“What’s the North like?” The Nuban girl wasn’t so easily deflected.

I tipped the amphora to my mouth, gulping wine while I held my hand out at a steep angle. “Like that.” I wiped my lips. “Only icy. All the northmen slip to the coasts, where they congregate in miserable villages smelling of fish. It gets very crowded. Every now and then a bunch more come sliding down from the hills on their arses and the only place for the ones closest to the shore is on a boat. And off they sail.” I mimicked a ship’s progression across the waves. I gave Lula my amphora. “Those horns on their helms?” I made myself two horns, a hand to each side of my head. “Cuckold’s horns. The new arrivals are bouncing abed with the wives left behind. Terrible place. Don’t ever go there.”

A small girl and small boy came out to sing for us, a remarkable pair with high clear voices, and even the elephant moved closer to listen. I had to shush Cherri to hear uninterrupted when the children sang “High-John,” but I let her giggle through their rendition of “Boogie Bugle.” Without warning their voices soared into an aria that drew me back to Father’s opera. They sang it sweeter and with more heart, but still the world seemed to close about me and I heard those screams in the fire. And beneath those screams my memory ran a deeper sound, something heard but at the time not understood, a different kind of howling. The roar of something angry rather than scared.

“Enough.” I threw a cushion at them. It missed and the elephant snagged it from the ground. “Scram!” The little girl’s lip wobbled for an instant and they both fled.

“. . . ‘give them what they want, dears.’ That’s all he says. With Taproot it’s all hips and tits. There’s no art in it for him.” Lula looked up at me over her clay goblet, seeking affirmation.

“Well, to be fair, Lula, you are mostly hips and tits,” I said, a slight slur to my words now.

They giggled at that. The combination of a title and freely flowing wine will have people laughing at anything you offer up as funny, and I’ve never once complained about it. A sharp oath rang out from the direction of Varga’s wagon. I put an arm around Cherri, another around Lula, and drew them close. Enjoy the world while you can, I say. A shallow enough philosophy by which to live, but shallow is what I’ve got. Besides, deep is apt to drown you.

The first evening stars watched me being taken for a guided tour of the dancers’ wagon, supported on either side by Cherri and Lula, though who was doing the most supporting would be hard to say. We tumbled inside and strange to say that in the dark nearly everything we wanted to do required three pairs of hands.

• • •

In the dead of night a commotion interrupted proceedings within the dancers’ wagon. At first we ignored it. Cherri was making her own commotion and I was doing my best to help. We ignored it until the wagon’s rocking stopped dead, moving Cherri to draw breath. Until that point I’d heard little above her exclamations and the creaking of axles and supports.