by Emma Bull
“Sit still, munequita,” said the new voice. It was lower than Sher’s, and thick with an accent that ought to have been Hispanic and wasn’t. Sherrea’s lips, making the words, moved differently than they usually did. Her face looked suddenly much older. “You afraid of me?”
Munequita meant — I felt the infinitesimal shift of new knowledge. Little doll. I shivered. “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, at least. Who are you?”
A hooting laugh. “Nobody you know. Listen now. It’s time you was doin’ what you supposed to. You got work to do, and all you do is look out for your own self. You not ready to do your work. That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you.”
“Nobody’s bound to me,” I said firmly.
“You think that? Where you been, sittin’ in a hole? You wait ’til le Chasseur comes. But you dangle those lives over the fire and that’s all for you. I give you warning.”
Sherrea’s lips had drawn back from her nicotine-stained teeth in a big nasty smile. I stood up carefully. “Well, thank you. I’ll be going, then.”
“Sit down.” I can’t describe that voice. I sat down. “But you can save your ass. You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits. Serve the loa, serve all the people, and go hungry and cold yourself. Then all the parts of you gonna come together and make you well. But strong people want to keep chained what you gotta make free. There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. But if you give what I tol’ you, the light of change’ll shine in the tower of shadows.” I felt like someone who’s gone to get a wart removed, and been told he needs radiation and chemo. I am not good at hungry and cold. “So what is it that I have to do?” I said.
“Donkey. Are you a little baby that I have to tell you right from wrong? You feel every day what you have to do, and you make like you don’t. But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords.”
“All I want is to quit doing downtime.”
Whatever was using Sherrea’s mouth hooted. “My brother already said he’d help with that. You know my brother? Uncle Death?”
I clutched at my knees. “What am I trying to accomplish, at least?”
“To open the way, little donkey!”
“What’re you frowning about?” Sherrea grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was back. Her eyes were where they ought to be, her face was her own.
“Is this your way of teaching me that I get what I pay for?”
“You don’t like the way I read, don’t ask me to do it.”
“I don’t mind your reading. It’s your little friends coming to visit that gives me a sharp pain.” She was sullen. “So you got a visit from Tia Luisa, huh? Better clean up your act, then. That’s for when the querent is in shit up to the chin.”
She put out a hand to sweep up the cards. I put two fingers on hers, lightly, and let go. “Sher. I’m sorry. But four times, it’s happened. I get some kind of physical trauma, not even enough to knock me out, and zip — I wake up someplace else, with the closing credits rolling, and I can’t remember the rest of the movie. Something in my head is broken.”
“Most people’s heads are broken, Sparrow. So what?”
“So I need help. And I’m scared.” That last escaped before I got my mouth closed.
She scratched her lower lip with her fingernail, watching me. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll try a clarification.”
She picked up the cards, all except Joan of Arc, and shuffled them. “Cut,” she told me, and I did. She picked up the piles and began to flick down cards. And slowed, and stopped, finally, with the fourth card, the grinning figure with the fan of swords over his shoulder. The third card had been the black juggler. The second had been the man with the sun. The first, Baron Samedi. Sherrea’s hand hovered over the deck, not quite touching the next card. Then she pulled it, quickly, and slapped it down. The red-and-white lovers. She raised her eyes to my face. “Don’t fuck with me,” she said.
“Funny. I was going to say that to you.” And I really was. I was angry. My vulnerability had slipped out into her hands, and she was playing me with it. I’ve seen card tricks; the randomness of a shuffled deck is an overrated quantity. But Sherrea’s eyes were a little wild, and her hands were graceless and uncertain. In a haphazard flurry, she laid the rest of the pattern. All the same.
We sat in the dim room, staring at the ugly pictures. I was holding as still as I could, so that none of them would do their foolish dance of transformation. But my nose itched, and it made Baron Samedi laugh.
“I guess you better do whatever it was I told you to do,” Sher said at last, and began picking up the cards, slowly, all her facility with them disappeared.
“You mean, nothing concrete?”
She shook her head. “If you can’t act the way the cards tell you, then react that way. Make your decisions when it’s time.”
She lifted the last card, Saint Joan. Under it, at the precise center of the white silk scarf, was a spot of fresh, vivid red.
“Do what you were told to do.” Sherrea’s voice was thin. “And don’t come back here until you’re sure you’re doing it.” She lifted her face, hard as a marble goddess’s. “The next move is yours.”
I found my shirt and pants in her kitchen, stiff from the clothesline. On top of them was a thin leather cord with a little pendant made out of dark wood: two V shapes, overlapping point to point. I locked myself in the bathroom again and dressed, and after a moment shrugged and dropped the thong around my neck and under my shirt. The pendant felt just like wood.
When I left, Sherrea was still sitting in the living room, in front of the blood-marred white scarf.
Card 2: Crossing The Sun
Waite: The transit from the light of this world to the light of the world to come. Consciousness of the spirit.
Crowley: Collecting intelligence. The lion, the sparrowhawk. Alcohol is his drug. His magical power is the red tincture, the power of acquiring wealth. Glory, gain, riches, triumph, pleasure; shamelessness, arrogance, vanity. Recovery from sickness.
2.0: A place for everything, and everything wired in place
Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that’s out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don’t have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.
The beauty of the Night Fair was that no matter how one defined happiness at a given moment, it was usually available there. The price was negotiable, within limits. That’s why the Night Fair endured: because we never stop needing something to make us happy.
The sun had set in a smear of indigo and orange when I reached that chainlink border. I twined my fingers in the fabric of the fence and felt bits of rust grind away under my grip. I was in my own country again. Here there were no gods but the Deal, no spooks but those that could be conjured for money at the buyer’s request. I was safe from Sherrea’s riding spirits, if not my own.
I traveled the fence line to the nearest of the three gates and found it open. The Night Fair was alive from sunset to full dawn. At any other time it was locked and silent, and no one climbed the fence.
What is that? she’d asked, and, A market, I’d told her. And an ocean is a large body of water, and hearts pump blood. The subtleties are lost.
What the Night Fair had been before I knew it, I couldn’t say. Now it was ten blocks of the City, in various states of repair. There were places where buildings had been knocked down or burnt away, and in those cavities and in the streets were the market and carnival places, the booths, the games of skill and chance, the food and drink vendors, the rides, the freak shows. For less easily granted wishes, one had to look to the buildings. There was no dir
ectory, no skyway map, no Guide to Retailers. If one wanted something in the buildings, one had to want it enough to go looking. I was as confident of the Night Fair as any of its patrons, but I went carefully when I left the streets.
I was so hungry I felt transparent, so thirsty that my own saliva rasped in my throat. But that was a state I could change, with a little currency. I could trudge to the other side of the Fair — but that was a long trudge. Besides, I wanted to feel the Deal in action. I had enough concentration left to do a little magic, if I could spot someone who’d shell out for it.
The Fair was half-asleep, so early in the evening; some of the stands were empty, and the ones that weren’t were gaudy islands without their proper context. The smell of cooking-oil lamps seemed strong without the stronger smells of food and fuel and humanity to bury it. But in a courtyard I found the kind of thing I was looking for, or in this case, listening for. A fat Oriental kid was running a duckshoot, and trying to catch custom with the City-run all-dance broadcast channel playing through an old Carvin PA speaker. Every bass note had the crunchy sound of a ripped speaker cone.
He looked hopeful when I approached, less so when I pointed to the speaker and said, “Sounds bad.”
His mouth turned down at the corners. “Sounds okay to me.”
“Ah. I guess you won’t want it fixed if there’s nothing wrong with it.” I half turned away.
“Why do you say it sounds bad?” he asked quickly, and I knew it was going to be all right. The passage of arms was begun.
“Well, last time I heard that jam, the guy playing the giant piece of cellophane wasn’t with them.”
“You mean that little noise?” He shrugged, and rather well, too. “It ain’t much. Nobody but an audiofreak’d notice.”
“Must be an audiofreak convention in town. People are crossing to the other side of the street.”
He scowled. No patience. With more patience, he could have been good at this. “What would it take to fix a little thing like that?”
“The right person, and twenty hard bucks.” The kid spit to his left. A ward against liars. “Hell, I could get another whole speaker for twenty.”
“You couldn’t get one of those for less than a hundred, and you’d have to find one first. And you know it.” Oh, he could have gotten something for twenty bucks. Maybe even that speaker, from someone who didn’t appreciate its solid, deep-throated sweetness.
“Five,” he said, one syllable of pure bravado. “Soft.”
“Kid,” I said, smiling kindly and leaning on the counter between the popguns, “have you ever heard the joke about the plumber and the little teeny hammer?” He was beaten. I could tell by his eyes. “Tapping, fifty cents; knowing where to tap, fifty dollars? Now, because I always enjoy telling a joke, I’ll give you a deal: fifteen, soft.” I should have held out for ten hard, but visions of carbohydrates were beginning to dance in front of my eyes.
It was a little tougher job than the plumber had. But I got the grille off and the cone out, and I carried a few things in my pockets that nobody else would have recognized as valuable. A roll of heat-shrink fiber tape, for instance; good for strain relief on cords, for covering spliced wire, and for mending tears in any stretched material. I covered the rip in the cone with a narrow piece and borrowed matches from the kid to shrink it tight. The speaker was not as good as new; one more fine and irreplaceable thing had slipped out of the world, and the world, as usual, hadn’t noticed. But a normal human being could now listen to it with teeth unclenched. At least, if said party liked City broadcast.
I wandered off with a light head, a sense of duty done, and fifteen folding City-made dollars. The first food vendor I came upon did Chinese. After six pot-stickers and three cups of lemon-balm tea, I was able to see the world with less prejudice. After another block, a few smoked pork ribs, and a skewer of batter-fried vegetables, my sense of proportion was restored. I tallied the day’s accomplishments. Today, after an impressively bad start, I had saved the life of one twelve-inch speaker cone, fed myself, and got all the way to Sherrea’s under my own (I granted myself some poetic exaggeration) power.
Where I’d been made no wiser, and been told besides to start shoveling or don’t show my face again. A fine friendly gesture. How was I to get my ordure in order if she couldn’t even give me useful clues? My theories about her mind reading were a little shaken, too; I refused to believe that the afternoon’s display of amateur theatricals had come out of my head.
In the deep, gritty voice that, looking back, I couldn’t call male or female: That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you. I wasn’t bound. That would have been flying in the face of good sense, and I tried not to do that. Surely the pure voice of my subconscious would have a better handle on me than that. Sherrea — or her friend — seemed to declare that sacrifice was the road to salvation; but I wanted to fix a busted head, not a rotten soul.
But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords. The card with the dark-haired figure on the sand, the upright swords.
I noticed that I had finished eating; or at least, I didn’t seem to want any more.
By then, the joint was, as they say, jumping. Money, bright and folding, hard and soft, was running in its well-worn channels. Objects and services were passing from one hand to another, and by that alchemy were turned to gold, purifying with each transaction. The streets fizzed like charged water with noise, motion, and change. Here before me was the familiar exercise of my faith, the Deal. The exchange was only its sacrament, the symbol of its larger principles. Nothing Is Free. One way or another, you will pay your debts; better you should arrange the method of payment yourself.
This was what the woman on the tri-wheeler had blasphemed against, and why I feared her. Because she didn’t know the Deal.
The Odeon was open. Under its optimistic, badly lettered sign, block-printed posters taped to the painted-over shop windows promised showings of The Lady Vanishes. I dropped my gaze to the doorway where Huey was sitting in his folding chair, taking tickets, and I shook my head and grinned at him. He rolled his eyes. This was shorthand for (in my case), “Huey, I happen to know that’s a bad third-generation dub of the lousy non-Hitchcock remake that you’re going to show on your crummy nineteen-inch monitor with a misaligned yoke and out-of-whack color,” and (in his case), “So what? You don’t come to no storefront vid parlor, anyhow.” This is a conversation one only needs to have once; after that, it reels out again on fast forward whenever necessary, without further rehearsal.
In front of the Odeon’s shabby blandishments, a herd of nightbabies clumped like a blood clot in the vein of the sidewalk. They weren’t going in, oo dear meee, nooo. Only the crawlers do vid parlors. But it’s sooo Deep ambie, y’knoow?
They were in High Savage, by which I decided they were from the greenkraals at the City’s edge. The tide was going out on Savage; in the towers, Rags was the waxing mode. The nearest nightbaby swayed out in front of me as I came closer. She had a mud-painted face, multicolored mud hair, and an epoxy bone in her nose — or a real one, maybe, but that was considered gauche in some circles.
“Ooo, loook! It’s a preeecious bit of street-meat! Let’s take it hooome and waaash it, and see what it iiis.”
That provoked a unison giggle from the group. I’d probably sold things to their parents. “Cinder in your eye,” I said, held up my palm, and blew across it at her face. She dodged, and I laughed.
She gave me a quick, narrow-eyed look — wondering if she’d been had? She couldn’t have been sure. The blood of the Horsemen had trickled over the continent — still did, though the Horsemen were dead. And where that blood was, where those genes came to rest, a skill might sprout: Sherrea’s mind reading; the placing of a nonexistent cinder in someone’s eye. But I had no inheritance from the wicked riders of the mind.
The mud furrowed and cracked around her eyes as she stared at me. Light reflected into her face for a moment, and I saw that those eyes wer
e a peculiar flat, hard gray. She seemed older than I’d first thought, bones planed with years. “Use it while you can, honey,” she murmured, so angry she forgot to drool over her vowels. I felt her watching me as I walked away.
I passed Banana Sam’s Beer Garden on my way up-Fair, and heard a familiar half whistle, half call, high-low-high. And Cassidy’s voice: “Little bird! Keeper of the fire! Come drink with meeeeee!”
He was already low in his chair, flushed and untidy. His wide eyes sank into their bruised-looking sockets like clams dug into the sand, and the bones below them lurched up against the skin as if to counterbalance. Frail strands of bleached gold hair had slid out of his queue and fallen around his face and ears. The pitcher in front of him had maybe an inch and a half left in it.
Resigned, I came to his table. “What’s this ‘little bird’ riff, Cass?”
“The sparrow,” he said, smug, dignified, and clownish. “Guarded fire for the Devil, ’til Swallow ripped it off and gave it to the walking dung beetles who started callin’ ’mselves Mankind.”
Cassidy always talked like a Taoist mystic with a lobotomy when he was drunk. “I take it tonight we’re on the Devil’s side?” I asked as I sat down. I poured the last of the beer into his glass, and drank off half.
“Hey!”
“You don’t need it. Besides, you invited me.”
“For company. You can damn well buy your own suds.” He peered at me, as if through fog. “I don’t owe you any, do I?”
I considered my answer carefully. But lying, after all, would have been a sin. “No,” I said.
Cassidy looked long at the empty pitcher. “Well, hell. Make it a present, then.”
I set the glass and its last swallow of beer on the table. What was left in my mouth tasted suddenly like soap. I leaned back in the uncomfortable wire chair, away from the table, from Cassidy’s gesture, from him. I felt the need to wound. “I thought you were going to stop drinking at Midsummer.” The picador rises dancing to his toes — thump.
