Bone and Jewel Creatures bajc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  As she lowered her head to investigate the clawed fingers, something caught her attention. It was the necrosis itself, the bones of the palm clearly visible between busy corpse-worms.

  And tucked between them, something that should not be there.

  “Ambrosias,” Bijou said.

  The centipede reared up beside her and poked its ferret-skull head over the edge of the bin. Telescoping feelers made of segmented wire brushed the wound, then pincers slipped forward, between the maggots, and tugged.

  A scrap of something soft and pale came free. Bijou lifted her jeweler’s monocle to her eye and bent towards it.

  Bloodstained and bruised, but what Ambrosias held was a tattered white rose petal.

  Two

  In its sleep, the child jerked and shuddered. Bijou was not surprised that it slept. It had been terrified, badly hurt, and exhausted, and she had no way of knowing for how long it had been ill. The delicate ribs rose taut under tented skin, however, and there had been little flesh over the joint to cut through.

  It might sleep the day away and be the better for it. Bijou could use the time to prepare a place.

  Her Artifices would perform the hard work, fetching and carrying, scrubbing and hauling, but they must be supervised. Ambrosias, at least, could scuttle up the attic ladder and, with Hawti’s assistance, lift down a disassembled bedstead, sheets, feather-beds, feather-pillows, and some of the many tanned pelts stacked there. But as for the rest, well. A corner by the hearth must be cleaned (Lucy did the sweeping, while Lupe lay, silver-and-steel-shod jaw resting on bony paws, and watched with telescope-lens eyes) and the cage brought over and scrubbed shining.

  Judging the child by the state of the cage was unfair; there was no telling how long it had been in there. And yet—Bijou leaned with both arms on the handle of her cane. “It’s probably not housebroken, is it?” she said idly to Catherine.

  Catherine hid its head under a tattered wing.

  So there was the bedstead. And there was the cage. And there was access to the side yard, which was high-walled and narrow, and Bijou thought that if the child could not be taught to work the latch, one of the smaller Artifices could be delegated as a door-thing. There remained only the matter of keeping it from worrying its stitches out. Bijou thought she could make a chased leather and metal cuff that would strap into place.

  Bathed and rid of the necrosis, the child smelled better. It barely stirred when Lucy tucked it still voiceless into the small bed, where it seemed to find the warmth and softness soothing. It curled tight, pulling all but its now clean and braided hair and the one delicate hand still left to it under the covers. Bijou thought, not unkindly, that her Artifices might seem less terrible to a feral child than to one which suspected their origin.

  The damp braid left a water stain on the pillow case. The hair was black, lustrous, the skin—despite the fading summer—brown as toast. It had a child’s face, still, with an undeveloped nose and chin, but Bijou thought from the angle of the bones and creased margins of closed eyes—black lashes drawing a smudged sooty line above the cheekbone—that with growth the child would prove some by-blow of the silk-and-spice traders who traveled a long cold road to Messaline each spring and summer, from the farthest East. The mother might have concealed her pregnancy under voluminous robes and given birth squatting in an alley—but how then had the child survived for six or seven years?

  It would in any case probably grow up beautiful, if Bijou saw it adequately fed. She wondered if it could be taught to walk upright. She needed to consult her books.

  A modicum of research suggested that outcomes were variable. The child was unlikely to learn to speak, or comport itself as befitted a human being. But if its mind were undamaged, it might learn to follow commands, to care for itself, and to perform simple tasks through demonstration. It was, in other words, no different from one of Bijou’s bone and jewel creatures, and Bijou thought that she could care for it.

  Though what Brazen had been thinking, bringing an injured child to an old woman living alone, she would never know.

  As anticipated, the child slept the clock around. In the morning, some of Bijou’s clients came to make preliminary inspections of the Artifices she was constructing for them. The Young Bey’s giant was nearly done, requiring only assembly—which could not be managed here, as Bijou’s ceilings were not tall enough—and dressing before its animation. The Bey’s man said he would send a send a cart and workman to move the pieces, and Bijou accepted the second third of her payment with graciousness. It had been heavy work—the giant was constructed of the petrified bones of such antediluvian monsters as eroded from the desert mudstones, with the gaps made up in elephant and rhinoceros—and intricate, and Bijou was coming to the opinion that she had not charged enough. But the Bey’s man seemed well-pleased, and soon the monumental heap of silk and wire and jewels and skeleton that crouched in one corner of Bijou’s loft like a child crammed into a shipping container would be standing guard over the city, banded agate eyes in its enormous horned skull, bony fingers curled about the handle of a spiked club taller than the Bey.

  The Bey’s man did not mention the bed or the cage in the corner, and the child remained as cannily concealed as a cat for the duration of both his visit and that of old Madam Oshanka, the Northerner, who had come to collect the Artificed skeleton of her small curly dog, which Bijou had re-dressed in its own tanned, grey-muzzled skin.

  Lupe had watched the process with suspicious lenses, but once it became evident that the small nervous Artifice was not staying, seemed to have accepted its presence without baring jeweled teeth. Hawti, Bijou suspected, had made something of a game of pretending to be about to step on the darting creature—but Bijou was certain that it was a game, for Hawti was perfectly capable of dodging crabs and kittens made of bone and gemstones and precious metal.

  Bijou’s Artifices made old Madam Oshanka nervous, which Bijou found ridiculous, considering what she was carrying from Bijou’s loft cradled in her arms. But if a little fur and padding and glass eyes made a difference—well, so be it.

  Bijou thought of Madam Oshanka as old, but she was ten years younger than Bijou. That didn’t seem significant when Madam Oshanka’s back was bent like a gaff and her hands shivered with every gesture, and she wore so many coats and rugs that if she had not been attended by her coterie of strong young servants, she would have looked more like a carpet-seller’s stall than a great Ordinary lady.

  Bijou showed her out and gestured Hawti to bar the door. Restive, clattering, the elephant did so. With relief, Bijou turned back to her loft, a private space once more. Private—except for the bright eyes and strip of forehead that had appeared above the covers on the bed.

  The child had awakened calm and free of fever. Its knees were drawn up, a fragile barrier. From the silhouette under the blanket, Bijou could tell it held the stump of its arm pressed hard to the ribcage, but its breath came normally, and it had been sensible enough to get its back to the wall.

  It looked like it was going to live. Which meant it was going to need a name. And breakfast.

  “Ambrosias,” Bijou said, “start the tea.” She tromped closer to the bed, waiting for the child to make some sound or begin to withdraw, but it only watched her approach through narrowed eyes. Lupe, which had arrayed itself beside the bed, rose slowly on paws of wired and flexing bone. The child startled.

  “Are you hungry?”

  The child crouched back, left shoulder raised and forward, chin dropped to the collarbones. Protecting its injured arm and throat. Bijou opened her mouth and touched her toothless gums with callused fingertips. Her paws were nearly as deformed as the one she’d amputated from the child, she thought bitterly. If still more functional.

  “Eat,” she said. “Hungry?”

  Just an animal response, crouched and tense, but she noticed that the child feared Lupe far less than it did Bijou herself.

  From the kitchen floated the aromas of stewing couscous and vegetab
les sautéed in oil with saffron and almonds. The child’s head turned. It sniffed deeply and its stomach gave a long, conversational rumble.

  “Right,” Bijou said. “Eat.”

  She turned away, trusting that the further smells of cooking would draw the child from its bed.

  It ate like a mantling falcon, awkwardly crouched over the plate with its left elbow and right stump spread wide and spiky. At first it had just shoved its face into the plate and been shocked to find the food painfully hot, drawing back with a silent frustrated cringe. But it was clever; as soon as it had seen Bijou scooping mouthfuls of couscous onto a bent lime leaf pinched in her cramped hand and blowing on them, it mimicked her actions, shoveling as fast as it could bear, no more chewing its food than would the raptor it resembled. Bijou gummed her own food slowly, appreciating the spices and the aroma of argan oil through dimmed senses.

  They sat chewing suspiciously at one another, Bijou settled on fat cushions and the child huddled on the floor, shivering with a chill across its naked shoulders.

  Bijou, trying potential names inside her head, wondered if there was any way to convince it to wear clothes. Well, one thing at a time. It was clever. It could learn that warmth and shade were portable.

  “Emeraude,” she said aloud.

  The child cocked its head at her like a listening dog.

  “Emeraude,” she said, and pushed her half-finished plate towards it across the floor. She had no appetite these years.

  It crouched a little lower, suspicious. She nudged the plate again. “Emeraude,” she said. “Eat.”

  The leather-wrapped stump of its right arm squeezed so hard against its brown torso that the flesh paled, but the left arm snaked out long and slid the plate closer.

  Not a dog, Bijou decided, watching it.

  Something shyer and more fastidious, wilder and even less certain.

  A jackal-child of the jackal-city.

  There’s more food here than the cub has ever seen, and no-one is trying to snatch it away. The old creature hurt the cub, before, but the cub barely remembers it except in a haze. Now it brings the cub food and soft things to nest in, and none of the other strange bony creatures seem afraid. So maybe the old creature is not an enemy. It’s not very big, anyway, and it moves with deliberation.

  There’s some other creature in the shadows overhead that does the same thing. The cub can hear it there, the slow click of claws on wood every few heartbeats. It might be one of the bony creatures; everything here that does not smell of food or of the old creature or of chemicals smells dusty, musty, like desert-dried bone.

  The wholesome smell of food drives out other considerations. Aromas carried on steam rise as if from the entrails of a fresh kill. But it’s hotter than that, hot enough to sear, so the cub crouches over the plate wishing it dared growl and protect its claim.

  The fever and dizziness are gone, the wounded useless limb no longer a dragging anchor. There’s pain, but it’s bearable pain, except the itch of healing. The cub might gnaw at the healing stump, but no matter how it stretches its neck or twists its shoulder, teeth will neither reach the wound nor penetrate the leather.

  The brothers-and-sisters could do it, for the teeth of the brothers-and-sisters is sharp. The cub has never been as sharp or strong or deft as the brothers-and-sisters. It can run longer, though, and wear down prey as the brothers-and-sisters cannot.

  There is enough food here for all the brothers-and-sisters. The cub should bring some back, except the food is too hot to touch, and too crumbly to carry. It might pack its gullet and then regurgitate, but it doesn’t know where the brothers-and-sisters and the mother can be found, or how to find its way back to them even if it did.

  So it eats, warily, all that its given, gorging until the skin of its stomach stretches uncomfortably. Then it angles itself out on the cushions, panting, and does not protest—not even a weak whine—when the old creature takes the remains of the food away. The cub is too sleepy and warm to be afraid.

  It has to roll to the other side to pillow its head on its foreleg, though. Because the useless one is missing, which is probably why it hurts less now.

  When Bijou heaved herself from the nest of cushions, the child was already twitching in dreams. Its resilience amazed her; the strength of animals, not to dwell in what could have been. Instead, it adapted, accepted, and carried on.

  “Watch it,” she said to Catherine and Lazybones, who peered down from the rafters. Lazybones’ round glittering head swiveled on the deceptively long neck, bent between strange arms. Light caught on the mirror-encrusted shoulderblades.

  The palms of Bijou’s hands were still laced with the network of fine scars she’d inflicted upon herself with the mirrors. For all its soft deliberate dignity, Lazybones was not a creature anyone would care to stroke.

  The child slept on while Ambrosias clattered close and cleared the plates away, while Bijou stomped to her nearest workbench. There, sealed in a shallow-lidded watchglass, lay the shredded petal, brown and curled at the edges. She sparked the lights over the bench and adjusted the reflectors to send brilliant light showering down.

  Jeweler’s tweezers and her scalpels would do for the dissection, though she already suspected what she would find. But it was neither scientifically nor sorcerously responsible to assume the accuracy of one’s speculations.

  Bijou would investigate.

  Blinking in the eye-watering light, hands already aching, Bijou selected her tools. “Lupe,” she called. The wolf trotted over, toenails and bones clattering on stone. Left-handed, Bijou reached down and smoothed the copper-chased skull. “I need your eyes,” she said.

  Lupe reared up, front pawbones on the edge of the bench, and cocked her head at the work surface. The light through her lenses coruscated for a moment before it focused, but then Bijou was looking at a much-enlarged projection of the rose fragment on the surface of her work bench. The projection was large enough to show every pore and vein in the petal, and make out a suggestion of the cellular structure.

  Delicately, she peeled back layers of tissue, the motions of scalpel and tweezers so tiny she could only see them in magnification.

  She found what she was looking for. Between the surfaces of the petal ran tiny threads as pale as moonlight. She scraped them free, returning a few to the watch-glass, and bent close to study the remainder in the projection.

  The silky fibers were the protective, venomous spines of a puss moth caterpillar, and they threaded the structure of the petal as if they had grown there.

  There was only one gardener in whose garden this poisoned blossom might have grown. Kaulas, the Necromancer.

  Days passed, and though autumn drew down around the great city of Messaline, Bijou had no occasion to leave her home or her work. As for the child, Emeraude was surprisingly little trouble. It was fastidious, making the enclosed side garden its toilet until Bijou demonstrated the use of the squatting toilet in the rear garden outbuilding. When it saw Bijou bathing in the old tub, it wanted to play as well. Despite the frustrations of teaching it to keep its stump out of the water, it learned quickly, by mimicry, though Bijou at first despaired of making it stand up and go about on its legs. But once she—with Lucy’s assistance—taught it to recognize the benefit of wearing clothes against the sun and in the night’s chill, it mastered walking erect quickly.

  Its bones were clean within a week.

  Compost kept the corpse-beetles and blowfly larvae at work in the back garden warm and productive, and Bijou had clay ovens to set about for when the nights—inevitably, though only in the deepest part of winter—might dip towards freezing.

  Bijou learned from the bones. As she had suspected, the deformity was not merely the result of an old injury. The bones were warped, and two fingers had had no bones at all. The child had been born with a useless limb, which explained why its mother might have chosen to expose it. How it had survived since was a story about which Bijou could only speculate.

  What she
could not comprehend was how it had run afoul of Kaulas the Necromancer, and what it might mean that she, Bijou, and Brazen the Enchanter had intervened.

  The stitches came out the day after the bones were polished, Emeraude watching curiously while Bijou steadied its arm and Ambrosias snipped and pulled. Emeraude bit its lip once, but remained stoic, and Bijou thought if it could have gotten its head down to the end of its stump it would have licked the blood away.

  The next morning, with moonstone and silver and wire, with some of its own bones and some bones that were better, Bijou began building the child an arm.

  The cub climbs and explores, but it does not try to run. The old creature is gentle and like the mother, bringing food and tending hurts, and it makes a warm soft place for the cub to sleep in. It grumbles to itself and it creaks and lurches when it walks, but the cub is used to old creatures that are cranky. They’re sore and no longer strong, the cub knows, and so one pays no mind to their irritability.

  And anyway, the garden wall is high for a three-legged cub to get over, at least until the cub is strong again.

  But the cub can explore the garden, whose walls bound all sorts of wonders. There are the roses and the palms, the passionflowers now merely huddled vines as winter encroaches. The lemon and lime trees are heavy with fruit in the cold, and once it understands what is wanted, the cub helps the centipede-creature harvest them. It is pleased to help feed the old creature, or, as it is starting to think of it, the old-mother. The limes are stacked in baskets; the lemons salted and packed away in lemon juice to pickle.

  Although the old creature makes that attention-noise—“Emeraude!”—to try to stop it, the cub nevertheless bites through the thin skin of one before it is pierced for pickling, and makes a face. This is food. This could be eaten.

  But for once in its life, the cub is not hungry enough to eat things that taste bad just because they are food.