Firetale
Page 13
Chapter 13: The Tower
“Tongue tied, nerves as big as boulders.”
Blind Melon, “Car Seat (God’s Present)”
The Judge’s senses gave a jingle even before his Scarab Stout reached the circus encampment. The spectators, gathered for the show, stared at his car and, judging by their exclamations, took him for an artist who was running late for the show. Some onlookers even tried to talk to him, but Caius ignored them. He confidently walked to the main tent. Never in his life had his sense for mongrels screamed so loud inside his head, like a banshee predicting death.
In a bright, old-fashioned, and a bit cartoonish jump-stand stood a charming dark-haired woman with huge eyes and a sensual scarlet mouth. Caius showed her his invitation. He saw a human, but knew she was a mongrel. He was one of the best Judges, and his sense never failed. Yet his thoughts were confused. One mongrel should not cause such feelings. Feelings interfered with clear thinking. Caius wanted to get back in his car, take a harpoon, and turn this show into a bloodbath, but he decided to behave calmly and wait for the beginning of the spectacle before taking the next step.
The size of the main tent did not surprise him, but he was struck by its oddness. Caius was not a big fan of entertainment, knew little about fun, and a traveling circus seemed to him a relic of the days when there was neither TV nor radio. Therefore the Judge was not surprised when it turned out that the “Lazarus Bernardius’ Circus,” as it was called on the bill, exactly matched his archaic ideas. Coming into the tent, the Judge took his seat in the grandstand and looked around. The other spectators were definitely people. In none of them, neither adult nor child, did Caius sense a mongrel. The audience was whispering excitedly. Someone next to the Judge boasted that he had been in an actual traveling circus, and there had been a constantly unpleasant smell of damp, old age, and animals, but this place was nothing like that. Therefore, the circus expert doubted that this circus was real and that the show would be worth the couple of bucks he had paid for a ticket. The expert’s friend told him to shut up, but his words about smells in the circus alerted Caius. It did smell of wood, iron, dust, and spectators, but not of animals.
The Judge’s thoughts were interrupted when the arena was plunged into darkness. A deep voice from the darkness greeted the audience, and when the light appeared again, a tall old gentleman was standing in the center of the arena. He wore a suit from the 19th century, a top hat, and a gray beard down to his waist. The old man introduced himself as Lazarus Bernardius and said that his circus had been traveling around the country for almost one hundred and fifty years, and claimed he had been with it from the very first show. In the auditorium, children gasped, and adults snorted. The old man promised a good show, and as his final words faded, darkness engulfed the arena again.
A cheerful little tinkling tune began, and when the tent was once again illuminated, Caius and the viewers saw a little man with a street organ standing in the center of the arena. The musician was very short; his head would barely reach the knee of an adult and looked like a melon, a little flattened on top and bottom and too big for his tiny body. His face was a light orange color. Caius sensed a melonhead in the little man. On the continent, such were relatively recent, and those who saw them often mistook them for victims of genetic mutations, products of mad scientists or government experiments. Like all Judges, Caius knew about melonheads, one of the most senseless and helpless mongrels, though their weakness did not make them more easygoing.
While the man was playing, more shorties jumped out from behind the scenes in the arena. They looked like a dozen twins. They sputtered and sang something in their high-pitched voices, galloping around the musician and turning handsprings. During the dance, one of the melonheads stumbled and fell. Another one tripped on him, couldn’t keep his balance, and ran into a third. The latter comically slapped the second’s face, and when the first one tried to disengage them, he was beaten by both. The orange men fought with each other, yelling something thick with their thin voices. Some used techniques from wrestling, grasping each other and throwing opponents around the arena. Only the musician remained untouched, and he continued to play a fast, ringing melody.
Suddenly the men stopped fighting and rolling around the arena, and began pointing up. The shrill cry of an animal sounded, and an unimaginable cross between a bird and a lizard flew from under the dome, right at the orange men, its wings spread wide. The creature had only a rear pair of limbs, and instead of front limbs, it had broad membranous wings covered with scales. It had a long snake-like neck and the head of a lizard, and its thin tail bore a stinger that looked like an arrowhead. A wyvern, thought the Judge. He was boiling inside, and his suspicions about the circus were strengthened.
The serpent spewed flames. They were bright, but more like harmless fireworks than terrifying dragon fire, and they landed in the center of the arena. The melonheads scattered in every direction. Two of them dragged away the unwary musician, who blinked, pretending surprise. When he came his to senses, he changed the roller in his street piano, which began to play a heroic tune. Upon hearing it, the orange men surrounded the wyvern. He hissed menacingly at them, flew low, and produced whirls of sparks, scaring the melonheads. Sometimes the serpent dived and grabbed one of the men, and his fellows would try to catch him and pull him down. During one of the dips, two melonheads caught the wyvern’s tail. The serpent tried to shake them off and breathe fire on them, but did not succeed.
The other orange men clutched the legs of their brother, which dangled from the monster, and dragged him to the ground. When the wyvern was quite low, a few men pounced on his long, flexible neck and finally pinned him to the arena. The musician played a triumphant melody, and the others shouted a victory cry. They hoisted the defeated “dragon” onto their shoulders, waved to the audience, and then dragged him behind the scenes.
Then an incredibly handsome man appeared on the scene. Judge Caius had never considered himself a connoisseur of male beauty, but something about this man attracted him. He thought perhaps he might like to have a friend like him, maybe even a brother. But his sharp senses told him that a mongrel was on the stage, although he could not guess his secret. The man bowed, winking playfully at some of the girls in the hall, the smile never leaving his face. While he was engaged with the audience, a monster appeared behind him. How beautiful was the artist, so ugly was the monster. Judging by the breasts and rounded hips, this creature was a female. Her legs were fused into one, tangled hair concealed most of her face, which was mottled with wrinkles, but it couldn’t hide the single big eye in the middle of her forehead, bloodshot and covered with a fleshy eyelid. In some places, the monster-woman’s skin looked more like the bark of a tree, and her hands were like crooked branches. Caius remembered the name of the monster. Patasol. They once lived on the border with Mexico, but they had not been heard of in a long time.
The spectators shouted at the handsome man to turn around. He put a hand to his ear, pretending he could not hear what was said to him, and joked with the people in the hall. The monster was approaching him in short hops, and when it seemed she was ready to grab him with her hand-branches, the artist, without turning to her, moved to another location to entertain the audience. This went on several times until finally the man did turn around as the audience shouted at him. Horror filled his face, but did not make it ugly. Hand-branches seized the man by the shoulders; the beastly woman drew him to her and opened a mouth full of crooked yellow and black teeth. But instead of biting the victim’s head off, she kissed him, and in the same moment the monster began to change. She decreased in size, her single leg was divided into two, and the bark fell from them onto stage, exposing girlish legs, slender and tanned. The leaves and branches disappeared from her hair, and her face no longer had only one eye but two, and her red mouth was full of beautiful white teeth. The Judge recognized the girl from the jump stand.
Then a mimi appeared on the scene, an incredibly tall mongrel with bronzed skin
covered with white tattoos. The mimi was ten feet tall, and thin beyond belief. He entertained the audience by turning to the side and becoming invisible. If too many people in the audience clapped and sighed at the same time, the mimi trembled like a piece of fabric in the wind and uttered a sad and lingering moan. When his act ended, the mongrel lay on the arena, becoming a living drawing on the floor before crawling behind the scenes.
The sad mimi was exchanged for two ogres, very similar in appearance, except that one was gray and the other green. Both had the same gloomy muzzles and heavy jaws, wore shabby bowler hats, and were dressed like longshoremen of the 30s. Frowning and harrumphing, the ogres performed stunts with weights; they bent iron bars, raised a wrecking ball over their heads, and crushed bricks with their bare hands or sometimes against each other’s heads. To do this, one of the ogres took off his ridiculous bowler, showing the audience two short horns, while the second one hit the top of his head with a brick, crumbling it to dust.
The more the Judge watched the show, the fewer doubts he had. This circus consisted entirely of mongrels, from the old ringmaster to the melonheads. So maybe when Bernardius said he’d been managing the circus for nearly one hundred and fifty years, it wasn’t a joke. The Judge felt incredible excitement, as always, when an interesting case loomed before him. A beam of light under the dome caught a girl on a trapeze. Caius’s sense for mongrels raged within him, and pain was bursting inside him, as if his whole being was ready to explode. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe. It seemed to him that if he sighed, his lungs would explode, unable to withstand the pressure, and if he did not breathe, the rush of blood in his veins would stop. Caius felt divided. While one part of him tried to remember how to breathe, painfully trying to cope with the senses raging inside him, the second was calm and pacified. He was contemplating his life, confessing what he had done. He thought about all the sentences he had passed just to amuse himself or brag to the other Judges. He thought of Danny and the werewolf girl, and was ashamed of the feelings he had experienced over her dead body. But he did not have pity for himself. He believed he could change, that life would get better, that there was hope even for him. While the aerialist girl hovered under the big top, he felt incredibly good. Recognizing his own sins had helped him recover spiritually.
The girl’s straps folded and unfolded, raising her to the top of the dome, and then dropping her to the floor. She had a surprisingly good body, but looking at her the Judge felt no lust or passion, only admiration and gratitude.
And then a fiery serpent was flying around the girl, shining, bursting with warmth, blinding the eyes with the brightness of its flaming scales. The first Caius, the one whose sense for mongrels had nearly finished him off on the spot, got the chance to crush the other Caius, the false Caius dwelling in dreams of hope and redemption. The first Caius, the prime Caius, trampled down the second Caius somewhere deep in the hell of the subconscious, and then, not celebrating victory, switched his attention to the magician who had created the fire snake.
Fire magic. So strong. Judge Caius had never heard of it during his long career, which had lasted more than thirty years.