A Cuckoo Sings Inside Me CH2

When an insect sees a weaker insect, all it sees is another bug.  When a cousin sees a cousin of lower caste, he may call him 'lesser', but he loves him as his own.

Gremlin sat on the edge of a box and counted his take for the day.  It was slim pickings by the docks, but he got less kicks than when he braved the merchant's run.  There was enough for bread at least.

Kicking up dirt and grinning, he made a beeline for the bakery, a good indoor shop that he was only allowed into if he wiped his feet before entering.  To be sure, he had to dodge the odd swing from a patron who disliked the lack of humble hunch in his youthful shoulders, but that was all down to instinct.  Gremlin was already seventeen, after all.  Two years a man, and proudly waiting for the stubble on his face to become a proper scruffy beard.

He had little enough to be proud of, after all.

The baker looked up as his coins clanked against the wooden counter.  "Two buns, please."

"What are you doin' back in here?" she asked, disdain all too apparent on her cherry red face.

Suppressing a grumbling sigh, Gremlin nudged a finger at the coins.  "I need food, same as anyone else.  Come on now, Miss Magolet, it's not like the old days.  I'm a payin' customer, as you can see plain."

She picked up the coins, counted them three times, and then bit one.  There had not been a decent counterfeiter in this sector of the city in over a year, he knew, but that was not a fact that an upstanding citizen ought to be aware.  He said nothing and bore the indignity with a wry look on his face.

At last, the baker turned round and retrieved two steaming buns from the tray behind her.  She dropped them into a cheap sack and handed it to Gremlin, pinching the top of it between her thumb and forefingers, as though he had already tainted it.

He saluted her, took the sack, and then marched cheerfully out of the shop, back onto the good honest street.  "That wasn't so bad," he said to himself as he darted to a hidey hole.

Luck was not with him.  He hadn't gone but halfway when a gnarled cane caught him in the shin and sent him tumbling.

Although he threw his arms out to catch himself, this only ended in losing a layer of skin from his hands and chin.  Blood spattered the cobblestones, the cuts stinging immediately in the chewy salt air.  For a moment, he could do nothing but sit and hold his wounds, air hissing through his teeth as he tried to find the wind to swear.

When he finally did, an older woman dashed hurriedly on, tutting about the youth of today in general and Gremlin in particular.  He threw up a vulgar salute at her departing back, then scrambled to his feet.

The bread and its sack had been crushed in his fall, but he had kept hold of it.  There were some things which one simply did not do, and letting go of food was one of them.  Especially when one had been quite deliberately tripped by a cane.

That cane.

It was legendary among beggars and thieves, or the offspring of Chaephar, as they were called in the more formal and kind vernacular.  A length of twisted wood, so old and warped by the local wind that it didn't even look like wood anymore.  Just dark sinew, as dark as the hand that held it.

As it tapped on the cobblestones, drawing its owner closer, Gremlin found he could not move his eyes from it.  There were knots and notches in the wood, so many that it was a wonder it held.  He knew what every notch meant, as well.  They formed symbols, as close to writing as thieves could garner from their garbled cant.

He bowed, as was proper with kings, but slipped the bag into his cloak.  It was getting too small for him, but it was still voluminous enough that he could sneak one of the buns out and hide it in one of the secret pockets sewn into his tunic.

"How's this, boy?  Looks like you've had a spot of trouble."

"Just fallen over my big feet, Melster."  He wet his lips and swallowed in almost the same breath, then struggled not to choke.  "Thanks for the care, I've it well in hand."

Even as he spun, ready to sprint away as fast as his legs would carry him, the cane smacked the cobblestones hard, bouncing up with momentum.  Melster tipped it, swinging it down fast and hard to catch Gremlin's shoulder.  "You misunderstand.  That was an offer of assistance."

When Gremlin had been significantly younger, a boy covered in filth and innocence, there had been a pony show about it all.  Help would have been offered directly and naively accepted.  Now that he'd learned, he had found out that it only meant the show became less fancy.

But that wasn't to say that there was no show at all.  He turned round, shrugging off the cane's hooked head.  "An' I'm sure it was kindly meant," he said, a teasing lilt to his own voice.  "But I've no need nor want of any help from anybody."  Less than a year ago, he would have added 'thanks anyway'.  If ever there was a mistake to be made in this delicate game, Gremlin had learned the hard way what it was and not to make it.

Melster, king of thieves in the city of Torchome, held the cane in both hands and leaned heavily on it.  He grinned, the ghastly expression melting into his long, scraggly grey beard like Miss Magolet drizzling butter onto a loaf of bread.  "But I insist."

"All the same."

This was the hard part.  Moving like lightning in a hurry, Gremlin tore open the sack and stuffed the bun he had left inside it into his mouth.  He didn't have time left to chew.  The cane walloped him in the stomach, so hard that he nearly choked again, this time trying not to cough and lose his prize.

But he knew already that the blow was only a signal.  Melster's two cronies, Bip and Jorsh, materialised like bad dreams on a rainy night.  They descended upon Gremlin in a storm of fists and boots, beating down hard.  Gremlin hugged himself into a tight ball, protecting his head and the soft things he had once heard doctor say were inside the body, making it work.

It was never over fast enough.  By the time the blows stopped coming, he had managed to chew and swallow.  Either they had noticed this, or they were just tired.

In any case, they backed off, and he was free to stumble and play his part to its end.  He bowed again, and then caught his balance without playing it up too much.

"Same time tomorrow, eh, Gremlin?" Melster said with a chuckle.  He had to eat, same as anyone, but everyone Gremlin knew was fully aware that it had stopped being about food for the thief king long ago.

The urge to respond with a clever line was mercifully quenched by the soreness.  Nevertheless, he forced himself to get going fast.  The important thing at this point was to look beaten and downtrodden, without sacrificing the essential speed.  He was also just eager to get the squashed bun out of his tunic before it chafed or became nothing but crums.

An odd sort of luck, but there were only a few places to go where Melster wouldn't bother looking.  He'd be watching now, just to make Gremlin nervous.  Still, one or two places in the city were practically registered thief-free zones.  Not even the maddest of Melster's cronies would go near the watch house, but neither would Gremlin.

The closest safe place was by the madhouse.  It was too early in the day to be guarantee he wouldn't be chased off by a sister of St Bartleby, but he decided it was worth the risk.

His usual scamper was non-fictitiously hindered by the new bruises and scrapes, but he made it to a quiet corner.  Once he felt he was sufficiently hidden, he extricated the abused bun and fanned his chest.

"Bugger was that hot!" he hissed.

The bun was flat, crumbling, and less than a shadow of what he had paid for, but it was still warm, and some of the butter glaze had survived.  After it was gone and his belly happy, Gremlin leaned against the door and wondered.

Thinking was how he spent a lot of his time.  It was free, didn't bother anyone but him, and he rather suspected that he wasn't allowed to do it.  Grinning aimlessly at the opposite wall, he counted the bricks and thought about becoming a sailor.  The air, he already knew, like anyone who had lived his entire life on the streets of Torchome, but he had heard the sailors talk about it with such a vigorous love.  The same way they talked about the crests and the waves, even the storms.

Suddenly the world titled, and his first thought was that the boat was taking on water.  He leapt to his feet, ready to start bailing, but the fantasy left him before he was fully upright.

An underly, one of the sisters' servants came out into the alley, arguing with one of his peers.  "Yeah well, I agree with your mum."

"You would, ya ponce."

"It just ain't right, is all."

The door was of the sort meant to touch the wall, no space lost.  Gremlin hurried out before the unlost space could disappear, keeping low to the ground.

At least there were only two of them.  However, each was as big and black as the other, carrying boxes twice as wide as Gremlin and just a bit taller into the bargain.  The underlies moved with the natural grace of men who had spent their entire lives in bodies like finely mortared brick walls.  One wore a clumsily knitted cap with a bobble on the top.

The hatless one, shorter by half a handspan, spat around the huge box he carried.  "What's not right about it?  Gods knows I would treat her good.  Like a lady, if you're so fond of things my mum says."

"Aye, I believe ya, but it ain't as simple as you want it.  She's a madd'un."

"Lies.  She's too pretty to be mad."

Somehow, they argued with every limb of their bodies, stepping like thick dancers over the alley trash and their own great feet.  Gremlin was forced into the dance, flailing wildly in his efforts to stay in between the boxers without being squashed, crushed underfoot, or worst of all, seen.

"Okay, fair enough.  If she was cleaned up, she'd be like one of those craft puppets in shop windows," the one with a hat went on, his voice the lower of the two.  "But mad is mad, 's all I'm sayin'."

As they moved the boxes closer to their destination, the underly with a hat grew more vehement, and the dance became a waltz.  Gremlin stopped paying any attention at all to their conversation, focusing solely on his own feet.  Words filtered in, but none of them made sense.

Then, a thump as the boxes were set down.  Panic clogged his blood, but the underlies were close to blows now.

"Ya can't just do as you please.  The sisters wouldn't like it, and that's that."

"So you say.  I think they'd be glad to be rid of another charge."

"Not that one.  You said yourself, she can answer when you talks to her.  Some of t'others cain't even look at you."

Even without their boxes, the underlies had enough girth on their own merit that Gremlin found it almost fun to dodge about in their shadows, staying out of sight and shamelessly dropping eaves.  A romance between an underly and a strangely cognitive unfortunate.  It was like a staged play.  He had to bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing aloud.

The moment of merriment cost him a move in the dance.  He had forgotten that throughout it, the door had remained open.  While he had counted on the time and motion  it would have taken them to open the door, it was not part of the dance.  He saw the motion, misread it, and then the door was swinging shut.

"Aww, g'on," said the hat-wearing underly.  "I won't do anything tonight, so don't get your undergarments in a holy knot."

His friend replied in a grumble, but Gremlin had ceased to care about the entertainment.  It was dark and cold.  He was indoors, properly indoors, not just ducking unwelcome into a shop, for the first time in years.  His skin broke out into goosepimples.

Rubbing his arm, he darted into a corner.  His eyesight, turned green and white by the abrupt lack of light, did not adjust until he had barked his shin on several unseen corners.  When he could see well enough to identify his hand in front of his face, he realised that he was quite close to walking into a wall.

Gremlin decided that he and Indoors simply did not get on.

However, even with the wall staring mockingly back at him, there was room for a tiny spot of luck.  The underlies had disappeared, and if he squinted, he could see a pile of laundry.

A vague recollection gnawed at his memory.  The last time he had been indoors, it had been to escape a storm.  He had slept on something soft that had smelled rather strongly of body odour and metal.  A washerwoman had taken pity on him, freezing in the rain, scrawny as a rat.

He climbed gingerly over the nearest pile, seeking a smaller, lower place to rest his aching body.  Listening to the underlies talk about romancing a madwoman had taken his mind off of it for a while, but that sort of balm was very temporary.  Now, with nowhere else for his thoughts to focus, they drifted to the ignored pains from the thieves' beating.

Cursing them, he pushed back his hooded cloak and rolled up his sleeves in the near dark.  It was difficult to tell, even squinting his eyes close to the point of shutting them, but he could make out the bruises.  They were elongated by the dark, and deeper in colour.  He traced the outlines of one or two, thinking of tales he'd heard explorers tell of oddly shaped lakes in the country beyond Torchome.

He pressed his thumb in the middle of one of the largest, wincing.  As good a time as any to be indoors, he supposed.  And what a place to sneak into.  The wince became a grin, prideful and stupid.  What luck he had.  Melster and his cronies wouldn't even venture to lurk outside the madhouse.  Being inside it was safe as…  Gremlin chuckled, drunk on his own concept of bravery.

Safe as houses.

He snuggled up to a bag stained with its lifelong task of containing sweaty garments, folded his cloak up to cover his nose, and settled in for a nap.

The smell woke him up some time later.  His cloak had unfolded itself, leaving him prey to the stink around him.  He jumped to his feet, bewildered, aching, and thoroughly disgruntled.

For a moment, he stood where he was, hugging his arms round himself and muttering.  Bravery forgotten, he let his nose drip freely.  It was horribly cold among the laundry.  Stepping carefully, he exited his sleepy corner and stumbled around in search of the door.

It was locked from the outside.  He struggled with it, one foot on the wall, pushing as he pulled, but to no avail.  The mostly blank white door, marked with the carelessness of years of underlies knocking into it with whatever dreadful cargo they carried out, stared back at him.  He returned its uncaring, inanimate glance with a petulant, cross-eyed frown.

The only other exit from the room, which seemed to be rapidly growing colder, was a set of stairs.  Gremlin sneaked over to it, but then halted at the bottom step and knelt as if in prayer.

His lip itched.  He whipped out a handkerchief that a lady had given him once instead of a coin, and blew into it as quietly as he could.  Pretending at defiance.

"Who's out there?"

The soft little voice sent him sprawling.  He all but ran to escape the length of the shadow that suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs.  Huddling in the corner with the smug laundry bags, he listened to the creaking.

Lungs burning with the effort to temporarily stop breathing, he shut his eyes tight.  The creaking was slow and careful.  Not heavy or deliberate, but tentative.  Like a child checking on the presence of an imagined nightmare in the dark.

"You had better come up before one of the women in white finds you," the voice said again, almost a whisper this time.  "They yell at me just for standing too close to the window."

There was nothing for it, he had to breathe.  He let out the old air with a helpless grunt.  Hoping stupidly that the noise would be missed, or drive back the timid investigator with fear of some imagined monster, he attempted to inhale silently.

The sound of his ragged breathing seemed to echo, not covered by a final creak, but accompanied by it.  "Come up with me.  I shall thell them you were frightened and they will be kind."

He flipped his hood up.  When he had been a child, he had believed that shutting his eyes tightly enough would hide him from all but Samun, the god of light in all places, and Aeric, the god so wise that he could not be fooled.  This belief had not persisted beyond a metaphorical kick or two, but he found himself taking refuge in it then.

Footsteps approached, and then his head, heating up in the close humidity of fear and hair inside the hood, was cold again.  Someone had pulled back the hood.

Swallowing back the bile of unwanted discovery, he turned his head up, already smiling disarmingly.  He was not a handsome young man, he knew, but if the seeker was old enough, she might take pity on him in his follied youth.

His jaw dropped.  The person crouching in front of him was dishevelled and a bit dirty, but she was lovely all the same.  Her hair was a lighter colour than anyone's hair had a right to be, as if she had gotten old before she should have.  Even in the dark, he could make out a certain curvature of the jaw and the nose that were, as the underly in the hat had said, like that of a crafted puppet.

However, she had a hollow look in her eyes that was too chilling to be beautiful.  And even in the dark, he could see how pale she was.

"You don't belong here, do you?" she asked, tilting her head to one side.

Gremlin imagined the scrape and click of wood to go along with the movement, almost thought he could see the strings.  "Not any more than you do," he said in a raspy voice.  He sniffled.  If she went on thinking he was an unfortunate, she might go away.

She smiled at this, and it made him shudder.  She smiled like someone who had been taught how to from a book.  All of the minute motions were correct, but just slightly out of place.  "That isn't so.  I would be able to tell."

Confused, he said, "I'll come up on my own.  Just--just go away."

"You won't.  I can tell you're lying."

He scoffed.  No one could tell when he was lying, it was his own special gift.  "You can't.  I said I'll go, so leave me alone."

To his dismay, she slid her feet out from under her and sat on the floor beside him, her slippers scraping softly against the floor.  "How long have you been here, then?"

Lies were not usually so tricky.  Gremlin eyed her, still subconsciously looking for the strings, as if they would lead back up to the stairs to a bored sister who had seen him somehow and decided to play a trick.

Then he shook his head, feeling foolish.  The very idea.

"Take me with you when you go."

Her hand, small and nearly white in the poor light coming from the stairs, rested on his knee.  He had not seen her move it.  He jerked his knee to dislodge it, as though it were a spider.  "No."  When one could not count on himself to lie--he blamed the stench of the foul laundry, sleeping on it must have addled out some of his brains--then one used as few words as possible.

She placed her hand on his knee again, this time holding tightly as he tried to shake it off.  Earnest pleading shone in her face.  "I've been here for long enough already," she said.

Gremlin met her gaze directly, and set his jaw.  "Why should I take you out then?"

"Because I don't belong here."

"Where do you belong then?"  He folded his arms, unaware that the variation in his posture made him look like a sulking child.

The girl appeared to think about this for a moment, grasping his knee in one hand, desperately tight, and tapping her lip with the index finger of the other hand.  At last, she said.  "Beyond the stars.  I only came here to explore a little."