Tatterdemalion

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Contents

  About the Writer

  About the Painter

  Time Line

  Constellation I

  Constellation II

  Constellation III

  Constellation IV

  By way of an Afterword

  Appendix of Rima Staines’ Paintings

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Dedication

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE WRITER

  SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT was born in San Francisco in 1989 and grew up reading and writing about old magics at the base of Mount Tamalpais. Her short story collection, The Gray Fox Epistles, won the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Literary Foundation in 2014. She has published two books about the wildlife and history of the San Francisco Bay Area and writes a regular column about land and myth for EarthLines magazine. Tatterdemalion is her first novel.

  ABOUT THE PAINTER

  RIMA STAINES was born in London in 1979 to a family of artists. Her book illustration work includes The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre by Jack Zipes; Baba Yaga by Sibelan Forrester et al.; Catherynne M. Valente’s Ventriloquism; and Sometimes a Wild God by her partner, Tom Hirons. Her paintings have been exhibited in the UK, France and the USA. Rima and Tom live with their young son in Hedgespoken, a travelling storytelling theatre.

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type POPPY in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, unbound

  TIME LINE

  Before — PRESENT TO 2025 CE

  (Rose, The Holy Beggars)

  The Fall — 2025–2043 CE

  (Margaret)

  The Camps — 2044–2198 CE

  (Wheel, Martin)

  The Fool’s Revolt — 2198 CE

  (Wheel, Iris, Ffion, Martin)

  The Wild Folk — 2198–2315 CE

  (Anja, Bells, Perches & Boots, Molly, Poppy)

  EVEN THE RAVENS STOPPED THE GLOSS OF THEIR CROAKING CALLS UP over the fir trees when the boy Poppy began to speak aloud. He read words from a book made of gray leather. The book was held in the hands of the wheeled creature called Lyoobov. On her great arched back, taller than any horse, sat a barn owl who listened with round yellow eyes.

  Before, watching from the needled bows and last scraps of telephone wires, the ravens had known Poppy as the boy, quick and orange-haired, who could speak in their velvet tones, who looked like a person but had the blood of a wild thing nursed on fir sap, on brush rabbit livers and black walnuts. They had known him as that fiery streak of loneliness, cawing and whistling and hissing as he went, no human word in him, wanting to touch every last thing he saw, even their own black feathers, which they once, in a startle of pity, let him do. They had known him as the little person with the shiny battered coffeepot, always polished, that he had found half-buried in sand on the beach and kept with him always, for brewing up dirt and thimbleberries, yerba buena leaves, the poppies of his name, over small fires. He poured his concoctions into acorn caps or buckeye shells and fed them to passing creatures—harvest mice, foxes, snakes, warblers. Always, whatever he poured in turned into the thing most needed—grass seeds, blood, mosquito-hawk legs.

  Now, he made his voice human as he read from the pages of that big book. The ravens gathered overhead as below the people from the hamlet called Nettleburn crowded close. They all kept the distance, still, that you would from a bonfire, as if Lyoobov or Poppy were coals. Even so, old men with braids in their white beards, with missing fingers and battered vests that still held a little of their original red, reached toward Lyoobov like she would warm them. Lyoobov was supposed to be only a story, dead for three hundred years. They were weeping.

  Molly, the mother of Poppy, stood in her husband’s arms with tears all over her own cheeks that had joy and also grief in them. Joy because her Poppy had been gone three years and she had been sure he was dead. He’d left on a July afternoon during his fourteenth year with a bag full of rosemary cakes, the battered old coffeepot he took everywhere, and a little green marble in his hand, heading toward the creek where he always went to watch for newts. He hadn’t returned. Joy because she had never before heard him speak a word in any human tongue. Grief because he leaned into Lyoobov’s chest like he had found a home, because he spoke now, when he had never spoken at her urging. This, she knew, was his real mother, this strange and wheeled beast they all had thought belonged only to the myths of a distant Fall. Lyoobov was luminous as any planet, and Molly’s boy swooned, at home in that orbit.

  Poppy’s voice as he read was strong and only a little accented, not with the lilt of another version of English or Spanish, no, but rather with the languages of streams moving, of ravens chortling and mountain lions purring to their kittens. Every so often a choke or a yip or hiss entered his speaking, and the people gathering, and gathering found that they could not look away. Nor did they want to look away from that boy and that big wheeling beast. His odd voice echoed outward as he leaned back into the glowing Lyoobov, who seemed to be lantern-lit from within.

  Poppy read only in the strictest sense of the word. It was as if, the old men whispered to the old women as they lit up pipes of cured tobacco and brought out candied hazelnuts saved for years for some outstanding occasion, it was as if he only had a voice when he put his eyes upon the book in Lyoobov’s hands. Otherwise his words would have been all towhee-speak. There on those pages the words formed and gathered. Those pages were his mind, his soul, they whispered, and Lyoobov his translator. And really they weren’t pages at all, but bark-bound sheaves of a body scratched with bird tracks and woodpecker holes.

  I’VE A FOX-SWALLOWED HEART I DO. IT WAS MADE UNDERGROUND, you see, in the ribs of Lyoobov, who has known gunfire but has regrown like any wise plant will do from her waiting roots. The only difference is that this Lyoobov came back as a female, not a male, like plants that have both the ovum and the pollen. Red alder trees for example. She found that was easiest. She found it was necessary, this time, to be a she instead of a he. A mama-beast, not a papa-beast.

  Of course you want to know that story of resurrection, but I’m not much of an alchemist. I know nothing of the metaphysical. I know only that I walked because I was looking for newts but I found no newts in the creek, so I walked further, and further, and I seemed to have some fire in m
y soles so I kept going. It was like following a red string or the path of a doe and all of her arrowed hoofprint. I walked and ate rosemary cakes from my mother. The stellar’s jays cackled, flaunting their black combs and spreading flashes of indigo with their wings in the oaks. I poured them perfect worms from my coffeepot and they quieted down. They even left me a handful of blue feathers, which I put in my hair.

  My need to keep on walking was like what you’re filled with when you meet a pretty girl and something about her is a whole hillside of purple lupines in your blood and you can’t do anything except hold her in your mind’s hands and follow wherever she goes. I know you think because I never could speak to you your way that I was simple or dumb or made in the wrong body with longings only for coyote-girls or something, but you are all mistaken. I have loved quietly like any boy. Annabelle, yes, I see you there turning pink because you remember how I watched you through the window of your father’s place where he fixed up all our shoes with tree resin and old rubber from the beach, string from the guts of rats. It was like that, the feeling as I walked for days—that kind of longing, that need for wholeness. I barely ate besides the rosemary cakes and new huckleberries in the woods, tart ones that made my tongue dry.

  At the end of my walking, Lyoobov and I just found each other, in the middle of a field made all of tar broken in fissures and veins by a thousand thick dandelions and milk thistles and clusters of fennel. It was like Lyoobov had been there all along, my whole life singing my small name, Poppy, Poppy, to the wind in thousands and thousands of small seeds.

  We are parts of the same thing, she and I. I am hers and she is mine. Lyoobov is not the same as before, not quite, because her bones came apart and then reassembled and she had to grow ligaments, veins, skin, which the broad-footed moles helped with.

  She told me that all the barn owls gathered blood from their prey in their beaks until there was enough to fill her whole body. Her heart grew from iris tubers, from a thousand million lacey pieces of mycelium knitting and knitting at all the last red thimbleberries and freshly dead fox hearts of that great meadow where she was buried as a he hundreds of years ago by the woman named Margaret who had watched him die. Before, Lyoobov was the map through the World as They Knew It and Out the Other Side, and he was a boy, like me. Now, Lyoobov, she is a Maker, that’s what she says, and so she is a girl.

  Listen: I rode on the back of Lyoobov all the way east up the big mountains to where the snow starts and the sun rises and the clouds drop everything and the waters flow down.

  Listen: I can tell you what happened to Anja, whose name you are always murmuring. Anja protect my child, Anja bless this bread, Anja heal this wound. I can tell you her story. We are carrying it, me in my little chest-country, Lyoobov in the great chamber of her abdomen which I have slept in through a small trapdoor beneath her.

  But listen: all stories are hitched to a hundred others like spokes on wheels. We told stories, catching up, dreaming of bright lines through the sky that hitched us to each other, that splintered and shone through our identical bones. We are carrying voices from Before. All the threads that made Lyoobov, that made Anja, that made me.

  It’s all candle-lit and red inside of Lyoobov, and she has been keeping these Stories safe too beside the heating hearth of her heart, where my coffeepot rests, near to boiling, ready to pour. You’d never believe it, what my pot brews on the hearth of Lyoobov’s heart.

  You are whispering loud, you are coming closer. Yes, I do mean Anja born of the buckeye whose mother was Wheel. Yes, like Bells, Perches and Boots have told it, kestrel-watched, cowbell-clanged, sole-trod. I don’t know how to tell a thing like they do. I only know how to say it all fox-swallowed and then spat up again with fur and bones on these pages which are and are not like new white milkmaid flowers perpetually blossoming and then dropping their petals all over our feet, growing with their roots right in Lyoobov’s ribcage, where I was, after all, born.

  I will tell it all to you, the life of Anja. But I will have to tell you from the beginning, Before the Fall.

  First, I will tell you how we came to know any of this at all.

  It started out that we were just rolling along the broken highways of the Valley that stretches forever and ever, out to squares with overgrown orchards of fruit trees dry and dead. The Valley is scattered with empty canals, silt and crabgrass thrusting up everywhere. We picked fruit at first, until the orchards grew crippled, twisted, like they’d been poisoned.

  Lyoobov crooned to me each morning that it was time to go East, toward the sunrise and the place where the snow all gathers up those granite peaks. That’s where it all Began, she said to me, in her way. That’s where she had first been dreamed into being four centuries ago, cold in the foothills in the snow, under the sky full of the smog that drifted and stayed from a City to the west.

  Lyoobov trundled on, murmuring about ice up in the mountains, and I followed, teaching myself to juggle shriveled almonds and peaches from the trees at the western edge of the Valley, boiling them up later in my coffeepot and pouring out vials of some elixir for the two of us, nothing transformed—just the hot syrup of peach and ground up almond.

  One morning, we found an orchard empty of leaves or fruits, and wandered between the endless trunks of the almond trees, horrified, wondering at this desolation. There, we met a woman.

  That’s when it truly began.

  From far away, coming through the trunks, she looked like a girl my age, tanned as a nut, tangled bun of hair, long moving skirts of tawny fabric stained and frayed but so ample it was hard to tell exactly where they ended. Close up, her face was lined a thousand ways like the little feet of songbirds. She greeted us with a hand raised. She smiled at me specifically, brilliantly, so that her whole face moved. To Lyoobov she nodded, a low nod almost like a bow, and she said:

  “You’re up and lurching around already, that’s a good start.” She reached a hand to lift her skirt to her ankles and I saw a sea of sparrow, junco, finch, wrentit and kinglet feet around her own feet, pecking at a ground as vast as the whole Valley. She grabbed one, a yellow goldfinch, snapped its neck and split it open with a single long fingernail.

  “Here is a map of the way up the mountains. You knew already, didn’t you Lyoobov, that somebody’s been calling, hard to say who, somebody’s been dreaming and time to go back, like a blue thread on a needle stitching a single blue stitch up there and leaving the line between so that the place the water comes from and the place it goes are one, not a clogged artery all laced up with sorrow.”

  “Iris from the stories!” I said, and it came out a garble of these words from Lyoobov’s book and the speaking of songbirds. My head went light with the feeling of it, of human words coming from my tongue, all sharp and tender at the same time. I reached out my hands to cradle that little goldfinch, the color of poppy pollen and the dark shade of night, still warm, still with a cheep in his beak, a word of comfort, a word of satisfaction at a small worm. Inside his opened abdomen, ribs as fine as plant stalks, I saw the sharp granite and snow and blue riverbeds of the mountains called the Sierra Nevada, looming to the east. The ones we’d already been moving toward. I saw the whole mountain range in there and I also saw a fine tracery of paths, magnified. The amount of detail that yellow-feathered body contained made my head spin.

  Iris grinned at me like a girl and it made her face complicated, an old woman’s rivuleted topography of skin.

  “Mmm,” she said. “I have been called that.” A wink. “Follow the blue creeks. I think you’ll get to the right place eventually, between the two of you.” She pulled several dried up bird organs the size of fingernails from a pocket and ate them like berries. “And you,” she said, touching my red hair, “listen well.”

  After she left I wished I’d offered her a draught from my coffeepot; I wanted to know what would have poured out. What it was she needed most. Perhaps it was best I didn’t.

  The dead almond trees and the patches of crabgrass turned to bro
ken tar, the ghost-bones of suburban houses, and dust, as we went further East over that Valley. Dust and fallow fields with stumps of old life across them, little husks and withered root balls. Poisoned, I whispered to Lyoobov and she whispered to me, and below our feet we could feel the sorrows of buried rivers, long ago dammed and dug under in tunnels of cement. By the time we rolled into the dry juniper scrub foothills, me sitting up on Lyoobov’s broad back with the blossomed book of her bones in my hands, learning and learning its sounds, the sounds of my boy’s voice as a thing separate from a raven’s, a frog’s, a streambed’s.

  Lyoobov always made the fire. It was an extraordinary thing to watch her gray leathery hands, her nimble wheeled bulk, her short trunk and her tail and her big dark eyes like cut out moons with tapered edges—all of her went into the making of a blaze. It was like she was giving birth to it, stick by gathered stick, tented into perfect forms that allowed the air and the flames to twine and crackle and sear. Afterward, she ate the embers, one by one, savoring.

  Every night I held out that dissected goldfinch for us to peer inside of. It never seemed to decompose, only remained a just-dead yellow form, neck broken, changed from a body to a map. We followed the blue lines like veins in the mountain range of her ribcage, not because we had any idea what we would find, but because it felt like the only thing in the world to do. It felt like following sustenance; like this was the only way to be fed, though we ate haphazardly—quail and lizards, roots, almonds stored in Lyoobov’s carriage-sized middle. I slept there nightly, the embers she had eaten warming her body, part wagon, part beast she is, a place all made for dreaming in.

  It may have been a year, a year and a half, it took us to get there. I cannot say. We rolled, we dreamed, through that wasteland of dust, up the mountain. We changed and we also stayed much as we always had been.