by Jay Lake
Dull brown, that was the man. She’d never known what Solis had seen in him.
Still, her late sister’s hand on her elbow propelled Laris into the light, struggling against the few steps toward that end of the bar.
“Oh, hullo,” Radko said, looking up at her.
Exasperation outpaced caution to Laris’s lips. “Hullo? That’s all you have for me now, two months after she died?”
He shrugged, accepted a pewter tankard of ale from Undine. Laris smelled the yeasty, liquid-bread stink of it. Radko traced a finger through the foam. “You don’t never talk to me, ma’am.” A shrug. “She died, you didn’t want me around. Didn’t matter what I had for you.”
Laris felt a pang of guilt, followed by another burst of anger. Her heart was too troubled for this conversation. But Neela had held the right of it on her sharp tongue as well. “I was wrong,” she said slowly. The words were ashen in her mouth. “You grieved her, too, and I was wrong to turn you away.”
Another shrug. “Ever’body turns me away. ’M used to it.” A long pull on the tankard. Radko seemed to find something fascinating floating in his ale.
“Sh-she needs to say farewell,” Laris blurted.
That drew a long look from Radko, with an expression that implied there might yet be a measure of shrewdness behind those dull eyes. Finally: “Solis needs that, or you?”
You cut me, and I bleed. Laris tried to think like a priestess, though she was tired and cold and broke. “All of us need that, perhaps.”
Radko returned to studying his ale. His right index finger made nonsense patterns in the spill glistening on the worn oak bartop. “I’ll go with you,” he muttered.
“I … I haven’t worked yet tonight.” Somehow, her lack of clients suddenly seemed a deeply personal failing. Laris knew her beauty was fading with age and hard use, but there was always more to it than that. “I c-cannot leave.”
The man reached into the inner pocket of his sheepskin vest. “You’re four coppers, same as Solis, right?”
Laris just stared.
“For a flatback and half a candle’s worth of time,” Radko added, in case she had somehow not understood.
“Yes, but I—”
“I ain’t going with you,” he snarled. Now they were both embarrassed. “Just buying your time. So’s we can say farewell to Solis together.” Five coppers clinked onto the bar.
Well, thought Laris, at the least I won’t have to pay Undine for the room. Against her better judgment, she reached shivering for the coins. She left one behind for the barback to take in payment for her abandoned wine, thin as winter blood and almost as cold.
* * *
They pushed through the night, walking into the chill, whistling wind. The snow had left off again, but the sky bellied low and full, where it could be seen at all in the darkness. Only the greater streets of Copper Downs were lit by the new gas lamps. On a winter’s evening like this one, even the third watch was late enough for most houses to be shuttered. The light posts on the city’s lesser streets were glowing cinders, or empty, their pitch-soaked torches stolen for someone’s night fire.
From the Poison Fish to Laris’s apartment was only a matter of fifteen minutes or so in good weather. Tonight, head down, her thin cotton cloak drawn close, she figured on twenty. In this weather the idea of taking Radko into her bed, just for the warmth of it, had a certain appeal. But this was Radko. Her sister’s pet simpleton. She didn’t even want to touch his arm as they walked.
They couldn’t go to the new fane. The ruins of the old temple, where Solis had died, would be unbearable. Only in her room would it make sense to try to bid her sister farewell. Besides, that was where Laris saw Solis in her dreams.
Something caught at Solis so that she stumbled. A belated moment after, she realized it was Radko, tugging at her elbow. “You got a bully boy?” he asked, almost shouting over the wind to be heard.
“What?”
Radko jerked his chin back over his shoulder. Laris turned to look. Not a bully boy. Bully boys. Two of them, tall and walking swiftly. One was wide as a wall, the other almost too thin, and dark-skinned besides. One of those Selistani immigrants that the damned girl Green had drawn into the city.
Their singleness of purpose bespoke an immigrant-native comity that would be the pride of many a street-corner demagogue. Unfortunately, she appeared to be their single purpose.
“Not mine,” Laris shouted, and turned to run.
Radko grabbed her elbow again, and pulled her close. She fought this betrayal, thrusting her knee into his groin. The only thing that saved him from collapsing in a groaning heap was the leather-and-canvas work pants, padded for outdoor days in the cold.
“Kiss me,” he said, his voice thin. “Pretend, at least.”
Again, she was a moment behind. What was with her head? A woman alone didn’t survive long on the streets of Copper Downs by being slow. Step into a doorway, step out of their way. If the bully boys were bound elsewhere, let them pass unwitnessed.
She couldn’t outrun them anyway.
Nuzzling close to Radko, Laris thought about her sister kissing this man. Touching him. Lying with him. Taking him into her body. Solis had always preferred to be taken as a boy, if there was a bit of grease to be had. Laris detested the way she felt after such sex, as if air had been forced through the entire length of her digestion.
But he had done this thing. To Solis. Did he want to do it to her?
Surprised, she found herself kissing him. Ale, and a bit of salt, and the frosty edge of night. He’d eaten fish for dinner, with some southern spice.
And this simple man smelled very complicated, when she got so close.
Rough hands ripped her from his grasp. Laris spun, praying now to Mother Iron—a goddess whose greatest virtue was perhaps that she walked the streets of Copper Downs in bodily form, at least on some occasions.
Hear the plea of all women, that the fist of men shall not strike me down.
Strength flared within Laris, where most people might have quailed. She’d taken more than one beating in her life for refusing to cringe.
The wide one had her in his vast paw. He didn’t even look at Radko, who had slipped into the shadows. Fool! How could she have thought…? Whatever she’d been thinking, for a moment. The thinner one leaned close, eyes gleaming with the sparkle of whitecrust, that was sold six copper taels a twist, enough to keep a man on the far side of the edge through two sunrises.
“I got a wo-wo-word for yoo-yoo-you.” His accent was from across the Storm Sea, but something else twisted his voice, drawing the speech out like sugar candy on the vendor’s metal fork.
The big one snorted. “Raji’s been a little deep into the fairy dust,” he said, as conversational as a man comparing potatoes in the market. “But it’s his show.” Fingers tightened until the joints in her shoulder cracked. Laris shivered, and would have dropped to her knees if he were not simply holding her up.
How strong was he? Where in all the Smagadine hells was Radko?
“Wo-wo-wo…” The skinny one had become terminally tangled in thought.
That was when Radko struck. The fool. He grabbed for the whitecrust addict, who slipped away like fire in a frying pan, then snatched at Radko so fast Laris didn’t see him move.
Radko went down with three fingers tearing at his ear, a knife clattering to the frosted cobbles at their feet. The big one released Laris to hold back his companion. She scooped up the knife and pressed it hard, with both hands, into the big man’s jaw from behind and below, at the base of his tongue.
The smell of hot metal filled her, and for a moment Laris knew the touch of Mother Iron.
He screamed, gargled and strange-sounding, then turned back to her with death in his eyes. She lost the knife in the movement, but it stuck out of the big man’s head like a handle, so Laris danced away from him, grabbing for the one piece of leverage she could have on him. Behind her, Radko vomited.
The whitecrust addict cam
e at her from around the big man’s back—the man she had stabbed was staggering with pain, and not quite moving fast enough to kill her yet, though Laris was certain she saw her own end right there, right then.
Then Radko got the skinny one by the ankles, and he went down face-first. Nerve-wrangled and angry, the addict was too busy reaching for Laris to break his fall with his own hands. Something—several somethings—crunched inside his face instead.
She and the big man both paused a moment in their deadly dance as an eerie keen of pain rose from the Selistani. Radko broke the moment by slamming uselessly into the big man’s knee. He kicked Radko away as if shaking loose a dog, then grabbed at the knife and pulled it free in a steaming, hot-scented gush of blood.
“You and your new goddess won’t live to see the springtime.” The big man’s voice was thick with pain. He staggered into the night, one hand pressed against the wound, while the bloody knife clattered to the street.
Laris stood staring a moment, breath hard in her lungs. The whole business had taken less than a minute. She had no idea why she was not dead.
Neither did Radko, apparently. He scrambled for his knife, then gave the skinny attacker a booted kick in the fork of his legs. The keening turned to a grunt, followed by a moan.
“Enough,” said Laris. “It’s not for us to finish him off.” She extended a hand to Radko. “Let’s go.”
He burst into tears. She understood the feeling.
“Now, Radko, let’s go now.”
They hurried arm in arm through the winter darkness, Radko’s breath shuddering with his tears. When Laris glanced over her shoulder, she saw a short, lumpy figure with glowing eyes standing over the body.
Mother Iron. Her new goddess. Strange, that one, a peculiar choice after the slaying of the goddess Marya, but Desire herself—mother-goddess to them all—had spoken.
Nothing passed between them, no nod of recognition, but Laris realized her prayer had been answered after all.
* * *
At her apartment she sent Radko out for more water. They would need to wash the blood away, and look to their bruises and cuts. She hated to use another day’s ration of wood, but there didn’t seem to be another way. Besides, after paying Undine, she was four copper taels to the good. Perhaps she could spare it.
He came back with a full bucket of water and slush. Too much, really, for her poor fire, but it wouldn’t go to waste. Wordless, Laris slipped out of her outer blouse and dropped the shoulder of her underslip as she turned away from him. “Tell me if you see too much damage.”
Radko’s big, blunt hands were surprisingly tender. Cold, from washing them outside when he was fetching water, but clean and careful. He pressed fingertips into her, poked a bit. When her breath hissed with pain, his touch eased and he worked his way around the damaged area.
“You got away okay,” he finally said. Lips brushed her shoulder, setting the hairs of her neck on end and a shiver crawling down her spine.
“Thank you,” Laris replied. “How are you?”
“Aches, ma’am, but they didn’t cut me open none.”
No, she had done the cutting open. But those two would have killed as easily as stared them down. What else could she have done?
“Let me have a look,” Laris said sternly.
Radko’s face was suffused with embarrassed shyness, and she could see the boy he had once been, not so far behind his eyes. He still shivered, almost violently now. Cold? Fear? Pain?
For Solis, Laris thought, and pulled Radko into her arms. They eased back onto the narrow bed together, and lay a long time until his weeping stopped. She found herself in no mood to let loose of him, and he did not seem inclined to pull away, so they held one another through the watches of the night.
* * *
Morning found them still abed. Laris had not slept well, but Radko had positively snored the night away in her arms. They were still clothed—she was four coppers to the good, and no trace of his seed within her sweetpocket, or her more fundamental regions, to show for it. Was there a living to be made holding on to sad, silent men?
Or just this one.
Radko opened his eyes, blinked, yawned. “We never did say good-bye to Solis,” he muttered.
She kissed his forehead. “I think we already have.”
“Hmm.” A grubby finger traced her nose. “I got to work soon. What about those men?”
Laris shrugged. “They were after the goddess. She will protect, or she will perish. I survived the death of Marya, I can survive the death of Mother Iron.”
“Mother Iron’s never going to die,” Radko said with an almost-pleased finality.
The point was well taken. The new goddess was an old, old figure, surviving centuries in the tunnels beneath Copper Downs, deity from an era so long past as to be forgotten, only lately risen to her new role. Laris laughed, a little. “Then perhaps I shall never die, either.”
“Will I see you again?” he asked plaintively.
Laris glanced away at the light leaking through the shutters. Her emotions were complicated, swirling. He was not so bad. And that scent. Truly, Neela had been right. Solis had been crying for Radko.
“My work is in the evening…” The man was used to prostitutes, after mooning over Solis so long.
His face fell, so she added hastily, “But we will find a time.”
Radko struggled to his feet, smiled crookedly, and limped out her door, heading for his own day’s wage. Laris pulled her robe about her and contemplated the four copper taels and the knife on the floor next to her bed, all neatly wrapped in a scrap of lace. She did not recall doing any such thing last night. She did not even own any lace.
“Solis?” she said softly. “Mother Iron?”
There was no answer. That was good enough for Laris. She rolled back into her thin covers and breathed in Radko’s scent, then settled in for a few more hours of sleep. For the first time in months, she was ready for a quiet journey through the countries of her dreams.
Unchambered Heart
* * *
This is the story Jeff and Ann hated. Luckily for me, not everyone else did.
* * *
One of the more controversial pieces in the collection is a print by the famed forger of art, currency, and graffiti, Alois Redpath (b. Minot, North Dakota, 1936; d. Xian, China, 1994), who signed his work Redman. Redman’s most famous work, of course, was an exact replica of a section of the Berlin Wall, built overnight on a lot in East Berlin in the summer of 1965. The Stasi are said to have authorized an assassination order against the artist in retaliation, but by then he was living in a commune just outside Phuket, Thailand, beyond even the long reach of the East German secret police.
This print, known as Unchambered Heart, is said to be a copy of one of the lost paintings of Mercer Amistad (b. Taos, NM, 1934; disappeared in Papua-New Guinea, ca. 1971, possibly infected with kuru). Amistad and the infamous gray market art collector Dr. Bentley Maxon toured Europe together in 1964 and 1965, seeking medical curiosities that had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II and secreted in a series of illicit museums operated by Himmler’s notorious Section Goat. The secretive paramilitary unit was responsible for much of the Nazi psychic war effort. Himmler and his spiritual advisors placed great faith in the accrued mystical powers of such artifacts as the Bottled Siamese Twins of Turin, the Bile Ducts of St. Boniface, and the sadly distorted skeleton of that Swedish unfortunate known as the Walrus Man.
Amistad’s interest in such material ties into her long history of representing the unspeakable through the lens of art. Maxon’s pursuits at that time naturally go without saying among the cognoscenti of his life and work. We can only speculate, of course, but Amistad and Maxon could surely have met Redman somewhere in Mitteleuropa during the time their travels overlapped. Internal evidence in the print suggests it may have used another artwork or sketch as its source, which would be consistent with Redman encountering a Bohemian artist wandering Europe with her sketchbook
, in the company of a mad doctor.
Controversy arises from two sources. First, the provenance of the print is dubious. Maxon’s own records regarding the piece are uncharacteristically vague, given the doctor’s more typical prolixity. This leaves open the possibility that Unchambered Heart is a forgery of a forgery, or a pseudo-copy. Second, Maxon’s interest in the print seems to be connected to his brief and unfortunate tenure with the transgressive German performance art troupe known as Golden Dusk, an episode in the good doctor’s biography for which he has more than once publicly stated his deep regret.
In other words, an unlikely vignette of which to hang a reminder in the front hall of Maxon’s Long Island conservatory.
—Unsigned curator’s notes on Unchambered Heart, from the unpublished catalog of the Roosevelt Island Medical Deviance Exhibition of 1997
The venue was the basement of a pawnshop that had once served as a bank, centuries earlier. Barrel-vaulted ceilings made for small rooms separated by iron bars in the oddest places. Curious drains interrupted the floor periodically, as if the place also included “abattoir” in its résumé.
Maxon circulated easily through the curled smoke. He identified the usual marihuana, cloves, and tobaccos, but also several rarer hallucinogenic substances. By the end of the evening the crowd was going to be very wired indeed.
The performers had yet to identify themselves, so the audience mingled anonymously. Many wore domino masks or face paint to obscure their identity. Mostly young and beautiful, these were the children of Europe’s post-war money. And in truth more than a few scions of wealth built on gold fillings picked from Jewish corpses during the war.
Those latter were of more interest to him and Merce, of course. He had permitted himself to be distracted by the unusual and bizarre, as was his wont, but neither of them had lost sight of their essential objectives.
A pair of men wrapped themselves into a clinch in a dark corner—American officers from the look of their bodies and the cut of their hair. Maxon smiled indulgently. If any place might be safe from persecution, it was the moveable space that was instantiated whenever these events were held.