Myth-Told Tales

by Robert Asprin

  Almost all the traffic was outbound from the merchants’ establishments. The rare ingress was what I was interested in. If Guido was correct, this was the day on which payments were normally due to the Don. Though they were now diverted to person or persons unknown, they were being picked up on the same schedule.

  I saw someone I knew weaving in and out of the crowd of tourists looking for a likely (and safe) place to have dinner: a fellow Troll named Percy—his real name. His nom de guerre, as mine was Big Crunch, was Mangler.

  His was not a casual visit to our street. His movements were as furtive as a Troll’s could be, attempting not to step on the party of Imps who had stopped to look over a street map in the middle of the thoroughfare, as he “not-looked” at the tents opposite our own. When he was nearly in front of our doorway, he quickly looked both ways, then pushed into Bochro’s.

  Quietly I tiptoed into Tananda’s room and whispered from the doorway, “We have a bite.”

  Before I’d quite finished the sentence she’d sprung off her bed and bounded to my side. “I’ll get Guido,” she said. “Can you handle him alone?”

  “I think so,” I said, albeit a trifle uncertainly. Mangler was a good foot wider than I was. I’d known him in school, where he was all-varsity wrestling champion our final year, though in hand-to-hand martial arts I held higher ranking.

  Hoping he had not come and gone while my back was turned, I left our tent and turned into the flow of traffic. At the end of the row, still keeping an occasional eye on my destination, I pretended to have forgotten something, clapped a hand to my head, and plowed deliberately into a group of Deveel merchants holding a quick negotiation in the open area of the intersection.

  “Damned clumsy Troll,” one of them snarled.

  I showed my teeth and snarled back. They blanched pink, and scattered, their deal forgotten. I turned back. Mangler was emerging from the tent, still furtive in his actions. He made for Melicronda’s. I opened my stride and caught him just before he went inside.

  “What ho, Percy, old thing,” I said, draping an arm across his shoulders.

  “Chumley!” he said, surprised. “Me mean, Crunch! Me punch!”

  “You Mangler, me strangler,” I said, raising a fist. I lowered my voice. “What say we nip around the corner for a quick drink, old friend?”

  “Chumley, I can’t be seen talking to you, old chap,” Percy said, looking worried. “It’s more than my job’s worth. Or my hide.”

  We’d gathered an audience by that time: Klahds, who were looking for free entertainment; Imps, who would bet on anything; and Deveels, who were willing to indulge them. Percy shook his head almost imperceptibly. I understood. I advanced on him with a roar, my arms above my head. He countered by growling back, and swiping at my chest with an open, clawed hand. Swiftly, I knocked it aside and closed with him, wrapping my arms around his body.

  Any other Troll in the audience would quickly have recognized Scenario Number 15 of the Trollia Handbook for Dealing with Other Species. In order for a pair of Trolls to have a private conversation in public, when all other means failed, this particular brawl would ensure that we had frequent close contact, while making very certain all others stayed out of the way of our wild-looking, but carefully choreographed, swings. Even a dragon would have hesitated to wander into the fray between two full-grown Trolls.

  “What is it, old man? Deveels?” I asked. I twisted around, grabbed his wrist, wrenched upward, and Percy flipped into the air, landing on his back. The fall wouldn’t hurt him. It didn’t even knock the breath out of him. He scissored out his powerful, furry legs and caught me about the waist. I dropped back, and he sprang up and knelt on my chest, hands going for my throat. I roared aloud to cover his furtive whisper.

  “No, worse!” I grabbed his throat with one hand, and he let out a loud squeak, which covered my next question.

  “What could be worse than Deveels?” I asked. A further grunt covered another query as he shook his head. “Do you owe money to the Gnomes?” We rolled over and over together in the dust. An open path cleared ahead as our audience pursued behind. I bellowed.

  “Worse!” Percy whispered, his face desperate. “I can’t tell you! The old one will get me if I talk!”

  I almost forgot to wait for his covering roar. “Who?”

  “Don’t ask any more, old man,” Percy said, sitting on my back as he twisted my foot around. I shouted in pain. He was so nervous he was actually hurting me. “Please. I’m asking you as an old friend. I can’t say any more; we might be overheard. Hmm, this is your turf. I know M.Y.T.H. Inc. well. I’d best let you win this round.”

  It was good of him to realize that. I assessed my position, face down in the dust. The only winning move I could make would render me utterly filthy, but that, as Aahz might observe, was show biz. I gathered my three free limbs underneath me, grabbed the earth and turned myself until I was aligned with my twisted limb. In doing so I mashed a great deal of the street into the front of my fur, but it was worth it for the denouement: I rose to all threes, Percy still riding my back, and, pushing myself upright on my one leg, deposited him to the ground. He fell, as though stunned. I jumped on him, grabbed him by shoulder and crotch, heaved him into the air, and threw him into the crowd.

  “Thanks, old man,” he said, just before I let go. Deveels, Imps, Ssslissi, Klahds, and others went down as a full-grown Troll landed on them.

  Brushing myself off, I stumped up the street. Tananda was standing in between two tents cleaning her nails with a dagger, where she had a perfect view of the whole brawl. She grinned up at me. Guido hulked in the shadows behind her.

  “Messy but effective, Big Brother.”

  “What’d he tell you?” Guido asked.

  I glanced around. Night had fallen sufficiently to conceal our return to our tent. “Let’s go inside.”

  “The old one?” Tananda asked, sitting at our conference table after I brought them up to date on my tête-à-tête with Percy. “Old what? A dragon? What’s big enough to intimidate a Troll?”

  “Well, we aint’ gonna get no data out of the victims, or outta their collectors,” Guido reasoned. “What’s next?”

  “Next,” I said, tenting my fingers together on the table rather like logs at the corner of a rustic cabin, “we must lure our perpetrators out of hiding.”

  “How do we do that?” Guido asked, skeptically.

  “They target small enterprises, do they not?” I asked. The other two nodded. “Then we establish our own.”

  “And wait to be approached,” Little Sister said, approvingly. “Good idea, Big Brother. Now, all we need to do is figure out what would attract their interest.”

  “Somethin’ that earns a lot of money,” Guido said. “Alla the businesses have a much higher income than overhead.”

  “It’s too much trouble to do market research on growing trends and get in merchandise from another dimension,” Tananda said thoughtfully, “so, a service business of some kind. I think I know just what will do the job.”

  I didn’t like the mischievious gleam in my sister’s green eyes. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Hairdressers?” Guido said, disbelievingly, surveying the contents of our hastily rented tent.

  “Beauticians,” Tananda corrected him, spreading out her hands in satisfaction. “It’s perfect. We don’t need any merchandise, apart from a few bottles of commercial tonic and cologne. And believe me, every being alive has a streak of vanity that could use a little buffing up. We will simply cater to that streak.”

  “But we know nothing about beauty culture,” I protested. “We might disfigure someone, or hurt them.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, if you will excuse the joke,” Tananda said. “You don’t have to know anything. You make it up as you go along. You can do whatever you want to the customers, and they will love it. They’ll come back for more and they will bring their friends! Trust me.”

  And so it proved. The very next day dawned upon
the opening of A Tough, A Troll and A Trollop, Beauty Specialists. The flaps of our tent were flipped coyly open to reveal the furnishings that we had obtained overnight from a few merchants who knew us well enough to open at midnight and ask no questions as to why we suddenly required three reclining pedestal chairs, diverse mirrors, basins, curlers, irons, combs and brushes, lacquers for hair, and nail files, unguents, lotions, shampoos, dyes, and spangles. Tananda appeared trim and professional in a green smock that matched her hair. Guido and I felt awkward in identical green coats. They fit, but that was all that a charitable mind might admit.

  “We look like morons,” Guido said, echoing my very thoughts.

  “You look fine,” Tananda assured us. “Smile! Here comes our first customer.”

  I seized the comb and scissors that I had chosen to be my tools. Guido picked a hot towel out of the salamander-powered steam box. Into the tent peered an Imp matron. We braced ourselves.

  “Are you . . . open?” she asked.

  “Yes, we are!” Tananda beamed, putting her arm about the Imp’s shoulders. “Come in!” She winked at me over the pink female’s horned head. “What can we do for you?”

  I held the scissors in my fist like a weapon, the points just sticking out beyond the percussion edge of my palm. Was she the “old one” Percy feared? To me she appeared to be only of middle age. Her reply, delivered shyly, easily assuaged my concern.

  “Well, I need . . . I’d like to look better.”

  “You look wonderful,” Tananda assured her, maneuvering her deftly into the center chair. “All we do here is to enchance your natural beauty. Don’t we, boys?”

  “Yeah,” Guido said, all but throttling the towel in his hands.

  “Yeh,” I grunted. As advertised, a Troll and a Tough. The Trollop already had the matter in hand.

  “You see? We just want you to feel confident in your own charm.”

  “Oh!” The matron pinked up, looking pleased. “Then . . . I’d like the works!”

  Tananda clapped her hands.

  We did not emulate a well-oiled machine, but swing into action we did. The Imp found herself the vortex of a whirlwind of tasteful scarves and draperies that covered her dress’s loud print (Imps have notoriously tacky clothes sense), leaving her head and face thrown into stark relief. For an Imp she was not unpleasant to behold once her garments ceased clashing with her cerise complexion.

  “Scalp massage,” Tananda ordered. Nervously, I moved in, oiled fingertips at the ready. A Troll’s fingers are strong enough to punch holes in the skulls of most of my fellow dimensional beings. I hesitated to touch her until Tananda delivered a sharp slap to my upper back. I plunged ahead, grasping the Imp’s scalp between my hands, and began to rub.

  “Oooh!” the Imp cried. “Oh! Aaaggh!” I halted at once, concerned that I’d hurt her. “Oooh aaah!” the Imp moaned, tilting her face to look up into my eyes. “That feels so good! Don’t stop, please!”

  So I didn’t. I massaged away, accompanied by an aria of moans and cries of pleasure. Guido, seeming as awkward as I’d felt, applied a hot towel to her face, eliciting a shrill scream, also of pleasure. Tananda moved in and attacked the Imp’s long nails with file and a pointed stick.

  Guido tossed aside the towel and moved in with the box of paints. My hands were too large, and Tananda was occupied with a more delicate job, so it had fallen to Guido to become the cosmetician. He was not happy about it, but Little Sister had explained that no beauty salon was complete without a purveyor of color and texture, so he was elected by default. His first essay with a brushful of black paint was not salubrious; the Imp jerked her head back just as he applied it to her brow, causing the horizontal line to extend vertically up her forehead. Seeing that it was impossible to salvage his original design, he made the other side the same. Then, bright orange cream in hand, he daubed at one eyelid. By the time his brush arrived at her face, however, the Imp had moved again, and the dot hit her somewhere over the ear.

  “Hell with it,” Guido breathed. Attacking his palette like a virtuoso attacks his instrument, Guido drew and dotted, limned and lined, until the Imp’s horned head was a work of art, if one cared for the oeuvre of a modern abstractionist. At that, it was not unpleasant to behold.

  The female continued to shriek and cry out, but by the time we released her from the chair and placed a hand mirror before her she was smiling broadly. We’d also attracted an audience. As the Imp opened her belt pouch and poured a handful of coins into Tananda’s palm, there was a rush toward the chairs. A bevy of females, Deveel and others, got into a scratching, kicking fistfight over who would occupy the third seat. Tananda shot me a quick but meaningful look. I stomped over to the crowd, every step making the floor shake, selected one female at random, lifted her by the scruff and plumped her decisively into the disputed chair. With my brows drawn down nearly to my eyes, I aimed a look at the others that quelled their grumbling. They crowded outward against the tent’s inner perimeter to watch.

  The Imp staggered out, and we turned our attention to our new customers.

  Many hours later, Guido folded down the tent flaps and tied them in a double knot.

  “I don’t want no one else comin’ in here today,” he said firmly. “I am so tired I could fall asleep over the salamander box. Broads! You were right, Tanda! You can do any fool thing to ’em, and they love it! I spilled face cream down one woman’s cleavage, then they was all clamorin’ for the same thing. And then when that Deveel showed up with a cart full of scarves, I thought they’d tear him to pieces. They all wanted to try his stuff on at once.”

  “I told you,” Tananda said, smugly, counting through the day’s receipts. She piled the coins in stacks. There were several, one of them of gold. “Very, very nice. And our cut of the Deveel’s profits make a nice addition to our income. We’ve already nearly paid for our furnishings. This business is very profitable! Once our job is over we might keep the salon going.”

  “Speak for yourself, Little Sister,” I said, pouring the last basin of iced water over my head and sinking to the carpet that was covered with clippings of hair, shed scales, and feathers, and dozens of dirty towels. “I would rather go back to my nice, peaceful life as an unfashionable intimidator.”

  “There’s just one thing more left to do,” Tananda said. “Birkli! Did you get all of them?”

  A small creature popped out from behind a tent panel. His body was about the length of my hand, with a hard, blue-black carapace that glittered in the twinkling light of our oil lamps. He was a Shutterbug, from Mount Olimpis in the dimension of Nikkonia. In their natural habitat the males used their ability to reproduce beautiful sights they’d seen on the iridescent scales of their compound wings to impress prospective mates, so they were both artistic and well-traveled. Tanda had had no trouble persuading one to come to Deva to assist us, promising him unique views that he could use to wow the ladies back home.

  “All right on the roll,” Birkli chirped, extending a thin black leg. Wrapped around it was a narrow coil of a translucent substance. Tananda unrolled it and looked at it with the aid of a magic lantern behind. The lantern expanded the images so they were visible to larger creatures than the diminutive Shutterbug. “I put them together so you could see them easier. What do you think? What do you think? Do you like them?”

  As was the case with all males of his species, he was eager for Tananda’s approval. Guido gave me a grin. He and I might as well have been absent. Tananda patted the Shutterbug on the shell and he glowed.

  “They’re perfect,” she said. From the collection on the table under the mirror she handed him a small but brightly polished silver coin. “There, a Gnomish groat. And the same every day, as we agreed?”

  “Perfect, perfect, perfect!” the little creature carolled happily, stowing the coin away under his hard shell. I believe he was happier to receive praise than money. We have had less amenable allies.

  “Good,” Guido grunted, as the Shutterbug climbed up into t
he canvas roof to sleep. “Let’s go see if your buddy can recognize any of these dames.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen, take it outside, please!” pleaded the bartender at the Shoppers’ Repose, an inn at some miles remove from our establishment. Percy agreed to meet me there for a prescheduled brawl. Roaring, I threw a table at the innkeeper. Percy snagged it neatly out of the air before it came anywhere near the Deveel, and broke it over his knee. “I’m begging you, go aw—watch out!”

  Percy threw a lamp at me. I crushed the glass chimney, but kept the lit torch in my hand as he charged me, thrusting me out into the street.

  “I want you to study these images and tell me if you recognize any of them,” I whispered, as we grappled for the torch. We were festooned with strands of horse brasses, banners that had lately decorated the ceiling of the bar, and hanks of one another’s fur. No one who was not looking for it would see a strip of microscopic portraits. It draped across his eyes.

  “I’ve told you I can’t do it,” Percy howled. I pushed against his throat with my forearm. With a resigned sigh that sounded to the uninitiated like a moan of pain, scanned it while I bore him to the ground, still with the flaming brand over his head to light up the beetle-wing cells. “No! No one!”

  He put a foot into my belly and flipped me over him. I landed on a party of Imps coming in the door. I scrambled to my feet, hoisted them up and dusted them off. With a final look of seeming disgust toward Percy, I uttered a loud “Huh!” and stumbled out into the street.

  Tananda and Guido fell into step alongside me as I left the tavern. “Even I saw his reaction,” she said. “Relief, more than anything. None of these is our pigeon.”

  “Well, he certainly ain’t no pigeon himself,” Guido admitted. “Back to the hairspray, huh?”

  “Every day until we get it right,” Tananda said. “Cheer up! Maybe you’ll start to like it.”

  “I was hired by Don Bruce to rub out trouble,” the enforcer said grimly. “Not massage it.”