by Ken Liu
The soldier boy had ruddy cheeks and a crooked smile. “Her lovers. Yesterday, her brother.”
By this time I knew the gossip, packed with a biscuit before I left the kitchens at home.
“How did they go?” I asked.
“They went,” the boy answered. “All five of them. All pleading innocence, of course. Except Smeaton.” He shook his head. “Smeaton was a mess,” he confided. “One eye was gone. Couldn’t walk. Had to be dragged.”
I saw that Englishmen spoke in short sentences and thought that this would become annoying over the years to come.
“Did they torture him?” They say torture is the best way to get a confession and that is probably true, if a confession is what you want and it usually is. Personally I think a person will say anything once they start with the pincers and the rack. I know I would.
“Yup. He confessed. Got him pretty good. Must’ve taken awhile.” He shrugged. “Wonder if the fucking was worth the fucking.” Then he caught himself and looked at my velvet cape and across the yard to my father’s broad back and sword. “Sorry,” he muttered and touched his hat. I swept past him and whipped my velvet cloak at his calves with a goodly snap.
The crowd was already gathering when Papa began his examination of the scaffold. This was not the happy, rowdy assemblage of most execution days. This day, whatever the cause, a crowned Queen of England would die. Nothing like it had ever happened, neither in England nor in any land, not so I had heard. Would her blood curse the ground or would tiny flowers spring up in the dirt at her feet?
People tried to be gay. A few jokes went the rounds. Morning light leaked over the mud, sharp, cool and briny, like stale pickle juice, not like May at all. A scrap of blue kept trying to break into the white circle of the sky, too discouraged to push back the scouring clouds. Many of those in the yard were sure to be her enemies, I thought, and tried to count them. Not hard, for those who loved her were weeping or whey-faced already. A group of Great Men gathered in a corner very near to the scaffold. They were the merriest, as if trying to move history in their own direction. Too close, I thought, they are too close and will catch blood on their fine coats. And I was glad of it.
I found a place near the new boards of the scaffold, but on the side near the gates so I could make a run for it as soon as maybe. Papa ignored me now, trusted me to do him credit in such a moment. It was the last thing I could do for him, so I stood proud and set my cloak so the orange lining glowed over the watery light and the mud.
The crowd pressed up tight. No one here knew any better than to push up against me. I didn’t like the pressing. I was not used to it and I saw that this would be the manner of things in the future. Then a door opened across the yard. Above us, the guard emerged on a stone stair. Two ladies came out first, all in plain gray and not like a Queen’s ladies at all. I wondered if they were her own women or slatterns given to her in the cell. They wept as they came, whoever they were.
I knew she would pause before she came through that door. She would pause before being seen for the last time, and so she did. There was a blank doorway, and then the Queen.
Pretty and pale and light of step as if she had never a care in the world. She must’ve rouged her lips, for they were rosy and sweet. I wondered, ever the child of the Prison Keep, who had passed her the lip wax and how she had thought to ask. She must have known that, although the King was not here but Courting Another girl altogether, the stories would pass to him and from lip to lip through all time.
She came down the steps carefully but quick and was swallowed by the crowd. I saw her again as she mounted the scaffold, two grey ladies before and two behind. She saw my father, who never wore a mask but looked so exactly like what he was. Perhaps she had thought to see a black, leather Executioner’s Hood, but my father is famous, there is no use in hiding his identity. The mask is for amateurs who cannot wear the colors and hope to fade into the crowd when the deed is done.
She hesitated, but kept coming. The keeper of the tower leaned in to her and she nodded. She gave Papa the little bag with his fee, and threw some coin into the crowd as the dying always must if they are not to be cursed by the living in their last moments.
Papa knelt before the Queen Anne then to receive her Pardon. This I had never seen. I don’t know whether my father planned this and did it because the Lady was an Anointed Queen, or whether it came upon him in the moment out of her Humbleness and Pride and her Mortal Fear all Sweetened by Grace.
If things had gone as they usually do, people would have written down her last words and passed them on in letters and such. But with what came after, no one cared. The death of a Queen of England means nothing now. I think I may be the only one who half knows or cares what she said that Evil Morning of the End of the World.
Do you want to know? I’ll tell you anyway. It is the last sad thing that was not my life but the knell of another’s fate at it crossed mine. I don’t remember exactly, but something like this she said:
“Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to the law by which I am judged. I speak nothing against it. I accuse no man nor speak anything of what I am accused, but I pray God to Save the King and send him long to reign over you.”
I thought she should curse him, but she did not. She forbore either out of love leftover or for her child’s sake. Poor little toddler who had been a Princess yesterday and today was not. She thought the child a ransom to fate, a match for Kings and Emperors, or a Queen herself. She did not think the child a concubine, foot-bound and pale, her red hair alight among a hundred dark ladies. So instead before she died she called upon the King softly saying “A gentler nor a more merciful Prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.”
I prayed for her. It was the last time I ever prayed and I prayed for her. And then she began her Jesu-receive-my-soul, her voice trembling. One by one the crowd looked at her, so small and white and proud and one by one they knelt down in the mud. We all knelt with her.
They took away her cloak and her velvet headpiece and left her there alone in the rising breeze, her lips moving and her prayers falling over us like breaking glass. I heard my father call for his sword, as if it were ever far from his hand, and the Lady looked up and then her head lay on the ground before us, her eyes still wide and dark, but cooling like currant jelly.
As soon as movement came back into the crowd, I followed them to be first out of the gate. I saw the streets of London lying before me and a new life hidden in the maze of stone and mud and brick. I lifted my skirts and for a moment saw all that could be, a new life before me and death behind.
Then just as my dreams climbed over the city streets a shattering blast rose up behind us, a great sound like a roar or thunder or the surf when it hits the sharp rocks. The Whole Earth Shook. It was a sound like the ground itself giving way, the walls came to tremor, and into after-silence arose a great wailing, which itself splattered into a hollow gibberish of screams and crying. I found myself in the dirt and then on my knees and then the mud filled my mouth and my hair and blotted the orange silk of my cloak. Nothing on the street was as it should be – strange creatures in droves, in hoards came pouring from the side streets.
Warriors in shining skirted armor came running towards us, their sickle swords like the crescent moon cutting us down. Men and women and even the babes and animals fell in pieces around me, their mouths like holes and their cries past the hearing pitch.
One soldier came to me, hovered over me, laughing. His sword whizzed in wide circles over his head slicing the air as wire cuts through soft cheese. I rolled sideways and crawled into the shadow of a pile of boxes and nets as he passed. There in the refuse and the dirt I thought only of my father and the safety of his arm and his own great sword.
With my skirts above my knees,
splashing through the reddened street mud, I ran. I threw myself at the Tower gate, just as it shuddered and fell. Inside, the stone buttresses of the old fortress had broken along the river, the whole wall blown into jagged and smoldering ruin. The defenses lay in pieces about the yard, all that crowd crushed beneath the gigantic blocks, a bizarre puzzling mess of arms and legs, bloody breeches and rags that had once been skirts.
Everywhere screaming and sobs, but nowhere my father. More of the dark army poured in across the broken wall and I could see their batwing ships rising and falling like thunder on the oily waters of the Thames. A crowd had assembled to watch the death of a Queen and now the survivors scrambled for hiding, pulling at each other and at any scrap for cover.
Then I saw him, still upon the scaffold. Father held the head of the fallen Queen under his arm, wrapped in his cloak as if it were a beloved babe. His sword made silver patterns in the air and he held off the strange soldiers, scanning the yard all the while. The invaders wisely concentrated on more defenseless prey and poured through the gates into the city streets so that he still stood above the crowd, beating back an attacker here and there as if hardly thinking on it.
He waited for me. He stood there alone on the high scaffold and waited for me. I saw him and I knew it and ran for him, leaping toward the stairs, dodging those who came for me.
As soon as he saw me, Papa moved, jumping down behind the scaffold and pulling me with him under it. Down there a few stragglers huddled sobbing and filthy. I saw an old woman trying to put her own hand back upon the bleeding stump of her arm. Father didn’t ask me where I’d been, but scrabbled in the straw with his free hand, the other still clasping the head of the English Queen and for a second I feared he would hand that relic to me, the better to find the thing for which he hunted.
Almost laughing, he found it, an iron ring and a trap door. It opened hard, but it did open and he pushed me into the dark before him and slipped in behind me before anyone saw. Not for nothing had he spent all those years manning a garrison hold and knowing the ways of Prisoners and their Keepers.
He barred the trap door behind us and we moved through the dark in the tunnel, not knowing where it would come out or how.
The rest of that day and many after it are only a blur to me now. I remember the cold and the grey stone and stale bread and the Queen’s head like a candle beside us all that time. We stayed in the Great Tower of London until it fell, for even that old fortress could not stand against the polished cannon of the Warriors of the Ming.
I have heard that Henry did go and court his new bride on the eve of the death of his last and that he interrupted that courting to send troops toward the coast at Dover, after hearing there might come some attack by one of his enemies...but without spies and diplomatics, guessing at an invasion-site is merely a throw of the dice for an Island Kingdom. The city guard had heard rumors of a Great Fleet, a bat-winged armada of ships, but few would have believed such stories and none would have guessed at an invasion of ships in the thousands. Hundreds of these Junks sat so large upon the sea that they make our three-masted treasure ships look like sweet little miniatures that boys play with in the village pond. They painted their ships with hundreds of staring eyeball for protection from Evil, as if their great cannons were not enough. Even the Spanish Emperor had no ships a quarter of their size, each as large as a manor house, four hundred feet long. He had beaten Barbarossa with the greatest fleet ever seen in Europe, his puny 300 galleons but a fraction of the thousands that now fell upon us.
Once England was taken, the Chinese fanned out from this base and fell on Europe like wolves, cutting off trade and raiding one coast after another until no one rose against them any more.
Father and I waited with the Constable of the Tower as long as we could and then surrendered what was left of it. We surrendered a broken shell, little enough to show for a month of siege.
And what is the Tower now? It is my home.
The Tower is what it has always been—a prison for the nobility, a torture chamber for their enemies, a shattered remnant of what once was English. No one prays now in the ruined chapel. I go there alone to visit the little Queen where we buried her head by itself in an old wooden box under a stone in the floor by the shattered altar. I go there still, but I cannot pray. Just look at the broken face of the Queen of Heaven, at the stars on her chipped blue robe, and remember the Lady’s little neck. She could not escape her fate, though the world fell to pieces around her. I think of her and the sign I was sent that day on the beach, the Jellyfish lying like living glass upon the wet sand—Les Meduses.
All that I hated, my family and its curse, saved me out of the throngs of my betters who die everyday in cities and on the seas. Father and his great sword made quite an impression on the War Leader, Xeng Hi – for Papa was the only man he saw that day who bore a sword to match his own. The Chinese understand an Executioner. When they understood what he was and his skill, they let him go back to St. Omer, where he still takes the Hauvage, his pieces of apples and cheese from the city vendors. They call Papa “The Great Lord Guìzishǒu,” which means Executioner in China Talk, and he has taken a concubine. I suppose if I were in St. Omer she would be my step-mother, a tiny, woman with long silken braids, who laughs easily and makes my father laugh somehow although she cannot speak to him and can barely walk for her crippled feet are curled into themselves like unborn roses. These are the ways that families are made even out of battle and the tumbling of dynasties—we are caught on the edge of a gaze or a heated touch and the fiber catches like wool on the spinning wheel and then it is all one thread.
The Orient has its own traditions for Low-Caste Reavers of the Killing Ground and we all serve The Ming. The Princes of the Ming Dynasty see the Tudors and the House of Valois and the Holy Roman Emperor himself as upstarts, pretenders, and barbarians. They see our Great Families as children who know only the nobility they see in the street all draped in golden silks and passing in their strangely carved litters, carried by yellow-haired, Norse slaves so their feet never touch the ground.
And my fate? It was made for me by Papa and the Lord Xeng Hi, over a game of chess in the very room where the Queen said her final prayers on the Last Day of the World. The Daughter of the Headsman of Calais made the perfect bride—perfect for the Lord High Executioner of the Great Northern World Dynasty. Lord Xeng thought it an Honorable Match and a Reward of Battle for his own Lord High Executioner. This one lineage they do recognize, if not our Royals, one ancient line of cursed men now bound to another from across the globe.
I do live in London town, that my husband calls Loon-Down Toon. I do run this Great House. My baby wears lace caps and red satin gowns embroidered with silver dragons. I make minced meat pasties, but they are flavored with strange spices and burn my mouth. I also make noodles and cinnamon soup and onion dumplings at the New Moon, and Ginger Candies and bowl after bowl of rice which I must eat with two narrow sticks.
My husband is taller even than my father, his sun-colored skin smooth and scented with sandalwood, his eyes like bits of black stone melt into pools of shadow and laughter when they meet mine. He does love my pretty mouth and I have learned some fine tricks to please him, special skills known only to the finest hereditary concubines. I use such sweet distractions every night in our great bed, all carved with snakes and winged creatures, for I must pleasure him well in order to persuade my Great Husband that you, my child, should not, no never, have your tiny feet bound.
Here I am. Fate has found me where it left me. This is why I tell you: Do Not Struggle against the tides upon which you were born. Those that struggled lie frozen and dead, jewels cast out of the living water on to that dark sand. Only if you learn to Ride the Tides will you Survive. You lie here in my arms, little one, swaddled all tightly in scarlet silks, your skin translucent as jade, and I love you with my whole restless heart—your father’s eyes, your soft little belly and your tiny button nose that crinkles when you smile and lights my heart.
We are the Daughters of the Guìzishǒu. We are Les meduses, who ride the seas and live.
A Word from Stacy Ericson
All the details of the traditions concerning Executioners in France and Calais (which was, in 1500. the last English hold in France) are accurate according to legal suits quoted in studies of crime and punishment in the period. As for the Chinese Armada: in the early 1400's the Ming dynasty built an Armada of over 300 ships, huge treasure galleons that rose 400 feet long and carried as many as 30,000 troops. These ships were several times larger than any European ships built in the next three hundred years. Under the command of the Muslim eunuch Zeng He, this amounted to the greatest Navy in History having at one time 3500 ships (today's U.S. Navy has only 324). By 1524, changes in policy and shifting priorities of the Chinese court precipitated the mass destruction of these gigantic ships and the beginning of an isolationist policy that characterized China for centuries to come. Had this fleet continued to expand and if the Chinese leaders been more of the mind of Genghis Khan, Europe and the America's might have a very different face today.
Stacy Ericson is a writer, playwright, and photographer living in Boise, Idaho. She now travels primarily in the border colonies of historical and speculative fiction, far away from her origins editing anthropological papers and studying ancient history and religion. She is currently working on a mermaid novella, tentatively titled Sea Legs. For more information on Stacy's work, visit her website (www.stacyericsonauthor.info).
Unnatural
by Ann Christy
SEPTEMBER 1978
ON A HOT LATE-SUMMER NIGHT in 1978, Pope John Paul the First sat propped up in his bed, his mind troubled and his anxiety too high for a proper night of rest. In his hand, he held the latest draft of his sermon for the next morning, liberally marked by his spidery script as he edited his words yet again.