by Jon Berkeley
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CELESTE’S APPRENTICE
Doctor Tau-Tau, unmasked and aghast, sat down heavily in his chair as though some of the air had been let out of him. “That was a long time ago,” he said quietly, “and a different life. I suppose you’re going to march out there now and tell everyone.”
“And what if I do?” said Baltinglass. “Will the stars stop spinning overhead?”
“For you, no,” said Tau-Tau. “But for Doctor Tau-Tau they will. It has taken me many years to change my appearance and create a new life for myself, and I don’t believe anyone would recognize me now, though I keep a low profile when I’m nearer to home. Who would want their future revealed by Noel Dank of Grubwater New Street?”
“Dank,” said Baltinglass to himself, “of Dank Haberdashers and Discontinued Items? Next to the undertakers on the corner?”
Doctor Tau-Tau nodded, evidently forgetting that Baltinglass couldn’t see him. The blind explorer puffed on his pipe for a minute, a frown of concentration on his face. “Then you must be old Phelim’s youngest boy. The chubby kid. If I remember rightly he was grooming you to take over the business. How did you come to be a roving swindler instead? Did you buy a kit?”
“I am a leading clairvoyant and a healer of note,” said Doctor Tau-Tau, taking on some air again. “Fate apprenticed me to this boy’s mother, who had a fine reputation in the divining arts.”
Baltinglass of Araby turned toward Miles. “You hear that, Master Miles?” he shouted. “If this fraud is besmirching your mother’s good name I’ll be glad to give him a taste of my sword stick on your behalf. Just say the word.”
“It’s true, I think,” said Miles. “I don’t know a lot about my mother. She died when I was born.”
“Well that’s a damn shame!” said Baltinglass. He turned back and jabbed his cane in Doctor Tau-Tau’s direction, almost poking him in the eye. “I trust you’ve painted the lad a true portrait of his mother, whom he never had the good fortune to meet.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure I have,” said Tau-Tau.
“No you haven’t,” said Miles. “I don’t even know what she looked like.”
“Ah, really?” said Doctor Tau-Tau. He got up and lit the stove under his copper kettle. The smell of masala tea filled the air, and he breathed in deeply. “That smell always reminds me of the first time I met Celeste, in this very wagon as it happens.”
Miles sat forward on the bunk. He tried to picture his mother sitting on the upholstered stool that now creaked under the bulk of Doctor Tau-Tau, while his father’s laugh boomed out from somewhere else in the camp. He could almost feel Celeste’s presence, dark and serene, but her face was beyond his imagination’s grasp.
“Did you come to have your fortune told?” Miles asked.
“Not exactly,” said Tau-Tau. “I was working for the tax office at the time, and with my natural diligence I had risen swiftly to be head of my department. When the circus came to town I was sent to make an undercover investigation into how much cash was changing hands, especially through these sideshows. I suspected they were not paying a fraction of the tax they should have been.”
“So you were a tax collector before you became a fraud!” shouted Baltinglass. “I see what you mean about rising up the career ladder.”
“What was my mother like?” asked Miles.
“Celeste,” said Doctor Tau-Tau, pouring the masala tea into small china cups, “was not what I imagined. I expected big gold earrings and a knotted scarf, all those trappings, but she wore a plain white dress and a necklace of shells. She had no crystal ball, just an incense burner and a silver pot of this fragrant tea on the table before her. Her hair was very dark, I remember, but try as I might I can’t bring her face to mind, though I knew her for several years after that first meeting.”
“Did she tell your fortune?” asked Little.
“That she did, and I was astonished at her insight. She spotted right away that I was an uncommon man, and within moments she had outlined my various strengths more accurately than I could have done myself. She seemed almost amused that I should feel the need to come and see her at all.”
Baltinglass snorted, but his head was nodding and Miles could not tell if the snort was a comment on Tau-Tau’s story or the beginning of a snore.
“Then she must have seen the real reason you were there,” said Miles.
“Ah,” said Doctor Tau-Tau, leaning across to hand him a cup of tea. “I have no doubt that she would have rumbled a less-experienced investigator in an instant, but I was an expert at undercover work. I had perfected a way of making my mind a blank in order to make my cover more convincing.” He leaned over again and handed a cup to Little, then he placed his fingertips to his temples. His eyes bulged dramatically. “It’s like a wall of iron inside my mind. My profession was an unknown quantity to her. She said so herself, and she was certainly no amateur. She said she could see in me the makings of a great clairvoyant.”
“Then you were able to find out what she charged?” asked Little.
Doctor Tau-Tau sat back on his stool. “That was the strange thing,” he said. “She told me she never charged a single penny for her services. That came as a great surprise to me, and in fact it even came as news to her husband, who had just barged into the wagon to get something at the moment she revealed this startling fact. I could see that she must have kept it a secret from him as well.”
Miles thought about this for a moment, and smiled to himself. It was the same smile that always crept across his face when he came across a clever plan, a smile he had inherited from Celeste, though he did not know it. Indeed it was the very one she had worn as she told the tax investigator that she had no interest in money all those years ago.
“How did you become her apprentice?” asked Little.
“That happened in the years that followed,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. A long, rumbling snore escaped from Baltinglass’s wrinkled lips, and Tau-Tau had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise. “I returned to my work, but I could not get Celeste off my mind. The power of her uncanny insight remained fresh in my memory, and by the time the circus came again I had made up my mind where my true path lay. I went to see Celeste once more, and asked her to teach me everything she knew about second sight and the healing arts. She refused outright at first, but eventually she realized, I suppose, that it was pointless trying to ignore my latent powers, and that at least she could be the one who set me on the path to greatness. Alas, I was not apprenticed to her for long. When she died I had only completed my initial training, which consisted of learning to care for her horse and to repaint her wagon. Still, one can’t mope forever, and her death only increased the need for my talents. I took the name of Doctor Tau-Tau from a previous life that I had lived on the island of Sulawesi, and took her place at the Circus Oscuro. Since Barty Fumble’s mind had snapped like a twig and the baby . . . and you were just a baby, it fell to me to inherit her diaries. With the help of these I continued my studies.”
“But then you lost them,” said Miles.
“Alas, yes,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. His voice dropped to a whisper, and he looked over his shoulder as if someone might be lurking outside the window. “Such was the Great Cortado’s murderous rage that I fled the circus with nothing but the clothes I stood up in. The diaries had been handed down through Celeste’s family and contained the knowledge of generations, and their loss was a great tragedy to me. In the course of my long travels I sought to collect again as much of that knowledge as I could, and I dared to hope that someday I would return and find the diaries safe in the trunk where I had left them.” He sighed deeply. “It was a forlorn hope. I have never found a trace of them since.”
Miles opened his mouth to ask Doctor Tau-Tau about his sighting of the Great Cortado in the circus audience, but before he could say anything Baltinglass’s eyes snapped open. “And if you do find those diaries,” barked the explorer, “they belong to the boy, and don’t you forget it, or yo
u’ll be Noel Dank the ex-taxman again before you can swallow twice.” He planted his cane in the blood-red carpet and hauled himself to his feet. “Now what about that supper?” he said. “Something out there smells sweet as a nut, and if we don’t get moving quickly these old teeth might just jump out of my mouth and go without me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SHAKY GUANO
Baltinglass of Araby, fortified and unfooled, sat by the fire and mopped up the last of his gravy with a chunk of bread. When his plate was clean he belched contentedly and rummaged in his pocket for his pipe. “I’ve feasted with moguls and supped with sovereigns,” he announced to anyone who would listen, “and I can’t remember having a better feed than that one. My compliments to the chef, and may his pot never cool.”
“My pleasure,” said Gila.
“I’m the chef!” said Umor. “You can’t even cook.”
“True, but I can accept a compliment,” said Gila. “You stick to what you’re good at and I’ll do the rest.”
“Where we come from,” said Fabio, “a fine meal calls out for a good tale.”
“Not sure I can help you there,” said Baltinglass. “The stories crawl around my head like maggots in an apple, but they’ve been jumbled up in there so long they’ve all swallowed each other’s tails, and separating one from the next would be tricky work.”
“Let them all out!” said Umor.
“We’ll round them up if they get out of hand,” said Fabio.
Miles thought about the yellowed newspaper clippings on Baltinglass’s wall, and all the wealth of stories that must be hidden behind them. There was Baltinglass at the mouth of the emperor’s tomb, Baltinglass perched in the rigging of a schooner, Baltinglass shaking hands with a dignified man with a long pointed beard. There was one small faded photo that had intrigued Miles the most. It showed a much younger Baltinglass standing at the foot of an enormous tree, soaked to the skin and with his left leg heavily bandaged. His face wore an odd grimace, but what really aroused Miles’s curiosity was the bizarre hat perched on the young explorer’s head.
“Tell us the one about the hat with the spike,” said Miles.
Baltinglass turned sharply to Miles. “What hat?” he said. “What spike?”
“There’s a picture on your wall,” said Miles. “It shows you standing by a tree, wearing a sort of helmet with a long spike on it.”
“There’s no such picture,” barked Baltinglass.
“There is,” insisted Miles, more curious than ever. “It’s in the corner, above the wooden man with the grass skirt.”
Baltinglass rubbed his stubbly chin with yellowed fingers. “Above the wooden man, eh? That’s not a photo of me crossing the Yukon on a husky sled, then?”
“No,” said Miles. “That’s on the opposite wall, next to your doctorate in painful swellings.”
“Well fry me in whale blubber!” muttered Baltinglass. “That’s the trouble with pictures—you can’t feel what’s in ’em. I thought that one had gone out with the potato peelings years ago.”
“Tell us about the funny hat then,” said Gila.
“We like a story with a point to it,” said Umor.
Baltinglass grunted. “You have a knack for picking the ones with the sharpest teeth, Master Miles. And it’s not a funny hat, it’s a unicrown. I’ll tell you how I came by it, but don’t blame me if you find your pillow crawling with nightmares.”
He lit his pipe and puffed on it in silence for a while, as the circus performers made themselves comfortable and waited for him to begin. Everyone loves a good tale, and those who count the road as their home value stories more than most.
“When I was young and full of beans,” began Baltinglass, “there was a fellow lived in our town named Shaky Guano.”
“Strange sort of name,” said Umor.
Baltinglass turned his blind stare to the little clown. “You’re allowed one interruption each,” he shouted. “Any more and you’ll get a lesson from Ingrid.”
“Who’s Ingrid?” asked Umor.
Baltinglass reached out with his cane, quick as a lizard, and rapped him sharply on the shins. “This is Ingrid,” he said. Umor opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and closed it again.
“Shaky Guano’s real name was Seamus Baltinglass,” continued Baltinglass. “He was my father’s younger brother, and from an early age it was obvious that he had no interest in pig farming. He ran away from home as a young lad, and was gone for fifteen years. Whatever happened to him in that time scrambled his wits like an egg, and he returned a changed man. He wore on his head the strangest hat; a round metal cap like half a melon, with a spike sticking out of the top. He would not say what it was or how he came by it, but if anyone tried to remove it he would scream like a train whistle, and pretty soon people gave up trying and left it where it was. He had developed a mortal fear of being indoors, and instead he roamed the streets under moon and hail, shouting and flailing like he was under attack from invisible bats. Before long people began to call him Shaky.”
“What about the Guano bit?” asked Miles.
“That came from the smell,” said Baltinglass. “He gave off a powerful stench of bat guano that was resistant to soap or scrubbing of any kind. It was no bad thing all the same, as it prevented him sneaking up on anyone unawares. Shaky was mad as a spoon, and people liked to have some warning of his approach.
“A lot of folk in the town were afraid of him, but not me. I was only a little lad, but it seemed to me that his fight was with himself and nobody else. On his quieter days he loved to talk, and I was happy to listen. The stories Shaky told had no rhyme or reason to them. He would always begin by promising to tell me about the Lake of Gold, but somehow he never arrived at that story, though I tried to steer him to it many times. Once he told me of being pursued by eight men dressed entirely in copper, and another time that monks in yellow robes had taught him to make paper from smoke. But however garbled his tales were, they opened my mind to the strange and wonderful world that awaited me beyond our narrow valley, and I too began to think of pig farming as a future I would be happy to leave to someone else.
“I joined the navy on my fourteenth birthday and left Grubwater without a backward glance. It was three years before I came home on leave, and Shaky died the day before my return. I knew that he was gone as I approached Grubwater, although I can’t say how. It just seemed there was a gap like a missing tooth in the landscape of the village. He had been hiding up a tree from the madness that pursued him, and there between the land and the sky he had given up the ghost. I went to see him laid out, and the undertaker, old Roger Murtice, took me aside. ‘You were the only one who had any time for the old fruitcake,’ he said, handing me a filthy bundle, ‘so I kept this for you.’ He looked relieved to be rid of it.”
Baltinglass paused for a while to gather his story. “I suspect,” he said to no one in particular, “that somewhere in this circus there is a bottle of gin. I can feel the old malaria coming on, and a medicinal drink may just keep the beast in the basement, if it’s not too late.”
“But of course,” said Countess Fontainbleau. “Little, be a dear and fetch a bottle from the cabinet in my trailer. And don’t let Eunice out. She has a slight chill and I left her on the bed to keep warm.”
Little slipped away into the darkness, and Baltinglass resumed his story.
“I remained with the navy for several years. It was an adventure that sailed me to almost every corner of the world, and I collected memories like more timid folk collect stamps.”
Miles cleared his throat, keeping a wary eye on Ingrid. “You didn’t tell us what was in the bundle,” he said.
“You didn’t ask,” barked Baltinglass.
“I’m asking now,” said Miles.
“It was the unicrown, of course, the strange hat that Shaky Guano had worn night and day, and the only thing he possessed to leave behind. On closer inspection it seemed to be made entirely of copper. It was decorated
with a fine pattern and looked like a lot of work had gone into it, but I had no idea what it was for, and I felt slightly disappointed.” Baltinglass turned his sightless gaze to Miles. “Little did I know then that it would save my life on two occasions,” he said quietly, “nor that it would demand the sight of my two eyes in payment.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE UNICROWN
Baltinglass of Araby, dry-tongued and tobacco-browned, held a match to his pipe and vanished for a moment behind a cloud of smoke. A baby cried in the darkness, and a woman’s voice sang to him softly. The air was warm and thick and carried the smell of approaching rain.
“How did the unicrown save your life?” asked Gila.
Baltinglass sighed. “I carried the thing in my kit bag for years, and after a while I no longer noticed it was there. One night I was in a tavern named the Old Tar Barrel, on the waterfront in Fuera, playing cards with a retired professor who was a regular there. He was a man of great learning and I enjoyed his company, but to tell the truth I was more interested in his daughter. She was a fine young girl named Gertrude, strong-willed and well-built. She would often collect her father from the tavern in the wee hours, and I believe she had taken a shine to me also.”
“Gertrude?” said Miles. “Was that Lady Partridge?”
“Who else would it be, Master Miles?” answered Baltinglass, giving him a rap on the shins with his cane in an almost absentminded fashion. Miles tried to picture the young Lady Partridge who had caught Baltinglass’s eye, but without much success.
“I had no luck at cards that particular night, and I played until I hadn’t a farthing left,” continued Baltinglass. “I rummaged for stray coins in my kit bag, and up came Shaky Guano’s unicrown instead. When the professor saw it he asked me at once for a closer look. ‘I don’t know where you got this, my friend,’ he said to me eventually, ‘but it’s a greater treasure than you realize, or it would not be rattling around in your kit bag.’ He insisted we return at once to his apartment, a place piled to the ceiling with books and manuscripts, and there he placed the unicrown under a strong lamp and spent the night searching through old volumes and muttering to himself, while I talked with Gertrude into the early hours and eventually fell asleep in an old armchair.
