Page 3 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

I noticed the mouth illustration had returned to the page.

Lighter because it had lost some ink.

But now it was smiling.

2Goats and Other Lovers

The next day, at a provisioners’ shop built higgledy-piggledy up a rocky incline, mostly sheltered under oiled tarps since the roof had collapsed in places and hadn’t been repaired, we went looking for a guide to help us over the mountains. Two geezers who wanted the job were summoned with a long, almost musical shout by the fellow who owned the place, but we soon found we had a dilemma.

Would we hire the one-eyed, smelly, illiterate local fellow?

Or the pale, handsome-ish little Wostran who looked like he cut throats for a hobby?

It was an important decision, but one I was having trouble making because I’d slept poorly. Our mattress was really just a sort of flat sack stuffed with I know not what hard and reeking vegetation, and I’d had bad dreams, as I said.

But yah, two guides on offer.

Let’s go through the good and bad of each. One-Eye was a goat-fucker. I’m not being funny. Early in the morning, while Galva did her hard hour of predawn Calar Bajat exercises, I took a walk. On said walk, among other pastoral sights, I saw a man in a field wearing a conical fur hat and back-butting a goat. He had tied its legs to a heavy log to keep it in place and so it wouldn’t kick. Good system, really, if you’re going to do that sort of thing. I’m guessing the goat was used to the treatment, because it didn’t bother trying to get free or fight. It just chewed and looked at me with its yellow-goldy eye, its pupil like a knocked-down hourglass. One-Eye knew I was there, but I suppose he wasn’t in violation of any local ordnance, for he hadn’t a whisker of shame about it. He even nodded at me so cordially I thought he might be on the point of asking me if I’d like a go, though which part he’d have in mind for me to play would be an open question. I hurried my pace and circled back to our inn, passing the mistress of the house in the rocky yard of the place where she scolded some blond boy of maybe ten years’ growth. When he turned a look at me, I saw he had the face of a careworn old man. The landlady had him by one ear and gave it a shake to get his gaze back on her.

I put my hand over my eyes to give them a bit of privacy and went in the back to the room I shared with Galva.

“S’a fella fuckin’ a goat,” I said.

The Spanth had a leg on the bench and the other on the bed in an uneven split and was lowering her chest to the floor and pushing back up slow again and again, drilling a hole in the stone wall with her eyes while she did it. Her sword lay in easy reach. It always did.

“Out in the field about a quarter mile from here.”

“What do you want me to do about this?” she said in her Ispanthian-accented Holtish, hissing the theeessss like a Keshite basket snake with her exertion. Which made me remember my snake dream. Which made me notice once again that her eyes were slightly different shades of blue, one of them having gotten blinded then healed after Sesta, the iron-armed assassin who really did spit poison, had done so to her. Happily, the last thing Sesta spat was her soul out her neck since Galva’s Queen Mireya had her head off. Personally, like, not by command.

“Just making conversation.”

Galva paused halfway up.

“Of all the things you saw on your walk…”

All the way up, arms locked.

“The rising sun…”

Halfway down and hold it, a drop of milky sweat on her nose.

“Birds singing to each other. Were there birds?”

“Yah, there was birds. Swallows especially, quick little karkers.”

The sweat-drop fell to the floor. She followed it down slowly, really working her arms.

“Birds. Fields. The mountains that will try to kill us soon.”

She rested her face sideways near, but not on the filthy stone—looking away from me, it should be noted—and sank her hips deeper into the stretch.

“This is what you bother me with during my practice? A man being unclean with his goat.”

She turned her head to look at me, started back up.

“Well,” I said, putting my things in my pack, “I don’t know for a fact that it was his goat.”

She stopped talking to me then.