Sisters of the Revolution

by Ann VanderMeer

  She lay quiet, taking air, and something stirred against her arm. She wrenched away and raised her sword, but Montaube’s ultimate glowing soldier was there, draped on the base of what looked to be a pillar trunk. A lamp, he shone for her as the circulatory flashes died from the interior of her eyes. So she saw Renier of Towers sprawled not a foot from her.

  She kneeled, and tested the quality of the tension about her. And she interpreted from it a savoring, a cat’s-paw willingness to play, to let out the leash before dragging it tight once more.

  The corpse (MAUDRAS SLEW ME inscribed on the pillar) appeared to glow brighter to enable her to see the mark on Renier’s forehead, like the bruise caused by some glancing bolt. A trickle of blood where formerly wine had trickled. The lids shivering, the chest rising and falling shallowly.

  She leaned to him and whispered: “You live then. Your luck’s kinder than I reckoned. To be stunned rather than slaughtered. And Maudras’s magic waiting for you to get up again. Not liking to kill when you would not know it. Preferring to make a meal of killing you, unfair and unsquare.”

  Then, without preface, terror swamped the hollow pillared guard of Maudras’s castle.

  A hundred, ten hundred, whirling slivers of steel carved the nothingness. From the blind vault, blades swooped, seared, wailed. Jaisel was netted in a sea of death. Waves of death broke over her, gushed aside, were negated by vaster waves. She sprang from one edge and reached another. The slashing was like the beaks of birds, scoring hands, cheeks; scratches as yet, but pecking, diligent. While, in its turn, her sword sank miles deep in substances like mud, like powder. Subhuman voices squalled. Unseen shapes tottered. But the rain of bites of pecks, of scratches, whirled her this way, that way, against pillars, broken stones, downward, upward. And she was in terror. Fought in terror. Terror lent her miraculous skills, feats, and a crazy flailing will to survive, and a high wild cry which again and again she smote the darkness with, along with dagger and sword.

  Till abruptly she could no longer fight. Her limbs melted and terror melted with them into a worse state of abject exhaustion, acceptance, resignation. Her spirit sank, she sank, the sword sank from one hand, the dagger from the other. Drowning, she thought stubbornly: Die fighting, at least. But she did not have the strength left her.

  Not until that moment did she grow aware of the cessation of blows, the silence.

  She had stumbled against, was partly leaning on, some upright block of stone that had been in her way when she dropped. Dully, her mind struggled with a paradox that would not quite resolve. She had been battling shadows, which had slain others instantly, but had not slain Jaisel. Surely what she supposed was a game had gone on too long for a game. While in earnest, now she was finished, the mechanism for butchery in this castle might slay her, yet did not. And swimming wonder surfaced scornfully: Am I charmed?

  There was a light. Not the phosphorus of Montaube’s soldiers. It was a light the color the wretched country had been by day, a sallow snow-blue glaze, dirty silver on the columns, coming up like a Sabbat moon from out of nowhere.

  Jaisel stared into the light, and perceived a face floating in it. No doubt. It must be the countenance of burned Maudras, the last malicious dregs of his spirit on holiday from hell to effect menace. More skull than man. Eye sockets faintly gleaming, mouth taut as if in agony.

  With loathing and aversion, and with horror, the skull regarded her. It seemed, perversely, to instruct her to shift her gaze downward, to the stone block where she leaned powerlessly.

  And something in the face ridiculously amused her, made her shake with laughter, shudder with it, so that she knew before she looked.

  The light was snuffed a second later.

  Then the castle began, in rumbling stages, to collapse on every side. Matter-of-factly, she went to Renier and lay over his unconscious body to protect him from the cascading granite.

  He was not grateful as she bathed his forehead at the chill pool equidistant between the ruin and the camp of Towers.

  Nearby, the horse licked the grudging turf. The mist had fled, and a rose-crimson sun was blooming on the horizon. A hundred yards off, the camp gave evidence of enormous turmoil. Renier swore at her.

  “Am I to credit that a strumpet nullified the sorcery of Maudras? Don’t feed me that stew.”

  “You suffer it too hardly. As ever,” said Jaisel, honed to patience by the events of the night. “Any woman might have achieved this thing. But women warriors are uncommon.”

  “There is one too many, indeed.”

  Jaisel stood. She started to walk away. Renier called after her huskily:

  “Wait. Say to me again what was written in the stone.”

  Her back to him, she halted. Concisely, wryly smiling, she said: “I, Maudras, to this castle do allot my everlasting bane, that no man shall ever approach its walls without hurt, nor enter it and live long. Nor, to the world’s ending, shall it be taken by any man.”

  Renier snarled.

  She did not respond to that, but walked on.

  Presently he caught up to her, and striding at her side, said: “How many other prophecies could be undone, do you judge, lady Insolence, that dismiss women in such fashion?”

  “As many as there are stars in heaven,” she said.

  Brooding, but no longer arguing, he escorted her into the camp.

  KARIN TIDBECK

  Aunts

  Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish writer who has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002, and in English since 2010. Her 2010 book debut, the short-story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?, was awarded the coveted one-year working grant from the Swedish Authors’ Fund. Her English-language collection Jagannath (2012) won the Crawford Award and was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr Memorial Award. Her English publication history includes Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Unstuck Annual. The strangely surreal “Aunts” shows the passages of rituals and history from one generation to another. It was first published in ODD? in 2011.

  In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles.

  The orangery is one such place. It is located in an apple orchard, which lies at the outskirts of a garden. The air is damp and laden with the yeasty sweetness of overripe fruit. Gnarled apple trees with bright yellow leaves flame against the cold and purpling sky. Red globes hang heavy on their branches. The orangery gets no visitors. The orchard belongs to a particular regent whose gardens are mostly populated by turgid nobles completely uninterested in the orchard. It has no servants, no entertainment. It requires walking, and the fruit is mealy.

  But in the event someone did walk in among the trees, they would find them marching on for a very long time, every tree almost identical to the other. (Should that someone try to count the fruit, they would also find that each tree has the exact same number of apples.) If this visitor did not turn around and flee for the safety of the more cultivated parts of the gardens, they would eventually see the trees disperse and the silver-and-glass bubble of an orangery rise out of the ground. Drawing closer, they would have seen this:

  The inside of the glass walls were covered by a thin brown film of fat vapour and breath. Inside, fifteen orange trees stood along the curve of the cupola; fifteen smaller, potted trees made a circle inside the first. Marble covered the center, where three bolstered divans sat surrounded by low round tables. The divans sagged under the weight of three gigantic women.

  The Aunts had one single holy task: to expand. They slowly accumulated layers of fat. A thigh bisected would reveal a pattern of concentric rings, the fat colored different hues. On the middle couch reclined Great-Aunt, who was the largest of the three. Her body flowed down from her head like waves of whipped cream, arms and legs mere nubs protruding from her magnificent mass.

  Great-Aunt’s sisters lay on either side. Middle Sister, her stoma
ch cascading over her knees like a blanket, was eating little link sausages one by one, like a string of pearls. Little Sister, not noticeably smaller than the others, peeled the lid off a meat pie. Great-Aunt extended an arm, letting her fingers slowly sink into the pie’s naked interior. She scooped up a fistful of dark filling and buried her face in it with a sigh. Little Sister licked the inside clean of the rest of the filling, then carefully folded it four times and slowly pushed it into her mouth. She snatched up a new link of sausages. She opened and scraped the filling from the skin with her teeth, then threw the empty skins aside. Great-Aunt sucked at the mouthpiece of a thin tube snaking up from a samovar on the table. The salty mist of melted butter rose up from the lid on the pot. She occasionally paused to twist her head and accept small marrow biscuits from one of the three girls hovering near the couches.

  The grey-clad girls quietly moving through the orangery were Nieces. In the kitchens under the orangery, they baked sumptuous pastries and cakes; they fed and cleaned their Aunts. They had no individual names and were indistinguishable from each other, often even to themselves. The Nieces lived on leftovers from the Aunts: licking up crumbs mopped from Great-Aunt’s chin, drinking the dregs of the butter samovar. The Aunts did not leave much, but the Nieces did not need much either.

  Great-Aunt could no longer expand, which was as it should be. Her skin, which had previously lain in soft folds around her, was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright. As she lay back, Great-Aunt began to shudder. She closed her eyes and her mouth became slack. A dark line appeared along her abdomen. As it reached her groin, she became still. With a soft sigh, the skin split along the line. Layer after layer of skin, fat, muscle, and membrane broke open until the breastbone was exposed and fell open with a wet crack. Golden blood washed out of the wound, splashing onto the couch and onto the floor, where it was caught in a shallow trough. The Nieces went to work, carefully scooping out organs and entrails. Deep in the cradle of her ribs lay a wrinkled pink shape, arms and legs wrapped around Great-Aunt’s heart. It opened its eyes and squealed as the Nieces lifted away the last of the surrounding tissue. They cut away the heart with the new Aunt still clinging to it, and placed her on a small pillow where she settled down and began to chew on the heart with tiny teeth.

  The Nieces sorted intestines, liver, lungs, kidneys, bladder, uterus, and stomach; they were each put in separate bowls. Next they removed Aunt’s skin. It came off easily in great sheets, ready to be cured and tanned and made into one of three new dresses. Then it was time for removing the fat: first the wealth of Aunt’s enormous breasts, then her voluminous belly, her thighs; last, her flattened buttocks. The Nieces teased muscle loose from the bones; it needed not much force, but almost fell into their hands. Finally, the bones themselves, soft and translucent, were chopped up into manageable bits. When all this was done, the Nieces turned to Middle and Little Sister who were waiting on their couches, still and wide open. Everything neatly divided into pots and tubs; the Nieces scrubbed the couches and on them lay the new Aunts, each still busy chewing on the remains of a heart.

  The Nieces retreated to the kitchens under the orangery. They melted and clarified the fat, ground the bones into fine flour, chopped and baked the organ meats, soaked the sweetbreads in vinegar, simmered the muscle until the meat fell apart in flakes, cleaned out and hung the intestines to dry. Nothing was wasted. The Aunts were baked into cakes and pâtés and pastries and little savoury sausages and dumplings and crackling. The new Aunts would be very hungry and very pleased.

  Neither the Nieces nor the Aunts saw it happen, but someone made their way through the apple trees and reached the orangery. The Aunts were getting a bath. The Nieces sponged the expanses of skin with lukewarm rose water. The quiet of the orangery was replaced by the drip and splash of water, the clunk of copper buckets, the grunts of Nieces straining to move flesh out of the way. They didn’t see the curious face pressed against the glass, greasy corkscrew locks drawing filigree traces: a hand landing next to the staring face, cradling a round metal object. Nor did they at first hear the quiet, irregular ticking noise the object made. It wasn’t until the ticking noise, first slow, then faster, amplified and filled the air, that an Aunt opened her eyes and listened. The Nieces turned toward the orangery wall. There was nothing there, save for a handprint and a smudge of white.

  Great-Aunt could no longer expand. Her skin was stretched taut over the fat pushing outward from inside. Great-Aunt raised her eyes from her vast body and looked at her sisters, who each nodded in turn. The Nieces stepped forward, removing the pillows that held the Aunts upright.

  The Aunts gasped and wheezed. Their abdomens were a smooth, unbroken expanse: there was no trace of the telltale dark line. Great-Aunt’s face turned a reddish blue as her own weight pressed down on her throat. Her shivers turned into convulsions. Then, suddenly, her breathing ceased altogether and her eyes stilled. On either side, her sisters rattled out their final breaths in concert.

  The Nieces stared at the quiet bodies. They stared at each other. One of them raised her knife.

  As the Nieces worked, the more they removed from Great-Aunt, the clearer it became that something was wrong. The flesh wouldn’t give willingly, but had to be forced apart. They resorted to using shears to open the ribcage. Finally, as they were scraping the last of the tissue from Great-Aunts thigh bones, one of them said:

  “I do not see a little Aunt.”

  “She should be here,” said another.

  They looked at each other. The third burst into tears. One of the others slapped the crying girl’s head.

  “We should look further,” said the one who had slapped her sister. “She could be behind the eyes.”

  The Nieces dug further into Great-Aunt; they peered into her skull, but found nothing. They dug into the depths of her pelvis, but there was no new Aunt. Not knowing what else to do, they finished the division of the body, then moved on to the other Aunts. When the last of the three had been opened, dressed, quartered, and scraped, no new Aunt had yet been found. By now, the orangery’s floor was filled with tubs of neatly ordered meat and offal. Some of the younger orange trees had fallen over and were soaking in golden blood. One of the Nieces, possibly the one who had slapped her sister, took a bowl and looked at the others.

  “We have work to do,” she said.

  The Nieces scrubbed the orangery floor and cleaned the couches. They turned every last bit of the Aunts into a feast. They carried platters of food from the kitchens and laid it out on the surrounding tables. The couches were still empty. One of the Nieces sat down in the middle couch. She took a meat pastry and nibbled at it. The rich flavour of Great-Aunt’s baked liver burst into her mouth; the pastry shell melted on her tongue. She crammed the rest of the pastry into her mouth and swallowed. When she opened her eyes, the other Nieces stood frozen in place, watching her.

  “We must be the new Aunts now,” the first Niece said.

  One of the others considered this. “Mustn’t waste it,” she said, eventually.

  The new Aunts sat down on Middle Sister and Little Sister’s couches and tentatively reached for the food on the tables. Like their sister, they took first little bites, then bigger and bigger as the taste of the old Aunts filled them. Never before had they been allowed to eat from the tables. They ate until they couldn’t down another bite. They slept. When they woke up, they fetched more food from the kitchen. The orangery was quiet save for the noise of chewing and swallowing. One Niece took an entire cake and buried her face in it, eating it from the inside out. Another rubbed marinated brain onto herself, as if to absorb it. Sausages, slices of tongue topped with jellied marrow, candied eyes that crunched and then melted. The girls ate and ate until the kitchen was empty and the floor covered in a layer of crumbs and drippings. They lay back on the couches and l
ooked at each other’s bodies, measuring bellies and legs. None of them were noticeably fatter.

  “It’s not working,” said the girl on the leftmost couch. “We ate them all up and it’s not working!” She burst into tears.

  The middle girl pondered this. “Aunts can’t be Aunts without Nieces,” she said.

  “But where do we find Nieces?” said the rightmost. “Where did we come from?” The other two were silent.

  “We could make them,” said the middle girl. “We are good at baking, after all.”

  And so the prospective Aunts swept up the crumbs from floor and plates, mopped up juices and bits of jelly, and returned with the last remains of the old Aunts to the kitchens. They made a dough and fashioned it into three girl-shaped cakes, baked them and glazed them. When the cakes were done, they were a crisp light brown and the size of a hand. The would-be Aunts took the cakes up to the orangery and set them down on the floor, one beside each couch. They wrapped themselves in the Aunt-skins, and lay down on their couches to wait.

  Outside, the apple trees rattled their leaves in a faint breeze. On the other side of the apple orchard was a loud party, where a gathering of nobles played croquet with human heads, and their changeling servants hid under the tables, telling each other stories to keep the fear away. No sound of this reached the orangery, quiet in the steady gloom. No smell of apples snuck in between the panes. The Aunt-skins settled in soft folds around the sleeping girls.

  Eventually one of them woke. The girl-shaped cakes lay on the floor, like before.

  The middle girl crawled out of the folds of the skin dress and set her feet down on the floor. She picked up the cake sitting on the floor next to her.

  “Perhaps we should eat them,” she said. “And the Nieces will grow inside us.” But her voice was faint.