by R. T. Kaelin
©2013, Elizabeth Bear, Mark Lawrence, Robert Silverberg, Erik Scott de Bie, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Philip Athans , Michael Stackpole, Michael J. Sullivan, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Vicki Johnson-Steger, Ari Marmell, Jean Rabe, Rick Novy, R.T. Kaelin, Donald J. Bingle, Alex Shvartsman, Maxwell Alexander Drake, SM Blooding, Jaym Gates, Alex Bledsoe, Stephen D. Sullivan, T.L. Gray, Tobias Buckell, C.S. Marks, Marian Allen, Bryan Young, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Sarah Hans, Janine Spendlove, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, C.J. Henderson, Steven Saus, Addie King, Doris Stever, Matt Bone, Elisabeth Waters, Rob Rogers, Tracy Chowdhury, Gregory Wilson, Tim Marquitz, Timothy Zahn
All Rights Reserved by a story's respective author.
Edited by R.T. Kaelin, Sarah Chorn, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, and Rob H. Bedford
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission from the authors.
Cover art by Kevin Ward, Cover Design by R.T. Kaelin
Columbus, Ohio
www.terrene.info
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who made this possible: the volunteer authors, editors, illustrators, and bloggers.
Top Contributors
The following people made a significant enough donation to warrant a special thank you here:
Stefan Gore
Connie Lipscomb
Jeff Ellis
Anonymous
Kerry Stubbs
Anonymous
Shaun Duke
Anuj Goel
Anthony R. Cardno
Donald J. Bingle
Shauna Roberts
William O’Connor
The Washor Family
Ajay Solai Jawahar
Jeridel Banks
Sandie Kirkland
A Quick Note to Readers
In the days immediately following Hurricane Sandy, I found myself both awed and saddened by the devastation I saw on the news. In the past, I’ve donated money for various relief efforts, but the gesture always felt somewhat hollow to me. Disasters have ripped apart people’s lives and homes, and here I am, sitting on my couch in my nice, warm living room, donating a measly fifty bucks.
I wanted to do more, to give more, but my familial obligations precluded me from physically going to help while economic constraints prevented me from giving more.
That’s when inspiration struck.
I’m an indie author (at the moment) and have enjoyed some relative success. In recent years, I’ve attended a few conventions as an author and made some wonderful professional connections. I reached out to a number of authors I knew, inquiring if they would like to donate a short story to an anthology, the proceeds of which would all go to Sandy relief.
A bunch said yes, emailed their contacts, and…well, things sort of took off after that. Turns out, people like helping people.
This anthology is our collective way of helping. We hope you enjoy.
-R.T. Kaelin
Triumph Over Tragedy
An anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy
Old Leatherwings
by Elizabeth Bear
Quick
by Mark Lawrence
When You’re Dead…
by Michael A. Stackpole
Tradition
by Michael J. Sullivan
Death Between the Stars
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Hell Matter
by Jean Rabe
The Adjoa Gambit
by Rick Novy
Hero
by R.T. Kaelin
Big Apple, Small Serpent
by Ari Marmell
The Pope of the Chimps
by Robert Silverberg
I Am Made of Every Color
by Jaym Gates
Spoils of War
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Orphan Train
by Vicki Johnson-Steger
Holocaust
by Maxwell Alexander Drake
Wrap
by Alex Bledsoe
The Gift of the Dragons
by Stephen D. Sullivan
The Kid in the Park
by T.L. Gray
Duncan Derring and the Call of the Lady Luck
by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Day of the Shadows
by Donald J. Bingle
Angels of Mercy
by Erik Scott de Bie
Heart’s Desire
by C.S. Marks
Spurn Babylon
by Tobias S. Buckell
Parting the Clouds
by Bradley P. Beaulieu
The Burning Servant
by Steven Saus
The Caretaker of Mire
by Gregory A. Wilson
The Last Incantation
by Alex Shvartsman
Welcome to New York
by Addie J. King
In the Glimpses
by Matt Bone
Coal: 1938
by Doris Stever
Undivided
by Marian Allen
Among The Stars
by Sarah Hans
Sergeant Argent’s Moment in the Sun
by Rob Rogers
Sperare Victor
by Tim Marquitz
Shadowlands
by Elisabeth Waters
Wish Upon a Star
by Janine Spendlove
A Happy Mother Takes Away Pain
by C.J. Henderson
Katanoi
by Philip Athans
Don’t Wake Me Up
by Tracy Chowdhury
One Good Deed
by Bryan Young
The Battle Rose
by SM Blooding
The Ring
by Timothy Zahn
Author Bios
Old Leatherwings
by Elizabeth Bear
The old leatherman was late for breakfast. This was more than an unusual happenstance: George Dell had fed the wanderer supper and breakfast every thirty-four days for twenty-six years, and never once had the old leatherman missed a meal or made a sound beyond the creak of his rough-sewn rawhide suit.
New York winters pushing snow and New York summers walking alongside a furrow behind the oxen left a man knotted and strong as bent rope, twisted to suit his tasks. Dell wasn’t young anymore himself. But he stomped into his thick hide boots, pulled his hat down stiffly with horny hands, shrugged his oilcloth on over his coveralls, and went out into the cold March rain. Dell knew his farm like the back of his own worn-out hand, hills and brooks like ropy veins and age spots and skin weathered shiny on the grips of the plow. He knew where he’d find the old leatherman, if he were there to be found.
A red-tail hawk hunched in a naked birch halfway up the hillside. White tree like bone among the cast iron black of wet oak and maple; the hawk fluffed almost headless against the chill and rain. Another farmer might have cursed leaving his shotgun leaned up by the planken door, butt propped beside the steel bucket of sand for the tall kitchen steps. Might have trudged back downslope, trudged back, shot the hawk off the branch and gone looking for its mate, if it had one. Might have crucified both bodies on the barbed wire fence beside the chicken coop, way to send a message.
But Dell didn’t keep chickens since his wife died, and he knew foxes took more poultry anyway. A red-tail was more likely to eat a weasel than eat a hen, and weasels were
bad on eggs.
He muttered to himself as he tromped through the pocked old snow. Maybe he decided to move on before breakfast. Maybe he decided to get breakfast somewhere else. Maybe he’s snug by the fire he banked last night to keep him warm, roasting a squirrel on a stick and too contented to come out in the cold.
Maybe my hogs will butcher and smoke their own selves come fall.
* *** *
Once there was a poor tradesman who loved a rich merchant’s daughter and would have given anything to win her.
* *** *
Jules Bourglay lay dying in a cave banked with rotten spring snow, on the shores of a foreign land. A white tree thrust between the tumbled granite blocks of his rude shelter, an accusing finger pointed at the sky. A hawk he had followed from France and then for twenty-six years in circles from the Connecticut River to the Hudson crouched in the branches overhead.
Bourglay’s fire had died to coals and his coals had died to ash. He held a thick, curved, three-sided leather needle threaded with sinew between fingers too cold to sew with, his stitchery pulled over his lap like a cowhide blanket.
A wet cough rattled his chest like a ship’s canvas in a gale. He laid the needle, which over time he had sharpened to less than half its length, on the leather and pulled his fingers into his sleeve, tucking the sleeve under his coat to warm his hand. He did not cover his mouth when he coughed again, but he spat blood and phlegm into the ashes when he was done.
The moisture didn’t sizzle. A cold rain fell through the junctures in the stones.
Twenty-six years he’d followed the hawks through these American states, from river to river and farm to farm. He’d swept a great circle steady as a clockhand, sleeping in caves to be closer to the hawks even when folk offered beds or barns. He’d held his tongue as the magic demanded, and he’d walked and he’d stitched and he’d clothed himself in the leftover plates of leather. He’d eaten what strangers offered in their charity, and he’d known they thought him a madman.
There was one hawk left.
He only needed one more day, he thought. Two, perhaps. But he could not walk, and he feared the hawk would leave before too much longer.
Slowly, Jules Bourglay slumped forward over his work, and fell to dreaming.
* *** *
Once there was a man held captive by a wicked king so that his only hope for escape was to make wings of wax and feathers and to fly across the sea.
* *** *
Inside the farmhouse, George Dell’s older daughter, Hannah Wickham, held her older daughter on her knee, fussing rose-pink ribbons on the little girl’s church dress. Widowed Hannah found George Dell a comfort, and widowed George Dell thought the same of Hannah. What five-year-old Stella made of these proceedings remained a mystery: she hadn’t spoken a word since her father died, though she was as well-behaved and sweetly sad a child as any mother would cling to in her sorrow.
Hannah rose at Dell’s shout from the yard and seated Stella on the tinderbox with an admonition to stay tidy. Graceful and strong, her brown hair twisted up and pinned, Hannah drew a robe around her shoulders and opened the kitchen door. “Pa? What is it?”
He stomped snow from his boots against the cast-iron hedgehog beside the door, and came in past her, his oilcloth dripping on the sanded puncheon floor. “The old leatherman is dying up the cave under the birch tree,” he said. “I’ll fetch the sled from down cellar. Get your boots on and out of your church clothes; I can’t manage him alone.”
“Mercy,” Hannah answered, and went to do as she was bid.
* *** *
Once there was an orphaned princess who was under a spell.
* *** *
Dell had to kneel to crawl through the overhang of a granite cave made from half a dozen flat boulders tumbled together like so much split maple. “He’s breathing,” Dell called back to Hannah. “Pass me in the blanket. I’ll have to drag him out.”
He glanced over his shoulder to see Hannah’s fair face as she squatted down, heedless of the snow and mud clotting the edge of her skirts, and shoved the folded blanket in. “Hand me up whatever ‘tis he’s got on his lap,” she said. Once Dell had the blanket from her, he did so, struggling with the soaked stiff leather. Something glittering tumbled from it; a needle, he saw, and meant to remember it after he fetched the old leatherman out.
Roots dug his knees as he spread the blanket and struggled to pull the old leatherman on to it. “What is that thing?”
“It looks like a cloak—” A snapping noise, the clatter of vast leathery wings, as she shook it open. “A cloak, it is. A hood and all. It looks near finished.”
The old leatherman was a vast slack weight in the narrow cave. Not for the first time, Dell wondered what duty or heartbreak had set the man wandering in circles, never speaking, living off the kindness of strangers and whatever he could snare.
Dell backed out of the narrow hole under the birch tree, dragging some two hundred pounds of fevered man and wet leather behind him. The blanket held together by the grace of his stern Puritan God alone. George Dell swore later that he never would have managed without the snow.
The hawk screamed as he and Hannah bundled the old leatherman on to the sledge, and took wing as Dell leaned into the traces. He was halfway down the slope before he remembered that he’d meant to fetch the needle.
* *** *
Once there was a nightingale who loved a poor scholar so much that she died to make a rose bloom in midwinter, so he could win the hand of his lady.
And yet his lady spurned him nonetheless.
* *** *
The white clapboard-sided farmhouse made a warmer place for dying in. His hands ached with warming, and he thought if he wasn’t so weary and comfortable before the fire he might even manage to open his eyes. But he was weary, and a woman’s voice sang wordless tunes over him. And rest was close, after twenty-six years of walking. Very close, indeed.
But Jules Bourglay could hear the hawk calling outside.
And the sewing wasn’t finished.
* *** *
Once there was a cruel and beautiful maiden with eleven handsome brothers who had been transformed into ravens.
* *** *
Hannah watched as her father heaved the old leatherman onto a pallet on the floor in the warmth of the kitchen. She washed his face while Stella clung to her skirts; his skin was tanned as insensate as his leather. She spread his cloak and his patchwork jacket out on chairs far enough from the cast-iron range that the leather would not crack and stiffen as they dried. Dell went out to unharness the oxen; they weren’t making church on this Sunday.
Stella still clung as Hannah shook pale green coffee from the tin into a skillet and set the beans on the top of the stove to roast. Between pumping up water and setting that to boil, she shook them occasionally. The rain made the kitchen grey. She thought of lighting a lantern to cheer the room, but decided not to waste the kerosene.
When a solid knock sounded at the bottom of the door, she went to answer, thinking her father must have kicked the frame because his arms were too loaded with wood to manage the latch.
Stella hopped back, dragging Hannah’s skirts with her, as a red-tailed hawk flapped into the room.
* *** *
Once there was a young tradesman who learned too late who it was that had truly loved him.
* *** *
George Dell had seen many a strange sight in his sixty years, but his daughter and granddaughter at bay behind the table while a hawk as big as a small eagle mantled over the form of a leather-clad vagrant on his kitchen floor was probably the strangest. He paused in the doorway, the leatherman’s needle—which he had hiked back up the hill to rescue, on the grounds that there was always a possibility the old wanderer might live—glittering between his fingers. The kitchen reeked of scorching coffee beans; the only sound was the stentorian rasp of the leatherman’s failing breath.
“Hannah?” He thrust the needle through his oilcloth slicker, and reached b
ehind the door for the shotgun, realizing even as he did so that he could not shoot the hawk without shooting the old leatherman, too. “What’s happening here?”
Hannah laughed softly, her back to the wall and one hand on the edge of the table. The other hand held her skirts in front of Stella, a pitiably fragile sort of barrier. “It seems the bird’s invited itself to luncheon, Pa. And I’m not quite sure how to invite it back out again.”
The hawk cocked an arrogant eye at Dell, and he laid his other hand on the shotgun, but did not raise it. It flipped its half-open wings shut and waddled around to face him, awkward on the floor as fat duck out of water.
“Mais oui, go ahead and shoot me,” the hawk said in the dulcet tones of a lady. “If Jules dies before he sets me free, I might as well be dead in any case.”
George Dell blinked, and ever-so-slowly set the gun back down behind the door.
* *** *
Once there was a poor but virtuous girl who could not spin straw into gold, though she tried with all her heart.
* *** *
Her voice brought Bourglay back from the warm and quiet place into which he had dreamed himself. Her dear, beloved voice: the only unchanged thing about her. He blinked once, slowly, and thought of examining his surroundings with care before he sat up, if he could manage to sit up. And then the cough took him like a convulsion, and his mouth filled up with slime.
