Ezra seemed in high spirits when a well-rested Mouse at last approached with a restored copy of that old, lost film in hand, the former merely notching an immaculate brow as Mouse passed the invisible border by a whole step or two.
“Hold on, Alan,” said merciful Adonis, seated in a modernized Classical pose—black phone cord coiled about his sculpted fingers, which he held aloft from the pedestal of his padded office throne; his other hand poised over a touchpad just as the ancient subject of a Renaissance painting might lord over some natural element in the surrounding pastoral idyll. “I’ve got company. Yes, exactly. Five minutes, all right?—Yes, Mr. Musset?”
Mouse meant to choose his words with care as he held out the canisters, mindful of the agonies his body underwent whenever proximate to Ezra’s light, but even then the words tumbled into one another, and occasionally lost their place. From the last shipment, he started—these—I thought you might—you seemed to like—remember?—Janet Gaynor. At last he could say no more, so he simply set them on the desk.
Ezra’s noble forehead creased as he drew the items close enough to read their labels, but when he had he merely laughed and pushed the lot aside.
“And why on earth should I care about this sentimental junk? Because I looked over a movie still or two with Mr. Hazlitt? Incredible, Mr. Musset. Don’t you realize I was only using those dumb old things as far as they would flatter him? Do you honestly think you can guess what I want from what I say when I’m with him?”
Mouse felt his heart wrench first towards the usual despair—then confusion. Had Ezra’s voice not softened, even wavered in that last thought? Was there not a thread of fragility, of loneliness trapped beneath his haughty words? To always echo another’s interest; to always be precisely what another wants him to be—Mouse could not help but thrill at this shadow of a defect in Ezra’s gleaming marble, though the rest of Mouse’s body still shook with disappointment at the failure of his weeks-long work.
“Tell me, then,” said Mouse, with upthrust chin. “What do you want, Mr. Levitz?”
And Ezra laughed—a short, curt thing. “What do I want?” His sneer faltered only slightly, then held firm. He stood and turned away, taut knuckles rapping at the desk. “All right, Mr. Musset. If you really want to prove yourself—”
“Yes!” cried Mouse. “Yes, I do.”
Ezra paused, then dismissed this sad outcry with a flick of his wrist and a moody scowl. “Well, find my ring, then. It’s eighth-century goldcraft, studded with garnet—you’ll find the listing in a collection Mr. Hazlitt put together five years ago, when I first started working here.” Ezra faced Mouse directly again, his eyes now lit in triumph. “It was his first gift to me. He saw how much I loved the damned thing, and just like that—it was mine.”
And you his, Mouse realized, though he dared not speak aloud. Before Ezra had even begun explaining the vague details of his ensuing loss, Mouse’s mind’s eye had already seized upon the exact scene, and all the minutiae Ezra had since forgotten—the warm spring night; a society function in the atrium and garden of an estate house by the coast; rich piano music drifting up the stairwell to where Mr. Hazlitt had secured his young aide for a moment alone in his colleague’s study; the reckless energy and rumpled clothes; the gold ring slipping into the gold-flecked earth about a potted fern. It would be so easy to steal in just after this breathless moment, to snatch the treasure back—but Mouse’s jealous heart refused to draw him there. Why should I not present it first? Before Mr. Hazlitt muscles in?
It took a hard rap on the desk to call him back. “Well, Mr. Musset?”
Even then, Mouse was so raw with renewed optimism that he could hardly do more than smile and nod—and certainly could no longer control himself as his desperate, aching heart seized upon a different scene, an ancient scene, and pulled him swiftly back.
“I promise you—I swear to you—” Ezra would later think he’d heard as Mr. Musset’s body blurred before him. Eventually those trumped up words would come to haunt him even more than that this strange, despairing man then winked abruptly out.
Mouse came to a halt in another era, another country, only to trip and tumble down the side of a steep, stone barrow on a cold, late autumn’s night. When he looked about him at the Swedish heathlands of yesteryear, he wondered at first if there had been some mistake, but no—as he took unsteadily to his feet he spied a narrow opening in a nearby mound, the lick of some idle fire within illuminating a heap of goldcraft beneath banners bearing a dragon in their heraldry. His heart ever driving him on, he wriggled through and made his careless way about the pile, kicking shields and cups and belts into chamber recesses until his fingers seized upon their target—finding his prize just in time to register a violent rumbling elsewhere in the low, lit room, and then to whip away through time and space.
Hurtling back to the present with prize in hand, Mouse gave himself over to laughter at long and precious last—a manic, joyous sound that struggled to give voice to all the slings and arrows of a years-long campaign nearing its triumphant end. How could Ezra refuse him now, with this—his self-admitted heart’s desire? But Mouse’s palms were so clammy with anticipation that the little gold piece began to slip, and when with a frantic cry he twisted to catch it up again his flightpath slowed in turn. The loss of momentum was enough then—just enough—to catch him in Lower Saxony one wet and miserable morning in August 1626, where cannon fire and the storm of cavalry barely had time to register in his ringing ears before a ball of lead found the center of his ribs.
The sky above him was an endless, mottled gray as his eyes rolled up. Speechless in the ensuing pain, Mouse sank to his knees, where he found just breath enough to marvel that he had not seen this coming all along: the hard collisions that inevitably followed any moment, in any era, through which he had always been able to fling himself when the present just would not do. But the present had simply never done, thought Mouse in the last, tired throes of consciousness, so what other end had there ever been for him to find?
The ring had already fallen from Mouse’s hand into the cold, thick mud—not to be discovered right at the battle’s close, when Tilly’s army picked through the remnants of both Protestant and Catholic dead, but by a farmer in the years thereafter, who passed it down his family line before at last it stood appraised and hocked, slipping from private collection to collection until one year, early in the twenty-first century, when Mr. Hazlitt would receive it with great curiosity—a piece of eighth-century design, but also of most uncertain lineage.
A bauble among baubles all the same, Mr. Hazlitt would soon enough observe with far greater amusement how his new secretary attended to the little piece every time he entered the massive study on some trumped up errand—and O, how those proud, fiery eyes glittered when the ring was at last made into an offering.
“Do you know what a man called the giver-of-rings in those days?” said Mr. Hazlitt.
“His king, of course,” said Ezra in one low, soft breath.
And sure enough, a sense of that ancient wyrd had come upon Ezra as he held up the ring, for he could almost feel an inner warmth to the old, dead thing—as if someone’s destiny were still writ upon it; as if that little bit of metal, so useless unto itself, had somehow traveled through the centuries for just this purpose: to be here now; to be claimed by him. Mr. Hazlitt basked awhile in Ezra’s changed and glowing countenance before moving in.
About the Author
Maggie Clark is a doctoral student at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), where she studies nineteenth-century science writing. Her science fiction has been published in Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Daily SF, with more work forthcoming at GigaNotoSaurus.
Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds
E. Catherine Tobler
They say everything in the world has been discovered. They are wrong.
Finding the bodies used to be troubling; it’s worse when the bunkers turn empty, the bodies taken.
The land is filled with bunkers, dark wombs carved into the earth, reinforced with stone, brick, bars. They kept us in small spaces, but we expanded even so, and when they left—they? I still don’t know—we began to die, and so I left too, before I could become a body for someone to discover.
Everywhere I go, the world is living and its people are dead. Lights in the sky every third night as I travel, some times near and most times distant, and then not again. The sky grows as quiet as the land, maybe more so because the land holds the whisper of wind through tall grasses and sometimes the trickle of fresh water, but there is never enough water. It was this way in the bunker, so many bodies, so much thirst.
Here, the land spreads quiet, low and still. I hunch against the short spiked grass and do not feel the seep of water through my pants; everything is frozen, a season unturned. Cipta told me the ways the ground would thaw, how water would pool when the season warmed, but everything remains cold, hard, and Cipta is gone with all the others.
The sky darkens with the coming of night and ahead, a bunker plummets into the cold ground, metal doors spread open against the sedge. It has been twelve sunrises since I found the last bunker and with the frozen ground, I did not expect another so soon. I will not sleep here, but build a fire in a ring of rocks. It has become rote, the metal and the flint and the way they can be made to spark. The flat land supports no trees and an almost-constant wind whips the sparks into flames.
Every bunker opens the same: metal stairs tonguing into the black ground. There will be sixty-four steps before I reach solid floor. I light my reed torch in the fire and it sputters in the cold dark, throwing shadows against the stairs. I do not touch the handrail, I do not touch the central support; dried blood splatters both like rust.
There should be bodies, but there is only the memory of such within these stone halls. The underground space spreads empty and black, torchlight moving over walls and metal cages. The sound of my feet echoes, floors slick with dust. Cots, blankets, the scent of a thing that was once wet and now rots. A coat hangs empty against a wall, then loose over my shoulders.
The earliest bunkers I found contained bodies, some lain out as if sleeping, others appearing felled in mid-step. The sixty-four steps of the earliest bunkers were piled with bodies, hands straining toward sky that would remain forever out of reach. The earliest bunkers contained pantries of food and provisions, but this bunker’s pantry is empty, every shelf draped in dust.
Halfway into my climb back into the wind-whipped world, cold, clear light punches down the staircase. The wind rushes down and the sharpness of the light makes my eyes water. I cannot see anything in the flood of light and tears, even looking through the bars of my fingers raised against the brilliance. The light pours through the opening like a vast and searching eye.
Have they come for me at last? I still don’t know who I mean; there were guards in the bunkers, administering meals and schedules, but they like every person held in the cages is dead or gone. Have they come for me at last? Do they control the lights?
Who? I hear the question in Cipta’s rough voice and I still don’t know who I mean.
The lights move off, the sky revealed as if the brightness was never there. The worn toes of my boots catch the lip of almost every step as I force myself up the remaining stairs, legs burning when I emerge into the evening wind, heart like a fist in my throat. Stars prick through the vault of sky—a brightening chain of them spread like string toward the far horizon—but it is not yet dark enough to hide anything that might otherwise be up there. There are no lights. There is no ship, no drone. Cipta said when there was, we were to run away, not toward, but the sky is empty of all but stars and night-flying birds and the wind extinguishes the flames from my reed torch.
I sink to the ground and smother the fire with the meager soil I am able to rake free with my fingers. Was it the fire that brought the lights in the sky? It was not the fire before, the lights always and ever at a distance. A glance at the empty and yawning mouth of the bunker reveals no answers so I take my meager pack and do what I have done since I left the confines of the bunker: I walk.
Every time I bleed, I make a mark in a book of paper with the end of a stick blackened in fire. Cipta kept this book before me, produced it with her own hands using threads pulled from her clothing and hair pulled from her scalp to bind the pages. Cipta wrote down days, and blood, and showed me how words are made. Cipta remembered a life lived beyond bunkers, a life with family and responsibilities, a life at the edge of a great sea that caught the colors of day and night alike, but of that life I see no sign no matter how far I walk. I have left the frozen waste behind and jagged mountains rise into the clouded sky.
The blood is not an injury, only a recurring means through which we might track the days, the months, the years. She told me that once this blood and body would nourish a child, but I have never seen a child in this world. Every time I bleed, I think of Cipta, because she was here in the beginning and no longer is.
Cold wind curls the edge of the page up against the stick, leaving the mark ragged. I slide the stick back into the book’s spine, and slide the book back into my pack, and keep moving. I will not want to travel tomorrow when the blood is more and the pain sharper, so must cover as much ground as I might today.
And where am I going? Away.
And why am I going? Because to stay was a kind of death all its own, though I knew the limits of that underground bunker better than I knew anything else. This world is, on the whole, unknown to me, the sky grotesque and endless, and yet to deny myself its terrifying grandeur once I had seen its colors and storms was in some way unthinkable.
The mountains, seen days ago as a ridge that grew less vague the more I walked, are dry and rocky. The vegetation is sparse and I find myself missing the frozen tundra; there was plenty to burn there. I have found no river, but even the smallest of plants draws water from somewhere. Even the smallest rodents.
A small furred body darts up the ridge ahead and I follow. It has been ten days since I’ve caught anything for the scarcity of things living on the ground. Birds traverse the sky in long unreachable lines and I lost two spears before I stopped trying for them. It’s a spear I throw now, skewering the rodent before it can escape. The motion of the spear hauls the rodent backward, into a slide of ruddy rock.
Once skinned, the small body crisps up in the scant fire. I am tearing a long strip of meat free from its spine when I see more movement on a distant ridge. If it is another animal, I will have food for tomorrow, tomorrow when I cannot travel as easi—
It is a person, a person moving up the next ridge I am to face. The person climbs with long-legged determinedness, body thrown into shadow by the angle of the sun. I stop breathing and stare, my meal growing cold between my teeth. I stagger to my feet and take a lurching step forward, kicking broken rock over my fire. Wait, I want to say, but the word sticks in my throat; it has been so long since I have spoken, have I forgotten how? Wait, I want to say, but my voice goes unheard.
Time fragments: I do not remember shoving my meal into my pack, do not remember abandoning the fire to the stones. I do not remember breaking my spear in two when I jolt at the sight of this person—wood of any decent length is so hard to come by and later there will be anger over this senseless destruction. The mountains themselves seem to fall away even as they impede my every step. Loose rock slides under my boots and when I reach the ridge, the mountains are already falling into the shadow of coming night. Breathless, I make my way up the ridge the person climbed, but a footprint makes me fall to my knees.
In the soft dry ground, the footprint is foreign. I reach for it, as if I can add it to my pack as something found on my journey, something to share with others in a distant future. Before I can ruin the outline of shoe in dirt, I stop myself. The footprint doesn’t matter; the foot that left the print does.
The ridge is hard under foot, hands bloodied and spear further broken by the time I reach the top.
I expect to see land spreading far and away from these dry hills, but more mountain spreads beyond. Amid the rocky landscape, there is no figure, no one to call to, and I wonder if after all this time I have begun to crave companionship and conjured a shadow to pursue.
I cannot look down the ridge at the footprint or its sudden absence.
The rock mountains give eventual way to sprawling plains, the wash of rock consumed by the rise of tender grass and harder sedge. Here, the air is soft with white tufts expelled from seed, as if the ground has never known ice and rivers run abundant if yet unseen. The green plain undulates in a gradual wave the way the mountains never did, every surface covered with long, thick grasses that conceal abundant life. Rodents and larger animals bound from the verdant growth and I think that if only they stayed still, I would never see them, they would pass unknown. But they spring from their hiding places, disrupting the clean, straight lines of the grass to burst brief into the air, before they are once again swallowed by the fertile deep. The beasts tunnel in frantic lines from the invasion of my boots, chittering to each other and going still when I do. If another person passed through this grass, the wind has long since erased their passage.
I stand and close my eyes and listen to the world around me, different from the mountains that rise far to my back. The wind makes a low breath through the grass and it is seed that lifts into the air instead of dry dust. Bent to my knees, damp ground soaks my clothes and gives way under my weight, as if it means to welcome me for a long stay, but I will not stay, no matter how cool and pleasant the blades are beneath my callused hands.
Against the far horizon the land moves upward again and if they are mountains I do not care. For now, there is only the plain and I clear a circle of grass down to the dirt, thinking to build a fire. But the ground is too wet and my laughter startles animals within the grass as it pours from me.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 92 Page 4
