The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  The Painter held court, one of a hundred festival kings, in a tent that sagged like a circus elephant that has gone too long without food. He had been an artist once, and had earned the irony of his sobriquet by turning critic and making a fortune writing for twenty journals under six different names. He had traveled widely, of course, there wasn’t enough art in the north to keep a man with half his appetites, but Berd didn’t find it strange that he stayed when all his readers escaped on the last ships that fled before the ice. He had been a prince here, and some princes did prefer to die than become paupers in exile. Randolph was hard-pressed to force himself close enough to bellow in King Painter’s ear, and before he made it—he was delayed more than once by an offered glass—Berd had freed her arm and drifted back to the wide-open door.

  It seemed very dark outside. Faces passed on another stage, a promenade of drunks and madmen. A man dressed in the old fashioned furs of an explorer passed by, his beard and the fur lining of his hood matted with vomit. A woman followed him wearing a gorgeous rug like a poncho, a hole cut in the middle of its flower-garden pattern, and another followed her with her party clothes torn all down her front, too drunk or mad to fold the cloth together, so that her breasts flashed in the lamplight from the tent. She would be dead before morning. So many would be, Berd thought, and her weariness came down on her with redoubled weight. A stage before her, a stage behind her, and she—less audience than stagehand, since these performers in no wise performed for her—stood in a thin margin of nowhere, a threshold between two dreams. She let her arms dangle and her head fall back, as if she could give up, not completely, but just for a heartbeat or two, enough to snatch one moment of rest. The stars glittered like chips of ice, blue-white, colder than the air. There was some comfort in the thought that they would still shine long after the human world was done. There would still be sun and moon, snow and ice, and perhaps the seals and the whales and the bears. Berd sighed and shifted her numb feet, thinking she should find something hot to drink, talk to the Painter herself. She looked down, and yes, there was Isse standing like a rock in the stream of the passing crowd.

  She might have been a statue for all the notice anyone took of her. Passersby passed by without a glance or a flinch from Isse’s radiating cold. It made Berd question herself, doubt everything she had seen and felt back at the house. She lifted her hand in a half-finished wave and felt an ache in her shoulder where Baer had touched her, the frightening pain of cold that has penetrated to the bone. Isse did not respond to Berd’s gesture. She was turned a little from where Berd stood, her feet frozen at the end of a stride, her body leaning toward the next step that never came. Still walking in that summer garden, her arms bare and as blue-white as the stars. Berd rubbed her shoulder, less afraid in the midst of carnival, though the ache of cold touched her heart. Dear Isse, where do you walk to? Is it beautiful there?

  Something cold touched Berd’s eye. Weeping ice? She blinked, and discovered a snowflake caught in her eyelashes. She looked up again. Stars, stars, more stars than she had seen moments ago, more stars than she thought she would see even if every gaslight and oil lamp and bonfire in the north were extinguished. Stars so thick there was hardly any black left in the sky, no matter how many fell. Falling stars, snow from a cloudless sky. Small flakes prickled against Berd’s face, so much colder than her cold skin they felt hot. She looked down and saw that Baer and Wael had joined Isse, motionless, three statues walking down the impromptu street. How lonely they looked! Berd had been terrified in the house with them. Now she hurt for their loneliness, and felt an instant’s powerful impulse to go to them, join them in their pilgrimage in whatever time and place they were. The impulse frightened her more than their presence did, and yet . . . And yet. She didn’t move from the threshold of the tent, but the impulse still lived in her body, making her lean even as Isse leaned, on the verge of another step.

  Snow fell more thickly, glittering in the firelight. It was strange that no one seemed to notice it, even as it dusted their heads and shoulders and whitened the ground. It fell more thickly, a windless blizzard that drew a curtain between Berd and the stage of the promenade, and more thickly still, until it was impossible that so much snow could fall—and from a starlit sky!—and yet she was still able to see Wael and Baer and Isse. It was as though they stood not in the street but in her mind. She was shivering, her mouth was dry. Snow fell and fell, an entire winter of snow pouring into the street, the soft hiss of the snowflakes deafening Berd to the voices, music, clatter and bustle of the tent behind her. It was the hiss of silence, no louder than the sigh of blood in her ears. And Isse, Wael, and Baer walked and walked, unmoving while the snow piled up in great drifts, filling the street, burying it, disappearing it from view. There were only the three cold ones and the snow.

  And then the snow began to generate ghosts. Berd knew this trick from her childhood, when the autumn winds would drive fogbanks and snowstorms onto the northern shore. The hiss and the monotonous whiteness gave birth to muttered voices and distant calls, and to the shapes of things barely visible behind the veil of mist or snow. People, yes, and animals like white bears and caribou and the musk oxen Berd only knew from the books they read in school; and sometimes stranger things, ice gnomes like white foxes walking on hind legs and carrying spears, and wolves drawing sleds ridden by naked giants, and witches perched backwards on white caribou made of old bones and snow. Those ghosts teased Berd’s vision as they passed down the street of snow, a promenade of the north that came clearer and clearer as she watched, until the diamond points of the gnomes’ spears glittered in the lamplight pouring out of the tent and the giants with their eyes as black as the sky stared down at her as they passed. Cold filled her, the chill of wonder, making her shudder. And now she saw there were others walking with the snow ghosts, people as real as the woman who wore the beautiful carpet, as solid as the woman who bared her breasts to the cold. They walked in their carnival madness, as if they had found their way through the curtain that had hidden them from view. Still they paid no notice to the three cold ones, the statues of Baer and Isse and Wael, but they walked there, fearless, oblivious, keeping pace with the witches, the oxen, the bears.

  And then Randolph grasped Berd’s sore shoulder with his warm hand and said, “Painter says Sele’s been sleeping with some woman in one of the empty houses . . . Hey, where’d everybody go?”

  For at his touch the snow had been wiped away like steam from a window, and all the ghosts, all the cold ones, and all the passersby were gone, leaving Berd standing at the edge of an empty stage.

  “Hey,” Randolph said softly. “Hey.”

  It was perfectly silent for a moment, but only for a moment. A fire burning up the street sent up a rush of sparks as a new log went on. A woman in the tent behind them screamed with laughter. A gang of children ran past, intent in their pursuit of some game. And then the promenade was full again, as varied and lively as a parade.

  Berd could feel Randolph’s shrug and his forgetting through the hand resting on her shoulder. She could feel his warmth, his gin-soaked breath past her cheek, his constant swaying as he sought an elusive equilibrium. She should not feel so alone, so perfectly, utterly, dreadfully alone. They had gone, leaving her behind.

  “No.” No. She was the one who was leaving.

  “Eh?” Randolph said.

  “Which house?” Berd said, turning at last from the door.

  “Eh?” He swayed more violently, his eyes dead, lost in some alcoholic fugue.

  “Sele.” She shook him, and was surprised by the stridency in her voice. “Sele! You said he was in a house with some woman. Which house?” Randolph focused with a tangible effort. “That’s right. Some rich woman who didn’t want to go with her husband. Took Sele up. Lives somewhere near here. One of the big houses. Some rich woman. Bitch. If I’d been her I’d’ve gone. I’d’ve been dead by now. Gone. I’d’ve been gone by now . . . ”

  Berd forced her icy hands to close around bot
h his arms, holding him against his swaying. “Which house? Randolph! Which house?”

  My dearest Berd,

  I’m embarrassed by the last letter I wrote. It must have given you a vision of me all alone in a dusty room, growing old before my time. Not true! Or, if it is, it isn’t the only truth. I should warn you that I have been extolling your virtues to everyone I know, until all of my acquaintance is agog to meet the woman, the mysterious northerner, the angel whose coming has turned me into a boy again. You are my birthday and my school holiday and my summer all rolled into one, and I cannot wait to parade you on my arm. Will it embarrass you if I buy you beautiful things to wear? I hope it won’t. I want shamelessly to show you off. I want you to become the new star of my almost-respectable circle as you are the star that lights the dark night of my heart . . .

  4198 Goldport Avenue.

  There were no avenues, just the haphazard lanes of the carnival town, but the Painter (Berd had given up on Randolph in the end) had added directions that took into account new landmarks and gave Berd some hope of finding her way. Please, oh please, let Sele be there.

  “It’s a monstrous place,” the Painter had said. His eyes were greedy, unsated by the city’s desperation, hungry for hers. “A bloody great Romantic pile with gargoyles like puking birds and pillars carved like tree nymphs. You can’t miss it. Last time I was there it was lit up like an opera house with a red carpet spilling down the stairs. Vulgar! My god, the woman has no taste at all except for whiskey and men. Your Sele will be lucky if she’s held onto him this long.”

  His eyes had roved all over Berd, but there was nothing to see except her weary face and frightened eyes. He dismissed her, too lazy to follow her if she wouldn’t oblige by bringing her drama to him, and Randolph was so drunk by then that he stared with sober dread into the far distance, watching the approach of death. Berd went alone into the carnival, feeling the cold all the more bitterly for the brief warmth of the Painter’s tent. Her hands and feet felt as if they were being bitten by invisible dogs, her ears burned with wasp-fire, her shoulder ached with a chill that grew roots down her arm and into the hollow of her ribs. Cold, cold. Oh, how she longed for warmth! Warmth and sunshine and smooth pavement that didn’t trip her hurting feet, and the proper sounds of spring, waves and laughter and shouting gulls, rather than the shouting crowd, yelping as though laughter were only a poor disguise for a howl of despair. She stumbled, buffeted by strangers, and wished she could only see, if she could only see. But Wael and Isse and Baer were near. She knew that, even in the darkness; heard their silence in the gaps and blank spaces of the noisy crowd, felt their cold. And oh, she was frightened. She missed them terribly, grieved for them, longed for them, and was terrified that longing would bring them back to her, as cold and strange and wrong as the walking dead.

  But she would not go that way, not that way, she would not.

  Berd stumbled again. Under her feet, barely visible in the light of a bonfire ringed by dancers there lay a street sign that said in ornate script Goldport Ave. She looked up, past the dancers and their fire—and what was that in the flames? A chair stood upright in the coals and on the chair an effigy, please let it be an effigy, burning down to a charcoal grin—she dragged her gaze up above the fire where the hot air shivered like a watery veil, and saw the pillared house with all its curtains open to expose the shapes dancing beneath the blazing chandeliers. Bears and giants and witches, and air pilots and buccaneers and queens. Fancy dress, as if the dancers had already died and moved on to a different form. Berd climbed the stairs, the vulgar carpet more black than red after the passage of many feet, and passed through the wide-open door.

  She gave up on the reception rooms very soon. They were so hot, and crowded by so many reckless dancing drunks, and the music was a noisy shambles played by more drunks who seemed to have only a nodding acquaintance with their instruments. Perhaps the dancers and the musicians had traded places for a lark. Berd thought that even were she drunk and in the company of friends it would still seem like a foretaste of hell, and she could feel a panic coming on before she had forced a way through a single room. Sele. Sele! Why wouldn’t he come and rescue her? She fought her way back into the grand foyer and climbed the wide marble stairs until she was above the heads of the crowd. Hot air mingled with cold. Lamps dimmed as the oil in the reservoirs ran low, candles guttered in ornate pools of wax; no one seemed to care. They would all die here, a mad party frozen in place like a story between the pages of a book. Berd sat on a step halfway above the first landing and put her head in her hands.

  “There you are. Do you know, I thought I’d missed you for good.”

  Berd burst into tears. Sele sat down beside her and rocked her, greatcoat and all, in his arms.

  He told her he had waited on the esplanade until his feet went numb. She told him about the suicide. She wanted to tell him about his sister, Isse, and her cousins, but could not find the words to begin.

  “I saw,” she said, “I saw,” and spilled more tears.

  “It isn’t a tragedy,” Sele said, meaning the suicide. “We all die, soon or late. It’s just an anticipation, that’s all.”

  “I know.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “I know.”

  He drew back to look at her. She looked at him, and saw that he knew, and that he saw that she knew, too.

  “Oh, Sele . . . ”

  His round brown face was solemn, but also serene. “Are you still going?”

  “Yes!” She shifted so she could grasp him too. “Sele, you have to come with me. You must, now, you have no choice.”

  He laughed at her with surprise. “What do you mean? Why don’t I have a choice?”

  “They—” She stammered, not wanting to know what she was trying to say. “Th-they have been following me, Wael and Baer and Isse. They’ve been following. They want—They’ll come for you, too.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them. I expect they’ll come soon.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong, but they frighten me so much. How can you be so calm?”

  “We did this,” he said. “We wanted change, didn’t we? We asked for it. We should take what we get.”

  “Oh, Sele.” Berd hid her face against his shoulder. He was only wearing a shirt, she realized. She could feel this chill of his flesh against her cheek. She whispered, “I can’t. It’s too dreadful. I can’t bear to always be so cold.”

  “Oh, little Berd.” He stroked her hair. “You don’t have to. I’ve made my choice, that’s all, and you’ve made yours. I don’t think, by now, there’s any right or wrong either way. We’ve gone too far for that.”

  She shook her head against him. She wanted very much to plead with him, to make her case, to spin for him all her dreams of the south, but she was too ashamed, and knew that it would do no good. They had already spun their dreams into nothing, into cold and ice, into the land beyond death. Anyway, Sele had never, ever, in all their lives, followed her lead. And at the last, she could not follow his.

  They pulled apart.

  “Come on,” Sele said. “I have your things in my room.”

  The gas jet would not light, so Berd stood by the door while Sele fumbled for candle and match. Two candles burning on a branch meant for four barely carved the shape of the room out of the darkness. It seemed very grand to Berd, with heavy curtains round the bed and thick carpets on the floor.

  “A strange place to end up,” she said.

  Sele glanced at her, his dark eyes big and bright with candlelight. “It’s warm,” he said, and then added ruefully, “It was warm. Anyway, I needed to be around to meet some of the right people. It’s such a good address, don’t you know.”

  “Better than your old one.” Berd couldn’t smile, remembering his old house, remembering the street sign under her feet and the shape in the bonfire outside.

  “Anyway.” Sele knelt and turned up a corner of the carpet. “My hostess is nosy but not good at finding things.
And she’s been good to me. I owe her a lot. She helped me get you what you’ll need.”

  “The ticket?” Berd did not have enough room for air in her chest.

  “Ticket.” Sele handed her the items one at a time. “Travel papers. Letters.”

  “Letters?” She was slow to take the last packet. Whose letters? Letters from whom?

  “From your sponsor. There’s a rumor that even with a ticket and papers they won’t let you on board unless you can prove you aren’t going south only to end up a beggar. Your sponsor is supposed to give you a place to stay, help you find work. He’s my own invention, but he’s a good one. No,” he said as she turned the packet over in her hands, “don’t read them now. You’ll have time on the ship.”

  It was strange to see her name on the top envelope in Sele’s familiar hand. He had never written her a letter in her life. She stowed them away in her pocket with the other papers and then checked, once, twice, that she had everything secure. I can’t go. The words lodged in her throat. She looked at Sele, all her despair—at going? at staying?—in her eyes.

  “You’re right to go,” Sele said. “Little Berd, flying south away from the cold.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Not I can’t, just I don’t want to.

  “But you will.”

  She shivered, doubting, torn, and yet knowing as well as he that he was right. She would go, and he would go too, on a different journey with Isse and Wael and Baer. So cold. She hugged him fiercely, trying to give him her heat, wanting to borrow his. He kissed her, and then she was going, going, her hand in her pocket, keeping her ticket safe. Running down the stairs. Finding the beacon of the aerodrome even before she was out the door.