AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Eee,”one of the men said, letting Mex dollars jingle through his fingers, “I used to hate the little scaly devils like everyone else, but they are making us rich.”
The other animal trainer did not answer. He picked up the gong and started pounding on it, trying to lure more scaly devils to the next show.
He had competition. A little way up the street, a fellow with a horn was playing old, familiar tunes. He didn’t play very well, but skill on the trumpet was not how he made his living: it was just the traditional signal a fellow who exhibited trained mice used to draw a crowd.
And, sure enough, a crowd gathered. It had children in it, and old people with time on their hands, but also a good many little scaly devils. Because the little devils stood and watched, so did Liu Han.
“Hello, hello, hello!” the mouse show man boomed jovially. He was wearing a square wooden box, held on by a shoulder strap. From the box rose a wooden pole two feet high, on top of which were mounted a pagoda, a wooden fish, a little hanging bucket made of tin, and a hollow wooden peach. “Do you want to see my little friends perform?”
“Yes!” the children shouted, loud and shrill as a flock of starlings. The little scaly devils who understood Chinese added their hissing voices to the cries.
“All right, then,” the man said. “You don’t have any cats, do you?” He looked sly. “If you do, kindly keep them in your pockets till we’re finished.”
He waited till the children’s giggles and the silent laughter of the scaly devils subsided, then rapped three times on the side of the box. It had a latched hole in the front. He lifted the latch. Four white mice came out and climbed a little ladder of string and sticks of bamboo. They went through their paces on the apparatus, scrambling down into the bucket and swinging in it, pulling the fish up by the string that held it, running to the top of the pagoda and jumping inside, and scrambling into the peach and peering out, whiskers quivering, little red eyes aglow.
The mouse show man said, “How’d you like to bite down and findthat inside your peach?” The children giggled once more.
The little scaly devils, though, did not react to that with mirth. One of them said, “The Big Uglies have filthy habits-always parasites in their food.”
“Truth,” another said. “And theyjoke about it.”
“They are disgusting,” a third chimed in, “but they also manage to be entertaining. We don’t have beast-shows back on Home to match these. Who would have thought animals-especially Tosevite animals-could learn to do so many interesting things? I spend as much free time as I can watching them.”
“And I,” said the scaly devil who had spoken second. A couple of others sputtered agreement.
Liu Han watched the performing mice a minute or two more. Then she tossed the man who exhibited them a few coppers and walked down theTa Cha La, thinking hard. More little devils congregated in a vacant lot from which the wreckage of a shop had been cleared away. A trained bear was going through its run of tricks there. The scaly devils exclaimed as it wielded a heavy wooden sword with a long handle. Liu Han walked by, hardly noticing.
Nieh Ho-T’ing was always looking for ways to get close to the little scaly devils, the better to make their lives miserable. If trained animals fascinated them so, a troupe of men with such performers might well gain access even to important males, or groups of important males. Anyone who showed Nieh a new way to do that would gain credit for it.
Liu Han scratched her head. She was sure she had a good idea, but how could she use it to best advantage? She was no longer the naive peasant woman she’d been when the little devils carried her away from her village. Too much had happened to her since. If she could, she would take her fate back into her own hands.
“Not to be a puppet,” she said. A man with a thin wisp of white beard turned and gave her a curious look. She didn’t care. Nieh Ho T’ing hadn’t treated her badly; he’d probably treated her better than anyone except Bobby Fiore. But one of the reasons he did treat her so was that he found her a tool to fit his hand. If she was lucky, if she was careful, maybe she could make him treat her as someone to be reckoned with.
After the lamplit gloom of theKrom, George Bagnall had to blink and wait for his eyes to adjust to daylight. Even after the adjustment, he looked about curiously. Something about the quality of the light, the color of the sky, had changed, ever so slightly. The day was bright and warm, and yet-
When Bagnall remarked on that, Jerome Jones nodded and said, “I noticed it, too, the other day. Somebody Up There”-the capitals were quite audible-“is telling us summer shan’t last forever.” He looked wistful. “Now that it’s beginning to go, it seems hardly to have been here at all.”
“Weren’t you the blighter who swore to us Pskov had a mild climate by Russian standards?” Ken Embry demanded with mock fierceness. “This, as I recall, while we were flying above endless snow and a frozen lake.”
“By Russian standards, Pskovdoes have a mild climate,” Jones protested. “Set alongside Moscow, it’s very pleasant. Set along Arkhangelsk, it’s like Havana or New Delhi.”
“Set alongside Arkhangelsk, by all accounts, the bloody South Pole looks like a holiday resort,” Embry said. “I knew Russian standards in matters of weather were elastic before we got here; I simply hadn’t realized how much stretch the elastic had to it: rather like a fat man’s underclothes, I’d say.”
“That may end up working to our advantage,” Bagnall said. “The Lizards like Russian winter even less than we do. We should be able to push them farther south of the city.”
“A consummation devoutly to be wished.” Ken Embry leered at him. “In aid of which, when will they be posting the banns for you and that little Russian flier?”
“Oh, give over such nonsense.” Bagnall kicked a clod of dirt down the street. “Nothing is going on between us.”
The other two Englishmen snorted, either disbelieving or affecting disbelief. Then Jerome Jones sighed. “I wish I thought you were lying. That might make Tatiana stop throwing her fair white body in your direction. We’ve had rows about it, once or twice.” He kicked moodily at the dirt.
“And?” Embry asked. “Leaving us in suspense that way is bad form.”
“And nothing,” Jones answered. “Tatiana does what she bloody well pleases. If one were mad enough to try stopping her, she’d blow off his head.”
Neither of the other Englishmen thought that was in any way figurative language. Bagnall said, “Whoever came up with ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ must have had your fair Russian sniper in mind.”
“Too true.” Jones sighed again. He glanced sidelong at Bagnall. “That’s why she’s keen on you, you know: she thinks you’re better at killing than I am-I’m just a radarman, after all. The idea makes her motor go.”
Bagnall sent him a sympathetic look “Old chap, I don’t mean to give offense, but have you never wondered if you’d be better off without her company?”
“Oh, many a time,” Jones said feelingly.
“Well, then?” Bagnall asked when the radarman failed to draw the obvious conclusion.
Now Jones looked shamefaced. “For one thing, if I give her the boot, she’s liable to give me something out of the barrel of that sniper’s rifle of hers.” He touched a forefinger to a spot just above the bridge of his nose, as if to say the bullet would go in there.
“Something to that, I expect,” Ken Embry said. “But a ‘for one thing’ generally implies a ‘for another,’ what? Rather like amen implying ade, if you’ve read your Greek like a good fellow.”
“Nai, malista,”Jones said, which made all three Englishmen laugh. Bagnall had trouble imagining anything further removed from the classical world than Pskov during wartime. They walked on for another few steps. Slowly, reluctantly, Jerome Jones continued, “Yes, there’s a ‘for another.’ The other reason I don’t send her packing is that-that-I seem to have fallen in love with her.” He waited for his companions to mock him.
Now it was Bagnall’s turn to sigh. He set a sympathetic hand on Jones’ shoulder. The radarman quivered under his touch like a restive horse. Bagnall said, “Steady, there. If we’re being classical, let’s be downright Socratic and define our terms, shall we? Are you truly in love with her, or is it just that she pleases you in the kip?”
Jerome Jones turned a vermilion not commonly seen this side of a sunset.How young he is, Bagnall thought from his superior altitude of three or four years. “How does one tell the difference?” the radarman asked plaintively.
“Always a good question,” Embry said with a cynical chuckle.
“Let’s try answering it, then,” Bagnall said, for Jones looked not only very young but very lost: he’d meant the question with every fiber of his being. Bagnall went on, “Socratics we are, having another go at theSymposium.”
That pleased Jones. Embry chuckled again and said, “Fair young Alcibiades is right out.”
