Vampire in the Banyan Tree

Sohbuk on the Back Step

Hart extricated himself, none too gently, from Aleron and threw aside the improvised windbreak. Neither spoke, a nod to the lightening sky was enough. Dawn. It was only the dimmest of grey, seen between branches but, after the blackness, it felt like hope, light and the return of the world.

Hart felt like all the muscles of his body had been seized in a vice, it was a couple of painful minutes before they could unstiffen enough to get a purchase on the bank and climb it. Gaining the top, they stretched, un-kinking their backs, and took in the land, visible now, although not to any great distance. The wind had dropped and there was heavy mist that receded the spinnies away into a delicate calligraphy of narrow strokes, branches and thickets, increasingly pale with distance. Their breath steamed very slightly. Water dripped from the nodding rushes and spider webs gleamed with heir morning jewellery. A bracing morning to be out of bed early, wolfing down bacon on trenchers of bread and saddling for a hunt. Shivering damp and aching from tree roots, it was less charming.

They looked down at the watercourse that had nearly done them in. It was indeed a canal, fast and surprisingly narrow.

         'It's not the river,' said Hart, speaking for the first time.

         'No.'

It was not the river. There wasn't even any guarantee it would feed into the river. It might be a drain cut to pull flood water off the spit, it could be a channel to dump overflow into the marshes. It could curve around the wide flatland of reeds they had crossed last night and not connect to the dike or the pumping stations at all. That meant they were lost.

When disorientated in normal terrain, it is generally a good idea to follow water downstream. But in the great swampland basin, watercourses often meandered until they slowed and shallowed into lakes, leading deeper into fen.

         'What we need is a coracle, like the fowlers use,' said Aleron.

         'Wish us some breakfast while you're at it’ replied Hart, sourly.

They stood, at a loss. Up and with the blood moving, they felt a little less cold, but they were fearfully hungry. They wrapped their arms around their chests to keep their body heat in and gritted their teeth.

         'Maybe we should try shouting for help,' suggested Hart.

         'We're not shouting' snapped Aleron, 'I'm finding the shortcut to Minnow Fett myself or I'm dying here. And you're dying with me.'

         'Why do I have to die?'

         'It's your duty.'

         'Pff' said Hart.

Aleron stared through the mist. He knew the path that lead to the shortcut was somewhere ahead. It had to be, because they had crossed the canal on the northern side and there were thickets in front of them, shielding more open ground. That had to be the wide section of open flat and quicksand that the crossing went over. If they headed northeast, they'd hit it.

         'The river's in front of us,' he said, confidently, 'because we didn't cross it. So it loops away west along with the road. If we came off the dike more or less where we should-' Hart rolled his eyes at this '-then the shortcut is northeast.'

         'We're lost' said Hart.

         'We are not.'

         'Let's just go back.'

         'Back where? Do you know the way?'

         'We'd have to hit the dike sooner or later.'

         'This canal probably feeds from the reach.' Aleron had spent an hour listening to Stole on the barge and now considered himself an expert on matters of drainage. 'That means the river's to our left, it has to be. We don't know where the dike is, because of all the turns we took in the dark. Anyway, you want to swim back over?'

Hart looked at the cold water. He didn't. He wasn't dry, but he'd dried a little, and was loath to give that up. And the dike did curve away to the southeast. They might miss it and end up slogging into untracked swamp. Of course, the same could be true if they continued looking for Aleron's inappropriately termed 'shortcut'.

         'There'll be a plank bridge or something..' he said, unconvincingly, and Aleron pressed his advantage.

         'I'm telling you we can find it! It's marked by torches on the crossing saddle and there's a watchman's shack. We can see the sun now, so we know our direction. We can't miss it if we move parallel to the canal, angling northwards.'

         'A parallel angle is a contradiction in terms,' said Hart, but he was tired and sore and his head was killing him. It didn't seem fair to have to deal with Aleron in this condition. 'We'll try it your way,' he conceded, 'although it occurs to me that that's what we've been doing so far.'

         'We'll soon warm up, walking,' predicted his friend, 'and anyway, if you hadn't pushed me into the water in we wouldn't be having this problem in the first place.'

         'Me?'

Aleron magnanimously raised his hand. 'However, when encountering reverses in the field, it does little good for a leader cast aspersions on the person or persons responsible. Although the person or persons responsible is clearly you. The priority is to resolve the issue. So-'

         'If I had my sword I'd chop your head off and blame bandits' said Hart.

         'I will attribute that unmanly outburst to the trying circumstances' replied Aleron.

Hart massaged his brow, feeling the hangover pain throbbing in his abused grey matter. He took a breath, held it, then let it out, looking up at the clearing sky. Then he smiled pleasantly. 'Northeast' he said.

***

Sohbuk lay on his side on the kitchen step. With him was a little girl, about three years of age, hair braided into pigtails and wearing a somewhat white dress that stood out from her body like a calico bluebell, who was using him as a couch. She was conducting a debate between herself and a doll with a wooden head and a body that was stitched together from rags and coloured thread. Occasionally she would break from discussion to administer 'patting' to her companion, a process that involved conversation but also a great deal of climbing on him and tugging at his ears.

Sohbuk endured it with patience. He knew the rules; all humans, no matter how small, outranked all dogs, no matter how big. All humans within the family designation that was, or those who came up the crunching path, to attend court in the Big Room, in celebration of his kind and good master. The first were deferred to, the second, tolerated. But! For the wrong-smell ones? The ones who came unpermitted, creeping about in the dark? Biting! As a general principle, Sohbuk didn't like barking because he'd learned it gave them a chance to run and sometimes they climbed a tree or jumped into water before he could get at them.

Sohbuk knew the name of his master, 'Boll'. He knew lots of human names. He knew words too, such as 'stay', 'no!' 'goodog', 'badog', 'stupidog', 'findim' and 'guard', but, mostly, his association process was linked to scent. He didn't think of the strange-smell people the Smaller Mistress had ushered through the side lane last night, because that's not how his memory worked. They had been filed in his scent bank and, would return vividly when his nose reacquired them, along with the information that they were up to no good. Sohbuk liked almost all smells. Some made him angry, but that was good too. It was good to get angry and bite enemies. There were a small number that made him shake his head and sneeze and back away, chemicals and cleaners and such. Then there was one he didn't like, the smell that wasn't a smell, more like a vibration in his nose, although it wasn't a sound either. That one made his hair stand up and his tail tuck between his legs. It was the shivery wrongness he scented when he passed the big metal cleaver above the fireplace in the Big Room. That shouldn't be there, he knew, and he'd growl at it no matter how many times he was told not to. He'd sensed it sometimes, too, when they were out in the Big Country, and his master, being wise as well as strong, would stare in the direction of his hackle-raising, and find another path.

Now, he lay on the warming threshold of the back door and tolerated the Little Little Mistresses' attentions until authority returned for her. He also had an idea he was not to allow the child to wander. He'd once retrieved her, muddy and complaining, from all the way back at the garden fence, from whence she'd been making for the river. He had not been sure if this was proper, but had received praise and head-pats, so it turned out to have been correct. The Big Mistress liked small family members to remain inside the Territory and Sohbuk agreed with that. Small members were not ready to go out in the Big Country.

Sohbuk's mental universe was shallower than that of the humans, in that it had no framework for abstract thought. He did not think of the past or future in anything but the vaguest way, living sharply in the present. However, it was wider by other means. The sphere of his senses was far broader, and he paid closer attention to it, undistracted by the noisy introspection of the human mind. His hearing was superb, but hearing was for orientation and alertness, smelling was for understanding. From his current position, his nose could read the story of the entire house in detail. He knew who was in attendance and read the news of the day from the air that moved through the structure. He smelled the strong scents, of course, like the meat the Big Mistress was searing on the stove (was it Eating Time yet? He was quite sure it was Eating Time soon) but also the subtitles that unraveled in the train of the greater. As one of the maids stepped over him to re-enter the kitchen he smelled the intimate identity of her body, the sun on cloth, the river-fresh of water and mud – good smells, he liked the river – the watercress she had been picking, identifiable in themselves, but redolent of subtle detail within each. He could answer the questions 'who' and 'what' in a fundamental way no human could, but not 'how' and 'why'. He sniffed the doll Pelia pushed into his face for inspection and his nose told him of the thing's substance, but he didn't comprehend that the objects stitched together were supposed to be an abstraction of the human form, or why she was now burbling to him of it in words outside his lexicon. He didn't need to. He thumped his tail on the ground to show that he was paying attention and that was enough. There were no reasons. The world was written in a tremendous and inexplicable language, trembling, endlessly, on the moment of expectation.

The child held the doll up to him again. This time, he licked it, that seeming the polite response.

         'Don't let Sohbuk lick Glinda, precious,' said Meylia, from the table where she and Charisty were chopping vegetables, 'it's yucky.' But, as Pelia turned, the big dog took the advantage of proximity to lick her, getting the little girl a good one, right across the side of the face and leaving her sputtering and wiping dog spit.

         'Meylia! Sohbuku licked me!' yelled Pelia, but Meylia wasn't listening. 'Meylia!' 'Meyliaaa!'

         'What, sweetheart?'

         'Sohbuk licked me!'

         'Well don't let him!'

         'It seems to me,' said Charisty, 'that them fellows from the city aren't the only people around here that have disappeared.'

Charisty, and Meylia, two of the one of the Laughers' more permanent kitchen staff, were chopping, washing and preparing food upon a large bench. Their hands moved with the swift autonomy of long practice, apparently leaving their minds free to wander over gossip and current events. With them was a mule-skinny, jug-eared youth, his attention seemingly focused on some internal dialog that had him occasionally guffaw and exclaim a contextless word or expression. His clothes were plain and somewhat ragged. He had splintered clogs on his raw-boned feet, and on his chest, a fragment of paper could be seen, secured with a pin, as if some letter had been affixed there, since torn away. He was working, far less effectively than the girls, on shelling a large pile of peas.

At the far end of the kitchen, where the ovens glowered under their soot-blacked cowls, Boll's wife could be seen, working with the cook, skinning rabbits and skewering joints of meat for roasting and basting. From the mistress of the house emanated a constant, absent-minded humming, that occasionally surfaced into fragments of recognizable tunes. Now and then she'd sing out, issuing a constant stream of queries and requests across her domestic empire.

         'How's them marrows coming along, Charisty?'

         'Coming ma'am!' replied Charisty, 'another minute!'

         'Well, no one I know has' said Meylia.

         'Folks won't walk alone on the road from the ford, not even in daytime,' relied Charisty, her voice dropping. 'You don't know, because you're in Heggwot. There was those pilgrims that were walking the Vinrest from the mountains to the capitol, visiting the reliquaries. One of them got sick and they laid up here for a couple of days, and sent their baggage through to the ferry. Then they went. Then, a week later, we get word from the ferry house, 'when's them fellows coming to pick up their gear?' He said he'd had it for a week and was tired of holding it.'

         'They got lost, I expect. They weren't locals.'

         'And they leave all their luggage and just kept walking? Never. Silvertooth got them.'

Silvertooth was a bandit that had preyed on the region some dozen years ago. Since authorities had never been able to arrest him, his reputation had blurred into folk law, and he was now something between a conventional villain and a bogyman to scare children with. Meylia did not think much of the theory.

         'Pff' said Meylia.

         'Silvertooth! Silvertooth!' hooted the jug-eared youth.

         'Don't get him exited' said Melvia. 'You stick to your peas, you.'

Sohbuk looked up at the sound. Sometimes people working at the tables would throw him scraps and bones and Sohbuk took that to express not just the goodness of the individuals in question but the benevolence of the universe in general. It was Eating Time soon, surely.

         'And then there's the funny goings on' said Charisty.

Meylia sighed. If there was one thing she was tired of hearing about, it was the funny goings on. Apparently, there were no end of them. Fires had been seen on Bonfire Hicks and Wicked Tor, places no local would have set foot on, day or night. The maggot man, a strange figure that beckoned to travellers, as if asking for their help, had appeared on the lonely roads. When a wayfarer drew close enough to the apparition to make out its details, the figure was revealed to be made entirely of squirming worms. At the Chivilad store, a man in a tall hat had quarrelled with a shopman over some trifle. Evicted from the premises, the stranger drew a circle in the dirt of the road, and a demon, covered in blue hair, had leapt out of it, tucked the unfortunate shopkeeper under his arm, and ran with him thirty miles, cross-country, leaping over houses and tall trees with great bounds until, finally, depositing him in a stock pond and disappearing with a crack of thunder. Fish had been caught in the marshes with strange objects in their bellies and, at Strong Ox Fett, a white serpent, with three heads, had been found, coiled, in the reliquary font. Somewhat reducing the credibility of these alleged events, at least in Meylia's opinion, was the supposed facts never remained constant day to day. Sometimes the devil was red, sometimes the maggot man merely had worms for eyes, sometimes, the snake had one head, or there was no snake but a pale toad.

Meylia told herself she like a good tale as much as the next person. She didn't, having been terrorized for most of her childhood by her grandmother's ghost stories.

         'The little girl c-r-rept up to the window,' her grandma would whisper, 'and what do you think she saw?'

         'What?' little Meylia had asked.

         'An o-o-old lady, making necklaces with beads she took from a black pot. O-o-one by one, she threaded them on, as the little girl watched. Then she held them up to the firelight. And what do you suppose she saw then?'

         'What?' little Melvlia had asked, miserably, knowing she wouldn't like the answer.

         'The beads were human eyes!

         'And that poor fellow at Bell May' Charisty was going on. 'Set upon by invisible devils. They chewed off his ears, so they say.'

That was a new one. 'People talk,' said Meylia, 'and people make up stories, and they get drunk and wander into the marshes and drown. And sometimes they just light out and disappear for a few years.' She thought she might do that herself. 'You don't need wizards and whatnot to explain it all. Human stupidity and liquor will account for most of it.'

         'Still, 'said Charisty, 'it's uncanny. We should have the priests up here with their bells and prayers, to drum it out. It's a disgrace to have such goings on. Hello. Here's Himself.'

Down the connecting corridor from the great hall, the impatient bulk of the proprietor of the Laughers could be seen approaching, his face beetle-browed and distracted. Boll had been up since long before dawn. In fact, he hadn't slept. After the party had wound down and the building somewhat cleared, the breakage swept up and the pots and tankards scrubbed by weary staff, after the songs dimmed, with the fire, down to embers, and the king's men and those locals too drunk to go home had subsided into snoring, Boll had wandered the halls of his little kingdom, stepping over sleeping people and peering into darkened rooms like a fretful ghost.

He'd forced himself to go to bed but couldn't rest, tossing and turning besides his sleeping wife as the wind muttered in the chimney, ears straining for news of some trouble he couldn't explain. Thinking it might help, he hiked up her nightdress and climbed onto her. He rubbed his member, spat on it and pushed it in. Getting himself firmly mounted, he thrust briskly, hoping to harden up. He pulled her night shirt up to her chin and grabbed one of her heavy breasts, hearing her say 'mm' and stroke her heels on the back of his legs. Boll thought of the day's profits, the jangling coins, letters of royal credit and gold in his coffers, something that never failed to give him a rod of iron, but it didn't seem to be working. Was it even in? It was like trying to thread a needle with a boiled noodle. He pulled back with a curse. Useless.

         'Wassimater? she asked, sleepily.

         'Nothing. Go to sleep.'

Boll pulled on his clothes. He didn't know the time but felt it would be dawn soon. The house woke early, even if its customers took longer to snore off their liquor. Soon maids would be raking ashes into bags, setting new fires and warming ovens, and then? Something terrible. What did that unspoken feeling mean? He felt it but couldn't name it, like a maddening blank spot in his memory that bumped away from his fingers even as he reached for it. Boll stood still for a moment. Was he going mad? It was a thought alien to him, he who had always thought his mind as an edifice set on the firmest foundation. But is this what it was like? Is this how it started? There was something wrong that he knew must be obvious, that, in some way, he knew he knew- as he stood here - but simply could not bring to mind.

Unwanted, another memory came to him, a face of narrow features and uncanny toad-golden eyes, wearing a shaggy coat of reeds that made him seem like a thistle on stilts. And those legs, something was wrong about his legs and always had been. In fact, something was wrong about that man and always had been, his strange friend and secret benefactor.

I'll ask Sharpfoot, he thought. That was not a pleasant idea either but, at the thought of the man's name, the pressure seemed to ease and he could breathe again. He was working too hard. That was all. Anxieties were natural in a man of his responsibility. If there's something wrong, Sharpfoot'll tell me. That, too, seemed odd, like a thought from another man's head. Boll Gort was not a man to be told things. Still, he felt the weight on his mind relieve a little more and was able to settle in a chair in the recess above the stairs, to wait out the hours until morning. He's listened to the house beginning to wake in darkness, a clatter and soft noise of the kitchens coming to life and fires being laid. Soon a dim light was visible through the alcove's deep-bricked window.

The wood of the landing floor, he noticed, with annoyance, had recently been levelled out and the boards set back with new nails. It was his fat wife who insisted on constantly expending effort in renovating and improving the old house (the bottom storeys anyway), against Boll's wishes. Every time he turned around, things seemed to get a little better. Rooms that had been packed with junk and cobwebs for years had been mysteriously cleared and whitewashed. Old benches got sanded back and varnished, new cooking utensils appeared in the racks. Gradually, the lower reaches became more homely and respectable, even if much of the upper story was still, as Hart had observed, a wreck, with its structure reinforced only to the degree necessary for its function.

There was a reason for Boll's resistance to improvement, however. Boll didn't want to make this place too appealing to the kind of thief that could yank the whole thing out from under him, magic locks or no, and didn't want to sink capitol into anything he couldn't strip out of the shell and cart away. He did not own this place, except by common custom, which held that a man restoring an abandoned wreck by his own work had a right of occupation. What legally constituted 'abandoned' was the topic of debate. There was plenty of ways the big people could rob a man of what he got by hard work, and it was best not to tempt them by having too much of it in one place or displaying it too openly. The crooks who came to steal in the night were easy to deal with, but you couldn't set your dog on the law. And there were plenty of people who couldn't wait to drag you into court, to answer to some trumped-up suit, because all these high-class maggots were in it together. Boll knew. He had learned the hard way. And for this reason he was frequently heard to remark he'd rather burn the place down and go live as a robber than pay money to a lawyer again, whereupon those of his regulars who found themselves in earshot felt compelled to point out that he was a robber, the prices he charged for this pisswater.

Boll got out of his chair and stretched the stiffness out. Then he reluctantly went downstairs. He passed the corridor leading to the small side door, which, two decades earlier, he had forced with his shoulder. He had bricked the entrance up soon after taking occupancy, and opened a new one at the back, barred with oak. Strong doors with good locks were the one thing actually worth spending money on. Boll had five spelled locks, and five magic keys that he kept around his neck, purchased in secret from over the sea, such shenanigans being illegal here on account of the old king's anti-wizard mania. Two could only be disarmed by a password, whispered into its keyhole, as well as the key, and would slay any thief fool enough to pick them from the outside. The others battered themselves like bells to create alarms and locked the wooden frames they guarded to their doorjambs with some sort of invisible flexing of the wood that was almost impossible to jimmy. These last guarded his various inner sanctums, but first two were affixed to the front and rear. The most impressive of these was the Kingstone Fulmigator, which had come in a handsome, black lacquer box, inset with gilt edges and a card on which was written the secret word that ruled it, (with a stern instruction to commit the word to memory and burn the card). Pictured on the back was some ragged member of the underclass, attempting to force the gate of a prosperous townhouse and being transfixed with a bolt of lightning for his troubles. For obvious reasons, Boll had never tested the Fulmigator's reputed powers of thief-incineration, but he didn't need to. The thing was obviously uncanny. It hummed with a subtle vibration that made the dog growl, and was warm to the touch, even when there was frost on the trees and the puddles outside were rimmed with ice. The Fulmigator sealed the rear entrance, on the assumption that villains would be less likely to try to force the main one.

As he entered the kitchen, Boll's eyes alighted on the jug-eared youth, at the other end of the chamber. His expression darkened. Whatever forces work upon the innkeeper to make him round-girthed and jovial had only half worked on Boll. He was round-girthed.

         'What's that piece of baggage doing in the kitchen?' he snapped at his wife.

         'He says he doesn't know. He says he got here because he was chasing a bee.'

         'For God's sake.'

         'I don't think he's entirely in his right mind, poor fellow.'

         'Perhaps a crack over the head with my knobbly hawthorn will settle his brains,' said Boll, but his tone seemed to imply the suggestion could be taken more as a threat than a genuine offer of therapeutic treatment.

The simpleton had turned up the previous day, in the general press of arriving people, and had declined to leave. He'd seemed a little ragged, but not so much as to be refused entry, and was soon standing around, asking questions in a too-loud voice and persistently misunderstanding the answers. At some point he'd begun hooting 'Soup in a basket! Soup in a basket!' as if this was highest wit, and it became hard to get anything else out of him. It was soon apparent that he had no money or probable intentions of ever earning any but, by that time, he was a favourite of the increasingly rowdy crowd and Boll had other problems.

         'I don't know who's looking after him' said Boll's wife. 'He might wander into the swamp.'

         'He'll be pushed in the swamp in a minute, if he annoys my customers,' replied Boll. 'Just shove him out the door, he'll find his way home.'

         'His name's Lolly Straw.'

         'Don't learn his name!' yelled her husband in exasperation, 'and don't give him a job either. I don't want another stray around here.'

         'I didn't give him a job. I've got him peeling some peas, since he's at the back door anyhow. That's not a job.'

         'Set the dog on him, problem solved' ordered Boll, over his shoulder, as he headed towards the rear. 'See if he can run back to Mithtoad faster than Sohbuk can.'

Boll had two wives. One was fat and one was thin, but neither seemed to do what he told them. They lived entirely separate and hated each other on principle (well, the fat one did), but he suspected that if they met they would eventually join forces. Two wives were bad enough, two acting in concert was all he needed. He had only one family, though, at his public house, his marriage to his thin wife being more of a fiction that they could not now escape without drawing attention to its illegality. But that was another story and one he didn't intend to irritate himself with this morning.

As he came out the back, he noticed the mist had banked up in the country but seemed to have cleared around the dike, giving him an impression of being in an island, emerging from a sea of soft white.

His youngest daughter was here, supervising the dog, or vice versa, and playing with a doll. Boll had had children because he'd calculated that raising them to the age where they could work was moderately cheaper than hiring full-time employees, although the way his wife insisted on feeding them was making that a bust.

         'Daddy is very busy' said the child.

         'That's right, pumpkin. And he's surrounded by layabouts and hand-out merchants.'

         'They need a crack on the head wif a nobbly hawthorn,' said the little girl, and Boll was gratified to hear she was already picking up the basics of the service industry. What was her name again? Oh yes, Pelia.

         'Good girl,' he said, 'go find mama. Sohbuk! The black hound leapt up with such alacrity he nearly pitched Pelia off the step. 'Come!'

Although years had passed since the 'unpleasantness' Boll was still never entirely certain that his detractors might not attempt to put a sack over his head and carry him back to the capitol to face certain legal processes. For that reason, he never went anywhere outside his premises without a cudgel in his belt and Sohbuk trotting in his shadow.

Boll walked down the side of the house, and turned the corner before the gate. Here was a large garden his wife had established for vegetables and herbs, bracketed by a hedge to keep off animals. Hart's companion, of the night before, was loitering there. Leaning insolently on the sun-warmed wall, jet-haired and sharply pretty, was Boll's sea-eyed minx of a niece, Iolene. Without a word, she pulled a long-bodied key from the front of her dress and handed it to Boll, who added it to the others around his neck.

         'The king's dogs are going to tear the countryside up looking for his pups,' said Boll, but the girl did not reply. 'When did they leave?'

         'Third bell, maybe.'

         'You fucked them?'

         'How is that any of your business?'

         'I don't want you getting sentimental, is how it's my business. Women do.'

His niece pursed her lips at that, and blew wordless disrespect to the empty garden. Boll looked at her. 'Fine,' he said, 'disappear. Go to your family '

         'Aren't you forgetting something?' she asked innocently, and Boll felt a swell of unease. He was forgetting something. But he knew what she meant.

He pulled from his jacket a coin. Not an Uliginous coin in the king's half-baked currency, or a Tholian piece from over the mountains, it was something much more splendid. It was pure gold, circular but irregular about its edges, as if it had been a nugget, hot enough to be soft when it was stamped in its middle by some pincer-like machine. The imprint was of two serpents, coiled about each other and biting one another's tails, to form a double ouroboros, which encircled three pillars. On the other side, the sigil was of a woman's head in profile, crowned and stern-looking. Iolene took it in surprise and wonder. The coin was heavy, beautiful and altogether foreign.

         'Gold. There.' said Boll. 'Now keep your mouth closed and don't come back around here for at least a month.'

Boll came back to the side lane and headed back to the house, getting halfway back of the lane before something stopped him in his tracks. He turned to stare at Sohbuk, and Sohbuk gazed back, in attentive interest. His dog. Dog. Dogs. The king's dogs. The fear of something wrong, this time stronger, this time paralysingly stronger, gripped his chest. Money. Gold. The King's dogs. Something terrible. Wealth was the only safe harbor. Without money, a man was leaf to be blown about. A man needed eyes in the back of his head, a man-

There was come commotion in his house. He heard crashing, and men's voices shouting from within. Women's voices too, raised in apology and dismay.

It's starting, thought Boll.