by Various
“Tartaric, Turkic, some Tungus,” she said.
“What did the leader say?”
“You should know,” Cnán said, “even if you ken not a word.”
Haakon frowned. “You think I’m an oaf.”
Cnán grimaced and dropped her chin.
Haakon flicked his damp hair back. “Tell me,” he persisted. “I want to hear it anyway.”
Cnán touched her right ear. “We are unclean spirits of the fallen,” she said, “returning to the forests of the west from which we came.”
“Ghosts,” Finn said.
“Ghosts,” she confirmed.
• • •
Once in the woods, two hours of picking their way along leaf-littered paths in broken moonlight brought them back to the clearing and the old monastery. By then, they had shaken off the clammy dread that had overtaken them during their journey, and had begun to converse about topics other than death and how to avoid it. They were received warmly by the Skjaldbræður, whose numbers, during their absence, had increased to something like a score. Illarion, of course, was embraced and even wept over. Cnán had expected this. But she was surprised by the hospitality that some of the knights were now showing toward her. In a courtly style that struck her as ridiculous, Feronantus asked whether she would consider gracing their camp with her presence for a while, and directed her attention toward a tent that had been pitched, somewhat aloof from the others, and made ready for her. This at first struck Cnán as amusing, since there was no shortage of buildings in the compound, though most lacked roofs.
But when she pulled back the tent’s flap and found the interior clean and tidy, with a floor of dry green grass and a raised cot with a fresh straw tick for her to lie on, she better understood the gesture. The buildings of the old monastery were ancient and tumbledown, infested by vermin, stinking in diverse ways.
Peering out the back flap, instinctively checking for an escape route, she saw moonlight reflecting from water about a stone’s throw away, and knew that she was not far from the monks’ old fish pond: the only place around here she could get anything like a bath.
She accepted Feronantus’s invitation. The knights retreated to their chapterhouse, whence she heard the popping of bungs and pouring of ale. She stripped and made a direct line for the pond. Drawing closer to it, she moved faster, since an impressive number of bugs seemed to be landing on her exposed skin. By the time she reached the shore, she was at the core of a humming swarm of mosquitoes and biting flies, and had to dive into the water if only to save her life. But it was worth it to feel the dirt of the road being rinsed from her skin and her hair. She swam for a while, bobbing her head up out of the water just long enough to breathe in air and mosquitoes, then diving before the bugs could do more serious damage.
The way back to the tent was a headlong sprint through an almost tangible mass of aroused insects. Bats swooped as well, making her groan when they squeaked too close. Unable to really see where she was going, she plunged through a group of knights who were on their way to the chapterhouse. Being seen naked meant nothing to her, but some of the knights gasped and looked the other way, imagining that she’d be mortified. The tallest of the group—Cnán instantly recognized him as Percival—took stock of the situation, moved adroitly to the entrance of her tent, peeled back the flap, and then stood there as if carved in marble, modestly averting his gaze. She dove through the opening. He let the flap drop.
The knights, now feeling free to speak their minds, issued a few good-natured complaints about her ungenerously having drawn so many insects into their camp. “At least I am clean!” she shouted from her enclosed fastness, “which is more than I can say for any of you.” This silenced them. Not, she guessed, because her words had struck home, but because they simply had no conception of what she was talking about.
She spent a few moments rolling around on the grass, slicking the water and the bugs from her skin. It was actually not the worst bath she’d ever had. Then she dressed in a linen tunic and doeskin breeches from her kit—clothes she had been saving against the unlikely possibility that she might have to costume herself as something other than a scurrying wretch.
Some part of her was wondering how she would look in the eyes of Percival. He had, in general, paid her no attention whatsoever. And yet there had been more than simple consideration in his act of holding the tent open. There had been… nobility? Brotherhood? She flung her short wet hair briskly at that thought.
She wanted Percival to see her in some better condition than wet and naked and covered with bugs. But another part of her—speaking, curiously, in the voice of her mother—was reminding her just how dangerous it was to feel any such desire. Emotion led to attachment; attachment led to…
While she was dressing, the jovial chitchat in the chapterhouse ceased. Someone protested he was not ready—voice too drunk and muffled to identify. Moments later, she heard a man howl, then scream long and loud. The murmur of conversation was slow to resume after that. But the aroma of cooking meat drew her to the place anyway. As she approached the door, Raphael came out, shoulders square, flexing his fingers. The fingers were stained green at the tips. He had been crushing more herbs.
His posture spoke of satisfaction, a job well done.
“Was it Illarion who cried out?” she asked.
“Yes. His ear—what’s left of it—is fine.”
“Fine? One side of his face is twice the size of the other.”
“That actually had little to do with the ear,” he insisted. “Thank the maggots and that poor girl and her poultice. I finally took the trouble to look in his mouth. The man had an abscessed molar.”
The words were unfamiliar.
“A toothache,” Raphael said. He lifted a sheathed dagger and pulled from one pocket a metal tool with long pincers, still stained with blood. “I yanked it out. The man has a jawbone like that of an ass. He’s already feeling better.”
She gave him an incredulous look. He tried, but failed, to prevent a grin from splitting his face. “I didn’t say he felt grateful,” he pointed out, raising his hands in mock-surrender. Then he used them to shoo her inside. “Get you in. There’s hot food and plenty.”
Cnán enjoyed the Syrian’s company but was happy to take his leave in this case. The pincers evoked a queasy reaction quite unlike her response to swords and daggers.
She entered the chapterhouse and felt something so unfamiliar that it took her a few moments to identify it: she felt safe.
She knew what it was to belong, surrounded by courage and kept from harm by the luck, skill, and daring of the knights of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae.
Brooke Bolander became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring” in Lightspeed (Feb. 2012), edited by John Joseph Adams.
Visit her online at twitter.com/BBolander.
* * *
Short Story: “Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring”
Short Story: “Sun Dogs”
Short Story: “The Beasts of the Earth, the Madness of Men” ••••
HER WORDS LIKE HUNTING VIXENS SPRING
by Brooke Bolander
First published in Lightspeed (Feb. 2012), edited by John Joseph Adams
• • • •
THE FIRST FOX to come clawing up and out of her throat is a sleek gray thing with enormous ears and eyes like drops of crude. Rosa opens her mouth to belch—she doesn’t give a good god-damn about being ladylike at this point, when the desert has cracked her lips to the texture of dried clay and the only other person around to hear is her horse—and all of the sudden she’s tasting musk and spitting fur and something big is scratching its way free of her gullet. The pain is lightning sear and cactus spine. She tumbles off Santiago’s back and crumples in the sand, dark spots exploding behind her eyelids.
The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Fi
nally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look. It wraps its tail around its paws and sets to grooming itself dry, for all the world like some mouser caught in a rainstorm. Rosa watches in glaze-eyed wonder. She can’t think straight. Her brains are still vibrating slightly from shock and hurt.
When she finally wobbles back to her feet, the first thing she does is fish the empty patent medicine bottle from the bottom of her leftmost saddlebag, pushing past two waterskins, a fiddle case, and a faded tintype of her brothers. There’s a drawing of a dandy with a waxed mustache on the label, and a long list of ailments the wondrous stuff inside is supposed to cure. Rosa examines the flask from top to bottom, but there’s no mention of potential side effects printed anywhere, nothing about ague or addiction or (surprise) spontaneously hacking up full-grown foxes. No question about it, then. It’s a genuine miracle, just like she asked the bruja for. An inexplicable, painful miracle, with no use whatsoever in her hunt.
She looks at the ground, where the tracks of her quarry have almost faded to scuffed half-moons. She considers what this new delay means, thinks of Captain Todd pulling away into the mountains where a million hidey holes and snaky little canyons lie in wait for him. Briefly—very briefly—she wonders if it might not be better to turn around and go home, with or without his freckled scalp hanging from her saddle horn. No one will think less of her if she does. She can sew a patch on the family quilt to commemorate the occasion, line it with strips of the wedding dress she’ll never get to wear. The Day My Beau Tried To Kill Me, September 17th, 1880.
Her conscience pipes up right on cue, like an annoying little sister with a one-track mind. But you’re not out here just for yourself, are you, girlie?
“God-dammit,” she says. She grinds her teeth together so hard she can feel them creaking in their sockets. It’s no use. The key has already turned in the lock; there’s no unseeing what bleeds behind the door, scalped and split open by a man she naively thought she knew. Twenty-four girls with twenty-four names and twenty-four lives, reduced to stinking cordwood under yellowing sheets. Twenty-four bodies carried back over the threshold like brides by retching volunteers, to lie in rows beneath a sepia sky.
It’s all too much. Rosa pitches a fit, right there in the middle of the desert.
She tears the big black hat off her head and chucks it in the dirt. She screams curses and stomps her boots and flaps her poncho until even the unshakable Santiago spooks a little, snorting warnings. She yanks clumps of dark hair out of her scalp and lets the wind take them spiraling upwards like hay scraps after a mowing. And when she’s finally done, red-faced and panting and blurry-eyed from tears she can’t shed, she feels a teensy bit better. Not a lot, because the problems Rosa’s got are too big to be fixed that easily, but enough that she can keep moving unhobbled by the memories.
She turns back to the fox, still watching her out of those bright black eyes. It’s panting laughter now, all parted fangs and wicked good humor at Rosa’s expense. Irritatingly, she feels herself begin to blush.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to see your good ideas,” she mutters, snatching her hat from the ground and jamming it low on her head. She tells herself she’s not hiding in the shade it casts. “Wouldn’t happen to know which way he went, would you?”
The fox’s laughter shuts off abruptly at her words. Its entire posture turns no nonsense, business from nose tip to tail tip. It glances over its shoulder at her—why didn’t you just ask me in the first place?—before setting off to the northwest at a steady trot, nose glued to the desert floor. What other choice does she have? Rosa follows. A miracle’s a miracle, whether sent by God or Santa Muerte. You don’t waste it, even if it comes in a ridiculous form.
Even if, like the second fox to disembark from Rosa’s innards, it sends you sprawling ass-over-appetite into a prickly pear patch. The new critter is jet-black with golden eyes, and it laughs at her as well.
• • •
When they found out what Captain Todd had been up to behind the locked doors of his villa, her three brothers wanted to hunt him down themselves. They were the weathered veterans of a million cattle drives and whore towns, rough and ragged as a rusty bucketful of cobs. Telling them “no” wasn’t a job for the faint of heart, but Rosa did it anyway. She got her hair ruffled patronizingly for her pains.
“We’ll string his hide on barb-wire like a coyote, little sister,” the eldest said. He was tall and lean and threw a shadow like a hangman’s platform at sunset. Rosa stole his revolver on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her to shoot it straight when their father wasn’t looking.
“That copper-haired devil is gonna dance a jig at the end of a yucca rope,” said the middle son. He wore a silver star on his barrel chest and carried a map of the territories from Tucumcari to Fort Bowie. Rosa stole the map from his saddlebags on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her how to read it when the snows were high and there wasn’t anything better to do.
“I’ll bring you back that pretty yellow scarf he wears for your wedding trunk,” the youngest told her. He slouched in his saddle and wore a black Stetson that must’ve cost him at least three months pay. Rosa stole the hat from a peg in the tack room on her way out and was thankful he’d taught her how to spit and swear like a man while their mother was otherwise occupied.
She knows they probably think her dead by now, another victim of the young man with the uniform and the foxy grin. Rosa misses her brothers desperately and wishes she could tell them the truth—don’t worry, fellas, I’ve gone to get the son of a bitch myself and the foxes I keep retching up track better than bloodhounds—but there’s no turning back until her task is done. The memory of all those girls drives Rosa onwards like a quirt, toward mountains that hover like judgment and a fiancé who is not what he once seemed.
• • •
The more of them she retches up, the easier it gets. It’s still not exactly what you’d call comfortable, but after the fourth or fifth time Rosa is able to brace herself when she feels her throat swelling like she’s just taken too big a gulp of water. They are all vixens, all female; when she looks around at the strange pack pacing beneath her stirrups she wonders what it all means.
Some are stout red matrons with shaggy coats and black masks. Others are small and sandy and whippy-thin as barn cats, quick to jump when Santiago’s iron-shod hoof strikes a rock. The heat doesn’t seem to bother them. They flow through the sage in a tireless wave, not even stopping to hunt or drink or mark bushes—a ghost army made real, called up by patent medicine and whatever dark forces for revenge lurk in Rosa’s craw. The idea is enough to make her laugh herself silly, or at least it would be had she any laughter left. Good humor has been powerful hard to come by since the day she used the key.
They’re indistinguishable from normal foxes in every other way that counts, though. They snap at flies and chase one another between Santiago’s legs and get into squabbles that sound like demons haggling over cribbage scores. The first one—Rosa calls her Gray Sister, all the while telling herself that she considers them neither pets nor family and what’s the point in naming figments?—takes to sitting at the foot of her pallet every night, ears swiveling against the speckled sky. Rosa isn’t sure when the vixen sleeps; maybe she never does.
A day comes when the trail fades to scrapes on stone and wisps of scent so faint not even the vixens can find them. The shadows lengthen until they’re all walking on stilts and Rosa’s hair is plastered to her neck like a wet strip of calico and her temper’s worn nubbin-small as lye soap on Saturday night and there’s no change, no nothing, they may as well have been walking this circuit forever eating their own tails and their own dust like stubborn hoop snakes. She reluctantly begins thinking about making camp, wondering if she even has the spit left to whistle an all in, ladies to her pack.
The wind in the desert has a million voices. It hisses like a Gila and moans through the dry riverbeds like a toothless old woman, cajoling and spiteful by t
urns. Sometimes it whispers words to Rosa. Names, or directions, or nonsense gibberish that trails off into mocking laughter stinging as sand. You’d have to be a fool born to trust such voices. Since Rosa was born a woman and not a fool, she ignores them, shutting off her ears when they speak like her father or mother or the Captain himself. The evening breeze that eddies up now sounds like one of the village’s ill-reputed saloon ladies, all cigarette smoke and sipping bourbon. It nips at Rosa’s damp nape and runs a bold finger along her jaw, tracing a line all the way to her earlobe. Gooseflesh prickles her skin.
Play, it whispers, teasing as desire. Play.
Rosa sets her jaw and keeps her eyes on the horizon. She’s not in the mood for this tonight. Not now, and probably not ever. Santiago shies nervously, sensing her anger, and she puts the spurs to him, harder than she means to. He crow-hops and it’s all she can do to stay put, hissing curses between her teeth. The wind chuckles roughly at her back, a calloused hand in a velvet glove.
Play, daughter. To the trail. Play.
She spits dust and jerks Santiago around to face the darkening east, teeth bared like one of her own foxes. Enough is enough.
“Miss,” she says, “unless you’re Santa Muerte herself, I kindly suggest you go blow up someone else’s skirts. I’m not interested.” Something that isn’t anger is uncurling in the pit of her stomach, but she won’t give Whatever It Is the satisfaction of knowing that. “I don’t even understand what you’re getting at. You want music? Is that it?”
At the words “Santa Muerte” the laughter suddenly becomes a gale. Sand billows like smoke, lifting into the sky to turn the light bone-colored and watery. The world vanishes as if a curtain’s come down, foxes, desert, and everything else turned to dim shadows seen through muslin. The mocking voice is all around her. It’s loud enough to make her ears ring and knowing enough to make her wish she’d kept her big mouth shut.