The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  “I am a hen. If you want sermons, go to Parson John,” Blanche said, a little tartly, for her new-growing flight-feathers were itching. Parson John paused from sweeping the first fallen leaves from the steps of his church, just in earshot though not a part of the ring of listeners. He was one who believed Blanche was a temptation instead of a reward, but he trod warily. His flock’s willingness to be led was inconstant in wastoure summers. They might cast him out.

  Well, say something, said the Lucky Village.

  With what was very near a sigh, and knowing they found comfort in such things, Blanche spoke the church-words Ada had been learning. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Benedicta tua in —”

  “Profanation!” Parson John cast down his broom with a clatter that startled Blanche into Ada’s arms; who stood beside the table. The Lucky Village exclaimed, murmured, and looked uneasily between man and hen.

  “Did she get them wrong?” asked Ada: she was not as good with the church-words as Blanche.

  “Abomination!” he bellowed, and the Village’s murmurs grew louder, became mutterings. Ada’s new mother stepped forward, but her new father placed his hand on her arm: safer to wait and see how this would arrange itself. The ring of watchers parted to admit the parson as he stomped to the table, stabbed a finger toward Blanche. She eyed his pointing finger rather as though she might bite it, feathers ruffled in the hot wind of his shouting. “A beast must not speak the words of angels!”

  “She’s not a beast!” said Ada, looking up, indignant. “She’s a chicken.”

  The parson towered over her. “A soulless beast!”

  Outcry; exclamation.

  Parson John looked around the ring, and shouted, “Our Lord gave us dominion over such! And we throng to this beast, like the Israelites in the desert before the false idol of the Calf, and we listen to heresy. He will not forgive.”

  Ada’s new mother stepped backward, into the circle of her husband’s arm, and turned her face away.

  This is how Ada and Blanche were cast from the Lucky Village that very night, into the path of the ravening wastoures.

  What of the Lucky Village, cradled in a fluke of geography and conditionally cruel? You blame them for sending children to die alone. But they have their own. They must be prudent; they must be reasonable. They must make a choice, and so they do what is right for their own children, and not these strangers—though of course there are some that are merely cruel, or selfish, or too absorbed in their own fears to spare thought for others.

  Their God does not seem to mind, but we little gods that are writers: we mind. Imagine the Lucky Village destroyed at last, if it comforts you. Or, if you are kind, imagine it learns its lesson and is rewarded with long lives and rich harvests. Imagine there is a lesson here. Still, why is fiction held to a higher standard than reality?

  • • • •

  Dusk was fading into darkness. Ada fled headlong, for the men who had driven them away were still outlined by the bonfire with their cudgels and staves, and they scared her. Blanche scurried alongside, calling in her distress. They ran over the curve of the hill and then farther, until they were in a lane between trees, where not even starlight could reach them (for the crescent moon was not yet risen) and it was utterly black.

  They ran until Ada stumbled, fell headlong into the unseen lane and sprawled there, grizzling and crying. Blanche huddled close.

  “Hush,” said Blanche, with the soft chuckling of a hen soothing her chicks; but her ears were open.

  Ada wailed; she had hit her chin and was seeing stars, green flaring bursts behind her eyes, though it was so dark.

  “Hush,” said Blanche, but it was no longer a chuckle: it was a sharp snapping cluck.

  Ada wept. She was six.

  “Hush,” said Blanche, and this time it was a terrified whisper.

  Ada’s breath caught in her throat.

  They heard it over their own hurrying heartbeats: still distant, the storm-sound of chattering nattering shrieks, the thunder of clawed feet.

  “Not under the trees. Not like this. We must get into the open,” said Blanche.

  They stumbled through utter-filled utter darkness; and still the sounds, behind them and to their right. There were other noises now: splintering wood, branches torn, an animal’s scream so tormented that it could not be identified as man or beast or bird. They tumbled on until they saw a lightening ahead, and suddenly they were out of the trees and fleeing beneath a star-scattered sky. The lane ran between fields too dark to see as more than textures, but smelling of barley to one side, scythed hay to the other. No houses, no lights, no shelter, no convenient tree; and still the sounds. Closer, louder.

  There was a ragged wall on one side of the lane, a bit taller than Ada’s head. “Here,” hissed Blanche, and terror pushed them up the rough stones.

  They crouched on the wall’s top course, which was scarcely wider than Blanche’s body. Everything was dark still. The gabbling sounds came from across the lane and beyond the barley field; as much as they could for the darkness, they watched the trees there. But now sounds came down the lane as well: a thundering of hooves and alarm-calls. A herd of fallow deer raced heedless in their hundreds, so close that Ada could have reached out and touched their heaving flanks as they passed. The wind of their flight smelled rank and peppery.

  They could not see what pursued at first, but they heard them: the gabbling and screeching of wastoures. It was not the main wave, only a few score that had smelled the deer and broken from the larger group to stampede the herd. They hurtled past, and above them Ada and Blanche crouched, frozen, soundless, and as flattened as they could be on so narrow a perch.

  The wastoures’ heads were lower than the fence’s top edge and perhaps they would not have bothered with Ada and Blanche, or even noticed them. But an adolescent bringing up the rear hesitated as it passed. It rocked back on its haunches, listening. Its head was a long dim wedge anchored with flicking eyes so pale they seemed to glow in the starlight. Ada was still as wax, yet it swiveled suddenly toward them. It scrabbled at the wall but couldn’t get purchase, then opened its long muzzle to bare a fringe of sharp teeth and a hot rotting smell, and gave a call that was a cross between a kestrel’s screech and the tuk-tuk-tuk of a hen calling her kin to food.

  “Jump down on the other side of the fence,” said Blanche. “Then run.” But Ada did not move: calcified in fear, trapped tight as a chick in its shell.

  After a moment, a larger wastoure joined the first. The smaller one sidled away, lowering its weight on its narrow hips and twisting its head to the side: a silent language unlike that of chickens, and yet Blanche understood it well enough. The higher-ranked wastoure clawed at the wall, long neck stretching up. Closer; but it could not reach, either. It lifted its head and called that screeching tuk-tuk-tuk.

  Others loped back: perhaps twenty of those chasing the deer. Looking down, Blanche saw a swarm of backs and reaching necks and snapping long jaws. Ada still did not move, though her eyes were open and gazing at the milling wastoures.

  They scraped and jumped at the fence. One, longer-necked, used its chin as a balance point to scratch its way up the wall, forelegs scrabbling along the stones. Blanche flared her wings and stabbed with her beak at its nearer eye, and it fell screaming down among the others, leaving a sticky smear of vitreous humor on the stone and the taste of slugs on her tongue. The swarm attacked the fallen wastoure, but the leader still watched Blanche, as though thinking something through. It made a sound, an abrupt clatter rising from its throat.

  Blanche understood it well enough: no longer a sound that summoned others to food, but something like a hen’s challenge-call to a strange pullet brought into her flock. She had not been lead hen of Marjory’s kitchen yard without reason. She growled a chicken’s growl, an angry rattle she had not had to make since her laying days. “Back away,” it was, and, “Who are you to use that tone with me?”

  The wastoures went silent and retreated a littl
e, leaving the shredded remains of the fallen one humped against the foot of the wall. Every wedge of a face angled toward her, smeared with blood that looked black under the moonless sky; every pale eye gleamed flatly, like a silver penny rediscovered in a dark corner. The leader snapped its head from side to side and chittered a clattering throat-sound: a clear challenge.

  Blanche growled again, louder, and this time it was, “Go.” She opened her wings and stood tall: a rooster’s stance. The leader reared in its turn, slashed the air with its gaping jaw, and chittered.

  Was she afraid, fierce Blanche, facing down these monsters? The wastoures were taller, toothed, smelling of fresh blood, with claws sharper than a fighting cock’s spurs; forelegs that reached and grasped in a way that wings could not. More: there was something of cunning in the leader’s eyes. But Blanche was clever, too—and she was so angry that her fear was a mere background hum in her heart.

  “Go,” growled Blanche, and she snapped forward with her beak, though the leader was too far away to peck. Nattering, the swarm recoiled. The leader lowered its weight a little on its narrow hips, still looking up. The dialect of its posture was unfamiliar yet understandable: confusion, wariness, skepticism.

  Blanche looked down, small and sturdy and strong as a queen with a naked sword in her hand; and, hunched low, the wastoures peered back at her. She said, in words and hen-sounds and manner, “Turn. Turn and run. Run until you drop in your tracks, run until you die. And do not return. Go.”

  The leader stepped backward, swiveled, and ran arrow-straight across the barley field. The others collected into a ragged mob behind it and vanished under the trees. In a moment even the sounds of their feet were gone. The only noise was the rustling of leaves: a night wind rising.

  Ada still did not move, and when the hen pressed against her hand, it was cold as death. “It’s all right, dear one,” Blanche crooned. “They’re gone.”

  • • • •

  The wastoures run, twenty-three of them, driven by a strange compulsion. They run and do not deviate, past farmhouses and villages; and when they come to the ford in the Wendle, where the water breaks knee-high on a riding-mare, they run into the water, lose their footing, and are swept away. Dead, as she demanded of them.

  As for Ada, Blanche will not tell her that the wastoures have died. She is a child. She should not have to imagine how they fought the Wendle as it pulled them down, how their lungs filled with weed-foaming water, how their fear was as great as the world.

  • • • •

  “What was that, hey?”said a voice behind Ada and Blanche.

  • • • •

  His name was Pall, he told them: an orphan who with certain fellow spirits had cobbled together platforms in the trees where they could sleep safely. They were seven in number, and they scavenged for food and other things. “Why, we’re rich!” he boasted to Ada, who had roused at his voice, begun crying, and now followed him, still grizzling, across the cut hayfield with a somewhat limp Blanche in her arms. “I have a silver candlestick, and three shillings and a lady’s fine gown and a gold piece with a lion’s head from some foreign land and a bridle for a horse and—”

  The list was a long one, long enough to take them to the beginning of the forest. He stopped at the foot of a tree as he ended, “—an’ I’ll go to the King and he’ll make me a lord, I’ll be that rich.—Here.”

  He pointed to a rope leading up into the boughs.

  “I can’t.” She started to grizzle again. Ada was a brave girl but she had just seen terrible things. Also, she was tired and hungry—and in any case, she could not climb like this: six and small for her age.

  “Rules are, you have to climb to be one o’ us Dead Squirrels,” said he. “But still, that hen o’ yours . . .” He gave a low whistle and a loop of rope dropped from the heights. “Put your arms through an’ hold tight. I’ll carry that hen.”

  “No,” said Ada and held Blanche tighter, squeezing from her a squawk.

  “I can take care of myself,” said Blanche. Presumably, the boy had heard her speak already, so there was no point to concealment.

  And so it was that they were lifted into the treetops, Blanche clinging to Ada’s shoulder (and trying not to dig in too hard); Ada spinning and bumping until she learned to walk her feet against the trunk as they ascended. Pall shinnied up the other rope so quickly that he was already at the top to hoist her onto a rough platform scarcely bigger than her own little bed had been, back when there had been such things as parents and homes. A single candle in a horn-paned lantern cast grimy light onto the faces and hands of the boys as they sat in the crooks of branches or leaned back into the boughs. The oldest might have been twelve; the youngest was scarcely older than Ada.

  “Why’d you bring ’em up?” said the Oldest. “We could have talked to ’em below;” and the Youngest wrinkled his face, adding, “They’re not Squirrels!”

  “There’re still wastoures about,” said Pall. “Seemed safest. They got skills, men. From right up here with your own eyes, you saw it. She sent ’em all away somehow, that hen.”

  “How’d you do that?” said a Squirrel, as another asked, “Where?” and the Youngest said, “Make them all go away!”

  “I didn’t send them away,” said Blanche, who was literal-minded. “I only sent the chief of them. The others followed her. I think that’s their way—like chickens, only not so clever.” She preened a little.

  Surprise at her soft gabbling voice. “You talk?” said one; while, “But what did you do?” said the Oldest; and the Youngest shaking his branch in excitement until leaves cascaded down into the darkness, crowing, “I saw! You stood up tall and flapped and shouted and they got scared and ran away.”

  “That hen,” said Pall to the others. “She’s got skills, see.”

  The Oldest Dead Squirrel looked down at them: Ada, curled tight in the exact center of the platform and still crying a bit; and Blanche standing beside her, small, round, and sturdy, her head tipped so that she could look back at him with one appraising eye.

  “Can you send them away?” said the Oldest.

  Said Blanche, “Yes.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “You can stay.—But not if that’n’s gonna cry all the time.”

  And after they tied Ada loosely onto the platform (so that she would not fall off in her sleep), each Dead Squirrel tucked himself into whatever nest he had fashioned in the branches close by, cradled in such wealth as he was able to rescue from the ruins of the world. The Oldest blew out the candle, for candles were scarce (wastoures ate tallow and wax), and in the darkness, the Dead Squirrels spoke. They had names from before or that they had given themselves: Pall and Red Paul, Stibby and Renard-the-Fox, Weyland and Edmund Blue-Toes and Baby Jack. Ada was half asleep and Blanche did not care about such things, and yet the names stuck in their minds and were not forgotten.

  And they had stories: a monkey from the Holy Land that Stibby had seen at the last-but-one Michaelmas Fair (but maybe that was a lie); baby pigs that came when you called, and swallows that slept snug as housecats at the bottoms of millponds for the winter (“I saw it myself, so it’s true as true,” said Red Paul); digging out a badgers’ cete in the spring (when sisters and parents still lived), and finding a scrap of tile old as old, painted with a single half-closed eye like a wink. As Squirrels nodded off, stories became whispers, became wishes. Family, family; home, home. No one said safety. They knew there was no such thing. As for the Youngest, he told no tales at all, nor wished, but only cried silently now that he could not be seen.

  Soon all were asleep save Blanche, tired as she was and late as it was.

  It seemed that she could keep the wastoures away from Ada. Knowing this was like November sunlight in her breast. And Pall was right: she might be able to preserve these boys, as well. A roost in the trees might be home to hens, but people were not suited to it. Come soon, come late, they would need to come back to the ground where their flat sturdy feet served them so well, an
d when they did, she could keep the wastoures away from them, also.

  Ada, safe. The Squirrels, safe.

  And the rest. The boys who brought news, running for pennies until their feet or their hearts failed them. All the children: alone, or crowded with family into brief havens, or defended by parents who died before their eyes. And even the ones who would live long lives without seeing a wastoure, but were hunted across the decades in nightmares. All save the silent children already underground and feeding worms in the churchyards. For them it was too late.

  The only way to protect them all was to stop the wastoures altogether. Was that possible?

  There had been a leader among the wastoures she had sent away. Blanche’s understanding of hierarchies was subtle in ways no human can fathom, but call it alpha. If the swarm that had trapped them at the wall was led by an alpha, then all swarms had alphas. Bring two swarms together, and there would still be just one alpha, for the lesser would fall back. So: gather all swarms together, and there would be a chief of all chiefs, an alphamost alpha. Send that one away and the others would follow.

  Where would it be, such a leader of wastoures? And once she knew to ask, this was a thing she knew without learning, like the weather. She felt her, as iron filings feel a magnet: an aged uttermost queen whose cunning was as sharp and strong in Blanche’s mind as the smell of yew in a churchyard. The way to the queen was as clear as home to a salmon in June: some leagues, south by southwest. She ruled in a cool damp cave of limestone that breathed the salt smell of a sea dead and gone long before hens or wastoures or any air-dwelling thing. Her court surrounded her, all the other egg-laying females, also grown old; and beyond them, the last lingering juveniles still too egg-tender to collect and ravage forth.

  All of this sensing thrummed with the uttermost queen’s demand to her flock: grow/go forth/find caves and flourish/there is no returning. It was hard to comprehend but not impossible, in the way a traveler in a foreign land can pluck meaning from signs by their shape and placement. It thrummed like a pulse, like surf on a shingle beach.