Was it looking for him?
Ducking behind his fellow chickens, Gaius made his way over to the food dispenser. While the black rooster searched the area near his dropped bag, he pushed the green lever. A few grains of rice dropped into the bowl at the bottom.
Here goes nothing! Gaius pecked at them, swallowing two.
Suddenly, everything went back to its proper size. In fact, if anything, it was a tad smaller than usual. He looked down—still white and fluffy. Still a chicken.
Well, he could not have everything.
And if he did, where would he put it?
The black rooster slowly turned its head until its beady, black eyes were fixed on Gaius.
Oh, oh. That did not look good.
The other bird strutted back and forth, crowing, but Gaius could tell from the gleam in its eye that it would be coming for him soon. It was a magnificent-looking bird, in prime condition, and it knew how to fight. It backed up, lowering and extending its neck so that its entire body seemed to vanish behind its towering black cockscomb and razor-sharp beak, its neck ruff spreading out around this point of deadly danger like a feathery black shield. It was a pose Gaius had seen cocks take in the barnyard, usually while he was sprinting to get a bucket of water to throw on them in an effort to dissuade them from continuing. He liked to think of this stance as their “alien pose,” because when they stood like that, they sure did not look like earthly creatures. He wagered that if some TV show used roosters in this position for their monster-of-the-week, the majority of the audience would have no idea that they had just seen a chicken.
Looked more like a dinosaur. Or a rabid vulture.
But usually the fighting cockerels were of puntable size. If they had come for him, and he had been wandless, he could have kicked them across the barnyard and scored a goal over the irrigation system. Now, it was enormous and coming for him. Sadly, punting was not going to do it. Nor was being an expert duelist any help. Knowing how to wreak havoc with just the right spell did not carry over well into winning a cockfight.
His eyes rested on the deadly beak surrounded by its circular backdrop of black ruff feathers. What was he supposed to do? Peck at it?
That would involve deliberately moving his head, his second favorite body part, toward said deadly, razor-sharp beak.
He could see the battle now. He would flex his neck muscles, throwing his wobbly chicken excuse-for-a head forward, beak first—such a crazy idea. It was like fighting by hitting the other guy with your nose—and, just as he reached some important juncture, his fluffy white crest would flop into his eyes, blinding him, and it would all be over.
Gaius was not a fan of illegal cockfights, the way a few of the local men were. He had never paid much attention to exactly what the birds did when they fought each other. But he had seen roosters battle. The year before he went away to school, a particularly large black and grey Sumatra that had escaped from a nearby farm and gone after one of their motley Easter Eggers. Gaius had a memory of the larger bird leaping into the air and striking the other bird with its feet.
He could do that.
How hard could it be?
Gaius took three large steps backward, charged forward, and leapt. He flew through the air like a martial artist from a Hong Kong action flick, both clawed feet extended.
“Hi-ya!” he shouted as he performed this high-class kung fu move. Only it came out sounding a lot more like: “Coo-doo!”
As if with perfect aim, he struck his broad opponent, pointy talons first. Only now, however, did he remember something important. The Sumatra had also flapped its wings. This had kept it upright, so that its feet snapped out and pulled back with the speed of a snake, while the bird hovered in the air.
Not so Gaius.
Oh, his feet hit the black rooster as planned, but the rest of him did the opposite of hover. Instead, he struck the hard earth with a loud smack.
Headfirst.
As he lay dizzy and disoriented on the ground, Gaius thought that at least he had finally mastered a martial art. Not karate or tai chi, as he had hoped when he was a wee lad, but rather his college roommate’s favorite martial art of squeegee: the art of outwitting one’s enemy by defeating oneself first.
Yeah. He was a first class squeegee master.
Black belt, even.
The pain was intense, especially when the black rooster’s beak carved into his soft chickeny flesh. Luckily, his ridiculous layer of fluffy feathers protected him just a little. A scream escaped him, but even that was not satisfying. Instead, a series of chickeny squawks issued from his throat, producing so many notes that he felt he could have rivaled a bagpipe for truly ghastly music.
Ghastly music! That gave him an idea.
The beak was coming for him again. Gaius rolled to the side and somehow managed to get his crazy, long-toed feet under him and rise. He ran backwards, his head swimming.
As he did so, he began issuing a series of high-pitched chicken sounds, trying to figure out how to make the ones he wanted. Human lips vibrated and tingled if one tried to push magic through them, but a solid chicken beak? It was practically an instrument.
There! He had it! One blue spark!
He could do this!
Sucking in a huge breath, Gaius thought rapidly about what result he wanted and what he wanted to do next, exactly as he would in the midst of a duel. Then, concentrating, he cried out as loudly as he could, making the exact three notes needed for the paralysis hex.
Blue sparks danced though the air and swirled around the black rooster, accompanied by a rush of what Gaius knew was the scent of evergreens, even though it smelled quite different to him as a chicken.
The gigantic black rooster froze. Or, rather, as Gaius had planned, its body froze, absolutely still, but its head still moved, issuing challenges and letting out an earsplitting cock-a-doodle-doo!
Gaius let out his own crow of relief.
He had done it! He had stopped the monster, and he had used the new spell variation he had been trying to perfect. He had now officially mastered focusing the paralysis hex on a single portion of an opponent’s anatomy.
He was a frozen chicken master!
Crowing victoriously, he strutted off in the direction of his dropped bag.
It took him an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out how to get his head into the bag. Every time he tried to lift one side of the cloth, the other side flopped down again. Finally, however, he got his head inside, to find the Frizzle in there, happily chowing down on the seeds. It let out a squawk and backed up when it saw him. He ignored the little fluffball, searching for…
Ah. There it was.
Gaius’s chicken beak carefully closed around the quartz he had tossed in the bag when he was spying up on the ridge. With a thought, he activated one of the Word of Ending cantrips he had stored in it.
And, just like that, he was himself again.
He lay there for a moment, stretched out on the hard, cold ground—a bit of soft mud under one knee—breathing in relief.
He had never been so happy to just be him.
“What have we ‘ere, me ‘ansome?” cackled an aged woman’s voice from just above him. “Irksome emmet causing trouble among Granny Moorcock’s birds?”
Gaius did not hesitate. He did not even pull his head out of the bag. He just grabbed the quartz and held it up. Relying on his dueling instincts, he gauged where the speaker was and, with a thought, fired off one of his stored paralysis hexes, and not a partial one, either.
He waited a moment. When the voice said nothing else, he pulled his head out of the bag. A rain of seeds fell from his hair as he rose, scattering everywhere. Seeds trickled down his neck and clung to his nose.
Great. First, stuck as a Sultan. Now, this.
What a humiliating day.
But he forgot his dismay when he saw the ugly hag—for that must be what she was, literally—caught mid-cackle, as frozen as a statue.
Grinning, he stalked forw
ard and stared the old woman in the face. “No. I am not going to turn you back so you can babble about your tragic backstory and what led you to this.” He gestured at the giant black rooster, which was still able to move only its head. “You can save that for the Agents. Turning humans into chickens! You’re sick!”
He started to turn away and then spun back toward her again. “And I am not an emmet! Born and breed Cornishman ‘ere.”
Returning to the food dispenser, Gaius pushed the red lever and caught a few of the grains of rice that fell. These, he tossed into the giant rooster’s mouth—which was why he had left its head unfrozen. There would have been no way to get it to swallow had he frozen the whole creature. The black Ayam Ceman shrank to the size of a normal chicken.
Then, Gaius stomped around the enclosure performing the Word of Ending cantrip over and over.
As he had suspected, the little Frizzle was the missing boy from Four Clover Farms. The Norfolk Grey turned out to be Mrs. Fiddock, the butcher’s wife, who had gone missing last summer. She seemed heartily glad to be back in her proper form and kept bursting into tears and clutching Gaius’s arm in gratitude. There were other humans as well, including the black rooster, who turned out to be a fisherman from Padstow who seemed to believe he had been suffering a nightmare. Gaius kept going, casting the cantrip on each and every bird. There were fifteen humans in all among the livestock.
But the emu was just an emu.
Gaius guided the locals, including the poor fisherman, out onto the moors, leaving those who were tourists from other places still in the enclosure. He called his girlfriend and asked if her father could send a few Agents to clean up the mess. Then he escorted the butcher’s wife and Farmer Angove’s grandson home.
Returning to his father’s farm, he was greeted as a hero. He could not tell the farmhands what had happened, except to say that the threat had been eliminated, and the little boy had been returned. However, he told his father the whole story when the older man came to see him in the chicken yard. The taciturn old farmer listened to him without comment. Then he nodded once and wordlessly held out Gaius’s wand.
Gaius stared at the length of teak and brass, so familiar and dear to him. Then, he smiled and shook his head.
“It’s all right, Father. You keep it till I’m ready to go back to school. I think this learning to get by without it is doing me some good.”
“At least, you won’t be freezing any more chickens,” his father replied, sticking the wand in his coat pocket.
“No, of course, not,” Gaius replied airily.
The moment the old farmer walked away, Gaius pulled out the harmonica he had been holding behind him.
“Okay, chickens, listen up!”
The End
About the Author
L. Jagi Lamplighter is the author of the YA fantasy series: The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, the third book of which was nominated for the YA Dragon Award in 2017 and the fourth book of which won the first YA Ribbit Award. She is also the author of the Prospero’s Children series: Prospero Lost, Prospero In Hell, and Prospero Regained.
She has published numerous articles and short stories. She also has an anthology of her own works: In the Lamplight. She also edits for Superversive Press and teaches The Art and Craft of Writing.
When not writing, she switches to her secret identity as wife and stay-home mom in Centreville, VA, where she lives with her dashing husband, author John C. Wright, and their four darling children, Orville, Ping-Ping Eve, Roland Wilbur, and Justinian Oberon. For more information visit: https://www.superversivesf.com/fantasticschools/
Spacer Williams’ Chicken
Joshua M. Young
Spacer Williams’ Chicken
Joshua M. Young
Spacer Third Class Williams had caused disaster on shore leave before and was rightfully leery of causing another. The incident on Capella IV had started from a one-night stand, and what was shore leave for if not for brief, torrid romantic encounters? Just because things had gone off the rails—well, that should have been his problem, not the fleet’s. But no. The Capellans had to go and make a big deal out of it— anyways. Different story. The Lister Protocol, unlike many Merchant Scout regulations, was clear, concise, and easy to understand. “Thou shalt not bring animals aboard the ship.” It didn’t apply to the science team, of course, but Williams was a Loadmaster’s Mate, not a scientist. He looked long and hard at the chicken and tried to ignore the impulse to pick it up.
Well, he thought it was a chicken. It was big, maybe three feet tall, and while it was chicken-shaped, it was more beautifully colored than any chicken he’d ever seen. Bright red tail plumes nestled in a body covered in iridescent, shiny black feathers. The creature’s head was a deep russet that made him think of fall; the eyes big and wide in a way that reminded him of those stupid cartoons Vance was always watching late at night. It looked at him in a way that could only be called imploring.
Williams felt like an idiot. He had been an Iowan farm boy before joining the Merchant Scout Fleet. He’d seen a lot of chickens in his life and taken off nearly as many chicken’s heads. He’d never felt much pity for one before.
He heard men shouting in the distance—maybe another street or two over. The chicken looked at him with those, big, shimmering eyes, and Williams almost wanted to weep for the poor thing.
“Fine,” he said to the chicken, “fine. Come on. But hurry!”
Once you got down on the ground, Dzamglin was just fine. There wasn’t much in the way of flat ground, but the unrelenting mountains provided a sort of harsh beauty. Coupled with the brightly colored pagoda complexes clinging to the sheer cliffs and cities laid out on the infrequent plateaus, it was actually a rather lovely world.
Except from orbit, Captain Alberto Fujiwara thought, staring balefully at the viewscreen. What he saw from Zheng He’s viewscreen was about twenty percent of the surface of an ugly grey ball. He’d seen asteroids that had more going for them.
“Ground to orbit gate established, Captain,” someone called from a station off to the side of the bridge. “Transit estimates five minutes for full transfer of inbound personnel, another three for transfer of outbound.”
Eight minutes. Call it ten. Longer than he’d like, but business as usual. Inbound personnel shuffled through the short-range wormhole without any enthusiasm, lugging shoddy and expensive souvenirs in with them. Outbound personnel positively bounded through, eager to get off the ship, eager to see something new, eager to get laid. “Nav, prepare to compensate for gravitic disequilibrium. Engineering, increase reactor output by point oh one and keep an eye on the matter/antimatter mix. Let’s see if we can keep the power frequencies clean this transfer.”
There was a chorus of Aye, captains and repeated orders with minor variations as bridge staff relayed more specific instructions to their departments. A few minutes later, the report came that all inbound personnel were aboard ship. Fujiwara sighed and felt a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying release from his shoulders. SP3C Williams was back aboard the ship, and there had been no angry calls from the local government, no somber visits from Father Cahill, the ship’s chaplain. It wasn’t really fair to Williams to single him out like this. He wasn’t the first spacer whose libido had made a mess on shore leave, but there’d been a big difference between marrying a Rigellian stripper, and, well, that mess back on Capella.
For the first time in thirty-six hours, Fujiwara relaxed.
Williams steadied his duffle bag on his back and squared his shoulders. He’d tried packing the chicken in the bag, but it squirmed and looked, well, really obvious. No one in Transit would fail to notice him violating the Lister Protocol if his bag was squawking and moving about. So he’d stuffed the chicken in his hotel room, and tried to avoid looking nervous around the men in robes and long knives on their hips checking every corner of the street as he went out and purchased a large, ornate chest. The thing would eat up most of his personal space in the quarters he and
Vance shared, and Vance would most likely gripe about it, but hey. Earth was only three months out. He could transfer it—and the chicken—back home to his parents then. The real trick was going to be keeping Vance happy until then and hoped he kept the secret. He went out and bought his bunkmate some of those creamy, cake-like bars the man had raved about after his own trip to the surface.
Three months was a lot of good will to expect from a box of sweets. Williams went back out, bought Vance a fancy knife the vendor called a “kila” and the translation matrix just called a “knife.” The translation matrix was like that, missing a lot of the local flavor initially. Williams entered a correction by tapping it into the virtual keyboard woven into the sleeve of his uniform. “Not just a knife. A fancy knife.”
As an afterthought, he snagged Vance some nudie holos and realized he’d just blown all of his remaining pay on this stupid chicken. The thought vaguely frustrated him, but all the same, he brought his haul back to the hotel and settled down in front of the chest to figure all this out.
The chicken looked at him and then at each souvenir in turn. Its big, shimmering eyes might have hovered on the knife, and then the nudes, but it was the chest that caused the chicken to look back at him doubtfully.
“What do you want from me?” Williams asked. “I can’t just march you through the wormhole.”
In response, the chicken pecked his knee. Hard.
It took a bit of coaxing and a bit of trial and error, but eventually Williams and the chicken got it figured out. The chicken settled down in the box and actually held still while Williams arranged some items around it. He draped his spare liberty uniform over the chicken with a muttered “sorry,” and then tried to strike some balance between tossing things in haphazardly— as any hungover spacer might do— and not unduly hurting the chicken. Eventually he got it right, closed the lid— with another whispered apology— and lugged it down the stairs, conscious of every jolt the poor bird was experiencing.
CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories Page 6