Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “You have known this for three days.”

  Shursta did not respond.

  “You talked to him. You warned him.”

  Again, he said nothing. She answered anyway.

  “He cannot run far enough.”

  “Hyrryai.”

  “You—do—not—speak—to—me.”

  “Hyrryai—”

  “No!”

  Her hand flashed out, much as Myrar Yaspir’s had. She took nothing from him but flesh. Fingernails raked his face. Shursta did not, at first, suffer any sting. What he did feel, way down at the bottom of his chest, was a deep snap as she broke the strand of pearl and teeth and stone she wore around her throat. Pieces of moonlight scattered. Fleet and silver as they, Hyrryai Blodestone bounded into the radiant darkness.

  One by one—by glint, by ridge, by razor edge—Shursta picked up pieces from the tufted grass. What he could salvage, he placed in the pouch he had prepared. His rucksack he retrieved from the hollow of a tree where he had hidden it the night before. The night was young, but the road to Sif was long.

  * * *

  Despite having begged her in his goodbye letter to go on and live her life in joy, with Laric Spectrox and his dream of a distant horizon, far from a brother who could only bring her shame and sorrow, Sharrar came home to Sif. And when she did, she did not come alone.

  She brought her new husband. She brought a ragged band of orphans, grayheads, widows, widowers. Joining her too were past-primers like Adularia Yaspir, face lined and eyes haunted. Even Oron Onyssix had joined them, itching for spaces ungoverned by crones, a place where he might breathe freely.

  Sharrar also brought a boat.

  It was a very large boat. Or rather, the frame of one. It was the biggest boat skeleton Shursta had ever seen. They wheeled it on slats all the way along the sea road from the outskirts of Droon where Laric had been building it. Shursta, who had thought he might never do so again, laughed.

  “What is this, Nugget? Who are all these people?”

  But he thought he knew.

  “These,” she told him, “are all our new kin. And this”—with a grand gesture to the unfinished monstrosity listing on its makeshift wagon—“is The Grimgramal—the ship that sails the world!”

  Shursta scrutinized it and said at last, “It doesn’t look like much, your ship that sails the world.”

  Sharrar stuck her tongue out at him. “We have to finish it first, brother mine!”

  “Ah.”

  “Everyone’s helping. You’ll help, too.”

  Shursta stared at all the people milling about his property, pitching tents, lining up for the outhouse, exploring the dock, testing the sturdiness of his small fishing boat. “Will I?” he asked. “How?”

  Laric came over to clap him on the shoulder. “However you can, my mesh-brother. Mend nets. Hem sails. Boil tar. Old man Alexo Alban is carving us a masthead. He says it’s a gift from all the Halls of Ages on the Last Isle to Sharrar.” Taking his mesh-mate’s hand, he indicated the dispersed crowd. “She’s the one who called them. She’s been speaking the name Grimgramal to anyone who’ll stand still to listen. And you know Sharrar—when she talks, no one can help but listen. Some sympathizers—a very few, like Alexo Alban, started demanding passage in exchange for labor. Though”—his left shoulder lifted in a gesture eloquent of resignation—“most of the grayheads say they’ll safe stay on dry land to see us off. Someone, they claim, must be left behind to tell the tale. And see?”

  Laric dipped into his pocket, spilling out a palmful of frozen rainbows. Shursta reached to catch a falling star before it buried itself in the sand. A large, almost bluish, diamond winked between his fingers. Hastily, he returned it.

  “Over the last few weeks, the grayheads have been coming to Sharrar. Some from far villages. Even a few crones of the Astrion Council—including Dymmori Blodestone. Each gave her a gem, and told her the lore behind it. Whatever is known, whatever has been surmised. Alexo Alban will embed them in the masthead like a crown. Nine Cities magic to protect us on our journey.”

  Shursta whistled through his teeth. “We’re really going, then?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sharrar said softly. “All of us. Before summer’s end.”

  It was not to Rath Sea that Shursta looked then, but to the empty road that led away from Sif.

  “All of us,” Sharrar repeated. “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  Dumwei Blodestone arrived one afternoon, drenched from a late summer storm, beady-eyed with irritation and chilled to the bone.

  “Is Sif the last village of the world? What a stupid place. At the end of the stupidest road. Mudholes the size of small islands. Swallow a horse, much less a man. Sharkbait, why do you let your roof leak? How can you expect to cross an ocean in a wooden boat when you can’t even be bothered to fix a leaky roof? We’ll all be drowned by the end of the week.”

  “We?” Sharrar asked brightly, slamming a bowl of chowder in front of him. “Are you planning on going somewhere, Dimwit?”

  “Of course!” He glanced at her, astonished, and brandished a spoon in her face. “You don’t really think I’m going to let you mutants have all the fun, do you? Orssi wanted to come, too, but now he’s got a girl. Mesh-mad, the pair of ’em.”

  His gaze flickered to the corner where Oron Onyssix sat carving fishhooks from antler and bone. Onyssix raised his high-arched eyebrows. Dumwei looked away.

  With a great laugh, Laric broke a fresh loaf of bread in two and handed the larger portion to Dumwei.

  “Poor Orssi. You’ll just have to have enough adventure for the two of you.”

  Dumwei’s chest expanded. “I intend to, Laric Spectrox!”

  “Laric Sarth,” Laric corrected.

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. Forgot. Maybe because you didn’t invite me to your meshing.”

  “Sorry,” the couple said in unison, sounding anything but.

  “And speaking of impossible mesh-mates…” Dumwei turned to Shursta, who knelt on the floor, feeding the fire pit. “My sister wants to see you, Shursta.”

  For a moment, none of the dozen or so people crammed in the room breathed. Dumwei did not notice. Or if he noticed, he did not care.

  “Mumsa won’t talk about her, you know. Well, she talks, but only to say things like, if her last living daughter wants to run off like a wild dog and file her teeth and declare herself windwyddiam, that’s Hyrryai’s decision. Maybe no one will care then, she says, when she declares herself a mother with six sons and no daughters. And then she cries. And Granmumsa and Auntie Elbanni and Auntie Ralorra all cluck their tongues and huddle close, and it’s all hugs and tears and clacking, and a man can’t hear himself think.”

  Shursta, who had not risen from his knees, comprehended little of this. If he’d held a flaming brand just then instead of ordinary wood, he might not have heeded it.

  Sharrar asked, carefully, “Have you seen Hyrryai then, Dumwei?”

  “Oh, ayup, all the time. She ran off to live in a little sea cave, in the…that cove.” Dumwei seemed to swallow the wrong way, though he had not started eating. Quickly, he ducked his head, inspecting his chowder as if for contaminates. When he raised his face again, his eyes were overbright. “You know…you know, Kuista was just two years younger than I. Hyrryai was like her second mumsa, maybe, but I was her best friend. Anyway. I hope Hyrryai does eat that killer’s heart!”

  In the corner of the room, Adularia Yaspir turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes.

  Dumwei shrugged. “I hope she eats it and spits it out again for chum. A heart like Myrar Yaspir’s wouldn’t make anyone much of meal. As she’s cast herself out of the kinline, Hyrryai has no roof or bed or board of her own. And you can only eat so much fish. So I bring her food. It’s not like they don’t know back home. Granmumsa slips me other things, too, that Hyrryai might need. Last time I saw her…Yesterday? Day before?” He nodded at Shursta. “She asked for you.”

  Shursta sprang to his feet. “I
’ll go right now.”

  But Sharrar and Laric both grabbed fistfuls of Shursta’s shirt and forced him down again.

  “You’ll wait till after the storm,” said Laric.

  “And you’ll eat first,” Sharrar put in.

  “And perhaps,” suggested Oron Onyssix from the corner, “you might wash your face. Dress in a clean change of clothes. Shave. What are they teaching young husbands these days?”

  Dumwei snorted. “Think you can write that manual, Onyssix?”

  “In my sleep,” he replied, with the ghost of his reckless grin. Dumwei flushed past his ears, but he took his bowl of chowder and went to sit nearer him.

  Obedient to his sister’s narrowed eyes, Shursta went through the motions of eating. But as soon as her back was turned, he slipped out the front door.

  * * *

  It was full dark when Shursta finally squelched into the sea cave. He stood there a moment, dripping, startled at the glowing suddenness of shelter after three relentlessly rainy hours on the sea road. There was a hurricane lamp at the back of the cave, tucked into a small natural stone alcove. Its glass chimney was sooty, its wick on the spluttering end of low. What Shursta wanted most was to collapse. But a swift glance around the flickering hollow made it clear that amongst the neatly stacked storage crates, the bedroll, the tiny folding camp table, the clay oven with its chimney near the cave mouth, the stockpile of weapons leaning in one corner, Hyrryai was not there.

  He closed his eyes briefly. Wiping a wet sleeve over his wet face, Shursta contemplated stripping everything, wrapping himself in one of her blankets, and waiting for her while he dried out. She hadn’t meant to be gone long, he reasoned; she left the lamp burning. And there was a plate of food, half-eaten. Something had disturbed her. A strange sound, cutting through the wind and rain and surf. Or perhaps a face. Someone who, like he had done, glimpsed the light from her cave and sought shelter of a fellow wayfarer.

  Already trembling from the cold, Shursta’s shivers grew violent, as if a hole had been bored into the bottom of his skull and now his spine was slowly filling with ice water. Who might be ranging abroad on such a night? The sick or deranged, the elderly or the very young. The desperate, like himself. The outcasts, like Hyrrai. And the outlaws: lean, hungry, hunted. But why should they choose this cove, of all the crannies and caverns of the Last Isle? Why this so particular haunted place, on such a howling night? Other than Hyrryai herself, Shursta could think of just one who’d have cause to come here. Who would be drawn here, inexorably, by ghosts or guilt or gloating.

  His stomach turned to stone, his knees to mud. He put his hand on the damp wall to steady himself.

  And what would Hyrryai have done, glancing up from her sad little supper to meet the shadowed, harrowed eyes of her sister’s killer?

  She would not have thought to grab her weapons. Or even her coat. Look, there it was, a well-oiled sealskin, draped over the camp stool. Her fork was on the floor there by the bedroll, but her dinner knife was missing.

  Shursta bolted from the cave, into the rain.

  The wind tore strips from the shroud of the sky. Moonlight splintered through, fanged like an anglerfish and as cold. Shursta slipped and slid around the first wall of boulders and began to clamber back up the stone steps to the sea road. He clutched at clumps of marram grass, which slicked through his fingers like seaweed. Wet sand and crumbled rock shifted beneath his feet. Gasping and drenched as he was, he clung to his claw-holds, knowing that if he fell, he’d have to do it all over again. He’d almost attained the headland, had slapped first his left hand onto the blessedly flat surface, was following it by his right, meaning to beach himself from the cliff face onto the road in one great heave and lie there awhile, catching his breath, when a hand grasped his and hauled him up the rest of the way.

  “Domo Blodestone!” gasped Myrar Yaspir. “You must help me. Your wife is hunting me.”

  The first time Shursta had seen Yaspir, he had looked like a man turned to stone and forgotten. The second time, his eyes had been livid as enraged wounds. Now he seemed scoured, nervous and alive, wet as Shursta. He wore an enormous rucksack and carried a walking stick that Shursta eyed speculatively. It had a smooth, blunt end, well polished from age and handling.

  “Is that how you killed Kuista Blodestone?” he blurted.

  Myrar Yaspir followed his gaze. “This?” he asked, blankly. “No, it was a stone. I threw it into the sea, after.” He grasped Shursta’s collar and hefted. Myrar Yaspir was a ropy, long-limbed man whose bones seemed to poke right through his skin, but rather than attenuated, he seemed vigorously condensed, and his strength was enormous, almost electrical. Hauled to his feet, Shursta felt as though a piece of mortal-shaped lightning had smote down upon the Last Isle just to manhandle him. “Come,” he commanded Shursta. “We must keep moving. She is circling us like a bone shark, closer, ever closer. Come, Domo Blodestone,” he said again, blinking back rain from his burning eyes. “You must help me.”

  Shursta disengaged himself, though he felt little shocks go through him when his wrists knocked Myrar Yaspir’s fists aside. “I already helped you, child-killer. I gave you three days to turn yourself in to the Astrion Council. I am done with you.”

  Myrar Yaspir glanced at him, then shook his head. “You are not listening to me,” he said with exasperated patience. “Your wife is hunting me. I will be safe nowhere on this island. Not here and not in Droon cowering in some straw cage built by those doddering bitches of the council.” He bent his head close to Shursta’s and whispered, “No, you must take me to Sif where you live. Word is you are sailing from this cursed place on a boat the size of a city. I will work for my passage. I work hard. I have worked all my life.” He opened his hands as if to show the calluses there; as if, even empty, they had always been enough.

  Shursta felt his voice go gentle, and could not prevent it, although he knew Myrar Yaspir would think him weakening.

  “The Grimgramal is the size, maybe, of a large house, and we who will sail on it are family. You, Domo Yaspir, are no one’s family.”

  “My wife is on that boat!” Myrar flashed, his fist grasping the sodden cloth at Shursta’s throat. His expression flickered from whetted volatility to bleak cobweb-clung despair, and after that, it seemed, he could express nothing because he no longer had a face. His was merely a sandblasted and sun-bleached skull, dripping dark rain. The skull whispered, “My Adularia.”

  Shursta was afraid. He had only been so afraid once in his entire life, and that was last year, out on the open ocean, in that breathless half-second before he jumped in after Gulak’s young son, realizing even as he leapt that he would rather by far spool out the remainder of his days taunted and disliked and respected by none than dive into that particular death, where the boy floundered and the shark danced.

  Now the words came with no stutter or click. “You have no wife.”

  The skull opened its mouth and screamed. It shrieked, raw and wordless, right into Shursta’s face. Its fists closed again on the collar of Shursta’s coat, twisted in a chokehold and jerked, lifting him off his feet as though he had been a small child. Shursta’s legs dangled. and his vision blackened, and he struck out with his fists, but it was like pummeling a waterspout. Myrar was still screaming, but the sound soon floated off to a faraway keening. Shursta, weightless between sky and sea, began to believe that Myrar had always been screaming, since the first time Shursta had beheld him sitting in the tavern, or maybe even before. Maybe he had been screaming since killing Kuista, the child he could not give his wife, and who, though a child, had all the esteem, joy of status, wealth, and hope for the future that Myrar Yaspir, a man in his prime and a citizen of proud Droon, lacked.

  Is it any wonder he screamed? Shursta thought. This was followed by another thought, further away: I am dying.

  The moment he could breathe again was the moment his breath was knocked out of him. Myrar had released his chokehold on Shursta, but Shursta, barely conscious, had n
o time to find his feet before the ground leapt up to grapple him. He tried to groan, but all sound was sucked from the pit of his stomach into the sky. Rain splattered on his face. The wind ripped over everything but did not move back into his lungs.

  By and by, he remembered how to breathe, and soon could do so without volunteering the effort. His mouth tasted coppery. His tongue was sore. Something had been bitten that probably should not have been. Shursta’s hands closed over stones, trying to find one jagged enough to fend off further advances from a screaming, skull-faced murderer. Where was his mesh-gift, the black knife Hyrryai had given him? Back in Sif, of course, in a box with his gemmaja, and the pressed petals of a purple hyacinth that had fallen from her hair that night she left him. All his fingers found now were pebbles and blades of grass, and he could not seem to properly grip any of them. Shursta sat up.

  Sometime between his falling and landing the awful scream had stopped. There was only sobbing now: convulsive, curt, wretched, interrupted by bitter gasps for breath and short, saw-toothed cries of rage. Muffled, moist thumps punctuated each cry. Shursta had barely registered that it could not be Myrar Yaspir who wept—his tears had turned to dust long ago—when the thumps and sobs stopped. For a few minutes it was just rain and wind. Shursta blinked his eyes back into focus and took in the moon-battered, rain-silvered scene before him. His heart crashed in his chest like a fog-bell.

  Hyrryai Blodestone crouched over the crumpled body of Myrar Yaspir. She grasped a large stone in her dominant hand. Myrar’s bloody hair was tangled in her other. Her dinner knife was clamped between her teeth. As he watched, she let the head fall—another pulpy thump—tossed the dripping stone to one side, and spat her knife into her hand. Her movements ragged and impatient, she sliced Myrar’s shirt down the middle and laid her hand against his chest. She seemed startled by what she felt there—the last echoes of a heartbeat or the fact there was none, Shursta did not know.