Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
| Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is
the author of more than 25 solo fantasy and science fiction
novels, including the 1989 Nebula award winning Healer’s War,
loosely based on her service as an Army Nurse in Vietnam during
the Vietnam War. She has collaborated on 16 novels with Anne
McCaffrey, six in the best selling Petaybee series and eight in
the YA bestselling Acorna series, and most recently, the Tales
of the Barque Cat series, Catalyst and Catacombs (from Del Rey).
Recently she has converted all of her previously published solo
novels to eBooks with the assistance of Gypsy Shadow Publishing,
under her own Fortune imprint. Spam Vs. the Vampire was her
first exclusive novel for eBook and print on demand publication,
followed by Father Christmas (a Spam the Cat Christmas novella)
and The Tour Bus of Doom. Redundant Dragons is her newest
exclusive novel in The Seashell Archives series and follows The
Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad.
WEBSITE: http://www. eascarborough.com
DEDICATED BOOK SITE: http://scarbor9.wix.com/beadtime-stories
BLOG: http://spamslitterature.wordpress.com/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/KBDundee
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.a.scarborough
OTHER:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4811383.K_
Check out Ms. Scarborough's
The Healer's War here!
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Magic, Dragons, Unicorns, Dastardly villains and more! Songs of
the Seashell Archives is a six book collection of some of the
finest fantasy writing you'll ever read. Together as one set for
a limited time only at this special price. Don't miss the chance
to grab this collection at a great discount.
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Scarborough Fair and Other Stories includes ten works
by the author of the Nebula Award–winning The Healer’s War
and many other novels. In “Final Vows,” Mu Mao the Magnificent,
the feline bodhisattva from Scarborough’s novel Last Refuge,
helps guide a reincarnated cat in solving the mystery of his own
betrayal and murder. “Whirlwinds” takes place on the Diné Trail
of Tears, when the US military force-marched ninety-five hundred
Navajo people from their ancient, sacred homeland to the barren
Bosque Redondo area surrounding New Mexico’s Fort Sumner. A
coveted princess packs on pounds when a disgruntled suitor casts
an evil spell on her in “Worse Than the Curse.” How is a plump
princess to cope? And “Long Time Coming Home,” cowritten with
Scarborough’s fellow Vietnam veteran Rick Reaser, is a story of
the battles and ghosts many vets face after returning from the
war. These and other stories capably demonstrate Scarborough’s
breadth of skill.
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A portentous song sparks an unlikely adventure in this lighthearted contemporary fantasy by the Nebula Award–winning author of
The Healer’s War. Colin Songsmith sings a song to an old witch who takes an unlikely revenge. The witch’s granddaughter rescues him from the dire threat of being eaten alive by the cat. She hears the song, which happens to concern her recently married sister and a gypsy. Convinced that she has to save her sister, she takes the minstrel, the cat, and her magical resources to Rowan Castle. The story is rich with descriptive details of setting and encounters with magical and fantastic creatures such as a talking cat, a lovesick dragon, and a bear prince. The characters speak in contemporary slang, which plays nicely against the traditional fantastic settings.
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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s The Godmother puts a new twist on contemporary fantasy with the assertion that fairy godmothers exist here and now, and they have magical power that allows them to intervene in real-world problems.
What if someone wished a fairy godmother would help the entire city of Seattle? An overworked, overstressed social worker named Rose Samson does just that when she makes an idle wish on a mustard seed. Felicity Fortune of “Godmothers Anonymous” shows up to help. Rose Samson is neither fashion model beautiful, nor a twit, and she happily joins forces with Felicity Fortune, a “Godmother” who demonstrates that Grimm’s fairy tales are still relevant in our humdrum modern world.
Fairy godmothers are on a magical budget, so every possible way they can get human beings or animals to assist one another, they will try, rather than using up their magical means.
Felicity encounters many strangely familiar situations: a pretty stablehand named Cindy Ellis is mistreated by her cruel stepsisters. A rock star’s daughter, scared of the supermodel her dad married, runs away from home and meets seven Vietnam veterans at an encounter session and retreat. One of them might be a big bad wolf, who knows?
In all their experiences, Rose and Felicity try to blend their magical aid with realistic human initiative and social responsibility. Scarborough’s fully realized settings, with the humor built into the mix of magical solutions and grim reality, make this work an entertaining and compelling read.
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ORDER The Godmother IN PRINT TODAY! (ISBN:
978-1-61950-362-5) |
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Queen Verity is queen only because her mother has said she has
to be. She agrees because, after all, somebody has to liberate
the dragons who have long toiled in the boiler room bowels of
the city. Now that they are free, nobody has any idea what to do
with them or how to feed them.
Everyone is used to dragons being docile cogs in the machinery
of industry, tamed into tranquility by food treated with a
hypnotic tranquilizer, now largely destroyed, leaving a lot of
huge hungry beasts roving the capital city of Queenston. Verity
needs to act fast, before the dragons remember what dragons once
did to feed themselves.
The crown has scarcely mussed her hair before her political
enemies have her shanghaied and sold to an outward bound vessel,
leaving the kingdom to the random mercies of her erstwhile
assistant, Malady Hyde.
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Word Count: 91845
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ORDER The Redundant Dragons IN PRINT TODAY! (ISBN:
978-1-61950-343-4) |
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Determined to become an author of western penny dreadful novels
like her idol, Ned Buntline, a young San Francisco newspaper
editor christens herself Valentine Lovelace (after a floozie
acquaintance of her father’s) and heads east for the Wild West.
She finds it in spades in the Texas Big Bend when she is
kidnapped from a mule train by Comanches and ends up the guest
of a ruthless comanchero, a sort of wild west warlord, after the
Comanches are distracted by a... dragon?
Fort Draco, as the comanchero fort is known, is as full
of intrigue and nighttime carryings-on as a modern day romantic
novel, but Frank Drake, the owner, is no hero. If Valentine
wants to save herself and the less-guilty if not entirely
innocent folks who live there, she must defeat heat stroke,
gunslingers, a couple of fake rainmakers and their camel,
hostile Indians, the voice haunting her dreams (not in a good
way) and a dragon who not only is gobbling all the livestock and
transportation in the area but is guarding the only water hole
in fifty miles of drought-ridden desert.
And she must do it all while taking good notes, of
course.
This is a western but not as we know it and a fantasy set
where we’re not used to it.
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The Djinn Decanted:
By his genie's standards, Aman Akbar was a pervert. He was not content
to marry his cousin, the beauteous Hyaganoosh, as custom
demanded. Instead he chose three ugly foreign wives—a pale
skinned barbarian Rasa, a sharp-tongued Chinese acrobat, Lady
Aster, and the tall ebony skinned 100th daughter of the Great
Elephant, Amollia. Just about the time the women were sorting
out the whole polygamy thing and dealing with their new
mother-in-law, Um Aman, Aman Akbar lost control of the genie and
got turned into a white ass (it happens a lot in the Arabian
Nights) at the wish of none other than Hyaganoosh. What's a
foreign wife to do? The three women and Aman Akbar's mother have
no choice but to seek a way to undo the spell and restore the
fellow to his former shape and state but along the way they have
some hair raising adventures involving monkeys, shape shifters
called peris, the dangerous divs who make the djinn look jolly,
and a rather nice elephant.
Delightful reading! Shades of
Scheherazade and Sinbad in the sort of Scarboroughian treat that
one is beginning to expect of this beguiling writer." Anne
McCaffrey
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the winner of the 1989 Nebula Award
for Best novel.
Hanging by a Hair
As soon as I awoke I wished I had not, for I could feel in great
detail the agony of my scalp as each hair in my head tried to
rip from its native soil as it strained upward, and the horrible
tension in my neck as my body was pulled in the other direction
by its own weight. The red hot glaze before my eyes vanished
briefly when I blinked and saw Amollia dangling just across from
me. Her short curls would not allow her to drop as far from the
iron ring to which they were tied as did my captive braids...
I saw a shutter fly open, and suddenly a stick was thrust
forward, striking Amollia in the ribs, setting her swinging and
shrieking. A moment later I too received a clout that tore loose
part of a braid, so that blood and tears simultaneously coursed
down my face as I rocked to and fro...
"Isn't that a shame?" Chu Mi's slimy voice hissed
to Aster. "Such nice little women. Such good friends of
yours. See how much they hurt? Don't you want to give us what is
ours so we can pull them in before they are quite bald and
dropped into the river for the crocodiles to eat?"
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Word Count: 96,000
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When a woman’s bones are found in
the icy dregs of the noxious Nor’ Loch, newly appointed sheriff
of Edinburgh, Walter Scott, is called upon. Are these the
remains of a drowned witch or religious heretic, or are they
perhaps linked to something more recent and sinister? For
although Edinburgh is known to be the center of literature,
science, and medicine, it is also the haunt of body snatchers
who prey upon the living and the dead alike, selling their
victims for study by the student physicians at the medical
school.
When a band of Travelling People is forced to winter near the
city, two young women are taken, one from her bed while she
sleeps near her family. Justice from the settled people is
rarely accorded to gypsies and the Travellers fear they will be
murdered one by one by the ghouls stalking their people.
A young gypsy named Midge Margret is sure that Scott
will care. He befriended her family before and once more
he promises to help find the murderer who prowls the snowy
forest in a black coach.
When a patchwork woman with supernatural strength begins hunting
the streets as well, Scott and Midge Margret know the crimes are
rooted in bloody dark magic. In order to catch the killer, the
butchered victims themselves must testify.
By Nebula Award winning author Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough.
Publisher's Weekly says, "Skillfully
cross-stitching history, mystery and old-time urban legend... tension mounts steadily... an artful work.
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Pelagia
Harper, aka Valentine Lovelace, published her memoirs of her
time in Draco, Texas and became an established writer—at least
in her own mind. But when her father dies and her stepmother
steals her royalties, she finds herself destitute. Also haunted.
The ghost of her papa keeps popping up everywhere. When her
father’s old flame, Sasha Devine, offers her a way out of her
poverty, Pelagia jumps on it before she knows what’s involved.
In 1897, the two ladies must travel North to the Klondike (the
Wild West is a relative term as far as V. Lovelace is concerned)
escorting the coffin of a man said to be Lost-Cause Lawson, a
prospector.
It turns out the man beneath the coffin lid is not as dead as he
was supposed to be and somehow, Pelagia ends up being accused of
murdering a Mountie. Apparently the sensible solution to that is
to fake her own suicide. The upshot is that when she finally
does arrive in Dawson City with Sasha, she is obliged to take
employment as a dance hall girl and a flamenco dancer (Corazon,
the Belle of Barcelone). Her boss seems nice though. Very
sociable, especially with all of his new female employees. It
isn’t long before Pelagia learns that Vasily Vladovitch
Bledinoff is giving the biting cold some competition. It isn’t
until her friend Captain Lomax receives a new book from England,
written by a fellow named Bram Stoker, that she begins to get a
clue what exactly is going on with the mode for black velvet
neck bands the girls are all sporting. Then there’s all of those
really smart wolves, the threat of starvation and disease, and
other strange and unusual wildlife.
This book is about what life was like for a female artiste in
Dawson City as it was during the Gold Rush—when everyone was
there to strike it rich—except for the vampires, who were there
for the night life.
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Word Count: 98,000
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In Song of Sorcery, Book 1 of Songs from the Seashell Archives,
hearthwitch Maggie Brown met minstrel Colin Songsmith and a
unicorn named Moonshine while saving both her sister and the
kingdom. All in a quest’s work for a girl who can magically do
anything she can convince her power is housework. To reward
Maggie, the king makes her a princess, and therefore a good
catch for the local noble bachelors. Only problem is, she
doesn’t want to get married. She wants to be with Moonshine,
whose Unicorn Creed, as he understands it, forbids him to
consort with anyone except a chaste maiden. It’s rather a touchy
situation, and so Princess Maggie abandons her crown and with
Moonshine, she and Colin set out to see if they can find a
loophole in Moonshine’s creed. Of course, in the process they
have to try to save the land of Argonia again, this time from a
were-man, a revolutionary nymph, a town’s worth of zombies, an
ice worm and an evil wizard.
“Gentle humor, deft plotting and a fine light-handed prose
style, all combine to make THE UNICORN CREED a pure delight.”
—New York Daily News
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Word Count: 146,000
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ORDER The
Unicorn Creed IN
PRINT TODAY! (ISBN: 978-1-61950-258-1) |
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Sleeping Beauty had it easy. Her curse only made her take a nap when she turned 16. As if it
wasn’t bad enough already that because of her frost giant
heritage from her father the king’s side of the family she was 6
feet tall when she was only 12 years old, poor Princess Bronwyn
(the Bold) of Argonia was cursed at birth to tell nothing but
lies. With her father away at war and her mother heavily
pregnant, Bronwyn is even more in the way than usual, so she
gets packed off to Wormroost, her aunt’s place in the glaciers,
and en route she meets her musician/magician cousin Carole , a
not-so-brave gypsy lad, and a princess-turned-swan. The lot of
them encounter monsters, sorcerers, sea serpents, mercenary
mages and sirens—many of whom are related to them. Without
quite intending to, they embark on a quest to end the war, heal
a battle-ravaged land, end a ban on magic and lift Bronwyn’s
Bane.
L. Sprague de Camp said, “I found BRONWYN’S BANE
delightful reading. I wish I had her fertility of imagination in
thinking up amusing twists, turns and business of plot.”
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Word Count: 90,000
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Bane IN PRINT
TODAY! (ISBN: 978-1-61950-259-8) |
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Going on a quest with a handsome prince
might sound like a dream, but Prince Rupert’s cousin Carole
comes to feel that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Carole
agrees to accompany her hunky cousin to Miragenia to christen
his baby niece. But it’s
really hard to even explain the situation to anyone: how the
little Princess was stolen from her mother’s side by Miragenians
who demand fifteen years of the first-born’s life in exchange
for a bit of help during wartime. Or how the baby was taken
before magical christening gifts could be bestowed upon her for
her protection and character development.
The ladies surrounding Rupert (also known as Rowan the Romantic
and Rowan the Rake) don’t care about some baby and don’t hear
anything about the mission because they’re
too busy sighing over him. Crowd control is an obvious problem,
as is extricating Rupert from more than one involuntary
engagement. When at last the two, with the help of dubious
questing companions including a love-stricken pink and purple
dragon, arrive at the theocracy of Gorequartz where the baby has
been fostered out to a queen, they find themselves in trouble of
a completely different complexion. Their most deadly nemesis is
none other than a giant crystal “god” seemingly created in
Rupert’s own image!
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Word Count: 74,000
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Christening Quest IN
PRINT TODAY! (ISBN: 978-1-61950-260-4) |
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Praise for Phantom Banjo from Booklist:
“This book has just about every virtue one can reasonably expect
in a contemporary fantasy tale, including a vivid portrait of
the contemporary folk scene and a chilling emotional impact that
makes many horror novels look pedestrian. Highly recommended.”
“Contemporary” in the above review means the world as it was in
1992 when the book was written. The rapid changes in recording
and communications technology make it seem like a period piece
now, which is entirely appropriate for the subject matter. This
is a fantasy series about a bunch of folk musicians, good
pickers and flawed but likable human beings, trying to reclaim
songs destroyed by the evil forces (or devils, including but by
no means limited to the Expediency Devil, the Stupidity and
Ignorance Devil, and the Debauchery Devil) that want humanity to
lose its humanity. Hauntings abound, as they do in the folk
songs. It’s a good yarn to read at Halloween, whether or not
this is the music that moves you. And sometimes it’s really
funny. There’s a lot of cussing though. Well, the characters are
frustrated and scared a lot, and they beg your pardon for their
language but you might do the same if faced with similar
catastrophies, disasters, travails, frustrations, and
circumstances.
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The ancient ballads of England,
Scotland and Ireland are great stories to visit but nobody in
their right mind would want to live there. There’s a high body
count for every ballad and a happy ending usually involves boy
meets girl and they end up sharing a grave. The musicians who go
to retrieve the songs, with the help of the magic banjo,
Lazarus, know this, but the fact is, the songs also contain a
great deal of magic useful in defeating the devils who are out
to dehumanize humanity by stealing the music. The Queen of the
Fairies, aka the Debauchery Demon, Torchy Burns, makes them a
deal they can’t refuse and the reluctant heroes find themselves
thrust into the lives and deaths of ballad people they know are
going to end badly. It’s enough to make a picker take up
accounting!
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Word Count: 77,000
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What started in the States ends in the
States. The song-saving musicians are back home, with heads and
hands full of songs they saved with the help of the Phantom
Banjo, Lazarus. The soul-destroying devils haven’t given up on
killing off the music though, along with everything else that’s
maybe a little fun or keeps people human and sane. Even the
debauchery devil, AKA Torchy Burns, AKA Lulubelle Baker (of
Lulubelle Baker’s Petroleum Puncher’s Palace in west Texas) AKA
Lady Luck AKA, believe it or not, the Queen of Faerie, has
fallen on hard times. Her fellow devils are willing to see her
demoted to the lower levels of hell, where a girl can’t even get
a decent mani-pedi. Her only hope is to convince one of the
musicians~that would be Willie MacKai~to become her human
sacrifice tithe to hell so she can get back her faerie kingdom.
Once the magic banjo self-destructs, Willie decides to cooperate
with Torchy. But the phone-in ghost of Sam Hawthorne and the
music aren’t done with Willie yet, though it takes a ghost train
full of cowboy poets and all of his friends to save him.
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Word Count: 106,500
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“Dear Rosie,
Being an apprentice fairy godmother is complicated. Not only do
I have to go out and find good deeds to do, but for a sidekick I
have that hit man that Felicity changed into a toad. I wanted to
take the cat but she seems to have had a big funeral to attend.
Felicity isn’t around much. She keeps disappearing through a
door in the guestroom that opens on the side of a hill. The
swimming pool is weird too, and I could have sworn I saw someone
dancing on the bottom. I am enjoying riding the flying horse and
helping a boy who plays squeezebox and talks to swans though, so
things are—you should pardon the
expression—looking up.”
“SIMPLY ENCHANTING.” Publisher’s Weekly
“CLEAR AND ENTERTAINING...LOTS OF FUN.” Locus
“CHARMING...Scarborough mixes folklore, adventure, atmosphere,
psychology, and whimsy into a thoroughly absorbing plot.”
Booklist
“AN ENCHANTING BOOK.” Affaire de Coeur
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ORDER The Godmother's Apprentice IN PRINT TODAY! (ISBN:
978-1-61950-363-3) |
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Cindy Ellis knows about fairy
godmothers. Her almost-stepdaughter is studying to be one and
she is a close personal friend of Felicity Fortune, an Irish
godmother. But she didn’t suspect when she picks up Grandma
Webster that the elderly, seemingly lost American Indian woman
in traditional dress was a magical godmother too. When a
self-serving skinwalker/witch inflames tensions between
neighbors and pits sisters against each other in the best fairy
tale fashion, Grandma enlists Cindy’s help, along with that of a
Navajo doctor, a Hopi rancher, and an unlikely champion, a dude
who is related to coyotes and dreams of a home shopping network
empire. Together they must defeat the evil that is threatening
to destroy their world forever.
“Characterization, pacing, and folkloric expertise are all up to
the series’ high standards, so Godmother-followers and others
should greet this book joyfully.”—Booklist
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Word Count: 106,000
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ORDER The Godmother's Web IN PRINT TODAY! (ISBN:
978-1-61950-664-0) |
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In a world where unemployment is
obliterated by putting all jobless people in the military to
maintain the endless ongoing warfare, Warrant Officer Viveka
Vanachek finds herself in a weirder place yet. Captured, raped,
and interrogated she is finally exiled to a remote snow-bound
prison camp where she is placed in solitary confinement. It
seems like the end of the world when she also becomes too sick
to eat and starts seeing ghosts and hearing mysterious chanting
within the noises of the camp. But her dreams tell her there is
more to her prison than there seems to be and soon her delusions
and reality start trading places.
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In NOTHING SACRED, Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough took a detour from her humorous classic and
contemporary fantasies to write her “obligatory science fiction
writer’s end-of-the-world book.” The bad news is the world has
ended. The good news is LAST REFUGE is the sequel.
Why does the end of the world seem so much more dire than the
end of our own lives, since, according to modern non-theology
based theory, we won’t know the difference one way or the other.
Using the Tibetan Buddhist background of NOTHING SACRED, the
answer to that was, if the Buddhists are right, when the end of
the world comes not only will our own present lives be ended,
but there will be no life forms left into which we may
reincarnate.
The children of Kalapa compound, safe from the war and the
aftermath as it is felt in most of the world, discover that the
problems work in reverse in Shambala. Babies are born there at a
deliberately amazing rate but no one dies within the borders.
Consequently, in time, there are no unembodied spirits in
Shambala left to inhabit the babies, cursing the poor children
with a spiritual birth defect.
Heir to the duties of Ama-La, young Chime Cincinnati, as the
guide to Shambala, cannot rest until she leaves the safety of
the compound to lead refugees to it. She is helped in this by
Mike, a young man who has always been like an older brother to
her.
These two face all of the standard fantasy characters, but with
a Tibetan twist——there is an evil wizard who is king of his own
compound, a hideously evil demon who is enough to give anyone
nightmares, a yeti, an American princess, and far too many
ghosts, not to mention Mu Mao the magnificent, a reincarnated
wise man who was good enough to finally be allowed to ascend to
life as a cat.
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Word Count: 105,000
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“Get the past life of your dreams!”
Leda Hubbard, a forensic pathologist, gets the job of her dreams
when an old school friend hires her to collect and authenticate
the DNA of the famous Cleopatra. It’s all great fun for Leda
until, during a massive disaster, her colorful dad, the dig’s
security specialist, is killed by a group trying to hijack the
precious material for a “blend,” a process in which the queen’s
DNA is used to import her memories, personality, and character
traits to a new host. They screw up, however, and get Leda’s
dad’s DNA instead. To keep the queen from going to the
murderers, Leda blends with Cleopatra herself, learning a lot
more about Egypt than she ever wanted to know.
“A bright, sometimes humorous, often dark, but always innovative
speculative fiction...Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is always a
treat to read but with this novel, she takes readers where
nobody has gone before.” BookBrowser
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Word Count: 67,500
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Cleopatra's back (again). This time she
brought friends.
“A science fiction thriller that feels like a futuristic James
Bond...The idea of two minds inhabiting one body is a
fascinating premise. The way they blend together and respect
each other’s personality makes Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s
latest work a fascinating, often humorous speculative fiction.”
Midwest Book Review
“Scattered throughout the narrative, Scarborough provides
amusing asides from the viewpoints of the Cleopatras. The modern
day is filled with marvels from the viewpoints of the ancient
queens, and Scarborough does a marvelous job of giving the world
we take for granted a new angle of understanding...[She] has
done a fabulous job of researching the past, and through the
observations of the two Cleos paints a heartrending picture of
loss and yet at the same time presents awe-inspiring
descriptions of wonders that have managed, despite war, neglect,
and outright vandalism, to survive for millennia to the modern
day.” SF Revu
“[An] exciting speculative thriller...Scarborough deftly
weaves her suspenseful web and then untangles the threads with
her clear and concise prose, preventing a plot with
dual-identity characters from spinning out of control. The
DNA-blending concept is fascinating...retains the breathless
action, frenetic pacing, and dry wit, [of its predecessor] with
homages to Elizabeth Peters and Indiana Jones, and will appeal
to a wide audience.”
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Excerpt
Word Count: 95,500
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A PURRANORMAL MYSTERY
Spam and the other cats at website designer Darcy Dupres’ house
are frantic with worry. Darcy walked out the door two (missed)
wet meals ago and didn’t return or send anyone else to look
after her beloved furry friends. The other cats think she has
abandoned them, but her office cat and (unbeknownst to her)
protégé, Spam, suspects darker forces are at work.
Darcy’s last project was helping a suspicious character who
called himself Marcel deMontreal with a dating website for
vampires and the women who dig them. Darcy thought Marcel was
playing and besides, he paid her a lot of kitty litter to design
the site.
But before she can finish, the self-proclaimed vampire announces
that he is coming to visit, and Darcy disappears. That and
the—duh—black billowy figure with the white face and red eyes
peering through the window seem like a dead giveaway to Spam.
Using the computer knowledge he learned at his human’s side,
Spam escapes to the world beyond his home to find Darcy and save
his family. When the other cats are rounded up and hauled to the
shelter, Spam’s only allies seem to be a hungry raccoon, some
friendly deer, observant otters and the fact that Marcel happens
to be allergic to cats.
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Reviews
In-House Reviews |
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Word Count: 65,000
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ORDER THE Spam Vs. the Vampire PRINT BOOK!
(ISBN #978-0-9834027-3-2) |
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In these stories a parade of
fascinating felines tell tales of their lives. Guinevere’s cat,
Gray Jane, tells what really happened at Camelot from her cat’s
eye view atop the queen’s canopy bed. An Egyptologist’s cat,
Shuttle, wards off a vengeful mummy by doing a favor for bastet,
the cat goddess. A Scottish cat, Tinkler Tam, stalks body
snatchers through a Gothic Edinburgh. Mu Mao the Magnificent, a
bodhisattva cat who is the last tomcat in the world, searches
for a mate in one story while in 3 others he assists his fellow
felines during the transition to their next incarnations. A
murdered cat named Mustard returns to avenge himself on his
killer and protect his former household. The old soldier hero of
a fairy tale discovers the secret of the 12 dancing princesses
with the help of his trusty cat companion, Captain Shadow. these
are the stories mother cats tell their kittens to provide them
with role models, inspiring them to hold their heads and tails
high.
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Excerpt
Word Count: 60000
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ORDER THE 9 Tales O' Cats PRINT BOOK!
(ISBN #978-978-1-61950-043-3) |
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Spam the cat thought he'd seen a lot of
the world in his nine months of life. After all, he was the
foremost vampire hunter of Port Deception, WA. (SPAM VS THE
VAMPIRE)! This was his first Christmas, however, and from what
he'd heard on TV, on Christmas all was supposed to be calm, all
was supposed to be bright. The deer and Renfrew the raccoon had
other ideas however. In an attempt to
keep Renfrew, aka "The UPS Bandit" from ruining a lot of
Christmases, Spam begins a task that leads to his being the sole
protection of a new mother and child, and a
less-than-warm-and-fuzzy reunion with his feral father.
Altogether, his first Christmas eve is a less than a Silent
Night.
The proceeds of this book from whatever source will be donated
to the Humane Society of Jefferson County for the benefit of the
animal shelter. eBook COMING SOON!
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ORDER THE Father Christmas PRINT BOOK! (ISBN #978-1-61950-052-5)
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As usual, a wonderful Scarborough—vintage,
witty, clever, profound, touching, vivid...
—Kerry Greenwood, author of the Phryne Fisher series
The Tour Bus of Doom rolls into a small coastal town, spewing
zombies to rampage down the main street. To the beat of eerie
drum music, they loot, kidnap, and zombie-fy innocent citizens.
Spam the cat, self-appointed feline defender of the town,
watches in horror from the rooftops. When the zombies abduct
Spam's jeweler friend and take over the nursing home, Spam is
certain they are also responsible for the disappearance of his
next-door neighbor Mr. Barker, partner of retired police dog,
Officer Bubba. Then Marigold, Spam's half sister, reports that
her human family, who went missing while on a mission of mercy
to earthquake ravaged Haiti, has finally returned home, just
long enough to take their valuables. And They. Don't. Even.
Recognize. Her.
All of that is dire enough, but then the zombies go too far and
take over the bodies of the owner and server at Spam's favorite
fish'n'chips place. Searching for help from his vampire friend
Maddog, Spam meets a new cat in town, the sinuous Havana Brown
Erzullie, who arrived with the zombies. Aided (sort of) by her,
Renfrew the raccoon, the urban deer cat taxi service, Rocky the
vampcat, and his half-siblings Marigold and Mat, the heroic
feline must investigate, before the zombie apocalyps-o destroys
not only his town, but his home and his beloved Darcy.
Just when he thinks he may have the situation well in paw, the
zombie hunters from Seattle arrive, responding to a bounty on
the heads of the zombies. What they don't realize is that they
have the wrong brand of zombies, the un-plagued un-dead, who
could revive as long as they keep their heads.
Excerpt
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Word Count: 67500
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ORDER The Tour Bus of Doom PRINT BOOK! (ISBN
#978-1-61950-113-3) |
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What you see (at first) is not what you
get in this collection of nine previously published tales of
shape shifting and transformation. An Alaskan student of
wildlife biology finds it difficult to write convincingly about
what she knows. A proud and beautiful princess loses her
popularity when cursed (in a way probably familiar to many
readers) by a wicked enchanter. A lonely Cajun fiddler has a
close encounter with his royal but scaly ancestor. In the secret
story of the railroad that transformed the American West,
Chinese and Irish workers compete to complete the job with a
little help from supernatural friends. A lowly jeweler creates a
wondrous bauble for the sultan's favorite, but his reward, an
exalted royal elephant, eats him out of house and home until he
unlocks her secret. An Irish nurse discovers the identity of the
lone fiddler who plays at the bedside of a critically ill
patient. A middle-aged woman, suddenly invisible, improves her
love and social life during Mardi Gras. And a predatory bill
collector meets his match in a story so dark that the author
even changed her name. In these shifty stories, you'll be
wondering who happens next!
Excerpt
Word Count: 54000
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ORDER THE Shifty PRINT BOOK! (ISBN #978-1-61950-164-5) |
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Progress has transformed Queenston,
capital city of Argonia. Once the land of witches, wizards,
fairies, and other magical people and animals, since the Great
War, the country has changed. Queenston, particularly, is now
the city of contraptions and conveyances, including a modern
international railroad.
In the Great War Argonia's dragons allied with the armies to
push back an invasion. For their assistance, the beasts shared
what food remained as the country rebuilt itself. But with the
war won, the allies came to "recover" the war-torn country,
bringing with them new ideas and inventions, most of which only
needed a supply of iron and a reliable source of heat for their
boilers. The dragons were again recruited, tamed, altered and
virtually enslaved to power Progress.
Verity Brown is a modern girl. The magic of her witchy
foremothers has become, if not actually illegal, highly
unfashionable. The only magic that matters to Verity is her own
curse, forcing her to know and tell the truth regardless of
convenience.
On Verity's 16th birthday, a hot-air balloon crash kills her
father. The balloon's dragon and wrangler rescue Verity, but are
blamed and sentenced to be put to death. Her honorable quest to
save them and find her father's murderer takes her straight into
the den of the wild and ferocious Dragon Vitia.
Excerpt
Word Count: 101700
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Price: $7.99
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ORDER The
Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad print book! (ISBN
#978-1-61950-252-9) |
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EXCERPTS
The Drastic Dragon of
Draco, Texas |
Paladins of the Prairie may very
well exist on the prairie, but they have clearly drawn the line
at carrying the Code of the West into the Texas desert. I know
for a fact that muleskinners bear no resemblance whatsoever to
either Saint George or to any of those other gallant knights who
traipsed about rescuing damsels in distress. When I was abducted
by wild Indians and subsequently menaced by a dragon, none of
the fifty teamsters with whom I was traveling lifted a finger to
rescue me.
Of course, forty-nine of them weren’t aware I needed rescuing,
since the wagon in which I was riding had bogged down behind the
others just before midday siesta and of course the mules had to
be rested before we were dislodged and reunited with the rest of
the train.
Not that my traveling companions were being
intentionally neglectful. They were simply more accustomed to
dealing with mules than with ladies. Had it occurred to them
that I might be in some danger, one of them would undoubtedly
have insisted that I join a wagon further up the trail in a more
protected position. But, as usual, they were so intent upon
their own routine they forgot me. I believe that they did so not
so much because I am unmemorable as because my presence
presented them with something of a dilemma. A frontiersman
curses in front of a lady only at peril to his life and immortal
soul. Unfortunately, cursing is an absolute requirement in the
practice of the mule-skinning profession.
Since my objective was to sample the true flavor of the
Wild West, I willingly accommodated myself to this benign
neglect. Though but three days away from the cavalry outpost, I
had already grown accustomed to the teamsters’ priorities. First
animals, then equipment, and then people were tended to. When I
inquired of Mr. Jones, the driver of my wagon, what might be a
human ailment sufficiently severe to halt the caravan, he gave
the various personal insects inhabiting his chin whiskers an
affectionate scratch and replied, “Oh, I don’t know, ma’am.
Indians—though there ain’t been that many bad raids since the
menfolk got back from the War. But if there was, we’d stop, I
reckon. Indians steal mules. And mebbe a panther”—(he said
“painter”)—“that’d be bad for the mules too. But strictly
human—I don’t know, a bullet in the belly maybe, specially if a fella was bleedin’ real messy.”
I remained skeptical about the negligibility of the
dangers of the despoblado, the great Texas desert. The cavalry
wives at Fort Davis were also less blase’ than the muleskinners,
especially regarding Indians. The tenth night I stayed at the
fort, a minor earthquake shook the ground. While the men ran to
their soldierly duties and the comfort of their horses, the
women clustered together in one room and talked of how the
earthquake had to be a sign from God that no decent person
should live out here among the heathen, after which the
conversation degenerated into morbidly grisly and graphic
descriptions of past Indian raids.
Current style dictates that I should claim I was
gathering wildflowers or something equally genteelly frivolous
when the Indians captured me. Nonsense. I had awakened from my
siesta half-melted despite the shade of the wagon above me,
nauseated by the stench of mules and Mr. Jones and, by now,
myself, begrimed and annoyed to have to stray from my nest even
as far as the closest cactus large enough to provide a modest
concealment.
I scanned the ground for snakes, not wildflowers, of
which there are none in the middle of the desert in late
September. Finishing my necessary errand behind the only sort of
greenery around—the prickly kind—I stood, adjusted my skirts,
and was about to return to the wagon when I saw the Indians.
I cannot report that I was instantly terrified. My
first instinct was to shoo them away. There were only three of
them, riding around our disabled wagon, poking through the
canvas, and pawing through the contents. Earlier in my journeys
I had encountered several members of the pacified tribes around
Tombstone and Santa Fe, folk with a distressing penchant for
examining other people’s property and begging a portion of it,
when possible. My brain was still so befuddled with sleep and
heat that I failed to make the distinction between those
curiosity-seekers and the three painted, armed, and mounted
warriors before me.
Therefore, I felt less alarm than vexation at Mr. Jones
for being remiss about guarding his cargo. I fancied he was
still enjoying his afternoon nap beneath the wagon. Though
several hours past noon, the day was still far too hot to
travel. At least for civilized folk. The Indians didn’t seem to
mind, having adjusted themselves to the climate by wearing very
little but scraps of skin, beads, and eagle feathers.
While I was fuming over Mr. Jones’s supposed laziness
and contemplating native haberdashery, one of the braves rounded
the wagon and spotted me. Those who fancy that Indians have no
sense of humor should have seen the delighted grin on his face
as he galloped his horse straight toward me. I had never heard
of Indians killing victims by simply trampling them, but
evidence seemed immediately forthcoming.
I would like to testify that it is not necessarily
one’s life that flashes before one when death seems imminent. I
saw nothing of my previous pallid existence. Neither my
childhood nor the most stimulating of the duties I performed
while ensuring that our newspaper functioned when my father did
not intruded on my consciousness at that time. What I saw were
the gruesome mental pictures my fertile brain had conceived
while the cavalry wives were scaring each other silly with the
histories of literally hair-raising Indian savagery.
I stood frozen for a moment, then flung myself down to
one side, twisting to avoid a nasty patch of Spanish dagger. The
grinning savage scooped me up beside him, clasping his hand over
my mouth so that I could not scream and alert the wagons in the
mule train preceding us.
My middle did not take kindly to being scooped. The air
went out of me and my limbs flailed so that I bore some
resemblance to a landed fish as I was hauled onto the horse. I
squirmed in my captor’s grasp enough to straddle the animal,
backwards, as it turned out, my seat facing the horse’s neck, my
face buried in the Indian’s breathtaking chest, which reeked of
rancid something or other and dead something else besides the
natural odor of a very active man on a very warm day.
My new position amused the Indian further, for he now
could gag and strangle me at the same time simply by holding my
face against him with the crook of one arm. Only my eyes were
free to stare across his shoulder as he and his fellows
plundered the packs, extracted as many as they could carry of
the whiskey bottles comprising a large portion of our cargo, and
galloped back into the desert. As I was spirited away I saw the
craven Mr. Jones, who had saved his own neck by feigning his
absence while huddled between the wagon wheels. Now he peered
out from beneath the wagon, his mouth working silently. I almost
forgave him, knowing that I probably would have hidden too. As
soon as we were far enough away that he could run to the other
wagons, I prayed that he would engineer my rescue in time to
save me from death and whatever it was that was supposed to be
worse.
Meanwhile, of course, I had this splendid opportunity
to apply my ability as a trained journalist and learn all I
could of Indian ways.
Sad to say, the only Indian ways I was able to observe from my unusual
vantage point were entirely too similar to the white men’s ways
with which I was already more familiar than I wished to be. My
captors broke the necks of the whiskey bottles on convenient
boulders and proceeded to get very drunk.
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Back to The Drastic Dragon of Draco Texas |
The Harem of Aman Akbar,
or The Djinn Decanted |
In the second year of the reign of
the Boy King, Aman Akbar commanded his djinn to begin casting
into the ether for wives suitable to the station to which our
illustrious lord then aspired. An ambitious yet kindly man with
a taste for the exotic engendered by the fashion of the day,
Aman specified to his djinn servant that a woman for his harem
must be comely and well learned in wifely crafts and also be of
noble blood among her own people, but must not be so beloved
that loss of her would greatly grieve her kin.
Perhaps you will think that such an arrangement was all
very well for Aman Akbar but detestable for the women involved.
You would, for the most part, be wrong, though the error is
certainly forgivable unless you, as I, had been the third
daughter and middle child of the overlord of our tribe. We
Yahtzeni are fighters first (by inclination) and herders
secondarily (by occupation). Thus good men are a rarity among
us, for the attrition rate is great.
Our foes are distant relations to my mother. They live
primarily in the upper portions of the hills and raid every
spring and fall, killing many men while stealing sheep and
women. We try to raid back, but are not such good climbers as
they, and lose even more men in such raids. Meanwhile, the women
left behind still bear children, and these children have in
recent years seemed more often to be girls than boys, so that
the girls among us, by adolescence, have no marriage to look
forward to, but a life of perpetual girlhood and servitude to
their parents and the tribe. The only possible distraction any
of us can as a rule anticipate is to be captured, enslaved,
ravished and married only when we bear male children to our
captors and are thus proven worthy of protection.
By the time I, as third daughter, was born to my
father, he had begun to despair of sons and in his sorrow became
unhinged enough to teach me to fight with the curved bronze
dagger and lance, to hunt with bow and arrow, and to capture and
ride wild ponies, as he would have taught a son. My mother
thought him mad and kept telling him no good would come of it,
and the surviving older men in the tribe taunted us both and
regarded me as uncommonly wild and strange. Great was my
mother's relief when she bore my brother and I could be tethered
to the spindle, flocks and loom, and taught the healing potions
and prayers she considered essential to a daughter's education.
Still, my early training as my father's son stood me in good
stead when the camp was raided, my father sorely injured and my
sister—somewhat gratefully—carried off. My own distaste for my
people's enemies' marriage customs was explicitly expressed with
my dagger.
Thus by the time I first felt eyes upon me as I sat
spinning, watching the sheep, I was already considered
unmarriageable among our people and thought to be of an
unnaturally fierce disposition.
Rain was sparse that season, and the sky, promising snow, looked
like a felted blanket. Our sheep ranged far and wide to find
forage and I with them. I'd found a comfortable rock, just high
enough for my spindle to rest against my thigh. When I felt the
eyes upon me, I stilled my spindle in mid-whirl and clasped it
to my hip. The hills around my flock teemed with wolves and
bear, as well as mother's disgruntled relatives. I set aside the
spindle and grabbed my dagger, fearing the two-legged beasts
more than the four. Had I known what was truly behind my unease,
I would have been terrified beyond any comfort to be gained from
the knife.
Later I would be glad that I had had to wear my new
robe that day, for the tattered one my mother had sewn for me
for my womanhood dance had been torn beyond repair in the last
battle. Even before that, it had been worn to transparency in
places so intimate I was almost embarrassed to wear it in front
of the sheep. The threads for my new robe were finer spun than
those in the old one, for my skill with the spindle had
increased in the years separating the making of the two. I had
dyed it a rich rust color by soaking it in a bath of iron wood.
Escaping the camp to roam with the sheep put me in a festive
mood. That and the chill sharpening the morning prompted me to
add to my new finery the felted vest I had been embroidering for
my sister before her capture—it had the fleece of a black lamb
inside and the yarns were various yellows and soft pinks. Aman
says that he found the contrast between my finery of that day
and my ferocious aspect in battle most erotic— Aman talks that
way sometimes. For although he has lived all his life in
Kharristan, he has always been a keen watcher of the market
place and also is the possessor of a vivid imagination. He finds
the strange people who flock to that center of the civilized
world endlessly fascinating and their diversity intriguing. Thus
he was prepared to find me beautiful instead of merely odd.
I am told the djinn complained that I was unworthy—
what noble woman, he protested, would be so careless of herself
as to bind her hair into leather-held braids instead of twining
it with pearls? Which shows how much the djinn knows about
feminine adornment—my hair is almost white and pearls would
ill-become me. He also deemed my substantial nose hideous—but
this is typical of the djinn, who has lived a sheltered
existence, for the most part, confined in his bottle. Therefore
his views often tend to be prudish and conservative. Though a
great one for taking others places, he has generally taken no
part in the life of those places, thereby managing to stay
relatively untouched and unenlightened by his travels. However,
on the occasion in question, his priggish complaints fell on
unheeding ears, for Aman replied, "Her nose is curved like the
beak of the hawk and is a fitting complement to the glitter of
her eyes—know you, o djinn, that the hawk is a noble bird and
proud and also, I think, useful."
There was further discussion of the sort Aman indulges
in when carrying out these quasi-poetic analogies of his, about
soft feathers and delicate coloring but even when he is being
smooth-tongued and soft-headed he can be acute. You notice he
did not pick a frivolous bird to compare with me.
All that morning I felt skittish as an unbroken pony,
disturbed, though I knew it not, by invisible scrutiny.
The new pasturage was a sloping mountain meadow and the
way was long and tiresome. I quickly shed my vest, the pleasant
coolness giving way to prickly discomfort as the sun and I
climbed together. By the time I reached the stream where I
planned to watch while the sheep grazed, sweat dewed my forehead
and stuck my new garments to me at the armpits. The bubbling
water looked refreshing and I smelled goatish. I did not wish to
spoil my new clothing by stinking it up on its first day in use,
so I shed it gratefully and waded in. The icy waters revived me
for but a moment before I began shaking with a cold that struck
through my body as though to cut flesh from bone. I shot from
the water, blowing through my nose and lips like a horse,
hugging myself and shivering in my blued hide.
"Who can account for the taste of my master?" a voice whined,
seemingly from above. I looked up sharply and dove for my
clothing, not to cover myself so much as to find my dagger,
still tangled in the silken sash. Despite the unfamiliar accent,
I feared I had been caught by our enemies and was determined to
sunder as many as possible from their lives before they could
sunder me from my maidenhood.
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Back to Harem of Aman Akbar |
The Lady in the Loch |
The mother of the corpse wore solid
black as she danced round and round the room to the lamenting
coronach of the pipes. With her danced the father of the corpse,
also in black. The attire of both showed signs of having been
recently, hastily dyed for the occasion. Phantoms of the plaid
fabric swam beneath the dye of the mother's gown. The mother
wept as she danced and the father scowled. The corpse lay in the
middle of the room, her claes deid, her funeral garments,
concealing the thirty stab wounds in her chest and the dishonor
her killer had subjected her body to before she died. All around
the coffin, her brothers and sisters-in-law, her sisters and
brothers-in-law, her fiance and her grandmother, all of them
weeping, shuffled in their own awkward dancing. The neighbors
danced and wept as well. And close by the coffin, the bound and
gagged tinkler man was weeping too, less for the murdered lassie
than for himself, he who was the accused.
The time was one minute until midnight by the
grand-father clock standing in the candle-cast shadows draping
the walls, festooning the ceiling and carpeting the floors. The
flickering of these same candles lent astonishing expressions to
the corpse's face and deepened the dread on the faces of the
other celebrants, dancing, singing, eating, drinking, and
weeping for the dead lass.
A danse macabre if ever there was one, Walter Scott
mused from his chair in the center of the room, close to the
girl's open coffin. Scott was excused from the dancing both
because of his semi-official status in the investigation and
because of his lame leg. In a way, it was quite thrilling, this
lyke-wake, for it was the first he had attended. Lowlanders and
Borderers such as himself, people raised in the strictness of
the Kirk, did not practice such rituals, but the girl's family,
the MacRitchies, were transplanted Highlanders. So on the one
hand, this gave Scott a wonderful opportunity to observe a
ritual of which he had previously only read. But on the other
hand, there was the girl in the coffin, and though he had never
known her, never heard her name, she was touchingly young,
younger even than his own eighteen years. She should have been
beautiful too, an Ophelia, a Lily Lady of Shalot, but she was
actually rather ordinary-looking, robust even in death, the
freckles standing out like blemishes on the waxiness of her
skin, her eyes, at present, closed with coins, her red hair too
festive for her own funeral.
The sheriff-depute of Selkirk, Scott's old friend Adam
Plummer, stood beside him, both of them shivering, for the room
was chill for more common reasons than the eldritch atmosphere
that gripped it. The fireplace was cold, as it must be until the
body was removed, and the door was still wide open for the
moment.
As the clock gonged the first of its twelve notes for
midnight, the dancing wound to a shuffling halt and the piped
lament died a wheezing death. Plummer crossed the makeshift
dance floor in two long strides and closed the door so that it
was barely ajar. The mourners hushed, except for one man who
continued, unheeding, to gnaw on the drumstick of a goose. As
Plummer returned to the corpse's side, the clock struck its
second gong. The mother, Mrs. MacRitchie, let loose with her
eerie keening cry, the hullulu, as the Irish so accurately
termed it, for that was the way it sounded, a long mourning-dove
yell.
The MacRitchies' large, pleasant stone farmhouse was
wrapped in the boughs of the Ettrick Forest, and both forest and
farmhouse kitchen could be entered from the kitchen door. The
house was not too far from that of Scott's old friend James
Hogg, and his mother. Hogg had been with the search party that
discovered the lass's poor body and also with the party that had
flushed the tinklers from their camp in the woods and chased the
young man through the trees. The murdered girl's fiance and her
brothers had assumed, as had all the neighbors, that the tinkler
lad, since he was in the area, was of course the perpetrator of
the crime. Had it been left only to them, the young man would by
now be hanged. But Hogg, who had some connections with and
sympathy for the tinklers, told the accusers that if they
proceeded, the current laws of this district would call them
murderers as well, that it was best to send for the
sheriff-depute and allow him to conduct a proper investigation.
Recalcitrant as the younger laddies were, the elder MacRitchies
prevailed and allowed Hogg to send a servant with a message to
the home of Scott's aunt Janet in Sandy Knowe. Scott was
visiting his aunt and uncle for the summer, far away from his
studies at the university in Edinburgh. He and Plummer had been
whiling away the early afternoon playing chess when the
MacRitchies' servant knocked on Aunt Janet's door and told him
of the lass's death (never calling her by name. One never called
the deceased by name unless in court or kirk or on one other
occasion, as the sheriff was soon to demonstrate). Plummer
evidently was acquainted with the family, however, and had some
idea that the lyke-wake was in order. He told Scott that this
might prove a more interesting experience than most and urged
the younger man to accompany him.
Riding hard, they had reached the farmhouse shortly
after sunset, when the forest shadows gave way to the mist
rising from the creeks and ponds, and that was joined by the
smoke from the kitchen chimney, blowing a solemn ring around the
house.
Plummer questioned Mrs. MacRitchie, who had laid her
daughter out, about the girl's wounds. Scott was relieved his
friend had felt no need to remove the funeral linens to see the
wounds for himself, but he wondered why. Plummer questioned the
tinkler lad as well, but the man refused to say anything except
that he had done nothing wrong, and to shake his head
stubbornly. The brothers and the girl's fiance, one Robert
Douglas, the son of an even more successful farmer than the
girl's father, wanted to "bate the truth oot o' the knacker,"
and in fact, it looked as if they had already made progress
toward that goal before Plummer and Scott arrived. Hogg too bore
a couple of visible bruises, although no apparent malice toward
those who had inflicted them.
The clock gonged for the fourth time. Plummer began,
"By the power vested in me by the Sheriff of Selkirk and through
him the King, I will noo commence interrogatin' the victim of
this heinous crime."
"What does he mean, interrogate the victim?" Scott
asked Hogg, who had drawn near.
Hogg shrugged. "Used to be done whenever there was foul
play, according to Mither," he whispered back. "Nowadays nane
but the law know the way."
"Why's that?" Scott asked, but just then, one of the
men screamed.
"No! Let her rest in peace! We hae Ma—my bride-to-be's
murderer there. We should hang him and be done wi' it!"
"Haud yer tongue, man," Plummer commanded. "Let nane
speak but her whose foremost business it is, the last witness to
this crime. In the pursuit of this investigation, once more I
invoke thy name, Mary MacRitchie," he said, in appropriately
sonorous tones. "Rise up, lass, and accuse thy slayer."
Though he had never seen such a thing before, Scott had
read of the dead accusing their slayers, but had thought it only
superstition. He, with the other occupants of the room, held his
breath, waiting, to see what would happen, what, if the victim
indeed rose up, she would say.
Even the gnawer of the goose bone had finished all the
flesh and, putting away his bone, realized that the room was now
completely still except for his ever-more-cautious chewing and
the echo of Plummer's invocation, and the heartbeats and
expirations of all of those who were not now allowed to speak.
The first sound other than those was a slight slipping, like
jewels against a lady's velvet dress, and then a hollow clink as
the coins fell from the girl's eyes and dropped into her coffin
as if it were a wishing well.
Even the tinkler was still, as with a sussuration of
the claes deid and a long, pain-wracked groan, the body raised
itself, hands still bound across its chest, to a sitting
position.
With the raising, Scott caught the stench of corruption
emanating from her, washed and freshly dressed as she was. On
such a warm summer day as this had been, her body had already
begun to decay.
|
|
Back to
The Lady in the Loch |
The Goldcamp Vampire |
Three days after my father’s funeral, his former mistress
summoned me to her place of employment and proposed that the two
of us distract ourselves from grief by accepting a rather
bizarre proposition. “Meet me backstage at 12:15 and you will,
as they say, learn something to your advantage,” her note read.
As very little had been to my advantage lately, I roused myself
to accept.
It would be inaccurate to say I had been prostrated with grief.
My father’s death was hardly unanticipated. He had been
deliberately drinking himself to death since the demise of my
mother thirty years ago, and since his second marriage to the
sanctimonious Widow Higgenbotham, he had speeded up the process
appreciably.
Considering his inclinations, the manner and location
of his passing were as he would have wished it. When found, he
wore a blissful smile upon his face as if he had discovered some
new and particularly potent elixir that had carried him straight
to heaven—assuming that was his destination. I felt guilty when
I saw him to note how pale and drained he looked, for I so
despised his new wife that I had seen him very seldom. But his
happy expression and the fact that he had died just outside his
favorite haunt, the Gold Nugget Opera House, consoled me.
Nevertheless, as I made my way to the backstage door of that
establishment, I averted my eyes and held my skirts away as I
passed the spot where he had been found.
With the mist creeping up to conceal the garbage and broken
bottles, and the drizzle descending like unceasing tears, the
alley was a depressing place to be. Even the pearl-handled
derringer in my bag was cold comfort. This was a night the poet
Poe might relish, except that ravens seldom frequented the
alleys or San Francisco anymore. Pigeons perhaps. Pigeons with
uncannily direct gazes, for as I turned back toward the
lamplight flickering in from the main street, small eyes
glittered down at me, then swooped aside. I grasped the knob of
the backstage door and shoved.
The strains of the final chorus act met me even before I
entered, but Sasha Devine’s numbers were over for the evening.
It was her policy always to “leave them wanting more.” Her
dressing room door was cracked open, for despite the midsummer
fog and damp, the air was warm.
Sasha saw me reflected in her mirror even before I spoke.
“Vahlenteena,” she said effusively, twisting in her chair to
face me. “How kind of you to come to see me in my bereavement.
You alone know how very dear Patrick was to me. And you, my dear
Vahlenteena, have always been the daughter I never had.”
I would have been more moved by this declaration were it not for
the fact that it was only since my novels began to sell that
Sasha had learned my name—and at that she chose to learn my nom
de plume, Valentine Lovelace, not my given name, Pelagia Harper.
Although to be perfectly fair, I do recall that at times while I
was in my teens, she was wont to refer to me as “Peggy.”
“Because of this sentiment I bear you and your dear departed
father,” she continued, “and because you are a fellow artiste in
what I understand are straitened circumstances, I have selected
you to be my traveling companion on my grand tour of the
Klondike. Expenses will be paid, of course, but you must wait
for your salary until we arrive.”
My spirits rose immediately. I was, in fact, so elated by the
chance to see the Klondike, that dazzling repository of gold of
which everyone was speaking, that I failed to note Sasha s tone.
It was identical to the one I had once heard her use when she
parted my father from the subscription money that was supposed
to support our newspaper for a month.
Instead, my previous caution vanished and I saw in her my
deliverance from my problems. No matter if Jade Fan, Wy Mi’s
grieving sister, sold her laundry—and my lodgings—and moved back
to China. No matter if the Widow Higgenbotham refused to pay me
the monies that Papa had promised me for the serialization of my
latest saga in the Herald. No matter that the West was now all
but won, and I had to dredge my dwindling memories of Texas for
material for my popular-but-un-lucrative epistles. No matter
that I would never again see Papa slumped over his desk, or hear
him singing as he stumbled from his favorite saloon. Long since
he had ceased telling me the stories of Cuchulain and Maeve. Wy
Mi had not mentioned the Wind Dragons of his native China since
I told him I’d met one. Life had become quite dull. And now
lovely, kindly Sasha Devine, in all her beneficence, was going
to take me away from all this.
My face must have betrayed my emotion. With a complacent smile,
she turned away from me and began removing her stage makeup,
smoothing the cream below the high ruffled collar of her
dressing gown, which kept tickling her chin and threatening to
get makeup and grease on its lace. I had never realized her
complexion was so fair-pallid, one might even say. When she
removed the whitening under her great green eyes, dark hollows
appeared. When she turned back to me, her collar flopped away,
revealing an angry insect bite on the left side of her still
almost-perfect throat.
Even without the makeup, however, Sasha looked no older than I,
though she had to be at least ten years my senior. Her hair
really was that blond, but without the false curls of her fancy
coiffure, it hung long and straight. She looked delicate when
unpainted, rather like a fairy princess who might, with that
sharp determined chin and those acquisitive green eyes, turn
into a wicked queen with the least encouragement. Hadn’t I heard
a rumor somewhere, no doubt started by Sasha herself, that she
was descended from the royal house of some long-defunct Balkan
country??
“I have been working very hard, and your father’s death
has distressed me greatly,” she said. “Also, until departure
time, I must continue to fulfill my contract here. You will be
in charge of the practical details, booking the passage for me,
yourself, and Mr. Lawson’s coffin...”
“Mr. Lawson’s what?” I asked.
“His coffin,” she said, slowly and distinctly, as if to the
deaf. “Mr. Lawson is dead and requires one.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Unacquainted with Mr. Lawson as I am, his
demise had escaped my notice. If he is dead, why does he require
not only a coffin, but passage aboard a steamer to the
Klondike?”
She turned again, her actress’s eyes entreating me tragically.
“Because Mr. Lawson’s partner is a man not only of exceptionally
good taste, as he is an admirer of mine, but also of
considerable sentiment. He and Mr. Lawson worked their Alaskan
claim for many years without success. Even when my admirer
temporarily gave up mining for bartending in order to earn a
further grubstake, Mr. Lawson, it is said, worked with
commendable determination throughout the winter in an attempt to
find the mother lode. To no avail. This earned him the cruel
soubriquet of Lost-Cause among his associates. Finally, his
partner insisted that he come to San Francisco to recuperate
from exhaustion and the illness that consumed him as a result of
his efforts. When the gold strike was made in the Klondike, my
admirer abandoned his bar, after standing a drink for the
denizens in order to get a head start on them, and headed for
Canada. The day Mr. Lawson died, my admirer made one of the
richest strikes in the Yukon. But he is guilt-ridden about it.
His partner must at least see the wealth that eluded them both
for so long, he feels. The gentleman in question remembers me
fondly from a night—a performance—two years ago, and dispatched
a message containing a retainer and promising that if I would
see to it that his poor partner was escorted to the Yukon, he
would make me owner of my own establishment, which is somewhat
better than a gold mine.”
“I see.”
“And you, you will get the experience of traveling to the most
exciting place in the world. Later, when I have earned my
reward, you may be my agent to summon my girls to come join me.”
“It’s a very kind offer, Miss Devine,” I said. “But I fail to
understand exactly why you need me...”
“Because I certainly cannot be expected to do everything. You
must see to collecting the body from the undertaker’s, to
booking the passage, to acquiring certain papers assuring Mr.
Lawson’s corpse of entry into Canada.”
She rose and faced me, one hand extended dramatically.
“Vahlenteena, I ask you because I know that you are a person of
integrity, and in my line of work one meets all too few of
those. Do you think I failed to see how you kept your newspaper
running when dear Patrick was unable? You are rather young, of
course, and a woman, but I thought you might be——”
She needed to say no more. I was hooked without hearing any of
the particulars, which is, of course, always a mistake.
I asked to see the letter from her admirer, so that I might get
a list of the tasks to be accomplished. I thought, from all the
details in her story, that it must certainly have been a very
long letter, or perhaps an entire series of correspondence.
However, she responded that she had received just a note and she
thought she had left it in her suite. She remembered it quite
well, however, and went over with me the prodigious list of
chores I needed to perform to secure our passage. The oddest of
these was arranging for the disinterment of Lost-Cause Lawson
from his tomb and his transport to the steamer.
This I determined to tackle the following day. I got a
rather late start. I left Sasha Devine during the wee hours
Sunday morning, when it was not yet light and the fog made the
alley look like the smoking aftermath of a great fire. I have
traveled the streets of my native city in what I fondly believed
was perfect safety for most of my life, but in these early
hours, I felt ill at case. The rain finished its demolition work
on my mourning bonnet, which had not been especially crisp to
begin with. My one good woolen coat had used the warmth of
Sasha’s dressing room to finish permeating its fibers with damp,
so that I was now chilled through. My spine was already curling
itself into tight ringlets when the black carriage flashed past
the alley entrance, drenching me to the waist as the wheels
splashed through a puddle.
I shouted a few of the more colorful epithets I had
learned in Texas at the denizens of the carriage, little
expecting response, for half of my remarks were in Spanish, the
vernacular being particularly suited for self-expression of that
sort.
To my dismay, the carriage stopped abruptly and swung around in
the middle of the street, the lamps gleaming off the coats of
the horses and the polished ebony of the coach. Shadows shrouded
the interior, but as the vehicle drew even with my dripping
form, a low and melodious voice from within said softly, ‘Se lo
reuego usted que mi disculpas con todo sinceridad, señora.”
“Oh, dear, excuse me,” I sputtered, wringing out my hem.
Evidently, I had just had the honor of being splattered by a
member of our local Spanish nobility. “I mean, I didn’t think
you’d under—oh, never mind...”
“Ah, you are American, despite your bilingual fluency.” The
voice sounded pleased. Its accent was foreign but not, I
thought, Spanish after all. “Please, madam, permit me to offer
the services of my carriage to conduct you to your quarters,
where you may change your attire and present your other clothing
to my man for cleaning or replacement, if the damage is too
extensive.”
I peered into the shadows and alternated between feeling like a
perfect fool and feeling very cautious about this disembodied
voice. The man sounded like a gentlemen, but many gentlemen, I
had found, were anything but gentle and had attained their
wealth and high station by taking the position that everyone
else was inferior to themselves and, therefore, fair game.
“Don’t trouble yourself, sir,” I said, inching away. “My
lodgings are not far and my landlady and her family, who are
waiting up for me, operate a laundry. Jade Fan will have my
costume good as new tomorrow at no expense to me.”
And before he could say any more or possibly leap from
his carriage and drag me in, as my overheated imagination began
to suggest, I sprinted—or splashed—away
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|
Back to The Goldcamp Vampire |
The Unicorn Creed |
Prologue
When Colin Songsmith arrived with the
royal party at Fort Iceworm, he scarcely recognized the place.
Indeed, he scarcely could see the place, once he and the rest of
Their Majesties' entourage had passed within the huge log gates,
for it was crammed ten deep with people everywhere. Even now, in
midsummer, when crops needed tending, animals needed herding,
and peasants needed supervising, and in spite of Fort Iceworm's
remoteness from Queenston, Argonia's capital city and center of
both population and enterprise, no one wanted to miss the royal
christening.
From all corners of the realm and the known world, the guests
had already gathered—kings and statesmen, queens of faery,
wazirs and wise men, gypsies, an unusually large number of
assorted unattached noblemen, plus other noble people, ignoble
people, were-people, half-people and even a few non-people. All
had assembled to christen the baby Princess Bronwyn in the hall
of her grandfather, Sir William Hood.
All visible portions of the castle's structure were layered with
silken banners of every color, bearing every crest in the realm,
fluttering less with wind than with the comings and goings of
the throng. The meadows separating castle and village from the
vast forest were strewn with guest pavilions, like huge
overblown summer flowers, crimson, azure, golden and green of
every shade and tint. From the topmost turret of Sir William's
keep flew the King's own crest, a rowan leaf on a field of
scarlet. Directly below it, as was proper, flew Sir William's
own banner, an iceworm, blue, rampant on a field of white.
Enterprising peasants hawked pennants bearing both emblems
through the streets. Every cottager and holder for leagues
around lodged at least twenty people in his small home, and at
all hours elaborately clad servants came and went from the
humblest of village dwellings. Never did the smell of cooking
food, nor the sound of laughter and song, abate, for the entire
week of festivities preceding the christening.
It was a good thing that His Majesty was so tall.
Otherwise Colin, whose duty it was as chief minstrel to always
be at the King's right hand, chronicling his regally witty
remarks on the marvelous occasion, could never have found either
the King or his right hand. Fortunately, His Highness was
descended from frost giants, and was thus of conveniently
outstanding stature.
Colin had less luck locating the other person he most wished to
find at the christening, his old questing companion, Maggie
Brown, Sir William's bastard daughter and Queen Amberwine's half
sister. He knew where she was well enough, or where she had
been, at any rate. It was Maggie's special talent, her
hearthcraft witchery, which kept the entire christening from
being a greater domestic disaster than it was. Hers was the
power to perform all household tasks in the twinkling of an eye,
and wherever she went she cut a swath of fragrant cooking fires,
clean rushes, whitewashed walls, clean dishes, hot food, cold
drink, emptied chamber pots, fresh linen, kindled torches and
tidied beds. It was not an unpleasant trail to follow.
Nevertheless, Colin had hoped for a more personal
confrontation—a bit of a reunion, as it were—a chance to sing
her his new songs, to tell her of his life at the castle, and
perhaps to strut for her a bit in the rich apparel the King had
given him. But somehow he never seemed to be free of his duties
at the same time she was free of hers in the same room. Once he
almost collided with her as he was coming in from a party at Sir
Oswald's pavilion, but without looking up she'd brushed past him
in a brown blur, automatically mending a small tear and cleaning
a wine stain on his sleeve in passing. He was, for once,
speechless, and after that had no more opportunities to seek her
out, preoccupied as he was with his own duties of observing,
chronicling, dancing, singing, entertaining and being
entertained by his fellow guests.
So it happened that, although she was the
first person he'd looked for, he never really saw her properly
until the actual christening had begun and he took his favored
place, slightly behind and to the left of Their Majesties'
makeshift thrones inside the cow yard, which was the only area
large enough to hold even the noble part of the assemblage.
King Roari and his queen, the exquisite Lady Amberwine, were
flanked on one side by the most important of the royal guests,
and on the other side by a smug and beaming Sir William, an
equally proud Granny Brown, Maggie's irascible witch
grandmother, and by Maggie herself. She was still dressed in her
brown woolen skirt and tunic and manure-spattered wooden clogs,
her apron splotched with a fresh grease stain, neglected in the
excitement, her brown eyes darting restlessly around the
courtyard, as if looking for tasks that still needed doing. Only
her shining otter's pelt of brown hair was clean and neatly
braided, and bespoke personal preparation for the historic
moment about to take place.
As the Mother's Priestess lifted Princess Bronwyn from Queen
Amberwine's arms, and carried her gently and ceremoniously to
the mound of christening mud heaped high upon the
white-silk-covered table in front of the throne, Maggie caught
Colin's eye and grinned at him. It was her old grin, and full of
relief, though somewhat nervous. He grinned back at her, trying
to think how to signal her to wait for him after the ceremony,
but then there was no time. The baby had stopped howling in the
priestess's unfamiliar arms, and now gurgled happily as the
woman tenderly smeared the small body with the Mother's
life-giving mud.
The congregation cheered as the last of Bronwyn's shining pink
flesh was blessed with another gooey glob, and the small
Princess was borne away into the castle to be bathed before the
gifting began.
Colin thought then he might step over to one side and snag
Maggie before she disappeared again. But before he'd taken a
pace, King Roari lifted his hand slightly, and the royal herald,
standing just to Colin's right, blew a loud, whinnying blast on
his trumpet. Colin winced.
The King rose majestically—he was very good at being
majestic, being so large—and the trumpet-silenced assemblage
knelt; not an easy task, since a kneeling person took up more
room than a standing one, and the cow yard was already packed.
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| Back to The Unicorn Creed |
Bronwyn's Bane |
Bronwyn the Bold was still flushed from the heat of battle when
the Lord Chamberlain found her in the small courtyard below the
eastern wall of the Royal Palace. The courtyard was in ruins.
Trees, walls, jousting dummies, the Queen's prize petunia patch,
all were gouged, hacked and otherwise dismembered. The Princess
knelt beside the wall, her short sword cooling in its sheath,
her red carved shield close by her side. Evidently satisfied
with the routing she'd dealt her enemies, she bent over the
prone forms of her dolls, each of which was blanketed by one of
her monogrammed handkerchiefs. “My lady," the Chamberlain began.
"What is it,
Uncle Binky?" she demanded in a fair imitation of her father's
regal roar. "Can't you see I've mortally wounded casualties on
my hands? We need healers and medicine now!”
"Yes, my lady,"
the Chamberlain replied with a tone sober and a face straight
from long and difficult practice. "I'll see to it personally, my
lady..."
"A simple
'general' will do," Bronwyn said graciously, since she was
actually very pleased to have someone to talk to. She hopped to
her feet and took the Chamberlain's hand in hers, her action
very like that of any normal child except that ordinary little
girls didn't tower over adult royal retainers. "What news do you
bring from behind our lines?"
"Your lady mother
wishes a word with you, madam," the Lord Chamberlain replied.
"She hasn't—?"
Bronwyn asked, jiggling his hand excitedly.
"No, madam, she
has not. Nor will she deliver the babe for a month yet to come,
as the Princess Magdalene has already informed Your Highness."
And he clamped his lips tightly shut as if he were afraid she'd
steal his teeth.
Bronwyn was quite
used to having not only the Lord Chamberlain but everyone else
who attended her adopt such attitudes when she tried to question
or talk to them, so as usual she continued chattering at him as
if he were answering each remark and paying her rapt attention.
She supposed it went with her high rank to have everyone so in
awe of her presence that they couldn't speak properly out of
deference. Later, she decided that his silence was less usual
than she'd thought, and smacked of the stoicism of a guard
escorting his prisoner to the block—or into direst exile.
* * * *
Maggie, Lady
Wormroost, paced the Royal sick chamber with an anxiety that was
in no way relieved by the sound of her niece's big feet
galumphing towards her from down the hall. At least this
interview would be short, but it wouldn't be easy.
She glanced at
the Queen—sleeping, of course, as she should be to conserve her
meager strength. Except for the mound of belly drifted over with
white satin coverlet, the Queen was more frail than Maggie had
ever seen her, her bones sticking out like those of a plucked
bird, her skin thinned to a ghost-like translucency, marbled
with blue. Maggie loved her elder half-sister and wished there
was something she could do for her besides keep her company when
she woke and see to it that her chamber pot was kept empty and
her bedding spotless.
For though Maggie
was officially Regent, she knew only enough about government to
know that it was best left in the hands of the few capable
ministers the King had appointed to take charge of the war
effort on the home front. Oh, she had used her hearth
witchcraft, which allowed her to do all work connected with the
home magically, to give a hand at readying the castle and
surrounding city for siege. But she hoped the preparations she
made, mostly consisting of magically expanding and storing
existing food supplies beyond normal winter needs, would be
unnecessary.
With any luck at
all, King Roari's army would be able to head off Worthyman the
Worthless and the Ablemarlonian forces and persuade them of the
error of their ways. But it would not be easy. Worthyman was an
unscrupulous scoundrel and a wastrel, but in one of his wiser
moments he had chosen to squander a large portion of the
treasury on a professional standing army of trained soldiers.
Immediately thereafter, without bothering to try to forge a
trade agreement, he had declared war on King Roari. He used the
excuse that his country needed Argonian timber for its
ship-building industry, which may have been true since, at his
direction, Ablemarle's remaining forest land had been denuded
and cultivated. However, the private opinion held by the King,
Maggie, and a few others, was that Worthyman was actually hoping
to find and eliminate his elder brother, the true Crown Prince,
a focus of frequent Ablemarlonian rebellions even though he
preferred to dwell quietly among the Argonian gypsies.
Whatever the
reasons behind the war, Maggie wished it were over and she and
Colin were safe back at Wormroost with their own daughter,
Carole.
Which reminded
her of her most immediate problem, one that concerned both
Carole and Bronwyn. Too bad the King hadn't left her some wise
minister to whom she could delegate this sort of domestic
crisis, but unfortunately she and the Queen would have to muddle
along by themselves.
If only Bronwyn weren't so bloody irritating. With her constant
rattling nonsense, she was so provoking that Maggie never seemed
to be able to talk to the child without snapping at her, even
though she knew what annoyed her most was hardly the poor girl's
own fault. Ah, well, Bronwyn was lucky Maggie was only a hearth
witch and not a transformer like her Granny Brown or a really
wicked witch like child-eating Great-Great-Grandma Elspat, or
there were times when Her Royal Highness would have gotten worse
than a snapping at...
"The Princess
Bronwyn," the Chamberlain announced at the door.
"You think we
can't see that for ourselves?" Maggie snapped. Damn! The girl
was getting to her already. The Chamberlain beat a hasty
retreat. Bronwyn gave her a shy smile that was ludicrous in such
a strapping girl. Then, with her eyes still on Maggie's, as if
anticipating a blow, she tripped sideways to her mother's
bedside, stumbling at the last moment to fall across the
sleeping Queen. Amberwine gasped and sat up, catching at her
daughter's arm. Bronwyn held her mother by the elbow with one
hand and with the other hand brushed at her, as if the contact
might have dirtied her.
"Leave off,
niece. You'll bruise her," Maggie advised as evenly as possible.
Bronwyn sprang
away from the bed as if she'd touched the lighted end of a
torch.
The frail Queen
blinked her wide, green eyes twice and held out her hand to her
daughter, who took it timidly. "How good it is to see you, my
darling. How are you today?"
"Splendid, Mama.
Extraordinary, in fact. I've just slain the entire Ablemarlonian
army and the leaders have all been hanged in your name." Maggie
groaned and Amberwine, had it been possible for her to have
become any paler, could have been said to have done so. "Er, how
kind of you, pet. You're such a thoughtful child. Isn't she,
Maggie?"
Maggie shook her
head and managed a faint, rueful smile. Bronwyn had her mother's
eyes and chin, but she was otherwise her father's daughter
entirely. A fitting successor to her paternal grandfathers,
Rowans the Rambunctious, Rampaging, and Reckless respectively,
she would have made King Roari a fine son. Pity. She was a dead
loss at the womanly pursuits, and had gone through so many gowns
her tiring women had finally given up and allowed her to go
about in the simple undergown and armor she preferred. She
clinked somewhat now as she perched on the edge of the bed, not
quite resting her entire weight upon it, afraid she'd break her
mother's bones if she relaxed. She was such a large girl—half
again as large as either Maggie or Amberwine and uncomfortably
aware that she had yet to gain mastery of her body. She knew she
could cause irreparable damage to practically anything in the
twinkling of an eye. If only she could be allowed to puncture
something other than her own fingers during her earnest but
ultimately painful attempts at needlework, perhaps the child
would be good for something despite her—problem.
Amberwine caught
Maggie's eye and said to Bronwyn, "Your aunt has a wonderful
surprise for you, darling. Don't you, Maggie?"
Maggie felt
another stab of guilt as a look of hopefulness and anticipatory
pleasure dawned in the girl's eyes, and before it could turn
into a full-fledged smile Maggie lost her nerve and tossed the
conversational ball back to Amberwine. Sick, or not, the Queen
was Bronwyn's mother. Let her be the one to break the news. "I
think she'd rather you'd tell her, Winnie."
"Tell me what?"
Bronwyn demanded in a childish parody of her father's boom.
She was a-wriggle
with excitement now.
Winnie shot
Maggie an injured look. "Why, that it's been arranged for you to
have a nice trip in the country for awhile, dear. To see some of
the rest of the kingdom and to meet your cousin Carole. It must
be so dull for you shut up in the castle all the time and..."
"But it's not,
Mama, really," Bronwyn protested, though, of course, it was.
"There's your
duty too, young lady," Maggie said, stepping in before the child
got out of hand. "To your mother, your subjects and Argonia. You
will need to see more of your realm than the capitol sometime,
and there's no time like the present."
Bronwyn started
to protest, but for once Winnie was firm.
"Besides, I wish
it. Maggie and I were such good friends as girls. You and Carole
must learn to know and love each other too. I want you to have
friends and—oh, darling, don't look like that! You'll have such
fun! Tell her about the ice castle and the worm and the animals
and the talking river, Maggie."
Maggie began
talking very fast, tripping over her own tongue while describing
the peculiar sights of Wormroost Manor, before the Princess
could start crying or raise some other row that would further
upset Winnie. It was unsettling enough to the Queen to be
pregnant and bedridden while her husband was at war and her
country under attack without worrying about Bronwyn. Not only
was the girl a handful to have around at such a crucial time,
but if the new reports of the enemy entering the Gulf of
Gremlins were true, and by some ill fortune the King's forces
could not stop them, the Ablemarlonians might soon be in
Queenston Harbor. Bronwyn was Crown Princess and must be kept
safe. Winnie was sure that if her daughter knew how potentially
perilous the situation was, she would refuse to leave, although
it was vital to national security that she do so. Maggie's view
was that the girl had to grow up sometime, but then, Maggie
wasn't Queen and very glad of it too. So she talked, wishing she
had her husband's gift of gab and persuasive musical abilities
to help her sound convincing.
Bronwyn
interrupted her in mid-sentence, rising from her mother's
bedside to stand at attention, her face set in a small painful
smile not quite tight enough to control the trembling of her
freckled chin. "Thank you for your intriguing tale, my
lady aunt. If my Royal Mama commands it, I am sure that I shall
greatly enjoy my banis—fostering at your home. If I may be
excused, I'll take my leave now and prepare for the journey."
And she turned on her heel and left.
Maggie and
Amberwine exchanged relieved sighs that Bronwyn had been so
tractable for a change. It was a sign of their anxious
preoccupation with other matters and the poor state of
Amberwine's health that it didn't occur to either of them until
much later that Bronwyn's seemingly sensible attitude was more
ominous than any fuss she might have made. For the trouble with
Bronwyn was that, through no fault of her own, the girl was
incapable of telling the truth.
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| Back to
Bronwyn's Bane |
The Christening Quest |
Chapter 2
Banshee shrieks and shuddering moans pealed off the
stone walls, bouncing from buttressed arch to arrow slot,
lending the whole north wing all the peaceful charm of a
dungeon. Rupert Rowan, prince and diplomatic trainee, winced and
recrossed his long legs, sinking back into the velvet padded
chair and trying to maintain his carefully cultivated serenity
despite his sister's anguished wails from the other side of the
iron-hinged door. He had wearied of pacing hours ago and now had
settled down to present a good example to the occasional subject
who passed by him in the corridor. Most of these subjects were
women, and many of them pretended not to hear Bronwyn's
caterwauling, which Rupert thought very decent of them. Bronwyn
was supposed to be a warrior. Why did she have to choose a time
when he was in earshot to give up stoicism??
A buxom
wench with a pert face and a corona of golden braids smiled
warmly at him, masking the expression he frequently saw in
female faces with one of sympathy. "There now, Your Highness,
don't worry. The hollering relieves the pains some, see? Every
woman does it in labor. She won't even remember this when she
holds the little one in her arms. You'll see."
He smiled at her,
a bit pitifully, striving to present a visage that would inspire
her to clasp it to her bosom. "You're very kind. Will it be much
longer do you think?"
She smoothed the
clean, white towels over her arm with one shapely hand. "Not
much, I should think. Though the first always takes longer. Is
it an Argonian custom to have a male relative in attendance,
Your Highness? Forgive me, but we were curious, we girls, if you
were here because Prince Jack couldn't be, being in Brazoria as
I'm sure it's needful he be, though very hard on our young lady,
your sister, it is. We think it ever so sweet that her brother
should come be near her in her husband’s stead. None of his folk
offered, not even the women." She blushed a pretty pink and
covered her pretty mouth with her fingertips. "No disrespect
intended, milord."
"None taken, I'm
sure. We all know what gypsies are like. As a matter of fact I—"
A particularly
blood-curdling bellow emanated from the royal bedchamber. The
girl started, gave him an apologetic smile and a half-curtsy,
and scurried off, banging through the door hip and shoulder
first.
He had been about
to explain to her that the last thing he intended was to be at
Bronwyn’s bedside for her birthing. He had, in fact, only been
stopping off on the way from his fostering in Wasimarkan, where
he was learning diplomacy at the behest of his Royal Mother,
Queen Amberwine. The Queen had rightly pointed out that with an
elder sister as Princess Consort of Ablemarle (having lost the
title of Crown Princess of Argonia when her brothers were born),
elder twin brothers (one of whom, Raleigh, would be King, the
other of whom, Roland, would be war leader), there was very
little else for her fourth child to do that would be useful.
The Queen had
declared with unusual forcefulness for a person of faery blood
that she was not about to have a son of hers turn into a
good-for-nothing knight errant bullying the populace and using
his royal prerogatives to rape and pillage. It had happened
elsewhere, and Rupert was no less fond of the phenomena than his
mother. He was a highly peaceable and loving sort by nature—so
loving, in fact, that by the age of twenty, when his frost giant
ancestry caused him to be so unusually tall and well grown and
his faery blood lent him an uncommon beauty and charm, he was a
cause for alarm among the fathers and husbands in the
Wasimarkanian Court. To the men he was called, behind his back
(for it would never do to offend so powerful an ally as the
Royal House of Argonia) Rowan the Rake. To the women, into whose
eyes he gazed soulfully and whose hands he kissed tenderly,
almost without regard for age, station, or pulchritude, he was
Rowan the Romantic. He would miss those charitable and generous
ladies, one and all, but his mentors, under pressure, had
declared that with princesses of six major countries in a swoon
for his attentions, he would need more advanced lessons in
diplomacy than they had to offer. They referred him back to his
own family for further instruction.
The stop in
Ablemarle’s capitol to visit Bronwyn had been an impulse. His
ship was docking to take on cargo. He had not seen Bronwyn in
several years, and she had always been his favorite in the
family. She was as good a fighter if not a better one than
Roland—at least on the practice field—and she had had marvelous
adventures when she was still much younger than Rupert. When
Rupert tired of hearing of those adventures, which he sometimes
did since he always wanted to learn something new, Bronwyn was
most adept at making up tales to amuse him.
He almost failed
to recognize the wild-eyed creature who greeted him and clung to
his hand, her face so pale that every freckle stood out like a
pock, her wiry red hair loose and straggling in every direction,
her belly great with child. The self-sufficient big sister of
his youth all but pleaded with him to remain until her child was
born, as it was to be any day. She begged him to stay since her
husband, Prince Jack, could not. Rupert had failed to understand
any more than the pretty lady-in-waiting why any masculine
family member should be a comfort to Bronwyn in what was first
and foremost and unarguably woman's work, but he could not deny
her. He had stayed.
A long, gasping
cry ended in an ear-splitting scream, and was followed closely
by another cry, this time the squall of an infant. Rupert jumped
to his feet and strode to the door, leaving his rowan shield
leaning against the door. All the Rowan offspring usually
carried the shields made by their father as birthing gifts on
their persons, for the rowan wood was proof against magic. But
he was in his sister’s hall and far more excited than he had
thought he would be at the advent of this new relative, and
three strides was hardly an incautious distance.
The door flung
back against him and the girl with whom he had been speaking
bustled out, brushing against him, a whimpering blanketed bundle
cradled against her breast.
"Wait," he said
quickly. "Can I see?"
She lifted the
triangle of blanket just above the crook of her elbow and showed
him a wrinkled, red little face that began to screw itself into
another scream. "It's a girl," the maid informed him. "Isn't she
adorable?"
"Quite," he said,
trying to sound sincere. "I'll just go congratulate Bronwyn."
"Oh, not yet,
milord," she said. "She's getting her bath and then she must
rest a bit. I'll be bathing this child to be presented to her
when she wakes."
"A bath?" he
asked blankly. "Oh, of course, the baby would be needing a bath.
Well, um, may I watch? I've never seen a new child bathed
before."
"I don't see why
not," the girl said with a saucy, calculating look from under
her lashes, "But you Argonians certainly have strange ways, if
you'll pardon my saying so, sir."
"I'd pardon you
almost anything, my dear," he said politely, and opened the door
to an adjoining chamber for her.
The baby's bath
was interesting chiefly in that Rupert thought it very
convenient to be able to bathe an entire human being in a wash
basin that barely fit his two hands. Otherwise it was rather
messy. The maid herself was far more intriguing, and he
proceeded to get to know her better while his new niece slept in
her cradle, carved in the shape of a swan and newly decked with
pink ribbons by the lady whose ear he was nibbling.
The enormous draft that blasted open the double doors took both
Rupert and his companion by surprise, as did the fact that
neither of them was able to do so much as raise a finger to lift
themselves from the tiled floor where they had been flung.
Indeed, Rupert could not so much as twitch his knee from where
it undoubtedly inconvenienced his paramour, lodged in her
midsection. He watched helplessly as a rather large rug whisked
in on the blast. Two gentlemen with blue robes and bandages tied
round their heads with blue cords lifted the baby from her
cradle and onto the rug and whisked back out again. They failed
to blast the door shut behind them and Rupert could hear doors
banging, presumably all the way down the corridors to the main
entrance, as the rug flew through unhindered.
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Back to
The Christening Quest |
Phantom Banjo |
A WORD FROM A WAYFARING STRANGER
A good storyteller, I
have learned, does not make the whole entire story center around
herself, as if she was the most important thing about the story.
I've seen many a fine songwriter who once wrote and sang
wonderfully understanding songs about the lives of ordinary
people fall flat on his ass when he gets a little famous, gets
away from regular folks, and pretty soon all he's able to write
are songs about how god-awful it is to be on the road and how he
is so a-lo-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-own.
So I want to make it
clear that though I'm in it and I have a little part of it, this
story is not about me. It's about me telling about what happened
when certain parties decided to deprive the world and these
United States of America in particular of what is broadly,
inaccurately, and disputedly called folk music.
About these certain
parties; lawyers would probably call them the parties of the
first part, but I call them devils. For one thing, they are, as
you will see in this story and the other two parts of it that
follow, mighty powerful and also mighty evil. That fits devils
down to the ground. More than that, they're mysterious and
magical and we—my friends and I—only learned what happened on
their end in little bitty pieces here and there most of the time
and had to fit it all together as we went along. Because to
begin with, I would say the common attitude among us was that we
all were inclined to like magic without exactly believing in it,
which was different from later when we were forced to believe in
it but didn't like it much at all.
It wasn't your little
Tinkerbell fairies or nice old bats with magic wands, none of
that stuff. Not even wise magicians like Merlin or witches like
that woman with the twitchy nose who used to be on television.
So though I could tell you they were goblins or gremlins or
all-powerful wicked wizards, I think I'll just call 'em what my
grandma from back in the Carolina mountains would have called
them: devils. Not necessarily the hellfire-and-brimstone kind
that get you if you don't believe a certain way. Buddhists have
devils same as Christians, same as a lot of folks. Most everyone
has something like that. So just say these were basic, generic,
all-around-ornery devils who were opposed to anybody having any
kind of belief or good feelings in themselves that helped them
get by. That was why they hated the music so, you see. That was
why they set out to destroy it.
And that is why it's
been up to me, who never has been able to carry a tune in a
bucket, to go before the others, back into where just about all
the music has been pulled out by the roots. My job is to tell
how it happened, to fertilize the soil, to make the people ready
for when the songs come back, fresh cuttings transplanted from
the old soil where my friends and I have spent these last
harrowing years harvesting the songs from their own history,
trying to save them from the oblivion where the devils sent so
many of our own songs.
I don't go on the radio
or TV talk shows, now that I'm home, or anywhere the devils can
find me and keep me from talking to people. I use my gift of gab
I got from bartending and the performance training I got from
dancing plus what I learned from hanging around all those
musicians lately, and I travel around among the ordinary people,
the kids, the bums, the working folks—anyone who is bored or
lonely enough to have time to listen. I turn myself into someone
else, someone as fascinating as a snake charmer, someone who is
a worthy enemy of all those devils, and I make myself heard.
What follows, written
down, is the important part of what's been happening since I've
been back, staying with a friend and with an audience as long as
it seems safe, then moving on to carry the story farther, to
break just a little more ground. It's not in my voice because
mostly it's not about me except as I'm reflected in the eyes of
other people. It's about them, what they say, what they do, what
can be guessed from the things that happen and from the lifting
of an eyebrow or a quirk of a mouth. And of course it's about
the songs, which, when you hear them, speak for themselves.
So think of me, and of
yourself, as if we were birds on a branch or flies buzzing in
the air around that first schoolyard, where a funny old woman is
talking to a bunch of kids, telling them about something that
happened a few years before.
Chapter 11
"One time all the
devils in the world had a meeting to decide what it was they
could do to make folks even more miserable than they already
were.
"First thing happened
was the Chairdevil stood up and allowed as how they all ought to
be congratulated for doing such a fine job so far." The woman
paused to heighten suspense while the children who were huddled
around her in the noisy schoolyard strained so that they
wouldn't miss anything she might say next.
The children were
fascinated by the woman, not only because of what she said, but
because of how she said it. When she talked, she moved her face
more than people usually did and she moved her body too, so that
she seemed to be the Chairdevil calling a meeting to order. This
was the second story—she'd told another, a short one, at morning
recess, a silly one about animals, just to whet their appetites.
The boy had been impressed then too by the way she spoke
different voices with each character, seeming to turn into a new
person as she spoke in each new voice. She never left out
important words, even if they weren't suitable for children, and
somehow, all of this combined to make her words come as alive in
his mind as anything he had seen on TV. She moved more than he
would have thought possible for such a small person, and all
without shifting from her sheltered position in the middle of
the group.
And she was
funny-looking. Oh, you could tell she had once been pretty
enough to be a corporate executive herself, but she'd let lines
get in her face, though her eyes were still snapping bright and
her cheeks red as apples after the grocer sprayed them with a
hose. Her legs were still fine and shapely, the boy noticed that
too, right off, but her waist was too thick. And her hair was a
mop of gray, not white, not silver, not violet or blond, but
plain old elderly gray curls. Nor was her voice quite what he
was used to. When she wasn't pretending to be someone else, it
had a snap and a twang and sometimes a sugary drawl. She didn't
call them children, she called them kids, and instead of trying
to learn their names, she carelessly addressed them all as hon
or darlin' or kiddo. His mom would have a fit if she knew he was
listening to someone like that. Everybody knew better than to
talk like that these days. You learned better just listening to
the educational shows on your TV. This crazy old woman might as
well have been a spaceperson for all the similarity she bore to
the women even his grandmother knew. He couldn't wait to hear
what she was going to say next.
" 'We've made great
strides in this century, fellow devils,' the Chairdevil
said.'Why, our nuclear bomb, nuclear reactors, and all our other
nuclear knickknacks by themselves can not only blow up the world
and melt down into mass catastrophe but can make those greedy,
hysterical suckers out there square off against each other like
nothing has since the apple Our Founder sold First Couple.' A
round of polite applause greeted this, but it was pretty much
old stuff. The Chairdevil was a fairly conservative fellow in
his way, and liked to stick with the tried and true.
"After a bit he waved
his hands for the others to stop clapping and continued, 'And
for those who have their heads too stuck in the mud to notice a
little thing like world destruction, some of you enterprising
souls have added teensy little wars in miserable little places.
I'd mention them individually, but I can't keep track of them
myself. Just let me say that just because the war you promote
isn't a big budget job between major powers doesn't mean it
isn't important. The little stuff adds up and I want you to know
it is by no means overlooked.' The Doom and Destruction Devil
and the Stupidity and Ignorance Devil exchanged knowing glances
and settled back with sighs full of long-suffering and neglect.
The Chairdevil theoretically did know that the cumulative effect
of their very successful efforts to see hunger and hostility
clamp down on one regime in one little country after another
regime in another little country made all the difference—all the
difference—in the world, but the Chairdevil just naturally went
for the flamboyant. Simple things like astronomical death tolls
didn't impress him. He liked things to go boom. In some ways, he
was surprisingly democratic. He enjoyed seeing great
civilizations crumbling, the rich and privileged, the sheltered
and pampered, dying just as miserably as poor folks. It was one
of his more endearingly infuriating characteristics.
"He departed from his notes then, laying them down and saying
in a casual, off-the-cuff way, 'And I really like what y'all
have been doing with the terrorism thing too. Very clever. Very
tricky. Pick off the civilians. Pick off the so-called
innocents. Why should they be left out? Keep reminding our
minions that it's up to us to set the example. If our people
commit one little suggestive atrocity, our lead will be followed
and amplified tenfold.' He looked kind of humble and grateful
after that and everyone else tried to look the same way." 'On
the domestic front, I think the pestilence department should be
congratulated on all those diseases that have made it more
dangerous than ever for the livestock out there to reach out and
touch anyone. I like the sanctimonious thing S&I has been
promoting to go with it too.' The Stupidity and Ignorance Devil
held up both huge hands and made them shake each other in the
air like a prize fighter. Now he was one that always got a lot
of pleasure out of the little things. 'And by the way, S&I
should continue to be congratulated for inspiring all those
enterprising people out there who even when there are no nearby
minority groups of any sort for them to hate never forget to
hate them anyway on general principle and continue to foster
generations of hatred by never failing to beat their kids, their
parents, and each other with enthusiastic ferocity.''
"All the other devils certainly agreed that they could drink to
something like that and they clapped some more and said 'Bravo'
and 'Hear hear' and so on, making an awful racket until the
Chairdevil shushed them again.
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Back to Phantom Banjo |
Picking the Ballad's Bones |
As if a night
like that with the wind and fog and rain in an ancient monastery
looking for a long-dead wizard wasn't Halloweenish enough for
everybody, Gussie was trying to get used to sharing her body
with a ghost. Hell, she hadn't shared it with a man on a regular
basis for close to twenty years except for a one-night stand
once in a blue moon. And this was a whole lot closer than being
in bed together—it was like being pregnant with somebody else's
homemade film, full of voices and pictures that weren't hers,
even when Sir Walter wasn't talking. It made her giddy. Not that
he wasn't as polite as he could be. It simply didn't give a lady
much privacy. She had never been quite so close to anyone even
before she ran her old man off.
She felt a little like
a ghost herself with her cold wet feet and her stringing hair
trailing water all down her back and face, her eyes wide from
trying to see in the dark.
As she passed through
the gate, reminding Sir Walter that they had to physically open
the gate and go between the doors, not through them as he had
been used to doing, she saw Julianne wafting ahead of them, like
something out of a Wilkie Collins novel.
At Willie MacKai's
back, the banjo was still playing that song and now more than
ever the words came back—Gussie realized Sir Walter was feeding
them to her.
"Cold blows the wind o'er my true
love
And gently falls the rain
I never had but one true love
And in greenwood he lies slain
I'll do as much for my true love
As any young girl may
I'll sit and mourn all on his grave
For twelvemonth and a day."
But as they crept
farther into the abbey, the song changed to a major key and the
tune became the one that urged them to "Take it to its Root,"
the song that the banjo had taught Willie and Juli to write
during the traffic jam from hell on the Oregon Trail. Willie
stopped, listened, then continued on, stalking silent and wary,
looking all around him like the soldiers on patrol in the war
movies did. Anna Mae Gunn walked a little to his left as if she
were on tippy-toe and if she were a cat her ears would have been
swiveling all different directions. Brose Fairchild pitty-patted
beside her with little reluctant steps, the irises of his eyes
all surrounded by whites and his wiry red-gray hair seeming to
stand on end more than ever.
"You seem ill at ease,
good woman," Sir Walter's ghost intruded on Gussie's thoughts.
"I am," she muttered—no
need to speak loud enough to wake the dead, so to speak, when
the dead was right here inside her head, cozy as another pea in
a one-pea pod. "I can understand how the atmosphere wouldn't
especially impress you but it scares the bejeezus out of me. And
I can't help wondering where that red-haired woman got herself
to."
"Oh, as to that, who
knows about such as she," he said, dotingly, Gussie thought.
"You evidently know her
better than we do if you think she's worth bowin' over and so
on," Gussie said.
"Aye. I know her," he said. Though he hadn't quite recognized
her in the long-distance visions he'd had when he first arose
from the grave, the moment he met her he'd known her for what
and who she was. He had been a sheriff and a lawman in life and
he had seen a lot of deviltry—enough to knock sense into any
ordinary man. But he was also the biggest romantic of his age
and lived more in his head than he did in the real world most of
the time and a little thing like dying hadn't changed that.
Gussie did not know what to make of the image he showed her of
Torchy Burns with her red hair blazing under a golden crown with
stars all over it and wearing a gown of velvet green decorated
with silver trim and little silver bells. She just supposed that
he liked redheads, which figured, him being Scottish and all,
and that he was having the kind of fantasies about her that if
he were a modern man, he would have dressed her up in a slinky
evening dress and diamonds and maybe a mink coat. (Well, maybe
not a mink coat what with the way people were reacting to those
things these days. But most men having fantasies about redheaded
women didn't worry about animal rights politics or much of
anything else at the time.))
"Here it is,"
Julianne's toneless voice floated back to them, an echo that
didn't repeat itself. "I found it," she said. "Michael Scott."
"Is he—uh—up?" Brose
asked in such a small voice he had to repeat himself.
Faron and Ellie had
been inspecting everything around them with interest but now
that Julianne had found the tomb Ellie's eyes were big as
saucers and Faron's Adam's apple traveled up and down, up and
down. They had already encountered several ghosts in the course
of their journeys but the ghost of a wizard was surely something
special. Both of them were big fans of fantasy novels and they
knew that the quintessential question when it came to wizards
was a paraphrase of the one Glenda the Good had asked Dorothy
Gale, "Are you a good wizard or a bad wizard?"
Neither of the
Randolphs had shown less courage than any of the others when
faced with actual ghosts, but then they hadn't had time to be
afraid of the ones they'd seen before. The other ghosts may have
appeared on atmospheric nights too but they didn't have the
fanfare of being announced by a descendant who was possessing a
friend of the Randolphs'. The Wizard Michael Scott might have
been a great philosopher, scientist, and scholar but he was
also, like all competent magicians, enough of a ham to know how
to make an entrance.
Ellie scooted closer to
Gussie. She was shivering so hard her rain-wet goose bumps stood
up like white caps. "Gussie, ask Sir Walter what this Mike guy
is like."
"He doesn't know. He
never met him."
"But he's going to wait
until midnight, huh?" she asked.
"It's only eleven,"
Anna Mae said. "God, I'm freezing."
"Me too," Ellie said,
jumping up and down vigorously to demonstrate her point.
"Maybe there'd be time
to go back to Abbotsford for blankets or something," Gussie
said. "I didn't lock up, Walt, did you? You don't mind if I call
you Walt, do you? And you call me Gussie. Seeing as how we're
getting so close and all."
"Seems imminently
practical to me, dear lady. I doot mah dear wife would mind even
were she alive, and would join me in begging you to call me what
you will. Walter or Wat, as you would have it."
But his pleasant speech
broke off abruptly and Gussie felt him stiffen and freeze within
her, before with even more alarming abruptness she found herself
turning and tearing back for the gate.
"Sir Walt—Wat, simmer
down. What is it? Where are we going? You don't have to return
to the grave at midnight do you?"
In her mind an
anguished howl let rip. "The swine! The dirty swine have
returned. They're after my bukes, Gussie. We maun save my
bukes."
He headed her straight
for the gate. "Whoa, Walt, if you're going that way you have to
leave me behind. Even if we don't go through walls I can't run
all the way back to your place."
"We must!" he cried. "I
canna bide here trapped while they destroy m'life's work!"
Gussie was too involved
with the distraught ghost to notice what the others were up to,
but Ellie, who had been close by, grabbed Faron. "Come on, we'll
drive you back."
"What about the
wizard?"
"There's an hour. The others can stay here. Once we get back
to Abbotsford Sir Walter can un-possess you and haunt the
vandals into submission if we make it in time. Brose, you got
thee
keys?"
He tossed them and
there was a clink as they hit the paving stones, then Ellie,
Faron, and Gussie/Sir Walter piled into the van and drove like
bats out of hell for Abbotsford.
A diesel
eighteen-wheeler with the legend Circus Rom on the side was
parked outside Abbotsford and the front door stood wide open.
"Oh, my God, Wat, I'm
sorry. I should have locked up," Gussie said. "Might as well
have printed an invitation."
But she was only able to aim the thoughts at him as she ran for
the house. Sir Walter forgot that she was no longer young and he
had been dead more than a hundred and fifty years. He took the
walk up to the house like a sprinter and Gussie passed Ellie and
Faron, and did not hear the scuffling from behind her when the
young couple came abreast of the circus truck. But Sir Walter
carried her along so fast she did make it to the door before
something came down on her head and she crumpled on the
threshold just as a bright orange light blossomed from the open
doorway to the library
|
|
Back to Picking the Ballad's
Bones |
Strum Again? |
The cowboy they
called Ute didn't look Native American, Shayla St. Michael
thought, but then you never could tell. As Shayla and the rest
of the small band of Californian eco-feminists gathered around
the campfire, Ute fixed them with a sardonic glance and
continued sharpening his blue pencil with his pocket knife. He'd
already cooked the women a nice vegetarian meal with a few
edible non-endangered native plants and onions from the Valley,
piñon nuts imported from New Mexico, and a little tofu imported
from the soy fields of Kansas.
The smoke that rose,
some might say fragrantly, to the sky, was authentically coming
from a fire of dried unspecified animal dung. He used to tell
the tour groups which animals, but that had proved unwise.
Unspecified was safest.
Now, sated with their
politically correct meal, the women sat around the campfire and
watched the smoke spiral toward the moon.
"I think this is
lovely. No television, no radio, no computers," began Barbara
Harrington-Smith, a corporate tax lawyer.
"I disagree," said
Shayla, who was a graphic artist for a large publisher. "I'm
bored. We walked a great deal, true, but I miss my evening jog
even though I do understand that we might trample indigenous
wildlife of the fanged serpentine variety and be immediately
chastised for our thoughtlessness. And I did as instructed and
didn't bring any work."
"Also," added
Heather-Jon Argulijan, "this fire stinks."
"I could tell you a
mite more about the interestin' things that have happened on
this ranch," Ute said in his quaint western twang. He was not
offensively macho. Though the eco-feminist group had requested
that their guide be a cowgirl, or more correctly, a cow-woman,
the tour director explained that the cowgirls were all attending
management seminars that week or competing for top prize money
in the rodeos and wouldn't be available but assured them that
Ute, while absolutely an authentic member of his profession, was
also extremely progressive in his attitudes and in fact was the
one who insisted on bumper stickers that proclaimed "ERA Will
Rise Again" for all of the ranch's Jeeps and pickups.
"Oh, God, not another
environmental impact statement," Heather-Jon moaned. "I'm sorry,
Barbara, but I just can't take any more."
Barbara sometimes
thought of Heather-Jon as the weakest link, but she was also
usually a lot of fun, and fun seemed to be what was missing.
Ute grinned at
Heather-Jon in a non-condescending, brotherly, and respectful
way. "Why, ma'am, as important as such a thing is to all of us,
I don't reckon I'd undertake to tell you women about it orally
like. That's somethin' that it's only fittin' should be read
carefully in big old folios of recycled hard copy. No'm, what I
had in mind was to tell you the story of how an old hand on this
here ranch and some compadres of his, includin' yours truly—"
"All men?" asked Shayla
in a still-bored tone that indicated she was just sure they all
would be. She inched a little farther from the fire and slipped
on her wool socks and pulled on a poncho her roommate had woven
for her from the wool of organically grown sheep.
"Hell no! Why, there
was Sister Julianne Martin and Sister Anna Mae Gunn, Sister
Terry Pruitt and Sister Ellie Randolph, not to mention Sister
Gussie Turner, who did the advance work and told me most of what
I'm about to tell you."
"Isn't this a
little—you know, out in the sticks, as a place to start a
movement?" Heather-Jon asked.
"Good as any, better'n
most," he said. "There's songs in this story too, and as I sing
'em while I'm tellin' you about how they was used, I'd
appreciate it if y'all would join in, especially if you can do
some nice harmony or play a mouth harp or anything."
"Comb and tissue okay?"
asked Mary Armstrong.
Ute's eyes, pale as
prairie skies and framed by wrinkles only a little leathery
since he was careful to use plenty of sunscreen, lit up. "That's
fine, Ms. Mary. Fact is, I always have wished I could get the
hang of a comb and tissue and never have. I'd be much obliged if
you could maybe give me some pointers? I'd be glad to show you a
thing or two about ropin' in exchange."
"That would be
acceptable," Mary said gruffly, but she squirmed around a
little, clearly pleased.
"Well, then, for your
information, ladies—and I use the term 'ladies' as one of
respect and admiration and in no sense as a restrictive or
class-conscious kinda thing—I happen to be by profession a
cowboy poet."
"What the devil is a
cowboy poet?" asked Heather-Jon.
"I couldn't have put
that question better myself, ma 'am, but if you'll bear with me,
I believe I'd rather not say right now. In line with the amended
Code of the West, I aim to show and not tell you all about it.
First off, I want you to imagine a little woman about sixty,
sixty-five years old, but quick on her feet and strong from lots
of dancin' and a good judge of people and a way with 'em from
years of bartendin'. She had thick curly hair that she just
plain let go gray, as if there was nothin' wrong in the world
with that."
"And do you think there
is?" demanded Barbara, whose well-styled bob was salt and
pepper.
"No, ma'am. Just shows
she wasn't one to put all them chemicals into the water system.
Besides, lotsa people pay to make their hair lighter. What's
wrong with just lettin' nature change it, is what I always say.
Anyway, this woman had gone through some tremendous changes in
her life because she happened to enjoy a certain type of
entertainment with which we cowboy poets are also in sympathy,
which is how I came to hear this story. You see, there were a
bunch of devils, and I don't mean only of the strictly
Judeo-Christian brand, mind you, more what your Native American
Indians might call the evil spirits. These folks decided to
eliminate this particular type of entertainment—oh, hell, call a
spade a spade. They used to call it folk music, though strictly
speakin' that's not always an accurate term. Anyhow, these
devils, who were rich and sophisticated and behind all the
troubles in this world that people didn't dream up all by
themselves, decided to take away the music that sometimes makes
people feel a little better about themselves and their work.
Gives 'em a kind of what we cowboy poets would call an
eagle's-eye view of their situation, helps 'em get their lives
back in control."
"Like a therapist?"
Heather-Jon asked.
"Yeah, but you don't
have to make appointments, and most folks could do it themselves
even though sometimes they hired other people to do it for them,
which is not as good but better than a poke in the eye with a
sharp stick (which was all the devils had for them). Anyhow, for
a space there—and y'all may not be too well aware of it, but me
and my compadres were—these devils by killin' and connivin'
managed to get rid of most of the most important singers of the
songs and make everybody forget the words to songs people had
been singin' for hundreds of years.
“After a while, they
even made people forget the melodies, so the songs were gone
from memory in this country. Everybody forgot every song sung by
every dead singer. When the great Sam Hawthorne died on the very
day the Library of Congress folk-music collection got blowed up,
almost all the songs in the country were wiped from people's
minds. You notice I said people's minds. Sam had this magic
banjo that he passed on before he died, and it remembered the
songs, though nobody knew how come. Now, this magical banjo
eventually passed into the hands of a very small group of
people. One of them was this woman I'm tellin' you about, Ms.
Gussie Turner. Others were the women I mentioned previously,
Julianne Martin, Anna Mae Gunn, Ellie Randolph, and Terry
Pruitt. All fine musicians except for Gussie and Ms. Randolph,
who was a more academic kind of lady. Then there was Mr. Brose
Fairchild, a gentleman of more than one color who was a
crackerjack blues man and purveyor of Baltic ethnic tunes. And
last but by no means least Mr. Willie MacKai, who used to work
right here on this ranch where we are now working—though that's
another story. These were the people who came together and ended
up as the guardians of Lazarus, Sam's magic banjo.
"Well, Lazarus knew
good and well that Gussie and Willie and their friends couldn't
get back all those forgotten songs as long as they stayed in
these United States, so the banjo helped them write a song in
which it told them to go overseas to the British Isles, where
the roots of much of American folk music were still dug in deep
and sendin' out shoots. They went over there and with some help
from a bunch of ghosts, includin' that of the famous writer Sir
Walter Scott, his ancestor the Wizard Michael Scott, and a bunch
of their kinfolk, they got back the songs. Then they went after
songs from other places than Scotland, such as Ireland, France,
Spain, and the like.
"In the meantime Ms.
Gussie, who had become a hell of a storyteller by virtue of
bein' possessed—though mind you in a very respectable and
respectful way—by the ghost of Sir Walter, came back here to do
a little low-profile advance publicity.
"Now there was one of
these devils, a redheaded user of many aliases, who was a little
more complicated than the rest of them and tougher to figure
out. She was the chief devil in charge of debauchery. Among
other things the musicians learned in Scotland, one was that she
used to be the Queen of Fairyland and had come down in the world
since then. So she was the one who both helped them and hindered
them when the musicians wanted to go into the ballad world to
reclaim the old songs that would help them release the rest of
'em. Of course, as a devil she was bound to uphold what the rest
of the devils wanted, which was to try to keep the musicians
from living through the songs, making them their own, and
bringing them back to this country to revive all the other songs
with the powerful magic contained in the oldest and strongest
ballads.
"However—as she told
the other devils—as the official Debauchery Devil she was in
charge of wine, your less enlightened and self-respecting kind
of women, and song. Musicians were some of her best people, and
she was always a little ambivalent about the whole devilish
operation to kill them off along with the music. Also, she was
always a little wild, as if she was high on some of her own
stuff. It seemed to Gussie that the redheaded devil's
unpredictableness made her the worst devil of them all—she was
like the old mule who'd be nice to you for two weeks just to get
a chance to kick you.
"So Gussie was wary when this carrot-topped character plucked
her off a nice reliable bus to give her a wild ride in a fast
red sports car."
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Back to Strum Again? |
The Godmother's
Apprentice |
The Princess and the Toad
Once upon a time there
was a princess who refused to live happily ever after. Having
survived a difficult childhood, the death of her mother, an
arrest for possession of illegal substances and the perpetual
adolescence of her father culminating in his marriage to a woman
who made three attempts to murder her, Snohomish Quantrill felt
far older than her fourteen-going-on-fifteen years. She decided
that instead of marrying a prince, which she was too young to do
anyway, she wanted to be a fairy godmother when she grew up.
Marrying princes was
not all it was cracked up to be. She knew that. Her father,
Raydir Quantrill, had been the Prince of Punk before he became
the King of Rock, and she definitely was not ready to take on
somebody like him. Besides, she had been through enough
counseling to know that you had to get your own shit together
before you interfaced with somebody else's kingdom and all of
its headaches.
The way she decided to
become a fairy godmother before she was even a mother was
through a counselor friend of hers, in fact.
Almost being murdered,
once by a hired hit man, twice by your own stepmom, made you
ponder on the meaning of your existence in a way that was
difficult to communicate to most people.
Her classmates at
Clarke Academy had welcomed her back with girlish squeals and
touchy-feely hugs. They were so sorry she'd been hurt and were
so genuinely glad she was back, and had the hit man, like, raped
her or anything? It was too creepy the way they drooled over the
details they'd gleaned from the media. Some of them, she knew,
were really, truly pissed at her because they'd been looking
forward to attending her funeral and giving tear-choked
statements for the six o'clock news. They acted like what had
happened to her was some lurid splatter movie instead of her own
life for the last month or so. But she had very real scars to
remind her of the last attempt on her life, which had landed her
in the Harborview ICU for two weeks.
Her dad wasn't exactly
a pillar of strength either. He'd extracted his head from his
ass long enough to join the search party looking for her, but in
the process had found someone else as well. He fell in love with
his fellow searcher, Cindy Ellis, hired her as his own stable
manager to keep her around, and lately had spent most of his
time trying to convince Cindy that he could change, he really
could.
Cindy was nice, and she
too had had a wicked stepmother, but Sno couldn't help being
less than thrilled with her for taking up so much of Raydir's
attention.
She didn't know what to
do or where to turn. She was what they called marginalized. Way
marginalized. On the surface, she seemed okay, even better. Her
testimony, at her stepmother Gerardine's trial, was clear and
unshakable enough to swathe that fashion slave in prison
coveralls long enough for her wardrobe to go out of style and in
again.
Meanwhile, Sno's grades
improved because she didn't have any real friends anymore. Drugs
had almost killed her, and she had no use for them. What she
longed to do was to go back into the woods with the seven
Vietnam veterans who had tried to protect her. They understood
what it felt like to have your life threatened, to be wounded,
hunted.
There was just one
problem. They weren't in the woods anymore. They'd returned home
to their own lives and their own wives and daughters, who would
take no more kindly to some outsider like Sno horning in on
their relationships than she took to Cindy Ellis. So she spent a
lot of time writing reports on World War II concentration camp
victims, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Somalia and the new gulag in
Uzbekistan, until her teachers stopped being delighted by her
industry and became concerned about her thematic choices.
The teachers spoke to
Raydir, who in turn sent forth an invitation summoning Sno's
former social worker, Rose Samson, to dinner one night. Rose
brought along Felicity Fortune, a woman with long white and
silver hair and a shimmery, floaty, asymmetrically hemmed,
much-scarved outfit that looked like something the ghost of a
1930s movie star would wear to dinner on Rodeo Drive. Felicity
was, Rose said, a bona fide fairy godmother.
Rosie went on to tell
her a fairly complicated account of what she and Felicity had
been doing while Sno was hiding out in the woods. They had
helped a street kid, Dico Miller, by giving him a talking cat,
Puss, which helped him get more handouts. Rosie and Felicity had
also confronted the Asian gang harassing Dico and turned the
gangbangers into helpful citizens. The gang leader, Ding, and
Dico had even become friends and had discovered a mutual musical
talent. Dico was supposedly pursuing his studies of the flute in
Waterford, Ireland, while Ding wrote an account of his parents'
experiences in the Vietnam War. Rosie and Felicity had helped
Cindy Ellis when her wicked stepmother and stepsisters tried to
take all her money and make her lose her job. They'd been
instrumental in Cindy's meeting Raydir and rescuing Sno. And,
while trying to help two neglected children who had been picked
up by a child molester, Rose had renewed her acquaintance with a
nice cop named Fred, and they had fallen for each other. Rosie
and Felicity had been very busy and had done so much and helped
so many people that Sno lost track of all the details, except
that now Rosie was her own department head and there was a big
shake-up in the state and city government and social services
organizations because of what she and Felicity had done.
This was all a
revelation to Sno. Before she was kidnapped, she had classed
fairy godmothers with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Given
her recent experience, however, all it took was Rose's word and
a peek at the creature Felicity carried in her pocket, and she
was a believer.
Admittedly, it was all a little surreal.
"You recognize him,
then?" Felicity Fortune asked, as if asking her to identify some
microscope slide for an oral exam in microbiology.
Sno peered carefully into the pocket Felicity held open and
looked into the popped eyes of the toad staring back at her with
an extremely in-your-face expression. She hadn't actually seen
the face before, of course, or the expression, but the attitude
behind it was frighteningly familiar, even on a toad. "Nooo..." she said, taking a quick step backward.
"How about if she puts
a little teeny motorcycle helmet on me, kid? Could you finger me
then?" a voice said inside her head, a voice unlike her own, one
she would never forget, menacing and mocking. Of course, all she
heard the actual toad say was "Reedeep."
Still, she stumbled
over an end table in her haste to back away.
"I'm sorry, my dear,"
Felicity said, quickly closing her pocket again. "No need to be
alarmed. As you have so sensitively perceived, your original
assailant, the "executioner" Robert Hunter, has been rendered
harmless and now inhabits this toad's body."
"Yeah? What happened to
his own body?"
"It currently houses
the toad-body's original personality and is safely hopping
around the psychiatric unit at Harborview Hospital, though I
suppose a more long-range institution may be necessary at some
point."
"Cool," Sno said.
|
|
Back to The Godmother's
Apprentice |
The Godmother's Web |
ONE
Beauty and the Menagerie
From the North comes
the sun-haired maiden. She is changed from a mouse. She is
changed into a far-flying she-eagle. She lands in Flagstaff and
is changed once more into a maiden.
Her skin is made of
white shell. Her eyes are made of deep waters. Her mouth is made
of cornelian. Where the sun kisses her cheek, the white shell
changes to cornelian. Her hair is the color of rabbit brush
blooms. Her hair is the texture of rabbit fur.
Her body sits straight
as a lance. Her touch on the rein is gentle as a warm breeze,
but firm as the red rock rising around her. A valuable blanket
made of soft wool and rainbows cushions her saddle. She is
riding the sun's own blue horse.
In beauty she rides
along the flowing highway. The cars flash like wish-granting
fish among the eighteen-wheeled leviathans. The darting minnow
motorcycles weave it into a single undulating fabric of noise
and motion, this highway along which she rides.
The highway's banks are
studded with turquoise and silver placed on bright blankets in
flimsy wooden stalls by sleepy Native Americans. They have just
left hogans and trailer houses down rutted paths from the
stalls. Signs of painted wood that say "Half price!" "Buy here!"
"Navajo made!" "You've Gone Too Far" and "Nice Indians" fish the
highway for silver and green tourist money.
To the south are the
cities of Flagstaff and Sedona, and the land where the blue
horse was born. To the west are the sacred mountains. To the
Anglos and the Mexicans, they are called the San Francisco
Peaks. To the Navajos they are the Sacred Mountains of the West,
Light Always Glitters on Top, and are made of abalone. To the
Hopi they are the place from which the kachinas dance, bringing
rain and corn and other good things to the Hopi, who by and
large say nothing of such matters to those who are not Hopi. To
the north lies Seattle, whence the maiden came.
To the north also lies
the Grand Canyon. Within it are the Colorado River, the images
on many postcards, the footprints and less fleeting reminders of
many tourists, and the place where the Hopis originally came
into this, the Fourth World.
To the east are what is
left of the lands of the Navajo, the Dinéh, the People and what
remains of the land entrusted by the gods to the Hopi.
To the east the maiden
is looking with her deep-water eyes. To the east she is guiding
her blue horse with her warm-breeze touch.
Then from the west,
where the abalone peaks stand sentinel, an old woman strides
across the desert.
She is dressed in
velvet, despite the heat. Her skirt is like yellow corn pollen
and does not show the dust of the desert at its bright hem. Her
moccasins and her silver-trimmed blouse are the red of the
canyon walls. Her hair is black obsidian and streaked with
strands of white shell. With white yarn bindings it is tied into
the shape of a bumblebee. At her ears, wrists, waist, fingers,
and neck are strands and nuggets and beads of the purest
sky-colored-turquoise. A rainbow-colored blanket is folded over
one of her arms and in her hand she carries a spindle.
Across the shimmering
sands she walks, and her small moving draws the attention of the
sun-haired maiden on the blue horse. The sun-haired maiden
thinks the woman from the west must be nuttier than a piñon
stand in Santa Fe, for, although it is late autumn, the air is
hotter than a red chili ristra.
However, the maiden has
learned that some old women are not what they seem. Some of them
can change Harley Davidsons into horse trailers. Some of them
can create from thin air crystal horseshoes that cure a favorite
pony's lameness. And besides, the sun-haired maiden is a kind
girl. She does not like to see someone's grandmother walking in
the heat like that, and she worries.
Later, she knows she
was right to worry. The old woman is a great deal of trouble,
even for a sun-haired maiden on the sun's own blue horse.
TWO
The sun-haired maiden’s
name was Cindy Ellis. She was neither Navajo, nor Hopi. She was
not a citizen of the state of Arizona, the state of Utah, the
state of New Mexico or the state of Colorado. Nor, strictly
speaking, was she a maiden.
In the lore of the
dominant culture, her story might begin: Once upon a time there
was a young woman who was as good as she was beautiful. It
probably would not say that many people found such a person
damned annoying, and sometimes so did Cindy. She was blessed
with both a modest disposition and an embarrassment of riches of
the nonmaterial sort that, in the olden days, it would have
taken an entire fleet of good fairies to bestow upon her at her
christening.
It was not just that
she was a good rider, a fine artist, had perfect pitch and sang
like an angel. It was not merely that she was graceful as a doe,
gentle as a dove, kind and thoughtful. She was good at other
things too. She had a gift for languages and no math block. She
could wire a house, fix the plumbing, put up sheetrock, make a
cake from scratch and a wedding dress by hand.
She also had a handsome
prince. Princes don't get where they are by being dummies and
Cindy's beauty, courage, versatility, good humor and
intelligence had drawn the attention and affection of Raydir
Quantrill. He was not only a prince but the King of the Alloy
Rock.
Her beauty and goodness
did not annoy Raydir, of course. He was far too self-involved to
be annoyed by anyone who didn't, for instance, screw up his
sound system during a recording session. But some of the less
lovely females in his entourage found his new stable
manager-sweetheart a bit hard to take.
"Cindy," said the young
woman's social worker friend, Rose Samson, when they met for
lunch to discuss Rose's bridesmaids' dresses for her forthcoming
nuptials, "it's a classic case of you reliving your family
drama, except now that your wicked stepmother and stepsisters
are out of the picture you're doing the same thing with the
women in Raydir's entourage—trying to please them instead of
making them look at their own stuff." Rose could sometimes be
very firm about what other people needed to do.
But Cindy had to admit
her friend probably had a point. Trying to get her stepmother
and stepsisters off her back was how she had acquired so many of
her skills. There was no need for them to hire anything done
when they had a live-in slave to torment.
Cindy's love of horses
and counseling from Rose had eventually helped her escape their
clutches, but she was beginning to feel she'd jumped out of the
barbecue and into the four-alarm chili, as her old stable boss,
Pill, used to say.
She had no friends at
Raydir's estate except Raydir, and though he had many good
points and made her heart pound like Silver's hooves when the
Lone Ranger was riding to the rescue, he could also be a major
pain. Plus he was gone a lot.
One morning after her
second riding lesson, she tripped lightly between the rows of
rhododendrons, madronas and weeping willows that lined the
palatial estate. In her hand was a posy of wildflowers for her
love, who surely would be awake by now, as it was well past his
usual crack of noon rising time.
Raydir was indeed
awake. Bejeaned and bare-chested in their bower, he was hastily
stuffing leather pants and T-shirts into a piece of luggage with
lots of pockets. "Hi, babe," he said, tossing in a hand-beaded
vest and a pair of custom cowboy boots.
"You're leaving?" she
asked. "I thought your gig wasn't until the sixteenth."
|
|
Back to The Godmother's
Web |
Nothing Sacred |
PART ONE
KALAPA COMPOUND, TIBET.
Late September,
2069.
DAY 11?
The guards gave
me this paper with instructions to write about my career as a
war criminal, starting with my life at age eight. This is fairly
standard practice in these places, according to what I've read,
and to what the Colonel told me when I first got here. He also
said they "haf vays off" not only making you talk, but making
you believe it after a while. So before my brain gets too well
washed, I am saving out some of this paper to keep a true record
of what happened, just to keep it straight in my own mind and
give me something to fill up the time. The Colonel and the
others told me some of the jargon the interrogators like to have
included in a confession and I think I get the drift. It
behooves the smart prisoner to indulge in a lot of verbal
self-flagellation before the authorities decide to flagellate
said prisoner in a more literal sense. There's a very strict
prose style involved. No problem, though. I'm a good mimic and
can write the most incredible bullshit as long as I don't have
to keep a straight face.
My name is Viveka
Jeng Vanachek. I am currently, albeit reluctantly, a warrant
officer in the North American Continental Allied Forces, 5th
Cobras, attached to the 9th New Ghurkas at Katmandu. I was
captured September 15, 2069, following a plane crash near the
Kun Lun Mountains while on a mapping mission. Not that I am this
great cartographer, but I do know the section of the file in the
program that allows the computer to reconfigure existing maps
while scanning the countryside from an eye in the bottom of an
XLT-3000 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Anyway, I'm
trained to use that knowledge, although that flight was the
first actual mission I've been on. Right up until the crash, I'd
been having the best day since I sold out and joined the
military.
Major Tom Siddons
was a very nice guy, and I think he must have enjoyed working
with me as much as I did with him. I suppose he got as far as he
did in the military just by being relatively good-natured and an
exceptionally good pilot. Unlike the other pilots, he could
express himself not only in words rather than in long strings of
symbols and numbers, he could even express himself in words of
more than one syllable. He also liked poetry, and I think he
liked me chiefly because he was impressed with my ability to
recite dirty limericks in Middle English and translate Chinese
verses.
I hadn't been in
Katmandu very long, but I had already told him over a beer how
much I hated the monotony of knowing one section of one file of
one program. Each of the other warrant officers in Katmandu with
the same rating knew another section of the same file of the
same program. If anyone was transferred, died or committed
suicide, he or she was replaced by a brand-new specialist in the
same section—specialists were never cross-trained, so the left
hand never knew what the right hand was doing. It made me feel
like a not-very-expensive microchip. Here I had spent almost
twenty years, off and on, studying the humanities and what do
they do with me? Stick me in computers, because I'd once taken a
class to fulfill a math requirement. My art history background
and the one drafting class I'd gotten a C in qualified me for
the mapping section. I told Siddons all of this and he sipped
his beer slowly and nodded in most of the right places.
I forgot all
about griping to him until one morning when he strode into the
hangar office, decked out in a silver suit with so many pockets
he looked like a walking shoe bag.
"Grab a flight
suit and your kit, Ms. Vanachek," he told me. "We have us a
mission."
It didn't occur
to me to bring a weapon. I'd been in what was technically
considered a combat zone for the best part of six months and had
yet to see more than a fleeting glimpse of an indigenous
civilian, much less an enemy.
I gawked through
the canopy as we climbed to 19,000 feet, then settled down to
the keyboard and punched up my section. Siddons had explained
that the plane's computer would do just as mine did back at the
hangar, except that while the computer in the hangar usually had
to make do with adjusting data, inputting new topographical
information from a graphic mock-up to existing map data, this
one had a special adapter that translated the terrain passing
through an eye in the bottom of the plane into a graphic image
and instantly altered the corresponding map data accordingly.
We need map
updates frequently because the terrain constantly changes so
that it no longer conforms to earlier maps. And while our
hangar-bound graphics adjustments are fine for recording the
changes our own side wreaks on the local scenery, our allies and
our enemies are not so conscientious about informing us of all
of their destructive activities. Furthermore, the war
precipitates natural disasters; earthquakes, avalanches and
floods that also make unauthorized and, worse, undocumented
alterations.
We overflew the
pass, into the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The more heavily
populated areas had been kept up to date, but the whole central
plateau was still a battleground. New valleys are dug daily and
mountains of rubble make strategic barriers that need recording.
The problem with
fast travel through or over any country, of course, is that it
so thoroughly objectifies what you're seeing that you might as
well be looking at a holovid screen. The landscape of Tibet,
vast plains with mountains pinched up all around the edges like
a fancy piecrust, seemed highly improbable to me and I returned
to my screen after about fifteen minutes of admiring the view.
Siddons wasn't
about to let me ignore it. His voice crackled into my headphones
saying, "Nah, don't bury your nose in your goddamn graphics yet.
Take a gander out there at the real world."
I stared down
over and through a swath of cloud. The tail end of the cloud
snagged on the ragged snow-splattered tops of raw-rock
mountains, but beneath it spread a lake covering—I checked my
screen—twenty square miles. It cupped the plane's shadow in
waters that looked like a huge opal, milky with shots of blue
and red fire reflecting off the surface. "Gorgeous," I said.
"What makes it look like that?"
"Poison," he
said. "Check your coordinates. This is where the PRC dumped its
toxic wastes before some of our forces helped India shoo the
bastards back behind the border again. The lake's Tibetan name
is Lhamo Lhatso. It was sacred. The holy men saw the birthplace
of their last spiritual leader in it."
With an
innocent-looking twinkle, the lake passed under our starboard
wing and away.
"We're going to
veer over India way now, toward Karakoram Pass. Between the
avalanches the saturation bombing triggered and the floods this
spring, the area is useless to ground troops."
"Not to mention a
little tricky for the local inhabitants," I said.
"There aren't a
hell of a lot of those left, except guerrillas," Siddons said.
"And they're tough bozos who play their own game and don't kiss
anybody's ass."
"Sounds like you
admire them."
"Well, hey, when
you have been in the service of our beloved organization as long
as I have, little lady, you too may come to admire anybody who
doesn't basically sit back and leave all the fighting to our
troops wearing their patches. The Tibetan guerrillas have to be
about the only people on the face of the planet fighting
anything worse than a hot game of Parcheesi who don't have NACAF
allies specifically assigned to them, evening up the odds
manpower and firepower-wise."
"Major, I had no
idea you were such an idealist."
"Doesn't mean I
won't blow the little buggers off the face of the earth if I get
a chance, you understand. There's no need to get sentimental
about it. If we blow up our fellow AmCans who are working for
the PRC or the Soviets, I see no particular reason to extend
professional courtesy to anyone else."
I watched the
high wild mountains sweep past our belly and noticed how often
the bomb pocks and avalanches showed up on the screen as a major
change in the landscape. I remembered that before NACAF entered
the three-sided conflict among China, India and the USSR, with
all the territory in the middle, including Tibet and the
Himalayas, as the battleground, Mount Everest had been the
highest mountain in the world, instead of the fourth highest. I
told the major, "I once took a course in myth and folklore. Did
you know that in the old days, Tibetans never climbed their
mountains much? They were afraid of disturbing the demons of the
upper air."
"Well, we got
those demons good and stirred up now," he said.
Soon we were past
one range and once more flying over a vast flattened plain,
flyspecked with the ruins of villages and monasteries, the
jagged hills bursting from the plains at times like the work of
some giant gopher. The flatlands were as pocked as the
mountains, the earth blasted and sickly tan, the whole thing
treeless. NACAF-made planes, NACAF pilots or pilot trainers,
NACAF defoliants and NACAF bombs made it all possible.
"Hey, maybe they
meant us," I said to Siddons. "Maybe they foresaw us."
"Who?"
"The old-time
Tibetans with those myths. Maybe we're the upper-air demons."
"Don't let the
scenery give you an attitude now, Warrant Officer. We didn't do
all of that by our lonesome, you know. This little old country's
been a stompin' ground for a good hundred years now for all
kinds of people who didn't like the way the local pope ran
things."
"Dalai Lama," I
corrected, remembering Comparative Religion and Central Asian
Soc.
"Yeah, I knew
that," he said, grinning back at me. His grin was as jerky as a
stop-motion film clip as the aircraft hopped from air pocket to
air pocket in a series of stomach-churning dips and bumps. I
took a deep breath. My digestive tract preferred ground travel.
"Anyhow," he
continued, "one thing good ol' NACAF does do is keep it all a
clean fight. You got any idea what we need all these updated
maps for?"
"Making sure
whichever rock the enemy hides behind doesn't move before our
side finds it?" I asked.
He ignored that.
I think he began to feel at that point he was setting a bad
example for a junior officer. So he said, "Nope, so we can still
locate any possible covert nuclear devices, no matter when or
where they were hidden, and send crews to disarm them. Fighting
for Peace, just like the recruitment ad says."
I would like
those words to be remembered as the major's last.
The XLT-300 model
aircraft we were in flew very far, very fast and changed
altitudes with very little difficulty. Ask a pilot why and how,
or an engineer. All they paid me to know was that my
Ground-Air-Geocartography program, or GAG as it was
affectionately called, was specifically designed to keep up with
the plane. We covered the plateau within about an hour and when
we took the hit, were on the far side of the Karakoram Pass,
headed east for the Kun Lun Mountains. Radio transmission this
far from base was damn near impossible, satellites or no
satellites. The mountains didn't get in the plane's way, and
they didn't get in the satellite's way, but they sure got in
Ground Control's way.
The wind was
fierce that day, and blew the little jet around as if it was a
paper airplane instead of a real one. So when we took the hit, I
thought for a moment it was just another gust of wind.
Siddons caught on
quicker, and I saw his hands fly across the switches and buttons
on the control panel.
Suddenly the
canopy popped and all those upper-air demons I'd been thinking
about roared in and snatched us from the plane. Something kicked
me in the rear. My seat bucked like the barroom bull-riding
machine they keep in the Cowboy Museum my grandparents once took
me to in Tacoma. Except that this bronco didn't come down again
but blasted me through the shrieking wind, up and over the body
of the jet. I screamed, not of my own accord but as if the
scream was ripped from my vocal cords by the velocity of my
plunge to earth.
When I haven't
had worse things to dream about, I still see the bolus of flame
spewing from the underside of the geometrically precise angle of
the starboard wing, and I spin to face a maw of rock and snow
yawning like a fast forward of some boa's jaws as it swallows
prey. I bolt awake as once more the feeling of the automatic
chute opening reminds me of being plucked from midair by a giant
bird and I try to come fully awake before Siddons's body,
twisting beneath a burning chute, plummets past me.
But my actual
landing must have been a testimony to the parachute maker's
technology. For though I had a bad case of vertical jet lag, my
mind skipping a few beats between ejecting and landing, when I
came to myself enough to take inventory, everything was
intact—no broken bones or missing teeth. Encouraged, I attempted
to stand, but the force of the wind complicated matters,
billowing my chute against me so it molded to my face, blinding
and smothering me within a wave of blue, red and white silon. I
yanked the suffocating fabric from my head. The stench of
burning metal, wiring and flesh pricked my nostrils before I
focused sufficiently to visually locate the smoke.
Pulling off my
helmet, I divested myself of the yard or so of chute attached to
it and scanned the horizon for a telltale plume, but it was as
if I was still swathed in some larger, grayer fabric, a bolt of
wildly swirling gauze that obscured everything.
The ground on
which I stood was indistinguishable from the air in front of me.
I was standing on some mountain plateau then, shrouded with
cloud. Vaguely, near the toes of my boots, ghostly tufts of
grass emerged and vanished as the wind whipped the ground cover.
But I saw no sign of Siddons.
I've dreamed of
his death since then, so I must have seen it, but I honestly
don't remember seeing him die other than in the dreams. Shock
probably. I tried calling to Siddons, but my words vanished in
the cloud before they were out of my mouth.
As I gathered up
the chute and uncoiled it from my legs, the wind whipped away a
corner of the mist and I saw four people jogging down a mountain
path toward me, carrying rifles. They all appeared to be Asian
but I wasn't alarmed by that, since many of our NACAF troops are
American or Canadian of Asian origin, or Asian allies. I even
felt a small surge of relief, thinking perhaps we were being
rescued. The rifles didn't alarm me either. There's a war on. Of
course they carried weapons.
I waved a
cautious greeting and would have shouted at them but they didn't
return my wave. That was when I began to realize that the crash
might be more than a temporary setback. Even if these were our
people, I didn't know any passwords. They pointed their guns at
me and one barked an order. He must have been used to talking
over the wind or else the wind had died down because I heard him
very well. He was speaking in Han Chinese, of which I had
learned a smattering in Intro to Chinese Dialects 101. Before I
could try to puzzle out exactly what it was that he'd said, the
man who'd spoken pushed me down while a woman rapidly scooped up
my helmet, then gathered the rest of my parachute. When she
finished, the first man prodded my ribs with his rifle, forcing
me to stand again, while a third covered me with another rifle,
presumably to make sure I didn't overpower the guy with the gun
in my ribs. A fourth man trotted through the mist toward us
carrying two winter kits, slightly charred and smoky around the
edges. A pair of jump boots were slung from his shoulder by
their laces and bounced in rhythm with his gait.
Siddons' helmet—I
could read his name in black block letters across the
front—dangled from one hand.
The woman tied my wrists together. I stared at them
stupidly. Right then the tangible evidence that I was a prisoner
cut through the shock of the crash. We had had a frightening
little lecture about enemy torture in basic training, but the
only advice about getting captured I was able to recall was
"Don't." Each of us knew so little about each piece of equipment
that almost everyone was expendable. People in my grade who got
captured fell into the category of "acceptable losses."
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Back to Nothing Sacred |
Last Refuge |
Section One KALAPA
On the morning of
the last birthday Mike would ever celebrate, the first
changeling was born.
That day, Mike
was officially twenty-one years old and an adult. He awoke
before dawn and slipped out of the communal housing compound.
The soft gray light of morning outlined the onion-shaped dome of
the chorten against the snowy backdrop of the horned peaks of
the guardian mountain, Karakal.
Prayer flags
fluttered from lines strung between the chorten's dome and
nearby buildings, the wind carrying the prayers to the heavens.
Mike bowed to the chorten, in memory of the heroes it
represented, and turned to walk down the steep path winding from
the uppermost point in Kalapa—the chorten—through the compound
built on the ruins of the ancient mystic city. The old city and
the current compound were located on a small mountain set within
a valley ringed by ranges of larger mountains, the largest of
which was the horned guardian Karakal.
From the dining
hall and kitchen issued muffled cooking noises and the aroma of
baking bread and yak butter tea. Farther down the path the open
walls of new stone buildings being constructed from the boulders
of the Great Avalanche waited for the day to begin and workmen
to come and add more of the raw-cut boulders and boards lying
nearby. Beyond the buildings, the lushly planted terraces of the
communal garden stepped down the mountainside.
Mike loved this
time when the moon, as if waiting for the sun to give it
permission to set, hovered just above the mountains. Even on
ordinary days, when he was not having a birthday and had no
momentous events to look forward to, Mike usually rose early to
enjoy this quiet time and take long walks before the paths were
thronged with people. He loved feeling the wings of Karakal
rising behind his back, even when he was not looking at the
mountain. He savored the sweet damp smell of the mist rising
from the waters of Kalapa's sacred lake, the sight of the lake's
blue-green waters lapping the lower garden and nourishing the
roots of the rhododendron jungle.
Mike stood by the
lake for a moment, watching the water shimmer and listening to
the breeze in the branches of the rhododendrons, making them
clack softly like tiny looms at work. The lake was fed by
artesian springs and hot springs, and bled off down the valley
in a pretty stream winding through the grove. The trees foamed
with pink, purple, and white flowers snowing petals into the
stream and carpeting the ground beneath whenever the softest
breeze tickled the air.
His ears picked
up the cry of the eagle owl and the distant grumbling of one of
the snow lions musing to itself as it retired to the den for the
day. And always, any time of the day or night, if you listened
closely you could hear the cracking and creaking of snow and ice
shifting on mountainsides, punctuated every so often by the boom
of an avalanche.
This morning
there was another sound as well, a low murmuring that had a
distinctly human note to it. Rounding a bend in the stream, Mike
saw the source, sitting cross-legged by the bank, dark fingers
describing little O's as they poised against bony knees, tight
black curls thrown back as the childishly rounded golden-brown
face sought the dawn through the upper branches of the trees.
"Ooooom," she said one more time, closed her eyes, lowered her
head for a moment, then calling him by his childhood name said,
"Hi, Meekay," and sprang to her feet, brushing away petals that
had fallen onto her face. "Happy birthday. Are you on your way
to see Nyima too?"
"Yes, of course.
She's supposed to give birth to her new baby any time now. Have
you heard anything, Chime Cincinnati?" he asked, hiding his
dismay at her unexpected interruption of his journey.
"Not yet," she
said.
He accepted her
company with as good a grace as he could muster. She was a weird
kind of girl, but his sister Nyima seemed to like her, and more
important, so did her beautiful friend Isme. Thoughts of Isme
had kept Mike lying awake nights, thinking of things he could
say or should have said, things he could do or should have done,
presents he might yet offer to convince her that she should take
him as her first husband.
Although Isme and
Chime Cincinnati were the same age, both nearly eighteen, they
were as different as night and day, and not just because Isme
was gracefully tall and blond like her mother, the mountaineer
Tania Enokin, while Chime was short and dark. Isme was already a
desirable grown woman, with gentle, womanly ways, and
Chime—well, Chime just got odder all the time. She didn't go to
school with the other kids, or play the same games. Instead, she
studied and meditated and mumbled to herself and made odd
remarks.
The other kids
had not ever been unkind to her, but they hadn't wanted much to
do with her either. Mike, who was three years older than Chime,
had tried to look after her when they were both younger, before
he went to work with his father in the underground excavations
of the buried portions of Kalapa. He'd always felt kind of sorry
for her, but he'd felt perplexed too. How could anybody grow up
in such a great place as Kalapa, lucky enough to be one of the
last surviving people on earth, and seem so—well—unsettled?
Dissatisfied. He couldn't figure her out.
"I didn't know
you meditated here," he said.
"I don't
usually," she told him. "My favorite place is just beyond the
chorten, facing Karakal, but I thought this morning I'd wait and
walk with you to Nyima's. I knew you'd want to check and see if
the baby might be coming in time to share your birthday."
"Yes, she
promised to name the baby for me if it's born today," he said,
pleased but a little daunted by the thought of having a niece or
nephew born on his birthday, carrying his name. This child would
have a special bond with him and would require a special gift
from him. The only thing he possessed that was special enough
was the set of hand-copied books he had hoped to trade for a
bride gift, a certain silver necklace with blue enameled birds,
and a length of blue silk that would reflect blue eyes.
"Isme's already
there," Chime teased, with a sly note in her voice and laughter
in her sideways glance up at him.
"What are we
waiting for?" he asked, prodding her to her feet. "They'll be
needing someone to help keep my other nieces and nephews out
from under foot."
"It's good to see
so many new babies after all the years of destruction," Chime
said, falling in beside him though he had quickened his pace a
little to keep the heat in his own face from betraying his
thoughts. She sounded as if she personally had witnessed the
world's destruction, although he knew she had lived her whole
life in Kalapa, as he had. It was one of the things that he and
everyone else found so strange about her. Some of the adults,
including his own parents, treated such remarks with respect—but
then, his father at least treated every utterance of every
resident of Kalapa with respect. Other people found Chime's
pronouncements strange and a little frightening, sometimes
annoying. Mike tried not to be annoyed, to ignore the
implication and just respond to what she actually said.
"Yes, and more
are being born all the time. It's a very good thing, of course,
all of this new life, but I'm worried about the haphazard way
new families are filling up the valley. We need to make plans so
that people don't cut into the rhododendron grove to make room
for more houses. After all, people can live in the next valley
over too, can't they? Everybody doesn't have to live right here
in Kalapa."
"The elders were
so busy coping with having our generation," Chime mused, "that
they didn't think ahead enough to what would happen when their
children grew up and started having children. Since any woman
who comes to Shambala before her childbearing years are ended
may continue to have children here, between our mothers and
ourselves we have been doing a good job of repopulating at least
our small corner of the world." She took his hand and swung it
back and forth in hers, as if they were still children. "Don't
worry, Meekay. I remember when Kalapa was much more crowded than
this."
Oh boy. There she
goes again, he thought.
is thought must
have showed on his face because she quickly added, "I mean, I
don't remember exactly, but that's what your father tells me
that my previous incarnation told him anyway."
"Chime
Cincinnati, you're just thinking of the story Auntie Dolma tells
the children."
"You'll hear a
different version tonight, Meekay, at your birthday
celebration," she said, suddenly very serious. On a person's
twenty-first birthday, after the general festivities were over,
the adults held a private initiation ceremony. During it, Mike
knew, the elders retold the story of how Shambala, Kalapa, and
the world came to be as they were now. In the ceremony, however,
they added all of the personal memories, histories, predictions,
and insights that pertained particularly to the person being
initiated into adulthood, sharing all of the information they
possessed about his or her heritage and the circumstances of his
or her birth. More than the presents or the special meal, Mike
was looking forward to this ceremony.
What would they add about him particularly to the basic
story?
“Know, O best beloved, that you are
privileged to be the children of Shambala, which connects heaven
and earth and which is located at the precise joining of the
two.”
Auntie Dolma, who was the one who told the story best
and who loved the works of Rudyard Kipling, insisted on the "O
best beloved" part. Mike thought it added something reassuringly
cozy to the story, which was otherwise rather too sweepingly
grand and timeless for comfort.
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Back to Last Refugee |
Channeling Cleopatra |
PRELUDE
Cleopatra looked at the snake. The snake,
its tongue flicking, stared back at her. She apologized to the
creature, the emblem of her queenship and the end of it. "My
lord, if only Octavius were as trustworthy as you are, there
would be no need to disturb you with our concerns. But alas, my
protectors are all dead, my beauty faded, and even my
hairdresser and handmaiden have offered their flesh to your
fangs for my sake, so I have no choice. If I live and flee,
Octavius will avenge himself upon my children. If I live and
submit, he will degrade and humiliate my person and position in
his accursed Roman triumph, dragging me in chains through the
city where I should by rights have ruled as empress. Then he
will kill me and destroy my body and my hope for the afterlife.
Oh yes, my lord," she said in her tender, singsong voice, the
voice of a natural-born snake charmer. The snake swayed, half
uncoiled to strike, its hood majestically fanned around its
face.
The coils of its body lay still upon the
folds of the yellow, red, and white linens of the Isis robes
covering Charmion's corpse. Iras lay beside the altar containing
the body. Charmion also wore the Isis crown and what was left of
the crown jewels. Iras had dressed her fellow handmaiden's head
in the black Isis curls Cleopatra customarily wore when assuming
the guise of the goddess. The queen herself had employed her
considerable skill with cosmetics to change faces with her
look-alike maid. Now, dressed as Charmion, she explained herself
to the cobra. The cobra did not mind her humble robes. It knew
who she was. She was Egypt, its home, its mother, and finally,
its prey.
She spoke to it to clarify her own mind
before her death and to delay that same death, for she had long
loved life and was loath to leave it, even under the
circumstances.
"Yes, it's true. I have it on the best
authority. Isis in her compassion has sent me a dream so I may
save my body and thus my immortal soul. Whatever lies he tells
my people, Octavius intends to burn me after my death—before it,
if he is given the opportunity, I'm sure. So I have chosen my
own time. My eldest son has fled the country, and as for my
younger children, I am unable to protect them, and moreover, I
provide cause for Octavius to do them harm. Perhaps without me
to spite with their suffering, he will spare them. And so you
must give me my last kiss, my lord. My priests, who know our
little secret, will do the rest. In exchange, I grant you your
freedom from your duties as guardian of this tomb and temple."
She took a deep breath, broke eye contact,
and quickly, so as to startle the fascinated snake, thrust her
arm at it. Having had its part so considerately explained to it,
the cobra performed its last state service and struck her with a
force that staggered her back, away from the altar.
Unhooded and blending with the dust, the
snake then slithered out through an open window.
The pain subsided, quickly replaced with
numbness. Soon she knew paralysis and death would follow. By
that time, Octavius would have received her message begging him
to bury her with Antony. She knew he would not, but the message
would serve to seal in his mind that the body in her robes was
her own. He would expect to see her there, and dead, and that is
what he would see.
The stage was set to perfection, except
the cobra, in striking, had pulled Charmion's wig askew. Slowly,
with a sense of detachment and amusement, as if she had had too
much wine, Cleopatra rose and stretched out her other hand to
adjust it.
Which was how Octavius and his soldiers
saw her when they burst into the room.
She felt Octavius staring hard at her, and
she thought for a moment the ruse had failed. Then he said,
puzzled, more to himself than to her, "Is this well done?"
The bastard was trying to figure out if
her death was to his advantage or not.
She felt herself ready to fly to the
afterlife, but she had never been able to resist a good exit
line. "It is well done," she said, her voice unrecognizably
husky with the dying, "and fitting for a princess descended of
so many royal kings."
And so it was that the body of Charmion,
dressed in the robes of Cleopatra, was displayed to the people
as proof of her death. Later, as Cleopatra's dream had warned,
Octavius publicly said she would be interred with Mark Antony
but privately, to his lieutenant, he said, "Burn the bitch. The
brats may watch."
The bodies of the handmaidens were removed
afterward by the priests. Cleopatra's public tomb, stripped of
its glories by Octavius, lay empty, as she had somehow always
known it would. But it secretly connected, through a long and
twisting passage with many stairs and a maze of tunnels, with a
private tomb concealed deep beneath her palace. In some ways,
the tomb was very bare, her special coffin, sealed within three
others, the simple alabaster canopic jars with her cartouche and
titles and seals of gold, some clothing and toiletries, a
prettily carved inlaid table and chair, a bed, a wealth of
lamps. The tomb was for one person only. No place for husbands
or children or even trusted servants. Iras's body had been
removed to her family's crypt. Instead, the side rooms held
Cleopatra's greatest treasure, one that Octavius and other
conquerors lacked the wit to covet. But to the queen, for whom
the love of erudition was more fundamental than her love of
either of her Roman husbands or even her kingdom, her burial
hoard was of the most valuable nature possible. It contained the
originals to the best, the rarest, the most informed and
fascinating of the manuscripts collected by her own great
Museon, the Library of Alexandria.
CHAPTER 11
For Leda Hubbard, attending the
International Conference of Egyptologists was the next best
thing to personally participating in a dig. When she found a
ticket in her mailbox, she was giddy with joy but curious and
also suspicious about who would treat her to such a thing. For
the cost of one of those tickets, you could almost buy a plane
trip to Egypt.
Most of the attendees who were not
presenting papers or teaching seminars had corporate
sponsorship. Nonetheless, Leda recalculated her budget six times
until she came up with almost enough to go. Then the urgent need
for a root canal and a new radiator for her car gobbled up her
ticket money.
Cinderella she wasn't, but nevertheless,
some mysterious benefactor, secret admirer, fairy godmother, or
possibly a stalker, decided she could go to the ball.
After enjoying a splendid day filled with
intellectual delights, Leda was finally ready to turn into a
pumpkin. It was not yet sunset, much less midnight, but the
showroom had closed, the lectures were over, and her feet felt
like they actually were encased in something as agonizing as
glass slippers, which could not have been comfy.
The Portland Convention Center was huge,
and she had walked the equivalent of a marathon attending
seminars, checking out the goodies in the showroom, and
searching for favorite authors of scholarly tomes. She hadn't
met any princes, true. But she now had something that was in her
opinion much better: a rolling suitcase full of books about
pharaohs (and related topics, such as how to identify said
pharaohs), now autographed. The only thing better than that
would have been to be the autographer instead of the
autographee.
Alas, she, who had entertained full-blown
H. Rider Haggard/Elizabeth Peters dreams of being an
Egyptologist while still an undergrad at Heidelberg, had never
fully realized her ambitions.
She had achieved the Ph.D. in forensic
anthropology and was a by-Bast doctor-not-of-medicine, though
she had probably handled more cadavers than the average M.D. But
she had not been able to squeeze in the additional studies
necessary to specialize in Egyptology with the time and money
allotted her.
The Navy, while debating about paying for
her graduate degree while she was on active duty, suggested in
their cute little bureaucratic way that Egyptologists were less
likely to make it through school without being called into a war
zone than, say, their useful colleagues who studied corpses of
more recent vintage. In the charming phrasing of the Graduate
Studies in Continuing Education financial assistance and career
counseling officer, "This is a weird sort of thing you want to
study, Chief Hubbard, but the Navy does have a certain limited
use for forensic scientists. What we need are people who can put
pieces of dead troops back together so the remains can be
identified. Most of these troops will not be of ancient Egyptian
stock; therefore, if you wish to study any of that elitist crap,
you can do so on your own dime. The Navy has no job openings for
Egyptologists. Do I make myself clear?"
She had sighed, batted her lashes, and
said in the sultry voice that had made her voted by her senior
class "most likely to succeed in a career in the telephonic sex
industry," "I just love it when you get all butch and masterful,
sir."
The officer had blushed. He was about
twenty-four. She was thirty-six at the time. A career that had
until that time been spent aboard aircraft carriers and
submarines dealing with matters that required a top security
clearance made her feel much much older.
But the kid had been right about one thing. There were, until
very recently, few job ops for Egyptologists who were not
Egyptian. This was as true of civilian life as it had been in
the Navy. These days, she worked in the Oregon state laboratory,
mostly helping law enforcement agencies gather evidence to
identify anonymous remains.
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Back to Channeling
Cleopatra |
Cleopatra 7.2 |
PROLOGUE
The Book of Cleopatra's Reawakeningg
Herein do I,
Cleopatra Philopater, Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt, the
seventh Cleopatra of the ruling house of Ptolemy, set down the
circumstances pertaining to the discovery of my tomb. This I do
at the behest of my soul's companion in this life, Leda Hubbard,
who asks it so that a play may be made of it and the story told
to the world thereby. For this we are to be endowed with, if not
a queen's ransom, at least the price of a modest palace.
To begin with, I
was awakened from the dead.
This was done by
means of a magic uncommonly known even in these years of
miraculous happenings. Quite simply, a portion of my body still
connected to my ba, or body spirit, was used to connect my ba to
another body, that of Leda Hubbard, a woman of low birth but
high intellect. This magic is called a blending. Leda and I
first blended as we dreamed. I learned that she, like myself,
grieved for her father and had suffered betrayal. I knew of her
love of books and words, her search for knowledge. But I also
knew, even as she slept, that we were in immediate mortal
danger. We awakened to our peril aboard a ship owned by our
enemy. With the aid of Leda's allies and our combined strengths,
we prevailed and vanquished our enemy.
When we were
safely ashore in what had once been my beloved Alexandria, I
began to understand that, although I once more breathed and
tasted, saw and smelled, was able to touch and to feel touch,
the life I had ended with the cobra would in no way continue. No
longer would I be concerned with the fate of the Egypt I knew,
for it was either gone or buried beneath many generations of
sand and captivity.
Octavian, who
continued his dominion of both my lands and his as Augustus
Caesar, this viper who murdered Caesar's own son, my Caesarian,
is dead. That Marc Antony is lost I knew before my own death.
His son, my Alexander Helios, was murdered like his half brother
by Octavian. My other children, Selene and Ptolemy Philadelphus,
were banished from Egypt and died in foreign lands without the
benefit of an Egyptian burial. Thus I had no hope that they
might enter into this afterlife as I have with the aid of that
odd little magician, Chimera.
Alas, Leda's body
is not capable of childbearing so there will be no more children
for me, even if there are in this new age men worthy of
fathering them. All that I loved, all that I lived for, is gone.
Thus is my life ended, and so it begins again, without husband
or children, title or lands or wealth of any consequence, great
beauty or great power.
Still, Leda's
loyalties are as strong as my own, and I find some comfort that
the people whose fates concern her do seem to be worthwhile.
However, she has
not been a queen and was not reared believing she was born to
greatness. Her goals are as modest as her means, and this I must
change.
We made a
beginning by changing history as Leda's contemporaries have
known it. We had no tension within us at this time, for our
thoughts and longings were in unison. Both of us wished to
revisit my tomb and learn what remained.
I imagined I
would be able to go straight to it. During my lifetime, I had
visited it clandestinely for years, secreting the most precious
of the scrolls I saved from the burning of the great library.
Later, when Antony gifted me with scrolls looted from the
library in Pergamum, I had them copied and personally deposited
the originals in the vaults within my second tomb.
Why a second
tomb? Leda asked. But she answered her own question almost
immediately. Grave robbers, of course, were the first reason I
chose to have a secret place of interment as well as my public
mausoleum. Anyone who has strolled through the marketplace has
beheld the property that was supposed to be taken into the
afterlife with long-dead pharaohs and other people of substance.
Their tombs were built more for grandeur than for security.
Looters broke in and stole their funeral goods and dismembered
the mummies so carefully and expensively laid to "eternal" rest.
I value my privacy and my dignity far too much to allow that to
happen to me.
So, though no one
knew but myself and one old childhood friend who became my most
trusted priest, there was concealed within my mausoleum an
underground passageway.
I have now
watched many films and read many books and articles that claim
to be about my life. Some of them say that I am a traitorous and
disloyal person. They base their evaluation on the evidence that
I had my brothers and sisters killed, disregarding the fact that
my beloved sibs would have done the same for me had I not, as
Leda says, "beat them to it." The truth is that I have always
been a very loyal person and a true friend to those who do not
try to murder me or betray me.
And Anoubus was always, if unobtrusively, loyal to me.
He understood my true nature. I wonder what became of him under
Octavian??
Ah well. Anoubus
and I discovered the passageway and the tomb when we were
children of perhaps eight and six years. It was within the
palace quarter, naturally, or I would not have been allowed
there. We found it while playing in a disused part of the harem.
Father did not keep as many concubines and wives as his
forebears, perhaps because he loved wine and song far better
than he loved women, with the possible exception of me.
The passageway
was exciting for us, a secret to be shared, but even more
exciting was the tomb at the end of it. I knew in my heart it
had been one of the early tombs of my own ancestor, Alexander.
Of course, it was empty then, but by the light of our lamps the
marble walls still gleamed, and the spaciousness of the rooms
rivaled that of my father's own private chambers. We scuffed
away the sand to reveal a fine mosaic on the floor, the colors
of its tiles bright even by our flickering lights.
Throughout my
childhood, I escaped there often from my older sister, who hated
me because Father preferred me, and my brothers. When I thought
of it, I held my breath, fearing that some new building project
would clear the entrance to my private haven, but this did not
happen. When I assumed the throne, I myself cleared the area and
had my mausoleum built over it; under the supervision of my
friend.
As intimately as
I had known it, when Leda and I tried to find it again, I
doubted we ever would. My beautiful white-columned city, with
its wide streets and its great monuments, might never have been.
Now it lies buried beneath tall and ugly buildings, short and
ugly buildings, and the streets are filled with noisy machinery,
tearing along at speed far greater than that of any chariot or
natural animal I have ever seen in all my life before I awakened
with Leda.
I knew
approximately where the palace quarter had been only from the
shoreline of the Eastern Harbor, and even this was much altered.
Leda and I pored over maps from many time periods. None was more
than someone's guess at the layout of the city of my birth, my
youth, my reign, the city I gave to Caesar and to Antony, the
city whose people, treasures, institutions, customs, and
monuments I protected with every skill and wit I possessed.
Leda showed me
the artifacts retrieved from the harbor when it had been drained
for excavation. Soon the sponsors of this excavation and the
current government will attempt to reconstruct the shore line as
I knew it, to rebuild some semblance of my palace and the
monuments of the time. This will be done not to house a new
pharaoh or even a president, but for foreign visitors called
tourists. It is a worthy project and I approve of it and mean to
have Leda and myself consulting so that we may instruct the
builders on the correct installation of each feature and
structure.
But I digress. We
examined these artifacts, most of which were large chunks of
stone that were mere suggestions of the intricately carved and
colored statuary and columns, building blocks and fountains that
had once adorned my home. These items, more than any other
thing, including the monstrous modern city, made clear to me how
much time has passed since last I walked these streets. Not that
I can walk them now without risk of being crushed by one of the
speeding conveyances.
I saw a blunted
and water worn statue of myself I had commissioned as a gift for
what we hoped would be Caesar's coronation. The cheeks were
pitted, the tip of the nose and part of the chin chipped off.
The details of hair and crown, clothing and jewels were mostly
lost, however. It looked, it was, thousands of years old. Many
pieces of the colossal statues of my Ptolemy ancestors whose
images had lined the harbor and stood sentinel beside the great
Pharos Lighthouse hulked among the cases and explanatory
plaques. The bones of my past.
They saddened me,
caused me to shudder. Though I had coolly faced the enemies who
were my kin and the enemy who was the death of my family, as
well as the cobra who was my ultimate deliverer, I was shaken
with disorientation, with vertigo. How strange it was to be
there viewing the scene of my former life as if from the wrong
end of a telescope that saw through the distance of time rather
than space.
Even so, another part of me, the part my father had
trained in the ways of all of the pharaohs and satraps before
us, was reading the plaques. I mentally restored and replaced
the objects to their original installations. Seeing where they
had been found from the maps and plaques, I calculated how far
they might have tumbled during the mighty earthquakes that were
my city's ultimate conquerors.
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Back to Cleopatra 7.2 |
Spam Vs. the Vampire |
There was no
indication when Darcy left the house that morning that she was
going to get herself snatched by a vampire and wasn’t coming
back. She left our dishes half full, the litter box un-scooped,
our fountains running, the TV set on the Critter Channel where
we like it and the desk top computer on “sleep.” If I had known
what she was going to do, I’d have stopped her, even if it meant
peeing on something vital or the ultimate sacrifice, acting sick
enough for an emergency trip to the vet. But none of us had any
idea she would just go away and stay away and none of us even
thought to look for clues until the first day and night passed.
I, at least, was
plenty anxious to see her. Even the night after she left, I ran
from window to window, jumping onto the broad sills and looking
out to try to see her coming. Usually I could hear her footsteps
several minutes before she arrived but this time, she stubbornly
continued to not appear.
When neither she
or anyone else showed up to open our cans, fill the kibble bowls
or clean our trays, as one or two of her friends had done before
when she was gone for more than one feeding, naturally everyone
began to speculate. Except for the ones who were busy panicking.
“Okay,” Rocky
said, his half-tail jerking with agitation. “It’s finally
happened. Darcy’s abandoned us, or else she’s dead. Either way,
we’re finished. We’ve had it pretty good here but we’re on our
own again. Pretty soon the animal control van will come, we’ll
be hauled off to the so-called shelter and be forced to take the
long dirt nap.”
“That’s if anyone
even finds us before the food and water run out and we starve to
death,” BearPaws cried as if he had already started starving.
Darcy had been gone long enough for us to miss two wet food
meals by then and BearPaws was in mourning. He really loved his
wet food.
“It’s the storm,”
my mother said sensibly. “She must have got caught in it and hid
somewhere till it let up.”
“Don’t be
ridiculous, Board!” Max told her, raising his gray and white
face from his paws. “Darcy’s not like us. Humans don’t get
caught out in storms.”
“Yes,” said Cleo,
who used to have a gift shop until the owner died and she came
to live with Darcy. She’s very sophisticated, Cleo is. “They go
into shops and eating places and wait and talk with other
humans. Often they buy things if you twine around their feet and
act friendly. That gives them the chance to ask the clerk about
you and the clerk a chance to ask them what they want to buy
without seeming pushy.”
“Are you
suggesting she is neglecting us in order to go out and pet other
cats?” My mother demanded.
“It happens,”
Trixie said. “You know it does. I’ve smelled her hands when she
comes home after patting other cats. There’s no getting around
it. She’s a sucker for a kitty face.”
“Lucky for us,”
Max said. “That’s why we’re all here.”
“The point is,”
Mother said, “We’re here but where is she?”
“Can’t you find
out from her ‘puter, Spam?” my sister Bitbit asked.
“I don’t think it
tells you where people go,” I said. “Anyway, we know that, don’t
we? She went out. Like she usually does.”
“To pet other
cats,” Trixie said.
“Maybe, but she
does it almost every day, sooner or later. She says she has to
leave the house and see other humans. Yesterday she was going to
meet that guy she’s been building a website for.”
“How do you know
that?” my brother Byte asked.
“She said so. She
said her client was going to pay her and she should be able to
bring home treats.” She didn’t really say anything about treats
but I thought it would make the others feel better if she had.
And I was sure she meant to say that. Her good luck was always
our good luck too. “Then she put her ‘puter pad in her backpack
and put that on over her outer coat, the black leather one, and
walked across the street into the woods, like always. You all
saw her. It was yesterday morning just before the storm
started.”
“Was he handsome?
Maybe she stayed with him,” Fat Mama suggested, sighing as she
plopped down onto her belly. Fat Mama has had a lot of kittens
in her day, most recently Coco, Mojo, Jojo and Cookie, who all
live here too. All but Cookie are black, like Fat Mama.
Cookie is orange
striped, like me and my brothers and sister, and half the cats
in town, according to my mother. She told us our feral sire is
an orange tabby. She says his hobby is making copies of himself.
“How would I
know?” I asked.
Rocky jumped on
his three good legs to the windowsill and peered out between the
curtains. I’d been there off and on for the whole day too,
watching the storm, listening to the wind as it moaned around
the house, sometimes shaking it and making things rattle. It
whipped the trees into a leafy hula dance and flattened the
grass with the rain. Now it was almost dark again and the
security light kept coming on, showing the depressingly empty
yard.
“It’s wild out
there,” Rocky said. “They were saying on the news that this is
the worst storm since ‘76, when it lasted for six days. There
are trees and power lines down all over the highway and the news
dude said the bridge is closed. I’m guessing a tree bopped Darcy
on the head and killed her outright.”
Everybody started
crying, me included. Rocky looked smug. Life sucked. He knew
that and he was always glad when he was proved right, even if it
meant our human mom might be dead and we’d all starve to death
before anybody remembered about us.
“You and your
news!” Mother said. “Why can’t you watch the Critter Channel
like the rest of us?”
“Because there’s
no bed to hide under in the living room, and Mojo and Coco are
always playing under the couch is why,” Fat Mama said. “Rocky’s
a big ‘fraidy cat. That’s why Darcy leaves on the TV in her
bedroom for him, so he has company in the dark. You better hope
the power doesn’t go off, Mr. ‘Fraidy Cat!”
“Darcy is not
dead,” Mother said firmly. “If she was, someone would come and
take care of us.”
“Unless they
didn’t know she was dead,” Rocky said. “Coyotes might have got
her.”
Mother popped him
one across the ear.
Darcy couldn’t be
dead. Dead was what Popsicle was when she laid all stiff and
still on the rug in front of the stove, her fur getting cool and
her scent—well, changing, and not in a good way. Dead was when
you went to the vet and never came back again.
“I bet the tree
knocked her out like one of those tranquilizer darts they use on
TV,” Trixie said. “She couldn’t tell anyone to come and feed
us,”
“Or a coyote got
her,” Rocky said.
“Coyotes don’t
get people. Only cats,” Mother told him.
I left them
arguing and returned to my place in the desk chair. When Darcy
was here, she used the chair seat and I sat on the back and
supervised, but I knew what was happening on the screen and
although she didn’t realize it, I know how to use the keypad
too.
I may be a young
cat who looks like most of the other young cats in town, but I
have skills. And the laptop was still here. I am a whiz with the
tablet that’s her new portable because it responds easily to a
paw touch but I’ve had more practice with the desktop. It’s
always on except when she goes to bed.
Darcy
doesn’t know I can use it but I practice every time she takes a
break or goes away. Even though I’m only half grown, the other
cats all know I am the one who helps her with her work and I
know what I’m doing. Mom says I probably picked up my talent
because she had me and my littermates in the gutted case of an
old CPU. That’s why Darcy named us all computer names—Mom is the
mother Board, ha ha, and there’s Bitbit, my sister, and Byte,
Shifty, Alt and Escape, my brothers, but Darcy said she was
darned if she was going to call me Delete. Since I looked so
much like all the other kittens in town, she named me Spam.
She held me in
her lap even before my eyes opened and I suckled, you might say,
on the electronic impulse. When my eyes did open, instead of
rough-housing with my littermates, I sat on her shoulder or lap
or the back of her chair, or, when she wasn’t looking, right
beside the keyboard, watching and learning. She thought my
brothers and I took turns sitting with her because she couldn’t
tell us apart then but nope, it was always me.
Of course I
checked to see if the ‘puter would tell me where she was. I
tapped the news feed, but nope, no stories about cat owners
getting bopped by trees.
I tapped on her
projects in progress, a website for the grocery CO-OP where she
gets our food, one for a local nursery and the “vampire dating
site” she was creating for the guy from Montreal she called
Marcel. He was the one she had been going to meet. Mew hoo! He
even went to the library two or three times so he could video
chat with her. It was always in the evening. She put on red
lipstick before she talked to him and her voice changed. I gave
her moral support by sitting on her lap. Her hands trembled when
she petted me and I knew this was not just another client.
They did talk
about work a little. He told her questions he wanted her to use
to interview the prospects. I thought they were kind of odd.
Especially the one about blood type. She laughed and said that
would be the kind of question a vampire date would ask. He also
wondered about family members living—or buried—near them and
that sort of thing. Darcy told him she had no one, which wasn’t
true of course. She had us.
It was nice we
had work, and I am all about getting kibble in the house, but I
didn’t like the look of this guy or the way Darcy acted when she
was online with him.
She’d come here,
I heard her telling her friend Perry, our sometimes-cat-sitter,
to get away from a bad relationship. The male she’d been
involved with had started taking drugs. I couldn’t understand
that. Drugs are the same thing as medicine like you get at the
vet and why someone would take them on purpose is beyond me! But
she said her habit had always been to pick guys who seemed nice
but turned out to be mean, married or addicted to something so
she had moved to Port Deception to get away from all that and
from now on, the only males in her life would have tails and
pointy ears.
I wanted to
remind her of that when she talked to Marcel. But he wasn’t bad
looking if you like human males, I suppose, all of his head fur
was dark and kind of curly and his eyes were sort of
hungry-looking, He had an oddly soothing voice—it almost put you
to sleep, but I found him hard to understand. He didn’t say his
words the way Darcy did but she seemed to like the way he did
it.
The last time
they chatted, when they finished, she scooped me up and hugged
me to her, kissing the top of my head. I learned long ago that
resistance was futile, so I purred instead. “Maybe my luck with
men has finally changed, Spammy. I think Marcel’s really into
me. Good thing for us he doesn’t like the more public social
networking sites and hired us instead. He’s a private kinda guy,
it sounds like. And hot. And—er—maybe rich?” She sighed, hugged
and kissed me again then tossed me to the floor and started her
magic fingers flying across the keyboard. She checked a couple
of accounts and winked at me. “The first $500 just hit my bank
account. Just like that.”
The next day she
drove to the grocery store and returned with five bags of canned
food and two thirty pound bags of kibble—plus canned salmon all
around.
That was two
weeks ago. I checked her mail trash and her send box and found
an email from him saying, “I expect to be in Port Deception
tomorrow night. Give me directions to your place.”
But apparently
her good sense kicked in then because she said, “I’d rather meet
in the morning. Maybe at Bagels and Begonias Bakery?”
“Okay. I suppose
I can find something to do in the meantime. I cannot wait to
meet you,” his email said. “But as it is a business meeting, for
now, bring all of your work and your computer. Maybe you can
give me a lesson?”
And that was the
last entry. I wasn’t sure what else to try. So I took a nap and
waited some more.
The whole first
night passed and then a morning and a long windy afternoon soon
followed by the beginning of another wild windy night and still
Darcy didn’t come home. The kibble dwindled to a sprinkling in
the bottoms of the dishes and the water dispensers burbled the
last of their wetness into the basins. Her scent wasn’t nearly
as strong in the chair or on the keyboard as it had been. I
rubbed my face against the keys and tried to nap but kept waking
up and jumping onto the windowsill long after the other cats had
settled down to sleep. Rocky passed the office door.
“Get used to it,
kit. She’s not coming back. You were born in captivity. You
haven’t been out in the world and learned what humans are really
like yet.”
“Rocky, she has
never been anything but nice to you and all the others. If you
had been born here like I was, you’d know it’s not captivity,
it’s how cats and their people are supposed to be.”
He gave a little
growl and limped away.
I huddled against
the cool windowpane after that, watching the wind blow and
waiting for the jingle of her house keys in her hand as she
approached the kitchen door.
I was so sad I
was almost convinced I’d never hear that sound again when I did.
The house keys. There they were. The clink of keys tapping
together, a smaller sound but very distinct against the wind.
But there was
something wrong. I’d heard no footsteps. The security light
hadn’t gone on and though I peered back toward the kitchen door,
I couldn’t see Darcy.
Barking exploded
from next door. Angry, loud barking so scary I flew off the
windowsill as if someone had shot me.
A key clicked in
the kitchen door. Well, I hadn’t seen her but it had to be
Darcy. Didn’t it? Or maybe Perry, come to cat sit since Darcy
was gone. I had to see anyway. I sprinted to the office door.
The kitchen door
creaked then slammed open with the wind. My mother and
littermates, who usually sleep under the kitchen table, streaked
past me in a blur of fur. Other drowsy heads snapped up and the
living room, where some of my housemates had been dozing, was
suddenly catless.
Who could it be?
I slunk toward the kitchen, ears flat and whiskers quivering. I
did not smell Darcy, not unless Rocky was right and she was
dead. The wind drove the scent through the kitchen and into me.
None of it was anything like Darcy.
The dog barking
up a storm in the middle of the storm, that was familiar too.
Had it been just last night when I was aroused from my nap on
Darcy’s pillow by Darcy rousing from her pillow and looking out
the window? The dog was barking then too, and there was the same
rotten stench and something flapping outside our window—at its
center was a bright white oval face with red glowing eyes.
I crept toward the kitchen, my curiosity strengthened by the
memory. The dead something had flown into the night, and Darcy
lay down again, sleeping as if she had never come all the way
awake, and nothing unusual had happened. After awhile, I did
too. End of close encounter of the weird kind
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Back to Spam Vs. the Vampire |
9 Tales O' Cats |
THE QUEEN’S CAT’S TALE
My first cat story for Andre Norton’s Cat
Fantastic series of cat anthologies, this story was dedicated to
Lady Jane Grey, a delicate and diffident tabby.
I’ve held my silence long enough and see no reason why my story
cannot now be told. My children are grown, everyone concerned
save only my lady and me has passed beyond, and though you’d
never know it by looking at me, I’m getting on in years. So is
my lady, drowsing now beside the fire. Her hair—that smelled so
like wild violets I delighted to roll in its spring-bright
strands during those long months when her lord was campaigning
and we lay together for comfort...Ah her hair—where was I? Oh
yes, (how one does wander as one gets on in years).
Her hair is now white as that cold
stuff—snow, it’s called—that sticks to the paw pads and
inevitably comes around whether it’s wanted or not.
Just like some people I could mention. But
more about them later.
As I was saying, it’s peaceful here in
this simple, quiet place, and although it is drafty, my fire. Of
course, the idea is that we live here with the sisters because
my lady has been humbled, you see, and they, she and the
sisters, are supposed to be all the same, but snobbery springs
eternal and my lady’s rank gets us our little fire and the
choicest morsels and never a cross word about me even if I
choose to sleep in the chapel. A queen—even a former queen, even
a disgraced queen, is still top cat.
Not that we haven’t made many sacrifices.
This is not as nice as the palace with its lovely fresh rushes
twice a day and the delicious fur coverlets to nuzzle and knead
and that little velvet cushion just for me. Not that I ever
actually used the thing, mind you, but I appreciated having it
reserved for my exclusive occupation nonetheless.
But those days have long since passed away, as soon shall I and
my lady as well, though not necessarily in that order. Just in
case I’m someday left alone I’ve taken as my protégée Sister
Mary Immaculata a common but cheerful young calico who loves to
hear of life among the quality. As well she might. For who came
closer to any of them than me? Who knows better the truth behind
the dreadful events that preceded the fall of Camelot, and who
else fully realizes why anything or anyone worthwhile was
salvaged from the entire mess? Who knows with more claw-bearing
conviction than I the true villain of the piece??
And who besides myself and my lady knows
the deepest, darkest, most private secret of the great and
fearless Sir Lancelot DuLac himself? No one, that’s who. And so
no one else is aware that this weakness in the great warrior is
the crux of the entire matter. Ordinarily I would never cast
aspersions on such a seemingly flawless reputation, but
willy-nilly there’s no tampering with the plain and simple fact
that Sir Lancelot was allergic to cats and it was this weakness
that was the undoing of Camelot and the salvation of my lady.
When I say allergic, I do not mean dislike
leading to the genteelly martyred sniffles some affect in my
presence. Oh, no. Blew up like a toad, he did. Broke out in
spots the size of mouse droppings. Got so itchy he looked like
he was trying to dance a pavane in a seated position. Sneezed
loud enough to be heard halfway to Cornwall. And his eyes,
usually so clear, swelled shut as if encased in two red pillows.
And me? I was crazy about him. He was like
catnip and cream to me. Something about his scent, I expect. But
particularly when I was younger, I simply could not stop myself.
No sooner did he walk in into the room than I twined around his
ankles. No sooner did he drop his hand to the arm of a chair
than I began grooming his fingers. No sooner was he seated at
the Round Table than I leapt upon his shoulders and ran my tail
beneath his nostrils, rubbing my face against his hair, purring
like a chit of a kitten.
The other knights laughed at us and my
lord, the king, looked rather sad that I had never so favored
him, for he was very fond of cats and had given me as a kitten
into my lady’s service, but I was shameless. My mother always
told me it is a wise creature who knows her own mind and I knew
that I wanted to be with Lancelot. Not that I ever got to spend
a great deal of time with him. My lady would always come to
pluck me away, though often I brought with me a bit of fabric or
a strand of hair for a souvenir, to purr over at some later
time. Lady Elaine, my lady’s minion, once tried removing me and
all I will say about that is that she never tried again.
Lancelot was too polite and too afraid of offending my lady to
swat me. Also, I am quite sure he admired me from afar, for as
events revealed, at one time he was fond of cats, despite his
malady. My fur is very soft and my purr is very soothing, as my
lady so often has said. I used to hope one day his iron will
would overcome his unfortunate reactions to my presence.
Alas, we never had the chance to find out,
for my lady, at the instigation of that beastly Elaine, shut me
up in the privy tower whenever Lancelot was in the vicinity.
After the time when I almost fell into the hole and had to be
rescued after hanging on by a clawtip and screaming for hours
before anyone heard me, I decided that my attraction to Lancelot
was merely a superficial one, and whatever silly problems
Lancelot had to overcome, he would have to find some other cat
to train him out of them.
Never let it be said that I am anything
but generous and patient to a fault, but I had my position to
think of and my lady could not be expected to do without my
services for long periods of time just because a mere knight, no
matter how worthy, had what was really a rather comical reaction
to cats.
So I hid. I hid in the little hollow of
the crown at the top of Arthur’s throne, under the Round Table,
and on nice days in one of the arrow slits overlooking the moat.
I particularly liked the top of the canopied beds because I
couldn’t be got down before I made sure the tapestries, as well
as arms and faces, suffered, and I knew very well how much Lady
Elaine hated mending. After awhile, they forgot to look for me,
and I once again assumed my rightful duties as my lady’s chief
confidante concerning the supervision of the business of the
castle.
I could have told them never to let those
two in, Mordred and that so-called cat of his. Any cat worth the
water to drown her in could have told them that Mordred was the
sort of boy who torments cats with unspeakable indignities (and
I should know), not the sort to share a morsel and pillow and a
bit of companionship with one of us. That alone should have
warned them, as I could not, but since it did not, they should
have realized what those two were up to at once when that
so-called cat snuggled up to Lancelot and he didn’t even
sniffle.
That should have told the humans, poor
things, that something distinctly fishy was brewing and it
wasn’t chowder. I knew at once, of course. The creature’s accent
was dreadful and her manners worse.
I was in the garden when they arrived,
Mordred riding his golden steed, that creature in a basket in
front of him. I was engaged in efficiently rearranging the piled
leaves the gardeners had gathered and paying no attention to
traffic. My lady, His Majesty, and Sir Lancelot played dominoes
on a nearby bench. Mordred, sweet as pie, dismounted, lifting
down the basket more tenderly, I swear, than he ever did
anything. To no avail. The nasty creature hopped out, landing
with a plop in the middle of my leaves, where she sat as if she
belonged. Naturally, I hissed at her and told her whose
territory she was invading before giving her a pawful across the
nose. She did not even do me the courtesy of hissing back. She
did not raise a hair, did not arch her back. She merely flipped
her tail as she deftly avoided my paw, rose, and sprang straight
onto Lancelot’s lap.
I crouched expectantly, quick thumps of my
tail sending the leaves flying like so many gold and orange
birds flushed from the gorse. Soon she would get her comeuppance
as he sneezed and swelled. I was not greatly surprised that no
one stirred a finger to remove her. It had been some months
since I had made my private, privy-bound decision to leave the
man alone in his poor cat-deprived existence. I’ve noticed
people have very short memories when it comes to who suffers
what ailments, and a good thing that is, too, I suppose. But
when, after several minutes, the knight’s long fingers strayed
to stroke her sleek black-and-red mottled fur, and his eyes
didn’t swell and he did not cough or sneeze, I confess I was
quite insulted. To all appearances, he was unperturbed by the
newcomer. To all appearances, therefore, he was not allergic to
cats in general, but to me in particular.
Not that I cared, mind you. I’d given up
on the man as hopeless already. I sat washing the fur of my
stomach with great concentration whenever he glanced my way. But
he did not glance my way. While Mordred charmed Their Majesties
with soft words, the tortoiseshell slitted her sly gold eyes at
my lady’s Champion and purred in a disgustingly ingratiating
manner. And Lancelot, normally so intelligent and perceptive,
called her la petite minou and fondled her ears while smiling
like a total ninny.
I entertained myself listening to Mordred,
who was attempting to convey greetings from the exiled witch,
Morgan le Fey, the King’s sister. His Majesty did not want to
hear about it. I had heard rumors that the witch was exiled for
plotting the King’s murder. I have also heard rumors that she
once stole Excalibur and arranged for the disappearance of the
king’s old tutor, the wizard Merlin. Whatever the king’s true
reason for her banishment, to him it was an urgent one: that
brave and kind man’s brow sweated at the mere mention of her
name.
My lady the queen nodded politely at
everything Mordred said, but stretched out her hand to the
newcomer in Lancelot’s lap, who arched so that her head butted
my lady’s palm. Well! That was enough for me. I bounded from my
leaf pile, not that anyone noticed, and twined about my lady’s
ankles, plaintively reminding her who was her trusted associate
and who was not. I was poised to jump up when Lancelot, the
traitor, began sneezing and snotting and, though I couldn’t see
for my lady’s skirts, swelling, I am sure. To my great
satisfaction the tortoiseshell horror was dumped from his lap
and I did a bit of swelling myself and lashed for her with my
front paws. Bat-a-bat-bat! I would give her, mincing her nose.
That would teach her to bring it interfering into the business
of others.
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|
Back to 9 Tales O' Cats |
Father Christmas: Spam the
Cat's First Christmas |
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all
through the house, not a creature was stirring; not even a
mouse. Rats! While I’d been out chasing vampires and zombies, my
furry housemates had hunted all the fun prey. Now my fourteen
feline roomies were all asleep, our human mom Darcy was gone for
the weekend leaving us on our own with just a cat-sitter coming
in to feed us, and I felt restless. I was nine months old, and
this was my first Christmas.
It felt like something ought to happen. It
felt like something was going to happen, but I was pretty sure
it wasn’t going to be in my boring house with my boring friends
and relatives.
On the other hand, it was snowing outside.
We were having a white Christmas. Bah, humbug. Bad weather is
what it is, the kind that clots white cold stuff in your paw
pads. Unacceptable. I would wait until the weather humans came
to their senses to go out, I had decided.
That was before I heard the prancing and
pawing of each little hoof, apparently coming from up on my
roof. I sat down to think, curling my tail around my front paws,
my calm pose betrayed only by a slight flick at the creamy end
of my plumy appendage. There were stockings hung by the propane
stove with care, but a trip down that chimney would be
disastrous for anybody, since they’d just end up inside the
stove and wouldn’t be able to get out. I considered waking my
mother for a further explanation of the powers of Santa Claws.
But then I thought that if anyone would know what was going on,
it would be Rocky. I jumped onto the kitchen counter and stood
against the corner cupboard. I am a very long cat, even without
taking my tail into account. My front feet could just reach the
top cabinet, where Rocky liked to lurk during the day. Inserting
my paw beneath the door’s trim, I pushed. It smelled like
vampire cat in there, but not as though the vampire cat was
actually in there. Rocky was out. Well, it was night. He
wouldn’t mind the snow.
Some more scrabbling on the roof, and I
suddenly thought, what if Rocky has Santa Claws and is feeding
on him? He might. He was my friend, but he was definitely no
respecter of age, gender, or mythological belief system.
I bolted out my private entrance. Only
Rocky and I were able to come and go through that new cat flap
that had been installed for me since my last adventure. I had a
chip in my neck that activated it. Rocky had my old collar
containing a similar chip, the one I’d worn before I went to the
vet and got tagged.
The cold air hit me with a shock, and the
snow wet my pink paw pads, though the heavy tufts of fur between
them formed natural snowshoes. I was a very convenient breed of
cat for this climate, actually. Maine Coon cats, or their
undocumented relatives like me, were built for cold and wet and
according to the Critter Channel, used to be ships’ cats on
Viking vessels. I didn’t mind a nice trip around the bay on a
nice day, but this snow stuff wasn’t my cup of—well, snow.
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| Back to Father
Christmas |
The
Tour Bus of Doom (Spam and the Zombie Apocalyps-o) |
Chapter 11
First came the vampires. After all the
movies promoting our neck of the woods (the Olympic National
Forest, to be exact) as being ideal for the undead, out of town
vampires arrived. I helped deport some of them, since they were
Canadian, but even I’ll admit Spam, Vampire Deporter just
doesn’t have the sound bite—pardon the expression—that slayer
does.
When the Tour Bus of Doom pulled up in
front of Elevated Ice Cream, I felt no sense of dread or
foreboding, but instead hightailed it to my favorite bench on
the back deck. Some of my best friends are tourists. Travelers
lonely for their cats at home bribe me with whipped cream and
melted ice cream, hoping to cop a pet. Unless they are very
young and their hands are very sticky, I graciously oblige. I
love imagining the frenzied rubbing and marking the tourists are
in for when they return home and their feline housemates get a
whiff of Spam.
I’ve made lots of new friends in the last
few months. For a while, after the whole vampire thing, I was
worried about our human mom Darcy, but she needed me less than I
thought she would. In fact, since I rescued her, once she
recovered from the shock, she started hanging out with—of all
people—Deputy Shelter Dude, the sheriff’s deputy who used to
take care of the shelter! That made all of us cats nervous,
especially Rocky, though now that he is a catpire (or vampcat if
you prefer) he sleeps in the cupboard most of the day so isn’t
too aware of what happens then.
The first time Deputy Daryl was still
there when the sun went down, Rocky took one look at him—no, one
sniff—and rocketed out the cat flap to which only he and I have
keys. Maddog, who seems to be sort of Vampire Law and Order
South of the (Canadian) Border, installed my private entrance
after he helped me rescue Darcy. He recognized the kind of cat I
am. He also noticed that Rocky, trying to defend our house, had
become a bloodsucker like him. Darcy hadn’t figured out that
Maddog and Rocky were both vampires, which was a good thing
because after her last experience, she was sick of them. But
even she realized I am no ordinary housecat.
Having had a taste of the great outdoors,
where I made quite a few new friends, I had no desire to return
to being housebound, even to oversee the office, which was my
former career. I became an unusual creature in Port Deception,
an outdoor cat. Not a stray, not feral, and not lunch for
coyotes, thanks to Rocky’s new hunting habits as Vampcat the
Coyote Slayer, but an emancipated cat, with my own entry to my
house and the freedom to come and go as I wished.
In the long bright hours of summer when
the grass smelled sweet and the light sea breeze kept my fur
coat from being too hot for comfort, I definitely wished to be
out. Not only was there my network of four-legged
friends-who-were-not-cats to maintain, I had on my previous
expeditions encountered several of my half brothers and sisters,
as well as my father, and I wanted to deepen my family ties.
This puzzled my mother and my brothers, who couldn’t care less
about the old man’s other litters.
But there were some good practical reasons
I wanted to be connected to them. For a cat with an exhaustingly
wide-ranging if transitory territory, having many siblings who
might be prevailed upon to share a napping spot and a food dish
when said cat grew footsore and hungry was a good thing.
Besides, seeing my lookalike half-brothers and sisters gave me a
sense of what my life could have been like. Not that I wanted to
trade. I was just, you know, curious.
Most of them fared pretty well, as
gorgeous orange tabby cats such as ourselves are apt to do, but
Marigold, the last one on my rounds tonight, was so upset I
could hear her crying from the street. I don’t have that many
lookalike sisters, as for some strange reason cats of our
coloring tend to be male. However, Marigold looked just like my
brothers and me, except for the girly bits. If it hadn’t been
for me, she wouldn’t be alive now. I’d met her and her mother
right after she was born at Christmas and kept the owls and
coyotes off them till they were rescued by humans and eventually
found nice homes. Deputy Daryl told Darcy it was love at first
sight between Marigold and her little human girl Amy, less of a
cat mom and more of a kitten-sister.
“What’s the matter, Sis?” I asked through
the mail slot. “Is someone standing on your tail?”
“Nooo, but my family’s gone and left me
and I don’t think I’ll ever see them again,” she cried. “They’ve
been gone so long and I tell you, Spammy, I’ve got a terrible
feeling about this.”
“They covered the important parts though,
didn’t they? Someone comes to feed you and change your box?”
“It doesn’t matter! They’ve been gone
weeks and weeks. Even the sitter says they’ve been gone a lot
longer than she agreed to take care of me. She wants to go away
too! I want my own people back. NYOW!”
“You said they went on vacation, a cruise
to some island somewhere?”
“They would not leave me to go play. They
are on an important relief mission to help hurricane victims on
some wretched island. They think those people need them, but I
need them too. And I had them first!”
I really felt I should do something about
her situation, but there was a mail slot between us. “If I could
come in, I would show you how to work the computer,” I told her.
“Then you could maybe go online and find them, since you can’t
get out.”
“I know how to use the computer,” she
said. “I’ve played video games till I have carpaw tunnel
syndrome.”
“I am Spamnotthebadkind@moggyblog.com,” I
told her. “Let me know if they show up. I know how upsetting it
can be to feel abandoned by your human.”
Since I couldn’t make her feel better, I
decided to try instead to make me feel better and proceeded down
the hill and into downtown, making a sharp left at the second
intersection, pitter-patting across the street and walking
boldly into the ice cream store.
My friend Amanda had the counter alone
that night, while Eric the ice cream maker worked in the back.
Elevated Ice Cream is the best place in town for a nocturnal
critter like me, since they are open till 10 to accommodate
people who come in to get goodies after the movies and ball
games.
Even so, on weeknights when there is no
game at Memorial Field, the town is mostly quiet as the evening
rolls on. You can hear the bugs buzzing the streetlights. They
would be in real trouble if cats could fly! A few people still
wandered the sidewalks, but not a soul sat in the red plastic
booths opposite the freezers full of cooling flavors or the
patio chairs set around little tables in the back.
Nevertheless, I was not allowed to remain
on the premises. Amanda and I had worked out a deal. I meowed to
let her know I was ready to be served. She came around the
counter and knelt down to give me a couple of pets, held my face
in her hands and looked into my eyes, “Your usual, sir?”
“Meow,” I said, affirmatively.
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| Back to The
Tour Bus of Doom |
Shifty |
WOLF FROM THE DOOR
I wrote this story for Werewolves, an anthology edited by Jane
Yolen. I was attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the
time, as you can probably tell from the content. Later in the
book is another story that was published under a very similar
title so I kept the title for this one and changed the title of
the other one.
“Come in, Ms.—um—Garou,” Professor Forrest said, checking the
name on his appointment calendar. “Have a seat. I could have
left your paper with the secretary, but she said something about
you wanting to talk about your future.”
“Right!” the girl said as she bounded in and pounced on an
unsuspecting chair. “I’ve wanted desperately to talk to you
about it for just the longest time. And, oh yeah, of course, I
want to talk to you about my paper, too.” She shot him a sly
look. Her brown eyes looked like dark holes in her fair-skinned
face. Her eyelashes and brows were both almost white, lending
her an expression of bald astonishment.
He was somewhat taken aback. She seemed insufficiently nervous
about her term paper, which was the one and only basis for her
grade. And he didn’t remember her as being one of his brighter
students, the sort who had nothing to worry about. In fact, he
barely remembered her at all. But then, his classes were large
and full and his memory for two-footed vertebrates was not as
keen as it was for the four-footed variety. Still, those
startling white braids should have caught his eye at some point.
“Ms. Garou, perhaps you’ll refresh my memory. Which of my
classes did you attend?”
“Life Cycle of the Wolf,” she said. “I was there the first two
classes and got the assignment and when I saw it, I rushed right
out and started my research. That’s what I wanted to talk to you
about, Professor Forrest. You’re supposed to be the best
furbearer biologist in the state of Alaska. And I just have to
be the very best wolf biologist there ever was.”
This last announcement was accompanied by a rise in the pitch of
her voice that elevated it to an irritating whine. “I sort of
figure you could be, like, my sponsor.”
“That’s what you figure, is it?” Forrest really had no time for
this, not now. He had already put in a long day and was ready
for his Christmas vacation. He was not spending this one in the
field as he had found necessary to do early in his career. No,
this Christmas he would be studying on the beaches of Hawaii,
where he would forget the cold (25 below zero!), the darkness
(it was scarcely four p.m. but already the full moon was the
only illumination in a pitch-dark sky and he would have a long,
cold, dark walk to his car on lower campus), the University of
Alaska, and students like this girl.
The biology department was full of earnest young persons who
lived in wood-heated, waterless cabins on the outskirts of town.
Like this one, they all dressed like lumberjacks and smelled
like forest fires.
As he shuffled through his stack of unclaimed papers, the girl
pulled off her ratty, duct-tape-patched parka with the matted
fake fur ruff. Sparks of static electricity jumped between it
and the chair. Underneath, she wore overalls over a
multi-colored wool sweater that spoke less of good taste than
Goodwill. Her blue and white stocking cap remained pulled
tightly over the tops of her ears, covering her brow and making
her long, plain face look even longer. A blonde, yes, but hardly
a glamorous one, he thought. A bit of a dog, really.
He wasn’t finding the paper. “What—uh—what makes you so
interested in our department and in wolves particularly, Ms.—?”
he asked, stalling while he continued to hunt.
“Just call me Lucy, sir. I guess you could say my whole family
has always been into wolves. Why, I remember even when I was
little, Mama couldn’t bear to read me fairy tales without
changing the endings. The other youngsters used to think I was
strange when I’d do book reports about ‘Little Red Riding Hood
and the Big, Beautiful Wolf.’”
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|
Back to Shifty |
The
Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad |
Chapter 20
Sacrificee
“Be still, lady, and be quiet. Screaming won’t do you any good,
you know, and it is annoying.” The man sounded exasperated. She
didn't recognize him from the train so perhaps he came from
above the avalanche. Now he tested the knot with which he had
bound her arms. What did he have to be cross about? She was the
one who’d been abducted!!
“So is being tied to a stake!” she bellowed at him. “I’ll stop
screaming when you untie me and take me back to the train!”
“Train is gone now,” the man said. Although the sack had been
removed from her head, she couldn’t tell what he looked like
because his coat and hood covered most of him and the hood’s
ruff, his hair, beard, mustache, and eyebrows were iced over.
He'd stood a bit behind her when they watched the dragons
working so she hadn't seen him clearly then. Of course, there
didn't appear to be any help coming who would require a clear
description of her attacker so it probably didn't matter.
“It can’t have,” she said hoarsely. Screaming against the wind
was hard on the voice. “My aunt wouldn’t let them leave without
me.”
It wasn’t a lie, of course, but she did have doubts. Ephemera
could still be napping with her shells in her ears. She might
not have realized Verity was missing until the train was well on
its way. But Verity was unclear about how much time had passed
since she'd been taken—it couldn’t have been long, surely? Maybe
he was lying about the train leaving. She screamed again, loudly
enough that surely if Ephemera had missed her she would hear and
pull the cord to the emergency brake.
“My apologies,” the man said. “I am sorry about this, truly. You
seem like nice girl, but Dragon Vitia is demanding sacrifice and
is best if it is no one we know. Besides, Queenston man paid
plenty for avalanche to stop train and you to be taken for
Dragon Vitia. It worked out neat for everyone. Man needs girl
gone and dragon needs girl. Elegant solution to problem. Is
nothing personal."
"That is absolutely not true!" she yelled. "Being consumed by a
dragon will be very personal to me!"
"Maybe she not eat you—or not much of you. Villagers say she
only do this sometimes—many years in between. They give her
sheep, cows, but sometimes she lets them know, she wants girl,
too. Maybe she will save you for later. Maybe she needs virgin
and you not virgin?"
"I won't dignify that with a response!" she snapped.
"Maybe if not, she doesn't eat you. Nobody speaks of her
spitting anyone out once she takes them, though." He looked up,
said, "She comes. I go, now. Rest in peace, you."
He ran off, galumphing in snowshoes at a surprisingly rapid
pace.
Other snowshoe tracks surrounding her marred the snow’s pristine
surface. A detached part of her wondered, if she was supposed to
be sacrificed, why hadn’t someone stuck around to do properly
whatever they were supposed to do, sacrificially speaking? If
they were going to make her a ritual sacrifice, they ought to at
least have the grace to see to it that the ritual was performed
properly, oughtn't they??
An ear-splitting shriek accompanied by a whole orchestra of
drums, “boom, boom, boom,” was followed by a gale, carrying the
stench of rotten eggs.
Her captor continued to bound like a bunny, as far from her as
he could go.
Very well, she thought, if her fate was decided she might as
well face her doom. She gasped, only partly in fear. The
creature was magnificent. Not a sooty drudge like Auld Smelt or
the locomotive’s beasts. The moon reflected off the snow and
glinted against the monstrous wings. The wingspread must have
been as wide as one of the train’s cars was long.
It zoomed in, circling her stake, and held her gaze with its
enormous golden eyes, each bearing a black pit in its center.
That was probably fortunate since otherwise she might have
fixated on its big yellow teeth and the fangs with the puffs of
smoke billowing from between them. She couldn’t recall if wild
dragons, the old time ones before they were all properly tamed,
were said to cook their meals before they ate them or not.
Either way, getting eaten by one was bound to hurt a lot.
Although she was sure she was still screaming, she could no
longer hear herself. She heard nothing but the
“whup-boom-whup-boom,” of gigantic wings as the dragon continued
to circle. The wind from the flapping blew her hood back.
Then, in a heart-stopping moment, the dragon swooped down so
close its scales grazed her face as its great jaws clamped shut...on the stake. Which it grabbed and pulled out of the ground,
with her attached.
Wonderful, she thought. I’m to be toasted like a marshmallow on
a stick.
But not yet. First the stake was hoisted aloft, and whereas
before she had struggled to loosen her bonds from the stake, now
she clung to it.
Suddenly the dragon dropped her. Her heart and body parted
company for the eternity between the time the beast released the
stake from its teeth and when it caught it in its great claws.
The dragon’s claws wrapped completely around her, stake and all.
The beast was so huge she could not see from one wing tip to the
other without shifting her gaze. Palaces are that big, not
animals. Or so she had believed.
Behind her, down the hill, were the train tracks, and on the
cliff top below her was a castle, a village, some pastures, and
farmsteads. But coming closer with every boom of the dragon’s
wings was a cratered mountain, a cone with the top bitten off.
Sheep and cattle, out for a quiet graze, scattered as the dragon
soared over them. Pigs squealed in their pens. Verity could
empathize completely.
The dragon, attracted by the squeals, swooped. Suddenly a blast
furnace erupted in front of Verity's face, the heat searing her
closed eyelids. When she opened her eyes again, surprised that
she could, she saw two charbroiled pigs’ heads bobbing between
the dragon’s front teeth.
Were the pigs a mere snack??
Apparently so, for the great beast casually climbed higher while
still carrying the cooking pigs in the oven of its mouth. Its
breath now smelled more like bacon than rotten eggs.
The rolling fields dropped away and the sheer rocky face of a
mountain rose up before her. The dragon flapped her great wings
up and down, up and down, and with each flap she scaled another
vertical mile of mountain.
Verity concentrated on refraining from regurgitating, a
perfectly natural thing to do with hard claws wrapped around her
middle as she imagined her gruesome death, all the while
shooting straight up the side of a volcano. She knew from her
geographical studies that conical mountains with hollow bits at
the top were almost always volcanoes. The way her luck had been
lately, this one was no doubt active. A heavily seamed rock face
relieved only by narrow outcroppings fell away beneath them as
the dragon climbed. Verity caught glimpses of what certainly
looked like human skulls and bones sticking out of the crevices
in the cliff face. These could have been the bones of previous
sacrifices, disposed of by the dragon after it had picked them
clean.
The dragon realigned its flight to a horizontal plane in a
nauseating change of direction, then glided into a broad grassy
bowl. Cattle and sheep had been grazing there but stampeded in
every direction, although there was nowhere for them to go. The
sides of the scooped out mountaintop were far too steep.
A small lake in the center of the crater mirrored the cold white
sky. The dragon flew over it, to the far side of the bowl.
Toward the top was a small black hole far too small for any part
of the dragon to enter, but when the dragon was upon it, it
turned out to be much larger than it had appeared. The dragon
drew in its wings and plunged straight down into darkness that
its flame suddenly exposed as rippling black rock.
Verity got sick then, all over herself and the dragon’s claws.
Fortunately, her captors had not gagged her.
The dragon dropped her and she fell...for about two feet. The
stake dug into her back. The impact of landing loosened her
ropes, and it took only a tug at her bonds and she was free!
Free to be eaten at last. The dragon exhaled a brief flame and
in it she saw once more the great beast’s eyes, sly, assessing,
no doubt trying to figure out which parts of her were the best
cuts, although that hadn’t concerned it with the poor pigs.
Verity closed her eyes and made fists of her palms, hoping the
beast would kill her with one blast of flame so she wouldn’t
feel its teeth.
Whup. Whup. Whup. She opened her eyes. The dragon was gone. That
dragon anyway. As the whupping died away, high-pitched screeches
replaced it. Twin flames, one on each side of her, zipped past
as scaly bodies cannoned into her, ricocheted off the walls and
turned around to do it again.
So, she thought, the dragon didn’t want her for itself—or
probably, herself. She must figure a human woman would make good
baby food—no tough hide or fur to worry about, though one good
thing about this particular sacrificial rite, at least, was that
it allowed the victim be offered wearing their cold weather gear
rather than, for instance, being naked, which would have been
not only embarrassing but extremely chilly.
By the gas-lamp sized flames sputtering out of the mouths of the
dragon babies, she saw that the floor was littered with rounded
pale slabs of something that resembled very thin broken china.
These, she conjectured, were the shells in which the young
dragons had arrived in this world. There were other plate like
objects lying around too, but she was too busy fending off
dragon assaults to identify them.
Dodging a pass at her head, she stepped sideways. One of the
dragonets flew past and its flame illuminated a dark abyss on
the far side of her left boot. She pulled her foot back and wind
milled her arms to drive back the dragons while she flung
herself at the nearest cave wall.
Huddling there, she tucked her face into her knees and wrapped
her arms around them.
Screeching drilled into her ears as dragon bodies butted her
from both sides. Hot flames singed her skin. Her sleeve caught
fire followed by her hood. However, from working with her Papa,
she was used to fires and burns and knew how to deal with them.
She slapped out the flames and rolled sideways on the cave
floor. “Go away, you little horrors!” she commanded—shrieked,
actually. She had quite a good shriek.
When she raised her head again, the twin flames showed the
dragonets had turned their backs on her and were tearing into a
carcass that lay next to the opposite wall, a calf from the look
of it. It didn’t smell too ripe so she thought the dragon must
have brought it for them before fetching her. So if she was not
food why, other than to be driven mad by these little
attack-torches, was she there??
And when was the mother dragon returning to finish her off??
The young dragons gobbled down the calf and started lapping at a
wall in the far corner. By the dragon light, Verity saw water
glittering in a fan-shaped pattern against the stone, a little
indoor fountain.
She rose as the dragonets turned toward her. They were not yet
actually flying, as their mother did. They were simply bouncing
off the walls like most small children. She had gradually become
convinced that she was not an item on their menu—for the time
being. Plenty of cow remained from what she could see.
When their bellies were full, they returned to examine Verity.
They clawed at her legs, not to rake but simply to command her
attention. She reached down very carefully and patted one on the
head. It butted its skull into the palm of her hand.
“Nice dragon,” she told it. “Lovely, gentle, kindly dragon,
aren’t you? Yes, you are!” It hiccoughed in surprise and caught
her hair on fire again, but she was convinced it was
awkwardness, not malice.
She tried to pat out the fire with one mitten and to distract
the dragons, lobbed a bit of shell over the edge of the abyss.
“Catch!” she cried, running to stick her stinking sizzling hair
under the water running down the wall. It flowed into a little
basin and fortunately that was deep enough to dunk all of the
burnt bits.
She was going to have to find a way to protect herself before
the little monsters killed her accidentally, if not on purpose.
A terrible squawking and whining issued from behind her and she
turned to see both dragons with their little wings unfurled and
their feet right on the edge of the ledge, looking down into the
depths of the cave. They wanted to chase the fragment of shell,
but she had sent it where they couldn’t go. Fledglings, they
were not yet ready to fly. Surely the adult dragon didn’t intend
that she teach them to do so??
“No matter, little horrors,” she told them, scooping up another
bit from the floor. It seemed to be scale rather than shell.
This time she threw it toward the entrance tunnel. Both of them
darted to it and struggled to claim it.
She threw another one, a little closer and they both pounced on
it. It seemed hours that she played fetch with them, until her
arms were aching and her back was burning with pain.
“Very well,” she said at last. “If you’re going to eat me, now
would be the time. I’m too tired to do this anymore.
Followed by more squawking and whining, she collapsed near the
water basin, removed her mitten, scooped a handful of the cold
water and drank. It had a very strange flavor, no doubt from the
minerals in the wall, but it seemed pure enough. Besides, she
doubted she would live long enough to die from poisoned water.
The flames of the young dragons traced dizzying circles while
they darted about a few more times, then they too came to the
fountain and rested beside it, wings folded, heads tilted
questioningly as if to say, “Now what are you going to do, you
strange excuse for a meal?”
One of them belched up a flame that came perilously close to her
nose. She clapped her hands, and said, “Stop that!” using the
same tone with which she had once admonished the kitchen cat’s
boisterous kittens, the watchdog’s puppies, or her horse when he
tried to stand on her foot or brush her off on a tree. The
dragonet swallowed its flame at once and looked up at her from
under surprisingly long curly eyelashes. Adorable, if one liked
that sort of thing. And rather pathetic. Perhaps the mother
dragon wasn’t very maternal. She seemed to have dropped off the
snack and left the little ones on their own.
“You must be sleepy,” Verity said aloud, but very soothingly. It
wasn’t a lie. It was a prayer. She was tired and hungry and the
flame-seared cow had begun to smell edible, if not exactly
appetizing.
The little dragons’ eyes were slightly less bright than their
flames. Maybe if they liked her, as something other than a menu
item, when their mother returned, she would refrain from eating
their new playmate. They folded their wings and settled down on
either side of Verity.
She wondered where their mother had gone and when she was coming
back. Evidently, they required her to do something, and they did
not seem to require her to cut their mangled cow up into smaller
pieces.
Perhaps a lullaby was in order? Under normal circumstances she
had a pleasant enough voice, but some animals liked singing and
some didn’t and actually, she couldn’t remember any lullabies,
which tended to consist of the minutes of various public
meetings and bits of official legislature set by long-ago
minstrels to snore-inducing tunes. The dirge from her father’s
funeral was freshest in her mind, but she was afraid it might
convey the wrong idea to her hosts. She hummed and sang snatches
from Madame Louisa's cabaret show, which were jolly and bouncy
but effective.
As she sang, Verity's eyes became adjusted to the dimness and
she realized that the cavern was not quite as dark as she had
first thought, but glowed with a slightly greenish light. Aha!
Bioluminescence. In a less—er—enlightened—time, they no doubt
had deemed it magic, but she knew it to be a natural phenomena,
caused by little plants growing on the walls, unless in this
case it was the chemical interaction of certain minerals? Her
papa had explained it to her, but there was more than one type.
She never realized it cast so many different colors of light,
however. It was sparkly without the need to reflect sunlight to
make it so.
The dragon’s children were asleep, but Verity was more alert
than ever, inspecting her surroundings. The interior—if one
could call a space with a thousand foot drop off on one side an
interior—of the little ledge was wildly disordered and full of
bone fragments and other things she had not wished to consider
before, even had she had the time. From the reaction of the
fledglings when she threw the shell over the edge, there seemed
to be no way down from their perch other than jumping, so she
tried not to think about it and examined her more immediate
surroundings.
Other humans had been there before her, as she could see by what
seemed to be drawings on the walls, though she could not see
them well in the dim light. From the shell fragments littering
the floor and some other, darker, flatter plates of material,
she guessed that there had been previous litters of dragonets as
well. Something poked her hip and she cautiously tilted to one
side and pulled it out from under her, careful not to disturb
the dragon baby whose head was resting against her arm. The
dragonets obligingly shifted so they were leaning on each other
instead of her. She stood, very cautiously. Her muscles were
cramped from sitting so long. She was sleepy, hungry, and
thirsty, but the cow was not as tempting as it had been.
Scooping her hand in the little basin, she sucked up more of the
water.
The article she had pulled from under her was a piece of
greenish-brown (though it is difficult to see precise shades and
tints of color without sufficient light) scale too large to have
belonged to either of the small dragons.
It was as big as a platter and if she could rig a handle in the
back, she might be able to use it as a shield, to protect
herself from the fires of her ledge-mates. Dragon scale had to
be fire-proof, didn’t it? The scale didn’t seem as big as the
ones on the mother dragon so she imagined it probably belonged
to an older and larger brother or sister dragon from another
clutch. She devoutly hoped he or she wasn’t off at dragon school
and would not want to come home to the cave for an after-school
snack—her—any time soon.
The young dragons were rather sweet in a terrifying sort of way,
but she had to leave. Going down the way she came up was out of
the question, but perhaps she could go further up on the
crater’s edge at another point and then go down—more gradually??
The possibility bore further exploration.
The entrance to the passage from the crater was open. Fresh air
and a spot of sunlight or even a snowy night would be refreshing
at any rate.
Verity was quite sure that if anyone were going to rescue her,
it would be her. She couldn’t expect much help from an elderly
aunt and a train full of strangers and nobody else would know
until the train reached civilization again, would they?
Civilization could be defined in this sense as being somewhere
that the locals did not tie other people to stakes and wait for
dragons to carry them off.
The tube-like passage was steep, but climbable. It was an old
lava tube, left in the mountain from the days when the volcano
was active. She'd read about them in geology texts.
The floor of the passage was quite slick, but fortunately her
moose hide soled boots were made for walking on the dry Argonian
snow, and were not at all slippery. It took much longer to climb
up it than it had to be carried down it, however. But at last,
and it seemed that it had been weeks instead of only hours, she
stood at the entrance, reveling in the open airr
The sky had darkened to steely gray with dirty clouds lurking on
incredibly vast horizons. Almost at her feet, the lake spanned
much of the crater’s bottom. It seemed even bigger now than it
did when the dragon soared over it.
She needed to see what lay under the lip of the crater where it
dipped to its lowest point. The walk was much farther than it
had looked, but there appeared to be a path along the side of
the bowl, skirting the lake. That made sense. Unless the dragon
had hauled each and every cow and sheep up the mountain, someone
had to drive them up, which meant they needed to climb back down
again—probably very quickly.
But looking down the side of the mountain, she saw only the
impossibly steep drop into the valley below she had seen when
the dragon flew up. It was far too sheer for her to climb,
especially without equipment. No wonder the passage from the
dragon nursery to the outside had been so easy. It wasn’t as if
she would be able to go anywhere from the only outside area she
could reach.
The path dwindled to nothing near the crater’s lip. Who had put
it there? Surely not the dragon. Unless she’d made the path to
give her babies easier access to the herd, which might mean she
wasn’t returning to help them.
Loathe to return underground and resume being a living target
for ballistic young dragons, Verity walked along the shore of
the lake until the sky grew darker and it began to snow. She
might not find her way back to the cave. She might die of
exposure. If only there were some way to signal any possible
airships flying overhead, a vain hope. The dragon could have
swatted one out of the sky with her tail. Airship dragons, any
tame working dragon, would be no match for her. If the area were
devoid of air traffic, a signal fire would be futile. It would
attract only the attention of the savage villagers who’d staked
Verity out to begin with. They’d probably take a signal fire for
the dragon’s flame as the beast barbecued her.
Nearing the cave mouth once more, she spied a flash of something
that caught the last rays of the setting sun shining off the
lake.
A rustling noise issued from inside the cavern’s passage. The
dragonets squealed up the long passageway and crowded around
her. They seemed to have missed her.
Then they saw the cows and sheep. She was glad it was getting
dark so she need not witness the details, but in the end, she
had to find a stone to finish off the sheep the dragons had
managed to wound the worst. She hated it, but she couldn’t bear
to watch the poor animal suffer any longer. The dragonets were
messy killers. She hoped even more fervently that they were now
her friends. At least they had not seriously attempted to kill
her. Yet.
So she dragged the sheep up to the cavern entrance and down the
corridor, hindered by the eager “assistance” of the dragonets.
The last thing she wanted was for the mother dragon to return,
but honestly, what could the creature be thinking, flying off
like that and leaving her babies to fend for themselves when
they were obviously so bad at it?
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Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad |
The Redundant Dragons |
Chapter 1: Dragons At Large
The controversial new queen watched from the battlements as the
former drone dragons made their presumably joyous exodus from
their workplace dungeons. More than one blinked nervously,
poking its head out to look up and down the city streets. Then,
claw by claw, each slunk out of its industrial den, abandoning
the familiarity of the only home it had known for many years, if
not its entire life.
‘Hooray, the dragons are free at last!’ thought the
truth-and-justice side of Queen Verity, followed by the more
realistic thought. ‘Oh dear, the dragons are free. Now what?’
Malady Hyde, the queen’s personal assistant, her predatory eye
keen for signs of weakness in her monarch, swooped in to stand
beside her. The crumbling gray stone of the castle’s jagged roof
had recently been reinforced with a lacework of wrought iron
studded at intervals with the latest distant-viewing
apparatuses.
“Just look at what you’ve done now!” Malady said. “Liberating
dragons is all very well, but the next question is who will
liberate us from the tyranny of dragons once they figure out
that without the kibble, they have the upper claw.”
Malady was a stranger to truth as Verity knew it, which made
their relationship even more antagonistic than it would have
been solely because of their differing worldviews, but in this
case the queen very much feared that Malady had a point.
Verity had a feeling that the rest of the population of
Queenston, whom she supposed she ought to think of as her
subjects, were less than enthusiastic about the turn events had
taken since she was recognized as the first royal to reign in
four generations. Her feeling, as usual, was not wrong.
Verity knew she wasn’t good at queening. Her mother had assumed
that Verity’s ability to tell the truth and be able to detect
lies would be an asset in a leader. In fact, it made it almost
impossible. The problem was that in politics, everyone was
lying, all the time, in such tangled webs of interwoven
falsehood that she couldn’t say who was being untruthful about
what since it all gave her an unbearable, raging headache. The
pain had never been so bad in her life. Malady, appointed her
assistant by the same troublesome mother who had appointed
Verity queen, kept going to court in her stead, since lies were
her native tongue.
In the politics of dragons, however, Malady was missing
something. The dragons were no longer dependent on the kibble,
but neither would they have anything else to eat for very long.
The wild game was already much depleted in a matter of a few
days, and the head of the Cattleperson’s Association had begun
complaining of livestock predation. “It’s not like we’re made of
coos,” were his exact words.
When Verity consulted dragon-wrangler Toby, and his dragon Taz
about the matter, Taz flew off and conferred with some of the
other dragons.
“They say that’s too bad,” Taz relayed via Toby. “But the humans
made their living on dragon backs for long enough and it’s no
good complaining now that the tables are turned.”
“Well, yes,” Verity said. “I’d be the first to agree, except
that humans have to eat, too, if they are to raise food for
dragons. If dragons take whatever they like whenever, everyone
will be starving very soon. I begin to appreciate the genius of
the kibble.”
Meanwhile dragons darkened the skies and crowded the streets.
Actually, just one good-sized dragon was enough to crowd almost
any street. Dragons lurked atop every building, like so much
menacing architecture. Fire strobed overhead from dragons whose
jobs had dictated timed releases of flame. Now that they were
free, they couldn’t quite kick the habit of firing according to
their old schedules.
Horatio and Myrtle
“Why don’t they go back where they came from?” complained
Horatio the Hair, the Queenstreet barber, casting a glance of
indignation not untinged with fear over his shoulder as he
entered his shop. A grayish drake the size of a coach met his
eye with a glare from a baleful yellow one.
“I’m afraid that’s exactly what they’re doing, but perhaps you’d
like to be the first to suggest it to them?” his wife Myrtle,
replied.
“The government should be doing something about this,” he said.
“Perhaps that new lass, whatsername, the queen, will sort it
out,” Myrtle said soothingly.
He snorted. “From what I hear, she’s to blame.”
Her Majesty’s Disability
Verity was of the same opinion. She was indeed to blame for the
dragon situation. Toby, the dragon-wrangler, and his scaly
partner, Taz, had instigated most of what he called a strike on
the part of dragons suing for better food and working
conditions. Even prior to that, they had, perhaps rather
impulsively, destroyed most of the kibble formerly used to
control the dragons through their diet, and disrupted the
breeding program.
Verity’s mother, who had missed being queen by a hundred years
or so before insisting that the burden of the crown become
Verity’s, had also been responsible. But it was the queen’s job
to take the blame for unfortunate ramifications of events she
set in motion. Someone better at the job could have made the
consequences look like part of a plan. Verity not only lacked
the talent for such pretense, but was constitutionally incapable
of it, due to her curse.
Once her mother had forced everyone who was anyone in Queenston
to acknowledge and honor the royal succession, she’d
disappeared, off traveling, even time traveling, although Verity
had not a clue what that actually involved, It had to be a real
thing, or her curse would have let her know.
Nor was her father any help. Since his near-fatal accident, he
had undergone a radical transformation involving a fish tail and
a musical career, and thus far did not seem to remember who she
was.
Her mother’s old traveling companion, the family solicitor, N.
Tod Belgaire, was out of the city supposedly locating an old
history teacher to tutor Verity in the ways of royalty. The
country hadn’t had one since her grandmother, Queen Bronwyn, sat
upon the throne at the beginning of the Great War. Since that
time, Argonia had become a commercial client nation of
neighboring Frostingdung. Verity’s return to the throne was
supposed to break the chains of Frostingdung’s economic hegemony
over her land. The breaking of those chains, both real and
metaphorical, was to begin with those that bound the dragons to
industrial servitude.
It was a good plan, but she had failed to foresee that the
solution to that problem could create many other, possibly worse
ones.
Her views were not undisputedly popular and received no
validation from anyone, least of all the Crown Council,
particularly the members who had owned interests in kibble
production.
“I do not know what to do,” she confided finally to absolutely
the worst person possible, Malady Hyde.
“Of course, you don’t, you idiot, um, Your Majesty. You have no
aptitude for this any more than you did for needlepoint when we
took Introduction to Ladycraft at school.”
Verity still had no idea what she had ever done to her mother,
absent for the best part of her life, that her un-maternal
maternal parent would foist Malady on her as an advisor.
“You don’t think she’ll give me good advice, surely?” she’d
challenged her mother before they parted.
“No, but you’ll know the difference and can just do the opposite
from what she advises. I have my reasons.”
That made sense, up to a point, but although she had never been
wounded badly enough to know how it felt having salt poured into
a wound, she suspected it must have been much like she felt
about Malady.
The worst of it was, the advisers and nobles all listened to
whatever Malady said and in general seemed to get on with her in
a way they did not get on with their queen.
Verity’s initial meeting with them had made that abundantly
clear.
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Back to The Redundant Dragons |
Scarborough Fair |
One
Once upon a time in a beautiful city by the edge of the sea
there toiled a young woman who did not believe in fairy tales.
Fairy tales, she said, had no relevance to her life and none to
the lives of the children she knew. She and the children she
knew inhabited another realm altogether. “More like a soap
opera,” she explained. “You know, boy meets girl, boy and girl
have children, girl quits job to raise children, boy loses job,
boy loses girl, girl meets second boy, second boy abuses girl’s
children by previous marriage, children abuse themselves and
their children unhappily ever after.”
“You don’t believe in happy endings, then?” a friend asked.
“No, I believe in happy moments,” she replied, for she was even
wiser than she was beautiful. Much wiser, as a matter of fact.
“Which is why I love to come in here.” Her gesture took in the
interior of the shop, a place filled with rhinestone tiaras,
Himalayan silver rings and silk kimonos, Indian saris sewn with
golden thread and brilliantly colored gauzy Arabian thwabs. Not
to mention the Victorian and Edwardian antique paisley shawls
and velvet smoking jackets, the bustled skirts and flounced
nightdresses that were the import stock making Fortunate Finery
the most intriguing shop in Pike Place Market and by far the
best vintage clothing shop in all of Seattle. “That white
ruffled skirt is absolutely gorgeous. I don’t suppose it’s a
fourteen, is it?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in fantasy,” chided her friend,
who was the proprietress of the fabulous establishment where the
young woman liked to spend her lunch hours and much of what she
laughingly described as her disposable income. “It’s a three.”
The young woman sighed and turned her attention to an ebony
Chinese shawl embroidered with peacocks in emerald, cerulean,
aquamarine and gilt threads. She draped it across her upper body
and admired her reflection in the mirror. The greens in the
shawl made her eyes look emerald instead of merely hazel, and
the black brought out the reddish glints in her curly dark brown
hair. By no stretch of the imagination did she look like a
Chinese empress, but with her dimples and clean-scrubbed, open,
heart-shaped face, she could have passed for a character in a
Victorian novel. Not the tragic governess. The good-hearted cook
maybe, or the nice, but slightly boring, well-off school chum of
the heroine.
“Oh, no, I never said that,” she replied, reluctantly replacing
the shawl around the shoulders of the mannequin. “Fantasies are
essential. Escape is essential, or life would be unbearable.
It’s when you start believing in your fantasies that you run
into trouble.”
“Did you learn that in school?” her friend asked.
“No. In school they taught us that we would be able to make a
difference. They tried to inspire us with the notion that by
helping a single junkie, prostitute or wino we would make
Seattle a better city and the world a better place to live in.
To the best of my knowledge, that’s a fairy tale.”
“Had a hard day, have we, Rosie?” the friend asked.
“I’ve had a hard day ever since the new governor took office,
cleaned house in the administration and implemented her idiotic
idea of a budget. So has everybody else working in the social
sector. Our staff has been cut by half, our budget is down to
zero and our new supervisor is a complete idiot. Of course,
we’re not suffering half as badly as the clients, except that
they’re quite used to suffering and if we don’t watch out, we’re
going to be competing with them for street turf and cardboard
condos.”
“Oh, my, you are down. Here, have a chocolate. They’re
Dilettante.” She referred to Seattle’s premier gourmet
chocolatier. She always kept a dish handy for her customers and
her other guests, among them the panhandlers who brought her
their pets to board when they had to go to hospitals or
treatment programs—or got itchy feet. The city of Seattle would
allow stray people to wander the streets, but animals found
doing the same would be taken to the pound where they, unlike
the people, would be fed and housed for a few days before being
euthanized, if not claimed. Rosalie Samson had first met Linden
Hoff because of the street pet shelter, back when Fortunate
Finery was between Pioneer Square and the International
District. Linden treated customers, street people and pets
pretty much the same, and everybody was welcome to a bit of
chocolate.
“I know, Linden,” Rosie said, taking a bite from a truffle.
“They always are.” She sighed, half with resignation, half with
bliss, as the truffle touched her tongue. “I should be jogging
or walking or weight training on my lunch hour,” she added after
demolishing the morsel. “It would be much healthier, and less
expensive.”
Linden Hoff, who had heard it all many times before, clucked at
her and opened the door to the ugly-brown clad UPS lady, who
hauled a dolly full of boxes into the tiny portion of the shop
that wasn’t covered in racks of frilly, colorful, exotic, or
merely amusing vintage clothes. “From England, Linden,” the UPS
lady said. “Don’t sell everything before I get back, will you?
Sign right here.”
“I’ll save you something special to make up for having to wear
that godawful uniform, Lenore,” Rosie’s friend promised. As soon
as Lenore and the dolly left, Linden pulled a box cutter from
her pocket and went to work.
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to Scarborough Fair |
Song of Sorcery |
1
If it hadn’t been for Maggie’s magic, the eggs would have
tumbled from the basket and shattered when the panting barmaid
careened into her. The automatic gathering spell barely had
time, as it was, to snatch the eggs into the container before
they were spilled back out again as the distraught young woman
began tugging at Maggie’s sleeve.
“Come! Be quick now! Your old Granny’s at it again!”
“Be careful!” Maggie scrambled to keep her eggs from breaking,
trying at the same time to snatch her sleeve from the girl’s
grasp. “What do you mean?”
“Some poor young minstrel was singing a song, and just like that
she starts ravin’ and rantin’ and changes him into a wee birdie,
and commenced chasin’ him and callin’ on her great cat to come
eat him up! Oooooh, I hears the cat now—do be quick!” This time
she had no occasion to do further snatching at the sleeve, but
slipped instead on the forgotten trail of egg mess left in
Maggie’s wake as she galloped across the barnyard and through
the tavern’s back door.
Wood clattered on stone and fist on flesh as the patrons of the
tavern rudely competed for the front exit, tripping on
overturned chairs and trampling table linens underfoot in their
haste to be gone. Only three of the most dedicated customers
remained at their table, placidly sipping their brew, watching
the commotion with far less interest than they watched the level
in their flagons.
Granny’s braid was switching faster than the tail of a cow
swatting blowflies as she ran back and forth. She showed
surprising agility for one of her age, and for all her leaping
about was not too out of breath to utter a constant stream of
hearty and imaginative curses. With the grace of a girl, she
bounded over an upturned bench and then to the top of a table,
whacking the rafter above it with furious blows of her broom.
“Come down from there this instant, you squawking horror, and
take what’s coming to you!” Granny demanded, black eyes
snapping, and body rocking with the fury of her attack. “Ching!”
she hollered back over her shoulder. “Ching! Here, kitty. Come
to breakfast!”
It was fortunate for the mockingbird that Maggie saw him dive
under the table to escape the broom before the cat spotted him.
Just as the cat gathered himself for a pounce on the low-flying
bird, Maggie launched herself in a soaring leap and managed to
catch the cat in mid-pounce, retaining her grip on him as they
landed with a whoof just short of the table.
Struggling for the breath their abrupt landing knocked from her,
Maggie clasped the cat tighter as he squirmed to escape.
“Grandma, you stop that right now!” she panted with all the
authority she could muster from her red-faced, spraddle-legged
position on the floor.
“I will not!” the old lady snapped, taking another swing at the
bird as it landed safely back in the rafter above the table. “No
two-bit traveling tinhorn is going to gargle such filth in MY
tavern about MY in-laws and get away with it.” She jumped down
from the table, looking for another vantage point from which to
launch her attack.
“Whoever he is, Gran, change him back,” Maggie insisted, setting
the cat free now that the bird was out of reach on the rafter,
quivering in its feathers at the slit-eyed looks it was
receiving from both broom-wielding elderly matron and
black-and-white-spotted cat.
The old lady glared at her granddaughter and primly adjusted her
attire, tucking her braid back into its pin. “I most certainly
will not.”
“You most certainly will,” Maggie insisted, noting with some
consternation the set of her grandmother’s chin and the
anthracite glitter of her eyes. “Grandma, whatever he’s done,
it’s for Dad to dispense justice—it just isn’t the thing these
days to go converting people into supper for one’s cat just
because they displease one. What will the neighbors think of us?
It isn’t respectable.”
The old lady made a rude noise. “As if I cared about that. But
all
right, dear. Only wait until you hear what he did—wait ’til your
father hears! That birdbrain will wish Ching had made a meal of
him before Sir William’s done with him!”
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The Godmother |
Final Vows
At first he thought the candleflame above his ears was the white
light he’d been chasing, trying to get within pouncing range.
But now, as he pried his encrusted eyes open, he saw it was just
a candle.
He lay there dazed, among the waxy smoke of candles and the
tinkle of windchimes, a cool breeze rippling his matted,
fever-soaked coat.
Hmm. He no longer felt too hot or too cold. Stiff though. He
could barely sit up, his muscles were in such a rictus. He took
a long horizontal stretch, avoiding the candles and keeping his
tail well out of the way, then stood on his hind paws and
stretched upward, batting with his front paws at the curling
candle smoke before dropping again to all fours.
Wherever this was, it wouldn’t do to lose his self-respect, and
he began setting in order his striped saffron coat, white paws
and cravat with short, economical licks. He wrinkled his nose
and lifted the outer edges of his mouth at his own smell. He had
been to the vet. Dr. Tony and his wife Jeannette were lovely
people and really knew how to pet a fellow, but their
establishment reeked of antiseptic and medicine, and Mustard did
not like medicine.
When he looked up from cleansing the underside of his tail,
another cat sat there, a female, surgically celibate, as he was,
clad all in black from nose to tailtip, ear points to claws.
“Finally awake, are you, lazybones? About time. Come along now.
It is high time you met The Master.”
“I do not have a master,” Mustard said. “My personal attendant
is female.” He looked around him and considered the stone walls,
the tiled floors without so much as a rug to warm the belly on,
the ceiling so high birds tantalizingly flitter through the
rafters, cheeping and leaving droppings on the floors and
furniture. His home was a log cabin with his own private
solarium (though his junior housemates had made free of it as he
couldn’t always be bothered to run them off. Besides, they were
bigger than he was, all except the kitten. She had been a rather
sweet little thing who begged him for hunting stories and when
he growled in annoyance, would flop purring beside him.). His
house was set in a large yard with a strip of forest in the back
where he caught many tasty adjuncts to his, the healthful but
monotonous diet of low-ash kibbles his attendant provided. His
last happy memory was of sitting at the picnic table being
petted by his old friend Drew, who had stopped by to visit.
“Don’t look now, but we’re not in Kansas anymore, Red,” the
black-robed female told him.
“My name is not Red, it is Mustard,” he said. “And I do not live
in Kansas. I was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska but for
the past ten years have resided in the state of Washington. It
is warmer there and I may go outside and it is altogether more
congenial. Are we there still?”
“Your questions will be answered at length,” she said. “When
you’ve met The Master. And don’t fret about a little nicknaming.
You’ll have to take a new one when you join the Order. I was
formerly known as Jessie Jane Goodall, but now am known simply
as Sister Paka, which is in the Black Swahili tongue the name of
our kind.”
“Humph,” Mustard said. “Affected. I’ve fallen into some cult,
haven’t I?”
She turned her new-moon dark tail to him and she waved it for
him to follow. Since he wanted answers and had nothing better to
do, he graciously obliged.
He was not, however, prepared for how weary he would be or how
long the corridors were—miles and miles of them, stone walled or
pillared, lined with trees and bushes—his favorites, roses. He
was mortally shamed and self-disgusted to have to pause to rest
from time to time on their journey, which felt more like a quest
of many days’ length from the way it taxed his strength.
Normally he was light and spry, even though well advanced in
years for one of his kind. He considered himself merely
seasoned, toughened, tempered, but today he felt every second of
every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every
month of every year of his life.
He expected impatience and jeering from the so-called sister,
but instead she simply squatted on her haunches, closed her eyes
and wrapped her tail around her front paws until he pronounced
himself ready to carry on once more.
At last they padded up a long, long flight of stairs, high into
the rafters, by which time even the flitting birds could not
hold the exhausted orange cat’s attention. The lady in black
scratched at an enormous wooden door, partially open, and from
within an unusually deep and sonorous voice, a voice like the
rumbling growl of a big cat—the kind Mustard had once seen in a
television movie—bade them enter. Mustard straightened his white
cravat and remounted the three steps he had backed down upon
first hearing that echoing tone.
Sister Paka pawed and pawed at the door but couldn’t get it to
swing further open. Mustard meanwhile, had regained his breath,
and with a deep sigh walked to the door, inserted first his
nose, then his head, shoulders, and upper body, and walked in.
She entered grandly behind him, tail waving, as if she always
sent her messengers to announce her entrance. She bumped into
Mustard’s behind immediately.
He could go no further straight forward, because a big hole took
up most of the floor space, about an inch from his front paws.
Hanging above the hole was a gigantic metal thing, a bell, as he
recognized from the tinier versions he’d entertained himself
with on various overly cute cat toys. That had to be why the
so-called Master’s voice sounded so deep and sonorous—it was
bouncing off this humongous piece of hollow iron. Cheap trick.
Mustard repressed the urge to growl himself. That hole was so
deep it made the sound of his breath and heartbeat echo back up
to him. And the edge was very, very close.
Sister NL sat back on her haunches and swatted at his rump.
“Kindly move forward, please. The Master must not be kept
waiting. Do you think you’re the only soul he must counsel
today?”
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