I still had the scar on my wrist from my first trip to the island. I’d been so scared, and I’d struggled so hard. Now I understood that the vines hadn’t meant to frighten me. They were just so excited by the green inside me they had to reach out to me. But their juices had caused an infection. The mark was ugly and puckered and I kept it covered with long sleeves or a bracelet. I wasn’t ready for anyone to ask about it.
I sat up slowly enough to let the vines slip loose of my arms and pile themselves across my toes. They were sensitive plants, quick to pick up on moods and reach out to those needing care. Like duckweed, they were the explorers of the bog, the first plants to cross any dry surface, and the most eager for spring thaw.
When spring thaw came, the bog was renewed. After the long months of enchantstorms loaded with glamour-dust, spring run-off sent streams of wild magic flooding into the marshland. The bog’s boundless growth fed on sunlight and water, but it was magic that stirred it into the frenzied bounty Oakridge depended upon. Bog-berries couldn’t grow without the power of enchantment. Marsh sharks wouldn’t breed without the stirrings of glamour.
And of course, there were no hinkypunks without magic.
I worked my lip between my teeth. There was balance in the bog that I was just beginning to understand. My mother had understood it; Mother Hawthorne too, though she had no more magical power than one of her spiced muffins. Maybe being a green-binder was as much a matter of paying attention as it was painting ward-signs and speaking to plants.
I rubbed my eyes, still dry after crying in the oak grove. The vines rubbed against my ankles. “I could have saved Danny O’Neil.”
The vines withdrew from my feet. But when I stood up, I saw a fine iron chain half-buried in the leaves, warm from pressing against my backside. The clasp was twisted and rusty.
~ ~ ~
I ran all the way back to the village, my feet slipping from the path and skidding on the slime. If I’d been anyone else, the black pools would have claimed me. But I could feel weeds and lilies pushing me back onto the path, and the trees bent their boughs close as if offering steadying hands.
Through the village square, past the smithy; it didn’t matter who stared. My hair tumbled loose of my cap and half-blinded me, the strands twisting like young vines. I skidded into the oak grove, Danny O’Neil’s eight ounces of cold iron closed tight in my fingers.
“Why?” I panted. “What does it mean? What happened to Danny?”
The trees did not even groan.
I knelt beside the thin, young oak. “Why did you have to become a tree, Mama? I can’t ask you anything.”
I shut my eyes and tried to imagine how any of it happened. How Danny O’Neal had let his anklet get rusty and worn out. How the sooleybooley men trapped a man’s soul inside a rattan shell. How my mother had gone out to the oak grove and drawn a cover of earth over her body, stretching it up into the shape of a sapling.
I opened my eyes, and my hands were glowing. I stared at them, hardly breathing as tracings of cool fire and green swamp-slime moved beneath my skin. The trees around me lit up with the same phosphorescence. Green ball lightning rolled from branch to branch.
Something brighter and whiter than the fire inside my skin glowed against the dead leaves. I just stared at it. An acorn made of light.
Go on, something inside me urged, something like the voice of the vines and the willows. I hesitated. Once I picked it up, there would be no turning back. I’d be able to control the magic inside me, but some day, it would call me here to stay.
I glanced up at the oak sapling and wished it would say something. But of all the plants and creatures whispering inside me, only the oak trees were silent. They just watched me, glowing.
My fingers shook as I stretched them toward the acorn.
I squeezed it and a crack darkened its surface, a crack that spread until the hard shell split in two pieces and the brilliant nut sat in my palm. Its light thrummed to same rhythm as the pulse in my veins, a tempo matched by the throbbing light in the trees and the vibrations I could feel in the earth beneath me.
Beside me, the oak sapling began to radiate a strange warmth. I thought of Father Doogan’s steamworks glowing red in the night air, but this warmth was kinder. It could never burn me or dry my knuckles. It was the tender heat of a compost pile, warm enough to steam on a fall morning but never scorching. It was like my mother’s arms around me in the middle of the night, easing me out of a bad dream.
The warmth seeped into me, pushing out the cold that had settled during the night as I crouched on the church steps. My heart fluttered and then slowed. There was no reason to cling to cold iron any longer.
I popped the acorn into my mouth. Its living heat burned all the way down my throat, until it settled in a tiny lump someplace beneath my breastbone.
The glowing beneath my skin and in the trees faded. I sagged against the young oak’s trunk, suddenly tired, but smiling. “Tomorrow’s Yule, Mama. I’ll have to help at the bonfire. And it’s cold enough, it might just snow.”
A twig fell down from above and landed in my lap. I picked it up and studied the whorls of lichen. Its bark was rough against my skin, a wordless reminder to wear gloves.
~ ~ ~
Sunset stained the sky when I finally finished painting Angus Cooper’s smithy. I was stiff and sweating as I washed my brushes in water from his pump and scrubbed the soot off my face.
“You better hurry, Miss Yaricka,” Angus reminded me. “Bonfire should start any minute.”
I jammed the brushes in my pocket and grabbed my jacket. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t let them start without me!” My feet skidded on the flagstones in front of his door.
“Wait.” His stack of anklets clattered as he hurried to catch up to me. “You forgot this.” He folded Danny’s anklet, clasp repaired, in my hand. “You really going to come back and finish my tattoo?”
The anklet was still warm from the forge. “Would your green-binder lie?”
He was still grinning as I turned to run back to the cottage. I’d readied my supplies for the bonfire this morning, although it had felt strange at first to work inside the house where I’d been born. I hadn’t set foot inside it since my mother had tacked a note on the front door and walked up to the oak grove.
I snatched a knapsack and joined the stream of people headed for the village square. We all hurried. No one wanted to be late for the Yule celebration.
Father Doogan stood beside the fountain, the fine fibers of his face stained purple by the dying light. Despite the cold weather, someone had turned on the water in the fountain for the night. It eased the minds of the wicker-skinned. Their bodies might be mostly steel cogs and copper piping, but their rattan skins were still flammable.
Father Doogan raised a torch above his head. “Let us celebrate the season of Yule!”
He laid the torch against a lump of pitch on the top of the wood pile. Fire sprang to life with a crackle. People cheered.
Then I stepped forward.
The cheers faded.
It wasn’t easy to drag my big knapsack up to the fire’s edge, but I did, and when I stood beside it, I felt every eye fixed upon me. I knew they were taking my measure. Probing me for weaknesses. They did it the way my mother had probed the wards on the ancient walls or the way a berry-picker tested every step she took out in the bog. I swallowed, and my mouth tasted of iron.
But just for a second. The heat in my breastbone told me I was ready.
“Every winter we stay inside our houses and keep our doors bolted. It’s a reminder of what life is like beyond our walls. It’s a reminder of how lucky we are to live in the bog.”
I opened my pack and removed one of the branches I’d collected in the oak grove. I held it before me and willed it to give off a little of that green gleaming I’d seen in the wood yesterday. People gasped. It was the sign of a green-binder, calling cold light from wood.
I tossed the branch onto the wood pile and watche
d fire finger its edges. Beneath the packed soil of the village square, tree roots were trembling with excitement. In the darkness, I could feel the hinkypunks, listening hard beyond the last path markers.
“Tomorrow is the first day of winter. Tonight is Yule. It’s a night for giving gifts and sharing blessings. So here is my gift. Merry Yule, everyone!”
The oak branch caught fire. I threw the other branches and twigs in too, even the twig my mother had dropped on my lap. They were all the gifts of the green-binders, the ones who’d given up their flesh-bodies to take their places as guardians. Their shed limbs sent up sparks of red, white and lichen-green.
In the back of the square someone began to sing in a clear soprano voice, and Father Doogan’s baritone joined in, then another voice and another. The old harmonies joined and rose with the sparks. All around me, people swayed and sang, and the feeling of Yuletide sank into my bones.
Then the pale lights filed out of the bog’s darkness, their voices joining in descant. Tonight the hinkypunks did not dance. They carried too many gifts to leap and dive. On their shoulders they bore baskets heaped with wild rice and bog-berries, platters stacked with fish and eels. They circled the villagers with slow, tentative hops.
Then Evelyn O’Neil held out her arms, and a hinkypunk approached her, its light brightening with every tentative jump. She lowered her face into its cloud of silver smoke and light, and her eyes were bright with tears of love.
My own eyes filled with a different kind of tears. “Happy Yuletide, Danny,” I whispered. I hadn’t known how to save him, but I could call up his spirit from its new home in the marsh.
Other families accepted gifts from their bog-lost, stirring their lights with wondering fingers, crying into bundles of sweet marsh-grass, exchanging sprigs of mistletoe. The hinkypunks’ pile of offerings grew beside the fire, and Father Doogan began organizing men into carrying brigades. It would all go into the church to share, the same as last year and all the other years the green-binders had welcomed the hinkypunks.
That was how the balance was built, I realized. Spirits and green-binders and ordinary men and women, strung along a beam of magic, wound tight by duckweed and windstorms. It was iron that threw things out of alignment. The sooleybooley men had only worsened things when they gave us steam-powered bodies that magic couldn’t touch. I’d have my work cut out for me, trying to balance out their iron's cold stillness with my green vines.
Mother Hawthorne came beside me and put her arm around my shoulders. She smelled of peat smoke and willow leaves. Like the bog.
I kissed her wrinkled cheek. “I have a Yule present for you.” I held out the anklet.
In the light of the fire I saw her smile. “You don’t need it, do you?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t afraid of enchantment any longer. I could dance with the hinkypunks all night and never lose my way in the swamp, not with the green magic lodged inside my ribs. That was a gift I had to give myself.
Angus Cooper brought out his fiddle and struck up a jig, and Evelyn O’Neil was the first to start dancing. The marsh spirits and villagers—both the flesh-bodied and wicker—clapped their hands and whirled and dove. Tomorrow, I knew, it would snow.
But tonight, the flames and the dancing made the village square as warm as a midsummer’s evening. I threw off my jacket and began to dance.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Wendy N. Wagner grew up between a swamp and a cemetery, coloring her viewpoint forever. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Crossed Genres, and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Rigor Amortis. She makes her home in Portland, Oregon, and blogs about words, food, and all things creepy at operabuffo.blogspot.com.
THE SECRET OF POGOPOLIS
Matthew Bey
BY THE STANDARDS OF THE CITY, a place of manic revelry and combustible enthusiasms, Carneby Fleivorwort is an unusually somber man.
For that reason he never got along with his parents, a couple whose temperament ran to the frivolous, lacking what Carneby thought of as a certain disciplined sobriety. They died at perigee when he was still a student. Having reached their padded couches drunk on washtub gin and high on hallucinogenic mushrooms, they didn’t settle themselves properly and their vomit was compressed into their lungs.
Few in The City live past the age of forty. Hundreds of perigees take their toll on the human body, on the blood vessels and organs. At the beginning of every ascent, city sanitation workers go from apartment to apartment, removing the quiet corpses from their couches. It is how most people expect to die; with their faces peaceful and their dead brains like sponges in buckets of blood.
As is the tradition in The City, the day after perigee is a day of rest, so Carneby Fleivorwort has not gone in to his job at the City Library, and has spent the morning strolling along the balconies of Colonel Channellocks Memorial Park. He finds the park banal for the most part. It extends a mere dozen feet beyond The City Limits, and private terraces on the levels below obstruct a good portion of the view. His preferred park, The Grand Promenade, snapped off at perigee a dozen descents previously, the precious dirt and brick plummeting beyond recovery.
Carneby is a pessimist and insists on measuring time by perigees.
He walks along the edge, one hand on the balustrade, dodging the food vendors and the romantic couples. A mime simulates a suicidal leap over The City Limits, thrashing his arms to the amusement of several children. Behind and above Carneby The City rises through the whipping clouds, a sheer cliff of balconies, porticos, striped awnings, terrace cafes, and windows that shine in the sun. But as always, his eyes are not for the city but for the wide expanse of The Earth, creeping by far below.
In a rare act of splurging, Carneby inserts a paper pfenig into one of the observation telescopes set on the railing. Instantly he regrets the expenditure. The lenses of the telescope are laced with cracks from hundreds of perigees. But he sweeps the telescope on its mount, scanning the ground for the scenery that will give him his money’s worth.
Through the cracks in his view he sees a landscape of green forests and meadows, pocked by perfectly circular lakes. He could just barely make out the white flocks of birds wheeling above the choppy waters. Certainly some of these lakes are the marks made by The City in a previous passage.
He has heard people say that another city was sighted before his birth. The engineers spotted it bounding along the horizon, but it had not answered their signal flares and flashing mirrors, as if it were a ghost city, peopled only by the corpses of its citizens. Whether such a thing had really happened, Carneby couldn’t guess.
Far out at the edge of the land, Carneby sees a cape stretching into a misty gray ocean. It curves twice; a sigmoid ‘S.’ He thinks he has never seen such a thing before. Perhaps The City has not passed this way for a lifetime or more; perhaps he is the only living man to have observed this cape.
Were there people living down there in the green of The Earth? Carneby wonders. Or did The Earth exist only for The City to rebound against?
The timing mechanism buzzes and the telescope’s shutter irises closed.
No sooner has Carneby taken his eye from the darkened lens and smoothed the waist of his suit-vest than he is knocked to the ground. He smells body odor and an unfamiliar musk. He shoves a squirming body off himself, his irritation making him rougher than he needs to be.
“Get off me! Where are your manners?”
He finds a young woman looking back at him, wild and snarling, her hair tangled in unwashed clumps. It is difficult to determine how old she is. She has an air of freshness about her, a smoothness of skin and lucidity of gaze he has never seen before. She seems close to his age, perhaps a dozen perigees younger.
But it is her clothing that he finds startling. He has seen the material binding one or two of the rarest books in the library. But outside of the library, it is unheard of, and certainly unattainable at the freshness of her garments.
“Is that leather? Where did you get that
?” Unable to help himself he reaches out to touch her.
She screams something in words he doesn’t understand and slashes his wrist with a stone tool. She’s on her feet in an instant, scrambling across the low, grassy hills of the park, startling the inbred albino squirrels as they beg for scraps from pedestrians. Carneby holds his bleeding wound and watches as she disappears through the gate at the base of the Fourth Merchant’s Insurance Building.
A few moments later the police run past, sweating and red-faced from their habitual complacency. The City’s culture of permissiveness makes it difficult to both commit and enforce crimes. A cop with sergeants chevrons beneath his ‘PPD’ patch stops in front of Carneby, leaning his hands on his knees and panting. Between gasps he asks, “Have you seen a girl run past here? Dirty? Strangely dressed?”
Carneby just shrugs.
~ ~ ~
There are no windows in Carneby’s apartment, so he sits on his padded couch of pigeon feathers and stares at the cupboard that holds his ironing board. He has bound the wound the girl has made, and he thinks it will heal without having to pay for a hospital visit. He can’t stop thinking about the girl, about the leather she wore and the words she used. His thoughts keep returning to that great blind-spot in the municipal consciousness: the outside.
As far as anyone knew, there had never been anyone who had ever lived outside The City. According to legend a city engineer had once suspended himself on a giant elastic cord, dangling over the edge of the City United Trust Building in order to observe the action of perigee. As the terrible deceleration of perigee began, his elastic stretched, and when the new ascent began, the elastic rebounded. The engineer snapped high above The City and fell back against the spire of the Commonwealth Building and Loan Headquarters, breaking nearly every bone in his body. He lived only long enough to recount what he had seen—the great shaft beneath The City striking the ground and compressing, then stretching back straight.
As they prepared his body for disposal, they found a clump of dried grass and dirt clenched in his right hand. It was believed that he had actually touched the ground for a moment, the only man in memory to have done so. A city park was covered in grass grown from the seeds found in his fist, a type of grass never before seen.
Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Page 12