Orson Card - Hart's Hope

Orem nodded at the boy who spoke, the only one who looked to be about Orem's own age.

"I suppose you don't want to grab just one."

Orem shrugged. Not good to label himself a coward. "Whichever way you want it."

"One then. And heave it right in the middle." The older boy didn't bother watching him—he had to keep flipping keeners back into the water in the middle of the pit.

Orem held the mouth of the bag with one hand and used the other to squeeze the bag between the rats. The one in the dead end of the bag he sealed off by holding the bag between his knees at that point. Then he carefully worked the bag smaller until the rat at the open end was tightly trapped and squealing so it could not move. Carefully Orem manipulated the rat until its back was to the mouth of the bag. I may get piss on my fingers but it's better than teeth.

Carefully he opened the mouth against the resistance of the fingers of his other hand and probed the body of the rat until he found a back leg. Then he released the mouth of the bag and pulled on the rat all at once, and with a single motion flicked it out into the snakes.

If he had hoped for a murmur of admiration he was disappointed. The rat landed near the middle of the pit, but immediately the boys were watching the performance of their snakes. The keeners went dead silent and the rat hung between the mouths of a dozen snakes, all of which had a hold. The rat hardly had time to squeal, it had so much poison in it: blood spurted from its mouth, vomiting forth from the deepest part of its bowel, and then it was just fur and mange and meat. The snakes struggled and pulled, and the rat fell apart. Some snakes came away with nothing, some with patches of fur, and finally there were two snakes left attached to the rat, both swallowing furiously until they met fang to fang, jaws distended by the rat they held.

The two boys whose snakes were thus joined hooted congratulations to each other. They had won the first part of the contest. It was the end of their snakes' part in the proceedings, however, for now the other snakes began howling and snapping at them. Keeners are not easily poisoned by their own venom, but with a dozen bites they began to sicken, and with a hundred bites they died. Now the other snakes began biting and trying to eat everything. Some of them died with the body of another keener halfway into their bellies; some died with nothing; and at the end of it, when all was still, the boys came nearer to take a tally. Which of the snakes had swallowed how much of the others?

Orem tried to decipher what the game meant. Those whose snakes were off alone, neither eaten nor eating, apparently were out of things—they grumbled and wandered off. The rest of the boys estimated how deeply a snake had been swallowed before it died, and the boys paired off according to the pairing of the keeners, always with one boy triumphant, the other grim-faced. For the first time it occurred to Orem that none of these boys had money. What was the wager, then? What was the forfeit for those who lost?

"Yours most eaten," said the oldest boy to a younger One. "Chew yourself," said the loser. "It was a short snake."

"I said chew yourself. Yours is most eaten."

Orem looked at the snakes and thought the younger boy might well be right. He also thought that unless the forfeit was something dire, it wouldn't be worth arguing the point, for the older boy had an air of cheerfulness that was frightening.

"I say not."

The younger boy looked frightened, but still defiant. "I didn't come here to get cheated by a chewer like you," he said loudly. The other boys began backing away.

"Not I," said the older boy. "I think not I. I say not I. You say it too. Not I."

"Not I!"

Now a touch to the chest, a step back, a shove, a step. Orem had seen the look on the older boy's face before—it was the faces of Cressam and Morram and Hob when they thrust him into the haystack to burn him alive.

"Hop, it's nothing," said Flea. Who was Hop? Was Flea trying to placate the older boy or reassure the younger one that losing to him wouldn't be too bad? Orem couldn't tell, for neither boy gave a sign of hearing. The argument was no longer about the snakes. It was about who would do the other one's will.

And then it ended. The younger boy pushed back, just once, and the older one had him by the hands and flipped him pitward in one motion. At first Orem was only sickened at the thought of landing on the corpses of the snakes. Then he discovered that the keeners were not dead. They were only sluggish, only quiet. When the boy landed on the snakes in the water, some of them came alive, quickly enough that the boy came up with five or six snakes dangling from him. Orem could not help himself—he screamed with the boy's own terror. Bad enough the fangs puncturing the skin like sewing needles, but the one snake hung from his eye as if it had grown from there. The boy doubled over and seemed to vomit all the blood of his body. Then he dropped and lay still as the rat had lain, with the snakes fruitlessly trying to open their mouths wide enough to swallow him whole.

For some reason all Orem could think of was the Hound taking Glasin Grocer's shoulder in its maw and tearing away at the flesh. Yet this was no such worthy sacrifice. The boy was acrawl with snakes that fondled him with their bodies and tickled him with their darting tongues, yet Orem could not turn away.

"Seen enough?" Flea asked softly.

Orem could not speak.

"We go now," said Flea, "or we don't get out of the Swamp alive, it's that short. Coming?" "In High Waterswatch," Orem said, "we wrestled and spun tops. That's how we played."

Orem followed Flea out of the Swamp, hearing the wails of the keeners behind him all the way. Only when they reached the shanties did Orem realize he was still holding the bag with the rat.

Impulsively he swung it hard against the wall of a house.

"Name of God!" cried Flea. "What are you doing?"

"Is the rat so precious to you?" Orem asked.

"Not the rat, Scant, the house. If you break a hole in their wall, you might as well have killed

them come winter, if they can't find a patch."

The house was sacred, but a boy could die for nothing in the Swamp. Orem handed Flea the bag. Flea turned it upside down and let the rat out. The animal was not dead, but the blow against the wall had left it dazed. It lurched drunkenly forward. Flea aimed a kick at it and sent it flying thirty

yards, wriggling in the air as it flew.

"What was the forfeit?" Orem asked. "For the boys who lost."

Flea shrugged. "Just a little game of plug-the-hole. Hop shouldn't have argued. He has a sister to

pay it for him."

"Do you have a sister?" asked Orem.

"No," Flea said. "But I don't lose." He grinned. "I'm a good judge of keeners."

"Why do you do it?" Orem asked. "Why do you play so close to dying?"

Flea shrugged. "It's who I am."

The Secret of the Fountain

Orem insisted he could find his own way home from Wood Road, and they parted, planning to meet in the morning to continue Orem's search for work. Orem had one errand to run before returning to the inn. He found his way through the darkening, emptying streets to the Little Temple, and a halfpriest showed him the fountain where strangers always came.

The fountain wasn't much. No one asked him to pay or even wanted a gift; he went to the fountain and poured out his flask of spring water. He wasn't sure what prayer it was they said here, so he murmured a prayer for his father, then dipped the flask again to take up the sacred water that Glasin had told him was so valuable.

Before he left, he looked into the water to see how the fountain was filled, to find the place where the water of spring came in. He looked for a little while before he realized there was no such place. It was just a pool, not a fountain at all. He poured out the water untasted. The fountain was filled by all the visitors to Inwit, who left the water of their home behind and took away nothing of Inwit at all, but just the half-evaporated gifts of the other fools. A fraud, of course, a cheat. Orem almost spat into the water, but stopped when he remembered that the next visitor did not deserve any harm from him. He could have shared his water with Flea, if he had known. That's what made him angriest, that he had been ungenerous with his water.