“Eventually I wound up here. They used to say no one’s ever originally from LA. True as Hell in my case.”
And then, before I could understand what he was doing, he leaned down and kissed me, gently, on the cheek. His stubble was rough and prickly, but his breath was surprisingly sweet. He whispered into my ear: “I never fell. I don’t care what they say. I’m still doing my job, as I see it.”
My cheek burned where his lips had touched it.
He straightened up. “But I still want to go home.”
The man walked away down the darkened street, and I sat on the bench and watched him go. I felt like he had taken something from me, although I could no longer remember what. And I felt like something had been left in its place—absolution, perhaps, or innocence, although of what, or from what, I could no longer say.
An image from somewhere: a scribbled drawing, of two angels in flight above a perfect city; and over the image a child’s perfect handprint, which stains the white paper blood-red. It came into my head unbidden, and I no longer know what it meant.
I stood up.
It was too dark to see the face of my watch, but I knew I would get no sleep that day. I walked back to the place I was staying, to the house by the stunted palm tree, to wash myself, and to wait. I thought about angels, and about Tink; and I wondered whether love and death went hand in hand.
The next day the planes to England were flying again.
I felt strange—lack of sleep had forced me into that miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. The taxi journey to the airport was a nightmare. I was hot, and tired, and testy. I wore a T-shirt in the LA heat; my coat was packed at the bottom of my luggage, where it had been for the entire stay.
The aeroplane was crowded, but I didn’t care.
The stewardess walked down the aisle with a rack of newspapers; the Herald Tribune, USA Today and the LA Times. I took a copy of the Times, but the words left my head as my eyes scanned over them. Nothing that I read remained with me. No, I lie: somewhere in the back of the paper was a report of a triple murder: two women, and a small child. No names were given, and I do not know why the report should have registered as it did.
Soon I fell asleep. I dreamed about fucking Tink, while blood ran sluggishly from her closed eyes and lips. The blood was cold and viscous and clammy, and I awoke chilled by the plane’s air conditioning, with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. My tongue and lips were dry. I looked out of the scratched oval window, stared down at the clouds, and it occurred to me then (not for the first time) that the clouds were in actuality another land, where everyone knew just what they were looking for and how to get back where they started from.
Staring down at the clouds is one of the things I have always liked best about flying. That, and the proximity one feels to one’s death.
I wrapped myself in the thin aircraft blanket, and slept some more, but if further dreams came then they made no impression upon me.
A blizzard blew up shortly after the plane landed in England, knocking out the airport’s power supply. I was alone in an airport elevator at the time, and it went dark and jammed between floors. A dim emergency light flickered on. I pressed the crimson alarm button until the batteries ran down and it ceased to sound; then I shivered in my LA T-shirt, in the corner of my little silver room. I watched my breath steam in the air, and I hugged myself for warmth.
There wasn’t anything in there except me; but even so, I felt safe, and secure. Soon someone would come and force open the doors. Eventually somebody would let me out; and I knew that I would soon be home.
THE HOUSES OF THE FAVORED
Jay Lake
JAY LAKE lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His most recent books include the novel Pinion from Tor Books; the novellas The Specific Gravity of Grief from Fairwood Press and The Baby Killers from PS Publishing; and a new collection, The Sky That Wraps, from Subterranean Press.
His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. He is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards.
“I first wrote this set of stories as part of a proposed project with Bruce Holland Rogers,” explains the author. “Bruce set me to his concept of a symmetrina, which is to say, writing to a very precise word count. It’s an interesting kind of limitation, which binds the writer to the form in a way that we don’t usually experience.
“I found the experience very focusing—not to mention the fun of finding five different ways to talk about angels gone bad. Just because they’re good doesn’t mean they’re nice.”
I SMELL LAMB’S BLOOD. Walking the dusty streets sword in hand, I hear only silence. High, silver clouds sweep moon’s brightness like the linen wrapping a lover’s face. These clouds are mine, the silence my shroud. There are tasks no one should be forced to, not even by the loving hand of He Is Who He Is.
One of my brothers stands in a grove of olives and pomegranates, waving a flaming sword, occasionally killing snakes. A symbolic post, with little business to execute.
Others were sent to despoil virgins and lay waste to cities. Symbolism and execution, but at the end, they went home with their hands clean and clear consciences. Sinners live for punishment, after all.
But here is a city of a million beating hearts crowded together on the banks of their Father River, now sleeping. In my presence, the dogs are silent, the vultures huddled uneasily on temple roofs. Even the louche crocodiles doze among their muddy reeds.
Who He Is has charged me with vengeance. Not Eden’s dangerous hungers, nor Sodom’s hot sins. Here it is only for me to still the hearts of ten thousand sleeping sons. Most of them innocent of any sin worse than craving the breast or a sweet, or perhaps a pretty girl.
My feet bring me to the stony regard of a jackal-headed god. “You, friend,” I whisper, “are at least honest in your falsehood. I wear Heaven’s gleaming mantle as I set about my murders.”
A thin spray of dust trails from the jackal’s muzzle as his smile cracks open a little wider.
Fang, I tell myself, I am the tooth of God. He Is Who He Is, and it is I who will render flesh.
Honest acknowledgement is needed of the suffering that will arise with the morning sun. Suffering simply to make a point. Though the pain reaches my heart, I tear all my feathers loose to lay them at the jackal’s feet, each great pinion radiant with holy power. The blood from my back I smear upon my face and hands, coat my sword with, echo of the lamb’s blood on the houses of the favored. Many and legion, I step into the darkest shadows to wound the hearts of ten thousand mothers.
AN INFESTATION OF ANGELS
Jane Yolen
JANE YOLEN has been called “the Hans Christian Andersen of America” (Newsweek) and “a modern equivalent of Aesop” (New York Times).
A prolific author, editor and poet of fantasy, science fiction, folklore and children’s books, she is a winner of the prestigious Caldecott Medal, two Nebula Awards for short fiction and the World Fantasy Grand Master Award.
Her most recent releases include her 300th book—however, she is not exactly certain which one it is! These include the novel Except the Queen (written with Midori Snyder) and a fantasy graphic novel, Foiled. She is currently working on a redacted young-adult fairy tale novel, Snow in Summer (which she describes as “an Appalachian Snow White”).
“I wrote (and originally published) ‘An Infestation of Angels’ a number of years ago while thinking about biblical stories of angels,” recalls Yolen. “God only knows why. And She hasn’t thought fit to tell me.
“I think a bird might have dropped something on my car that morning. Certainly I have had other instances when small irritations have encysted in the brain and turned into a bitter pearl.”
THE ANGELS CAME AGAIN TODAY, filthy things, dropping golden-hard wing
feathers and turds as big and brown as camel dung. This time one of them took Isak, clamping him from behind with massive talons. We could hear him screaming long after the covey was out of sight. His blood stained the doorpost where they took him. We left it there, part warning, part desperate memorial, with the dropped feathers nailed above. In a time of plagues, this infestation of angels was the worst.
We did not want to stay in the land of the Gipts, but slaves must do as their masters command. And though we were not slaves in the traditional sense, only hirelings, we had signed contracts and the Gipts are great believers in contracts. It was a saying of theirs that “One who goes back on his signed word is no better than a thief.” What they do to thieves is considered grotesque even in this godforsaken desert-land.
So we were trapped here, under skies that rained frogs, amid sparse fields that bred locusts, beneath a sun that raised rashes and blisters on our sensitive skins. It was a year of unnature. Yet if any one of us complained, the leader of the Gipts, the faró, waved the contract high over his head, causing his followers to break into that high ulullation they mis-call laughter.
We stayed.
Minutes after Isak was taken, his daughter Miriamne came to my house with the Rod of Leaders. I carved my own sign below Isak’s and then spoke the solemn oath in our ancient tongue to Miriamne and the nine others who came to witness the passing of the stick. My sign was a snake, for my clan is Serpent. It had been exactly twelve rotations since the last member of Serpent had led the People here, but if the plague of angels lasted much longer, there would be no one else of my tribe to carry on in this place. We were not a warrior clan and I was the last. We had always been a small clan, and poor, ground under the heels of the more prosperous tribes.
When the oath was done and properly attested to—we are a people of parchment and ink—we sat down at the table together to break bread.
“We cannot stay longer,” began Josu. His big, bearded face was so crisscrossed with scars it looked like a map, and the southern hemisphere was moving angrily. “We must ask the faró to let us out of our contract.”
“In all the years of our dealings with the Gipts,” I pointed out, “there has never been a broken contract. My father and yours, Josu, would turn in their graves knowing we even consider such a thing.” My father, comfortably dead these fifteen years back in the Homeland, would not have bothered turning, no matter what the cause. But Josu’s father, like all those of Scorpion, had been the anxious type, always looking for extra trouble. It took little imagination to picture him rotating in the earth like a lamb on a holiday spit.
Miriamne wept silently in the corner, but her brothers pounded the table with fists as broad as hammers.
“He must let us go!” Ur shouted.
“Or at least,” his younger, larger brother added sensibly, “he must let us put off the work on his temple until the angels migrate north. It is almost summer.”
Miriamne was weeping aloud now, though whether for Isak’s sudden bloody death or at the thought of his killers in the lush high valleys of the north was difficult to say.
“It will do us no good to ask the faró to let us go,” I said. “For if we do, he will use us as the Gipts always use thieves, and that is not a happy prospect.” By us, of course, I meant me, for the faró’s wrath would be visited upon the asker which, as leader, would be me. “But ...” I paused, pauses being the coin of Serpent’s wisdom.
They looked expectant.
“... if we could persuade the faró that this plague was meant for the Gipts and not us ...” I left that thought in front of them. The Serpent clan is known for its deviousness and wit, and deviousness and wit were what was needed now, in this time of troubles.
Miriamne stopped weeping. She walked around the table and stood behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders.
“I stand behind Masha,” she said.
“And I.” It was Ur, who always followed his sister’s lead.
And so, one by one by one, the rest of the minon agreed. What the ten agreed to, the rest of the People in the land of the Gipts would do without question. In this loyalty lay our strength.
I went at once to the great palace of the faró, for if I waited much longer he would not understand the urgency of my mission. The Gipts are a fat race with little memory, which is why they have others build them large reminders. The deserts around are littered with their monuments—stone and bone and mortar tokens cemented with the People’s blood. Ordinarily we do not complain of this. After all, we are the only ones who can satisfactorily plan and construct these mammoth memories. The Gipts are incapable on their own. Instead they squat upon their vast store of treasures, doling out golden tokens for work. It is a strange understanding we have, but no stranger than some of nature’s other associations. Does not the sharp-beaked plover feed upon the crocodile’s back? Does not the tiny remora cling to the shark?
But this year the conditions in the Gipt kingdom had been intolerable. While we often lose a few of the People to the heat, to the badly-prepared Giptanese food, or to the ever-surprising visit of the Gipt pox, there had never before been such a year: plague after plague after plague. There were dark murmurs everywhere that our God had somehow been angered. And the last, this hideous infestation.
Normally angels stay within their mountain fasts, feasting on wild goats and occasional nestlings. They are rarely seen, except from afar on their spiraling mating flights when the males circle the heavens, caroling and displaying their stiffened pinions and erections to their females who watch from the heights. (There are, of course, stories of Gipt women who, inflamed by the sight of that strange, winged masculinity, run off into the wilds and are never seen again. Women of the People would never do such a thing.)
However this year there had been a severe drought and the mountain foliage was sparse. Many goats died of starvation. The angels, hungry for red meat, had found our veins carried the same sweet nectar. Working out on the monuments, walking along the streets unprotected, we were easier prey than the homed goats. And the Gipts allow us to carry no weapons. It is in the contract.
Fifty-seven had fallen to the angel claws, ten of them of my own precious clan. It was too many. We had to convince the faró that this plague was his problem and not ours. It would take all of the deviousness and wit of a true Serpent. I thought quickly as I walked down the great wide street, the Street of Memories, towards the palace of the faró.
Because the Gipts think a woman’s face and ankle can cause unnecessary desire, both had to be suitably draped. I wore the traditional black robe and pants that covered my legs, and the black silk mask that hid all but my eyes. However, a builder needs to be able to move easily, and it was hot in this land, so my stomach and arms were bare. Those parts of the body were considered undistinguished by the Gipts. It occurred to me as I walked that my stomach and arms were thereby flashing unmistakable signals to any angels on the prowl. My grip on the Rod of Leadership tightened. I shifted to carry it between both hands. I would not go meekly, as Isak had, clamped from behind. I twirled and looked around, then glanced up and scanned the skies.
There was nothing there but the clear, untrammeled blue of the Gipt summer canopy. Not even a bird wrote in lazy script across that slate.
And so I got to the palace without incident. The streets had been as bare as the sky. Normally the streets would be a-squall with the People and other hirelings of the Gipts. They only traveled in donkey-drawn chairs and at night, when their overweight, ill-proportioned bodies can stand the heat. And since the angels are a diurnal race, bedding down in their aeries at night, Gipts and angels rarely meet.
I knocked at the palace door. The guards, mercenaries hired from across the great water, their black faces mapped with ritual scars, opened the doors from within. I nodded slightly. In the ranks of the Gipts, the People were higher than they. However it says in our holy books that all shall be equal, so I nodded.
They did not return my greetings. Their own relig
ion counted mercenaries as dead men until they came back home. The dead do not worry about the niceties of conversation.
“Masha-la, Masha-la,” came a twittering cry.
I looked up and saw the faró’s twenty sons bearing down on me, their foreshortened legs churning along the hall. Still too young to have gained the enormous weight that marked their elders, the boys climbed upon me like little monkeys. I was a great favorite at court, using my Serpent’s wit to construct wonder tales for their entertainment.
“Masha-la, tell us a story.”
I held out the Rod and they fell back, astonished to see it in my hand. It put an end to our casual story sessions. “I must see your father, the great faró,” I said.
They raced back down the hall, chittering and smacking their lips as the smell of the food in the dining commons drew them in. I followed, knowing that the adult Gipts would be there as well, partaking of one of their day-long feasts.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 5