by Myers, Karen
Mag, too, he thought. Can she track him, the way she does me?
He thought to her, you sure you don’t want to come along with us today, Mag? We’ll be back tonight.
*I’ll watch through you. And, yes, I can find Benitoe the way I do you, now.*
George rolled his eyes at this reminder that few of his own thoughts were private, but he’d come to terms with that months ago.
“Today is for you,” he told Benitoe. “I plan to wear you out with a million ideas at the fair.”
Tomorrow is for me, he thought. Tomorrow I check out the last known address of the man who might be my father.
It was a quiet ride. The first half ran northeast along the Bald Eagle Valley between the end of the Appalachian mountains on the right, and the Allegheny front on the left. Eventually the interstate veered right and crossed back over into the Appalachians and trailed up through some of the last of their interior valleys, avoiding most of the towns.
He paused after crossing the West Branch of the Susquehanna at New Columbia to give Benitoe a good look at the ancient river, far older than the mountains around it as its many water gaps attested. Even at its lowest point, in mid-summer, it made an impression.
From there, it was north up to Hughesville and the fairgrounds.
The aborted driving lesson had produced a side benefit—they were early enough that parking near the entrance was possible.
George picked up programs for both of them at the ticket booth. He stood near the booth, flipping through his. Without looking at Benitoe, he asked, “Do you want to plan this out, or just come look around with me? We have all day.”
When Benitoe didn’t answer, George looked up from his program to see why. The lutin was staring at all the activity, the program forgotten in his hand. The crowds were small, this early on a weekday, but so much of it was strange to him that he clearly didn’t know where to start.
“Never mind,” George said. “Follow me.” He headed for the most obvious route in.
“What is this stuff?”
Benitoe was staring in puzzlement at the pink cotton candy he held on a paper cone. Under George’s guidance, he pulled off another small piece, with a texture like fiberglass, and popped it into his mouth to feel it dissolve sweetly.
George smiled before launching into an explanation. “You take sugar, and heat it, and it forms thin strands that you can gather up like this.” He let Benitoe watch the vendor make up a fresh batch for his stand. “Any moisture, and it all melts away, like it does in your mouth.”
He could see Benitoe thinking about it, from the Kuzul’s point of view, and hastened to forestall that. “I don’t think this is something you can easily import. You’d need the machines that make it, and it doesn’t keep at all.”
“But you said that about ice cream, and I’m sure we can get cold spells that would work,” Benitoe objected, taking another tentative bite.
“Making this is much more technical than ice cream. I’d be surprised if you’ve got any equivalent.”
Benitoe nodded, but George could see his skepticism and rolled his eyes.
They’d already tried popcorn, from a kettlecorn vendor, and Benitoe was an enthusiastic convert. That was high on the list of novelty foods for the Kuzul, no significant technology needed to produce it. Benitoe pointed out that providing paper bags for it would be more difficult than the food itself, but agreed that the smell alone was like cinnamon buns at a bakery—it drew people in.
They turned now to the 4-H exhibits. “Why are so many of these animals displayed by children?” Benitoe wondered.
“It’s a sort of club to encourage farmers to practice the most modern methods of agriculture, by giving their kids special projects to do. Teaching the next generation. ‘4-H’ stands for Head, Heart, Hands, and something else—I forget. It’s a good way to spread best practices around. They’ll have some sort of judged contest later, I think.”
Children, mostly teenagers, but some younger, sat with their prize animals, a lamb, or a hog, or a calf. The animals were immaculately groomed and well-tended, under shade on the summer morning and given plenty of access to fresh water.
George discreetly looked over each entry with his beast-sense. Cattle were cattle, here or in Gwyn’s domain, the breed differences immaterial to his probing. But Annwn held no alpacas, say, or some of the exotic domestic fowl, like guinea hens, and this was his first chance to see what they were like, to his mind’s eye.
“What are they good for?” Benitoe asked, about the alpacas.
“Well, they’re from the southern continent. You’ve heard me talk about that with Mag?”
Benitoe nodded.
George continued, “These are domesticated for their fur, like sheep. It makes a wonderful, soft yarn. Their bigger cousins, llamas, are used to carry things, though they’re not big enough to ride. Some people put a llama with a herd of sheep, and it acts like a guard animal against predators.”
“Does that work?” Benitoe said.
“I know people who’ve done it,” George confirmed. “Donkeys will do it, too. There are even special breeds of dogs who live with sheep and adopt them.”
Benitoe mused out loud. “The wool trade is large and thriving. A new source of a luxury material might be very popular.”
George nodded. “And many of the cattle are specialized, some for meat production, some for milk. The older heirloom breeds are more flexible, used as draught oxen as well as meat or milk.”
“Or for riding.” Benitoe smiled. They’d seen the small exhibition rodeo already, and Benitoe had judged it an excellent show, though he’d shared his surprise that cattle were raised deliberately for the purpose. George had watched the bulls with his beast-sense as they bucked and spun, and was fascinated to see that they enjoyed the challenge. They’d evolved to toss off predators and he could feel their pleasure when they succeeded.
“Ready for the wild animal show?” George asked. “It’s about to start.”
George checked his pocket watch. It would soon be time for the big surprise he’d planned for Benitoe.
They were sitting at a picnic-bench. A group of hot, tired, screaming children trudged by, tended by their embarrassed parents, and George and Benitoe exchanged sympathetic glances. It had been a long day, and they hadn’t seen the whole fair yet, since they’d lingered in so many spots. An uneaten corn dog sat in front of Benitoe, rejected after one nibble, though he liked the basic concept.
“I can see why fried food on a stick is popular, but not this specimen,” Benitoe said.
“Good thing you can console yourself with ice cream,” George observed dryly. “How many flavors have you sampled?”
Benitoe paused to consider. “I think this is the seventh one.” He returned to his chocolate chip cone, contemplating the taste after each lick.
George sniffed the air, dominated by the smell of popcorn and animals on a hot day. The big cats at the wild animal show had been fascinating. He’d listened in to both sides of the dialogue between the handler and the lion or tiger, the cats coming through much more clearly to his beast-sense than the human. They were bored and lazy, but there was still an underlying sense of danger, and he felt the wariness of the handler easily enough. What would it have been like for Senua to inhabit a panther instead of Imp, he wondered, grateful for the smaller beast keeping Angharad company at home.
His dream from last night had faded, but for some reason he recalled his mother’s admonition to “be careful.”
Benitoe’s first look at an elephant had been a disappointment for George. It seems she wasn’t nearly as large or as hairy as the similar animals he’d already known in Annwn. George had yet to encounter a mastodon in Gwyn’s domain, but he knew they were there—he’d already seen the mounted specimens in Eurig’s game hall.
It was exciting for George, though, his first touch of an elephant with his beast-sense. She was smart, like a dog, but very different. She observed everything, all the people, the sme
lls of the food, the sounds of the fair. She wanted to stand in the shade and drowse with the other elephant, but she went willingly enough around the ring, dancing through her routine to earn a tasty reward. George could tell this was the only life she knew, and was saddened by the thought. It was the same for other domesticated animals, of course, but it was harder for him to reconcile the vision of elephants as wild symbols with this quiet matron attending to her job.
What would the mastodons living free in the forests of Annwn be like, by contrast, he wondered.
He’d invited Cernunnos to look with him, soliciting the opinion of the Master of the Beasts. There’d been no response, and it had put a damper on the amusement of watching Benitoe explore. He pulled himself away from his disappointment, as best he could, so as not to spoil the fun for Benitoe.
Benitoe crunched the final bit of his ice cream cone and wiped his hands on a paper napkin. “So, when do we get to see the horses?”
“I’ve been saving them for last,” George said. “There’s just one more thing I want to show you first.”
“And that is?” Benitoe asked.
“You’ll see.” George was tickled he’d managed to keep this secret all day long. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER 21
Benitoe wasn’t sure he was ready for more surprises—it had already been a very long day—but he followed after George obediently, and noticed a current in the crowd bringing others in the same direction.
They entered a large open grassy space, and he tilted his head as he sought to make sense of the activity there. Three groups of people were standing about around big square wicker baskets almost as tall as he was. Ropes of some kind stretched from the baskets to great lengths of colored fabric laid out along the ground.
George lost no time hastening him along to the furthest of these, strolling ahead of the crowd. “Two tickets,” he cried, and a fellow with a cap and a uniform of some kind came up to take his money.
“You’ll go up in the first round, as soon as we get a few more people,” the man told them, and then went back to work on the rigging.
Four lengths of cable connected the basket to spikes hammered into the ground, but two of the ropes, neatly coiled, seemed ridiculously long.
“What is this?” he asked George, but all the huntsman did was turn him around and point at the group nearest to the entrance.
With a loud whoosh, a great spike of flame roared up before it was cut off, and Benitoe took an involuntary step back. The uniformed men laid the big square basket on its side and attached the machine that had made the flame right in the middle of it. They moved a large fan over to what looked like an open hoop connected to the colored fabric and turned it on.
The fan blew air into the hoop, and Benitoe realized the material formed a sort of giant sack with the hoop as its mouth. It began to fill with air and flutter, expanding so that he could see the pattern of brightly colored stripes along the material. Once it was quite full of air along the ground, they removed the fan and tilted the fire machine toward the hoop, and lit it again. This time, Benitoe was prepared for the sound.
What were they doing, he wondered. Were they going to burn the fabric? No, he realized, they were pointing the flame at the air inside it. When they did, the inflated upper portion raised itself higher. The longer the flame stayed on, the more the sack lifted up.
“Hot air rises,” George said, cryptically.
Benitoe tore his gaze away and stared at him.
“Keep watching,” George said.
The filled sack began to lift off the ground, until less and less of the material was actually touching the earth. The narrow mouth was as tall as three horses, and the whole sack was gigantic, big as a house. The handlers lifted the basket off its side and turned it upright, and continued to heat the air inside.
George spoke softly, just for his ears, in the crowd that was beginning to form around them. “We call that a balloon.”
The noise of another burner going off drew his gaze to the second group, which was a bit further behind. Their balloon had a pattern of colored chevrons. When he heard the noise of a fan behind him, he turned and saw a yellow balloon with a huge red rooster on it begin to take shape on the ground.
The first balloon was fully upright, suspended over its basket, which was firmly secured to the ground. Suddenly he put it all together. “We’re going to get into the basket?” It came out as a squeak, and he cleared his throat. “Up in the air?”
“It’s perfectly safe,” George said. “We’ll be tethered to the ground the whole time.” He pointed to the coiled cables behind them. “As long as you don’t jump out.”
Benitoe glared at him, but indeed, as he looked around, he recognized the lines of customers that were forming at each balloon, as they did for some of the “carnival rides” he’d been introduced to. There were plenty of older children, and he scolded himself for his alarm. If those chattering girls over there could do this, then so could he.
Their line was the last to form, being furthest from the entrance, and George hastened to explain before they were surrounded by too many people.
“You can journey long distances this way, untethered, but it’s difficult to control. Winds blow in different directions at different heights, so you all you can do is go up or down by heating the air or letting it cool and try to catch a wind blowing the right way. I understand you can’t actually feel the wind, since you’re moving with it.”
He looked down at Benitoe with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve never done this myself, but I’ve always wanted to. I think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Is it like the planes you’ve shown me, in the sky?”
“Not nearly so high,” George said. “We’ll only be a few hundred feet in the air, not thousands. And we won’t be inside a noisy metal box, either.”
And I’ll be just as dead if I fall from that height, Benitoe thought, but he was intrigued. What would the view be like?
Benitoe was sorry when it was over. He could have lingered for hours, looking at the mountains and the river. Except for the occasional roar of the burner, maintaining the proper temperature to keep the balloon aloft, it had been almost silent. Even the other passengers had spoken in hushed tones, unlike their noisy exuberance on the “rides.”
On the way down, he’d examined the fairgrounds to see what else was on display and located the quadrant given over to horses. Something caught his eye, even from the air, and he was in a hurry to look more closely.
“Let’s go,” he said to George after he’d scrambled out of the basket. “There’s something I want to see.”
“The horses?” George suggested.
“Yes, but one in particular.”
“Must be good if you could spot it from the air,” George teased. He pulled out the program from his back pocket. “Over this way.”
Despite his urgency, Benitoe couldn’t help lingering over the various draft horses on exhibit, but he kept searching and pulling George along until he found what he was seeking.
“There they are,” he said. He led George over to a pair of flashy black and white horses and stopped stock still in admiration. Heavily feathered, with extravagantly long manes, these small draft horses filled his eye.
“What are they?” he asked the huntsman.
“I think they must be Vanners,” George said. He teased out a brochure from a nearby pile, and nodded. “Yep, that’s what they are.”
He turned to Benitoe. “They’re used for draft and riding. People like to think they’re from gypsy stock, for pulling caravans.”
Benitoe didn’t know what he was talking about, but he’d ask more in the car. Meanwhile, he just smiled, looking at them. “Not very practical for farm work, all that hair,” he said, judiciously. “Mud collectors.”
“Maybe so,” George said, “but think how splendid they would look with a carriage.” He looked more closely at the brochure. “These are even bred around here.” He showed Benitoe a picture of two horses
pulling a heavily decorated enclosed wagon.
Why, those were like houses on wheels, weren’t they, Benitoe thought. You could put a whole family inside. You could have a whole troop of people, couldn’t you, and their goods, all traveling together. And they’d remember you in every town, wouldn’t they.
Benitoe yawned as George took a different route on a smaller highway, down the Bald Eagle Valley between the mountains where all the settlements were. George had promised him one more treat on the way back to their lodgings before the sun set.
Benitoe shook himself awake and stretched. “I’m beginning to get the ghost of an idea about what to present to the Kuzul,” he told George. “What they really want is a way for lutins to participate in the growth all around them, not to be relegated to some backwater and left behind.”
George nodded. “The korrigans will have new trade routes, from the new ways being opened by the rock-wights. There will be new trade with Gaul and maybe Britain. The fae will prosper from the increased activity, too.”
“Well, we can’t just be second-best in trade, as though we were trying to be korrigans,” Benitoe said. “We need something we can embrace, something that expands on what we are.”
He squirmed upright in his seat to make himself more comfortable as the road rolled by. He ticked off points on the fingers of one hand. “We are the experts in animal husbandry and agriculture, and the produce thereof. We are famous for our clans and our mutual support within them. We have skills in all sorts of crafts.”
He raised a finger. “But,” he said, “we are isolated in small groups and there are many places where we hardly exist at all, where we’re not of use to anyone.”
“It’s the horses, isn’t it?” George said. “You want to travel to your customers, not make them come to you.”