by M. A. Ray
“That’s one for around the campfire on a chill autumn night.” Wallace shivered. “Ill luck, so it is.”
“It’s sad,” Dingus said, looking at his plate. “Oda did wrong, but all He wanted was to get loved. He hurt so much it made Him bitter.” He scowled, picked up a big piece of haggis, and stuffed it in his mouth.
The other two were silent while he chewed. Tony snorted and popped the cork out of the bottle, releasing the powerful, sick-sweet stink of rum. “You checked your pants lately? Looking a little light there.”
“Like you’d know the difference.”
They all laughed, and Tony took a healthy swig from the bottle. He swallowed, but to Dingus his face sure was a picture, his eyes all bugged out and his mouth stretched down. When he got the rum down, he started coughing. “Fuckin’ A!”
“What’s the matter, never had it before?” Dingus asked. He popped another chunk of haggis in his mouth and chewed, savoring the pepper.
“So? You have?”
“Once,” he admitted. “The other night. At the Masters’ fellowship thing. Santo made me.”
“You been in there, too. Why am I not surprised?” Tony threw up his free hand and passed the bottle to Wallace, who was a little more careful.
Wasn’t as if I wanted to go, Dingus thought.
“So what was it like?”
“Mostly bullshitting about when they were Squires,” he said. “Raising hell and all that.”
“Raising hell?” Tony’s eyebrows went high, opening the shadows that were his eyes.
“Vandis, mayhap,” Wallace put in. “Santo? Evan? Nae, I can’t believe that.”
“They said.” Dingus explained what the Masters had told him about the firecrackers in the incense burner and the frogs at the feast. The discussion carried them the rest of the way through Dingus’s supper, and the bottle going around a couple of times—though Dingus didn’t drink much of the rum. He didn’t see himself acquiring the taste. Neither did the other two, and eventually Tony stuck a cork in the bottle and they stripped down to go swimming.
The water was icy, at least until he ducked his head beneath the surface and swam out, letting the chill soak into his skin and muscle until it didn’t bother him anymore. After a few minutes they bunched together again, in a triangle, to talk more.
“So they really did all that?” Wallace asked, his eyes huge and shiny even in the dark.
“Uh-huh.”
“They’re probably gonna be disappointed when they find out we was just swimming,” Tony said. He laughed and bobbed beneath the water, then up again. “Maybe we should do something.”
Dingus made a face. “Rather not get yelled at. Besides, it’s just my luck, Reed’d catch us doing whatever it was and I’d be in it to my eyeballs, Vandis too I bet.”
“What’s Sir Reed got to do with anything?” Wallace demanded.
“He don’t care for Vandis.”
He scoffed. “Everybody knows that.”
“Well, yeah, but…” Dingus bit his lip. He didn’t know that he wanted to put this out, but he didn’t know that he didn’t want to, either. “Reed’s saying Vandis beats on me.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” Tony swished himself back and forth. “Santo wouldn’t be friends with him, he did that.”
“Well, he don’t. Doesn’t. Reed was saying so, though. Wish I could do something to him, except he’d know it was me.”
“What a—” Wallace said something in Bearded. “We ought to, we just ought! Let’s rub pomade in his smalls, wouldn’t that roast his sausage proper?”
“Yeah, but that’d involve touching Reed’s smalls,” Tony said. “Bet they’re skeevy.”
Dingus laughed. “Naw, they’re clean, bet you anything. He don’t smell like dirty smalls. Just pomade and fuckhead.”
“Let’s do it then!” Wallace said eagerly.
All three of them trod water.
“Naw,” Dingus said, at the same time Tony said, “Nah.”
“Really rather not get yelled at.”
“Santo’s a prick when he gets mad, he won’t talk to me for days.”
“Evan trusts me. I’d sooner keep that.”
They all looked at the beginning of moon in the water between them. Then Dingus said, “Sure would be funny though.”
Wallace floated onto his back. “Why is it the bad ones get to have all the fun?”
“Maybe they don’t. Arkady’s probably missing out somewhere.” Dingus kind of doubted it, but it was nice saying so.
“Yeah, but he gets pussy and we get none, and by the way, I’m freezing my nuts off in here.”
“Speak for yourself,” Wallace said. “Except for the last bit. It’s awfully chilly.”
Dingus wasn’t cold, but he backstroked lazily toward the shore with the others to pull dry clothes over wet skin.
“At least when I die a virgin, you’re gonna be right there with me,” Tony said, struggling with his tight, bottle-green breeches.
“Says you.”
“Aw, what?”
“You heard me.” Dingus knotted his boots and stood, sorry he’d said anything. “C’mon, I’m hungry, let’s go get some food.”
“Aye, I could eat,” Wallace said.
“Hell no, you don’t get to just say that and change the subject! Details. Give.”
Dingus stuck his hands in his pockets. “I don’t kiss and tell. That’d be disrespectful to the lady involved.”
“How is this world fair?” Tony flung his arms wide, looking up at the sky. “Dingus can get laid, and I can’t?”
“Hey, fuck you!”
“Maybe if you didn’t dress yourself prettier than all the lasses, they’d take an interest,” Wallace suggested, and Dingus nodded.
“Or maybe if you quit polishing your head with lemon oil. You stink like a damn floor.”
“Fuck both a’ ya!”
“Just sayin’,” Wallace and Dingus said, at the same time. They grinned at each other, and Wallace bumped his shoulder lightly against Dingus’s. Tony scowled and finished dressing in silence, but the sulk ended in a hurry down at the fair when Dingus put a fried cake, dripping with maple syrup, into his hand; and so everybody finished the night with a smile on his face.
It was different. But it felt good.
Exile
Prime Cloisters
Longday
Stas stood in rank with the other novices in the garden. Even this early in the morning, bees bumbled from bloom to yellow bloom on the low, winding vines of the summer squash plants. Naheel’s face slid slowly up the cloudless sky, as though Heaven’s Queen rose and straightened from a deep sleep. They’d been standing and kneeling, standing and kneeling here since dawn had broken at Prime, novices and monks together. Abbot Iosef, with his Militant, Abbot Zygmunt, stood under the morning-glory trellis at the front of all and led the Mendicants and Militants in the Longday Liturgy. It was past Tierce and Prime Offices weren’t even through. They’d had breakfast and the bath after Lauds, but that seemed a long time ago to Stas. Luckily, nobody was likely to hear one stomach growling over the noise of all the other empty bellies in the novices’ ranks.
Food smells floated out of the summer kitchen. There’d be a feast, Brother Anatoly had promised, at Sext, but that seemed a terribly long way away just now. Stas couldn’t hear the Abbots declaiming. They’d reached a long passage—Stas thought it was a prayer, since the Mendicant Abbot had his hands and face lifted to the sunshine, and the Militant had turned his sword point up to the heavens—in which it was only the two of them going back and forth. After only a minute or so, by the sun, they all knelt and bowed heads.
They stayed that way for ages. Stas gazed at the dirty, bare toes of the boy directly in front of him, a tall, weedy fellow named Viktor, who had never spoken to Stas; but then, he was one of the oldest novices, nearly ready to take the tonsure. The older ones didn’t speak to the younger ones unless it was to berate them for something. Stas’s eyes w
andered from the long, skinny toes to the more interesting world in the rammed dirt of the garden chapel.
The larger insects had fled at first, if they could, from the dozens of novice feet, but after so many hours with so little activity, they’d come back. He watched the ferocious lights of the ants as they trooped through the novices’ lines, carrying bits of leaf or crumbs, huge burdens for their bodies. He watched them often, and always wondered how they knew where they were going. They never seemed to leave anything behind, and yet each ant followed the next, even if he couldn’t imagine them being able to see one another. Sometimes a whole minute would go by before another ant did, but the second ant would come by roughly the same route. They looked as though they wandered aimlessly over the ground, but looks were often deceiving.
The ants absorbed him until, when all the novices stood up again, Boris had to tug on his smock to make him stand, too. “It’s over, Stas,” he whispered. “Come on, let’s play hedball.”
Stas didn’t particularly want to play ball, but he tagged behind Boris to the middle of the meeting-place, which had begun to empty out as monks trailed away through the garden in groups or in pairs, talking. Now there was only a large, empty square with grass torn by hundreds of sandals, and the novices near the center. Stas shivered. They were all so much broader and taller than he. Even Boris looked huge. Have I grown at all? he wondered.
Boris’s kind manner and blond beauty won him lots of friends; even the novices intended for Mendicant couldn’t seem to resist. While they walked over to the cluster of bright life-lights, plenty of them hailed Boris with waves and shouts. Nobody seemed to notice tiny, drab Stas—nobody ever did, except when he made a fuss. Or when it was Brother Jerzy or Boris looking. Stas mostly preferred it that way. When others noticed, it was never a good thing.
“Hey, guys, are we picking teams?” Boris asked.
“You’re on mine,” Viktor said immediately, and Boris beamed.
“Okay!” he said. “But Stas wants to be on a team with me, right, Stas?”
I don’t want to play at all, Stas thought, but he put on his vacant, agreeable face, with the vaguest suggestion of idiot happiness. All the boys were watching; he could feel their eyes.
“He can’t play,” piped up someone whose voice Stas recognized. He couldn’t put a face to it, or a name, because he wasn’t looking that way, and wouldn’t. “He’s too stupid.”
Boris said, “That’s not kind.”
“So? He is.”
“No, he isn’t.” Anger touched Boris’s tone now. “Take that back.”
“Won’t,” the other boy said.
From the corner of his eye, Stas saw Boris looking from boy to boy. “Stas can play, can’t he?” he asked, almost pleaded, but nobody spoke up. It wasn’t as though Stas really wanted to play hedball, but it would’ve been nice if somebody besides Boris had wanted him to play. Stas wandered away, as aimlessly as the ants seemed to wander. On the edge of the field, some of the monks worked at carrying big trestle tables outside for the feast at Sext. He ambled somewhat toward them in a roundabout way, stopping to look, here and there, at a plant that had been crushed by many feet. Where some soft blue of life remained, Stas used It, so that where he passed, every so often, a flower would spring erect when only a moment before it had lain squashed.
Before long, though, Boris noticed he’d gone, and caught up with him. “What’re you doing?” his only friend demanded, keeping his voice low. “You can’t do that here, Stas!”
Don’t you want to play ball? Stas signed, with tiny twitches of his fingers.
“Not if they’re going to be mean. You have to—”
Stas didn’t even need his fingers to tell Boris he knew that was a lie. Boris glanced away.
“I really like hedball,” he said to the ground.
Stas touched his arm and twitched his fingers again. It is okay. Go play.
“I don’t—” He broke off, chewing his lip. “Are you sure?”
Eyes were enough. He grinned and dashed back to the game. Stas didn’t watch him go, but roamed back toward the tables, drifting here and there in the sunshiny scent of crushed grass—though he didn’t use It on any more plants. If Boris had noticed, probably someone else would, too. He contented himself with watching the lights of the bugs as he walked, careful not to step on any of them, and soon he found himself an out-of-the-way spot under a lilac bush, the blooms of which had all fallen. He huddled against the bare base and watched the world go by: the monks who worked in the kitchens setting up the feast, but more interestingly, the lives of the bugs scuttling and squirming from place to place. He could have watched them all day. Stas put one hand to the ground to steady himself.
A quiet crunch sounded from under the heel of his hand. Horrified, Stas lifted it to see a beetle with a broken shell going dark, so quickly dark, on the ground. The spindly legs twitched. Without thinking, he reached out with a finger—with It. Even to someone as little as Stas was, the beetle’s pain wasn’t much. He felt a twinge in his midsection, but that was all. To the beetle, it must be far more than that. In a moment, its shell knit back together, and its legs ceased their wild shivering. It wound in circles, confused. He grinned at it while it scampered ’round and ’round, back and forth, until it managed to run off in front of Stas, right between a pair of sandaled feet.
Stas lifted his eyes, letting them travel higher and higher from the puffy feet to the thin body, up to Brother Jerzy’s kind face and watery, wondering brown eyes—the eyes were always very slightly swollen, more some days than others. Another flash of horror shot through Stas’s body.
Brother Jerzy said, hushed, “Stasya.”
Stas hunched in on himself. Stupid, he thought, stupid, even Boris told you not to use It, and you didn’t listen.
The monk looked right to left, three times. The shadow of the lilac shifted over his face as he moved it side to side, and when he looked down at Stas again his reddened eyes were in shade, and serious.
He inclined his head—and then he left Stas gaping after him. As soon as he’d gotten a few paces away, Stas scrambled up and darted deep into the garden. He didn’t allow even the bestial growls his belly uttered to draw him back to the feast. He sneaked some of the few raspberries that had already begun to ripen toward black; and he didn’t show his face among the other novices until dusk, between Vespers and Compline, when there was service again.
Goddess Bless the Freaks
Fort Rule
Longday
Just like Lech to turn a festival into a funeral, Krakus thought sourly, the third hour after Longday’s dawn—his third hour standing still. He badly needed to make a few adjustments in his crotch; Nadia stood near the middle of the crowd of celebrants, and his eyes kept falling on her from where he stood, behind Lech and just to the right. Here he was, stewing away inside his ceremonial suit of white-enamel plate chased with gold, when all he wanted was to be buck naked in the storage shed with his pretty summer-sky girl. They’d sneaked away twice more since the first time, and while Lech preached a sermon about the Great Work they were doing at Fort Rule, about the Bright Lady’s blessings on the Special Units, and how they were Her very special children sent to carry the glory of Muscoda far and wide, Krakus thought helplessly about Nadia’s midnight hair cascading around him while she’d bounced in the saddle yesterday and tried to ignore the uncomfortable position of his genitals, folded under the steel meant to protect them.
Lech raised his hands, at last, and tilted his head back to look into the sky. “Bright Lady, enlighten our hearts,” he intoned.
“Bright Lady, be our shield against the night,” Krakus responded.
“Keeper of Time, guide our steps, we pray.”
“And let us ever spend our days in works of praise.”
“O! Sanctifying Flame, burn away our sin!”
“O! Sanctifying Flame, purge away our enemies.”
“Queen of Heaven, reign over us forever.”
“An
d in battle lead us for aye,” Krakus finished.
“Let us kneel and give thanks in silence,” Lech said, and as one, the congregation of soldiers, officers, Special Units, and Aurelian commissars took a knee. Even Lech bent his, though he didn’t bow in the dirt; he had a special little rug for the purpose, so he wouldn’t muss his white vestments. All the others bent their heads; Krakus did, too, but every so often he peeked up at the Bright Lady’s track in the sky. Almost half an hour Lech kept them on their knees and quiet, nobody daring to sneeze or sigh, but at last he rose, and Krakus rose with him, levering himself up on the gilded ceremonial spear he had to drag out on these occasions.
Lech raised his hands again, palms down, as if to lay them on the heads of the kneelers. “Naheel keep your souls holy on this, the longest day of Her dominion,” he said, and it was over, at least until dusk.
“Happy Longday, Lechie,” Krakus said, and clattered down the steps of the wooden dais knocked together for the purpose. Lech sniffed, but Krakus was already too far away to hear. He rushed to their apartments and started to struggle his way out of the suit of plate. He was wrestling with the straps on the breastplate when Lech swept in, wearing his most constipated face.
“Would it kill you to stay properly vested for a single day?” he said sourly.
“It could.”
“I manage it nearly every day.”
“Your vestments don’t include a sixty-pound steel oven,” Krakus pointed out, managing a difficult buckle.
Lech raised his arms as if he was going to flap his voluminous sleeves. “The wool weighs heavily enough.” When Krakus just snorted and shook his head, Lech said, “You need to have a care for how you appear to others. A man in our position can’t afford to show himself weak.”
“Way I see it, a man in our position can’t afford not to.” Krakus lifted the breastplate over his head and let it clatter to the floor.
“And have a care for your Goddess’s things!”
“It’s getting too big anyway.” Krakus unbuckled his cuisses and dropped them with the rest of the armor, then sat on the bed to work on greaves. Lech’s nostrils flared. Krakus took off his sabatons, groaning with relief and wiggling his freed toes.