minutes at an open street corner. The birds here were gentler, mostly singing greetings rather than screeching declarations, and the people went by without noticing Palk and Starn at all.

  “This,” she said.

  “What?” he asked. She motioned with her arm.

  “This is where we’re going to end up, if we ever come back here,” she said. “It gets more upscale from here, I’m sure. But this is a good place.”

  “I liked King’s Bounty okay,” Palk said. She nodded.

  “We would always be outsiders there,” she said. “They still have a sense of community that revolves around language and decendency. Here, they wouldn’t care. You’ll need to learn to read,” she teased, “but if we make it to the point that we belong here, no one is going to think we don’t.”

  The work animals here were more handsome and well-bred than the ones they’d seen so far, long-legged, many of them, with clear muscles and conformation that suggested some level of planning and intent. There was almost no squalor, either among the people or the animals, and again the people were clean, their vehicles well-kept and some of them painted in bright colors.

  “Okay,” he said. Starn looked at him to read his face. He smiled.

  “This is the place,” he said. “If we ever decide we want to live in a city, for whatever reason we would, this is where we would come.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, then looked up at the sun.

  “We need to get back,” she said, taking one long last look around. “It’s good to see it, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. It was good to see hope.

  They turned and started back the way they’d come, arm in arm.

  *********

  The train ride to Transit was uneventful. The land grew drier, redder, as they went along, obviously traveling further and further from the coast as they went. Towns went by, but they didn’t stop. Herds of animals, some gangly and tall, others shorter, fuzzier, and dumber looking, grouped around the rails, looking up at them with dull interest.

  The grass grew more scarce.

  “This is where you can afford more land,” Starn observed. “Fewer people competing for it.”

  He nodded.

  There were mountains in the distance, some of them far off with snow on the tops. It felt safe, familiar in a kind of way that suggested not that he knew the place, but that the place that he knew was something more like this. Starn leaned across him to look out the window, and he ran his fingers through her hair.

  She’d left it down today, and while they both needed a good wash, he preferred it to the tight ponytail on the back of her head. It was more accessible, more familiar to his hands.

  “The sun’s beginning to set,” she observed. “We should be close, now.”

  She leaned back again and they both sighed.

  “We’re almost there,” he said.

  “There are going to be a lot of people there like us,” she warned him. “We need to be sharp. Be the first ones to get opportunities.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m bigger than almost all of them,” he said, motioning at the rest of the people in the train car. She smiled.

  “Yup. But you have to impress them for more than your freakish brute strength.”

  “Freakish,” he echoed, amused.

  She laughed to herself.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked. “Do you want to work on one of the ranches?”

  “No, I’m looking for a fit,” she said.

  “How can you know what fits?” he asked her and she leaned her head against him.

  “I’ll know.”

  He put his chin on top of her head, content, and they sat, quiet, for a long time after that, waiting for Transit.

  *********

  It turned out Transit was the end of the line. They let off all of the passengers and set to work with the cargo, then the little blue furry animals pulled the entire train around the loop to turn it around and they started loading the massive number of animals waiting on the platform in great, writhing chaos.

  It was a good space, and Palk and Starn stood and watched for some time as the animal handlers worked.

  The animals had the smell of sweat and dirt on them, maybe smellier than they might have normally been, as they pressed together. There were white and gray animals that were shoulder-high to Palk at the head, with big, flashing eyes and a tendency to poop when they got excited. They were meat animals, from the look of them, with heavy bodies and square stances. There were dark purple and black animals, shaggy with unseasonably long fur, who hung out in little groups of six or eight and charged the men who got too close, even attacking some of the other animals to defend a perimeter of space around them. Palk liked the looks of them, liked their spirit, but recognized that they were going to be the hardest to load, despite the long handles the fur made and their relatively small size.

  There were dark brown animals, flat back
ed, broad shouldered, and careless, who might have been work animals and might have been meat animals, Palk couldn’t tell. They were the easiest to work with, because they followed each other around mindlessly.

  He saw a small number of the flat, blue animals that they’d seen on the trip, the little cart pullers who always looked like they were going to get crushed, but who seemed to repel other animals, as if by scent or attitude.

  There were a dozen different species of animal, there, all with distinct behaviors, all with marketable traits, though Palk could see that his impressions of them would just be guesses for now. There were probably multiple uses for any one of them.

  “You ready?” Starn asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered, taking her hand and making their way to the stairs and off of the platform.

  The little town was raucous with people, packed past capacity with animals and their handlers, and out on the hillside beyond the town, Palk could see dozens of campfires where presumably the overflow people and herds were staying until the trains could take them away.

  “It’s going to be hard to find a place to stay like this,” Starn observed over the thronging noises of animals and of people calling to each other across them.

  “Yeah,” Palk said. “But there are a lot of people here who might be looking for new workers. It’s not all bad.”

  She nodded.

  “Stay sharp.”

  They went into a building whose sign Starn said indicated it was an inn and tavern, approaching the bar.

  “We’re looking for a place to stay,” Starn shouted over the crowd to the bartender. He frowned and pointed over at the end of the bar, where there were a pair of doors back into a back area. He held them open as Palk and Starn went through, then let them fall closed. The noise dampened considerably.