He walked over to me, keeping one arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “I understand I have you to thank for bringing our girls back.” He reached out to shake my hand and I saw that one of his arms was bandaged up tight. His grip was solid in spite of it. He smiled the widest smile I’d seen since I left Simmon at the University. “My name’s Jim. ”
“How’s the arm?” I asked, not realizing how it would sound. His smile faded a little, and I was quick to add. “I’ve had some training as a physicker. And I know that those sort of things can be tricky to deal with when you’re away from home.” When you’re living in a country that thinks mercury is a cure-all, I thought to myself.
His smile came back from behind its cloud and he flexed his fingers. “It’s stiff, but that’s all. Just a little meat. They caught us by surprise. I got my hands on one of them, but he stuck me and got away. How did you end up getting the girls away from those godless Ruh bastards?” He spat.
“They weren’t Edema Ruh,” I said, my voice sounding more strained than I would have liked. “They weren’t even real troupers.”
The smile began to fade again. “What do you mean?”
“They weren’t Edema Ruh. We don’t do the things that they did.”
“Listen,” he said plainly, his temper starting to rise a bit. “I know damn well what they do and don’t do. They came in all sweet and nice, played a little music, made a penny or two. Then they started to make trouble around town. When we told them to leave they took my girl.” He almost breathed fire as he said the last words.
“We?” Someone said faintly behind me, “Jim, he said we.”
Jake scowled around the side of the Mayor to get a look at me again, “I told you he looked like one,” he said triumphantly. Then dropped his voice to a hush. “I know ’em. You can always tell by their eyes.”
“Hold on,” the mayor with slow incredulity. “Are you telling me that you’re one of them?” His expression grew dangerous.
Before I could explain myself. Ellie had grabbed his arm. “Oh, don’t make him mad, Daddy,” she said quickly, holding onto his good arm as if to pull him away from me. “Don’t say anything to get him angry. You don’t know what he’s like. He’s not with them. He brought me back, he saved me.”
The mayor seemed somewhat mollified by this, but his former congeniality was gone. “Explain yourself,” he said grimly.
I sighed inside, realizing what I mess I’d made of this. “They weren’t troupers, and they certainly weren’t Edema Ruh troupers. They were bandits who had killed some of my family and stolen their wagons. They were only pretending to be performers.”
“Why would anyone pretend to be Ruh?” he asked as if the thought were incomprehensible.
“So they could do what they did,” I snapped. “You let them into your town and they abused that trust. That is something no Edema Ruh would ever do.”
“You never did answer my question,” he said. “How did you get the girls away?”
“I took care of things,” I said simply.
“He killed them,” Krin said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “He killed them all.”
I could feel everyone looking at me. Half of them were thinking, All of them? He killed seven men? The other half were thinking, There were two women with them, does he mean them too?
“Well, then.” Jim looked down at me for a long moment. “Good,” he said as if he had just made up his mind. “That’s good. The world’s a better place for it.”
I felt everyone relax slightly. “These are their horses.” I pointed to the two horses that had been carrying our baggage. “They belong to the girls now. About thirty miles east on the road you’ll find the wagons. Krin can show you where they’re hidden. They belong to the girls too.”
“They’ll fetch a good price in a bigger city,” Jim mused.
“Together with the instruments inside and the clothes and such. They’ll fetch a heavy penny,” I agreed. “Split two ways, it’ll make a fine dowry,“ I said firmly.
He met my eyes, nodded slowly as if understanding. “That it will.”
“What about the things they stole from us?” A stout, balding man in an apron protested. “They smashed up my place and stole two barrels of my best ale!”
“Do you have any daughters?” I asked him calmly. The sudden, stricken look on his face told me that he did. I met his eye, held it. “Then I think you came away from this pretty well.”
The mayor looked around and finally noticed Jason clutching his broken arm. “What happened to you?”
Jason looked at his feet. There was tense silence for a moment. Jake spoke up for him. “He said some things he shouldn’t’ve.”
The mayor looked around and saw that getting more of an answer than that would involve an ordeal. He shrugged and let it go.
“I could splint it for you,” I said easily.
“No!” Jason said too quickly. Then backpedaled. “I’d rather go to Gran.”
I gave a sideways look to the mayor. “Gran?”
He gave a fond smile. “Everyone’s grandma. When we scrape our knees Gran patches us back up again.”
“Would Bil be there?” I asked. “The man with the crushed leg?”
He nodded. “She won’t let him out of her sight. Not for another span of days if I know her.”
“I’ll walk you over to her house,” I said to the sweating boy who was carefully cradling his arm against his chest. “I’d like to watch her work.”
Judging from the way she dealt with Jason’s broken arm, Gran was worth more than several students I could name in the Medica. We talked shop for a while, and after a small amount of persuasion she let me see Bil, who was in a small room at the back of her home.
His leg was ugly, broken in several places and broken messily. Swollen and discolored as it was, it was healing. Gran had done everything to mend it that I could have, and then some. He wasn’t fevered or infected, and it looked like he would probably keep the leg. How much use it would be was another matter. He might come away with nothing more than a heavy limp. But I wouldn’t bet on him ever running again.
“What sort of folk shoot a man’s horse?” he asked me as I looked at his leg. “It ain’t right.”
It had been his horse, and you know as well as I do how expensive horses are. This wasn’t the sort of town where people had horses to spare. Bil was a young man with a new wife and his own small farm, and he might never walk again because he had tried to do what he thought was the right thing. It hurt to think about it.
When I came outside the crowd had swelled considerably. Krin’s father and mother had ridden in on the roan. Pete was there too, having run back to town. He offered up his unbroken head for my inspection and demanded his two pennies for services rendered.
I was warmly thanked by Krin’s parents. They seemed to be good people. Most people are if given the chance to be. I managed to get hold of the roan, and using him as a sort of portable wall, managed to get a few minutes of relatively private conversation with Krin.
Her dark eyes were a little red around the edges, but her face was bright and happy. “Make sure you get Burrback,” I said, nodding to one of the horses. “He’s yours.” The mayor’s daughter would have a fair dowry no matter what, so I’d loaded Krin’s horse with the more valuable goods, as well as most of the money the false troupers had.
Her expression grew serious as she met my eyes, and again she reminded me of a young Denna. “You’re leaving,” she said.
I guess I was. I nodded. She didn’t try to convince me to stay, and instead surprised me with a sudden, emotional embrace. After kissing me on the cheek she whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”
We stepped away from each other, knowing that propriety would only allow so much. “Don’t sell yourself short and marry some fool,” I said, feeling as if I should say something.
“Don’t you either,” she said, her sad, dark eyes mocking me gently.
I unpacked my lutecase and travels
ack from Greytail and led the roan over to where the mayor stood. He was alone, off to one side, watching the crowd in a proprietary way. I handed him the reigns and he cocked an eyebrow at me.
“You’d be doing me a favor if you took care of him until Bil is up and about,” I said. “Or taking it to his farm, if he’s got family taking care of it.”
“You leaving?” He asked, not sounding too surprised, or too disappointed for that matter. I nodded. “Without your horse?” He asked.
“He’s just lost his.” I shrugged. “And we Ruh are used to walking. I wouldn’t know what to do with a horse, anyway,” I said half-honestly.
He took the reins and gave me a good long look, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of me. “Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked at last.
“Remember that it was bandits that took them,” I said as I turned to leave. “And remember it was one of the Edema Ruh who brought them back.”
FIXING HANOVER
JEFF VANDERMEER
When Shyver can’t lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It’s been lost a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.
“It’s good salvage, at least,” Shyver says. “Maybe more.”
“Or maybe less,” I reply. Salvage is the life’s blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea’s too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there’s no telling what the salvagers will want and what they discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.
To Shyver, maybe the thing he’d found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.
As soon as I see it, I call it “Hanover,” after a character I had seen in an old movie back when the projector still worked.
“Hanover?” Shyver says with a trace of contempt.
“Hanover never gave away what he thought,” I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it’s carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I’ve lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don’t have to explain much.
“Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts,” Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he’s already put a face on Hanover, too. “I think it’s from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea.”
Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he’s lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He’s good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He’ll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.
Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we’ve made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and self-conscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.
First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?
John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders, and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called—she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling—one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We’ve been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.
With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broad-faced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep gold-and-orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.
Blake says, “Where?” He’s a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.
“The beach, the cove,” Shyver says. Blake always reduces him to a similar terseness.
“What is it?”
This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I’m the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what’s sold to the hill scavengers. But I’m also Lady Salt’s lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.
I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.
“It is part of a metal man,” I say.
A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she’s thinking: in scant days she’ll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it Seeker, or sometimes Mist, or even just Cleave. Salvage holds little interest for her.
But I can see the gears turning in Blake’s head. He thinks awhile before he says more. Even the blacksmith and the weaver, more for ceremony and obligation than their insight, seem to contemplate the rusted bucket before them.
A refurbished water pump keeps delivering from the aquifers; parts bartered to the hill people mean only milk and smoked meat for half a season. Still, Blake knows that the fishing has been less dependable the past few years, and that if we do not give the hill people something, they will not keep coming back.
“Fix it,” he says.
It’s not a question, although I try to treat it like one.
Later that night, I am with the Lady Salt, whose whispered name in these moments is Rebecca. “Not a name men would follow,” she said to me once. “A land-ish name.”
In bed, she’s as shifting as the tides, beside me, on top, and beneath. Her mouth is soft but firm, her tongue curling like a question mark across my body. She makes little cries that are so different from the orders she barks out ship-board that she might as well be a different person. We’re all different people, depending.
Rebecca can read. She has a few books from the hill people, taught herself with the help of an old man who remembered how. A couple of the books are even from the Empire—the New Empire, not the old. Sometimes I want to think she is not the Lady Salt, but the Lady Flight. That she wants to leave the village. That she seeks so much more. But I look into those eyes in the dimness of half-dawn, so close, so far, and realize she would never tell me, no matter how long I live here. Even in bed, there is a bit of Lady Salt in Rebecca.
When we are finished, lying in each other’s arms under the thick covers, her hair against my cheek, Rebecca asks me, “Is that thing from your world? Do you know what it is?”
I have told her a little about my past, where I came from—mostly bed-time stories when she cannot sleep, little fantasies of golden spires and a million thron
ging people, fables of something so utterly different from the village that it must exist only in dream. Once upon a time there was a foolish man. Once upon a time there was an Empire. She tells me she doesn’t believe me, and there’s freedom in that. It’s a strange pillow talk that can be so grim.
I tell her the truth about Hanover: “It’s nothing like what I remember.” If it came from Empire, it came late, after I was already gone.
“Can you really fix it?” she asks.
I smile. “I can fix anything,” and I really believe it. If I want to, I can fix anything. I’m just not sure yet I want Hanover fixed, because I don’t know what he is.
But my hands can’t lie—they tremble to have at it, to explore, impatient for the task even then and there, in bed with Blake’s lost love.
I came from the same sea the Lady Salt loves. I came as salvage, and was fixed. Despite careful preparation, my vessel had been damaged first by a storm, and then a reef. Forced to the surface, I managed to escape into a raft just before my creation drowned. It was never meant for life above the waves, just as I was never meant for life below them. I washed up near the village, was found, and eventually accepted into their community; they did not sell me to the hill people.
I never meant to stay. I didn’t think I’d fled far enough. Even as I’d put distance between me and Empire, I’d set traps, put up decoys, sent out false rumors. I’d done all I could to escape that former life, and yet some nights, sleepless, restless, it feels as if I am just waiting to be found.
Even failure can be a kind of success, my father always said. But I still don’t know if I believe that.
Three days pass, and I’m still fixing Hanover, sometimes with help from Shyver, sometimes not. Shyver doesn’t have much else to do until the fishing fleet goes out, but that doesn’t mean he has to stay cooped up in a cluttered workshop with me. Not when, conveniently, the blacksmithy is next door, and with it the lovely daughter of Growder, who he adores.
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