A Company of Heroes Book Two: The Fabulist (22 page)

Besides being owner of the circus, he doubles as its strong man.

He places an ear next to Thud’s chest and seems satisfied with what he hears. A coin purchases the services of a goggle-eyed boy who is sent off to the vacant lot with a message. This produces, a half hour later, a flatbed wagon and a half-dozen husky roustabouts. A block and tackle and some skids are all that is needed to haul the elephantine body into the wagon.

It is not until then that it occurs to someone that their Wonder is being taken away.

The boy who had been sent off to fetch the wagon has returned with it and he is now being sent off again, this time to alert the merchants, who are no doubt wholly unaware that their arguments about the disposition of the giant are at that very moment being rendered academic. Whatever else might happen that night, there is one lad who has found it highly profitable.

By the time an indignant delegation of merchants arrives at the circus ground, there is no sign of the purloined giant. Their demands to see the owner are ignored. Finally, after sufficient threats involving sheriffs and license revocations, the burly owner materializes. His aboriginal appearance cows them.

“Gentlemen,” he chastises, “the first show will not be until tomorrow morning! Here, please accept these complimentary passes.”

“We’re not here about any show,” says the delegated leader. “We’re here about the giant.”

“What giant?”

“See here, there’s no need to take that stance. We know you took it. There are witnesses!”

“Witnesses to what?”

“To your theft of the giant, that’s what!”

“Theft? Theft from whom?”

“What?”

“Theft from whom? Did I take someone’s property?”

“You had no right,” put in another villager, “to take the giant away!”

“What law did I break?”

“Law? Who says anything about law?”

“Didn’t you?”

“That is city property,” says the first man.

“Really? Did the giant know this?”

“What?”

“Did the giant know he is property? Did you ask him?”

“How could we do that? He is virtually dead.”

“But not literally. I think there’s every chance of his recovery. I know you’ll be glad to learn this.”

“What?” they all cried more or less in unison. “You can’t do that!”

“It is but common charity.”

“We’ll bring the sheriff, then we’ll talk about charity!”

“An excellent subject, a worthy subject. I look forward to it.”

“You haven’t seen the last of us!”

“A reassurance I will treasure through the night.”

The sheriff is a taciturn, practical, unimaginative man who has held his post uninterruptedly for nearly twenty-five years and who knows personally every one of the men who have awakened him at three o’clock in the morning. He listens to as much of their complaint as he can, then refuses to have anything to do with anything less than cold-blooded murder at that hour. The merchants argue, but the sheriff is adamant and finally shuts the door in their faces, warning them that if anyone is asking to be arrested, it is them.

There is some talk about going to the mayor and the local magistrate, but cooler heads prevail and any further action is deferred until later that morning.

Thud finally awakens at dawn, after two days and two nights of unconsciousness. He lay on a bed of hay under a canvas dome that glows warmly from the early morning light. He has no idea where he is, but someone brings him a bucket of chicken soup and when he asks, “Where am I?” the response is a shrug and, “Somewhere. Who knows?”

A few minutes later someone else comes in and asks, “How are you feeling now?”

It is a nice voice, a sweet soprano compared with Bronwyn’s throaty contralto, and when Thud deliberately focuses on its source he sees that it had been issued by a girl who looks very much like a dark version of the princess. Like Bronwyn, she is tall and has a bony, strong-featured face. Unlike Bronwyn, this girl’s hair is as black as wet licorice and cut in a kind of shoulder-length pageboy. She is dressed in a tight-fitting outfit of black sequins that clings to her torso and just barely covers her breasts. A short ruffly skirt flares at her hips, but it is purely decorative as it leaves the entire length of her almost supernaturally long legs exposed. He thinks she looks very pretty, though not half so pretty, of course, as his princess.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“I think so. Where am I? Who are you?”

“In order as asked: I have no idea. Some fishing village or something in the backwaters of nowhere; they’re all pretty much the same after the first two or three hundred. My name is Rykkla. What’s yours?”

“Thud.”

“Sounds about right. My uncle runs this circus, the Sloon-Woxen Combined Grand Shows and Menagerie. He’s the one who found you and brought you here. Whatever happened to you, anyway?”

“I is looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“The princess.”

“Your dog?”

“No Princess Bronwyn.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know her. Sorry,” she adds, seeing his face fall. “She the one who beaned you?”

“Huh? No. Something fell on my head.”

“You think that you’re feeling well enough to talk to Uncle Busra?”

“I feel all right.”

“Fine! Wait right here and I’ll get him.” With a flurry of long legs, flashing like a busy tailor’s shears, she vanishes from the tent. Thud sits up and looks around. His head hurts terribly. He had been lying, is now sitting, on a mound of clean straw in the middle of a small tent whose sides are glowing warmly from the early morning sun. From outside he can hear voices mixed with strange sounds, animal or mechanical or both, he can’t tell. He tries to stand up but feels so dizzy that he thumps back into the straw, head throbbing. It is amazing that so much pain can occur within so small an object.

After a few minutes, Rykkla returned with her uncle, Busra, the powerful, hirsute man who had rescued Thud the previous night . . . or earlier that morning, to be entirely accurate. He grins at the sight of the conscious Thud, an action that makes him look like a hungry bear. It would not have occurred to Thud, but, except for their coloring, there is little to suggest a familial relationship between the man whose every feature seems a gross exaggeration and the girl beside him who is as sleek and graceful as a steel spring. Perhaps the resemblance lies in that both had animal counterparts: he the badger, she the otter.

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re feeling better! Hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Some food’ll be brought here for you, until you feel steadier on your feet. Rykkla, will you take care of that?”

“Of course, Uncle,” she replies, vanishing once again.

“Do you feel like talking?” Busra asks, squatting on his haunches to bring his face level with Thud’s.

“I guess so.”

“Well, look here, I have a proposition for you.”

“Proposition?”

“Yes. Do you have a job? Are you working anywhere?”

“I is working on the
Princess.”

“The
Princess
?”

“I shoveled coal.”

“Ah, a ship. And where is this ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is no ship in the harbor when I found you. I think you are left for dead, my friend, abandoned. Would you like a job? Do you want to work? If you do, I’ve an offer for you. I’ll be frank: I’ve worked in circuses all my life and I’ve never in all that time seen anyone like you. Tell me, are you as strong as you look?”

“I don’t know. How strong do I look?”

“Strong enough to tear a horse in half.”

“I never tried that.”

“No matter. I’d like to hire you as my new strong man. I’ll pay you . . . well, we’ll talk about that later. You’ll have your own place to sleep and all of your meals provided.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Excellent! Wonderful! It’s agreed then. As soon as you’re feeling better, tomorrow, perhaps?, I’ll explain to you what you have to do. All right?”

“All right.”

And thus begins Thud’s career as a circus strong man. When the merchants finally reappear to demand the return of their giant, Busra simply demonstrates that he is now employed by the circus. There is little the townsmen can say, confronted as they are by a living, breathing Thud who answers their questions more or less intelligibly; the most cogent, and disappointing, being the “Yes” they receive in answer to the inquiry: “Do you work here?”

Busra has a costume prepared for his new act, an imitation leopard skin draped over one of Thud’s shoulders, and a new sideshow tent with Thud’s picture painted on it. There is considerable debate whether to change Thud’s name. The most convincing argument for leaving it alone is that Thud might not remember to answer to any other. So the primary-hued, yard-high letters proclaim: “Thud the Invincible, Strongest Man in the Universe.”

Thud’s duties are simple enough and he enjoys them. He ties knots in one-inch steel reinforcing rods and occasionally makes pretty designs with them at the request of the audience.

He bends railroad rails into Us, but these are not always easy to come by. He juggles cannonballs and lifts an ox when someone responds to the challenge in the handbills that are passed out in advance of every appearance and brings one with them. He holds a kind of sling in his fist, at arm’s length, and invites any number of people from the audience to sit in it and his arm would budge no more than the bough of an oak. Rykkla climbs onto his shoulders and then walks out to the end of his outstretched arm where she then does a handstand on his open palm.

Thud rapidly becomes one of Busra’s most popular attractions. As for Thud, he enjoys his sojourn with the circus immensely.

He particularly enjoys the animals, never in his life having seen anything as exotic as the lions, tigers, bears, seals and, most particularly, the elephants, for whom he has an especial affinity and who take to him like a brother. The other performers and employees take an almost immediate liking to the amiable giant. Not one of them sees anything strange in Thud’s appearance, just as they have never seen anything awry with each other. Within the inverted world of their circus, like troglodytes living within a hollow earth, or Kobolds, for that matter, the circus folk only see normality in uniqueness. The acrobats and tumblers, the high-wire artists and animal trainers and clowns, all of those whose strangeness lay in something inside their heads that made them want to abandon the mundane and see in their mirrors nothing outwardly different from the denizens of the freak tents, the pinheads, the alligator girls, the fishboys, the living skeletons, the bearded women, the fat women, the half men-half women, the human pincushions, the fire-eaters and the geeks . . . to these self-abandoned, self-sufficient creatures, to their eyes each of the others look as they futilely dream themselves to be.

Thud never for a moment forgets his great mission, and in every town the circus passes through he asks about his lost princess. Of every awed farmhand who is granted permission to visit the giant backstage he inquires about Bronwyn. No one takes him seriously, however, because they are all outsiders who see only the shell Thud had been buried within. All they hear, if they hear him at all, are the inane ramblings of a half-wit giant.

The circus people listen to him, however, and they believe him, more or less. That final qualifying phrase is necessary since they are almost all wise enough to understand that what someone like Thud
believes
to be true and what is
in fact
true might be two entirely different things.

Thud is far from being a born storyteller, and his attempts to recite the events of the last two years are not even remotely coherent. There had been so much he had accepted without thought, that there is little he truly remembers. So his new friends listen to a disconnected and confused catalog of apparently unrelated events that include lost princesses, flights through the air, trips underground and bad people who had chased him here and had chased him there. His new friends don’t know what to make of it all.

Thud does not know how long he stayed with the circus, nor does he even bother to think about how many towns and villages he has passed through, or how many people he has puzzled with his mysterious and incomprehensible questions.

Then on one rainy night the circus burns. Busra has no idea how it started, only that once it has there is no chance of stopping it. The only thing he has to be thankful for is that it occurred after the evening’s final performance and the show tents are virtually empty. The menagerie, however, and the trained animals are all under canvas and it is imperative that they be gotten to safety before any thought could be given to the tents and equipment. Everyone, from roustabout to aerialist to palmist, work like demons in the scorching heat, steaming like hot coals as they become soaked by the pervasive, heavy mist. Black, smoking silhouettes of all shapes and sizes dance and scurry with a deliberate frenzy against the backdrop of flame. Thud’s feats are prodigious. Though he is never to know it, he creates legends that night that eventually filter through all the world of the circus, carnival and sideshow, becoming, finally, standard tales to tell around the urns in the coffee tents and to wide-eyed novices.

But in spite of everyone’s efforts, the circus is lost. Only the empty wagons and caravans remain. Busra is forced to sell most of his animals to pay his debts and has to let his performers go on to other shows.

“Thud,” Busra explains to the giant after the last of his regular performers have taken his or her regretful but necessary farewell, “Thud, there’s no reason that we, you, Rykkla and I, cannot continue the strongman act on its own.”

Thud sees nothing wrong with this, as he views almost everything, and for some weeks the trio are very successful. They are crowded in the single small wagon left to them, but the weather is still fine, especially after they have descended into the lower country, and Thud has no objection to sleeping out of doors. An awning is stretched from one side of the wagon, which gives Thud a little shelter and also provides a place where they can cook and eat their meals. Busra is able to get some handbills printed cheaply and this increases the numbers of the audiences which in turn, naturally, increases the quantity of coins tossed into the hat that is passed around at the end of each demonstration.