Hart's Hope (15 page)

“The dead take them and ride,” Flea said. “They go everywhere on birds' backs. It's why you never kill a bird. There might be a spirit there who can't get home, and he'll haunt you forever.”

“The dead are gathered up in the nets of God,” Orem said.

Flea looked at him blankly. “I thought you weren't a priest.”

“I'm not anything if I don't find work,” Orem said. “A man
is
what he does to earn his bread. A carpenter, a farmer, a halfpriest, or a beggar.”

“Or a thief?” asked Flea. There was an edge of anger to his voice.

“Why not, if it's how you live?”

“I steal, Scant, but that's not what I
am
.”

“What are you, then?”

“A man
is
the greatest, boldest thing he dares to do.
I
play the snakes.”

Orem shrugged. “I don't know what that means.”

Flea grinned. “Then you'll have to see, won't you, Scant.”

A
T THE
S
NAKEPIT

Orem guessed they were near the Swamp when the smell of the town became a reek, and what huts there were stood on stilts. “Got to stick tight to me,” Flea said. “There's sinking sands here, and clay sucks you down, if you step in the wrong place. Stick tight.”

Orem stayed right behind him, imitating as best he could the intricate path that Flea followed among the great-rooted trees and the cattail stands. After what felt like a mile through the meaningless maze, Flea abruptly stopped. Orem jostled him.

“Stand back,” said Flea. “You never know what the snake's going to do.”

Flea picked up a stick with a short fork at the end—it looked as if it had been cut that way. He dug with it, scraping dirt away from a board hidden in the ground. Then he pried under the edge of the board. A high whining sound came from the hole. Orem flinched involuntarily. Not a child in Burland didn't know that the whine of a keener meant death if you didn't get away. They lived only in places like this, where the country couldn't decide whether it was lake or land. It was as good a reason to stay away from swamps as any.

Flea laughed, but not at Orem. “Three days, and he didn't suffocate. Now that's luck, that's luck!”

Orem watched with fascination as Flea inched the board open, always with the stick. When a keener moved, it moved like a bird, quick and invisible until it stopped again. And there it was, a flash of green skittering over the ground, straight toward the nearest standing water. It got no farther than a few feet away, though, and then it lay wriggling, neck neatly pinned under Flea's stick.

“Can I trust you with my life?” Flea asked.

“Today.”

“Then hold this stick and don't let up the pressure.”

“No.”

“Once this keener hits water and drinks, it'll follow us out of the swamp, you know that.”

“Tale to frighten children.”

“Tell it to the dead children in Swamptown.”

Orem walked over and took the stick. At the faint change in pressure the keener let out a high wail, but Orem held firm. Flea laughed nervously. “That's right, that's right, hold her tight, they say she's just like a woman, lots of music and death when she bites.” Orem knew that Flea was just talking to hear the sound of his own voice. The snake began flapping its whole body from the stick down, slapping out with the tail. Flea showed no sign of paying attention to
that—
he reached out his hand and pinched the keener tightly right behind where the stick had it, then pulled slowly backward until the head was drawn tight up against the stick. The keener made a choking sound, but Flea was humming. Now he dared reach right up behind the jaw; he took a tight, tight grip. “Not yet,” he whispered. The snake wailed. Flea drew his left hand down the snake's writhing body until he had hold of the tip of the tail as well. “Now let go.”

Orem waited another second, afraid.

“Let go, you want to strangle it?”

He let go. Immediately the snake writhed violently in terrible shudders and spasms; Flea held on. The snake whined, the snake cried out, for all the world as if its child had died. Flea giggled in relief. “Tricky, that. Tricky, tricky. If you don't hold the tail it flips you in the eye, you know, and you drop it and it gets you. Now come on. The pit's a ways on.”

Orem had hoped that catching the snake would be bravery enough for one day. He would gladly have left Flea then, but he didn't know the way out of the Swamp.

The snake pit was not deep—there could be no deep pits in the Swamp, for the water would seep into any cavity. They had only been there a few moments when other boys began arriving, each holding a keener by the neck.

“Flea!” called several, and “Buzzer!” Flea thrust his keener's head toward them playfully. A few of them eyed Orem.

“Scant,” said Flea, by way of introduction. “He's a pisser, but he'll do.”

One by one the boys came to the edge of the pit and cast in the snakes. Each keener immediately rushed to the water and drank. Then they began trying to slither out, toward the boys. Each snake that came close to the edge was flipped back with a forked stick. The sound of a funeral filled the clearing as the keeners wailed and whined.

“You, Scant,” said a boy. “You got no stick, you do the rats.”

Rats? Flea was quick to fill in what Orem didn't know.

“Off to your right, there, in the castle.”

The “castle” was a fence of stones, roofed with wood. Inside were whimpering and scurrying rats. Orem was not delighted at the prospect of reaching in to take one out. Again Flea advised him. “Take the bag and hold it ready and open a stone in the wall.” Orem did it clumsily once, and the first rat got away; the second two went into the bag, and then he was able to kick the rock back into place well enough to keep the others in. The rats fought each other and struggled in the bag, lunging every direction and making it hard to hold.

“Got two?”

Orem nodded at the boy who spoke, the only one who looked to be about Orem's own age.

“I suppose you don't want to grab just one.”

Orem shrugged. Not good to label himself a coward. “Whichever way you want it.”

“One then. And heave it right in the middle.” The older boy didn't bother watching him—he had to keep flipping keeners back into the water in the middle of the pit.

Orem held the mouth of the bag with one hand and used the other to squeeze the bag between the rats. The one in the dead end of the bag he sealed off by holding the bag between his knees at that point. Then he carefully worked the bag smaller until the rat at the open end was tightly trapped and squealing so it could not move. Carefully Orem manipulated the rat until its back was to the mouth of the bag. I may get piss on my fingers but it's better than teeth.

Carefully he opened the mouth against the resistance of the fingers of his other hand and probed the body of the rat until he found a back leg. Then he released the mouth of the bag and pulled on the rat all at once, and with a single motion flicked it out into the snakes.

If he had hoped for a murmur of admiration he was disappointed. The rat landed near the middle of the pit, but immediately the boys were watching the performance of their snakes. The keeners went dead silent and the rat hung between the mouths of a dozen snakes, all of which had a hold. The rat hardly had time to squeal, it had so much poison in it: blood spurted from its mouth, vomiting forth from the deepest part of its bowel, and then it was just fur and mange and meat. The snakes struggled and pulled, and the rat fell apart. Some snakes came away with nothing, some with patches of fur, and finally there were two snakes left attached to the rat, both swallowing furiously until they met fang to fang, jaws distended by the rat they held.

The two boys whose snakes were thus joined hooted congratulations to each other. They had won the first part of the contest. It was the end of their snakes' part in the proceedings, however, for now the other snakes began howling and snapping at them. Keeners are not easily poisoned by their own venom, but with a dozen bites they began to sicken, and with a hundred bites they died. Now the other snakes began biting and trying to eat everything. Some of them died with the body of another keener halfway into their bellies; some died with nothing; and at the end of it, when all was still, the boys came nearer to take a tally. Which of the snakes had swallowed how much of the others?

Orem tried to decipher what the game meant. Those whose snakes were off alone, neither eaten nor eating, apparently were out of things—they grumbled and wandered off. The rest of the boys estimated how deeply a snake had been swallowed before it died, and the boys paired off according to the pairing of the keeners, always with one boy triumphant, the other grim-faced. For the first time it occurred to Orem that none of these boys had money. What was the wager, then? What was the forfeit for those who lost?

“Yours most eaten,” said the oldest boy to a younger one.

“Chew yourself,” said the loser. “It was a short snake.”

“I said,” said the older one.

“I said chew yourself. Yours is most eaten.”

Orem looked at the snakes and thought the younger boy might well be right. He also thought that unless the forfeit was something dire, it wouldn't be worth arguing the point, for the older boy had an air of cheerfulness that was frightening.

“I say not.”

The younger boy looked frightened, but still defiant. “I didn't come here to get cheated by a chewer like you,” he said loudly. The other boys began backing away.

“Not I,” said the older boy. “I think not I. I say not I. You say it too. Not I.”

“Not
I
!”

Now a touch to the chest, a step back, a shove, a step. Orem had seen the look on the older boy's face before—it was the faces of Cressam and Morram and Hob when they thrust him into the haystack to burn him alive.

“Hop, it's nothing,” said Flea. Who was Hop? Was Flea trying to placate the older boy or reassure the younger one that losing to him wouldn't be too bad? Orem couldn't tell, for neither boy gave a sign of hearing. The argument was no longer about the snakes. It was about who would do the other one's will.

And then it ended. The younger boy pushed back, just once, and the older one had him by the hands and flipped him pitward in one motion. At first Orem was only sickened at the thought of landing on the corpses of the snakes. Then he discovered that the keeners were not dead. They were only sluggish, only quiet. When the boy landed on the snakes in the water, some of them came alive, quickly enough that the boy came up with five or six snakes dangling from him. Orem could not help himself—he screamed with the boy's own terror. Bad enough the fangs puncturing the skin like sewing needles, but the one snake hung from his eye as if it had grown from there. The boy doubled over and seemed to vomit all the blood of his body. Then he dropped and lay still as the rat had lain, with the snakes fruitlessly trying to open their mouths wide enough to swallow him whole.

For some reason all Orem could think of was the Hound taking Glasin Grocer's shoulder in its maw and tearing away at the flesh. Yet this was no such worthy sacrifice. The boy was acrawl with snakes that fondled him with their bodies and tickled him with their darting tongues, yet Orem could not turn away.

“Seen enough?” Flea asked softly.

Orem could not speak.

“We go now,” said Flea, “or we don't get out of the Swamp alive, it's that short. Coming?”

“In High Waterswatch,” Orem said, “we wrestled and spun tops. That's how we played.”

“There's no name for a man in
that
,” said Flea. “But I remember you were quick enough to grab my balls for the sake of four coppers.”

Orem followed Flea out of the Swamp, hearing the wails of the keeners behind him all the way. Only when they reached the shanties did Orem realize he was still holding the bag with the rat. Impulsively he swung it hard against the wall of a house.

“Name of God!” cried Flea. “What are you doing?”

“Is the rat so precious to you?” Orem asked.

“Not the rat, Scant, the house. If you break a hole in their wall, you might as well have killed them come winter, if they can't find a patch.”

The house was sacred, but a boy could die for nothing in the Swamp. Orem handed Flea the bag. Flea turned it upside down and let the rat out. The animal was not dead, but the blow against the wall had left it dazed. It lurched drunkenly forward. Flea aimed a kick at it and sent it flying thirty yards, wriggling in the air as it flew.

“What was the forfeit?” Orem asked. “For the boys who lost.”

Flea shrugged. “Just a little game of plug-the-hole. Hop shouldn't have argued. He has a sister to pay it for him.”

“Do
you
have a sister?” asked Orem.

“No,” Flea said. “But I don't lose.” He grinned. “I'm a good judge of keeners.”

“Why do you do it?” Orem asked. “Why do you play so close to dying?”

Flea shrugged. “It's who I am.”

T
HE
S
ECRET OF THE
F
OUNTAIN

Orem insisted he could find his own way home from Wood Road, and they parted, planning to meet in the morning to continue Orem's search for work. Orem had one errand to run before returning to the inn. He found his way through the darkening, emptying streets to the Little Temple, and a halfpriest showed him the fountain where strangers always came.

The fountain wasn't much. No one asked him to pay or even wanted a gift; he went to the fountain and poured out his flask of spring water. He wasn't sure what prayer it was they said here, so he murmured a prayer for his father, then dipped the flask again to take up the sacred water that Glasin had told him was so valuable.