by William King
"But don't tell anyone," he said to Folderol, looking the creature in one of its tiny eyes. "It's a secret, all right?" Another advantage of the wyvern, Hans decided, was that he could be relied upon not to go around gossiping.
"It's not so bad," said Hans, sitting there thinking of future achievements. "It's not so bad, working for the carnival."
But it couldn't last, of course.
From that very first day in The Purse and Pocket, the figure of Grunwald had overshadowed the carnival like some spectre of doom. At first, this had shown itself only in the grumblings of Pulg, who would occasionally break off from a long diatribe on the subject of his great ambitions to make some disapproving remark about snotball.
And then the summons had arrived.
Hans himself had opened the door to admit the little man from the city council.
"Herr Pulg?" the little man had said, squinting into the gloom of the hall and wrinkling his nose at the smell. "I have a summons for Herr Pulg."
"I'll fetch him," said Hans, turning to go in search of Pulg. But then the showman himself came striding out of the shadows, descending on the little man like some enormous predatory bird. "A summons?" he cried. "A summons? What nonsense is this?"
The little man uttered a squeak of alarm and held out a piece of parchment which Pulg immediately snatched from his hand.
"Rodents?" cried Pulg, reading the document. "What does it say - an excessive level of rodent infestation?" He looked about him in disbelief and spread out his arms indicating the great hall. "But the building is in prime condition. I often eat my dinner off the floor here. Do you see any evidence of this 'rodent infestation'?"
The little man adjusted his spectacles and peered about him critically, as though he was scrutinizing some legal document.
"Well," he said eventually, clearing his throat. "There's one over there." He was pointing at the giant rat, which was peering back at him through the bars of its cage.
Pulg was speechless for a moment. He closed his eyes for a short while as though to concentrate his reserves of patience.
"That is not a health hazard," he explained, slowly and deliberately. "It is an exhibit. Surely this ridiculous summons does not apply to rodents which are displayed for the entertainment and education of the general public?"
The man from the council sucked in his breath and shook his head.
"I wouldn't care to express an opinion on that," he said. "And if you will excuse me now, I must return to my office..."
"But what should I do?" said Pulg, distraught. "I have not had a chance to read the small print..."
"Three days time," said the little man. "There will be an official inspection in three days time. If you fail that, we shall have to close you down." And then he was gone.
Pulg was left staring at a closed door, remembering Grunwald's final words that day at The Purse and Packet: "I have influence," he had said, "at the city council."
"Yes," muttered Pulg. "It seems as though he does have influence." But he did not seem to be too discouraged.
"Three days," he told Hans, speaking with renewed confidence. "There won't be a rat within five miles of here in three days time."
Hans watched in mounting excitement as Pulg's hired wizard entered the hall and began setting out his magical artefacts: black candles arranged in a circle and, in the centre of this, a pedestal on which he placed the rotting corpse of a venomous toad.
Heidi, characteristically, was less impressed. She stood there with folded arms, shaking her head.
"Why don't you just give up?" she asked Pulg. "It's hopeless. Grunwald is a determined man and has great influence in the city. If he doesn't get the council to close you down, he'll just try something else."
But Pulg hardly seemed to be listening.
"Look," he said, as the wizard began to chant, his arms weaving around, describing intricate arabesques in the air above him. "What an impressive sight! There won't be a rat alive in this building before long."
"I'll believe it when I see it," said Heidi.
But by nightfall the giant rat was dead on the floor of its cage, covered in great red weals.
It was Heidi who discovered it. She ran tearfully to Pulg with the news and the showman broke into a broad smile.
"Why, that is excellent news," he said. "If that great beast is dead then its lesser relatives will certainly have perished also. Now - you and Hans and Wolfgang must clean the place out from floor to ceiling. All rat corpses must be taken out and burnt."
"But I nurtured that animal," Heidi sobbed, "I nurtured it with my own hands!"
"It died a noble death," said Pulg, with quiet satisfaction. "It died so that the other creatures might live. When the men from the council come, they will not find a single rodent in the carnival!"
"Not unless they bring their own," Heidi muttered.
But Grunwald's plan appeared to stop short of such outright trickery. The men from the council came and poked around for hours, examining the floor with great looking-glasses, but they could find no evidence with which to close down the carnival.
When they had gone, Pulg opened a bottle of wine and fetched his staff tiny glasses, which he filled almost to the brim.
"A toast!" he announced. "I propose a toast to the ruination of Grunwald and his petty machinations!"
As they raised their glasses, there came a knock at the door.
"Get it, Hans," said Pulg. "Let us hope it is not the men from the council, come back for a closer inspection."
As Hans moved towards the door, he felt his elation slipping away from him. He was overcome with trepidation. He felt as though he would open the door and find the very doom of the carnival standing there on the threshold.
But it wasn't the men from the council. It was Grunwald himself.
The snotball impressario came swaggering in, with several of his cronies behind him.
Pulg drained his wineglass in a single gulp. Then he stood there without a word, waiting for Grunwald to speak.
"Nice of you to clean the place up for me," said Grunwald, casting a casual eye about the hall. "Now you've had a taste of the kind of influence I exact in the city, I expect you'll be ready to sell to me, won't you? Does five thousand gold crowns sound like a fair price?"
"It sounds a bit like getting mugged in the street," said Pulg, gesturing for Hans and Wolfgang to come to his side. "There's a big wooden box in my room," he whispered to them. "Bring it in here, will you?"
"Gone to fetch your cash-box, have they?" asked Grunwald, as they ran off.
"Not exactly," said Pulg. "It is something that I think will interest you, however. A recent invention of which you may have heard. I'm told it has potential sporting value, but I myself have purchased it for a different purpose."
"Oh yes?" said Grunwald, his eyes narrowing in suspicion as Hans and Wolfgang carried in the heavy wooden box.
"Just put it down there," said Pulg, and he bent to open the lid, taking out a long metal tube with a flared end. "It works like this," he said, "you take some of this powder and put it down the barrel. Then you take one of these balls of lead..."
There was a cry of panic from one of Grunwald's cronies. "It's a blunderbuss, a gun. He's going to shoot us all!" And the deputation began to edge back towards the door. Grunwald held out his arms in a gesture of restraint.
"This will not help your case," he said. "The penalty for murder is a heavier burden than mere business relocation. Perhaps I can suggest an alternative property. I have a grocer's shop..."
He didn't bother to continue this business discussion. Pulg had raised the blunderbuss to his shoulder, as though about to fire it.
"Don't do it!" cried Heidi, "don't be so stupid, Pulg!"
But her warning was no longer necessary. Grunwald and his friends were gone. Pulg was pointing his blunderbuss at the back door, which was swinging open in the breeze.
"Let's see him bring his influence to bear on this!" he said, laughing wildly.
&nb
sp; "Right - that's it," said Heidi, whispering to Hans. "He's gone too far, this time. I'm getting out."
After that, Hans noticed that attendances at the shows began to drop. And people would turn and whisper in the street as he and Pulg and Folderol walked along. Hostile glances were commonplace.
"Keep that creature out of the way now," Heidi advised, taking Pulg on one side, but the showman ignored her. He alone seemed unaware of the strength of feeling that was rising against the carnival.
"Pulg's out of touch," said Heidi. "Grunwald is too powerful. He's gradually turning the whole city against us but Pulg doesn't seem to realize how serious it is. He thinks he can shoot down public opinion with that stupid blunderbuss of his."
Then, one day, Hans was chased through the streets by a mob of youngsters. He had been handing out leaflets for the carnival when the group of louts had seemed to emerge out of nowhere, throwing stones and calling him a fiend and a mutant. He had taken quite a battering.
"Don't you see what's happening, Pulg?" said Heidi, as she bathed the cuts on Hans' head. "Soon it won't be safe for any of us to walk the streets."
"We're going through a difficult period," said Pulg. "But don't worry - the public will fix their attention on some other poor scapegoat in a month or two. You mark my words."
"I'm more impressed by the marks on Hans' head," said Heidi. "It really is time we got out," she whispered to Hans. "We may not have the chance for very much longer."
The next day, she told Hans she was definitely leaving.
"I've got a new job," she said. "Barmaid at the Happy Haddock Inn. Much the same sort of work, really, but I'll show less legs and more cleavage. I'll miss the animals, though." "I wasn't sure you liked the animals," said Hans. "You complain about them so much."
"I complain because I hate being exploited by Pulg," said Heidi. "But I like the animals all right. They're the only reason I put up with it."
She was pacing up and down, eating sweetmeats compulsively from a big bag. Hans had never seen her look so nervous.
"It's Pulg," she said. "I haven't told him yet. I was going to do it at lunchtime but he presented me with a legal document making me officially second-in-command of the carnival. Can you believe it? The first step to a partnership, he said, beaming all over his scheming face."
"Congratulations," said Hans.
Heidi snorted.
"Hardly," she said. "Obviously it's got through to him at last that I'm not too happy with the way things are going and he's done this to try to bring me round. But it's too late. I'm definitely leaving."
"I suppose you're right," said Hans, dolefully.
"I know I'm right! But I still feel I'm letting him down. Ridiculous, isn't it?"
Hans could understand that. He would feel the same way himself.
"I like Pulg," he said.
"Yes," said Heidi. "I suppose people do like him. That's why he can get away with so much. I liked him once myself, before I got to know him better. But he's good for nothing, Hans, believe me. He's nothing but talk."
Hans thought this was going too far.
"But the carnival," he said. "It's Pulg's carnival. It must have taken some effort to assemble all those animals."
"Of course it did. But not on Pulg's part. From what I've heard him babble in his drunken moments, his mentor got the carnival together. Pulg was an orphan you see, brought up by a powerful magician. Pulg showed no facility for magic, too busy pulling the tails of dogs and the legs off spiders, so the wizard fixed him up with a tame menagerie for his livelihood. All that Pulg's done since is to drag it round the Empire, persuading fools like us to do all the work for him."
Hans was silent for a moment.
"I still like him," he said, defiantly.
Heidi gave a long-suffering sigh.
"But you have to leave here," she said. "Pulg isn't going to get away with things for much longer. If you stay around, he'll just bring you down with him."
"When will you tell him you're going?" asked Hans.
"Later," said Heidi, popping another sweetmeat into her mouth. "I'll tell him later."
Hans felt terrible that night, as he walked beside Pulg to The Squandered Youth. The showman was full of himself, telling all the old stories, about staging shows at the stadium, about how he and Hans would one day be partners. Hans wanted to blurt out that Heidi was leaving and be done with it. He hated himself for bottling it up like this, when he knew that Pulg should really be told. How would the showman react, he wondered? How could he get by without Heidi?
Despite all his fears, Hans found that as he walked on and listened to Pulg's great plans, his mood began to lift a little. He didn't really believe any of Pulg's wild plans any more but he found that the patter was infectious. He could almost believe, as he walked down the street with Pulg and Folderol, that everything was going to turn out all right.
Later, sitting up on the balcony of the inn, he found himself confused by the twin feelings competing inside him: Pulg's optimism and Heidi's despair. He turned to old reliable Folderol, sitting there beside him, and scratched the creature's scaly hide beneath his chin.
"What's going to happen to us, Folderol?" he asked. As usual, the creature did not reply.
Hans sighed and thought back on all the times he had sat up here, feeling so secure in his new life. Now it was all so different. He was almost afraid to look out at the skyline of Krugenheim, in case he saw it change before his very eyes. He still had the magic flute, of course, but how could he use it to help matters?
Then he looked down at the street and saw the soldiers approaching.
At first, he took them for a pack of beasts, but as they separated out from the passing crowds he saw that the bestial heads were sitting upon human ones. Hans did not find this reassuring. These were the Templars of the White Wolf, he realized, the ruthless soldiers of Ulric - each resplendant in a swirling wolf-skin cloak, complete with head for hood, and fashioned - it was said - from beasts killed by the soldiers themselves in single combat. When they marched up to the door of the inn, Hans didn't stay around to watch what happened. They had come for Pulg, he realized, incensed by all the talk of heresy that Grunwald had put about. He found a window that was sitting ajar, wrenched it further open and climbed through into the inn.
Now he was in the large room that the landlord hired out for private functions - not long since vacated, it seemed. There was a smell of stale beer and a pool of vomit on the floor. He ran across the room, colliding in his haste with a stack of chairs which fell crashing to the floor around him, and tried a door on the far side. He was lucky - it wasn't locked.
"I must get downstairs and rescue Pulg," he kept thinking to himself. "I must get down there and warn him before the soldiers get to him." But there wasn't much time.
Which way now?
He was in a corridor, with no sign of a staircase either way. He guessed the direction and turned left, rushing past the closed doors of guest rooms and turning a corner to find a small cat, cornered against a wall, baring its claws and mewing in hurt outrage. He had come to a dead end.
Hans retraced his steps, panting now, bemoaning the lost time, back past the door of the function room. Was there any point now? Surely he must be too late. Perhaps he could use the flute... Then he rounded a corner to find a staircase and Pulg running up it.
"Quick!" said the showman, "the balcony!"
They hurried back along the corridor and through the function room. There were clattering noises behind them. Were the templars giving chase?
"Who put those bloody chairs here?" cried Pulg, as he tripped and went sliding and crashing about the floor.
"Watch out," said Hans, as he helped Pulg back to his feet again, "there's a pool of vomit over there."
"Somehow," muttered Pulg, "I feel this whole businesses beneath me."
But then they were through the window and out onto the balcony and Folderol was there waiting - stretching his wings.
"Right," said Pul
g, climbing on the creature's back. "Climb on behind me - hang on to my waist!"
"He'll never take the two of us," cried Hans, but he did as he was told, pulling himself up across the rough scales of the creature's body. He could hear the soldiers crashing through the chairs in the room behind them. He looked round and saw one of them lose his footing and slide through the vomit.
"Pay attention!" cried Pulg. "Hang on to me, you idiot!"
There was the usual sinking sensation in Hans' stomach as Folderol leapt off the edge of the building. But this time it was no gentle glide down into the street. Folderol flapped his great wings, straining to keep all three of them aloft. But they still seemed to be losing height. Hans could see some of the soldiers in the street below, running along beneath them, waving their swords - their cloaks swirling in the air behind them to make them look more than ever like a pack of wolves. Very much lower and those great swords of theirs would almost reach...
Then Folderol seemed to be gaining height at last. Hans saw clear sky around them as he lay there with his head pressed against Pulg's back, watching those great wings rising and falling, rising and falling, beating through the air beside them.
"Well done, Folderol!" said Pulg. "Well done, my boy! There'll be an extra steak for you for dinner tomorrow if we make it."
Then he shouted over his shoulder to Hans: "I'm only glad those templars didn't call any later in the evening. Another few mugs of ale and I'd never have noticed them outside the inn, never mind made it up all those stairs."
"But what are we going to do?" shouted Hans. "Surely they'll just come after us at the carnival!"
"We'll barricade ourselves in there, my boy," said Pulg. "There will be a siege of historic proportions. Don't worry - I've prepared for this eventuality. I've got enough food in store to keep us for months."
Hans didn't think this idea sounded very promising. He could imagine day after day stuck in that dark smelly building, while Pulg strutted about feeling grand and making rousing speeches. Hans could think of better ways to spend his time. And he hoped that this "food in store" of Pulg's didn't refer to the animals - he didn't fancy eating them. He began to wonder what a bog octopus would taste like...