And so we begin a new section of Tag. Exciting, isn’t it? (God, I hope so!)
Continuing with Tag – Part IV The Circus – Chapter 20.
Haasel stilled her wheel to better hear the tinkling of harness bells moving down the street. The bells kept time to the steady clomp clomp clomp of horses’ hooves. Wagon wheels creaked. Another wagon followed with a smaller horse and a single bell, rougly palm size and bronze-cast from the sound. It jingled quietly until the wagon wheels clapped through a rut or over a rill in the road. Three more followed. Haasel picked up the mingled scents of bear and pony. “Not quite the lion and the lamb, and close.”
She grabbed her cane and opened her door. Bright sunlight warmed her face and arms. The jingling and tinkling stopped. The draft horse’s foreleg stomped a definitive clomp and shook itself of flies. Its rein and haress bells sounded came from quite high off the ground as if held in the hands of a musical giant. The second wagon’s bells sounded as its horses stopped but the sound was from someone deliberately plucking it, not from a movement of the wagon or horse.
“Hello, Good Lady!” A deep, bellowing voice called to her from the first wagon’s driver’s seat. It carried a slight echo from the cabin mounted on the wagon’s frame. The door between the cabin and the driver’s seat opened and Haasel heard a woman’s voice, old, harsh, gibbering as if in a delerium. The driver closed the door with a thud and the woman’s voice was gone.
The driver continued. “A circus, Good Lady! Acrobats! Jugglers! Strange tasties from distant lands made while you watch. The poetry of Homer read by none other than myself! And other plays of the ancient Greeks and Persians! Storytellers sharing our ancestors’ lore!”
Someone shifted on the third wagon’s driver’s seat but made no other noise. A servant, perhaps a slave.
“And news of the Mongol.” The voice tightened slightly, the words slightly rushed, the speaker’s tone betraying a hidden excitement. “They do brutal things to beautiful women.”
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