Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “Did I … like it?” Grizelda said, nonplussed.

  A couple of them started a pantomime of Crome’s angry, one-armed stalk around the laundry room.

  “We did it because you’re the sewer girl.”

  “You fixed Kricker’s jacket for him.”

  “Very nice. Very pretty.”

  One of the pantomimers broke off. “If I make the electrical system break down tonight, will you sew for us some more?”

  “Wait! Wait,” she said. They quieted down a little. “I won’t sew anything for you if you keep doing that. You’ve got to stop.”

  The mood in the cave dampened a little. They shifted their weight and looked at each other, as if she had just spoiled all their fun.

  “You’ve all got to go back inside right now,” she said. “I need to talk to the ratriders who found me.”

  Reluctantly, they started to go. “Going” was a relative term, because Grizelda didn’t actually see the ratriders going anywhere. They weren’t walking up to the houses and stepping inside. There were just fewer and fewer of them in the cave each time she looked, as if they were vanishing into thin air. Soon there was nobody left but her three.

  Wearily she sat down on a lumpy place in the cave floor and rubbed her head. The three ratriders looked on.

  “Let me get this right,” she said. “You made my boss get hit on the head because you thought I would like it?”

  “We thought you would think it was funny,” said Geddy.

  “No. I could have lost my job. I…” She stopped, then chucked ruefully. “All right. It was kind of funny.”

  For a couple of minutes, nobody knew quite what to say.

  Geddy ventured first. “There really is a secret passage,” he said. “We weren’t lying about that. We could get you out of here tonight.”

  A secret passage. Grizelda could imagine what kind of a future she had in store for her if the ratriders were telling the truth, and, well, what if they were? Hiding by day, crossing country by night, hitching rides on trains. All with a scarf tied tightly over her head to hide her witch mark. Getting across the border to Salinaca. And if she did manage it somehow? She didn’t speak the language, she had no family there or even any money. She would have to start over from absolutely nothing.

  The alternative was to stay here with the goblins. It was dreary work, but it was a living.

  Her mind made up, she shook her head. “I don’t think I’m going to take that secret passage. But thank you.”

  They looked surprised, even Tunya, who had been conspicuously looking at the wall for most of this conversation.

  Lenk was right. The ratriders really just didn’t understand. But did that mean they didn’t care?

  “I’m still sort of…” Grizelda hesitated. “Is it all right if we call a truce?”

  “What sort of a truce?” Geddy said.

  “You’ve got to stop breaking the goblins’ things. They don’t like it. They work really hard, and they don’t make a lot of money, and you messing up their machines just makes it even harder.”

  They looked at her as if she had just asked them to grow another head.

  “Look, if you tell all the others to stop the pranks, I’ll sew for you. As much as you want.”

  “As much as we want?” Tunya said suspiciously.

  “Well, guys?” Geddy looked at his two friends. Kricker nodded. Tunya shrugged.

  “All right, a truce,” Geddy said.

  Grizelda stood up and held out her hand. In turn, the ratriders each shook her finger.

  Chapter 10

  Crome never mentioned the outcome of his conversation with the foreman. The morning after the quacking machine incident he was oddly silent about the entire topic, preferring instead to storm around the laundry in a worse mood than ever, checking up on the machines for any sign of unusual behavior.

  As she set up for work, Grizelda imagined how that conversation must have gone. She could just picture Crome angrily trying to explain to a goblin official how he had gotten outwitted by a washing machine. She smiled inwardly.

  Upstairs, there was a small pile of ratrider clothing sitting on her mattress, waiting for her to mend that night.

  After sneaking a look to the left and right, Grizelda extended her heel ever so slowly behind her and set it down on her salt ring. A quick scuff and the circle was broken. Geddy appeared not long after.

  As usual, he seemed to come out of nowhere. She didn’t recall looking away, but she must have, because she found herself looking back. And there was Geddy, sitting cross-legged on top of the sewing machine.

  She picked up a sock from her pile and flipped it inside out without looking quite at him. As she fed it under the needle, she bent her head in close and whispered, “Hey, Geddy.”

  “Hey, Grizelda.” He sat there watching her for a minute, absently swinging his heels against the side of the sewing machine. Then he said, “I was reading this thing the other day about invisible hands, and I wondered, if, well…” He hesitated. “If that was one of those metaphor things again?”

  She honestly didn’t know. She didn’t know the answer to a lot of Geddy’s questions, but he didn’t seem to mind because he always had another one in line to ask her. And Grizelda enjoyed the company. They kept up a steady, hushed conversation underneath the hisses and clangs of the laundry machines. They shut up quickly whenever another laundry worker got too near. While they talked, Geddy would run and get new pieces of clothing for her.

  He grilled her on any and all aspects of her life on the surface and listened to her answers with a rapt attention. She was amazed by how keen he was for all of it. He wanted to put absolutely everything into that book he was writing about humans. At his pressing, she found herself talking about everything from horses to barbershops, as well as her life back at the shop. She told him about that time when all of the girls had pooled their money to buy a stereoscope. They’d spent all evening after the customers were gone passing it around and giggling at the funny, cross-eyed pictures.

  And then she started to talk about sunlight, not realizing how much she missed it until she got herself started. The way the light looked slanting through the trees in the morning. The way the Sarny sparkled in the summertime when the steamboats came up from the sea with their loads of crabs.

  Sometimes Geddy seemed to know more about Corvain than she did.

  “Did you know there actually used to be good sorcerers?” he said. “They weren’t all the Auks’ tax collectors. The books since the revolution tend to tone it down a lot, but I read in some of the old ones that a lot of the sorcerers fought with the resistance fighters during the Auk conquest.”

  Grizelda opened her mouth to speak, but before she could reply, there was a loud, evil-sounding clank from somewhere behind her. As was getting to be the norm in this laundry, everybody stopped their work and craned their necks around to see what had gone wrong this time.

  Crome seemed to know what was the matter before he had even gotten over to the source of the noise.

  “It’s that laundry soap again,” he said. He turned to Grizelda. “Seamstress Grizelda, you’re not doing anything important.”

  She looked up at him, startled. Fortunately Geddy had disappeared some moments before.

  “Go and get another bag of that powdered soap. We keep it in the warehouse a block south and to the right.”

  Not certain if she was in trouble again, she got up and prepared to go. Crome seemed to mean what he’d said; he motioned her to the door. She picked her way across the work floor. As she passed through the anteroom full of cubbies, Geddy leapt onto her shoulder from somewhere above.

  Once they were out on the street and she’d checked that the coast was clear, she asked him, “The conquest … you weren’t there, were you?”

  “Grizelda, that was over two hundred years ago!”

  She frowned. “I thought fairies lived forever.”

  Geddy prepared to go into another of his long explanations
about the fey kind. “Okay, for one thing, we’re not fairies, we’re pixies. And secondly, no. We’ve been mortal since we followed you people into the city. See, I have this theory that because we spend so much time around humans–”

  “Wait!”

  Grizelda stopped in her tracks and held her hand up for silence.

  “Did you see that?”

  Geddy shook his head, but just then Grizelda saw it again. A flicker of movement in the alley across the street. She took a couple of steps toward it, but as soon as whoever was there saw her change direction, he or she (or it, you never knew in this place) got up and ran away.

  She started walking towards the warehouse again, but just as soon as she came to the next cross street, there it was again. The figure seemed to be keeping pace with her, falling back whenever it thought she was looking, coming in as close as possible when it thought she wasn’t. She exchanged a glance with Geddy and started walking faster. On her way back from the warehouse with the soap, she came almost at a run.

  She dropped off the bag of soap at the door, then held off on getting Crome’s attention until he was near the back of the room, which was relatively more private. Then she cornered him.

  “Somebody’s following me,” she told him.

  Crome didn’t answer her. He seemed more interested in whether she’d brought the soap. It was already being hauled away by two laundry workers to refill the washing machines.

  Even Crome didn’t care about her! She tried again. “Is there anything you can do about it?”

  Crome focused on her, as if he had not been paying attention. “What, that somebody’s following you? Go to the police if you want, girl. It’s not my business.” He started to move away.

  “Laundryman, I’m scared.”

  “Like I said, it’s not my business.” Then he left her, to go assist the two workers with the soap.

  On the next step of his search for the disappeared prisoner, Mant went to the officer in charge of personnel and told him he needed to see a gendarme named Humphries.

  “You just missed him, sir,” he said. “He went home for the day not too long ago.”

  “When will he be back?” said Mant.

  “Blessed if I know, sir. I think he’s ill.”

  Mant sighed. “All right, what about a gendarme named Lemond?”

  A blank look. “Who’s Lemond?”

  Mant felt like screaming. He managed to maintain his composure long enough to get out of the room, though. Once he was sure nobody was looking, he yelled like a maniac and kicked the wall – too hard. Then he cursed and rubbed his foot. Now what?

  Chapter 11

  When Grizelda woke up the next morning, she knew immediately that something was wrong with the sound. It took her several moments lying awake on the mattress to figure out exactly what was wrong. Finally she realized that there was no sound. Instead of the usual bang and rumble of laundry machines warming up for the day, all was silence.

  She slipped on her shoes and crossed the hall to the head of the stairs on tiptoe, feeling somehow like she shouldn’t break the silence that had descended on Goblin Town either. The work floor below was all deserted, the electric lights off.

  Great. What fresh hell was this? She must have woken up in the middle of the night and thought it was morning. But no, it felt like she’d slept a full night through. The only way to resolve this was to go outside. Maybe she could figure out what the goblins were doing this time.

  The rows of dormant laundry machines loomed over her like sea monsters as she crossed the work floor. Some of them had little lights on them that blinked at her in the half light. Made her feel like she was being watched.

  Outside the daytime-simulating electric lights beat down on the street in a blare of white and a wave of that motor-oil smell again. Grizelda winced and shut the laundry door partway. After her eyes had adjusted, she stepped outside.

  There were goblins walking the streets outside just like any other normal day. And, if it was possible, they looked a tiny bit more gay than usual. Or less dour.

  “Excuse me?” She went up to an older goblin who was nearby. He only turned up his nose at her and walked away.

  She tried this two or three more times before she finally got a goblin to pay attention to her, more out of irritation than anything else.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “What’s going on here?” she said.

  “It’s PT day. Means there’s no work. You’re free to go get caught in the grinder or something, ogre.”

  “But it’s a Thursday–”

  But it was no use. The goblin quickened his pace and left her.

  Grizelda stood there in front of the laundry for a few minutes, considering what to do next. So there would be no work for that day. There was nothing for her to do, not that she knew of. She might as well spend the day wandering the city. She picked a direction and started walking.

  If today was a goblin holiday, it seemed against the holiday’s rules to have too much fun. Most of the city’s population, as far as she could make out, had crowded into the bars that were dotted everywhere. They drank clear and bitter-smelling stuff with grouchy looks on their faces. A handful of goblin children stood around on a street corner playing halfheartedly with a metal top.

  After a while, on a street near the city square, Grizelda found herself in front of a building with the word COMMISSARY engraved on the front in bold, black letters. It was heavy and solid and imposing-looking, like a lot of old buildings in town. It sounded interesting. Cautiously, she pushed open the door.

  Grizelda found herself in a low-ceilinged, dim and musty room. In contrast to the electric lights out on the street, this place was lit only by a battered gas lamp hanging from a hook in the wall. The whole place smelled like dust and bicycle grease. In the back were rows and rows of shelves, their contents obscured by the long shadows they cast over each other. In front of them was a counter with a goblin sitting behind it, staring at her malevolently. He did not speak.

  She seriously considered turning around and leaving. But an idea had occurred to her when she saw those rows of shelves in the back of the room. Scissors. Maybe they had scissors here. She was ready to face an angry goblin to get back what Promontory had stolen from her.

  The cashier’s gaze followed her the whole way while she crossed the room to the back. Despite her determination to get scissors, it made her highly uncomfortable. It was a relief to finally get between the shelves, to have heavy slabs of metal between her and those eyes.

  Back here, the smell of old bicycle grease was even stronger, and the shelves reaching up almost to the ceiling blotted out most of the light from the front. She scooted along sideways to avoid bumping her elbows on the things sitting on display around her: nails, bolts, tin cups, jars of lamp oil. The prices of each were handwritten on scraps of paper with what looked like a quill pen and tacked up behind them.

  Finally, in the back, Grizelda found what she was looking for. A sorry-looking bin of scissors, squashed between some canned biscuits and a pile of chain. Most of them were rusted shut, but she picked the likeliest-looking one and tried it on some of the thread from the spools on her sleeve. It wasn’t very good, but it cut. She took it out to the counter with her.

  “Excuse me, I…”

  Grizelda realized the goblin behind the counter was fiercely ignoring her, inspecting one of his long, curved fingernails instead.

  “Um, my name’s–”

  “I know who you are!” the goblin snapped, and snatched the scissors from her. “You want to buy these?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Hmpf,” he said, flicking over the pages in his ledger with his nail. “I’ll deduct the credit from your pay account…”

  Struck by an impulse, Grizelda said, “Do you sell paper here?”

  “Like what kind of paper?” he said, still intent on his work.

  Grizelda’s heart leapt into her mouth. She hadn’t intended to ask f
or paper, not here, not after what had happened. Now the goblin was sitting there looking at her, waiting for an answer.

  “Just– just any kind of paper,” she said hastily, wishing she could take it back.

  “Row four.”

  She already knew what was in row four. It was nasty, brittle stuff, yellowed and curling around the edges. It had probably been sitting there for more than a decade. For a moment Grizelda’s distaste got the better of her.

  “You don’t have any pretty paper?”

  The goblin gave her a skeptical look.

  Grizelda decided to cut her losses and just leave, but finally the goblin spoke.

  “I can put in an order.” He heaved a heavy sigh and started searching around for something behind the counter, involving much banging of drawers and rustling of papers.

  “Yes – that’s wonderful – thank you!” She started backing out of the room, then she realized she’d left her scissors at the counter and ran back up to get them. Garnering a look of ire from the cashier, she slipped them into her bodice pocket and left in a hurry.

  Back outside, she slapped herself for being so stupid. Asking for paper? Hopefully they’d just lose the order and forget about the whole thing. She looked up and down the street, trying to decide which way to go next. There were not many goblins out and about here. Most of them moved along in a businesslike way, completely ignoring her. Well, at least it was a lot better than jeers. One goblin hung around on the corner looking at a storefront. She’d been on her way to the square anyway when she found the commissary, so she decided to keep going.

  But no sooner had she started moving when the goblin on the corner abandoned his store and started walking also. She gritted her teeth. It was him, that goblin who was following her. She was sure of it. He ambled from store to store, purposely avoiding looking like he was in any sort of a hurry, but he was definitely following her. She picked up her pace, and he sped up, too.