Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  “There,” Major said, the same time that Clare gripped his arm and whispered, “There.”

  She was looking to the front where the iconic man, so different than the bodyguards around him, emerged and waved at the crowd. There, the cobblestone—she drew from her pocket a cube of sugar that had been soaked in amaretto, crumbled it, let the grains fall, then licked her fingers. The sweet, heady flavor stung her tongue.

  Major lunged away from her. “No!”

  The stone lifted, and the great Jonathan Smith tripped. A universal gasp went up.

  Major wasn’t looking to the front with everyone else. He was looking at a man in the crowd, twenty feet away, dissolute. A troublemaker. Hair ragged, shirt soiled, faded trousers, and a canvas jacket a size too large. Boots made for kicking. He held something in his right fist, in a white-knuckled grip.

  This was it, the source, the gun—the locus, everything. This was where they learned if they nudged enough, and correctly. But the assassin didn’t raise a straight arm to aim. He cocked back to throw. He didn’t carry a gun, he held a grenade.

  Gerald and the others had planned for a bullet. They hadn’t planned for this.

  Major put his shoulder to the man’s chest and shoved. The would-be assassin stumbled, surprised, clutched the grenade to his chest—it wasn’t active, he hadn’t lit the fuse. Major stopped him. Stopped the explosive, stopped the assassin, and that was good. Except it wasn’t, and he didn’t.

  Smith recovered from his near-fall. He mounted the platform. The bodyguard behind him drew his handgun, pointed at the back of Smith’s head, and fired. The shot echoed and everyone saw it and spent a moment in frozen astonishment. Even the man with the grenade. Everyone but Major, who was on the ground, doubled over, shivering as if every nerve burned.

  Clare fell on top of him, crying, clutching at him. His eyes rolled back, enough to look at her, enough for her to see the fear in them. If she could have held onto him, carried him with her, saved him, she would have. But he’d put himself back into the world. He’d acted, plunged back into a time and place he wasn’t part of anymore, and now it tore him to pieces. The skin of his face cracked under her hands, and the blood and flesh underneath was black and crumbling to dust.

  She couldn’t sob hard enough to save him.

  Clare was lost in chaos. Then Gerald was there with his cloak. So theatrical, Major always said. Gerald used the cloak like Major used the jack of diamonds. He swept it around the three of them, shoving them through a doorway.

  But only Clare and Gerald emerged on the other side.

  The first lesson they learned, that Major forgot for only a second, the wrong second: They could only build steps, not leap. They couldn’t act directly, they couldn’t be part of the history they made.

  So Jonathan Smith died, and the military coup that followed ruined everything.

  Five of them remained.

  The problem was she could not imagine a world different from the burned-out husk that resulted from the war fought over the course of the next year. Gerald’s plan might have worked, bringing forth a lush Eden where everyone drank nectar and played hopscotch with angelic children, and she still would have felt empty.

  Gerald’s goal had always been utopia. Clare no longer believed it was possible.

  The others were very kind to her, in the way anyone was kind to a child they pitied. Poor dear, but she should have known better. Clare accepted the blanket Ildie put over her shoulders and the cup of hot tea Fred pressed into her hands.

  “Be strong, Clare,” Ildie said, and Clare thought, easy for her to say.

  “What next, what next,” Gerard paced the warehouse, head bent, snarling almost, his frown was so energetic.

  “Corruption scandal?” Marco offered.

  “Too direct.”

  “A single line of accounting, the wrong number in the right place, to discredit the regime,” Ildie said.

  Gerald stopped pacing. “Maybe.”

  Another meeting. As if nothing had happened. As if they could still go on.

  “Major was the best of us,” Clare murmured.

  “We’ll just have to be more careful,” Ildie murmured back.

  “He made a mistake. An elementary mistake,” Gerald said, and never spoke of Major again.

  The village a mile outside the city had once been greater, a way station and market town. Now, it was a skeleton. The war had crushed it, burned it, until only hovels remained, the scorched frames of buildings standing like trees in a forest. Brick walls had fallen and lay strewn, crumbling, decaying. Rough canvas stretched over alcoves provided shelter. Cooking fires burned under tripods and pots beaten out of other objects. What had been the cobbled town square still had the atmosphere of an open-air market, people shouting and milling, bartering fiercely, trading. The noise made a language all its own, and a dozen different scents mingled.

  Despite the war and bombing, some of the people hadn’t fled, but they hadn’t tried to rebuild. Instead, they seemed to have crawled underground when the bombardment began, and when it ended they reemerged, continued their lives where they left off as best they could, with the materials they had at hand. Cockroaches, Clare thought, and shook the thought away.

  At the end of the main street, where the twisted, naked foundations gave way and only shattered cobblestones remained, a group of men were digging a well into an old aquifer, part of the water system of the dying village. They were looking for water. Really, though, at this point they weren’t digging, but observing the amount of dirt they’d already removed and arguing. They were about to give up and try again somewhere else. A whole day’s work wasted, a day they could little afford when they had children to feed and material to scavenge.

  Clare helped. Spit on her hands, put them on the dusty earth, then rubbed them together and drew patterns in the dust. Pressed her hands to the ground again. The aquifer that they had missed by just a few feet seeped into the ditch they’d dug. The well filled. The men cheered.

  Wiping her hands on her skirt, Clare walked away. She was late for another meeting.

  “What is the pattern?” Gerald asked. And no one answered. They were down to four.

  Ildie had tried to cause a scandal by prompting a divorce between the RLP Premiere and his popular wife. No matter how similar attempts had failed before. “This is different, it’s not causing an affair, it’s destroying one. I can do this,” she had insisted, desperate to prove herself. But the targets couldn’t be forced. She might as well have tried to cause an affair after all. Once again, too direct. Clare could have told her it wouldn’t work. Clare recognized when people were in love. Even Republic Loyalists fell in love.

  “What will change this path? We must make this better!”

  She stared. “I just built a well.”

  Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”

  Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”

  Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”

  “No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”

  Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”

  Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”

  “It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.

  “Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.

  He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.

  “You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly.
“It’s all right if you want to rest.”

  She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.

  She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.

  Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.

  And yet. Even here. She drew a pattern on a slab of broken wood. Watched a young man drop a brick of peat for the fire. Watched a young woman pick it up for him and look into his eyes. He smiled.

  Now if only she knew the pattern that would ensure that they survived.

  When they launched the next plan—collapse the army high command’s headquarters, crippling the RLP and allowing the PTP to fill the vacuum, or so Gerald insisted—she had no part to play. She was not talented enough, Gerald didn’t say, but she understood it. She could only play with detritus from a kitchen table. She could never think big enough for them. Major hadn’t cared.

  She did a little thing, though: scattered birdseed on a pool of soapy water, to send a tremor through the air and warn the pigeons, rats, and such that they ought to flee. And maybe that ruined the plan for the others. She’d nudged the pattern too far out of alignment for their pattern to work. The building didn’t collapse, but the clock tower across the square from which Fred and Marco were watching did. As if they had planted explosives and been caught in the blast.

  Too direct, of course.

  She left. Escaped, rather, as she thought. She didn’t want Gerald to find her. Didn’t want to look him in the eye. She would either laugh at him or accuse him of killing Major and everyone else. Then she would strangle him, and since they were both equally out of history she just might be able to do it. It couldn’t possibly be too direct, and the rest of the world couldn’t possibly notice.

  Very tempting, in those terms.

  But she found her place, her niche, her purpose. Her little village on the edge of everything was starting to build itself into something bigger. She’d worried about it, but just last year the number of babies born exceeded the number of people who died of disease, age, and accident. A few more cook fires had been added. She watched, pleased.

  But Gerald found her, eventually, because that was one of his talents: finding people who had the ability to move outside the world. She might as well have set out a lantern.

  She didn’t look up when he arrived. She was gathering mint leaves that she’d set out to dry, putting them in the tin box where she stored them. A spoonful of an earlier harvest was brewing in a cup of water over her little fire. Her small realm was tucked under the overhang formed by three walls that had fallen together. The witch’s cave, she called it. It looked over the village so she could always watch her people.

  Gerald stood at the edge of her cave for a long time, watching. He seemed deflated, his cloak worn, his skin pale. But his eyes still burned. With desperation this time, maybe, instead of ambition.

  When he spoke, he sounded appalled. “Clare. What are you doing here? Why are you living in this … this pit?”

  “Because it’s my pit. Leave me alone, I’m working.”

  “Clare. Come away. Get out of there. Come with me.”

  She raised a brow at him. “No.”

  “You’re not doing any good here.”

  She still did not give him more than a passing glance. The village below was full of the evening’s activities: farmers returning from fields, groups bustling around cook fires. Someone was singing, another laughing, a third crying.

  She pointed. “Maybe that little girl right there is the one who will grow up and turn this all around. Maybe I can keep her safe until she does.”

  He shook his head. “Not likely. You can’t point to a random child and make such a claim. She’ll be dead of influenza before she reaches maturity.”

  “It’s the little things, you’re always saying. But you don’t think small enough,” she said.

  “Now what are you talking about?”

  “Nails,” she murmured.

  “You have a talent,” he said, desperately. “You see what other people overlook. Things other people take for granted. There are revolutions in little things. I understand that now. I didn’t—”

  “Why can’t you let the revolutions take care of themselves?”

  He stared at her, astonished. Might as well tell him to stop breathing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And no one had ever spoken to him like this.

  “You can’t go back,” he said as if it was a threat. “You can’t go back to being alive in the world.”

  “Does it look like I’m trying?” He couldn’t answer, of course, because she only looked like she was making tea. “You’re only here because there’s no one left to help you. And you’re blind.”

  Some days when she was in a very low mood she imagined Major here with her, and imagined that he’d be happy, even without the games.

  “Clare. You shouldn’t be alone. You can’t leave me. Not after everything.”

  “I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact, maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”

  “You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”

  “I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or pressed into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”

  His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”

  “Ambitious enough,” she said.

  “I won’t come for you again. I won’t try to save you again.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She did not watch Gerald walk away and vanish in the swoop of his cloak.

  Later, looking over the village, she reached for her tin box and drew out a sugar cube that had been soaked in brandy. Crumbling it and licking her fingers, she lifted a bit of earth, which made a small girl trip harmlessly four steps before she would have stumbled and fallen into a cook fire. Years later, after the girl had grown up to be the kind of revolutionary leader who saves the world, she would say she had a guardian angel.

  © 2013 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

  Originally published in Unfettered, edited by Shawn Speakman.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. The eleventh novel, Kitty Rocks the House, came out in March 2013. She has also written young adult novels, Voices of Dragons and Steel, and the fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared many times in Realms of Fantasy magazine, and in a number of anthologies, such as Fast Ships, Black Sails and Warriors. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.

  Author Spotlight: L. Timmel Duchamp

  Moshe Siegel

  Your novella, “The Fool’s Tale,” conveys a recurring message that reality (and literature) is in the eye of the beholder, that once created, all things take on a life of their own, unbounded by preconception, and that what one believes as truth, others may see as fantasy. In the writing of this story, was it challenging to weave the fantastic with the factual, the certain with the ambiguous?

  I don’t see my fi
ction as conveying “messages,” though I’m aware that my work, like any reasonable complex fiction must often contains subtexts, usually without my conscious knowledge. Since perception management has been an obsessive interest of several US Republican administrations, beginning with the Reagan Administration (cf Oliver North’s emails, quoted in the Tower Commission report documenting the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s), the subject is not exactly an innocent one. Bush II’s neocon administration openly declared they could dispense with facts and rewrite reality. This presumption did a lot of damage along the way, but ultimately failed. Because writers are not imposing their fantastic visions on reality—for they expect readers to understand the difference between truth and fantasy—they enjoy a certain latitude for inviting readers to participate in a collective fantasy, which is exactly what the Fool does: invite the Queen and the Countess and their ladies into a magical moment of rewriting the ending of Twelfth Night. This isn’t that different from their experience of having watched the play and joined Shakespeare in his dramatic fantasy the evening before. Was it challenging for me to weave the fantastic with the factual, the certain with the ambiguous? No. I love ambiguity. And anyone who writes fiction necessarily weaves the factual with the fantastic (even when they are writing a roman à clef). What was challenging was getting the language right. Before writing the version of the story that was eventually published, I wrote the manuscript the story quotes from—all of it, of course, in Jacobean English, and it took me more than four months to do. (Such a concentrated dose of Jacobean prose was too difficult for my first readers to enjoy reading. And so I wrote a second version that discussed, paraphrased, and quoted from it.)

  The reader is given a window into the intrigues and complexity of King James’s court, from the perspective of your fictional Fool. How much of said court life was drawn from research, and how much detail, if any, did you fabricate for the purposes of this tale?

  I invented the Fool and her personal history and a few minor characters, for instance Robin, who plays Viola. Most of the characters, though, were drawn from life, including Pierette, the Queen’s personal servant. Similarly, most of the details were lifted from historical sources, though occasionally I took some license. The Fool recognizes Lady Olivia’s costume as having once been Queen Anne’s gown, but in fact I have no idea whose gown was used in that production. Designated members of the royal households were granted the right to sell garments when the royals were done with them, and costumes were the chief properties owned by acting companies. Given James’s obsession with passing (and then struggling to enforce) sumptuary laws, not many people would have legally been entitled to wear secondhand royal clothing. Interestingly, I knew a lot about the Court (consisting, actually, of three overlapping courts: King James’s, Queen Anne’s, and Prince Henry’s) before I became mildly obsessed with Twelfth Night, an obsession that led me to read the history of its performance and accompanying critical scholarship debating its interpretation. The moment I knew I’d have to write a story about it came when I began thinking about the performance of the play at court. I knew that Queen Anne and her ladies took a rather subversive attitude toward James’s misogynistic attitudes and preferences and that the Countess of Bedford was a patron of the arts in general and women poets in particular, and that the Countess and the Queen were acutely aware of gender politics in the masques they put on at court. So when I thought about Twelfth Night being performed at court, I began to see the play from the point of view of someone immersed in the Court’s gender politics.