I’ve always been good at causing distractions.
I rolled silently on to my back and began to stroke lazily towards Hero Boy. He made such a noise with his splashing that he didn’t see me until I crashed into him. I dove under the water and emerged with a squeal. “Oh, sir! What are you doing?”
My outraged tone and obvious nakedness did the trick. He apologised so many times that I thought his tongue might fall out (not that he wasn’t getting a good eyeful at the same time).
I squealed a bit more, mostly about what my father and six older brothers would do when they found out about this scandal. Hero Boy paled at the thought of seven burly farmers coming after him, and prepared to make a hasty exit. He turned just in time to see Luc making away with his clothes. He roared and ran after him, but didn’t get very far because a) he was naked and barefoot and b) among other things, Luc had stolen his horse.
–§–§–§–§–§–
By the time Luc and I met up, deep in the woods around our village, we were both laughing so hysterically that neither of us could talk. Even the horse was amused—I don’t think he’d been too impressed by his previous owner.
In case you’re wondering, yes I had taken the time to snatch up my own clothes, and I was now respectably dressed.
It was time to examine the loot. Along with the clothes and the horse, there were a couple of well-stuffed saddlebags. Not too shabby for our first efforts at Seeking our Fortune. As long as Ma never found out about this, we’d be right.
While Luc tried to figure out how to button up white ruffled shirt, I tried on the dove-grey boots. They were very good boots. They went all the way up to my knees, which you couldn’t see under my modest village dress (hand-stitched by Ma Fortuna) but I was already planning a new outfit around the boots.
“Hey, hand them over,” Luc protested when he noticed I had staked my claim.
I tossed the black curly wig at him. “Consider them my commission. Just be glad I didn’t take a fancy to the leather trews. What’s the sword like?”
Luc looked embarrassed. “I didn’t take his sword.”
I paused halfway in the act of unbuckling the first saddlebag. Of all the necessary props for a hero, a sword is right up there. “Why not?”
Luc shuffled his feet. “Well, it might have been an heirloom.”
“No,” I said, gingerly removing my arm from inside the saddlebag and flipping it open so he could see the contents. “I think this is the heirloom.”
Inside the saddlebag was a huge, oozing, rotting troll head. Turned out our Hero Boy was more impressive than your average show-pony. He’d bagged a troll.
“I feel sick,” said Luc. He did look pretty green.
“No time for that,” I said brightly. “It’s time to say our goodbyes and hit the open road. This gives me such a brilliant idea.”
–§–§–§–§–§–
The first step to becoming a hero is to look like one. The second step is to be recognised as a hero, by other heroes as well as by the world at large. As far as I could see, short of actually spending a few years performing good deeds and buttering up news minstrels, there was only one way to achieve hero recognition.
Sure, this was tossing Luc in at the deep end. But even if he sank without a trace, he’d at least get a glimpse of what real heroes looked and acted like. Maybe it would put him off the idea.
Mocklore Survival Guide #3: Taverns.
There are a lot of these in Mocklore. Inns, hostelries, watering holes, ale houses, wine bars, beer bars, home-brewed cider bars. When a community is stuck on a small island, they want to be sure they can get a drink around every corner. As well as the ordinary taverns, there are the trade bars. There’s a profit-scoundrel bar in Dreadnought, an assassin bar at the top of the Teatime Mountain, a woodcutter bar behind every other oak tree and about fourteen exotic dancer/spy bars in Zibria. There’s even an ex-Emperor bar somewhere in Skullcap now, though that wasn’t around in our youth.
Unless you’re an exotic dancer (they’re welcome everywhere except the Sparkling Nuns’ Beer Hut), you don’t set foot into a trade tavern without belonging to the trade. Everyone still remembers that nasty incident when two blacksmiths accidentally walked into the Braidmakers’ Community Cabaret Club. Braidmakers are scary.
There’s a hero bar, obviously. It’s smack bang in the middle of the city of Axgaard, which is such a hero thing to do—you have to be brave to walk through Axgaard in daylight, let alone during traditional drinking hours. Getting as far as the Twelve Labours Saloon is a heroic quest all on its own. The streets are filled with sword-wielding maniacs and prematurely-bearded children playing target games with knives and each other’s braids.
Luc and I had thought out our plan carefully. Well, I had thought it out carefully and then spent a lot of time talking him into it. I was in costume as an exotic dancer, which involved a lacy white two-piece dress and lots of jingling beads. Luc was dressed in the Hero Boy costume, with his old brown boots blacked up for the occasion. Naturally, I was hanging on to the lovely long grey boots we’d stolen.
The horse was far too sensible to allow itself to be dragged within the city walls, so we tethered it to a tree before going in.
The Twelve Labours Saloon stood in the city square, bright white from roof to welcome mat. It was built from shiny white stone, surrounded by pillars. It would look perfect in Zibria, where every building is either a temple or just looks like one, but in the shambling, lopsided city of Axgaard (built from splintering timber and rusty nails from old orange boxes) it stood out like a naked male troll in a convent. Still, at least it stayed up whenever the rest of the city burned down around it, which happened every other week.
“What now?” Luc whispered.
“Relax,” I hissed back. “Whatever happens, go along with me and act cool. You’re a hero now. Confidence is your middle name.”
“Right,” he said uncertainly. My hero.
The noise from inside the Twelve Labours Saloon was deafening. Clashing tankards harmonised with raucous laughter, loud belching, bad piano music and the sound of fists smashing into furniture. It was quite restrained compared to the goings on in the street around us, so I didn’t hesitate to march through the door. Luc waited in the street for his cue.
I should explain that in Mocklore the hero business is mostly a male profession. There are a few women who do it, but they are the kind of girls who are far too pragmatic to hang out in bars. The first time I realised this with any degree of clarity was while standing in that doorway.
All eyes looked at me. Male eyes. I’ve never felt so outnumbered in my life. Somewhere, a bloke playing a piano struck a few false notes and then lapsed into silence. I know this is an often-used psychological trick to intimidate people, but it was working.
Still, I had a job to do. I had a bosom to heave and I was damn well going to heave it. I took a deep breath and the bosom started heaving all on its own. I clasped my hands together in a traditional distressed maiden pose and let them have it. “Trolls! On the Great Road, swarming all over me!”
Now I was properly categorised as a damsel in distress with news of a potential adventure, the heroes dropped their hostility. One of them, a giant of a bloke wearing a black leather jerkin over a shirt even whiter and frillier than Luc’s, leaped to his feet and pounded a fist against the wall, causing a thin shower of marble dust to fall down from the high ceiling. “A troll, you say?” he roared in delight. “What you need is a HERO!”
“Augghhyeah!!” chorused the others, smashing their tankards over each other’s heads.
One hero, smaller than the rest, sighed and pulled his twirly moustache. “I don’t believe you used that line again,” he complained.
“It’s a classic,” protested the giant in ruffles, pouting.
“There’s a chasm between classic and cliché,” groaned the hero with the moustache. “And not one of you morons can tell the difference.”
I felt myself losing contro
l of the conversation. “There’s already a hero facing those monsters,” I gasped, swooning against a pillar and hanging on to it for dear life. “Luco the Magnificent, the greatest hero I have ever known. But he’s outnumbered four to one, I fear he is lost forever!”
“Right, Thimbleknees,” bellowed the giant hero, dragging the thin moustached hero up out of his chair and setting him on his feet. “Let’s go. And if you say one more word about my dramatic monologues, I’ll bloody thump you!”
Right on cue, the tavern door flew open. The piano player, caught flatfooted, started playing jauntily again for a few seconds before striking the traditional false notes and lapsing into silence.
Luc stood there in the doorway: some of my best work, even if I do say so myself. With a few stitches here and there (lucky Ma Fortuna taught him to use a needle), the hero costume fit him perfectly. The black curls of the wig were perfectly slightly askew, and a touch of face powder (Corpse White No. 8) gave him the dramatic vampyre aesthetic that was so fashionable with our generation.
He gripped the huge, dripping troll head in one hand, allowing the blood to pool on the floor. We’d bought a bag of blood and mutton chunks from a butcher’s stall to freshen up the head after so many days mouldering in a saddlebag.
When Luc spoke, his voice bounced off the marble walls. Living with younger siblings really teaches you to project. “I told you there was no need to go for help, fair maiden. Four trolls is hardly enough to build up a sweat!” He dropped the head on the floor with a heavy squelch, stepped casually over it and headed for the bar. “Is anyone going to buy me a drink?”
There was a long pause.
In a sane universe, he would have been beaten up. They would have seen through him in an instant and smashed his face in or hung him upside down from the roof gutters. Luc knew this, which is why it took me so long to talk him into my brilliant plan. But I was counting on something he didn’t even know he had: a strange, unexplainable charisma that had transformed the most average boy in the school into a king of the playground. Luc had something that made everyone like him and look up to him. Even me, and I don’t look up to anyone. Maybe it was a genetic thing from Ma Fortuna—who rocked the ability to make everyone follow even the most unreasonable of demands (hence me wearing a respectable dress for the past four years).
But Luc wasn’t like that. He didn’t make people do anything. They did it because they genuinely liked him and they wanted him to like them. I was careful to only take advantage of this sparingly, because if he ever realised the truth about his talent, he had the potential to become the most insufferable (and dangerous) person in the Mocklore Empire.
I held my breath for a full minute, but it was worth the wait. It worked. One minute they were staring at Luc like they couldn’t figure out whether to kill him or just rip his arms off, and the next they were slapping him on the back and buying him drinks. Lots of drinks.
Soon, they were all rowdily settled around a table swapping troll stories. Luc was among them, swept up in an ocean of ruffled white shirts, tight leather trousers and foaming beer tankards.
It was a good half an hour before anyone noticed me again, and that was when the trouble started. I was dangling my legs on one of the rickety bar stools, sipping something sweet. I’m a sucker for drinks that come out of pretty bottles. This one tasted like a cross between cherry cordial and salt-whisky. I was bored, keeping half an ear on the conversation of the heroes—they had moved on from trolls to giants and were all lying their arses off.
A hand slapped me on the shoulder, spinning me around. Luckily, the stool wasn’t up to much, or the force of that blow might have had me whizzing around for hours. Instead, the stool rotated once and cracked hard, leaving me jammed lopsidedly against the bar. I twisted my neck up to see who was responsible. Uh-oh.
She was scary. Half a foot taller than me and far more intimidating in the bust region. She was squeezed into a bronze corset that made her look like a tiny-waisted giantess. Metal bangles lined her muscular arms. Her copper-red hair jangled in thousands of tiny braids, each holding either a bell or a blade. Her skirt was a short curtain of metal coins. Her bare thighs were toned slabs of lethal weapon. Even her boots were shinier than mine.
She was a real exotic dancer, and I was in trouble.
The dancer sneered at me, leaned her bosom forward and shoved her nose about an inch from mine. “What the hell do you think you are?”
I didn’t have the nerve to claim that I shared status with her—it was laughable. This woman was a professional. “Damsel in distress,” I squeaked.
She raised an eyebrow in such a scorching expression of disdain that I’m surprised my fringe didn’t catch fire. “Distress?”
Well, I was in distress now. I pointed at Luc amid the gang of boasting heroes, none of whom had noticed my predicament. “He rescued me. From a troll.”
The scary bronze woman didn’t back off. Instead, she pointed her muscular finger at the tawdry line of bells I had made Luc stitch to my damsel-in-distress frock. “Looks to me like you fancy yourself as a bit of a dancer.”
Shit, I was going to die.
The heroes finally sniffed out a brewing fight. This wasn’t helpful. Chairs scraped back as they all tried to get a better view, and some weasel-nosed skeezebucket scratched odds on the menu blackboard. Luc looked worried.
I’d like to say that what I did next was to prevent him getting his head pulled off by the scary bronze lady when he inevitably tried to rescue me, but it was nothing so rational. The combination of an audience of leather-clad men, an unbeatable female opponent and odds of 100-1 against my survival brought out the worst in me.
I pushed myself off the broken bar stool. Fortunately, her nose was no longer pressed into my face. Unfortunately, this was because she was now a whole foot taller than me. I gave her the hobgoblin stare—it’s an ability that anyone with a smidgen of fey folk blood is born with, an ability to look at someone as if you are the mistress of the universe and they are the dirt under your fingernails.
Usually it forces my opponent to step back a bit and check they don’t have crumbs in their teeth. The scary bronze lady didn’t even flinch. Instead, her mouth twitched into a purr of a smile, and she stuck out her hand. “Lilya.”
Cautiously, I clasped my hand to hers. “Bounty.”
As soon as I touched her hand, I realised my mistake. Her grip changed, and I was suddenly airborne. The ceiling twisted up to meet me, and THUD. I lay on my back, the wind knocked out of me. Lilya grinned in triumph and brought her hands together a few times in a slow clap. The heroes joined in.
The dratted piano started up again with a boppy tune that matched the beat. Lilya began to dance. Given that I wasn’t sure I would ever walk again, I had no choice but to watch her. And damn, she was good. She stomped and spun and turned her body inside out with rippling stomach action. Her body was steel one minute; water the next. She flowed and oozed and rattled and shimmied. She was sexy as hell.
I crawled painfully to the door, my back screaming in a hundred different ways. Lilya’s meaty hand grasped the back of my skimpy outfit and dragged me to my feet by my breast-band. I hung from her hand, a few inches off the floor. She still moved in perfect time to the music. Then she dropped me, clapped her hands and slapped them once against her thighs.
Everyone looked expectantly at me. Waiting for me to join the dance. Now, I’d seen combat dancing before. It’s a nasty business—someone always ends up maimed. In the crowd, I found Luc’s steady gaze, and remembered that I’d talked him into striding into a hero bar with a giant troll’s head bleeding from his hand. The least I could do was do a bit of dancing.
My back screamed out in a hundred new and interesting ways as I clapped my hands, slapped my thighs and accepted the invitation to dance. Even now, years later, most of that night is a foggy blur of painful, sweaty memories. Lilya and I danced and jumped and shimmied our butts off in a stomping, sweating duel. After an hour or so, the heroes
stopped watching and wandered back to swap stories and play cards. We barely noticed. We weren’t dancing for them.
Finally, somewhere near midnight, my hobgoblin stamina deserted me. I slumped over a bar stool, my legs trembling in a paralysed, jelly custard kind of way. “I give up. You win.”
Lilya hoisted me up so I was sitting properly on the bar stool. “Well, yeah,” she said with a toothsome grin. “Buy me a drink, sweetheart?”
I nodded hazily, signaling to the barman. “You bet, babe.”
A few minutes later, one of the larger bearded heroes came up beside us to order a huge round of beer. “That new bloke’s not bad,” he said with an impressed kind of leer. “Eight trolls in one day. Can’t do better than that.”
“Oh, he’s a champ,” I managed through a haze of cherry cordial and whisky with extra gin for good measure.
When the sun rose the next morning, Lilya and I staggered arm in arm out of the tavern, barely able to stand without each other’s help. We found Luc tied to a flagpole in the middle of the square, draped in women’s underwear and garlands of flowers. Various axes were stuck in the pole from where they had been drunkenly thrown at him.
“They called your bluff?” I asked sympathetically.
“No,” he said in a stunned, croaky voice. “This is what they do when they like you. They think I’m one of them!”
I let go of Lilya and she crashed to the cobblestones with a booming thump. I squinted up at Luc, trying to gauge how easily it would be to get him down in my current inebriated state. “Fancy a drink?”
–§–§–§–§–§–
Okay, so Luc had been accepted into the hero community. He even had an official licence scrawled in crayon on the back of a beer mat. Now it was time to introduce him to the world in general—after all, heroes don’t go around advertising each other. My own portrayal of a damsel in distress was less than convincing, so what we needed to do was find a blushing maiden and make her think Luc had saved her life.
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 90
