—Phyllis Eisenstein
Elizabeth Moon
An Incident in Uskvosk
Elizabeth Moon has degrees in history and biology and served in the US Marine Corps. Her novels include The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, Divided Allegiance, Oath of Gold, Sassinak and Generation Warriors (written with Anne McCaffrey), Surrender None, Liar’s Oath, The Planet Pirates (with Jody Lynn Nye and Anne McCaffery), Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, Winning Colors, Once a Hero, Rules of Engagement, Change of Command, Against the Odds, Trading in Danger, Remnant Population, Marque and Reprisal, and Engaging the Enemy. Her short fiction has been collected in Lunar Activity, Phases, and Moon Flights, and she has edited the anthologies Military SF 1 and Military SF 2. Her novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula Award in 2004. Her most recent book is a new novel, Victory Conditions.
Here she gives us ringside seats for an exciting day at the races—Dying Earth style.
An Incident in Uskvosk
Elizabeth Moon
Once a mighty city rose beside the head of a deep gulf in the Sea of Sighs, and its ships plied their trade, and the magnificence of its buildings proved its wealth…but in these latter days, only a dusty town remained, buildings shabby, patched with stones from its earlier grandeur. Unimportant to most, a minor port, a stop on the caravan route across the land, Uskvosk had shrunk and faded in the bleak millennia of the sun’s decay, and its population held many idiosyncratic beliefs with ferocious tenacity.
Midafternoon in the dry season, with the bloated sun hanging sullenly over the town, and most folk with nothing better to do than slump by a window and watch passersby, was not the best time for an assignation. It was, however, the only time that Petry, general dogsbody at the Bilge & Belly, the locals’ name for Herimar’s First-class Drinking & Dining, Superior Rooms Available, Sea Views Extra, could be sure his chosen outbuilding was empty.
In caravan season, the stable would have been full and busy, but caravan season was a quarter year away. Now the partitions intended to keep beasts separate made private nooks, suitable, Petry thought, for an afternoon’s exploration of the town lady of pleasure he most favored. He had saved enough for her reputed fee, in battered copper slugs stolen, one by careful one, from under the beds of drunken merchants, while removing their stinking chamber-pots. She would not be busy at this hour. And surely she would rather lie with him, a sweet innocent lad as he appeared, than with the kind of men who came to the Bilge & Belly before attending Aunt Meridel’s Treasure-house, the high-walled establishment in which the fairest of the town’s professional ladies spent their evenings.
Now Emeraldine stood in the doorway, all ripe lips and riper body, golden curls tumbling to her plump shoulders, but scowling instead of smiling—eyes narrowed to slits, chin jutting, arms folded stiffly. “What’s this? The stable? Where’s my surprise?”
“In here,” Petry said, doffing his boy’s cap and making a broad gesture, such as storytellers made. “Ten coppers’ worth, I’m telling you truly.” He opened his hand so she could see the coppers.
Her face relaxed a little, but she did not step forward, despite his bow and second flourish of the cap. “Petry—you’re a sweet boy, but I fear you have mistook me. Pillow companion I am, and will be till the day I die, but I do not lie with children. You are but half-grown, lad. Talk to me again in a year or two, when you’ve some growth and we can both take pleasure in it.”
“But—but I am old enough—” Petry struggled to keep his voice high enough for a boy’s.
Her eyes narrowed again. “If you were able, Petry, it would mean you were a dwarf, and while I do not lie with children out of care for them, I would not lie with a dwarf for care of my pride. As you surely know, such are unlucky and deserve the stoning our custom demands. Are you then a dwarf pretending to be a boy? I’m sure Master Herimar, who gave you work out of pity for an orphan, would be glad to know—”
Petry cringed. Discovery would be disastrous. Besides, he wasn’t a dwarf, he was simply a very small man. “I’m not! I’m not a dwarf! I just thought—there’s a boy on the docks, said he’d had a woman and he’s just a half-year older than me—” Older than his apparent age; he had topped thirty in the previous dry season.
She snorted. “If you mean Katelburt, he’s a very young looking fifteen; he lies about his age all the time. But you, young Petry—” She came a step nearer, put out a hand to his face, stroked his cheek, kept boy-smooth by use of a depilatory. “You, lad, are too young. I understand your curiosity, and honor your effort to save up my fee. I’ll tell you what. You can look all you want at what awaits you when you’re old enough, so that the first sight of a woman’s body won’t affright you.” She undulated into the stable; Petry scampered past her, not daring even a pat on her hip, to the stall he had prepared with stolen straw and borrowed bed linens. Smaller than the great roach stalls, it would have made a cozy nest for lovers.
“You sit there,” she said, pointing to the far corner of the stall. “Be a good lad now, and do not think of trying to touch. This is education, not entertainment.”
Petry sat where she indicated, cursing the superstition that forced him to maintain the illusion of boyhood. With no more delay, she lifted her striped skirts to reveal dimpled knees, then plump white thighs, then—he gaped at the view as she held her skirts aside with one hand and fumbled down her bodice for a key to unlock the cage of her secrets.
“PETRY! Lazy mudspawn! These pots are still filthy!”
At Herimar’s bellow, Emeraldine grimaced, shrugged, and dropped her skirts as Petry scrambled up.
“Better go, boy, or you’ll lose your—”
“PETRY, damn you! If I find you loafing in the shade I’ll kick your skinny ass halfway to the docks—”
Petry seethed with frustrated lust, and darted forward; Emeraldine grabbed him by the arm, forced his hand open, and peeled the coppers out of it like peeling seeds from a melon. “You surely didn’t intend to rob me of my fee,” she said too sweetly, as she dropped the coins into the pocket of her wide sleeve. Petry jerked away; her chuckle followed him out into the hot afternoon, where Herimar, vast and purple with rage, grabbed him by the ear, belabored his backside with a billet, and flung him in the general direction of the cook, who thumped his head with a spoon and soon had him head-down in the dirtiest cauldron, scrubbing until his fingers were raw. It was no benefit to his feelings when he heard Emeraldine and Herimar talking. Would she tell Herimar about the straw and the sheets? If so, he was as good as dead.
The sun went down, a soft ooze of deep crimson, but Petry’s work did not end until late night, when he finished the last of the dinner cookpots to Cook’s satisfaction. Herimar shoved him out the door. “You lazed all afternoon,” Herimar said. “You don’t get a place to sleep for that. Be here at first light, or else.”
Petry found a snug spot under a pile of trash two alleys down, but the day’s misfortune hunted him down even there, for in the middle of the night a cutpurse ran down the alley, pursued at a distance by one of the town’s heavy-footed nightwatchmen. Petry woke when the thief stepped on him, tripped, and fell; Petry yelped aloud; the thief, cursing, leapt up and ran on. Petry struggled up, hearing more footsteps coming, and one hand came down on a soft, lumpy object. Muddled with sleep as he was, he did not recognize it in time to toss it away, but picked it up just as the watchman rounded the corner.
Very shortly, he stood before the serjeant of the watch, hands bound and the evidence of his thievery laid out on the serjeant’s desk. A rich velvet purse, a lady’s purse, heavily embroidered with flowers and stinking of perfume, now empty: when the serjeant had tipped out its contents, gold terces and silvers of local coinage glinted as they fell, chiming a dangerous melody on the desk.
“Well, boy,” the serjeant said. He was both tall and wide, straining the buttons of his bright yellow uniform. Two men stood leaning on the wall behind the serjeant, one caressing the handle of a cat-o’nine-tails. “Proper little thief you are, ain’t
you? Been seein’ you at the Bilge & Belly, been hearing of missing coppers here and there—your work, I don’t doubt.”
“I—I didn’t—this isn’t—”
“You expect me to believe someone just came by and dropped a fancy lady’s purse with gold and silver coins on your head while you were innocently—what were you doing in that alley, anyway?”
“Sleeping,” Petry said.
“Sleeping,” the serjeant said, in a tone that conveyed how little he believed that. “In a trash pile. Of course. When everyone knows you should be asleep in the Bilge and Belly stable…unless Herimar found you thieving and threw you out—”
“No!” Petry tried to think of am explanation that would get him out of trouble but hold up if they talked to Herimar. “He didn’t throw me out. He just said I couldn’t sleep there tonight but to be back in the morning…”
“Why couldn’t you sleep there tonight? He have a full house?”
“I dunno,” Petry said. “I mean, I dunno if he had a full house. He just said…”
“And here you are with a purse full of gold and silver. If you didn’t have a steady job with Herimar, boy, it’d be thumbs and toes for you right now. As it is…a public stripping and a day in the stocks…”
Petry tried to look pitiful and young. Public stripping would reveal the truth—that he wasn’t a young boy at all, but a very small man—what some would call a dwarf, a freak, a mutant, and send to the stake for stoning. A night and day without the depilatory he’d obtained with so much effort and cunning from the witches of the waste and his beard would show. Then the stones would come…and he’d die, painfully and thoroughly. So it wasn’t hard to look pitiful and scared. It wasn’t working, either…no sympathy at all in the faces of the big men around him.
Then the serjeant pursed lips and sighed. “On the other hand…”
“The other hand?” Petry squeaked.
“It’s the races, you see.”
Petry didn’t see, but anything that might save him from exposure he wanted to hear.
“The roach races, boy. Just a few days away, the south-coast yearly race meeting. We thought we had a sure thing, this year. Old Maggotory, used to be head of the local constabulary—that’s us—went to breeding racing roaches when he retired. He’s got a good one now, real good. Won some races out of town, healthy, training well. Sure thing to win the Cup this meet…or so we thought, when we wagered the entire pension fund on it, against those fool wormigers who think because their ships move fast across the sea, they can judge the speed of a roach.”
Petry could see where this was going. “But?”
“But now the word is that the Duke of Malakendra, who’s never bothered to send any of his prize beasts here before, has noticed the size of the purse and is sending his champion, undefeated winner of a hundred races. And it is this roach, whom the wormigers saw run in another place, they bet upon.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“Because every roach has its cuttlemites, as you surely know—you work in the stables, betimes; you have seen them, no doubt, scribble-scrabbling in the interstices of the roaches’ cuticles, nibbling away those itchy accumulations. And you’ll have noticed, maybe, that if one drops off, sated with its meal, it always returns to the same beast, does it not?”
“Aye…it does.”
“We consulted the mage Kersandar, who by diverse arts and for a sum I will not reveal told us that the Duke’s roach owes its celerity to a special breed of cuttlemites, not known to this region. The Duke obtained their eggs and established them in his stables, where they reproduced and attached to each of his own roaches…and to this champion sent to ruin us.”
Petry examined the nails of one hand as if fascinated by the sediment thus revealed. “I pray you, explain—”
“Do you not see? A racing roach must have its cuttlemites, to keep its cuticle clean and its crevices free of those exudations which by nature the creatures produce, and which, accumulated, irritate and annoy, so the roach moves erratically at best, and always slowly. If we but remove the cuttlemites from Duke Malakendra’s roach, and transfer them to Maggotory’s beast, the Duke’s will not run so well, ours will run better, and our funds are safe. If not—we lose all. None of us has any excuse to be working around the Duke’s roach, nor is small enough, light enough, to infiltrate the stable without being noticed, but you, my lad, are the one who might save us.”
“How?”
“It is certain that the Duke’s roach will be stabled at Herimar’s from tomorrow or the next day. You will surely have access to it; Herimar has no one else to clean the stable. If you perform this task, it might be possible to overlook your thieving, since you are so young and can be retrained…”
Petry bethought himself of the certainty of death if he failed, and quickly agreed to do his best. The serjeant kept him close in the watch-house until it was time for him to return to Herimar. “Abase yourself,” the serjeant said. “Whatever is necessary to regain your place—for I am sure you did not tell us the whole truth. It matters not, if you are able to perform your task.”
Before dawn, Petry crouched outside the main door of the Bilge and Belly, face washed, hair combed, cap tipped rakishly to one side. When Herimar threw open the door at last, Petry leapt up and bowed, bowed once, twice, thrice, sweeping his cap to the dust each time.
“Well, you rascal,” Herimar said. “Are you ready to work, then?”
“With all my heart,” Petry said.
“It’s your hands I want,” Herimar said. “At work. You can start by cleaning the stable; we have a valuable beast coming in.” He led Petry through the inn’s main downstairs room without even time to snatch a crumb from the bar. Still talking, he led the way to the stable. “The Duke of Malakendra’s famous racing roach, here—and a premium paid for the exclusive use of the entire stable. Every stall to be cleaned, swept, and raked. No dung, no webs, no loose dirt. In this one, spread straw, make it level. I shall inspect your work later. It’s essential the creature win—for to obtain the custom, I had to lay a wager risking all my possessions, including this inn. You may earn yourself bread and cheese, if you do well.”
When Herimar was well out of the way, Petry slunk down to the end of the row and dug up his small pot of depilatory, smearing it on his face and body. The bristly hairs already rising from his skin fell off at once. Then he set to work, his belly clinging to his backbone with hunger, but he had no choice. He thought of many potent curses to lay on Herimar, but if the man sickened or died before the Duke’s roach arrived, the constabulary would blame him.
When Herimar came back, Petry had cleaned all the stalls to the walls and bedded the one Herimar specified with straw to the depth of his elbow. Petry bowed, doffing his cap and waving it about. “You see, gracious Master, I have performed all you asked, to the last detail. Please, sir, a morsel to break my fast.”
Herimar dug his hand into the straw. “Deeper,” he said. “Twice as deep. I didn’t mean a boy’s elbow deep, but a man’s. Are you stupid as well as lazy? Do that, and you can come to the kitchen door. You are at least working.”
Grumbling to himself, but no louder than his empty belly, Petry added straw until it reached his own armpit, then went to the kitchen where the cook, without looking at him, handed out a half-loaf of stale bread and a lump of hard cheese rimed with mold.
He was halfway through his lunch when the Duke’s roach arrived, surrounded by liveried roachifers, each holding one of the sandspider-fiber ropes that kept the creature in check, their black-and-white tunics and red leggings setting off the roach’s gleaming dark crimson elytra with inlaid silver scrollwork. The Duke’s own Roachkeeper Extraordinary led the way, wearing a wide hat layered in black and white plumes, a white cape edged in black and white sand-spider fur, a crimson shirt with full sleeves and baggy black trousers tucked into crimson boots. He led a pack animal carrying sacks of roach-bait that kept the creature moving forward.
Herimar, bowing a
nd scraping for all he was worth, led the way into the stables; the Roachkeeper signaled his assistants to follow, and the great roach, leg by leg, squeezed through the gateway and into the stall prepared for it.
“We require a dungpicker,” the Roachkeeper said, in a tone that suggested he expected Herimar to offer a selection of them for his inspection.
Herimar grabbed Petry by the shoulder and shoved him forward. “Here you are, good sir. Name’s Petry—smart lad, does exactly what you tell him.”
The Roachkeeper stared at Petry as if at dung on his shoe. “Well…if that’s the best you can do…you, boy, you do exactly what you’re told and nothing else, hear? And no gossiping about Magnificence out in town!”
“No, sir,” Petry said.
“And no eavesdropping!”
Petry attempted a shocked expression that seemed to satisfy the Roachkeeper, who turned to Herimar. “I will require your best room for myself. My roachifers will stay with the champion and will require bedding in the stable, and their meals served to them there.”
“Of course,” Herimar said. “Come this way, good sir.”
The rest of that day, the roachifers ordered Petry about as if he were their exclusive servant. He had to bed a stall to either side of the roach with straw, and fetch sheets to lay over it; he had to bring buckets of water; they demanded dishes not on the menu and complained about the quality of the crockery. During that time he had no need to eavesdrop, as they talked freely as if Petry had no ears. He heard the gossip of the Duke’s court—which girls they’d bedded, which they fancied, when the Duchess might birth the next, which servants were cheating the steward. The only matter of interest to him was the recent illness and death of the Duke’s dwarf jester.
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 34