Archivist Wasp
Page 26
Now the silence was complete. Everyone was staring at Wasp. Her throat felt like she’d eaten sand. She cleared it and kept talking.
“They’re standing here in rags and you’re up out of the snow in a pile of blankets. They sleep on stone, you sleep on a feather bed. Their hands are cracked and callused and raw. Yours are smooth. The townspeople feed you and the upstarts get the scraps. No wonder they hate each other. No wonder they fight each other. No wonder they climb up each other to get out of the pit of this place.”
Wasp turned to the upstarts and pitched her voice as clear and loud as she could, which was not very. “Catchkeep didn’t choose you. Any of you.” She pointed at the Catchkeep-priest. “He did.”
The Catchkeep-priest coughed a laugh. “You can’t seriously be listening to this,” he told the crowd. Some of the crowd laughed back, half-certain. He played to them. “Listen to me. She’s lost her mind. Too much Waste, too much winter. Wasp, sweetness, climb down off it. Nobody’s interested in—”
“I’m interested,” one of the upstarts called out. Wasp recognized that voice. Maybe some of us look at that and see weakness. Maybe some of us see something else. Wasp never did return that blanket. “What’s the harm? It’s just a story. We’re all comfortable.” The upstart smiled up at the Catchkeep-priest. “Unless you have something to hide.”
It bought Wasp another moment of quiet, another moment of no knives flung at her throat. She spoke.
“Maybe Catchkeep’s real and maybe She isn’t. I don’t know. Maybe this knife fell out of the sky and maybe it didn’t. Maybe there was a man, a long time ago, who thought he could talk to the stars, and a girl with a scar on her face who thought those stars chose her. Maybe she picked up the knife and realized it let her hear ghosts, and so she learned to listen. I don’t know when the system fell apart. When it turned into something that calls girls upstarts and sets them at each other’s throats. Something for people like him to hide behind.”
Wasp beckoned with the long knife. “Well, you’re done hiding. I’m calling you out. Stand and face me. Or walk.”
First she thought: Don’t walk. I would love for you not to walk.
Then she realized she didn’t care anymore. Looking at him now only made her tired.
Some of the townspeople still seemed torn between seizing her and hearing her out. She addressed them. “Is he the one removing the ghosts from your houses? Or bringing you ghosts, if you need them?” She looked to the midwife, standing with her hands on her niece’s shoulders. The midwife gave her the shadow of a nod. Probably for the best it didn’t work out, Wasp thought at them. It wasn’t going to end well.
“Is he the one who captures ghosts and learns from them and speaks for them? No. You keep him fed and comfortable when he does nothing. You let him take babies and raise and beat them into more people who keep him fed and comfortable. But as far as you’re concerned, I’m the one who’s a monster. Me and the ghosts I protect you from.”
Foster’s voice went streaking like a comet through her head. “Well, if I’m going to be a monster, I’m going to be my own monster.” She pointed to the upstarts. “And so are they.”
Out of nowhere, the Catchkeep-priest flung another knife. Wasp was half-turned, facing the people. Never should have turned my back on him, she thought wildly. Stupid, stupid—
She hurled her arm up to fend off what she could of the blow—but the blow never came.
The upstart who had been sneaking up to stab her in the back was now standing before her, the Catchkeep-priest’s knife stuck quivering in the makeshift shield on her arm.
The look on the Catchkeep-priest’s face. Wasp would have liked to preserve it in stone and keep it forever. She realized the look on her own face was probably similar.
The upstart eyed him levelly, her voice bitter and thick. “I asked you if it’s true.”
He forced another laugh. “Don’t be stupid, girl, of course it isn’t. Our Wasp here always was a little bit on the—”
“Then where did we come from?” said the upstart who’d lent Wasp the blanket, long ago. “If she’s lying. Tell us that.”
“And our scars,” said another.
“The rest of it’s true enough,” said another, hesitant. “We do all the work.”
“And sleep on stone,” said another one.
“Don’t forget the whippings,” said another.
“Tess died,” another added, softly, staring at her feet. “Because she tried to find her parents.” Her gaze hardened as she raised it. “He killed her. He made us help.” A pause. “She brought me soup one time, when I was sick.”
“And he steals the shrine-offerings people leave for Catchkeep,” said another. “I’ve seen it. I saw a starved old man leave food there and fall down dead the next day in the street, while this one fed the food to the dogs.”
“I saw him take a necklace a girl left,” said another. “She left it and asked Catchkeep to help her sister’s ghost find its way. She said it was all she had left of her.”
Now the townspeople were muttering like the upstarts had been. The upstarts, for their part, were shouting now. It brought the Catchkeep-priest to his feet, a knife in each hand. But he still didn’t come down.
“I’ve wanted to kill you as long as I can remember,” Wasp said softly. “Today, I was ready to say what I just said, tell the upstarts you’re mine, and cut you down.” She shrugged. “But I’m looking at them, and they’re looking at you, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them want something so badly. And, well, nobody’s really ever given them anything before.”
She turned to the upstarts, their knife-hands and their hungry eyes. “I changed my mind. He’s yours.”
Winter passed, and spring came. Ice cracked. Snow melted. Cold mud shot up greenery, then flowers. As the roads became passable, one or two of the upstarts left the Catchkeep-shrine, set off to look for the families they’d been taken from, the lives they should have had. A couple chose instead to start a family of their own. Some dispersed into the town to take up trades: one brought her keen eyes and strong stomach to learn healing from the midwife; another took her muscled back and shoulders to the blacksmith, and learned to turn scavenged scraps into tools. Others learned to bake bread or draw maps or keep bees or brew beer, or took posts at the warn-fires, weapons at the ready, eyes scanning the hills beyond. They found the clay of their lives taking slow shape under their hands.
Others stayed, and some of the ones who had left came back, bringing their new skills and knowledge with them. They divided what of the Catchkeep-priest’s things would help see them through long winters and burned the rest. They scrubbed the living-quarters top to bottom, and aired the whole building out for three days straight, in case any girl-ghosts were still trapped there in the stone of it, but none were seen to leave. They still maintained the shrine, and saw to it that Catchkeep’s pedestal gathered no dust, and that no offerings were subtracted.
For the time being, when the company didn’t chafe her, Wasp stayed with them. In the absence of the Catchkeep-priest, the absence of Archivists and upstarts, they began to call each other by the names they remembered, and those who no longer remembered theirs made up new ones.
Isabel had never before gotten to know the upstarts at all. There’d seemed to be no point. As an upstart herself, she’d looked at them and seen nothing but rivals. As an Archivist, she’d looked at them and seen nothing but her death. Now she learned which one sang under her breath as she swept the floors, which one had an eye for healing plants, which one sleepwalked, which one never learned to read, and which one was willing to take the time to teach her. Which ones couldn’t shake the taste for combat, and sparred in the fields in the moonlight when the nights were warm.
If Catchkeep looked down and noticed the dereliction of their duties, or the absence of Her priest, She never once complained.
When the earth thawed they tended the orchard, tapped sugar maples for syrup, went foraging for wild greens, and plant
ed vegetables, fencing them off from browsing deer. In summer they picked wild blackberries in the woods, and harvested more beans than they could eat, so they dried them for winter. In the autumn there were tiny wild grapes, powdery with yeast, and they made wine, and hunted, and set apples in the sun to dry, and traded for what they could not make or grow themselves. In the winter they never locked their door, and they kept a fire roaring in the great stone hearth, their table big enough and full enough for anyone who wandered in out of the cold.
Sometimes ghosts came, too. Isabel never encountered another that could speak to her, but there were still those with a dying word or a name to repeat, and she wrote them down with diligence and respect. She began bartering for paper-scraps, and learned to soak and pound them into sheets. She learned to make ink, and carve a pen. She sketched every ghost she saw, and recognized none.
Her harvesting-knife was useless now. Like a key handed down across centuries until nobody remembered anymore what lock it belonged to or what door it opened, it had waited, as Foster had waited, until it had fallen into the hands of someone who, not knowing the door, was willing, against all odds, to try and find it. It had gone there and returned, and now it was just a big knife with an outsized hilt and a guard like a sword. Isabel pried out the constellation and unwound the dogleather from the grip, and kept it always sharp and always by her side.
From time to time she wondered whether it would go with her when she died, down to that other world below. Whether it would cut through the fiber of that place, leaving doors she only had to step through to get where she wanted to go. She didn’t allow herself to dwell too long on where that might be.
One day, in late autumn, she was out back of the shrine, building a wooden box for the coming year’s field notes, when she heard footsteps approaching from behind. One pair stopped, then the other. She didn’t need to turn to know who was standing there.
“I suppose you want this back,” she said, touching the knife in her belt.
“Keep it,” said Foster, and in her voice was the wry smile Isabel remembered. “I have my own.” A pause, which Isabel could not read. “You have my thanks. For everything.”
Isabel nodded, stalling. She didn’t know what would happen if she turned. She didn’t trust herself to chance it.
Behind her, she heard Foster stand aside, heard the ghost step forward and draw his sword.
“If you want to come with us,” he said, “it’ll be quick and painless. You have my word.”
Something pulled within her chest, in the place where a silver thread used to be, and Isabel found herself grinning. It fit her face and her feelings badly, but it was either that or cry.
Blinking hard, she stared off into the distance, where even from here she could make out a silvery mass on the lower ledge of Execution Hill. Countless ghosts wandering, toward or from whatever drove them, unhindered by scarred girls with knives who’d thought they understood the world.
From there, her gaze was drawn downward. Toward the shrine outbuildings, the town, the fields they had cleared and planted, the buildings they had built—the thousand ways in which those girls had set their hands together to that world and changed it, or changed themselves, until the one could finally fit comfortably inside the other.
“I’ll hold you to that,” she told him. “But not today.”
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, my thanks go to Ysabeau S. Wilce, patron saint of this book, without whom it would have languished.
I am endlessly grateful to Small Beer Press for taking a chance on Wasp and her specimen when everybody else told me they were unmarketable. My editor, Kelly Link, is the most careful, insightful, and incisive reader I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Any good parts in this book were helped made so by her wizardry; any soggy bits left over are all mine.
Likewise, Kate McKean at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency has proved invaluable in the short time I’ve worked with her, and I’m looking forward to having her in my corner for some time to come.
Thanks also to my amazing first reader crew: Mike and Anita Allen, Patty Templeton, Caitlyn Paxson, Julia Rios, Ysabeau S. Wilce, Autumn Canter, Dominik Parisien, and C.S.E. Cooney. My family chimed in on this one too with interesting and useful perspectives, so thanks also to Matt, Steve, and Char Kornher. Also to everyone else who provided advice and support along the way, or listened to me whining about query letters, finding agents, etc., including but not limited to Francesca Forrest, Erik Amundsen, Jeff VanderMeer, Ellen Kushner, Amal El-Mohtar, Leah Bobet, Sally Harding, and Alex Dally MacFarlane. Apologies and thanks to anyone I may have accidentally left out. You know who you are.
Mike and Anita Allen published my short story “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse,” which eventually, in a very different form, became this book. Thanks again to them, and also to Alex Dally MacFarlane, who reprinted it in The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.
And to Dan Stace, who, despite having never written a word of fiction in his life, remains the best book-brainstormer I’ve ever met. I don’t understand it but I’ve learned by now not to question it. Thanks, dude.
About the Author
Nicole Kornher-Stace lives in New Paltz, NY, with two humans, three ferrets, and more books than strictly necessary. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Archivist Wasp is her second novel. Her website is nicolekornherstace.com.
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