by Neil Clarke
“Yes,” Ambri said, laughing, “I would like that. But I’ll relax, first.” A four-legged cactus with cocktail sticks for spines walked across the table, guided by Aus’ other hand.
“This one is possible,” the epicene said.
“I like it.”
Esnan pushed his half-finished plate of fish across the table. The warm ceramic pressed against Ambri’s arm. “You’re in the right place for relaxing.”
“Yes, I am.”
The fish was light and lemony over her tongue, tinted with a taste she could not identify—like the pub itself. Ambri had never found a place quite like it.
A place built over a century and a half ago, by short-lived people who had not known what it would become: a place for those longer-lived, with different tasks and difficult lives.
She ate the plate bare and reclined against the dark blue leather, letting her lids slide shut until she saw only the faint glows of lamps above and Idjinna at her right. Laughter speckled the air. Idjinna’s skin crackled and flared, as if she was made of small twigs catching alight one after the other. “How are you?” Ambri murmured, reaching out to touch Idjinna’s arm.
Her fingertips pinkened.
“There was a bronze bowl,” Idjinna said.
“Ah.”
Idjinna’s voice sounded like burning as she told Ambri of a merchant who found a way to trap her, to carefully tap her wishes through the latter years of his life. Medicine gardens flourished around his house and the murals stayed fresh. Idjinna could not escape. The bronze bowl singed around the edges. But the merchant died, eventually, and the bowl among many of his other possessions fell to the care of a young Englishman who took it to auction. As the auctioneer’s assistant held it high, his hand tremored and it fell.
“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-centered 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 flavored 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 colored 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-colored 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 molded from bone and metal; that I gre
w 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 color 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 traveling? Your shirt comes from all over the world.”
“I went to Malawi 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 (alexdallymacfarlane.com) lives in London, where the foxes cross paths with her at night. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and her poetry in The Moment of Change, Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling and Here, We Cross. A handbound limited edition of her story “Two Coins” was published by Papaveria Press in 2010. 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.
The Loyalty of Birds
Rachel Sobel
She is so afraid that he will die that she cannot bear to watch his restless hands stilled upon the fine sheets; instead she sits at his bedside and watches the sunlight creep across the wall, abandoned tea cupped awkwardly between her palms. There are crickets singing in the garden, but beyond their mild whirring music, the world is still, as if it too is holding its breath.
Or perhaps she has merely forgotten the quiet of this place. It has been so many years since she came here last, preferring the convenience and lively bustle of the city to her family’s isolated peace, and she finds it disconcerting to be surrounded by so much silence, though she rarely lets herself think why. She tries not to remember the city; it is too painful to think that everything she once loved has been destroyed by the Dauphim’s war.
As remedy to her smothered grief, she savors the smooth stones of the pale villa, walks the gardens of the inner courtyard and helps her attendants sort out the complicated trousseau of half a hundred generations that has come to rest in her attic. In the evenings she can sit in the fading light, keeping her hands busy with some necessary task or other, and watch the nest of fledgling starlings in the apple orchard scream at the farm cats with neighborly fury when the kittens draw too near them.
It is easier to be practical than to think much about anything else, because while there are irises beneath her bedroom window and lilies in the woods, there is still a civil war on her doorstep and a man who has destroyed himself lying in her second-best guest bedroom, his face drawn tight with his sleeping pain.
“It will be worse before it gets better,” Gilos warns her, the truism as strange in his mouth as is the grimness in his light eyes. He is her physician, and like all of her people who have stayed, he is loyal more to her than to the honor of her name or any ideal of king or country. They were lovers once, long before he came to serve her, and the distance of that time makes her wonder if she has become old.
She looks at him now without expression, and he adds: “If it gets better.” His eyes are hard. She remembers belatedly that he too loved the man who lies in dreaming agony in the second-best guest bedroom, and she is sorry.
But she doesn’t believe him. She isn’t sure she can afford to believe him. They have lost so much already, and all that has been left to them are the ancient faded linens in the attic and the bright birds in the garden; if they cannot save him, she thinks, perhaps these things too shall be destroyed when the civil war comes to this place.
“I don’t believe you,” she tells Gilos, and his smile is as hard as his eyes, bitter and self-mocking, but he spends none of his violence on her, and his voice is as mild as ever.
“Then don’t, my lady,” he says simply, and his gaze does not stray to the doorway to the sickroom. He hesitates. “I will lessen the laudanum tonight,” he says at last. “It must be done, but—it will be worse.”
“I’ll come,” she assures him, and goes to take refuge in her garden among the weeds she hasn’t had the time to pull.
She is not sure if his screams are worse than his stillness.
There is no way to know if the war will come here, but she knows it is her duty to make preparations as if it will; she helps her people to repair the walls until her hands are scraped raw with a new set of calluses. They are far from any significant territory, and for all the beauty of this place, it is still only a rambling mountain valley, hidden between the cliffs and fed by spring and rain, but there is always the chance someone will remember the name she used before they ever knew her.
They eat still-warm bread with goat cheese spread liberally across it, and choose to save the sausages for winter, which is only common sense. Instead they slice tomatoes and cucumbers while the solemn black-and-white kitten rubs against her ankles, his dignity apparently forgotten. Her eldest brother loved to steal garden vegetables when they were children, and she cannot eat here without thinking of him.
In the night, she sits beside the man she loves and watches him fight sleep with every lingering strength in his body; he barely speaks
even to her, and then only when he wakes from his nightmares.
“I dreamt that my hands were made of molten gold,” he murmurs once, his chest heaving with his gasping sobs; his face shines with tears in the light of her candle, and he flinches away from the touch of her hand on his face, looking sick. “I dreamt . . . ”
“You’re safe now,” she whispers, stroking his dark hair back with a gentleness that surprises her. “There’s no one to hurt you here.”
She doesn’t look at his hands until he has fallen asleep again, his exhaustion too strong for him, and only then does she rest one hand lightly on his right wrist, well above the careful bandages.
His hands are ruined; the left is burnt beyond repair, and Gilos is still afraid he will have to cut it. She knows that he did it to himself in the fire that took his power from him, and it frightens her when he cries out in his sleep with such anguish that she cannot bear to touch him. Laudanum or no, there are no easy answers to his pain.
She finds in the attic a slender book bound in brown leather, and opens it to reveal pages covered with marvelous illustrations in colorful ink: dragons over warm seas, banquets and menageries, camels aboard flying ships and smiths shoeing horses; the paper is fine and dry beneath her fingers, and she brings it downstairs with her almost absently. On a whim, she takes it to show him, and sits beside him, tracing the shape of a sparrow’s wing with the tip of her little finger.
She stays for more than an hour, turning the pages for him when he tilts his chin at the book, and leaves only when duty forces her to. His eyes are overbright as he follows the trailing line of a willow, but he sits leaning against the pillows, shaking slightly. It is not until after she leaves that she remembers his fondness for books and paper, for drawings and paint as well as other stronger things. Perhaps she has only been cruel after all.
But that night he asks her to read to him; the request comes haltingly from his lips, strange in a mouth that has said so little voluntarily, and she brings an aging volume of peculiar foreign philosophy for his approval. Apparently it is good enough, because he settles back, his eyes closing so that the lashes lie along his cheeks. She reads aloud for hours, trying not to let him catch her watching the tension flow out of his body like very lethargic water, until at last she is sure he is asleep.
