The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  Could she stop this uttermost queen? Blanche knew truths but not all truths; still, what choice did she have?

  The night sky brightened as the crescent moon rose. It found a way through the leaves and shone onto Ada, who jerked upright, looking about wildly.

  “Hush,” said Blanche in her gentlest soft chuckling-to-chicks voice. “We are in the trees.”

  Ada nodded. “Are we safe?” she whispered.

  “We are never safe,” said Blanche. “But from the wastoures, perhaps. I know what to do.”

  • • • •

  Ada would not stay with the Squirrels, despite all her fear. She had been afraid since the day her mother died (and the baby with her), which had been five months after her father had died in the fields, cut almost in half by a plough. The people you loved failed you in a thousand ways, not least by dying out of your sight while you were doing what they told you to do, collecting walnuts in a basket or pulling weeds in the garden. After such lessons, who would not keep her eyes fixed on her last loved one? So Ada would not stay behind—and she would not again freeze in fear.

  The Dead Squirrels did not want to let them go, but Blanche had a certain voice they all remembered, though their mothers were dead; and in the end, they lowered Blanche and Ada from the tree, with gifts: a stale honeycake they had been saving and a waterskin that was just barely manageable if Ada filled it only halfway.

  The Squirrels: three will die, one by a fall, one of the flux, one killed by a man driven mad by this world. Which live? Which die? You have your favorites. Pall, because he is named and has shown kindness. Baby Jack because of his tender sobriquet, and we are sentimental about the young, though the world is not. The Oldest, though you do not even know which Squirrel that is, whether Weyland or Renard-the-Fox or even Edmund Blue-Toes. And if you knew that Stibby used to beat his little sisters and steal their food, and that Edmund once threw stones at a kitten until it died, would that change things?

  The remaining four will live for a while, and then die, like everyone else.

  Are you counting the deaths in this story, keeping a roster, keeping score? Is it higher or lower than The Wizard of Oz? There are more than I have told you.

  • • • •

  Things happened, and other things.

  Blanche and Ada backtracked along the path the wastoures had carved, past St Giles’ and Coombe Pastor and what was left of Rufford. Everything was very lush from where the blood had soaked into the ground, and flies clustered like clouds at the thickest-growing places. Blanche scratched for her own food, but Ada needed more: bread at least (there was no meat or milk), and someone to help her when she got a sliver in her heel that she could not reach. She gave more of her pennies away, and soon there were only two.

  At midafternoon on the sixth day, as the sky darkened with rain to the northwest, they came over the shoulder of a raw-rocked hill and saw a ruin in a clearing of the forest below them: the pale crumbling walls of what had once been a Roman villa, destroyed not by wastoures, but by weather and centuries of people stealing its stones for their own chimneys and fences—though it had been long ages since any had come to this place.

  Blanche shivered. The uttermost queen was stronger now that they were so close, and her demands scratched at Blanche’s mind the way growing feathers prickled in their sockets: grow and go forth/eat/do not return/do not stop until you find new grounds/if you can. Walking into the compulsion was like wading against flowing water, but Blanche marched on, and Ada close beside her.

  They picked their way down the slope toward the villa. There were no plants beyond a few dusty shrubs, for anything smaller had been trampled flat by the waves of departing wastoures. There was no sound of living creatures, not so much as a fly; but when a rumble of thunder made them look up, they saw two birds circling against the heavy clouds. Blanche cast one golden-black eye on their braiding flights and knew them for carrion crows. Ada only wondered whether they had babies and how they kept them hidden.

  A lone wastoure came suddenly around a collapsed wall, gawked, and gave a stuttering cry that was fierce cousin to the tuk-tuk-tuk of a hen summoning her chicks. A second popped from a hole in a leaf-covered floor. A third. More poured around corners and up from holes, and loped toward Blanche and Ada, calling. Tuk-tuk-tuk.

  “I wish I had not brought you,” said Blanche, but Ada laid her hand on Blanche’s broad back and said, “Where else would I go?”

  The first wastoure paused some paces away, wary and weaving, twisting its neck to peer from each eye in turn. Tuk-tuk-tuk. The others streamed past it, until—

  “Stop,” Blanche said, with her rattling growl.

  The foremost wastoures halted as though they had slammed into a wall, so abruptly that the rest crashed into them and they all fell together in a shrieking, bickering mass. Blanche flutter-hopped on, Ada alongside, and the wastoures scrambled out of reach; but more kept appearing, and more, until chicken and child walked through a crowd of them, in a clearing an armspan across.

  The wastoures were a cohort not yet full-grown and mostly the same size, a little taller than Blanche and waist-high to Ada. In her small experience, the only thing like this had been coming into Marjory’s kitchen-yard in the morning, when the hens would swarm toward her, hungry and loud. This was so much worse. She could smell their hot breath, a mix of sweetness and rank meat, like flyblown bacon hanging in a chimney before the smoke has cured it. Their claws beat on the hard-packed earth. She felt a touch on her heel and though she wanted to be brave she gave a little scream.

  Blanche said, “Back.”

  The wastoures stumbled away, though they still kept pace, and Blanche fluttered up into Ada’s arms.

  Down the hill, and into the tumbledown villa itself. Blanche’s eyes were on the wastoures, but Ada was watching her feet, for it would not do to fall. A single perfect circle appeared on the dust: a raindrop, and then another. The ground changed as she walked, claw-pounded dust to rain-spattered dirt to flagstones, and finally to a ruined mosaic peeping through the leaf-litter. Ada saw a golden-red fish against waving blue lines, and then more, a school running in a river of blue and green. The rain-wet colors were startling.

  Ada tightened her grip. “We found it!” she whispered. “The Town with the Moat!” Blanche only ruffled a little, a hen’s equivalent of a frown.

  They crossed the pavement to where two ruined walls met. “Here,” said Blanche, and dropped from Ada’s arms.

  The wastoures stopped, a tight chattering circle that blocked all ways. All ways but down: there was a triangular hole at Ada’s feet, where a flagstone had broken in half and left a gap.

  A wastoure popped up its head, a quick lunge away.

  “Go,” said Blanche, and it fell back as though it had been struck.

  Ada did not like holes: not cellars, not caves, not even the thought of safe happy busy burrows full of baby rabbits and their tender mothers. And this was none of those, but a gash, a ragged breach fringed with dirty broken mosaic that looked like teeth. (She did not think, like monsters’ teeth. She knew what the teeth of monsters looked like.) Through the hole, she could see a second floor some feet beneath the first, heaped with leaf-mold and sticks, and the fallen flagstone, tipped at an angle that made it look like a wet, pale tongue.

  The young wastoures jostled closer, snake-necked and sharp-beaked, narrow heads weaving and bright claws curling. Their eyes were hungry and curious.

  “Back,” hen-growled Blanche, and they recoiled.

  Ada looked into the hole.

  Blanche said, “I know. But we must go there.”

  Ada knew hard truths: had been raised in them. They dropped together.

  • • • •

  In another version of this story, they do not come to the ruined villa, but instead find the Town With a Moat. Ada is collected into the heart of a family with three daughters, whose names are Charity, Kindness, and Patience. Blanche is given a gold collar and lives to a great age.


  • • • •

  It was not a long fall, and there was a pile of litter at the bottom, pounded into a cushion by the claws of wastoures. Ada landed awkwardly, but Blanche fluttered down, white wings outstretched, and guarded her as she clambered off the leaves. They were in a broad low space, as large as the room overhead would have been, and just tall enough for Ada to stand upright. Irregular piles of rock served as pillars to hold up the . . . floor, it had been when they walked above; but here it was their roof. Daylight and silver rain filtered in through holes where the floor-now-roof had fallen.

  A thousand years before, this space would have been heated by a furnace, and the villa’s owner would have walked through his rooms warm-footed and smug, but neither Ada nor Blanche had ever imagined such things as hypocausts. Nor had that owner (whose name was Fabricius, who died of cancer; at the end, he wore a red scarf concealing the tumors on his throat: not a vain man but tidy) imagined such things as wastoures, for they came down from the mountains only when he was gone.

  The general darkness and the pillars made it hard to see far clearly. Wastoures dropped through the holes and crowded closer, more with each moment until—

  “Back,” hen-growled Blanche.

  Just out of arm’s-reach, the circle re-formed. The uttermost queen’s demand vibrated in Blanche’s hollow hen-bones, closer now, trembling in each feather like a maddening itch: grow/go forth/waste the way/find home and hole/do not return.

  A young female pushed forward into the circle of space: clever and assertive, alphamost of those present. It reared tall and looked down on the hen, first with one eye, then the other, and Blanche read the challenge clearly enough. To gain the high ground, she hopped onto the fallen flagstone, though peering faces fringed the hole just overhead. Now she could see more clearly across the hypocaust. Ada, still as a stone, in a dirty shawl that had once been the color of sky. The sharp challenge in the young alpha’s eye as it swiveled to view her, the reflexive clench of its foreclaws. The wastoures in their scores, a milling chaos in rain-wet darkness and the streaks of light from above. There was a rough gash in the far wall of raw rock that led down into deeper darkness. It was there they must go.

  Blanche opened her pearl-white wings and stretched her neck and hen-growled, “Leave. Die. Be gone.”

  Her order beat against the queen’s demand. To the young wastoures, it was like the throb of two great bells tuned a quarter tone apart: a thrumming in their teeth, in the fluid of their eyes, in their hearts struggling to keep the beat. Some dropped to their haunches shivering and clawing themselves, but most attacked whatever was closest, pillar or kin—though never Blanche and Ada. Some seethed toward the holes and, pillaring over their fighting broodmates, fled into the rain. A hard-willed few did not seem much affected, the young alpha among them; they still encircled Ada and Blanche.

  “Go,” Blanche said, with wing-mantle and head-thrust and hen-growl. In the end, the alpha snapped her jaws but stepped aside, and the remaining wastoures dropped back. Blanche and Ada crossed to the broken place in the hypocaust floor. Rank cold air breathed up at them. They crawled through.

  • • • •

  A thousand years before Ada and Blanche, when the villa’s builder had selected his site, the laborers had discovered a hole. There was no telling what caves or hidden rivers might be there to undermine the villa’s foundation, and the hole was too small for an adult to pass through, so they sent down a child of eight. An orphan. The child did not return. They built there anyway, sealing the hole with a great flat stone.

  The child’s bones are gone; should I tell you how he died?

  Blanche and Ada stood on that fallen stone. They were at the highest point of a limestone cavern, a long, sloping-floored space barely touched by a rain-silver glow that filtered from two places, the hole behind them and a single high crevice off to one side.

  Ada saw only glints and movement; faint light touching the curve of what might be an egg, the sudden spark of a kindling eye. She heard pattering claws, a dislodged stone, the breathing of the young ones clustered in the doorway behind them. She smelled water and earth and the memory of salt. And wastoures.

  Blanche saw even less than Ada, but she understood more. The eggs of the uttermost queen and her court had been laid here, across decades, collecting until a current ran through them, like the chemical change that pulls a cicada brood from its shells, each seventeenth year. The eggs hatched and the young grew, then left in their legions, seeking new caves that would meet the needs of so stringent a reproductive strategy. This wastoure summer was waning, so only a few hundred eggs remained, clustered at the cavern’s far end. Beneath the queen’s demand—grow/go forth/find caves/and flourish—Blanche could feel the weak, unformed impulses of the restless unborn, pressed against their curving walls.

  A score of females stood between Blanche and the eggs: the court. She felt the currents of their thoughts, as well: fear and anger, ambition for themselves and their eggs, but above all, pervasive and unstopping, a desperate hunger that wastoures thrive. They stepped forward, silent and snaking-necked. And among the eggs themselves stood the uttermost queen, the alphamost alpha: ancient, crumpled as wet linen, and marked with sores where her skin was shredding, for she was dying, her task nearly completed.

  She did not advance: did not need to. Her underlying demand did not change, but there was another thread now, tenuous (for her kind had not changed their demand in long centuries) and specific: kill this unflock thing/do not let it be.

  “Die,” Blanche said to the uttermost queen, though she knew already that she would not be stopped so easily. And she was right. The queen only shivered, as though shaking away a spiderweb; but the rest were confused—the court, the half-awake eggs, the young fighting overhead in the hypocaust or scattering in the gray rain, nor even the seething hordes long leagues away.

  The queen above her eggs stretched her neck, stance broad, tail twisted high and lashing—kill/unkind unkin/unfriendly unflock. Even the strongest of the juveniles could not enter the cave against the ancient demand, go hence, but the females of the court were cleverer, stronger. They advanced.

  Ada made a sound in her throat like the squeak of an infant mouse.

  “Be gone,” Blanche growled. Two of the court broke and ran in a great curve around Blanche and Ada to the hole, but it was blocked with fighting juveniles. Ada saw none of this, only heard shrieks and claw-nailed feet running, and then smelled the bright fresh thread of blood.

  And Blanche said: “Die. Kill your eggs. Kill your queen. Kill yourselves.”

  The court’s advance fell into chaos. One attacked another and they rolled screaming down the long sloping floor toward the eggs, and as they tumbled past, others turned to fight one another, or dropped convulsing to the ground.

  Deaths and more deaths, wastoures laid waste and wasting. At the still center stood the queen, splashed with the blood of her people, her eggs, and herself: too strong to fall but not able to counter Blanche’s demands.

  you/kill all said the queen—who will kill me?/they cannot

  “Well, then,” said Blanche. To Ada she said, “Cover your eyes, dear one.”

  But Ada did not.

  • • • •

  The uttermost queen is gone. The humming voice in the remaining wastoures’ narrow skulls is now Blanche’s: Die. Kill the eggs. Kill yourselves.

  The final eggs are ripped open by the last member of the queen’s court, uttermost queen by attrition. She is too weak to kill herself before she tears open the eggs; the yolk-slick infants slide free and writhe in the cold air until she bites open their throats. Her death when it comes is a mercy.

  Die, be destroyed.

  And the wastoures die. They throw themselves from cliffs. They bolt into lakes. They ram headfirst against stone walls until their jaws dislodge, and still they do not stop. They tear one another to pieces, frantic and babbling with the blood of their broodmates in their throats.

  Some hordes are
driven by stronger-willed alphas, but even their strength fails. A few manage to avoid Blanche’s demand, alphas and their bands that have gone far enough that the humming lies less heavily. The hypocaust and the chamber of eggs are gone; but the task was always to find a new cavern and begin the long task of producing enough eggs to start a new brood.

  One young, strong-willed female does find an apparently suitable cave, though it is chalk, not limestone. She is now the uttermost queen by default. She goes to ground with the band she has been able to save. It is not as good; eggs collecting in a chalk cave are softer-shelled than those laid in limestone. Grow and grow strong, she demands, but the shadow of Blanche’s humming voice sifts into the proteins of their yolks.

  When after long years there is at last a new brood, many do not hatch. Some kill themselves or one another before they leave the nest. A few survive, raven forth. Still fewer, the next time there is a brood. There are five last wastoure summers, spread across a century, until they die off entirely and dissolve into memory. Such documents as recorded their ravages are lost, rotted or turned to endpapers and razor strops, mouse nests and tinder.

  But in that last century, in those last broods . . . the ever-smaller courts and their weakening queens tell tales of horror to the dwindling eggs and the diminishing young. Pearl-feathered Blanche spreading her wings is a nightmare that everyone shares, stained into their genes, feared more even than skin rot or water. Hers is a name too dreadful to utter in daylight without blood spilled to wash it away. She is a monster, the Monster, Destroyer of Worlds. Waster.

  Who calls a thing genocide? Not the aggressors, anyway. Blanche is monster and savior, depending on who you ask.

  • • • •

  Here is where we stop, if you want a happy ending—for Blanche and Ada anyway. At the moment, Blanche and Ada are alive, triumphant. The wastoures are defeated.