Smiler's Fair: Book I of The Hollow Gods

by Rebecca Levene

  ‘He wasn’t –’ Marvan began, and then saw the sly expression on the other man’s face and the glint of amusement in his eyes. ‘Thank you for your help, friend, whyever you gave it.’

  The tribesman raised the bottle of whisky in salute, then poured its dregs down his throat. ‘The world is full of reasons – who can know them all? Good journey to you.’

  Dae Hyo watched the man from Smiler’s Fair walk away. His spine was stiff and Dae Hyo knew he was fighting not to turn around. Well, that had certainly made the morning more entertaining than he’d expected. He’d woken at dawn with a pounding head and no interesting prospects on the horizon. The way he felt, the whisky was medicinal, truly. Poison for an antidote, like the elder mothers always said. He took another swallow and his vision, which had begun to clear, became pleasantly fuzzy again. The world looked better this way. He didn’t understand why anyone would choose to spend any time sober. Life was shit. Anything that made it seem less so was a gift from the ancestors.

  But Smiler’s Fair was here at last and he could move on with his plan. Min Ki might be a coward and a traitor, but he was right about one thing: raiding was the last refuge of a man who had nowhere else to go. Dae Hyo had no people to fight for any longer but he still had his own mouth to fill with food. And raiding could be honourable, if you conducted it honourably.

  He tossed the empty bottle at the cairn, watching the glass shatter on the stranger’s grave. ‘May your ancestors welcome you,’ he said, then turned away.

  The Wanderers he’d been tracking were camped beside an energetic mountain stream. They’d been following its course for three days now, no doubt hoping they’d find habitation and a market for their wares somewhere along it. Probably they were right, but they’d been disappointed so far and, even packed up in carts as it was right now, Smiler’s Fair should prove too tempting for them to resist. The important thing was making sure they knew it was there.

  Dae Hyo could move silently when he wanted, a hunter’s skill he’d never forgotten. He crept to the edge of a hillock that overlooked the Wanderers’ wagon and peered down at them. There were four in their party: two freckle-faced men too alike to be anything but brothers, a plump, stern woman and her child. He’d yet to figure out which of the men she was married to. Maybe it was both – who knew how foreigners lived their lives? All four of them were clustered round a small fire where a pot bubbled, their conversation too low for him to hear. He caught a faint whiff of porridge and his stomach twisted. When he drank, he didn’t remember to eat as often as he should.

  He’d been careful to stay hidden and he knew they hadn’t seen him. Wanderers were careless, anyway. Everyone knew they travelled under their Hunter’s hawk pact and that it was death to hurt any of the Hunter’s folk. That was no problem: he didn’t have harm in mind, just a bit of robbery.

  He had to admit, theft sat a little ill with him, but everyone knew the Wanderers had gold rather than blood in their veins and a locked box where their hearts ought to be. He’d never forgotten the three who’d passed through Dae lands when the great murrain was sweeping the plains and his brothers and sisters were starving. They’d sold grain and cheese to the tribe for ten times what it was worth. These bastards had money to spare. He wouldn’t even take it all, just enough to keep him in whisky for a good long time.

  Nothing would happen, though, until they could be made to leave their wagon unattended. It was clear they’d not heard the fair’s passing. Sometimes a horse needed to be led to water. He touched each of his blades for luck and then stood up, smiled and strode towards them.

  The woman noticed him first. She seemed almost insultingly unalarmed, shading her eyes against the morning sun to watch him approach.

  ‘I tell you what, you seem to be lost,’ Dae Hyo said when he was only a few paces away.

  The woman frowned and one of the freckled men strode up to sling an arm around her shoulder. Probably her husband, then. ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.

  ‘Because Smiler’s Fair is that way, and you’re here.’

  Oh yes, the hook was in their cheeks, no doubt of it. Husband and wife exchanged startled looks and the other man strode hurriedly up and said, ‘Smiler’s Fair?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Dae Hyo asked, as if he didn’t much care. ‘I was hoping to buy something there myself. Let’s be honest, probably a whore. But when I went down to see them in the Blade Pass, all the interesting parts were packed up and they told me they weren’t stopping. You’re not with them, then? I thought all you Moon Forest folk loved the fair.’

  ‘Smiler’s Fair isn’t our home,’ the first man said, ‘though we have friends there.’

  Dae Hyo peered blearily at him. ‘I don’t suppose you have a whore for sale?’

  The man flinched away from the whisky on Dae Hyo’s breath and Dae Hyo knew he had them for certain. People feared the violence of the drunk, but not their cunning tricks.

  ‘No?’ Dae Hyo said when the man didn’t reply. ‘Well, good travels to you then.’ He smiled round at the whole group and sauntered past their wagon and along the river’s course, as if that had been his route all along. A bright green frog leapt out of his path to splash in the water and he looked at that and not behind him, walking on until he was out of sight of the camp.

  When he felt certain he wasn’t being followed, he stopped. The snow-dusted landscape didn’t give him much to look at, so he sat on a rock and picked at the scabrous grey moss as he made himself wait. The time seemed to trickle away with impossible slowness, but when he judged enough had passed, he stood.

  He knew it was best not to return by the same path. If the Wanderers had chosen to remain, it was sure to rouse their suspicions, so he turned away from the river instead and took to the low hills. It was a difficult route, keeping to the shadows and muffling his footsteps in the scattered patches of grass, but eventually he’d circled himself back round to the campsite. He wriggled the last few feet on his belly and peered over the crown of the hill as a chill breeze picked at his topknot.

  It had worked. The wagon still sat there, plump and inviting with the haughty golden Hunter painted on its side, but the people were gone. The only sound was the stream, its chuckle echoing Dae Hyo’s own feelings.

  The campsite was a little disorderly. The Wanderers had left plates scattered about in their hurry to visit the fair, and half their porridge in the pot. It was congealed and burnt on the bottom but Dae Hyo paused to scrape it out and lick it from his fingers. Then he’d run out of things to do except rob the wagon and he took a breath to stiffen his resolve before climbing in.

  The interior was gloomy, even with the canvas flaps flung wide. It was thick with the clashing smells of the spices that were these Wanderers’ trade, and he could see pots and pans and scales and knives and dried flowers and a big cured ham cluttering the space. Everything but what he wanted. He pushed aside a string of rosebuds and moved deeper in.

  It was even darker here and he was forced to feel his way round. His fingers found a greasy solidity he thought might be a cheese and the rough weave of linen thrown on top of the softness of wool. He groped deeper into the material, sensing something harder beneath, and then the cloth moved, a hand clawed into his and there was a hoarse scream of shock.

  He shouted as well, too surprised to be stealthy. For a frozen moment he did nothing else, until his wits returned and he drew his knife from its sheath and slashed downward. He’d mis-aimed the blow, though, and he felt the blade tangle in cloth. The figure below him squirmed and shrieked and he’d torn the knife free and raised it for a killing strike when his target twisted and turned her face to the dim light. He had only a moment to register the wrinkled skin, the rheumy eyes and the thin lips before he stopped his blade an inch away from her throat and fled the wagon.

  He meant to run far away, but all the strength had gone from his legs. He fell to his knees on the stony ground instead, gasping as if he’d been in a real fight rather than about to slaugh
ter a helpless woman. He’d come so close to killing her. If she hadn’t turned towards the light, if he’d moved the knife aside just a little more slowly … He sat on the ground shivering with the horror of an almost done thing.

  After a little while, though, it occurred to him that there was no noise coming from inside the wagon. Shouldn’t the old woman have been shouting an alarm? But he’d given her a terrible shock and everyone knew the heart weakened as the body aged.

  He had the strength to stand now and he wanted to flee the campsite and the murder he’d so nearly committed. But he was a Dae warrior and Dae warriors didn’t run. He picked his knife up from the ground where he’d let it drop, sheathed it and then climbed back into the wagon. There was more daylight now and he could see the figure under the blankets quite clearly. When he stepped closer he realised that the cloudy blue eyes were open, and he sagged in relief as they blinked.

  ‘I tell you what, I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said in the Moon Forest tongue he’d learned from Edgar and Edmund.

  The old woman coughed, an awful gurgling sound that told him why she’d been staying in the wagon. Then she whispered, ‘What do you want, warrior?’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘they told me to look after you while they went to the fair.’

  Her face was so leathery with age it was hard to read the expression on it, but when she smiled to show a few teeth and mostly gums, he thought that was a good sign.

  ‘So you’ve been in here all these days?’ He stepped a little closer. ‘You people don’t know how to look after the sick. All these bad airs trapped in here with you, and darkness, anyone can see that’s no good. You need sun.’

  They’d wrapped her up in the cloth so tightly she looked like a caterpillar in its cocoon. It made it easy to stoop and pick her up. The blankets weighed more than she did and she leaned trustingly against his chest as he took her outside and laid her on a soft piece of ground where she could smell the green things winter had left living and see the fish in the stream.

  ‘That’s better,’ Dae Hyo said. He’d meant to leave her then, but it occurred to him there might be wolves about or other men with fewer morals than him, so he sank cross-legged to the ground beside her.

  For a little while the old woman seemed to drift into dreams, her body twitching in its covers and her eyeballs rolling beneath their lids. But when her eyes opened they were clear. ‘Still here?’ she asked.

  That didn’t seem to require any answer, so instead he said, ‘I’m Dae Hyo.’

  ‘Dae Hyo. Dae Hyo, is it? I’m Mayda Maysdochter.’

  ‘It’s a pretty name.’

  She gave a laugh, which turned into a rasping cough. ‘A flatterer, aren’t you? A charmer. I thought all you savages cared about was war?’

  ‘The Dae aren’t war-makers.’

  ‘Not like those Janggok, eh? A child carried off in raids from each village we passed in the forest, and the Hunter nowhere to be seen. We tithe our bairns to her for hawks and still our children are taken and sold as slaves in foreign lands. My own Rheda stolen when she was still suckling at my tit. Oh, but that was many moons ago.’ Her gaze sharpened as she looked at him. ‘Before you were born, warrior.’

  ‘Dae Hyo,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Oh aye, the Dae.’ Then her eyes slipped shut and he thought she slept. He’d half risen to carry her back into the wagon when her shrivelled hand reached out to grasp his. ‘The Dae are dead, you know. Their lands are empty.’

  He gently loosened her fingers with his. ‘My brothers and sisters are dead, but the Chun took our land. They live on what they don’t own.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘All gone.’

  He nodded, not willing to argue with her on a topic he preferred to look away from when he could, but she tightened her grip against his resistance.

  ‘The hunting grounds are empty. We rode through them, oh, five weeks past. The Chun – but they call themselves the Brotherband now, don’t they? The Brotherband headed north, to harry the Four Together. The plains were full of talk of their murder and their rape. Maybe now the tribes will know what we suffer with the Janggok. Yes, maybe they will.’

  There was more, but he hardly heard it. He let her talk herself to sleep, then lifted her gently and carried her inside the wagon to her bed. He washed the cooking pot clean of its porridge, which seemed the least he could do, and then turned his back on the camp.

  The Dae hunting grounds were empty. The grasslands and the hills, the reed-fringed lake where Dae Sun had taught him to swim, the scattered ash trees the youngest boys had raced to climb, the river called the Snake because of the way the water hissed over the jagged rocks of its bottom, the camp where a thousand of his brothers and sisters and the elder mothers had been made into skeletons and bleached in the sun. Every place that held every memory of his childhood. For the first time in seven years, he was free to return home. The last Dae could live and hunt on Dae lands.

  The whisky he’d drunk had vanished and taken its warmth with it, but now he felt a new sensation course through him, every bit as intense. It had been so long since he’d felt it, it took him a few moments to realise what it was: joy. It filled him to overflowing as he turned his back on the mountains and picked his path west towards the plains.

  13

  Olufemi passed the graveyard first. The dead lay on wooden platforms resting on piles of rocks. The recent thaw had melted the snow, at least for a while, and the bones were exposed to the chilly air. They’d long ago been picked clean by vultures, but she could see that some had teeth marks in them, too wide to belong to one of the mountain’s many predators. There were hands missing here and there, and on one corpse the entire left leg was gone. Yron’s servants had killed them, she felt certain, which meant she was probably approaching a mining community. Miners seldom buried their dead. Having lived their lives in darkness, they preferred to spend the aftermath in the light of the sun.

  By the time she saw the settlement itself, her pack was digging into her shoulders, Adofo’s sling weighed her down at the front and her bones felt as brittle as those in the graveyard. She sighed, slid the pack from her back and sat on a rock to examine her destination. She found it better if she prepared herself before speaking to new people, to decide which story she’d tell them, which shading of the truth. It should have been easy after all this time, but instead it seemed to grow harder with every month, every wasted year.

  She didn’t imagine her fortunes changing in this place. She’d visited its like before: a charmless collection of bars and brothels and boarding houses catering to the miners and mercenaries desperate enough to enter the earth in search of a few scraps of iron. Many of them seemed to be in town today, leading a motley collection of horses and donkeys. The men were hitching the mounts to the wooden bars that protruded from the side of each building. Then, as she watched, the beasts moved and so did the buildings themselves.

  Olufemi smiled a little. Now that was different. She couldn’t see any wheels beneath the houses and guessed they must be gliding on tracks of some kind. There was always something new to be discovered in the world, she needed to remember that.

  She heaved herself up and moved a little closer. Then she drew out her notebook and began to write down what she saw in the script she’d been taught in her distant youth in Mirror Town. The rails were a complex network, with sidings that allowed one house to be shunted aside so that others could pass it. There were 112 buildings in the settlement and they all seemed to be on the move. The grunts of effort drifted up to her.

  It didn’t seem possible that order would emerge out of all that chaos. But after a surprisingly short time, a three-storey bar had been shuttled past a long, thin whorehouse and locked into place at the end of a row of tenements, and the job seemed to be done. The people dispersed, some clearly struggling to find their destination in the town’s new configuration, and Olufemi sighed. She’d secure some lodgings and then she’d get started.

  The lodging hou
se was filthy. The walls were covered in a combination of soot and what appeared to be blood; Olufemi took one look at the bed and then stripped the sheets and blankets from it and piled them in a corner, hoping their collection of fleas wouldn’t migrate to her in the night. She placed her own bedroll on the bare straw mattress and sat on it. She could remember a time when her slaves would have performed all these tasks for her. But there was no bedroom this dismal in Mirror Town, not even the slaves’ own.

  The place was warm, at least. They’d lit a fire in the grate when they brought her in here, and the floor itself radiated heat. She suspected she might be above the kitchens. It would explain the smell of overcooked cabbage.

  The warmth was already waking Adofo from his hibernation. Olufemi removed the lizard monkey from his sling and placed him gently on the bed as the nictitating membranes over the creature’s eyes blinked open. She took a moment, as she always did, to admire them: the silver irises and the black crescent of the pupil within them. His red scales glittered in the firelight. His claws looked wickedly sharp and his teeth too when he yawned widely. Then he rubbed his paws along each side of his face and peered mournfully at Olufemi. He seemed reproachful, as well he might. He’d been in the deep rest only five days since Olufemi had last awakened him. No doubt he’d been hoping to sleep the winter through.

  Olufemi pulled an apple from her pack and carefully divided it, giving the bigger portion to her pet. ‘Here, maybe this will make waking up worthwhile.’

  Adofo’s movements were still a little sluggish as he took the offering. He turned it round to inspect it from every angle before eating it. He always did that, as if he was afraid that one day Olufemi might try to poison him. When he was finished looking he took a delicate nibble, chittered in pleasure, then hurriedly scoffed the whole thing. After that he rolled on to his back beside the fire, half-closed his eyes and settled down to enjoy the heat.