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It was still dewy out – just – when he woke up.  The sun was moving fast, the air was still lightly cool, there were excited animals losing their minds that the sun had come up, can you believe it the sun came up, there’s a ball of fire in the sky again, holy heck, and noon was closer than it wasn’t but not as close as it could be.

So he skipped breakfast for the hundredth time in a row and stepped outside, throwing a folded piece of paper in the air to check the breezes. 

It fluttered, dipped, and dropped nose-first.  He took the measure of its angle and started walking. 

He had a lot to catch up on. 

***

Down to the waters first.  A long walk – and worryingly exposed, without much cover – but bearable in the absence of both midday heat and mid-morning travellers.  He slipped through the crust of thickets and down into the cedars, hopped the stream, and under two trees and atop a stone and just barely above the waves he sat, looking out under the boughs into the long, wide water, quite invisible. 

A good place for a cache.  He checked his stash: ancient shells that whispered hidden secrets; wave-polished jewels that glowed without light; and a piece of wood turned into something more complicated by the will and whim of the waves.  He gripped it in his palm, drew something out of it that stood in place of his breakfast, and he slid back up out of his undertree hollow and hopped the stream again and strode down to the pebbled beach.  He found nothing, but that was alright.  Most days that was true.  The waves were rising higher and higher on the shoreline, pushing up the gravel – the last gasps of white-caps from out in the deeps, where the monster may or may not be lurking nearby.  A fish jumped – escaping something, hunting something?  Who knew. 

A strange call, long and hooting, from the ancient pier that serenely rotted in the waves nearby.  The locals were gathering.  He shivered and moved farther down the beach, away from the shadows looming down through the trees above the shore, splashing into the noisy burble and bubble of the river where it spilled into the broader body of the lake, cold and fast pooling and slowing and spreading into warm and lazy.

 ***

The sun was higher now, farther up in the sky and closer to the back of his neck, sizzling away.  The river kept him from sweating; ankle deep, thigh-high, waist, knee, back down to ankle as he moved upstream, clinging to branches and taking each step with care.  Some rocks were unsteady; some rocks were slippery; some rocks were dwelling-places of crustaceans with crushing claws, and the best way to tell the difference was to place your foot and carefully roll and nudge and swirl before your full weight bore down upon it. 

That was the slow, constant danger.  The fast, unsteady danger was the rapids.  The churn and bubble and froth over the stones was easy to spot, but when the bed dipped deeper the fast-moving current sometimes hid itself below, ready to shove and grab and yank you down, closer to the spiny fish and the clutching claws of the things that scuttled under rock and maybe even the ponderous, primevally knobbled skull of an ancient reptile. 

So the going was slow, and the going was long, and there was a break to be had along the way where the dense thicket pulled back and slumped over the ruins of an ancient building, stones strewn and foundations slowly sinking into the dirt.  He sat on what had been a finely-cut keystone for some decrepit archway and pondered the history of the place: a mill?  A tower?  A power station?  Laboratory, fortress, dungeon… whatever it had been, whoever it had been for, now it was rubble.  

A croak, a rustle in the rushes.  He left for the water again in a hurry.  He didn’t know this terrain as well as he’d like. 

***

Like any ambush predator, the trees came up slowly, skulkingly, never moving when he looked directly at them.  They crept into his peripheral vision, lulled it into a false sense of security, then slowly rose overhead to join hands until the whole river was swathed from the sun by a canopy of green and gold.  

A distant call made him freeze in the water and scan his surroundings: he was fully in the domain of the dinosaurs now, and their eyes were sharper than his.  Only by paying careful attention would he catch sight of one before it saw him, and so he lurked low in the water and moved quickly in short bursts, watching and listening and holding his breath between each surge until finally the rapids rose up into an aggressive roar not even his most careful footing could manage and he was forced inshore under the cedars, beneath the dead branches and above a thick layer of shed needles and dry twigs. 

It was a strange place to be; a thicket of bare, undead limbs.  You could hardly walk two feet without getting your eyes poked loose by clawing twigs, but without so much as a single leaf left alive in the understory to block your view you could see almost to the other end of the woods.  He detoured, he ducked, he swerved, and when at last he was hemmed in he took up the largest weapon he could find and chopped his way through the zombie foliage, wincing at each crack and stopping to look for any sign of sudden movement. 

But he was lucky, and he was close, and soon he emerged onto the edge of the sunlight and crossed over once more into the blinding breadth of the world.

***

The trees were above him.  The sky was above them.  And all around, sloping down, were the reeds and the rushes and the scream of the cicadas and the (still present, still too near) call of dinosaurs and the occasional deep, guttural grunt of the lions of the pond. 

It was those that he was hunting now. 

He walked down into the basin – a quarry of fathomless age, now a seasonal funnel that turned rainwater into something beautiful – like a stubby-necked heron, and waded amongst the slimy and sucking ooze of the marsh with caution and with care as great as that he had expressed when he was picking his way through the rocky stones of the creek, each footfall as slow and gentle as the settling of a fallen tree into a bog. 

Until at last it was within arm’s reach, at which he struck without thinking or blinking. 

Splash!  Grab!  Squeeze!  The pond-lion thrashed in his hands, legs kicking, toothless maw gaping in defiance.  Its beady eyes glared defiance and promised sure death if he were foolish enough to come a little bit closer, just a little bit closer please, only a tiny bit closer. 

He held his wriggling prize for just one more moment of glory, in which its struggles slowed and halted.  Gathering strength?  Detecting his intent? Accepting its fate?  Who could say, who could see, who could know what flirted through its brain.  The pond-lion was far more alien to him than the dinosaurs. 

A cloud passed above, shading the sun.  His grip released.  Its form impacted the surface.  And it was gone. 

So should he be, if he had sense.  The roar of metal came from nearby – up the hill, from the cindered trail.  A growling, gas-breathed predator was coming close, no doubt helmed by another of the locals.  He retreated away – skirted the edge of the water as mechanical heels and hands dug into its muddy edge and spat tepid water into the air, fleeing into the far brush.

And farther than that. 

***

Here was riotous growth and death all at once.  The trees had been slashed, then levelled, then finally crushed and piled high  in unimaginable corpse-welters of oozing trunk and shredded canopy, churned through with the very earth that their roots had clutched and pinned and kept solid and safe. 

Now that earth was exposed, raw, bleeding away into gravel with every rainfall.  Ponds had formed that no water-lion would dwell in, barren of green and shade.  Vulcanized footprints big enough to swallow him three times over shaped their bounds and the paths between them, a moment’s errant pause-and-reverse determining where water would flow and where it wouldn’t. 

One trench had been dug with deeper intent.  It stretched wide and far, waters clear and bright and only slightly tinted by floating dust.  Nothing lived in it.  It was deep enough to swim and drown and float in.  He would not set foot in it.

Instead he turned farther in, away from the greater display of devastation, and followed the tracks of its makers back into the wood proper – cedar again, but older and taller and greater by far.  There was greater room too between the trees, where much work with much effort had trimmed loose the tangle of dead and dying branches, and there between three conjoined trunks he found his cache, where he kept the tools that had done this.  Branches had been woven and raised and used as wall and fortress, creating a cranny that hid its contents from the dinosaurs and the locals and all other life that might casually pass by, and in this hidden niche were tools and weapons of varying sizes. 

He selected a new (if blunt) machete – of greater size and more sophisticated shape than that which he had used near the stream – and he swung it once or twice, checking it for rot or damage before putting it back at last.  The day was wearing on, and he had long ago cleared this place for his own uses.  It was safe.  It was close.  And he had to hurry, if what he heard was true. 

He had no need for stealth here so close to his goal, so he ran free and fast and uncaring of the snap and twist of twigs or the distant scream of the dinosaurs or the gasp and pound of his vital organs and then ahead was the light, and ahead of the light was the backyard of his house, and out the window was his mother’s voice calling him, telling him he was late for lunch. 

Henry Fairfield Osborn, head curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, soon to be elected President of the Board of Trustees of the same institution, sat at his desk and considered the world as he saw it.

“I’m real,” he announced. “I’m a real person that really existed. Whoo-eee, I am. I didn’t say this though – or that, did I? I’m also a big ol’ racist and an eager advocate of eugenics. Yessir. Yessir.”

“Mister Osborn,” said Barnum Brown with the sort of patience only available to a man who stared at rocks for a living, “you said you were done with showing instead of telling. That’s why you paid me, remember?”
“Oh! I DO remember!” said Osborn, nodding eagerly. “I paid you a lot of money to go find something we could show the public instead of telling them. I did, I did. ‘Go out there, Mr. Brown, and find me a big beautiful skeleton that we can exhibit to the public and charge them five cents a head to gawk at!’ That’s what I said, didn’t I? Anyways, you’re telling me instead of showing me your own self! Didn’t you find anything?”
“Well, we found something alright, but it wasn’t quite a skeleton,” said Brown. “Nothing like, say, that set of Miocene peccary molars sticking out from under your carpet.”

“Under my wha – ah.”

“Yes, right there. Just give me a moment with a trowel and we’ll have him out in a jiffy.”

“Well done, Brown! Your knack clearly hasn’t faded. So anyways, what’s all this fuss about what you found that wasn’t a skeleton?”

“We found a living, breathing, drinking, eating, defecating, aging, healthy-and-robust living specimen, Mr. Osborn. She’s parked outside.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn, who in a little over ten years would eagerly write multiple prefaces for a book Adolf Hitler called ‘his Bible,’ ran to the window and squinted outdoors. “Ah! So it is, so it is. Good god, Brown, is that thing fifty feet long? She’s taking up a LOT of parking space.”
“Forty at least. We stopped trying to measure her with tape when she kept eating it. That costs money.”

“Sensible, sensible, sensible,” mused Osborn. “And fifteen feet at the shoulder?”

“Twelve foot or so at the hip. Same problem.”
“Remarkable. Well, I’d better describe it then. Fetch me a pen.”

“Sure thing,” said Brown, who had just dropped a lit stick of dynamite into the drawer of Osborn’s desk. A loud BANG emitted, and from the smoke and rubble the paleontologist excavated a pen, some paper, and a perfectly preserved Triceratops skull. “Apologies for the smoke, Mr. Osborn. Had a hunch.”
“Yes, well, these sorts of things happen,” muttered Osborn, scribbling frantically. “HEY, WHOEVER’S LISTENING TO ME AT THIS MOMENT – PUT A STAGE TOGETHER IN THE MAIN HALL, WON’T YOU? Skeletal sketch….eh, that’ll do it for now. Size…..big…bigger than that… sex…. No thank you – hah, remember that one, Brown? Cope taught me that one…. and name. Name. Name, name, name, name. Hmm. Needs something big. Something mighty. Something stupendous in a headline and on a plaque and on a mural. Something that’ll make an artist’s pen shake, that’ll really slice the brisket, if you know what I mean.”
“We fed her fifty pounds of brisket a day to make it home alive, I know exactly what you mean. Swallowed it nigh-whole.”

“Wow, now THERE’S an expense. She ate like a king, eh? Like a king. Oh. Hmm. Hmmmmmm. Yes, I have a name now. RIGHT THAT STAGE UP YET? IT’D BETTER BE, I’M GOING TO BE ON IT IN THREE MINUTES.” Osborn stood up and dusted off his jacket. “Well then, Mr. Brown, how do I look?”
“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics Society,” said Brown truthfully, now elbow-deep in the wainscoting, hammering away with a pick at the freshly-exposed vertebrae of a pantodont.

“Well yes OBVIOUSLY, but what about right now, at this very moment?”

“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics society heading downstairs to unveil the greatest and most sensational wonder the world has ever seen?”

“Excellent. Oh and SOMEONE GET ME A CROWD WE NEED AN AUDIENCE JUST PULL ‘EM IN OFF THE STREET alright let’s go.”

***

By the time the two men were downstairs a stage had been hastily assembled along with a crowd – the former by the latter, judging from the audience’s unusually high concentration of burly men with overalls, newsboy hats, steel lunchboxes, and big steel girders slung over their arms. Still, there were more than enough mobsters, molls, dames, wise guys, jabronis, palookas, mooks, hard cases, bad apples, chumps, goons, schmucks, shmendriks, paper boys, shoeshine kids, and guys selling hot dogs out of carts to fill out all the necessary elements of a proper cross section of New York. Already they grew restive.

“’Ey, what’s the holdup?”
“Fuggadabouddit!”

“Hey asshole! I’m talkin’ to YOU!”

“Siddown and shaddup!”

Henry Fairfield Osborn mounted the stage. Behind him, squinting and baring its teeth a little in the spotlights, anchored by comically large chains, stood a forty-foot-plus carnivorous reptile.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he called. “I am Henry Fairfield Osborn! I am an expert on vertebrate paleontology! I am a head curator at this institution! I am capable of extremely advanced and esoteric pseudoscientific racism and someday very soon, god willing, I will send men to labour under the sun of the Gobi desert in service of those beliefs! And I stand before you now to ask you the most pressing question imaginable: did all of you pay five cents to be in here?!”

Barnum Brown coughed.

“Right yes and also I have named the beast behind you – the great and magnificent creature that you all have better have paid five cents to see today – the titan of terror – the fossil that walks – the king of the cretaceous – the monster from Hell Creek – the sultan of the saurian – an animal so powerful and outstanding that I had to use both Greek AND Latin to name it…… Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes!”

Absolute silence reigned.

“’Láktismaclunes’ translates to ‘kicks butt,’ I believe,” said Osborn cheerfully. “Why aren’t you clapping?”

“You misspelled ‘saurus,’” said Brown. He scratched at his hat awkwardly and six opalescent trilobites fell out.

“Youse mugs cans’t even use no dictionary!” shouted someone from the crowd. “It should be ‘κλοτσιάclunes!”

“They’s using the ancient form, ya moron!”

“Aw, blow it out your kazoo!”

“Please!” called Henry Fairfield Osborn, now grown vexed. “Order, people! Despite my firm belief that many if not all of you are intellectually lesser than me by your descent from what I have predecided to be inherently inferior ethnic groups, we are still all Americans and you still all have five cents and because of that we all now can come together in this moment and celebrate my naming of-”

But it was too late. Concealed until now by the cover of the growing hubbub, a rogue construction crew jumped into action, demolished the dinosaur’s comically large chains, and began building the Empire State Building nearly three decades ahead of schedule.

“Stop! Stop!” screamed Osborn, scrabbling ineffectually at the burgeoning foundations with his bare hands. “Brown! Do something!”

Barnum Brown shrugged on his fur coat (sending three Diplodocus skeletons stuffed in its pockets clattering to the ground), lit a cigarette, used that cigarette to light every stick of dynamite in his fur coat, then hurled them all in the air and hid behind his hat.

“You did say ‘do something,’” he said later, when the smoke had cleared and the ceiling had finished caving in. He inserted a toothpick into his mouth and wiggled it with great care and precision.

“Yes,” mourned Osborn, now draped despondently over the ruins of the stage and mopping the dust from his brow with a pocket-sized klan hood, “but something less expensive would’ve been nice. Now we’re all out of anything to show. What will we exhibit, Brown?”
“Well, how would this do?” asked Brown, pulling loose the toothpick, along with two reasonably-complete skeletons of a forty-foot-long hypercarnivorous Cretaceous theropod dinosaur.
“Barnum, you devil – what on earth were those doing in there?”
“Leftover from when we were digging at Hell Creek, I bet,” said Brown, who was gently probing the joint of his jaw for any stray teeth that didn’t belong to him. “I’m a real rockhound, and sometimes I get more than a taste for my work, you know? A dog with a bone, a paleontologist with a mineralized skeleton.”

“Fair enough, fair enough, all is forgiven,” mused Osborn, running his fingers lovingly over the railroad-spike teeth (oh, if his railroad-owning father could see them!). “Yes, and I’ll not misspell the name on this one, oh no no no. Still, it’s a pity to lose the original beast. Did you see where it went in all the hullabaloo?”
“No, said Brown, idly plaster-jacketing and cataloguing the single gigantic footprint that was all the evidence remaining of their brief guest, “but I suspect she’s gone to do the same thing the audience has: build a new life in a new century.”

“But it’s a giant animal loose in the greatest city on earth!” protested Osborn as he kicked the twisted remnants of the chains out the door onto the sidewalk. “It’ll stick out like a sore thumb. No, Barnum, I’m afraid your romantic fantasy is false: it’s simply too unrealistic to be true.”

“Hey pal,” said an irritable pedestrian, the head of a procession of dozens carrying a twenty-foot gorillia in a reinforced steel cage, “We’re walkin’ here!”

“Blow it out your clunes, gentlemen!”

“Only if you yank your head outta yours first, creep!”

“Shaddup! And don’t touch that chain or you owe me five cents!”

***

Regina Clunes (?-1949) was a New York hot dog vendor famous for serving the patrons of the American Museum of Natural History.[1][2] She married Heinrich Adelman in 1909, and the two had six children.[1] Although she was a forty-three-foot-long carnivorous theropod dinosaur from the late Maastrichtian of Hell Creek, it is a matter of taxonomic debate as to whether or not she should be classified under Tyrannosaurus rex or under the nomen dubium of Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes (sic).[2][3][4][5][6]

Anguilliform Bing, maester of Galliform’s Great Gorehouse, the Stabbiest Show on Slerth, stood before the wagonwoman and examined her paperwork once again in service of the escalatingly cheery hope that this would show her that everything was fine.

“-and so if you look right here,” she explained, helpfully pointing with her longest and most fearsome finger, “you’ll see that the name on the paperwork is Galliform, not Anguilliform.”
“Huh,” said the wagonwoman, tilting her head back and forth and squinting. “But it says ‘Galliform’s Great Gorehouse’ on the gate.”
“Galliform was my great-grandmother.”
“Huh.”
“So you can see how this mistake happened?”
“Yuh.”
“And it won’t happen again?”
“Yah.”
“And you can fix it now?”
“Nope, no way. The poliprisoner wagons go out first thing in the morning and it’s nigh-noon; no way they haven’t disembarked already. You’ve got what you’ve got.”
Anguilliform felt a smile she hadn’t used since she was seven (and begging her mother to whip her sister instead) crawling across her face entirely without her permission. “And the fact that ‘what I’ve got’ is sixteen metric gronnes of vegetables, which do not possess arms, legs, blood, or the ability to feel and express pain and fear?”
“Plants can feel pain, insofar as they register damage to their persons and react to it,” argued the wagonwoman. “And they aren’t vegetables. They’re fruit. They’re berries. They’re scabberries.”

Anguilliform’s smile retracted into her skull. “Why are they called scabberries?”
“Well, they’re red and they ooze everywhere if you knock ‘em around too much. Sixteen metric gronnes of them, as delivered. Sign here. In the box that says ‘this shipment was in error,’ please.”

Anguilliform signed it. Then, because there was less than two hours between her and the end of her family’s business, she sat down on the curb, gave her scutes a good scratch, and had three smokes, one after another. They went by too quickly and gave her no ideas. She was contemplating a fourth when her beast handler found her.

“Mom. You’d quit.”
“Don’t tell me you still believe me when I said that, Protanguilla – you’re a grown woman, with the mandibular scarring to prove it.”

“Yeah but you told me you’d quit last night, and it usually lasts a full day. Something wrong with the prison wagon and it’s going to be late? Warping Cough running rampant through the cellblocks and none of the poliprisoners are going to be fit enough to run and hide and fight? City council got coup’d last night and they had to spend all morning reversing who’s on which side of the bars again?”
“No poliprisoners.”
“What?”
“They already got delivered somewhere else. Maybe a farm somewhere. We got sixteen metric gronnes of scabberries.”
“Why are they called sc-”

“I asked that, the answer wasn’t interesting. We have no prisoners for the games and we have sixteen metric gronnes of produce instead. The tickets have been sold out for a month. The stadium is already filling. I think you should change your name and leave town; maybe if I draw the mob to me you can take your kids and your boy and get the hell out of dodge.” She squinted into the sky. “Shit, and it’s so nice out. What a waste of a perfectly good Sunsday.”

Protanguilla’s whole body went limp, but in the relived kind of way. “Oh, that’s good. I was afraid it wouldn’t be a disaster.”
“What now?”
“Y’see, it’s about Roarbald – the rippopotamus, you remember?”
“I spent half our yearly profit buying that thing off the Whippomorphia expedition, you’re damned right I remember. And it’s worth about as much as a toothless bare if we have no poliprisoners for it to eat.”

“Well, good news on that. It’s herbivorous.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Turned up its nose at every limb and steak we’ve offered it, but there was some moss growing in its cage and it’s licked the bricks clean.”

“Whippomorphia swore to her mother’s soul that thing killed half her porters before she wore it out. Said it was the most brutal woman-eater she’d ever dared imagine, with a poet’s hunger for blood and the limbic system of a serial murderer.”
“Well, it seems like it’s just an asshole who starts fights for fun. I made one of the feeders stick his hand into the enclosure and it stamped it flat and left it. It’s got to be ravenous by now and that juicy little pile of fingers might as well have been made of dirt and dung.”

“Huh,” said Anguilliform. She realized she was almost done her fourth smoke, and was holding her fifth in her free hand. “So it won’t eat anyone. And we don’t have anyone for it to eat. Yeah. That’s all pretty bad. Not as bad as my thing, but pretty bad.”

A polite cough; a politer tug at her elbow-braid; a plaintive, sorrowful face of a messenger-boy in cook’s colours.

“Beg pardon maester, but Cook says the first lunch orders are coming in and he’s not got a drop of blood or flesh for the crowds yet, and could you please send the meat upstairs before they eat him instead? And he said to say they’ll eat you next.”

“Huh,” said Anguilliform. “Yeah. Yeah, we do usually get the steaks on the poliprisoner wagon, don’t we? Yeah. Yeah.” She nodded, smokes five and six wobbling in her mouth like the useless-ass tusks on her overpriced rippopotamus. “Yeah. Right. Okay, okay, okay. Boy, go tell Cook he can go to hell and ask them to keep my seat warm for me. Protanguilla, you can start running now and get the rest of the family to safety. And THIS fucking thing –” she kicked the wagonload of scabberries, which creaked and dropped one in front of her like an overripe turd “– can stay. Right. Here!”

Her foot came down. The world went red. The world stayed red.

“Mom?”
“Gimme a, a,” Anguilliform smacked her lips to clear the splatter from her words, “a handkerchief or something.”

“I’m fresh from the beast pens, mom.”
“’Or something.’”

A damp mass was placed into her palm. She rubbed it over her face until the world wasn’t red anymore.
“Crisp and crunchy craphouses,” she said, looking at the wad in her palm. “What the hell was this?”
“’Or something.’ Look, it was the cleanest cloth I had on me at work, so if you want to complain, then yo-”

“Not the rag – wait, is that a rag, what the hell is this, wha NEVER MIND, look at it!”
Protanguilla squinted. “What am I looking at? It’s hard to see what it could be under all that juice, it’s goddamned everywhere. You couldn’t have made a bigger mess if you’d torn out your heart in front of oh.”

Anguilliform was smiling without conscious control again. It dripped red at the corners. “Get every strong back you can out here five minutes ago. You got anyone on staff that knows how to fight?”

“Hell no, me and Elopomorpha are the best you’ve got.”
“Fuck, never mind, never mind, you got anyone on staff that knows how to LOOK like they know how to fight?”
“Monotremata, Soricidae, and Pygoscelis,” said Protanguilla promptly. “They’re the cheap hires for the summer – lot of disappointed theatrists in this batch.”

“Same as it was every year,” said Anguilliform. “Get ‘em. And get all your safety equipment. All of it. And some paint.” She slapped her palms together.

The world went red again.

“Fuck.”
“I don’t know if I have another or-something on me.”
“No, no, that’s great. This is good. This is perfect.” She spat, then licked her lips thoughtfully. “And hey – boy! Send the kitchen staff down here on the double. Cancel my previous message and tell Cook he’s got an hour to make a miracle.”

***

By one o’crock the crowd had slipped past rowdy and plunged into the depths of restiveness. That hushed murmur that hinted of eager anticipation turning sourly impatient, teetering towards the first angry shout.

Anguilliform walked out into the ring with the swagger of a woman who was absolutely definitely positively one hundred percent certain she was not about to die horribly and wasn’t bluffing in the slightest.

“Gentleladies and men!” she roared over her megaphone from the bottom of all of her lungs. “Happy Sunsday! Happy Games! And in this moment, we have something a little – no, VERY – special for you! Remember this-” (because one way or another they definitely would, so why not embellish) “-and remember that you saw it here first at Galliform’s Great Gorehouse!”

Then she left through the announcer’s door without running, which took a lot of effort. And as she walked she heard the crowd murmur, then hush, then murmur again louder, louder, into a confused jumble…

Then CLANG.

Dead silence for three seconds, then

CLANG

CLANG

SPLASH

And then the roar came and Anguilliform realized she’d been holding her breath for almost a full minute and started hyperventilating, which made her run up the staircase a bit slower and clumsier than usual. She needed to see what was happening, probably, as long as it wasn’t going to be the last thing she saw in her life.

She got to the announcer’s peephole at the top of the staircase just in time for the end. In the center of the arena, where four dozen swarming, starved, desperate poliprisoners should have been clawing each other to death with blunted knives to see who got to be readmitted to the community, two figures – made giant by their solitude and their bizarre and ornate armour, spiked and fluted and helmed – lunged and swung at each other with impossible, desperate force, each wielding weapons that – even at their ludicrous size – shouldn’t have weighed as much as they made them look, heaving and throwing their whole body weight into every blow. They stabbed and roared and parried and it was the worst fighting Anguilliform had ever seen in her life, just godawful telegraphed showy bullshit and every time a blow was glancing it went

CLANG

like a big clear bell, and when it struck true there was a sudden

SPLASH

of bright red liquid spraying like a hydrant from the wounded belligerent, delivered by one of the ten grillograms of scabberries Monotremata and Pygoscelis were wearing underneath their beast-trainer-suit-with-pans-attached armour. It gushed, it poured, it bubbled arteriously, and it covered up all the smears from the half-dry paintjob on the armour.

The crowd had stopped yelling now except for every time a particularly ‘devastating’ blow landed, at which point they went nuts and threw things. Anguilliform was nervous until she realized it was mostly money, rather than snacks or rocks. She’d have to make sure the cleaning boys didn’t pocket too much of it tonight.

Look at that. Pull a tentative miracle out of a manureheap and at the first sign of it actually working what do you do? Start thinking about the money. Well, that was slumanity for you.

“Maester, you okay?”

It was Elopomorpha, the beast secondhandler. “Yeah. Just, making notes. They rehearsed this?”
“Sort of. A lot of the summer hires said they could do it; they were two of the three that were lying the least; and they hate each other. They’ve probably imagined this a lot.”
A particularly surprising and furious punch crumpled the breastplate of one of the warriors like a food wrapper, soaking her opponent in scabberry fluids. “So, how’s it meant to end?”
“Either one of them stops being able to sell a victory and gives up with style for the love of the show, or she goes nuts at the prospect of defeat and gets herself killed forcing the issue.”

A particularly wild swing slammed into the dirt, spraying both warriors in mud and juice.

“Those aren’t sharpened, right?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they do nothing.”

“Right. Right. Right.” Anguilliform exhaled. “Hey, you got any smokes? I’m out of smokes.”
“No, sorry maester.”
“Then what the hell am I paying you for?”
“The second act, maester. It’s ready.”
“Is it any good?”
“Only one way to find out.”
CLANG

SPLASH

THUD

The crowd was screaming. One warrior was kneeling. The other was splayed with incredibly pettily beautiful lifelessness over the berry-drenched sands. She saluted three times, stood, and strode away with the weight of the world on her shoulders as six shrouded figures – janitor boys wrapped in dark tablecloths – bore away her fallen opponent.

“Did someone just throw underwear? No, nevermind. If it isn’t good, is it at least ready?”

“Oh yes.” The crowd was already starting to mutter again. Trying to figure out if what had happened was good or bad. That wouldn’t do.

“Then here I go. Don’t wish me luck, we just broke the budget on that. Anything that happens next is entirely our fault one way or the other.”

So Anguilliform walked out into the arena with her head held high like it made sense and she wasn’t a fraud and she stood in the circle of sand that smelled like sweet and sour lies and she said “Gentleladies and men! Did I not promise you something special?”

The crowd called back, which was good. It was cautiously enthusiastic, which was better. “Well, you haven’t seen it yet! For our second act, our animal feature – one never seen before outside the wasted woodlands of the far west! A creature so deadly, it crushed no less than seventy-nine porters, armswomen, and hunters underfoot before being laid low through exhaustion! The bane of the bog, the beast that craves death – the rippopotamus!”
Then she turned and left, and although she had to be sure not to walk faster even as the beast gate began to raise as her own door was opened, that was a more normal and appropriate sort of fear, a regular kind of fear she’d long ago shrunken down from a sharp sword in her brain into a little tickling sliver.

Then she shut the door and burst into a sprint up the stairs and shoved Elopomorpha loose from the peephole at a flying (sliding) tackle, because she really, really, wanted to see this.

She was just in time. The rippopotamus had stepped into the ring, lured by the promise of sunlight and the relief from vicious stabbing by long iron spears at its most tender (relatively) haunches. It stood there, and for the crowd, for a moment, that would be enough. Ten metric gronnes of flesh and bone and hide and tusk blinked as it made eye contact with several thousand confused but cautiously enthusiastic slumans.

And then, right at the moment of uncertainty, the squeak-squeak-squeak of another gate being raised. Unoiled, uncouth, unused, unasked for.

The service entrance. High and wide and big enough to bring in a dung cart and a flesh wagon and a cleaning squad, shoulder-to-shoulder or stacked one atop another, all at once.

Or, in this case, an entire covered delivery wagon. The sort poliprisoners were kept in.

It trundled into the arena under the power of two teams of shorses that were blinkered and earstopped and probably had been doing this job long enough that they wouldn’t care even if they weren’t, and the sight was just ridiculous enough that a little nervous shudder of laughter flicked through the crowd like a snake fleeing through the grass. The driver did not share in it. Anguilliform would’ve berated her daughter for her lack of showmanship if she didn’t know that there wasn’t anyone else that could pull this off. It was a very, very, very stupid idea that could go wrong in many ways, only one of which would be entertaining.

Protanguilla’s cheeks puffed. It didn’t mean much to anyone sharp-eyed enough to spot it, but Anguilliform knew her daughter and knew her trade and knew her tools and knew the plan, which was that she’d just blown the whistle she’d stuffed into her cheek before the show began. Silent to slumans, but audible to some.

The rippopotamus reacted in the one way it knew home.

The resulting chase started out terrifying – the speed on that thing was a shock if you hadn’t seen it move before – descended into farce – the sheer number of hairpin turns you could execute in a delivery wagon before it got too ridiculous to be funny was higher than most people would’ve guessed – and concluded in a precisely aimed tragedy, when Protanguilla ‘accidentally’ let the wheel of the cart clip the wall during a wide turn.

She leapt. The shorses shrieked. The wood splintered. The rippopotamus did not stop. And oh, but oh, but oh the spray and the splash of red when it opened that cart, tearing into the bright, bright red blood and seizing and raising high the helpless form of a big wooden barrel, full of oozing scabberries.

Its jaws tensed, bulged, clamped, and crunched – and berries exploded everywhere. And although Anguilliform hated to interrupt this moment, it was come clean then or not at all.

“That’s right, folks!” she screamed, megaphone slapped against the peephole. “Just because the cart was short on poliprisoners doesn’t mean it has to be short on violence – and just because it eats fruit doesn’t mean it can’t crush with the best of them! And you too can take a crush of your own – lunch is open! Hit the stands and grab a cruncher of FRUIT BLOOD!”

Then she dropped her instrument and doubled over, wheezing so hard for so long that she couldn’t hear anything but her heartbeat. Then a gentle tip-tap on her arm.

“S’good?” she croaked up at the slightly perturbed face of Protanguilla.

“Yeah. Jammed my arm and one of the shorses got its foot peeled off by a wheel. Expected we’d lose all four.”
“How’s Cook?”
“Selling crushed scabberries and juice in a mug filled with ice,” she said flatly. “If it works, I’m amazed.”

“Good.”
“Yeah. You should quit.”
“Maybe six was a lot. Before all the yelling.” Anguilliform wheezed. “But you know. What I think?”

“We didn’t blow the biggest day of the year entirely?”

“I think we learned. A lot today. Death is scary. Death is amazing. Death is addicting… but you know what? It’s too realistic to be entertaining forever. Fake is sexier, and sex sells.” She took a deep breath. Her lungs were working again. Back to normal. “Proty, run down the address of the farm that grew these things. We’re going to be keeping them in business for the rest of our lives. And cancel our poliprison contract. If this works out, we just quadrupled our net.”

***

The Planetary Museum of Sluman Rights is hereby dedicated to the memory of ANGUILLIFORM BING, an early advocate for the compassionate and humane treatment of prisoners. Centuries ahead of her time, we look upon her brave and selfless efforts to reform the bloodthirsty entertainments of her era in favour of peaceful stuntsmanship as among the first steps leading to what we know as the Sluman Rights Revolution.

“There is no day so dark that there are none who may dream of light.”

It was six in the morning when Lunk the Large received her visitor.

“Just stopping by to pay my respects to my favourite niece,” said Trickster, with a winning smile. They did everything with a winning smile. Life could turn up heads or tails for them, but that grin would call it good-enough every time. 

“Unh-huh,” said Lunk, who had made enough coffee for three people and wasn’t about to share any of it, even with relatives. “And what do you want?”
“Just a little thing, just a little thing,” said Trickster. “You see, my back is aching and sore today-”

“Someone beat you up for being a tricky jerk, huh?”
“-from all the injustices and ingratitude that the world heaps upon me-”

“More than one someone.”

“-and I was wondering if I could ask you, my most favourite niece, to do me a solid and take up my burdens for the day. All you have to do is wander around and look out for troubles and be tricky. Just one day!”

Lunk glared at her relative over the rim of her coffee pot/mug. “There’s a catch. I’m not agreeing to anything until you tell me what the catch is. Tell me what the catch is now or I’m not buying it.”

“I’ve packed you a lunch and I’ll give you my nice hat.”
“Sure, what the hell, might as well.”

***

So Lunk put on Trickster’s hat (which was very nice) and took Trickster’s satisfyingly-hefty bag of lunch and set herself on the road, stomping along with the force and fury of a bad mood poorly expressed. So it was unsurprising that when she came across a small, hapless doll lying in the road, she kicked it.

It stuck to her foot.

“Geddouttahere,” Lunk snarled, and kicked again.

It remained stuck.

Lunk said some uninventive and universally competent curses and pulled the doll free from her foot. It immediately stuck to her hand, which made sense since it was covered in pine resin.

“Get OFF,” said Lunk, and she punched it with her other hand. Which then stuck to it.

“Aha!” cried the two large, hulking thugs lurking in a nearby ditch, as they leapt free of their hiding place. “You’re caught! That nice hat can’t save you from revenge this time, you tricky jerk!”

“Wasn’t me,” said Lunk. “That was my relative – I’m filling in for them.”
“Close enough for vengeance’s sake. Now we’re gonna kill you slowly and gruesomely in the way you despise most! Any suggestions for how we can put an end to your life in the way you’d least prefer?”

Lunk blinked slowly and looked around her.

“Huh?” she requested.
“Tell us how you don’t want to die, so we can kill you that way,” the slightly smaller of the two men explained.

“Yeah,” the slightly larger of the two men agreed. “Just pick something. Like being eaten by sharks.”
“Or devoured by ants.”
“Or being thrown in that briar patch over there.”
“Yeah, that’d be awful. I hate briars. I can’t stand going anywhere near ‘em.”
“Me either. I’d do anything before I’d set foot in that briar patch, even if the person I hated most in the whole world was in the middle of it. Say, by being thrown in there by a pair of gullible rubes.”
“Yeah. So anyways, tell us how to kill you. And no tricky business!”

Lunk’s eyes shifted between the men, her hands, and the briar patch with the care of tweezers and the speed of a continental plate. Then a slow smile spread across her face.

“I got it!” she announced proudly. And she reached out with both gluey hands, ripped the briar patch out of the ground, and smashed it directly into the faces of the two men.

***

Anyways after that Lunk found herself hungry. And tired, and thirsty, and gluey, and covered in briar-scratches (especially on her hands, which were as much rosebush as they were flesh by this point), but she couldn’t do anything about any of that stuff, whereas she DID have a packed lunch.

She opened it. Inside was a large plain-grey stone, and a stewpot.

Lunk nearly succumbed to her first instinct, which was to throw the stone away, but as her arm reached its apex, she hesitated (and luckily, her hands were still gluey).

“Wait,” she said, and a slow clever smile crept over her from face to feet. “I remember them telling me about this trick. I can do this.”

So she stamped into the next village she saw and walked up to the first home she saw and slammed her knuckles into the first door she came across until someone peered out of the window and asked “why are you knocking on our cellar door?”

“Never mind that,” said Lunk, holding up the stewpot. “I’m making stone soup. You want in on this?”

“Stone soup?” said the villager, peering into the pot. “Doesn’t sound very tasty. Or nourishing. Are you trying to trick me into feeding you? No, I think I’ll pass.”

“Nah, it’s great,” said Lunk. “Really filling, really tasty. It just needs some ingredients to bring out the flavour a little. Got a spare carrot?”
“Well, I suppose I could spare a carrot,” fretted the villager. “But no more. And I’ll bet my neighbour could spare an onion, and her neighbour could spare a potato, and their neighbour could spare a rabbit, and –”

“Great!” said Lunk happily. And she pulled the stone out of the pot and clonked the villager over the head with it. Then she went inside, knocked everything around until she found the bag of carrots, slung it over her shoulder, and walked next door with a whistle on her lips and a carefree heart.

“Hey, wanna get in on some stone soup?” she asked. “I heard you got onions.”
“Stone what?”
CLONK.

***

Lunk sat in the village square, stone soup sat on the ground before her, stone at her side (now lightly scratched from contact with many skulls of varying sturdiness), flint and tinder in hand, and a long, monotonous list of curses in her mouth.

“LIGHT,” she snapped for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time the flint did not spark. “Why won’t you light!”
“Nice of you to ask that question!” croaked a passerby, half-propped-up in his doorway to cradle his throbbing head. “Because it’s your fault! You and that fancy hat of yours! Last week you talked us into tricking the gods into accepting hide and bone as offerings while we got to keep the meat, and you cheesed them off so much they’ve rescinded fire! Now NOBODY can have a warm meal, or a light at night, or anything to keep away the chill of winter.”

“That wasn’t me,” said Lunk. “That was my relative – I’m filling in for them.”
“Then it is your family duty to mend what your kin’s rashness has broken and trick the gods to bring fire back to the world!”
Lunk stared blankly at him.

“Or you can’t cook your stone soup either,” he added.

“Which way’d they go?” asked Lunk.

“Up yonder mountain, tallest around. The manses of the gods are at its peak, and in the grandest manse of their ruler lies fire, held in a brazier, and –” but Lunk had already departed, stamping along faster than ever, her foul mood made worse by her scraped hands and growling stomach and the way that the mountain insolently rose ever-higher underfoot and overhand until at last she was heaving and crawling and lurching her way above precipice after precipice and then she was above the cold, above the snow, and in the golden glorious vineyards and palaces of the gods, rising up in tier after tier like demented wedding cakes until they reached their culmination in the grandest, goldenest, gaudiest manse of them all, which was that of the ruler of the gods. Behind its silver gates lay a sealed vault, within that sealed vault grew a garden of stones, among that garden of stones was dangled a bronze chain, inside that bronze chain was cradled a brass brazier, and inside that brass brazier was a glowing ember of fire, the last in all the world, which danced and smouldered quite prettily when Lunk smashed through the brazier with her fist and clasped it tight.
“Gotcha!” she shouted in triumph. Then “gah, hot!” and then “ow, hey!” and “OUCH” and similar things with much less politeness. The harder she swore the faster she swung her hand; the faster she swung her hand the hotter the fire burned; the hotter the fire burned the harder she swore.

“DAMNIT!” she shouted, and tried to put it out by slapping her other hand atop the blaze. The gummy pine resin caught aflame. “DOUBLE DAMNIT!” she said, and tried to slap her burning hands against the walls of the stone garden, the sealed vault, the mansion, and its silver gates. They caught fire too. “TRIPLE DAMNIT.”

Lunk ran through the mansions of the gods, waving her burning arms and shouting and slapping beauteous architecture that transformed itself piece by piece into new burning things for her to shout and slap at. Many of the gods followed her lead, and soon the mountain was in such a commotion that one could scarcely hear or see anything, which Lunk claimed justified why she accidentally ran off a cliff and slid down the entire mountain, still shouting and waving her arms. This rush of wind also stimulated the blaze on her arms to cover her whole body. “QUADRUPLE DAMNIT!” she screamed as she ran through the village, setting alight her stone soup, the houses that had donated to it, the gardens that had been raided for it, the briar patch she had used as a flail, half the fields, half the woods, and the shallower part of the lake before she could wade out into the deep end, where she sat underwater until the sun went down and she was tired enough to go back to bed.

Still hungry, too.

***

Trickster stopped by the next day. Not so early; nine AM.

“I burned up your hat and lost your stone soup,” said Lunk, who was halfway through enough coffee for sixteen people (and enough burn cream and antibiotics for thirty-two, plus six sets of tweezers). “Sorry about that, but your job sucks and nobody likes you.”
“Oh, that’s alright,” said Trickster. “I have other hats, and I have other stones. And now that they’ve had a bit of a break from me, I have a hunch everyone’ll be a lot more forgiving of my tricks for a good, long while.”