She also saw a whole lotta things she didn’t like. The swamp wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right, and it didn’t look right. There were big bare areas where the stimps had flicked their wings and scythed the grasses down like wheat, big white slashes in the trees where they’d rubbed their beaks and cut to the heartwood. There were ducks floating head-down, gutted by a careless stimp feather, and the water was greasy black with rot.
It was when she saw a dead beaver laid out, nearly chopped in half by iron wings, that Fisher-Bird started to get mad. But she kept her tongue and her temper inside her beak and went flying on until she came to a stimp so tall, it looked like a scarecrow made of iron.
Fisher-Bird landed next to the tallest stimp and said, “Morning.”
The stimp didn’t move.
Fisher-Bird cleaned her beak with her foot and said, louder, “I said good morning!”
The stimp didn’t move.
“Shit,” said Fisher-Bird. “You died standing up?”
The stimp gave up. “I have not died,” said the steel heron, with icy precision. “I am fishing. Which I would have thought that you would understand, even if you practice the art like a wild boar practices dancing.”
Fisher-Bird’s beak didn’t lend itself to smirking, which was probably for the best. “Aw, you’re in a mood. What’s wrong, not enough fish?”
The stimp grunted.
“Mess this place is in, surprised there’s a fish to be found. Or a frog or a turtle for that matter. Maybe it’s time you stimps moved on.”
“Go bother someone else, little bird,” said the stimp. “I’ve no time for such as you.”
“Sorry about your momma,” said Fisher-Bird. “Must be hard.”
“What?” The steel heron turned its head finally, gold eyes narrowing. “What about my mother?”
“Just figured you lost her young,” said Fisher-Bird. “Or else she’d have taught you some proper manners.” She studied her claws nonchalantly. “Unless you learned from her, in which case it’s pretty clear she was no better than she should—krrk!”
The stimp’s strike would have made a meal of a slower bird, but Fisher-Bird had been waiting. She was in the air as soon as the stimp took the first step. The swamp filled up with the rattle of steel feathers and the chatter of Fisher-bird cussing, but Fisher-Bird’s faster than any heron, even a blessed one. She came winging back to Stronger, pleased with herself.
“Heard quite a ruckus,” said Stronger. “But they didn’t take to the air.”
“Nope,” said Fisher-Bird. “Didn’t think they would. But they’re killin’ beavers now, what never did nobody no harm, and also they were rude, so now I got no qualms at all.”
“Suppose we could try to scare them out,” said Stronger, a bit dubiously.
“Krrk-rkk! What’s a stimp got to be scared of? Unless you got like . . . eagles with magnets or something.” Fisher-Bird got a thoughtful look. “Huh, that’s not a bad idea. If this doesn’t work, the osprey boys owe me a favor. . . .”
Stronger put his head in his hands. “One plan at a time, please,” he whispered.
“Sit yourself down,” said Fisher-Bird. “Once it gets a little later in the day, the stimp boys will start trying to look real fine for the ladies, and that’s when we’ll do it.”
Stronger picked a log out of the water and set it down so he had a comfortable place to sit. Fisher-Bird amused herself picking crunchy tidbits with lots of legs off the end that had been in the water.
The sun started to climb up in the sky. Nothing much happened for a while, except the sound of carrion flies buzzing over the dead ducks and the dead beaver. Fisher-Bird didn’t like that either. Ought to have been a lot more insect sounds in the swamp, maybe some early pondhawks zipping over the water, but nothing, just the flies.
Then a noise rang out over the swamp, a metallic clatter like somebody shuffling a deck of cards made out of tin.
“What the devil . . . ?” Stronger jumped, startled, and accidentally put his log a foot deep in the wet ground.
Fisher-Bird got splattered by the mud and chattered, outraged, while she cleaned her feathers off. “Krrk-krrk-krk!”
“Sorry,” said Stronger. “Didn’t mean—what is that?” The noise came again, louder, and then another one. “It’s like a frog . . . a train . . . some kind of bug?”
Fisher-Bird preened her feathers down with her heavy beak, grumbling. “It’s the stimps,” she said. “You never seen herons do the dance for each other, son? The boys raise their crests way up and then flatten ’em back down, trying to look taller. ’Cept when stimps do it, their crests are made outta metal and it sounds like . . . well, like that.”
Another metallic crash, like the mating call of rain gutters.
“Now you take those tin cans and fan ’em out,” said Fisher-Bird. “And you raise them real high over your head and you rattle ’em together and you’ll sound like the tallest, sexiest stimp in creation.”
Stronger stared at her.
“What?” said Fisher-Bird. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s like flexing your muscles for the ladies. Except the ladies in this case are magicked-up herons.”
“You want me to do a bird mating dance?”
“Shit, son, you put it that way, it almost sounds weird.”
“But what happens then?” said Stronger, taking out the tin cans and looking at them in disbelief. “Do they come looking for me?”
“And risk gettin’ shown up? No, they’re gonna try to make themselves taller and prettier. They’re gonna be hopping up and down in the swamp, doing their best jumps for the ladies. You look out over the reeds then, you’ll see a whole bunch of stimps going up and down like jumping jacks.”
Stronger looked blank.
“And that’s when you shoot ’em with arrows,” said Fisher-Bird. “Son, I got eggs that would have latched on to this plan faster than you are. Unfertilized eggs.”
Stronger gave her a hangdog look. Then he sighed, held the cans up as far as he could, and drew his thumbnail down over the short edges, like fanning the pages of a book. An ordinary man might have cut hisself to ribbons, but Stronger had the blood of gods thick and oozing in his veins, and the cans rattled and clattered like a stimp’s crest in his hands.
Fisher-Bird took to the air and watched stimp heads shooting up all over the swamp, like chickens hearing a hawk yell.
Stronger rattled the cans again and again, and the stimps craned their necks, looking for the source of the sound, each one worried it might be one of the others. Then they stood up straight, raising their crests as high as they could go, and they started to bounce up and down, leaping into the air, each trying to make themselves look like the tallest stimp of all.
Fisher-Bird circled back to Stronger and said, “Now’s a good time.”
“Thank god,” said Stronger, shoving the cans into his belt. “Ain’t dignified.” He pulled his bow off his back, pulled an arrow from the bucket—it made a wet sucking sound—and took aim.
Fisher-Bird was a little bit worried, what with the stimps leaping back and forth, but Stronger’s aim was good. He pulled back on the bow till the wood moaned, then fired.
Thwap! Tar exploded over the nearest stimp’s neck feathers, and the bird dropped with a yell of disgust.
Thwap! Thwap! Sometimes Stronger missed, but mostly he didn’t.
Fisher-Bird winged in next to the first stricken stimp and saw its feathers splashed with black tar. The bird was frantically trying to scrape the mess off with its beak, preening at the feathers like any bird would, and pretty soon the rat poison started to kick in.
“Don’t feel so good . . .” muttered the stimp. It stopped worrying about its feathers and went staggering off into the swamp, wings trailing. Fisher-Bird cackled. There probably wasn’t enough rat poison to kill something the size of a stimp, but after the dead beaver, she wasn’t feeling a lot of remorse.
“Is that all of them?” asked Stronger. “I’m nearly out of arrows.”
“All the boys,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ought to be enough to move them along.”
Fisher-Bird went looking for the tallest stimp and found it at last, bent over like an old man, with tar rimming its beak. “This is your doing, Fisher-Bird,” said the stimp. “Don’t lie.”
“Didn’t plan to,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ain’t ashamed of it. Your people’ve made a mess outta this swamp, and it’s time you moved on. Plus you were right little shits to my cousin, and I ain’t forgotten.”
“Used a human to do it, didn’t you?” The stimp’s voice was no longer so icy and precise. “Saw the arrow hit me. Some gall you’ve got, claiming we made a mess. You seen what humans do to a swamp?”
“Sure,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t stupid.”
The stimp tried to step forward and its leg almost gave out under it, so it wobbled sideways and nearly fell, but its eyes stayed locked on Fisher-Bird.
“Go!” said Fisher-Bird. “Get gone! You’ve got no fish, no frogs, no food, and the human’ll sit out here and cover you in tar every time to try to dance. This ain’t no place for you anymore.”
“Oh, we’ll go,” said the stimp. “You’re not wrong there. But you’re not as smart as you think you are, Fisher-Bird.”
“Oh?”
“Heh,” said the stimp softly. “Heh heh heh.” And then it whipped its neck around so hard that the bones crackled, and Fisher-Bird was just a hair slow getting into the air, so the slash of the stimp’s crest took her low across the belly and knocked her down into the rotting mud.
Stronger came plodding through a long time later. “Bird?” he called. “Bird? The stimps flew away, the ones that could fly. Bird, where are you?”
He slid and squelched into the clear spot that had been the tallest stimp’s dance floor, and caught sight of Fisher-Bird. “Bird, no!”
He went to his knees next to the little limp bundle of feathers and picked her up with hands that were stronger than anyone else’s. “Bird, don’t die. It worked. Please don’t die.” He cradled her in his palm, and her wings hung limp at her sides, a girdle of dried blood across her white feathers. “You helped me. You’re the only one, aside from my cousin, who’s given me the time of day. Please don’t die.”
Fisher-Bird didn’t speak, didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and her beak gaped open.
Stronger put his forehead down against her feathered breast and started to cry. And I ain’t saying the tears of a hero with god-blood have any kind of power, but I’ll tell you the only thing I know, which is that Fisher-Bird pecked his eyebrow, hard.
“Ow!” Stronger jerked back, nearly dropping her. “What the hell was that?”
“You damn near squashed me,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t feeling all that well, all right? Damn stimp had rat poison left on his feathers. Serves me right for letting him get too close, I guess. More fool me.”
“I thought you were dead!”
“Can’t even have a bit of a lie-down without some damn fool crying all over you.” She pecked him again for good measure. “There. You got your stimps cleared out. Your mother-in-law can’t say you didn’t, and the swamp’ll be better for it in a season or two.”
“Can I take you back to your stream?” asked Stronger, who was raised polite.
“Yeah, I’ll let you,” said Fisher-Bird, who didn’t want to let on that she wasn’t feelin’ too much like flying right then. So he carried her back on his shoulder and set her down on her favorite branch, and bid her farewell.
“Hmmph,” said Fisher-Bird. “You finish up your jobs and get away from that woman, you hear?”
“I will,” he promised. “I will.”
Anyway, you all know the rest of the story. There were some golden cattle—or maybe some golden apples, depending on who you ask—and Old Man Hades’s guard dogs with their fine snapping teeth. Stronger did it all, without complaining too much, and finally his mother-in-law had to let him go.
As for Fisher-Bird, she never could clean her feathers for fear of getting a mouthful of poison, so she’s had a red band of blood and rust right across her belly, from that day to this. Which is still getting off lightly if you mess about with gods and heroes, so Fisher-Bird always said.
Author's Note: The Labors of Hercules is one of the first myths I remember reading as a child. (At the time, I remember being very invested in the man-eating mares of Diomedes.) Looking back on it, years later, I was bemused by how many of the labors fundamentally seem to involve animals. Kill this lion and this hydra and this boar and these birds. Catch these horses, this dog, this deer, and then clean up the stables while you’re at it.
It got me thinking about how the animals likely felt about the matter, and what their view on the Labors might be, and from that initial spark came Fisher-Bird’s story.
* * *
Ursula Vernon is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Mythopoeic Awards. She has written a number of children’s books, short stories, and comics, and writes for adults under the name T. Kingfisher. She likes fairy-tale retellings, gardening, and has strong opinions about heirloom beans. You can find more of her work at redwombatstudio.com.
How the Trick is Done
By A.C. Wise
The Magician Takes a Bow
How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip—dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air—everyone claimed they knew someone who heard the Magician’s Assistant scream, saw the spray of blood, saw a man rush on stage and faint dead away.
Of course very few people making the claim, then or now, are telling the truth. Vegas is a city of illusion, and everyone likes feeling they’re in on the secret, understand how the trick is done, but very few do.
The end came for the Magician, fittingly, during the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat, the trick that made him famous. A real gun is fired by a willing audience member. The Magician dies. The Magician reappears alive and at back of the theater. Presto, abracadabra, ta-da.
There are small variations. Sometimes the Magician’s Assistant fires the gun, if the audience is squeamish, or especially drunk. She revels in these brief moments in the spotlight, dreaming of being a magician herself some day. Sometimes the Magician reappears in the balcony, waving, and sometimes by the exit doors. Once he reappeared as a vendor selling popcorn, his satin-lapeled jacket smelling of butter and heat and salt. Once, he came back as a waiter and spilled a drink on an audience member who was confidently whispering that they knew exactly how he pulled it off.
Just because Houdini flashed bullets in his smile years before the Magician was born, people think they have it nailed down. Variations on tricks of every kind are a grand tradition in the magic world, and everyone knows none of it is real. The world is rational; it obeys certain rules. They hold this truth like shield against the swoop in their bellies every time the Magician falls and gets back up again. None would dare admit out loud that deep down, a tiny part of them desperately wants to believe.
Here’s the secret, and it’s a simple one: dying is easy. All the Magician has to do is stand with teeth clenched, muscles tight, breath slowed, and wait. The real work is left to his Resurrectionist girlfriend, Angie, standing just off stage, night after night, doing the impossible, upsetting the natural order of the world. Her timing is always impeccable, her focus a razor’s edge. Her entire will is trained on holding the bullet in place, coaxing the Magician’s blood to flow and forbidding his heart from simply quitting out of shock. Death can be very startling, after all.
There is pain, of course, but by the time he died for good, it had become a habit for the Magician, and besides, the applause made it worthwhile. He never once allowed himself to think about the thousand huge and tiny things had to go right for the trick to work, or that only one had to go wrong.
After all, the Resurrectionist pulled it off night afte
r night—how hard could it be? Inside the wash of the spotlight, he couldn’t see her grit her teeth, how she sweated in the shadows while he flashed his smile and took his bows. Everything always went off, just like magic, and he always managed to vanish by the time her raging headache set in, forcing her to lie in a dark room with a cold cloth over her eyes.
But she never complained. The money was good, and much like dying had become a habit for the Magician, the Magician had become a habit for her.
Maybe they could have gone on like that forever if it hadn’t been for the Magician’s Assistant. Not the one who fired the gun, but the first one. Meg, who died and came back as a ghost.
• • • •
The Assistant Takes Flight
Meg was young when she was the Magician’s Assistant, but everyone was back then. She was also in love with the Magician, but everyone was that back then, too. Even Rory, the Magician’s longtime stage manager, who was perhaps the most in love of all.
Rory thought of Meg as a little sister, and Meg thought of Rory as a dear friend, but neither of them ever spoke of their feelings for the Magician aloud. They worked side by side every day, believing themselves alone in their singular orbits of longing, both ashamed to have fallen so far and so hard for so long.
All of this was before the Magician’s Resurrectionist girlfriend, before the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat was even a gleam in the Magician’s eye. Back then, before coming back from the dead to thunderous applause supplanted it all, the Magician sawed women in half, plucked cards from thin air, nicked watches from sleeves, and pulled one very grumpy rabbit out of a hat night after night. Off stage and on, the Magician called the rabbit Gus, even though that wasn’t his name, and assigned him motives and personality to make the audience laugh.
Whether it was the name or the hat, the rabbit only tolerated this for so long, and one fateful night, he bit the Magician hard enough to necessitate the tip of his left index finger being sewn back on. After the blood and the gauze, and the trip to the hospital, the Magician decided he was fed up too. He needed a new act, a new assistant, a fresh start.
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