Running of the Bulls

I feel as if I have been running forever. In fact, I have been running for about twenty minutes. I am not in the shape I should be. I am not nearly in the shape Obert was. But I am in better shape than he is now, or ever will be.

A last turn. The arena looms ahead. It is a great limestone bowl of a building. It looks as if it has been sitting right there for hundreds of years. It looks that way because it has. People on the other side of the ocean cannot hope to understand what a place like that means. Nothing in Dubyook has earned the right to look so old.

At the arena, there are people-sized gaps in the barrier. It is not plywood there. It is stone. Lady Ett ducks through a gap. Kime follows. I am right behind them. The gaps are too small for bulls. They pound on to the pens where they will wait to fight.

“Move away!” a blue-painted acolyte calls to us in Astilian. “Move away so others can get through.”

Ett and Kime do not speak the language. Panting, I herd them down the alley. “Well,” I say, “now you’ve run with the bulls in Amblona. How do you like it?”

Ett’s look says she thought I was cold-blooded, but not so cold-blooded as that. Kime says, “It’s a good thing to have done once.” I nod. It is a better answer than I expected.

People keep squeezing through the gaps. On the other side of the barrier, handlers with long goads persuade the bulls to go where they want them to. I understand how the bulls feel. My conscience pricks at me like the point on the end of one of those goads.

“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” I say.

“Why not? You can get drunk there,” Ett says. She knows me too well. She knows that is what I want to do most.

“They’ll stuff what’s left of Obert in a sack and bring him back there,” I answer. “And then they’ll ask me what to do next.”

“Quite,” Kime says. “That’s what you get for being his countryman. This far from Dubyook, you might as well have hatched from the same clutch. The Astilians will think you did.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say.

And that is how things work out. “I am very sorry, sir, but we know nothing of how you deal with death in Dubyook,” Tonmoya says. Yes, he is apologetic as hell, but that does me no good. He is telling me I am stuck with it, as if I cannot see as much for myself.

“He’s here. He died because he wanted to join your ritual. Give him the kind of funeral you’d give one of your own. He’d like that,” I say. Whether or not Obert would like it, I neither know nor care. All I know is, he is not going to argue with me.

Tonmoya bows. Astilians are a formal folk. “As you say, sir. But how shall we pay for the rites?”

“Let’s see what he’s got in his room. That will cover some of it.”

“Do you have the right to take it?”

“The right? Of course not,” I say frankly. “But nobody here will complain if I do, which is all that counts. If we’re still short, I’ll kick in some myself. It’s the least I can do.” It is also the most I can do. I go on, “Maybe Lady Ett and Kime can add a little, too.”

Tonmoya looks grave. “I would have to doubt it, sir. The gentleman asked me to lend him a hundred sepetas yesterday morning.”

“Oh.” I leave it there. Anything more would be too much. Kime Kelbam is broke a lot of the time. When he has cash, he is the most generous fellow you would ever want to see. That is not the smallest reason he is broke so often.

The hotelkeeper takes a key off a hook. “Let us go see what the poor dead gentleman has.” He invites me along as if I hatched in the same sandbank as Obert. What an awful thought!

I would rather find another dirty, hairy mammal on my sink than go through a dead man’s things. Thanks to the war, I have done it before. I never thought to do it again in peacetime. Just because you do not think of something does not mean it cannot happen to you.

Obert Ohn has more cash than I figured. I knew he had some. He never lived like a poor expatriate. But he brought a nice chunk to Astilia—almost enough to pay for his own last rites. I chip in the rest, the way I said I would. “The crematorium will be satisfied,” Tonmoya tells me. Chances are he will also keep a bit for himself. He is a good hotelkeeper, but he is a hotelkeeper all the same.

And I would much rather find another dirty, hairy mammal on my sink than get grilled by an Astilian captain of police. Captain Sargia questions me and Ett and Kime about Obert and the bull as soon as we have cleaned off our whitewash. “The death of a foreigner requires an official investigation,” he says.

To make things even better, I have to translate for the two Dunliners. Captain Sargia speaks only Astilian. We talk about what Obert did. We try not to talk about why he did it.