Cross CHILDREN Walk
Esther M. Friesner
"And how was your work day, dear?" Garth asked his wife. He meant well.
"You know how it was!" Zoli flung her spoon down into the dish of Seven Berry Surprise pudding. Sugary globs splattered everywhere. "Nothing's the same since the water-dragon disappeared. No excitement, no adventure. I spend my days hoping someone will fall in, just so I could rescue them, but the Iron River's so sluggish it'd be as thrilling as fishing kittens out of a washbasin. I hate my job!"
"For Gnut's sake, Zoli, it's not like anyone's forcing you to be a crossing guard."
As soon as the words escaped his lips, Garth regretted them. He clamped his hands over his mouth, but too late. He'd done the unthinkable: He'd spoken his mind to his wife. He was doomed.
Zoli rested one still-muscular arm on the dinner table and leaned towards him with that look in her eye. He knew that look. It was the same one he'd seen when they'd first met, right before she decapitated the Great Ogre of Limpwater, thereby saving Garth's bacon.
"Well," she said in a deceptively soft voice. "And have we, perhaps, forgotten why I became a crossing guard in the first place?"
"No, dear," Garth mumbled. "It was the only job for you in this town." He did not add Besides keep house. He knew better. He'd been married to Zoli for twenty years, but he still recalled how she'd dealt with the Great Ogre, and he was still very much attached to his bacon.
"Oh, so you do pay attention. And why is it that I, Zoli of the Brazen Shield, have no other job opportunities?"
"Because—because you scare people hereabouts."
"So I do. Which means no one in this dratted little backwater will employ me for labor befitting a grown woman. I've seen the blacksmith and the carter and the rest all eyeing the strength of my arms and back, but I know what they're thinking: 'I'd love to have her toil for me, but if it doesn't work out, where will I ever find the balls to fire her?' That is what they say of me, isn't it?"
"Nearly." Garth had indeed overheard his fellow townsmen discuss Zoli's unexploited strength in those very words, with one exception: They didn't worry about where to find the balls to fire her so much as where they'd find their balls after they fired her. So far the most popular theoretical answer that had come up during open debate at the Crusty Boar was "Up a tree." "Down your throat" ran a close second.
Zoli tilted her chair back and swung her feet up to rest among the dinner dishes. Old habits died hard, and most of hers had been formed in the barrack room, the war camp, and the forbidden temples of half a dozen assorted snake gods. "So I am a crossing guard, for want of any better employment, because I fell in love with you and you insisted on retiring here."
"It's my home town," Garth defended himself. "Anyway, you made me retire and settle down when you got pregnant!"
"Are you saying it's my fault I'm unhappy?" Zoli had that look in her eye again. Garth shut up fast. "It was different when the kids were small," she continued. "But now they're grown and gone it's either mind the ford or go mad with boredom." She sat up straight and began chunking her dagger into the tabletop slowly, methodically, and with a dull viciousness born of deep frustration. "Why did the dragon have to vanish? While he was here, the townsfolk respected me because I protected their brats. But now? Kids learn from their parents. Some of them lob spitballs at me, others make snide remarks about how tight my armor fits. Which it does, but they don't have to say so."
Garth came around the table to stand behind his wife, his hands automatically falling to the task of massaging tension from her shoulders. "You know, sweetheart, maybe the problem isn't that you're a crossing guard, but that you're a school crossing guard."
"Tell me about it," she grumbled.
"I could have a word with Mayor Eyebright, get you a transfer to the toll bridge."
"Like that would be so much more exciting." She shrugged off his kneading hands impatiently and stuck a heaping spoonful of pudding in her mouth.
Garth frowned. "I'm trying to help. On the bridge, you wouldn't have to deal with those snotty kids."
Again Zoli slammed her spoon into the pudding, this time splattering herself and her husband, except she was too worked up to notice. "When have you ever known me to run from any battle?" she demanded. "Even one for these yokels' respect? I may have let my membership in the Swordsisters' Union lapse, but I've still got my professional standards. I will not surrender!" This said, she flopped back down into her chair and ate what little Seven Berry Surprise pudding was left in her dish.
And I will never again ask how your day was, Garth thought as he too resumed his seat and tucked into his dessert. They finished their meal in silence.
Meanwhile, at the far end of town, Mayor Eyebright was enjoying his own dinner while at the same time doing what he did best, namely ignoring his wife and seven children. His evening monologue droned on and on, not only between mouthfuls of food but straight through them.
"Oh, what a day I've had!" he sighed, stuffing half a slice of bread into his cheek and keeping it there while he talked. "There was a terrible dust-up at the Overford Academy, a faculty meeting that ended in a scuffle and eviction. They actually summoned the town patrol! Why a bunch of wizards can't police themselves . . . I mean, we're paying them more than enough to teach our children, so why can't they hire their own security force instead of coming running to me every time there's a body wants booting into the cold-and-cruel? Do they think the patrol works for free? Those bloodsuckers charge the council extra for hazardous duty, which includes ejecting wizards. They claim that it takes five men working as a team to subdue one wizard. Five! A likely story. And what was it all about, I ask you? Tenure. Bah! Why should a frowzy bookworm be guaranteed a job for life? I say that the more of 'em get yanked off the academic titty, the better men they'll be."
"Master Porfirio's not frowzy!" little Ethelberthina objected.
A gasp of astonishment gusted from the other members of Household Eyebright. An octet of horrified stares fixed themselves on the youngest daughter of the house, a pert, plump lass of twelve summers. Ethelberthina met her family's collective gawk with the same cool self-possession that had caused all of her teachers to write "A young woman who exhibits many potential leadership qualities. If you don't beat them out of her, I will," on her progress reports.
"Ethelberthina, how dare you interrupt your father!" Goodwife Eyebright exclaimed.
"Oh, poo," said the unnatural child, crossing her arms and looking for all the world like a tax assessor. "Dad should know the real story about the fuss at school. Those old buzzards said they fired Master Porfirio for inapt morals, but the truth is he talked back to the dean."
"If he talked back to someone in authority, he got what he deserved," Mayor Eyebright opined, giving the girl a meaningful look. What it meant was: Don't push your luck.
"Poo," said Ethelberthina a second time. "Our philosophy master taught us that authority without virtue merits no obedience. Anyway, it all depends on what he talked back to the dean about, doesn't it?"
Mayor Eyebright had long known that Ethelberthina was nothing like her two elder sisters. Mauve and Demystria were normal females, properly deferential. The closest Ethelberthina ever came to deference was knowing how to spell it correctly. Still, a father's duty was to make all his girls into proper women. He had to try.
"You know, Ethelberthina," he said slowly, "you are a very exceptional girl."
Ethelberthina knew what that meant. She stood up from the table with the weariness of Here we go again upon her. "Another trip to the woodshed?"
Mayor Eyebright shook his head. "Not this time. No sense beating a dead horse. Thus, instead, I will be removing you from Overford Academy soonest."
"What?!" For the first time in her young life, Ethelberthina was actually attentive to her father's words.
"No need to thank me. I'm merely correcting an honest mistake for which I blame no one but your mother. And her meddling old Granny Ethelberthina. It was that woman who insisted we put you to school." Here he gave his wife a reproving look.
Goodwife Eyebright, pregnant with Number Eight, murmured almost inaudibly into her vanished lap, "You didn't have to do what Granny said, dear."
Her husband scowled. "Of course I did; she was rich! I refused to risk offending her until she was safely dead and our inheritance secured." His scowl shifted to his youngest daughter. "Sneaky old cow."
"Daddy, I did say I'd share Great-granny's money with you as soon as I'm old enough to get it out of the trust fund," Ethelberthina said sweetly. "And so I will . . . if I remember. Master Porfirio once taught that a broken heart affects the memory, and I would be so heartbroken if you took me out of school!"
"There," Mayor Eyebright said bitterly. "That's what comes of educating females: Flagrant displays of logic at the dinner table! Well, my girl, you may be your great-granny's sole heir, with the money held in trust until you're sixteen, but the king's law says that if you marry before then it becomes your husband's property when you do. Perhaps you follow my reasoning?"
Ethelberthina's face tensed, but she maintained a brave front. "You'd force me to wed some local lout, except first you'll make sure he signs you a promissory note for most of my trust fund."
Her father smiled. "You are a smart child."
"Smart enough. The king's law still requires a consenting bride, and I won't."
Mayor Eyebright looked casually up at the ceiling. "Dear," he said, "how much more is sixteen than twelve?"
"Four," she answered, suspicious of this arithmetical turn in the conversation.
"Four years, four years . . ." he mused, tapping his fingertips together. "Four long, exhausting, years. Four empty years just waiting to be filled with all sorts of things that can make a young woman—even a young woman of your feminine shortcomings—more than a little eager to become a bride. Anyone's bride, as long as marriage means escape." He leaned forward with a wolfish smile.
Ethelberthina's lip trembled, but in a wobbly voice she still defied him: "I'll run away!"
"I doubt it. You're wise enough to scrape away the rind of romantic folderol from the harsh facts of existence. I needn't tell you what sort of life you'd lead in the wide world at your tender age with neither money nor skills."
Ethelberthina lowered her eyes and bowed her head over her plate. Her father allowed the full impact of this sudden quiet to settle in securely over his family. When he was satisfied with the depth and immobility of the subservient hush, he announced, "You will finish out the semester—only a week left, no sense in wasting tuition—but when that's done you will return to a young woman's proper occupations. That's all." With that, he resumed his dinnertime discursion as if the exchange with his daughter had never occurred. The girl herself ate her dinner a little more slowly and quietly than usual. This added weight of silence on Ethelberthina's part was duly noted and pleased her father no end.
As many an equally thick soul before him, Mayor Eyebright had decided that silence meant surrender. He did not know his daughter well at all.
To anyone else it was a nasty, huge, stinking, half-eaten corpse of draco aquaticus, or the common water-dragon. To Master Porfirio it was a welcome diversion from his own dark thoughts. He had discovered the body quite by accident, as he wandered aimlessly downstream along the riverbank, kicking at clumps of reeds and muttering many curses against the faculty of Overford Academy. No one was more surprised than he when he came eye-to-empty-socket with the deceased monster, despite the fact that the fumes of its dissolution were strong enough to peel the paint from passing rivercraft. Like most wizards, Master Porfirio had destroyed his sense of smell over the course of hundreds of alchemical experiments gone awry.
There was nothing wrong with his sense of sight, however. "So that's what became of you!" he exclaimed, scrutinizing the sad remains.
There was nothing apparently extraordinary about the body. Like others of its kind, the late water-dragon of the Iron River consisted of a disproportionately large, horse-like head attached to a long, sinuous, finned body. It was not an attractive creature, barring the scales which were the shimmery green of summer leaves. Master Porfirio tugged one loose with surprising ease and scrutinized it closely.
"Not even a hint of silvering," he told the corpse. "You were a very young monster. Whatever you died of, it wasn't age."
He tucked the telltale scale into his pocket and ambled along that portion of the body which did not trail off into the river. "Incredible," he said, noting the way in which the soil had been churned up around the creature's corpse. "You beached yourself before you died, and it looks like you were in a lot of pain. But pain from what? There's the question."
He paced up and down one side of the body, then leaped over the beast's back to check the other. It no longer seemed to matter to him that he was unemployed and as badly beached as the dead dragon, with only a few coins in his purse and no letter of recommendation for a new position. A dedicated scholar, Master Porfirio was easily distracted from his own troubles when confronted with an intriguing mental puzzle such as this.
"Not a mark on you. Nothing except for these old scars the crossing guard gave you, and that was over two years ago. I guess she scared you, too. Gnut knows, she scares everybody. Loud sort of female, I think her daughter Lily studied Advanced Alchemy with old Master Caromar before he died and Dean Thrumble gave his own idiot son the post. Over me. As if that incapable clod could complete even one experiment without botching it horribly! At least I know better than to dump my mistakes in the river. I don't care if it did get me fired, I'm glad I took a stand against him at the faculty meeting! Someone had to."
The burden of bitterness on his soul elbowed out Master Porfirio's scholastic interest in deducing the water-dragon's doom. Taken up by his own words, he leaned against the creature's flank and relieved his spirit to an audience of one, and that one dead. "I suppose that when that moron graduates to blowing up parts of the school, someone else might object to his inept antics, but I doubt it. Not with my fate such a fresh example of the price one pays for truth-telling. Bah!"
In his wrath, Master Porifirio brought his fist down hard on the water-dragon's back. To his shock, the scales crumbled on impact and his hand sank up to the wrist in deliquescing flesh. Uttering an exclamation of disgust, he shook off most of the goo and hastened to wash the rest away in the river.
"How very odd," he murmured as he knelt by the water, scubbing his hand. "Dragon scales are the hardest substance known, resistant to all save the keenest blades, and then only when wielded by expert hands. Perhaps they turn brittle when the beast dies? Hmm, no, if that were so, there wouldn't be a waiting list seven leagues long of king's guardsmen ready to pay top price for dragon-scale armor, to say nothing of the ban on selling it to—ouch!"
The disemployed mage yanked his hand out of the river and stared at it. The skin, once the pasty hue favored by pedagogues everywhere, now looked as dark as if its owner had soaked it in walnut juice. It had also developed a number of ugly boils of a size not seen this side of a troll's rump. His other hand, however, retained its original aspect. His glance darted from one to the other with a growing expression of bafflement and dismay.
Master Porfirio was no slowcoach. On the great chalkboard of his brain an alarmingly simple equation was rapidly being posted and solved. He looked from his hands to the dead water-dragon to the water, then upriver, to where the thatched roofs of Overford Academy and its attendant town bided in unsuspecting peace.
"Oh dear," he said. "I suppose I should go back and inform the authorities. I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
Ethelberthina Eyebright was on her way to school when she happened across the battered body of her former alchemy teacher in the alley behind the Crusty Boar. "Goodness," she told the corpse. "When Dean Thrumble terminates someone, he doesn't fool around."
She was about to continue on her way when the corpse groaned and rolled over, sending a pair of honeymooning rats scurrying off. "Master Porfirio?" Ethelberthina knelt and gently touched his shoulder.
"It's me; I wish it weren't." The banged-up wizard pulled himself to a sitting position against the alley wall. "Is that you, Ethelberthina? Hard to see after one has been punched in both eyes more than necessary."
"Yes, sir," the girl replied dutifully. "What happened? I thought you'd left town."
"I almost left existence." Slowly and painfully he got to his feet, groaned, stretched his battered bones, then asked, "Child, do you love your father?"
...
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