The marionette rolled its carved eyes. “I’ve been able to open that lock for the last ten years.”
Jep rested both hands on the horse’s back. “I see,” he said.
The wooden lips twisted up. “Are you surprised, old man? That I could open it, or that I didn’t strangle you in your sleep some night?”
Jep shrugged.
The marionette looked down at the horse.
Its face changed. Sarah couldn’t explain it. A light came behind its eyes that had been missing before.
It said, very quietly, “Oh.”
It took a step forward and Sarah knew that she should be ready to run, but instead she burst out, “Don’t you dare try to eat this horse!”
The marionette laughed, but it wasn’t the horrible clacking laughter that she had heard earlier. It was softer and more rueful, the most human sound that she had yet heard it make.
“I won’t,” it said. “I understand why you’d think that, but I wouldn’t.”
It took two more steps forward. Sarah backed up. Jep didn’t.
It stroked one long, articulated hand over the horse’s neck.
She could see the exact moment when the horse woke. She saw the flanks heave as it inhaled, and saw the marionette’s ball–joint fingers tighten in the suddenly liquid mane.
“We did badly by each other, old man,” said the marionette distantly.
“We did,” said Jep quietly. “She’d have been disappointed in us.”
It shook its head. “She’d have understood.”
The horse lifted its head. Its carved nostrils flared open and it turned and nuzzled the marionette’s arm.
“I’m going now,” said the carved boy. “Finally. Now that I have my horse.”
“All right,” said Jep.
It—he—swung up on the horse’s back. They were perfectly sized for one another. He had to lean far forward to go through the doorway, but then he was through.
As one, Sarah and Jep followed.
The moon was the eye of an ink–dark whale overhead, barnacled with stars. They walked through the shadows of the sideyard. The pale wood–grain color of the horse was bleached to blue–white bone.
Moonlight surrounded the boy and the horse as they walked into the street. The click of wooden hooves on asphalt became a clatter as the horse broke into a trot, and then into a run, and then the moonlight was a blue ribbon before them and they were running up it and there was no sound at all.
And they were gone.
Sarah had to put Jep to bed. He was heavy, for all his frailness, and she was practically carrying him as they reached the bedroom.
She tried to set him down on the near side of the bed and he struggled until she helped him around to the far side, where the blankets were pushed back. “My side,” he said, by way of explanation. She looked at the other side, at the neatly tucked pillow and the faint depression in the mattress, and she would have cried again if there were any tears left in her.
She got his shoes off and left it at that. His frayed suit wouldn’t get any more frayed for being slept in.
She picked up her tools. When she had duplicates, she left him one, and when she didn’t she left him one anyway. Her credit card could strain to another few knives if it had to.
She let herself out of the shed and drove back to the flea market in the moonlight. She kept expecting to see a horse and a rider, but she didn’t and she thought probably no one else ever would either.
She was exhausted, but there was no chance of sleeping. She didn’t feel like going home.
Instead, she keyed in the security code and let herself into the empty building. Her stall was dark, but she turned on one light, and saw the reflections winking in Rauf’s popcorn maker across the way.
She had the right tools to finish the ruddy, so she did.
There was light coming in through the skylights when she put the last line on the feathers.
She sat back. Her neck ached and her eyes were gritty. It was the best thing she had ever carved, even better than the horse’s tail.
She didn’t know what she was waiting for.
She set down the sandpaper and sighed.
“Maybe I’m being stupid,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and lost in the vast echoing spaces of the market.
The duck carving flexed its wings. Its unpainted bill opened, just a fraction, and then it shook itself and settled back down. Its tail flicked, and then it was a wooden carving again, with no more life than any piece of art has on its own.
A single wooden feather slipped free of the wings and landed on the table.
She picked it up. It was unpainted, and more perfectly carved than anything that she had ever done.
But not, perhaps, more perfect than anything she could do.
She stroked her hands over the wood, then got up and turned out the light and went home.
* * *
T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon, who is a writer, illustrator, gardener, and occasional children’s book creator. As T. Kingfisher, she has written multiple novels based on fairy-tale retellings, including “The Raven & The Reindeer” and “The Seventh Bride.” Her work has won the Hugo, Nebula, WSFA and Mythopoeic Awards. She is fond of plants, bugs, and hound dogs.
Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight
By Aliette de Bodard
Green tea: green tea is made from steamed or lightly dried tea leaves. The brew is light, with a pleasant, grassy taste. Do not over-steep it, lest it become bitter.
• • • •
After the funeral, Quang Tu walked back to his compartment, and sat down alone, staring sightlessly at the slow ballet of bots cleaning the small room—the metal walls pristine already, with every trace of Mother’s presence or of her numerous mourners scrubbed away. He’d shut down the communal network—couldn’t bear to see the potted summaries of Mother’s life, the endlessly looping vids of the funeral procession, the hundred thousand bystanders gathered at the grave site to say goodbye, vultures feasting on the flesh of the grieving—they hadn’t known her, they hadn’t cared—and all their offerings of flowers were worth as much as the insurances of the Embroidered Guard.
“Big brother, I know you’re here,” a voice said, on the other side of the door he’d locked. “Let me in, please?”
Of course. Quang Tu didn’t move. “I said I wanted to be alone,” he said.
A snort that might have been amusement. “Fine. If you insist on doing it that way…”
His sister, The Tiger in the Banyan, materialised in the kitchen, hovering over the polished counter, near the remains of his morning tea. Of course, it wasn’t really her: she was a Mind encased in the heartroom of a spaceship, far too heavy to leave orbit; and what she projected down onto the planet was an avatar, a perfectly rendered, smaller version of herself—elegant and sharp, with a small, blackened spot on her hull which served as a mourning band. “Typical,” she said, hovering around the compartment. “You can’t just shut yourself away.”
“I can if I want to,” Quang Tu said—feeling like he was eight years old again, trying to argue with her—as if it had ever made sense. She seldom got angry—mindships didn’t, mostly; he wasn’t sure if that was the overall design of the Imperial Workshops, or the simple fact that her lifespan was counted in centuries, and his (and Mother’s) in mere decades. He’d have thought she didn’t grieve, either; but she was changed—something in the slow, careful deliberation of her movements, as if anything and everything might break her…
The Tiger in the Banyan hovered near the kitchen table, watching the bots. She could hack them, easily; no security worth anything in the compartment. Who would steal bots, anyway?
What he valued most had already been taken away.
“Leave me alone,” he said. But he didn’t want to be alone; not really. He didn’t want to hear the silence in the compartment; the clicking sounds of the bots’ legs on metal, bereft of any warmth or humanity.
“Do you want to talk about it?
” The Tiger in the Banyan asked.
She didn’t need to say what; and he didn’t do her the insult of pretending she did. “What would be the point?”
“To talk.” Her voice was uncannily shrewd. “It helps. At least, I’m told it does.”
Quang Tu heard, again, the voice of the Embroidered Guard; the slow, measured tones commiserating on his loss; and then the frown, and the knife-thrust in his gut.
You must understand that your mother’s work was very valuable…
The circumstances are not ordinary…
The slow, pompous tones of the scholar; the convoluted official language he knew by heart—the only excuses the state would make to him, couched in the over-formality of memorials and edicts.
“She—” he took a deep, trembling breath—was it grief, or anger? “I should have had her mem-implants.” Forty-nine days after the funeral; when there was time for the labs to have decanted and stabilised Mother’s personality and memories, and added her to the ranks of the ancestors on file. It wasn’t her, it would never be her, of course—just a simulation meant to share knowledge and advice. But it would have been something. It would have filled the awful emptiness in his life.
“It was your right, as the eldest,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Something in the tone of her voice…
“You disapprove? You wanted them?” Families had fallen out before, on more trivial things.
“Of course not.” A burst of careless, amused laughter. “Don’t be a fool. What use would I have, for them. It’s just—” She hesitated, banking left and right in uncertainty. “You need something more. Beyond Mother.”
“There isn’t something more!”
“You—”
“You weren’t there,” Quang Tu said. She’d been away on her journeys, ferrying people back and forth between the planets that made up the Dai Viet Empire; leaping from world to world, with hardly a care for planet-bound humans. She—she hadn’t seen Mother’s unsteady hands, dropping the glass; heard the sound of its shattering like a gunshot; hadn’t carried her back to bed every evening, tracking the progress of the disease by the growing lightness in his arms—by the growing sharpness of ribs, protruding under taut skin.
Mother had remained herself until almost the end—sharp and lucid and utterly aware of what was happening, scribbling in the margins of her team’s reports and sending her instructions to the new space station’s building site, as if nothing untoward had ever happened to her. Had it been a blessing; or a curse? He didn’t have answers; and he wasn’t sure he wanted that awful certainty to shatter him.
“I was here,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, gently, slowly. “At the end.”
Quang Tu closed his eyes, again, smelling antiseptic and the sharp odour of painkillers; and the sour smell of a body finally breaking down, finally failing. “I’m sorry. You were. I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t.” The Tiger in the Banyan moved closer to him; brushed against his shoulder—ghostly, almost intangible, the breath that had been beside him all his childhood. “But nevertheless. Your life got eaten up, taking care of Mother. And you can say you were only doing what a filial son ought to do; you can say it didn’t matter. But… it’s done now, big brother. It’s over.”
It’s not, he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow in his own ears. He moved, stared at the altar; at the holo of Mother—over the offering of tea and rice, the food to sustain her on her journey through Hell. It cycled through vids—Mother, heavily pregnant with his sister, moving with the characteristic arrested slowness of Mind-bearers; Mother standing behind Quang Tu and The Tiger in the Banyan in front of the ancestral altar for Grandfather’s death anniversary; Mother, accepting her Hoang Minh Medal from the then Minister of Investigation; and one before the diagnosis, when she’d already started to become frailer and thinner—insisting on going back to the lab; to her abandoned teams and research…
He thought, again, of the Embroidered Guard; of the words tightening around his neck like an executioner’s garrotte. How dare he. How dare they all. “She came home,” he said, not sure how to voice the turmoil within him. “To us. To her family. In the end. It meant something, didn’t it?”
The Tiger in the Banyan’s voice was wry, amused. “It wasn’t the Empress that comforted her when she woke at night, coughing her lungs out, was it?” It was… treason to much as think this, let alone utter it; though the Embroidered Guard would make allowances for grief, and anger; and for Mother’s continued usefulness to the service of the Empress. The truth was, neither of them much cared, anyway. “It’s not the Empress that was by her side when she died.”
She’d clung to his hand, then, her eyes open wide, a network of blood within the whites, and the fear in her eyes. “I—please, child…” He’d stood, frozen; until, behind him, The Tiger in the Banyan whispered, “The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim…”— an Old Earth lullaby, the words stretched into the familiar, slow, comforting rhythm that he’d unthinkingly taken up.
“Go home to study
I shall wait nine months, I shall wait ten autumns…”
She’d relaxed, then, against him; and they had gone on singing songs until—he didn’t know when she’d died; when the eyes lost their lustre, the face its usual sharpness. But he’d risen from her death-bed with the song still in his mind; and an awful yawning gap in his world that nothing had closed.
And then—after the scattering of votive papers, after the final handful of earth thrown over the grave—the Embroidered Guard.
The Embroidered Guard was young; baby-faced and callow, but he was already moving with the easy arrogance of the privileged. He’d approached Quang Tu at the grave site, ostensibly to offer his condolences—it had taken him all of two sentences to get to his true purpose; and to shatter Quang Tu’s world, all over again.
Your mother’s mem-implants will go to Professor Tuyet Hoa, who will be best able to continue her research…
Of course, the Empire required food; and crops of rice grown in space; and better, more reliable harvests to feed the masses. Of course he didn’t want anyone to starve. But…
Mem-implants always went from parent to child. They were a family’s riches and fortune; the continued advice of the ancestors, dispensed from beyond the grave. He’d—he’d had the comfort, as Mother lay dying, to know that he wouldn’t lose her. Not for real; not for long.
“They took her away from us,” Quang Tu said. “Again and again and again. And now, at the very end, when she ought to be ours—when she should return to her family…”
The Tiger in the Banyan didn’t move; but a vid of the funeral appeared on one of the walls, projected through the communal network. There hadn’t been enough space in the small compartment for people to pay their respects; the numerous callers had jammed into the corridors and alcoves, jostling each other in utter silence. “She’s theirs in death, too.”
“And you don’t care?”
A side-roll of the avatar, her equivalent of a shrug. “Not as much as you do. I remember her. None of them do.”
Except Tuyet Hoa.
He remembered Tuyet Hoa, too; coming to visit them on the third day after the New Year—a student paying respect to her teacher, year after year; turning from an unattainable grown-up to a woman not much older than either he or The Tiger in the Banyan; though she’d never lost her rigid awkwardness in dealing with them. No doubt, in Tuyet Hoa’s ideal world, Mother wouldn’t have had children; wouldn’t have let anything distract her from her work.
“You have to move on,” The Tiger in the Banyan said, slowly, gently; coming by his side to stare at the memorial altar. Bots gathered in the kitchen space, started putting together fresh tea to replace the three cups laid there. “Accept that this is the way things are. They’ll compensate, you know—offer you higher-level promotions and make allowances. You’ll find your path through civil service is… smoother.”
Bribes or sops; pay
ments for the loss of something that had no price. “Fair dealings,” he said, slowly, bitterly. They knew exactly the value of what Tuyet Hoa was getting.
“Of course,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. “But you’ll only ruin your health and your career; and you know Mother wouldn’t have wanted it.”
As if… No, he was being unfair. Mother could be distant, and engrossed in her work; but she had always made time for them. She had raised them and played with them, telling them stories of princesses and fishermen and citadels vanished in one night; and, later on, going on long walks with Quang Tu in the gardens of Azure Dragons, delightedly pointing at a pine tree or at a crane flying overhead; and animatedly discussing Quang Tu’s fledging career in the Ministry of Works.
“You can’t afford to let this go sour,” The Tiger in the Banyan said. Below her, the bots brought a small, perfect cup of tea: green, fragrant liquid in a cup, the cracks in the pale celadon like those in eggshells.
Quang Tu lifted the cup; breathed in the grassy, pleasant smell—Mother would love it, even beyond the grave. “I know,” he said, laying the cup on the altar. The lie slipped out of him as softly, as easily as Mother’s last exhaled breath.
• • • •
O Long tea: those teas are carefully prepared by the tea masters to create a range of tastes and appearances. The brew is sweet with a hint of strength, each subsequent steeping revealing new nuances.
• • • •
Tuyet Hoa woke up—with a diffuse, growing sense of panic and fear, before she remembered the procedure.
She was alive. She was sane. At least…
She took in a deep, trembling breath; and realised she lay at home, in her bed. What had woken her up—above the stubborn, panicked rhythm of her heart—was a gentle nudge from the communal network, flashes of light relayed by the bots in the lightest phase of her sleep cycle. It wasn’t her alarm; but rather, a notification that a message classified as “urgent” had arrived for her.
The Long List Anthology 2 Page 10