A sinuous dragon-snake reaches back into the darkness of eternity. Their scales are that horrible familiar iridescence, absorbing the power of the slow-slip. Tendril whiskers undulate in the heat, stroking with a parasitic life that makes me shiver. Every now and then one brushes my sheath-skin, and everything tilts.
This E can’t be my reality. Like the ghosts, I’ve constructed them out of the smallness of what I know. Reductive. Easy to look upon, easy to look away.
Like a mirror.
‘Tēnā koe, Hineahuone.’ E’s voice doesn’t shatter mountains. It’s soft and pleasing. I could listen for hours. What stories of the entire age of the world do you have to tell?
‘E.’ I resist a bow. This is the one that kills with impunity, reshapes the land to their will. ‘What language are you speaking?’
‘All of them, and none.’ E insinuates around the cracks, moving like a shark that will suffocate if it stops.
‘How do I understand what you’re saying?’
‘It is the voice of the land.’
I roll my eyes. Am I rolling my eyes? Am I really here, embodied of Papatūānuku? I’ll go mad if I think too hard. ‘You sound like aunty Awhina.’
‘Good. She’s been paying attention.’ E licks at one of the too-black cracks and it wriggles with delight. Was that one tongue, or many?
‘So, this.’ I gesture around at... it all. Why am I not scared? This is the moment I’ve avoided so long. This is the end. ‘What are you? Some sort of alien? A dragon? I’m the knight come to slay you?’
E chuckles. I know that sound; a gentle three pointer. ‘What did Awhina say? You only know things through the eyes of others.’
‘Eavesdropping is rude.’ I make fists. How do I punch an earthquake?
‘I am not bound by human rules, Hineahuone.’ E pulses as large as a tectonic plate then as small as pinhead. A fever dream. All fiddling tendrils, glinting fangs, blunt predator cat nose, and oil-slick eyes. ‘You are but motes of my existence. Fleas upon my back.’
I laugh. ‘Wow, that’s such a cliché. I think I’ve read that in a thousand books.’
‘You are what you make me.’
Admitting weakness is a weakness, but it’s the only trick I’ve got. ‘What happens now? Do we fight? I subdue you with my heretofore hidden powers that only come to me in my time of need?’
E contorts their face in what I can only read as pity. ‘We’re already doing it. You come to me, plead this land’s case, pretend you can hold it together with your two tiny hands. I pretend to listen, but I’m already whispering into the cracks, because there are so many in this world and there is so much of me. Your imagination, like all the women before you, is woefully inadequate for this task. You may save a few, but in the end I win. This world must breathe. This is the folly of your species, thinking you can control the land. But even gods tremble before me.’
‘Nice talk. We should do it again some time.’
This is what I’ve imagined they would say once we finally met. Maybe I put the words in their mouth, like the ghosts in my head and my hands behind my back. Everything I wanted to yell at Oma throbs within me. This isn’t fair! I didn’t ask for this! How can one person be expected to tame the land? You taught me nothing! Goddesses and magic? E te teka!
‘You should have been there in nineteen thirty-one of your years. It was glorious... ’
E likes to talk. And while they do, probably thinking their words would grind me down, I try to make sense of the truth of this beast. Push aside the vanity and strangle my fear, and I can see the hints and failures my tupuna wahine have left behind to show the way.
That fang is broken. A tattered piece of rein wraps a horn. A broken chain gnarled with a whisker-tendril. Rope plaited into the mane. A golden nose ring.
What do I come with to fight? Swift feet, turned back, and fists full of scars? Beneath the iridescent sheath, my hands look almost ashy smooth.
E rambles on. Maybe E is lonely. It’s been a long time since Oma was down here. I brace myself for how E will weaponize her against me. What did she use to say? ‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose.’ I think she stole it from someone, but then she did like quoting great women.
There’s a wistfulness to E’s grandiosity as they speak on the human folly of building on their back, about pushing the puzzle piece tectonic plates. I hold quite still, play dumb. I’m good at that. I wait. Watch for my in.
And then I see it. E won’t get close enough to be touched. How alike we are. Afraid our skin will break if we allow it. A weak spot. I must ride the earthquake’s back to find it.
Perhaps E senses my resolve. They are bigger than me after all. Their human-cat-dragon-snake face changes, and they recoil into the fault line they’re making love to.
Expecting the next assault from their tongue to be Oma’s name, I’m thrown off balance as E utters Awhina’s instead.
‘What?’ I shake my head. Their words had become the bassline of an oncoming tremblor.
‘Awhina. Did you know her name means “support”? She’s right above us. Amongst all those rocks and mountains.’
‘What the heck is wrong with you?’ My voice is shaking and I hate it. ‘She is not yours! Haven’t you done enough to her? To the people of Te Waipounamu and Dhamar? Oh yeah, I know it was you there in our year of nineteen eighty-two, breaking the rules.’
Surprise stops E’s retreat and I’m on them before I have a plan. My scars give me purchase on oily tendrils. E bellows, shaking like a mad animal. Using the remnants of the old reins I swing up and bury into the vines of their mane. Thorns and spines whip my arms, but they’re nothing compared to the sharp edges of humanity.
‘I am The Land,’ E bellows. ‘You have no hold on me, Papatūānuku, you vengeful hag! You can’t unbirth me. I’ll never fit back in that small, stinking space!’
E bucks, but I simply bury my arms further. Maybe if I let them rage out...
No. I feel more than hear or see the ceiling creaking. The Alpine Fault has a need. The Land is not a static thing. Our lives are too small to see how it must move, reach out, test its boundaries.
The blood of the land throbs hot in my ears. My back trembles beneath the weight of holding up The Above. What else do I know? What else do I have in my tiny arsenal to stop this beast.
I know how to hurt.
Push deeper, past the scales in the neck. No throwing me off now. The vines whip at my ankle, wrists, throat. If E wants to break the spine of the world then I’ll go for theirs.
‘I can’t stop you,’ I pant. Nostrils and mouth filling with blood-ichor and I spit E out. ‘Maybe I’m not meant to. I am but one link in a chain of powerful wāhine, like a spine that holds the head of the world high. And like a spine we can stiffen in resolve.’
‘I am big! I am The Land! I must breathe!’ E roars in pain.
‘And you will. But you must learn to take smaller sips.’ I am sunk to my elbows in dragon-flesh, fingers working past scar tissue. ‘You and me, we have to learn to get along.’
E chokes on their laughter. Their wild thrashing must be causing at least a six pointer. I can’t help that. The best I can hope to do is to lessen it by a few magnitudes.
E grows longer, the ripples reaching out to Golden Bay in the north.
6.1.
St Arnaud and Wairau Valley shiver, their mountains flex, the valley tense.
6.2.
A tsunami pushed by E’s screams will devastate Wellington. All the progress in Christchurch will crumble. The glaciers will collapse. Thousands dead.
My iridescent sheath is lost beneath blood, red on red in the red-dark of the veins of the world. I was made to run, not hold, and my muscles quiver. I can’t go any further.
A nudge against my elbows. A gentle weight on my back. A hand on my shoulder.
I can only afford a glanc
e, and through the tangle of mane, strobing blood light, and scream-shivered air, a grey mist collects around me. Back and back it threads, weaving into each other, holding tight.
There may be no such thing as ghosts, but these are my ghosts. Perhaps Oma is in there. I can’t tell. Their bodies are all a blur. They push my arms deep, give me the strength I can’t find in life.
My arms slide through the meaty fibres of E’s gristle and my fingers encounter their vertebrae.
I squeeze. Gently. Not enough to break. That would be unfair. I only need to teach a lesson.
The thrashing slows. The earthquake abates. I rub my face against the ripples of Down Here, taste its flesh. The blood of the land is stirred, but nothing has been wildly broken. No one is dead. This time.
This time I put my hands to stone and I stopped death.
I’m sorry I couldn’t do that for you, Oma. Maybe I whisper this, I don’t know. I only know the taste of E’s blood and my fingers cramped around their spine.
E is reduced. They hold still enough, trembling, so I can slip my arms out of their flesh and slide off. I am covered in gore. A new sheath.
‘We will do this again, and much sooner,’ I say. ‘You can stretch but only a little at a time. Distribute the weight on your shoulders.’
E grunts. ‘That’s not fair.’ They sound like a petulant child. Yes. So much in common.
‘Get used to it.’
This triumph is small. Not even Papatūānuku has anything to say. I sense the edges of her womb nearby, quiet, warm, inviting. But I’ve abandoned my job for too long. I can’t go back to the solace of ignorance.
‘Go,’ E growls, shaking their head, testing their new scar tissue. ‘You won’t be the first. You won’t be the last.’
I bow.
And when I look up, I’m back in my own body, shivering in the river bed. Back up Above. Back home.
‘Awhina,’ I start to say, but my throat feels as scarred and thick with ichor as my hands and arms.
The adrenalin wanes quickly. I cast about for Awhina. She was right here.
‘Awhina, I did it,’ I croak. ‘I stopped the big break.’
There is no answer except the wind and settling rocks after the shake.
But that boulder. Was it there before? It hunches, pressing against the ground detritus of the mountain’s eons. A new understanding from having wrapped myself in stone washes through me, gravity pulling me to my knees.
‘No!’
I place my hands upon the stone. It’s still warm as blood. The same size as a person. The same size as a boulder left somewhere on the triple plate junction near Dhamar.
Awhina. Support. This is where the final push came from. My last piece of strength. Was that all she was put on this land to do? Support me through my fight with E? Through Oma’s?
That’s not fair.
‘No, Aunty.’
From the land. Back to the land.
I sit with my back against the boulder until it cools.
The Itch of Iron, the Pull of the Moon
Carol Borden
From: Drag Noir
Fey was all-around too sharp, but had found ways to use her sharpness. She solved problems, often, but not always, permanently. It was good work, but if she were an honest Puck, which she tried to be in her way, she was always better at unmaking things, well, to be honest, breaking things than making them, which was probably why she lived with her business partner Reynard in the grounds of an abandoned factory. She wasn’t sure what the plant had made, but it probably had something to do with cars. She wasn’t far from Henry Ford’s planned communities and his artificial lake with houses still standing beneath water where long green plants fanned out like mermaids’ hair. She had a hard time paying attention to human commerce, but she loved rusty metal, broken glass and cracked pavement. And she loved the little plants that grew in all the cracks, just like her.
A river ran along the west side of the property and hickory, beech and oak trees grew up the ravine to the asphalt. The forest had been cut down not so long ago, and it was always ready to come back. The owners held on to the property hoping that they could sell it for more than they had paid for it. She watched the lot for the owners and was as trustworthy about it as could be expected. They thought she was a transient, but had no complaints. She rarely saw them. They didn’t like to leave Bloomfield Hills. And so she watched the trees, the broken asphalt and the dented chain link fence. A good deal all around, she would call it.
Fey and Reynard did business in the factory’s old parking lot office almost overtaken by the blackthorn locust, sumac and sassafrass reclaiming the lot. She had an old fashioned wooden filing cabinet, a folding card table, a particle board desk, a few moulded wood chairs she found in the factory office, a rotary phone and a disposable cellphone. But she preferred to meet her clients in their homes or at nearby cafes.
Fey was finishing a plate of home fries at Cafe Vert when her client floated in, uncertain as a dandelion seed. He was holding one of her fliers. ‘M. Fey, Unmaker of Problems,’ it read, with her phone number beneath. The fliers only rarely returned to their natural state, sassafrass leaves.
‘Ms. Fey?’
‘Just Fey is fine.’
‘I’m Doug Stokowski. I called you about my problem.’
‘Have a seat, Mr. Stokowski.’
‘Doug.’ He slid into the booth across from Fey and next to Reynard. Reynard put his ears back, but didn’t protest any further. Instead, he began digging at the table to bury his frittata. Reynard didn’t like sharing.
‘A cat, huh?’
‘Yeah.’ Reynard was an orange tabby with big feet, strange blue eyes and a broken canine, but people usually saw him as a red-haired man in bespoke suit and tie. Reynard liked to look nice. Fey wondered what Doug saw when he looked at her. A woman with hair like clipped crow feathers and fingers like bundles of twigs because they were clipped crow feathers and bundles of twigs? Fey’s eyes used to be grey green; the colour of the ocean she saw on her way to America, but that was a long time ago. Now they were the colour of rusty metal. The waitress asked Doug if he wanted anything. Doug asked for a plate of fries with ranch dressing on the side. Fey was nearly finished eating and Reynard was cleaning his face and ears.
‘Nice place.’
‘It’s my favourite. So what’s your problem?’
Doug held out his hand palm up. ‘This is.’
There was a pentagram on his palm.
‘Well, that’s not right,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘I hate to tell you this—I really do—but I don’t know how I can help you.’
I want you to find out who did this to me and I want you to end them.’
‘’End them?’’
‘You know what I mean.’
Doug leaned back as the server brought his plate of fries and a small paper cup of ranch dressing. After she went back to the counter, Fey answered, ‘Okay, three things. First, I’m pretty sure ‘ending’ someone won’t solve your problem. Second, killing’s not all that emotionally or aesthetically satisfying. Third, ending someone will not solve your problem. And it really could mess up a pretty decent thing Reynard and I have going on for ourselves. That’s four, I guess.’
Reynard flicked his tail. Doug looked mildly sceptical of whatever decent thing Fey and Reynard had going on, but mostly he looked frustrated. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘Well, explain it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Then I can’t help, because my own reluctance aside, I don’t understand how killing would help you.’
‘Okay,’ Doug glanced around the mostly empty cafe. The server was busy making something with the espresso machine. Doug leaned forward. ‘What do you mean killing won’t solve my problem?’
‘Pre-killing a werewolf will not
erase that pentagram or reverse the curse. With curses, it doesn’t matter how they happen—it just matters that they do.’
Doug reached across the table for the bottle of hot sauce and squirted some on his fries disconsolately. Fey continued, ‘I might kill a werewolf, only for another to kill you, because it doesn’t matter which poor, doomed soul does. I could kill the werewolf after it kills you, or save you after you’ve bitten, just in time for you to become the next local big feral dog. I might make your problem worse or create more collateral damage. Killing whoever you think the werewolf might be only makes how your curse plays out more complicated.’
Doug swirled a fry in the ranch, but didn’t eat it.
‘And that’s not getting into silver bullets or whether the wolf has to be killed by their one true love. The full moon’s tomorrow night—that’s a quick romance.’
‘You won’t need silver bullets.’
‘I won’t?’
‘You won’t. You’re not looking for a werewolf. You’re looking for the person—the human person—who did this to me.’
‘Doug, this isn’t something that someone does. This is something that happens. This is a heads up from the universe that you are screwed. A chain of events is written right there on your palm and it ends with you as some dog’s dinner.’
‘Someone did this. Please, just find out who. If you have time, find out why they did this to me. I don’t need to know how. How is probably beyond me anyway.’
Fey rubbed her face.
‘Believe me, if you end them, you will end this.’ Doug held out his palm again. The pentagram looked like dried blood. Then he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bunch of crumpled bills, mostly twenties, and put them on the table. ‘I cleaned out my account. It won’t matter, if...’
‘If you get killed by a werewolf tomorrow night.’
Doug nodded and ate his fries. Reynard looked annoyed. Fey took the money. It was about two-hundred and fifty dollars. ‘Okay, I’ll look into it. Stay home tonight. I’ll call tomorrow and let you know what I found out.’
Fearless Genre Warriors Page 5