The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  He didn’t want to, started to shake his head, because his place was right here, with all the death and ruin about them to clear away, bodies to bury or burn, and the people needing someone to show the way, and that being down to him, the Queen’s Man in Useless Loop. And what would he know, anyway, if he did go, about whether this dreaming was put to rest for good, or not?

  But, “Go!” she said, and he staggered up and away from her, propelled by the force in that word.

  People stumbled out of the church. Some fell to their knees, some turned away and covered their children’s eyes, some vomited. Others hugged each other and wept. A sudden shaft of bright sunshine lit the battlefield in unwelcome light. Bowley hurried past.

  He put his fingers to his mouth, barely noticing the salt-metal tang of blood as his whistle shattered the quiet. He whistled again, and saw Clay prick her ears, standing in the street outside the police station. He went to her at a stumbling run, and got her moving at a trot as soon as he was aboard.

  He felt the pressure of their eyes, like a physical weight, as he skirted the church yard. He kept his own fixed straight ahead. No-one called out to him. Maise didn’t look up from rocking her niece. The Dappled Man and his escort had already vanished into the mist. It didn’t matter - Bowley knew where they were headed.

  He caught up with them quickly enough. The blackfellas ignored him, so he followed a few yards behind, all the way up into the hills behind Del Mars’. The Dappled Man swayed like a man half dead in his saddle. His horse directed itself, or sometimes the blackfellas did, when it seemed unsure. They walked tirelessly, high-stepping over undergrowth and litter from the trees so they rarely needed to check their gait. Bowley watched the patterns of scars on their backs and legs, rippling as they moved, and wondered at the price they paid for living with the land, for not holding themselves apart as whitefellas did.

  At the mouth of the caves, they pulled the Man down from his horse and carried him inside, stooping under the low lip of rock. One paused when Bowley got down from Clay and made to follow. He raised a hand, his long, broad-tipped fingers splayed, the palm pink and free of scars. He held Bowley’s gaze with brown-black eyes. Shadows gathered beneath his heavy brow. The ridged scars that covered his skin formed a mask that obscured his expression. Once he was certain Bowley wasn’t going to follow, the man turned and went after his fellows.

  Bowley waited, with only the horses for company. He saw to Clay, but left her saddled, and made himself a small fire. The Man’s horse seemed content and Bowley was disinclined to approach it. He hunched beside his fire as night closed in and knew he’d made a mistake, coming here. Knew he should’ve stayed in town, and been the Queen’s Man, no matter what Maise had wanted. But he knew there was no way he could’ve refused her.

  He stared into the flames, trying not to see Alby’s head come apart, over and over again. He tried not to hear German’s screams as human teeth tore into him. Not to see the grief on

  Maise’s face as she held her niece, nor hear Jemima’s wailing, that said saving her was the worst they could’ve done. Exhaustion eventually let him fall into a light doze.

  ~ * ~

  The blackfellas brought the Dappled Man back out in the grey of morning. He said nothing to Bowley, nor even appeared to recognize his presence, even though Bowley rose to his feet barely an arm’s length from where the Man passed.

  The blackfellas led him to his horse and put him up in the saddle. One of them took its reins, and another two held the Man’s legs to keep him in his seat as they walked away with him into the bush.

  Bowley was left alone once again, and wondering what victory had cost the spook, whether he hadn’t been able to separate all of himself from the dreaming when they’d put it back into the ground.

  He looked back into the cave, felt gooseflesh rise all over his body. He could only hope that the task was done.

  He got his skinning knife from his saddle roll, scratched the rune for danger into the rock above the cave mouth. The sign had no power, since he had none to give it, and the shallow marks would fade quickly, but it would serve, for now.

  ~ * ~

  Smoke rose from the churchyard, when he returned to town. A funeral pyre. They’d burned all the bodies together. A few folk watched him walk past on Clay, their faces closed in, looking at him like a stranger. Crows picked among the headstones, hunting for any titbits that might’ve been overlooked.

  There was a cart outside the post office, half loaded with small furnishings and baskets and crates of bric-a-brac. Maise’s rocking chair, from the porch, that Nev had made her for a wedding gift, was lashed in pride of place on top of the pile. As Bowley approached, she came out with a basket of clothes. Her eyes flickered over to him. Her expression closed in and she looked away.

  Bowley stopped Clay beside the cart and watched for a moment while she worked the basket into a too-small space at the back.

  “Maise? You’re leaving?”

  She didn’t look up. “I am.”

  His eyes were suddenly hot and overfull. “Where are you going, love?” he asked.

  “Don’t you ...” She caught herself. “I don’t know. Away.”

  Bowley’s mouth worked silently for a moment before he could shape more words. “Would you have left before I got back?”

  Maise stopped, bowed her head. “I can’t do it, Robert,” she said, from between her raised arms. “I can’t even look at you.”

  She gave the basket a final shove and turned her back on him. He watched her disappear back inside. She returned a moment later, followed by Dermott O’Shane, carrying Jemima. The younger man glanced at Bowley, and away again, without speaking. Maise climbed up onto the cart’s bench, then turned to help O’Shane lift Jemima up beside her. The girl was wrapped in a blanket, so Bowley could discern little more than the fact that she was conscious. She huddled against Maise, tucking her head low. Maise sat straight and rigid, looking neither left nor right, nor back, as she picked up the reins and clucked their horse into motion.

  Clay danced a little, when the cart started moving. She twisted her neck to watch it, then snorted, and returned her gaze forward, to wait patiently, again, for her master to tell her what to do. O’Shane looked as though he might speak, then shook his head, dissatisfied with the words he might’ve offered, and walked away.

  Bowley sat there for a long time, the words “Can I come with you?” lying bitter on his tongue.

  * * * *

  Ian McHugh is a graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop and a member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. His stories have won the gold prize in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest (for ‘Bitter Dreams’) and the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story. His bibliography and links to read or hear most of his short fiction publications free online can be found at his website, ianmchugh.wordpress.com. ‘Bitter Dreams’ was the first story Ian wrote at Clarion West. It would not exist (and probably much of what he’s written since wouldn’t exist) if Paul Park hadn’t read ‘A Dry, Quiet War’ by Tony Daniel to the class during the first week of that workshop. “That story, and the others Paul read to us, set the bar high. I’d been planning to write a horror-Western masli-up for my first story, so ‘A Dry, Quiet War’ really set me back on my heels and made me think, ‘Damn, I’m going to have to find something special,’ which in turn got me thinking about writing an Australian horror-Western. Relocating it meant rethinking the whole suite of Western characters and their relationship to the land around them, which is something that’s continued to interest me since.”

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  * * * *

  * * *

  The Goosle

  MARGO LANAGAN

  “There.” said Grinnan as we cleared the trees. “Now, you keep your counsel, Hanny-boy.”

  Why, that is the mudwife’s house, I thought. Dread thudded in me. Since two days ago among the older trees when I knew we were in my father’s forest, I’d feared this.

 
; The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer-biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating.

  The mudwife might be dead, I thought hopefully. So many are dead, after all, of the black.

  But then came a convulsion in the house. A face passed the window-hole, and there she was at the door. Same squat body with a big face snarling above. Same clothing, even, after all these years, the dress trying for bluishness and the pinafore for brown through all the dirt. She looked just as strong. However much bigger I’d grown, it took all my strength to hold my bowels together.

  “Don’t come a step nearer.” She held a red fire-banger in her hand, but it was so dusty - if I’d not known her I’d have laughed.

  “Madam, I pray you.” said Grinnan. “We are clean as clean - there’s not a speck on us, not a blister. Humble travellers in need only of a pig-hut or a chicken-shed to shelter the night.”

  “Touch my stock and I’ll have you.” she says to all his smoothness. “I’ll roast your head in a pot.”

  I tugged Grinnan’s sleeve. It was all too sudden - one moment walking wondering, the next on the doorstep with the witch right there, talking heads in pots.

  “We have pretties to trade.” said Grinnan.

  “You can put your pretties up your poink-hole where they belong.”

  “We have all the news of long travel. Are you not at all curious about the world and its woes?”

  “Why would I live here, tuffet-head?” And she went inside and slammed her door and banged the shutter across her window.

  “She is softening.” said Grinnan. “She is curious. She can’t help herself.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You watch me. Get us a fire going, boy. There on that bit of bare ground.”

  “She will come and throw her hunger in it. She’ll blind us, and then -”

  “Just make and shut. I tell you, this one is as good as married to me. I have her heart in my hand like a rabbit-kitten.”

  I was sure he was mistaken, but I went to, because fire meant food and just the sight of the house had made me hungry. While I fed the fire its kindling I dug up a little stone from the flattened ground and sucked the dirt off it.

  Grinnan had me make a smelly soup. Salt-fish, it had in it, and sea-celery and the yellow spice.

  When the smell was strong, the door whumped open and there she was again. Ooh, she was so like in my dreams, with her suddenness and her ugly intentions that you can’t guess. But it was me and Grinnan this time, not me and Kirtle. Grinnan was big and smart, and he had his own purposes. And I knew there was no magic in the world, just trickery on the innocent. Grinnan would never let anyone else trick me; he wanted that privilege all for himself.

  “Take your smelly smells from my garden this instant!” the mud wife shouted.

  Grinnan bowed as if she’d greeted him most civilly. “Madam, if you’d join us? There is plenty of this lovely bull-a-bess for you as well.”

  “I’d not touch my lips to such mess. What kind of foreign muck -”

  Even I could hear the longing in her voice, that she was trying to shout down.

  There before her he ladled out a bowlful - yellow, splashy, full of delicious lumps. Very humbly - he does humbleness well when he needs to, for such a big man - he took it to her. When she recoiled he placed it on the little table by the door, the one that I ran against in my clumsiness when escaping, so hard I still sometimes feel the bruise in my rib. I remember, I knocked it skittering out the door, and I flung it back meaning to trip up the mudwife. But instead I tripped up Kirtle, and the wife came out and plucked her up and bellowed after me and kicked the table onto the path, and ran out herself with Kirtle like a tortoise swimming from her fist and kicked the table aside again -

  Bang! went the cottage door.

  Grinnan came laughing quietly back to me.

  “She is ours. Once they’ve et your food, Hanny, you’re free to eat theirs. Fish and onion pie tonight, I’d say.”

  “Eugh.”

  “Jealous, are we? Don’t like old Grinnan supping at other pots, hnh?”

  “It’s not that!” I glared at his laughing face. “She’s so ugly, that’s all. So old. I don’t know how you can even think of -”

  “Well, I am no primrose myself, golden boy.” he says. “And I’m grateful for any flower that lets me pluck her.”

  I was not old and desperate enough to laugh at that joke. I pushed his soup-bowl at him.

  “Ah, bull-a-bess.” he said into the steam. “Food of gods and seducers.”

  ~ * ~

  When the mudwife let us in, I looked straight to the corner, and the cage was still there! It had been repaired in places with fresh plaited withes, but it was still of the same pattern. Now there was an animal in it, but the cottage was so dim ... a very thin cat, maybe, or a ferret. It rippled slowly around its borders, and flashed little eyes at us, and smelled as if its own piss were combed through its fur for pomade. I never smelled that bad when I lived in that cage. I ate well, I remember; I fattened. She took away my leavings in a little cup, on a little dish, but there was still plenty of me left.

  So that when Kirtle freed me I lumbered away. As soon as I was out of sight of the mud-house I stopped in the forest and just stood there blowing from the effort of propelling myself, after all those weeks of sloth.

  So that Grinnan when he first saw me said, Here’s a jubbly one. Here’s a cheese cake. Wherever did you get the makings of those round cheeks? And he fell on me like a starving man on a roasted mutton-leg. Before too long he had used me thin again, and thin I stayed thereafter.

  He was busy at work on the mudwife now.

  “Oh my, what an array of herbs! You must be a very knowledgeable woman. And hasn’t she a lot of pots, Hansel! A pot for every occasion, I think.”

  Oh yes, I nearly said, including head-boiling, remember?

  “Well, you are very comfortably set up here, indeed, Madam.” He looked about him as if he’d found himself inside some kind of enchanted palace, instead of in a stinking hovel with a witch in the middle of it. “Now, I’m sure you told me your name -”

  “I did not. My name’s not for such as you to know.” Her mouth was all pruny and she strutted around and banged things and shot him sharp looks, but I’d seen it. We were in here, weren’t we? We’d made it this far.

  “Ah, a guessing game!” says Grinnan delightedly. “Now, you’d have a good strong name, I’m sure. Bridda, maybe, or Gert. Or else something fiery and passionate, such as Rossavita, eh?”

  He can afford to play her awhile. If the worst comes to the worst, he has the liquor, after all. The liquor has worked on me when nothing else would, when I’ve been ready to run, to some town’s wilds where I could hide - to such as that farm-wife with the worried face who beat off Grinnan with a broom. The liquor had softened me and made me sleepy, made me give in to the old bugger’s blandishments; next day it had stopped me thinking with its head-pain, further than to obey Grinnan’s grunts and gestures.

  ~ * ~

  How does yours like it? said Gadfly’s red-haired boy viciously. I’ve heard him call you ‘honey’, like a girl-wife; does he do you like a girl, face to face and lots of kissing? Like your boy-bits, which they is so small, ain’t even there, so squashed and ground in?

  He calls me Hanny, because Hanny is my name. Hansel.

  Honey is your name, eh? said the black boy - a boy of black skin from naturalness, not illness. After your honey hair?

  Which they commenced patting and pulling and then held me down and chopped all away with Gadfly’s good knife. When Grinnan saw me he went pale, but I’m pretty sure he was trying to cut some kind of deal with Gadfly to swap me for the red-hair (with the skin like milk, like freckled milk, he said), so the only thing
it changed, he did not come after me for several nights until the hair had settled and I did not give off such an air of humiliation.

  Then he whispered, You were quite handsome under that thatch, weren’t you? All along. And things were bad as ever, and the next day he tidied off the stragglier strands, as I sat on a stump with my poink-hole thumping and the other boys idled this way and that, watching, warping their faces at each other and snorting.

  ~ * ~

  The first time Grinnan did me, I could imagine that it didn’t happen. I thought, I had that big dump full of so much nervous earth and stones and some of them must have had sharp corners and cut me as I passed them, and the throbbing of the cuts gave me the dream, that the old man had done that to me. Because I was so fearful, you know, frightened of everything coming straight from the mudwife, and I put fear and pain together and made it up in my sleep. The first time I could trick myself, because it was so terrible and mortifying a thing, it could not be real. It could not.