The voice circles me now, a warm, gravelly purr joined at the hip to a lazy stroll, footsteps followed by the sound of ice beating a futile attempt to escape its glass.
“Colonel Fosbery would be proud of you. Yes, he would. See how she shines?” There’s a sip, a slow exhale, and a chuckle. “Who’d’ve countenanced a journey of one hundred years, just so she could wind up here?”
I don’t want to listen, but do anyway, multi-tasking when I least appreciate the skill. The barrel is something special. I use a silicone cloth to wipe off fingerprints after all the manhandling.
The figure is opposite me, back on the sofa, a vague silhouette in the corner of my eye that leans forward and says, patiently, “I think you can about call it a wrap now — why don’t you set her up for me as well, there’s a good chap.”
She might’ve been ancient, but the gat is dead easy to suss out. She’s cocked by simply shoving the cylinder-barrel assembly back as far as it’ll go, and in doing so I make out the sound of an internal spring that holds it in position.
I don’t know when I notice I’ve stopped whistling. Cole Porter doesn’t ring right for what’s about to happen, despite the gun now flashing and myself no more than a flunkey.
I pass him the gun, grip-first — it’s the polite thing to do.
Placing an empty glass on the table, the man accepts the prize. He examines her in the light from the overhead fluorescent and finally I look at his face. Pleased seems to be the emotion that passes across it, although I can’t really be sure. I hardly know the gent.
“Are you ready now?” he inquires of the Webley-Fosbery as she settles herself into his left hand, barrel pointed in my direction.
I doubt the question was intended for me, but I nod anyway. ‘Cos all I want is you.
This next fantasy ‘potboiler’ was something I concocted in April 2012 — immediately after destroying my brain finishing off my second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. I remember I was all at sea, and decided to try my hand at an offbeat, God-hopefully-comic adventure/fantasy romp.
I was probably re-reading Roy Thomas’ classic retake (with artist Barry Windsor-Smith) of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, which he did at Marvel Comics in the early ‘70s. I tend to flick through it often on the loo.
The twist here (for me) was a tough, sardonic female protagonist who left my male leads for dead. While the thing was fun to write and I’d love to try my hand at this again, at the time I felt it lacked something special to motivate further work. Still do. I eventually shelved the greater concept (this may change, depending on time).
I did pitch it about to some swords ‘n’ sandals ‘n’ sorcery mags and anthologies, but the standard response was like this one: “Thank you for sending us A Woman of Some Sense. This is a perfectly good story, but it doesn’t quite have the feel I want for Sword & Sorceress. Try this on another market.”
The people at Beneath Ceaseless Skies wrote back in June 2012 that “The narrator is entertaining, but I found I never got quite enough grounding in the setting, and the story didn’t have quite enough substance to it to completely win me over.” Quite.
In the end, it was published via the very nice people at Big Pulp.
Looking back, I think I had a hankering to stick a character in a story with the lord-someone-or-other moniker, I always had a soft spot for cliffhanger scenes, and I do kind of dig the silly repartee — though at times this needs to be reined in and/or ditched completely.
The story could do with some love, a more solid sense of jocularity and an overhaul, but I decided to place it in, warts ‘n’ all, possibly to fill out some space.
A Woman of Some Sense
How I got here was not important.
The way in which I removed myself mattered, especially given my position — hanging upside down from a leather strap that was loosely coiled around the shin of my left leg, the other end snagged in a two-inch-thick scrub plant that grew out of a cliff face. The cliff continued in a straight line down to rocky terrain about a hundred and fifty feet away. So, while extraction was my principle concern, I also had to hang docile and move as little as possible. The ring-in bonsai up there could snap at any moment, and then it’d be sayonara Valeria.
Thank somebody for the belly dancing lessons. A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have been able to do what I now did — lift up my torso, using my stomach and back muscles alone — so that the world flipped the right way round, and my eyes were parallel with my knees. The belly dancing had been done to sneak into a palace and steal a treasure. I hadn’t expected fringe benefits.
That was precisely when the bonsai shook and dirt tumbled down. I froze, not an easy thing when you’ve bent yourself up into a U-shape and every fibre of your body squabbles for release. This is the kind of moment when how you got here does become important, and in my case it was the fault of a man. Always was; always would be.
This man’s name was Lord Ervin of Brownwood.
“That’s nowhere near Redwood, is it?” I quipped, when I first encountered the effete, rake-thin uppercruster in an arranged meeting at an inn.
Ervin frowned and wobbled his unattractive head. “I haven’t the woolliest.”
In case you haven’t figured it out, I was more enamoured with this man’s hefty purse than any screaming loud physical attributes. He had none. But his moneybag — ahhh, his moneybag.
“I hear tell that you are rather the good swordswoman.”
“Swordsman,” I said. “I’m better than any man, other woman or diabolical pell you might decide to match me up with.”
Ervin, several inches shorter and with that shimmying skull, walked slowly around me there in the yard of the inn. “Tall, full-bosomed—”
“Excuse me?” My sword was out of its scabbard and at his narrow throat in less time than it took for him to finish his irritating appraisal.
“—Err…devilishly fast with a blade, I’ll give you that. Kudos, my dear. Also large-limbed, compact shoulders — yet still overtly feminine.”
“So I do have charms.” I slotted the sword home. “Ta. What’s the ruckus?”
“Ruckus?”
“You know, racket. Swindle.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“The job.”
“Oh! Oh, yes, I see. Well, I want you to be my wife.”
I laughed when I heard this. The other option was bringing out my blade again and sticking the fellow for real, but he did tickle my funny bone.
“Laugh away,” Lord Ervin muttered in an annoyed fashion. He dusted down a log and sat there. “I don’t mean a bona fide bride, just someone to pretend being one.”
After my chuckles subsided, I felt sorry for the loser and sat next to him. “Why?”
“I need a bodyguard for a trip from this town to my villa.”
“What kind of bodyguarding are we talking?”
“Really, now.”
“How far is it?”
“The villa? A day’s ride.”
“You’re expecting trouble?”
“I will be carrying a shipment of jewels. Word has leaked out and about.”
“Iffy.”
“I suppose.”
“And the sham spouse?”
“I believe a ‘wife’ would be a wonderful disguise. No one would suspect.”
“Well, I think some might, given your personality and habits.”
“How dare you!” After a momentary head sway, Ervin slapped me with his glove. I’d have said it hurt, just to make the fellow feel better, but it merely tingled and I wasn’t in the mood for fabrications to make a potential employer feel better. That cost extra.
“Look, how much are you prepared to pay?”
This man’s vitriol was a quick-burning beast. The rage vanished, and he was suddenly counting out gold doubloons into both my hands.
“Enough?”
“With this, I’d marry you for real.”
“Oh, no need.” The blueblood�
�s frigid gaze washed over me. “Of course, we will have to get you a change of clothes. Breeches, boots, a scabbard and a shirt better worn by pirates of ill-repute are not appropriate.”
“Aren’t all pirates people of ill-repute?”
“Even so, this wardrobe is hardly becoming for the spouse of someone as important as me — or even some low-ranking fool, for that matter.”
“Keep the compliments coming,” I sighed. “I feel like we’re married already.”
Which was why, the next day, I was embalmed with an extremely tight bodice — stiffened with whalebone — that cut off half my blood circulation, and my legs smothered beneath three different voluminous skirts that dragged on the ground when I dared walking. My hair was braided and twisted up into a topknot beneath a silk veil that hampered my peripheral vision, and I ended up riding my horse far more than usual if only to avoid accidents.
“You look a vision,” Lord Ervin was gushing as he cantered beside me on a road beside a high bluff. His noggin wobbled more than usual.
“I look like an upscale dimwit.”
“Like me?” He had a minor smirk.
I smiled back. “Like you.”
In the midst of the sweet nothings — which were what these words truly meant — the ambush took place. Think ruffians swinging down from trees to our left and jumping out of bushes and from behind trunks. The place was full of the fiends. I counted at least twenty as I clutched for the rapier that was hidden somewhere in my skirts, but this took too long — and then I was knocked from the horse. Five men surrounded me with an assortment of dangerous instruments, ranging from a primitive garden hoe to an overdone mace.
I finally got out my sword, dealt with the five, and was straight after leaning against my horse — breathless, dizzy and wheezing. I had to get the corset off. Hacking at the strings, I ripped it free and tossed the garment as I swung around to face another dozen fiends. I couldn’t see Ervin or his mare anywhere close by — perhaps he’d scarpered. Good for him.
Another four men dropped before I misjudged my place on the edge of the cliff, tripped on my skirts, and took an unhealthy plunge.
Which was how I wound up here, upside down in a tricky situation.
A lucky one, I’ll give you that — I should have ended up on the rocks far below, where the bodice I’d cut off even now lay. The problem was how to untangle myself from the leather strap, get a decent grip on the vertical rock, and climb the six feet to stable terra firma.
“May I give you a hand, fair maiden?”
I spied Ervin gazing over the edge, a large grin on his face.
“Fair maiden, my foot. You know your disguise very nearly killed me?”
“That was the plan.”
I stared up at him. I figured the smile wasn’t so friendly after all. “Go on. You have a captive audience down here.”
“Why, that’s very kind of you.”
“I’ve learned how much the villains of the piece like to wax boring.”
“Well said.”
“Not particularly. Anyhow — what’s afoot?”
Ervin pouted in a triumphant kind of way. I noted that his head had stopped bouncing. “I spread the rumour around these parts that my new bride would be carrying all my worth, given to her as a sign of my absolute devotion. When those cretins attacked, they went straight for you, and I was able to slip away. I knew either you would kill them or vice versa, and to be honest I didn’t care which outcome transpired. I could ride home safely with my fortune.”
“You took a risk coming back, then, to see what happened.”
“I was going to lie,” he chuckled, “but in this position I see there’s no need.”
“Wrong.”
While we’d been indulging in honeymoon talk, I’d got a decent grip on the rocks, untied the leather strap, and tethered it to a strip of cloth from my dress. This I had fashioned into a rough lasso and I swung it around and up, over the man’s narrow shoulders, before his lordship knew what to expect. Then I pulled — hard.
“You won’t be needing this,” I muttered, tearing the purse from Lord Ervin’s belt as he flew past. He certainly screamed like a girl. It was embarrassing.
After I heard the crunch of bones far below, I focused on climbing the rock face, inch by precarious inch. It took me half an hour to reach the top. When I got there, I flopped over onto my back and looked up at a beautiful blue sky I hadn’t noticed before now.
“God, I’m sick of men. Always doing the wrong bloody thing.” I sat back up, laughed, and shook my hair free of the veil. Then I lobbed it and focused on the silk bag of coins on the ground beside me. “Oh, well. Time to go shopping.”
The next two pieces were never written or intended as stand-alone short stories.
While my first pair of novels were an homage to sci-fi/dystopia with noir undertones and classic hardboiled cinema (Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat) and surreal, slipstream fantasy (One Hundred Years of Vicissitude), the latest pays respect to two things I love the most — one of them being 1930s-40s noir detective stories.
In particular that written by Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) and Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) and the film adaptations by rather brilliant directors like John Huston, Robert Altman and Howard Hawks.
But I have a confession to make to anyone who’ll listen — I also adore 1960s comicbooks and occasionally obsess over comic artist Jack ‘King’ Kirby. His work for Marvel in the ’60s, the so-called Silver Age or pop-art era, remains mind-boggling for me 50 years after it was first drafted.
So, anyway, back to the next two stories you’ll find here. They’re dual prologue pieces I had in my original manuscript for the novel Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, a noir/superhero homage I wrote in the second half of 2012.
The first one, The Kármán Line, I ended up keeping and I’m inserting it as a teaser.
The second, here called Icing on the Cape, outlined the death of superhero Sir Omphalos (a.k.a. the Big O), which is a pivotal point through the novel.
I was fortunate enough to have a character design for him drawn by Maan House in Uruguay (see previous page) this January, a collaborative combination of ideas that included an unused design for Captain America by Jack Kirby, the Equalizers’ logo on the belt buckle, and the cape design for Captain America’s short-time alias Nomad created by Sal Buscema and Gil Kane in 1974.
Funnily enough, I abandoned this particular prologue by the time of tweaking the final manuscript in the September-December rewrite, because the thing didn’t want to click.
The Celsius/Fahrenheit riff was dead in the water no matter how much I really wanted to work with it, and without the riff the scene was just plain bland.
And keeping the Big O’s actual death “unknown”, aside from basic information, adds to the man’s mystique.
So, I’ve added this short, deleted aside in here for your very own verdict, whether or not you’ve read the novel.
The Kármán Line
“Aer’t,” the radio receiver squawks inside her helmet. “Aeri—st, re—ng me?”
“Hello, you’ve called the Aerialist,” the Cape says in response. “She’s not home at the moment, too busy falling from a ridiculous height. Please leave a message after the tone so the girl can get back to you — you know, after all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put her together again. Beep.”
God knows if anyone hears the quip. The only feedback coming through loud and clear is shrill static.
The Aerialist was aware of risks, but sabotage — someone cutting a hole in her jetpack to siphon out the fuel — had not been one of the hazards people bothered to mention.
Fifteen seconds pass and the drop is only one thousand, nine hundred feet shorter, according to the instrumentation on her wrist. Three hundred and twenty-six thousand of the imperial buggers to go.
The Aerialist is slap-bang in freefall, somewhere marginally past the Kármán line — in plain English abou
t a hundred kilometres to impact on earth. Unless, of course, she hits something higher like Mount Everest (shaving off nine kilometres) or the top of the Empire State, four hundred and forty metres above terra firma.
Not that either place is optional here.
Flame-on! she quips, laughing for just a moment.
Inferring she’s alit does, however, exaggerate the case. Objects light up when they fall at tens of miles a second, whereas her rate of descent clocks in around a few hundred miles per hour. Maybe seven hundred. Slower than a lead balloon.
That doesn’t stop her brain racing, conjuring up the insane, expecting fire to lick up on the outside the pressure suit. This suit takes the brunt of buffeting as she tumbles arse over tit. No hope. Nothing. Just falling till she hits the ground.
Never thought it’d end via such a lame whimper, she further mulls, dizzy now. Maybe I should’ve packed a parachute?
Icing on the Cape
From out of the west with not quite the speed of light and a hearty ‘Hi-yo’ he comes, soaring thirty metres above a meadow on the outskirts of town. It’s taken the Cape half an hour’s flying time to reach this point. There’s an azure blue sky and the temperature hovers around twenty-three degrees Celsius — or seventy-three point four in the old Fahrenheit system.
One wondered if German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit would have resented younger contemporary Anders Celsius had he only known that the Swede’s temperature scale would gut Fahrenheit over the ensuing three centuries.
Then the Cape purges the notion.
You and your over-analyzing, Gypsie-Ann would likely grumble — ironic, given her penchant for the same pursuit.
So, instead, the masked man resolves to enjoy the moment and the beauty of all about him. Pristine weather and gorgeous country houses; the white-picket fences below that nipped and tucked rolling green lawns and flowers of multiple colours.
The Condimental Op Page 4