City of Lies - Lian Tanner [30]
Goldie inspected the cake. It looked nice enough. She took a bite and immediately spat it out again. “There’s hair in it!”
“No there’s not,” said the man. And he trotted back into his shop, chortling loudly.
Nearly everyone Goldie saw was wearing a mask, and many of them wore huge, elaborate costumes as well. A group of people dressed as the Seven Gods capered in the middle of the road. Great Wooden attacked passersby with a papier-mâché hammer. The Weeping Lady laughed. The Black Ox (which was really just two boys in costume) lay down in the middle of the street and rolled on its back like a puppy.
They’re mocking the Gods! Goldie thought nervously. And none of them are even flicking their fingers!
But gradually she realized that what Pounce had told her was right. During the Festival, everything was turned back to front and upside down. Women were disguised as men and men were disguised as women. They staged pretend battles in the street, or walked everywhere backward, or dressed as plague victims and collapsed on the cobblestones, groaning horribly. They fell in love with stray dogs, and when the dogs barked at them, they cried, “Oh, my beloved, how sweetly you sing!”
The cat stalked through it all with an air of calm superiority. But the nameless streets and the noisy, surging crowds soon had Goldie completely lost. She stopped on a corner and stared around in frustration.
“I’m trying to find the street where I saw that mask stall,” she said to the cat.
The cat gazed up at her. “Hhhhow?”
“Exactly. How?” said Goldie, who was growing used to the odd way the cat talked to her. “Everything’s changed. I can’t trust anything!”
In the back of her mind, the little voice whispered, This way.
Goldie smiled. It was true that she couldn’t trust anything in this mad city while the Festival lasted. But she could trust what was inside her.
This way, whispered the little voice again, and within ten minutes it had led her where she wanted to go.
The street in question was even more crowded than it had been the day before yesterday. A man sat in a second-story window, banging saucepans with a giant spoon. The noise was awful. “Maestro!” screamed the crowd. “More, more!”
Several people offered Goldie delicious-looking cakes and drinks, but she refused them all. She and the cat walked up and down the street twice before they found the stall they were looking for.
There was a crush of people around it, grabbing at the different sorts of masks that were for sale. Quignog, horse, dog, cockerel, slommerkin … and cat. The buyers shouted and laughed at each other. An argument erupted between a dog and a slommerkin. Goldie squeezed past them and found herself pressed against a wooden table.
The young woman who owned the stall was holding on to it, trying to stop it from wobbling. People thrust coins at her and she snatched at them one-handed. The coins fell past her fingers and rolled to the ground.
“Roughly now,” she cried, her voice anxious. “Jiggle the table, please, and throw your money anywhere you like. Don’t worry about me and my livelihood.”
Goldie stared at her. Why was she saying such things? Surely she didn’t mean them!
Then she realized. Everything the stall owner said was a lie. She was really begging her customers to be careful.
But her customers took no notice. They pushed and jostled and bumped. The table rocked. The pile of dog masks teetered … and fell.
They were only papier-mâché, and they would have been crushed underfoot in an instant. But Goldie dived toward them and grabbed them just in time. She was pressed from every side, but she kept hold of the masks until she could pile them safely back on the table.
The stall owner flashed her a worried smile. “Curses on you, boy. That was badly done.”
“What?” said Goldie. “Oh.” Of course, the woman was thanking her in a back-to-front sort of way.
Goldie grinned and ducked under the table, digging between the cobblestones for the coins that had fallen there. When she had a handful, she dropped them in the woman’s pocket and went back