Pawned

by Laura Bickle

  But the eyes are the same as Bert’s—golden and luminous.

  Bert lowers his head. “That was me. Once upon a time.” He sits on his hammock and his legs and tail dangle in the fringe on the edge.

  “You joined the circus?” Callie climbs into the hammock with him.

  “Well, that was a very long time ago.” Judging by the fading on the paper, it had to be at least a hundred years ago. I feel a pang of sorrow for Bert.

  Callie snuggles up against Bert’s side. He directs her attention to the poster showing the mermaid. “How about if I tell you a story about the mermaid and the circus?”

  “Are you in the story?”

  “I am.”

  “Yes, please!”

  I lean forward. I want to hear this story as much as she does.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Once upon a time, there was a dragon...”

  “A dragon named Bert?”

  “We can call him Bert, if you like.”

  “Okay, then. Bert!”

  “Once upon a time, there was a dragon named Bert. He lived in a very strange time, much different from the modern era. People believed in magic—they wanted very much to believe in it, in fact, when the Industrial Revolution was still new. Science was obliterating much of what came before, and people rushed to see what remained of the old ways. They came to see strange sights like Bert.

  “Bert was a dragon, this was true. But he had some magic. That magic was the ability to change his shape. And for most of his life, Bert appeared to walk on two legs like an ordinary man. He found work as a magician in this age of steam engines and soot. He was the finest magician in his city, working to sold-out crowds in theatres every night. People would be amazed to see him walk into a box looking like a man, and then come out as a woman. Or a flock of birds. Or sometimes a unicorn.”

  “Wow.”

  “It was something to see. Bert made a very comfortable living. But people were jealous of Bert’s success and wanted to learn his secrets. For, you see, Bert had real magic. And the magicians around him had none of their own. They had to resort to wires and mirrors and sewing the heads of goats onto alligators to make strange creatures preserved in formaldehyde.”

  “Ew.”

  “It was very common in some of the more terrible venues, like the circuses. People would buy tickets to be ushered into dark rooms to see something that would scare them. Most of the time, whatever that creature in the dark was, was simply something manufactured by the owner of the circus or something so exotic it had never been seen. This was a world in which no one on this side of the ocean had ever seen a python or a gibbon, for example. And having such a stuffed creature would bring good money. These animals were kept long after they were shabby and worn, shown only under dim lights to patrons who were hustled on beyond threadbare velvet ropes.

  “In this age, wonder was something to be traded on. The Ringmaster of one such circus offered to buy Bert’s secrets. Bert turned him down—having nothing to sell, after all. His powers were his own, and not exactly transferable.

  “But the Ringmaster was furious. No one had ever told him ‘no,’ and Bert’s audiences were siphoning away his profits. So he did something terrible, something designed to ruin Bert forever.”

  “What did he do?”

  “One night, Bert was playing before a sold-out audience. He was doing one of his illusions in the box. He had stepped into the box as himself, and intended to step out in the shape of a beautiful woman.

  “The Ringmaster had other plans. He sent men into the theater and set it on fire. The men set fire to the curtains and closed most of the exits. People stampeded for the doors, but crushed themselves trying to escape. Some threw themselves from windows, hurling themselves into the alley below. Hundreds of men, women, and children were killed that night.”

  “Oh no! What happened to Bert?”

  “The Ringmaster’s men waited to set the fire until Bert was in his box. They wrapped chains around the box and hauled it away, away to the tent of the Ringmaster.”

  Callie presses her fist to her mouth.

  Bert continues, “The Ringmaster did everything he could to elicit Bert’s secret, but Bert didn’t tell. He couldn’t. This only fed the Ringmaster’s fury. The Ringmaster was a master of petty illusions, to be certain. He knew how to sew the tail of a snake on a tiger to make a naga. He knew how to do little sleights of hand and how appear to shoot an apple off the head of a woman.

  “But he sensed something about Bert. Real magic. And the Ringmaster was greedy for it. He eventually learned Bert’s real name, and then had power over Bert. He could see Bert’s true shape as a dragon, and ordered Bert to remain in that shape for all to see. He made Bert crawl on his belly like a snake, on a leash, and walked him back and forth on a stage, spurred on by a whip and a chair.”

  Tears well in Callie’s eyes. I see Bert reel himself back in to make the tale lighter. “But Bert was able to make friends at the circus. He slept in a cage with Leo the Lion, and the Dog-Faced Boy sneaked him scraps. Bert and the Tattooed Man would talk about philosophy until late in the night. And the Mermaid would always bring him water.”

  “The Mermaid was real, then?”

  “Sort of. She wasn’t magical. But she wasn’t exactly normal, either. She was born with a disorder that caused her legs to fuse together, like fins. She could walk a little bit, but usually walked on her hands or sat in a cart pushed by the Bearded Lady.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Yes, very lovely. She had long blond hair that had never been cut, waving past what would’ve been her knees if she had them. Her eyes were gray-blue, the color of a stormy ocean, and she had the face and voice of an angel.” Bert trails off in wistfulness, and he visibly pulls himself back to the tale he’s telling Callie, which I’m sure is only a very light gradient of the truth. “She was beautiful and very kind to Bert. But she was also like Bert, in that she was the Ringmaster’s pet.”

  I stifle a shudder, but Callie accepts this at face value.

  Bert goes on: “Bert and the Mermaid were good friends. The Ringmaster would often use them both together in acts...make Bert shapeshift from a dragon to the form of the Mermaid, and then have the Mermaid appear in the audience. It kept everyone quite entranced, and the tents were full.

  “But Bert and the Mermaid despaired of ever being free. The Mermaid couldn’t run fast enough to escape the Ringmaster, and Bert was bound by magic to obey him. They struggled long and hard with a way that they might be free of him. They even considered killing him.”

  Callie’s breath is an indrawn hiss. I’m afraid of where this story is going.

  Bert stares down at his clawed hands. “The Ringmaster had made more enemies than just Bert and the Mermaid. He was roundly hated by everyone in the circus, and he had something on every one of them. But the animals hated him the most. They could sense his evil, and were even more powerless against him than the other denizens of the circus were.

  “And it was the animals that had their revenge. The Ringmaster had been keeping food and water from the lion. Leo. One night, the Mermaid crawled into the dragon’s tent with her ration of food. She had found a key to the cage that held the dragon and the lion in the Ringmaster’s tent and used it to open the cage. Bert was unable to leave the cage, still under the Ringmaster’s sway. He knew Bert’s name, and that is an unbreakable oath for a dragon.

  “But Leo was under no such oath. He devoured the food and slipped from the tent, silent as death. The Ringmaster disappeared, never to be seen again.”

  A shiver trickles down my spine.

  “What happened to Bert and the Mermaid?” Callie is drowsing against Bert’s shoulder, her eyes closed. Bert smooths her hair.

  “Bert, the Mermaid, and Leo escaped the circus and went away to live out their lives in a little cottage by the sea...happily ever after.”

  Callie smiles in her sleep.

  Bert gathers her up in his arms. “I’ll take her upsta
irs,” he murmurs. There’s a particular sadness in the way he picks the little girl up and plods to the door. I see Bert’s reflection in his mirror. He isn’t using his glamour. He was himself for Callie this whole time.

  “Bert?” I ask quietly.

  “Yeah?”

  “That story...was it the truth?”

  “Most of it.” He slips out, leaving the door ajar.

  I sit on the floor, staring up at the poster. I’m ashamed that I know so little about Bert’s past, that I’ve never asked. I took for granted that he was simply a jovial Godzilla in our midst. It never occurred to me that he had such a depth and breadth of a life before us, his own sorrows and pains. I assumed that, because he wasn’t human, he felt nothing of these things.

  I climb to my feet, cross the room. Steeling myself, I reach out to touch the poster with the dragon and the mermaid cowering before the Ringmaster.

  A swirl of images assails my senses. Gas footlights shine before the roar of an audience. Bert glides across the stage in a suit with tails that frame his own dragon tail. Tiny white gloves perch on his little hands. He slides across the stage to thunderous applause, bowing as he climbs into an ornate box at the center of the stage. The box is carved to look like an Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with gilt and black and turquoise paint. The eyes are blank white and rimmed with black, giving it a curious, corpse-like countenance. Bert slides inside, wiggling his tail at the edge of the box, to the gasps and applause of the audience.

  Darkness surrounds him. I can hear the muffled sounds of the spectators, smell the resin of the cheap pine the box is made of. The rough interior snags on Bert’s suit. I can hear his breathing and my own heartbeat—at least, I think it’s my own.

  Bert pushes against the lid of the box, but it’s not moving. Bert makes a frustrated grunt. Through a daylight crack in the top of the box, smoke leaks. The clink and scrapes of a chain are pulled over the lid. Screams and shouts come from the audience—not exclamations of wonder, but shrieks of fear. The white crack of light at the top of the box reddens, and the box is slammed on its back. Bert’s claws splinter into the soft pine, splitting through his fancy gloves.

  More blackness, a jumble of swearing and bouncing and rough handling. I suspect the box is slammed on a cart, because horse hooves clatter on what could be brick. The box is eventually dragged around, set upright, and opened to an intense light.

  Bert stumbles out, disoriented. His gloves are in shreds and his tuxedo is covered in splinters, like a porcupine. A small man in a Ringmaster costume, with the requisite old-fashioned moustache, regards him. In his hand, he holds a whip.

  “You will tell me the secret of your magic.”

  The whip cracks. Bert struggles against the bodies of other men holding him down. The tang of blood sharpens the air. The Ringmaster’s whip tears into the back of the suit jacket. Bert changes form, perhaps seeking some sympathy from this cruel master. He takes the form of a random woman, an old woman, a child, a man with the Ringmaster’s face.

  None of this deters him. The Ringmaster continues to slash at him. When he’s not using the whip, tearing Bert’s flesh to red ribbons, he’s using tools made red in a fire: pokers, hammers, awls. I recoil from the sight and sizzle of it.

  At last, Bert’s weak voice splinters from broken teeth: “I am Bertasimus.”

  “And now you are mine. You shall crawl on your belly, like the animal you are.”

  The brassy tinkle of circus music trickles into his world. Bert lies in an iron cage covered with dirty straw. An emaciated lion with scars on his back from the whip shares the cage with him. A woman with fleshy, deformed legs crawls to the edge of the cage to slide a dish of water between the bars. The lion drinks first then Bert. The woman is beautiful, even with her deformed fins peeking from the bottom of her dirty skirt. But the scars of the lash are visible on her arm.

  She crawls up into the cage. She’s small enough to slide between the bars, her skirts dragging in the straw. She’s unafraid of the lion, who comes to her and places his head in her lap. She combs his ruff with her fingers and speaks to him in a soothing, melodic voice that reminds me of Lily’s singing.

  The singing wakes Bert. His tail moves in the straw.

  “They say you can speak,” the Mermaid says.

  One of Bert’s bloodied eyes opens. He will heal, eventually, as demons usually do. “Yes. But I should never have spoken. Now he owns me.”

  She reaches out to him, unafraid of his lizard form. The lion sleepily slides from her lap. She touches Bert’s head, seeming to marvel at the texture of the scales, her fingers delicately tracing the pattern.

  “He owns all of us,” the Mermaid says. “But we try to be kind to each other.”

  She reaches down for a bucket and a rag and cleans Bert’s wounds. It’s a beautiful mercy, one I’m certain she’s repeated for the lion and the others in her care.

  I have the sense of the passage of time. In glowing lights, Bert performs in a dirt circle, walking on four legs behind the Ringmaster. He’s forced to change into other creatures as the need arises: a polar bear, a gazelle, a seal. But they are imperfect reproductions: the polar bear has a long tail, the gazelle is spotted, and the seal has a pair of vestigial legs. I suspect this is because Bert’s never seen any of these creatures before. I glimpse an image of him studying illustrations that the Ringmaster’s placed before him, crude ink drawings sketched by explorers to the far reaches of the earth, made with more fear than artistic skill.

  There are pockets of warmth in his world. Once in a while, he’s out of his cage. Whether the Ringmaster allows it, or whether the Mermaid has a key, I don’t know. He plays chess with a little person. He helps the Bearded Lady hang out the wash. He swims in a river with the Strong Man, chasing after fish like an eel. It heartens me that he seems to have friends. The scars on his back slowly fade. I wonder if that’s because of the passage of time or his obedience.

  And there is the Mermaid. They are special friends. Many evenings unfold in the cage tent, with her slipped behind the bars. The lion dozes, and the Mermaid curls up under Bert’s lizard arm. He’s reading to her from a book that belongs to the Bearded Lady. She’s smiling as he does so. I can tell by the conversation that she probably can’t read. The lion seems to take some comfort from the story as well. His paws and tail twitch, as if in dreams.

  But the Ringmaster isn’t content to be a distracted master. He drags the Mermaid away by her hair to his tent. He sends Bert out on awful missions with the Strong Man and the Tattooed Man to destroy his competition. The three of them are fearsome creatures, and very effective. They succeed in driving a rival circus out of town with fists full of chains and the threat of fire. Blood glistens on Bert’s scales as he viciously tears with his teeth at a man in a top hat. He stands over him with a chain dangling from his claws, his shadow thin and atavistic. The man at his feet is torn, but still breathing. The top hat is crushed on the ground.

  The Strong Man wipes a spatter of blood from his face and cleans his hammer on his shirt. There are bodies behind him. “Master told us to kill him.”

  Bert stares down at the man. “I can’t.”

  The Strong Man looks at him with sadness. “I thought you did everything he said?”

  “I can’t kill.”

  “He’ll kill us.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then, I’ll have to do it for you. But you’ll owe me.” The Strong Man swings the hammer, and it strikes flesh with the sound of a melon dropped on concrete.

  Everything is traded at the circus—favors, little luxuries. Bert manages to scrape together enough favors by mucking out the elephant’s stall to buy a present for the Mermaid. It’s an ivory hair comb that used to belong to the Bearded Lady. The Bearded Lady lies on the ground with her neck broken and legs twisted under her. She committed suicide, it seemed, falling from the carousel. Or was pushed. No one really can tell in the gas-lit darkness.

  Whispers of murder flicker through the c
ircus. The Ringmaster beats them down ruthlessly, but the Bearded Lady was beloved by all. She was their mother figure. And they are angry. There’s dissension, late-night discussions of insurrection by candlelight.

  “What would happen if we could leave this place?” the Mermaid asks. She curls up against Bert’s chest, and his tail is twined in her fins. The lion snores on Bert’s feet. “Where would we go?”

  “The three of us?”

  “Yes. The two of us and Leo. We couldn’t ever leave him behind.”

  Bert stares up at the cage ceiling, woolgathering. “I think we should go to Scotland. There are some wild places still, with sea oats and heather, where no one would come to bother us. We could smell the ocean and have a little garden. Leo would be free to hunt foxes and sleep on the floor of our little cottage.”

  “A cottage? Just for us?”

  “Yes. I still have some money buried in accounts that the Ringmaster knows nothing about. We could be on our own, far away from the likes of him.”

  “From everyone? From all people?” Delight flickers through her voice. I imagine it would be a tremendous kindness, never to have to display oneself before the public again.

  “Yes. Away from everyone.”

  She smiles. “And if it’s near the ocean, perhaps I can learn to swim.”

  Still, they all feel the power of the Ringmaster’s heel upon them. Some whisper that they would have nowhere to go if he was gone. Others insist there’s nothing worse than this hell he’s created for them. The Ringmaster attempts to put down the rebellion by cutting rations and increasing the lash. The Strong Man, who most vocally suggested rebellion, disappears.

  Gunshots can sometimes be heard in the night, solitary and foreboding.

  Bert awakes one such night, hearing the echo of it rolling across the meadow and through the thin fabric of the tents.

  The Mermaid crawls to the cage with a key. Her face is swollen, and there’s blood underneath her fingernails. She brings a dish of food. The plate is fine china—the kind the Ringmaster keeps in his tent. On it is a cut-up steak and some half-eaten green beans. She slips it between the bars, and the lion falls upon it with a snort and a growl.