Page 29 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

The girleen was back, and this time she had no placard. Instead, she was pictured with her right and left hands each canting a different word.

FREE ME

One thing the Guild had tried very hard to beat or frighten out of me was the impulse to help a creature in trouble who couldn’t do for itself, be it cat or kynd.

It was perhaps the lesson I had most poorly learned.

I swept the iron off the pages.

And oh, the smile that wrestler smiled at me.

9A Wrestle at the Faire

I was at a faire or festival in Gallardia, and from the fact that geezers were wearing odd clothes and people seemed happy enough, and there were lots of healthy young men about, I guessed this was before the Goblin Wars. A huge castle stood on a hill above everything, flying pennants. The sky was cool and blue, in that way of late spring or early autumn. Merchants’ tents and stalls offered everything from tea to songbirds; bolts of brightly dyed wool shone, and best of all, horses were everywhere. I had forgotten how many colors they wore, and all the pretty names for those colors; bays and paints and roans, tar blacks and winter-sky grays. Their manes were long or short, straight or braided, and they came in all sizes. Here a draft horse pulled a cart of beer kegs, there a knight rode a palfrey while his squire led a fiery-red warhorse with a mean look about it, and I mean this geezer looked like it wanted to step on a baby.

And the food! Here the loudest karker I ever heard in my life was yelling he had knotbread for sale, and carried a great tree of it through crowds, with pots of Unthern mustard on his belt. There a black-bearded bear of an Istrean barking at a herd of girleens selling garlic and vinecherry pies, and I’ll be buggered if everyone walking away chewing hot mouthfuls wasn’t making faces of sheer pleasure.

And just as I was about to head there and get a pie for myself, passing a booth offering old Keshite coins with their winged wyrms, and elephants, and tigers, and people fucking, I heard someone yell, “Malk!”

Now, the Malk I knew got pulled to pieces by goblins in Grevitsa in a stupid goblin-game, but Malk is a Galtish name, so I walked over to see if I had countrymen about. And what should I see but a crowd gathering near where a rope had been laid on the ground in a circle, which was where beggar’s bouts got fought. Wrestling or boxing, or sometimes foot-boxing, and a Gallard foot-boxer will kick the piss out of you with his thumbs through his belt the whole time.

Now, I was right guessing there was a Galt nearby, but what I couldn’t guess was that it would be me. What I mean is that there I stood, in the middle of the beggar’s round, just in knee-trews, all greased up to wrestle. I was staring myself straight in the eye. That other me even gestured at me to come over, then made a lewd waggle at me with my long, black tongue. That me was bigger than I remembered, but fuck if I was going to take that from myself.

I paced over.

“Why would you make the cunny-tongue at me, Kinch Na Shannack?” I said. “Faith and I took it for granted we were chums.”

“Well, Malk Na Brannyck,” other Kinch said to me, “I thought maybe I karked up our friendship when I cheated yer ma out of the copper shave I promised her if she’d let me thump her in the stinker.”

“What!” I said, uncharacteristically short of words. I glanced over my shoulder where a barber-surgeon held up a shiny lookbrass so I could see my own image, and I was indeed square-jawed Malk Na Brannyck now. “What!” I said again and felt my hands close into fists.

“What, he says! A bit early in the season for the eejit what-bird to crow so. I was just saying how your mam and me conspired to brown up my winkle. I goobered her shytewhistle. I pushed her supper back up her. She’ll be wanting a soft cushion for a hard bench, so be a good son and buy her one, Foxfoot knows I left her a shave short for market.”

Well, even though other Kinch was scandalizing Malk’s mother, not our own, for the purposes of this dream, I seemed to be Malk, so I had no choice but defend the honor of my borrowed mam’s sorrowful stinker.

I said, “You fucking slipper!” which was what Malk had called me just before the one bruising and painful time I had come to blows with him. And now I kicked off my shoes and went to unshirt myself. But while I had the shirt over my face, that’s when the little blacktongue bastard shot at me, and clenched me about the knees and had me on the ground. He tried to scoot up and straddle my trunk, which would have been exactly what I would have done, and very bad for me as I was now, so I grabbed him about the waist with my legs. I still had the fucking shirt on me and couldn’t tell much through it except that it was a bright day and my Malk-self had bad breath.

It was during this grunting, bewildering moment of impasse that I had a second to think.

I wasn’t Malk fighting myself, I was myself fighting the book.

There would be a girleen in the crowd, and she was the key to it, even if that key only led to a deeper level of fuckery in the labyrinth that was the Book of the Full Shadow.

Now other-Kinch tried to push my leg down and shoot past it, but I gripped him too strong.

He was sweating down onto the shirt over my face.

I tried to feed him some elbows, but I didn’t have the leverage or position to really hurt him.

I did hear the crowd go hooooo, though, because, right, this beggar’s bout was supposed to be a wrestling match, not a no-rules free-banger. The crowd here hated me, as the crowd on the ship had when I’d fought the real Malk. Only now I was Malk, and all my stronger limbs weren’t doing me any good with this little cunny binding me up so. It was all very confusing.

Now he did manage to pass my legs, but I hugged him around the neck so he wouldn’t rear up and start thumping me like a galley drum. It was risky to grab a geezer this close if he was prepared to fight dirty, and of course I was. I meaning he, meaning other-Kinch. He now started biting my face through the shirt, and hard.

It hurt like a whore.

“Fuck, I hate this dream!” I said.

Soon I saw blood on the shirt where he’d savaged my cheeks. I couldn’t let him get my nose, he’d have it off me, so I started biting him back. I got him good by the chin, and he made a sound between a scream and a growl.