Tess of the Road

by Rachel Hartman

  The customer wrinkled his delicate highborn nose. Tess wondered if he’d attended her sister’s wedding; he seemed to be someone important. In any case, she couldn’t resist muttering behind him, “Ask for a door worm instead. They’re much more useful.”

  The man recoiled as if Tess smelled bad, which may indeed have been the case, and furrowed his brow. “What’s a door worm?”

  Tess’s eyes went big and innocent, a strategy she’d often employed to charm old ladies at court. “If you lose your key, you stick the worm into the lock and it opens the door for you.”

  A door worm would also destroy the lock and sometimes the door, the wall, and the floor; it would burrow until it broke, and some of the blighters were distressingly durable. The man was considering the possibilities, though. Everyone, it seemed, had a door they’d like opened, generally one they weren’t entitled to look behind. The worm was an unsubtle means of entry, but he would come to appreciate that too late.

  Of course, it was not nice to inflict mischief on an unsuspecting stranger, even if he rather deserved it. Tess had to admit she was getting a touch of anarchic joy from this. She wrestled her conscience and was about to recant her suggestion, but the man raised his chin like the prow of a ship and said, “Throw in a door worm, and I’ll pay forty-five.”

  The female rolled her eye cones toward the patriarch, whose throat pouch swelled minutely in response. “Your hard-driven bargains will assuredly ruin us,” wheezed the engine, while the female hissed at the youngster in the rafters, “Toss down a worm, Athla.”

  The man left with his bounty, looking smug. Only a practiced eye could discern that the quigutl looked equally pleased, their head spines at a cocky angle. “Forty-five is a lot! We could buy you a ruff, Kashth,” chirped the young one.

  “It would look better on Futha,” said the female, glancing at the old male, who was drumming his fingers dreamily on the money box. “Ko has a longer neck.”

  Ko was the pronoun quigutl used for each other, although Tess could never bring herself to use it. The word was hard to say correctly with human mouthparts, but more uncomfortably, it was ungendered. It, to Tess’s mind, implied a thing, or at best an animal. It seemed disrespectful.

  Tess was just turning away from the stall when the translation engine blared at her: “Young maidy, what will you buy? Thniks, thnimis, toys, tools, specialty items?”

  “No, thanks,” Tess said, walking backward, hands raised. “I haven’t any money.”

  The two adults pursed their beaky mouths demurely, but the little one scuttled down the pole headfirst, crying, “How does she live without money? You said it was impossible!” The exclamation was delivered with an accusatory glare at Kashth.

  “It’s not easy,” Tess interjected, hoping to head off a squabble. Quigutl generally had no compunctions about fighting like cats, but these two were mismatched and the booth was full of things they could break. “I haven’t been without for long, and I hope to remedy it soon, but…”

  She trailed off because all three quigutl were staring at her, openmouthed.

  “She understands Quootla!” cried the little one, prone to excited exclamations.

  “How do you know our speech, human?” asked the female warily, without the engine.

  “A quigutl friend taught me. Her name was Pathka,” said Tess.

  “Pathka!” crowed the youngster, Athla. “Pathka lives with us in the Big House. You should come see ko. Kashth, can she come home and meet everyone?”

  Tess’s heart leaped. She hadn’t seen Pathka in years, since before St. Jannoula’s War; the little quigutl had disappeared without a trace. When war had forced the citizens of Lavondaville into the tunnels, Tess had ventured beneath Quighole, where the quigutl had their nests (dragging a frightened Jeanne along with her). None of the quigutl had known where Pathka had gone. If she was here in Trowebridge, Tess had to see her.

  Kashth, the female, was saying, “Yes, go see our house. We bought a house, you understand. In a street. The biggest house owned by quigutl in Goredd. We were clever to move here, where houses are cheap. Every quigutl in Trowebridge lives in our house, or under it. Even Pathka, who has antiquated fancies and sometimes slinks off to the sewers. Futha had to break ko dorsal arm to make ko obey.”

  Futha, at the back of the booth, grunted acknowledgment.

  “But now ko stays home and makes wonderful things,” little Athla piped up cheerfully, as if Kashth had not just said something appalling.

  “I see,” said Tess, worried now. Quigutl could be cruel—Pathka’s mother had bitten her in the face—but this kind of violently enforced discipline was not something she’d heard of before. Tess decided to withhold judgment until she saw how Pathka was taking it; it was Pathka’s judgment that mattered, Tess had learned long ago, not squeamish human standards.

  The patriarch, who’d been speaking to Kashth with hand signals, made a gesture of assent. The youngster in the eaves gave a whoop, leaped down, and took Tess’s hand in one of its pad-fingered ventral ones. “Futha says we may!”

  “I’ll follow you,” said Tess, gently disentangling herself. It wouldn’t do to walk through town holding hands with a quigutl, even in these liberal and enlightened times. Also, the hand was sticky. She surreptitiously wiped her own on her skirts.

  The youngster bounded ahead, looking back often as if to make sure Tess didn’t slip away. Tess wouldn’t; she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to quigutl. Dragons were one thing—the saar didn’t care—but quigutl had emotions, even if the naturalists denied it. Dragon and human scholars alike hadn’t put in the hours of observation Tess had.

  The Big House was, indeed, “in a street” in the sense of being along a main road. It stood five stories tall, half-timbered with diamond-pane windows and cheerful yellow shutters. The window boxes were planted, though it was early for blooms, and swallows nested in the eaves.

  The houses on either side were for sale, Tess noted with sorrow but little surprise.

  The youngster ushered her inside, and Tess paused in the front hall, breathing rapidly through her nose to put her sense of smell to sleep. The ground floor was deserted, although the hatchling insisted on opening every door and showing Tess their collection of fine human furniture: exquisite hardwood chairs, claw-footed couches, painted screens, inlaid tables, fancy boot jacks and coat trees, credenzas the size of small islands, paintings of Samsamese earls, suits of antique dracomachia armor in lifelike poses…more furniture and objets d’art than Tess could take in at once, let alone identify, jumbled together in the most unusable fashion.

  “Four parlors,” said the little one, cocking its spines. “Does anyone else have four?”

  “Indeed not,” said Tess. Cragmarog and the Queen’s residences didn’t count. “You can’t sit in them, though. That’s the reason for parlors, as I understand it. To sit in.”

  “We can’t sit on chairs like that,” scoffed the youngster. “It’s in case we have guests.”

  They went upstairs, where there were workshops for making devices. The dormitory floors were farther up, the hatchling said, but Tess didn’t need to see those. The quigutl would have made themselves nests so they could sleep in heaps; the house would barely look like a house up there. Tess followed the youngster down a short hall into a sunny room filled with, intriguingly, quigutl-style furniture: couches or benches, allowing them to lie on their bellies with their hands free to work. Several of the lizard-like creatures were working here. Some had affixed magnifying lenses into the openings of their eye cones, to do delicate, close-up work on thniks. Some worked on larger objects—jennies, groglets, pilchards, woles—or welded joints with the jet of fire at the end of their hollow tongues. Hot metallic smoke curled toward the ceiling.

  Across the room, a smallish quigutl swiveled one eye at Tess, then the other, then raised the front of its body upright and cried,
“Tethie!”

  Tess’s mouth fell open. This quigutl was a male, with ruddy streaks on his throat; he couldn’t be the same Pathka, who’d been laying eggs when Tess first met her. And yet he knew her name (the notorious quigutl lisp was only apparent to Tess when they tried to pronounce Goreddi words; her name was a challenge). She knew the voice, and even though it sounded like a heron choking on a frog—a double-strong croak, as it were—it brought a lump to her throat.

  What other quigutl would know her name or be happy to see her? At least…maybe he was happy. He’d made no move to leave his couch.

  “Pathka, is it really you?” Tess managed.

  “I might ask the same thing. You’ve grown so tall,” said Pathka, head spines waggling playfully. “But come closer so I can sniff you. I can’t leave my bench.”

  Tess picked her way among the working quigutl, who ignored her, and saw that Pathka wasn’t exaggerating: a manacle around one ankle bound him to the workbench with a chain. Tess knelt beside him, holding out her arm to be sniffed and studying his scaly face as he did so. This was Pathka, all right; there was the broken head spine, and the scar behind her ear where her mother had bitten her.

  His mother. Its mother?

  “Youuuu,” said Pathka in a long exhale, “have been having adventures without me.”

  “None worth the name,” said Tess, smiling apologetically.

  “Nonsense. You’re a mother, I whiff. Congratulations!”

  Tess withdrew her arm, embarrassed. So much had happened since she last saw Pathka; there seemed suddenly a great chasm of time and experience between them. “What are you doing here?” she said, gracelessly changing direction. “How is it that you’re male now?”

  Pathka clapped his mouth, quigutl laughter, and said, “I became male three years ago. It was overdue. The others teased me, ‘Do you want to lay another clutch of eggs, after it nearly killed you?’ But I worried thuthmeptha would hurt.”

  Tess didn’t know the word thuthmeptha; few non-quigutl did. Even the greater dragons of the Tanamoot, who stayed one sex their whole lives, didn’t quite comprehend it. Quigutl couldn’t change into humans like the saar could, but the drive to change was still in them. They changed back and forth from female to male several times across their life spans, and evidently thuthmeptha was what they called that process. It was like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar in its chrysalis, though the caterpillar, that rank amateur, only manages it once.

  Tess filed the word away for later. “But how did you come to Trowebridge? You left without saying goodbye, and no one knew where you’d gone.” Her words came out accusingly, as if Tess’s life might have turned out differently had Pathka not gone missing. Pathka would surely have kept her out of trouble.

  Tess misremembered: Pathka was always more likely to get her into trouble than out of it.

  “They knew,” said Pathka. “A whole nest of us came east together. We were tired of the city and heard life was simpler in Trowebridge.”

  Around the room, the other quigutl, who’d been unsubtly listening in, slapped tails in agreement.

  “Simpler how?” asked Tess, glancing uncertainly at the others. Pathka was the only one chained to a worktable; things surely hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped.

  “I can’t speak for others,” said Pathka, “but I wanted to escape the tyranny of money.”

  The other quigutl shifted uncomfortably, now anxious to pretend they weren’t listening.

  Pathka continued, too loudly to ignore: “There was a time when we used our hands, minds, and fiery tongues for the joy of it. When following our nature was its own reward. Now we ceaselessly quest after coin. I find this a hollow existence.”

  Around the room, quigutl body language rose and swelled like a wave. Tess had been quite adept at interpreting it, but it was a long while since she’d been faced with so much of it at once. Here was a skeptical shoulder roll, there a spinal arch of irritation (or anxiety? She was out of practice). Nervous tails moved side to side in quick flicks, angry ones in a steady, deliberate wave.

  Tess gleaned from this symphony of motion that the whole room was suddenly tense and defensive. Pathka had insulted everyone.

  “You oversimplify our history and clog it with nostalgia,” croaked an old female across the room. “You omit the generations of quigutl who were compelled to their craft by dragons; the way humans and dragons would like to harvest our labor without compensation; the way they’ve scorned us for living like beasts, without the refinements of civilization.”

  The gathered quigutl puffed their throat pouches and chattered agreement: “True. We have money now, a tangible good. They have to respect us and take us seriously.”

  Pathka swiveled an eye cone at Tess and wobbled it sarcastically. “And so the quigutl of this age mistake bemusement for respect, resentment for tolerance, and money for joy.”

  “Whereas you mistake dreams for reality,” countered the old female. “You’d take us back toward powerlessness and subservience, to lose ourselves in myth. What joy is there in that?”

  “Brethren, it is time for dinner,” said a much younger female, appearing in the doorway.

  “Yes, go,” Pathka called after the rest, who slithered off their benches and bolted for the door. “Eat on schedule. Sleep on schedule. Poop on schedule.”

  “Stop harassing them, Mother,” said the young quigutl who’d called them to dinner.

  “Teth,” said Pathka, gesturing at the youngster, “do you remember Kikiu?”

  The juvenile reared up and folded her ventral arms across her chest, a very human pose. Tess didn’t recognize her or her name. Pathka said, “Ko is my offspring, the one who survived. The one you persuaded me to spare.”

  Tess blinked incredulously; she’d half forgotten that argument, partly because she’d never seen the hatchling again. “You really didn’t eat her! I assumed you were humoring me.”

  “I might have eaten ko, my promise notwithstanding,” said Pathka slyly, “but I’d had seven already, and my belly was full.”

  Kikiu snorted as disdainfully as any human adolescent. “So it’s this human’s fault.”

  “Her fault you’re alive? Yes, poor you. I’m sure it’s been awful,” said Pathka.

  Smoke curled out of Kikiu’s nostrils, and she kept one wary eye on Tess while she said, “I’ll bring up your dinner, Mother. There’s goat stew and fresh bread from the baker’s.”

  “I want fungus,” said Pathka crankily. “And dung.”

  “We don’t eat that anymore,” said Kikiu, turning up her snout.

  “Which is why you’re always so dyspeptic,” said Pathka.

  Kikiu departed with a haughty swish of her tail, leaving Tess and Pathka alone. “She still calls you Mother, even though you’re male?” Tess asked, trying to work out the nuances.

  “I laid her egg,” snapped Pathka, “so I am her mother. That can’t change.”

  He pushed himself off his belly and reeled in the chain affixed to his leg. “Quick, Teth, close the door and brace it with something. I’m so pleased you’re here; I need help with this.”

  Tess did as he asked, dragging one of the work couches in front of the door. “What are you—?” she began, but there was no point finishing, as Pathka focused his tongue-flame upon one of the links of his chain, pulling to stretch the link open.

  It didn’t budge. “Stupid steel,” he snarled. “Stupid high melting point.”

  “What can I do?” Tess asked. Pathka couldn’t answer, as his mouth was occupied again, but he pointed with one of his dorsal hands. Tess retrieved the indicated hammer.

  He held the chain taut across the pommel of his workbench, flaming until the steel glowed orange, and then indicated where Tess should strike. Her weak blow sent up a shower of sparks. Pathka redoubled his flame; the metal glowed white, and the bench beg
an to smolder. Tess gritted her teeth and struck again, flattening the link but not breaking through.

  Gravelly voices became audible through the door, and then came pounding. Pathka trembled with the effort of sustaining such a powerful flame. Tess rummaged frantically for a better tool and found a pair of cruel-looking loppers. With difficulty, she snipped the white-hot link in two.

  The steel clattered to the wooden floor, which began to smoke. Pathka gasped for breath, pulling himself loose; he still had a manacle around his ankle, but he was free of the bench.

  Behind Tess, the door splintered and cracked under a heavy blow.

  “This way,” cried Pathka, flinging up the window sash. He could easily climb down the wall, and lost no time in doing so. Tess stuck her head out; the alley below was full of trash, and it was a long drop. She scanned the wall to either side, looking for a surer way down, and saw footholds to the left. It had been a long time since she’d climbed out a window; it had only led to trouble.

  The door burst off its hinges. The work couch kept it propped up, but a gap at the top allowed quigutl to swarm toward her across the ceiling. Tess reached into her satchel, grabbed the last of her coins, and cast them into the room, hoping that their natural affinity for metals, or else their newly “civilized” greed, would keep them busy for a minute or two.

  Then she said a hasty prayer and swung herself out after Pathka.

  Tess scrambled down alleys after Pathka, who seemed to have a clear idea where he was going. He led her out of Trowebridge and down the southern river road, running on four legs; his long body rippled like an otter’s. He kept looking behind him, clearly expecting to be followed.

  Tess’s legs still ached from her long hike yesterday, the blisters on her toes screamed agony, and she wasn’t sure exactly how much danger they were in, but she grinned in spite of herself as she ran. She’d found the dearest friend of her childhood and they were doing exactly what they’d always done—fleeing from mischief. In that moment she felt like she’d stepped back in time, or like she was fleeing all the intervening years as well.