Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  “Below, Akins!” Charles ordered. Akins flashed him a look.

  “Find the surgeon and get a count of men down.” The boy nodded and scrambled belowships. Charles had no use for the information, but the boy would resent being told to hide away for his own safety.

  His men and the remaining lobster-coated marines were holding the line, but they couldn’t much longer. Grappled as she was, the Charmant could sink the Viper with a cannonade to her exposed flank. It was odd she hadn’t done so.

  He thought he knew why.

  First Lieutenant Aubry was dead. It went against the Captain’s every instinct to leave the deck mid-battle.

  “Bowdin!” he bellowed, in a voice accustomed to be heard over the worst Cape gale. “See that they hold for five minutes more!”

  Bowdin nodded grimly.

  His quarters had been disassembled for the guns, but the Char­mant’s second volley had made them useless. Glimpses of blue, powder-tinged sky and brown-green sea showed through the fissures.

  His sister, the younger Miss Austen, stood calmly at his little dispatch-table. A small, flat box was open before her; she was carefully sorting through the papers within.

  “Bad luck, Charlie,” she said, without looking up. “Or fate, perhaps. They did not appear by chance.”

  “We cannot hold, Jane,” he said. “They will soon overwhelm us.”

  “You must surrender, my dear,” she said. “They will not relent.”

  She caught the expression on his face and smiled. “They will kill all your men, one by one, to capture me. I could not countenance such a fine tenor as Bowdin to die on my account.”

  She selected three papers, covered and cross-hatched with fine writing. Methodically she tore one to pieces and crumpled the fragments together.

  “The rest shall serve as an obvious bluff, and this one less so.” Crouching near the joint between the deck and the siding she stuffed the papers between. “And these two…” she returned to Charles’ side, looking at the two remaining papers and frowning, for all the world as if they were in the sitting room at Steventon, and she parsing out a ball scene for Between Friends. “These must not fall into the Monster’s hands, nor his spymaster’s, not on any account.” She began to tear them into long strips. “Nor,” she added, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, “must I.”

  She placed a strip in her mouth and chewed, methodically. If the ink was bitter she did not say.

  She swallowed the pulped mass and smiled. “’Twould go down better with a glass of wine, but no matter.”

  “I should have refused to take you on board,” he burst out, unable to contain himself. “It was a mad scheme, to take you to the French coast. Wickham has betrayed you.”

  “No. We had a fighting chance. And you had no choice, brother. Come now, were you to defy Admiralty orders you would be court- martialed at best. William Wickham has his reasons.”

  She had not stopped chewing and swallowing the papers, chewing and swallowing. He watched with a morbid fascination.

  Then, topsides, pistol shots and men shouting. Jane wiped the corner of her mouth.

  “Surrender the Viper, Charlie,” she said, paling slightly. “I have all the means I need.” She pulled a tiny crystal bottle from her bodice. It hung cunningly on the chain she always wore, the chain he had brought her, and the amber cross, so long ago.

  He froze in horror as she unstoppered the bottle.

  “Go,” she whispered. “I cannot do it while you look at me so.”

  So he turned and clambered to the deck, shouting defiance, imprecations, words of surrender, words he did not know, anything to drown the sound of the tiny thump of something hitting the floor in the cabin below.

  FANCY BREAD, by Gregory Feeley

  The ogre lifts his rockslide face and sniffs, cavernous nostrils distending. With a howl of rage—Jack can whiff his breath from where he hides—he stamps the tree-wide floorboards and cries out in a bowel- solving roar:

  Fee, fye, fo, fum!

  I smell the Blod of an Englysshman!

  Be he quicke or be he dede,

  I’ll grinde his Bones to make my Brede!

  Behind the oven grate, Jack feels his shanks quiver as though struck free from his spine. Wolves came down once from the hills and snatched a village child, and crows pluck corses on the gibbet; but never did Jack imagine that his end might be another’s maw. It is a terror beyond reckoning: his sweet flesh guttled like dough.

  The ogre’s goodwife assures him that what he smells is simply the remains of the boy he ate yesterday. Jack squitters in terror but the ogre seems mollified, for he sits down to be served a tremendous meal. The broth he slurps reeks of a mutton unknown to Jack’s nose, and his stomach clenks at his mouth’s watering. The ogre calls for a loaf, and when he sops then cracks loudly, Jack knows what he is crunching.

  The din allows Jack to shift his cramped feet, stirring wisps of ankle-high ash which conceals hard lumps that bump his toes like riverstones. At last he sinks aching to his hams, and in the humdrum of the ogre’s guzzling—even terror sates with surfeit—he nudges one of the lumps and discovers it an unrelieved crust. Jack brushes away bits of ash with wonder: the ogre, strong enough to disjoint him like a hen, owns no leaven.

  Barrels of ale sluice the ogre’s gullet as Jack squats in a plague pit of bones and ash. He cradles a rock of grain, pitiful weapon, and wonders at its coarseness. A memory stirs from childhood, the voice of traveling player declaiming on market day:

  Tell me, where is fancy bread,

  Or in the heart, or in the head?

  Hungry with no market-day bun, Jack had yearned for fancy bread, sticky with sugar and finer than cake, something he had tasted one Whitsunday. Later he wondered whether the player’s question meant that fancy bread might exist only in the head, never to be tasted in the stomach. Bread with dough smooth as milk, bread so soft the toothless could eat it without sopping first. Had such yearnings led him in time to the hedge of the ogre’s castle?

  Replete and belching, the ogre nods at table like a swaying oak, knocks his spoon to the floor, and soon is snoring deeply. Fearful beyond measure—the goodwife does not come to aid him—Jack slowly pushes open the grate and creeps from the oven’s belly, leaving ashy footprints even an ogre could follow.

  It seems greatly daring that in his flight Jack could pause to pick up the spoon, but even in his terror he realizes that no man can be eaten twice. It is as long as his arm and heavier than any Jack has held, so he clutches it the harder and sneaks past, breaking into a run at the door.

  Later he would try to recall whether he had heard a roar as he burst into sunlight. He had not looked back, and ran half a mile before slowing. The spoon is crusted with porridge, and when Jack finishes gasping he sniffs, then tastes it. The oats are merely greasy, but the tip of his tongue thrills at the metal’s touch. It is silver, and he later sells it for six shillings. A shard of crust lodged in his pocket he discards with a shudder.

  He never again tried to rob an ogre’s fastness, a lesson learned if not remembered. (Once he saw a widow lay her dough on a bed of coals then sprinkle it with hot ashes, and shivered with sourceless dread.) Curled under a pew that night, cold and still hungry, Jack worries the experience for what else he can take. The day is already falling from memory like a cinder from burnt fingers, but as Jack nestles into the rug of sleep a shard presses hard against him, sharp so he feels every word: Bread made with men’s bones never rise.

  * * * *

  Starvelings bedded under hedges never rise, either, but rather turn coldly stiff, in glorious reversal of the Devil’s fell offer to change stones into bread. Jack feels hardened to petrifaction, but his limbs yield, if complainingly, as he crawls forth, brushing crumbs of dirt from his coat, to blink at the morning’s pale glare. Gazing across the fields in the breath-steaming chill, he recognizes barley and, farther on, what looks to be rye, but nothing that nods like wheat-stalks. Nor pasturage for miles now: it’s
crusts and tubers Jack has to look forward to, assuming he is not offered a hail of rocks.

  The rutted path is muddy, but Jack is glad enough to see no lace of frost upon the standing water. Frozen roads traverse better and stink less, but it’s a thin coat Jack wears this early March day, a hungry season with the winter stores dwindling and naught but peason planted. The wheel ruts are not deep, so the land is not yet too soft for fellers’ carts; but Jack can see that felling time is over early here. The woods, like a sexton’s hair, have receded steadily over the years, and the open fields show few stands of any size.

  The sparsely hedged fields also offer few means of concealment, and Jack walks bent and brisk when a rise threatens to bring him within sight of harrowers, who will soon be out. He knows enough not to fear pursuit—no rustic will leave his work to accost a sturdy wayfarer a field away—but word travels fast even in villages, and he does not want suspicion running before him.

  But no one is abroad at this least pleasant hour, too early for laborers and too late for the rogues who walk the roads at night. Other travelers—the tag-and-rag army of vagabonds and abandoned women who fill the highways—will be out soon, and Jack does not care to be numbered among them. If he has not a horse and a fine plumed hat, he must distinguish himself otherwise.

  The first cottage he sees is not promising; but the men are out by now, so disappointment is not likely to prove calamitous. Jack cannot suppress a quaver of fear at approaching a strange door, but is by the knowledge that most peasants (with dangerous exceptions) are stupid as dirt. Ignorant of the ways of cozenage, they substitute a brute suspicion of all strangers: which, being surmounted, could leave them defenseless as hatchlings.

  Jack sees no chickens in the yard, but no dogs neither. He fingers his beard for crumbs, then spits three times on his right hand. The effort produces a loud rumble in his stomach. Emboldened by such perceptible evidence of want, he knocks upon the door—not confidently, as serves some circumstances, but weakly as he thinks will be heard.

  He is bent to one side as the door is opened and a servant girl looks out. “Ah, mistress, a cup of water in Christ’s name. I am set upon and robbed of my wares, and beaten half to death besides.”

  He steps back at this point, rather than forward as the servant fears, and staggers with a soft groan. The servant gasps—he is listening even as he grimaces—and before she can speak he brings up his hand and feels tenderly the back of his head. The pig’s blood (from yesterday’s unsuccessful venture) has dried in his hair, but enough comes away to redden his wet fingers and gives a half-clotted appearance.

  “Jesu!” the girl exclaims. “Does it hurt?”

  “More now than last night, though it scarce seems possible.” Jack looks at her ruefully. “I hid my face in my hands, but they kicked my ribs till I feared they be stove in. And my wares—” Here he sighs as if at the cruellest stroke of all. “My lace and pins and buttons, which I have three times sold thy lady in the spring, are stolen me.”

  “The goodwife is not in,” says the witless creature. At this Jack lowers himself to the ground, as though his legs were failing him, and cries out briefly as one ham touches the packed earth.

  “My teeth are not broke,” he says, touching them, “but I am sore dry. Is there water here cleaner than the ditch’s where I lay?”

  The bird rushes for a ladle, and Jack looks up to peer through the door. It is a meaner cottage than will yield much. Servants in London eat better than freeholders here, who have a servant only because the tide of workless women and men spill into any house open to them. Jack guesses that the goodwife has lain in yearly, and is worn enough to need a drudge with the surviving brats, one who can moreover bend her back at harvest and spend winter weaving hemp or flax. A wolf gauging the gauntness of the deer, Jack judges this freeholder not far from becoming a landless laborer himself.

  As if in confirmation, he hears a babe’s squall. Any mother still alive to give suck will be nearby, and Jack decides to work fast. He is rising as though painfully when the girl returns, dipper in one hand, a crust in the other. “Will you report this to the Justice?” she asks him.

  “Lord, no, girl!” he cries in feigned alarm. “The village justice likes not wanderers, and is like to demand I prove no rogue myself. And how could I do that, with my wares gone?”

  The girl crinkles her face in confusion, and Jack knows he is home. He drinks avidly (good water is scarce on the highways, and this is at least unclouded) and quickly examines the bread, as a merchant might eye a bolt of cloth. It is brown as her muddied hem, and smells to be rude maslin indeed, containing scant wheat and even some barley with the rye. Jack’s stomach clamors loudly and he eats, tasting barley in the hard and ill-risen bread, which will rest heavy in the stomach without filling it.

  He thanks the girl and returns the dipper (it is of no value anyway) before commencing his cast. “Good woman, where shall I go now?” he asks earnestly. “I have no goods, nor means to return to London Town—” the name never fails in its effect—“so must offer my hands and strong back to earn my bread. Tell me where an honest man should go to find work.”

  The cony looks ready to cry. “There is no place, alas,” she says. “Come you from a parish where work awaits every man willing? What a wonder if so!”

  Looking suitably stricken, Jack protests his readiness to work and offers to perform any chore, however onerous, this freehold wants done. He straightens his back with scarce a wince to demonstrate resolve, and senses he is on the verge of being asked within—it is all he needs—when the sound of voices in back snaps the girl’s head around as if on a string. Jack’s labours are undone in an instant, a card-castle struck by wind, for the mistress of the house comes around, swollen-bellied, suspicious, and blanched of charity, and Jack is dealt with briskly. She does not recall past dealings with the pedlar, has no work to give him, and directs the injured man to take his knocks to his own parish, whither the Justice will speed him if he thinks to dally. And so Jack is sent back along the road, with no solace but the crust and his memory of the girl’s hurt eyes, bereft as though bidding him to return and devour her.

  * * * *

  No beer, scant bread, and uncertain fortunes ahead. Jack does not know the name of the township he is near, and would not betray ignorance by asking. It is not however a fortunate one, for the next bread he eats (a day later) tastes of vetches, what market-town folk call “horse- bread” who never have to eat it themselves. Cottagers are running low on corn, which a cold winter burns like wood: it will be gaunt weeks before the spring barley is up. Jack keeps an eye out for a servant-girl from a richer household than the cottagers’, but doors remain closed to him.

  A village where you are not known is like a cow that has not yet been milked. Jack moves carefully through the parish, alert both to danger and opportunity. One morning he steals a chicken, which he plucks, roasts, and eats entire before he hears the halloo. On another he helps a goodwife whose husband has broken his leg: he hauls sacks of grain by cart to the miller, but gets nothing for it but dinner, for the woman watches closely all the while.

  He stands agape at the mill, which growls and creaks like a giant’s wagon, and returns the suspicious looks of the miller and his son, who know everyone living in the village. The goodwife’s grain—it is barley, with not a peck of wheat—disappears into the grinding maw, and Jack feels a nameless dread that moves him to stand in the doorway. The goody attempts to oversee all stages of the operation, and quarrels fiercely over the division afterwards.

  “He hath a magic thumb,” she complains to Jack as he pulls the cart—now, from the millstream, mostly uphill—back to her farm. And Jack thrills to think of the ways a miller might divert more than his rightful sixth part of the grain. He wishes to know more, but is fed and dismissed directly they return.

  The spring brings rains, and too little sun otherwise. Apprehensions of a poor harvest settle like an ache into the bones, and fear of the dearth grips all. Jack catches
an ague and coughs for weeks, but the lengthening days save him. With the haymaking there is work for all, and Jack labours like any vagabond for his bread and ale. One tumble behind a hedge with a doxy whose man had been arrested, one sheaf of ballads taken from a vagrant who lay sleeping, and it is hard sweat for the rest of his gettings. Jack enjoys selling ballads, which are light for their value and allow him to deal with better custom­ers than farm wives; but they are hard to procure save in Lon­don, where he cannot now go.

  To avoid charges of vagrancy, he long claimed to be carrying a letter to a nobleman in another county, but a Justice of the Peace once read it, found its date long past, and destroyed it. Lately he has employed, with more success (though he hates using it), a letter attesting that he had been whipped as a vagrant and was being sent back to his parish. But now he swims safely in the great school of available laborers, their numbers swelled (he learns by always listening) not only by vagrants but also former husbandmen, forced off their land by falling prices and poor harvests. The engrossment of holdings is under way in the lands of corn, as it hitherto had been in the lands of sheep.

  Jack hawks the ballads between the mill and the inn, speaking smoothly and pretending at times to sing from one. He catches the interest of a yeoman’s wife, who fixes him with a saucy eye (or so he takes it) and asks him what the songs concern.

  “Marry, here is a song of a new way to make bread,” he says smiling.

  “A new way? And what might that be?”

  “Why Madame, they employ up and down husbandry,” he replies with a leer.

  The woman barks a laugh and pays tuppence for two. Boldly he asks how bread is made in her master’s household, and she directs him to follow her servant. He gets a half-loaf of cheat bread—his first taste of wheat this year—handed him from the back door.

  Standing in the chill air, with the hens keeping their distance and ducks jeering from the safety of their pond, the bread’s soft texture and sweet taste awakens in him a rage never again to eat worse. No longer should Jack bend his back for brown bread, heavy with ill-ground pease and beans. If cozenage proves no perch, he shall not slip down but claw up.