HATH NO FURY
Outland Entertainment | www.outlandentertainment.com
Publisher & Creative Director: Jeremy Mohler | Editor-in-Chief: Alana Joli Abbott
All stories within are copyright © their respective authors. All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Outland Entertainment
5601 NW 25th Street
Topeka KS, 66618
ISBN-13: 9781945528057
Worldwide Rights
Created in the United States of America | Printed in Taiwan
Editor: Melanie R. Meadors
Editorial Assists by: Alana Joli Abbott, Gwendolyn Nix, Richard Shealy
Cover Illustration: Manuel Castañón
Interior Illustrations: Nicolás R. Giacondino, Keri Hayes, M. Wayne Miller, Oksana Dmitrienko
Cover/Interior Design: STK•Kreations
Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told—on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others—there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change—passing on the fire like a torch—forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all.
—TANITH LEE (September 19, 1947 - May 24, 2015)
CONTENTS
FOREWORD – Robin Hobb
INTRODUCTION – Margaret Weis
RIDING EVER SOUTHWARD, IN THE COMPANY OF BEES – Seanan McGuire
SHE TORE – Nisi Shawl
THE SCION – S.R. Cambridge
HARRIET TUBMAN – Melanie R. Meadors
CASTING ON – Philippa Ballantine
FOR THE LOVE OF ETTA CANDY: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FEMALE FRIEND – Shanna Germain
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING – Anton Strout
BURNING – Elaine Cunningham
IT AIN’T BAD TO GET MAD: THE ANGRY HEROINES OF SF/F – Sarah Kuhn
A DANCE WITH DEATH – Marc Turner
ADA LOVELACE – Melanie R. Meadors
PAX EGYPTICA – Dana Cameron
A WASTELAND OF MY GOD’S OWN MAKING – Bradley P. Beaulieu
ECHOES OF STONE – Elizabeth Vaughan
ANGER IS A FRIEND TO LOVE – Diana M. Pho
THE MARK OF A MOUNTAIN POPPY – Erin M. Evans
SNAKESKIN: A MUTANT FILES STORY – William C. Dietz
A SEED PLANTED – Carina Bissett
THE BOOK OF ROWE – Carol Berg
CHING SHIH – Melanie R. Meadors
SHE KEEPS CRAWLING BACK – Delilah S. Dawson
A HERO OF GRÜNJORD – Lucy A. Snyder
THE UNLIKELY TURNCOAT: A GENRENAUTS SHORT STORY – Michael R. Underwood
CRAFT – Lian Hearn
RECONCILING MEMORY – Gail Z. Martin
THIS IS NOT ANOTHER “WHY REPRESENTATION IS IMPORTANT” ESSAY – Monica Valentinelli
TRENCH WITCH – M.L. Brennan
LAST OF THE RED RIDERS – Django Wexler
CHRISTINE JORGENSEN – Melanie R. Meadors
RISE OF THE BONECRUSHERS – Eloise J. Knapp
FOREWORD
ROBIN HOBB
HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE a woman scorned.”
Um, no. Take away those quotation marks! This writer has been hacked! He never said that!
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” and “Music has charms to sooth a savage beast” are possibly among our most familiar incorrect quotes in the English language.
(Right up there with “Peace on Earth; goodwill toward men.” No. That should be translated, “Peace on earth to men of goodwill.” Rather a different sentiment. But here I am, in only paragraph four and already wandering off topic. Melanie can’t say I didn’t warn you here. Essays are not my forte!
But let’s go back to the focus of this piece.
In 1627, William Congreve wrote a play entitled The Mourning Bride. A playwright who became known for writing comedy of manners, this five act play is his only tragedy. And here we are, hundreds of years later, still misquoting the poor fellow.
The Mourning Bride is among his lesser works. Congreve is better known for The Way of the World. Here I will admit that I’ve only read portions of The Mourning Bride. I am by no means a scholar of this work! But as a reader, any play that features a kidnapped bride, a shipwreck, a vengeful Queen Zara, a man who is mistakenly executed by his own orders…well, this William Congreve definitely was stirring up some of my favorite ingredients for a tale.
But what were the actual lines he penned that have come down to us in mangled form?
In Act III, it is Perez who declaims:
Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.
(Another aside. Wikipedia, in its quaint way, insists that Queen Zara is the one who speaks these lines, and references Act III, Scene
VIII. Unfortunately, Act III does not have eight scenes. And the error is now widely repeated across the internet, on many “quotation source” boards. Poor William Congreve. Not only misquoted, but those transcendent lines ascribed to the wrong character in a scene that doesn’t exist!)
As in Romeo and Juliet, the princess Almeria has fallen in love with the son of her father’s enemy, King Manuel. She is separated from her husband Alphonso during a shipwreck. Then, both he and King Manuel are captured and held as slaves, along with Queen Zara! Manuel is the fellow whose own orders get him executed, and Queen Zara exits via suicide. Alphonso and Almeria survive for a joyous reunion and an overthrow of the government!
I can see why this play was so popular in its time!
As for the other quote, “Music has charms to soothe the savage beast.” Well, as long as I’m setting the record straight, let’s look at that one, too. In its correct form, it is actually the opening line of the play, spoken by Almeria who is full of grief and apparently seeking solace in music.
“Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.”
Sad to say, not even the music can cheer her from Aphonso’s loss!
As I so often do when I sit down to write something, the research has distracted me from my original intent!
Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this meandering? Besides, of course, “Never trust Wikipedia” and “Double check all quotations?” Perhaps.
The fury of women, scorned and otherwise, is scarcely a new concept. But within this anthology you will find a collection of tales that present that fury in new lights.
Enjoy!
INTRODUCTION
MARGARET WEIS
I WAS AN AVID READER when I was young, growing up in the fifties. My family did not go to movies on Saturdays. We went to the library. One of my proudest moments was when I was old enough to have my own library card!
My mother and grandmother introduced me to books featuring strong women characters written by women authors, both sharing their own favorite books with me.
These books were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when women were struggling to obtain the right to vote and asserting themselves in other fields. My favorites included Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Freckles and Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter, and the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
I learned not only from the characters in the novels, but also from the authors. Alcott made her own way in
the world, writing novels, poems, magazine articles, and thrillers. Stratton-Porter was a naturalist and photographer who used to go into the Limberlost Swamp carrying her camera and a gun to deal with poisonous snakes. She was one of the first women to start her own movie production studio. Her heroine in Freckles saves the hero from the bad guys instead of the other way around!
The other types of books I enjoyed growing up were those that drew me into worlds of exciting adventure such as The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. Sadly, there are few women characters in these books. The two strongest, Milady and Irene Adler, are both villains!
This lack of strong female characters was never a problem for me, however. I simply devised my own plots for my heroes and added myself in as the heroine. I rode in hansom cabs with Holmes and Watson. I was the first female musketeer, a member of Captain Blood’s pirate crew, and I roamed the moors of Scotland in company with Alan Breck and David Balfour.
I spent hours in my mind, creating these plots, refining them, having fun interacting with my heroes. I suppose, in a way, the lack of strong female characters in adventure novels led me to become a writer.
These days, girls growing up have a wide range of books featuring strong women characters with whom they can identify, just as they have strong women role models in all walks of life. We still have a ways to go, however, and it is therefore with great pleasure that I introduce you to the stories in Hath No Fury.
I hope you enjoy them!
RIDING EVER SOUTHWARD, IN THE COMPANY OF BEES
SEANAN McGUIRE
Honey for the baker, sweet and gentle on the tongue;
Honey for the teacher, for the virtue of the young.
Honey for the doctor, for the kindness of the bees,
Honey for the lovers. May they do just as they please.
SUNLIGHT LIKE HONEY ON I-5 southbound, dribbling in thick streams, pooling at the center of the road, where it casts blacktop phantoms against the blistering sky. It lacks honey’s sweetness, honey’s forgiving nature, but the comparison is a natural one, especially in this season, especially on this road. Sunlight like honey, the rolling tires like the buzzing wings of bees, turning distance into dreams, turning the long haul into something that tastes a little bit like hope when it’s balanced on the tongue. A little bit like freedom.
A little bit like loss.
The gas rations don’t apply to us, not during pollination season: we roll in full glory, taking up the entire road. It’s a parade rich in pomp and circumstance, and I hate it, because it paints a target on our backs the size of the central valley. When the roar of engines is audible from a mile away, people know what’s coming. They know what we have. And yeah, there have been problems. There are always going to be problems when something familiar goes scarce, turns from common coal into dearest gold. Hell, we saw it happen with coal and gold themselves, when Kentucky burned, when all the gold in the world stopped being enough to buy an extra drink of water.
Illustration by KERI HAYES
They use gold in bee-shrines these days, decorate their plaster honeycomb with chains and coins and pray that somehow, their schoolyard alchemy will undo what man has done. Will turn the honey in the air into honey on the tongue; will bring back the bees. Oh, how they yearn for the bees. What once they swatted without thought has become a symbol of a better time, a better world, a better life for them and everyone that they care about. So we roll down the road like a traveling fortress, ever watching the hills around us, ever waiting for the attack.
This is the honeycomb structure of our hive:
At the front, the bikes, four of them, two riding point and two hanging back just enough to form a blunted V-shape. They clear the road for us, keeping things rolling smooth. Any one of them can call off the ride if they feel like things are going sour, and any one of them would die to keep that from happening. They know how important what we do is to the survival of the state, to the souls of the people who watch us from the hills as we roll by, gold chains in their hands and honey in their hearts.
Behind the bikes, the three advance cars, all pre-Burn, all kitted to run on whatever we grind and stuff into their tanks, all tough enough to take a direct missile hit and keep on racing the horizon. When we get closer to the fields the bikes will fall back and the cars will move forward, trading places in a dance that we have long since choreographed to perfection. While each bike has a single rider, each car carries two: one to hold the wheel and one to hold the gun. The lead car’s gunner, Poppy, has been making this run for fifteen years. She wasn’t in the first convoy, but she was in the second, and she has a bee tattooed on her left arm for every person she’s killed in the process of getting the bees to the fields. When she takes her shirt off, it looks like a swarm taking flight, swirling endless toward the sky. When she puts her arms around me, it’s like being in the heart of the hive.
The ink on her latest tattoo was still fresh and weeping when we loaded up for this trip. She’s running short on skin that hasn’t been striped black and gold and bitter with another life lost; she’s said, several times, that she hopes she can make it just one run without adding to her arm. So do the rest of us. We’ve always been hoping for that sort of peace.
Behind the advance cars, the truck, ghost of a shipping company’s label still visible through the gaudy paint that decorates its sides, wheels armored with makeshift shields that weigh the vehicle down but have done almost as much to keep it moving through badland routes as the bikes, as the guns, as the whole damned human orchestra of violence and hope and hopelessness. Six people ride atop the vehicle, strapped into bolted-down chairs, guns at the ready, drenched in sun like honey and praying, just this once, to make a life-giving run without taking it at the same time.
Behind the truck, three more cars; behind them, two more bikes, riding single-file, the stingers on the bottom of the bee. Unlike the advance bikes, these have passengers, sharpshooters trained in the strange and delicate art of picking off a target from a distance. All told, we ride thirty strong, from the drivers to the alternates to the ones who hold the guns. It’s not enough. It’s never enough. We could ride with fifty, with a hundred, and it still wouldn’t be enough, because there would always be someone so desperate or so foolish that they would look at our convoy, rolling down the line, and think that we were a target worth taking.
Desperate times. Desperate measures. And sunlight like honey, bleeding over the horizon, drowning us all.
Honey for the liar, help him spin a sweeter tale;
Honey for the sailor, help her set a swifter sail.
Honey for the student, help the pen write swift and true,
Honey for the farmers. May they plant the world anew.
When it’s not pollination season, the last bees on the west coast are kept in a secure facility in Muir Woods, surrounded by fences and snipers and everything a tiny pollinator could want to ensure that they don’t wind up trapped in a jar and sold on the black market to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about bees, or beekeeping, or why the hive is so important. They just know that once, bees were everywhere, and food was plentiful and cheap, and paintbrushes were something you bought for your kids to paint with, not tools that narrowed the gap between your hand and the end of the world.
“Hope.”
I grunt, eyes still on the honey-soaked road. We left the Bay Area this morning, when the sky was still pink and the heat of the day was still an unfulfilled rumor that might yet be proven untrue. It hadn’t been, of course; there hasn’t been a cool day any lower than Portland since before I was born. Every day, the sky burns, and the sun bleeds honey, and we struggle with cooling units and ever-moving convoys to keep the world alive for a little bit longer, while clever scientists in secret bunkers work to heal the world.
Nijmi rides with the point bikes, following Lou, who says the bunkers are a lie. Lou likes to claim
she rode all the way to Ames, Iowa, once to bang on the bunker door and ask to be let in, only to find a rusted-out hole in the side of a mountain, leading down to nowhere. She likes to tell the newbies that we’re the only true salvation of the world. Us, and the bees, who don’t understand that things have changed. They only understand the age-old dance of field and flower, and the slow manufacture of honeycomb and hive. It must be nice, to be a bee.
Alan sighs. “We have to stop soon,” he says. “The engines don’t like going this hard in the heat. We need to give them a chance to cool down.”
“We’re still six hours from the first farm on this route.” Six hours from an armed militia standing ready to receive us, to guide us and our precious cargo to the fields where the bees will be allowed, at last, to dance. There used to be more farms, but most of them have dried up and blown away, consigned to memory and dust. Others are still struggling for survival, paintbrushes in hand and children flooding the fields to do the work of insects. They’ve dropped off our route for other reasons: failure to pay, failure to protect, failure to follow the rules. We can’t afford repeat offenders. Not with the resources already stretched so thin. Not with the hives so few, and so precious.
“Doesn’t matter.” Alan shrugs, expansive as a mountain range. He’s a skink of a man, all long torso and quick-moving limbs, but he still somehow manages to take up twice his share of space. “The engines don’t care how far we are from farmland.”
I grunt, wishing I had a better objection, knowing that Alan will overrule me if I try. He’s the lead mechanic for this convoy: without him, we’d be hauling our bees on foot down the curve of the coast. We all know how long that would last. The lesson of the Oregon hives is not one any beekeeper will forget any time soon.
Alan looks at me expectantly. Finally, I sigh and hit the horn, two long bursts, signaling the bikes to fall back, because a stop is coming, and they’re going to need to follow my lead.
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