by Nick Mamatas
As the wife seems to have anticipated.
After a time of pushing through thick reeds, violet thistles on thick green stalks nod into view, an uncanny mute assembly. Their brilliant shade is perverse in this landscape, as though they had soaked up the vitality of the environs to produce their striking hue. I tug at a stalk thick as my antennae—and fluid emerald and burning sprays from the violet bulb in every direction. I try to shield myself, but the mud sucks at me and drags me down into the mire. The spray burns like the sun herself.
By the time I’ve managed back onto my feet again, the fatherteat spray has eaten away portions of my integument shell. Only a layer of exposed cuticle shields viscera from the open air. I avoid looking at the burns and collect the red umbrella from where it fell into the mud. Without it, the wounds would have been worse.
I distract myself with the task of procuring fatherteat. I have wrested a bag of stalks from the grove when I narrowly avoid an especially high fatherteat spray. Staggering aside, my gaze strays deeper into the grove where a brown gleam catches my eye. My thorax tightens. I drop the stalk I’m holding and move through the grove towards the thing—
—Into a clear patch where thistles have been cut down and mud churned up. The satin sheen of exoskeleton; mud mounded. The air is snatched from me. I can make out three sets of legs in the mire. One end of the shell is hidden beneath the mound—the end where a head should be. The channels around the legs indicate that once the legs thrashed and thrashed. Now they are still.
It is a wife. He has been buried alive.
The shell is smeared with copious palmate markings, prints of whatever piled the mud on the wife and kept him submerged. Until he didn’t try to get out anymore.
What could have made the palmate markings on the shell? I am inundated with dreadful imaginings. Bogles. As the wife said.
I snatch up the stalk bag, nearly toppling into the mud again, and strike a frantic step-sweeping pace back towards the ferry rope, which stretches up into the clouds like a beanstalk from the old tales. All the while I listen and look for something baleful following behind. Why did wives think they could manage alone undercloud? What madness compelled that now-dead wife to come here? I fumble and yank on the ferry rope with a leg; my primaries hang tingling and still.
Waiting alone on the plain, the wind murmurs a warning in a strange tongue. I drop the bread and take the knife from the bag. I hold my fighter’s stance, vigilant, ready to take whatever might come—whatever bogles with their strange hands.
The lurch of the ferry overhead startles me. It slows to the ground and the wooden door swings open. The ferryman steps out, regarding me with solemn black bead eyes. She moves aside.
Out strides a goodman bedecked in armor.
But no. It’s worse than bogles. The thin face gives him away.
It is a wife. And he is not alone.
Two more wives step from the ferry, similarly clad in armor, looking ridiculous in goodmen’s garb. Each carries an umbrella and bears a bundle on his back. The first takes a revolver from his belt, gazing across the plain, the wind batting his hat about on his head. The largest wife notices me and steps away as if by instinct. From his belt hangs a muslin bag; the ivory handle of a dagger protrudes from a sheath.
“Look,” says the large one, pointing to me with his red umbrella. The other two stare, stricken. The first says, “It doesn’t matter now. Let’s get going.”
I go to speak, but already they are scuttling away, their feet fitted with broad webbed shoes that let them walk over the mud. They open their umbrellas.
They have come prepared. They have a procedure.
The ferryman holds out a claw for the toll; arms shaking, I fish coins from the bag.
Inside, words finally come, bearing the ring of accusation. “Those were wives that came out,” I say. The ferryman nods like a fatherteat head in the wind. “They’ve been coming down here, haven’t they?—goodwives. Lots of them.” The ferryman presses her lips together, turns to the winch and says nothing. The ferry shoots skyward.
Nursing my numb arms, I watch through the cracks in the slats and look for them crossing the plain alone—without husbands. As though they are husbands. Perhaps they go to the dead wife. But no. My wife as good as told me why they are there. We goodmen go about in the world more than them; we will suffer from the sunpoison more and sooner than them. They seek fatherteat to replace what their husbands will soon lack.
How dare they impinge upon our right, our way of life ages old?
The buried wife’s face beneath the dirt jeers up from memory: the tiny compound eyes, the mouth set in an “o” beneath the mound, the churned-up sludge from his struggle to scramble up, out of the mud and away. Some coward, it had seemed to me before, had sent her wife undercloud in her stead. But those goodwives had come prepared, with weapons and tools. They went on their own. They went of their own volition.
My shell taps the ferry wall as I look out. I am shuddering with outrage.
That, and something akin to fear.
It is night when the ferry touches on the dock near the Cumulesce, invisible in the dark, a starless void in the sky. I’m out the door before I have to hear the ferryman bid me goodbye with the traditional, maddening expression. I hail a lepidopter to the lighthouse. As we come out from under the canopy and the fare change registers on the meter, I notice a light far beyond the lighthouse: an airship approaching.
And no light to warn of what lies behind the Cumulesce. I’ve come home too late.
I toss coins to the driver and hit the ground running, pushing through the hard-shelled crowd and up the claptrap bridge to the lighthouse.
The wife meets me at the door. I push past him to the spiral staircase.
“I talked to some wives in town on the pterophone,” he says. His feet make scrabbling sounds on the stairs as he follows behind.
“The children—by sun’s eyes, there’s an airship coming!” I cry, stepping into the lantern room.
“They’re telling stories about fatherteat,” he says as I open the crèche door where the grub-babies reside behind the massive lens that amplifies their glow. “Ones I hadn’t heard before.”
“I bet they are. Let me guess—stories from undercloud, eh?” I say, but now, now at the crèche I can see the babies live. They have no glow, only the vaguest luminescence, a hint of nacreous gray light. They hear and smell my arrival. Weakly, their mouths open and close in need, emitting tiny shrieks as they writhe over each other like animals. The wife is speaking, but beyond the windows, the red and amber lights of the airship near. I wrestle the stalk bag with my secondary hands.
“Your arms are hurt. I should have made you wear more cover,” I hear him say as if from afar. I tear a wet stalk from the bag and tip it to the smallest and dimmest of the babies. Its mouth works; it gibbers in infant bliss while the others fight for the stalk-teat. The wife prattles on as I quickly move through the lot of them, feeding them.
As I squeeze the last drops from a stalk for the last infant, the wife is at my side, his four hands upon the nymph-child I am holding.
“Are you listening to me?” he says in a way I have never heard him speak. I begin to reply, but my gaze is snatched to the window and the light spangled across the sky, growing nearer.
“Are you listening? It’s the thistle milk,” he says, still trying to wrest the child from me. I slap his hands away, my own numb hands fumbling. “The cloud-cover traps the sunpoison beneath. The thistles are—”
“I knew it,” I say, heaving the child out of his grasp; the nearly-dry stalk drops to the floor. “You wives found the fatherteat yourselves. You’re trying to find a way to live without us,” I say.
“No, we’re trying to find a way to survive. The wives’ tales say the sunpoison has demolished our people before. If that’s so, it’ll take you husbands first.”
“You’re trying to usurp our right to nourish the children ourselves. It’s disgusting,” I say. “It’s immoral.
” I move closer to the great lens door, the child in my arms.
“We’re doing whatever might save us. We have more pressing things to think about than whether wives or husbands will nourish the young. Bogles will destroy us if we try to live undercloud. They are why we ended up in Overcloud to begin with.”
“I bet that’s from a wives’ tale as well,” I say, but his words have turned me cold, even my numbed arms—
When my babies begin to glow. They incandesce blue-green, casting light on the walls. I place the child with the others in the fresnel crèche. They brighten so quickly I have to turn away. The amber lights of the ship are hidden behind the wife, enrobing him in a golden halo.
Then the children’s light changes from turquoise to green-gold, and more brilliant than ever I have seen.
The light is accompanied by a cloying sweet smell of flesh burning, followed by a pop and a hiss as the noxious light of one, then another, then more of my babies is extinguished.
The wife cries out. The light is diminished enough that I can turn back to the small charred bodies—which I can see by the light of one last, gray infant.
Until it, too, blinks out in a waft of smoke and sweet stench.
I turn back to the wife, but he is not looking at me. I follow his line of sight outside to the cluster of lights in the dark. The airship, perhaps not noticing or understanding the brief beacon, is still moving blindly towards the Cumulesce.
“The fatherteat milk—what were you saying of the fatherteat milk?” I cry.
The wife is wailing too much to answer.
There is no choice. The city is risked if I do not act. I reach for the bag of fatherteat and pull out one of the last remaining stalks. I peer at the wife, seeing in his place the dead wife undercloud. Once I might have thought, if I do this, he might as well be that dead wife, buried alive under the weight of his dependence.
I cannot lose the feeling that that is not true now.
No time: the ship is drifting towards the Cumulesce.
So I suck from the stalk.
“The children. The city,” cries the wife. “After all we’ve done.” I know he must mean not the goodmen, but the wives.
The thistle milk tastes of flowers. I am no longer a nymph-child, but my body still knows what to do with milk. I feel it mingling with the sweetbreads in my thorax. I think of my father and the decade since I drank from her body.
The milk lights me up, soft. The wife gasps. I go to the crèche. I climb in and squeeze behind the great fresnel lens that is the heart of the lighthouse.
The lens magnifies and focuses my light into a beacon. A channel of green-gold light slices open the night.
My glow fluoresces and fills my vision. I am blinded. Perhaps by now the airship has begun to slow, to approach the Cumulesce, to ease safely into the harbor. An infant comfort dances across memory at the edge of the void.
An appalling image fills that void: my wife, setting out with dozens of others—undercloud. Another image: goodmen gone. A wife feeding a child from an apparatus of hose and metal. And from another intricate device—laying eggs.
I’ve given them these things by warning the airship of the Cumulesce. Darkness could have brought it all down: the airship colliding with the city and sending it in flames to undercloud.
I turn to see what I can of my wife through my light. He is standing by the lens, silent, blind as ever, smelling my choice.
The city, Overcloud, cast to the ground. Maybe it would have been better to let the beacon fall dark, to forfeit it all to the bogles. Something in me says I should have done it.
The wife will not be buried under my absence like a wife buried alive in the wilderness. He is digging himself out. All of them are digging themselves out.
Now, at any moment, he—they—will scramble up and away, free.
Darja Malcolm-Clarke attended Clarion West in 2004 and has fiction and poetry appearing in TEL: Stories, Mythic Delirium, and elsewhere. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Indiana University, studying postmodern and speculative literature. When she is not teaching undergraduates or editing articles for Strange Horizons, she looks after a high-maintenance goblin masquerading as a black cat.
THE APE’S WIFE
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Neither yet awake nor quite asleep, she pauses in her dreaming to listen to the distant sounds of the jungle approaching twilight. They are each balanced now between one world and another—she between sleep and waking, and the jungle between day and night. In the dream, she is once again the woman she was before she came to the island, the starving woman on that other island, that faraway island that was not warm and green but had come to seem to her always cold and grey, stinking of dirty snow and the exhaust of automobiles and buses. She stands outside a lunch room on Mulberry Street, her empty belly rumbling as she watches other people eat. The evening begins to fill up with the raucous screams of nocturnal birds and flying reptiles and a gentle tropical wind rustling through the leaves of banana and banyan trees, through cycads and ferns grown as tall or taller than the brick and steel and concrete canyon that surrounds her.
She leans forward, and her breath fogs the lunch room’s plate-glass window, but none of those faces turn to stare back at her. They are all too occupied with their meals, these swells with their forks and knives and china platters buried under mounds of scrambled eggs or roast beef on toast or mashed potatoes and gravy. They raise china cups of hot black coffee to their lips and pretend she isn’t there. This winter night is too filled with starving, tattered women on the bum. There is not time to notice them all, so better to notice none of them, better not to allow the sight of real hunger to spoil your appetite. A little farther down the street there is a Greek who sells apples and oranges and pears from a little sidewalk stand, and she wonders how long before he catches her stealing, him or someone else. She has never been a particularly lucky girl.
Somewhere close by, a parrot shrieks and another parrot answers it, and finally she turns away from the people and the tiled walls of the lunch room and opens her eyes; the Manhattan street vanishes in a slushy, disorienting flurry and takes the cold with it. She is still hungry, but for a while she is content to lie in her carefully woven nest of rattan, bamboo, and ebony branches, blinking away the last shreds of sleep and gazing deeply into the rising mists and gathering dusk. She has made her home high atop a weathered promontory, this charcoal peak of lava rock and tephra a vestige of the island’s fiery origins. It is for this summit’s unusual shape— not so unlike a human skull— that white men named the place. And it is here that she last saw the giant ape, before it left her to pursue the moving-picture man and Captain Englehorn, the first mate and the rest of the crew of the Venture, left her alone to get itself killed and hauled away in the rusty hold of that evil-smelling ship.
At least, that is one version of the story she tells herself to explain why the beast never returned for her. It may not be the truth. Perhaps the ape died somewhere in the swampy jungle spread out below the mountain, somewhere along the meandering river leading down to the sea. She has learned that there is no end of ways to die on the island, and that nothing alive is so fierce or so cunning as to be entirely immune to those countless perils. The ape’s hide was riddled with bullets, and it might simply have succumbed to its wounds and bled to death. Time and again, she has imagined this, the gorilla only halfway back to the wall but growing suddenly too weak to continue the chase, and perhaps it stopped, surrendering to pain and exhaustion, and sat down in a glade somewhere below the cliffs, resting against the bole of an enormous tree. Maybe it sat there, peering through a break in the fog and the forest canopy, gazing forlornly back up at the skull-shaped mountain. It would have been a terrible, lonely death, but not so terrible an end as the beast might have met had it managed to gain the ancient gates and the sandy peninsula beyond.
She has, on occasion, imagined another outcome, one in which the enraged god-thing overtook the men from the steamer, either in
the jungle or somewhere out beyond the wall, in the village or on the beachhead. And though the ape was killed by their gunshots and gas bombs (for surely he would have returned, otherwise), first they died screaming, every last mother’s son of them. She has taken some grim satisfaction in this fantasy, on days when she has had need of grim satisfaction. But she knows it isn’t true, if only because she watched with her own eyes the Venture sailing away from the place where it had anchored out past the reefs and the deadly island, the smoke from its single stack drawing an ashen smudge across the blue morning sky. They escaped, at least enough of them to pilot the ship, and left her for dead or good as dead.
She stretches and sits up in her nest, watching the sun as it sinks slowly into the shimmering, flat monotony of the Indian Ocean, the dying day setting the western horizon on fire. She stands, and the red-orange light paints her naked skin the color of clay. Her stomach growls again, and she thinks of her small hoard of fruit and nuts, dried fish and a couple of turtle eggs she found the day before, all wrapped up safe in banana leaves and hidden in amongst the stones and brambles. Here, she need only fear nightmares of hunger and never hunger itself. There is the faint, rotten smell of sulfur emanating from the cavern that forms the skull’s left eye socket, the mountain’s malodorous breath wafting up from bubbling hot springs deep within the grotto. She has long since grown accustomed to the stench and has found that the treacherous maze of bubbling lakes and mud helps to protect her from many of the island’s predators. For this reason, more than any other, more even than the sentimentality that she no longer denies, she chose these steep volcanic cliffs for her eyrie.
Stepping from her bed, the stones warm against the toughened soles of her feet, she remembers a bit of melody, a ghostly snatch of lyrics that has followed her up from the dream of the city and the woman she will never be again. She closes her eyes, shutting out the jungle noises for just a moment, and listens to the faint crackle of a half-forgotten radio broadcast.
