and left that syrup on the fire!” Muttering imprecations, she snatched it off and dumped its molten contents on the marble countertop, where the red stuff ran and spread like a sheet of gore.
“What on earth?” Smith scrambled to his feet, staring.
“It’s the candy glass for the dragon’s wings,” Mrs. Smith explained, glaring at the door through which Burnbright and Willowspear had disappeared. “Grab a spatula and help me. If we don’t pull this mess into wing shapes before it hardens, it’ll be wasted. Gods and goddesses, I could wring that child’s neck sometimes!”
Smith, being a wise man, grabbed a spatula.
By that afternoon, Smith was too busy to continue his investigation.
Salesh had stretched on her silken couch and awakened once again, blinking through wine-fogged eyes at her lover Festival. After a brief moment of confusion and search for headache remedies, she had recollected who he was and taken him back into her insatiable embrace with renewed vigor.
The solemn bells for Third Prayer Interval signaled the start of the grand Parade of Joyous Couplings along Front Street. Its staging area was just around the corner on Hawser, so guests at the Hotel Grandview had a fine view of the proceedings.
With a shrill wail of pipes, with a chime and rattle of tambourines, here came the first of the revelers, clad in a shower of rose petals and very little else! They danced, they tossed their wild hair, they bounded athletically for the edification of the assembled crowd along the street’s edge. Winsome girls rode the shoulders of bull-mighty boys, and from small baskets the girls tossed aphrodisiac comfits to onlookers.
Behind them, a team of men costumed as angels towed a wide flat wagon. Riding in it were some two dozen nurses who bore in their arms the bounty of last year’s Festival, pretty three-month-olds decked in flowers. The babies stared around in bewilderment, or wept at all the noise, or slept in sublime indifference to the passion that had created them.
Following after, likewise crowned in flowers, were scores of little children born of previous Festivals, marching unevenly behind the foremost, who carried a long banner between them reading: LOVE MADE US. They trotted doggedly along, pushing back wreaths that slipped over their eyes. They stared uncertainly into the sea of adult faces, searching for their mothers, or waved as they had been told, or held hands with other children and laboriously performed the dance steps they had been taught for this occasion.
Next came the Salesh Festival Orchestra, blaring with enthusiasm a medley that began with “Burnished Beard on My Pillow,” continued into “The Lady Who Could Do It Thirty Times Without Stopping” and concluded with a rousing arrangement of “The Virgins of Karkateen.” After them came the parade floats sponsored by the different businesses and guilds of Salesh.
Here, steering badly as it lumbered along, for all that it was driven with ingenious gear ratios by its clockwork rowers, was a thirty-foot gilded galley bearing the Spirit of Love, in her scarlet silks. Her breasts were the size of harbor buoys, and puppeteers worked her immense languid hands as she blessed the crowd.
Here was a float presenting the Mother of Fire in her garden, a towering lady wreathed in red and yellow scarves, which were kept in constant motion by concealed technicians working a series of bellows under the float. Their scrambling legs were just visible under the skirts of the pageant wagon, and now and then a hand would flash into view as it tossed a fistful of incense onto one of the several braziers that were housed in giant roses of flame-colored enameled tin.
Here was a float representing the Father Blacksmith, presented at the Anvil of the World, his sea-colored eyes great disks of inset glass with lanterns behind them, and his left arm articulated on a ratcheting wheel cranked by a technician who crouched under his elbow, so that it rose and fell, rose and fell with its great hammer, beating out the fate of all men, and more incense smoke streamed upward from his forge.
After his wagon came a dozen clowns dressed as phalluses, running to and fro on tiny spindly legs and peering desperately through tiny eyeholes as they tried to avoid falling over one another. They were great favorites with the little children in the audience.
Next came rolling a half-sized replica of the famous war galley Duke Rakut’s Pride, its decks crowded with sailors and mermaids, waving cheerfully at the crowd despite their various amatory entanglements.