Beneath Ceaseless Skies #106

by Nancy Fulda

  I drew the shutters.

  It’s odd, the way momentum drives us forward in times of uncertainty. I’d imagined wreaking vengeance on the Pahadorans so many times as a boy; had plotted so many schemes to avenge Grandfather’s death. Now that the chance lay before me, I didn’t know what to do besides seize it.

  Should I wait? It would have been safer to leave the manor before destroying the gem. But I knew that now, right now, Tabisha was wearing it. In a few hours, she might have removed it, and all our family’s chances would be gone.

  I lifted a cat-sized statue from a pedestal in the corner of the room, a black marble carving of a mounted hunter. The purple amulet lay delicate and defenseless on the stone tiles of the floor. Mahogany light flickered within it like a baleful eye.

  With strength born from three generations of Mosvin bitterness, I thrust the statue towards the ground. The jewel exploded in a burst of tangible power, and I raised my arms to shield myself from the shards. From the courtyard rose an echoing explosion, and the sickening scent of charred flesh.

  I glanced toward the window.

  Through the slats of the shutters, I saw a courtyard streaked with crimson. Scorch marks marred the wall where Tabisha had stood, and horrified servants clustered around a slender figure, clothed in velvet, whose long black hair had caught against the bushes as she fell.

  A life for a life. A child’s for my father’s. Logic would call it an even trade. But standing alone amidst a sea of splintered glass, I finally understood the heavy price it had cost me.

  I did not linger long. I slipped out of the manor before the gatekeeper heard of the murder and hid in the forest until the search parties left. But her mangled carcass is spewed across my dreams. Red and black, blood and hair; long cat-claw streaks against the back of my eyelids.

  Jeene holds me after the worst nightmares. She never says it, dear heart, never reminds me that she loathed the plan from the beginning. She just presses her cheek against my back and watches with me as the black sky turns silver against the wealthy skyline of our palace.

  I know she hates it here as much as I do. But Father and Cair Saeva could never bear to leave, and I don’t have the heart to leave without them.

  The children, at least, seem happy. They live in the same quarters where Tabisha once played, but they have never asked, and hopefully never will, where the beautifully carved toys came from.

  Now, jolted from sleep by that image I dare not ponder, I thrash beneath the blankets and stare toward the window. A vibrant glow lights the edge of the darkness, but it cannot vanquish my guilt. I think of Lord Pahadoran, gnarled and shivering on his throne. I begin to understand why the canyons of his face seemed so bitter.

  And so we wait, Jeene and I, until the golden sunrise brings sounds of stirring from the servants’ rooms, and the cooks begin to rattle kettles in the kitchens. Soon I must drag myself from the pillows. I will sign edicts and hear petitions, and eat fine bread that tastes like ashes in my mouth, and pretend, until nightfall, that I am content.

  Copyright © 2012 Nancy Fulda

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  Nancyv Fulda is a Hugo and Nebula Nominee, a Phobos Award winner, and a Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award recipient. She is the first (and so far only) female recipient of the Jim Baen Memorial Award. Find more of her work, including her other story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, at www.nancyfulda.com.

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  HOLD A CANDLE TO THE DEVIL

  by Nicole M. Taylor

  If Florence had dreams, it was the sort of thing that would have given her nightmares.

  The girl should have come to her right away. Florence only leaned what she’d gotten into because she heard the other young ladies murmuring and gasping over the girl’s bed.

  They were gathered around her like ghosts of bad things done and unforgotten, white arms and nightgowns and frowning young lady faces. Florence could smell her, sweet like bile.

  “Let me see,” Florence said; she tried to be kind. She always tried to be kind. It did not come naturally to her.

  The girl in the bed was feverish and sweating. Her name was Alice. Apparently in fever madness, she’d tried to cut her own hair, and it was ragged against her grey face and slick neck. Chunks of hair, sprays of dark brown, spread out on her chest and the blankets. She raised her arm limply, gestured towards the bedclothes. Florence realized she didn’t have the strength to lift them.

  Florence sat down next to Alice; the girls around her scattered to let her through and reformed around the two of them again, like a flock of chickens. Florence raised up the blanket. Heat, in waves, and that bile stench, an order of magnitude stronger. Florence swallowed hard. Some of the girls gasped and turned away.

  Alice’s nightgown was soaked and translucent in the middle, as though someone had poured kitchen oil on her. It was tinged pink, but not from blood. Florence lifted the hem of the nightgown delicately; it peeled away from Alice’s body in a way that made Alice grunt and squirm.

  The infection was raging, already black in some spots, mostly green in others. The edges of the letters were so swollen and red that it was nearly unreadable. Nearly. Florence touched her fingertip to the point of the “A;” Alice jolted underneath her. Florence pulled her finger away, shiny with rot.

  It said “Thomas.” He’d used a dirty shaving razor, and he’d cut her so deep Florence could see the dribbling yellow fat underneath her maimed skin.

  One of the other girls, weedy and big-eyed, one who hadn’t turned away or turned green, asked Florence: “Should we tell Miss Em?”

  Florence shook her head. “We aren’t going to tell Miss Em anything. I’ll take care of this.”

  The office was new; Miss Em had given it to Florence just a few weeks ago, just before she had retired to her bed on a permanent basis. It was still filled with the woman’s mementos; trinkets from admirers, flowers she’d allowed to die in a vase on the window.

  Florence sat down on the chair facing the desk, a place she had often occupied and found more comfortable than the identical chair behind the desk. She pressed her knees together until they ached. She imagined that Miss Em was sitting across from her, smiling her kind and toothless smile, telling her just what she should do.

  Florence closed her eyes. She could still smell Alice. When she was eleven and her father shot Elias Barnes, the hired hand, Florence had seen his wound turn green then black like that. Florence’s father had less compassion for Elias than he did for a cow or goat; he let him crawl away wounded and hole up in the barn. “He’ll feel it this way,” Florence’s father said; “he’ll die knowing he done wrong.”

  Florence had snuck out the back door, gone to him with water and blankets that he turned away while the infection burned him alive. She’d watched his skin swell and crack and she’d held his hand while he muttered and babbled. He cried out for his mother, and Florence cried. She was eleven; she didn’t know anything else to do. He’d smelled like Alice, and Florence knew this girl would die just like him without the proper attention. And Florence wasn’t eleven years old anymore.

  “Jerome,” Florence called out. Her voice was hoarse. “Jerome, bring me Thomas DeRoss.”

  Miss Em had asked her about Elias the first time they ever met, though not in so many words.

  “Who was the first man you ever loved?” Miss Em hadn’t been so skinny then. Her hair was shiny and dark; it sat in ringlets on her head like a dessert in a bakery window. Her eyes were clear and bright and only a little hollow underneath. Florence sat in front of her, thirteen years old, road dust ground into her coat and boots and hair. She’d been too afraid to sleep on the streets, so she’d been awake for three days. That was how Miss Em found her, slumped over the pint she’d ordered with the last of her savings in order to have a booth to sit in for a spell.

  “Come with me, little one,” Miss Em had said.

  But she must have been sleepy still, because she had told Miss Em
: “Elias. My daddy’s farm hand. He’s dead now.”

  “What happened?” Miss Em asked her.

  “My momma said he was interfering with me.” Florence ran her tongue along her teeth; how was it that she had never noticed the texture, the contour of them? What strange things to be inside of her.

  Miss Em leaned forward. “Was he?”

  Florence shook her head mutely. She used to sit in the great pile of yellow straw while Elias forked it over the stalls to the farm horses and the one evil-tempered mule. He used to tell her story about the city, where he’d come from. He told her about his little brother and all the scrapes they used to get into.

  Florence had loved him a little. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d tried to kiss her, but he never did, he never did.

  Florence sat across from Miss Em, a young girl but already round of hip and bust. She had a tender, cupid face and men looked at her when she walked. Men had always looked at her.

  Elias never had.

  “Why did your momma say that?”

  Florence was mute. She had never understood her mother. Her mother came from across the sea, from cold and white Sweden. English was her second language and she had never learned how to talk to her daughter. She watched the girl, watched the fullness of her body, the brightness of her eyes. Something in the tilt of her chin that resisted a mother’s love, the good lord’s favor. Florence’s mother distrusted the daughter of her body, doubted her. She knew stories about women-beasts in the forest dark that devoured men, ate souls for their own benefit. And didn’t her boys die? Her baby boys, hadn’t she found them cold and hard as a shank of beef in their bassinets? And hadn’t she put them there warm and thrilling against her? They had sought out her breast and rested their softness, their tiny, mewling mouths against her. They had lived and cooed and stared at her with blue eyes. And then she placed them in her bassinet and they were taken away from her. And still Florence lived. Florence thrived.

  See the way the men looked at her?

  Florence was thirteen; she’d been in the city, sleepless, for three days. She had traveled long before that. Florence couldn’t tell these things to Miss Em, but Miss Em knew all about mothers and daughters. After all, she was a kind of mother herself, and she had so many daughters. Daughters of joy.

  “You’re safe here,” Miss Em told her; “I will take care of you.”

  “There was nothing I could do for him,” Florence said. “It took so long.”

  She didn’t know why she said it. It was a secret that she had never told anyone. “I tried to kill him myself. I tried to choke him, but I wasn’t strong enough or I couldn’t do it right. I tried. He... he cried out. He... stank. I couldn’t....”

  Miss Em rounded the desk, enfolded Florence in her arms. She smelled so good, clean as talcum powder and sweet. Florence rested her face against Miss Em’s shoulder and breathed deeply.

  “Don’t fret, don’t fret.” Miss Em stroked her frayed and tangled hair. “I see a light in you, little one. I don’t pick just anyone, you know.”

  Miss Em pulled away. She was smiling like the madonna.

  “I can teach you so much, Florence.”

  The DeRoss boy, Thomas, had a face like curdled milk; he looked about thirteen years old though Florence knew him to be near twenty and still raising hell with whatever stipend his steel-money daddy saw fit to give him. “You can’t even grow whiskers,” Florence said, shaking her head at him. “What the hell did you need a razor for?”

  The boy’s hands fumbled in his lap, just itching to reach for his wallet.

  Miss Em had always told Florence that it was important to keep their more affluent clients happy. “Money can buy a certain latitude,” she said. But she always told Florence that there couldn’t be no hurting of the girls. “We can’t teach them that we’re cheap,” Miss Em said, “because we are terribly expensive.”

  The boy looked up at Jerome, a wordless plea for clemency. Jerome didn’t meet his eyes.

  “You’re gonna need to pay attention to me,” Florence said, leaning forward and putting out her cigarette on the taunt flesh of the boy’s knee. She burned a hole through his trousers and into his skin. He screamed and the smoke rose. Florence fished another cigarette out of her delicate silver case.

  “You gotta know you’ve done wrong.” Florence stared at the boy. He was grasping his knee with both hands and staring at it in disbelieving horror.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded, still holding his knee as if to staunch a geyser of blood.

  Florence looked to Jerome, who moved over silently to stand behind the boy’s chair. He placed his big hands on the boy’s shoulders. “What, folks can’t just hurt you for no reason? That ain’t okay?”

  The boy looked at her, outraged. He even strained a little against Jerome, as if he were going to jump up and come at Florence. “It’s not like I cut up her face or anything.”

  Florence stared at him. Under her gaze, he relaxed, seemed to grow smaller, even. “You think men want to be with a girl who’s got another man’s named carved in her belly? Ain’t so good for business, son.”

  Thomas leaned as far forward as Jerome would let him. His face was sincere, sweating. “I just wanted her to be mine, not to go off with the others. That’s all I wanted. I like her. I like Alice.” He smiled at Florence. “I wouldn’t pick just any girl.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a mite selfish?” Florence realized that she had yet to light her cigarette, was still holding it cold and inert in her hand. She reached for her lighter slowly, all her movements as conscious and controlled as a ballet dancer’s.

  The boy stared at her. Florence couldn’t tell if he was quelled or just not terribly bright. She lit her cigarette. Smoke gathered heavy in her lungs.

  The boy drew himself up, crossed his leg over the burned one as if to hide it. He looked like a fine and upstanding young man. He smiled all glossy at Florence. “I realize I’ve been careless,” he said, “and I apologize for that.” He spread his hands like a king offering pardons. “I’ll pay for her,” said Thomas DeRoss.

  Florence blew her smoke out towards him; it wreathed him in blue. “You certainly will,” she said.

  Jerome didn’t trust Florence. He didn’t trust any whores, not really. Living day in and day out in a cathouse opened a man’s eyes to certain things. Like a butcher who don’t eat meat. Jerome wasn’t fooled by outsides. But Jerome loved Miss Em.

  Miss Em had rescued him when he was a teenager, a mutt with no father and a dead mother; he’d wound up at a place like Miss Em’s, but not as good. Not as good at all. Miss Em knew the madam there, and when Jerome aged out, got a man’s body and a smashy unbeautiful face from one too many fights, Miss Em took him on. Jerome was grateful; he’d always hated the heaviness of the men and how they pushed the air out of him. The taste and the muttering whispers. The other boys used to beat him down for being a nellie. Jerome wasn’t a sodomite; Jerome wasn’t anything at all.

  Until Jerome was Miss Em’s bodyguard.

  She never made him do fuck-work for her and she didn’t use anybody, boys or girls, younger than thirteen (though she did have a few that looked uncommon young, because Miss Em never did like to cut herself out of a market if she could manage it). Miss Em was good; Miss Em was the only one who’d ever been good to him. So when she said: “Florence is in charge now,” Jerome listened to her. But he didn’t like it.

  Florence sat in Miss Em’s desk and looked small and wrong there. She was awful white. “I’m gonna fix him,” she said softly. “Miss Em taught me how.”

  She looked up at Jerome, uncertain. It wasn’t Jerome’s job to interfere. He was there to keep the order and keep his mouth shut. Those were things he was good at. But Florence was very white and she looked awful young.

  “Miss Em’ll be needing her supper soon,” Jerome suggested. Florence nodded, taking the hint. Miss Em wasn’t dead, just sick. Someday she’d get well and she’d come back and take care of t
hem all. She could tell Florence what to do; she always did know.

  “Miss Em?” Florence called softly from the doorway. It was dark in the room, and in the darkness, something stirred. The air was thick with a warm, moldy scent and the only light came from the narrow crack between the room’s only window and its shade. The light drew a thin line on the floor and illuminated the thick layer of gray dust and discarded bedroom slippers. They looked forlorn lying there. Soulless and unoccupied. Florence kicked them underneath the bed as she crossed the room.

  Florence had suggested sending a girl up here to clean the room, clear out the dust at least, but Miss Em had refused. “Don’t you know that the light hurts my eyes? And they are all like a troop of elephants, those girls. Not a one of them walks like a lady.” And so the dust pillowed upon itself.

  The woman—perhaps it was a woman—in the bed was fragile and hollow as a teacup. Her white hair wisped and curled around her skull, and her eyes looked like stones dropped in deep snow. She opened her mouth and made a weak, kitten-ish sound. Florence nodded and bent to adjust her pillow.

  Florence touched her arm; the skin was stretched tight. If she exerted just a little bit of pressure, she thought she might tear through, expose what could only be the driest of bones. Florence was careful with her, like a child, like something defenseless and beloved. She sometimes wondered if this was the way that daughters were supposed to be with their mothers; if they lingered at their bedsides and attended to their every need. Florence wondered if what she felt when she looked at the brittle seashell whorl of Miss Em’s ear and the roundness of her skull, visible through her hair, was love.

  Florence cradled a bowl of broth in her lap. She lifted small spoonfuls into Miss Em’s eager, babyish mouth. There was something obscene about her lips, husk-dry and grasping. Florence stopped after a few bites.