Sixteen-blade magazines for Winthrop’s latest model, if Wilson remembered rightly. Enough, if he didn’t miss a single shot. If the kniver were fully loaded. Madness.
The heat stopped him. He leaned out to his left. A cool wind blew upwards from rapidly enlarging trees and pools.
It must be time.
Wilson was an excellent shot under normal conditions. Which did not usually include wracking pain and exhaustion, but always, always, the threat of death. He aimed carefully. The first line parted. The second, third, fourth. They’d been damaged by the flames. The fifth seemed at first only to fray. Would he have to waste another blade? Seconds passed till it gave way.
The gondola lurched and Wilson held desperately to the slick gunwale. It looked almost level now. He nodded. Naturally. The lift lost because the fore end no longer hung from the airbag was counteracting the uneven distribution of terrified passengers, and the abandonment of the stabilizer levers.
He was amazed he could consider the matter so calmly.
The sixth line, exactly opposite his present seat, was obscured low down by the advancing flames. Wilson aimed above them. This time he did need two shots. No help for that.
He retreated to the deck and shot away the seventh line. Half done. Almost. He’d never finish soon enough. They were going to crash burning into the swamp. His ship, his crew, his command.
He took aim at the eighth line but an Oo-Gandahn fighter got in the way, smiling and brandishing a spear. Stupid woman! “Go! Mwanamke! Go!” He flourished the kniver, indicating she should move aft, but she only grinned and began sawing away at the line with her weapon.
New shouts died on his lips. She understood! Turning to the line directly behind him, he shot it. Three times, but he had ammunition to spare now. The Oo-Gandahn finished and went on to the next starboard line. This one took her longer. Evidently her spear’s point was dulling. She called out something and took a long machete from the man who answered her. He didn’t seem to favor the idea. Wilson lost sight of the disagreement as he dashed to his next target. One shot only this time.
But now he was in among the crowd of passengers. None of them spoke English. Why should they? Confused and angry babbling greeted him on all sides. What had happened to his men? He caught a brief glimpse of a couple of them stationed roughly where Kalala’s steering wheel ought to be. The twelfth line—thirteenth if his assistant had succeeded—was right there. A clear shot. He raised the kniver. A blow to his back threw off his aim—he barely maintained his hold on the gun. He pushed his way to the bulwark and braced himself, tried again. Bingo!
Shoving hard he got through to the last of the port lines. Here were the slave children, huddled together, so tightly packed there was no path between. The only road was up. Wilson climbed the line with cramping arms and legs. He craned his neck to look for Yoka. No luck.
Kalala’s gondola dropped precipitously. The deck lay at a sharp slant. All lines to the envelope but this one and the stern’s were loose. Cries of horror, wordless screeching—bodies tumbled down into the relentless fire or over the gunwales into the green and black swamp.
Wilson pointed and shot anyway. The knife hit. The gondola jerked again and more passengers fell.
Two knives left. Wilson aimed down and pulled the trigger. Its last tie to the gondola severed, Kalala’s envelope rushed skywards, whipping him around furiously around at the end of the cut line. From below came an enormous hissing splash. Wilson dared to look down. The gondola was in a single half-charred piece. People moved on it, swam and waded around it. They sank further and further away. Or rather, he and the envelope rose—and Yoka also, he hoped.
The higher one went, the colder and thinner the air. Without the gondola’s weight he’d—they’d—fly too high to breathe. Wilson attempted for a few moments to slow his twisting and spinning, to steady himself by wrapping the line’s slack around his wrist. He gave up. The envelope was big; how could he miss? Praying not to hit Yoka, he shot his last blade.
Falling, falling—yet the envelope acted like a giant jumpsheet. What went up must come down, but at least at a survivable speed. Dizzy, ill, aghast at the deaths he knew were his responsibility, Wilson still clung to hope something would go right. Something had to.
Something did.
Leopold lost. And Wilson and Yoka, drifting eastward on prevailing winds, were witnesses. From the net around the punctured envelope Yoka tossed Wilson a makeshift sling. Gliding lower and lower they saw soldiers and policemen running in every direction. They saw massive disorder and piles of surrendered rifles. They saw King Mwenda’s fighters herding captive overseers back the way they’d come, uphill, toward the rendezvous at Lutshi. And they saw many dying, many dead. Most wore the Belgian tyrant’s uniform.
At last they landed gently on a hillside on the swamp’s far side. Against all likelihood, they were alive.
So, too, was everyone else who’d been aboard Kalala.
When Yoka told Wilson this he refused to believe it. He sat, at the Bah-Sangah priests’ insistence, underneath a length of undyed cotton. Apparently his dream—which he had unwisely related to Yoka—decreed Wilson’s immediate initiation. So far this had involved fasting and isolation. He wasn’t even sure where the two of them were, since he’d been blindfolded before being led there.
“But they fell!” Wilson objected.
“Not far,” Yoka responded.
“Into the fire!”
“And out again.”
“And the waters of the swamp—”
“All shallow.”
“No one was bitten by poisonous serpents? Eaten by crocodiles?”
“No. We were protected.”
“Protected by whom?” asked Wilson.
A moment of silence. Under the white cloth it seemed long to him.
“Protected by him to whom you have promised yourself.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. Or else you would be dead. Others, too.”
“But I—” Wilson remembered. If I give you your life back you will owe it to me. “I have dedicated my life to my lord, Jesus Christ.”
“Yes? When was this?”
“What? What does it matter when?”
“If it was before you met your new lord you must take it back.”
Take it back. Be forsworn. He couldn’t do that.
Could he?
“You will remain here overnight. Alone. Considering. In the morning I will come for you, for your final decision.”
“I can say no?”
“You can. So think well. Think what that will mean.
“When I am gone, remove the cloth. You will see you have been provided with water, food, a candle, a pot into which you may relieve yourself, and one more thing: an object to help you make your choice.”
The sound of footsteps leaving.
Wilson lifted the cloth and looked around at a small cave. The food, water, candle, and chamber pot were all present as described.
The only other thing there was a mirror.
Wilson removed his clothing. He looked at himself as long as the candle’s light lasted, using the reflective surface to examine sides he would normally be unable to see. He stared at the healed bullet wound hard and often.
The candle died. He couldn’t use the mirror anymore, so he used his mind.
All he had was his life. It was all that was wanted.
The sound of footsteps coming back.
The Firebird
Emily B. Cataneo
Elena, bright rage twisting in her chest, felt her tail creak under her coat as she faced the man in the snow.
“That’s not enough.” The man jabbed his fat fingers at the three gemstones pinned to burgundy velvet that Elena clenched in her gloved hand.
Elena wished she could spit in this man’s face, watch cold spittle drip from his frozen whiskers. If only she could trade for the oil with someone else, as she had all autumn, but winter fell hard over Novgorod and today he was the onl
y merchant left in the market—all the other stalls stood shuttered in the long purple shadow cast by St. Sophia’s gold domes.
“It’s more than enough.” Elena dangled the velvet between them; snowflakes pocked the fabric. Sell me the oil, you fat bastard. They had run out of oil more than a week ago, and Nina was fading away.
“I’ll need twice as many. Price’s gone up.” The man cradled the glass bottle, black oil sluicing inside.
“Do you have any idea what these jewels are worth?” Elena’s tail creaked again, stretching the cold skin around her tailbone; she ground her teeth as the corroded feathers spread apart. She willed her tail to stay down, to stay hidden, but anger coursed through her and she felt the spreading feathers lifting her coat’s frayed hem. “The Empress Catherine gave this sapphire to my great-great grandmother, and this emerald—”
“It don’t mean you get to tell me what to do no more.” The man stomped his feet as snow drifted around his boots. “Your kind aren’t even people. Commissar says so.”
Elena hated the way his mouth twisted in a smile around the words. Once upon a time you would have ducked out of the road for our family’s motorcar. Where were you the night of the fire? Stealing vodka from our cellars or holding a torch?
I can’t lose Nina too, the way I lost my parents.
Sell me the oil.
“Seven gemstones, or nothing,” he said.
Her tail twitched, this time lifting her knee-length coat like a boat-sail—she felt the wind bite her thighs. Wincing, she turned her head and out of the corner of her eye saw the rubies on her tail winking in the falling dusk.
The man’s mouth spread into a smile of missing teeth and triumph. “Cout-ments. I see.”
“They’re called accoutrement,” Elena snapped.
“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’ve been hoarding the people’s property?”
They ripped off accoutrement, without ether—Elena had heard men like this one talk about it in the market, about how some nobles died from the pain. She would make them shoot her before she let them take her tail, or take Nina’s lungs.
“Wouldn’t the commissar like to know you’re bartering for jewels with a noblewoman instead of reporting me straight to him?” Elena’s tail was now fully lifted, the feathers spreading apart and bristling, visible under her coat, but she didn’t care. He already knew she had accoutrement.
He shrugged. “You have nothing anymore. The commissar don’t care what you say.”
Elena lunged forward and jammed her fingernails into his throat, wanting to hear him howl, because he wouldn’t sell her the oil she needed for Nina, because he was a face of the faceless millions who had risen up and destroyed her home, her family, everything.
He grappled with her hands and threw her off. She skidded over ice, the swollen skin around her tail grinding into the snow as her coat rode up.
She pulled herself up using the low branches of a pine tree, then skidded towards him, pulling up her coat-sleeve to reveal the thick brass opera glasses installed on her left wrist. She swooped her arm down on his head.
He screamed. The oil bottle rolled into the snow. She snatched it up and ducked away from his stomping boots. He was still screaming, and she hit him again, from behind. He tripped, rolled into the snow with a red line spidering up his forehead.
Elena jammed her black-buttoned boot into his side. He wasn’t dead, but he should be.
A shout, and shadowy figures marched around the church, coats buttoned tight and hammer-and-plough hats pulled low over eyebrows. Elena ducked behind the silver bell hulking on a frozen patch of dirt beneath the birches that lined the market. She pressed her back against the frozen metal, remembering when this bell had hung in the belfry of St. Sophia’s, before the city’s new commissars had taken it down to melt it for metal.
Elena peered around the bell: the soldiers clustered around the man she had hit. She slunk around the other side of the bell, then raced towards the kremlin gates—her tail aching in its socket with every step she took—towards the road that would lead her back to Nina’s raw cough and to the boxcar, the only home they had left.
* * *
In Elena’s girlhood of lemonwood dressers and ice skating parties, her favorite folktale was the story of the firebird, the wild creature that men hunted through the dark Siberian forests. In the best version of the story, which Mother didn’t like her to read, the firebird turned vicious when it was caught, lighting villages aflame and clawing out the necks of the men that captured it. She always knew when she came of age and received her accoutrement, as all aristocrats had since ornamenting oneself with the tails or wings of folktale creatures had become fashionable in the last century, she would receive the jeweled tail of a firebird.
Nina, on the other hand, had always loved the story of the rusalka, the drowned women who mope around after lost lovers in marshy rivers, and so the summer of Nina’s debut she had received fish scales on her arms along with the customary opera glasses. Of course, consumptive Nina, who grew tired even after an afternoon of playing the piano, already had another accoutrement: the pair of brass lungs she’d received when Mother and Father had sent her to a spa in Switzerland one summer.
As Elena trudged along the road towards the boxcar, the blackened gold tower of the horseshoe-shaped house loomed on the other side of the hill. She clenched her teeth, remembered Mother’s peppermint perfume, Father playing the piano, his epaulettes quivering on his shoulders. They were nothing but fading sepia photographs now, and she and Nina, the last Trubetskoys, were countesses only of an abandoned wooden boxcar hidden on the outskirts of what had once been their estate. As dark fell and the boxcar loomed behind the copse of trees, Elena’s thoughts crashed over and over into the images of the life she was supposed to have: seasons in Petrograd with daring affairs, a year traveling the Continent, Mother and Father growing old in the house and Nina living in their sky-blue palace by the canal in Petrograd, filling the rooms with lilies and books of poetry.
We will never have any of that, now, Elena thought as she yanked open the boxcar door. I’m the woman who uses her opera glasses accoutrement to beat peasants instead of to watch the Ballets Russes.
“Oh thank goodness, you’ve returned,” Nina said. Several dark-stained handkerchiefs wilted on the sawdust-covered floor around her feet. She was draped in a fur coat, the only one that Elena hadn’t nailed up around the boxcar windows for insulation. A book—one of the ones their great-grandfather had had signed by Pushkin—dangled from her fingers. “Were you—”
Elena held up the bottle of oil, and Nina clapped.
“I smashed up one of them, too.” Elena peeled off her gloves, scooped a set of pliers and a wrench out of a carpetbag. “I hope wolves eat him.”
“Elena, that’s not very—”
“Hush, don’t become agitated. It’ll only make your cough worse. Now hold still.”
Nina sighed and hunched over the back of her chair. Elena peeled down her sister’s dress to reveal the brass door fitted into the flesh between her shoulderblades.
“I despise this part,” Nina whispered. “I hate when—”
Nina jerked up, barking out a cough that bounced through the boxcar and shuddered her body. She grappled for a handkerchief, her cheeks puffed out and darkness filled the white cloth.
“All right, you’re all right.” Elena’s head swam as she watched Nina cough up blood. She hated that Nina, who had once curled beneath blankets by fat radiators, now had to live in this drafty boxcar, her cough wracking her body whenever they ran out of oil.
After the coughs subsided, Elena unscrewed the brass plate on Nina’s back, lifted it up with the creaking of rusty hinges. The smell of old metal and pus drifted through the boxcar.
“This isn’t much oil.” Elena shook the bottle, then positioned the spigot over the gaping hole that revealed the rusted swell of Nina’s brass lungs. “And it’s not good oil, either. It’s just gun oil, not even accoutrement oil. No
t worth giving up jewels.”
“You stole—”
“What else could I do?” Elena shook the bottle and oil dripped into the seam between the lungs. “It’s all corroded back here.”
After she finished Nina’s lungs, Elena oiled the creaky scales on Nina’s arms. She cleaned the blood off her opera glasses, then oiled her feathers and the crease between her back and tail. She flexed her tail and at last the skin that anchored it to her back didn’t pull painfully tight.
She put her feet on the woodstove while Nina curled in her fur and they shared porcelain cups of tea and a chunk of rusk.
“This is a far cry from picnics in the Crimea,” Elena said.
“Oh, picnics when you would pilfer jam from the—”
“From that old cook who despised me? You were self-righteous about stealing even then, dearest. Yet you always ate the jam, didn’t you?”
“I only ate the jam because you forced me to eat the jam.” Nina was laughing, and already her cheeks flushed healthy in the woodstove light. “You always forced me to eat your pilfered jam and to play the princess—”
“Because you wanted to play the princess. And I wanted to play the knight.”
“Until you fell running and skinned your knees and cried for Mother, because you’ve always pretended to be tougher than you are.”
Elena jabbed her sister in the ribs, but warmth and comfort tugged at her. At least Nina was here, Nina had survived, and for now Nina’s cough had subsided and she was laughing.
But then Elena reminded herself of how much they’d lost, of how she must already start thinking about where their next bottle of oil might come from, and how her anger burned in her chest, an eternal flame.
* * *
Within a week, Elena had shaken the last drop of oil onto Nina’s lungs. Nina grew pale again, and barely slept; Elena woke sometimes in the night to the sounds of Nina coughing as she clattered around the boxcar.
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