“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.