by Kali Wallace
She watched his cock stiffen. “You said that last time.”
“Aye, but this time I mean it. Come over here, Kathrin. Be a good girl now and you’ll have your pig back.”
Kathrin looked back over her shoulder. No one was going to disturb them. The dray had blocked all the traffic behind it, and nothing was coming over the bridge from the south.
“Please,” she said.
“Just this once,” Garret said. “And make your mind up fast, girl. This pig’s getting awfully heavy in my hand.”
Kathrin stood in the widow’s candlelit kitchen—it only had one tiny, dusty window - while the old woman turned her bent back to attend to the coals burning in her black metal stove. She poked and prodded the fire until it hissed back like a cat. “You came all the way from Jarrow Ferry?” she asked.
“Aye,” Kathrin said. The room smelled smoky.
“That’s too far for anyone, let alone a sixteen year old lass. I should have a word with your father. I heard he was working on Twenty Arch Bridge.”
Kathrin shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t mind walking. The weather’s all right.”
“So they say. All the same, the evenings are still cold, and there are types about you wouldn’t care to meet on your own, miles from Jarrow.”
“I’ll be back before it gets dark,” Kathrin said, with more optimism than she felt. Not if she went out of her way to avoid Garret Kinnear she wouldn’t. He knew the route she’d normally take back home, and the alternatives would mean a much longer journey.
“You sure about that?”
“I have no one else to visit. I can start home now.” Kathrin offered her one remaining bag, as Widow Grayling turned from the fire, brushing her hands on her apron.
“Put it on the table, will you?”
Kathrin put the bag down. “One pig’s head, and twenty candles, just as you wanted,” she said brightly.
Widow Grayling hobbled over to the table, supporting herself with a stick, eyeing Kathrin as she opened the bag and took out the solitary head. She weighed it in her hand then set it down on the table, the head facing Kathrin in such a way that its beady black eyes and smiling snout suggested amused complicity.
“It’s a good head,” the widow said. “But there were meant to be two of them.”
“Can you manage with just the one, until I visit again? I’ll have three for you next time.”
“I’ll manage if I must. Was there a problem with the butcher in the Shield?”
Kathrin had considered feigning ignorance, saying that she did not recall how only one head had come to be in her bags. But she knew Widow Grayling too well for that.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Of course.” The widow hobbled around the table to one of the rickety stools and dragged it out. “Are you all right, girl?”
Kathrin lowered herself onto the stool.
“The other bag was taken from me,” she answered quietly.
“By who?”
“Someone on the bridge.”
“Children?”
“A man.”
Widow Grayling nodded slowly, as if Kathrin’s answer had only confirmed some deep-seated suspicion she had harbored for many years. “Thomas Kinnear’s boy, was it?”
“How could you know?”
“Because I’ve lived long enough to form ready opinions of people. Garret Kinnear is filth. But there’s no one that’ll touch him, because they’re scared of his father. Even the Sheriff tugs his forelock to Thomas Kinnear. Did he rape you?”
“No. But he wanted me to do something nearly as bad.”
“And did he make you?”
Kathrin looked away.
“Not this time.”
Widow Grayling closed her eyes. She reached across the table and took one of Kathrin’s hands, squeezing it between her own. “When was it?”
“Three months ago, when there was still snow on the ground. I had to cross the bridge on my own. It was later than usual, and there weren’t any people around. I knew about Garret already, but I’d managed to keep away from him. I thought I was going to be lucky.” Kathrin turned back to face her companion. “He caught me and took me into one of the mills. The wheels were turning, but there was nobody inside except me and Garret. I struggled, but then he put his finger to my lips and told me to shush.”
“Because of your father.”
“If I made trouble, if I did not do what he wanted, Garret would tell his father some lie about mine. He would say that he caught him sleeping on the job, or drunk, or stealing nails.”
“Garret promised you that?”
“He said, life’s hard enough for a sledge-maker’s daughter when no one wants sledges. He said it would only be harder if my father lost his work.”
“In that respect he was probably right,” the widow said resignedly. “It was brave of you to hold your silence, Kathrin. But the problem hasn’t gone away, has it? You cannot avoid Garret forever.”
“I can take the other bridge.”
“That’ll make no difference, now that he has his eye on you.”
Kathrin looked down at her hands. “Then he’s won already.”
“No, he just thinks that he has.” Without warning the widow stood from her chair. “How long have we known each other, would you say?”
“Since I was small.”
“And in all that time, have I come to seem any older to you?”
“You’ve always seemed the same to me, Widow Lynch.”
“An old woman. The witch on the hill.”
“There are good witches and bad witches,” Kathrin pointed out.
“And there are mad old women who don’t belong in either category. Wait a moment.”
Widow Grayling stooped under the impossibly low doorway into the next room. Kathrin heard a scrape of wood on wood, as of a drawer being opened. She heard rummaging sounds. Widow Grayling returned with something in her hands, wrapped in red cotton. Whatever it was, she put it down on the table. By the noise it made Kathrin judged that it was an item of some weight and solidity.
“I was just like you once. I grew up not far from Ferry, in the darkest, coldest years of the Great Winter.”
“How long ago?”
“The Sheriff then was William the Questioner. You won’t have heard of him.” Widow Grayling sat down in the same seat she’d been using before and quickly exposed the contents of the red cotton bundle.
Kathrin wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. There was a thick and unornamented bracelet, made of some dull grey metal like pewter. Next to the ornament was something like the handle of a broken sword: a grip, with a crissed-crossed pattern on it, with a curved guard reaching from one end of the hilt to the other. It was fashioned from the same dull grey metal.
“Pick it up,” the widow said. “Feel it.”
Kathrin reached out tentatively and closed her finger around the criss-crossed hilt. It felt cold and hard and not quite the right shape for her hand. She lifted it from the table, feeling its weight.
“What is it, widow?”
“It’s yours. It’s a thing that has been in my possession for a very long while, but now it must change hands.”
Kathrin didn’t know quite what to say. A gift was a gift, but neither she nor her father would have any use for this ugly broken thing, save for its value to a scrap man.
“What happened to the sword?” she asked.
“There was never a sword. The thing you are holding is the entire object.”
“Then I don’t understand what it is for.”
“You shall, in time. I’m about to place a hard burden on your shoulders. I have often thought that you were the right one, but I wished to wait until you were older, stronger. But what has happened today cannot be ignored. I am old and weakening. It would be a mistake to wait another year.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Take the bracelet. Put it on your wrist.”
Kathrin did as she was told. Th
e bracelet opened on a heavy hinge, like a manacle. When she locked it together, the join was nearly invisible. It was a cunning thing, to be sure. But it still felt as heavy and dead and useless as the broken sword.
Kathrin tried to keep a composed face, while all the while suspecting that the widow was as mad as people had always said.
“Thank you,” she said, with as much sincerity as she could muster.
“Now listen to what I have to say. You walked across the bridge today. Doubtless you passed the inn known as the Winged Man.”
“It was where Garret caught up with me.”
“Did it ever occur to you to wonder where the name of the tavern comes from?”
“My dad told me once. He said the tavern was named after a metal statue that used to stand on a hill to the south, on the Durham road.”
“And did your father explain the origin of this statue?”
“He said some people reckoned it had been up there since before the Great Winter. Other people said an old sheriff had put it up. Some other people . . . ” But Kathrin trailed off.
“Yes?”
“It’s silly, but they said a real Winged Man had come down, out of the sky.”
“And did your father place any credence in that story?”
“Not really,” Kathrin said.
“He was right not to. The statue was indeed older than the Great Winter, when they tore it down. It was not put up to honor the sheriff, or commemorate the arrival of a Winged Man.” Now the widow looked at her intently. “But a Winged Man did come down. I know what happened, Kathrin: I saw the statue with my own eyes, before the Winged Man fell. I was there.”
Kathrin shifted. She was growing uncomfortable in the widow’s presence.
“My dad said people reckoned the Winged Man came down hundreds of years ago.”
“It did.”
“Then you can’t have been there, Widow Grayling.”
“Because if I had been, I should be dead by now? You’re right. By all that is natural, I should be. I was born three hundred years ago, Kathrin. I’ve been a widow for more than two hundred of those years, though not always under this name. I’ve moved from house to house, village to village, as soon as people start suspecting what I am. I found the Winged Man when I was sixteen years old, just like you.”
Kathrin smiled tightly. “I want to believe you.”
“You will, shortly. I already told you that this was the coldest time of the Great Winter. The sun was a cold grey disk, as if it was made of ice itself. For years the river hardly thawed at all. The Frost Fair stayed almost all year round. It was nothing like the miserable little gatherings you have known. This was ten times bigger, a whole city built on the frozen river. It had streets and avenues, its own quarters. There were tents and stalls, with skaters and sledges everywhere. There’d be races, jousting competitions, fireworks, mystery players, even printing presses to make newspapers and souvenirs just for the Frost Fair. People came from miles around to see it, Kathrin: from as far away as Carlisle or York.”
“Didn’t they get bored with it, if it was always there?”
“It was always changing, though. Every few months there was something different. You would travel fifty miles to see a new wonder if enough people started talking about it. And there was no shortage of wonders, even if they were not always quite what you had imagined when you set off on your journey. Things fell from the sky more often in those days. A living thing like the Winged Man was still a rarity, but other things came down regularly enough. People would spy where they fell and try to get there first. Usually all they’d find would be bits of hot metal, all warped and runny like melted sugar.”
“Skydrift,” Kathrin said. “Metal that’s no use to anyone, except barbers and butchers.”
“Only because we can’t make fires hot enough to make that metal smelt down like iron or copper. Once, we could. But if you could find a small piece with an edge, there was nothing it couldn’t cut through. A surgeon’s best knife will always be skydrift.”
“Some people think the metal belongs to the jangling men, and that anyone who touches it will be cursed.”
“And I’m sure the sheriff does nothing to persuade them otherwise. Do you think the jangling men care what happens to their metal?”
“I don’t think they care, because I don’t think they exist.”
“I was once of the same opinion. Then something happened to make me change my mind.”
“This being when you found the Winged Man, I take it.”
“Before even that. I would have been thirteen, I suppose. It was in the back of a tent in the Frost Fair. There was a case holding a hand made of metal, found among skydrift near Wallsend.”
“A rider’s gauntlet.”
“I don’t think so. It was broken off at the wrist, but you could tell that it used to belong to something that was also made of metal. There were metal bones and muscles in it. No cogs or springs, like in a clock or tin toy. This was something finer, more ingenious. I don’t believe any man could have made it. But it cannot just be the jangling men who drop things from the sky, or fall out of it.”
“Why not?” Kathrin asked, in the spirit of someone going along with a game.
“Because it was said that the sheriff’s men once found a head of skin and bone, all burned up, but which still had a pair of spectacles on it. The glass in them was dark like coal, but when the sheriff wore them, he could see at night like a wolf. Another time, his men found a shred of garment that kept changing color, depending on what it was lying against. You could hardly see it then. Not enough to make a suit, but you could imagine how useful that would have been to the sheriff’s spies.”
“They’d have wanted to get to the Winged Man first.”
Widow Grayling nodded. “It was just luck that I got to him first. I was on the Durham road, riding a mule, when he fell from the sky. Now, the law said that they would spike your head on the bridge if you touched something that fell on the Sheriff’s land, especially skydrift. But everyone knew that the Sheriff could only travel so fast, even when he had his flying machine. It was a risk worth taking, so I took it, and I found the Winged Man, and he was still alive.”
“Was he really a man?”
“He was a creature of flesh and blood, not a jangling man, but he was not like any man I had seen before. He was smashed and bent, like a toy that had been trodden on. When I found him he was covered in armor, hot enough to turn the snow to water and make the water hiss and bubble under him. I could only see his face. A kind of golden mask had come off, lying next to him. There were bars across his mask, like the head of the Angel on the tavern sign. The rest of him was covered in metal, jointed in a clever fashion. It was silver in places and black in others, where it had been scorched. His arms were metal wings, as wide across as the road itself if they had not been snapped back on themselves. Instead of legs he just had a long tail, with a kind of fluke at the end of it. I crept closer, watching the sky all around me for the sheriff’s whirling machine. I was fearful at first, but when I saw the Winged Man’s face I only wanted to do what I could for him. And he was dying. I knew it, because I’d seen the same look on the faces of men hanging from the sheriff’s killing poles.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I asked him if he wanted some water. At first he just looked at me, his eyes pale as the sky, his lips opening and closing like a fish that has just been landed. Then he said ‘Water will not help me.’ Just those five words, in a dialect I didn’t know. Then I asked him if there was anything else I could do to help him, all the while glancing over my shoulder in case anyone should come upon us. But the road was empty and the sky was clear. It took a long time for him to answer me again.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘Thank you, but there is nothing you can do for me.’ Then I asked him if he was an angel. He smiled, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not an angel, really. But I am a flier.’ I asked him if there was a
difference. He smiled again before answering me. ‘Perhaps not, after all this time. Do you know of fliers, girl? Do any of you still remember the war?’ ”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth. I said I knew nothing of a war, unless he spoke of the Battle of the Stadium of Light, which had only happened twenty years earlier. He looked sad, then, as if he had hoped for a different answer. I asked him if he was a kind of soldier. He said that he was. ‘Fliers are warriors’, he said. ‘Men like me are fighting a great war, on your behalf, against an enemy you do not even remember.’ ”
“What enemy?”
“The jangling men. They exist, but not in the way we imagine them. They don’t crawl in through bedroom windows at night, clacking tin-bodied things with skull faces and clockwork keys whirring from their backs. But they’re real enough.”
“Why would such things exist?”
“They’d been made to do the work of men on the other side of the sky, where men cannot breathe because the air is so thin. They made the jangling men canny enough that they could work without being told exactly what to do. But that already made them slyer than foxes. The jangling men coveted our world for themselves. That was before the Great Winter came in. The flier said that men like him—special soldiers, born and bred to fight the jangling men—were all that was holding them back.”
“And he told you they were fighting a war, above the sky?”
Something pained Widow Grayling. “All the years since haven’t made it any easier to understand what the flier told me. He said that, just as there may be holes in a old piece of timber, one that has been eaten through by woodworm, so there may be holes in the sky itself. He said that his wings were not really to help him fly, but to help him navigate those tunnels in the sky, just as the wheels of a cart find their way into the ruts on a road.”
“I don’t understand. How can there be holes in the sky, when the air is already too thin to breathe?”
“He said that the fliers and the jangling men make these holes, just as armies may dig a shifting network of trenches and tunnels as part of a long campaign. It requires strength to dig a hole and more strength to shore it up when it has already been dug. In an army, it would be the muscle of men and horses and whatever machines still work. But the flier was talking about a different kind of strength altogether.” The widow paused, then stared into Kathrin’s eyes with a look of foreboding. “He told me where it came from, you see. And ever since then, I have seen the world with different eyes. It is a hard burden, Kathrin. But someone must bear it.”
