by Various
“Yes, Papa.”
I uncorked the bottle and turned toward the sink. I poured a big palm sized splash of ether onto the cloth and spread it around with my thumb.
The girl flinched as I pressed the cloth over her mouth and nose. She glanced between me and Papa sorting his needles. Within a breath, her eyes went unfocused and rolled slowly back into their lids. The room was very quiet.
“Papa?” I asked as I handed him the first needle.
“Yes, girl?” he said flexing the girl’s flesh carefully with his fingers to pucker the folds of skin just right. He didn’t even need to hold her leg.
“Did you and Mama birth me in Sacramento, or… after you escaped from it?” I said.
His eyes glanced sharply between the girl and me. “Elana Anne, this is no subject to be speaking on,” he said, his tone final.
“She can’t hear us talking Papa.” My hand lifted the cloth from the girl’s mouth, showing the smooth, slack face.
“That don’t matter. These aren’t questions to be asking a father.”
“I ain’t got no mama to ask these things to, Papa. You’re having me marry Tom Wayland in less than a fortnight. You’ve showed me how to sew a virgin-mother, but there are things about birth and the curse that Mama would have taught me by now.”
He sighed, suddenly small and weary. “We bore you on the road, but your mama and I conceived you the way that all parents do. With a jar of water and a brass seeding rod.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not if it’s done right.”
“What if it’s done wrong?”
Papa kept working, his fingers nimble.
The girl moaned. I checked her eye with my thumb and draped the cloth back over her mouth.
“I reckon I should have told you the birds and the bees by now,” said Papa, drawing the threads taught. “I’m sorry I’ve kept so much from you.”
I nodded.
“Imagine,” said Papa, “that you are a woman whose fertility has come. Your womb is like a little tree Elana. A little girl tree with two branches, heavy with fruit. Every seed a man puts inside will try to find one of those fruit. Every seed. Inseminate a woman with a drop of a man’s green seed diluted in a pint of water and you may bear a child, or two or three. Give a woman much more, and she becomes something unlike herself. The little tree inside starts to grow and take shape. There’s something in us Elana, something that can’t be put to sleep once it’s woken.”
“What does it have to do with the curse, Papa?”
“I don’t know that it rightly is a curse, Elana. The chapel hymns will tell you so. Your mama used to say that the Tree of Life was supposed to grant life eternal. That there was something holy about the trees if we could just find it. I loved your mama, but I can’t say I believed her way either. The trees don’t burst out of the ground at God’s call to punish people nor to grant them eternal life.”
“They don’t?” I whispered.
“No,” said Papa. His eyes grew distant. His fingers laced without looking, making the pattern distort.
“The people are the trees, Elana. The trees burst from inside of them. It spreads like wildfire the moment they’re caught by the branches and roots of those others that have been touched. Their skin splits and the roots rush everywhere. The sound of it is terrible.”
My back touched the lip of the stone basin as I shrank back from his words.
“How would you know what it sounds like unless you watched it happen, Papa?” I said, staring into his eyes. “You didn’t come from Sacramento. You and Mama saw it happen right here, didn’t you? In Lexington.”
Papa stared at me, stunned. He stood still, trapped with a taught thread in each hand. “Where did you even… Shut your mouth, girl.”
“No.”
“You will mind me.” he said.
“You can’t make me. You can’t even make me marry Tom. You and mama ran away from that fate yourself.”
“You have no right no right to be talking to me this way!”
“You gave me this right,” I screamed, “when you lied to me about everything!”
His slap stung my face. My head turned round slowly, lips shuddering. The needles swung back and forth on their threads below Rebecca’s bleeding labia. All of the tension in the thread had gone out.
I stumbled back toward the doors and ran.
“Elana,” Papa cried as I shoved through the sliding doors and out the front door. It slammed open so hard it bounced closed again.
I ran past the barn and through the apple trees, ran toward the main road and the sounds of music, the distant smell of wood smoke.
I slowed and stopped amidst the dark boughs, my back against the far side of a gnarled trunk. The tears came. The ache of it wracked me from head to belly. I crouched and gripped the little pendant at my neck till the cord bit my skin.
“What are you doing out here in the trees, girl?” a voice said by my ear. My breath leapt from my mouth. Mr. Greely came round the far side of the tree supported by his hand.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping your daddy with the debutantes?”
“No,” I croaked and stepped back from the tree.
“Where you going?” He said, stepping forward. A half smile played on his lips.
“I have to get back to my Papa.”
He gave a guttural sigh and leaned against the trunk, nodding as if this were some great revelation.
“You picked a fight with him didn’t you?” he beamed. “Don’t deny it. I can see it on your face.”
“No,” I said.
He laughed, “I thought you would. Now what did you fight about?”
I edged toward the road and the distant sound of laughter.
“Oh,” he said, not moving. “You asked about your mama, didn’t you?”
My feet stopped.
“Did he tell you where your mama is?” he said, voice growing earnest. “Tell me, girl. Tell me what happened to her.” His eyes searched my face.
“I don’t know,” I said in a fierce whisper.
His eyes burned into mine for second, but then he laughed, settled his whole weight back against the tree. I caught that faint sharpness of whisky over the mold of fallen apples.
“Did he tell you that he was supposed to stitch up your mama and that he stole away with her instead?”
“No,” I whispered. His smile grew wider.
“Did he tell you they came sneaking back one night when her belly was like a cow, begging me with nowhere else to turn? She was half starved and I was sure those babies in her had to be dead. You and your little brothers and sisters—all still-born except for you. Your daddy ruined her, made her an outcast. And I was the one that pulled those dead babies from her and told her I’d take care of her and bury her secrets. I told her if she begged to the town elders, I’d say that your daddy took her against her will. I told her I’d love her and make her an honest woman. And she said yes.” He pounded his fist on the trunk.
“No, she’d never…” I whispered.
“Oh she did,” he said, pushing himself off the tree slowly. “And you know what she told me when I pulled you out of the womb, live and wriggling?”
I could only shake my head.
“She told me to give you over and she damned me to hell for tempting her. So I reached down and ripped out that whore’s stitches. Told her she’d never survive the bleeding if she didn’t stay. I would have killed you then if your daddy hadn’t burst in. He didn’t know why she was screaming and clutching at you, but for all the blood and those dead babies on the floor. He promised to drag you both off and never return. But I knew she’d crawl back to me if she wanted to live a good life. So I let her go. And the next day, Lexington was gone. Just gone. And she’s gone.” A tear rolled down his quivering lip.
His hand grasped my elbow and yanked me forward. My knees skinned against tree roots, and I shrieked. He pressed himself against me. “Yo
u may be no virgin-mother like her, but you’re a lying whore just the same.”
I screamed into the sweaty cloth of his shirt as my skin dragged down the bark. His weight stabbed the wooden pendant into my skin and I choked under his hand and his corn-liquor breath.
His fingers tore at his belt and my skirts until I felt the crude, metal rings in his skin press against me. He fumbled at them, trying to twist the metal as I kicked him. Rings are forged to hold, but somehow he worked them loose quickly until his hardness slapped against my thigh. The barbed jag of the open metal hoop tore my skin as he slid against my stitches and failed to thrust inside. He was blurting my mother’s name over and over, and there was a gush of warmth from his seed. I felt it splash across my aching thighs.
“Crap,” he said, in a small voice.
I choked against his fat palm, feeling the terror in my belly as his seed dripped down the outside of my stitch, burning my skin like a rash. I froze, afraid to move even as the anger grew past fear and my teeth bit at his hand till he yanked it away.
“You bastard!” yelled a voice that I first thought was mine. Wendy was slapping at Greely, hitting him on the head. “Get off of her!” she yelled. “You can’t make her touch you the way you made me. Don’t you know what she is? She’s a virgin!”
I yelled and fought to push him off, no longer hearing Wendy’s shouting, just kicking and wrestling. His face changed from angry to empty to terrified. His hands came back, wrapped around my throat, choked off my scream.
Something rose through my terror and fury, something like a distant voice. It called my name with the urgency of a mother. I felt the deep well of power in my belly as I thrashed and choked and the sky went black. Mama’s voice was with me as I was dying, whispering my name, and the sound of what I could become.
I reached for that inner fire as his fingers crushed the last breath from my throat. My fingers scratched down his side until they slipped between us and gripped my aching stitches. I found the heartstring and ripped it. My fingers twitched in the dying light, then thrust the failed wetness of his seed inside of me.
The pain left instantly. The shadows became such a beautiful color I had never known. Blackgreen. My body filled with strength and wildfire, pushing him up.
He clutched at me and began to yell. Tried to get off and couldn’t. He just kept slipping and shuddering as the black veins burst from my belly and burrowed into his flesh.
As he threw himself back, his penis ripped free of his crotch. The little thing dangled in the roots that grew between my thighs, draped like a weed caught in driftwood. Wendy started screaming. Mr. Greely fell over and made no sound.
I wanted to hold this hatred, but it’s hard when the world is so beautiful. The sound inside my head was the verdant chorus of a thousand leaves. I basked in the shafts of sunset light, each caressing me like a kiss. The woman’s screams clashed against the song, so I put a hand out to stop her. The vines of my fingers burst through her mouth. Her body writhed as my flesh rooted into hers, joining her into our growing song. She fell on top of him, already wracked with his own becoming.
Mama’s voice was in me, I could hear her song clearly from the wooden pendant against my skin and know that Papa had carved it from her own wood. In a language without words the voice welcomed me home.
Another voice, just as familiar as Mama’s, called out through the orchard. It rose against the music of the distant bonfire.
“Elana! Elana where are you?” Papa called and the sound of his voice felt like the color of summer rain. He limped around the trunk of the apple tree.
My many tendrils wrapped around Papa.
“Papa,” I cried, as he yelled and struggled. “What happened to Momma?”
“No,” he cried, “No… Not like this.”
“Tell me what happened to her.” The budding limb of my arm reached out and touched him, brushed his hair softly.
He broke into a sob and the words came out in a rush. “She was bleeding to death. We tried to go back to our kin in Lexington, but they beat her and locked us up. They were going to kill us. Kill you.”
The tendrils cradled him as he whispered the words. “She wanted us to cause the wood together, to live forever where we could always be with you. I pulled… myself out of her when she stopped breathing. I thought she was dead. I broke right out of that room and ran with you. When I heard the sound of the trees tearing through the town behind us, I knew she must have still….”
“It’s ok, Papa, Mama’s here with us, and it’s so beautiful,” I whispered, feeling the quickening inside. The song surged beyond all control, a joyful goodbye to all anger and lies. To all cruelty and shame. To all stitches and rings.
I stretched in all directions, tunneling through wall and stone, wood and flames, men, women and screaming children.
“No. Please,” he whispered as I brought him home.
Anthony Ryan became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of Blood Song (2012), from Ace/Roc.
Visit his website at anthonystuff.wordpress.com.
* * *
Novel: Blood Song: A Raven’s Shadow Novel (excerpt)
BLOOD SONG: A RAVEN’S SHADOW NOVEL
(excerpt)
by Anthony Ryan
First published as Blood Song (2012), by Ace/Roc
• • • •
Chapter 1
THE MIST SAT THICK on the ground the morning Vaelin’s father took him to the house of the Sixth Order. He rode in front, his hands grasping the saddle’s pommel, enjoying the treat. His father rarely took him riding.
“Where do we go, my lord?” he had asked as his father led him to the stable.
The tall man said nothing but there was the briefest pause before he hoisted the saddle onto one of his chargers. Accustomed to his father’s failure to respond to most questions, Vaelin thought nothing of it.
They rode away from the house, the charger’s iron shoes clattering on the cobbles. After a while they passed through the eastern gate where the bodies hung in cages from the gibbet and stained the air with the sick stench of decay. He had learned not to ask what they had done to earn such punishment, it was one of the few questions his father had always been willing to answer and the stories he told would leave Vaelin sweating and tearful in the night, whimpering at every noise beyond the window, wondering if the thieves or rebels or Dark afflicted Deniers were coming for him.
The cobbles soon gave way to the turf beyond the walls, his father spurring the charger to a canter then a gallop, Vaelin laughing with excitement. He felt a momentary shame at his enjoyment. His mother had passed just two months previously and his father’s sorrow was a black cloud that sat over the whole household, making servants fearful and callers rare. But Vaelin was but ten years old and had a child’s view of death: he missed his mother but her passing was a mystery, the ultimate secret of the adult world and although he cried he didn’t know why, and he still stole pastries from the cook and played with his wooden swords in the yard.
They galloped for several minutes before his father reined in, although to Vaelin it was all too brief, he wanted to gallop forever. They had stopped before a large iron gate. The railings were tall, taller than three men set end to end, each topped with a wicked spike. At the apex of the gate’s arch stood a figure made of iron, a warrior, sword held in front of his chest, pointing downwards, the face a withered skull. The walls on either side were almost as tall as the gate. To the left a brass bell hung from a wooden cross beam.
Vaelin’s father dismounted then lifted him from the saddle.
“What is this place, my lord?” he asked. His voice felt as loud as a shout although he spoke in a whisper. The silence and the mist made him uneasy, he didn’t like the gate and the figure which sat atop it. He knew with a child’s certainty that the blank eye sockets were a lie, a trick. It was watching them, waiting.
His father didn’t reply, walking over to the bell he took his dagger from h
is belt and struck it with the pommel. The noise seemed like an outrage in the silence. Vaelin put his hands over his ears until it died away. When he looked up his father was standing over him.
“Vaelin,” he said in his coarse, warrior’s voice. “Do you remember the motto I taught you? Our family creed.”
“Yes my lord.”
“Tell me.”
“‘Loyalty is our strength.’”
“Yes. Loyalty is our strength. Remember it. Remember that you are my son and that I want you to stay here. In this place you will learn many things, you will become a brother of the Sixth Order. But you will always be my son, and you will honour my wishes.”
There was a scrape of gravel beyond the gate and Vaelin started, seeing a tall, cloaked figure standing behind the railings. He had been waiting for them. His face was hidden by the mist but Vaelin squirmed in the knowledge of being studied, appraised. He looked up at his father seeing a large, strong featured man with a greying beard and deep lines in his face and forehead. There was something new in his expression, something Vaelin had never seen before and couldn’t name. In later years he would see it in the faces of a thousand men and know it as an old friend: fear. It struck him that his father’s eyes were unusually dark, much darker than his mother’s. This was how he would remember him throughout his life. To others he was the Battle Lord, First Sword of the Realm, the hero of Beltrian, King’s saviour and father of a famous son. To Vaelin he would always be a fearful man abandoning his son at the gate to the House of the Sixth Order.
He felt his father’s large hand pressing against his back. “Go now Vaelin. Go to him. He will not hurt you.”
Liar! Vaelin thought fiercely, his feet dragging on the soil as he was pushed toward the gate. The cloaked figure’s face became clearer as they neared, long and narrow with thin lips with pale blue eyes. Vaelin found himself staring into them. The long faced man stared back, ignoring his father.
“What is your name, boy?” The voice was soft, a sigh in the mist.