The stack of books the librarian had set aside for me varied from folklore collections available for general loan to the rarer stuff, including one fine-looking sixteenth-century manuscript that had to remain in her line of sight at all times. I chose that one first. She laid the book out on a stand, handed me a pair of fine gloves, and showed me the section I would be looking for in the text. It was luckily in German—a language of mine—and the story began with that arresting line: There was once a quill that could not be held by any hand…
I read it, and my mouth had gone parched by the end, tongue sticking to my teeth. I swallowed and signaled for the librarian, who gathered up the book and informed me that the rest could be checked out, as I was faculty. I took the pile of them, stacked neatly into canvas bags, and proceeded out of the quiet, private room, up the stairs, and out into the evening gloom.
The young witch in the story had used a glove to hold the quill, a glove made of goatskin, though I doubted that was significant. In her hand it had written new magics, it had crafted poetry that won her the heart of a handsome lordling; assuredly, the quill was potent. The grim turn had come after her marriage, as she continued using the quill but found that its gifts had begun to sour. Accidents began to occur around her person, slow and slight at first, but with growing rapidity, until the eventual bloody demise of her husband, followed by her own death in a house fire—which the quill survived, ominously.
The moral of the story seemed to be, do look a gift horse in the mouth. The price would be paid, and the price was death. The trudge to my car from the library seemed cooler than the spring evening could account for, as if an icy wind were blowing beneath my hair and sliding noose-like around my throat. It was only the first story, and possibly it was just a story, just a moral-tale, despite its strange focus of protagonist. Witches didn’t generally figure as sympathetic leads in folklore of a certain sort. I was determined to see the research through the rest of the texts. The witch, after all, had gotten greedy—if she had stopped with the husband and the shift in social class, it would have been all right. She could have given the quill away.
Before the danger began, though, the profits had been tidy and wondrous, and all it had taken was wearing a glove. I couldn’t quite get that out of my head. The sun had set by the time I made my way into my foyer. I set the books down to lock the door and flip the lights on. The shadow spilling from the library’s open door seemed pitch-black, and I swore I had closed it behind me, but possibly not. I carted the bags of books in, regardless, refusing to let superstition take my favorite room from me.
The lights came on with the flick of a switch. I lingered in the doorway, hand on the lintel, the ache of my sutured finger less but still present. The desk hulked across the room, scattered with papers from a failed attempt at longhand composition. I crossed the floor to the sideboard and collected ice from the mini-fridge in a tumbler. I eyed the soda water for a moment before skipping it altogether in favor of a glass of straight bourbon. It was a minor change-up from the last incident’s drink of choice. Glass in hand, I made my way upstairs to the bedroom and dug through a winter-clothes drawer until I found a leather glove. I slipped it on my good hand, though it wasn’t my dominant one, and drifted downstairs again. A sip of honey-rich liquor fortified me as I lifted my chin and strode into the study. The ritual was familiar already; I sat down, placed the drink to the side, and dug the lacquered box out of the bottom drawer. This time, I opened it with the gloved hand.
I reached forward, elbow braced on a scatter of yellow ruled paper. A touch of my index finger to the oily black quill produced a flinch in me, but not from pain, simply anticipation. Otherwise, nothing happened. Gingerly I flattened my other fingers against it. The quill seemed warm through the leather, but that must have been pure hallucination. A bit clumsy, I molded fingers around it and hefted it free of the case with what seemed like a Herculean effort, the sudden fear clamping my guts was so intense. I used my injured hand to take another sip of my drink and ran my thumb up and down the shaft of the quill, watching the spill of sheen waver and change with my touch and the angle of the light. It wasn’t a polish, as far as I could tell, but I had no idea what it might be.
The glass bottle of India ink at the top corner of the desk was from a period of fanciful stationery collecting; I had never become proficient with a nib pen. Despite that, I uncapped it and dipped the stained pewter tip in. As I lifted it, a spatter of ink splashed the already-scribbled-upon pages. I pushed them aside and found the legal pad buried underneath. A warmth had taken up residence in my head, a strange humming pleasure. Offhanded, I set nib to page and closed my eyes. The buzzing inside my head exploded with lights; my hand moved, and it wasn’t necessarily that the quill did the moving itself, but it was—
The burst of elated inspiration stretched on improbably, unbearably, as I wrote and wrote and wrote. The passion of it was a wave of the kind that drags swimmers out to sea to drown, helpless and alone.
Even in my best years, it had never been like that. The briefest sparks of pleasure had seemed monumental, then, amidst the drudge work, but this.
The long note of ecstasy wavered and cut free, after some indeterminate time. I blinked sweat from my eyes and with a groan unclenched my hard-cramping hand from the quill. It clattered to the desk. There were pages upon pages. The ink was smudged by the motion of my hand going left-ways over the paper, but I could still manage it enough to transcribe the words, later. The splatters of ink tracking from the inkpot across my desk to the pad, on the other hand, would require elbow grease to clean. I collapsed into the chair, boneless, and closed my eyes. I realized as I fell into sleep that the light against my eyelids was sunrise.
The worst and best thing was that I woke hungry to read the story, and that I did so immediately, without even getting out of the chair I’d slept in to stretch; the worst and best thing was that it was astoundingly, wrenchingly beautiful. It was the best I’d ever done—and I hadn’t done it. But the block was gone, if the tale was evidence. My spine was stiff and throbbing, the muscles of my lower back protesting as I slid out of the chair. With the gloved hand, I picked up the pen and dropped it into its box. That was enough of that, at least until I’d read some of the other research texts—the first hadn’t inspired me to much confidence that I wasn’t one of those hapless protagonists encountering the eldritch, and so like one of them, I’d let the temptation to see win over my better sense.
On the other hand, the first completed, worthwhile piece of fiction I’d written in nearly thirteen months was clutched in my wounded fist. I shuffled out of the room to scrounge up a cup of coffee and then type the scrawled pages, transcribe the words that at once sounded like me and like something alien.
It sold by the next morning, with a personal note at the bottom of the email: “Glad to see you back in top form.”
The research progressed, and the congratulatory emails rolled in after I announced the sale, each a pinprick to the tender, ugly bits of my psyche—because that first story, the witch story, was not an anomaly in the tradition of the cursed quill. Instead, it was the template. Whether peasant or prince, maiden or matron, the protagonists of these tales met grisly ends brought about by their own greed and hubris; the quill would not admit strength of will or cunning ploys as diversions from the end result.
Considering that macabre evidence, the best and brightest decision would have been to throw the box out of my car while driving over a bridge. I had gotten one story out of it, one story that had freed me from the quagmire of unproductive months, and that was relatively safe. The lore agreed that it took far more than one slip of curiosity to bring about the doom-and-gloom resolution. Methodical use and increasing returns came first, regardless of what form those returns took, before the pivot for the worst. Once was insignificant.
In point of fact, twice was insignificant.
If it was possible to blame the hungry magic of the quill for the ensuing choices I made, I would do so, but
in the fullness of truth it was nothing more than the desperate, life-shaking hunger that gnawed in the corners of my guts, and the fear of losing myself, when all that I knew of me was what I did. At least I took three days to consider the monumental insanity of what I was about to do before I found myself at my desk in the cool twilight hour, hands gloved, a sheaf of blank paper at my elbow.
I considered myself clever, and capable; I knew that the promise of safety—acid and treacherous though it was—lay in the will to stop once the business was done. I took up the quill, the doors of my weak spirit and my desperate heart flung wide, and put it to pristine white bond. The ink leeched in as I wrote the first tremulous words, the nova burn of the curse lighting up my head and hands:Hallowed Be, a Novel, and skipping a line, by Mel Ashton.
Eleven months passing without a solitary word scribbled undid me.
The release of that elegant, precise, inimitable book into the world, while I had written not a line of my own between its supernatural drafting and its reception, undid me.
The outpouring of adoration, respect, validation that followed undid me.
And so I took the pen up again, in the twelfth month, after the third day without real sleep and the fifth sustained by a steady application of liquor. I had glimpsed myself, in that book; I had glimpsed what I was and might never be again. That was me, and this was a simulacra, a shell with no referent, a map without a territory. To say that I was desperate does not begin to encompass the bleak and maddened state of me, to all purposes dead and unmoored without my work and without my so carefully crafted identity.
The taste of it had been too much, and I knew what I could be, if only for a short time. The quill didn’t promise a long life—only one incandescent with the bliss of fulfillment.
The next short manuscript was blotched with spills and tears, but it was unbelievably beautiful. The one after that was pristine but for a splatter of blood, dried rust brown; tapping one’s lip with the quill was paramount stupidity. I spaced them apart, I waited, I read. I hunted up ever more obscure variations on the quill’s tale from libraries across the country, switching out my piles with the concerned desk clerks on campus once a week.
If I couldn’t stop—and it had become obvious that I could not—then my last gamble was to find a way to circumvent the inevitable. The stories were a dwindling hope—the farther they drifted from the original, the more distant and corrupted their narratives became via transmission and adaptation—but they were, still, a hope. I needed to know: with the mistake made and irreversible, was there a single, miniscule, degraded chance to escape the price of my rewards?
The answer, so far, has been no. I do not retain any real hope that I will uncover a yes.
Four evenings ago, after scrawling the hash mark of an ending on my legal pad with the sheen-slick quill, I intended to take myself up to bed. At the top step of the staircase, though there was nothing underfoot, I slipped. A grasp for the banister left me empty-handed and I tumbled down to the landing, bashing my head on the way and turning my ankle at a nauseating angle. I lay panting with pain and terror for a long while before I could make it to the phone. The ankle was, I found after a trip to Emergency in the back of an ambulance, broken.
Coincidence, possibly—or the beginning of the last spiral, the payment to be taken from me with exacting, awful care. Regardless, I sit propped up in bed, a notebook open across my knees and the pen in well-gloved hand. The itch of the cast is not nearly enough to distract me from the ink stains I’ve already managed to drizzle across my sheets, or the ominous promise of the words at the top of the page: End Game, a Novel—by Mel Ashton.
I should say I hear a footstep upon the stair.
“The Writ of Years” copyright © 2013 by Brit Mandelo
E. LILY YU
E. Lily Yu is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, and game writer whose work has appeared or forthcoming in places such as McSweeney's, Boston Review, Clarkesworld, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. She is a recent graduate of Princeton University and a first-year doctoral student at Cornell.
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, by E. Lily Yu
Hugo Nomination for Best Short Story 2012
For longer than anyone could remember, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.
Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.
The villagers' subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys.
At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves.
"It's a good place to land," the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. "Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute.
"We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand."
It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees' kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees—"as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory," she hummed.
The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive.
The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received.
"You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty," the foundress said, as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, "nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken."
"I trust I will do better," the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than the others, and the hairs of her thorax were sparse and faded.
"I do hope so."
"Unlike them, I have complete authority to speak for the hive. You have propositions for us; that is clear enough. We are prepared to listen."
"Oh, good." The foundress drained her horn and took another. "Yours is an old and highly cultured so
ciety, despite the indolence of your ruler, which we understand to be a racial rather than personal proclivity. You have laws, and traditional dances, and mathematicians, and principles, which of course we do respect."
"Your terms, please."
She smiled. "Since there is a local population of tussah moths, which we prefer for incubation, there is no need for anything so unrepublican as slavery. If you refrain from insurrection, you may keep your self-rule. But we will take a fifth of your stores in an ordinary year, and a tenth in drought years, and one of every hundred larvae."
"To eat?" Her antennae trembled with revulsion.
"Only if food is scarce. No, they will be raised among us and learn our ways and our arts, and then they will serve as officials and bureaucrats among you. It will be to your advantage, you see."
The diplomat paused for a moment, looking at nothing at all. Finally she said, "A tenth, in a good year—"
"Our terms," the foundress said, "are not negotiable."
The guards shifted among themselves, clinking the plates of their armor and shifting the gleaming points of their stings.
"I don't have a choice, do I?"
"The choice is enslavement or cooperation," the foundress said. "For your hive, I mean. You might choose something else, certainly, but they have tens of thousands to replace you with."
The diplomat bent her head. "I am old," she said. "I have served the hive all my life, in every fashion. My loyalty is to my hive and I will do what is best for it."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 476