The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  The girl Trudle gave a kind of a whinny, and were no prettier for laughing. If anything she looked more weaselish or rattish, creased up like that.

  Her mam looked at her and shook her head. “She’d be happy on a dungheap, that one. She’s touched more ways than the one.”

  “Ask Fan Dowser how touched I am,” said Trudle in a rasping voice.

  Swiftly the mam stepped over and smacked Trudle’s head. The girl rubbed the spot and glared up at her through her eyebrows.

  “Very well, take her,” said the mam with great carelessness. “Don’t come blubbing back to me, though, what she gets up to with your pretty lads.” She spared me something of a sneer, but there was fear in it, too. “As I say, there’s not a lot up her top. Why a person cannot have magic and intelligence I do not know.”

  “ ’Tis straightforward enough work,” said Dad.

  “Hmph. Nothing of this nature is straight. Go fetch your box, girl.”

  I did not like traveling with this girl. We were an odd little couple, her and me, her in some ancient hand-me-down ruffles and a big dark-blue bonnet, her weasely face in the middle looking everywhere. She walked in a funny rocking way, her legs wide as if she had discovered herself wet. People glanced at us going by, and glanced away when they saw me watching. My dad preceded us, Trudle’s box on his shoulder, her best-dress pillowing up at the top. He was walking quite fast, making Trudle rocky-rock along ridiculous. It was a nightmare, this big town and the hurrying, people’s eyes and opinions peppering us as we walked, and the sun lost behind the flare-edged house rows. Trudle did not speak to me nor I to her; we only struggled along separate and together, both after Dad.

  Then the crowds cleared, and the bus was there waiting for us alongside its shelter. The door was just hissing shut, but my dad hoyed and waved and ran, and it opened for us again.

  Trudle got up first very bustling. She chose a seat halfway down and sat very straight and pleased there, sparing Dad a glare when he made to sit by her, so that he came with me to the seat behind her instead.

  “That was close,” he said as the bus threw him back into his seat. “Any more bargaining with that mam and we’d have been stuck here the night.”

  I could smell Trudle Callisher; I could smell the oldness of her clothes, and the fact that she had not bathed in a while.

  “I seen you got talking to a maid?” says my dad politely when we had got our breaths.

  I nodded, watching the last of Knocknee town whirl by: a cottage with a yard full of rubbish, a dog with a plume-y tail, water shining in bootprinted mud.

  “What was that like?” he said.

  I shrugged—it had not been like anything, and I did not know what to think of it, what to say.

  “Did you like her?”

  I slid my bottom back, to sit straighter in the seat. Cows flew by, some of them watching us with their great heads raised. “She was fine, I suppose.” Did I have the right to like or dislike such a stranger? Today I was just a big empty trawler-hold, with the world’s fish and sea-worms tumbling into me. “We only talked a little while.”

  There’s something about those Killy women, isn’t there? I saw the girl’s narrow eyes, her hair-wires around her head as she asked. Those Killy women. I wished I was among those Killy women suddenly, sharply; I was sick of this adventure. I wished I was tiny again, and curled in Mam’s lap with her singing buzzing and burring around me in the quiet room, Dad gone to fish or to Wholeman’s. Or among the mams on their sea-washed stones, their blankets trailing and pulling at their legs as they called to each other, as they laughed, grown-up jokes that we didn’t need to understand, and me with my fellows at play.

  Trudle watched everything out the window across the mainland countryside. She boarded the boat ahead of us as if she owned it, and kept similar straightness and cheer all across the Bite.

  When we reached Killy my dad sent me up home, and I did not see what happened then and nor did I mind. I went home with a lemon for my mam, given me by Mr. Fisher. I dug my fingernail in the rind a little and sniffed lemon all the way up the town, to clear the Trudle-smell out of my head.

  From what I gathered she were given over to Messkeletha just as promised and no fussing. And after that the two of them went about a pair, like a flour-caddy and a tea. They both wore witch-dresses, tight to their tops to the waist, then springing out like flower-bells, nearly to the ground. Cages and flowers, like all those women at Knocknee and at Cordlin Harbortown wore, so presenting of themselves, so insisting on your looking.

  The one’s hair was dirty orange in the sunlight, the other’s mostly frost, only a few reddish stains in it to hint what it once was. And Messkeletha’s was thin in places; as Trudle stayed longer, she grew her hair, as if to make the point that she alone had such color, and could bear it about in such quantity.

  Messkeletha never was polite, never greeted you even did she meet your eye, and this one learned the same ways quite fast, or at least towards mams and children. For men she would raise what might be called a smile if it were not so sly and ambiguous. “Mister Paige,” she would say, but it would come out Pay-eesh, too lingering, and Paige would seem to dodge and weave without taking a step in any direction, would seem to bow and tug a forelock without taking his hands from his pockets. In all her interactions with our men Trudle got herself this chopped-about reaction, and enjoyed herself with the getting, anyone could see.

  But, as I say, she followed her mistress about the town and there was something powerful in there being the two of them, the small caddy tripping after the big one, taking on and giving new notes to the oul-witch’s herbaceous, privy-aceous smell. Two bells on feet, they were, ringing unpleasant thoughts out the men’s memories. Two ragged flower shadows, they crept along the sky on Watch-Out Hill. Messkeletha would stand peering to sea and town on the south mole while Trudle bent bum-up collecting fish-scales for their magics. Or the two of them would be horrors together on Marksman Road, glowering ahead, pretending not to see us boys as we hugged the hedge opposite, greeting them feebly.

  You stand there against the boat rail with your small warmth hugged to you inside the stiff coat. The seals break out of the endlessness of the sea, they make all that space less anguishing, all that drowned world beneath. Their round head-tops, their whiskery-ness, the humdrummery of their rough breath, the shiver of ripples around the landforms of their heads, their seeming to smile—you cannot help but love them.

  And the eyes, oh the eyes. The eyes are the magic of them, seals and mams: deep as night but starless, starless and kind—or at least not calculating the way pale eyes are. They are dark and glossy as any sea-washed stone, still magic while wetted, still live.

  Water flowing over a rock, over a seal, curves and curls to the rock’s shape—or the seal’s—clinging. The skirts around mams’ thighs are like that, the curves of them, the cloth. Follow a mam down the town and you cannot keep your eyes off her beskirted bum, what it does with that skirt, shaking and shuddering it, turning it almost to liquid.

  They have beautiful faces, too, not like dad faces all pinched and pale and suspicious. Mams’ faces are open, the eyes wide and all-seeing, the mouths ready always to kiss you, their salty kisses. My baby, they call you, even if you are someone else’s. They gather up anyone little and kiss them better, they encircle them in their strong arms, the skin so cool, the flesh beneath so warm. Strands of their loose hair catch in their lips, and in yours, and their eyes blink over you, and their mouths smile. They love children, mams. It doesn’t matter whose; they love all of us.

  I found Toddy Martyr the far side the northern mole, where you can see forever and not be seen, where the town might not exist, for all you can see or hear of it.

  I saw him because I looked up from my moody walking, from my plodding boots, and in among the mole-rocks one of those rocks lifted an arm and dropped it again. Then I worked out a head, with hair flopping about on it in the wind a bit of black, a bit of shine, and a pale boy-face. I di
dn’t care who it was; it was someone out here with me not a mam or a dad, not a witch, and greeting this someone would provide me a path away from my thoughts.

  By his swaying and by his singing which I now separated out of the wind’s other strings as I clambered, Toddy was off in his own land, or his own private ocean and swimming. Then he wrenched something up and lifted—ah, it was a spirit-bottle—and drank from it. He was headed for trouble, wasn’t he? That bottle was quite full, the way he had to heft it.

  “Dan’l Mallett!” he cried as he distinguished me from all the other rocks climbing towards him. “What brings you here this fine morning sirrah?” And he bonked the cork back in and held out his hand like an old gaffer from the village seat.

  I shook it, cold frog that it was. “Your dad will give you a thrashing, no mistake.”

  “Rather me than my mam. And this here is the fuel of his thrash-motor, so I am doubly saving her. ”

  “You could’ve only emptied it, into the sea or otherwise,” I said.

  “That’s what I intended. But then I got seated here and I thought what a waste. And here, have a slosh of it, Dan’l; it is like carrying hot coals in your stomach. It warms all of you, right out to the toenails.” He twisted out the cork and offered me the bottle.

  “There’s a quantity,” I said in wonder. I lifted and tipped. The air off the stuff rushed out the neck and nipped my nose; the spirit itself ran cold and evil and stinging across my tongue; a little ran out the side and dripped to my collar, leaving a line of cold burning. “Who-hoah.” I gave it back to him, and wiped my chin, and crouched in the cavity next to him.

  “How is this, Dan’l? It is in-suff’rable the way things are, do you not think?”

  “With the mams, you mean?” I was still negotiating the spirit into myself; it felt as if it were eating my gullet lining to lacework.

  “With the mams, with the dads, with all the people of our world.” He spread his arms extravagantly, as if the people were out there seaward, not behind us.

  “None of us is happy any more,” I conceded.

  “Happy!” He shook his head, pointed his face to the wind to clear it of hair. “I hate my dad. I could kill my dad, had I stren’th. And he hates me. And he hates my mam so wild, he’s like a madman at her. He can. Not. Let. Up. And the only reason she don’t hate him is, she’s so dispirited. She hardly have life to lift her head, let alone raise a good temper.”

  I sat my bottom to the wet sand among the rocks and hugged my knees and nodded miserable.

  “I don’t see why everyone’s fussing so,” said Toddy. “Who wants girls anyway? What are they good for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I han’t ever known any.” Except that red girl at Knocknee, her hair fizzing and flaming, her inquisitive eyes looking me up and down.

  “And babies. Gawd, that last one! Yawped all day and night until Mam took her down. He was glad to be rid of it as much as I was, the racketing. We could all get some sleep.”

  We listened to his cruel words in our shelter there. Then doik!, he pulled out the cork again, thrust the bottle at me, as much apologizing as daring me to drink more.

  The second pull of it was gentler; it soothed the damages caused by the first. Watching Toddy’s throat jump around his next swallow, I told myself I must not do this again too soon. It was far too pleasant, too warming against the weather. Enough of it, and I should be agreeing Toddy Martyr; I should be agreeing all the Toddy Martyrs of this town; I should be loosing everything about my own mam and how she lived alone in her room under her weed, and about Trumbells opposite—though the town knew most of that already.

  I drank myself hot-faced, though—that didn’t take much. And I kept Toddy company while he sickened himself. When next he could anyway stand I helped him up and along to Fishers, because he wouldn’t be taken to his home. Then I went hill-walking, not wanting to present myself at my house with spirit on my breath. Right to the top of Watch-Out I went and down and across the Spine and to Windaway Peak, all that way, and stood in the rain there and listened to the chattering of my teeth. The drink was gone from me by then, and it was a trudge home, and more of a trudge. I thought I would never get there.

  I woke warm in the morning knowing what I must do. I ached all over, from my hair-ends in to my heart. I sat up and looked around at the ordinariness of my room, at the spills of light across the wall around my window-blind, and at all sides of my proposition to myself.

  That night I walked up home from Wholeman’s hearth with the first part, the main part, accomplished. Dad had stayed behind, with his pipe and pals awhile, to talk that special make of eldermen’s talk that makes no sense to young ones with its boringness, but seems to gratify dads so.

  Into our little house I broke, the seaweedy silence of it. I hummed, a twiddling tune such as Jerrolt Harding had been whistling up in the snug, but without so much direction as he.

  I went in to her. She was a great dark dune there. She was awake, though, because you couldn’t hear her breathing.

  I sat at her pillow edge and tried to distinguish the tear-salted hair from the knitted weed. A scooped sea-heart lay beginning rancid in a saucer on the sill; the spoon was licked clean, almost polished in its shine.

  “Mam,” I said, “I have some news for you.”

  She burrowed a little deeper into the blanket.

  “Your son,” I said, “has got himself a position, as bottlewash at Wholeman’s.”

  I had thought her still before, but now she was all listening; not a leaf of seaweed moved.

  “I’m a good lad, says Mister Wholeman. He says they can trust me. Cannot they.”

  The dune quaked and her white face rolled up from under. There was not much light. “Did they bully you?”

  “A little,” I said. “I had to weep some and show proper remorse for that day last winter.” I thought perhaps she could hear my smile, if she could not see it.

  She crawled up to me. Powerful out from under the blanket came her warmth and the smell of the warmed weed. “They would kill you, Daniel, even for thinking this.”

  “Yes,” I said, with an odd satisfaction. “It’s different, though, when you are our mams. Mams is different from wives.”

  She swayed there on her hands and knees, accustoming herself to the thought. Fears and realizations stopped and started her breath. Even with their little window-shine her eyes were indistinct; holes in her floating pale face through which her attention poured and poured at me.

  “I know I don’t need to tell you,” she said low. And then she whispered, half-strangled, “You must not say a word.”

  “Not to anyone,” I said to her, as earnest as she could wish. “Don’t you worry. Not even to myself.”

  She laughed suddenly, and knocked me to the bed, and squashed the breath out of me the way we had always liked to fight. She was still the stronger yet, though I might be bottle-boy, but I was beginning to see that I might soon have a chance against her. It was all darkness and strain and struggle a little while, and stifled laughter and threats.

  She pinned and then released me, sprang back onto her haunches and the fight was over. “They will know it was you, Daniel,” she said. “And no other.”

  “I don’t care,” I said panting. “You will be home by then.”

  “Foolish boy,” she said fondly, and her thin hand reached through the dark, pushed my hair behind my ear, tickled down my neck and along the shelf of my collarbone. Then she slapped my cheek twice, lightly. “Let me think on this. Out of here, laddy-lad. Just a glance at us and he’ll know we were plotting and scheming. Go.”

  I went to bed happy. I washed and undressed and lay down untroubled, and my sleep closed over me like sun-warmed water.

  Things fast went out of my control, of course, as they will when you tell a secret. First, it was that Kit’s mam must come too, and then all the mams. Then, Kit’s mam must bring Kit, and then, yes, all the other mams must bring their boys too. “Particularly you, Daniel
,” said Mam, “who is up for the greatest punishment. The only way I can protect you is have you with me.”

  “I can protect myself,” I said, as stoutly as I could, but truth to tell a mad hope had been lit in me when she said that Kit was to be coming. Was that possible, then? For us to go under and be seals with our happy mams?

  It turned out there was work involved, much secret work, difficultly organized because the mams could not have with each other, and must send coded and sometimes garbled messages along of their boys, house to house under the guise of playing. This work involved witchery of a kind, though not Trudle-spells nor Messkeletha, and skins, fish skins and sheep-skins and any kind of skins that could be got. The stories we span about skins, to our dads, when they happened on our hoards! The only way to get over the terror of it was to pretend it were all a great game, a great secret costume-play for the dads, and some of them were entirely silly with it, conducting false rehearsals of carefully crafted song-and-dances so as on purpose to be discovered and scramble to hidings in their skin patchworks.

  “Stand still, Daniel.” Mam’s hands were at my face, pinching, pinning. “Or I’ll have your eye out.”

  “It’s tight as tight,” I said. “A boy cannot breathe in it.”

  “Not here,” she agreed. “But once you touch water, it will all soften, and you’ll grow great underwater lungs, for to swim full minutes on a single breath. You’ve seen us.”

  “I have. And will my nose work the same, close-and-openable on top of my snout?”

  “Exactly that way, my sweet.”

  I tried it within the hood. She tut-tutted. “Wretched boy.” She sounded quite fond all the same.

  “There,” she said eventually. “Now, don’t dislodge my pins, getting it off. It must be sewn aright if it’s to fit and form you.”

  Time came for the thefts from the coat-room. I don’t know what they had planned for the red-witches; some things they kept from me, so as I could not confess them if pressured by the men. Down at Wholeman’s I was bottlewash and guard and keeper-at-bay of our dads, stopping them going the pisser while the coats were taken out the back, between elf-fifteen and elf-thirty by the snug clock, which had a chime that could be heard in the hall. Grinny and Batton had been locked in the room all afternoon, taking down the coats and tying them, and the whole operation went like a game of fire-buckets along a chain of children to Lonna Trumbell, who only had to sniff one coming to say whose it was and where to send the runner. I pictured it all happening as Jerrolt held the men steady and somnolent in the snug with the tunes I had requested, which were all the slow and funereal ones it would be rude to get up and piss through: “The Night My Mother Died” and “Low Lay the Boat in the Harbor” and “The Fiercest Storm.”