“Not on an intinerant’s pass,” the guardswoman had grinned, showing herself unimpressed by these theatrics. “Here for carnival, I suppose?”
“Also inevitably,” he laughed, showing teeth white and pointed as fangs at the corners of his smile, like a vampire, licking them quickly as though to get the last taste of blood off. Not really fangs, no, merely teeth that were longer and narrower than most, the guardswoman had told herself with a half pleasurable shiver. “Magician?”
“Say showman. Bits of this and bits of that,” he admitted. “It is my profession.”
“Alone?”
“Who would be alone?” he said with a dramatic gesture. “Lonely, yes, madam, as are we all in these latter days when the desolation gathers around us like so many clustered pockmarks on the face of nature, but alone, no. I have some pretense of a troupe. An assistant, as it were, or two.”
“Your first stop…,” the guardswoman began.
“Must be at the quarantine house,” interrupted Septemius. “We quite understand. Believe me, madam, we have no wish to distribute infection in these altogether admirable purlieus. Without Women’s Country, we would have no custom, therefore we attend to your custom, do we not?” A quirk again, as though an announcement of laughter which was only assumed, not heard.
From the brightly painted wagon a touseled head emerged. “Bird, are we here, have we arrived?” A gray-headed oldster, face scruffily obscured behind a ten-day beard, coughing as he spoke.
Two other heads above and below, identical to one another, down to the copper locks falling in studied disarray before the ears. Women’s voices from these girls’ faces, two blended into one, like a voice holding its own echo close to its heart. “Septemius?” A vibration, like that of a tuning fork, dwindling into silence. From the cage atop the wagon came a muffled “whuff,” as one of the dancing dogs turned over in his sleep.
“The elderly gentleman is Bowough Bird. The young women are my nieces.” He presented their books and she took her time leafing through them, tracing back their travels. They had covered Women’s Country. Bird’s passbook was numbered eighteen, and it was almost full. Eighteen books he had filled! The old man had filled twenty-seven!
“Well, madam?” Bird bowed extravagantly, one foot well back, an arm bent across his chest, holding a broad-brimmed and plume-decked hat, his other arm sweeping the red-lined cloak into a wide wing at his side. “Well?”
“Get on with you, all four of you. Considerin’ how polite you are, I won’t make you use the outside entrance. You don’t need to go back outside the gates. Quarantine house is down this road to your left. There’s a medic there now,”
The wagon rocked off down Wallside Road, leaving the guardswoman to shake her head. Carnival brought strange folk to Women’s Country. Magicians, fire painters, dance troupes, animal trainers. And the likes of Septemius Bird. She sneaked a look at herself in the mirror hung behind the door while considering that she was looking rather well that evening despite this really regrettable tabard she had to wear to identify her status.
At the quarantine house they found a young medic on duty, more or less, a woman with a thick mop of tawny hair, eyes green as grass—though full of sleep—and a wide, tender mouth.
“Health cards,” she demanded with a bright, wide-eyed stare, as though she was suspicious of them ail or covering up the fact she had been drowsing when they entered. She hunched over the proferred cards making noises, hm and ah, to show she knew what the chicken tracks on them meant. “Seven days ago in Mollyburg, a clean record there. Any contact since?”
“If by that, madam, you mean any lascivious conduct, lecherous behavior, lubricious or priapic pauses in our days’ endeavors, no. I am unsuited to such by mere inclination. Bowough, there nodding his gray head, is unsuited by age. My nieces, precocious though they are, are unsuited by aesthetic preference, which time will, no doubt, reverse.”
Stavia, for it was Stavia, gave the girls a quick look. Prepubertal, surely, though it would not be the first time some huckster had tried to sell his female companions, over and over again, as virgin nymphs. She had learned of such in the academy at Abbyville, of such and of half a hundred other suches she would as soon not have known of. These girls had not that look about them, though. There was none of that Gypsy-camp lewdness in their eyes, though there was other sorts of wisdom there, the Lady wot. A certain knowledge of the world, perhaps. They returned her hard look with calm ones of their own, blue eyes like clear tidewater pools, reflecting the measureless sky.
She fought her way out of those pools, examining the books again. No! These women were the same age as she. Twenty-two years in the bodies of sylphs? Surely not. “They assist you?”
“A moment’s thought will assure you of the value of identical twins to a magician, particularly twins who look like mere children.” He flashed his teeth at her, a fox’s smile. “May I introduce you to Kostia and Tonia. They are my sister’s daughters, and I had the deepest affection for my sister.” This time he did not smile, and Stavia believed him.
“For their sakes, showman, you’d do better to let them live in Women’s Country.”
He shook his head, evidently accustomed to this suggestion, placing his hands on the edge of her desk, poised on their fingertips, each hand like some five-legged creature pressing up and down, up and down. “I have considered that, from time to time. My sister thought not, however. There are advantages to our life, madam.”
“If you can stay clear of bandits, no doubt.” She sighed, and he heard the sigh. Something there that made her sympathetic to a wandering life. He gave no sign of having heard or understood that sigh.
“Thus far we have been lucky.”
Stavia went through the motions with them, though both instinct and experience
