Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight

by Cat Rambo

  “Master?” she whispered in his ear. “Master, you can construct wishes. You are a well-learned man. Could you not ask Cerunnos that my child be given a voice?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Olivia!” Niccolo snapped. “I thought you claimed you would not put the egg before me, and now you’re asking that I meddle with a god on its behalf? Have you no concern for my well-being? I am a poor enough wizard as it is, letting emotions sway me as I have!”

  “But…” She subsided into silence as he scowled at her.

  “We will hear no more of this,” he said.

  In the fire’s dancing light, her eyes glittered like the jewels of her costume, but he could not read the emotion there.

  At midnight, the crowd gathered around the fire, and masks were doffed. Niccolo took off his wig, sticking it under his arm. Ibbi stood beside him, having reclaimed Hrist from the reluctant children.

  The faces across the fire were horns and feathers, slips of skin and eager eyes that stared, like Niccolo and his tiny group, into the heart of the fire, waiting for the God.

  He grew so slowly from the flames that no one knew when he arrived. Great curling ram’s horns, dripping with ash and fire, sat his shoulders. His cloak was night, and its lining gleamed with subdued stars.

  He did not speak, but looked about the circle, waiting. There was resignation in his shoulders. Niccolo wondered how long it had been since anyone ignored the thousand cautionary tales and asked the god for a boon.

  And then, from his shoulder, impossibly, Olivia spoke.

  “Cerunnos, hear my plea!”

  “No,” Niccolo said, and grabbed at her with panicked fingers, but all he caught was a netting of gilt and rhinestone, and she was hovering in the air before that patrician figure. “Olivia, no!”

  The god gestured, and Niccolo could no longer speak. The massive face, still as a statue, listened.

  “My child…and my master,” Olivia said. “Let them be what they want, what they aspire to! Grant me this, Cerunnos!”

  Fire coursed through Niccolo, chasing away the panic.

  The god considered, spoke. “No matter the price?”

  “No matter the price,” Olivia said, and Niccolo knew she was doomed. He was being pulled into the fire, with Hrist, and somehow Ibbi, the three of them among the flames but not burning. He glimpsed Hrist, the doll-sized wizard’s hat askew, clinging to Ibbi, and hope surged in him before he was pulled inside the shadow of Cerunnos’ cloak, and darkness overtook him.

  After the god had gone away, after the villagers had scattered, as the dawn began to glimmer over the forest like an uncertain plea, Niccolo raised his head and spoke to Ibbi and Hrist beside the smoldering ashes of the fire.

  “Well?” he said. His voice was rough. In his hands was Olivia’s body, broken by the magic that had surged through her in answer to her prayer.

  Ibbi and Hrist stared at each other. Then Hrist spoke. “I can speak. But I am still not a familiar,” the little lizard said.

  “No.” Ibbi stretched out his hand and suddenly laughed. “But I am no longer a wizard.”

  “What?” Niccolo said, trying to understand.

  They turned to look at him in eerie unison. Olivia was heavy in his hands.

  “I am a familiar,” Ibbi said, and looked at Hrist.

  “And I the wizard,” Hrist said. “You will bear the sorrow for me, Ibbi.”

  So Ibbi wept obediently as Niccolo and Hrist buried Olivia’s tiny form in the garden, between the rows where Hrist had hunted flies and pill bugs in the summer sun. They placed her finery beneath her, as though she were in truth what she resembled, a dragon curled on a horde of gems and coins and precious metal and a caddis fly lure. She lay with her snout laid atop her paws, eyes closed and tail curled about her as they took handfuls of dirt and closed her into the earth’s darkness.

  Ibbi wept.

  But Hrist and Niccolo were true wizards now, and they felt nothing at all.

  The Silent Familiar was originally written for a Halloween contest held by the Codex Writers’ group. The prompt, provided by Jenny Rae Rappaport, involved someone in love with someone they shouldn’t be and a haunted zucchini. The story of a mute familiar had been floating around in my head for a couple of years, spurred by the wealth of smart-ass, wisecracking familiars to be found in fantasy fiction.

  Events at Fort Plentitude

  December 27th, Duke Theo’s reign, 11th Year, Fort Plentitude

  In the coldest nights of the winter, when the new moon rides the sky’s breast like an arrow, the fox women come out of the pine woods. Their flashes of hair are scarlet cardinals against the blue snow shadows. They sing, an odd, whining song like puppies who have lost the teat.

  Those are the nights that the sentries are changed every half hour, and they come back with cold-chapped lips and frost crystals along their jacket fronts. Every night in the dark of the moon, we can see three or four of the animal women out among the snow banks. Ensign Caruso keeps track of the sightings in the fort’s log book. Starting December 17th, there were five, immediately followed by two nights of solo visitations.

  We post female soldiers more often on those cold nights, or married men with wives here in the fort. During last year in the trade village that preceded this fort, two men threw off their clothes and ran out into the snow chasing fox women. They found them frozen solid among the reeds of the river bank, the slender blades of ice fixing them like swords. When they tried to disentangle them, the men shattered like crystal and were strewn across the ice. One-eyed Bill sent two of his wives down with whisk brooms to sweep the ice for fragments, but even so, the next summer, no one would eat frogs or turtles caught from that bank.

  December 31st, Duke Theo’s reign, 11th Year, Fort Plentitude

  The food situation continues dismal. If the Captain were a wiser man, he would seek to keep his troops busier. Instead they sit around the fort and vie to see who can complain the longest and hardest about the meals. It is impossible to spice them up, but we each carry a little skin of salt and pepper mixed according to our taste. The cook, it is rumored, has been using yellow salt to cook with, chipped from a deer lick near the fort, and saving the finer salt to sell to the soldiers.

  Jan 2nd, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  Captain Mercer and the cook have been arguing again. It is clear that the man has been skimming off profits and that the paucity of our meals is due to his graft. Nonetheless, he makes meals for Captain Mercer and our officer’s mess that are better than the average run, and so his corruption is tolerated. But as his supply of seasonings has dwindled, the Captain’s temper has grown harsher.

  I went so far yesterday as to break one of my three demon gems and send the beast to the Southern Isles for an armload of fruit. If the Sorcerer Corps knew, they would court-martial me for wasting such a valuable thing, but I couldn’t help it. The hunger ate at me.

  I told the demon to bring as much as it could carry, but it purposely made its arms as small as possible and brought me only three apples and a shriveled fig. I had meant to share my bounty with the soldiers. But when I saw the portion’s scantiness I took it all for my own and ate it in one sitting, greedily, licking my fingers, devouring even the stems and seeds, and refusing to think about what I had done.

  The demon stood staring at me all the time that I ate. It was a leathery-winged Demonica falciformus, with silky-tendriled hair and small black eyes that seemed intelligent.

  Plinot argues that demons possess the equivalent intelligence of great Barbary apes or chimera, but this one seemed possessed of a peculiar, innocent malignity. It would have torn the flesh from my bones and rejoiced in it with the happy savagery of a form Mankind has not known since we first learned to worry.

  I am morose and weepy these days. At night I turn in my bed and send sparks among my bedclothes to seek out the fleas and lice nesting there. The linens smell of smoke but this is better by far than bedbugs. All the while tears stream down my f
ace and trail among my whiskers, dampening them and making them sticky. My moustache curls with sorrow and I am oppressed by the sins of the world.

  January 28th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  The days and nights are tedious. I tried to organize a party to go dig along the banks for cattail roots, which according to a manuscript I read last week are edible, indeed a delicacy among some tribes. But the water had frozen so solid that there was no cracking it. We tried building fires atop the ice, but they sank, icy mud extinguishing them. We returned with nothing for our efforts—not even a brace of squirrels, because the soldiers were too loud and frightened every animal away.

  The Captain has eighty troopers altogether, two Lieutenants, four sergeants, a cook, and myself, the only sorcerer in the group. All of us are miserable. Many of the men have come here in search of land grants for diligent labor, only to find a Captain ready to swindle them out of their holdings in exchange for stakes in dubious gold mines or counterfeit artifacts. Others like myself are one form of exile or another, trying to escape memories or pursuers. We are not in search of anything—we know there is only cold and misery here for us in civilization’s hinterlands.

  February 2nd, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  I lay awake last night belaboring myself with guilt for not saving the fruit for the nursing women here. I was greedy and foolish. Still, I cannot help but think that divided among the six of them, it would have been only enough of a taste to torment. My ministry to their health is surely worth this small price, to keep me lively and able to tend to their needs while they are caring for their babies.

  I have talked the Captain into having Ensign Caruso cut up the old boiler and stove that we had sitting out near the dock. He uses the forge and cuts the metal into inch wide squares that the natives prize for making spearheads or hide scrapers. They trade us five gallons of dried corn for each square. The cook soaks it and makes it into porridge that the women eat. We must keep the babies healthy and strong.

  In the spring a boat will pass by and take the latest crop of babies back to the more settled lands, where people are cutting down trees and plowing fields and doing things that require healthy young workers, a new generation of settlers that can produce more in turn to man the forts and breed more babies. All part of the Duke’s plan for expansion.

  By the time the boat reaches Tabat, there will be half a dozen wet nurses aboard it, and the infants they supply, plus a small goat herd, sails full of just washed linens, and a few guards.

  It has been a long and tedious winter. Their ranks will grow before spring comes, I am sure, since two additional women are pregnant. I see them fed better than most as well. The fort is too small to rate a doctor, so my small dabbling in medicine suffices for the ailments here: dysentery, syphilis, boils, chilblains and pregnancies.

  I have been thinking about the spring, and the fish markets of Tabat, and what my mother would cook: baked black bass, spiced eels, fried smelts, boiled mackerel, fried skate wing, codfish balls, baked trout, flounder cooked with bitter greens.

  February 28th, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  Today Ensign Caruso brought me up to the gun tower. The wind whistled and screamed in my ears. We looked out across the river’s white sweep, nearly a mile wide, and saw a dark mass moving across it, hesitantly at first, then with mounting confidence and speed. It came closer and we realized it was a herd of buffalo.

  The ice was frozen thick enough all the way across that the animals, hundreds of them, could make their way to our eastern shore in fruitless search of fodder. The Captain dispatched several men to shoot stragglers in order to relieve the tedium of our meals. They killed several dozen and dragged them into the main yard of the fort.

  I took my spyglass and watched from atop the outer wall. One-eyed Bill Lafitte and his wives moved back and forth on the scarlet ice, engaged in the same task of butchery. I imagined the ice under them, thick as layers of rock, shadows swimming underneath, deep down in the dark water.

  Two wives stripped the hides off the carcasses and piled them on a rickety sled that the four other wives pulled. One of them had an infant tied to her back. I imagined the last wife was at home, tending the brood of children.

  The human women were flat-faced and expressionless as they moved back and forth, taking the best of the meat to pile on the sled. The two Snake women were equally expressionless, but their tongues flickered in their reptilian faces, bright as flames against the winter white of their scales.

  The cook roasted buffalo steaks and the fort smelled wonderful for an evening. Everyone went around smiling. But at table the meat proved stringy and tough. This far into winter, the animals are themselves half-dead of hunger and have little flesh to spare.

  March 1, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  Big White, the Shoshal shaman, came to see me. It was his third visit to my cabin, but the careful attention he gave every detail was the same as the first two times. I drew the structure of the universe and its concentric circles of realms, like a vast onion, on the wall and we debated its shape, for he insists that it is different, and that spikes from other realms protrude upon our own.

  At least that is what I believe he tried to sketch out for me. His English is bad, and my Shoshal non-existent. Rumor back at the College of Mages in Tabat held that the native mages, as well as the Snake people, are sophisticated in their understanding of magic, but this seemed like rank gibberish to me.

  He made tea for both of us, a pleasant brew of flower petals and leaf fragments that made the inside of my cabin smell like summer. Tension dropped away as though I had shrugged it off with my buffalo-hide robe and hung it on the peg just inside the door.

  Cold winter, he said and touched the demon gems on my desk, shaking his head sorrowfully. They do not believe in trafficking with spirits, and if he knew I had traveled here in one’s arms, he might not speak with me again.

  Demon travel is unpleasant at best. The beast has one duty and one duty only to discharge, to convey their burden from one point to another. They will not pause to rest, no matter how long the flight, and they are not at any pains to make their passenger comfortable. I came in the summer, when the weather was warm, but at one point we flew through a great lightning storm, and the demon would not change its course no matter how I shouted at it.

  I asked Big White about the fox women, but he pretended not to know what I meant. I will have one of Lafitte’s wives teach me more Shoshal, so I have words for the magical concepts I want to convey. If there is an easy way to drive them off, I would like to know.

  March 2, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  Slept exceedingly well last night.

  March 5, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  My sister Sarah’s birthday. I sent her a pile of pelts last fall, martin and beaver, to make herself a coat, and warned her that, come winter, communications would be at a standstill due to the frozen river. I imagine her sitting in her comfortable, well-appointed house, eating sandwiches spread with a layer of butter and cress, the thin leaves from the greenhouse sharp and bitter against the bland bread.

  She did not want me to leave Tabat, but after the failed experiment that killed Melissa and our unborn, I could not stay. Could not endure the eyes of the other mages knowing what I had done, how badly I had predicted events. Even this privation is better than that shame and sorrow.

  I caught a handful of snow sprites in the afternoon, near the outer wall of the fort. They look like crane flies—insects as big around as a Spanish doubloon, but all wing and legs, and little else. They have tiny faces made of ice, but they do not speak. Why has God made these creatures that resemble us in all but intelligence?

  Deep in the woods, Lafitte claims to have seen winter sprites as big as wolves or buffalo, enormous flying things that move along the edges of snowstorms, riding the winds in a flurry of icy chitin. I put the ones I ca
ught in a glass jar. They fluttered for twenty-two minutes before succumbing to the heat of the room and dying, melting away into a noisome, clotted liquid that smelled of vinegar.

  March 6, Duke Theo’s reign, 12th Year, Fort Plentitude

  When Big White came today, he shook his head and said over and over, bad, very bad. He led me outside the fortress walls and showed me ice runes on the outer walls, twelve feet high, two-thirds the height of the walls.

  I asked him who had put them there, for I did not recognize the language or the writing, but it was clearly set there by sorcery. I had sensed none the night before, but I am so exhausted and hungry in the evenings that I do little but imagine meals at my mother’s house back in Tabat.

  He said winter and then a word I did not know, and indicated this entity had put them there. He threw handfuls of snow at the markings until they were partly obscured, but his face was troubled.

  Inside the fort, I showed him a sketch Caruso had made of one of the fox women the night before. Did this woman draw the marks, I asked.

  He shook his head and said dead, very bad, tapping the paper. That was all I could get out of him.

  I asked him about trade for food, although I hated to throw myself on his mercy like that. But the pieces of iron were all gone and we have very few other goods. I indicated my belongings, trying to keep the whine out of my tone—surely there must be some equipment there he would like, I said. It would be easy enough to replace next year when spring came and the river thawed. Perhaps I’d even make the trip myself, and go to see Sarah in her fine new coat.