Terri Windling - [Bordertown 02] - Borderland

by Mark Alan Arnold (epub)

  His hands were making music. They played, and the air took shape in front of him.

  From his right, calmly, Aarka’an said, “It’s very close now.”

  Scooter played. He thought of the thing behind him, the thing he had made, the thing that wanted Roxanne, and he hated it, wanted it dead, wanted it drained the way it had drained the coyote.

  The air before him darkened and churned.

  What you make belongs to you.

  He was doing it wrong; the hate was how he had made the thing in the first place, from hatred and rage and loss.

  To make a thing is to suggest its opposite.

  Roxanne! Think of Roxanne, not of wanting her back, but of what it’s like when she’s there. She sleeps holding on to you all night, she understands things about your music that nobody else does, sees things in it that no one else sees; she—

  He missed a note.

  —she printed up funny headlines for him when he felt down, left them thrust between the strings of his guitars. She made him tell her his dreams when they woke and told him things about them he never would have thought of by himself. She had brought him out of it, a year ago, had untied that knot of anger inside him, had pulled him out of the water when he hadn’t even known he was drowning.

  Maybe you don’t believe it when I say that I still love you, but I do.

  It was true; he knew it was true. Roxanne loved him,

  The air brightened, drew in on itself, began coalescing.

  Scooter played.

  She loved him, had left him because he wouldn’t think of the two of them as a pair, because he had done nothing to help keep them going. He had been living for his music and not for her, as though either could take away from the other.

  The shining was steady, not pulsing, but restrained, like a light in fog, turbulent like the sun seen from a dozen feet beneath the surface of the ocean. It floated in the air, a perfect sphere.

  There was nothing of flash in Scooter’s music, nothing intricate. It did not strut, scream, wail, parade, spread peacock feathers, or incite. It was the sound of a naive guitar sounding notes that were almost childishly simple—because what he felt for Roxanne was almost childishly simple. He loved her.

  The world darkened around him.

  Aarka’an’s voice: “It’s around you now.”

  Cold blossomed inside him; a chilled thread dragged through his chest. He could feel it surrounding him, could feel its need, like a malignant cancer removed from his body and held before him.

  He held his thoughts to Roxanne and kept playing. He could no longer see what his music shaped in the air between himself and the woman held by the hamadryad tree.

  She loved to lie in the sun, he thought, loved to spread her arms in the grass in the hot afternoon, and he would look at her and almost feel her feeling the warmth in her bones.

  “Scooter?” Her voice, ahead of him, terrified. He faltered, recovered, played. “Scooter, I—”

  Light detonated around him.

  Afterimages pulsed, red-tinged at their edges. They faded, dwindled, left behind a redness that was somehow black as well.

  He blinked. He couldn’t tell the difference between lids open or shut.

  Lilting voices spoke an alien language around him.

  “Can you hear me?” Aarka’an’s voice.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can—” He tried to sit up and was gendy pushed back.

  “Can you see?”

  “I’m . . . not sure.”

  “How many fingers do you see?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t even see a hand,” he said.

  “Ail right.” Something behind his head shifted; he realized a hand had been cradling it, had been removed. “I’ll be back. Someone will be here if you call out. Try to stay where you are; don’t move around.” “Where are you going?”

  “To get a healer.”

  “Roxanne—is . . . ?”

  “Wait.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “He has a lot of thinking he needs to do. Now, please, I must go.” He felt the boy walk away rather than hearing him.

  The waiting, in his private darkness, was bad. He played his last visions over and over in his mind, seeing Roxanne against the tree, his world becoming colored in murky browns and sluggish reds, the explosion of white light. And her voice, just before that, trying to tell him something.

  He wondered what.

  He tried, but failed, to shake an image that came to him: the thing he had created, breaking through, enveloping Roxanne, taking from her, lifting, and leaving behind nothing but that agonized face in the tree, but changed into Roxanne’s trapped face.

  A woman’s voice near his ear: “Tell me what you see.”

  “Who ... ?”

  “I am a healer. What do you see?” Her voice was gentle.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Nothing? Completely black?”

  “No; it’s—it’s like red mist, with black between the red. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes a great deal of sense. You would say that it means the optic nerve is still Firing.”

  “What would you say?”

  She laughed. “Never mind. Hold still now.”

  He felt her long hand across his forehead, thumb pressing right temple, index finger pressing left. “Still,” she repeated.

  He cried out.

  The red mist began to recede. Sunlight edged his vision, trickled in as blackness bled away, grew brighter as the world focused around him. Her hand lifted, and he could see.

  He blinked rapidly. She was the one with the copper-colored hair he had stared at, the one with Aarka’an, carving the tree. “I can see.” He sat up. “I can see! Hey, that’s . . .” He stopped.

  She was still looking at where he’d been.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

  A hand caught her and helped her to her feet. Scooter looked up at Aarka’an in confusion.

  “She gave you her sight,” he explained.

  “You mean she—”

  Aarka’an shook his head. “Only for a few days. It’s like that, with us.”

  Scooter said, “Oh,” as if he understood.

  “I’ll take her back to her family now,” said the boy.

  “No, wait. What about—”

  “Wait here.” He turned away, leading her by the arm.

  Scooter muttered to himself. They had restored his sight and he was grateful—now where was Roxanne?

  He got up and looked around. Things were as normal—if that meant anything here—as if nothing had happened.

  The face in the tree was unchanged.

  He saw nothing of the thing that had followed him here, nothing either of the gently glowing sphere. He saw children making worker ants march in circles and figure eights, adolescents throwing stones that skipped hundreds of times along the stream before sinking, and adults examining leaves as if reading them. He did not see Roxanne.

  He went looking for her.

  She lay in the sun by the stream, nude, arms outstretched, eyes closed, unmoving.

  He couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  He ran to her, certain she was dead, and she sat up and opened her eyes.

  He halted. “I thought,” he said, and stopped. He saw her searching his expression for some hint of what he felt, a clue that would prepare her for what he might say, and he knew that, even though she loved him, their future pivoted on what came next.

  He lowered his hands and splayed his fingers. “All right,” he said contritely. “I’ll get a job!”

  GRAY

  Bellamy Bach

  —Many years later

  She wakes in an alley and can’t remember how she got there. There is blood under her fingernails and scratches across her cheekbone; a chunk of flesh is missing from one earlobe. She rises and stretches, hears her bones pop. The alley smells of garbage and cat piss. The sun is just rising over the Old Wall of Bordertown.

  The morning is
cold enough to make her breath frost, crisp enough to carry the sounds from the docks beyond the wall—the cries of the fishmongers, the clatter of cartwheels on asphalt, the whine of machinery, the slap of water against the river locks. Behind her, Soho is quiet, its residents asleep behind broken windows and doors hung with blankets and old rugs against the cold. The graffiti that lights the walls at night with the glitter of fairy-dust laced in the paint looks garish by day, decorating deserted streets where the wind rolls trash like tumbleweeds.

  Gray pulls a wool cap low over her ears, over her spiky silver and gray hair, and cracked leather gloves over her blood-encrusted fingers. In a boys'jacket and without the scraps of motley cloth wrapped around knees and shins as is the fashion these days in Soho, she. might pass as a Wharf Rat on the docks and perhaps earn a bit of breakfast. If not, there are less honest ways to come about a penny or two on the crowded Riverway in the morning traffic.

  She hesitates at the Wall and feels for the knife in the lining of her jacket; but it is only Riff-Raff on duty, eyes glazed with fairy-dust he should have left to decorate buildings. He does not challenge her as she walks past him into the fetid tunnel and out again, exhaling a breath held against the stench.

  Unlike the ruined streets of the old city, Riverside and the rest of Bordertown are awake and open for business. The foot traffic and wagons on the Riverway are headed for Traders’ Heaven, the market place for which Bordertown is famed and tolerated. There are no bikes on the road connecting the city with the human world for the spells needed to fuel them cease to work too far away from the Border, and the gasoline-powered bikes of the World exploded this close to it. Alongside the highway, the fishwives are set up for the morning trade, frying fish and thumb-sized potatoes over fire pits hollowed out of the concrete. Two pennies will buy half a fish and a bit of salty bread or potatoes roasted on a skewer, half a penny a cup of the green tea that is precious out in the World and common here so close to the Elflands. The smells make Gray’s stomach ache with hunger. The hunting was bad last night.

  Wharf Rats are crowded around an unclaimed fire pit, warming their hands over a trash fire under the skeletal frame of some unimaginable ancient dockside building. There are too many of them standing around idle, and Gray’s heart sinks. Not enough work today, or the Rats would be out on the docks, hauling in nets, stacking crates, mumbling incantations at the direction of some two-penny wizard to keep the machinery moving. And idle Rats will notice a stranger in their midst.

  Gray pulls her cap down lower as if this will hide her from the Rats—though even without it she can pass for human. Two Rats turn hostile eyes her way as she passes. She keeps her pace deliberately slow and casual, as if she has every right to be there ... a fisherman’s son, no, not dressed as she is. A messenger, then, on her way to Heaven.

  The fishwives ignore her, gossiping in the lilting patois of the river people. The touch of elvin blood shows in their pale eyes, the white skin that looks as though it has never seen the sun in spite of all the hours on the docks and the river. Yet they consider themselves human and venture no farther upriver than the Border that separates the Elflands from the World.

  Gray finds them frightening, more frightening than true blood elves. Even elves, like sensible folk, shun the open hills of the Borderland, where magic gone awry has created were-beasts and dust-devils and other creatures best not spoken of, where the moonlight, they say, can drive a man insane. Yet the river people live without fear on the banks of the aptly named Mad River, netting fish that swim in the waters of Faery. Few other humans will drink the blood-red river water, or touch its fish—said to be poisonous or enchanted or both. But Gray, whatever her unknown parentage might be, is not inclined to be overly cautious. She has not eaten in two days. And that last meal—well, better not to think of that now.

  An old fishwife with a face like the trout she is frying, all pop eyes and drooping jowls, lifts a skewered potato invitingly from the flames and peers at Gray with an expression that is probably meant to be a smile. Grease drips into the fire and makes it sputter. Gray’s stomach rumbles, and she wishes she had the elvin ability to turn leaves or asphalt pebbles into silver. No, she needs the real thing. And soon.

  She edges into the crowd on the highway: the well-guarded wagon trains coming in from the cities beyond the Borderlands, local traffic headed to town at the start of another business day, newspaper hawkers selling sheets barely dry from the presses. Looking for an open pocket or a loose purse, she eyes a farmer pacing beside her cartload of eggs, a fat bureaucrat headed for some office in Courthouse Square, a young woman with a pushcart of denim jeans manufactured out in the World. Some of the goods on their way to Traders’ Heaven will soon depart again for other corners of the World; some will feed and clothe and amuse the population of Bordertown; and some will vanish into the mysterious land beyond the Border.

  No one ever knows what the elves will take a fancy to next. One month it will be cheese, the next day clay pots and light bulbs, the next suede boots two years out of style . . . following merchantile needs and fashion trends unfathomable to the rest of the World. Dealing with elves is a risky business at best; turning pebbles into fake silver is the least of their tricks. But those who do so successfully are the richer for it, and there will always be those who are willing to try. Bordertown’s great fortunes were made on such bargaining—and perhaps more fortunes in the World than respectable folk like to admit.

  Sammy says the old city had been a thriving trade center even in the days before the Border . . . but who remembers the old city? Except perhaps the eldest elves. And who can trust what they have to say?

  Gray’s eye is caught by a pretty trader with hennaed hair and so much gold and silver on his wrists that surely he won’t miss a copper penny or two, or even a full new moon. Gray sidles up to him, wishing now for her despised country-girl skirts and braids, for with them he might not think it so odd if she smiles into his eyes and puts a hand on his thigh . . . looking for a pocket of change or a purse, as Sammy has taught her. She nibbles her lower lip speculatively and wonders what he thinks of young boys.

  “Hey there, darlin’.” The trader laughs, catching her by the shoulders as she stumbles up against him. His pale cheeks flush then, thinking he’s mistaken her sex, and he sets her more roughly back on her feet—but not before she had a hand in and out of his trousers. Empty. Back pockets maybe? Or a purse-string beneath the rhinestone-studded jacket? “Sorry, kid,” he says, pushing long red hair out of his eyes with an irritated gesture. “But watch where you’re going, ey?”

  Maybe he keeps his purse in the top of his boot. ...

  “You watch where you’re going, fishface,” she says in her best belligerent adolescent mumble, giving the man another shove and disappearing into the crowd.

  “Hey!” he says, but he doesn’t pursue her. She wonders how long it will take him to figure out he is one gold bracelet the lighter.

  She threads her way against the current of the crowd back to the quayside, where two fishwives laugh together with a sound like the distant gulls. One is the old wife who had smiled at her.

  “What’er it be now, boy?” she says in the queer river singsong. “Taters or fish now, say? Taters for just a penny, they be smallish today, say?”

  “What can I get for this?” she asks, her mouth watering, knowing the bracelet is too good to trade for break-last, too hungry to care.

  The old wife clucks her tongue and beams at her, reaching greedily for the gold, then pales even whiter than the true elvin born. “Get you out of here, boy,” she hisses, no singsong in her voice now. “Out! Out of my sight!”

  “But—”

  “Out! I say out!” the old woman shrieks. A Wharf Rat looks up at the commotion, and Gray decides to take the old woman’s advice.

  As she dives back into the crowd and pushes her way to the opposite side of the highway, sliding on horse dung and knocking the breath out of an already breathless old man, she can hear the so
unds of pursuit behind her. “Oh god’s slimy breath,” she mutters, heading for the warehouses and the Old Wall. She has a good start on the Rats, but this is their turf, as far as the wall. No way she is going to lose them or outsmart them here. She has to make it back to the gate. With only Riff-Raff on duty, she can expect no help—but the Rats don’t know that. They won’t dare follow her into the old city. A Rat is no more welcome south of Ho Street than she had been down on the docks. What possessed her, oh gods, what possessed her to try her luck on the docks this morning? Her growling stomach answers the question.

  The soft slap of her sneakers on the cobblestones is echoed by the clatter of boots as she threads a course through empty alleyways, between shattered gray buildings. At least two Rats, maybe more. What kind of sporting odds are those?

  She digs the knife out of her jacket lining as she runs, replacing it with the offending bracelet. The knife springs open at her touch.

  The gate is too far away, the Rats too near.

  She stumbles on the cobblestones, feels a harsh grip spin her around.

  “This way, stupid.”

  Sammy dodges the kick intended for a Rat, the swipe of her knife that could have disemboweled him, and pulls her roughly through a jagged window. She lands on splintered glass, and curses.

  “Shut up,” he suggests affably, and pulls her blindly into a darkness smelling of rotted fish.

  Wicker jangles as she runs; the silver bracelets on both wrists jangle, the string of silver bells tied around her left boot jangles, the copper discs braided into her long pink-and-silver-streaked hair jangle like some exotic wind chime as she runs down Ho Street as fast as high-heeled boots will allow. It doesn’t matter. She’s run all the way from Fare-you-well Park, and it doesn’t even matter, she is still late . . . two hours late to be precise. When she opens the door of the Dancing Ferret, the music immediately stops and they all turn to glare at her. Oh shit. Not again.

  She gives Lari a bright, false smile, the kind that melts the hearts of elvin groupies and has gotten her out of scrapes since she was three. Lari does not look impressed. She tosses back her hair so that the copper discs clatter, opens her mouth wondering what’s going to come out of it, what excuse she’s going to invent on the spot this time . . . something a little more lively than; I overslept. . . but “Don’t even say it,” Lari says. “I don’t even want to hear it. I don’t care if your mother had an epileptic seizure, your cat went on the bends, your horoscope told you to stay in bed all day, your boyfriend jumped off of Dragon’s Claw Bridge. Don’t even tell me, Wicker. This is the fourth rehearsal you’ve missed since the last time we slugged it out, and I’ve had it.”