Icons

by Margaret Stohl

  “How did she know?”

  “Your friend calls the drink the wrong name. You say sea foam. We call it Sympa pisswater.”

  The woman holds out the drink. Now she is angry, and shouting at me.

  “Take it,” the old man says. “She says to take it and go.” He leans closer to me. That much farther away from the Sympas who idle on the side of the street, behind the cart.

  “She says to hurry. She says the Merk is waiting for you.”

  “What?”

  I back away from him, confused. I find myself in the middle of the street, in a seemingly never-ending stream of Remnants, students, laborers, jugglers, street musicians.

  “Dol! Wait—”

  An old man pushing a massive wooden drum on wheels slams into me. Now I’m trapped in the middle of some kind of processional. I whirl around to see a second drum, just before it hits me.

  I go flying.

  I open my eyes. A group of old men stand over me, inside an elaborately carved doorway. Red and yellow and green. A wooden scroll is cut into the frame.

  THE BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION. That’s what it says on the door. Same as the characters on the drum that knocked me to the ground.

  The men look benevolent, I guess. They don’t look malevolent, anyway. They look nice.

  I close my eyes. The day has overwhelmed me. I’m bruised from where the drum has hit me, and I’m too tired to think.

  I open my eyes to see that I am sitting inside what I imagine is the main room of the Benevolent Association. I try to stand up. I have the impulse to run.

  “Please, please. You must sit.” Only one man says the words in English. The others are all shouting at me in a language I don’t understand.

  I look past card tables where men are smoking and playing a game with well-worn tiles. There are zodiac calendars on the wall. Hanging beads line the doorways.

  I am given a warm glass of water and a bowl of spiced nuts. The smell curls into my face, chili peppers and lemongrass. I cough spice.

  “You are well. You will be well.”

  A bespectacled man in a jade-colored jacket sits across from me.

  “Where’s Lucas?” I ask.

  “Your friend? The Little Ambassador? He is well. All is well.”

  I try to stand again.

  The man pulls me down, but doesn’t let go of my hand. In fact, he stares at it.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Your hand.”

  “What about it?”

  “Nothing. I give you reading. Make sure you are well.”

  “No thanks.”

  “I insist. I am most benevolent.”

  He straightens my hand, in front of him, pulling a clipboard out of a bag he wears against his hip. The clipboard carries a chart showing the dim outline of a hand divided into quadrants, and a schematic of a blank face. Graphs and grids and charts of numbers, as well as the zodiac, fill the rest of the page.

  “Your reading. For the Year of the Tiger.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  He ignores me. I look around, a bit desperately now, for Lucas. I don’t like this man touching me. I don’t like anyone touching me. He feels smooth and soft, though, both the part I can feel with my hand and the part I can feel with my mind.

  “I can’t read you with numbers. Not for you. I read you with creatures. You belong to the animals.”

  He pulls a handful of jade animals out of his bag, one by one. He lines them up in a row on the table between us, carefully. His hand shakes as he moves, resting heavily on each one while he speaks.

  A pig. “I am sorry for your loss.” He lays the pig down on the table. Ramona, I think.

  He weighs what looks like a lamb in his hand, shaking his head. “Not the sheep. The shepherd. You have lost him as well.” The sheep joins the pig.

  He holds up a monkey. “Monkey. Very playful. Very dangerous. Keep your eyes open and see things for what they are.” He places the monkey on the far side of the table, a distance from the sheep and the pig.

  Now he fingers a turtle. “Very scared. Lonely. But will help you find your way.” The turtle goes halfway between the monkey on one side, and the sheep and the pig on the other.

  He places a dog next to the turtle. “Faithful. Loyal. But teeth are sharp.” Now he holds up what looks like a small carved lion. “Lion of heart not always a good thing. Will cause you great pain. You must decide for yourself what is a lion and what is a dog.”

  The dog and the lion stand together.

  I look at his face. He grins, bobbing his head, and I notice for the first time he is wearing a neatly brimmed hat with a bright orange feather sticking out of the stitched band of trim. The feather exactly matches the kumquats that sit in a bowl in the center of the card table between us. He is a card table made into a man, I think.

  “Your hand.”

  I give him my hand again. This time, he is full of sorrow and anxious energy, tears and sweat like foam from the ocean when it touches the shore, washing up along the beach.

  Sea foam, I think. Not pisswater.

  “See this? You are strong.”

  I don’t know how a freckle beneath my thumb can possibly mean that, but I nod.

  “Do not marry before you are twenty-five. If you do, you will have many children and no money. Very unfortunate.”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

  He laughs and I see the gold in his teeth. He taps at a line that spreads like wings in the center of my palm. “Your brothers. They watch over you.”

  “They’re dead.” I try to pull my hand away, but he stops me.

  “My bad. I try again. Best two out of three.”

  He scrunches up his face, this time tracing the three lines that arc across my palm.

  “I see a child in your future. Here. A girl.”

  “Before twenty-five? So I’m poor?”

  He shakes his head. “Not yours.” He frowns. “Very important.”

  “I am?”

  He looks at me carefully, closely.

  “She is.”

  He holds my hand tightly, and his eyes glaze over. He is looking but not looking at my hand, and I can feel him slipping away from me.

  “You must help her. Everything depends upon it.” His tone changes and he is no longer smiling.

  “Yeah?”

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small velvet bag. One by one, he picks up the jade animals and drops them inside it.

  “Keep them. I was to keep them, but your hand tells me to give them to you.”

  I reach for the bag. He pulls it away.

  “Greedy, greedy. Not for you. For her. When you find her. If.”

  He is, like everyone else in the Hole, crazy. That’s the first thing I think. The second is, he’s running a scam.

  So much for the Benevolent Association. They’re probably ransoming Lucas as we speak.

  “What about the boy?” he asks.

  It’s as if he can read my mind. “What about him? What does my hand say?”

  But at that, the old man tips back his head and laughs, raising his hands. “I can’t tell you. Time up now. Shoot me. So it is written.”

  “What?”

  “Shoot me. That is all that remains.”

  He smiles and rolls his eyes back, until all I can see are the whites.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He closes his eyes. A bullet rips through his chest, spattering me with red flesh. Another whizzes past my head.

  “Oh my God.”

  The old man is dead. A row of bullets eats into the wood above him. I fall out of my chair and sprawl onto the floor.

  Even so, I can’t take my eyes off the old man.

  The red stain seeps upward as his body slumps downward. The hat tumbles free and the orange feather floats lazily in the air. There are kumquats everywhere, rolling and spilling across the table, across the floor. Like the blood.

  Shoot me. He wasn’t kidding.
<
br />   He knew it was coming.

  He knew.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. Sweet Maria.”

  I grab the velvet bag, scramble to my feet, and run.

  As I move, I think that this is what my life has become. This, and nothing more. Mysterious news and sudden death. Blood spatter on the wall and kumquats rolling on the floor. This is my life now.

  It makes me run faster.

  EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL VIRTUAL AUTOPSY: DECEASED PERSONAL POSSESSIONS TRANSCRIPT (DPPT)

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET

  Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD

  Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare

  Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B

  See adjoining Tribunal Autopsy, attached.

  DPPT (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE)

  Catalogue at Time of Death includes:

  31..

  32. One small carved animal, green in color. Cheap quality, commonly sold in souvenir shops throughout the Southlands. 2.2 zm. Jade. It appears to be a lion, broken in half.

  Source or significance unknown.

  20

  OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS

  I leave the Benevolent Society, running as fast as I can. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sympas in formation, moving through the center of the street.

  Why would Sympas shoot at me? Why now?

  I thread my way through the crowd as it thins. I hear the sound of more gunshots. People scream, scattering frantically. I keep going.

  Lucas. Where is Lucas?

  Why would Sympas shoot at him?

  I turn the corner into an alley and duck behind the trash cans. A few minutes later, Lucas dives into the shadows after me.

  We lie there, panting, as the Sympas run by, in the brightness of the street in front of us.

  “Why?” It’s the first word I can manage to get out.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are they looking for you or me?” I’m hoping not to be the answer.

  He doesn’t say anything. I think of the old man who told my fortune, the way blood seeped through to his chest, the way his body spun back.

  I touch my pocket, feeling for the hard lumps of jade. Everything looks blurry to me now, and I try to wipe the tears from my face but they just keep coming.

  “Do you know why Doc was invented?” Lucas asks.

  “He’s a Virt. A Medic.” Doc told me himself.

  “When I was five, I found an asp in my bed. When I was eleven, my tutor drank a glass of milk that was meant for me and dropped dead from cyanide. When I was thirteen, someone took a shot at me in broad daylight, and we moved to Santa Catalina.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Doc isn’t just a Medic. He’s my bodyguard. As many people who want me to live want me to die. That’s part of every day of my life.” He sounds as terrible as I feel.

  “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  I settle back against him, in the garbage, in the shadows, in the alley. I let his warmth run back and forth between us.

  “I’m sorry, Dol. I’m sorry I got you into this. I should have been more careful. I should have come by myself.”

  He didn’t, and he shouldn’t. It’s how he feels, though. I understand. So I don’t say anything at all.

  Eventually, we slip back out into the street. We keep our heads down and stick to the alleys. The crowd has surged back across the pavement and the sidewalks, and the temporary quiet of a Sympa incident has subsided into the normal noise and teeming chaos. Crowds and noise are comforting here. Only the quiet disturbs. I am glad it has passed.

  Soon we come to a sandstone wall that follows the length of a block, maybe more. I run my finger along the smooth rectangles of pale stone, badly crumbling. I look up to see a row of green brass bells. You could still see the coppery color underneath the patina of time, in places. Only a few.

  “Here,” says Lucas. “This is what I was looking for.”

  There is a gate, and it is locked—even though the building looks abandoned.

  “What now?”

  “This.” Lucas pushes it open, and the oxidized iron gives way beneath his hand. It is, like most of the Hole, something broken and useless that only retains the slight impression of a thing with a purpose that came before.

  Lucas and I walk through an abandoned courtyard, where wide, flat steps lead up to a massive sandstone building on the left, and a shallow, dry fountain on the right. A last row of buildings, empty shops with doors that have rusted open, marks the far right.

  Lucas steps behind me, moving me into one particular spot. I feel his hands on either shoulder, two warm places where I am otherwise cold, though the sun is shining.

  “There, right there. Now—look up.”

  I look toward the sky, and the facade of a cathedral spins up into the blue air, in front of me.

  There she is. Now I understand why we are here. And he’s right. She is more beautiful.

  A stone statue—a sad Lady—looks down on me.

  “Our Lady of the Angels. That’s what this place used to be called. Long, long ago,” Lucas tells me.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  He tilts his head, so we are looking with the same angle. “Look at her halo. It’s cut away, made out of sky, see? That’s my favorite part.”

  I don’t know if she is the Lady, or an angel. Either way, the stone roof is cut out in a circle over her head, and I realize he’s right.

  Her halo is the sky.

  “Do you like it? Her?” I hear his voice in my ear, but I don’t answer. I can’t speak.

  Her halo is the sky. The same sky that gave us the monsters, the Lords themselves.

  The Lady and the monsters. Peace, and death.

  Angels and aliens.

  The Lady is cloaked in orange blossoms and scarlet bougainvillea, growing like wild over the fountains and the stones of the square.

  “Lucas.”

  It’s all I can say. He moves his hands from my shoulders, until his arms encircle me, and I lean against him…

  “That’s a real Icon, eh?”

  I recognize the voice. Lucas pulls his arms away, and we turn, startled.

  “Kind of puts everythin’ in perspective, I’d say.”

  The church square isn’t empty anymore. Fortis stands in front of us. Behind him, a row of people I can’t place. They’re not Sympas. They don’t look like Grass. They’re something else.

  “My friends at the Rebellion. I thought it was time you finally met. Especially now, seein’ as you’ve come all the way to their home.” He gestures. “Nice place, hey? I like the bit over there, what with the fountain and the flowers.” He snaps off a bougainvillea blossom. “Red, like my first wife. Always liked datin’ a ginger.”

  I look at Lucas. “Him? This is where you were coming? To see Fortis?” I can’t believe it. Especially not from Lucas.

  Lucas shrugs. “You’re the one who said you trusted him, right?”

  The Merk grins. “Come on now, Miss lady. My friends tell me they’ve been trailin’ you through the city all day. Lost you for a bit, after the unpleasantness with the Benevolent gentleman. Such a shame.”

  “Shut up, Fortis.” I don’t like the way he says things. As if everything weighs the same, no one thing matters more than the next. The flower is red. The man is dead. They’re all just words to him. That’s what Merks are like, I guess.

  “They only want to talk for a bit. The least you can do is come in for a cake or two and a spot of tea.”

  One by one, I begin to pick out faces in the crowd. The woman from the candy shack in the plaza. The old man who helped us buy the drink at the red wagon, and the woman who sold it. Even a few old men from the Benevolent Association are in the crowd—I recognize their jade quilted jackets.

  It’s strange to see them all here, a motley collection of lost souls in the courtyard of a broken-down church in the backwater chaos of the Hole.

  “One drink,” says Lucas, and
it is decided. Lucas and I follow Fortis through the massive doors into what used to be the church. I take a last look at Our Lady, but she doesn’t say a word. As if giving a sign, though, her halo of sky has become a halo of clouds.

  I tell myself I don’t believe in signs, and let the heavy door fall shut behind me.

  But it’s a lie.

  Because I do.

  The inside of the church is no church at all. It really is or was a cathedral. The ceiling soars and the room broadens until I realize we have walked to the other side. I stand looking down the center aisle to the apse, where the walls bisect the space into a cross. Like the Mission, I think, only a hundred times bigger. I can see that everything about this place was vast and grand. The remains of some kind of gold, carved shrine sit in the very back. I imagine that at one time, there would have been rows of pews, filled with people praying. Not animals, I think, with a smile.

  If they had candles, I would light one for Ramona Jamona.

  But now there are no pews, only rows of cots. Tables spread with maps. Clusters of children and the elderly, here and there. It’s as chaotic, in its own way, as the marketplace and the stalls and the Hole outside.

  Only the walls remain still. The stone, the large squares, are immovable, and we are all small beside them.

  Fortis motions me into an alcove, where a thick rug has been thrown over the floor and covered with embroidered pillows. A brilliant pattern of silk scarves hangs to cover the doorway, which is simply a break in the walls. I let myself drop to a low table set with an elaborate brass tea setting, next to Lucas. A plate of dusty-looking pastry accompanies the tea.

  Fortis sits across from us. “Thanks for comin’, mate. I was surprised to get your message.”

  “Really? After you came to us? What was so surprising about my wanting to return the visit?”

  “I wasn’t surprised you were curious. I was more surprised that you could get a message to me. I’m not an easy fellow to rin’ up.”

  “Speaking of which, how did you find this place?” I look at Lucas suspiciously.

  “I asked.” He shrugs.

  “Asked who,” I say.

  “I asked around.”