and they flung their dust in handfuls that drifted out over the crowd. People suddenly cried out as the dust stung their eyes. Coughing and sneezing, I turned my head away from the dance and tried to push my way back into the gathered folk, to no avail. The dust I had inhaled burned in the back of my throat and left a fetid taste in my mouth. The keeper was shrieking at the Specks to stop, stop, and suddenly they did.
Without a glance at their keeper, all of them gathered silently in the middle of their enclosure. The men upended their little dust bags and shook them, but nothing fell out. The woman stood in their midst and briefly set a hand on top of each of their heads, almost like a benediction. Then they turned, and with no acknowledgment to the crowd at all, nor to the rain of coins that were showering onto the straw, they retreated to their crude shelter and huddled there, showing us only their striped backs. Their heads bent together as they conferred about something.
Almost immediately the crowd began to break up, but it was some moments before we could move away from our spot. “I never saw anything like that before,” Trist said. He knuckled at his eyes, reddened where the dust had hit them. I turned a little aside from my fellows and spat several times, trying to clear the foul taste from my mouth. I wiped my mouth with my handkerchief, and almost immediately had a violent sneezing fit. Around me, other people were coughing.
Rory clung to the bars still. “She is, well, she is somethin’,” Rory agreed. His mouth hung slightly ajar as he stared at the woman huddling in the shadows of the crate.
“You want her?”
We all turned, startled, at the keeper’s lascivious offer. Somehow he had crept close to us. Now he spoke to Rory in an undertone. “I seen her looking at you, fella. Fancies you, she does. Now, I don’t usually do this, but-” And here he looked from side to side as if fearful of being overheard. “I could ’range for you to see her. Alone. Or maybe with a friend or two, long as there’s no rough stuff. She’s a beauty, and I got to keep her that way.”
“What?” Rory asked blankly.
“You know what you want, fella. Here’s how it works. You give me the money now, so we know you’re the one. Then you come back, round midnight when the crowds are less. I’ll take you to her. All she’ll want from you is your ’baccy. Specks do love ’baccy something fierce. She’ll probably do anything you want. Anything. And yer friends can watch, you want ’em to.”
“That’s disgusting,” Oron said. “She’s a savage.”
The keeper shrugged and brushed at his striped shirt. “Maybe so, fella. But some men, they like a woman a bit on the wild side. Give you a ride you won’t never forget. Not an ounce of shame in that one, there isn’t.”
“Don’t do it,” I said quietly to Rory. “She’s not what she seems.” I could not have explained my foreboding.
He jumped as if I had poked him, and looked startled to find me there. He had been so completely focused on the keeper’s base offer. “Well, course not, Nevare. What sorta fool do you take me for?”
The keeper laughed, low. “Listen to him, you’ll be the fool that missed the chance of a lifetime, young feller. Do it now, while yer young, and the memory will keep you warm even when yer old.”
“Let’s get away from here,” Oron said. He didn’t seem to care that he sounded prissy. I was just glad that he had said it, instead of me. We all began to turn away.
“Come back later, without your friends!” the keeper called out after us as we pushed our way through the crowd. “You can tell ’em later what they missed.”
It was not Rory but Trist who glanced back as we left. Would they go back? I strongly suspected they would. “Let’s see the rest of the freaks and get out of here,” I suggested.
“I need a beer,” Rory countered. “I got dust down my throat what needs washin’ out. I’m leavin’ now.”
And so he left us, and I feared he had gone back to speak to the keeper. I told myself there was nothing I could do about it. I abruptly recalled I was supposed to be looking for Epiny. As the current of the crowd washed us along, I watched for her chimney hat in vain. By the time we had seen the firewalker, the tall man, and the bug eater, my fellow cadets had somehow melted away from me in the crowd. Despite myself, my mind pictured Rory tangled with the calico woman, and I knew an odd mixture of both envy and disgust. I made myself walk on.
I moved to a less congested area. I spat again, feeling queasy from the foul taste of the Speck dust in my mouth. I tried to clear my throat of it, and ended up coughing instead.
When I caught my breath and looked around me, I found myself standing in a backwater in the freak tent. I’d seen the main spectacles. Here, at the outer edges of the tent, were the secondary attractions, the ones that seemed trivial after the greater shocks of the main stages. A woman wriggled her deformed yellow feet at me while she cackled like a chicken. The insect man sat within a tiny tent of mosquito netting while roaches and beetles and spiders crawled about on him. Laughing, he set a caterpillar across his upper lip as if it were a mustache. It was too tame. The crowd shuffled past him, unamused.
The fat man stood up from his stool and wiggled his shoulders to set his naked gelid belly dancing. I stared at him. His bulk dwarfed Gord’s. He had greased his pouched flesh to make it glisten in the lamplight. He had hanging breasts like a woman and his bare belly drooped over the waistband of his striped trousers like a fleshy apron. Even his ankles were fat, I noted, the flesh puddling over the tops of his feet. Beside him an obese woman dressed in a short pleated skirt and a sleeveless bodice reclined languidly on a divan. She had a box of candies on a low table before her. As I watched, she ate the last one, and sent the box to join its empty fellows on the floor around the table. Her mouth and eyes were painted, and when she lifted her gaze and saw me staring at her, she pursed her lips at me in a kiss.
“Look, Eron. A soldier boy. Did you come to see sweet Candy?” She beckoned to me. The way her arms wobbled put me instantly in mind of the tree woman of my dream. I took an involuntary step backward, making her laugh. “Don’t be scared. Come a little closer, lovey. I won’t bite you. Not unless you’re as sweet as sugar.”
The fat man had resumed his seat on his stool. He turned his head to look at me and smiled. His face was wreathed in fat; even his brow seemed heavy. I was, for the moment, the sole gawker. He spoke to me. “Soldier, eh? You a soldier lad? Oh, yes, I can tell. It’s in the bearing. What branch are you? Artilleryman?”
He spoke in such a friendly way that I would have been an oaf to ignore him. Yet I was suddenly uneasy to have the spectacle turn into a person. I glanced over my shoulder. Most of the crowd seemed to prefer the more lurid offerings of the tent and shuffled past his little stage with scarcely a glance.
“I’m cavalla. I’m a cadet at the King’s Academy,” I said, and then I stopped. Was I? In a few more days, I was certain, I’d be culled. The fat man didn’t even notice my abrupt silence.
“Cavalla! You don’t say! I was cavalla myself once, though you’re not like to believe it now. Jensen’s Horse. I started out as their bugle boy, I did, no taller than a flea and skinny as a whippet. Bet you don’t believe that, do you?” He spoke as casually as if we had met at a cabstand, as if there was nothing strange about him chatting with someone who had come to gawk at him as an oddity.
I felt embarrassed for him, and smiled awkwardly. “It’s a bit hard to believe, sir, yes.”
“Sir,” he said softly. Then he smiled, the expression pressing lines into his doughy face. “Been a long time since a young soldier has called me that. I was a lieutenant when this happened to me. I was on my way up, too. They told me that in a month, perhaps two, there would be a vacancy and I’d be a captain in my father’s old regiment. I was so happy. I thought it had all been worth it.” His face was transfigured by some memory, his eyes staring into the distance. He glanced down at me abruptly. “But you’re an Academy lad. Bet you wouldn’t think much of some ranker like me. My father had been a ranker before me, but he’d never risen higher than master sergeant. When I got my lieutenant’s bars, he was over the moon about it. He and my old maw sold just about everything they had to buy me a commission. I was shocked to hear they’d done it.”
He suddenly fell silent and all the old glory faded from his face. “Well,” he said, and laughed harshly. “My dad was always a good trader. I bet he got top dollar out of that commission when he sold it off.” He saw me staring at this revelation, and laughed again, more harshly. He gestured rudely at his body. “Well, after this happened to me, what was I to do? My career was over. I come back west, hoping my family would take me in; they wouldn’t even speak to me. Wouldn’t even admit itwas me. My old dad tells everybody that his son died in battle with the Specks. Close enough to truth, I guess. It was the damn Speck plague that did this to me.”
He lumbered over to the edge of his stage and sat down heavily. The whole process of lowering himself looked awkward. He dangled his legs over the edge. His low shoes were run over and tired, near bursting at their seams. His feet looked fat and run over, too, wider than they should have been. I wanted to leave, but could not simply turn and walk away from him. I wished other spectators would come to distract him from me. I did not like
