Table of Contents
Introduction
The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!
Afterword to “The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror”
Quartermaster Returns
Afterword to “Quartermaster Returns”
Metal More Attractive
Afterword to “Metal More Attractive”
The Lineaments of Gratified Desire
Afterword to “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”
Lovelocks
Afterword to “Lovelocks”
Hand in Glove
Afterword to “Hand in Glove”
Scaring the Shavetail
Afterword to “Scaring the Shavetail”
About the Author
Also Available from Small Beer Press:
Advance praise for Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams
“Ysabeau Wilce is an original American fantasist. Unique in vision, rare in quality, Califa is one of the few truly American fantasy worlds, owing as much to the Wild West, San Francisco Bay and Mexican folklore as to Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolkien. Read and enjoy!”—Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint
“I would trade a year of my life, and things more precious still, to be transported for one hour to the sumptuous streets of Ysabeau Wilce’s Califa.”—Paul Witcover, author of The Emperor of All Things
“The Republic of Califa differs from the American West Coast in a number of small details, of course: the egregores and praterhumans, the Magick and Gramatica, the peculiar dynastic struggles of the Pontifexa Georgiana and her decadent postbears. But all these are the subtle and minuscule discrepancies of a parallel yet proximate reality, easily overlooked by the casual reader. Where Ms. Wilce shines is in her use of the larger effects—those of tone, style, and voice—which make her world so much richer than our own.”—Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania
“Those who have been yearning for another voyage through Califa—and who hasn’t?—will be delighted to plunge into the lives of General Hardhands and Tiny Doom, discover the mystery behind the Hand of Gory, and learn the truth of the Bouncing Boy Terror, Springheel Jack. Rich and intricate, clever and sexy, these tales never fail to deliver glorious adventure and transcendent worldbuilding. Wilce is truly a Queen among fantasists.”—Tiffany Trent, author of The Unnaturalists
Praise for Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Flora Segunda
“Highly original, strange and amusing.”—Diana Wynne Jones
“Wilce’s novel features a cast of quirky but appealing characters, a distinctive magical setting, wry humor, and some insightful comments about coming-of-age and asserting oneself over the adults in charge. Fantasy buffs will relish the surprising plot twists, the satisfying ending, and the possibility of future escapades.”—Booklist
“Wilce has matters well in hand in this, her first novel. . . . The book is rich and odd. . . . The heroine is this novel’s strongest suit. Like Pullman’s Lyra Silvertongue or Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, Flora Fyrdraaca is a descendant of Jo March rather than a fainting beauty who needs rescuing. These wayward, determined girls do the rescuing themselves, although not wisely or always too well.”—New York Times Book Review
Praise for Flora’s Dare
Winner of the Andre Norton Award
“This fresh and funky setting is rich with glorious costumes, innovative language and tantalizing glimpses of history.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A fantastic and unique world. . . . Guaranteed thrills, chills, and amazing revelations.”—Voya
Praise for Flora’s Fury
“A charming conclusion to a fine fantasy series.”—Booklist
“[A] thrilling, bizarre ride.”—The Horn Book
————————————————————————
Prophecies
Libels and Dreams
————————————————————————
Stories of Califa
Edited and Annotated
by
Ysabeau S. Wilce
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories of Califa copyright © 2014 by Ysabeau S. Wilce. All rights reserved.
yswilce.com
“The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!” Asimov’s, 2004
“Quartermaster Returns,” Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2007
“Metal More Attractive,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2004
“The Lineaments of Gratified Desire,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2006
“Lovelocks” appears here for the first time.
“Hand in Glove,” Steampunk! An Anthology of Strange and Fascinating Stories, 2011
“Scaring the Shavetail” appears here for the first time.
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant Street #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
www.smallbeerpress.com
www.weightlessbooks.com
[email protected]
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilce, Ysabeau S.
[Short stories. Selections]
Prophecies, libels & dreams : stories / Ysabeau S. Wilce. -- First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “These interconnected stories are set in the Republic of Califa -- a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony. By turn whimsical and horrific (sometime in the same paragraph), Wilce’s stories have been characterized as “screwball comedies for goths” but they could also be described as “historical fantasies” or “fanciful histories” for there are nuggets of historical fact hidden in them there lies”-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61873-089-3 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-090-9 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3623.I529A6 2014
813’.6--dc23
2014022473
First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Text set in Centaur.
Paper edition printed on 30% 50 Natures Natural PCR recycled paper by the Maple Press in York, PA.
Cover illustration © 2014 by Oliver Hunter (oliverhunter.tumblr.com).
Dedicated to
The House of Ono:
Nunquam Credere Piscum
Introduction
Ah, Califa! Cool white city surrounded on three sides by water, braced by fog and sea breezes. A city of mysterious barrancas, glorious vistas, towering hills, wavery sandbanks. Sitting on the rim of the continent, caught between land and sea, Califa has always been an intermittent place, a locale that has attracted dreamers, dæmons, outlaws, mavericks. Caught between the Waking World and Elsewhere, once The Current in Califa ran high, engendering danger, intrigue, excitement and power.[1]
But no more! Today Califa is decorous and subdued, and the raucous days of yore are dimly remembered. Yet, as sunlight may find its way through the tears of a curtain, illuminating the dusty furniture of a long enclosed room, so these stories cast light upon a time now dark and remote. Some are clearly fragments of a greater whole, now lost to history. Others seem to be complete as they are. Several show the singular hand of one writer, whose detailed knowledge of the events described claim an intimacy that could only come from being an eyewitness. A few are clearly fanciful, yarns for children or simpletons. Two are clearly the result of a churning propaganda machine. One is downright fantastic.
But taken together, these stories offer glimpses into a world long since lost: a world we can only dream of, where
human and praterhuman conspired side by side, where rule of law was subsumed by the rule of power, when the City was wide-awake to magick and intrigue. Today it is hard for us to imagine a time when the line between Elsewhere and the Waking World was so thin that humans and praterhumans mingled, where Will alone could accomplish wonders. Rough, this world was, and dangerous, but still romantic. Who among us would not have given much to have been invited to a dance at Bilskinir House, when it was under the sway of the mighty egregore Paimon? Caroused with the Redlegs’ Regiment as they celebrated their birthday and their glory? Followed two daring detectives as they cut the sign of a merciless killer? Slid into the sparkly boots of a sparkly outlaw and soar into a life of crime?
We could not be there when these events happened, but through these stories, we may relive these excitements and, in doing so, gain a greater understanding of the glories and perils of days now evaporated into the mists of history.
A Lady of Quality
Pumpkinville, Ariviapa
15-Tecaptl-161
Author of Califa in Sunshine & Shade:
A History of Califa in Ten Volumes
[1] See Spiro, Joshua. Bay of Empire: Califa Bay and the Eastward Expansion. Arcangel: Honeycutt Press, 11-Calli-156.
The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror!
Part One: Crime Commences
Once upon a time, my little waffles, far across the pale eastern sands, a baby boy bounced from his mother’s womb into a dark and dangerous world, into a land well full of hardship, turmoil, and empty handball courts. This boy, starting tiny and growing huge, would one day become a legend in the minds of his minions, a hero in the hearts of his hobbledehoys, the fanciest lad of them all: Springheel Jack!
And this, my dovetails, is the story of how it all started.
Now in the beginning young Jack was not a rowdy tyke, well full of the jiggamaree and the falder-a-oo. The other childer might drive their mammas mad with fancy ideas of fun, but young Jack was not made for sportive tricks. He was his mamma’s muffin and he kept to her side, helping in the smelly sport of making matches, which phosphoric occupation was how the family kept fed. They were a poor household, with no extra divas for white sugar or white bread, and all ten of Jack’s tiny brothers and sisters must put paws into keeping the darkness of poverty at bay. Dipping lucifers at ten glories a decade leaves little room for boisterous fun.
Well dingy was the rundown tenement in which Jack’s family lived, perched atop a noisome blind tiger from which issued rousting and revelry all hours of the night—illegal whist games, bitter beer, and up-against-the-wall fiddling. Well dingy was the rundown room into which Jack’s family squeezed, tiny oil lamp the only tiny light, tiny window opening into tiny alley, and tiny pinch-faced siblings with cold blue fingers dipping matchsticks into glowing blue poison. Instead of a cat, the family kept Hunger, which crouched in the corner of the tiny room, wiggling its tail and licking its prickly chops, waiting, just waiting. They had each other but they had nothing else, not even shoes to cover their frigid toes. Their days were drab and dreary.
But at night, dear doorknobs, when the dipping was done and the little pots of phosphorus illumined the shadows, Jack lay in his nest of rags, tucked up against his baby mice siblings, and he dreamed away the pallid gray world: the knobby fingers, the tightening tummies, each drab day dribbling into another drab day, endlessly endless. At night Jack dreamed of colors: glimmering, glittering, glistening, glowing colors—cyan, jade, celadon, amber, cobalt, wheat, orange, plum, lavender, and magenta. But the color that shone the most through Jacko’s dreams was the brilliant tang of red: cerise, sangyn, vermilion, carmine, crimson, gules, rust, rose, cochineal. Rushing friendly warm red, delicious and hot.
Well, my nifty needles, once a week Jack’s mamma would take the little boxes of matches and place them into her market basket for to redeem. The other childer stayed home, under the concern of Jack, but the baby who coughed went with mamma, wrapped in newspaper and tucked also into the basket, sleeping uneasily among the boxes of spark. At the factory of Zebulon Quarrel & Dau., Manufacturers of Lucifers, Phosphates, & Triggers, Jack’s mamma would turn in the week’s hundred boxes and receive into her thin hand one dull gold diva and eleven dingy glories, and on this happy day, there would be moldy cheese and squashed kale pie for supper.
But one day, Jack’s mamma could carry neither basket nor baby. The sickly prickles were itching through the City, and like all Disease, they enjoyed the poorest people first, leaving the rich for a luscious fat dessert. In Jack’s mamma’s illness, it fell to her muffin to do her duty, else gobbling Hunger would creep from its corner and snatch the childer up, one by one. So, leaving the basket for the baby who coughed, Jack packed the boxes of matches in a crumpled cracker box and set out down the splashy wet streets to Zebulon Quarrel’s crenellated factory.
Through the sloppy streets he sloshed, brave Jackling, clutching his cracker box from the splashing dillys, the clippy horsecars, and the pushing people who were eager to get home to their toasted cheese dinners and hot tea before darkfall. At the hulking behemoth gates of Quarrel’s factory, wee Jack stood upon the iron shoe scraper and handed his cracker box upward to the grimacing factotum behind the window rail. Handed down he was, after a few minutes of stolid counting, the munificent sum of one dull-faced diva and eleven chipped glories. A fortune in coin.
Thus paid, Jacko slogged to the 99 Glory Tuckshop where to buy squashed pie and moldy cheese, and perhaps even a crock of spinach paste for the hungry childer’s evening sup. Full darkness lingered in the wings of the sky, waiting for its cue, and the graying rain drove down like needles, stitching the evening in silvery sorrow. The streets were most empty and wet now, and only sweet Jacko, with his blue bare feet and his ragged sweater, hopped through the puddles, shivering.
Then—Jack paused.
Then—Jack poised.
Then—Jack stood staring into a glowing window front by which he had just been hurrying, and there he saw a thing that caught in his head like happy, stuck in his sight like sugar, a vision that near tore his breath away. A vision that seemed sprung from his most secret special dreams.
A pair of red sparkly boots.
And what boots—heels as high as heaven and toes as sharp as salt. Gleaming stove-pipe uppers greaving tall and slick, and on the tip of each pointy toe a snake’s head leered, spitting tongue and bone-sharp teeth.
And what sparkle—glistening and glittering in the evening light like diamond rain after the shower has stopped, like snow in the sun, like a thousand stars clustered in the midnight sky.
And what red—slick wet red, sparking like sunshine, thick and rich as paint, gleaming like a pricked finger, like a stormy dawn, like first love.
Jacko opened the door and inside he went. The shop contained a vast smoky gloom from which sprang the vague hulk of cabinets and large pieces of carved wood whose shapes Jack could neither see fully nor understand. He cared not for the shadows or the smoke; he cared only for the brilliant boots in the window.
“Do you see love?” a squeaky voice inquired from the distant reaches of the room.
“Those red sparkly boots in the window—” stuttered Jack, overcome by fog and fright. A jackdaw flapped out of the shadows, perched upon a hat rack, and regarded our boy with flat button eyes.
“A most discerning young dasher,” said the grammer who leapt from the back of the store with a flash of blue petticoats and took up stand beside him, gripping his arm with a grandmotherly pinch. In the gloam her teeth shone as green as grass, and her ancient monkey head was surmounted by a soufflé of a cap. “Best in the house. Chop-chop, my little darlings, and come to your bungalow baby boy.”
The boots jumped out of their window, driven by their own joie-de-vie, and began to caper nimbly on the countertop, heels clacking a fandango, tongues flapping a jaunty tune. The jackdaw cawed accompaniment and even the old grammer tapped gnarled fingers as the heels clicked and spun, snapping upward, diddling do
wnward, the snake heads gnashing their needley teeth and spitting. Jack’s blue toes began to tap the splintery floor and his heart jiggled and jumped in his chest. Never before had he seen such a glorious slick shade of red, and now he was completely caught.
“The boots like your sweetness,” said the grammer, and both she and the jackdaw giggled. “For a small price they shall be your daisies, and together such fun you shall have.”
Jack’s jiggly heart flopped. What funds did he have to purchase anything other than moldy cheese and squashed kale pie? What funds would he ever get, in his dull little room, dipping poison matches for plungers to light their cigars from? And the hungry childer and the sick mamma waiting at home for his return. His world would be forever dull; all else was a forlorn hope. Jack’s wiggly heart died and he began to turn away.
“Cheap at the price, but dear in the taking,” the grammer said. “And naught price that you can not pay, I warrant.”
“I have no flash,” Jacko said, his sad exit halted. But his fingers felt the twist of his sweater wherein he had carefully placed the coins, rubbing their rounded shapes through the thin cloth.
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