Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (2 page)

Chain mail clatters as the gate guard turns a clanking hedgehog of keys to give a milkmaid ingress to the keep. She stumbles through the side-door into the courtyard, groggy from morning chores and the last evening’s indiscretions with the butcher’s eldest son.

It was the carnival
, she thinks, blames, trips through the doorway and splays milk across the cobblestones with a curse.

A monk stops to chide her blasphemy, but she is too hungover to care.

A pair of guards laugh at the girl’s predicament, both hoping they run into her at the carnival when the shift is done, neither telling the other of their shared intent.

Through an arrow slit, a tiny avalanche of dust falls and a rooster crows. The sun floods over the crenellations, the day begun.

Impetuous, the spoiled prince sets forth, disdainful of the royal edict that forbids entertainers entrance to the great hall without the king’s personal invitation. He swears there will be no such decrees when
he
inherits the throne.

Dust begins to cover his trouser legs. He looks down at the dirt, congratulating himself on his peasant disguise, but questioning the wisdom of wearing said disguise over his doublet and breeches. The day must, at some point, get hot.

Flags are strung from the front eaves to stakes at the road, a fabric queue beckoning to the wealthy, the naïve, the bored. Ilyan the bear trainer wakes to the staring eyes of his animal. The acrobats have already begun stretching and setting up their gymnastic instruments. A woman of ill-repute stretches in her bedroll. Her purse is a little heavier from a night visitor. She feels an ache growing in her groin, but this cannot be a result of her sale the night before. Impossible.

Andretto, the prince’s own dwarf jongleur, staggers through the gates following a night with the carnival whores. The gate guards kick his backside, laughing, sending him into a well-rehearsed tumble. Only Andretto is not stable on his feet as he comes out of the roll, his head still cracked from a half-barrel of hard cider the night past. He drops to his knees, crawling up to his bed above the keep’s kitchen.

Once on his cot, Andretto heaves under a wave of sudden nausea and cold sweats unassociated with last night’s excess. No amount of drink can make a man this miserable, he thinks. His head scorches from the inside, the steam rising from the kitchen pots beneath cooler than his own flesh. He hears a low, gravely sound somewhere in the distance, like a dog barking at children.

•

King’s bellows echo off the walls of the council hall.

“Where is my son?!” and a guard slinks from the room to relay instructions down the line. Murmur passes to murmur, and three horsemen emerge from the castle’s main portcullis, crossing the moat bridge at a gallop.

Blacksmithy’s brood, three males strong, bully the weaker children along the way. “Cain’t!” — ”Prove it!” — ”Yay?” — ”Nay!” and fists rain blows on the tanner’s son, bloodied nose as red as heated steel, ash-black eye forming as young Tanner nurses his face and pride, the Smiths walking on, seeking victims as a fire ignites inside Tanner.

•

A group of off-duty soldiers, recently released from the night-watch, saunters toward the portable city.

•

A juggler, bright in smile and azure, or, and argent stripes, watches from atop man-high stilts as the first trickle of crowd approaches the fair. He spots the prince, noting the noble’s poor attempt to appear poor. There is geld to be made today!

Varga, the bear, eats the proffered lamb with a lust unseen by Ilyan since the Easterner first captured the beast fifteen years ago. Unease creeps across the trainer’s skin as he recalls how pieces of his hounds flew through the air like rain that day. Ilyan reminds himself that the past was gone and shrugs off the feeling as the fears of an old man. “Too long I have done this,” he complains to the bear. “Soon I will train an apprentice and sell you off, old friend. I cannot stay married to an animal until I enter the grave.” The fur-lidded eyes continue to stare at the man’s bald plate. Ilyan ignores Varga, looking outside his tent door toward the faire’s common where wrestlers grease their trunks and slap their triceps, taunting the locals to challenge their strength. “Who dares?” and “A penny, pay a penny, and five to you if you win!” sounds across the grassy square. The yells invade the tent of the whore, who massages her pain-filled armpits between lung-deep coughs, the warmth of her ascending fever her only comfort.

Sheep bustle before the crook of a shepherd, travelers form a village common over the hills. A wedding feast requires the fowler’s wares: quail, duck, and chicken for the celebrants, and the shepherd has come to trade. One of the flock disappears at the edge of the fair closest town, on the road to the castle.

•

To market with flour the miller closest castle trots his ox cart. The deputy-sheriff takes taxes at the courtyard entrance — a bag a cart or gold ducats in kind, this miller passes to the centermost stall. He trades with his neighbor, a chicken a bag. “Won’t the wife love this? Fowl for dinner. Times are good.”

Into a tavern, musicians three: a fiddle, a bodhran, and a quiver of krumhorns — announce the faire to the early crowd. Then on to another, another, a fourth. The air brightens in their path, smiles and poorly written invites trailing behind them, a chorus of resolve and plan changing in their wake from the illiterate crowd. They might as well have accepted their own execution papers, so excited are they by the music, and so ignorant of the written word.

•

In the great hall, gloom as the king waits word. “I’ll have that boy whipped — unfit for a prince. And whose breed might he be, daughter of my liege, whose?!”

The queen leaves to card wool, unwilling to argue.

The dwarf’s nose bleeds profusely. Andretto is in misery, as if an unseen horse has kicked him in the head. This is no mere hangover. He begins to shiver, cold sweat down the neck and back. He wishes the privy were closer.

The off-duty soldiers spot the wrestlers, and one answers the call: “I have a penny, greasy man,” the largest boasts. “I’ve taken a sword in my side, a Saracene arrow to the leg. Methinks I can best you.” And the betting begins: 5:1, 1:5, a month’s wages wagered. He is Boecker, the watch sergeant, a Prussian by birth. He removes his doublet and tunic to reveal his rip of a scar, then enters the ring.

His soldiers bet against him.

The king’s horsemen scan the crowd, but cannot find the prince. They slow, an excuse to watch the entertainment. An old man, paunchy as his pet, bids the bear “Dance! Dance!” to the glee of the crowd. Then, to their horror, a scream tears forth as the bear plunges over the wrinkled trainer, clawing his face clean, then onto the crowd where the prince — ”There he is!” — is caught in the gut by a passing paw, opening the abdomen, a shiny trinket at the prince’s neck having caught the beast’s attention. The horseman trio bolts to Varga, swords drawn, and hackstab until movement ceases. Two pick up the prince as the
third clears the way, stooping at a tent long enough to wrestle something from therein: “Give me the blanket, whore!” and they wrap up the bleeding prince and take him toward the castle where a more exquisite pain awaits him.

•

A lady of ill-repute lies dying cold in her tent, her blanket fluttering away with the prince. Black buboes erupt from her neck, armpits, and groin.

The acrobats, earlier apprised of the prince’s presence at the faire, tumble up the King’s Way toward the castle in the mistaken assumption that the noble will share his son’s love of spectacle. They cartwheel and somersault through the nameless crowd, pity for the commonness of the commoner lending a sad edge to their antics. They throw one another over grey and white flocks, laughing and smiling hysterically in their sorrow, unable to differentiate between the four-legged and two-legged sheep beneath them.

•

Tanner eddy-turns from the Commoners’ Way to the King’s Way, melding with the anonymous crowd, money pouch empty of coin, face full of pain. One eye swells shut, giving half of his brain a dark, solitary place in which to brood. “Will I always be the weakest of boys, the weakest of men?”

•

“Silk from the East,” claims the burgundy-velvet-clad trader, but a spear poke between his wares yields a muffled cry of pain and a scarlet-tipped point. Uncovered from his brocaded cocoon, Van Huys, the mad thief who raided the queen’s bed chamber last spring, leaving his signature silk scarf folded in the shape of a heart on her pillow. The castle guards, remembering the sting of their floggings, pull the vagabond from between the sheets. The driver is escorted to the guard house, worrying over the possible confiscation of his goods. He will soon find that the material is the least of his worries as he learns that flesh is much more precious than silk, but no less susceptible to cutting, tearing, and rending.

Midday the quiet is terrifying, apocalyptic, think the stall-watchers. Only merchants at the market, trading amongst themselves. No customers, these having followed the musicians out of town. The merchants scheme and collude in broad daylight, preparing for the mass’s eventual return. They are bold and greedy — no need to hide it while the consumers are away. Honesty among thieves.

•

The king sits silent on his throne, listening for some sound that might herald the return of his errant son. The queen cards wool alone, glad for the peace.

•

Andretto floats, Ophelia-like, on a river of nausea and hallucinations. He lets the fever carry him, far from the aches in his armpits and between his legs, the bumps that scrape raw with every toss and turn. He dreams of opulence, a room of pillowed silk where young harlequins, mere girls, caper and dance for his entertainment. The taste of salty flesh fills his mouth as he gorges himself on roast boar. On either side of a golden door stand two Cushites armed with scimitars, loyal to the death, loyal to King Andretto. He hears the tinkling of wind chimes through an open window and a strange scent wafts through.

The Cushites melt into misshapen brown blobs. Heads roll off harlequins, and their bodies decay only slightly faster than the unraveling silk of the room.

The wind chimes lose their crystalline edge, flatten into the wheezing and popping of his lungs.

The scent is a pudding of sweat, phlegm, and blood.

The musicians weave through the joy-blinded crowd, proud of their catch. Half-drunken men and foolhardy boys abandon responsibility for the rules of the fiddle, dance-walking to the bright tents at the end of the road. Gentle-women become suddenly bawdy, their daughters staring, gape-mouthed and unsure, at their transformed mothers and the speech coming from their laughing maws. A priest warns the crowd to repent, but they laugh him to scorn.

Boecker’s Saracene arrow is his undoing. A bald wrestler, a head and a hand shorter than the Prussian, flips the watch-sergeant onto his back by lifting the larger man’s bad leg. His soldiers, each winning five month’s worth of wages, are now significantly richer than their superior.

But lust presses them on and it is only a few moments before they open the curtain to the whore’s tent, fumbling at their pouches.

Their ardor is quickly quenched when they look past the lips of their pouches. Their gaze, all thrice at once, meets the vacant eyes of her bubbled corpse, all studded with iridescent black pearls.

They flee back to the castle, stumbling over each other for the first opportunity to fight their way through the crowds to the protection of the keep.

The guards’ dour faces overshadow the acrobats’ fire.

“No entrance, gypsies, by order of the king. Turn back.”

The acrobats’ well-rehearsed smiles and over-the-top flattery are met with cold stares and the slick sound of unsheathing steel. Smiles collapse, the acrobats turn onto the Commoners’ Way.

They see a nearly empty road between castle and carnival, an open strip of nothing. Smiles return and the gypsies bound away again toward the tents, tiny clouds of dust erupting from their hands and feet.

•

Tanner scoots past the acrobats. An old guard recognizes him, lets him through the gate house.

“Looks like you’ve got yourself a good knock in the eye.”

The guard squints, mirroring Tanner’s swollen face.

“Here’s what ye do.” The wizened soldier leans over and whispers into the young man’s ear. A sly grin spreads from old to young, spanning two generations.

•

An older man, ancient, if one could see beneath his carefully-gathered cowl, slips past the old guard and the boy. He is unobtrusive, anonymous, so much so that no one notices as he slips through the customer-empty market, past the guards of the inner keep, and into the hallway leading to the council hall.

•

Most do not realize that the prince is wounded. They mistake the diagonal scarlet marks across his front as a heraldic symbol, bend gules, blood-red and bright. But there is no mistaking that it is, indeed, the prince, despite the dirty beggar’s cloak held round his shoulders by one of the king’s own bodyguards.

The prince’s attendants make their presence known, carving a reckless swath through the crowd. The throng is thinning, some turned back to follow the acrobats back to the carnival, others filtering off to the countryside when they see that the guards are in no mood to tolerate unauthorized entry. Besides, some conclude, the merchants have likely gone off to the faire. The castle will soon be full of nothing but ghosts.