Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  Fifty feet away, the Dorchester wallowed, to her attuned senses more putrid than any cesspool. Its ballast tanks sloshed and echoed as they filled with water, and the submarine lowered into the depths. Reverberations carried from each rotation of the hand crank that propelled it forward.

  She surfaced in the middle of the river. Her seal eyes showed her a world hued in blues and greens. Bubbles marked the submersible’s wake.

  At the end of the dock, a blue glow caught her eye. The figure waved at her.

  “ …pelt won’t work!” she barely made out. “No glow!” Other soldiers surrounded Chaplain Walsh, gripping his arms, trying to calm him.

  Beulah swam closer, her mind blank, her heart racing.

  “No glow!” he shouted again. “She got no glow!”

  No glow? Annie’s pelt had no glow? No. Beulah sank into absolute darkness. Chaplain Walsh had to be lying. He just wanted to stop her, stop the Dorchester. He was a Yankee at heart, and a man of God. He had every reason to want this to fail.

  Ripples slapped her whiskers as the Dorchester thrummed by. Beulah twisted in the water and swam alongside. She rested a flipper against the icy hull. The metal gnashed her limb as if with spiny teeth. In her mind, she heard her human self scream in agony as she struggled to stay conscious. Her senses fought through the accursed iron to find Papa within.

  She knew his magic the way she knew the murmur of indistinct voices a room away. He stood five feet distant at command position. Metal groaned as the crew powered the crankshaft, but she could not discern the individual men with her magic. Nor could she find any other glow. The skin may as well have not been there, but she knew it was; the men wouldn’t have sailed without it. Chaplain was right.

  The submarine pushed past in a torrent of bubbles. She drifted, limp. She was scarcely aware of how her flipper ached and throbbed and how lingering convulsions rippled across her skin.

  Annie’s pelt was empty. She was dead.

  Papa killed her.

  You’re a weapon for a cause in which you don’t believe, you and your sister both. Chaplain’s words pierced through the numbness. Papa’s cause had killed Annie, and would kill Beulah, too. Her and so many more. The Union ship was out there, with hundreds more burdens on her soul.

  Papa’s good luck charm was dead. Without Annie’s magic, the Dorchester would eventually fail, as the Hunley had. Maybe take its crew of ten with it.

  Beulah couldn’t wait. If she was going to be a weapon, this’d be the last time, on her terms.

  God have mercy on her soul.

  She swam, her body a sleek torpedo. She surpassed the submarine, powered by pedaling men, and passed the wooden spar with its explosive. She knew the river’s sinuous curves as it broadened into the Atlantic. By her whiskers and the flow of the water, she knew the channel’s depth, the anxious and erratic paths of fish. She stopped to let the submarine catch up.

  Beulah’s flipper banged on the hull, fast enough that it didn’t scald her. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. An obstacle ahead, bear right. You’re a good girl, Papa always said. He trusted her to be obedient, to do as she ought.

  After a long pause, it began to turn, oh so slowly. It was a perfect maneuver, one they had practiced time and again. The new angle aimed the torpedo-laden spar directly at rocks thirty feet ahead. The submersible was at full speed.

  Beulah swam hard, but not far enough. Not fast enough. Metal crunched and whined and not a second later the explosion shoved her through the water. She sensed shrapnel shoot past, and she dove deeper. Her tail, her every muscle pushed her forward. To what? A shore, swarming with Confederates who would want to know what happened? To a world without the brightness of Annie awaiting her back home? She swam by blind instinct until she could take it no more. She shot to the surface.

  Her head craned from the water and she screamed. The hoarse bray echoed. The sound of the explosion had faded, though something still crackled in the distance. She didn’t turn around to look. The dock was not far away, still adorned with the blue glow of Chaplain Walsh. Men scrambled and yelled from the shore and pier. Oars slapped the water.

  “I see Miss Beulah!” called one of the men. “She’s out there!”

  “Miss Beulah?” echoed Lieutenant Groves, panting. He sat in the lead boat, not ten feet away. “What happened?”

  She sensed Chaplain Walsh’s gaze on her. He knew she had done this. Would he condemn her, as part of his honesty?

  Still in deep water, she pulled back her skin to the shoulders. “Lieutenant!” she cried, hoarse from her scream. “Something went awful wrong. I tried to catch up, but I moved too slow. They plowed straight into them rocks down at the fork.”

  “God Almighty. All our hopes …” Lieutenant Groves looked so weary and old as he gazed in the direction of her voice. “That Union sloop may send men in to investigate. Might be a battle here soon enough, but we can’t let them get salvage. Get ashore, girl. The men’ll get you inland.”

  “And Chaplain Walsh, sir?” she asked. “Is he well? I thought he yelled somethin’.”

  “He’s to stay still. Ain’t right in the head.” Lieutenant Groves motioned a soldier to continue paddling. Boats hurried past. The other men on the pier had dashed away, readying for battle.

  Chaplain Walsh looked directly at her. “Your sister …I’m so very sorry, Miss Beulah.”

  “So am I, Chaplain Walsh, for so many things.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I’m going. Before they use me as a weapon again. Before …before I end up like Annie.”

  “Yes. Yes.” He stared away and she wondered if he was about to faint again. “I’d swim away with you, if I could.” The words were so soft, she barely heard them.

  “No. You don’t believe in their cause, but they made you vow to serve. Knowin’ you, you’d still hold yourself to such a thing.”

  He snorted. “You know me so well, so quickly.”

  “Yes, and you …you’re gonna end up dead yourself. Battle or sickness or because of your own mouth. I wish you could lie. I wish you’d try. I wish you’d stay alive.”

  “Thank you for that.” He paused. “I’ll do what I need to do.”

  Beulah stared at him in dismay, emotion choking her throat. The fool. The wonderful, stupidly stubborn fool.

  In the moonless blackness, his magic made his pale skin glow all the more. “I’ll pray for you.”

  “Yes. I’d like that. Pray for me. Please. I need your prayers, Chaplain Walsh.”

  Beulah pulled herself deeper into her own skin, deeper than she had ever gone before. Water thrummed against her whiskers, her vision of dark colors, the human color spectrum a mere memory. She tucked her flippers flush against her sides and swam. The river flowed against her, but she’d fight it every inch of the way.

  The Demoiselle d’Ys

  Robert W. Chambers

  “Mais je croy que je

  Suis descendu on puiz

  Ténébreux onquel disoit

  Heraclytus estre Vereté cachée.”

  “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:

  “The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”

  I

  The utter desolation of the scene began to have its effect; I sat down to face the situation and, if possible, recall to mind some landmark which might aid me in extricating myself from my present position. If I could only find the ocean again all would be clear, for I knew one could see the island of Groix from the cliffs.

  I laid down my gun, and kneeling behind a rock lighted a pipe. Then I looked at my watch. It was nearly four o’clock. I might have wandered far from Kerselec since daybreak.

  Standing the day before on the cliffs below Kerselec with Goulven, looking out over the sombre moors among which
I had now lost my way, these downs had appeared to me level as a meadow, stretching to the horizon, and although I knew how deceptive is distance, I could not realize that what from Kerselec seemed to be mere grassy hollows were great valleys covered with gorse and heather, and what looked like scattered boulders were in reality enormous cliffs of granite.

  “It’s a bad place for a stranger,” old Goulven had said: “you’d better take a guide;” and I had replied, “I shall not lose myself.” Now I knew that I had lost myself, as I sat there smoking, with the sea-wind blowing in my face. On every side stretched the moorland, covered with flowering gorse and heath and granite boulders. There was not a tree in sight, much less a house. After a while, I picked up the gun, and turning my back on the sun tramped on again.

  There was little use in following any of the brawling streams which every now and then crossed my path, for, instead of flowing into the sea, they ran inland to reedy pools in the hollows of the moors. I had followed several, but they all led me to swamps or silent little ponds from which the snipe rose peeping and wheeled away in an ecstasy of fright. I began to feel fatigued, and the gun galled my shoulder in spite of the double pads. The sun sank lower and lower, shining level across yellow gorse and the moorland pools.

  As I walked my own gigantic shadow led me on, seeming to lengthen at every step. The gorse scraped against my leggings, crackled beneath my feet, showering the brown earth with blossoms, and the brake bowed and billowed along my path. From tufts of heath rabbits scurried away through the bracken, and among the swamp grass I heard the wild duck’s drowsy quack. Once a fox stole across my path, and again, as I stooped to drink at a hurrying rill, a heron flapped heavily from the reeds beside me. I turned to look at the sun. It seemed to touch the edges of the plain. When at last I decided that it was useless to go on, and that I must make up my mind to spend at least one night on the moors, I threw myself down thoroughly fagged out. The evening sunlight slanted warm across my body, but the sea-winds began to rise, and I felt a chill strike through me from my wet shooting-boots. High overhead gulls were wheeling and tossing like bits of white paper; from some distant marsh a solitary curlew called. Little by little the sun sank into the plain, and the zenith flushed with the after-glow. I watched the sky change from palest gold to pink and then to smouldering fire. Clouds of midges danced above me, and high in the calm air a bat dipped and soared. My eyelids began to droop. Then as I shook off the drowsiness a sudden crash among the bracken roused me. I raised my eyes. A great bird hung quivering in the air above my face. For an instant I stared, incapable of motion; then something leaped past me in the ferns and the bird rose, wheeled, and pitched headlong into the brake.

  I was on my feet in an instant peering through the gorse. There came the sound of a struggle from a bunch of heather close by, and then all was quiet. I stepped forward, my gun poised, but when I came to the heather the gun fell under my arm again, and I stood motionless in silent astonishment. A dead hare lay on the ground, and on the hare stood a magnificent falcon, one talon buried in the creature’s neck, the other planted firmly on its limp flank. But what astonished me, was not the mere sight of a falcon sitting upon its prey. I had seen that more than once. It was that the falcon was fitted with a sort of leash about both talons, and from the leash hung a round bit of metal like a sleigh-bell. The bird turned its fierce yellow eyes on me, and then stooped and struck its curved beak into the quarry. At the same instant hurried steps sounded among the heather, and a girl sprang into the covert in front. Without a glance at me she walked up to the falcon, and passing her gloved hand under its breast, raised it from the quarry. Then she deftly slipped a small hood over the bird’s head, and holding it out on her gauntlet, stooped and picked up the hare.

  She passed a cord about the animal’s legs and fastened the end of the thong to her girdle. Then she started to retrace her steps through the covert. As she passed me I raised my cap and she acknowledged my presence with a scarcely perceptible inclination. I had been so astonished, so lost in admiration of the scene before my eyes, that it had not occurred to me that here was my salvation. But as she moved away I recollected that unless I wanted to sleep on a windy moor that night I had better recover my speech without delay. At my first word she hesitated, and as I stepped before her I thought a look of fear came into her beautiful eyes. But as I humbly explained my unpleasant plight, her face flushed and she looked at me in wonder.

  “Surely you did not come from Kerselec!” she repeated.

  Her sweet voice had no trace of the Breton accent nor of any accent which I knew, and yet there was something in it I seemed to have heard before, something quaint and indefinable, like the theme of an old song.

  I explained that I was an American, unacquainted with Finistère, shooting there for my own amusement.

  “An American,” she repeated in the same quaint musical tones. “I have never before seen an American.”

  For a moment she stood silent, then looking at me she said. “If you should walk all night you could not reach Kerselec now, even if you had a guide.”

  This was pleasant news.

  “But,” I began, “if I could only find a peasant’s hut where I might get something to eat, and shelter.”

  The falcon on her wrist fluttered and shook its head. The girl smoothed its glossy back and glanced at me.

  “Look around,” she said gently. “Can you see the end of these moors? Look, north, south, east, west. Can you see anything but moorland and bracken?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The moor is wild and desolate. It is easy to enter, but sometimes they who enter never leave it. There are no peasants’ huts here.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you will tell me in which direction Kerselec lies, tomorrow it will take me no longer to go back than it has to come.”

  She looked at me again with an expression almost like pity.

  “Ah,” she said, “to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different – and may take centuries.”

  I stared at her in amazement but decided that I had misunderstood her. Then before I had time to speak she drew a whistle from her belt and sounded it.

  “Sit down and rest,” she said to me; “you have come a long distance and are tired.”

  She gathered up her pleated skirts and motioning me to follow picked her dainty way through the gorse to a flat rock among the ferns.

  “They will be here directly,” she said, and taking a seat at one end of the rock invited me to sit down on the other edge. The after-glow was beginning to fade in the sky and a single star twinkled faintly through the rosy haze. A long wavering triangle of water-fowl drifted southward over our heads, and from the swamps around plover were calling.

  “They are very beautiful – these moors,” she said quietly.

  “Beautiful, but cruel to strangers,” I answered.

  “Beautiful and cruel,” she repeated dreamily, “beautiful and cruel.”

  “Like a woman,” I said stupidly.

  “Oh,” she cried with a little catch in her breath, and looked at me. Her dark eyes met mine, and I thought she seemed angry or frightened.

  “Like a woman,” she repeated under her breath, “How cruel to say so!” Then after a pause, as though speaking aloud to herself, “How cruel for him to say that!”

  I don’t know what sort of an apology I offered for my inane, though harmless speech, but I know that she seemed so troubled about it that I began to think I had said something very dreadful without knowing it, and remembered with horror the pitfalls and snares which the French language sets for foreigners. While I was trying to imagine what I might have said, a sound of voices came across the moor, and the girl rose to her feet.

  “No,” she said, with a trace of a smile on her pale face, “I will not accept your apologies, monsieur, but I must prove you wrong, and that shall be my revenge. Look. Here come Hastur and Raoul.” />
  Two men loomed up in the twilight. One had a sack across his shoulders and the other carried a hoop before him as a waiter carries a tray. The hoop was fastened with straps to his shoulders, and around the edge of the circlet sat three hooded falcons fitted with tinkling bells. The girl stepped up to the falconer, and with a quick turn of her wrist transferred her falcon to the hoop, where it quickly sidled off and nestled among its mates, who shook their hooded heads and ruffled their feathers till the belled jesses tinkled again. The other man stepped forward and bowing respectfully took up the hare and dropped it into the game-sack.

  “These are my piqueurs,” said the girl, turning to me with a gentle dignity. “Raoul is a good fauconnier, and I shall some day make him grand veneur. Hastur is incomparable.”

  The two silent men saluted me respectfully.

  “Did I not tell you, monsieur, that I should prove you wrong?” she continued. “This, then, is my revenge, that you do me the courtesy of accepting food and shelter at my own house.”

  Before I could answer she spoke to the falconers, who started instantly across the heath, and with a gracious gesture to me she followed. I don’t know whether I made her understand how profoundly grateful I felt, but she seemed pleased to listen, as we walked over the dewy heather.

  “Are you not very tired?” she asked.

  I had clean forgotten my fatigue in her presence, and I told her so.

  “Don’t you think your gallantry is a little old-fashioned?” she said; and when I looked confused and humbled, she added quietly, “Oh, I like it, I like everything old-fashioned, and it is delightful to hear you say such pretty things.”

  The moorland around us was very still now under its ghostly sheet of mist. The plovers had ceased their calling; the crickets and all the little creatures of the fields were silent as we passed, yet it seemed to me as if I could hear them beginning again far behind us. Well in advance, the two tall falconers strode across the heather, and the faint jingling of the hawks’ bells came to our ears in distant murmuring chimes.