“But — but I am old enough—” Petry struggled to keep his voice high enough for a boy’s.
Her eyes narrowed again. “If you were able, Petry, it would mean you were a dwarf, and while I do not lie with children out of care for them, I would not lie with a dwarf for care of my pride. As you surely know, such are unlucky and deserve the stoning our custom demands. Are you then a dwarf pretending to be a boy? I’m sure Master Herimar, who gave you work out of pity for an orphan, would be glad to know—”
Petry cringed. Discovery would be disastrous. Besides, he wasn’t a dwarf, he was simply a very small man. “I’m not! I’m not a dwarf! I just thought — there’s a boy on the docks, said he’d had a woman and he’s just a half- year older than me—” Older than his apparent age; he had topped thirty in the previous dry season.
She snorted. “If you mean Katelburt, he’s a very young looking fifteen; he lies about his age all the time. But you, young Petry—” She came a step nearer, put out a hand to his face, stroked his cheek, kept boy-smooth by use of a depilatory. “You, lad, are too young. I understand your curiosity, and honor your effort to save up my fee. I’ll tell you what. You can look all you want at what awaits you when you’re old enough, so that the first sight of a woman’s body won’t affright you.” She undulated into the stable; Petry scampered past her, not daring even a pat on her hip, to the stall he had prepared with stolen straw and borrowed bed linens. Smaller than the great roach stalls, it would have made a cozy nest for lovers.
“You sit there,” she said, pointing to the far corner of the stall. “Be a good lad now, and do not think of trying to touch. This is education, not entertainment.”
Petry sat where she indicated, cursing the superstition that forced him to maintain the illusion of boyhood. With no more delay, she lifted her striped skirts to reveal dimpled knees, then plump white thighs, then — he gaped at the view as she held her skirts aside with one hand and fumbled down her bodice for a key to unlock the cage of her secrets.
“PETRY! Lazy mudspawn! These pots are still filthy!”
At Herimar’s bellow, Emeraldine grimaced, shrugged, and dropped her skirts as Petry scrambled up.
“Better go, boy, or you’ll lose your—”
“PETRY, damn you! If I find you loafing in the shade I’ll kick your skinny ass halfway to the docks—”
Petry seethed with frustrated lust, and darted forward; Emeraldine grabbed him by the arm, forced his hand open, and peeled the coppers out of it like peeling seeds from a melon. “You surely didn’t intend to rob me of my fee,” she said too sweetly, as she dropped the coins into the pocket of her wide sleeve. Petry jerked away; her chuckle followed him out into the hot afternoon, where Herimar, vast and purple with rage, grabbed him by the ear, belabored his backside with a billet, and flung him in the general direction of the cook, who thumped his head with a spoon and soon had him head-down in the dirtiest cauldron, scrubbing until his fingers were raw. It was no benefit to his feelings when he heard Emeraldine and Herimar talking. Would she tell Herimar about the straw and the sheets? If so, he was as good as dead.
The sun went down, a soft ooze of deep crimson, but Petry’s work did not end until late night, when he finished the last of the dinner cookpots to Cook’s satisfaction. Herimar shoved him out the door. “You lazed all afternoon,” Herimar said. “You don’t get a place to sleep for that. Be here at first light, or else.”
Petry found a snug spot under a pile of trash two alleys down, but the day’s misfortune hunted him down even there, for in the middle of the night a cutpurse ran down the alley, pursued at a distance by one of the town’s heavy-footed nightwatchmen. Petry woke when the thief stepped on him, tripped, and fell; Petry yelped aloud; the thief, cursing, leapt up and ran on. Petry struggled up, hearing more footsteps coming, and one hand came down on a soft, lumpy object. Muddled with sleep as he was, he did not recognize it in time to toss it away, but picked it up just as the watchman rounded the corner.
Very shortly, he stood before the serjeant of the watch, hands bound and the evidence of his thievery laid out on the serjeant’s desk. A rich velvet purse, a lady’s purse, heavily embroidered with flowers and stinking of perfume, now empty: when the serjeant had tipped out its contents, gold terces and silvers of local coinage glinted as they fell, chiming a dangerous melody on the desk.
“Well, boy,” the serjeant said. He was both tall and wide, straining the buttons of his bright yellow uniform. Two men stood leaning on the wall behind the serjeant, one caressing the handle of a cat-o’nine-tails. “Proper little thief you are, ain’t you? Been seein’ you at the Bilge & Belly, been hearing of missing coppers here and there — your work, I don’t doubt.”
“I–I didn’t — this isn’t—”
“You expect me to believe someone just came by and dropped a fancy lady’s purse with gold and silver coins on your head while you were innocently — what were you doing in that alley, anyway?”
“Sleeping,” Petry said.
“Sleeping,” the serjeant said, in a tone that conveyed how little he believed that. “In a trash pile. Of course. When everyone knows you should be asleep in the Bilge and Belly stable…unless Herimar found you thieving and threw you out—”
“No!” Petry tried to think of am explanation that would get him out of trouble but hold up if they talked to Herimar. “He didn’t throw me out. He just said I couldn’t sleep there tonight but to be back in the morning…”
“Why couldn’t you sleep there tonight? He have a full house?”
“I dunno,” Petry said. “I mean, I dunno if he had a full house. He just said…”
“And here you are with a purse full of gold and silver. If you didn’t have a steady job with Herimar, boy, it’d be thumbs and toes for you right now. As it is…a public stripping and a day in the stocks…”
Petry tried to look pitiful and young. Public stripping would reveal the truth — that he wasn’t a young boy at all, but a very small man — what some would call a dwarf, a freak, a mutant, and send to the stake for stoning. A night and day without the depilatory he’d obtained with so much effort and cunning from the witches of the waste and his beard would show. Then the stones would come…and he’d die, painfully and thoroughly. So it wasn’t hard to look pitiful and scared. It wasn’t working, either…no sympathy at all in the faces of the big men around him.
Then the serjeant pursed lips and sighed. “On the other hand…”
“The other hand?” Petry squeaked.
“It’s the races, you see.”
Petry didn’t see, but anything that might save him from exposure he wanted to hear.
“The roach races, boy. Just a few days away, the south-coast yearly race meeting. We thought we had a sure thing, this year. Old Maggotory, used to be head of the local constabulary — that’s us — went to breeding racing roaches when he retired. He’s got a good one now, real good. Won some races out of town, healthy, training well. Sure thing to win the Cup this meet…or so we thought, when we wagered the entire pension fund on it, against those fool wormigers who think because their ships move fast across the sea, they can judge the speed of a roach.”
Petry could see where this was going. “But?”
“But now the word is that the Duke of Malakendra, who’s never bothered to send any of his prize beasts here before, has noticed the size of the purse and is sending his champion, undefeated winner of a hundred races. And it is this roach, whom the wormigers saw run in another place, they bet upon.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“Because every roach has its cuttlemites, as you surely know — you work in the stables, betimes; you have seen them, no doubt, scribble-scrabbling in the interstices of the roaches’ cuticles, nibbling away those itchy accumulations. And you’ll have noticed, maybe, that if one drops off, sated with its meal, it always returns to the same beast, does it not?”
“Aye…it does.”
“We consulted the mage Kersandar, who by diverse arts and for a sum I will not reveal told us that the Duke’s roach owes its celerity to a special breed of cuttlemites, not known to this region. The Duke obtained their eggs and established them in his stables, where they reproduced and attached to each of his own roaches…and to this champion sent to ruin us.”
Petry examined the nails of one hand as if fascinated by the sediment thus revealed. “I pray you, explain —”
“Do you not see? A racing roach must have its cuttlemites, to keep its cuticle clean and its crevices free of those exudations which by nature the creatures produce, and which, accumulated, irritate and annoy, so the roach moves erratically at best, and always slowly. If we but remove the cuttlemites from Duke Malakendra’s roach, and transfer them to Maggotory’s beast, the Duke’s will not run so well, ours will run better, and our funds are safe. If not — we lose all. None of us has any excuse to be working around the Duke’s roach, nor is small enough, light
