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.”