“No, Sparrow,” Marla said. “It’s too dirty. You’ll need another bath. And how many baths can one girl have, really?”
But the girl didn’t listen. She buried her face in the stiff breast of the dead hen and couldn’t speak for sobbing. Marla sighed.
“There, there, child,” Marla said. “Things live and then they die. There’s no use in crying over what can’t be helped.”
The girl wailed louder. She sprang to her feet, clutched her dead chicken, and ran from the coop in a rage. The dogs followed her, as always. They never liked to have the child out of their sight.
Marla shook her head. She let the child go. She swept the coop and fed the chickens and fixed the wobbly bits on the fence, and stripped and squatted on the ground to urinate at the four corners as a deterrent for foxes and stoats. When she was finished, she walked around to the far side of the house and saw the dogs watching the girl as she played with the hen.
The hen!
It was, as before, fat and hale and shining. A princess among hens.
“My Midge,” the girl sang. “My Midge, my Midge, my Midge.”
The once-dead hen clucked and preened. It was a thing of beauty. It loved the girl. Of course it did. Everything loved the girl. Marla snatched Sparrow around her waist and hauled her, screaming, inside.
She fed the girl, bathed the girl, and distracted the girl. She told her stories. She looked out the window to make sure Midge was gone. But Midge wasn’t gone. And what’s more, there was Midge and an identical Midge strutting through the grass, looking for tasty bugs to catch. Marla closed the curtains and convinced the girl to play in the basement.
By lunch there were five Midges in the yard. Two of them had laid eggs—fat and speckled and gorgeous, nestled in the grass. Marla locked the door.
By supper there were fifteen (though there would have been seventeen—a hawk made off with one and another made a fine supper for a passing feral cat).
Marla sighed, and let the girl outside.
“My Midge,” the girl sang happily as she frolicked among the flock of identical chickens. “My Midge, my Midge, my Midge.” And she kissed each one on its ruby wattle and was, by all reckoning, the happiest girl alive.
Marla sighed. Fine, she thought.
That night, Marla told the Sparrow the story of the magic children. And the Boro comet—the source of all this nonsense. She told her how frightened the nation’s mothers were each time the Boro comet appeared in the sky. She told of the children born with the magic marks. Of the soldiers who took those children away. Of what happened to them.
She told her about the day the junk man found her.
She told her about the Minister. He was old, that Minister. And yet, young. Maintained by magic. Hungry for magic. So hungry. How he lived alone in that strange fortress stretching up to the sky.
She even told her about her own dear baby. Marked. Taken. Lost forever.
(Red flowers, red flowers, red, red, red.)
The girl listened for a long time, her large brown eyes sober and serious, a thin slick of tears at the bottom edge.
“Does my junk man know?” the girl asked gravely. “For real, I mean. Does my papa know he is not my papa? It seems like he might not know.”
“I know what you mean, love,” Marla said. “Your papa lives in a world of his own making. He was there, though, and he knows. But you are wrong in your thinking. It isn’t blood that makes a papa, a papa. Love does that. Simon’s love for you is limitless. Your papa is more papa to you than most can claim.” There was a note of bitterness in her mouth. Her own father had turned her out, years ago, when her teenage waist began to swell, and did not welcome her back when the soldiers took her baby away (though he was happy to relieve her of the hefty payment—and she didn’t argue. She didn’t want it anyway. Blood money, she said). He later died in a brawl, and Marla never mourned him. “Your papa is what he is, and he is doing as fine a job as he can, and he loves you so very much. More than you will ever know.” And, for the first time, Marla knew it was true. What’s more, she could feel it too.
“Me too,” the girl said.
“Not everyone can see you, my darling,” Marla said. “But I don’t know how long that will last. And you are not safe. And you need to be safe. Your papa needs you to be safe.” She closed her eyes and closed her fingers around the girl’s soft, pliable hands. “I need you to be safe.”
And so, as the sun went down, and in the quiet of the loft, surrounded by quilts and candles and safe arms and hushed voices, the girl and her Marla began to make a plan.
The army of blue speckled hens—nearly a hundred of them now—stood guard on the fence, their bright black eyes beading into the night.
21. Now.
The butterfly takes notice of the flowers along the trail leading to the town, and releases itself from the girl’s back in order to gorge itself on pollen. The dogs whine a bit. They don’t like that butterfly. Too bright. Too big. Too unpredictable. They don’t like how it clings to the girl, how it refuses to walk on the ground. They whine and growl, but they do not snap. The girl lets her fingers linger on their heads, and they calm.
They are so old, these dogs. And they love her so much, they feel that they will die without her. (Which, the junk man’s daughter knows in her heart, is likely true. I will miss you, she thinks.)
She reaches the fork in the trail, where one branch goes to town and the other branch wanders up to the top of a rocky knoll. There are seven standing stones at the top of the knoll—remnants, she’s heard, of another time, another people, another way of thinking. Gone now. No one knows where or why or when. History is banned, after all. There is only now. There is only the Minister. That is all they ever need know.
The girl smiles. The Minister. He has haunted her dreams for as long as she can remember. His damp eyes. His receding hair. The delicate lobes on his ears, fragile and soft between her finger and her thumb. She has not touched the Minister. She has not laid eyes on him. But she knows him, even so. She knows him from the inside out.
She summits the knoll and climbs the tallest of the standing stones and sits, cross-legged, at the top. She cups her hands around her eyes. The Minister’s fortress is too far away to see—miles and miles and miles away. And yet she can see it all the same. Its happenstance form. Its blackened windows. Its terrible height. Its dark stones, each one groaning with the souls of magic children. She can see the Minister too, sitting cross-legged atop his own standing stone, perched on the roof of his impossibly tall tower. Every quarter century, the tower gets taller. Every quarter century, it is imbued with more magic. Every quarter century, it brings him closer to the thing he desires most of all.
The Boro comet.
Its strangeness.
Its miracles.
Its curses.
She plucks another hair from her head and weaves it into a pentagram. She curls her fingers into its center and pulls, stretching it larger and larger and larger. And as she pulls, the fibers of the pentagram thicken and strengthen. They are rope. They are wire. They are rod-iron. It is a trinket, then a mirror, then a window. She holds it in front of her as though she is hanging a picture on the wall. She jiggles until it feels secure, and lets her hands drift down to her sides. The pentagram floats in front of her, its center shimmering like the moon on a quiet lake.
And she sees him. The Minister. And he sees her. The junk man’s daughter. She smiles. He is terrified. She waves. He does not wave back. His mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out. He looks exactly as she imagined him, though his skin is more dull than his billboards lead a person to expect. Age, perhaps. Or stasis. Or an overindulgence of magic.
Not that she knows anything about magic. She doesn’t. How could she?
She stands. Slides her arms out of her sleeves. Peels her dress from her shoulders, her chest, her belly. She is before him
, in the window of the pentagram, naked to the hips, the strange mark on her stomach curling from her navel, glowing so bright to make him squint. There are tears in his eyes.
“You!” the Minister says.
“Me,” she says. Her eyes glitter. Her teeth flash.
“You’re dead!”
“Am I?”
“I need you.”
“I know.”
“I’ve always needed you.”
“I know.”
She loves him. So much. She can’t help it. He is broken. And the world broke with him. She rears back and kicks the pentagram—a quick, sure force. It goes flying away. She can hear him screaming for her to come back, screaming for the guards, screaming for his mother. Screaming, screaming, screaming. And then the pentagram hits the ground, unravels, and his voice is gone.
The dogs wait at the bottom of the standing stone. The butterfly has rested on the head of a Labrador. It is not amused, but it does not fuss at the butterfly.
The girl jumps, and lands lightly on her toes. The dogs whine.
“I know,” she says. “It’s not too much longer.”
And they head toward town.
22. Then.
The chickens were just the beginning.
Marla had to build eight new coops to house them all. Fortunately, one of the Midges turned out to be male (Marla was unsurprised by this—it stood to reason, knowing Midge). And what a male he was! Her entire chicken population—from the bitter leafs to the argonites to the peppershells to the reds—started to wriggle and swoon in his presence. They preened and clucked and presented their bottoms with a saucy swish. The rooster-Midge only had to turn his head and an entire coop would be sent into a tizzy. Their laying quadrupled overnight. And what eggs! They had shimmer and heft. They caused a shiver up the spine at just the touch of them.
Marla came home from her first day in the marketplace selling those eggs with a smile on her face. She bought real beef and shared it with the dogs. She bought a coat for the girl (she told people it was for a country family she knew on hard times). She even bought a new hat for the junk man.
It wasn’t until she waved good-bye to the girl and her papa in their handmade cart that she started to worry.
Because those eggs.
They did things, those eggs.
Cured illness.
Eased pain.
Repaired marriages.
Within two weeks six young wives of her acquaintance grew green about the gills. Dark circles around the eyes. A glow on the cheeks. They had been trying to get pregnant for several years, and suddenly all six were pregnant at once.
Word got around. But no one said “magic.” They didn’t dare.
Then there was the herb garden. And the vegetable patch. (Both, of course, were fed with the manure from the chicken coops—now providing the plants with more than simply nitrogen.)
And then it was the cow. Her butter could remove scars, regrow hair, whiten teeth, and cure arthritis. Her cream cured gout. No one mentioned this—they just bought Marla’s wares without making eye contact, and hurried home like the devil was after them.
And Marla worried.
Meanwhile, the junk man, with the help of his daughter, was finding more and more curious things in the rubbish heaps. A pair of eyeglasses that allowed the wearer to see in the dark. A pen that never ran out of ink. A picture frame that would show the face of the person the holder missed most. The Sparrow helped the junk man to identify these curious objects, and then connect them to the person who needed them most. The Sparrow had a keen eye for people. She could read them like stories. They didn’t see her—not usually, anyway—but she could see them from the inside out. And she loved them.
These objects were few and far between—often they would find only one during the space of a month, and some months would come up empty. Still, as the years passed and as the girl grew, the objects began to proliferate.
Shoes that would allow the wearer to run and run and never tire.
A pot that was always filled with soup.
A blanket that would calm even the fussiest baby.
When the Sparrow was nine, Marla stood in her stall at the market, selling her eggs by the basketful. She saw the Sparrow and the junk man perched on the cart, selling god-knows-what to god-knows-who. She saw the church pastor examining a small, leather-bound volume. She saw how his eyes lit up. He stuffed some money in the junk man’s hands, tipped his hat to the Sparrow, and hurried away.
The pastor tipped his hat. To the Sparrow. He saw her, noticed her, greeted her. Not good, Marla thought. Not good at all.
And then a little boy waved at her.
And a matron looked the girl up and down, crinkled her nose, gave her a harumph.
Marla sold her last egg, wrapped up a bundle of cookies, and walked across the square.
The Constable sat on a folding chair, under a banner that said, “See Lest Ye Be Seen.” It was highly produced and shiny. Made in the capital.
“Hello, Henry,” the egg woman said.
The Constable started. No one had used his name since he became the Constable. He had almost forgotten that he had one to begin with.
“Marla,” he said. He gritted his teeth. He remembered the punch. He hoped Marla wasn’t mad at him. “Do you have an observation to share?”
“No. An invitation. There is something that I would like you to see. And something that I feel that you should understand. Can you find your way to my house?”
“I do believe I can.” He gazed at the egg woman under the shade of his regulation hat. Her arms were crossed over her ample bosom, and her face was set. Of course he knew where she lived. He also had a history with Marla. And not a happy one.
“Be there at sundown. Bring a toothbrush.”
And she walked away.
The Constable could have made his way blindfolded.
There was a trick, he had learned, to the constable business. An eye that fluctuated between the blind and the keen. A show of fairness, with an open hand toward those who were able to come and go between the province and the capital with ease—factory owners, bureaucrats, and the like (he never had to worry about over-expectations; aside from the Inquisitor, none of them lasted very long). And a gruff presence, which gave the impression of a stricter fist than he actually possessed. (There was, he grudgingly allowed, something to be said for maintaining order in a population so weighted by worry and work and weariness that they didn’t have time to fool with crime or sedition or independent thinking. The Minister, when it came down to it, knew what he was doing. All hail the Minister.)
The Constable loved his home. And he hated the capital. And so he stayed, protected his own. (Not like he had much choice in the matter. There weren’t a lot of retired constables around. They had a tendency to disappear. No one had ever lasted as long as he did. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had decided as much.)
He arrived at Marla’s tiny farm shortly before sunset. The chickens were just settling into their coops. And there were so many of them. Hen after hen after identical hen, all murmuring their goodnights to one another. He pulled a cheroot from his pocket and chewed on it thoughtfully. He didn’t turn when Marla approached from behind.
“I wouldn’t want to have to report an illegal breeding operation, Marla,” he said.
“Fortunately, you won’t have to,” Marla said.
“Marla, I turn a blind eye to a lot, but this? The Ag Czar is going to—”
“These are not bred birds,” Marla said. “They’re made.”
“What’s the difference?”
“They’re all the same hen. Midge. They’re all Midge.”
The Constable peered into the coop. The chickens all turned their beaks in unison toward the left. They shivered as one. They blinked as one. He looked carefully from hen to hen, and couldn
’t find a speck of difference. They weren’t just the same breed. They were the same.
His mouth went dry. “What are they looking at?”
“I’m getting to that in a minute. First I want to tell you a story. About a baby.”
23. Now.
Jonah kneels in the backyard with his spyscope, gazing up. The ground is damp and the wet soaks the knees of his trousers. He doesn’t care. The sky is darkening by degrees, but it still isn’t dark enough for good stargazing. He doesn’t care about that either. The night, after all, is long. There is plenty of time.
As he waits for the fullness of dark, Jonah enjoys watching the alterations of light—the decay of color, the way the day strips itself from the surface of the sky. He likes things in flux.
There is an object that he hopes to see. A star, perhaps. Or a galaxy. It behaves oddly, appearing and disappearing at will. Lately, the object has been coming closer and closer to a star known locally as the Eye of Ashra, though it has a different name in different towns—his favorite star—approaching, vanishing, approaching, vanishing. He has tracked the odd object’s movements. He has documented the quality of its light. He has scratched through equations and theorems. He has an idea. It is too stupid to even write down.
The dew clings to his clothes. He shivers. He has a locket around his neck. His hand grips it absently. Most days, he has forgotten that he has it.
His spyglass is of his own design—a polished wood casing, cast-brass hardware that he poured himself in the hidden workshop in the barn. The glass was tricky—it took him years harvesting the broken glass windows from the munitions factory, the patient and precise work of grinding lenses and convex mirrors, experimenting with thickness and curve until landing on the right combination, polishing each piece until it gleamed. There was one particularly excellent piece of glass that he snatched from a landship. He was never caught. If it was ever found, he would have surely been killed.
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories Page 19