Beneath Ceaseless Skies #182

by Margaret Ronald

  “It was Current-Catches-the-Leg who made it clear,” Mieni said at last as we watched Borwitz lead Brontia away. “Mr. Halliwell hated the aiga-morir, and sòr Brontia took that hate on herself. It is, indeed, a hard thing to bear the hate of another, and worse to act on it.”

  “I never realized,” Caliga said. “I knew she’d grown attached to Halliwell, but I didn’t know she was keeping him sick to keep him here. It goes against every principle of St. Thecla’s.”

  Mieni glanced at me, then at her. “Indeed. But principles can bend under other forces. It is no less hard to bear the love of another.”

  There was a pause in which I could feel Mieni’s gaze on my face and just as clearly Caliga’s refusal to look at me.

  At last Caliga spoke up. “We try not to burden our patients here. With anything.”

  I cleared my throat. “You know, I doubt Halliwell even noticed how much she cared for him. He didn’t exactly pay much attention to a girl once he’d gotten her to fall for him. So maybe she had cause to fear his leaving after all.”

  Mieni shrugged. “He would have changed in any case. I do not know what it will mean that Mr. Halliwell has eaten draugar flesh. If he wakes, if they try the treatments again now that he is not being constantly poisoned, I suspect he will not be quite the same man that sòr Brontia loved.”

  I ran my hands over my face, trying to clear away the events of the morning. “Nor the man I knew. Judas, Mieni, it’s enough to make a man despair.”

  She thumped my leg with the knuckles of one hand. “Ah, Mr. Swift, it is not so bad. Love can make a number of wonderful things as well. Come back to the maternity ward with me, both of you; I will introduce you to one such, my newest great-grandson, and you may remember that we are in the midst of life.”

  “All right.” I started down the hall after her, then glanced back at Caliga. “Coming?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “It’s not my place. But thank you.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say—anything I could have said would have been far too late and, as I had said to Mieni, cruel to both of us.

  This time, Mieni saved me. “Then come another time, sòr Caliga. I will still be there, and if I am not, then you may come find me.” She smiled, long teeth friendly in her red face, and Caliga’s smile matched hers more than mine ever could.

  Copyright © 2015 Margaret Ronald

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  Margaret Ronald’s short fiction has appeared in such venues as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and over ten times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including a series of stand-alone stories set in the same steampunk world that began with “A Serpent in the Gears” in BCS #34 and includes “Salvage” in BCS #77 and “The Governess and the Lobster” in BCS #95 along with four others, as well as a ongoing series of fantasy mysteries beginning with “A Death for the Ageless” in BCS #134 and continuing in “Sweet Death“ in BCS #161 and “Murder Goes Hungry“ in BCS #182. Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at mronald.wordpress.com.

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  FLYING THE COOP

  by Jack Nicholls

  The hut lumbered past Nadia Daniilovna’s window, so close that she could have reached out and brushed her fingers against its dark timbers. It seemed to be having trouble with the rain-slick planking laid across the streets, because it moved like a drunk: tottering forward a few steps on its clawed bird feet, then pausing and listing from side to side. Nadia heard the scrape of its eaves against her roof and winced as a cascade of shingles crashed down into the street.

  As the hut creaked onwards, she spotted Bogdana Osorgina peering out of her own window. Before Nadia could make some gesture of fellow-suffering, the older woman crossed herself and slammed the shutters closed.

  The hut awkwardly navigated a twist in the road and turned towards the saltworks, disappearing from view except for its misshapen chimney bobbing above the modest rooftops. Its shuffling footsteps faded, and Nadia regretfully returned to the problem of her father’s corpse.

  Daniil Ivanov, foremost fur trader in the north, was laid out in his whites with his feet pointed towards the icon in the corner. The three candles placed about his head were sinking into puddles of red wax, and still the priest had not come. Nobody had come. They were all hiding from the witch’s hut.

  Nadia sat at the head of the bier and brushed a straying grey hair back behind her father’s ear. “What am I to do, Papa? I can’t carry you alone, but our friends are cowards. They would not have dared to disrespect you like this when you were alive.”

  Daniil Ivanov said nothing. Nadia plucked at his fingers like she had as a child, trying to slip her hand in his. But his hands were as limp and cold as a dead salmon, and Nadia knew from a recent inspection that the skin over his sagging belly was turning an unpleasant shade of sea-green. Outside, the sun dipped towards the horizon. Already she had spent three nights alone with Papa’s body. The thought of another, while the room filled with the stench of his rotting, was too much to bear.

  Rain spat against the roof, and the mantle clock ticked away the minutes. Nadia had just about made up her mind to forcibly drag the priest down from his churchyard when there was a tentative rap at the door.

  Opening it, Nadia found herself facing a curly-haired youth in a marten-fur cloak. Aleksandr Parfeev, the son of one her father’s old trading partners and a frequent visitor at Nadia’s home when they had both been children. His beard was still more goat than bear, but he would be a fine pall-bearer.

  Aleksandr doffed his round-brimmed hat and bowed low, the gallantry somewhat spoiled by the way he peered under his own armpit to check the road behind him. “My condolences, Nadia. I hope am not too late for Daniil Ivanov’s service?”

  “No, Aleksandr, although everybody else is. You have to help me get him up to the church.”

  A hen squawked somewhere nearby, and Aleksandr jumped. “Ah, he is still here then? I had thought, perhaps...”

  Aleksandr had been brave to come, and Nadia felt sorry for him, but she wasn’t about to let him out of her clutches now. “You know Daniil Ivanov always thought of you as the son he never had, Sasha,” she lied, pulling him into the house. “He would have been thrilled to know that you were guiding him to his final rest.”

  Daniil Ivanov had been a large man, and even with Aleksandr’s help, Nadia couldn’t lift the casket to her shoulders. She gripped the rear handles at the level of her waist while Aleksandr held up the front. He had to walk backwards to keep a proper hold and hunch forward to match Nadia’s height. They struggled up through the town like this, and to Nadia’s shame she had to rest her arms twice. During these pauses they laid the coffin across their knees, to avoid placing Daniil Ivanov onto unconsecrated dirt. Nadia knew that the neighbors were watching them, but nobody came to their aid. “Cowards!” she shouted at the shuttered windows. “He would have carried you! May your beards molt and your wombs shrivel!”

  “Nadia!” hissed Aleksandr. “You will bring the witch down on us.”

  They took up the body again and staggered on through the drizzle, feet slapping against the logs that kept the roads from dissolving into slush. They were in sight of the churchyard gates when the witch’s hut hopped out from between two buildings, thirty paces behind them.

  It was the first time Nadia had seen it in its entirety: a dark log cabin perched atop a pair of chicken legs at least as tall as she. It bound towards them in a series of ungainly lurches, sending tremors through the logs with each jump. Aleksandr was freezing up, so Nadia shoved the casket forward to ram him in the stomach. “Come on, Sasha!” she shouted.

  They ran, jostling poor Papa about inside his casket. Nadia forced herself not to look back at the charging house, but she kept expecting the witch’s soot-black tongue to snake ou
t around her ankle and bring herself, Aleksandr, and Papa all crashing down onto the logs. She could hear its door banging back and forth as it closed the distance.

  Somehow, Nadia kept her grip and Aleksandr kept his footing, and they passed between the iron gateposts just a few feet ahead of their pursuer. The gate was too small for the hut to pass through, and it collided against the railings with a ringing clang that bent the ironwork like windblown reeds.

  Another charge would probably have brought down the fence, but the witch seemed to have given up the chase. The hut sank to its haunches, blocking the buckled gateway

  While Aleksandr laid Daniil Ivanov’s casket down by the open grave that had been prepared for him the day before, Nadia ventured into the church of the saints. To her disgust, she found it empty and the candles unlit. Even the priest was in hiding. Having gotten this far, Nadia wasn’t going to wait for however long it would take for the coward to return, so she took the Psalter from the vestry and carried it back outside. The hut was still loitering by the gateway.

  The rain trickled mud into the hole. Nadia stood with her back resolutely turned against the witch, crying out the church-words. Aleksandr’s aghast gaze was fixed on the hut behind her, but he clasped his hands piously and chimed his responses when needed.

  When she closed the book, the witch’s hut clattered its shutters in ghoulish applause. Nadia’s chest tightened, but she was too angry to cry. Angry at the witch, and the weather, and her neighbors, who had all conspired to shame proud Daniil Ivanov into this pauper’s funeral.

  Aleksandr rigged up some sodden ropes, and together they lowered the casket into the hole. It settled with a squelch. Gravedigging was menial work, but he took up the shovel without complaint and began to splatter sods onto the casket. Rain and sweat plastered down his curls, and he gave only a perfunctory protest when Nadia found a birch broom and helped him scrape dirt down onto her father’s casket.

  The witch’s hut remained. It was still there when Aleksandr was patting down the last of the turned earth, although half-hidden in the shadow of the church spires. In the end, Nadia and Aleksandr had to climb over the churchyard’s back fence and circle around the twilight streets to get home. Aleksandr offered Nadia the protection of the Parfeev house, but she turned him down. She must be seen to be unflappable. Reputation was everything, in the furrier trade.

  * * *

  The next day, the hut was waiting in the road outside Nadia’s house. Her startled shriek as she opened the shutters sent crows flapping up from its snow-crusted shingles, but the hut remained still. A spiral knothole above its lintel sat at the level of Nadia’s window, staring in like a lidless eye. She instinctively clapped a protective arm across her face and slammed the shutters closed.

  Legs trembling, Nadia leaned her weight against the wall and counted to a hundred. When her heartbeat had steadied, she inched the shutters ajar and took another peek.

  The knothole leered.

  There was no point in screaming again, nobody was likely to come to her aid while a witch’s house squatted outside. She was just going to have to deal with this herself.

  She went downstairs and lit a taper. “If you are here, Grandmother Yaga, I mean you no harm.” she called out. When there was no reply, Nadia ran to the food bin and crumbled all the eggshells she could find, ensuring that the witch could not crawl out of them as her kind were known to do. Then, giving the lie to her words, Nadia picked up a sharp knife and opened every cupboard and chest, wondering as she did so whether the witch swallowed her victims whole or crunched them first, and which would be more unpleasant.

  The house was empty, though to be certain Nadia had to enter her father’s room for the first time since his illness. His sable coat, left hanging on the door, still carried his scent, and Nadia couldn’t bear to leave it languishing in the dark. She carried it out and hung it on the workroom peg as if Papa had just come home, and fresh wave of grief wracked her. Once it passed she was left with a rising sense of indignation. Did Grandmother Yaga have no decency, to haunt a person still in mourning?

  Nadia banged open the front door and glared at the cottage. Its doorstep stood level with her head, and it was shifting its weight slowly from leg to leg so that its floor tilted first one way, then the other. It must have been there all night, because the dirt beneath its shadow was dry while all around it lay newly fallen snow.

  “Grandmother, what is it you want from me?” Nadia called. Surely if the witch had wanted to eat her, she would have done so already. Emboldened by this reasoning, Nadia knocked as high up on the door as she could reach. Maybe if she offered a gift, the witch would go away. There was always a deal to be made.

  The hut jolted back a step, as if it had been stung. Nobody answered. In fact, there was no sign of the witch at all. The hut’s chimney was smokeless, as it had been yesterday, and what old woman could spend October without a fire burning in the stove?

  “Are you lost?” Nadia asked the hut. She noticed Bogdana Osorgina’s shutters inch open across the road and realized the absurdity of conducting a dialogue with a wooden cabin. “The forest is that way,” she said, pointing to the distant grey treeline, and then she returned to her own house to prepare for market day, the centerpiece of her week. Hopefully, the hut would leave her alone if she ignored it.

  The hut was still waiting half an hour later when she reemerged with her barrow of carefully packed skins and coats. She pretended not to notice it and started wheeling her goods down the street, but after a moment, she heard the hesitant click of claws following behind.

  The pallid sun was rising at her back, and the hut dogged her heels so closely that she walked within the elongated triangle of its shadow. Ahead of her, women screamed and men cursed, and the streets quickly emptied again. It was no good; if she arrived at the trading square with the hut in tow, the market would be thrown into chaos. But she couldn’t give up—with Papa gone, it was more vital than ever to show that Daniil Ivanov’s Fine Fur Emporium was still in business.

  She came to a narrow side-road that was little more than a drainage ditch running between two rows of stinking tanneries, twisting and narrowing as it went. Thinking quickly, Nadia swerved and pushed her cart into the alley. Behind her she saw that the hut had paused at the mouth of the tunnel, perhaps sizing up the width. It took a few cautious steps after her, timbers creaking.

  “That’s right,” encouraged Nadia, adopting the falsely cheery tone she used with dogs and children. “Come along, then.”

  The hut managed one mighty surge forward and then came to a halt, wedged between the walls. It kicked its legs forlornly and pitched back and forth, grinding its flanks against the buildings that confined it. Nadia, quashing a pang of unexpected guilt, trundled her way out into the next street, leaving the hut trapped.

  The market was smaller than usual, but not even the threat of the witch had closed it down completely. When Nadia arrived, the air was thick with traders’ cries, smoothed of their consonants through long repetition. She pushed through the crowd, graciously accepting excuses from any who had missed Daniil Ivanov’s funeral. Several of the traders offered to man her stall for her during this difficult time, but Nadia brushed them off. An hour of weakness can cost a year of business, Papa had liked to say. When she reached Ivanov’s Fine Fur Emporium on furrier’s row, she bundled away her old stool and pointedly sat in the canvas chair that had been his.

  “Fine furs, fine furs and cloths,” she called, slapping her mittened hands together to keep them limber. Her breath steamed. “Fox, badger, Siberian beaver. Or how about some Damascene silk, eighty kopeks the yard. The closest weave this side of the Orient. How about it, Anna Parsokova? Some watered silk to bring out your eyes?”

  Nadia could keep up this easy patter for hours, but it was drawing no customers today. The merchants’ wives, embalmed in their pungent makeup, gave her smiles of condolence but did not pause. Former customers idly picked through her merchandise then moved on down the row to
buy moth-eaten cloaks from cheap peddlers.

  A humiliating hour passed, and her cries grew more strained, until at last an ironmonger shouted back, “Nobody wants your furs, girl! They’re cursed by death, and you charge too much for them.”

  Nadia’s cheeks went hot. “The price matches the quality! How dare you say such a thing about my business!”

  “It was Daniil Ivanov’s business. Your business is to squeeze out a few sons,” advised the ironmonger. “That’s the way to honor your father.”

  Nadia was drawing in her breath to speak her mind at that, when Aleksandr appeared. “I’ll buy something,” he said loudly, staring down the crowd. “I would be proud to shop at Daniil Ivanov’s stall. What do you have available, Nadia?”

  At last. “Well, feast your eyes on this caftan,” Nadia was beginning, when her spiel was interrupted by distant screams. People craned uncertainly as the cries grew louder, washing towards them like a wave.

  Aleksandr seized Nadia’s arm and dragged her out of her booth, and then the air was full of splinters. She fell to the ground and twisted around to see the chicken hut looming against the sky, Damascene silk fluttering from its rafters like a pennant. It was sprawled lopsidedly in the wreckage of her stall, legs churning as it tried to regain its balance.

  Nadia was distantly aware that Aleksandr was calling her name, but she was too furious to pay him any mind. “You...you monstrous henhouse!” she screamed. She snatched up a shard of planking and charged forward, swinging the timber like a woodsman’s axe.

  The hut scrambled to its feet, shedding beaver pelts, but not before she reached it. THWACK – she brought the plank up hard against its wall, chipping its dark-stained wood. “Terrifying children!” she screamed. “Interrupting funerals! Ruining markets! You’re a disgrace!” She chased it across the square, raining blows onto its rear end while it rampaged desperately through the aisles. In the end it demolished a tinker’s stand to break loose and waded into the shallows of the river, which it followed until it twisted away out of sight behind the monastery.