Lightspeed Magazine Issue 21
Page 16
They were from Portstown, Ivar told the Gerder boy, who took their horses. The Gerder boy didn’t have the sense to ask where they were going (he didn’t have the sense God gave an apple), so Gerder the father, who tended the saloon, asked instead.
Most of the people in Konstan Spring came out when strangers came into town. It was always interesting to see new people, no matter how briefly they’d be staying.
Anni and John sat at a little table in a corner, set apart from the crowd and noise of the saloon. At the other tables the wagers about their courtship went up and up and up, even in the midst of looking at the strangers; there was always a place for a friendly bet.
At last, old Gerder asked the brothers, “What brings you to Konstan Spring?”
By that time Ivar was already drunk, and he laughed loudly and said, “We were supposed to head south for Bruntofte, but we turned right instead of left!” which was an old joke that no one paid any mind. It was never hard to tell which of two brothers was the fool.
“Bruntofte isn’t very welcoming,” Gerder said. “Hope you boys plan to do some trade; they don’t like people showing up with empty hands. We all saw what happened to the English, before they got driven out.”
After a little pause, Finn sighed and said, “Haven’t thought that far ahead. We’re just looking to start over in a place that has enough room to be lonely in.”
You didn’t get as far as Konstan Spring unless you were putting something behind you, so no one was surprised to hear it. But the way he spoke must have struck Anni something awful, because she got up from her seat and took a place next to Finn at the bar.
She’d never been pretty (not compared to whorehouse girls from Odal), but the way she looked at him would have charmed a much less lonely man than Finn Halfred.
They talked until late, until everyone had gone home but Kit from the whorehouse, whose girls were working to bring Ivar back and lighten his pockets. They tried to hook Finn, too, but Anni put her hand on his arm, and the girls respected her claim.
Anni brought Finn home with her when she left that night, his arm linked with hers. The girls from the whorehouse thought it was a scandal, but Kit told them to mind their own business and tend to their customer.
Kit was no fool; she knew how slowly time moved in Konstan Spring, and a girl shouldn’t be a bad cook and an indifferent chemist year in and year out without anything else happening inside of her. Anni could have a night with a young clerk if she wanted. (It was the first thing Anni had managed well in a long time. Kit was glad to see something worthy from Anni at last.)
The next morning Anni brought Finn out on the little promenade. She told Kit in passing, “He got thirsty—I gave him some water.”
Kit told the town.
They held a meeting (in the lodge, safely away from Anni) to discuss what to tell Finn about his brother’s sad accident the night before.
Philip Prain said right off that it was a shame about the wagering pool, but Folkvarder Gray called them back to order; all things in their time, gambling had no place in the lodge. They had to decide what would happen now, with their gravedigger.
John was a steady man, but now they weren’t sure who would do for him but old Mrs. Domar, who was a widow and too old to be suitable.
“As if I would,” sniffed Mrs. Domar.
The only other girl in town was Gerder’s daughter Sue, who was only fourteen and couldn’t yet go courting. If she got a little older, then perhaps they could consider, but none of them had been in Konstan Spring long enough to really know if the young ever grew older, or if the grown slowly grew old.
(Konstan Spring hadn’t been an early settlement by the Longboaters. It hadn’t even been in the eyes of the railroad men. It was a town by accident, because the water was of value; a town because the people in it were slow to want change; a town because it was better to live among the same kind forever than to risk going into the wide new country full of strangers.)
The town was like the Ness orchard, whose little apple trees (always saplings and never older) bent their young branches nearly to snapping just to bear their fruit.
It would be the same with Sue, if they let her go courting too early.
Outside, John had turned his hand to his art for poor Ivar Halfred, and one shovelful of dirt after another bloomed from the ground as he worked.
Folkvarder Gray went himself to break the news.
He told Finn that Ivar had drunk himself to death, and his whorehouse girl hadn’t been able to wake him no matter what they did. Finn was sorely grieved, and Folkvarder Gray thought it was best to wait for some other day to explain about the water.
On his way out, the folkvarder tipped his hat to John, who was sharpening the edge of his shovel on a boulder that sat beside a wide grave, sharp-edged and deep as a well. John looked as quiet and calm as ever, but Folkvarder Gray had been disappointed in a woman himself, many years back, on his home shores, and he knew the look of a heartbroken man doing a chore just to keep his hands busy.
“No need for all this, John,” Folkvarder Gray said. “It’ll be weeks yet before the thaw opens the roads, and no knowing when the next one will come.”
Folkvarder Gray looked carefully into the thick dark of the grave. “A little steep, my boy,” he said after a moment. The warm damp rose up from the ground, sharp-smelling, and he stepped back. That was no smell for the living.
“It’s just for practice,” said John, turned the shovel on its edge, slid a slender finger along it until he began to bleed.
After the service on Sunday, Anni and Finn went out walking.
Inside the lodge, Samuel Ness started a new wager that they’d come back that same day and ask the priest to marry them. Mrs. Domar, who didn’t approve of such suggestions, went to the window and pretended to be deaf.
From the window Mrs. Domar could see Anni and Finn walking on the lawn behind the lodge, hand in hand toward the chemist’s, and John’s silhouette in the upper window, looking out toward the graveyard to admire his work.
“Finn will come sniffing around after a job,” said Philip Prain. “I could make use of him in the store maybe a month out of the year, but he’ll have to make his money some other way, and I don’t see much need for a clerk in Konstan Spring.”
“We have need for him if he does good work,” said Folkvarder Gray. “And who will be the chemist if he takes Anni out to some farm instead of staying in town? We can’t do without a chemist. It’s not civilized.”
“They’ll find some way to scrape by,” said Kit. “Young fools like that always do.”
“It’s no good,” said Mrs. Domar, watching John look over at the cemetery.
No one answered her; Mrs. Domar never saw good in anything.
The wager, sadly for Samuel, came to nothing.
That evening, Finn and Anni disappeared from Konstan Spring, and if Folkvarder Gray noticed that the chemist’s house was quiet, that the boulder in the yard was gone and the wide deep grave was smoothed over, he said nothing to John about it.
No town was run well without some sacrifices. Artists had their ways, and another chemist would be easier to come by than a gravedigger of so much patience and skill.
The question of Anni and Finn trapped in the grave made the folkvarder sorry for Anni’s sake, but it was what came sometimes of breaking a good man’s heart.
(Not everyone can be missed.)
It was for the best. Anni had never been a good chemist; Konstan Spring deserved better, he knew.
Samuel Ness paid Kit from the whorehouse two dollars, having been wrong about both Anni and John, and Anni and Finn.
Mrs. Domar didn’t approve of Kit, but she had never forgiven Samuel for taking back his orchard, and was happy to see him lose a little money.
Kit kept the money in an envelope, for a wedding present in case Anni should ever come home. (She knew Anni must; she wasn’t the type to disappear on her own.)
After a month of no word, Kit sent redheaded M
ary from Odal over to the shop at the edge of the graveyard.
Mary knew a little about the chemist’s, and a little about coaxing the hearts of quiet men, and it would be best, Kit figured, to have the gravedigger of Konstan Spring soon settled with a pretty young wife.
Others did not quite agree; against Kit’s complaints, Folkvarder Gray put a CHEMIST WANTED sign in the window of his office, and sent young Gerder to town on horseback with another advertisement for the train station wall.
Folkvarder Gray was confident that sooner or later a wonderful chemist would come across the advertisement, when the time was right. The country was still rough and unknown, and brave artists were hard to come by, but he was prepared—he would take nothing but the best.
Konstan Spring could afford to wait, and Folkvarder Gray knew the importance of a job done right.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was recently published by Prime Books. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in many anthologies, including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her story “Light on the Water” was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com.
Not Our Brother
Robert Silverberg
Halperin came into San Simón Zuluaga in late October, a couple of days before the fiesta of the local patron saint, when the men of the town would dance in masks. He wanted to see that. This part of Mexico was famous for its masks, grotesque and terrifying ones portraying devils and monsters and fiends. Halperin had been collecting them for three years. But masks on a wall are one thing, and masks on dancers in the town plaza quite another.
San Simón was a mountain town about halfway between Acapulco and Taxco. “Tourists don’t go there,” Guzmán López had told him. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” Guzmán ran a gallery in Acapulco where Halperin had bought a great many masks. He was a suave, cosmopolitan man from Mexico City, with smooth dark skin and a bald head that gleamed as if it had been polished. “But they still do the Bat Dance there, the Lord of the Animals Dance. It is the only place left that performs it. This is from San Simón Zuluaga,” said Guzmán, and pointed to an intricate and astonishing mask in purple and yellow depicting a bat with outspread leathery wings that was at the same time somehow also a human skull and a jaguar. Halperin would have paid ten thousand pesos for it, but Guzmán was not interested in selling. “Go to San Simón,” he said. “You’ll see others like this.”
“For sale?”
Guzman laughed and crossed himself. “Don’t suggest it. In Rome, would you make an offer for the Pope’s robes? These masks are sacred.”
“I want one. How did you get this one?”
“Sometimes favors are done. But not for strangers. Perhaps I’ll be able to work something out for you.”
“You’ll be there, then?”
“I go every year for the Bat Dance,” said Guzmán. “It’s important to me. To touch the real Mexico, the old Mexico. I am too much a Spaniard, not enough an Aztec; so I go back and drink from the source. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” Halperin said. “Yes.”
“You want to see the true Mexico?”
“Do they still slice out hearts with an obsidian dagger?”
Guzmán said, chuckling, “If they do, they don’t tell me about it. But they know the old gods there. You should go. You would learn much. You might even experience interesting dangers.”
“Danger doesn’t interest me a whole lot,” said Halperin.
“Mexico interests you. If you wish to swallow Mexico, you must swallow some danger with it, like the salt with the tequila. If you want sunlight, you must have a little darkness. You should go to San Simón.” Guzmán’s eyes sparkled. “No one will harm you. They are very polite there. Stay away from demons and you will be fine. You should go.”
Halperin arranged to keep his hotel room in Acapulco and rented a car with four-wheel drive. He invited Guzmán to ride with him, but the dealer was leaving for San Simón that afternoon, with stops en route to pick up artifacts at Chacalapa and Hueycantenango. Halperin could not go that soon. “I will reserve a room for you at the hotel,” Guzmán promised, and drew a precise road map for him.
The road was rugged and winding and barely paved, and turned into a chaotic dirt-and-gravel track beyond Chichihualco. The last four kilometers were studded with boulders like the bed of a mountain stream. Halperin drove most of the way in first gear, gripping the wheel desperately, taking every jolt and jounce in his spine and kidneys. To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred years back in time. But the air up here was fresh and cool and clean, and the jungle was lush from recent rains, and now and then Halperin saw a mysterious little town half-buried in the heavy greenery: dogs barked, naked children ran out and waved, leathery old Nahua folk peered gravely at him and called incomprehensible greetings. Once he heard a tremendous thump against his undercarriage and was sure he had ripped out his oil pan on a rock, but when he peered below everything seemed to be intact. Two kilometers later, he veered into a giant rut and thought he had cracked an axle, but he had not. He hunched down over the wheel, aching, tense, and imagined that splendid bat mask, or its twin, spotlighted against a stark white wall in his study. Would Guzmán be able to get him one? Probably. His talk of the difficulties involved was just a way of hyping the price. But even if Halperin came back empty-handed from San Simón, it would be reward enough simply to have witnessed the dance, that bizarre, alien rite of a lost pagan civilization. There was more to collecting Mexican masks, he knew, than simply acquiring objects for the wall.
In late afternoon he entered the town just as he was beginning to think he had misread Guzmán’s map. To his surprise it was quite imposing, the largest village he had seen since turning off the main highway—a great bare plaza ringed by stone benches, marketplace on one side, vast heavy-walled old church on the other, giant gnarled trees, chickens, dogs, children about everywhere, and houses of crumbling adobe spreading up the slope of a gray flat-faced mountain to the right and down into the dense darkness of a barranca thick with ferns and elephant-ears to the left. For the last hundred meters into town an impenetrable living palisade of cactus lined the road on both sides, unbranched spiny green columns that had been planted one flush against the next. Bougainvillea in many shades of red and purple and orange cascaded like gaudy draperies over walls and rooftops.
Halperin saw a few old Volkswagens and an ancient ramshackle bus parked on the far side of the plaza and pulled his car up beside them. Everyone stared at him as he got out. Well, why not? He was big news here, maybe the first stranger in six months. But the pressure of those scores of dark amphibian eyes unnerved him. These people were all Indians, Nahuas, untouched in any important way not only by the twentieth century but by the nineteenth, the eighteenth, all the centuries back to Moctezuma. They had nice Christian names like Santiago and Francisco and Jesús, and they went obligingly to the iglesia for mass whenever they thought they should, and they knew about cars and transistor radios and Coca-Cola. But all that was on the surface. They were still Aztecs at heart, Halperin thought. Time-travelers. As alien as Martians.
He shrugged off his discomfort. Here he was the Martian, dropping in from a distant planet for a quick visit. Let them stare: he deserved it. They meant no harm. Halperin walked toward them and said, “Por favor, donde está el hotel del pueblo?”
Blank faces. “El hotel?” he asked, wandering around the plaza. “Por favor. Donde?” No one answered. That irritated him. Sure, Nahuatl was their language, but it was inc
onceivable that Spanish would be unknown here. Even in the most remote towns someone spoke Spanish. “Por favor!” he said, exasperated. They melted back at his approach as though he were ablaze. Halperin peered into dark cluttered shops. “Habla usted Español?” he asked again and again, and met only silence. He was at the edge of the marketplace, looking into a chaos of fruit stands, tacos stands, piles of brilliant serapes and flimsy sandals and stacked sombreros, and booths where vendors were selling the toys of next week’s Day of the Dead holiday, candy skeletons and green banners emblazoned with grinning red skulls. “Por favor?” he said loudly, feeling very foolish.
A woman in jodhpurs and an Eisenhower jacket materialized suddenly in front of him and said in English, “They don’t mean to be rude. They’re just very shy with strangers.”
Halperin was taken aback. He realized that he had begun to think of himself as an intrepid explorer, making his way with difficulty through a mysterious primitive land. In an instant she had snatched all that from him, both the intrepidity and the difficulties.
She was about thirty, with close-cut dark hair and bright, alert eyes, attractive, obviously American. He struggled to hide the sense of letdown her advent had created in him and said, “I’ve been trying to find the hotel.”
“Just off the plaza, three blocks behind the market. Let’s go to your car and I’ll ride over there with you.”
“I’m from San Francisco,” he said. “Tom Halperin.”
“That’s such a pretty city. I love San Francisco.”
“And you?”
“Miami,” she said. “Ellen Chambers.” She seemed to be measuring him with her eyes. He noticed that she was carrying a couple of Day of the Dead trinkets—a crudely carved wooden skeleton with big eyeglasses, and a rubber snake with a gleaming human skull of white plastic, like a cue-ball, for a head. As they reached his car she said, “You came here alone?”
Halperin nodded. “Did you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Come down from Taxco. How did you find this place?”
“Antiquities dealer in Acapulco told me about it. Antonio Guzmán López. I collect Mexican masks.”