Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “No, they’re gone.”

  “I guess…”

  “So what’s the point of going back? It would have been horrible going back, having to admit they were right. I can’t survive out here on my own. But now they’re not even there.”

  “So what’s the point of staying out here?” T.J. asked.

  Elizabeth shrugged. “It’s what I deserve for being such an idiot.”

  “Now you’re just talking stupid.”

  Elizabeth looked up at her, eyes flashing.

  “Remember what I said when you came in?” she asked. “Why don’t you just do it? Piss off and leave me alone.”

  T.J. didn’t move.

  “Look,” Elizabeth said. “You have no idea what it’s like being me. Not having friends. Living somewhere you don’t want, with people who don’t understand you. Okay? So don’t pretend you understand and can somehow make it better.”

  “You are so full of crap,” T.J. said.

  “What?”

  “You act so brave, but here you still are, hiding out in my shed.”

  “You don’t think I’d go if I could? But the night’s full of owls and cats and the day’s full of hawks and dogs and more cats. The few times I’ve tried to get away, I almost got eaten alive!”

  “So what? You think you’re the only person to feel scared or alone? Do you think I have all kinds of kids falling over me, wanting to be my friend? Do you think I don’t miss the farm and Red?”

  “At least you’re a normal size.”

  “Oh yeah. That makes it really easy.”

  Elizabeth glared at her. “So what’s your big point?”

  “God, you are such a piece of work,” T.J. snapped. “I should just wrap some tape around that big mouth of yours, stick you in a padded envelope and mail you somewhere.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes widened a little. And then she actually smiled.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Wow what?’

  “You do have some backbone.”

  T.J. wasn’t sure if she should feel complimented or insulted. That old “Goody Two-shoes” comment still rankled.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t being snarky,” Elizabeth added.

  “Did I just hear you apologise?”

  Elizabeth went on as though T.J. hadn’t spoken. “It’s just you go around and let everybody walk all over you.”

  “I don’t. I just like to get along.”

  “Even if you don’t get your way?”

  T.J. sighed. “It’s not like that. It’s not all about getting your own way. Sometimes there’s a bigger picture. Sure, I hate that we moved. And I really, really hated having to give up Red. But we’re still a family and things had to change because…because they just did. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just how it worked out.”

  “So you just go along with it?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m trying to make the best of it, okay? Which is more than I can say for you. All you do is go around with a big chip on your shoulder. How does that make it better for you or anybody around you?”

  “You’re probably right.”

  T.J. blinked in surprise. “I am?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Well, look where it’s got me so far.”

  Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

  “So do you want to come back to the house?” T.J. finally asked.

  “I guess.”

  “We could try to find your family,” T.J. went on. “Or some other Littles. I could carry you so that you don’t have to worry about being attacked or anything.”

  “Like a pet.”

  T.J. rolled her eyes. “No, like a friend.”

  “I guess…”

  “You know there’s books about Littles.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “One, at least. None of us can figure out how she got the story so right.”

  “She’s written a new one.”

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s about how the Littles have learned to turn back into birds. You know, like werewolves or something. They can just go back and forth and they don’t even have to wait for a full moon.”

  “No way.”

  T.J. shrugged. “Well, it’s just a book.”

  “Yeah, but her other one was dead-on.”

  “So maybe we could look her up. She lives here—or at least in the city.”

  Elizabeth got up and brushed the dust from her very short, very dirty skirt. It didn’t do much good.

  “I am kind of hungry,” she said. “For real food, I mean.”

  “We’ve got plenty.”

  “And I’m dying to be clean again.”

  “We’ve got water, too.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “So…thanks, T.J. I guess I’ll take you up on your hospitality.”

  “Do you…um, want to go under your own steam?”

  “Instead of being carried like a pet?”

  “It wouldn’t be—”

  Elizabeth smiled. “I know. I’m just pushing your buttons. Yeah, I’d appreciate the lift.”

  T.J. laid her hand palm-up on the shelf beside the Little. When Elizabeth climbed on, she carefully cupped her hand a little and stuck up a finger for Elizabeth to hang on to. Elizabeth didn’t hesitate to use it.

  “So where does this writer live again?” she asked as T.J. lifted her into the air.

  “The librarian said somewhere downtown.”

  “I wonder how hard she’d be to find?”

  “Shh,” T.J. told her as she stepped out of the shed. “You’re supposed to be a secret, remember?”

  “Maybe you could mail me to her.”

  “Shh.”

  “But in a box. With padding and airholes…”

  “Really, you need to shush.”

  “Can’t you just imagine her face when she opens it and out I pop?”

  “Shh.”

  But they couldn’t stop giggling softly as they made their way back into the house.

  CHARLES DE LINThas been a seventeen-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award, winning in 2000 for the short story collection Moonlight and Vines, which is set in his popular fictional city of Newford. Medicine Road, Quicksilver and Shadow, and The Blue Girl are the most recent of his many novels, illustrated novellas, and story collections. He is also the author of A Circle of Cats, a children’s picture book illustrated by Charles Vess.

  De Lint is a respected critic in his field, and is currently the primary book reviewer for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  A professional musician for over twenty-five years, specializing in traditional and contemporary Celtic and American roots music, he frequently performs with his wife, MaryAnn Harris—fellow musician, artist, and kindred spirit. They live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

  Visit Charles de Lint’s Web site at www.charlesdelint.com and MaryAnn Harris’s at www.reclectica.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I’ve always had a fondness for little people living hidden on the periphery of our lives, from Gulliver’s Lilliputians (both in Swift’s book, and in T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose) to the Brownies from the old Sunday colour comics. I’ve explored the theme before in books such as The Little Country(1991) and short stories like “The Pennymen” (which was reprinted in Moonlight and Vines, 1999) and “Big City Littles” (Tapping the Dream Tree, 2002), but this story is the first time I’ve done it with contemporary teenage characters, and I have to say, I had the best time visiting with them.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  I’LL GIVE YOU MY WORD

  People were always asking Jethro, “How do you manage with a brother like yours?”

  Jethro mostly smiled and answered, “No problem. He makes me laugh.”

  This was not really a lie. Jethro used to laugh a lot in the days when he and Jeremy shared a bedroom and Jeremy used to kneel up in his bunk-bed every morning, rocking from side to side and singing—to a tune he had made up himself—“Computers, computers. Caramel custard computers.” He
sang until Dad banged on the wall and shouted that it was only dawn, for goodness’ sake, and would Jeremy just shut up! At this Jeremy would turn his very knowing big blue eyes toward Jethro, a small smile would flit across his mouth, and he would sing in a whisper, “Collapsed cardinal caramel custard computers!” Jeremy had a way of making his face into a solemn egg-shape and staring crazily into the space between Jethro’s head and the window while he uttered, “Sweet cervical béchamel with empirical gladiolus.” This never failed to send Jethro off into squeals of laughter. And their father banged on the walls again.

  But Jethro’s problem was that he was a worrier. In those days he worried that he would stop breathing in the night or that he would prick himself in his sleep and lose all the blood in his body, so that it was always a relief to be woken by Jeremy’s singing. When eventually their father, Graeme, got so sick of the singing that he cleared out the box room at the end of the passage and their mother, Annabelle, made it into a bedroom for Jeremy, Jethro started to worry about Jeremy too. Jeremy took to wandering round the house then, saying things. “Ponderous plenipotential cardomum,” he would say. “In sacks.” And after a bit, “Sententious purple coriander.”

  “Does that come in sacks too?” Jethro asked him.

  “No,” Jeremy said. “In suitcases.”

  “What does plenipotential mean?” Jethro asked. “Or sententious?”

  Jeremy just made his face egg-shaped and stared crazily over Jethro’s head. At first Jethro thought that Jeremy was simply inventing these words, and he worried that his brother was mad. But then it occurred to Jethro to look them up in one of the many dictionaries in their house, and he found they were real. Plenipotential meant possessing full power and authority and sententious meant tending to indulge in pompous moralizing. And it was the same with all the other words Jeremy kept coming up with: they were always in one dictionary or another, although Jethro was fairly sure Jeremy had no idea what any of the words meant. He began worrying about how they got into Jeremy’s head.

  Their house was full of dictionaries. Graeme and Annabelle’s main work was running an agency called Occult Security, which protected clients of all kinds from magical dangers, exorcised haunts and cleansed evil from houses; but this agency did not pay very well and there were long intervals between commissions. So when they were not getting rid of malign spirits or clearing out gremlins from factories, they both did other things. Annabelle wrote little books called Hall’s Guides to Witchcraft and Graeme feverishly composed crossword puzzles for several newspapers. There were three computers in the house, one devoted to Occult Security, one on which Annabelle pattered away, frowning and murmuring, “Now is that strictly shamanism, or should it go under folk magic?” and a third full of hundreds of black and white square patterns and lists of words. Graeme was usually to be found in front of this one, irritably tapping a very sharp pencil and muttering, “I want something Q something something K here and I’m not sure there is a word.” Then he would reach for one of the wall of dictionaries behind his desk.

  Jethro began to suspect that these dictionaries—or maybe the computers or the crosswords—were leaking into his brother’s brain.

  Meanwhile Jeremy was marching round the house chanting, “Borborygmata, borborygmata!”

  Jethro looked this one up too and found that it meant rumblings of the stomach. “Mum,” he said. “Dad, I think this is serious.”

  Graeme shook his head and laughed. “You’d think he had a direct line to a dictionary somewhere.”

  “Yes,” said Jethro, “but how?”

  “You worry too much, my love,” Annabelle said. “He probably only wants his lunch. I’d better stop this and find him some food.”

  “But it’s not natural!” Jethro said. “And he doesn’t know what any of his words mean. Ask him!”

  Graeme bent down to Jeremy and said, “Jeremy, old son, have you any idea what borborygmata means?”

  Jeremy went egg-shaped and angelical and answered, “Avocado pears.”

  “That’s just your favourite food, old son,” Graeme explained. “It means tummy rumblings.”

  “I know,” Jeremy said, looking crazily over Graeme’s right shoulder. “With pendulous polyps.”

  “You see!” said Jethro. “He can’t go on like this! What happens when he starts school?”

  “I think school will cure him,” Annabelle said. “You have to remember we’re a rather special household here. When Jeremy discovers that none of the other children talk like he does, he’ll stop doing it—you’ll see.”

  Jethro had nothing like Mum’s faith in this. The week before Jeremy started school, Jethro took his brother outside and tried to explain to him that school was very different from home. “You have to speak normally there,” he said, “or everyone will laugh at you.”

  Jeremy nodded placidly. “You laugh at me.”

  “No, not like I laugh at you,” Jethro said. “I mean they’ll jeer. Some of them may hit you for being peculiar.”

  “Cacophonous incredulity,” Jeremy retorted. “Turnip fondue.” And then went back indoors. Jethro sighed.

  He worried a lot about Jeremy when school actually started. Jeremy was put in Miss Heathersay’s class. Miss Heathersay was known to be a really nice, understanding teacher. If anyone could deal with Jeremy, Jethro hoped it was Miss Heathersay. He watched anxiously that afternoon as Jeremy came out with the rest of the class, ready to go home. Jeremy sauntered out, serene and angelic, as if nothing at all had happened to disturb him, and smiled blindingly when he saw Jethro. Jethro noticed that a crowd of other little kids followed after Jeremy, looking awed and maybe even respectful.

  “What happened?” Jethro asked. “Did you talk normally?”

  “Replenishment,” Jeremy replied. “Hirsute haplography.”

  Whatever that meant, it was all Jeremy would say. Jethro never did manage to find out how his brother got on in Miss Heathersay’s class, except that it seemed perfectly peaceful there. No one complained. Nobody seemed inclined to bully Jeremy. All that happened was that more and more people came up to Jethro and asked, “How do you manage with a brother like that?” Jethro got very used to answering, “No problem. He makes me laugh.” Which was only half a lie, because Jethro did laugh at Jeremy even while he worried about him more than ever.

  All through the summer holidays that followed Jeremy’s first school year, Jethro laughed and worried. Annabelle and Graeme were very busy sitting over the Occult computer, trying to solve the problem of a lady Town Councillor who kept hearing voices, and whether it was because that computer was leaking or for some other reason, Jeremy came up with a new set of strange words every half hour or so.

  “Impermanent epistemological urethra,” he remarked to Jethro in exactly the same tone of voice ordinary people would say, “Nice day, isn’t it?” At Jethro’s worried stare, the knowing look came into Jeremy’s round blue eyes and he added, “Febrile potlatch, don’t you think?”

  Jethro’s worry turned to giggles as he looked these words up in several dictionaries. Urethra meant the canal that in most mammals carries urine from the bladder out of the body. He told Jeremy it did and Jeremy answered, “Obloquy,” with a cheerful smile.

  “Do go and laugh somewhere else, you two,” Annabelle implored them. She and Graeme were leaning over a recording they had managed to make of the Town Councillor’s voices. It was faint and far off and ghostly.

  “These are real,” Graeme said. “Mrs Callaghan is certainly not imagining them.”

  “And she’s not going mad either,” Annabelle agreed. “I’m so glad for her, Graeme.”

  “No, they’re being broadcast to her somehow,” said Graeme. “Someone’s playing a very unkind psychic trick on the poor lady. Now, how do we make life bearable for her while we track down who’s doing it?”

  “Earplugs?” Jethro suggested, on his way to the dictionary to find out what obloquy meant.

  “Now that’s a very good idea,” Graeme said.
He pointed his beautifully sharpened pencil at Jethro in the way that meant “Congratulations!”—which was almost exactly the opposite of obloquy, Jethro discovered. “Occult earplugs,” Graeme said. “How do we go about making some, Annabelle?” He and Annabelle began tapping keys and bringing up diagrams.

  “Scrutinizing congenial tinnitus,” Jeremy remarked, coming in to look at the diagrams. “Pending conglomerate haruspication.”

  “Shut up, Jeremy! Go away!” both his parents commanded.

  “Toads,” Jeremy said disgustedly, “implicated in paradigms of exponential frogspawn.”

  He went away, and Jethro pulled down the dictionary again. But Jeremy kept coming back while his parents were doing delicate wiring on two deaf-aids and leaning between them to make remarks such as, “Subaverage nucleosis,” or, “Tendentious bromoids.”

  At last Graeme said, “Jeremy, we are very busy with something very small and delicate that we have to get right. If you don’t want your neck wrung, go away!”

  “Halitosis,” Jeremy said. “You never have time for me.”

  “Play with him, Jethro,” Annabelle said, “and I’ll double your pocket money.”

  “But he’s so boring,” Jethro objected. “He only knows Snap.”

  “So teach him a new game,” Graeme said “Just get out, the pair of you.”

  Jethro gloomily took Jeremy away and tried to teach him to keep goal in football. It was no good. Jeremy always dived the wrong way like a goalkeeper missing a penalty and the football kept going over into the road. But Jethro had to keep playing with Jeremy, all that summer, because Graeme and Annabelle soon grew busier yet. While they were still trying to trace the person who was broadcasting Mrs Callaghan’s voices, trekking out at night with earphones and backpacks of equipment, Mrs Callaghan was wearing the deaf-aids. These earplugs cut out the broadcast so effectively that Mrs Callaghan became convinced that Occult Security had already solved her problem. She recommended Graeme and Annabelle to everyone else on the Council. The consequence was that the Lord Mayor ordered psychic protection around the Council Building, several Councillors requested their homes made safe against occult invasion, and—while Annabelle began worrying that she was not going to meet her deadline with her latest Guide to Witchcraft—Jack Smith, the local Member of Parliament, came to visit them in person.