Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 120

by Neil Clarke

  “In a hospital bed beside my husband, no doubt,” the haggard woman says, “and that’s more than he deserves. You were in the cells with him. You talked to him. Did he mention the names of those healing herbs?”

  “You didn’t beat it out of him, so?” I laugh harshly. A migraine springs into existence like a rainbow.

  She shakes her head.

  “He never made a sound,” she says distantly. “They’re not human. They don’t feel pain. Not like us.”

  Evidence that the aos sí feel pain:

  1. Aversion. Why would Miach have scrambled away from those prison bars if they didn’t cause pain? Why bring titanium handcuffs to the lock-in and take such care not to touch the gate? Why leave the land of youth for good, if not for his aversion to being chopped in half?

  2. Sequence of events. First the sparks from the saw touched him. Then he pissed his pants. It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t a good look, for a so-called superior immortal.

  3. Physical damage. When I see him again, I see that the mob didn’t stop until his back, his belly and his long limbs were burned, cracked, and bleeding green aos sí blood. Somehow, he’d managed to protect his head. The hospital staff haven’t the burn dressings to spare for him. His skin weeps, and sticks to the sheets, and when they turn him it tears the healing growth away.

  It’s the middle of the night.

  I’m busy with the mop in Miach’s ward.

  I think he’s sleeping but he beckons to me from his bed.

  At first, I think I’ll pretend not to have seen him, but I find myself going to his right side, where the ear is that he can still hear with, and the eye is that he can still see with. Even weak and humiliated, he’s still beautiful, I suppose; I can’t see it any more. After Cian, I trained myself, through years of self-loathing self-talk, to feel nothing when I look at faces like Miach’s. At bodies like his. At the female versions of bodies like his.

  “What is it, so?” I hiss.

  “The island of learning.” He lifts one trembling hand to point at the wall, as if it had a window. His arm’s cross-hatched by scars left behind by the shopping trolley. “Sheep can’t get to the island in the lough. Alder against drowning, rowan against fire. Dandelion to call spirits, hawthorn to call salmon. Apple for long life, holly for luck.”

  The water level of the lake is down since the earthquake. There is no more island. There’s no place the sheep can’t get to. It’s all connected.

  I don’t know why I don’t tell him.

  “Why didn’t you tell that woman with the sick husband about the herbs on the island? Wouldn’t they have cured him?”

  “They didn’t believe in me, or they could not have harmed me,” he says in a weak and distant whisper. “They didn’t believe in the woodland, or they could not have allowed it to be harmed. If you can’t love a thing for its own sake, the love you profess for it in your time of need is false love. Whatever is inside the wall could not have cured him.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Miach.”

  “Please,” he begs. “Please find them. Fetch them for me. Killarney fern to purge the blood of iron. Kerry violet for driving out infection. Strawberry tree to sweeten dreams.”

  “How can your blood have no iron?”

  “Have you less pity than I do? Are you less human than I am?”

  “I don’t have to help you.” I lean on my mop, shaking with anger. “I don’t want to help you. Twice, I’ve fallen under the spells of aos sí and been the worse for it. If I haven’t learned by now, what use am I?”

  “I don’t know,” he sighs, his hand settling back against the white sheet. “I’ve stopped asking mortals for their names. Even if I did know them, your natures aren’t in your names, and sometimes even when they seem to be, those names are lies. Where is the power that prevents the bestowing of ill-suited names? How can you function in a world where true selves are unapparent? How could you not have known Cian’s nature by his black name? Any aos sí could have told you not to let him roam free.”

  Fae facts that I thought were probably shite but which turned out to be true:

  1. They do stay young forever.

  2. They can be killed by steel.

  3. Their blood is green.

  4. They are slaves to their names.

  5. They can be weakened by professions of disbelief.

  My shift finishes at 2AM.

  It takes me an hour to tromp the long way through the town and down to the side of the lake. There, the footprints of my wellies in the muck look like Armstrong’s on the moon. Stark where it sticks up from the shallows, lit by sleek LED arrays, is a reflective warning sign advising that levels of volatile organic compounds in Lough Leane exceed 250ppm.

  With a little skull and crossbones underneath in case you’re not really sure what that means.

  There are no other human footprints beside mine. Ducks and dogs, it seems, have taken their chances. Swimming the lake to get to the unguarded back gate of the woodland is possibly a suicide mission, but there are too many guards and dogs near the main gate, so what choice do I have?

  I can’t just be letting him die.

  I mean, I can.

  He was after all, letting me Mam die, when he could’ve come rolling in with his fancy herb lore, with her being a defender of the woodland and all.

  But I don’t want to be who I’ve been, lately. I want to be the me that Mam would recognize, if her spirit was to emerge from the waters of the lake on a white horse with the fairy host flying along behind her.

  I want to be the me who picked pimply red fruit off the wild strawberry trees, and asked Mam if I could eat some, and she said their name in Latin was something like eat one, only. I tried one and I spat it out. Those Latin lads were right, after all.

  I forgot to ask Miach which part of the strawberry tree he needed when he was making his little shopping list.

  Never mind.

  The water’s cold, even with all my clothes on. Should have taken them off. They weigh me down as I start to swim.

  It’s summer, so the cold isn’t a killing cold, but the tingle in my fingertips and toes that turns to numbness might be the sign of another kind of killing. There’s a wooden paling fence keeping the sheep well back from the lake and I wake the clustered, woolly shapes when I climb it, shivering in my wet things.

  I left my wellies standing by themselves on the opposite side of the water, next to the sign. When I look back and see them, I stifle a giggle; it looks like my body’s dematerialized just by looking at the lake.

  Then I’m squelching in soggy socks along sheep trails, into the woods. Into the tangled embrace of oak and yew. Up hills and down gullies to places where fern-lined waterfalls no longer fall. Moonlight shows the bare, dry rocks.

  I put some dead brown sticks that used to be ferns into my wet pocket, hoping some of the dried-out spores have survived. The bogs, when I come to them, are also dried up and dead, with no sign of Kerry violets.

  The best I can do is fill my other pocket with the serrated-edged leaves and prickly, unripe fruit of a few stunted-looking strawberry trees.

  Then I’m dizzy. I stop to vomit.

  I shouldn’t have gone into the lake.

  As the rising sun’s touch sets the innocent-looking waters a-sparkle, I stagger out the main gates of the woodland. The ringing in my ears almost drowns out the sound of the dogs barking. The security guards are too afraid to be touching me.

  I wonder if I’m going back to prison to die.

  When I wake up in the white-walled hospital ward, still quivering, hard, like the dogs have me in their teeth and won’t stop shaking, I sense vaguely that I’m in the bed beside Miach and that he’s got visitors.

  Visitors? They must be aos sí.

  My vision’s blurry.

  I don’t want to turn my head too fast, but I soon realize Miach’s visitors are human, not aos sí. They’ve brought him flowers. Lots of flowers. They’re not the only ones who have; the head of
his bed is surrounded by a sea of carnations and gladioli, tulips and lilies; in short, every kind but the kind that can actually help him. Where is my jacket with the woodland harvest in its pockets? I pat myself down jerkily, only to find I’m naked beneath the hospital gown.

  Miach’s visitors bend solicitously over him.

  “I don’t believe in you,” the man whispers gently. He stands back to make room for the woman, who also murmurs in Miach’s right ear,

  “I don’t believe in you.”

  Miach’s face leaps into focus under the fluorescent lights of the ward. In the time I’ve been away, no more than a night and day, the stunning symmetry of his face has been destroyed. On the side where he can hear and see them, his smooth skin’s spotted and withered. Half his head of gleaming yellow hair’s turned brittle and white. His right eye all sunken and pouched.

  As if he wasn’t sick enough, they are killing the side of him that can understand them. Only the brain-dividing injury done to him by the winner of the All-Ireland Worst Father Prize is keeping him from shriveling up altogether.

  “You,” I cry, waving my spasming hands at the visitors. “You leave him be!”

  I throw myself out of bed. Drip lines come loose from my arms in a red spray of blood. The visitors make a hasty retreat, leaving the flowers behind. Pulling myself upright on the plastic safety bars of his bed, I meet Miach’s exhausted, empty-seeming gaze.

  “We’re going to my house,” I tell him. “It’s about two miles from here but it’s safer there. We might have to lean on each other. Get your immortal arse out of that bed.”

  We don’t go through the public access ways. I take him down the cleaning corridors. He’s a bit useless for me to lean on, seeing as he’s so weak himself, so I procure us a pair of wooden-handled mops and we lean on them as we sneak past the medical waste storage building, under a hedge and across an abandoned, contaminated lot. The sun warms my face but the breeze bites my bum through the open back of the gown.

  “Not far,” I croak. “Turn left.”

  There it is, over a low brick wall and across a smattering of weeds and uneven pavers. Mossy, shingled awnings. Thin chimneys adorned by the skeletons of dead communication aerials. Cracked plastic downpipes. By the front door is Mam’s terrifying terracotta rabbit with ivy growing out its eyes.

  I don’t even glance up at the second story with the tacked-on external staircase that’s nothing to do with me anymore. Nothing to do with my half home. Only, the two upstairs children, wide-eyed girls with black ponytails and gold stud earrings, are wrestling something up the staircase. They’re grubby, like they’ve been under the house; their tracksuits are covered in dirt and cobwebs.

  The thing they’re carrying is an enormous, thin, shallow, stainless steel bowl. It must be a meter across. Miach goes very still at the sight of it.

  “What you got there?” I call out to them.

  “Our Mam’s salad bowl,” the slightly larger child calls back.

  “What you been doing with it?”

  “Making salad.”

  I’m not as green as I am cabbage.

  “Tell me what you’ve really been doing or I’ll get you while you’re sleeping.”

  The larger child’s shoulders stiffen.

  “We was using it to cover the well,” she answers reluctantly. “On account of the whispering woman. Hanan don’t like to listen to her when we’re playing mole hospital.”

  “What whispering woman?” I demand to know. I’m losing my grip on the mop. I need to lie down. This whole conversation is exhausting and I’m dying. I don’t have time. “What well?”

  “The well under the house what’s got the whispering woman inside. She’s warning her brother to stay away. She says if he comes home, their father will chop him into pieces again,” the bigger girl says matter-of-factly, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. “My name is Shafyaa. What’s your name?”

  They were using the salad bowl to cover the well.

  Jaysus.

  What the upstairs children’s names mean:

  1. Hanan—means kind, compassionate, tender-hearted.

  2. Shafyaa—means a healer, one who cures others.

  The well’s full of live salmon and fallen hazelnuts.

  I don’t know how either of those things are possible, but I see them in the light filtering through the smashed windows of the sunroom.

  “Don’t touch it with your hands,” Miach instructs. Instead, he dips into it with a wooden bowl and pours the water over my head. I get the same cold shock from it as I got from the lake water, but at the same time it feels like my heart is zipping up in my chest, recovering from a sword-blow I never knew was there.

  We kneel in the dirt by the stone rim in the jaggedly dangerous circle of ripped-up floorboards we made. Miach pours a bowl of water over himself, next. I expect the aged, ruined half of his face to heal, but it stays the same.

  Only the grill scars from the shopping trolley and the wounds left by the hammer wash instantly away.

  He looks at his reflection in the water. I look at it, too, and receive a second shock when I realize that his face, even better than the face of a person I could fuck, is the face of a person I could learn to like. Maybe even to trust.

  “I can’t go through,” he says. “My father’s still waiting on the other side.”

  “You’d better stay here,” I agree. “A face like that belongs in the house of half mirrors.”

  Evidence I’m actually mostly Mam (my better half):

  1. I stopped stealing from the mother upstairs. I even told her about it and apologized. She said she knew what I was doing but was too afraid of me to complain. I was the kind of person who smashed windows and mirrors. The kind of person who stole from the upstairs neighbors.

  I am not that kind of person any more. It helps that I like eating salmon.

  2. That upstairs lady makes a mean salad.

  3. Miach poured a bowl of water over each of my hazel-tree skeletons. They came back to life. Apparently they were always still alive in the land of youth. I’m not sure if I believe that.

  But I believe Mam loved me while she was alive. A woman like that doesn’t love people for no reason. So there must be something in me worth loving.

  4. Nobody dies of cancer in our hospital anymore. I’d fix it so everyone got a share of our well-water but I don’t have time, except to spike the hospital supply. I’m not Santy, to get around to every house, though I’d appreciate a few of Santy’s mince pies and glasses of Guinness.

  The word is spreading. They even suspect it might be something in the water.

  Every now and again, one of the ninety-nine will turn up on our doorstep in the middle of the night while I’m away sprinkling the good stuff in the hospital cistern. Miach helps them get to where they’re going, if their aim is to go back. Sometimes they just want to drink from the wooden bowl or to eat one of the salmon.

  5. Miach doesn’t want to fuck me and it’s OK. I noticed after a few months that the mirror-halves in the house seemed to be finding one another and joining back up into wholes. Even the wardrobe mirror. Even the sunglasses.

  Of course they would do that, I told Mam’s memory while I flooded the roots of her hazel trees with sacred well-water. There’s an aos sí healer in the house.

  Miach said it was nothing to do with him, and nothing to do with uncovering the well, either.

  When you focus on the good things, even though the world is full of shite, you spiral up, up, up above the madness, into the light, where new hazel branches reach for the sun and the upstairs shitehawks shouting about the clouds being shaped like moles or salmon are so loud that you can’t hear the warning whispers from the well.

  About the Author

  Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning, Sydney-based science fiction writer and lapsed veterinarian. Besides the most excellent Clarkesworld, her work has appeared in Apex, Cosmos, Analog, and various US/Australian anthologies. Four of her original s
tories are collected in Asymmetry, available from Twelfth Planet Press. Her first novel, Crossroads of Canopy, a big fat fantasy set in a magical rainforest, is due from Tor in January 2017; you can listen to a short story set in the same world, “The Chimney-Borer and the Tanner,” at Podcastle.org and/or follow her @ThoraiyaDyer on Twitter.

  The Dark City Luminous

  Tom Crosshill

  Back when I was free to choose, I would sometimes disable my lenses and go out at night into the dark city luminous.

  I had been the one who gave Riga this title in the heady days of the unlit revolution, when we led the world into a new dark age which would save the planet. Yet sometimes I blinded myself to the shining wonder we darkitects had created—the dazzling skins, the well-lit spaces projected directly onto my cornea by my own Apollo, my god of light and wonder, my seventy euros’ worth of silicon and plastic and gold. Like a prophetess turned apostate I cast aside my night vision and ventured unseeing into the shadowed streets.

  It was slow going even on moonlit nights. Carefully I ambled along familiar sidewalks, listening for footsteps, a car, the bark of a dog. On more than one occasion I twisted my ankle in a pothole which my sensors would have detected and my lenses would have lit up bright. Yet for this paltry price I saw my city as it had never been seen in the nine centuries of its history.

  Unlit.

  The great black hulk of the Dom cathedral—where I’d worshipped for twenty years—an unfamiliar giant standing guard over a ragged skyline I barely recognized.

  The Vilnius express on the rail bridge—which I’d ridden to university every day—a serpent slithering across a Daugava silvery in moonlight.

  Kipsala’s skyscrapers—a mausoleum of office space where I too had once toiled—a dark forest of accusatory fingers pointed at the sky.

  At times I felt unwelcome in this shadowed city. Yet then I came to the gray concrete boxes of a hundred new schools, churches, malls and theaters. Riga’s darkitects had clad them in wondrous illusions. I’d skinned many myself, some in spires and towers and lions and sphinxes, others in steel and glass.