King of the Wind (9 page)

The cook cast a quick glance to the right and to the left. In all the long shed there was not another horsetrader in sight. He sighed with relief, for the fewer people who saw him in his
disheveled condition the less talk there would be. If word of the lost pig and the runaway horse ever reached the royal kitchen, his high position would be ruined. The scullions, as they cleaned their pots and kettles, would whisper and laugh behind his back. He must sell the horse quickly. He resolved to get rid of him to the very first buyer.

Scarcely had he blotted the splattered eggs from his over-blouse when a man walked past. He was enormous in build, and he stalked rather than walked, like a big tiger cat. His hat was pulled far down over his head and he looked neither to the one side nor to the other. Yet somehow the cook sensed that the man was in the vicinity of Thieves’ Kitchen for but one purpose. He was in need of a horse.

Almost past the shed, he wheeled about and came skulking back, shaking his head as if suddenly remembering an errand.

The cook could not see the face of the man, but he noticed the brutish size of him—hands big and broad, legs shaped like water casks. He noticed, too, that the man carried a horsewhip. A wood carter, he figured. Or a street hawker.

“Ahem!” the cook cleared his throat. “Are you in need of a stout beast, sir?”

The man stopped in his tracks.

“No!” he snarled, pulling his hat even farther over his eyes. “Your price is too high.”

“But, sir,” wheedled the cook, “I have not spoken to you about the price.”

“I know you thieves,” the carter bawled out, waving the cook aside. “You steal a horse. Then ask a fortune for it.”

A group of passers-by and idlers began surrounding the two men.

The cook spoke in a low tone. “Name
your
price, my good man, and I’ll throw in the harness, too, and a slightly damaged cart with a few vegetables in it. He’s a good stout beast, he is.”

“Why, that weed!” the carter threw back his head and bellowed. “He’s neither horse nor pony. Too small for one; too big for the other. Besides, his neck’s misshaped!”

“But, sir,” pleaded the cook, “you’ve not even looked at the creature.”

The carter motioned the growing crowd to close in. He thumped himself on the chest with the handle of his whip. “Me and all my friends here,” he roared, “we saw the whole show. Ho! Ho!” he snorted, “the beast made a fool out of you. He freed your pig and scrambled your eggs. Ho! Ho! Ho!”

Then he brushed the people aside and began fumbling in his pockets, taking a little money from each one. “I’ll give you these francs for the nag,” he said. “Then I’ll teach him a thing or two.” And he cracked his whip sharply as if to prove his words.

Sham felt the gust of wind made by the whip. He quivered, then went up on his hind legs and neighed shrilly.

The cook laughed. He was not interested in Sham’s feelings. He was interested only in getting rid of the horse. That the man was brutish concerned him not at all. Quickly the deal was closed, and the carter led Sham away.

W
HEN THE chief cook returned alone, his clothes torn and his face grim, Agba knew that Sham was in trouble. He was beside himself with worry. He dogged the man’s footsteps, but he could learn only that Sham had been left in Paris. Why or where the cook stubbornly refused to tell.

Finally he became so annoyed at Agba’s shadow that he booted the boy out of the kitchen door. “You, you tagtail!” he bawled out after him. “Stay out of my sight. Go find the beast yourself.”

Agba fled to Paris. He haunted the market place, the Horse
Fair, the stables of the inns. Night and day he searched the roads that led into the great city. He lived on nothing but apples which the apple woman gave him. When he did sleep, he curled up in a nest of straw in the very shed where Sham had been sold.

One night the owner of a chocolate shop offered him a job as an awakener. “Ye seldom seem to sleep anyway,” he told Agba. “Ye may as well be paid for waking others. Besides, ye look as if ye needed some steaming chocolate to warm your belly and a kind word to warm your heart.”

Agba was glad of the work. The chocolate shop was in the center of the market district and served carters and buyers. One among them might turn out to be the owner of Sham.

Each night now he snatched a few hours of sleep in the shed at the Horse Fair. Then long before sunrise he would hurry to the chocolate shop, drink his pot of chocolate, and go to work. It was his job, as soon as the market stalls were ready for business, to awaken the customers who had arrived in the middle of the night and had fallen asleep over their cups.

Some slept so deeply that no amount of shaking would rouse them. They had almost to be lifted to their feet. These heavy sleepers paid Agba two sous. The light sleepers paid him one sou. A few laughed in his face and did not pay him at all.

One early summer evening when Agba was on his way to the shed, he decided to wander along the Boulevard St. Denis and wait for dark to fall. He stopped to watch the play of water in a marble fountain. There was something about the tinkling sound that reached far back into his memory. The street faded
away. In its place was the Sultan’s garden. Agba could smell the orange blossoms and jasmine. He could hear the Sultan’s voice: “And one shall be a clear bay touched with gold.”

He was hardly aware of the sound of cartwheels and the
clomp-clomp
of unshod hooves. Yet he closed the shutter on his dreams and from force of habit rather than hope turned to look at the animal.

Something within him snapped. A small, dusty horse, harnessed to an empty cart, was coming toward him. The horse turned toward the fountain as if to drink, but the driver jerked him sharply away.

Agba’s heart seemed to stop altogether, then suddenly began thumping. He waved to the man to stop.

“Aside! You dog!” roared the carter as he struck Agba’s legs with the lash of his long whip.

Agba jumped aside, his eyes never leaving the horse. He tried to make the little purling noises in his throat, but they would not come. No matter. This beaten creature could not be Sham. It was only the size that brought up his memory. There was no wheat ear on his chest. Or . . . could it be hidden by the collar of his harness? There was no white spot on his off hind heel. Or . . . could it be crusted with mud?

Agba followed the cart past a big inn, past a theater of marionettes, past houses with gabled roofs that stared down at him with their triangular eyes, then down squalid old streets and narrow passages.
Clop, clop. Clop, clop Clop, clop.
Once the horse stumbled and Agba could hear the loud curses of the driver. Then
clop, clop. Clop, clop.
And just when Agba could bear the
sound no longer, the horse turned into an extremely narrow alley and stopped before a rickety shed.

Hiding behind a barrel, Agba peered around and saw that half of the shed was empty, the other half piled to the rafters with wood. He watched as a cat leaped out from the woodpile, streaked toward the horse, and landed lightly on his back. A weak whinny escaped the horse but it was lost in the carter’s scorn. “Grimalkin! You crazy tomcat!” he taunted, “still in love with your bony friend?”

Agba saw the cart drawn into the shed, saw the driver hitch the horse to a ring on the wall, toss him a bundle of hay, and walk off into the deepening twilight.

Slowly, slowly, the boy stole into the shed. He walked around the cart until at last he was standing face to face with the horse. He was near enough to touch the muzzle, near enough to stroke the gaunt neck, but he forced his hands to hang at his sides. Now the cat was mewing softly, and to his voice the boy added the only sounds he could make, the little purling noises like a brook on a summer’s day.

The ears of the horse began to twitch. His nostrils quivered. Then without a sound he lowered his head and rubbed it against Agba’s shoulder.

Agba did not need to look for the wheat ear or the white spot. It was Sham!

T
HE CARTER allowed Agba to live in his shed not from kindness but because he could use the boy. He had long wanted someone to load his cart each morning. Now, a slave had come to him as if by magic. And it cost him nothing at all—in money or food or clothing.

Agba gave up his job as awakener. Instead, he helped the fishmongers and the farm women at the market place by day, and so came to the alley at night with presents of little things that horses and cats like.

It was a strange threesome: the boy, the cat, and the horse. Each evening, at the first sound of cartwheels, Grimalkin would fly out of the shed. With a quick leap he was on Sham’s back, miaowing and talking to him in his cat’s way.

Agba would wait in silence, wait for the creaking wheels to come to a stop, wait for the deep bellowing roar of the carter. Always it was the same.

“You mute! You numps! A horse and a cat for company! Out of my way!”

At first the carter let Agba unharness Sham at night and tend his sores, but when he saw the fiery look return to Sham’s eyes he was not pleased. And when, one day, Sham seized him by the breeches and bit him viciously, the carter flew into a rage.

“The brute can sleep harnessed and standing,” he told Agba. “A few harness sores’ll teach him to respect this!” And he snaked his whip in the air until it hissed.

On Sundays, however, the carter never came near the shed, and it seemed as if all day long the cat never stopped purring and Sham neighed his happiness in a pitiful, thin sound. As for Agba, there was a silent rapture in the way he worked. He washed Sham. He dried and smoothed his coat. He rubbed the horse’s legs with the last of the
budra
which he had brought from Africa. He combed Sham’s tangled tail and mane. He made cooling poultices of wet leaves and applied them with gentle fingers to all of Sham’s sores. He packed the inner walls of Sham’s hooves with mud. And he fed him three times a day with the oats he had bought with his own money.

As Agba ran his hand over the wheat ear on Sham’s chest or the white spot on his heel, the words of Signor Achmet kept beating in his ears.