The next morning she expected to be taken to see the owner, to be given an official job and permission to stay, but instead, Brightfeather lead her straight to the goats. The circus wasn’t open until the evening, but, he explained, the animals bought in a lot of coin. The goats were owned by the circus and used to help clear the roads as they moved. Between stops, they were set up in the petting area, and kids could pay a penny for a little bag of feed for them. They more than paid for themselves.
The goats required checking each morning for burrs or health problems, and then splitting into groups. The check also served a dual purpose, it kept them healthy, and it also kept them tame enough to handle.
Not all the goats were suitable for the petting area, and she had to separate those out. The herd was used to it so it wasn’t too bad, but if the wrong one got through and a child got bitten, she would be out on her ear.
She would spend the rest of the morning taking coins and handing out little bags of goat-nuts and handfuls of hay in return.
In the afternoons Brightfeather would take over and she was expected to help pick up litter, assist the stall owners, and generally make herself useful.
-
That first afternoon, after she had handed off the coin box to Brightfeather, she found herself helping out an old woman named Butterflies. It was an odd name, and she needed help re-waxing the roof of her wagon, too old to climb up on her own.
The caravans were all painted in different colours, and from above she could see how the circus was laid out, a city in miniature. The caravans were all made of wood, which seemed strange to her sensibilities, and they were all heavily painted and varnished in bright colours.
The size and shapes of them were mostly the same, the roofs gently curved, with a wide overhang on each side. Little steps down at the back and small windows to let in light.
She didn’t get to see inside, but the old woman had lived her whole life in there, she told Dreamspears. She had raised three children in that caravan, and had been travelling with the circus her whole life.
Dreamspears made a mental note to come back sometime later and have dinner with the woman, but not tonight.
The circus was a whole ecosystem, and she came to know it much better over the next few days, hanging out with the clowns and the acrobats, those who performed in the ring and those who maintained it.
The only class of circus people that she didn't meet were the scouts, already gone. They were always one city ahead, putting up posters and arranging essential supplies. They organised all the different things that the circus needed to function. Food for the animals, food for the people, food for the vendors.
She learnt this from Washesblack, who was being coached into becoming a scout at some point. The logistics behind it all were surprisingly complicated, and Dreamspears was glad she only had to contend with goats.
The goats were owned by the circus, but most of the animals were owned by the people who looked after them. The lizards (which, to her supreme disappointment, were not actually baby dragons) and snakes were owned by a man named Rushred, who would let nobody else touch or interact with them.
The winged cat had turned up one day, and nobody was sure where it had come from, but a small child named Snowblossom fed and brushed it daily. You couldn’t own a cat, but everyone agreed that she was its official caretaker.
The giant beast which pulled the biggest wagons was a draw in its own right, and she learnt it was called a Lumpox. The Lumpox was owned by the circus, but the same woman had been looking after it for almost thirty years. It had been taken from a place far, far away when it was only a babe, and they had never found another.
Nobody was sure how long its lifespan was, or if there were others of its kind, but the circus had a bounty out on any others, and posted it on the noticeboard of every inn and pub they passed through.
She wondered if it was lonely, but she wasn’t going to go near anything which could crush her in a single misplaced step.
-
After a few days, somebody had given her a brass token, which she could use to get in and out of the front gate without having to pay. It had a hole bored through it, and she hung it on a string around her neck, hidden under her shirt. It made her skin a little green, but she didn’t mind.
One of the other kids offered to escort her back to wherever she had been living and pick up her belongings, but she had nowhere to go and nothing to get.
Everything she owned was on her back, and anything she'd left behind would have been gone by the morning.
They decided to drag her into town anyway. She wasn’t yet being paid for looking after the goats, she wouldn't be paid until she had proven that she was going to stick around, but the other kids had gathered some money together to get her some new clothes.
She picked herself up a worn backpack and some better fitting clothing from a store off Brandle Street. The place was run by the Tailors Guild and catered to mending and reselling old clothing to the poor.
She hadn’t lived in this city all her life, having moved here when she was eleven, escaping the bad situation at home, but she had grown up here. The thought of leaving gave her a strange feeling in her stomach, but it wasn't a bad one, and walking around the familiar store was strange, the realisation that she would never see it again.
-
The circus was only in town for two weeks, and the day before they left was a whirlwind of packing. They were closed to the public, and at 5 am somebody prodded her awake, leaving her blinking in the dim pre-dawn light. She started by herding together her goats. Checking them over and making sure they were fed, glaring jealously at another kid who tried to help. Once she had them ready for the move, in the way Brightfeather had explained to her the day before, she set off to see who else needed help.
There was a dedicated team taking apart the big top. Some people checking and folding the waxed canvas, others stacking the light wooden benches together on the back of their dedicated cart. They folded down in some way she didn’t care to investigate, but she did stand and watch for a moment, until somebody shouted at her to go find something better to do.
She helped an old man check that all his chickens were locked in their little house. She helped a food vendor go through their small kitchen, locking up plates and cutlery in custom made cupboards and crates.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
After that, she helped one of the clowns shoo a group of teenagers away. They had snuck in through a gap in the hedge and were standing around gawking and getting in the way. They were her age, and she had seen them around the city on occasion. They liked to hang around the rougher parts of town and pretend they were hard, but they were well fed, and she knew they all went back to their homes at night.
By noon everything was packed and they were ready to get moving. It was amazingly fast, long practice and time pressure making the process efficient. Her goats were tethered to the back of a cart, near the end of the procession, and the animals were unbothered, used to the routine.
She clambered up onto the front of a cart with the old woman Butterflies, and they ate lunch together. The woman had spent the morning making stew and sandwiches from the leftover supplies they had no way of reasonably preserving. They were warm and greasy, and one of the best things she’d eaten in years.
After that, she said her goodbyes and trotted to the back of the line, where she would spend the next week. The Lumpox had already set off, and everyone else was following, but it would be late afternoon before her herd started moving. They were the last thing in the queue, and once they were out of the city she was to recruit Brightfeather’s help and let them graze on the sides of the road. She learnt that the government paid the circus a small stipend for this, yet another way the goats paid for themselves.
Behind her, there would be only a few people. Those who didn’t live on-site, instead preferring to spend their time in hotels or inns, and a small crew of Growers who would repair any damage they had done to the road. The Lumpox had big feet, and the iron-bound wheels churned up the ground as they went.
She had seen the procession coming into town two weeks before, the Lumpox followed by the massive carts containing the tents and benches. There had been jugglers and clowns and acrobats. There had been somebody tossing sweets into the crowd, and others giving out free tickets to drum up hype. She was a little sad she would miss that, arriving hours later, but she was glad of the peace.
She wasn’t unsociable, being a part of everything was a lot of fun, but going from a life on the streets, where she had to be wary of every interaction, to one where she was part of a huge… Family? Was that the right word? It was all a little overwhelming.
She was determined to stick with it though. She didn’t want to go back to cold doorways and other people's boots in her ribs. She hadn’t seen much of Berrygreen since that first night, but he smiled at her when he saw her around, and it made her happy.
Plus, she couldn't abandon her goats now! If they had names, then nobody knew them. There were almost twenty of them, and they had been looked after by a long procession of different teenagers. As long as they got fed and they were in good health, that was all anyone cared about.
Brightfeather had been stuck with the job when their previous caretaker had disappeared, roughly two months ago. They weren't dead, the other kids had followed up on it, they’d simply decided to leave. Rumour was he’d lost his heart to a handsome young man, and everyone wished him well. If she stuck around for longer than they had then she would get paid, but until then, the others looked after her.
That night they didn’t stop, walking on through the night. Sometime around midnight Washesblack took over goat duty, and in return she took over for Butterflies, letting the old woman get some sleep.
Early next morning they reached their first stop, and everyone got a few hours of rest, including the poor goats. In the early afternoon ponies and horses were swapped out, and the whole thing started all over again.
It took them almost a week to reach the next city, and the journey through the thick jungle was strange to her. There was a rainstorm on the third day, where everyone hunkered down under the cart overhangs and she mostly left the goats to fend for themselves. Once they reached the city everyone would re-varnish and check the wood of the carts, but they were well made and one rainstorm wouldn't destroy them.
-
Arriving in the new city was fun. It was a place she had never been before, and was named Popshire. Cities always had such weird names. It was smaller than their previous stop, but still impressive to her.
Pophire didn’t have what was referred to as a Dragon Park, so the circus set up in some grassy fields on the outskirts of town. The streets were too narrow for them to do a procession with the Lumpox, but the acrobats and clowns had gone out, dancing and handing out sweets.
Her goats had weathered the walk well. They were tired and glad of the rest, but mostly in good health. They had grazed well on the way, and it didn’t take her long to set up their pen and shelter.
-
It was late afternoon by the time she was done, and she and Brightfeather collected the child Snowblossom, and together they set out to explore the city. None of them had any money to spend, but she had long ago gotten used to that, and they could always window-shop.
The city was strange. She was used to the greenways of her home, long terraces of connected houses, their roofs forming streets that anyone was welcome to use. They functioned as a second and third set of streets, and she had never considered a city without them. Here, just a week distant, people were confined to the ground along with the horses and traffic. Each roof was fenced off from those around it, and only accessible from within the houses. It was quite a culture shock, and to her, it gave the city an oppressive and claustrophobic feeling.
Brightfeather agreed with her, having grown up somewhere similar. “I guess only doorways?” was his response to Dreamspears’ musing on where the homeless slept, “weird. Wouldn’t like to live here.”
Dreamspears nodded in agreement. The few homeless she’d seen had looked harried and worn, and she wondered what other things this city had going on.
Snowblossom was oblivious to all this. She was seven years old, and completely taken in by the shops and stalls. She had been born in the caravan she called home and had never lived any other way, so every trip to the city was one of wonder.
Together they steered her around the fanciest shopping district, peering into glass windows and laughing and lifting her up so she could see better, despite her protests.
-
If you’re gonna window-shop, you may as well do it in style! They admired rings set with precious gems and alchemical mixtures which promised all sorts of varying effects, some of which couldn’t be real surely. They passed shops selling perfumes and soaps, the smell of which seemed to linger on them just from passing.
They stopped at one open-fronted shop to watch a Changer at work, the mage adding delicate patterns to the previously bare arm. The three of them cooed and admired as the bright lines and colours seemed to be drawn out of the skin itself, until the artist stopped and shouted at them to move on.
They ran off giggling, and discussing what they would have if they could afford that sort of work. Snowblossom wanted patterns shaped like flowers, all up both arms. Brightfeather wanted intricate geometric designs. Dreamspears suggested the designs should be shaped like angular feathers, to match his name, but the older boy wasn’t into it.
For herself, she decided on leaves, coating her skin like camouflage. With that, she could hide anywhere overnight and nobody would see her!
Giggling and laughing, they made their way back to the circus. Snowblossom’s mother had given her a penny, so they bought a bag of sweets and ate them together on the way back.
-
The Lumpox had arrived the night before, and the workers had spent most of the morning setting up the big tent and arranging the carts and wagons. It was even faster to get everything set up than it was to square it all away, and Dreamspears was impressed by how quickly it all came together. They would take tomorrow for break and rehearsals, and then the day after the circus would open to the public again.
Evening coming on, she went back to check on her goats.
One of them was a little lame on a back leg, and she and Brightfeather mooched around the circus until they found somebody who could help. One of the older clowns was a man named Salamandershield, and he offered to show them what to do. It was a proper mouthful of a name, and he was one of the only people she’d ever met who used a short-name for their short-name. Everyone called him Sal or Shield, and with practised motions, he showed the two of them how to clean the goat's feet. She had a large stone wedged between her toes, and he showed them how to pry it out without hurting her, the goat bleating in indignation the whole time.
After that, he went back to practising his routine and the two of them went over the rest of the herd with soapy water and a brush, but found no other issues.
With all the goats clean and brushed, Dreamspears lay back on the warm grass with her arms behind her head, watching the sunset.
Life was pretty good. She could get used to this.