Goblin Secrets (Alexander, William)

by William Alexander

  Rownie was impressed that the goblins shared food more freely than anyone in Graba’s household ever did, and he resisted the urge to sneak some dried fruit into his only pocket. He could feel himself relax. His legs no longer prepared themselves to start running at any given moment. He stopped looking around for ghouls or the Guard. He let his toes warm up by the fire.

  Then Thomas leaned toward Rownie. The old goblin did not pause in his playing, but he no longer seemed to be paying much attention to the song either.

  “Tell me, young sir: Where in all the vastness of Zombay would your brother hide?”

  Rownie coughed on a mouthful of tea, and spit most of it out again. Lemony droplets sizzled in the cook fire.

  “Pardon the abrupt rudeness of my question,” Thomas said, “but we have been looking for Rowan with some concern. We had taught him the language of masks, and he spoke it very well—better than anyone else in that amateur and unChanged troupe of his. Then we left Zombay for an important piece of business, far downstream. We returned to find his troupe arrested and undone, and Rowan himself escaped but missing. The Broken Wall is the very last place he was known to perform. Do you have any notion where he might be hiding now?”

  The circle of goblins all stared at Rownie with their large, bright-flecked eyes. Rownie tried not to cough again. The world had just changed shape, and he didn’t recognize the new shape it was in.

  “You know my brother?” he asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Thomas. “A fine fellow, and a respectful student, though he also had a sense of mischief appropriate to our profession.”

  Rownie had as much trouble swallowing this as he had just had swallowing tea. He knew that his brother’s life and world were larger than Graba’s shack, but he didn’t enjoy the thought that he knew so very little about it, or that these goblins might know Rowan better than he did.

  “I don’t think I should help anybody find him if he doesn’t want to be found,” Rownie said. “Thanks for the supper. Thanks for hiding me away from the Captain. But . . .” There was no polite way to ask this, so he did not ask politely. “Why should I trust you?”

  Semele smiled. Nonny, of course, said nothing.

  “Because we’re nice?” Essa suggested.

  Patch shrugged and looked dour. “Probably shouldn’t,” he said.

  Thomas let out a sigh. It made his beard flare out in all directions. He stopped strumming the bandore and set it aside. “Because I swear to you, by the stage itself, by every tale and character I have ever breathed life into while treading the boards, by every single mask I have ever worn and offered the use of my voice, that we will not harm your brother, and that by finding him we can prevent harm from coming down upon a great many other people—ourselves included. I swear it by blood and by flood and by fire, and I swear it by the stage.”

  “Wow,” said Essa.

  Rownie was also impressed, but he still wasn’t convinced. “Actors are liars,” he said. “You pretend. It’s kind of your job.”

  “No,” said Semele. “We are always using masks and a lack of facts to find the truth and nudge it into becoming more true.” She picked up a pebble from the ground, wiped it off with her sleeve, and held it out to Rownie. “Here. This is more properly a way to say hello to the dead, who are stone silent themselves and therefore accustomed to a pebblish way of speaking. I do not think that Rowan is dead, but he is lost and therefore silent, and I know that this was his way of saying hello to your mother. So I will use it to say hello to you, yes—from him, and also from me.”

  Rownie took the offered pebble. It was greenish gray and egg-shaped. “Hello,” he said.

  “Welcome to our troupe,” said Semele. “You may stay and perform with us. We will teach you the language of masks—though we must go about that carefully, yes, since maskcraft is more likely to bring about arrest and imprisonment than it once was. We must also go carefully because your former household will be hunting for you. You are still welcome. In exchange, please be helping us to find your brother before the floods come.”

  Rownie put the pebble into the only pocket of his coat. “He might be on the bridge,” he said quietly. “I look for him there, and sometimes I see someone who looks like him, though it isn’t ever really him. But maybe he’s there.”

  “We have also searched the sanctuary of the Fiddleway,” Thomas said, “and we also have not found him. But we will keep searching. We are grateful for any help you can provide.”

  “What do you mean, his former household will be hunting for him?” Essa asked. “We have to worry about old Chicken Legs? Again?”

  “Yes,” said Semele. “Please be cautious around pigeons. Tell me if you see them. Tell me if you dream of them, and shout if you wake up from such a dream.”

  “Pigeons aren’t very clever,” said Essa. “I mean, I knew an owl who could use doorknobs, and a pair of crows who played harpsichord together. They had terrible voices, but were really just fantastic at the harpsichord. But pigeons are so dumb and mangy-looking. Do we really have to worry about them?”

  “Yes,” said Semele. “Tell me if you dream of them.”

  “Speaking of dreams,” said Thomas, “it is time we all went to our rest. We have a long walk before the show and the search tomorrow. Choose your masks for the morning walk, and then to bed. Here, Rownie. This one will be yours.” He took off his hat, reached in, and removed a mask shaped like a fox’s face. It had furry fox ears and a long fox nose, with whiskers.

  Rownie took the mask and looked it over. It smiled with small, sharp teeth. Its fur was short, and coarse when his thumb rubbed it in the wrong direction. He smoothed the fur back again.

  “You will also wear gloves and a hat,” Thomas told him, “in order to hide your un-Tamlinish features. The Guard would be very unhappy with us for teaching maskcraft to an unChanged child. In this way you may hide with us, in full view and in daylight, and seem to be Tamlin yourself. Now, everyone to their rest. I’ll see to the cleaning up. Rownie, find yourself a spare hammock in the wagon and keep the fox nearby while you sleep.” The old goblin poured the rest of the kettle’s contents over the fire. It hissed, sputtered, and steamed.

  “Good night,” said Semele.

  The rest of the troupe mumbled their good nights. Rownie stood. He felt the fox teeth with his fingertips. He wondered if he would really be able to sleep in a litchfield, surrounded by graves and goblins and possibly ghouls, with a hangman’s rope dangling in the tree branches and bird-dreams perched in the air, waiting to be dreamed. Then he yawned and followed Essa, Patch, and Nonny into the wagon. He carried the fox mask in one hand. With his other hand he checked to make sure the pebblish hello still sat safe in his pocket.

  Act II, Scene IV

  SEVERAL HAMMOCKS STRETCHED across the inside of the wagon, like sailors’ bedding on a barge. Rownie found an empty one, set the mask underneath it, and figured out how to climb in. It took him three tries to manage. He had never slept in a hammock before.

  He didn’t think it would be possible to sleep. The bedding was unfamiliar. Straw and rope were both itchy, but in different ways, and he was accustomed to straw and not rope. But he had walked a long way when the day began and had eaten as good and filling a meal as he had ever tasted when the day was over. These two things together summoned sleep, and Rownie let it carry him off.

  He dreamed that the city was also his face. The Fiddleway Bridge was the bridge of his nose, and it tickled as traffic walked across it from Northside to Southside, and from Southside to Northside. He woke up and flicked a bug away from his nose. He suspected that a Grub might have put it there, as a joke. Then he remembered that he was no longer in the company of Grubs. He opened his eyes.

  Semele stood beside his hammock. She squinted at him. Dusty sunlight poured in through open window hatches in the wagon walls.

  “Pigeons?” she asked.

  Rownie blinked. He was only half sure where he was, and he wasn’t sure at all what she meant.
>
  “Did you dream of pigeons?” Semele asked.

  Rownie shook his head. “No pigeons.”

  “Well, that is a good thing, yes.”

  Rownie tried to sit up. It wasn’t easy, and he had to brace himself with both arms to manage. He didn’t know how to get out of a hammock. Finally, he flipped the thing upside down and tumbled forth.

  “Has the boy injured himself?” Thomas asked from elsewhere in the wagon. “Is he fragile? Is he dead? Have we lost our little fledgling actor already?”

  Essa peered down at Rownie from among the ropes and rafters. “He’s not dead,” she reported. “Not unless he’s the sort of dead who gets up and goes walking afterward.”

  “Good then,” said Thomas.

  Rownie got to his feet, embarrassed. Then he checked to make sure that he hadn’t crushed the fox mask as he fell. The fox grinned, undamaged.

  Semele showed him where breakfast was—a bit of bread and dried fruit, left over from supper the night before, and some runny egg yolk to mix with the bread.

  The others were already awake. Most of them held masks in their hands. Patch had a half mask with a sinister-looking brow. Essa had two: one of a lady and another that looked heroic. Semele held a mask dyed bluish gray. It had high, sharp cheekbones and long, white hair. She sat on a crate and rubbed egg whites into the hair.

  “That’ll make the hair stick out in all directions,” Essa explained. “She’s playing the ghost, and she needs the ghost hair to flow as though moved by wind between worlds, so she shellacs it with egg whites first.”

  “I should have been doing this last night, yes,” Semele said. She lifted the mask to regard her handiwork, and then added more transparent goop to the hair. “It will be droopy by the time we are finished with the walking.”

  Rownie wondered what “the walking” was, so he asked. “What walking?”

  Thomas tapped the floor of the wagon with his cane, and he smiled a sly smile. “Rownie, we will now accomplish a very great mystery of our profession, something ancient and grand. We will mask ourselves and walk through the streets of Zombay, to the site of our performance. We will each walk alone, by several routes, and in this way we will find our audience. Those who take notice of you as you pass, those who follow to see where you will lead—without attempting to, say, arrest you—they are our audience. We will each of us lead them down to the docks and upstream to the very last pier of the Floating Market. Nonny will ride on ahead and meet us there with the stage itself. Do you know the way?”

  Rownie nodded, because he did.

  “Do you know several ways?” Thomas pressed him. “Will you lose yourself, once separated from the rest of us?”

  “No,” Rownie said. “I won’t get lost. I don’t get lost.” He didn’t always know where home was. Home used to be a shack that moved all over Southside, according to Graba’s whim. But he always knew where he was in Zombay.

  He wondered if Graba had already picked up the shack and moved it elsewhere. She probably had. It might be very far away, up in the hills of the southernmost part of the city. It might be very close. She might have leaned it up against the litchfield wall, near the gate, just outside. She might have moved it anywhere.

  “Good,” said Thomas. “Remember, Rownie—and all the rest of you—that what we do is important. This is a mystery of our craft. Carry yourselves with appropriate poise.”

  “This is what we always do whenever we forget to put up posters,” Essa whispered to Rownie. “Nobody would know about the show, otherwise.”

  Thomas pretended not to hear her, even though her whispering voice still carried. The old goblin took off his big black hat and pulled from it a mask with a high forehead and an iron crown. This was for himself. He also took out a smaller hat and a pair of gloves, and gave both to Rownie.

  “Put these on,” he said, “and the fox mask with them. You might also leave that tattered coat behind.”

  Rownie refused to take off his coat, but he put on the hat, the gloves, and the mask. The fox face smelled leathery, and it pressed oddly on the skin of his face. His nose itched. Then he stopped focusing on the mask, and looked through it. He saw his surroundings through fox eyes.

  “Don’t slouch,” Thomas told him. “Not at all. Foxes are small, smaller than you are, but they do not slouch. Neither do actors. Stand and move with purpose. Move the way the mask would prefer you to move.”

  Rownie wasn’t sure how the mask wanted to move, but he tried to stand up straight.

  “Good,” said Thomas.

  The mask slipped down Rownie’s face a bit. He tried to straighten it. Then he tried to ask whether he had it on properly, but Thomas shushed him.

  “Don’t speak while masked,” the old goblin said. “Not if you can possibly help it.”

  Rownie took off the fox face. “Why not?” he asked. “I had lines to say when I was playing a giant.”

  “You did,” said Thomas. “You delivered them with a certain amount of untrained talent—and that is why.”

  Rownie blinked. He didn’t understand, and he wasn’t willing to shelve his lack of understanding this time. “I shouldn’t talk while masked . . . because I’m good at it?”

  “Quite right,” said Thomas. “As with a charm or a chant, the world might change to fit the shape of your words. Your own belief becomes contagious. Others catch it. You believed yourself a giant when you spoke as a giant, and so you became one. Your audience regarded you as one. They knew better, but they believed it anyway.”

  “I got taller?” Rownie asked.

  “Everyone thought so,” said Thomas, “so please don’t declaim anything at all while wearing another face—most especially anything about yourself. Don’t say any lines Semele did not write for you. And remember, always remember, that curses and charms have consequences. You set yourself apart from the world by changing the shape of it.”

  Essa put on both of her masks, one on top of the other. “The morning’s wasting away,” she said, trying to sound patient but not succeeding.

  “Quite right,” said Thomas. “Mask yourselves, everyone. And pay careful attention for any glimpse or news of young Rowan. Apart from the Fiddleway, the docks are the second best place in the city to hide.”

  Semele gave the egged hair of her own mask one final tug, and then put it on. Thomas and Patch did the same with their own. Rownie peered through fox eyes again. He tied the string above his ears and behind his head.

  “Be on your several ways,” said Semele.

  “Break your face, everybody!” said Essa. She said it with so much hope and cheer that Rownie was sure he must have heard her wrong.

  They left the wagon. The sun was up and bright. It had already burned away most of the morning fog.

  Nonny waved from the driving bench, and then set off. The rest followed on foot, through the litchfield and through the gates. Rownie looked around for Graba’s shack. He did not see it. Maybe she had taken it up into the hills. Maybe she was nowhere nearby.

  The troupe separated, moving down different streets and alleys to the east and south. Semele took Rownie’s gloved hand before he could choose his own way.

  “Take care,” she said behind the high cheekbones and waving hair of her ghost face. “If anyone puts a hand to you, run. It will mean that they know you are not Tamlin. UnChanged folk do not touch Tamlin, as a rule. They seem to believe that it would give them freckles. You will be mistaken for Tamlin, and this should keep you safe, yes. But take care. While masked you will also be vulnerable to changes.”

  Rownie held the old Tamlin’s hand, to show that he wasn’t afraid of freckles—but he wasn’t at all sure what she meant by vulnerability to change. “Is that bad?” he asked.

  “It all depends,” Semele said. She seemed to be smiling under the ghost face, but of course he couldn’t tell.

  She turned and went her own way. Rownie chose his.

  All roads to the docks ran downhill. They wound and switchbacked across a steep ravine wal
l, with Southside above and the River below. Some of these streets were so steep and narrow that they had to be climbed rather than walked on. Stairs had been cut into the stone or built with driftwood logs lashed together over the precarious slope.

  Rownie took these staircases on his own way down to the Floating Market. He remembered dockside errands he had run for Graba—mostly picking things up or bringing things down, and usually without ever knowing what the things were that he had carried. Pick up a small package from a barge woman missing her left ear, Graba might say. Bring it back to me, now—but never be peeking inside it, and make sure it’s her left ear that’s missing.

  Rownie and Rowan used to run the dockside errands together. Rowan would usually have a spare coin or two, earned by singing on the Fiddleway or doing odd jobs for the stone movers near Broken Wall. He would use it to buy each of them some breakfast—a greasy fish pastry or a strange piece of fruit from foreign places—and then the brothers would eat their breakfast while sitting on some unused stretch of pier, dangling their legs over the side and watching the barges sail by.

  Sometimes they made up stories about where the barges had come from, and where they might be going. Sometimes they imagined how fights against pirate fleets would unfold all around them, upstream and downstream, up and down the pylons of the Fiddleway Bridge, up and down the piers and the switchbacking streets behind them. Sometimes Rowan had enough to buy an extra fish pastry, and they would split the third one. He always gave his younger brother the larger piece.

  Three pigeons watched fox-masked Rownie from a rooftop, and then turned away and pecked for seeds in the thatch. Rownie wondered if they were Graba’s pigeons. He wondered if Graba had sent any Grubs on riverside errands today, to bring back fish heads or strange packages, or maybe to keep watch for him—or to keep watch for Rowan.

  Rownie looked over his shoulder to see if Grubs were following. He saw others following him instead.

  A small crowd of curious people had been pulled into his wake, diverted from wherever else they had intended to go and whatever they had intended to do. Some were old and some young. Some wore more expensive clothes and others less. They followed from a safe distance, watching him, wanting to see where he would go and what he might do.