Indeed, indeed, Greyboar was in a rare rage, and it was plain as day that Leuwen would rather be anywhere else at that moment than behind the bar at The Trough telling his story. He’d started off hemming and hawing, moaning about his bad memory and all, but after Greyboar told him, and I quote: “You either spill your guts or I do it for you,” Leuwen got right into the tale like a bard of the olden days. Positively babbled, he did.
The Cat was in trouble. Big trouble.
It seemed—nobody really knew how it got started—that she’d attracted the admiration of the Goatmonk after we left for the Abbey. Probably ran into him while she was wandering around looking for Schrödinger. Anyway, his interest aroused, the Goatmonk had apparently followed her back to The Trough.
“The first I knew about it I swear the very first time was when the Goatmonk come in the door and Fergus said we had trouble and I looked and sure enough it was him and I swear he went right to the table where the Cat was sitting where she always does and I swear it all happened so fast I didn’t have time to move and I swear I don’t even know how he could’ve spotted her so quick because you know how dark it always is in this place that’s how the customers like it and the lights were just as dark as always I swear on my mother’s grave but he spotted her right away I don’t know how he could have—”
Simple, that was. The Goatmonk had ELP—extra-lecherous perception. Every time he went off on one of his country outings the farmers hid their wives and daughters (and their mothers) in special bunkers. They’d try to hide the sheep, too. Father Venery, they called him.
Anyway, I’ll just tell the story from here on, as I put it together from Leuwen’s babbling. Bit difficult to follow his own petrified grammar, don’t you know?
The Goatmonk hadn’t come into The Trough in quite a while. The one and only time he did The Roach took a dislike to him. Instant dislike, in fact—the Goatmonk didn’t even make it to a chair. Unfortunately, The Boots just missed him by a hair, and the Goatmonk made it out the door before The Roach could send him to the Big Cell in the Sky. Pity, that.
The Roach’s voice—quite the voice it is, too—followed Father Venery down the street, informing him in The Roach’s inimitable style that if the stinking priest ever showed his face in The Trough again he’d be so much stomped parson. Not scared of much, the Goatmonk wasn’t, but like most people he had a real fear of The Boots. Not that I blamed him. Over the years I must have turned down a hundred jobs from The Roach’s ex-employers, wanting to hire Greyboar to choke “that booted, bearded ruffian,” as they usually called him.
First time we got an offer, I consulted with Greyboar, but the big guy said not a chance. “I like The Roach,” he’d explained, “even though he doesn’t approve of my `idle ways,’ as he calls them. Then, there’s the fact that my sister thinks the world of him—`old friend and comrade-in-arms,’ she calls him, when she isn’t calling him `the champion of the toiling masses.’ Wouldn’t want to antagonize Gwendolyn, surely wouldn’t. And besides,” he concluded, scratching his head thoughtfully, “I’m not actually sure how it would all turn out, trying to choke The Roach. Bit dicey, job like that, bit dicey. Fearsome they are, The Boots.”
But the Goatmonk must’ve heard The Roach was out of town, so he followed the Cat into The Trough. The trouble started right away. The Goatmonk sat himself down at the Cat’s table. She told him to get lost. Then Leuwen swore (a hundred times) that he tried to stop the whole thing before it got started but he swore (a thousand times) that the Cat told him to shut up, she didn’t need any help. He was probably telling the truth, it’d be just like the Cat. What they call an independent woman. It was one of the reasons she and Greyboar were so tight—they gave each other plenty of room.