Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  “Such an easy life,” said one. “Fed from the Duke’s own table and all the ale he could drink, all for acting the fool and letting people laugh at him.”

  “I wouldn’t like that,” said another.

  “For meat every day and a skinful of ale? They could laugh all they wanted, and I would be laughing too.”

  Petry felt the same way, but saw no way to get the Duke to hire him. Here, he was known as a beardless boy of no particular talent, fit to carry straw and dung and scrub pots. How could he prove himself without getting killed for it?

  The next afternoon, when the roachifers had taken the roach out of town for a workout and Petry was hoping for a quick nap, one of the watchmen came to the inn and demanded to have a cask of ale delivered to the watch-house. Herimar beckoned to Petry. “Take the handcart, and be very sure you do not crack the hogshead or damage the cart or it will be the worse for you.” Accompanied by the watchman, Petry pushed the cart down to the watch-house.

  “Tell me all,” the serjeant said, once the cask had been set up and broached. He sucked the ale off his whiskers; no one had offered Petry any.

  Petry recounted the little he knew—the creature’s size, its name, and the care being taken of it.

  “Well, then. First we’ll need a pellet of its dung, to season the bait. Then we’ll give you the cuttlemite bait, and a jug to put them in. Drag the cuttlemite bait from its side to the jar; they’ll follow the scent.”

  “They won’t let me touch the beast…how am I supposed to get its cuttlemites?”

  “You collect its dung…surely you have to be close to it to do that.”

  “No—they take it out to exercise; I’m only allowed in the stall then. And the roachifers sleep in the stable with it—they never leave it unguarded.”

  The serjeant exchanged glances with his men. “That still might work. We get the dung and make the bait, then—you take their meals to them, don’t you?” Petry nodded. “Then you’ll have to drug them.” The serjeant pulled out a box from below the desk and rummaged in it, coming up with a flat-sided bottle, glass-stoppered. It had no label. “See that you drop a thimbleful in the food or drink of each roachifer this evening. Daggart will obtain a sample from the dungheap on his afternoon rounds. When your work’s done and the inn’s locked up, one of us’ll be out behind the stable, on guard as it were, with the cuttlemite bait.”

  “What if the roachifers taste something?”

  “They won’t. The wizard Kalendar created for us this most potent soporific, undetectable but by another wizard. Very useful for those times when—” The serjeant stopped abruptly, flushing. “Never mind. Use it tonight; the race is day after tomorrow, time for the roach to miss its cuttlemites, but not time enough to fetch any from the Duke’s stronghold.”

  Petry put the potion in the pocket of his vest and raced back to the inn, turning in the handcart to a scowling Herimar.

  “Get yourself out there and make sure the stall is clean,” Herimar said. “They’ll be back from its training run soon.”

  Petris found only two more dung pellets in the stall and carried them out just as the roachifers led their charge in the gate. “Just a moment, goodsirs,” Petry said, bowing. “And I will bring your supper.”

  “I don’t think so,” one of them said. “Not with the filth you’ve got on you. We’ll have a nice fresh serving wench, and you can tell the Cook that—without touching our trays, understand?”

  The Roachkeeper Extraordinary had already gone inside by that time; the roachifers led Magnificence into the stall. Petry wished blisters on their feet and hands and boils everywhere else as he carried the dung across the yard to the dungheap and jogged over to the kitchen door. Daggart came out of the inn, hitching up his belt and twirling a billet, just as one of the watchmen did every day. Petry ignored him. Cook was piling the trays with pannikins of sliced meat and gravy, bowls of deep-fried insects, boiled vegetables, and a whole loaf each of fresh bread, still steaming.

  “So you’re finally here,” Cook said.

  “Please, Cook, the roachifers want a serving wench instead of me…”

  “I don’t wonder. Boys are always dirty,” Cook said. “Put anyone off their feed, the way you look and smell.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to fetch one of the girls…” He turned away, bellowing.

  Petry pulled out the potion bottle and put two drops in each serving of meat, each serving of vegetables, and then, with great care, spat in them as well, and stirred them with a grubby finger. If they all sickened…it would not be counted his fault. The rest of the potion he poured into the jug of ale. He was across the yard, lifting a bundle of thorny sticks for Cook’s oven, when one of the girls came out, whining that she couldn’t possibly carry that many trays at once. Cook yelled, she yelled, and eventually another girl came out. They both carried trays to the stable.

  It was well into the second watch when Petry finished the last of the supper pots, got his meager supper—no meat or gravy for him—and heard the kitchen latch snick to behind him. He sauntered across the yard to the wash house, biting hunks off his stale bread, and adding another curse to the pile of them he planned to topple on Cook’s head when he had enough money for a magician’s fee. From the stable, he heard snoring—at least two of the roachifers were sleeping soundly and perhaps the rest did not snore.

  At the back of the wash house, he wiggled out the supposedly thief-proof window, having loosened the bars in advance, and moved silently along the alley wall to the end wall of the stable, then around to the back, where he found the serjeant and several watchmen waiting with an earthenware jug: the cuttlemite baited rag, the cord to lower it by, and a rope through the handle to lift the jug. Petry tied the rope around his waist.

  Two men lifted him high enough to reach the edge of the roof. Petry shinnied over the edge and pulled himself onto the mismatched collection of warped boards, tiles, shingles, branches, and thornbush thatch that served now in place of the original roof. Herimar, always unwilling to spend a copper without need, insisted that his stable roof offered superior ventilation and was healthier for any beasts housed therein. Petry untied the rope from his waist and looped it around the board he’d pushed through the roof and tied in place for just this purpose.

  Slowly, carefully, Petry crept forward, testing each separate unstable surface, wary of the slightest noise, which the roachifers below would surely hear if not adequately under the influence of the drug. Fortunately, the multiple glowspheres the guards had deployed against thieves gave sufficient light to outline the roof sections, and made it easier for him to keep from falling through.

  Something rustled below. Petry put his eye to one of the many vacancies and looked down on the great roach, stirring restlessly in its stall. The silver scrollwork inlaid on its elegant elytra left bare the area where its rider would sit. The roach lifted its elytra, releasing the gauzy underwings, fluttering them, and a strange eldrich fragrance, heady and alluring, rose to Petry’s nostrils. And there, for the first time, Petry saw the glitter of something moving, something that must be the cuttlemites, gently grooming the great beast. He peered as far headward of the beast as he could. The long, sensitive antennae waved about, one almost reaching the roof.

  Petry shifted the shingle nearest him—now he could see the liveried roachifers, sound asleep in the stalls on either side of the great roach. So the potion had worked, or apparently so. He slithered ungracefully down the slant of the roof, unlooped the rope from which hung the jar of cuttlemite bait, and pulled it up. After a dicey crawl back up the roof, he unplugged the jar, pulled out the bait-soaked rag already knotted to a cord, and sniffed it. He could detect nothing but a faint smell of roach, but the serjeant had sworn it would attract cuttlemites better than a roach itself.

  He lowered it through the gap he’d made between two boards until it touched Magnificence of Malakendra’s back, right where the jockey would sit. The pronotum, the serjeant had said that was. Nerves had been cut, so the roach
would not reflexively open its wings at the sensation of the jockey’s weight.

  The roach’s antennae wiggled, but it did not react otherwise. Petry wondered if the roach could smell the bait, as well as its cuttlemites. He began counting, as instructed. At first he saw nothing, then a faint ripple, moving forward from the roach’s rear, and backward from its head, that must, he thought, be the cuttlemites. The cord began to cut into his hand as the cuttlemites crawled onto the rag. The lower end, above the rag, appeared frayed as cuttlemites climbed up it, as well, to get their palps on the bait. At last, and some unimportant number less than he’d been told to count, he had enough, and pulled the cord up, smoothly, not too fast.

  The hardest part was getting the rag and its cuttlemites through the gap in the roof without letting them bump against it. Once they were out, he poked the rag back into the jar with a stick, coiled the cord on top of it, plugged the jar, and crawled back down the roof to the back stable wall, where he lowered the jar to the serjeant. When he landed in the alleyway, the serjeant and his men were already out in the street beyond; he made it back to the wash house with no alarms, and set the bars back in place before stretching out on the floor.

  Next morning, he woke to shouts that mingled worry and anger, just as someone kicked open the wash-house door.

  “No, he’s here!” That was one of the roachifers. “Sound asleep, too. Get up, roach-dung! Get out. We’re searching for evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Something tickled in Petry’s hair and he was instantly sure it was a cuttlemite that would prove him guilty. He struggled not to scratch.

  “Did you drug that swill you fed us last night?” the roachifer said, shaking his shoulder. “Couldn’t have tasted anything in that disgusting liquid they call ale around here—”

  “Hold on there,” Herimar said. He was turning purple again, Petry noticed. “That’s an insult, sir. There’s nothing wrong with my ale. Brew it ourselves we do, best quality…”

  “Out of dirty socks and chamberpots, by the way it tastes,” the roachifer said, still holding Petry. “If it wasn’t drugged, it was poison to start with. We’d none of us sleep on watch without—” The roachifer was eyeing the Duke’s Roachkeeper Extraordinary, who had slept in the inn’s best room, due his position.

  “Let us consider all possibilities,” the Roachkeeper Extraordinary said. “Our host has not had the benefit of comparing his ale to that brewed by the Duke’s brewmaster, but though it is of course inferior to that served the Duke at his own table, I found it not undrinkable at all—intriguing, really, the hint of delunkin berries and just a touch of saltgrass.”

  Herimar’s face went through several expressions and finally settled into a nervous grin that Petry judged related to the bulk of the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and his weaponry…and the fat wallet at his belt.

  “This boy, now,” the Roachkeeper said. “Boy, did you bring the men their food last night, as always?”

  “N-no,” Petry said. “They—the roachifers—asked to have a girl bring it—”

  “Oh, did they!” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary shot his men a look of disdain. “A pretty one, did they specify that?”

  “No, no,” one roachifer said. “This boy was hauling dung, is all, and we didn’t want his dirty fingers in our food. The lasses inside, they’re cleanly. And we were hungry and didn’t want to wait.”

  “Did you water your charge before you ate?”

  “Yes, Roachkeeper—” “Of course, Roachkeeper—”

  “And where was the boy, when the serving girl brought you your supper?”

  The roachifers didn’t know, but when all the servants were questioned, Cook’s evidence was conclusive: Petry had come to tell him the men wanted a serving girl that night; Cook had agreed the boy stank of roach dung, and sent him to get firewood for the morning’s baking. Cook had fetched Pecantia, who argued the job was too hard, and then Scyllinta to help her, and the two girls had come back after awhile, flushed and giggling…he had seen Petry carrying bundles of wood to the side of the oven.

  “Did they…” The Roachkeeper Extraordinary eyed his men again, and they shuffled their feet. “Well, let the boy go, Jost. If anyone drugged your food, if you didn’t drop off on your own from drinking too much of Master Herimar’s unique ale and pillow-dancing with those girls, it certainly wasn’t this little fellow.”

  The roachifer let go Petry’s shoulder and shoved him away; Herimar pointed at him. “Now you’re up, you’ll start sweeping—unless, gentlesirs, you wish the roach’s stall cleaned immediately—”

  “No!” all the roachifers said at once. The Roachkeeper Extraordinary expanded on that. “The beast is not himself this morning, some trifling irritation perhaps, and it is best not to introduce strangers to it at such times.”

  “Sick?” Herimar asked. “The race—” His face paled; Petry knew he was thinking of the wager he had made.

  “It will be fine by race time,” the Roachkeeper Extraordinary said. “Roaches in training do often develop minor problems—sabotage is the only thing we have to fear, really, and I suspect my roachifers simply drank so much last night the fumes affected the creature’s breathing orifices. Today—” He glared at his men. “Today, serve them nothing but plain water and bread. It will clear their heads.”

  For the rest of that morning, Petry swept and carried, fetched out full chamber pots and scrubbed them, all the while listening, listening. The two girls burst into tears when accused and denied all, even the obvious—for both had the signs of illicit encounters on their persons, the telltale little bruises and rednesses which could be expected, and a silver each in their sleeve pockets that Herimar had certainly not paid them.

  Herimar was furious, Petry gathered, not because the girls had been playing bounce-the-bunnies in his inn, but because they had not paid him his share of their fee. He took both silvers to teach them a lesson; they glared at him behind his back, and fell to whispering. He called for the pot the ale had been in, but Petry had already washed it—” Cook said clean up all the dishes,” he said.

  Herimar glared at him. “Don’t act so virtuous, scum-boy. You are up to something, don’t think I don’t know it! Stealing a finger of sugar from the kitchen, or grabbing a girl behind my back…you watch yourself, see?”

  Petry thought it wise to withdraw, and finished cleaning the upstairs rooms without moving a single copper slug from its owner’s possessions.

  All the rest of that day, he saw roachifers going in and out of the stable. He came at their call to the stable doors, fetching water and carrying away wet towels to dry in the sun.

  “Is your beast fevered?” Herimar asked on one of his own frequent trips to the stable doors. “Would he not be better in the open air of the yard?”

  “No,” the Roachkeeper said. “He is merely a little uncomfortable and we are massaging him…there’s a spot where the saddle may have galled.” Petry could hear rustling from within, as if the roach were scrabbling in the straw, not just shifting in its stance.

  A spot where the saddle might have galled? Where the rag soaked with cuttlemite bait had rested through that long, long count? Was it the bait, or was it the many cuttlemites that had gathered there to feed on the bait?

  Later in the afternoon, Petry went once more with a large jug of ale to the watch-house—again, a watchman had stopped by the Bilge & Belly to ask for a delivery—and he reported to the serjeant all he had seen and heard.

  “You give a good report, boy,” the serjeant said. “Ever think of becoming a watchman when you grow up?”

  “Er…I hadn’t, sir…”

  “That’s good, because you’re far too young and there’s still the little matter of your thievery. But there might be work for you, now and then, since you’ve proved yourself so far. If the Duke’s roach loses, and Herimar’s bankrupt, you’ll need another way to live, and I’d hate to see a lad with your talents taken up as a pickpocket.”

  In other words, Petry realized, he would not
be free of his obligation to the serjeant even after this.

  Race day at last—the townsfolk crowded the lanes on the way out to the ancient track, once used for racing chariots but now modified for giant roach racing. Herimar left early to get a seat in the Merchant’s Box. Petry tried to sneak out the window of the wash-house again with a couple of wooden house-tokens he’d pilfered and hoped to trade for drinks at the track, but a grinning watchman waited outside and delivered him to the serjeant, who kept a firm fist knotted in Petry’s collar all the way to the racetrack.

  Roaches, unlike the other species humans had raced over the millenia, had neither the innate desire to run, nor the desire to chase down prey. Instead, roaches ran because they were chased, chased by something that ate roaches. At minor race-meets, the more common and less expensive gritches were used as chasers, so that even the slower race-roaches came home alive, but for important races such as this, owners hired a giant shrew, and had to commit a certain percentage of the roaches themselves to the fee. This was non-negotiable, since otherwise the shrews would attack the humans. Only when sated with roach-flesh could they once more be muzzled and sedated.

  The roaches ran the prescribed course only because, with their wings disabled, they could not fly, and the incurved track boundaries gave their jockeys a leverage advantage if they tried to run up and over them. A series of winches mounted to the high pommel of the saddles gave the jockeys control of the roaches’ front legs.

  In the post parade, teams of roachifers led the race-roaches past the shrew’s wheeled cage, to get its scent and understand their peril. Maggatory’s entry, a gleaming golden-copper named “Arresting,” high-stepped past the chittering shrew, flicking its antennae. It was ranked second in the betting. Petry had not seen it before; it was a little longer and slimmer than Magnificence of Malakendra, but moved smoothly despite its agitation. After it came a dark brown roach belonging to the Harbormaster, its elytra inlaid with a turquoise wave design.