Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

“The Grove?” I said.

  “Ay, the wud,” was the answer in broad Scots.

  I wanted to see how much he understood.

  “Mr. Lawson’s family is from the Scottish Border?”

  “Ay. I understand they come off Borthwick Water side,” he replied, but I saw by his eyes that he knew what I meant.

  “Mr. Lawson is my oldest friend,” I went on, “and I am going to take measures to cure him. For what I am going to do I take the sole responsibility. I will make that plain to your master. But if I am to succeed I want your help. Will you give it me? It sounds like madness, and you are a sensible man and may like to keep out of it. I leave it to your discretion.”

  Jobson looked me straight in the face. “Have no fear for me,” he said; “there is an unholy thing in that place, and if I have the strength in me I will destroy it. He has been a good master to me, and, forbye, I am a believing Christian. So say on, sir.”

  There was no mistaking the air. I had found my Tishbite.

  “I want men,” I said – “as many as we can get.”

  Jobson mused. “The Kaffirs will no’ gang near the place, but there’s some thirty white men on the tobacco farm. They’ll do your will, if you give them an indemnity in writing.”

  “Good,” said I. “Then we will take our instructions from the only authority which meets the case. We will follow the example of King Josiah.” I turned up the 3rd chapter of Second Kings, and read –

  “And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtaroth the abomination of the Zidomans …did the king defile.

  “And he braise in pieces the images, and cut down the groves, and filled their places with the bones of men,

  “Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.”

  Jobson nodded. “It’ll need dinnymite. But I’ve plenty of yon down at the workshops. I’ll be off to collect the lads.”

  Before nine the men had assembled at Jobson’s house. They were a hardy lot of young farmers from home, who took their instructions docilely from the masterful factor. On my orders they had brought their shot-guns. We armed them with spades and woodmen’s axes, and one man wheeled some coils of rope in a handcart.

  In the clear, windless air of morning the Grove, set amid its lawns, looked too innocent and exquisite for evil. I had a pang of regret that a thing so fair should suffer; nay, if I had come alone, I think I might have repented. But the men were there, and the grim-faced Jobson was waiting for orders. I placed the guns, and sent beaters to the far side. I told them that every dove must be shot.

  It was only a small flock, and we killed fifteen at the first drive. The poor birds flew over the glen to another spinney, but we brought them back over the guns and seven fell. Four more were got in the trees, and the last I killed myself with a long shot. In half an hour there was a pile of little green bodies on the sward.

  Then we went to work to cut down the trees. The slim stems were an easy task to a good woodman, and one after another they toppled to the ground. And meantime, as I watched, I became conscious of a strange emotion.

  It was as if some one were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading – something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman’s voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness unrepaid to the world. And what the voice told me was, that I was destroying her last shelter.

  That was the pathos of it – the voice was homeless. As the axes flashed in the sunlight and the wood grew thin, that gentle spirit was pleading with me for mercy and a brief respite. It seemed to be telling of a world for centuries grown coarse and pitiless, of long sad wanderings, of hardly-won shelter, and a peace which was the little all she sought from men. There was nothing terrible in it. No thought of wrongdoing. The spell, which to Semitic blood held the mystery of evil, was to me, of a different race, only delicate and rare and beautiful. Jobson and the rest did not feel it, I with my finer senses caught nothing but the hopeless sadness of it. That which had stirred the passion in Lawson was only wringing my heart. It was almost too pitiful to bear. As the trees crashed down and the men wiped the sweat from their brows, I seemed to myself like the murderer of fair women and innocent children. I remember that the tears were running over my cheeks. More than once I opened my mouth to countermand the work, but the face of Jobson, that grim Tishbite, held me back.

  I knew now what gave the Prophets of the Lord their mastery, and I knew also why the people sometimes stoned them.

  The last tree fell, and the little tower stood like a ravished shrine, stripped of all defences against the world. I heard Jobson’s voice speaking. “We’d better blast that stane thing now. We’ll trench on four sides and lay the dinnymite. Ye’re no’ looking weel, sir. Ye’d better go and sit down on the brae-face.”

  I went up the hillside and lay down. Below me, in the waste of shorn trunks, men were running about, and I saw the mining begin. It all seemed like an aimless dream in which I had no part. The voice of that homeless goddess was still pleading. It was the innocence of it that tortured me. Even so must a merciful Inquisitor have suffered from the plea of some fair girl with the aureole of death on her hair. I knew I was killing rare and unrecoverable beauty. As I sat dazed and heartsick, the whole loveliness of Nature seemed to plead for its divinity. The sun in the heavens, the mellow lines of upland, the blue mystery of the far plains, were all part of that soft voice. I felt bitter scorn for myself. I was guilty of blood; nay, I was guilty of the sin against light which knows no forgiveness. I was murdering innocent gentleness, and there would be no peace on earth for me. Yet I sat helpless. The power of a sterner will constrained me. And all the while the voice was growing fainter and dying away into unutterable sorrow.

  Suddenly a great flame sprang to heaven, and a pall of smoke. I heard men crying out, and fragments of stone fell around the ruins of the grove. When the air cleared, the little tower had gone out of sight.

  The voice had ceased, and there seemed to me to be a bereaved silence in the world. The shock moved me to my feet, and I ran down the slope to where Jobson stood rubbing his eyes.

  “That’s done the job. Now we maun get up the tree roots. We’ve no time to howk. We’ll just blast the feck o’ them.”

  The work of destruction went on, but I was coming back to my senses. I forced myself to be practical and reasonable. I thought of the night’s experience and Lawson’s haggard eyes, and I screwed myself into a determination to see the thing through. I had done the deed; it was my business to make it complete. A text in Jeremiah came into my head: ‘Their children remember their altars and their groves by the green trees upon the high hills.’ I would see to it that this grove should be utterly forgotten.

  We blasted the tree roots, and, yoking oxen, dragged the debris into a great heap. Then the men set to work with their spades, and roughly levelled the ground. I was getting back to my old self, and Jobson’s spirit was becoming mine.

  “There is one thing more,” I told him. “Get ready a couple of ploughs. We will improve upon King Josiah.” My brain was a medley of Scripture precedents, and I was determined that no safeguard should be wanting.

  We yoked the oxen again and drove the ploughs over the site of the grove. It was rough ploughing, for the place was thick with bits of stone from the tower, but the slow Afrikander oxen plodded on, and sometime in the afternoon the work was finis
hed. Then I sent down to the farm for bags of rock-salt, such as they use for cattle. Jobson and I took a sack apiece, and walked up and down the furrows, sowing them with salt.

  The last act was to set fire to the pile of tree trunks. They burned well, and on the top we flung the bodies of the green doves. The birds of Ashtaroth had an honourable pyre.

  Then I dismissed the much-perplexed men, and gravely shook hands with Jobson. Black with dust and smoke I went back to the house, where I bade Travers pack my bags and order the motor. I found Lawson’s servant, and heard from him that his master was sleeping peacefully. I gave him some directions, and then went to wash and change.

  Before I left I wrote a line to Lawson. I began by transcribing the verses from the 23rd chapter of Second Kings. I told him what I had done, and my reason.

  “I take the whole responsibility upon myself,” I wrote. “No man in the place had anything to do with it but me. I acted as I did for the sake of our old friendship, and you will believe it was no easy task for me. I hope you will understand. Whenever you are able to see me send me word, and I will come back and settle with you. But I think you will realise that I have saved your soul.”

  The afternoon was merging into twilight as I left the house on the road to Taqui. The great fire, where the grove had been, was still blazing fiercely, and the smoke made a cloud over the upper glen, and filled all the air with a soft violet haze. I knew that I had done well for my friend, and that he would come to his senses and be grateful …But as the car reached the ridge I looked back to the vale I had outraged. The moon was rising and silvering the smoke, and through the gaps I could see the tongues of fire. Somehow, I know not why, the lake, the stream, the garden-coverts, even the green slopes of hill, wore an air of loneliness and desecration.

  And then my heartache returned, and I knew that I had driven something lovely and adorable from its last refuge on earth.

  Moon Skin

  Beth Cato

  Beulah emerged from the river and into a brisk autumn night that made the waning moon shiver behind the clouds. Her vision, even with the color spectrum narrowed, was keen in the darkness, and she detected the movement of men amongst the few wooden buildings and tents near the shore. The vertical slits in her nose opened and she took in the ripeness of the swamp and the wretched stench of the Dorchester’s iron hulk.

  With a tilt of her head, her seal skin peeled back to her shoulders. Smells altered, the marsh’s rot more bothersome, the iron more annoying than appalling. She could see the Dorchester better now. The forty-foot submarine floated alongside a pier. Gray metal maintained a dull sheen beneath lit lamps. A few soldiers bobbed in a boat at the tip of the long spar where a torpedo would be affixed in place. If all went according to Papa’s plan, tomorrow the submersible would engage the enemy.

  “Miss Beulah’s back!” a spotter called.

  She sensed Papa’s approach. His body glowed with innate magic, like a full moon that cast no shadows on the normal world. Annie’s pelt, hooked to his waist, held a fainter glow tonight, like a lamp tucked beneath a quilt.

  Oh, Annie. Her sister endured such agony right now. The dimmed pelt was proof of that.

  Only her head above water, Beulah shimmied out of her pelt. She hunkered as she walked onto higher ground and obscured herself in the reeds. Her frail human skin pocked in goose bumps, she pulled on a thick robe she’d left hanging there and draped her long gray pelt over her arm. Her bare feet squished in mud as she walked onto land. Papa awaited her on the embankment. A glow behind him caught her eye. She stopped.

  Amidst so many fellows in gray attire, the strange man didn’t stand out at all but for his innate blue glow. He was a boy, really, close to her age. Skinny as a fence rail, his features plain. In water, she knew of everything around her by the current against her whiskers; the buzz of his magic was strong like that, the sense of it different than Papa or Annie. Like the difference between a wood fire and a gas lamp.

  “Miss Beulah.” Papa inclined his head, a dozen questions compounded into her name. He was never one to dither.

  “Captain Kettleman, sir.” She saluted. Even in private, she had not been permitted to call him ‘Papa’ for years. “Two Union sloops still off-shore, three civilian crafts aside. One a fisherman, the others smuggling.”

  If anyone spied her, they’d likely think she was a porpoise. Seals were uncommon along the North Carolina coast; she had never met one in the wild.

  “They must know we’re hidden in the vicinity. Let the Yanks linger. All the better for tomorrow. Won’t need to sail far to find our target.” Papa fidgeted with Annie’s pale pelt. He nodded at Beulah. “You’re a good girl. You get adequate rest. Be ready for tomorrow.” The words held a warning.

  His care for her extended to her usefulness. As a child, she had been taught enough reading and arithmetic to manage as his secretary. Back then, she thought it was flattering, even if her literacy set her uncomfortably apart from the other house slaves. As if being the master’s bastard daughter wasn’t enough.

  His treatment of Annie proved that anything of his blood was his property, to use as he will. Skin color had nothing to with it.

  “Yes, sir.” Beulah’s teeth threatened to chatter.

  She clutched her own pelt a little closer for both warmth and security as she walked past Papa. She caught the direct, wide gaze of the man behind him. It was pretty clear that he saw her, and not simply as a young woman in a robe. He appeared as skittish as a kitten in a dog kennel as he looked between her and Papa. He must have never seen magic in a person before. How peculiar.

  “Miss Beulah?”

  “Sir?” She stopped and faced her father.

  “This man here, Chaplain …?”

  “Walsh, sir,” said the stranger.

  “Yes, Walsh. He will escort you once you’re dressed.”

  “Not Lieutenant Groves, sir?” she asked.

  “Lee believed a chaplain’s presence would do the men well before we deploy, but we have no need of him yet.” Papa’s curled lip revealed he had no use for a chaplain, period, but Lee’s word was akin to God’s. “Lieutenant Groves has plenty else to do.”

  With that, Papa walked on, already bellowing an order to another soldier.

  The man who glowed, a chaplain? Through thin lamplight, they stared each other down. His face was pale and pink, his nose blotched with freckles. Irish, then, like Papa’s line. They’d carried a lot of old magic to American shores, though she’d noticed that glow in other folks, too. Most of them hadn’t seen hers in turn, though.

  “I be but a few minutes, sir,” Beulah murmured, and scurried past him to her tent.

  The tent had been her home for a brief while, until it became clear that she needed a quieter environment for sleep; shifting to seal and back left her drained, and if she was deprived she couldn’t manage the change at all. Papa had begrudgingly arranged for her to stay with a loyal yet humble family nearby.

  She emerged in proper clothes, hugging her coat close to her cotton dress. It was cold enough that she belted her pelt in place beneath her layers, girthing her like a saddle blanket.

  Papa’s soldiers nodded and sidestepped around her. She knew some made signs of the cross and muttered, but no one behaved cruelly with her secret known, and it wasn’t simply because of Papa’s command or that he was known as a selkie, too. She was respected in her own right – a peculiar thing, truly – for her service in the war. She’d scouted for the Hunley and more, and the Hunley had busted the Union blockade of Charleston. Until it recently docked for repairs, the submersible had prowled the South Carolina coast and sent Yanks fleeing northward.

  A month after the Hunley’s first success, Sherman had been obliterated on his march from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Peace and independence might be possible by the dawn of 1865, God willing.

  Peace for white folk, anyway. But if Beulah had to
be a slave, she’d be with Annie and Annie would treat her as well as she could.

  Chaplain Walsh awaited her with a wagon; he seemed afraid to look at her. She sat on the bench seat and tugged blankets onto her lap. The chaplain clicked his tongue, and the horse pulled the wagon onto the bumpy road.

  Beulah waited until the camp’s noise was replaced by the chirps and trills of the marsh. “No need to worry, sir. Captain Kettleman can’t see your glow.”

  He shot her a nervous glance. “But he’s a selkie, like you, if I understand correctly? That is, er …”

  “Yes, sir, he’s my father, but men-selkies can’t change form or use any magic they carry. You never met no one like us before?”

  “You have?”

  “A few times, yes, sir. Not that common, and not every person with magic can see or sense how it’s carried in others. I got a sense that you’re not of selkie blood, sir.”

  His grip on the reins tightened. “Can you sense what I am, Miss Beulah?”

  What a strange conversation this was. She twined her hands beneath the blankets. The night was fiercely quiet. Back when the blockade was still in place and more Lincoln soldiers lurked close, Papa kept more guards around her. As if she’d run north and leave Annie behind, or even let soldiers steal her away.

  She squinted at him. “I met some Indian spirits I don’t know to name, and a dryad once. You glow like a pure drink of water, like nothing else I seen.”

  “Like a pure drink of water.” He repeated it with a small smile in his voice. “The pelt the Captain carries. Who …?”

  “My sister. Annie.” She noted the quick shift in subject.

  “She’s –”

  “White, sir. His wife’s child. She was a good woman, God rest her.”

  “I was ’bout to ask her age, the skin so small.”

  “Oh. She’s seven, sir.”

  His brow furrowed. “It’s hooked on his belt, too. Am I right to reckon …?”

  “She got a hole through her left hand. Size of a blueberry. Never heals. He keeps her pelt close here. For luck.”