by IGMS
The sleeper moved toward the gate. "I still don't understand!"
"It's a dream!" she called in exasperation. "You're not supposed to understand."
The train roared into the station and he leapt aboard at the last moment. As it pulled out, he awoke in his bed at home. It was morning, and his wife was already up.
"Sleep well, hon?" she asked, gathering laundry.
"For a billion years, I thought, but I feel . . . wonderful."
"Mmm. I tossed and turned all night. Honey," she said, putting the laundry basket down, "I know this is your day off, and you always shut yourself away in your study to work on your day off, but wouldn't it be nice if we could just, maybe, go for a drive together?"
He considered this. "Where?"
"Anywhere. It doesn't matter."
The sleeper nodded. "Yes, I'd like that a lot. Let's do it." And he leapt out of bed and dressed enthusiastically, as the twin suns shown brightly.
Coda: Tales Without Tails
There once was a man who thought of himself as a fabulist. He wrote parables and allegories; teaching stories. He was reluctant, though, to add morals to his tales, loath to impose his principles on others. Instead, he left it to the readers to come to their own conclusions about the enigmas he handed them. This, he felt, would encourage them to engage with his tales in ways he could never expect.
So he wrote his fables about Time Dragons, and Truth, and then set them loose to see what would come of them. They neither disappeared nor shone brightly, as is true of most fables, and he never learned of their destinies; oddly enough this added to his sense of fulfillment.
Never famous, never celebrated; he was nevertheless content.
Golden Chaos
by M.K. Hutchins
Artwork by Anna Repp
* * *
Being near Ingrid was the only good thing about living in a God-neglected frozen wasteland. Her face was round as the moon -- a soft, pleasant face that suggested her cooking encouraged second helpings. Her face didn't lie: light rye breads, sweet poached fruit, elk and wild onion stew that made my beard grow. Well, the bit of a beard I had. Ingrid always laughed and teased when she caught me finger-combing the handful of hairs sticking from my face. Her laugh -- that was pure silver. For too long, she'd slaved away under Arbiter Elof's guardianship. The day I signed a contract with Elof and became Ingrid's betrothed was the happiest day of my life.
The next day was the worst.
I clambered down the loft, picking bits of straw from my clothes. Grandma stirred something on the hearth. "Breakfast for you? Your folks are already off preparing the cellars."
"Rob's helping them?" Other than Grandma and me, my family's one-room house was empty.
She smiled fondly. "No. He woke early and asked me some questions about my days in the Confederate Ithena. He left before anyone else woke up. Don't think your folks realize he's not still sleeping in the loft."
I groaned inside. Grandma had traveled with the merchant caravans before she married Grandpa -- she was one of the rare people who'd chosen to live in Ogynan's frozen lands. "Your stories bring out the worst in Rob. I wish you'd stop."
"The worst?" She raised an eyebrow, pulling a trail of wrinkles with it. "He's a curious boy. No harm in that."
"Curious is an understatement," I muttered.
Grandma dropped some wild rye berries into her pot. "And worst seemed like an exaggeration. We're even."
"Where's Rob?" I asked again, already tired.
Grandma shrugged. "Why not leave him alone?"
"Because it'll lead to more quarreling." My parents had spent all of dinner last night chastising Rob for shirking chores, but lecturing Rob was like lecturing a glacier. He never seemed to hear. Then Grandma chided them for being so harsh on him. Everyone went to bed cross.
Well, everyone except Rob. He went to bed oblivious.
"Please, Grandma," I pleaded.
"Always the peacemaker." Grandma mumbled that like it was an insult. She pursed her lips. "He's up by the border between us and the Confederacy. West of the ice-lanes, if he didn't get distracted."
That was a pretty big if. I grabbed a flat of rye bread -- nothing like my Ingrid's -- and gnawed it as I hurried outside.
Snow blanked the sod roofs and the ground, giving the village a pearly, sparkling veneer. Too bad the lumpy wattle-and-daub walls remained visible.
I passed several sleds already running loads down the ice-lanes. My gut twisted. Rob and I should be running loads ourselves. I had a bride-price to pay. No work, no money, no Ingrid.
I veered west and, sure as snow, Rob crouched by the border. Even though he was fully seventeen, from a distance his thin frame made him look more like ten. The snow ended in a sharp line at the border. On the Confederacy's side, lush grasses and tiny yellow autumn flowers blanketed every hillock.
Rob meticulously lined purple-black elderberries right along the border, but they all rolled back onto the snow or into the grass. He must have been at it for some time -- a half-dozen neglected berries on the Confederacy side had already defrosted.
"Rob," I said gently, "it's time to get to work."
Another finicky berry rolled away. Rob mumbled under his breath and gingerly placed the berry back with its fellows.
"Rob," I tried a little louder. No response. I scooped up the berries he was fiddling with. "Rob!"
He blinked up at me, then smiled, completely unruffled. "Oh good. I thought they might have somehow rolled upward. Hi, Trygve. Those are seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Did you want to try?"
"You numbered them?"
He shrugged. "Mother named you."
I peered at him, but he just stared back without explanation.
"Rob, that didn't make sense."
"Numbers and names are the same thing. They make things easier to keep track of."
I sighed and dumped the elderberries into his hands. "What are you doing this time?"
"Grandma told me about a man who ate hemlock. The Confederate Ithena has a Goddess of Hemlock, so they can prepare it as a medicine for arthritis. But then an arthritis sufferer stood on the border between the Confederacy and the Teuloc Nations. His body seized up and he died. Fascinating, huh?"
"What does that have to do with berries?"
"Not berries, borders." Rob shook his head. "Was the hemlock still medicinal on the Confederacy side? After all, having half an unpoisoned body would still kill him."
I stared at Rob, not sure if he was brilliant or broken. But I hadn't come to encourage his strange fixations. "Do you remember last night? How mad everyone was? If we get to work now, Mother and Father won't know that you ran off again."
"I'm trying to see if I can get half a berry to freeze." He spoke as calmly as if I hadn't mentioned last night. "Have you ever really thought about borders?"
"No." We didn't have time for this.
"It's easy to see that gods affect geographical areas. Ogynan, God of Freezing, over here," he gestured at the snow, "and the Confederacy's pantheon over there." He waved at the grass and flowers. "But what if something's in both? Would it be half-frozen and half-thawed? Or do Gods and Goddess only affect discrete objects? And if it is discrete, do they affect anything so much as touching their geographical area, or does it have to be more than halfway inside?"
When he was younger, Mother and Father told each other that Rob would grow out of these absent-minded meanderings. That he'd settle.
They didn't say that anymore.
Rob started drawing with a stick in the snow, a little map with the Confederate Ithena and the Chaos lands sandwiching us -- Ogynan's people, the frozen ones who have to barter for everything except ice.
"One day," Rob said, "when I travel like Grandma did, I'm going to test all the borders. Do you think they all work the same?"
His words stabbed me. Rob would never travel. No merchant would hire him, and we didn't have the money to buy him a Confederate citizen's contract.
"
I wish Grandma would stop telling you stories."
"Why?" He blinked at me.
I didn't have the heart to tell him -- again -- that he'd always live here.
Map finished, Rob crouched back down and gently laid his elderberries along the border. 'That's eight . . . you're eleven . . . there we go. Just as we started."
But of course the berries kept rolling.
"Where did you get those?" I asked, but Rob ignored me and kept fiddling. I sighed. "That's never going to work."
He pursed his lips. "Well, I've only failed to set a berry on the border two hundred and seventy-eight times. Never seems like a stretch. But yes, blackberries would be better. They'd stay put."
"It's never going to work and you'll get an onslaught of hail at dinner tonight if we don't get to work."
"Hail?" Rob blinked. "Is something wrong with the roof again?"
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "It's an idiom." How could I make him understand? "Mother and Father are already preparing the ice cellars. It's not an easy job, scraping the walls to uniformity. And when you wander away, they feel like . . ."
"You've pinched your nose like that twelve and a half times this week," Rob said. "Does it make it easier to think? I've tried it, but didn't notice any difference."
So much for explaining our parents' frustration. "Half?"
"Three times you reached up and stopped partway through. Maybe half isn't a very accurate description." Rob frowned, his eyebrows pulling together.
I sighed. "Rob, your thoughts are always off in their own world. C'mon." Gently, I pulled him to his feet. "Time for work."
Rob blinked. "Work?"
"Yes, work." I shook my head, but I couldn't help smiling at him -- big brown eyes, uncombed hair sticking out to the side like a bird's wing. He was my little brother, and if I didn't watch out for him, no one would. "If we don't hurry with our sled, there won't be any contracts left for us. C'mon. I need good contracts to pay Ingrid's bride price."
"Ingrid's nice. She shares her bread with me sometimes."
"I know." She was one of the few people who treated Rob like a human being instead of a nuisance -- which was one more reason to love her.
"After the sleds, then we'll come back with blackberries?" Rob asked. "I'd like ten of them. We should number them thirteen through twenty-three so they start and end happy."
I sighed. "Does playing with berries matter? All we need to know is that the Confederacy will pay us to store their surplus because we have the God of Freezing and their massive pantheon doesn't. What happens at the exact border isn't important."
"Important?" Rob stared at me like I'd murdered all twelve elderberries and condemned them to a shallow grave.
"Fine," I said as we headed back toward the village, "I'll think about it."
Rob scuffed his feet in the snow. "That always means no."
We grabbed our sled from where it hung inside our hut. Somewhere in the world, there's a Goddess of Sleds, but she doesn't know us. These sleds were rough contraptions -- elk hide folded around slats of wood, as long and wide as I was tall. Rob took one of the ropes, I took the other, and we jogged up through the village. About a thousand of us eked out a living here, in the only settlement Ogynan's Land could support.
"Do you think," Rob began, "that it's possible to contrive some kind of slick, ice-like surface in the Confederacy that our sled could run on?"
"Can you try to focus on the present?" I asked.
"Hmm." Rob paused. "The patch on your coat has forty-two stitches. Unless you don't count the broken stitch. So, forty-one. Unless you're looking at it from the inside, where you can't see the break. Then it's forty-three -- since the starting and ending knots are on the inside. Unless you don't count those. Then there's still forty-one on the inside, just like the outside."
Rob had a way of responding just as requested and never as anticipated. At least he was smiling, looking happy to be out and pulling the sled with me.
Others with their sleds maneuvered past us on the ice-lanes. Most of them ignored us, but our neighbors, the siblings Kettil and Nea, slowed long enough for Nea to scoop up a snowball. She lobbed it at us.
I tried to swat it down, but it hit Rob square in the face.
"Slush-brain!" Kettil shouted. They laughed like he'd said something clever, then hurried downhill. They were both older than Rob; you'd think they could come up with something better.
"You're both idiots!" I shouted back. Then I helped Rob brush his face off.
Rob blinked wetly. "Is it snowing?"
My insides wrenched. At least Kettil and Nea were too far away to hear that. I didn't answer.
"When I'm off exploring the world, I wonder if I'll find anywhere else with snow. Do you think the caravans will hire me next year?" Rob asked.
Next year meant he'd already been rejected this year. The merchants were right not to hire him -- his own family could barely take care of him -- but it still left my stomach sour. I placed a hand on his shoulder. "You'll always be my brother. You know that, right?"
Rob's face scrunched up. "How could I not be? Unless somewhere there's a God of Time that allows you to go back and change my parentage . . ." he trailed off. "Do you think there is? A God of Time, I mean."
"I've never heard of one."
"That's not the same thing," Rob said.
I didn't know how to respond to that, so we started pulling the sled uphill again. Soon enough, we reached the border, where the broad, main ice-lane ended in a neat line. Tent after tent crammed the Confederacy side, all over their autumn grass. I jogged to a promising-looking one and told Rob to wait with the sled.
I bartered with a hawk-eyed, matronly woman with crates and crates of straw-packed berries behind her. Eventually we settled on a decent rate -- half payment up-front, half upon return of the berries -- and I stamped my thumb to the contract. Rob and I loaded up the sled.
The first trip went well. And the third and the sixth. Mother and Father unloaded at the cellars -- ice-lined rooms built half-underground. From the outside, the waist-high roof made it look like the snow was trying to swallow it whole. The lines of ire and frustration were already melting from my parents' faces. They could never stay mad at Rob for long.
My fingers were numb by the time Rob and I loaded the last of the hawk-eyed woman's berries, but I couldn't stop grinning. Tonight we'd actually eat dinner like a normal, happy family. And in two weeks, Ingrid would be part of that family.
We eased the sled onto the ice-lane. She creaked a bit, then whispered as the pull of the earth and the smoothness of the ice did its work. I ran along one side, Rob on the other. Snow began to fall, just baby's breath -- tiny, fluffy flakes.
We passed Arbiter Elof's grand home. Ingrid was outside, scrapping ice off the eaves. I think she winked at me. My stomach fluttered.
Then I noticed my sled was drifting across the lane, toward me.
"Tug!" I shouted to Rob. He ran outward with his rope, pulling the sled straight.
Maybe it was all the loads we'd done, but as we came down the final stretch, the sled jerked against my rope. A slick, slushy ice-lane can do that. Or maybe I'd loaded it too high.
"Run up!" I shouted, sprinting uphill to slow the sled before it crashed into our cellars.
The rope nearly yanked my arms from their sockets. Then it ripped straight through my mittens. My innards froze solid as I watched it spin, watched the back corner crash into the low ceiling of the cellar, watched those blood-red berries spill over the snow.
It took me another long moment to understand. Rob stood a ways off, staring up at the sky, at the thrice-cursed snowflakes. I'd been the only one running up.
We managed to patch the cellar wall with snow and ice, but the sled was kindling. I tried to borrow one, but as expected, nobody could spare a sled this time of year. No one had extra wood planks, either.
Father, Rob, and I felled a tree, but it took a week to saw it into something useable. By then, the rest of the co
ntracts were gone, the Confederates' surplus safely in others' cellars.
I sat on our roof, staring out at Arbiter Elof's sprawling house. At the end of sled season, we always bought things we needed and couldn't make ourselves from the Confederates. Wool. Real wheat -- not the wild rye that grows here. Looms. We only have one god, and he's just good at making us all cold.
My breath swirled in front of me. Mother had sold everything extra we owned -- a shirt, her favorite hairpin, some wood carvings -- but we had to spend all of it on buying food for winter. I didn't have the bride-price I'd promised Arbiter Elof.
Rob climbed the snow drift up next to me. I wanted to punch him off.
"Mm sorry. Very sorry."
"You come up with that grand speech yourself?" I snapped. Part of me felt horrible for being sharp with him, and the other part wanted to scream so that maybe -- maybe this once -- he'd understand how badly he'd messed up.
"No. Grandma helped me." He stared down at his hands.
I looked away from the Arbiter's, into the black smear of the Chaos beyond our village, where no one lived, where no gods reigned or created Order. "I'm supposed to get married in a week."
"To Ingrid, right?"
"Icestorms," I cursed. "When I don't have the money I promised, do you know what that makes me?"
"Single."
"A contract-breaker. Do you know what happens to contract-breakers?"
"Contracts are Order. Breaking them invites Chaos."
He never could focus on the immediate. "And to make sure Order keeps reigning in the village, I'll be exiled into the Chaos."
People who step into the Chaos don't usually turn inside-out or have their clothes eat their eyeballs -- people have a bit of Order in them to keep themselves and what they're touching together -- but the land does whatever it wants. Grandpa went into the Chaos once and came out with a gaping wound in his chest and a nugget of gold in his hand. He said triangles attacked him. He was insane for the rest of his life, which admittedly wasn't long. Father was a tyke when it happened, but Grandma told the story often.