by Paula Guran
So now she was wife to a king who would have let her burn, and queen of those who’d sent her to the fire. These were her people, this her life. There was little in it that he’d call love. “My brothers don’t mind the way I do,” he said. “They’re not as close to her. We were the youngest together, she and I.”
He said that his brothers had settled easily enough into life at court. He was the only one whose heart remained divided. “A halfway heart, unhappy to stay, unhappy to go,” he said, “a heart like your mother’s.” This took Maura by surprise. She’d thought he’d slept through her stories about her mother. Her breath grew thin and quick. He must also remember then how she’d slept beside him.
He said that in his dreams, he still flew. It hurt to wake in the morning, find himself with nothing but his clumsy feet. And at the change of seasons, the longing to be in the air, to be on the move was so intense, it overtook him. Maybe that was because the curse had never been completely lifted. Maybe it was because of the wing.
“You won’t be staying then,” Maura said. She said this carefully, no shaking in her voice. Staying in the house by the sea had long been the thing Maura most wanted. She would still have a mother if they’d only been able to stay in the house by the sea.
“There’s a woman I’ve loved all my life,” he answered. “We quarreled when I left; I can’t leave it like that. We don’t choose whom we love,” he told Maura, so gently that she knew he knew. If she wasn’t to be loved in return, she would have liked not to be pitied for it. She got neither of these wishes. “But people have this advantage over swans, to put their unwise loves aside and love another. Not me. I’m too much swan for that.”
He left the next morning. “Good-bye, father,” he said, kissing the old man. “I’m off to find my fortune.” He kissed Maura. “Thanks for your kindness and your stories. You’ve the gift of contentment,” he said, and as soon as he named it, he took it from her.
We come now to the final act. Keep your eyes shut tight, little one. The fire inside is dying and the wind outside. As I rock you, monsters are moving in the deep.
Maura’s heart froze in her chest. Summertime came and she said goodbye to the seaside house and felt nothing. The landlord had sold it. He went straight to the bars to drink to his good fortune. “For more than it’s worth,” he told everyone, a few cups in. “Triple its worth,” a few cups later.
The new owners took possession in the night. They kept to themselves, which made the curious locals more curious. A family of men, the baker told Maura. He’d seen them down at the docks. They asked more questions than they’d answer. They were looking for sailors off a ship called The Faucon Dieu. No one knew why they’d come or how long they’d stay, but they had the seaside house guarded as if it were a fort. Or a prison. You couldn’t take the road past without one or another of them stopping you.
Gossip arrived from the capital—the queen’s youngest brother had been banished and the queen, who loved him, was sick from it. She’d been sent into seclusion until her health and spirits returned. Maura overheard this in a kitchen as she was cleaning. There was more, but the sound of the ocean had filled Maura’s ears and she couldn’t hear the rest. Her heart shivered and her hands shook.
That night she couldn’t sleep. She got up, and like her mother before her, walked out the door in her nightgown. She walked the long distance to the sea, skirting the seaside house. The moonlight was a road on the water. She could imagine walking on it as, perhaps, her mother had done. Instead she climbed to the cliff where she’d first seen Sewell. And there he stood again, just as she remembered, wrapped in his cape. She called to him, her breath catching so his name was a stutter. The man in the cape turned and he resembled Sewell strongly, but he had two arms and all of Maura’s years. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Is it Maura?” he asked and the voice was very like Sewell’s voice. He walked toward her. “I meant to call on you,” he said, “to thank you for your kindness to my brother.”
The night wasn’t cold, but Maura’s nightgown was thin. The man took off his cape, put it around her shoulders as if she were a princess. It had been a long time since a man had treated her with such care. Sewell had been the last. But Sewell had been wrong about one thing. She would never trade her unwise love for another, even if offered by someone with Sewell’s same gentleness and sorrow. “Is he here?” Maura asked.
He’d been exiled, the man said, and the penalty for helping him was death. But they’d had warning. He’d run for the coast, with the archbishop’s men hard behind him, to a foreign ship where his brothers had arranged passage only hours before it became illegal to do so. The ship was to take him across the sea to the country where they’d lived as children. He was to send a pigeon to let them know he’d arrived, but no pigeon had come. “My sister, the queen,” the man said, “has suffered from the not-knowing. We all have.”
Then, just yesterday, for the price of a whiskey, a middle brother had gotten a story from a sailor at the docks. It was a story the sailor had heard recently in another harbor, not a story he’d lived. There was no way to know how much of it was true.
In this story there was a ship whose name the sailor didn’t remember, becalmed in a sea he couldn’t name. The food ran out and the crew lost their wits. There was a passenger on this ship, a man with a deformity, a wing where his arm should be. The crew decided he was the cause of their misfortunes. They’d seized him from his bed, dragged him up on deck, taken bets on how long he’d stay afloat. “Fly away,” they told him as they threw him overboard. “Fly away, little bird.”
And he did.
As he fell, his arm had become a second wing. For just one moment he’d been an angel. And then a moment later, a swan. He’d circled the ship three times and vanished into the horizon. “My brother had seen the face of the mob before,” the man said, “and it made him regret being human. If he’s a swan again, he’s glad.”
Maura closed her eyes. She pushed the picture of Sewell the angel, Sewell the swan away, made him a tiny figure in the distant sky. “Why was he exiled?” she asked.
“An unnatural intimacy with the queen. No proof, mind you. The king is a good man, but the archbishop calls the tune. And he’s always hated our poor sister. Eager to believe the most vile gossip,” said the man. “Our poor sister. Queen of a people who would have burned her and warmed their hands at the fire. Married to a man who’d let them.”
“He said you didn’t mind that,” Maura told him.
“He was wrong.”
The man walked Maura back to her rooms, his cape still around her. He said he’d see her again, but summer ended and winter came with no word. The weather turned bitter. Maura was bitter, too. She could taste her bitterness in the food she ate, the air she breathed.
Her father couldn’t understand why they were still in their rented rooms. “Do we go home today?” he asked every morning and often more than once. September became October. November became December. January became February.
Then late one night, Sewell’s brother knocked at Maura’s window. It was iced shut; she heard a crack when she forced it open. “We leave in the morning,” the man said. “I’m here to say good-bye. And to beg you and your father to go to the house as soon as you wake tomorrow, without speaking to anyone. We thank you for the use of it, but it was always yours.”
He was gone before Maura could find the thing that she should say; thank you or good-bye or please don’t go.
In the morning, she and her father did as directed. The coast was wrapped in a fog that grew thicker the farther they walked. As they neared the house, they saw shadows, the shapes of men in the mist. Ten men, clustered together around a smaller, slighter figure. The eldest brother waved Maura past him toward the house. Her father went to speak to him. Maura went inside.
Sometimes summer guests left cups and sometimes hairpins. These guests had left a letter, a cradle, and a baby.
The letter s
aid: My brother told me you could be trusted with this child. I give him to you. My brother told me you would make up a story explaining how you’ve come to own this house and have this child, a story so good that people would believe it. This child’s life depends on you doing so. No one must ever know he exists. The truth is a danger none of us would survive.
Burn this letter, is how it ended. There was no signature. The writing was a woman’s.
Maura lifted the baby. She loosened the blanket in which he was wrapped. A boy. Two arms. Ten fingers. She wrapped him up again, rested her cheek on the curve of his scalp. He smelled of soap. And very faintly, beneath that, Maura smelled the sea. “This child will stay put,” Maura said aloud, as if she had the power to cast such a spell.
No child should have a mother with a frozen heart. Maura’s cracked and opened. All the love that she would someday have for this child was already there, inside her heart, waiting for him. But she couldn’t feel one thing and not another. She found herself weeping, half joyful, half undone with grief. Good-bye to her mother in her castle underwater. Good-bye to the summer life of drudgery and rented rooms. Good-bye to Sewell in his castle in the air.
Her father came into the house. “They gave me money,” he said wonderingly. His arms were full. Ten leather pouches. “So much money.”
When you’ve heard more of the old stories, little one, you’ll see that the usual return on a kindness to a stranger is three wishes. The usual wishes are for a fine house, fortune, and love. Maura was where she’d never thought to be, at the very center of one of the old stories, with a prince in her arms.
“Oh!” Her father saw the baby. He reached out and the pouches of money spilled to the floor. He stepped on them without noticing. “Oh!” He took the swaddled child from her. He, too, was crying. “I dreamed that Sewell was a grown man and left us,” he said. “But now I wake and he’s a baby. How wonderful to be at the beginning of his life with us instead of the end. Maura! How wonderful life is.”
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. Her novel The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her 2014 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was honored with the PEN/Faulkner Award. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and five grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.
Margo Lanagan retells and expands “The Tinderbox” by Hans Christian Andersen (which was, in turn, his retelling of a Scandinavian folk tale.) Andersen’s story of a poor soldier who finds his fortune with the help of a few sparks from flint and steel and some magic dogs is less bleak than many he wrote. But Lanagan’s soldier is savage and his story as dark and brutal as war; he flicks a Bic and gets what he wants—no matter how ugly it may be.
Catastrophic Disruption of the Head
Margo Lanagan
Who believes in his own death? I’ve seen how men stop being, how people that you spoke to and traded with slump to bleeding and lie still, and never rise again. I have my own shiny scars, now; I’ve a head full of stories that goat-men will never believe. And I can tell you: with everyone dying around you, still you can remain unharmed. Some boss-soldier will pull you out roughly at the end, while the machines in the air fling fire down on the enemy, halting the chatter of their guns—at last, at last!—when nothing on the ground would quiet it. I always thought I would be one of those lucky ones, and it turns out that I am. The men who go home as stories on others’ lips? They fell in front of me, next to me; I could have been dead just as instantly, or maimed worse than dead. I steeled myself before every fight, and shat myself. But still another part of me stayed serene, didn’t it. And was justified in that, wasn’t it, for here I am: all in one piece, wealthy, powerful, safe, and on the point of becoming king.
I have the king by the neck. I push my pistol into his mouth, and he gags. He does not know how to fight, hasn’t the first clue. He smells nice, expensive. I swing him out from me. I blow out the back of his head. All sound goes out of the world.
I went to the war because elsewhere was glamorous to me. Men had passed through the mountains, one or two of them every year of my life, speaking of what they had come from, and where they were going. All those events and places showed me, with their color and their mystery and their crowdedness, how simple an existence I had here with my people—and how confined, though the sky was broad above us, though we walked the hills and mountains freely with our flocks. The fathers drank up their words, the mothers hurried to feed them, and silently watched and listened. I wanted to bring news home and be the feted man and the respected, the one explaining, not the one all eyes and questions among the goats and children.
I went for the adventure and the cleverness of these men’s lives and the scheming. I wanted to live in those stories they told. The boss-soldiers and all their equipment and belongings and weapons and information, and all the other people grasping after those things—I wanted to play them off against each other as these men said they did, and gather the money and food and toys that fell between. One of those silvery capsules, that opened like a seed-case and twinkled and tinkled, that you used for talking to your contact in the hills or among the bosses—I wanted one of those.
There was also the game of the fighting itself. A man might lose that game, they told us, at any moment, and in the least dignified manner, toileting in a ditch, or putting food on his plate at the barracks, or having at a whore in the tents nearby. (There were lots of whores, they told the fathers; every woman was a whore there; some of them did not even take your money, but went with you for the sheer love of whoring.) But look, here was this stranger whole and healthy among us, and all he had was that scar on his arm, smooth and harmless, for all his stories of a head rolling into his lap, and of men up dancing one moment, and stilled forever the next. He was here, eating our food and laughing. The others were only words; they might be stories and no more, boasting and no more. I watched my father and uncles, and some could believe our visitor and some could not, that he had seen so many deaths, and so vivid.
“You are different,” whispers the princess, almost crouched there, looking up at me. “You were gentle and kind before. What has happened? What has changed?”
I was standing in a wasteland, very cold. An old woman lay dead, blown backwards off the stump she’d been sitting on; the pistol that had taken her face off was in my hand—mine, that the bosses had given me to fight with, that I was smuggling home. My wrist hummed from the shot, my fingertips tingled.
I still had some swagger in me, from the stuff my drugs-man had given me, my going-home gift, his farewell spliff to me, with good powder in it, that I had half-smoked as I walked here. I lifted the pistol and sniffed the tip, and the smoke stung in my nostrils. Then the hand with the pistol fell to my side, and I was only cold and mystified. An explosion will do that, wake you up from whatever drug is running your mind, dismiss whatever dream, and sharply.
I put the pistol back in my belt. What had she done, the old biddy, to annoy me so? I went around the stump and looked at her. She was only disgusting the way old women are always disgusting, with a layer of filth on her such as war always leaves. She had no weapon; she could not have been dangerous to me in any way. Her face was clean and bright between her dirt-black hands—not like a face, of course, but clean red tissue, clean white bone-shards. I was annoyed with myself, mildly, for not leaving her alive so that she could tell me what all this was about. I glared at her facelessness, watching in case the drug should make her dead face speak, mouthless as she was. But she only lay, looking blankly, redly at the sky.
She lied to you, my memory hissed at me.
Ah, yes, that was why I’d shot her. You make no sense, old woman, I’d said. Sick of looking at her ugliness, I’d turned cruel, from having been milder befor
e, even kind—from doing the old rag-and-bone a favor! Here I stand, I said, with Yankee dollars spilling over my feet. Here you sit, over a cellar full of treasures, enough to set you up in palaces and feed and clothe you queenly the rest of your days. Yet all you can bring yourself to want is this old thing, factory made, one of millions, well used already.
I’d turned the Bic this way and that in the sunlight. It was like opening a sack of rice at a homeless camp; I had her full attention, however uncaring she tried to seem.
Children of this country, of this war, will sell you these Bics for a packet-meal—they feed a whole family with one man’s ration. In desperate times, two rows of chocolate is all it costs you. Their doddering grandfather will sell you the fluid for a twist of tobacco. Or you can buy a Bic entirely new and full from such shops as are left—caves in the rubble, banged-together stalls set up on the bulldozed streets. A new one will light first go; you won’t have to shake it and swear, or click it some magic number of times. Soldiers are rich men in war. All our needs are met, and our pay is laid on extra. There is no need for us to go shooting people, not for cheap cigarette-lighters—cheap and pink and lady-sized.
Yes, but it is mine, she had lied on at me. It was given to me by my son, that went off to war just like you, and got himself killed for his motherland. It has its hold on me that way. Quite worthless to any other person, it is.
In the hunch of her and the lick of her lips, the thing was of very great worth indeed.
Tell me the truth, old woman. I had pushed aside my coat. I have a gun here that makes people tell things true. I have used it many times. What is this Bic to you? or I’ll take your head off.