Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  “But Jutta, a man cannot live forever alone. It’s not right. It’s not healthy. It’s not Christian. And Jutta, I know what a good mother you will be. Are you not already a mother to my child?”

  Now I did look up, startled. “Herr Geiger—you know not what you are saying—you know so little about me—you are still headspun with grief—”

  He leaned forward and took my hands in his. I tried not to lean back. “Jutta, my darling, let me hope. Give me a kiss.”

  I felt the force of his request coursing through my body, the pressure to bend toward him and part my lips. This was different than just a request for information, to which, after all, I at least had pretended to accede. I felt the Matronit’s strength behind my own, and I redoubled my resolve. Never. Never. Not even to lull him into complacency.

  I think that if I had not been able to resist, I would have strangled him right then and there.

  But I did resist. The Matronit lent me strength and I directed it, meeting Herr Geiger’s magic with my own, stopping his will in its tracks.

  I stood up. “Alas, Herr Geiger. I regret that I cannot give you cause to hope. But my loyalty to one who is now gone prevents it. I will care for Eva faithfully, but to you I must never be any more than your daughter’s nurse.”

  He gazed at me in wonder. I spared a thought for the late Konstanze, and wondered if she had been tricked into marriage by such a request, if she had mistaken his desires and magical compulsions for her own inclinations.

  “Good night, Herr Geiger.” I walked out of the room and left him staring after me, eyes wide.

  * * *

  The following morning I took time during Eva’s morning nap to bake cakes for the Matronit. I stayed in the kitchen as much as possible, trying to avoid Herr Geiger’s eyes. I suppose it had been many years since anybody had been able to refuse him a direct request. I did not care to encounter his scrutiny.

  But I could not avoid it forever. I became aware of … how shall I put this … his eyes upon me. And he took to accosting me without warning and asking me to do things. I acceded, but when he would ask for a kiss, I would not, and then his curiosity would redouble.

  “When?” I pled with the Matronit. “When? I cannot stay near this man much longer, Mother. When will you be strong enough?”

  Soon, she replied. But every time you must refuse a request of his, my power is depleted. Are you so sure you will not—

  “I am sure,” I told her. “I will not endure the touch of his lips. Not now. Not ever.”

  * * *

  One morning, a month later, she said tonight.

  * * *

  I devoted myself to Eva that day as if I would never see her again, for I did not believe I would. I could not take a Christian baby, not after all the lies told about us. This is not a thing we do, stealing children.

  But did Eva not belong to me? By love if not by right? Her face lit up when I picked her up from her cradle in the morning, and when she was fretful, only I could calm her. She laughed at my games and clung to me with both her fists whenever someone else tried to hold her. Even her father.

  I did not like to think of what would become of her with the rest of Dornburg dead. For I could not kill an infant, not an infant. I am not a monster.

  But how could I take her?

  * * *

  Eva became drowsy at dusk, and I cuddled her and sang her to sleep as gently as I could. After she fell asleep in my arms, I curled myself around her and napped, drifting in and out of sleep. I felt at peace; I felt that all the world had fallen away, and only Eva and I remained, coiled together in love.

  The clock at the center of town tolled midnight. I shifted, but did not rouse myself. I did not want to leave Eva. I wanted only to have her in my arms forever.

  Rise! The Matronit’s voice was mighty, implacable, and I was instantly fully awake. The time is now.

  I sat up and reluctantly pulled away from Eva’s small body. She stretched out an arm, looking for me in her sleep, but was otherwise undisturbed.

  I had been ready, I think, for a decade.

  * * *

  First I went to Herr Geiger’s study and collected his fiddle and his blowpipe. Then I silently left the house. The judge who had ordered my father’s death had been an old man then, I had learned over the months. He had died not long after. But the mayor and the hangman, they were still in the prime of life. The hangman had several children and a lovely house, some distance from the other homes, it’s true, for nobody loves a scharfrichter, but nonetheless, he had a good life, and was respected if not celebrated. I walked to his home by moonlight, my cloak wrapped tightly around me. Standing outside his house, the Matronit told me to shut my eyes, and when I did, she granted me a vision.

  The scharfrichter, Franz Schmidt, and his wife, Adelheide, were sleeping in their shared bed. All was peaceful.

  What is your desire? asked the Matronit.

  “Give him a dream,” I told her. “Can you do that?”

  But of course.

  “Give him a dream. He is in chains, being led to the scaffold. He is innocent of any crime, but nonetheless, the faces of the crowd are filled with hatred. He thinks of his wife, his children, and how they will long for him, grow old without him. The noose is fitted around his neck and he finds his tongue, pleads for mercy, but the judge and the crowd only laugh. The platform drops out from under him, but the rope is not weighted correctly, and instead of his neck breaking instantly, he is slowly strangling, dancing in air. Oh, how he dances!”

  The vision the Matronit granted me changed—Schmidt is twisting and turning in bed, unable to wake, unable to breathe. His face is pained and panicked.

  I waited, wondering if I would feel pity, or remorse, or forgiveness. I felt none.

  “Stop his heart,” I said.

  Schmidt convulses once, and then is still. His wife has never moved.

  I then went to the house of the Bürgermeister.

  * * *

  Strangely calm, I returned home; I returned to the house of Herr Geiger.

  Herr Geiger awoke to find me seated on a chair at the foot of his bed. “Jutta?” he yawned, all confusion. “What are you doing here?”

  I did not answer. Instead, I brought the blowpipe out of my pocket and snapped it in two.

  “Jutta! What are you doing?”

  I then smashed the fiddle against his bedpost. It was nothing, then, but shattered splinters and catgut. I threw it to the ground.

  “Jutta!” Herr Geiger was on his feet, looming in front of me, grabbing my shoulders. “Do you know what you have done?”

  Still I did not answer. My braids undid themselves and my hair, my true black hair, stretched out toward the fiddler, becoming thorn-covered vines. He shrieked and tried to back away, but my vines caught his arms and legs, lifted him into the air, and there was nobody to hear his shrieks except Eva, who awoke and began crying in the other room. The maid and the cook came in daily, but lived with their own families.

  I stood.

  My vines twined ever tighter around his arms and legs, and blood ran down his body freely as the thorns dug through his skin. He twisted in pain, trying to wrench himself free, but succeeded only in digging the thorns in more deeply. My vines suspended him in the air in front of me, and I watched his struggles dispassionately. They did not bring me pleasure, but neither did they move me to pity or compassion.

  “Why, Jutta?” he gasped.

  “My name is Itte,” I told him. Then I spoke to the Matronit. “Let him see my true face.” I watched his eyes as my disguise melted away and my own features showed forth.

  “You killed my father,” I told him. “Ten years ago, you killed him. For ten years I have missed his embrace and smile. And never will I see them again.”

  “Jewess!” he spat.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  The vines grew further, wrapping themselves along his trunk, and they began burrowing into his flesh. He screamed.

  “Did my father
scream like that?” I asked him. “Did he scream when you made him dance in thorns?”

  Eva continued to cry.

  “Please, Jutta, spare me!”

  Again, I could feel the force of his request marching through my body. The Matronit was channeling all her strength into the vines of my hair. I had only my own resolve with which to meet his power, but that power had been weakened by my breaking the blowpipe and the fiddle, for all things are more powerful in threes. I met his will with my own.

  “For Eva’s sake, spare me!”

  I stared into his eyes. “You know nothing of Eva! Do you know which solid foods she can stomach, and which she cannot? Do you know on which day she began to crawl? Does she even babble your name?”

  I thought of my father, swinging me through the air, patching my dolly, cuddling me to sleep and I thought of him exhausted, breathless, limbs burning like fire, skin torn, confessing to crimes he had never committed, knowing he would never see me nor my brothers nor my mother again, and my resolve strengthened.

  “I will not spare you, Herr Geiger,” I said. A new vine formed from another lock of my hair, and even as he gibbered in terror, it wrapped itself around his throat.

  “Eva—” he began.

  “Eva is mine,” I told him. “You destroyed my family. I will take her and make a new one.”

  At my nod, the vine gave one jerk, and snapped his neck.

  The vines let him fall, and they began shrinking and turning back into my plain black hair, which replaited itself. I took one final look down at what had been Herr Geiger. Then I nodded again, and turned and ran to Eva.

  As soon as she caught sight of my face, she stopped crying, and she beamed at me through her tears and held out her arms. I picked her up and began to soothe her. I changed her cloth, for she had wet herself, and nursed her back to sleep.

  “I am taking her with me,” I told the Matronit as I threw my belongings into my sack. “I do not care what is said about us. I will not leave her here to be raised by strangers, to be taught to hate Jews.”

  It would be a terrible thing to do to a Jewish infant, said the Matronit.

  I paused. “She is not Jewish.”

  She is the child of a Jewish mother.

  “Konstanze was Jewish?” I asked.

  No. Konstanze is not her only mother.

  “She is not my daughter.”

  She is. Your milk gave her life. She knows she is your daughter.

  “Why did she not cry when I picked her up?” I asked. “She has not seen my true face before, only my disguise.”

  She has never seen any face but your true one, the Matronit said. She knows you. She knows your face. She knows you are her mother.

  I had finished packing. I picked up Eva and she opened her eyes to peer drowsily at me. She smiled, nestled her head against my chest, and fell back asleep. I tied her to me, picked up my sack, and left Herr Geiger’s home with my daughter.

  * * *

  Outside the town walls, I stood and watched as bushes and vines of thorns grow. They blocked the gate and rose to enclose Dornburg.

  “What will happen to the townspeople?” I asked the Matronit.

  They will wake tomorrow to find the sun blotted out, the sky replaced by a ceiling of thorns, and no way out of the eternal night their town has become. The sun will not shine. The crops will fail. No traders will be able to penetrate the thorns. They will starve.

  I watched for a while longer, and found myself troubled. I could not shake from my mind the memory of the grin the little boy had given me on my first day in Dornburg. Apparently I had some pity, some compassion after all.

  “Is this just?” I asked. “To destroy the lives of children for what their elders have done before they were born?”

  The vines paused in their growth.

  Do you question me?

  “I do,” I said. “Children are powerless. Is this divine retribution, to murder the helpless? I do not wish it. Matronit, you should not do this.”

  The Matronit was silent. And then—Very well. I will spare the children. You may take them away to safety.

  I remembered an old story, of a man in a many-colored suit leading away the children of Hamelin. But is this what I wanted? To take charge of a town’s worth of children who by the age of six were already playing at killing my people?

  “No,” I said. “What you suggest is impossible. How should I do such a thing? And is it mercy to take children from the only love they have ever known, to make them wander the earth without family? Without home? Is this kindness?”

  What do you suggest? The Matronit did not seem pleased with me.

  I thought again, looking at the thorn-vines. “I know another story,” I said. “Of a princess asleep in a tower, and a forest of thorns sprung up around her.”

  And this is your vengeance? asked the Matronit. Sleep for a hundred years? They will sleep and wake and your people will still be suffering.

  “No,” I agreed. “A hundred years will not suffice. But … let them sleep … let them sleep…” I thought of what the Matronit had shown me of the future. “Let them sleep until their loathing for my people, Matronit, for your children, is only a curiosity, an absurdity, a poor joke. Let them sleep until they are only antiquities, laughing-stocks. Let them sleep until Hesse—and all the lands that surround it—are safe for the Jews.”

  The Matronit was silent once more.

  “Will that suffice?” I prodded her.

  That will be a long time, my daughter.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  That … will suffice. They will sleep until realms of this land—all this land, all Europe—are safe for the Jews. And you are satisfied? This is different enough from death?

  I struggled to explain. “If they do not wake … if they cannot wake … it will be only their fellows in hatred who are to blame. Not I.”

  I stroked Eva’s head, noticing the darkness growing in at the roots of her hair. “Will you guide us, Matronit? Will you guide my footsteps?”

  I will guide you. I will guide you to Worms, where you will see and speak with your Uncle Leyb and Elias, and then you shall take them with you to London.

  “London?” I asked, surprised.

  London is open to my children once again. And there will be no pogroms there, not in your lifetime. Nor your daughter’s. Nor your daughter’s children’s, and their children’s after them. I will guide you to London, and then I must depart. But you will keep my rites, daughter. Keep my rites.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I will keep your rites.”

  * * *

  I stood outside those walls with Eva bound to my chest, my old dolly tucked in next to her, and I carried my pack, which contained only those things I brought with me—I no more steal than my father did—and some of Eva’s necessary items. She is sleeping peacefully, and I can feel the damp warmth of her breath against my neck. No feeling has ever given me greater pleasure.

  The vines of thorns had almost reached the top of the town walls when I turned and did what my father had not been allowed to do. I walked away from Dornburg.

  * * *

  For Donna Mosevius Levinsohn

  Copyright (C) 2014 by Veronica Schanoes

  Art copyright (C) 2014 by Anna & Elena Balbusso

  Before Fairuz got the tattoo, I’d never even heard of the beetles.

  I just knew that the tattoo she wanted was enormous, and that it would take all night, and even as I agreed to come with her I said, “This is a bad idea.”

  “Good,” she said, and hit the gas.

  I expected some shithole off the main drag, the kind of place Fairuz would go to make a point. But it was clean as a dentist’s office, and they gave us paper caps and told us to watch what we touched.

  Inside was even cleaner, and the man waiting for us was in a work suit that zipped up to his neck.

  “Lie down,” he said, turning on the projector.

  As Fairuz pulled off her shirt and settled onto her stomach,
the ink drawing snapped into place over her skin: fifteen constellations, scattered on her back from the shoulder blades down past the waist of her trousers; freckles with labels, pulled together by string.

  “You want something for the pain?” the guy asked.

  Fairuz shrugged. “Sure.”

  He picked up a container of gold and pink marbles and poured them over her back.

  Of course they weren’t marbles, but when you haven’t heard of the beetles before, you don’t think that kind of thing will ever happen, that someone gets a Tupperware of bugs and dumps them out.

  (You only need one or two, if the area’s small, but Fairuz never did anything small if she could help it; the tattoo was all over and so were the beetles.)

  They skittered back and forth over her skin, a shirt of rosy sequins, and across their bodies the projected constellations flickered in and out of sight.

  I think this is before she died.

  * * *

  Cetonia aphrodite (Venus beetle). This beetle, native to continental Europe and long thought extinct, was recently rediscovered in Denmark’s temperate thickets. Though no definitive studies have been conducted, it may be inferred that global warming forced a migration of the species to a more northern climate.

  Cetonia aphrodite, commonly known as the Venus beetle because of its pink-gold coloring, feeds off pollen, particularly roses and other flowering climbers. In order to monopolize this popular resource, the beetles produce a toxin that deters predators and competition.

  It is this trait that has made the Venus beetle of particular interest, and combined with a hardy disposition that does well in captivity, domestication efforts have brought the species back from the brink of extinction. Breeding programs recently began in Denmark to assure the supply of Venus beetle toxin as a natural pesticide.

  The most promising potential for human application since the project’s inception has been the peripheral effects of the toxin, which acts as an analgesic on contact with skin. Like many great discoveries, it was an accidental find, but its medical application as an inexpensive, naturally-derived painkiller could be significant.

  When applied repeatedly in a short span, buildup of the toxin creates mild euphoria. Addicts and experimenters have been known to plant the Venus beetle under the skin near a vein for a sustained high. The Insect Preservation Act of 2046, if passed, will place these and similar insects under protected status and make implantation punishable, but the market for them continues to thrive, and each year, dozens of injuries are reported from those who tried to self-extract the beetle, and the image of the beetle—a distant, smaller cousin of the scarab, inheriting their round heads and sturdy legs—has become a symbol among the chemical class of thrill-seekers.