by Clarke, Neil
“I was angry and happy all at once, and so I danced: it is what I do best.” She twirled dark, smoky fingers through the flames on her head. “The auction house was made of wood.”
Ambri laughed through a yawn.
“They are such a nuisance, these people who cannot even see me but who know how to trap me,” Idjinna said.
To Ambri and Idjinna and the rest of the group around the table, short-lived people were wispy, unfocused shapes, talking and drinking and unaware that there were others in their midst. If they even noticed Idjinna, they probably saw a dark woman wearing orange, or wearing a t-shirt painted with flames, or covered in too many tattoos. Only some of them, sometimes, knew a little more — but the man with a map of the London Underground on his skin had ways to keep them out.
Idjinna twined her fingers with Ambri’s and sighed. “I am particularly tired of crockery.”
As the four-legged cactus creature made of napkins and cocktail sticks marched across the table, examined at every step and turn by Aus and Esnan, the two women curled together in the back of the booth. Idjinna quietened her flames, and Ambri lay with her back against that hot chest and her legs linked with smoke and ember. Her skin did not burn.
They slept.
4. The chandelier, amber-eternal
The girl was a kaleidoscope, a patchwork quilt, a mosaic pieced together from tiles of multiple sets. So Ambri had thought, fifty years ago when they first met at the liquid-limned counter.
That first time, the girl’s hair drew Ambri’s eye before anything else. Part-stained pale with lemons, part-stained black with soot, with a streak tinted brown-red and smelling of a spice market, her hair hung in disorderly lengths over her broken nose, her bare left shoulder, her left ear with its seven piercings and her right ear with its one glass sphere dangling from the edge of the lobe. Then Ambri noticed her clothes: a blue skirt chopped to uneven lengths and a left trouser leg beneath it that fell to her grubby ankle; the right sleeve of a green dress; a waistcoat covered in beads and oddments. Among them Ambri saw empty-centred coins from China and Denmark, bright red beads from the Serengeti, ivory and jade amulets. Rings, and the finger of a black velvet glove on her right thumb, covered the girl’s pale hands. Her eyes were one-blue, one-amber, like those of certain cats.
“Stop,” she had said to Ambri, who tapped her fingers to a popular tune on her thin-stemmed glass of water flavoured with wine. “Tha-at annoys me, stop it!” Her voice dipped into half a dozen accents, like bread into a platter of oils: Scottish and Indian, Russian and Thai, Turkish and Moroccan. “Fingers. Fi-ingers are too loud!”
She pulled the glass out of Ambri’s hands.
“You were tapping.”
“Good evening,” Ambri said, bemused.
“Too many rhythms. Pat-terns. I don’t like them.”
Ambri turned to the man behind the counter and said, “Can I have a glass of water, please, with the rim of the glass chipped for a third of its curvature, and with unevenly chopped pieces of carrot floating in it.”
When Ambri looked back at the girl, she was staring, her mouth ajar like a door.
“Here,” Ambri said, giving her the drink. “I hope you like this.”
“You…” Six of her fingers curled tightly around the glass. “No one has ever…”
Ambri smiled. “You are far from the strangest person to find your way inside this pub.” Less than a minute later she said it, after inviting the girl to sit down, take a long around, stay: “Welcome to the Devonshire Arms.”
5. The booths, soft like beds
They woke, and Ambri met for the second time the girl who could not tolerate rhythms.
“Do either of you want a drink?” Ambri asked Idjinna and Esnan.
“Feathers and kindling.”
“Just a glass of apple juice,” said Esnan, back at his phials mixing fortunes and trickeries and a hint of vanilla.
As she shuffled out of the booth, Ambri asked where Aus had gone.
Red and pearl-hued liquids mixed like different coloured hairs in a breast-round phial; a drop of something yellow turned the potion monochrome teal. “Something about needing to make the spines poisonous,” Esnan said without looking up.
Laughing at Aus’ intent, Ambri went to the counter and ordered three drinks from the map-covered man. Hammersmith & City snared Metropolitan like bind weed around a drooping branch, magenta into pink. The grey of Jubilee wriggled. With one hand the man took feathers from under the counter and mixed them in a metal tumbler with cocktail sticks; with the other, he poured hot blackberry liqueur into a wine glass.
Movement to her left caught Ambri’s attention.
At the far corner of the counter, a young woman scattered dried peas in un-patterned intervals. “Good,” she said when one nudged an empty glass; when three peas bounced off each other and one fell on the floor, she muttered, “Irreg-lar,” in a different accent. Another time she just smiled: a slow, lopsided curve of her thin lips.
This time fishnet covered the young woman’s left arm, and strips of a CD hung in hair that was chopped and dyed in more ways than Ambri could count. Seven of her fingernails were orange and two were white; pink and beige swirled on the tenth. Her shirt was made of newspaper clippings.
“You’re still enjoying it here?” Ambri asked, pitching her voice above the murmurings of the wispy people.
The young woman looked up. “Hello,” she said, and her smile broadened.
When they met for the first time, the girl had said that a name always remained the same and she didn’t want that, but giving herself a new one whenever she wanted meant no one would remember what to call her. Easier to have none at all.
Ambri wrapped her hand around her wine glass of liqueur, putting each finger a different space apart. “You’re older than when I first saw you.”
The young woman watched Ambri’s fingers. “I don’t age in a pattern, ye-ar by year. Never have. Parents didn’t like that. I was born under Victori-ah.” With her bi-coloured eyes she looked up. “You don’t change at all.”
“I never have. I do not remember my birth, but I have heard many stories: that I was cut from the side of a wasp; that I was moulded from bone and metal; that I grew to this size in a womb and in tearing free from it killed my mother, the first death for me to collect.” Ambri inclined a brown shoulder in a shrug. “All I remember is doing my job.”
“That’s a long time to al-aways do the same thing.”
“It is.” She thought of her sword, resting by the door. “Though I am made for longevity, it is a long time. It is wearying.” But some of the tightness had left her shoulders, eased away by Idjinna’s heat; and her hands were warm from her glass, not exertion. “That is why I come here, from time to time.”
The young woman nodded, and two CD strips tapped each other.
“Idjinna and Esnan are in a booth. I think you’ve met them?”
“Once.”
“Do you want to sit with us?”
Nodding more — up-and-down or sidewise gestures, unevenly spaced — the young woman gathered up her dried peas and slid off her stool.
“You’re always solid, you and the oth-ers,” she said on the way to the booth. “You always see me and you never stare, you ne-ever look at me like I left the circus.”
Ambri looked over her shoulder at the young woman. “I know.”
“You try not to make rhythms.”
“Hello!” Esnan cried, seeing them. “Sit down! Now, what do you think’s the best colour mixture? Thanks for the drink, Ambri.”
The young woman settled down in front of the phials arrayed chaotically across the table and stared at them all in turn, playing with the peas in her hands. Eventually she dropped a pea in a phial of cinnabar liquid and said, “That one.”
Esnan laughed. “I know exactly what that one’s for! Thank you, wonderful lady. Now tell me, where have you been travelling? Your shirt comes from all over the world.”
“I went to Malaw
i and Uruguay, and in a bo-at to Cyprus…”
As the young woman related her journeys, Ambri leaned against Idjinna and smiled. This is why we come here.
6. The floor, made for standing still
When they parted for the second time, the young woman told Ambri that she would travel with Esnan.
“To markets and sites of misfortune,” the man said. “You can find us there, if you wish.”
“Or he-ere.”
The young woman grinned up at Ambri, who climbed out of the booth with her cheek singed from Idjinna’s farewell and walked to the door, who took up her sword, fastened the belt and scabbard around her waist. One hand on the hilt, Ambri said over the early afternoon quiet, “I’ll be back here, of course.”
“We all will be back here,” said the young woman with phials in her hands. “Eve-entually.”
7. The door, welcoming
Glasses and plates slid on and off tables like a brocade cloth. In high-sided booths, dark blue like the late-night sky, friends and the newly met chewed and swallowed, sipped and smiled. With dried peas on their tongues they exchanged their lives.
The door creaked open and another entered: swamp-skinned and broad; or reptilian, ancient, the first creature ever to lay an egg in a nest; or tall and pale, dressed in scraps, wanting a drink from her begged coins and finding a booth full of people she saw plainly. They made space for her. The young woman with mismatched clothes and an intolerance for rhythms offered half a plate of chicken and couscous.
A candle burned.
“Welcome,” the young woman said.
About the Author
Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in the south-east of England, where she works as a Senior Content Editor for a defence publisher. Her short fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Velocipede, Sybil’s Garage, Shimmer, Farrago’s Wainscot and several other zines. One of her poems, published in Goblin Fruit, received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. The Devonshire Arms is a real pub in Kensington, London; for two years it was her local, and she always suspected it of keeping secrets.
“What if it All Goes Wrong? A Conversation with Robert V. S. Redick”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones
Robert V. S. Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy (Del Rey, April 2009) is populated with tarboys, unwilling maidens, mad ship captains, and power hungry sorcerers. Monarchies clash and the lust for power obscures the weighty price of magic. The ocean rages and storm clouds loom. There is conspiracy, treason, and secrecy. Whole empires rest on small choices made by terrified individuals. Set largely aboard the Chathrand, a giant, 600-year old ship, Red Wolf positively reeks of adventure.
All in all, Red Wolf tells the story of characters who, according to Redick, are a bunch of misfits.
“I have a soft spot for misfits, having been one roughly since my diaper years,” Redick wrote in a recent essay at suvudu.com. “Oh, not in any tragic, soul-scarring way: my misfit status has always been more a disposition than a curse… Misfits suffer (and cause) far more interesting disasters than those who fit snugly into a culture or a camp.
Redick’s misfits are unforgivably appealing — even his most wretched characters. Each seems to live in the crow’s nest, high above a stormy sea, holding on by fingernails and sheer determination. The jeopardy is constant. The world of Alifros teeters on the edge of collapse — one person at a time.
Redick’s prose is elegant without being florid, rich without being garish. There is much of the New World/Age of Discovery spice to the tale he tells.
In a recent review, Terry Brooks, author of the Shannara novels, praised Red Wolf as “a spirited and exciting journey” and “a throwback to the days of the European adventure story writers–Stevenson, Dumas, Scott and the like — a tale that is a gripping page-turner accessible to all ages.”
Yet, The Red Wolf Conspiracy is also a very humane book–a character driven-novel written from multiple points-of-view. Redick takes on human nature in all its complex glory — from assassins to mermaids, traitors to boy heroes.
After a year of critical acclaim in England, The Red Wolf Conspiracy is finally available in the United States. Redick and I spoke a few days after the novel’s US release on a rare afternoon off from drafting the third book in the Chathrand Voyage series.
Ten years ago, you were a literary writer fascinated with languages and other cultures.
Who’d have thought it’d come to this, eh? Well, I’d like to think I’m still the same guy: still a literary writer obsessed with language and place. You and I have talked before about how the SF and literary worlds fail to engage each other. And since committing to a fantasy novel I’ve thought quite a lot about what personal meaning I attach to the notion of the “literary.”
To me the term indicates a concern with craftsmanship, and with human life as it is intimately experienced: the texture of thought and memory, the interplay of language and consciousness, the self-aware life of the mind — and the interface of these elusive, human phenomena with the larger universe. These happen to be my chief interests; without them I really can’t get too excited about your dragon or your mage.
But come on, my fellow literary types, admit it: you’re genre writers too. Westerns have guns and cows; you have neuroses and unreliable narrators.
Years ago John Updike — who as David Hartwell observes was something of a defender of SF, though he didn’t write it — accused the genre of being so wrapped up in the building of exotic scenarios that it failed to invest in all these “human subtleties.” We should not lightly dismiss that accusation.
But my take on it is a bit different: I’d say that when a work — any work, speculative or mundane — does invest in those subtleties, we collectively push it in the direction of the literary, and see it a bit less as SF/F. Perhaps it began for marketing reasons, but the divide has taken on a life of its own. We are so conditioned to believe in the two spheres that we segregate ourselves.
How often have you been to a craft discussion at a SF/F con and heard anyone invoke Conrad, García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, or any other non-SF/F master in a discussion of technique? And how often in an MFA program does one encounter a teacher of literary orientation willing to explore the craft innovations with which SFF abounds?
The good news is that I think both camps are getting over their hang-ups, and realizing how much the other side has to offer. It may take another generation, but in time literature in English may indeed let its useless guard down. Latin America managed this back in the 1960s, and the result was the greatest fiction renaissance of the latter half of the twentieth century: the so-called “Boom.”
What do you enjoy most about writing fiction?
Nothing beats those moments of ecstatic discovery, when you first commit material (however rough) to the page. I’ll never forget the joyride of certain first-draft passages: the tiny ixchel fighting to get aboard the Chathrand without being discovered by humans; the fight in the Weather Tower on the emperor’s mountain, the moment Pazel and Neeps are hurled into the depths with orders to plunder a shipwreck or die trying.
And yet your question’s harder than it appears. Those ecstatic moments are the most thrilling, sure, but they can also terrify you and leave you drained. What if it all goes wrong? What if (as R.E.M. has it) “all these fantasies come flaming aground?” There’s a scary image for your novel.
But the image I return to most often is that of working clay on a potter’s wheel, as I’ve done. It’s sensual, and breathtaking at times: The soft, liquid form of the bowl or vase rises like magic under your hands. But it’s so fragile! As long as that wheel’s in motion there’s a chance the whole structure may list over and collapse.
Did playing role-playing games (RPGs) as a kid influence what you write about and the way you write it?
Unquestionably. I was a D&D addict for many years — though I haven’t played it in twenty. It’s juvenile. I mean that with great respect, and would p
lay again in a heartbeat if I could so arrange my life. But again, let’s be honest: a large part of RPGs involves running around, stealing, smashing, crushing and killing things. Not unlike certain sports, except that the actions are literal mental abstractions, rather than symbolic physical ones.
But in every other respect role-playing games are an exquisite form of training for storytellers. The most obvious way is world-building, but that in itself means so much more than choosing details and writing them down. There’s dialogue improvisation, scene building, three-dimensional spatial thinking, imaginary timekeeping, dramatic pacing: it’s all there, and you experience it in the most natural and honest way: in a private huddle with your peers. If those peers actually care about the quality of the experience…
Is there a character in the novel (or trilogy) that you most relate to? Or most enjoy writing about?
Well, one man always springs to mind. I love writing from Captain Rose’s point of view, which in Red Wolf is given through letters he writes to his (possibly deceased) father. Rose is a paranoid, deceptive, violent and wounded megalomaniac. But he brings a twisted zeal to everything he does, and that’s compelling for a writer. There is also a fascination with evil, when it’s done in a complex way. Some might argue that it’s because we have more to learn from those who are not like us than those who are. I don’t think that’s the case: good has plenty to teach. It may be that we’re engineered to pay sharp attention to those we sense might threaten us.
But The Red Wolf Conspiracy employs seven or eight points of view. I think the truth is that I relate most with the POV character I’m writing about at a given moment. Sometimes that identification is more pleasant than others. It’s not pleasant to enter the mind of Sandor Ott, the old spymaster responsible for some of the heinous political trouble my world’s thrown into. It doesn’t feel good to inhabit his internal asylum, his padded cell. But it is my job.
