The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  • • • •

  By first light there were fewer wastoures. The crushed grass was red with dawn and more than dawn. The lingering wastoures bickered for the chance to pull the blades through their beaks, for the blood.

  Ada whispered to Blanche, “I have to pee.”

  “So?” Blanche had no great opinion of the things people worried about.

  Ada wrinkled her brow. “They’ll smell it.”

  Blanche tipped her head as though listening through the feather-edged pinholes of her ears, though what she listened to was not the air. “By now, most are far to the west. These are the little lame ones that cannot keep up. They’ll leave soon enough.”

  “They don’t seem any littler than the others,” said Ada, dubious, but she peed over the side of the branch anyway. One came sniffing over and looked up, eyeing them from its sideways-tipped head before it ambled off to the west. The others followed.

  Ada was very hungry (for burdock and blackberries and a handful of kippernuts had been yesterday’s dinner, and today’s breakfast, too). But still she waited until Blanche said at last, “We can get down now.”

  “Are we safe?” said Ada.

  “We are never safe,” said Blanche.

  It was worse descending. Blanche flutter-jumped from branch to branch, but Ada had to lower herself carefully, and the bark that had seemed so sturdy under hands rushing up now broke away under the same hands creeping down. The lowest branch was higher than she remembered, and it was a long time before she could bring herself to drop onto the tumbledown wall.

  At the sound, one final wastoure emerged from a pile of fallen stones. Not all the blood drawn in the long night had that of forest creatures; this wastoure had been slashed accidentally by a fellow and itself became prey. It limped toward them, hungry and curious, but Blanche spread her white wings and snapped her short rose-pink beak. To her surprise it turned away and limped westward into the forest.

  And now it is gone from this story as well. Imagine its ending as you would. If you are kind, see it dead quickly in the jaws of a hungry young wolf a short league from this place. If you are as cold as the world, then see pain, infection, hunger, and death a mercy at last.

  • • • •

  Ada picked up Blanche and recrossed the clearing to the path-that-was-a-road. The wastoures had crushed the ferns and trampled the shrubs, gouged the beech and staunch oak with their claws, scattered blood and shards of bone everywhere—but the road home was easy to see, for the deep-trenched ruts were a thousand years old, more permanent than any horde.

  It was afternoon when they came at last to the forest’s edge and saw their little church across the trampled fields, and the handful of houses and huts, but the chimneys were unsmoking and the doors agape or gone. There was no sound: no churn or quern or clattering loom, no hammer on iron or chisel on wood, no oxen or horses, milk-cows or sheep or chuckling chickens. Ada had always been a little afraid of the village’s big dogs, and even more afraid of the geese, but neither came buffeting down the lane to bowl her flat.

  Marjory’s cottage was at the far end of the village. Three wastoures had clustered around something gray and red in the lane between here and there. They did not look up.

  “Will they eat us?” whispered Ada.

  Blanche said, “I think they are no longer hungry.”

  Perhaps she was right, for they sidled into the woods, leaving their dinner half-eaten: Father Alfred’s donkey. Blanche fluttered from Ada’s arms and ran across to peek through the gaping door of the nearest cottage, where Ada’s only friend Giles lived, with his siblings Armand and Geoffroy and Natalie and Marie, their mother and father and aunt, five goats and a dog, two cows, and the chickens and ducks.

  “Is anyone there?” asked Ada.

  Blanche said only, “Do not look inside the huts. Do not look closely at anything.”

  Everywhere was the same. There were corpses or parts of them, and sometimes Ada could tell who it had been. Other people were just not there and there was no telling where they had gone, or how. The donkey was partially eaten, but his short gray face was for some reason untouched, and his eyes were closed as though he were sleeping. Ada had always longed to stroke his nose but she had been scared to put her hand so close to those long yellow teeth. Now she stroked it at last, and it was as soft as she had guessed, like kitten ears.

  You ask, Where is her grief? Why does Ada not scream and wail, as you might, or I? Why does she not fall to the ground in despair, run weeping in circles? She has seen horrors before this, horrors at six, orphaned and alone. She has been here before. She has learned that adults always fail—if only by dying—so what’s new?

  At least she has Blanche. Not every lost child does.

  The door to Marjory’s cottage was closed but the thatch had been torn through and the oiled oxskin that glazed the window was in shreds. When Ada reached for the door, Blanche pushed her white head between hand and iron latch. “Best not,” she said.

  The coop door was agape, and the sunlight streaming in filled the air with golden flecks. The chickens were gone, dead or fled or hiding deep in the hearts of trees they had managed somehow to ascend. There were only torn nests, broken eggshells, and splashes of blood clustered with busy flies; but the air still smelled comfortingly of Blanche’s kin, feathers and fluff, millet and shit.

  And what of Blanche’s grief? Do you think she feels none? I have known a chicken who pined to death, waiting by the gate for a dead coopmate until she starved. But sometimes grief is a luxury. But Blanche is practical, and there is Ada to look after.

  Ada’s little bed of hay and rags had been ripped apart. She plumped it back together and cuddled down, with an eye on the open doorway. Blanche tucked herself carefully onto her favorite roost, just above, and said: “We must plan.”

  They could not stay. Wastoures did not come every year, but when they did, it was in waves. Tomorrow, the day after, next week—they would come again, and keep coming until winter came and they died or found secret caverns. Also, there would be scavengers: foxes, rats, and others on two legs, scrounging through whatever was left behind. Ada would not be able to hide here.

  There was no point to following the wastoures’ path, for everywhere they had been would be the same: ruin, loss, the clustering scavengers. And the lands they had not yet touched would be overrun with fleeing people and animals, lost or afraid to go home. No one would care for a small barefooted girl and a clip-winged white hen.

  “What can we do?” Ada asked. She was drowsy with eating. They had gone out again and found food everywhere, in lavish and unguarded profusion. The wastoures ate only flesh, so there were tarts and turnips, cabbages and tender new carrots. Ada had filled her skirt with apples and bread (nibbled, for some mice had survived) and carried them back to the coop.

  Blanche said, “Wastoures cannot swim. If we cross a lake or a river without a bridge, we’ll be safer. Maybe. A town with a moat would be best.”

  “What’s a moat?” Ada knew what a town was; it was more people than she had ever seen in her whole life, all in a place.

  “A river that runs all the way around a town. A ring of water,” said Blanche.

  Ada nodded, as though she understood. “What do we do?”

  “Find a new home. Find a family and make ourselves part of that.”

  “I suppose,” said Ada, dubiously. Her experience with families was not so happy as Blanche’s.

  “First you must do a thing for me,” said Blanche.

  Ada nodded; she was so very tired.

  Blanche dropped to the floor beside Ada and stretched out her right wing. “Pluck the clipped feathers.”

  Ada sat up. “But you won’t be able to fly!”

  “I cannot fly now. If you pluck them, they will grow back whole.”

  “How long will that take?” Ada asked.

  But Blanche did not know, for it had never happened to her. It was only a sort of legend in every henyard. It was an uncomfortabl
e business, for Ada was afraid to hurt Blanche and it required a strong pull, and Blanche could not help twitching away, but at last it was done and there were four feathers piled beside Ada’s bed. By that time it was dark.

  And, because Ada was after all a very small girl (and Blanche a chicken), in spite of the dead, the smell of blood and the loneliness, they slept. They could not have in any case kept their eyes open, not even if the wastoures had run ravening in and devoured them down to the bones.

  • • • •

  In the morning, Ada filled a basket with white bread, a hard cheese wrapped in a cloth, and butter in a tub she had found sunk into a pail of water at the midwife’s house—all finer than anything she had eaten since coming to Marjory’s cottage. She did not think to bring a knife nor money until Blanche reminded her (Blanche was old for a hen and accordingly wise), and then she took a dirk and eleven silver pennies from the blacksmith’s house, and put on a blue gown that had belonged to his middle daughter—for her own was ruined and there was no sign of his family, no sign at all. They walked south into the new morning.

  A small girl and a hen are not built to travel fast nor far, especially when they must often hide. Their path traversed the wasteland the wastoures had left behind: ruined fields and orchards, collapsed huts and trampled copses. Pillars of ravens and rooks circled above the wastoures’ leavings—but even amid all the ruin were places that had not been damaged, as though the wastoures had been a wildfire, razing one field and leaving the next untouched.

  They passed a village the wastoures had missed, but there were men with bows and short swords everywhere about it. “Leave it,” said Blanche. “That is no home. We’ll find somewhere better.”

  They saw other people like themselves (but adults), lost and stumbling or moving with fierce purpose. Some carried food. Others carried things that made no sense: a mirror, a silver candlestick, a roll of vellum, a fine cape too warm for August. Once there was a woman with her head uncovered and her hair a tangled mat down her back, cradling a bundle and weeping; she saw Ada and folded to her knees, reaching out, and the bundle dropped forgotten from her hands: not a babe in arms but a crumpled wad of rags. Later a man chased them, snatching for Blanche until she attacked, flapping into his face; and he stumbled back with a scream, hands laced over his eyes and blood seeping past his fingers.

  And now they are gone from this story, as well, the blinded thief and the grieving woman and these other hard-faced or frightened roamers. I have not told you their stories. They do not matter; they die alone, unremembered, pointless except to make a point. All authors leave a swath of destruction. We maim and move on. The privilege of the happy ending is accorded to few.

  • • • •

  That night, Ada and Blanche slept in an empty sheepfold under the bright-mooned sky. In the morning they went on, though the soles of Ada’s feet burned with the friction of calluses on dirt. In time they came to a brook. Ada lay down on the bank, paddling her feet in the cold water as Blanche scratched for worms.

  “What do we do now?” Ada asked.

  Chickens do not much note the expressions of people, but even to Blanche the girl looked pale and tired. She dropped beside her and rubbed her small feathery face against Ada’s.

  “There will be a place for us. I know it.”

  The wind shifted, and as though she had summoned the sound, they heard the distant sound of church bells: a single low bell rung nine times, then a pause, then nine more.

  Nine, and nine again. Blanche said, “Nine tolls for a man, and seven for a woman—” the distant bell was tolling seven; seven; seven—“and three for a child of more than four years.”

  Ada was six. “What if you are smaller?”

  Blanche’s voice was a soft clucking. “For an infant, a single bell to remind men of the soul reaped early, and to comfort the mother.”

  Three, three, three: a long pause, and then a single toll.

  Blanche said, “Someone still lives, to climb the church tower and pull the rope. There is order there. That is where we must go.”

  “Will they want us?” Ada asked, for Marjory had not.

  Blanche smoothed a feather with her beak, heaved herself back onto her sturdy claws. “If they do not, we must find a way to make them want us.”

  They followed a sunken lane, smooth with use and pounded smoother by the recent four-toed prints of wastoures. They hid from a youth limping the other way, and from two hard-faced men dragging a high-piled handcart. They hid from a double file of silent monks bearing a dead man on a litter, and from a half-grown wild boar so lost in the pain of its torn flank that it stumbled unseeing down the middle of the lane. In the afternoon, Ada shared the last of her bread with Blanche, leaving the pot with the remains of the butter at the base of a beech tree, for even ants grow hungry.

  They were still trudging along the lane when the bell tolled again, so sudden, close, and loud that all they had to do was turn left and climb a hill. And there was the Unlucky Village.

  Perhaps the wastoure’s numbers had been greater here, or their hunger. From the breast of the hill the village seemed no more than huddled ruins: houses and cottages destroyed, stone walls and chimneys toppled, roofs collapsed. The outbuildings were torn apart entirely, and only piles of stone, thatch, wood, and withy marked their locations. The fences had been trampled into the ground, the gardens razed. A wasteland of stained, crushed grass was all that was left of the common green. Only the little parish church looked intact, though the lead roof had buckled in one corner. The bell had fallen silent again.

  Blanche scuttered a few steps down the path to the village, but Ada did not follow. Seeing this, Blanche said, “Come,” in the tone that had once brought her chicks running (grown now, grown to hens and cocks: grown, gone, and dead).

  Ada chewed her lip. “No.”

  What is the hen’s equivalent of a sigh? A puff of breath and an impatient shake of wattle and comb? Blanche gave it. “It will be night soon, and there will be wolves and bandits and perhaps wastoures, too.”

  Ada’s head shook, no no no, though she did not seem to realize it. “There’s nobody here.”

  Yet there was white smoke rising from a chimney, and the sound of iron on wood, and the drifting scent of an oak wood fire and barley porridge on the boil. Blanche sighed again, that complicated act, then harried Ada down the path, the girl stumbling and her lip trembling. But what choice did they have?

  They passed the first fallen fence, and at last they saw someone, a woman leaving one of the ruined cottages to hurry across the green.

  Ada did a very brave thing then. For all her fear, she called out, “Wait!”

  The woman did not stop, only averted her face as she ran past, vanishing round the corner of a paling half-erected to surround the church. Blanche fluttered into Ada’s arms, and they tumbled after her and saw other people now: a woman stacking wood salvaged from a ruined house, a man digging a grave. Another, holding a paling upright in its hole, looked up grim-faced, but he also said nothing, and turned back at a sharp word from the man trying to set the post in the ground—as though that would stop the wastoures when they came again; as though anything would.

  Ada stood uncertainly in the middle of the claw-flattened lane. “What should we do?” she whispered, though she knew that Blanche would not speak in front of these hard-faced people. The hen in her arms only shook her head.

  “Who are you?” asked a voice, unexpected and very close. Blanche fluttered to the ground with a squawk, but Ada looked up into the face of a man they hadn’t noticed. He had been rehanging a nearby cottage’s door; he still held a mallet and the new-forged pin for the hinge.

  Ada looked at Blanche for advice, but the hen said of course nothing. “Are you ghosts?” she asked at last.

  The man put down his mallet and stepped back from the door. He was very tall, and wore dusty black shoes. “We look it, I guess,” he said. “Are you?”

  Ada shook her head. “No, I am a girl,
and this is Blanche. She’s a hen, not a ghost either.”

  “You’re alone?” The man walked across.

  “No!” said Ada, indignantly. “I have Blanche. But we don’t know what to do.”

  The man looked down from all his great height for a moment, then knelt and reached out a hand to her. “You might stay here with me and the boy. I’m Robert. I have room for you if you want it.”

  • • • •

  After disaster, when we are adults, we survive if we can. We are hungry, we are cold, we are sick or injured. We save what and who we can. There is fear, loss, and crippling grief, but we do not have time or energy yet to fully reckon our dead. We must think about tonight and tomorrow: portioning out the phone’s charge and our only bottle of water, tallying the last seven doses of our heart medication, now six, now five. Periods start whether we have tampons or not. Diapers need to be changed even when there are none.

  But someone will come. We will hear helicopters, trucks, see red crosses and crescents. We will be safe.

  When we are children alone in the heart of horrors, we do not know this.

  There had been no warning for the Unlucky Village, no boy earning pennies until he felt the wastoures’ talons scything the air at his heels. Robert had been a farrier (but the horses were gone) and a husband (his wife, as well: walking back from the Egendon market where she had gone to sell her weaving) and a father (daughters dead with their mother, and his son in the churchyard’s fifth new grave). Robert was an old man, though he had not been so a week ago.

  He gave Ada the loft his children had shared. “But no chickens inside,” he said, so Blanche slept in the henhouse, which was empty except for her own quick heartbeat, for the wastoures had found them all. Each night Ada crept out to cuddle with Blanche, until Robert brought her back in.

  There was another child that he had found: a boy a little older than Ada. The day after the wastoures had passed, Robert had gone searching for his wife and daughters, though he found no signs of them but a ribbon that might once have been blue. On his way back, he heard a hopeless, unaware moaning from within the hollow trunk of a fallen oak tree and opened the trunk with his axe. There was a boy, wedged as deep as he had been able to get. His right foot was shredded where the wastoures had worked for a while at pulling him out. Robert brought the boy home and laid him in his own bed. The boy’s name was Ulf, though Robert will never learn this.