Serendipity Market

by Penny Blubaugh

  “The dripping stranger nodded and said, ‘My thanks.’ He looked ready to topple sideways and to sleep where he landed. This my father noticed, at the same time that he noticed me. ‘Zola, take him up to that noble lady’—sarcasm here, please note—‘room. At least we know there’s a bed there that’s usable. I doubt we’ll have any princesses or duchesses wanting to use it tonight.’

  “‘Of course.’

  “But before I could lead the stranger away, my father added, ‘Your name, sir?’

  “He pulled in breath, visibly drawing on his remaining strength to answer my father’s question. ‘Dragoran, sir. Tris Dragoran.’

  “Tris. A shortened version of Tristan, perhaps? A knight’s name?

  “I wanted to ask, wanted to know much more. But as I led Tris up the stairs, he began to sway. I grabbed him to keep him upright, and the next thing I knew, my arm was around him and I was half dragging him along. He smelled of rain, wet hair, horse, and the acrid kind of sweat that starts up when you begin to fear for your life.

  “By the time I had him in what my father had referred to as the noble lady room, he was barely with me. The climbing drag up the stairs seemed to have used whatever reserves of strength he might have had left. He was a dead weight against me, and enough rain had transferred between us that I was almost as wet and bedraggled as he.

  “‘Here we are,’ I said, trying to sound bouncy. Tris dragged his eyes open wider than the slits they’d been while we’d careened down the hall. I could almost feel the muscles in his eyelids gather to do their work. And then he saw the ladder that reached to the top of the eight or twelve mattresses.

  “‘Oh, please,’ he moaned. ‘I have to climb?’

  “‘Well,’ I said after a moment. ‘I could prop you up in the corner and take a few of those away. Get it down to five or seven.’

  “‘No.’ Then, as if realizing how brusque he’d sounded, he said, ‘If you could stay a moment and help…I think me climbing once rather than waiting for you to climb multiple times is all I can manage. Do you mind?’

  “I shook my head, quite taken with his look of determination and his golden lion’s eyes.

  “It was a struggle, but we made it. Tris seemed to fall asleep the minute he hit the top mattress. I pulled a cover over him, hoping it would help absorb the rain, climbed down the ladder, and left.

  “It was only then, looking through the open door of the great hall from the staircase, that I saw that the storm had passed. The sun was out, steam rose from the ground like boil from a kettle, and all the clouds were gone but one. And that one cloud looked exactly like the cloud woman from the storm. She faced me once again, but now there was a gentle smile on her face. Then the winds shifted, the cloud disappeared, and all that was left was the washed blue sky.

  “Tris did not join us at the evening meal. Which gave my mother, my father, and me all the opportunity we needed to speculate.

  “‘It’s a fine horse, that one he rode up on,’ my father said.

  “‘Fought that storm like a demon,’ I said. ‘I watched from my tower.’

  “‘Poor things,’ my mother said, and her sympathy was obviously for both Tris and his horse. ‘How far do you suppose they came?’

  “‘Don’t know any Dragorans,’ my father said. ‘But it’s rich leather on that horse.’

  “‘And fine enough clothes on him, too,’ I pointed out.

  “My mother tapped her index finger against her jaw. ‘Interesting,’ she said.”

  “Two in the morning, with milk-white moonlight pouring through my tower window and spilling across my pillow like liquid from a broken jug. I couldn’t sleep, no matter how much I twisted and turned.

  “You’d have thought my mother had put peas under my mattress, hundreds of them, several centimeters deep.

  “I decided to see if Tris was awake, perhaps hungry after all that riding and no dinner. I knocked gently on his door.

  “‘Come in!’ he called, and his voice sounded harried.

  “Come in I did, and I saw him wrestling with that tower of mattresses. I started to ask what he was up to when it hit me with all the force of the winds from the day before. I wanted to be sure, though, so I was quite cautious when I said, ‘Trouble sleeping?’

  “He looked at me, and the look was equal parts of disgust and chagrin. ‘Sorry.’ He shoved at another mattress and looked at the piles cluttering the floor. ‘Very sorry. About the mess, about the noise. I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  “I shook my head and stepped onto and then over a small pile of three mattresses. ‘Didn’t wake me at all. What’s wrong?’ And silly as it sounds, I mentally crossed my fingers. Please, I thought, say there’s something under the mattresses. Please.

  “‘I think,’ Tris said, ‘there’s something under the mattresses. I thought I’d just move them, get it out, and that would be that.’ He looked again at the mess. ‘It seems to be more trouble than I expected.’

  “I wanted to grab him and hug him, or jump up and down in glee, but I stayed calm and said, ‘Let’s just check all the way down to the bottom. After all, you only have two or five left.’

  “Together we tossed the rest of the mattresses aside. And there, as I’d known it would be, was a dried golden pea.

  “I picked it up. ‘The culprit,’ I said.

  “‘That?’ Tris’s voice went up a few notches. ‘Please. It couldn’t be that.’

  “I thought about how to explain this, then started with ‘That mother of mine…’

  “Tris joined us for breakfast, but he picked at his food, and he looked somewhat worse for the wear of his sleepless night. It had been closing in on four when I’d finished explaining my mother’s plot, and we’d spent some time talking about other things as well. His lion eyes, my raven locks, and—well, really, that’s all you need to know.

  “What we hadn’t talked about was how to break things to my parents.

  “Finally, in an effort to get him to say something, anything, at the breakfast table, I asked how he’d slept.

  “He looked surprised. ‘You don’t remember?’

  “‘Umm—tell them?’ I suggested, pointing at my mother and my father, who, after my question, were watching me warily.

  “Tris shrugged, then said, ‘Not well, I’m afraid. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I was up much of the night. Zola came to check on me in the early morning, and between us, we found the problem.’ He held the golden pea out for their inspection. ‘Once we’d moved this, things improved considerably.’

  “‘Zola!’ my mother cried.

  “‘I never told,’ I swore. ‘Tell her, Tris. Tell her I didn’t say a thing until you’d told me about that sharp, pointy thing digging into your back.’

  “‘True,’ Tris said. ‘I promise, I’m not usually so sensitive. Roget, my horse, and I have spent many nights in unusual and uncomfortable places. And when I saw my problem was a small pea…’ His voice trailed off. And he blushed. Endearing. And attractive as hell.

  “There was a silence that almost rang around our table. My mother finally said, ‘Does this mean what I think it means?’

  “My father said, ‘No wonder none of those women were interesting to you.’

  “I sighed, a sigh of pure relief.

  “Perhaps you’ve already guessed the end. Nothing is ever easy, though, so there was shouting, explaining, hand wringing; crying, laughing, and sheer giddiness. But my parents are my parents, and eventually they accepted what I’d known and they’d suspected for a long time. I was a gay prince. And I felt that I’d finally met my other half.

  “But Tris, even after all that early-morning talking, had never given me an unequivocal yes. So I had to ask, even though my parents were still sitting side by side at the table. ‘Are you sure? Do you really want to do this?’

  “Tris looked directly at me, wrinkled his brow as if he couldn’t understand how I could be confused, and said, ‘Well, Zola, of course.’ There was no hesitation at all.


  “My union with Tris has united my kingdom and the far northern duchy of Dragoran. It appears that heirs will not be forthcoming. Of course, one never knows. It appears that my mother is working on this scheme…”

  The audience is smiling and laughing as Zola leaves. He is quite pleased, and he can’t wait to get home and tell Tris how it all went. Tris, he knows, will especially enjoy the laughter, one of the things they do best together. As he returns to the tellers’ waiting area, he sees that Mama Inez is laughing, too.

  “In the middle of normal,” she says. “After that story?”

  “Of course,” he says. Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “Everything except for the storm. That was quite impressive.”

  “As if it had been meant to be,” Mama Inez agrees, and she watches for his reaction.

  Zola looks at her long and hard, then laughs himself. “It was you, wasn’t it? That bundle of clouds. It had to be.”

  Mama Inez shrugs her right shoulder, a casual movement. “Magic,” she says.

  “Magic,” Zola repeats, still smiling. “And all this time I was just going with a happy coincidence. Wait until I tell Tris.”

  As Zola walks through the waiting area, he passes the two who still wait to go out to the teller’s cushion. One of them is Sue, Lightning’s friend and rider. She says, “No magic like that in my story. Maybe some events people’d see as overblown, things I think they might find interesting, but nothing even close to magic.”

  Zola stops. “You never know. Look at me. Proof positive. I never even thought about magic.”

  “Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t recognize it,” agrees Rosey, who’s the last teller of the evening.

  Mama Inez comes up behind Zola, her eyes shining. She seems to be glowing from the inside out. “Ready?” she asks Sue.

  Sue swallows, hard. “I was, until about two seconds ago,” she says in a whisper. Then she looks at Mama Inez, and looks again. “Do you have a sister? You look so much like someone who used to live in—”

  She’s interrupted by Zola, who throws his arm around her shoulders. “You’ll be fine out there.” He points to the waiting audience. “They’re ready to hear anything, to support anything. Best of all, they’re willing to believe anything.”

  “Easy for you. You’re a prince and all.” Sue sighs, forgetting about Mama Inez and her possible sister.

  Sue reaches over and pats Lightning, who looks at her, his liquid brown eyes steady and sharp.

  The Lizard Man, who seems to have adopted Lightning as his own, says, “I am not a prince. I told my story.”

  Lightning simply whinnies.

  Sue says, “Hmpf.” Then she puts one foot in front of the other and mumbles, “The only thing to fear is fear its own self.”

  The Colors of Lightning

  “I DO LOVE TO ride, and that’s what I was doing the first time that handsome Pecos Bill saw me. And, for that matter, the first time I saw him. I was riding the biggest catfish in the county. Only saw him for a minute, though, catfish being what they are, and this one in particular bucking and bouncing like a bronc who’s positively against the idea of being broke.

  “That fish and me was under the water again before I could holler out so much as a ‘Good day,’ but even in that short a time I could see that Bill, riding some gorgeous stallion for all he was worth, was one to be reckoned with.

  “Now, you might be asking yourself, ‘What is it with that Slewfoot Sue? Why is she a-riding on a catfish, for Lord’s sake?’

  “All I can tell you is it’s a sight better than riding a broom around a kitchen and picking up after a man. And I have always loved a challenge.

  “I saw him for the second time at the county picnic on Independence Day. There was everything there, just like you’d expect. Corn on the cob, sweet melons, beans dripping with molasses, slabs of barbecue, hunks of cornbread soaking up honey, and chilies so hot, felt like the roof of your mouth was blown right off. Whiskey and pure spring-water beer. Three-legged races for the little ones. And, late that night, fireworks shooting colors out to the moon.

  “It was after one of the big sunburst fireworks exploded, the kind that look like the whole world’s caught on fire, that I saw Bill again. This time he weren’t riding his horse. No sir. This time he was hanging on to one of them tails of that starburst firework, sailing acrost the sky, headed for who knew where. Looked like that man liked a challenge as much as me.

  “That was when I knew I had to meet him. But as luck would have it, when he came down from that firework tail, he landed over to Bexar County, up north, and he weren’t able to get back down to home until a good bit later.

  “So I took that time while he was gone to start asking around. Talked to some who knew some who knew of him. Talked to some who knew some who knew him. Finally talked to some who knew him theirselves. And found out then that he’d been asking around about me.

  “Maeve Maginty, down to the general store, she said, ‘He saw you riding that big rainbow catfish lives over in the river, down to the aqueduct, Sue. Says you were quite a sight.’ Maeve winked. ‘Seems smitten, girl.’

  “I sniffed, my nose in the air. ‘He can seem smitten, Maeve, all he wants. I’d rather be riding that old catfish any day than taking care of some man.’ Which was generally true, but truth be told, I was feeling the bittiest bit smitten myself. I weren’t ready to be tied down, no sir. But if I’d been asked, I’d’ve had to admit that I found Bill occupying a good piece of my mind.

  “I wanted to keep Maeve off track, though, so I added, ‘He does have one fine horse. Like to take a ride on that one, I would.’

  “Maeve Maginty laughed so hard, she had to hang on to her selling counter to keep from falling down onto the floor and dirtying her dress on the sawdust.

  “‘Ride Lightning? Why, girl, you got as much chance of doing that as you do of getting that forever bachelor Bill to settle down in amongst the piney woods and raise a passelful of kids!’

  “I sniffed again, much louder, stood tall as I was able, and said, ‘Maeve, I weren’t talking about riding him. I was talking about riding his horse.’

  “Which made Maeve Maginty stop laughing and start to blushing mighty fast, and gave me a chance to make my escape.

  “So now, not only was I thinking that Bill was a kind of fine-looking man, I was also half crazy to ride this horse that Maeve Maginty thought I couldn’t ride. I mean, my mama didn’t raise no fool, and I was pretty sure of what I could and could not do. I didn’t put on airs and say I could do things I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t take no bets on something I thought was foolish, not ever. But that horse Lightning—I was just real sure that he and I could come to an understanding, same as me and that old catfish. And I aimed to find Bill and prove that the feeling in my gut was right. Maybe, in fact, both the feeling in my gut as well as the one that was starting to tickle my heart, too.

  “I guess Maeve must’ve told Bill about me showing an interest in that horse of his, because the next thing I knowed, who was knocking at my door but the man himself?

  “‘Howdy,’ I says, sounding cool as the springhouse on a hot day in August. But I gotta tell you true, inside me, my heart was tippy-tapping fit to beat the band. That man was real handsome up close. And he was holding his hat in his hand, exactly like a gentleman come to call.

  “‘Right pleased to meet you, ma’am.’ He smiled, and I thought I’d done died and gone to heaven. Them blue eyes, with little laugh crinkles. ‘I hear you’ve been talking around town about my Lightning.’

  “‘That I have,’ I agreed. ‘Sure would like to ride a fine-looking horse like that.’

  “Bill, he just laughed. It were a good laugh, strong and sure. But I do not like being laughed at, no sir.

  “I straightened up tall, just like I done in Maeve Maginty’s store, and said, ‘Never seen a horse I couldn’t ride.’

  “Bill, he just nodded and said, real polite, ‘Ma’am, I believe you have now. Ligh
tning don’t let nobody ride him but me. It’s just,’ he added, almost an apology, ‘this understanding we’ve got worked out.’

  “I could see Lightning now. He was tied to the low branch of the apple tree, down close to the road. He’d been hid by the barn till now, so he must’ve been moving around, cropping my good grasses and no doubt munching on wind-falled apples. I watched him through eyes that were half shut against the sun.

  “‘Bet he and I could come to an understanding, too.’

  “Bill, he turned his back to me, and ladies, you’ll understand when I say he looked as good in back as he did in front. He eyed his horse, and Lightning, as if he knowed he was being seen, swished his tail in the sun till it glowed bright as the North Star on a no-moon night. When Bill turned back to me, there was this speculating look in his eyes.

  “‘That was you rode that big old rainbow catfish down to the creek, weren’t it?’

  “I allowed as how yes, that’d been me.

  “‘It was bucking pretty good,’ he said. ‘I remember. In and out of that water, up and down like a double stripe of rainbow, looking for the sun.’

  “I agreed, then added, ‘Sometime, riding something like that, you got to use real good breath control. Got to be pretty calm. Got to have some faith.’

  “Bill nodded, as if to say, ‘I reckon you do need all them things,’ turned to look at Lightning again, then to look back to me.

  “‘We might could give it a try,’ he said at last. He spoke real slow, dragging them words out almost to tomorrow.

  “‘I’ll just get my boots.’ I was gone and back before he could change his mind.

  “Me and Bill walked out to Lightning, not saying one word. Just before we got to the horse, Bill said, ‘Wait here for just a minute. Him and me, we got to talk.’