Goblin Secrets (4 page)

Rownie jerked one way, pulling Vass with him, and dropped the sack as he bolted the other way, toward the rusted gate. He pushed against the metal latticework and squeezed through, stumbling in. He felt Vass’s hand reach in after him and catch at the edge of his coat. He pulled back.

“Stupid runt!” Vass shouted.

“I have a message from Graba!” Rownie was angry that she wouldn’t let him deliver it, even though there wasn’t really any message to deliver.

“Stupid,” she said. “So stupid. Now the diggers will get you. Can you hear them? Can you hear them behind you?”

Rownie took a step backward, farther in. He didn’t look behind him. “It’s all flooded,” he said. “They dug the tunnel into the River, and now it’s all flooded.” Everyone knew that. The Mayor wanted to build a railcar track between Northside and Southside. He kept trying, but the tunnel kept flooding.

The Mayor also wanted to tear down the ramshackle
buildings of Southside and replace them with roads that moved in straight lines. That’s what Graba always said.

“Folks still hear them digging,” Vass told Rownie. “So the diggers are still down there, in the rail tunnel.” She let that thought sink in for a while. It sank. Rownie thought about diggers with skin all gray from soaking in River water. He thought about how they would only remember digging, how they would always move forward and break things in front of them with shovels or pickaxes or just their hands. Diggers were people without hearts, without any will of their own, and they just kept doing whatever task they were set to. Rownie wondered if any of them had struck off downward, disoriented by the flood, and if they might pop out the other side of the world someday. He thought about the tunnels behind him, haunted by digging.

“I’ll protect you,” Vass told him, as sweetly as Vass could say anything. “Come out and carry the sack.”

Rownie stepped backward again. “No,” he said. Now
he
haunted the tunnels. Now he was something to be afraid of.

Vass spit on the ground. Then she smiled, and it looked like Graba’s smile in miniature. “Where’s my gear oil, runt?” she asked.

Rownie’s heart beat like it wanted to run off without him. “What oil?” Vass had left the house already when
Graba gave him the errand. Vass couldn’t have known about it.

“Stop it!” Vass yelled, and Rownie didn’t think she was yelling at him. Her eyes were shut. All the muscles of her face were tightly scrunched. “You can’t! I’m not a Grub. Stop it, stop it!” Vass stumbled away, out of sight. She took the grain sack with her.

Rownie stood absolutely still. He did not understand what had just happened. He carefully put it on a shelf in the back of his mind, with other things he did not understand.

He listened for shovel sounds and shuffling steps behind him. It was quiet, cold, and heavy in the station, just a few feet from the warm open bustle of the market where Vass might still be hiding, waiting for him.

He stood as long as he could, and then he stood for longer. He did not look behind him. He did not hear shovels or steps or any other sign that the diggers were coming. He finally took three steps of his own and squeezed out through the iron doors.

Vass was gone, and most of the market was gone. A few open wagons rolled away from the empty square. The sky was a darker blue than it had been. Almost dusk. He ran.

A CLOSED WAGON STOOD IN THE CENTER
of the fairgrounds. It had walls and a rooftop, like a small house on wheels. A crowd had gathered beside it. The sky was still blue overhead, but the sun was already gone.

Rownie climbed down the slope from the road to the green. His feet hurt. He heard drums and a flute, though he didn’t see any musicians. He made his way to the very back of the crowd. He had to stand off to one side to get a view of the wagon around the thick press of people. He found a spot with a view, and then waited for something to happen. He tried to keep still. He kept shifting his weight.

The wall of the wagon fell over. It stopped level to the ground and became the platform of a stage. Curtains hung where the wall used to be, hiding the space inside the wagon. More curtains dropped around the edge of the platform, hiding the space underneath. Trumpets snapped up from the wagon’s roof and played a flourish all by themselves.

A goblin stepped onstage.

Rownie stared. He had never seen one of the Changed before. This one was completely bald, and taller than Rownie thought goblins could get. His sharp ear-tips stuck out sideways from his head, and his eyes were large and flecked with silver and brown. His skin was green; the deep green of thick moss and riverweed. His clothes were patched together from fabric of all different colors.

The goblin bowed. He set two lanterns at both corners of the stage, and then stood in the center. He held several thin clubs in one hand. He watched the audience in a cruel and curious way, the way molekeys watch beetles before they pull off their wings and legs.

Rownie felt like he should be hiding behind something. When the goblin moved, finally, throwing the clubs in the air with a snap of both sleeves, Rownie flinched.

The goblin started to juggle. Then he stomped his foot three times against the platform. A dragon puppet peered out through the curtain behind him. It was made of plaster and paper, and it glowed in golden colors. The puppet breathed fire over the stage. The goblin tossed his clubs up through the dragon breath, and each club caught fire at one end. Then the puppet roared and pulled back through the curtain. The goblin juggled fire.

Rownie tried jumping in place to get a better view. He
wanted to be at the very front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage. He tried to push between knees and shoulders to get there. He couldn’t manage it. He clenched his hands and strained forward, but he couldn’t force himself to move.

“It will cost you two coppers to be any closer than this,” said a voice.

Rownie looked. A small, round, and wrinkled goblin stood beside him.

This one had white hair tied tightly behind her head, and a pair of thick eyeglasses on a little brass chain. She had flecks of gold and bright green in her eyes, which were magnified by the eyeglasses. She held out her hand politely, not too far outstretched. The skin of her hand was a deep green-brown, and her fingers were longer than Rownie thought fingers should be.

Rownie took Graba’s pennies from his coat pocket and dropped them in the goblin’s hand.

“Thank you,” she said, nodding once. “You have paid your way through the audience wall, which is the fifth wall, so you are free to cross it and believe it is not there and only made up of a song and a circle in the grass.”

The old goblin moved away. Rownie could hear her voice at the edge of the crowd. “Two coppers if you please, yes?”

He pushed forward, dodging around the knees of many
tall people and working his way to the very front. It was easy enough to do.

The fire juggling ended. The tall goblin extinguished the burning clubs, bowed, and withdrew. A smaller goblin with a trim gray beard and a huge black hat stepped onstage. His face was wide and round, and as he walked, his chin went first in front of him. He leaned on a polished cane, which clacked against the floorboards. He was small—shorter than Rownie—but he moved like he knew himself superior to everyone else gathered there.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “You have no doubt heard that our profession has been prohibited by his lordship, the Mayor.”

Some booed. Others cheered. “We’re only here to see you arrested!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

The old goblin smiled a polite smile. “I am loath to disappoint my audience, sir, but I believe that I myself, and my companions here, are not so inconvenienced by this law. The citizens of this fair city are prohibited from pretending to be other than they are. We, however, are not citizens. We are not legally considered to be persons. This saddens me, because I lived in this city long before any of you were born, but I will have to quibble with that particular injustice another time. You have come for a play. We will give you a play. We are already Changed—the additional change
of a mask and a costume will not do you any harm, and it will not break the law.”

Everyone cheered this time—those who wanted to see the show and those who wanted to see goblin actors dragged off by the Guard, who didn’t believe that any sort of legal loopholes or flummery would prevent this from happening.

“We will first offer a brief tale to delight the children among you,” the goblin said. He took off his hat, and then pulled out the mask of a giant. The mask had a protruding, furrowed forehead and rows of thick, square teeth. Rownie was surprised that the giant mask had fit inside the goblin’s hat—though it
was
a very large hat.

The old goblin closed his eyes. Everyone was quiet in that moment, and respectful of that silence—whether or not they wanted to be.

He put on the mask and shifted his stance to tower above them all, even though he wasn’t very tall.

“I am a giant,” he said in a giant’s voice, and it was true because he said that it was true.

Rownie wanted to try it. He wanted to declare himself a giant. He tried to focus on standing still and not bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

A slight little goblin came onstage with a whip, a wooden sword, and enormous eyes behind a brave-looking hero mask. The Hero tried to outwit the Giant.

“I’ve heard that you can change yourself into a lion,” said the goblin-hero in a high, crisp voice, “but I don’t believe you can manage it.”

“Fool,” said the goblin-giant in a very deep voice. “I can change into anything I please!” He dropped the giant mask and pulled a lion mask up over his face with one smooth motion. He snarled and crouched.

The audience cheered, but it was a nervous cheer.

“This is not safe,” said an old man who stood beside Rownie. His spine was so gnarled and bent over that he had to turn his head sideways to see the stage. “Don’t believe it is, just because they’re goblins. No masks and no changes, none. Not safe.”

“That was wonderful!” said the goblin-hero. “But a magnificent lion is not such a small step away from a giant. Can you change into a python?”

The lion reached into its own mouth and turned the mask inside out. It was a snake now, and it shook slowly from side to side.

“Astonishing!” said the goblin-hero. “But a python is still such a large creature. You cannot have so much magic as to transform yourself into a small and humble housefly.”

Metal shutters closed over the stage lanterns. In the sudden dark, Rownie could dimly see the goblin take off his snake mask and toss something in the air.

The lanterns snapped open. A housefly puppet made of paper and gears began to buzz in circles over the stage. The goblin-hero cracked his whip. The housefly exploded in sparks.

“One less giant!” the hero shouted. The crowd clapped. Rownie cheered. “But I wonder if there might be any more?” He peered out into the crowd, and then jumped over the side of the stage. “Any giants over here?” he shouted from somewhere in the dark.

Meanwhile, the old goblin had withdrawn. A gruesome head peered out through the stage curtains, exactly where the dragon puppet had been before. The giant puppet winked at the crowd, one paper eyelid closing over a painted wooden eye.

The puppet spoke. “We must have a volunteer to play our next giant! The mask will fit a child best.”

The audience responded with a stunned silence. No one knew if this was a joke. No one knew if it was funny. Everyone knew that even goblinish legal loopholes could never allow an unChanged child to wear a mask.

Rownie expected to hear some sort of official person make an official refusal. He waited for members of the Guard to come forward and forbid any such thing. But there were no members of the Guard nearby. No one said anything at all.

“The child will be perfectly safe!” said the giant puppet. “You there! The tasty-looking one with a hat. Would you like to perform?” It licked its lips with a long puppet tongue, and the crowd finally laughed a nervous laugh. Someone—a father, uncle, or older brother—pulled the child with the hat away from the stage.

The giant puppet searched with its wooden eyes. “You!” it called out. “The one wearing a flower necklace. Play a giant for our story here, and I promise that you will absolutely not spend the next thousand years enslaved in underground caverns. We would never do any such thing.”

“No!” the girl shouted back.

“Very well, delectable child.” The puppet’s eyes moved. “Is there any one among you brave and foolish enough to stand on this stage and impersonate a person of my own great stature?”

Rownie waved his hand in the air. “I’ll do it!” He wasn’t afraid. He felt like he would be even less afraid if he could stand high up above everyone else. He wanted to command attention, like the old goblin had just done.

The crowd cheered him on, but cruelly, convinced that something awful would certainly happen to him onstage and that they would get to watch it happen. The goblins would take him, and then the Guard would come and take away the goblins. It would be an excellent spectacle to see.