Pip squinted at the king. “Wha—?”
“You’re the third born in the third generation of dragon masters, and your dragonkin are the purest bastions of light there is.”
The whelplings sang, “Master, protector, friend.”
Pip’s eyes grew wide, and a smile spread across his face. Their joy was his joy, and suddenly for the first time in his life, he understood his place in the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MELONY R Boseley is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She was born in Texas but migrated to Australia in 2006. She now resides in Queensland with her husband, an Aussie bloke, and her two dogs and two cats. Her writing can usually be found on her blog at melonyboseley.wordpress.com. Her work can also be seen in two anthologies, titled Sensorially Challenged Vol 1 and 72 Hours of Insanity, and a creative nonfiction piece on Sammiches and Psych Meds. She is currently working on a middle grade fantasy book.
What We Bring With Us by J. Hepburn
WHEN HE CAME TO A CROSSROADS, Burn stopped under a spreading she-oak to rest his legs for a while.
The road he came to was away from the major highways but was well enough travelled, showing the marks of wheels and the feet of beasts and men.
He pondered his options while chewing on an oatcake. He knew there were villages to either side, full of fishers and the occasional farmer, but he had not heard anything to recommend either direction over the other.
When he reached the end of the oatcake before he reached inspiration, he pulled out a coin.
The distant rumble of cartwheels reached his left ear.
He smiled and put the coin back into his pouch but he did not stand until the cart was drawing level.
“Ho, goodman! Can you tell me where this road may take me?”
The carter, apparently alone between a single stolid horse and his loaded vehicle, stared at him. “Clayman.”
Burn saw no point in denying it and he had long since decided to ignore the local mispronunciation of his people—a pronunciation mocking in some mouths, merely ignorant in others—so he simply responded with: “Aye.”
Outside major cities, the hair and skin that marked him as Claewian were more often greeted with curiosity or surprise than distrust, and it seemed that would be the case here.
“You coming from Kiak, not Somol?” the carter asked.
“Aye.” Burn had not heard of Somol, but he had left Kiak that morning.
“Long way to walk, you hitch a lift?”
“I walk. I was awake early, so I left.”
The carter grunted, then spat to the side, away from Burn, and made a version of the local sign to ward off evil. “Go to Embel,” he said, pointing back over his shoulder with his chin. “Somol has the scarlet fever. Word came in the night.”
Burn stared at the man for a dozen heartbeats, then at the cart. There were sacks and barrels. Clean supplies for an unclean town. “We should get moving, then. You know the treatments? It can be cured if caught early, managed if not. I can help.”
The man stared back at him. “You would help, Clayman?”
These people helped each other without question but were surprised when a travelling Claewian offered his hand so readily. “I had the scarlet fever when I was young, and been immune since. Is that why you’re heading to Somol? What’s your name, goodman?”
“Carac,” the man said, still unsettled. Then he shrugged with one shoulder. “I have had the fever, aye, and I bring clean water and food, and what herbs we had, although we didn’t have much to give.” He gestured with his chin to the board next to him. “Hop up, Clayman. What name do you carry?”
“Burn.” Burn stowed his staff and bag among the barrels and sacks in the cart—too many to allow for a passenger there—before pulling himself up to the flat board that did the carter for a seat. “Water is safe if boiled, food if cooked well enough.”
Carac gave Burn a look with one eye as he urged his horse on.
“You know much about the scarlet fever, then?”
“My village was sore hit but I recovered early enough to help do for those who could not,” Burn said. “I was there in Vutlupt two years ago when they had an outbreak so severe all clothes were burned by order of the mayor, but I did not get sick and we saved many.”
Carac favoured Burn with both eyes, that time, both wide. “We heard about Vutlupt, even here. You would go back into that?”
“Why not? I trust I may not get sick, and I can help those who suffer. What else should a man do?”
“Are you some sort of travelling monk?” Carac asked him. “You don’t look like a holy man.”
“Not exactly a monk, although I may say I’m on a pilgrimage of sorts.” Burn pulled out the chain around his neck, from which hung a coin with a hole drilled crudely through it.
“What’s that, then? Token of your god?”
Burn ignored the genially mocking tone in Carac’s voice. Odrilians were not alone in viewing any religion other than their own with contempt. Burn did not take it personally. Religion was no longer what anchored his life.
“It’s a token. It was my father’s, but neither he nor my brothers have use for it now. I’m looking for his brothers, or their kin.”
The humour disappeared instantly from Carac’s face. “Sorry I am to hear it,” he muttered. He swallowed. “It was not the fever, was it?”
“It was.”
Carac gave him another oblique look. “Won’t nobody blame you for turning away right now, Clayman Burn, I remember what you said about boiling water and I’ll pass on the word with gratitude.”
“I’d blame me if one man died I might have helped.”
Carac had no answer to that. “You travel looking for your father’s kin?” he asked.
“I do.”
“No horse, no boat? You could spend a score of years and not be half done! There must be half a score of Claymen in every city and one in every other village, there never was a people so for travelling.”
“We have feet for roaming,” Burn said. “And I have spent a score of years already and found only rumour, but there are still more cities and villages to search. I have time.”
“You might have the stubbornness of a mule.” Carac sounded almost more admiring than mocking. Burn reflected that such a trait might be admired in this land. He had not yet spent much time in this corner of Odril and knew yet little of their ways.
“I have tryst, not stubbornness,” Burn said with a smile, holding up his coin again and turning it to read the runes on the reverse.
Carac’s brows furrowed. “Tryst?”
“Trust,” Burn said. “It’s my family motto. ‘Hold tryst’.”
“You come from high-born family, then?” Carac said. There was judgement there, and no trace of deference.
“No, Carac, I come from Claew, where we are all born the same: bawling and bloody. We are a restive people so we keep our bonds tight and carry tokens to remind us of our kin. In the wilds, you may be far from your own people, so anyone you meet is your family and you give a hand where needed, but we do not forget where we came from.”
Carac grunted, a sound that was almost a grudging admission of respect.
“What’s it mean, then, ‘hold trust’?”
“To me, it means to expect good fortune, not ill,” Burn said. “To keep my eyes forward and my heart up. This is Somol?”
The road had curved to come out of the forest and fall away down towards a shore Burn could faintly hear and faintly smell but not yet see. Ahead of them, a wooden barricade had been hastily assembled.
“Aye, this be Somol,” Carac growled.
A man ran towards them, waving his arms. “Unclean! Fever! Unclean!” he shouted. He had a deep voice, a good voice for carrying.
Carac opened his lungs and matched the man. “Two men who survived the fever afore, and water and food and herbs in the cart!”
“Then come in and welcome to you!”
The man stopped his running and waited for them to ap
proach. “Oh, it’s you, Carac. That tinker reached Embel, then?”
“Aye, Wade, and never happier to do so. This Clayman says he knows some about the fever.”
“Sure? Then welcome to the pair of you, and may God come with you.”
Wade and his companion hauled aside the barricade. The road headed down, winding a little to manage the slope, to a cluster of houses in a bay.
“Good fortune, eh?” Carac said as he urged his horse down the slope. “Where would you look for good fortune here, Clayman Burn?”
Burn glanced back at the cart and its load of supplies a small village might not easily have afforded to send.
“Let’s start with this cart, Odrilian Carac,” he said. “And the men riding in it. Nothing says we can’t bring it with us.”
Carac snorted. “I hope you’re right, Clayman Burn.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: J. Hepburn is a Queensland-based writer of speculative things with an interest in everything from fantasy to far-future sci-fi via steampunk and urban fantasy. He likes to explore human relationships and thinks sex and romance are more interesting than violence. Find him at http://www.jhepburnauthor.com/ or https://twitter.com/JHPeregrine/
Time and Again by Ian Harrison
IT MUST HAVE STARTED, oh, around four months back, I suppose.
Scorching summer’s day, a sticky thirty-five degrees in the shade. The sky rippled from a shimmering, electric blue, to a menacing gang of angry black smudges, flexing like a wrestler’s biceps. The accompanying southerly buster swept through around six, dropping the temperature ten degrees in thirty minutes, as the electrical storm hit. Hard.
Thunder rumbled, lightning turning the evening to midday. Heavy drops of rain morphed into bouncing pea-sized hailstones. Whistling wind rattled windows to get at me, methodically testing each pane.
I swiftly garaged my car. Both won’t fit without a squeeze, and mine’s newer. Wendy will be back from volleyball or whatever, later—after the weather. She can put hers away then; I’m not going outside twice. Instead, I’m huddled in a light blanket, newspaper loaded on the tablet at the kitchen table, waiting for Wendy to return from indoor netball. That’s right, netball.
Six forty-five and the storm has worked itself up into a state. From curious, to serious, to furious. Demanding undivided attention by removing electricity from the suburb, as frozen peas become progressively marbles, then golf balls.
An out-of-season White Christmas display outside. Large, barely-melted hailstones lie strewn across the bare lawn. Photos would scarcely do it justice; my devices were dead anyway.
Wendy enters. Smiling, exhausted, flicks switches, making a cute grunt of disappointment when nothing happens.
“What’s for dinner?” she sings—I’m not the only one starving.
“Take a bloody guess, Wendy. I’m Wee Willie fucking Winkie here, in the dark with my rumbling stomach, last month’s magazines and my stupid damn aromatherapy candle. Sandalwood! How the hell could I possibly cook?”
Calm Wendy, almost sinister in the flickering shadows, flicks through her fingers.
“One. Gas cook-tops and a hurricane lamp in the back shed.
“Two. What’s wrong with your car phone charger? Or your legs? Both cars are still here—Carol drove me to netball. You could’ve ordered pizza. We’d collect it on the way through. If you’re worried about cold dinner on my arrival.
“Option number three,” almost an afterthought. “You could support us for once, and romance your proud, sweaty wife after the game, rather than reading old news like Wee Willie Winkie in the darkness. We won, by the way.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
Wendy rolls her eyes. “Grand final? Next year’s comp begins after silly season, and we’ll defend our title then. Gee, all that hail and rain on the roof and the thunder outside sounded like we had a grandstand full of our own personal cheer squad. In reality, it was some of the other girls’ husbands, boyfriends and kids cheering us on.”
She was talking to herself. Wendy gave up, ordered her veggie pizza, and was showering when the kid arrived. She forgot my garlic bread.
POWER RETURNS LATER; sudden bright lights shining through the house rouse me. Wendy must’ve missed a few switches, so I do the rounds. Gas appliances—reality check time.
Wendy would’ve appreciated me hand-mixing and baking a cake to celebrate. Plus, she’d let me eat it too—next netball season is just weeks away; and my crotchety Aunt Carol’s Christmas gift has never been tact. “Eating for two, are we? Are we expecting?” Every damned December.
Our archaic bedside clock-radio also returned to life, flashing bold red numerals: 12:06. I hated the ugly plastic appliance, with its faux wood-grain and matt-black finish. As I press buttons to re-set the time, early morning light disappears, replaced by a flash-frame image of us lying in bed, my back to her. Wendy reaches out but the Phil in bed, semi-conscious, testily brushes her hand away, and I recoil, losing contact with the clock-radio.
Soft pre-dawn light shines through the narrow slits of the Venetian blinds, warm horizontal bars glow on the pastel wall behind me. I tentatively touch the digital clock-radio as it continues flashing its place-holding time, and everything goes dark. My eyes adjust to the gloom. Laying back-to-back, my brow is furrowed; Wendy’s in a foetal position.
The scene unfolds in time-lapse as I wind the clock forward. Distant sounds of modern life; fridge and air-conditioning’s soft hums in synchronicity with the light-beam beneath the door, marking the precise moment when power returned.
Sleeping Phil creeps from the bedroom to turn lights out again before they disturb Wendy, and the clock-radio falls from my grasp onto the bedside table with a soft thump. Once I let the clock go (4:28am), the other me vanishes, and the bedroom returns to darkness.
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS’ ENDING means I must adjust our bedside clock-radio, while Wendy badgers me from the en-suite. Her voice stops mid-sentence, and the room shifts around. Not the room per se, but full moon shadows play on the back wall through the Venetian blind slits.
Holding the clock in one hand, my favourite mug sits, empty to the dregs on the nightstand, where I’d placed it hot and steaming moments before. Could the clock-radio really show the future? Or was I going nuts? I breathlessly race the clock through to 11:59. One minute to midnight.
Wendy lays on one side, right hand resting on the empty side of the bed, where my chest would normally be. Saturday night . . . an old action movie?
Still gripping the clock-radio, I creep as far as the power-lead allows, toward the door. Machine-gun fire emanates angrily from the living room. Do I always have the TV volume up this loud once Wendy goes to bed?
Time clicks over to 12:00; the AM/PM light flips and the scene dissolves, just like that. It must now be last night. Midnight, this morning.
An unseasonal cold snap, with a shivering Wendy reaching out to a greedy Phil hogging the blankets. Our clock-radio is stuck in its own little time loop. One minute, I’m out of the room, listening to a booming shoot-em-up; the next, I watch her shivering, trying desperately to get warm. Pawing at me.
I remember. Wendy’s goodbye kiss landed only half-across my lips. Can I use this clock-radio daily, to critique my marriage? My arm-hairs prickle.
If I could wind the day backward in the evening to review what happened, and then forward in the morning, to foresee the day, I’d have a combined time machine and spy camera. Drawback: it only spans a single day.
I can work with that.
“I could—I could leave the finance pages or the form guide on the nightstand and clean up!” I thought. “Finally live the life I want to, and give Wendy the one she deserves, too.”
My plan, ruined with astonishing regularity by my obsessive-compulsive wife. She would claim meticulous. Wendy abhors clutter, so my hot stock tips and chosen horses get recycled. I could ask her to not clean up, but I asked her to make me a sandwich without cheese once, and she’s never made one since. She doesn’t even buy carbs anym
ore. I’m loath to push it, otherwise I’ll be relegated to housemaid.
Discretion is key as I don’t know what she’d do with the knowledge.
Finance page open on the bedside table—rather, it would be—at eight pm this evening. It surprised me, so I had to be quick. Memorise one stock. Highest price for the day. That’d do. Find a company—something that fluctuates, plenty of shares traded, so I couldn’t screw up.
I swore. My online share trading account isn’t established yet.
Frustration bubbles, self-sabotage and desperate thoughts. “What about some quiet, out of the way horse-racing meet that nobody cares about?”
The newspaper became exactly that—so long as I remember later in the day to buy one and leave it opened to that page.
That done, I remembered physical newspaper deadlines are less flexible than steel; firmer than a horse-racing track in the tail-end of summer. I had yesterday’s results and yesterday’s stock quotes, damn it. My realisation made the newspaper vanish.
I like this mind-control idea, forcing my future self to acquiesce to my every current whim. I leave notes directed for myself and colleagues—even instructed Phil: “buy flowers for upset Wendy”, nuanced three times to get her the right bunch without overdoing it.
It worked, kind of. She assumed I read her diary; I assured her we were finally perfectly in tune, after all these years.
Wendy became more secretive.
I went low-tech and left myself a piece of paper with coded details. That would have to do.
TO TEST THE CLOCK-RADIO’S powers, I placed a modest bet on the way home from work. “Horse number four, the second evening race down south.” Or, 4/2/s, as I hastily scratched onto the nearest piece of paper.
Couldn’t remember the nag’s name. All that mattered was following the biggest winning roughie. At twenty to one, it proved my theory and meant four hundred free dollars for me. I could spare twenty if some quirk of fate of my betting changed the odds or the outcome.
Stories of Hope Page 34
