The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  This, then, was Ada’s family in the Unlucky Village: grieving Robert substituted for bitter Marjory, raving Ulf for the cruel sisters, and Blanche. There was plenty of food (though no meat) and blankets enough for everyone who was left. Robert was gone all of each day, trying to set the fields to rights without oxen, guarding against looters, working on the paling—for always the Unlucky Village worked in fear of the next wave.

  It was Ada’s job to watch the porridge pot and the fire, and also to watch the boy. When Robert was not by, Blanche crept in and sat with her. Her plucked feathers were growing back, little sharp quills so delicate she could feel air moving like fingers on them.

  Watching Ulf was not an easy thing. He was feverish and kept reaching down to paw at his leg above the ruined foot, where it was mottled the color of marsh water. He gabbled Mother and Father, Jesu and Mary; the names of his sisters and brother, his dog, and his family’s cows.

  On the second day, he started up in his fever and grasped Ada’s arm with a hot hand like a claw. “You don’t belong here,” he hissed. “He’s my father now.”

  Blanche flared her wings and snaked her white neck forward, but before she could peck him, he had released Ada and fell back delirious again, crying and repeating, “The Lucky Village, the Lucky Village.”

  Blanche settled on Ada’s knee, one wary golden-black eye on the boy. Ada whispered, “What’s the Lucky Village?”

  Blanche contemplated, in the way she had. “It’s a true thing. There is a village where the wastoures don’t come.”

  “Is it a town with a moat?” asked Ada.

  “No,” said Blanche. “It is just luckier than others.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Somewhere near.” Blanche kept no maps in her head, though she could find places once she knew they existed.

  “Your chicken talks?” said the boy abruptly. He had a habit of sudden lucidity.

  Ada said, “No.”

  “I know it did! I’m sick but I’m not deaf.” He pushed himself upright in the bed.

  “You dreamed it,” said Ada fiercely, “and if you tell Robert, I will stick you with a pin”—for she had forgotten that the running boy had taken the pin her mother had given to her. But when Robert returned at dusk (and Blanche in the yard, meek as a nun, as though she had never seen the inside of a house), the boy had fallen back into terrors and seemed to remember nothing of their talk. A line had begun creeping up the boy’s leg like a streak of oak-gall ink, ankle to calf.

  “He’s going to die,” Blanche said softly once when they were together, and Ada nodded. She remembered the smell from when her parents had died.

  But Robert did not know that smell, or chose to ignore it. The boy would be fine. He needed time. He needed herbs. He needed charms hung over his bed and painted upon his leg. He needed to be kept cool, to be kept warm, to be poulticed with nettle infusions, to sleep, to be prayed over. The line crept up and up. When Ada could not sleep for the sound of the boy’s sobs, she crept into the henhouse and cuddled Blanche close, nose deep in her sweet, earthy fluff.

  On their third day in the Unlucky Village, there was news: a boy not running but trotting loose-kneed with exhaustion, who told them that a wave of wastoures had passed in the night, to the north. “Is Woodend safe?” asked a woman whose daughter had moved there to wed; but the boy shook his head.

  “I started in Berton, and I ran through Tirborne and Nutley and Chatton, and I hid in a tree when they went past, and now I’m going back. I came past Woodend last night. There was nothing left.” He thought. “Nothing to recognize.”

  But the woman was screaming already and she beat him with her fists until two of the men pulled her still screaming away; and instead of staying for the night as he had hoped to, the boy left—though with a wallet full of fried porridge-cakes and new apples slipped to him (but secretly) by one of the other village women. For it was not her bad news he carried, and it might have been.

  Now, this boy also is gone from this tale. He will return safely to Berton with thirty-two pennies, apprentice himself to the blacksmith (who has lost all his sons), and in time become blacksmith himself. He will have three daughters and two sons, and mourn his first wife when she dies in childbirth, but not so much that he will not wed again. He will not have nightmares. He will not dream. Horror does not strike all equally.

  • • • •

  That night Robert said, “The boy needs meat.”

  He and Ada sat at the little crooked table beside the fire, eating porridge stiff from a day’s cooking, with hazelnuts and some lettuces that had survived the garden’s ruin, and drinking small beer. Ulf had rejected everything. He tossed in the corner bed, moaning in his sleep.

  “There is none,” Ada said sadly. Her mouth watered as she thought of stewed beef, duck meat pressed until it was tender, trout fried and sizzling; the sweet flesh of such chickens as were not Blanche.

  Robert gestured outside. “We have the hen.” Blanche was pecking for insects just beyond the cottage door; she looked up, her white feathers aglow in the sunlight, plump, bright-eyed, and hale.

  Ada shook her head.

  He rubbed his eyes. “We have to be reasonable. It isn’t laying and it’ll have no chicks. And the boy needs to eat. A good broth, some stewed meat—”

  “No.”

  “He’s sick, girl. We need to get him better.”

  “He’s not going to get better,” said Ada: too young to know what should not be said. “He’s going to die anyway.”

  Robert slammed his fist on the table and stood, and the room loomed with his shadows, cast from firelight and the late sun shining in through the door. “The boy will be fine!” he said.

  Ada began to cry, and Blanche scuttered through the door and flutter-hopped ground to bench to table, and launched herself at Robert’s face. Robert threw up his hands to protect his eyes and grabbed Blanche by the throat. She hung, fluttering and squawking.

  “You can’t eat her,” Ada cried. “She is a talking chicken.”

  “Lies are the Old Gentleman’s work,” Robert said sternly.

  But Ulf had been awakened by the fight, and said, in the quick feverish voice that came in his moments of clarity, “It does! I heard it yesterday. And she said she would stick me with a pin if I said anything.” He jabbed a thin finger at Ada.

  “Hens do not speak,” Robert said, and held up Blanche to look at her, no longer struggling but hanging loosely in his hands. Blanche gave a sudden writhe and dropped to the table, and said:

  “If I did, would you not eat me?”

  This was the end of Ada’s family in the Unlucky Village.

  • • • •

  Robert stopped his ears against Blanche’s words and Ada’s tears, and dragging the girl to the coop, threw her inside, the hen scuttering protectively after her; slammed the door shut and left them there. A talking chicken must be some trick of the Devil. It might even in some fashion attract wastoures, for hen and horror were likewise two-legged and claw-footed, snake-necked and bright eyed. In any case, Robert had no room in his life for things he did not understand yet could not ignore. The hen would be killed and made soup of, that was understood, though first the priest must expel any demons, lest they enter the boy. That would be a task for the morning. The girl would get over it. What choice did she have?

  But in the night, as Ada clutched Blanche tight in her arms, the hen said to her, “We must go.”

  “Where?” asked Ada. “Everywhere will be like this.”

  A chink in the back wall admitted a blade of steel-colored moonlight. “The people of this village see nothing but badness. The Lucky Village will be different.”

  “Will it?” said Ada dubiously. “Shouldn’t we go to the Town With A Moat?”

  But even a talking hen that sees truths may ignore them, and decide instead that the easy path is the only one. Blanche said, “The Lucky Village will be fine.”

  The coop had been built to keep chickens in and foxes an
d weasels out; still, fear and fingers found a way to pry loose a board in the back. It was noisy but no one of the Unlucky Village (not even Robert) opened their tight-sealed doors to learn what new ill thing the sounds augured.

  Ada squeezed out, and Blanche after her, and for the rest of the night, they hid in a ravaged cottage nearby. At first light, they started to walk. There was no food and no blankets, only the eight remaining silver pennies and a shawl which had once belonged to Robert’s oldest girl, which he had given to Ada, soft as a chick and blue as an August sky.

  The raving boy, Ulf, will die in two days and be buried on the third. Robert will die later, and it will not matter when or why or how, even to Robert.

  • • • •

  Blanche and Ada walked for a day and another, and in the night between, they slept in the house of a woman who said not a single word, only wept steadily as November rain, even while she put out fresh-baked oatcakes and honey for them both and arranged a blanket into a little nest beside the fire. Though there was room enough and the walls were firm, neither girl nor hen spoke of staying. In the morning, the unspeaking woman gave them the last of the oatcakes and a skin to carry water in.

  Things happened, horrors and little beauties.

  When it seemed prudent, Ada asked after the Lucky Village, but no one had heard of such a place until an ancient man mumbled past his five remaining teeth, “That’m Byfield.” He pointed with a finger so bent it seemed to turn back on itself. “’Along o’ there. An’ east o’ the Hangin’ Cross an’ west at the River Bye an’ on for five, six miles. But they don’ like strange folk”—and he pointed to a scar on his arm, many decades old.

  On for five, six miles. They ate worms and honey cakes, purslane and dandelions, and berries from inside a bush where the birds had not gotten to them. They ate beetles and a loaf of barley bread that Ada purchased from a blank-faced man with one of her pennies. They grew hungrier. They hid. They hid. They hid.

  At last they came to a narrow lane with a signpost Ada could not read, but—“This way,” said Blanche. They turned and came down through a copse of oak trees between fields amazingly untrampled.

  And there it was. The Lucky Village was cradled in a curve of a clear, swift-moving stream, and the green before the gray stone church was clustered with fat sheep—for in these troubled times, it seemed safest to keep them close. There were chickens (though none who spoke) and geese and even a farrowing sow. There was a parson and a miller, a blacksmith and a harness-maker, a baker and a woman who gave herbs and treated injuries, a man who rented out his strong back and a woman born foolish who could not speak—and what was her use in the village none would say (though we guess and do not guess wrong).

  The Lucky Village had never been attacked by wastoures. They did not understand what accidents of landscape and circumstance protected them, so they interpreted their safety in their own way. They were lucky because they were good—but they also had to be careful: virtuous, discreet, cautious, slow to change, swift to assess sin and exact punishment. They were wary of strangers at all times, but during a wastoure summer, the Lucky Village turned everyone away, with weapons if need be.

  Ada and Blanche were intercepted by a man scything a field and brought to the steps of the church to stand before the parson and the blacksmith. The rest of the Lucky Village gathered around them. They asked questions: What did a very small girl in a sky-blue shawl, carrying seven pennies and a chicken as white as a pearl, have to offer that they could not simply take from her (had they not been good men)? Was she good? Did she know her prayers? Did she honor the Church? Did she work hard?

  Ada, confused and tired and hungry, wept.

  The Lucky Village said, Well, we don’t need more of that.

  Ada scrubbed her eyes against her shoulder (for her arms were filled with Blanche) and said, “My chicken is magic. She does tricks.” Blanche gave a sudden start.

  The Lucky Village said, What sort of tricks?

  Blanche was looking as wary as a chicken can look, head tipped sideways to see Ada fully from one golden-black eye. Ada only lowered Blanche to the stone stairs.

  “Blanche, count to nine.” Nine was a lucky number.

  Blanche tapped the stone delicately with one ivory-nailed foot. Nine times.

  It’s a sham, said the Lucky Village. You always say nine, or you gave her some secret signal.

  “What is three plus four, dear Blanche?” said Ada.

  Blanche spread her wings and resettled them. Arithmetic was hard until she imagined beetles scuttering across the ground and snapping them up, first three, then four. Seven.

  Exclamations; a spattering of hands clapping.

  “And she can dance, and she can talk, and she can tell the weather. But she will only do it if you let us stay.”

  The woman who gave herbs to the Village knelt. “Poor little things!” she said. Her voice was kind. “You may stay with my husband and me. We have never had children.”

  “And no one will eat Blanche?”

  No one, promised the Lucky Village.

  • • • •

  It all looked very much as Ada’s little home had looked. Her new mother and father were kind, if stern, though they gave her much to do and were very serious about her prayers. In her home with her own parents (before they died), Ada had not yet learned the church-word prayers, just little English rhyming versions; after their death, Marjory had not cared much about Ada’s eternal soul, but now her new father demanded she learn the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and he beat her when she was slow—though not hard: a swat merely, to keep her alert. Blanche, who was always close by, ruffled up at this but did not peck or claw.

  Even on the warmest afternoons, Ada wore the blue shawl and carried with her the seven pennies, her little knife, and some bread—for after leaving the Unlucky Village, she had learned to keep close everything that was hers, plus whatever food she could. Her new mother gave her an ancient mended leather pouch for this purpose, to reassure her until she settled in.

  There was a bed for her inside the cottage, but Ada slept with Blanche in the coop. “It’s not right,” said her new father, but her new mother only said, “Peace, husband; she has seen things. Give her time.” And so it was permitted (for now), and in the meantime Ada learned the church-word prayers and worked hard.

  There were other chickens. None of the chickens of Marjory’s flock had ever spoken save Blanche, but who knew the natural rules of talking among chickens? Not Ada. When she asked Blanche, the hen disdained them all as silly creatures saying nothing worth hearing. But this was the price for staying in the Lucky Village, Blanche knew: sleep safe, surrounded by fools who are not even kin.

  In the long blue August dusks, the Lucky Village brought out a rough table from behind the alehouse and placed it on the green, and Blanche hop-fluttered onto it and answered questions. At first she only added numbers for them, tapping the worn wood with one white toe.

  Then the Lucky Village asked, You said it talks? That it tells the morrow’s weather?

  Ada and Blanche looked at each other. Robert had cast them out for speaking at all, let alone foretelling anything: why should the Lucky Village be any different? For Ada had not lied: The weather was one of the truths that Blanche knew, though she had never bothered to speak of it before the wastoures came. It could not be changed and she’d had her coop to retreat to, so why bother? But it had been useful as they wandered, since the wastoures.

  “Yes,” said Blanche finally. Her voice was a sweet gabble that cut through the rattling twilight insects and the never-quite-gone murmur of the Lucky Village’s talk. “Tomorrow will start foggy down by the stream, but it will clear, and after that it will be hot and bright. The trout will stay cool in the hollow below the willow tree. The bees will cluster on the goosefoot and the meadow saffron. Beetles will hide, but the little grass-snakes will lie in the sunny lane and be easy to catch.”

  Exclamations, uneasy laughter, surprise. Some thought Ada spoke fo
r Blanche through a clever trick, though she was very young to have such skill. A few groused that anyone could predict all that at this season. One or two wondered whether this was the Devil’s work. But on the whole, the Lucky Village was pleased. Knowing the weather was indeed useful, and perhaps this hen was yet another proof that they were not lucky but blessed.

  Days passed. On the Feast of St. Alcmund, wastoures seethed across the countryside a few miles to the south. Jesu preserved the Lucky Village, yet again.

  A few days after that came a running boy, warning of another wave from the west, half a day away and headed straight toward them. He made no pennies from the Village for, safe in God’s arms, it knew it owed him none; and in any case he was a coarse, ill-favored child that stirred no compassion. Cursing them for heartless, he turned to go, but Ada ran after and gave him one of her pennies. Now she was down to six.

  His name is Piers, this running boy. He has a birthmark shaped like a hare on his face, and an expression in his despairing eyes that no child should bear. His ankle hurts, from when he stepped on a rock and it shifted underfoot, but he still can run. How likely is it that he survives? How real do you want your fiction?

  • • • •

  In the indigo twilight after vespers that night, the Lucky Village crowded close to Blanche. The nights were growing cold, so there was a bonfire that cast a shuddering light across them all. The Village would be fine, of course it would—though there were some who thought they might have shown more compassion to the running boy, given him bread at least.

  Naturally we trust our benevolent Lord, said the Lucky Village. But. Is there anything we should be doing, anything more? Are we failing at anything?