by Bill Fawcett
“You can’t leave,” Janelle said. Her voice was going up. “Chris, what if I’m pregnant?”
“Marry a local boy,” I said. I almost said, “Marry Kettler,” her father’s hired man and now hers. He was a solid sort, and I could tell from his eyes when he looked at me that it was more than the farm that he resented me for. “I’d never make a farmer. I had enough years of it to know that for a fact.”
I stepped sideways toward the bedroom door, still looking at her. She got up like I’d hoped she wouldn’t and said, “Chris, you can’t do this to me! You can’t just leave!”
“Love, you don’t know who I am or what I am,” I said, not trying to keep my tone sweet anymore. “Whatever happens to you now, it’d be worse if I stayed. But that doesn’t matter, since I’m not going to stay.”
Janelle started screaming. There wasn’t anything to be gained by hanging around, so I walked across the front room—walked fast, but I wasn’t running. I had my hand on the latch just as Perley jerked the door open from the outside.
“Chris, what’s the matter?” he said, looking as wild as his sister did.
I blinked when I saw his outfit. He was wearing a leather jerkin, cut to look like my jack but not boiled in wax to harden it, and a leather cap like mine, too. He had a harness strap over his shoulder for a bandolier, and from it hung the holstered revolver I’d given him when he agreed to go out into the shed at night.
I’d asked him to sleep in the shed “to keep watch on things,” and I’d given him the gun. And, okay, it had been a dumb thing to do, but I liked the boy.
“Perley, go help your sister,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. Then I was through the front door and heading back to where I belonged.
The Captain saw me coming but didn’t say anything, just nodded from the car. Diccon brightened like a lamp being turned up and said, “I thought you was gonna stay, Chris. Gee, I’m glad you’re not.”
If it’d been anybody but Diccon, I’d have gone for him; but the boy really was that dumb, and I needed him for a loader. I just said, “Nope. We ready to lift, Captain?”
There were nine local men on the ropes. That would’ve been okay, but most of them hadn’t come through the fight yesterday any better than I had. Well, peasant farmers had as much experience in working hurt as we floating swords did. They’d be all right for as long as we needed them to steady our rise.
“The fire’s ready,” the Captain said. He’d laid more charcoal on the brazier when the original sticks were well alight. “We just need to get Siltsy aboard.”
“Right,” I said. “Birgitta, get into the car. I’ll lift him up to you.”
“I’ll—” Birgitta said. She was in a mood to argue with anything I said. But she really did care about Siltsy, and that shut her mouth when she took time to think.
“I’m taller than you are,” I said, squatting by Siltsy across from her. He wasn’t sleeping, exactly, but his eyes were closed and what he mumbled didn’t seem to be words. “And you can’t be both places.”
“I can help!” said Diccon.
I raised an eyebrow to Birgitta. She grimaced and stood. “Get in the car with me, Diccon,” she said. “We need you to pull the balloon over the brazier when Bagnell and I get Siltsy aboard.” She had to make the choice, but again she’d made the smart one.
The boy was strong and not particularly clumsy, but his own mother wouldn’t have called him gentle. I’d seen him crack the handle off a stoneware tankard, just holding it in his hands.
The Baron and four of his men were mounted and watching from the other end of the ridge. They were making sure we were on our way as agreed.
There wouldn’t be a problem, though I noticed the Captain had cocked both the crossbows in the car with him. The bows weren’t a threat till quarrels were nocked; but leave-taking was a nervous business for both sides.
The Baron had captured horses and armor yesterday, but that didn’t make riders out of footmen or a warrior out of the peasant he’d just promoted to House Man. It had been a great victory by his standards, but he’d lost people, too.
“Ready,” Birgitta said.
I slid my arms under Siltsy, making sure I had his head cradled in the crook of my right elbow. His skin felt tight and as hot as a brass foot-warmer. I got up smoothly, using my knees to lift. My whole left side felt like it was being branded, but I didn’t flinch. I stepped toward the car and Birgitta’s outstretched arms. “Chris!” a voice piped up behind me. “Chris Bagnell! Turn around!”
“I’ll take care of this!” I said to the three in the car. I wasn’t worried about the Captain, but Diccon had already lifted a bow with a quarrel in his other hand. In our line of work, you don’t hesitate when somebody points a weapon at you.
“Turn around or I’ll shoot you in the back!” Perley said. Carefully, just like there was nothing else on my mind, I laid Siltsy onto Birgitta’s arms. She was wary, but I was the one who knew what was going on, so she was backing my play.
“I’m going to shoot you!” Perley said.
Birgitta took the weight and lifted Siltsy out of my arms. I turned like any other time: not fast, not slow. There was the kid, six feet away, and there was the little revolver pointed right at the middle of my chest.
It was the old kind of steel that looks like silver but doesn’t rust.
He’d kept it polished with a chammy, just like I used to do, and I knew the five brass cartridges would shine like gold in the rising sun if we took them out of the cylinder.
“Where did he get that?” Diccon whispered. The Captain told him to hush. The Captain knew where Perley’s revolver came from. “If you don’t come back to Janelle, I’ll kill you, Chris!” Perley said. His face looked like he’d been crying, but it might just have been that he was so angry. “You’ve got to come back!”
“Perley, I’m not the right man for your sister,” I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could. “She’ll know that herself in a day or two, and so will you when you get a little older.”
“You’ve got to!” The revolver was trembling, his whole body was trembling, but the muzzle never wobbled so much that it didn’t point at my chest.
“I’m going to leave now, Perley,” I said. I started to turn, and he pulled the trigger.
I moved fast then, but he kept trying to shoot me till I had his right arm behind his back and squeezed till his hand opened. He was screaming—with anger, not pain, though I wasn’t being gentle. I used the bandolier to bind his wrists. There was enough of a tail left to the harness strap that I lashed his ankles, too, leaving Perley on his belly and properly hog-tied.
I stood, leaving the revolver where it was. The cartridges had been dead long before the gun came to me; probably dead for centuries.
Part of me hadn’t really believed that, though; not till it was over. “Don’t let him loose!” I said to the men holding the ropes. None of them looked like they planned to, but it was simply to make sure.
They were scared of what was about to happen to them, if I was any judge of expressions.
I turned toward the Baron and yelled, “Keep him tied till we’re safely away! Otherwise he’s likely to hurt himself!”
I walked to the car. Diccon must’ve pulled the balloon’s throat onto the frame over the brazier as soon as Birgitta had laid Siltsy on the floor. He wouldn’t have done that without orders, so the Captain wasn’t taking chances. The bag was full enough that the car was getting light on the ground.
Usually I’d have half jumped, half swung over the wicker side, but I was weak as a kitten after the business with Perley. I barely got my feet off the ground and had to grab the shrouds to drag myself in. Even so I’d have landed on my face if the Captain hadn’t supported me with an arm. The Captain has muscles like steel bars.
“I’ll follow you, Chris Bagnell!” the boy shouted. He’d managed to roll onto his side so he could look at us, but he wasn’t going to get loose on his own. “I don’t care how far you run, I’ll catch yo
u!”
“Slack the ropes!” the Captain called to the local help. “Easy, now, easy!”
We started to rise.
There was a good breeze at three hundred feet. It was taking us in the direction I wanted to go: away. The village had been out of sight for more than an hour.
Birgitta was talking to Siltsy, though what I caught of her words didn’t make any more sense than his own mumbling did. She must have seen more in Siltsy than I’d thought was there. Well, it was none of my business.
Diccon was dozing. He’d had quite a time last night, a big hero and money in his purse. I suspected he didn’t have as much left of his pay as I did of mine.
The Captain was standing beside me. I hadn’t noticed him move; I guess I was off somewhere else myself.
When I looked at him, the Captain nodded and said, “I’d always wondered where that revolver went.” I could barely hear his voice, even as close as we were.
“It didn’t weigh much,” I said in the same kind of whisper. “Where did you get it? I never asked you that.”
“Took it off a drunk in Gotham on my first contract,” he said. He smiled faintly. “That was before the sack and the fire, of course. He had too much ale in him and decided we mercenaries were being paid more than we were worth.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking.
“Do you suppose the boy will follow?” the Captain said. “Boys say a lot of things, but now and again they mean them.”
“He might,” I said. “He’s got a lot of grit. But it’ll take him years if he does. The years’ll teach him, and chasing me will teach him even more. Things will look different by the time he catches up.”
I looked at him. I was smiling, too, but it felt lopsided.
“Anyway,” I said, “they looked different to me. Didn’t they, Captain?”
The army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Vietnam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away.
Dave returned to the United States to become Chapel Hill’s assistant town attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction, making sense of his army experiences.
He often wishes he had a less interesting background. Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.
. . . And Other Stories
NANCY KRESS
On Gene Wolfe: I have known Gene for thirty years, and his work for even longer. When I met him, I was a young writer and in awe of this man. Decades later—after we have taught together, visited each other, blurbed each other, cut up fruit salad together— I still am in awe. No one else has produced anything like Gene’s body of work. No one else could.
Yesterday I was in Emma. Unseen on Box Hill, as all servants are unseen, I unpacked hampers from the wagons and watched Emma flirt with Frank Churchill. Mr. Knightley glared at Emma. None of the other servants challenged my presence. Maybe they were too busy, or not allowed to talk among themselves while serving, or else the Hartfield servants thought I came from Donwell Abbey and Mr. Knightley’s groom assumed I came from Hartfield. Or not. I never find out that sort of thing.
The grass on Box Hill was very green, soft and lush from English rain free of industrial pollutants. Emma was lovely in her absurd high-waisted muslin, and very bratty. I lugged the heavy hampers of food and blankets, china and wine, up the hill, but I was only there about thirty minutes before it ended.
I never know how long it will last, or where I will go, or when. Sometimes I’m already in Grandmother’s house. Sometimes I’m shopping or at school, where I am mocked and shunned and friendless. Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, when the terrible summons comes, I have to race to Grandmother’s library. Then she does it to me, and there is no way to resist.
“Lose yourself in literature,” my asshole English teacher tells the class.
She has no idea.
Thursday I’m in detention when the summons hits. Two days of detention for truancy, again. I sit working on quadratic equations and then all at once my skin is on fire, my bowels are turning to water, my mind howls with an icy wind. There is no resisting it. I jump up, knocking Advanced Algebra off the desk, and race to the door, which is locked. Shaking the lock, I howl like a hyena, unable to stop.
“Caitlin!” shouts Mr. Emry.
I howl louder. The others in detention are not the kind students who pity me or the timid ones who shun me; kind and timid students don’t end up in this basement room. The ones here laugh and point. I tear my hair, and Mr. Emry, trying to not look frightened, calls for Security. The moment the ex-cop hired by Wakefield High arrives to unlock the door from the outside, I am gone, evading his grasp, running down the hall and out of the school and down the street to Grandmother’s gloomy Victorian house. On the way I shit my jeans, but that never makes any difference. I collapse in the library and then I am in Anna Karenina.
I recognize Anna from previous trips. She sits in the garden at Vozdvizhenskoe, sewing, her beautiful face clenched and sour. When I appear, she looks up. “Katerina, tea, please.”
I go to fetch the tea tray from the kitchen. Everyone there accepts my presence; that is how Grandmother’s curse works. Never any difficulty with language or duties, just the unrelenting hard work of a menial. She hates me. I know why, but it is not fair.
I carry the heavy tea tray to the garden. Count Vronsky has just returned from Moscow; he and Anna are quarreling. Their voices rise to a shout: “Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable?” I know that later she will take out her unhappiness on me, for witnessing it. Jealousy and regret and the boredom of exile have already changed her, and in a few more chapters she will return to Moscow, where she will be still more unhappy.
By night my shoulders ache with the hard labor of a servant in czarist Russia. My legs tremble so much I can barely stand. I find my bed and collapse into it, but it seems I am barely asleep before there arrives the early dawn of a Russian summer, and I must rise to carry cans of hot water, scrub corridors and dishes, empty chamber pots. Anna Karenina is not as back-breaking as parts of David Copperfield, but it is hard enough.
The irony is: I used to love to read.
I am at Vozdvizhenskoe the entire week. Vronsky and Anna make up, fight again, say bitter things to each other. Levin has just arrived to visit Anna when I am snatched back to the library. I lay on the floor, panting and stinking, in my freshly soiled jeans. Here, no time has passed.
“Welcome back,” Grandmother says. She guides her feather duster around the tusks of a carved elephant. She and my mother, the love of Grandmother’s life, bought it on their travels in India.
I will not cry in front of her. I will not.
“I think, Caitlin,” she says in her measured, calm voice, “now that you are sixteen, you should drop out of school. It does not seem to be doing you much good. I will obtain the paperwork for you to sign.”
I cannot speak yet, nor move. When I have enough strength to get up off the floor, I stagger to the shower. Every muscle in my body hurts.
The truant officer will, I know, show up here soon. I know, but I don’t care. School, with its jeering classmates, is only another kind of torture. Twice I have not made it out of the building before my bowels gave way. Dropping out doesn’t seem any worse than staying. Or any better.
The summons began when I was twelve, six months after my mother died. Since then I have scrubbed chamber pots in Victorian England, starved in a labor camp with Ivan Denisovich, slaved in David Copperfield’s wine- bottling factory until my fingers bled, suffered a beating at Lowood Institute along with Jane Eyre. Three times I ran away from Grandmother. The first time I was thirteen and I got no farther than the park, carrying my sleeping bag and suitcase, before the summons hit me. The second time I was fourteen, and savvier. I stole money, bought a bus ticket, got as far as the next city. The summons hit and I tried frantically to hitchhike back to the library, my s
kin burning and my mind howling. When my bowels gave way, the kind woman who had picked me up took me straight to the emergency room. I jumped out of the car and staggered—was dragged, compelled, forced— to the library.
Three months later, savvier still, I went voluntarily to the ER and acted crazy, waving around a kitchen knife and claiming hallucinations. I was examined, committed, sent to a locked psychiatric ward. It was wonderful. Grandmother was not allowed to visit. Then another inmate sat in the day room reading Les Misérables, and I was with Fantine and the other women forced into prostitution to survive. Fantine sold her hair, then her jewelry, but could not stop the inevitable. I had no jewelry, and my hair was already cut short. I was had by ten men in four days.
“If you try that again,” Grandmother said, “it will be Les Misérables again.”
In the middle of that night, I set the library on fire. I poured gasoline siphoned from the lawn mower—we had no car—onto the parquet floor. I opened the window, went outside, and tossed in a flaming match, one of the long wooden kind used for fireplaces. The gasoline blazed for half a second and then went out. Two more matches. It didn’t burn.
My grandmother appeared in the doorway in her long white nightdress, looking like a ghost, a phantom, a white demon from an icy hell. “Don’t do that again, Caitlin,” she said. “It won’t help. You took her life away from me. So yours belongs to me. That’s only fair. Now clean up this mess.”
I screamed, “I didn’t mean what happened to Mama!”
“Meaning is an illusion,” she said and went back to bed, leaving me alone outside the window, staring at the pool of gasoline on the polished golden floor.
I drop out of school. I watch TV. I go for walks, but not very far. I read nonfiction. I’m in the kitchen, eating a ham sandwich and ignoring the dirty dishes piled in the sink, which I was supposed to wash last night, when the summons comes and I run to the library.
It’s a medieval castle, further back in time than I have been before. Knights, ladies, servants gather in a great stone hall with banners on the wall and great smoky fires. Everyone is shouting, dogs are barking; it’s chaos. Finally one huge knight climbs onto a trestle table and makes himself heard above everybody else.
