* * *
What Tallys says to the goldfinch:
You had a sister.
She hatched in that same nest by the fire yesterday, a little before dawn. She fed from that same thistle, and when she was strong enough I sent out past the forest to where the King’s high castle sits stone on stone. She found the King where he lay in his bed, recovering from his burns if not from his despair, and sang him a song that I taught her, notes that drift, falling light like leaves in green shade, a song of the peace those leaves find as they pass to cool soil and lose themselves in the roots of the tall trees.
The King heard that song in his dreams, and those dreams for once did not end in fear but in a gentle waking, and after a while he sat up in his bed and saw your sister in his window and said, “Yes, yes, I see.”
All this your sister told me when she found me in the forest, and not long after, the King came following her song.
His hair had been burnt away; a fringe had grown back, but only in spots. One arm hung in heavy bandages and ended too soon, where the red-hot chains had taken fingers. There was a scar across his cheekbone where the sparrowhawk had held him that bloody day under the hawthorn. But his eyes held the same blue that they had as a boy, like a sliver of sky that had lost itself. He stared at me with those eyes for a long time.
“An odd end for a hunt,” he said, finally.
My laugh was almost not bitter in my mouth. “‘This is but the quest,’ you said when last you were here.”
“The quest is done,” the King said, “when one finds a hart in its harbouring. And I did find the hart back then, did I not?”
“So you did, Hugh.”
“Tallys,” he said, “when my Uncle found me asleep the next morning, with the marks of a great stag all around me, did you set that stag against me, or to protect me against the Wild?”
“What do you think, Hugh son of Edwin King?”
He stared again for a while, until the goldfinch, your sister, flew up in a circle about him and landed on his shoulder. He raised his good hand and she jumped down to it. He gently shut his fingers about her, a little cage of bone. “I think you are the Wild. And in my dreams—dreams are a sort of mirror, aren’t they?”
“Yes, Hugh.”
“In my dreams sometimes you turn into a bird and sometimes into the stag. Did you protect me from yourself, then?”
This laugh was wholly bitter. “No, Hugh King of the Three Kingdoms. No, I did not.”
There had been horns in the distance ever since Hugh had entered the trees, and now those horns grew close enough for the king to hear. He lifted his head and listened. “That is my cousin Eduoard,” he said.
I nodded. “I hear he comes this way, on horse with a few men besides.”
“Hunting me,” the King said.
I nodded again.
“I would rather not be found this time,” the King said and though his voice was still calm, his shoulders began to shake.
“I can make the way hard, so that they must leave the horses and come through the trees on foot, but your cousin the Duke knows the woods too well not to track you here.”
“Then take me from here. In the stories, the Queen of the Wild has a tower at the heart of the woods.”
“The Wild has no queen, Hugh, it just is. And if there is a tower at its heart, your cousin the Duke would find it as well, soon enough.”
I tilted my head to listen, the rattle of leaves and the distant cry of birds, and said, “Nor is your cousin the only one who comes.”
“Meriel,” he said.
“With many men, and torches.”
The King was shaking too badly to stand, now. He lowered himself to the ground. “This is as far as I can go,” he said to the goldfinch, your sister, still caged in his fingers. “Now its your time to fly higher.” He raised his hand and opened his fingers. But your sister sat still.
“She’s not a wren, she’s a goldfinch,” I said. I sat down next to him and held out my hand, but your sister would not come to me.
“And what story has the goldfinch?” the King asked.
“Penance,” I said. “She pays penance amongst thistle and thorn.”
“Penance for what?”
“In the stories, for knowing too much of the future. But was that her story after all?”
“It’s mine now,” Hugh said, and closed her fingers gently about her again. We waited then, for a while, in the cool leaf light, as birds followed their own stories overhead and other creatures rustled over leaves or under soil, a small moment of peace then, as small as the goldfinch your sister. That glamour I cannot escape, that mortal seeming that mortals see in which I have no more choice than does the mirror over its reflected form, for a short while it drifted and dappled into leaf light and Hugh saw me as I am.
Finally he sighed, and said, “And the story of the hart?”
“‘The hart hath a bone in its heart that bringeth great comfort.’“
“Yes, that,” the King said. “Tallys, is it true?’
“If it were,” I said, “the only way to find it would be a terrible Unmaking.”
Duke Eduoard stepped into the clearing, with a few men on either side, swords drawn. “The Unmaking is a noble art,” the Duke said. “The ritual honors the hunters and the hunted. It is a matter of respect.” He drew his own sword and spat, a wet splatter off the King’s ruined scalp and into my face. “The two of you we will chop into pieces that even the dogs will disdain to take. There is no hound to stand guard over you this time, Hugh, only this witch that has taken your wits.”
I laughed, and this time there was no bitterness, but a great deal of sorrow. “Do you mortal folk never listen? I do not take nor give. I just am. And just now, I am behind you.”
The hart came from the trees at such a speed that even a hawk would have marvelled and tossed the two men to the right of the Duke into the air. They flew like birds for a space, but did not land as well. The hart reared and came down on the men to the left, who fell under his hooves without time to shout their surprise.
The Duke did not shout, in surprise or otherwise. He leapt over the King and buried his hand in my hair, grunting as the thorns and brambles bit his palm, and dragged me to my feet.
The stag stopped behind the King. So great he was that, even though Hugh had regained his feet, the stag looked over the King’s head at us.
The Duke held his sword to my throat. “Call the beast off, witch, and your death will be a swift one,” he growled in my ear. “Otherwise, I promise you we shall be a long while at it, and you will well understand the art of the Unmaking before I am through.”
I laughed one last time, in the Duke’s arms. “What you call an art and think your own is my story, an endless circle of Making and Unmaking, and was so when men first came to these woods and learned it from me.”
And the stag laughed with me, a bellow that shook the trees, and he stepped past the King. The Duke swore and raised his sword above his head. But as he struck at the stag, and as the stag lowered its great antlers to catch that blow, the King pushed his way between them.
“No,” the King said, and knocked me out of the Duke’s grasp, his ruined arm raised to catch the Duke’s sword. I would have laughed at the way time mirrored itself, but I was done laughing. I fell to the ground, and over me there was a great noise, a meeting of metal and horn, flesh and feather and blood and bone.
Queen Meriel found me there, some time later, bringing dogs and men and torches. The King lay curled in the center of the clearing, his head in my lap. All around us, from the edge of the clearing to no more than the length of an arm away, the stag had torn the earth, mingling his blood and that of the Duke. What else was left of the Duke and his men lay scattered, and if the dogs disdained to take the pieces, the leaves would cover them soon enough.
“Meriel, is that you?” The King asked. His sight had gone some while before, along with too much blood. His voice was measured in shorter and shorter breaths. “I
did not shatter after all, it wasn’t me, broken, it was a mirror, of glass, and a girl. I remember.”
“Do you now?” I asked.
“I remember, or maybe it was the bird.” Hugh somehow opened the fingers of his remaining hand, though the bones were splintered and bare. The goldfinch, your sister, lay broken in his palm but he could not see. “Meriel, do you know the story of how the wren became queen of the birds?”
“Yes,” the Queen said.
“Yes,” the King agreed, and died.
Meriel sat down next to me, and shifted the King’s head from my lap to hers.
“This was not the taking I meant, when I spoke with you at the King’s charivari,” she said, in a calm voice.
“No,” I said.
“Will you not tell me that this is no doing of yours, nor any of our mortal madness? Will you tell me I should not judge?”
“No,” I said.
“Will you not remind me that you do not take nor give?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, I do take and give,” the Queen said, still quiet, the quiet of slow tides and sunlight stone, as old and wild as my trees. “And I give you this, an evening and night to make what peace you can, while I lay the King to his. And with the dawn I shall come to take you. You are too much for us, too wild, too much a promise of wonder.”
She looked up at me. “And if you hide within your glamours, I’ll take the trees and all that shelter under them, by fire and steel, every last one of them.”
“I shall wait for you at dawn. There is a tower at the heart of the woods—”
“Yes,” Queen Meriel said. “I remember the story.”
* * *
I open all the cages then, and the goldfinch steps up into my palm. “And will you remember, bird of my revival, what I have told you, and the stories of your brothers and sisters here?”
She shakes her wings loose and sings her consent.
“Then fly, until you find another woods and another tower, or if there is no tower, then find a child alone in the woods and tell her this tale, and with luck and time she will build a new tower and you will live there with her in the woods for all your days.”
I take the goldfinch to the window and kiss her head and open my fingers. And unlike her sister she springs up and out, into the air and away from the tower. There’s an uneven flapping and the jackdaw flings itself past me. “Tallys,” it cries. Whether it meant me or the goldfinch I do not know. It is all one to me.
“The rest of you may go as well,” I say, but they do not. The sparrowhawk preens a feather smooth and shuts her eyes again. The wren comes to my hand and sings her song. The blackbird paces a circle around my feet. “I do not know the song, so lovely it would ease the living gladly to their death and set the dead to waking,” he says, apologetically.
“It was just a story that I made,” I say.
We watch the goldfinch fly in the dim red light, the jackdaw like a shadow by her side. But this is the west window, not the east, and this glow is not the dawn but torches under the trees, coming closer.
Copyright © 2014 Gregory Norman Bossert
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, currently based just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. He started writing in 2009, attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 2010, and has had over a dozen stories appear in venues such as Asimov’s Science Fiction. His story “The Telling” in BCS #109 won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, and he was a finalist for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. When not writing, he works as a layout artist for Industrial Light & Magic, wrangling spaceships and monsters. More information on his writing, films, and music is available at SuddenSound.com and on his blog GregoryNormanBossert.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE RUGMAKER’S LOVERS
by Brynn MacNab
The rugmaker built her own house, and because she was not a carpenter or a bricklayer or a stonemason, her house was unlike any other. For seven days she worked her loom on the empty plot of land, and she slept beside it at night. When it rained she covered the loom with her own blankets, said a charm over them, and let herself be soaked. When the weather was fine she hummed with the songbirds and wove their good cheer into her home.
On the third day her cousin, whom she had hired to bring her loom and herself across six villages in his cart, sent his wife to ask after the rugmaker’s health. The rugmaker said that she was well and lacked for nothing. Her visitor looked doubtfully around at the loom and the stone-encircled fire pit and the few piled blankets. When she returned home, she told her husband exactly what the rugmaker had said and left out her own opinions. But she told the other good women of the village what a strange family she had married into, and afterward they found many unavoidable reasons to pass the rugmaker’s new-bought holding and cast a glance at her, and she wove their curiosity into her walls.
For the seven days following, the rugmaker slept all day and wove all night. When the king’s riders passed on their great birds between her and the moon, she sang a prayer for renown and another for peace. When she caught sight or sound of an owl or fox hunting she whispered, “Thou and I, thou and I,” so to secure the comradely goodwill of all things working like herself through the night.
On the third night a man crept out of the forest to sit beside the red ashes of the rugmaker’s fire.
“I am a terrible outlaw,” he told her as she worked. “I have killed a great lord, and I once stole a bracelet that was to be given to the queen herself.”
The rugmaker listened to his talk and said not a word against him or his stories. She knew better than to shame a terrible outlaw with the village gossip (told by her cousin on the long and jouncing ride from home) that held him responsible for no worse than the theft of another man’s ox. And so for the rest of that week she had from him many wonderful accounts of his wicked bravery, and she wove these into her house as well.
For the seven days after that the rugmaker wove dawns and sunsets into her house, and the rest of the time she slept, and prayed, and pulled up grass and weeds, and stamped down a good earthen floor for her home. And little transpired during this time except for seven sunrises and sunsets, which are all the magic needed to make a thing that can endure.
In the last sunrise at the end of the three weeks’ work, the rugmaker cut the cloth from her loom and left it flat and folded on her strong earth floor while she went to find the village priest. “Come bless my house,” she said, “so that it will stand.”
The priest went with her to look at her handiwork and her land. He was a man of not very much faith, so he said, “Perhaps if you put a wooden frame under it, it will be a good house.”
“No,” said the rugmaker. “It is not to be made of wood; if I were a furniture maker you would be right. But I only want a simple rugmaker’s house. Surely God can give me that.”
“Perhaps you had better see the wise woman,” said the priest.
“It is not wisdom I want, but miracles,” said the rugmaker. To herself she added, ‘A priest should be ashamed to give away God’s work to sinners.’ But she followed his instructions to the wise woman’s house.
The wise woman was much older than the rugmaker, and her house was a clutter of things that seemed to have no use—ridiculous constructions and broken things left unmended. (The rugmaker thought that she would never keep her own house so carelessly.) The wise woman gave her a cup of tea and told her not to blame the priest too much. “If he did all he should, I would have no living. And leaving a living for others is also something a Christian should do. Not many people will pay for wisdom.”
When the rugmaker had finished her tea, she took the wise woman to her home. The wise woman picked up the cloth in her hands and complimented the rugmaker’s craftsmanship and her hours of work. “A woman should make her own house,” she said. “It is a good beginning for a life.” Then she spoke to the
earth, and the wind, and the sky, and the cloth, and when she let it go the rugmaker’s house unfurled to stand as solid as any other. The rugmaker took her last coins from her shoe and gave them to the wise woman. Then she went inside and began to weave the rugs that she would sell.
The next day the priest came and blessed the rugmaker’s house, and commissioned a new aisle rug for the church. He was a good man, if timid, and he feared that the rugmaker would have too few customers in such a humble village. He wanted her to have a little money to start on something else—planting a garden, or raising a flock of chickens, or catching a man—if the need came for that.
The rugmaker did plant a garden, and she bought chickens too, but she did not want for work. Whenever a fine lady passed near the village on her way between larger, more important places, the curiosity of the village women that the rugmaker had woven into her house called to the curiosity of the traveler. Whenever a young and ambitious nobleman rode by on his horse (for the village lay beside a broad thoroughfare and road of the kingdom), the outlaw’s bold and exciting stories drew him to look more closely. Whenever a well-off pilgrim, the sins brought on by his riches well forgiven, passed by light-hearted on the way to his home, the priest’s blessing caught at his baptized fancy. And because the rugmaker had made friends of distant horizons, of night-sneaking things that knew more than they should, and of hard work, she always had a rug that suited her caller’s taste.
One day a warrior came walking alone on the road beside the rugmaker’s village. As evening drew on he spied the rugmaker’s odd house and thought, ‘Here, surely, is someone who will take in a stranger.’
The rugmaker gave the warrior a good thick stew for his supper and told him to go to the priest, who would let him sleep in the church. She noticed the breadth of his shoulders, the banked fire in his eyes, the softened thunder rumble of his voice. ‘If only,’ she said to herself, ‘he were not a fighting man. If only such a man could stand by my side someday.’ Then she resolved to put it from her mind. A woman who prayed every Sunday for peace could not marry a man who killed.
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