• • • •
That night, I pretended to sleep until Marc eased himself onto the sleeping mat beside me. I startled awake, grabbed at him, pushed my face into the crook of his shoulder and allowed myself the shudder I’d been suppressing all day.
“Oh,” he said softly, his arm rising to wrap around me. “What is it, love? Are you all right?”
His hands were so gentle. His breath stirred the hair on top of my head, and I remembered that I loved him. Look at what he has done. “I had a nightmare,” I said, and the tremor in my voice was real.
“It wasn’t real,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the top of my head. “It wasn’t real, you’re safe. It’s all right.”
I swallowed hard, forced myself to continue. “It was awful,” I whispered. “It was like I was back there all over again, in the desert.”
Marc didn’t say anything for long enough that I feared he’d fallen asleep. Beside our bed, the baby shifted. Finally, Marc spoke. “The dissenters?”
“Yes,” I said, too loudly. Ducky made a low noise in her sleep, and I reminded myself to whisper. “Yes,” I repeated, “the dissenters — it was so horrible, Marc, their faces… some of them were children, and I—”
“I’m sure it was hard to see,” Marc replied. He began to rub my back in small circles. “Sometimes the Gods’ justice is difficult to take in.”
“Justice?” I asked. Marc was very still beside me.
“Yes,” he said. “It must have been awful for you, having to see that. But surely you agree that it’s no less than what they deserved?”
I pulled away from him, stared at him hard even though he was just a vague patch of darkness in the shadows of our tent. “No,” I said, forgetting my volume again. “No one deserves that. They didn’t—”
“They strayed from the Gods’ path,” Marc said, also too loud, and his voice was a cliff’s edge. “Whoever killed them did them a favor. They were spared a life of sin.”
Ducky began to cry. I reached for her without needing to see where she was. Her forehead was hot against my shoulder, and I patted her back, blowing on her neck to cool her off. “Who would do such a thing?” I asked Marc. “Who would slaughter those children? They were innocents, Marc.”
“Innocents who stole seeds and water from the Children of the Gods,” he said. He was breathing hard, and I could hear him twisting the blanket between his fists. “Innocents who abandoned their people.”
I shook my head. Ducky had fallen back asleep moments after I’d picked her up, but I didn’t want to put her down. Not yet. I couldn’t find words. Marc reached up a hand and tugged gently on my shoulder, pulling me back down to lie beside him. “Hush, Prophetess,” he murmured, his lips against my temple again. “It was only a bad dream. The Gods will never let any harm befall those who follow their path.”
Ducky rested on my chest, her belly rising and falling with each deep breath she took. Marc’s hand found her, and he stroked her hair. “Who would do such a thing?” I whispered again.
“Shhh. Go to sleep,” he whispered. “There’s nothing to fear.”
The Gods Whispers nearly drowned him out. Look, they said to me. Look at what you have done.
Chapter 12
Arrival
I stood at the cliff’s edge and stared at the tablet in my hands as the first stars of the evening appeared in the bruise-black sky.
Here, here, here, here, here. The words swam across the etched bone and echoed in my bones.
“This is it,” I called to the gathered crowd behind me. “We’re here.”
Here, here, here, here.
“This can’t be it,” a voice cried back.
“It’s impossible,” said another.
“Shut up,” said a third, and I recognized it as Samuel, the healer-boy.
Here.
“Look — in the water.” Samuel again. “What is that?”
• • • •
Everyone had been in a festival mood for the preceding week. Every last one of the Children of the Gods knew the timeline of the tablets backwards and forwards. On the first night of the dead moon in the Thirty-First year, the Children of the Gods shall cross out of the scrubland and into the Promised Land. Rich hunting and plentiful fish and good, clear waters await you, and your spawn shall be many, and no harm shall befall you from above or below. The Gods had never lied to us. We had weathered flood and famine and fire and fever, all with their guidance. We had wandered through the desert, the rock flats, the grassland, the mountains — we had seen loss and endured fear, and the Gods had always told us that we would make it through.
Everyone, even my most troubled followers, had been looking to the horizon all week. They would trail off in the middle of sentences, staring into the distance, their eyes bright. It’s there, they would whisper to each other. Just over that hill, just around the corner. The Promised Land. It’s there.
• • • •
Marc ran up, Ducky clutched in his arms. She was fighting at her swaddling clothes, and as Marc pulled up short beside me, Ducky wrenched an arm free. She grabbed at a lock of my hair as it flailed in the cold wind that blew off the sea in front of us.
“Is this it?” Marc asked, his eyes fever-bright. He grinned so widely that I could see the shadow of his missing molar.
“I… it can’t be,” I said, searching his face for a sign of doubt. There was none — his faith was as intense and unwavering as the lightning that had instilled it in him. “This can’t be the Promised Land, Marc. There’s no land here.” I was ashamed at the note of pleading in my voice. “It’s all scrubland behind us, there’s no — this isn’t — stone and sea don’t make land.”
“It is, though, Fisher. It’s their land. Don’t you see?” He peered over the cliff’s edge. His sandal sent pebbles skittering down the cliffside; they landed in the water below, close enough that I could hear the splash but too far for me to see the ripples. A vast moon shone in the water. “They’re inviting us. We can join them. All we have to do is trust.”
I blinked. I looked up at the sky and rubbed my eyes with the hand that did not hold the Gods’ tablet. “This can’t be, Marc. Maybe… maybe they just don’t understand?” I let out a hoarse laugh. “We can’t live underwater. This can’t be it.”
There was no moon in the sky. It was a dead moon — the great bowl of the God’s light was empty.
But there it was, floating in the water below us.
Cries rose up behind me as my followers began to notice the light. I held up a hand to silence them, and listened hard for the Gods Whispers to tell me what to do.
Here, they repeated, maddeningly persistent, here, here, here, here, here.
In the water, another moon rose. And another, and another — and then there were dozens of them, hundreds, green-white and bobbing gently with the rocking of the sea. Tendrils floated between some of them, drifting with the motion of the water. Here, here, here, here, here.
“Do you hear them?” Marc asked, absentmindedly patting Ducky’s back with one hand. “Do you hear them, Fisher?”
I snapped my eyes to him. “What?”
“The Gods,” he said. A smile had spread across his face; his eyes were locked on the water.
“What do you hear?” I asked him.
He looked up at me and pointed to the water. “The Gods,” he said again. “They’re here.”
I would wonder later if I had reached for him or for Ducky. I would wonder if I had seen something in his face, illuminated by the bright light from below. Had I tried to save them both, or had I hoped to catch only one?
It didn’t matter, either way. My hands closed around a corner of swaddling cloth, and a too-small weight fell into my arms, and Ducky began to scream against my shoulder as Marc plummeted silently to the water below.
• • • •
We made our way down the cliffside single-file, the pack animals left behind. I stumbled across the rocky slope in front of everyone, my hands and face n
umb with the stinging, frigid wind that whipped up off the water. I clutched the baby to my chest with one arm. I couldn’t hear anything over the wind and Ducky’s ceaseless crying, but my way was lit by the glow that still came off the water. There was a narrow strip of rocky shore between the cliff and the water, and when my feet met the ground, they ached with cold.
I turned to face the water, and the wind stilled. Gentle waves lapped at the shore, dampening my feet.
The moons parted. As I watched, a shadow passed through them. Each wave brought it closer, pushing it toward me and then pulling it back. I did not move. Behind me, the Children of the Gods packed themselves onto the tiny beach, watching me watch the ocean.
“What is it?” someone whispered.
“Hush,” came the sharp reply.
I stepped into the water, shaking with fear and cold. As the water rose past my knees, the waves stilled. One of the moons in the water reached out a long tendril and wrapped it around my calf. It looked like a loving gesture, but it hurt. Oh, Gods, it hurt. It was everything I could do not to drop Ducky, everything I could do not to faint. The pain was a stripe of bright fire — but then the tendril withdrew, and when I looked into the water to see whether my blood was pinking the brine, the shadow was there, bumping against my shins.
I held the Gods’ tablet out to Samuel. “Take this,” I said, and he hesitated until I turned to glare at him. He took the tablet with the same tender reverence I’d seen on Marc’s face the first time he’d held Ducky.
I pushed the thought away. I held Ducky a little tighter as I bent over the water. With my free hand, I reached into the freezing sea, soaking my tunic to the elbow, and grabbed it.
It was hard. Small — just large enough to be tricky to grab with just one hand. I scooped my palm underneath it and lifted it out of the sea. I held it up, and the light that shone from the water illuminated it in my hands.
It was a skull. The jawbone was gone. A tuft of blonde hair clung to the crown of it. Blood streaked the insides of the eye sockets, the places between the teeth. It smelled of salt and iron.
One of the molars was missing.
“Marc,” I whispered. “No.”
The moons in the water came closer, nearly touching me. Ducky turned her head toward the light, reaching with one arm toward the water. In their glow, I saw that Gods Words scarred the skull, burned blood darkening the streaks of lettering. The words swam before my eyes, just as they did on the sacred tablets. They resolved themselves into a message:
Who are you who cannot come home to us? You are not the ones we sent for.
* * *
Hugo and Campbell award finalist Sarah Gailey lives and works in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Their nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and their fiction has been published internationally. They are a regular contributor for Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. You can find links to their work at www.sarahgailey.com. They tweet @gaileyfrey.
Crispin’s Model
By Max Gladstone
There were no monsters at first, only “Arthur Dufresne Crispin,” who met me on the front steps of his apartment in the Village: towheaded, tall, and lean, with long spidery fingers that closed mine in a strangler’s handshake. He had an accent that would have told someone from Boston or Providence a lot about his parents and the pedigree of his dog, but told me jack-all, except that he was the kind of guy who introduced himself with his middle name. He wore a green Brooks Brothers shirt, and men that pale should be careful wearing green. It seeps into the skin.
“I’m Deliah Dane,” I said, and followed him up three flights of stairs to his studio. “Good light in here.” Crispin kept the place neat. A few still life setups in corners, a shelf of sketchbooks and anatomy texts and older leatherbound tomes. A folio of Dali prints, another of Bosch, and one of a Swedish painter whose name I don’t remember. Canvases draped with light silk leaned against walls and doors and furniture. Through the silk I could see the canvases were painted, but not much more. The floor was strewn with lights: lamps, reflectors, mirrors, even a kerosene lantern. “Bet your landlord doesn’t like you having this.” I nudged the lantern with my shoe.
“I have no landlord,” Crispin said, which told me more than the accent. “Ms. Dane, we should discuss the nature of my work. Previous models have expressed reluctance to operate under the conditions I require, and if this will be the case, I would rather find out now before we waste our time. Don’t you agree?”
I’d been afraid of this when I couldn’t find pictures of his recent work. My hand tightened around the cell phone in my jacket pocket. “I don’t know what conditions you require, but I won’t take any drugs for you, and no pegs go in any holes. I show up on time, I sit still. You paint, and you pay me.”
“In terms of your responsibilities, our visions align. No drugs will be involved. Reality interests me, not psilocybin abstractions. As for”—and there it was, the dust of blush that meant maybe even Arthur Dufresne Crispin was human—“as for the rest, I will require no more of you than any other artist, insofar as poses are concerned.”
A gorgeous red leather divan lay upon on the stage, with a scrolled wood headrest and a fringe of trailing beads like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. I stroked the leather. “Why the conditions, then?”
“I do not converse with my models. Your form interests me. Personal connection distorts perspective.”
“I doubt I’ll want to talk with you much, either.”
A ghost smile at that, faint as the blush. “I require exact duplication of poses from session to session. I may touch you, to restore a finger or an elbow to its proper place.”
“Ask my permission first.”
“Fair. And the last: You will not view our work while it proceeds. You may never see the pieces for which you pose. Should you happen to do so, you may not recognize yourself.”
That rang alarms I didn’t know I had. “What do you mean?”
“I paint the noumenal—that which lies beneath appearance. Some models take offence at my depiction, but no offense is meant.”
“So, what, you paint me as subhuman and I don’t get to call you racist afterward? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That is not my intent.”
“I want to see an example.”
“I have no finished model work,” he said, “and if I show you a still life, I will be unable to sell it.”
No sense asking artists why. They’re a weird breed. “Show me, and I’ll decide whether to sit for you.” The power had shifted in the room, as it always does when you learn someone needs you.
His eyes were gray and cold as fish scales. At last, he turned to a canvas propped near a setup of a bowl and rose. He peeled back the silk as if peeling off his skin. Beneath—
It wasn’t a bowl and rose. It wasn’t not a bowl and rose, either. Take the bowl, and take the rose, and shatter them, cubist-like, through time as well as space, so in one facet the rose blooms and in another it’s rotten, the bowl here tarnished and there radioactive gleaming. But that doesn’t capture the twisted, callous distance of the effect. There was more time than time in that painting, and more space than space.
There’s this Chinese story about a bird called p’eng, really big damn bird, flies so high the earth below fades to blue for it just like the sky does for us. To that bird, we’re motes in a sunbeam, sparks kicked up by a campfire, insignificant painful specks that vanish back into the burn. And that was what he’d done with a bowl and a rose.
What would he do with me?
It was disgusting. Exciting too.
“Let’s go,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants.
• • • •
You have the wrong idea about me already.
I moved up from Savannah to be on stage. I write. I act. I love the way an audience looks when you have them stuck, I mean skewered, to their seats. When they’d stay for at least a second even if someone did shout fire. And yes it isn’t practical, and yes Mama writes l
etters every week and each one holds some allusion to this cousin or that who’s doing whatever with herself. Mama’s plumbed Michael Baysian depths of subtlety. I’m workshopping a one-woman show. I sent spec scripts around. An agent wants to see my next.
None of which counts for much rent-wise, in this city.
So, modeling.
Not the clothes kind, which work I doubt anyone would give me anyway on account of my having a body. But painters pay, and they like bodies, or at least they don’t seem to care whether you stop eating after the first half of the M&M.
Yes, painters. They still exist. I mean the ones who paint people who look sort of like people, or at least paintings that involve people, not the squares-of-solid-blue shit.
Here’s what you need to be an artist’s model:
Here are some things that help:
2. Pride (If you get embarrassed when folk stare, this isn’t the line for you.)
3. Honesty (Good artists draw what they see, so you might as well get to love that belly.)
4. Active imagination (You’ll spend four hours at a time holding still.)
5. Bathrobe (To wear on break.)
6. Wristwatch with alarm.
The last is so important it should be first. Artists aren’t timely people as a rule, but if they’re paying for you, they expect you to be. A painter takes forty-five minutes to set up her easel, get the light just so, mix the paints—she expects you right at two, clothes off and in position, not at three thirty complaining about the subway. Get a watch. Or use that fancy phone for something other than taking pictures of your banh mi.
Some folks model to commune with an artist’s tortured soul, to be the fulcrum between created and increate. All that mystery goes out the door the first time they get off a four-hour sit and can’t feel their left butt cheek. For me, this was Something That Paid Twice as Much an Hour as the Restaurant. Each four-hour sit gave me a day to audition, to write, to please Ms. Agent.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 21
