by Ian Whates
“Are you dead?” she asked as Sabin slumped down onto the catwalk. He had certainly had enough of getting shot.
“No, I’m just a little tired,” Sabin told her.
Sigrid helped him retrieve his various weapons and supported him back towards the hole where the Crab had ‘docked’ with the Pride of Jupiter. Red was there. He had retrieved his pistol and was gingerly dabbing his ear with a now bloody finger.
“You shot me!” the dwarf cried. Then he looked at Sigrid. “When did you get all purty and femaleafied?” he asked.
“I’ve always been purty... pretty,” Sigrid told him.
“Just get into the submarine,” Sabin snapped at Red. There wasn’t a great deal of water leaking in through the seal but there was more than enough to make the elf nervous.
“Actually I call it a perambulating...”
“Red!” Sabin shouted. Oh excellent, now I’m shouting out our names, Sabin thought.
“Bourbonne?” Sigrid asked.
Red pointed to the corner by the boiler. “He’s still alive, some of the piss and vinegar seems to have leaked out of him though, not to mention his blood.”
Sigrid waited until Red had climbed down into the Crab.
“Just kill him and let’s be gone,” Sabin said. ‘Sigrid’ looked at him. The anger was back.
“He’s the kind of elf...” she started.
“We don’t have time,” Sabin told her. He was leaning against one of the supports trying not to bleed to death. Sigrid didn’t answer him. Instead she drew a small knife and cut a flap in her stolen skin. Just enough so that he would be able to see the skin underneath. Sabin was shaking his head.
“What if they get a necromancer to look in his eyes to find his killer?” Sabin asked. Sigrid turned and walked away from him towards where the wounded Bourbonne lay. She knelt down over him. Sabin could hear her talking but couldn’t make out the words.
“No! You can’t be...!” Bourbonne screamed, real terror in his words. “You were wiped out thousands of years ago! They’ll...” A gunshot cut short his final words.
“What do you mean we’re sinking into the mud?” Sabin demanded. He was lying on an uncomfortable wooden bench as ‘Sigrid’ cleaned and dressed his wounds. She had a bandage wrapped around her own face.
“Well as it transpired riverboats are quite heavy!” Red said somewhat testily as he frantically worked levers. All that could be seen through the two circular bolt holes was muddy water, but they had felt the Pride of Jupiter land on them after they broke the seal and flooded the paddle steamer’s engine room. They had also felt the Crab’s legs sink deeper into the Mississippi mud. The idea had been that the Pride of Jupiter would roll off the Crab using the rollers protruding from the top of the strange underwater vehicle. That had sort of worked. The paddle steamer was sinking just behind their current position but in doing so the weight had caused the river-crawling Crab to get stuck.
“And that’s only occurring to you now?” Sabin screamed at the dwarf.
“Have you any idea the miracles I have performed here?” Red demanded.
“Have you any idea what’s going to happen the moment the Redeemer works out what happened?” Sabin countered.
“Just so I understand, the plan to get us out of this is to scream at each other?” Sigrid enquired.
“We’re going to run out of air soon. We’ll have to surface. Surrender to the Redeemer,” Red said. “At least I’ve proved it can work. Now the naval office will have to listen to me!”
Sigrid had to hold the furious Sabin down.
Red had extended the legs and popped the hatch. Sigrid had helped Sabin out of the craft and the three of them stood on the carapace-like hull, those that could holding their hands up as the gunboat steamed towards them, cannons covering the Crab, sailors with rifles levelled at them on the armour-plated deck.
The first cannon round almost blew them off the top of the Crab. Sigrid grabbed Sabin and dragged him down onto the Crab’s armoured carapace, using the folded accordion skirt as cover. Shrapnel flew past them, raining down on the river, as shell after shell impacted into the Redeemer.
Ears ringing, Sabin finally risked looking over the lip of the seal’s folded rubber and iron skirt. The Redeemer was sinking, joining the Pride of Jupiter, the top of which was still protruding out of the river just behind them. There were sailors in the water, swimming for the riverbank.
Another ironclad, a Union Monitor class, was steaming towards them, having presumably just rounded the bend to the north of their current position. It was flying a blood red flag with an hourglass on it. A pirate flag, and it seemed that time had indeed run out for the Redeemer. The Monitor class ironclad was making straight for the Crab. There was a strange figure standing on the prow holding a 10-gauge shotgun at port. He was a grizzly-bearded orc, with prominent protruding lower canines. He had an eye patch on but it was pushed up onto his forehead under a ludicrous leather tricorn hat, both his eyes looked perfectly healthy. He did however have an iron peg leg, which ended in a mace-like ball. The iron peg was painted red but the paint was flaking off in many places. Sabin assumed that it was Captain ‘Bloody-Leg’ Murray, the infamous Union privateer.
The ironclad manoeuvred expertly alongside the Crab.
“I ran into some survivors from the Pride of Jupiter early this morning,” Murray said. “Imagine my disappointment when I heard the paddle steamer I was intent on raiding had sunk. One of Bourbonne’s men had an interesting story to tell, however, after some persuading.” Sabin started to sag. He knew what was coming. It had all been for nothing. He could see Sigrid coming to the same conclusion. Red just looked frightened. “Seems y’all saved me some trouble. Just how much do you think is in the safe?”
Oak
Lou Morgan
The cottage didn’t look as though it had been built so much as dropped from a great height onto a patch of land at the edge of the village. It slumped in several different directions at once, the edges of the thatched roof dipping almost to touch the grass bank behind it as though the bundles of reeds were trying to reroot themselves in the earth. It was the only home for a day’s walk in any direction without a horseshoe beside the window, and the only one whose door had no lock. It was not the kind of house that needed either: nobody called at that cottage lightly.
From the relative safety of the meadow path, Bron, Bors and Gwen eyed it warily. They knew better than to run up to the door, or to peer through the small window into the darkness, or even to try and scrump one of the apples growing on the slightly drunk-looking tree in the garden. Not, Gwen thought, that her grandmother would even think of it as a garden; maybe there were useful plants in there, somewhere. Maybe there were herbs for headaches and flavours for possets; berries that would stain lips and fingers and cloth… but from where she stood, all she could see was a tangle of grass and thorns.
The problem was that somewhere in there, under the tangle, was Bron’s father’s knife.
It was his own fault. If he hadn’t lost his temper, he wouldn’t have thrown the knife. They wouldn’t have watched it sail like a swallow through the air, looping over and over and over itself, blade tumbling over handle all the way back down – into the middle of the thorns. Of course, if Bron’s aim with a bow were any better, then he might actually have hit the rabbit he’d been aiming at in the meadow, and then he wouldn’t have had anything to lose his temper about. And instead of throwing the knife he would have been kneeling on the grass of the meadow, using the blade to skin the rabbit he’d just shot.
But there was no point in wishing time undone, because if Bron wasn’t home with his father’s knife by sundown, he would be the one getting skinned.
Bron sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “I think you should fetch it, Bors.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the youngest. And I said so.”
“I’m not going. Gwen’s the one who scared the rabbit off. She should go.” Bors po
ked at Gwen. She poked him back.
“I did no such thing.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. A gust of wind immediately swept it back over her face. “Besides, if you’d let me have the bow, I could have hit it.”
Bron snorted. “Could not.”
“Could.”
“It’s my bow, anyway.”
“And it’s your father’s knife. Which you threw. So you get it.”
They went back to watching the cottage. It didn’t look menacing, exactly. It looked… empty. Unloved. Not like the homes in the middle of the village, where smoke curled up from the chimneys and people sat out in the last of the day’s spring sunshine, plucking chickens or skinning rabbits for the pot (provided their aim had been better than Bron’s…). This cottage didn’t have the look of a home.
“I won’t fetch it.” Bron folded his arms across his chest the way he’d seen his father do it when he didn’t want to talk about something any more.
Gwen rolled her eyes. “What will you be telling your father, then?”
“My father?”
“I mean: what are you going to tell him when you go home without his knife? Other than ask him not to beat you.” The last part was meant lightly, but one look at Bron and Bors’ faces told Gwen that their father wouldn’t think twice about taking a switch to either boy – or both. She wished she could unsay it.
But she still wasn’t going to be the one who fetched the knife.
“They say a witch used to live there. She would catch children and skin them and hang them up in the smoke from her fire to cook. Just like pigs,” whispered Bors, suddenly sounding younger than his nine summers. ‘They’ actually meant Aelfric, one of the older boys who took pleasure in telling the younger children the most frightening stories they could imagine. There was usually a witch involved somewhere. Gwen half-wondered what Aelfric would do if he ever actually met the kind of witch he liked to tell stories about. It almost certainly involved crying.
“There’s no witch living there,” she said, hoping to calm Bors. “I don’t think anyone at all lives there. Not any more.”
“On the contrary!” said a strange voice from behind them.
Bors let out a high-pitched yelp, while Bron tried to make it look like his startled twitch had been part of a cough - and Gwen found herself turning to look at the owner of the new voice, which sounded like shadows and edges and secrets.
It was a man, a young man, barely older than Bron. He had dark hair that tumbled to his shoulders – and which appeared to have several twigs and grass stalks caught in it. His eyes were cornflower blue at the edges, but darkened at the centre to the shade of the millpond in midwinter. His tunic wasn’t so different from theirs: muddy-coloured wool, tied at the waist with a belt… but his belt was leather, and hung with a row of little pouches that bounced off his hips and off one another as he moved, and the tunic had a large, thick leather patch stitched onto the left shoulder. His boots were covered in dust, and he leaned on a staff. He had obviously been watching and listening to them argue for some time.
Bron was the first to recover, planting his feet and looking the stranger up and down even as Gwen ushered Bors behind her. All of them had heard the whispers passed between the adults before the fire at night when they thought the children were asleep. There were unfriendly soldiers on the roads, moving from village to village across the kingdom. No one knew what they would do next: sometimes they passed through with barely a second glance; sometimes they burned every building in the village to the ground. Sometimes they would smile at the people they passed; sometimes they would… do something else.
But this man didn’t look much like a soldier. For a start, he had no sword or axe. No shield. No helm. He looked more like a pilgrim than anything else: a man who had been on the road a long time. As the children eyed him, there was a fluttering overhead and a small falcon swooped down to land on his shoulder. It shook itself, then blinked at them from its perch. Bors peered out from behind Gwen to get a better look, the threat of a stranger forgotten.
“Is he tame?” he asked.
The stranger smiled. “Tame? No. Not tame. You can’t tame birds. You can only teach them that they can trust you. Whether or not they do… That’s up to them.” He wriggled his fingers into one of the pouches hanging from his waist and pulled out something small, feeding it to the bird – who snatched the offering and swallowed greedily. The stranger rubbed his fingertips on the edge of his tunic. “So then, my friends. What is it about my garden that interests you?”
“Your garden?” asked Gwen.
“Mine, yes.”
“But… it looks abandoned.”
He followed her gaze towards the tangle of green and brown branches and frowned. “I’ve been away longer than I had intended.”
“How come I’ve never seen you before?” Bron asked, his hands settling on his hips.
“It was a lot longer than I had intended.” The man smiled at them, and nodded what looked like a goodbye, stepping past them and into the knee-high grass. “Ah.” He pointed to a spot just in front of his boots – right where they had been looking. “Is this what you were looking for?”
There was the knife, sticking straight up from the soil.
Bron mumbled something and moved forward, intending to take the knife from the man… but no sooner had he taken a step towards the garden than he found himself back behind the others with his hand firmly closed around the handle of his father’s knife as though he had never thrown it at all.
Gwen tried to forget about the man with the falcon, but he wasn’t easily forgotten. He hadn’t given them his name, and when she asked who lived in the cottage on the edge of the village, no one seemed to know the answer. Her grandmother looked up from her stitching and said that perhaps she remembered there being a man who had lived there, but that was a long time ago, and he had been old when she was still young – younger than Gwen was now… And before Gwen knew it, she was the one doing the sewing while her grandmother talked. It was a trick she never quite understood, but her grandmother was the mistress of it.
As the weeks slid by, and summer became autumn, autumn became winter – and there was news. Soldiers had been sighted two villages west: barely a day’s ride away. A couple on foot, leading a horse laden with what must have been all they had left, stopped for water in the village, and the story they told turned the air colder than the frost had. A dozen men, all mounted, all with swords and axes, cutting down anyone who happened across their path. Broken skulls, severed limbs; men and women hung from the branches of thorn trees. One homestead where the inhabitants had put up a fight and been left handless, footless, helpless. A warning not to stand against them. “The new king’s ravagers,” the travellers called them – and before they left, the woman looked hard at Gwen. “You hear hoof beats, you hide, girl. You hide.”
But where was there to hide? The soldiers were spreading across the land like a pox, an infection of the body. Nowhere was safe, and soon enough there would not be a single village that had not felt the new king stamp his rule and seal it with blood. Wrapping her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, Gwen walked out into the dusk, following the path towards the meadows – now cold-baked into stillness and sleeping under a hard frost. There would be no stars tonight, the sky was a sheet of grey. Without thinking about why, or about what she was walking away from or towards, Gwen walked. And with every step of the way, she heard phantom horses in the distance.
The world darkened about her. The wind pulled at her hair, at her clothes. It pushed her this way and that, like another body leaning against her own and trying to steer her with its will. The further out she walked, the stronger the wind became – until simply putting one foot ahead of the other was a battle, to walk an arrow’s length a war. But when she tried to turn back, the wind grew stronger still. It doubled and redoubled in strength until she was bowed over against it just to stand in one place. A vicious, sudden gust whipped her hair into her eyes so hard that tears s
pilled down her cheeks – snatched away by the gale. Another ripped her shawl from her grasp and carried it off into the air.
And then, ahead of her, she saw a light. Faint and flickering, but real. A single lantern in a window. If she could get to it, perhaps she could shelter there until the wind dropped…
No sooner had she thought this than the wind died to little more than a breeze that smelled of applewood smoke, leaving her cowering at nothing and feeling foolish. It was strange, yes, and more than a little suspicious, but shelter was shelter.
She hadn’t realised how far along the path she had walked, because when she raised her hand to knock at the door she recognised it. She was at the door of the little cottage that belonged to the man with the falcon. If the sky had been lighter, she might have turned around as soon as she realised; as it was, the knuckles of her hand paused an inch from the door… and again, a gust of wind swirled about her, pushing her hand against the knotted wood. The door swung open, and at first all she could see was feathers: wings beating a hand’s breadth from her face, then eyes – sharp and dark – and a beak. And then a human face. A man’s face with eyes that were both the softness of summer and the hardness of winter at once.