Strange Horizons, August 2002

by Strange Horizons

  “Mr. Benjamin Dawson,” Grandad says, with just the tiniest twist of spite in his voice. “We have found our val-u-able horse."

  Ben looks around, taking in the scene. His eyes flit over his people, the rowans, Tal, the blood on me, back to Grandad.

  “The girl's got a morrigan, Ben,” says Jack, and I realize that Ben had been thinking about fighting. Calpurnia starts to giggle, and I press my face into Tal's shoulder. My lip stings.

  There is a long, tight silence. I hear the wind, the trickling spring, feet shuffling, little whimpers, the tink of metal. Ben's voice comes slow and grim. “What is it gonna take to make peace between us, Aldwine?"

  “Every damned thing you've got.” Mom means it. The Dawsons will be paupers at the end of this.

  I close my eyes and lean on Tal and want to be home. Voices swirl around me but I'm not listening. If I'm not very careful, I keep remembering the rowans, and that woman's hand. I just want to be home. I want a shower and clean clothes.

  There is a soft noise behind me. I turn only my head. It's Jack, holding the halter and lead rope out to me.

  “Thanks,” I whisper, and take them from him. We're both careful not to let our fingertips touch. I slip the halter over Tal's head. He's trembling but he lets me do it, and I almost cry. I don't want him to trust me that much. I press my face into the hollow by his withers and breathe.

  “Does he—” Jack licks his lips. “Does he send ... that other thing ... away?"

  “No.” I push against the grain of Tal's coat so that the soft hairs poke my skin. “He's a talisman. He helps bring me forward.” As long as he's stronger than Calpurnia, I think, but I don't say that. I concentrate on the heartbeat under my cheek.

  After a few minutes, I realize Jack hasn't gone. I don't move, but he seems to know he's got my attention. He comes closer, only a step away, so close I can feel the heat of his body. He does not touch me. Nobody but Tal will touch me, I think, and it's hard to swallow then.

  “Callie,” he breathes. I don't turn. “Callie, please. You can make me thegn. Please.” I say nothing. There is a hurting edge to his voice. “Please, Callie."

  Face still pressed to Tal, I say, “My family is very small, and it's about to become rich. When you're small and rich, you have to fight to keep what you have. This is just the beginning."

  I put my cold hands on Tal's nose so I can feel his breath. “My family planned ahead. Here we are, in Quarter Horse country, and I have this huge Hanoverian as my talisman.” I laugh, and there is something in my laugh that scares me at how close it is to not being mine. “Do you know what the airs above the ground are, Jack? There's this one, the capriole, where the horse jumps up and snaps his hind legs out—"

  He says flatly, “You're training a warhorse."

  That something is in my laugh again. “That's the kind of planning my family does. And you think—” I can barely get my breath past the laughing. “You think we'll make you one of us?"

  “There's still time. I haven't touched food, not even water, and the sun's not up yet. Please, Callie."

  Like he has any right to ask for that honor, standing there without a mark on him. He makes me sick.

  “The woman,” I say, eyes closed, feeling the crusty salt on Tal's coat. “What's her name?"

  “Gillian."

  “Is she left-handed?"

  Silence. Damn. I feel really bad about that.

  “Take him.” I push myself away from Tal and hand the rope to Jack. “Wash the salt off in the spring. And any blood I got on him, too.” I walk away, towards the hostages.

  “Callie, Callie, please,” Jack calls desperately, but I ignore him.

  Gillian is very pale and her skin is damp. When I kneel in front of her, she opens her eyes and swallows hard but doesn't back away. She's braver than I am. I'd run from me.

  “Gillian Dawson,” I tell her. “I have an offer for you. Your family's broken. They can't rescue you, and I doubt they can ransom you, either. I fought you. I respect you, and I don't want to see you end up as property."

  “Go on,” she says thickly. Pain makes it hard for her to speak.

  “We can use someone like you in the family. Swear yourself to us."

  It's not a hard decision, under the circumstances. She nods and pulls herself upright. “I swear."

  I try not to look too long at her hand. Very carefully, I slip my forefingers through the chains on her wrists and pull, cupping them in my palms as they fall. I link them together and clasp the makeshift necklace around her, keeping my fingers as far from her skin as I can.

  “Gillian Aldwine, I give you my name, the protection of my house, and honorable standing in my family.” I kiss her mouth, and my lip hurts. Calpurnia's breath catches with the ecstasy of a blade sliding across flesh. I pull away quickly.

  “Thank you.” Her voice is slow and weak, and her head drops to her chest when she's done. I have to lean close to hear her say, “I'll come to you when I can."

  “Yes. Good.” I rock back on my heels, ready to leave. I want, very much, to stay, to feel skin next to mine. I know better. Before I go, I say softly, “I'm sorry.” She doesn't respond.

  I go to where my family stands with the remaining Dawsons. Everybody steps well aside to make room for me. “Benjamin Dawson,” I say, first thing. “I've taken the woman Gillian as thegn.” I don't have to tell him this. I don't have to announce it to anyone but Gillian and my family. I'm showing Ben courtesy, but from the look on his face, you'd think I just spat on him. My family looks pleased, though.

  Now that I'm there, Grandad formally states the terms of the peaceprice. It's even steeper than I guessed. The Dawsons gambled and lost, and my family intends to make an example of them. Because of Calpurnia—what she is, what she is capable of—we can do that.

  For the first time in my life, I really think about that. About how very advantageous that is.

  What was it I told Jack? My family plans ahead.

  Some things start falling into place for me.

  I barely watch as Grandma nicks Ben inside the elbow and drops salt there to seal the terms. I see hate in his eyes, a helpless anger at this symbol of his family's ruin. The other Dawsons stare at me, and stand well back. I'm busy thinking.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid not to have figured this out before.

  My mother grants twenty-four hours for Ben's family to come up with the ransoms for the hostages. This is a polite fiction. There is no money left for ransoms, so they will be Aldwine thralls by tomorrow night. Ben has lost fully half his family in one day, and mine is stronger by five.

  I turn and start walking. Behind me, I hear Ben's voice, so loud and clear that I know the words are really for me even though he's supposedly talking to Grandad. “Jesus Christ, Edward. A morrigan. Are you crazy? Why didn't you drown that girl at birth?"

  When I get to Tal, I take the lead rope from Jack. “Go,” I tell him, and there is enough of Calpurnia in my voice that he doesn't argue.

  Ben is shouting now. “She'll up and kill you one day, you know! They always do. They get so hungry to touch, they up and kill every—” His voice cuts off.

  I wash myself in the spring as best I can. I run my hands over every inch of Tal, making sure he's fine. I'm finger-combing his tail when Mom and Grandma and Grandad come to get me.

  “Everything's settled,” Mom says.

  “Gillian?” I ask.

  “Jack's taking her to the hospital. And the hostages are on their way to the house. We can go."

  I nod slowly.

  “Pay no mind to Dawson's mouth,” says Grandma. “He's just trying to scare you, now that he has nothing else. I never heard of any such thing."

  “Me, neither,” says Mom.

  I say nothing. We start back towards the truck. I'm mindful of Tal's footing.

  “I was thinking,” says Grandma after a while, “of the west bedroom for Gillian. Thought she might like seeing the sun set over the hills.” When I don't reply, she adds, “It's just
amazing what they can do at hospitals these days. Might be she'll use that hand again, even."

  Grandad nods. “Taver Rood, you remember, after his accident, he had a neurosurgeon—"

  I do not listen. I am thinking about how many other old families will look at us—small, temptingly rich—and consider Calpurnia and the rowans and think again.

  Grandma is talking about the boys who came back from the War and learned to write with their left hands. I am not listening. I am hearing the leaves rustling and sticks popping beneath our feet, and Tal's soft snorting. I close my eyes as I walk. I feel the wind on my face, like a soft sweep of fingers.

  “Whose decision,” I say when there is a lull in all the other talking, “whose decision was it to put a morrigan in me?” My voice shakes. “Who did this to me?"

  The wind plays over my eyelids, my cheeks, my forehead. I hear faltering steps in front of me. I was right. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

  There is a long, uncomfortable silence. Tal's hooves click against stones. The breeze kisses my bangs. I lift my face to it.

  “Let's get home,” my mother says uneasily. “It's not safe in these woods at night."

  That seems very funny. I start to giggle, louder and louder, and I can't stop.

  The voice is not quite mine.

  Copyright © 2002 Tracina Jackson-Adams

  * * * *

  Tracina Jackson-Adams lives in the Snow Belt and rides big horses. Her fiction also appears in Speculon, Weird Tales, and Icarus Ascending, and her poetry in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Star*Line, and The Modern Art Cave. She'd like to thank the Nobel Academy—oh, wait, that's something else.

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  Other Cities #12 of 12: Stin

  By Benjamin Rosenbaum

  8/19/02

  Last in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.

  Stin is the city for those who are tired of other cities, of villages, of houses, tents, roads, trees, anything at all. Those for whom the desert monasteries offer no retreat, the teeming megalopolises no distraction, the ethereal balloon cities no solace, come to Stin.

  If, sleeping on a train, you wake with a start, and for a moment, you do not know who you are; you look into the window at your left, and against the racing black night you see your half-reflection looking back; you recognize the face, the dark staring eyes, but the fact that this is you seems like a joke, an absurd curse; you recall that you are going to die, your heart pounds, and you are desperate to cling to your flesh, but more desperate still not to forget the fear, not to lapse back into the placid dullness of taking existence for granted, and you fight to keep this sudden, strange terror alive—if so, you might want to consider moving to Stin.

  A glitter of blue; a geometric form too complex to understand, seen only for an instant; a stillness like the pause before some great and violent action; not death (which is no more interesting than dirt or mold), but the knowledge that you will die.... The travelers who truly yearn, who are dissatisfied with the blandishments of the fleshpots, the self-important outrage of the barricades, the easy answers of ashrams and the dullness of kibbutzim, come to Stin.

  Now accepting applications for residency. Please fill out the enclosed card; someone will contact you.

  * * * *

  Previous city (The Cities of Myrkhyr)

  All published cities

  Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum

  * * * *

  Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vestal Review, Writer Online, and Quarterly West. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.

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  Looking Back

  By Corie Ralston

  8/26/02

  I watched Kira sleep. Soft breathing had turned to light snoring over the years, black hair to gray. She slept deepest in the quiet hours of early morning. There are no secrets when you've lived together thirty years in a nine hundred square foot house.

  Almost no secrets.

  The sun would rise soon, and I hadn't slept at all. Already the muddy light of the pre-dawn sky was slipping through the bedroom blinds. I stared at Kira's tight gray curls against the ivory pillow and felt an unexpected tightening in my chest. I wanted to kiss her lightly on the forehead, like in the old romances. One last goodbye, violins wailing in the background. But she might wake up, and I couldn't chance it.

  Russell followed when I left the bedroom, padding silently behind me. A quick splash of water on my face from the bathroom sink, and I looked up at the mirror, water dripping from my nose. Deep-set eyes beneath dark eyebrows beneath white, bristled hair. Pronounced lines at the corners of my eyes, the edges of my mouth. When had I become so old?

  My pack was hidden in the hall closet, behind the vacuum cleaner that Kira used on Tuesdays and the old twelve-string I never played anymore.

  Russell watched expectantly while I changed into the clothes I had placed in the side pocket of the pack: thick jeans, a thermal undershirt, the flannel overshirt with the rip in the elbow that Kira had mended for me twice already.

  I eased the front door open, pausing each time the hinges protested, listening for sounds from the bedroom. Russell waited patiently through the slow process, head tilted, not making a sound. Smart, quiet, loyal Russell.

  That dog, Kira always said, like it was a bad word. That dog is getting hair all over my couch. She had never appreciated Russell. She would be glad that he was gone.

  I stroked Russell's velvet head and ushered him out into the icy air.

  As I moved to close the door, my wedding band caught the light from the front porch. I pulled the ring from my finger and placed it on the table just inside the door. A small parting gift.

  Short, squat houses lined the street. Mine was one in a long row of blank indistinguishable faces, windows like unblinking eyes.

  Mine no longer. When the Tourists took me, I would be legally dead. The trust, the savings, my old truck, my cameras, everything would become hers. She would be well taken care of.

  The maples planted in the grassy border along the street were growing too large for their confinement, their roots buckling the uniform gray slabs of the sidewalk.

  The fog crept up from the river to lie across the road like a tired ghost.

  I had never felt so alone. I had never felt so alive.

  * * * *

  The Tourists came in gigantic ships. Golden and bullet-shaped, but bristling with flexible antennae like fur, they orbited our sun between Earth and Mars. They sent images and words across the blackness between us.

  The Tourists were human-sized, amorphous, soft-spoken. Their heads ballooned and shrank as they spoke; their many eyes wandered this way and that over their soft bodies.

  They offered us a deal.

  Come tour the universe with us, they said, in Chinese and then in every other human language. They laughed when the scientists asked how they knew our physiology, our languages. When you've toured a while, they said, you will see that there are far stranger beings than you. You are really quite ordinary.

  We caught glimpses of those other aliens in the images they sent: beings with limbs like upside-down trees, or bodies like moss, or creatures that moved so fast they were a blur or colors. The Tourists took care of them all.

  They sent smaller ships, empty shuttles, to the surface of the Earth. Shuttles to carry us to their touring ships, if we wanted.

  What do we give up?

  You give up your lives on Earth. While you Tour for fifty years, fifty thousand will pass on Earth. Everyone you know will be dead. Your descendants will have forgotten that you left.

  What was in it for them
? Nothing. They were Tourists. They wanted company for their journey.

  A journey! When I was younger I had yearned to travel the world with just my camera and backpack. But that had never happened. Marriage had trapped me in one city, with a mortgage and a job, and social obligations piling up like the unwanted bills on my desk.

  “Do you believe them?” Kira asked one night, glued to the TV like everyone else around the world, as footage of the golden ships played over and over.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  On the screen a golden bullet slid up through a purpling sky. Thousands of people setting out to explore, to watch the birth of stars, to sail the huge, open, waiting universe. I had seen pictures: nebulae and swirling galaxies in an astonishing spectrum of colors, hues I could never seem to capture in my own photography. To set foot on the surfaces of planets in distant galaxies, plateaus overlooking unfathomable depths, gaseous atmospheres as deep and thick as a family secret. Exploration, enlightenment.

  My heart fluttered at the sight. Set me free.

  Kira turned to me, as if she had heard.

  “Why would anyone get on that ship and fly God knows where and leave everything they know behind?"

  “Exploring is in our blood,” I said. “That's why people came to America. That's why we still cross the North Pole and dive the ocean.” The pictures on the screen defied the ordinariness of our living room: mushroom-brown furniture, throw rugs, framed crochet on the walls.

  She used to understand. When we were young, we would plan trips together. Someday soon, we told each other, we'll see the Tibetan plateau, the Great Barrier Reef, the Angel Falls of Venezuela. Like love, the dream had faded with time.

  “The people who leave will be bored within a week,” she said. “And then they'll be stuck and unhappy and wishing they were home."