The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [14]
There had always been a few sharpsies in Trowth. Like their mortal enemies, the trolljrmen, the sharpsies had brought unusual crafts and trade specialties that the Empire found useful. Sharpsies were, for instance, excellent butchers and superb cooks. Never fully integrated into society, the sharpsies had carved a small niche out for themselves on the fringes.
Starting around 1840, a wave of omphaloskepsis immigrants inundated the Empire. They were fleeing their own lands, west of Sar-Sarpek, and had been settling anywhere that would take them. This did not amount to very many places, and the sharpsies soon became a gypsy race, carrying their own possessions on their backs, always trying to drive their herds of horses and reindeer to new pastures, always finding themselves more and more unwelcome. By the time the Emperor offered them amnesty in Trowth, there were no herds left, and the Sharpsies were desperate.
They accepted the amnesty and attempted to settle in the Empire’s capital city. Thousands, male and female, were immediately pressganged into the war with the ettercap. They died beneath the mountains of Gorcia, far from their own homes, from their families, and far from the city that had offered them its feigned sanctuary. Only the old, recognizable by the thick tufts of wiry, yellow hair that they grew on their forearms and shoulders, and the very young were left in Trowth, to eke out a meager existence as best they could, unwanted, untrained, and uncertain.
The young sharpsies that managed to avoid the pressgangs grew into angry young men. No one wanted to hire them. They couldn’t communicate their needs effectively, except to other members of their species: the sharp teeth and thick tongue of a sharpsie made learning Trowthi all but impossible. Their own language sounded to Trowth ears like a man choking on a fishbone, which only served to drive a wedge of ridicule in between the city men and the sharp-toothed strangesr.
While Elijah Beckett and his coroners searched the house on Bynam Street, most of the sharpsies were doing what they did every day: lounging by the docks on the Stark, trying to find work as day-laborers. Some worked unloading ships or laying stone or in the chilly back rooms of the butcher shops carving meat. It was illegal to hire them, and if the pressmen found that a merchant had employed a sharpsie, the worker was at once sent to the front. Despite the danger, sharpsies could still find work as unskilled laborers—so long as they sold their services cheap enough.
The sharpsies that couldn’t find work that day spent it dodging pressgangs or picking fights with trolljrmen. Half past noon, a dozen gendarmes from North Ferry—or, perhaps only six from North Ferry who’d found a few likely fellows on the trip down—appeared in Mudside, the sharpsie shanty town on the Stark. They came with their blue armbands prominent, heavy truncheons ready, riot shields hanging from their wrists. They’d come to find the murderers of the Zindel family, they said, and they’d break the bones of every sharpsie in Mudside if they had to. They screamed and kicked in doors. They threatened to start fires.
If a Trowthi man was able-bodied, it was almost a sure thing that he’d be taken by the pressgangs. The gendarmerie was no protection, but the criminal brand was. Gendarmes were sometimes clever, sometimes old, sometimes lame or sick,