by Amber Sparks
I went to my father, tried to plead with him, but the bees left my lips and my father, horrified, pronounced me a demon. She smiled, and nodded, and summoned her minions, those terrible dark hulking things. They circled me and grabbed me and their hands hurt like ice. They did terrible things to me, and when they had finished, they wiped the blood on their pinstriped trousers and drove my body to the shore. And there they released me, gave me to the waves to claim and keep.
But I was not dead, not quite. My breath rippled the water, my remaining fears flew straight up like a flare, a bright column of stars. I was mute and all alone, underneath the cold moon, on the deserted white road it shone over the sea. The thunder—hers or nature’s, I could not tell—was deafening and I flung myself forward, seeing no land in sight, hearing no sound that could save me. At last, just before the end of my strength had come, I smashed against a tall rock, and I half-clambered, half-floated onto it and collapsed over its welcome solid stern.
Suddenly a single white feather landed beside me. As I gazed up, I saw seven swans winging down, furiously beating against the winds, coming to land neatly in a circle around me. I was surrounded again, but this time by my brothers, my poor, poor brothers, just boys, and how I wept to see them changed so, and how they wept to see me broken so, and how we stayed on that rock for many days, exhausted and alone and utterly devoid of hope or home. They brought me fish and fresh water to build back my strength, and the tears they wept healed my wounds and wore away my scars. And on the seventh day, I woke, healthy and whole, to find my brothers human and solemn and sleeping beside me.
I woke them, unable to speak for the spell on me, but shaking them and humming and grunting with a sort of primitive delight. My eldest brother shouted and smiled, but the youngest frowned and told me this would only last a day. On the last day of each month, he said, the witch had told him they would spend the day as humans once more—not out of kindness, but out of cruelty, so that they would always know the terrible thing that had happened and would remember the human bodies they could never possess again. We wept again this time, and yet again when I shook my head and tried to speak and the bees escaped their prison. We knew I must be parted from my brothers during the day, for they must hunt upon the water and I must live upon the land. And so they brought a cast-off fishing net, and carried me in it to the edge of the water, where I was able to stand and walk and search for a place to live. I found a sort of a cave at the edge, in a little grotto, and in it I made a home, as best I could, and spent the days sleeping and dreaming of music and sunshine and my brothers and I as we were. And at night I lay near the water, to watch over my brother-swans as they nestled their heads in their necks and floated their way to a sad, undreaming sleep.
All the while, the witch was building her city. Her fortress of stone stood at the base of our village, with ten enormous guns to guard it and ten thousand goons to defend it. Our castle became a prison, and the villagers who hadn’t fled one by one started to disappear inside it. The first to go were the fanatics, then the political dissidents, but eventually a problem arose: she needed an army to go east and take back outposts that had been ours in my great-great-grandfather’s time. So the peasants started disappearing, too, but some were able to get messages out and usually they said simply “GONE EAST TO FIGHT.”
And so the villagers began to hide. They built rabbit-like warrens and underground dens; they went south and dug caves there, or went further south to the next kingdom. The artists fled, the musicians fled, the actors fled, the politicians fled, the merchants and craftsmen fled, and our city was finally empty and silent. But she was not content with this. She would have subjects to worship her, an army to command. And so at last she began to build her ghosts. An army of chemically broken once-bodies, she build them of the newly dead, the long-dead, and even the inhuman-dead—snouts and hooves and long hairy tails hooked to human arms and legs and faces. It became not uncommon to see a soldier with the head of a sheep, or a goat, or a bull. The animal eyes rolled in terror and the nostrils snorted in short bursts and the bellows of beastly fear groaned from furry, foam-covered muzzles. But the bespelled human body marched on, and on, and on, off to certain sacrifice in the east. The kings that ruled there were horrified by the black magic advancing on their kingdoms, and they ordered that any animal-man captured alive was to be staked through the heart and decapitated immediately. Then the body and head would be burned in a pit, setting the poor souls at rest once more.
But despite the brutality of these measures, the witch was still winning. She could conjure endless soldiers from the dead, enough to circle the world and back again. By day she sat in her throne room and traced their routes on maps and laughed, bare throat thrown back, barbed wire stretched around her throne for protection. By night she threw lavish, wicked parties for all the humans she had in her power, the ones who had remained fixed by her charms. Her court feasted every night for hours, on course after course, while the rest of the kingdom starved: ground meat in spiced wine sauce; meatballs in aspic; pork pottage; bladders full of eggs, pepper, cloves, currants, dates, and sugar in a rich sauce; roast venison, baby rabbit, stork, crane, buzzard, peacock, partridge, woodcock, egret; a course of martinets baked in quinces; wine, apples, and pears with sugar and syrup fruit compote; cherries and grapes; and finally a cheese course with spiced red wine and wafers. Where she got all of this abundance, no one knew, but by the lean look of her court much of it must have been enchanted.
After these feasts, she held elaborate masked balls with champagne fountains, and hired jazz bands to play wild, whirling tunes. Speakers were placed in the courtyard to carry the sound of the revelry far and wide. Handsome men and beautiful women danced until dawn in tails and beads and sequins. In the shadows of the halls and courtyard, bodies tangled in hot, animal passions, sometimes three and four and ten or twenty. Sometimes these orgies went on for days, it was rumored. But, some said, if you removed the participants’ masks, you would see red eyes, haggard faces, sweat-soaked brows and deathly pallor. Help us, they would mouth, cracked, bleeding lips working around the hopeless words.
One of these nights, as I slept on the cold ground near the water, I could hear the music and see their poor faces, these trapped souls. I dreamt of their pleas, and her laughter, and I heard her then, clear as day, whisper the secret of my release into my father’s unhearing ear. She told him he must order all the flax in the kingdom brought and burned, for if I was ever able to weave seven shirts of the stuff–one for each of my brothers—they would return to human form and all her magic would be undone. In the dream, my puppet-father nodded, and I cringed as she kissed his lifeless lips, licking at the bits of soul that still cling there, like strands of honey. She smiled, all red mouth and sharp teeth and white, white face like the coldest moon. And I woke and knew exactly what I must do.
We cannot wait for mercy to fall from heaven, I told my brothers. They flew up to avoid the bees and gave me swanlike, skeptical stares when I described my dream, each syllable stinging my lips like needle pricks. But should we do nothing, I cried, and I think then they knew it was harder for me than it was for them; harder for the human to spend a lifetime waiting than for the immediate needs of the animal creatures to be met. And so when the sun left the sky and the trees drank from the earth, when brimstone pools ringed the cave where I lay, my brothers would gather the flax I needed from the farthest reaches, leaving it for me to find in neat piles when I woke. And so I began to weave, and so we began to hope.
In the beginning, the cave seemed a haunted place, almost an old abandoned drawing room, grown oppressive with damp and rot. I heard laughing. Bats swept unseen overhead like ghosts; cobwebs grew thick over the walls like damask drapery. The air was dark and heavy, full of a strange animal musk I couldn’t place—rather like a long-dead lady’s perfume.
But eventually we grew to understand one another, my cave and I. I grew comfortable, unafraid, trusted to fate and my task. And I went on doing all I co
uld to plait the flax and weave the shirts, my hands a mess of cuts and oozing sores, my hair a tangled, filthy mat. I used the laces of my boots to knot it back, and then eventually I lost my boots, too, and went barefoot in the wild. My feet grew callused and hard, my lips grew swollen and red from the occasional uttered sound and ensuing stings. I must have looked more animal than human to any passersby, though I never saw any other humans in this secluded place. Not until the day the foreign king drove through.
His car was a shiny gray, sleek and modern and so out of place in this wild, ancient wood. It looked like an industrial beast fleeing unthinkable places, the new cowering from the oldest things of the world. And the man who drove it belonged in a very modern magazine; he was all black hair and sharp lines and tan, so tan and healthy it hurt my sick eyes to look for too long. It was like looking at the sun. I wondered, briefly, madly, if I was gazing at some incarnation of Apollo and his chariot, lighting my woods for a moment on their way to somewhere else. But then he stopped his car. He and his companion, a short man with kind eyes, who reminded me of my smallest brother. They got out of the car and ran to where I was frozen in the act of picking the nettles for the shirts. Apollo-who-was-not-Apollo tilted his head to the side and did the thing men do when they decide they are falling in love. And I dropped my flax nettles, horrified, and ran back to the cave in hopes of losing these invaders.
They followed me, of course, and used their artificial light to find their way down the dark. And you know, everyone knows, how the story unfolds when a man decides he is in love. A very stupid man, clearly; who decides to love a wild and probable imbecile, a feral child scraping the ground for plant scraps? But men in the throes of their own passion do odd things. And this, of course, was our neighboring king, more used to following his passions than most. So you can guess, then, that he was the poor sort of king that leaves the running of his kingdom to others and spends his days hunting deer and fox and women with equal aplomb. So you can guess, then, how he took me, against the frowns and sager advice of his friend. You can guess how delighted he was by my refusal to speak, by the acquiescence signaled by the absence of a “no.” You can guess, I’m sure, that after the bath, and the bandages, and the damask silk and pearls, and the fawning court ladies, and the leering court men—You wear those robes like a courtesan—and through it all, my weeping, weeping, weeping over my lost flax shirts, and my chance of saving my poor brothers gone for now if not for good—you can guess how he took me, how he stripped me of those new robes like an unwrapped present and how he hurt me terribly, fiercely, and how in his supreme arrogance he took my tears for gratitude and licked them with his neat pink tongue like a panther. Don’t cry, he said, kindly, I suppose. This happiness will last, he said. And just like that, never mind the society ladies, the royal heirs lined up for the chance at his hand, never mind his father’s wish that he marry a foreign princess—he disappointed court and country alike and married the wild young thing he’d found in the wood.
It was a danger from the start and he never saw it. It made people angry, and angry people are apt to start rumors that other angry people want to believe. It soon got around, even to my sheltered ears, that I was a wood spirit, an evil one, and that I spent half my time in fox shape and half in human shape. It was whispered that I had bewitched His Majesty. It was whispered that I turned him into a boar when he slept. It was whispered that I stole a piece of his soul every time he made love to me. And why not? I supposed it was no odder than the truth; and I was, yes, bewitched. I knew I could never, never let myself try to speak in front of these people, or they would burn me for witchcraft for sure.
I kept trying to get out to the cave, but I was virtually under lock and key. It was a large, modern kingdom, much less rustic than ours, and court life was quite structured. You were never, ever alone. Ladies and servants and hangers-on, and yet you were always lonely. The only person I wasn’t lonely with was the King’s friend, who reminded me so much of my youngest brother. He was very tender with me, and always made time to stop and talk to me in my walks through the gardens, or to take me out for drives because he knew how much I missed my wood. Though he thought I’d been there always, of course. I was glad of these trips, and I even liked the car—I had never ridden in one before and was surprised at how exhilarating the feeling of speed could be. The King never minded these outings—he spent most of his time hunting, and, I suppose, whoring and drinking. One late night when very drunk he forced open my mouth and pulled out my tongue. He told me there was nothing so wrong with me and demanded to know why I couldn’t speak. I shook my head, again and again, and he said he would put my mouth to better use instead then. He wrapped my hair around his fist, around, and around, like a skein, and forced me to my knees, and I thought then of my poor brothers, doomed to fly over the waves for their long or short lives. Would they live as long as men, or as long as swans? How long do swans live? How long would I, with this brutish husband and a court composed of jealousy and lies?
Not long, not long as it happened, and it happened so quickly I am still dizzy now as I am tied to the stake. The thing I feared: in my sleep I spoke, or tried to, and my husband woke to swarms of bees flooding from my mouth and stinging his naked flesh. I was quickly denounced and dragged off, my hair shorn, a rough cotton gown thrown over me—and just when I’d given up all hope, sent up a silent message on the winds to my poor brothers—there in the prison with me, unbelievably, were my flaxen shirts and a large pile of nettles beside them! The jailor laughed and said that poor kind friend of the King’s, he had brought them, for he knew how important they had been to me. He thought perhaps they would comfort me in my final hours. Though, added the jailor, you haven’t got many more hours, witch—they’ll be burning you at dawn. I made myself weave faster than I ever had before. I would save my brothers if I could not save myself. And I have been weeping and weaving; through the bumpy, sickening cart ride to the burning place; through the surprising heavy pain of the apples and pears and other rotten fruit heaved at me; through the cries of “witch,” “harlot,” “burn her,” as the cart passed the throngs of villagers gathered to watch the fire—through all this I wove and I wept and I prayed to any god who would hear me to let me finish my work. And as they tie me to the stake I am on the very last shirt, and as they light the faggots below me, seven large, lovely white swans suddenly sail over the crowd and land in a circle surrounding me. I wince as the smoke hits my eyes and blindly I throw the flaxen shirts through the air, even the unfinished one. And because magic always works that way, they land, yes, they float, yes, softly over the heads of the swans and their feathers, and the shirts transform them at once into my dear handsome brothers again. All except for my youngest brother, whose shirt was unfinished and so still has a swan’s wing instead of a man’s arm, though other than that he is whole and human and hale. And then the flames flicker and fail, and the crowd gasps and slowly, slowly they began to bow, in waves they bow before these men they know now to be princes or angels or gods.
My brothers explain to the silent villagers who they are, and who I am, and I open my mouth to weep my brothers’ names, and no bees emerge, no, nothing but the sweet sound of the human, very human sound of my youngest brother’s name, after the archangel himself, and indeed he as gentle and forbearing in his deformity now as if he were still in flight over the endless sea.
The Men and Women Like Him
It’s raining when Hugh arrives at the gates of Jerusalem, and the skirmish is already well under way. Roman legionnaires are hacking at faceless creatures in dark blue skin suits. The skin suits are shooting back with laser cannons. The bone-thin, nailed-up figure moans and bleeds, the usual morbid backdrop to this muddy melee.
Hugh sighs. He affixes his pocket amplifier, tells the time pirates that if they don’t stop shooting and come quietly, they’ll all be neutralized. The Romans stop hacking and stare. The pirates—the few who aren’t already scattered in pieces all over Calvary—are mostly docile
. Hugh quickly vaporizes the remaining Romans, along with the bits of hacked pirates and lasers, makes sure the poor skeletal man is still securely fastened to his crucifix. He seems too far gone, thank goodness, to register what’s happening around him.
What did you have today? asks Polly, back at the base. She is eating sort-of-cheeseburgers, hideous gray things from the canteen that look like moldy plaster. Hugh shudders, distracted by such terrible food. He is distracted by so many things lately. I don’t know how you can eat that shit, he says. Before he was a Cleaner—before the Scarcity began—he was the head chef at a fairly decent restaurant in Midtown.
Polly shrugs. I had Hitler’s bunker today, she said. Everything tastes like shit after that.
Hugh doesn’t blame her. Hitler’s bunker is one of the worst runs. The neo-fascists shouting down the Nazi-hunters and Eva Braun’s operatic screams and those fucking dogs trying to bite everybody in between. By the time the Cleaners arrive, at least dear Adolf is usually dead, but sometimes he isn’t. And that’s difficult, too. Because you try looking at that mad, paste-white face, screaming itself into a mottled beet soup, you try, when your great-aunt was crushed to death on a transport between Terezin and Auschwitz, only six years old and small as a toddler, you try to stay your hand and save that furious face for its own damned death. It takes all the effort you can muster, and sometimes, every once in a while, Hugh has arrived on the scene only to find another Cleaner standing before the lifeless body, fatally unable to resist the urge.