Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  “Oh for God’s sake,” the woman said, directing her words to Luz’s father. “Andy, we came here to destroy this unauthorized car as a favor to you, not to watch you Luddites play at justice.” With that, she and the man leapt from the saddles stitched to their horses’ flanks. They both whistled high and hard and pointed at Fizz’s vehicle. It slowly turned in the air, held a foot above the ground by a strong cable.

  For the first time, Fizz appeared confused, even frightened.

  Then everyone was frightened, as the horses leapt.

  Their lips curled back, exposing spikes where an unaltered horse’s teeth would be. Long claws extended from the dewlaps above their steel-shod hooves, and the muscles rippling beneath their flanks were square and hard. They jumped onto the hanging car, clinging to opposite sides, steam and smoke belching from their noses and ears as they struck and bit, kicked and tore. The sounds of metal ripping and wood splitting rang across the square, frighteningly loud, yet still not loud enough to drown the frightened cries of the children in the crowd. Luz was as shocked by the sounds the horses made as she was by the savagery of their assault.

  In moments, the car called Rudolf was a pile of scrap metal and wood. The horses’ spikes and claws retracted as they trotted back to their riders, who waited with more skips of coal to replenish what they’d burned up in the destruction.

  The Federals swung into their saddles and the woman spoke to Luz’s father once more. “Do you want us to take your prisoner off your hands, too, Andy? We’re better equipped to deal with his kind of trouble than you.”

  “No!” cried Luz.

  Everyone turned to look at her. “If Fizz has broken any rules they were ours, not yours. You . . . you lot get going.”

  Luz’s father nodded at the Federals. The woman and the deadeyed man exchanged ugly grins, but they put their spurs to their mounts and left the square.

  Luz turned to the Council. “And you lot, you get to explaining. What is all this? Papa, you can’t stand the Federals and their ways. None of you can. You’d put us in debt to enforce some law that you won’t even name?”

  All of the people sitting behind the table looked troubled, and only Papa would meet her gaze.

  “We protect our children from such things until they’ve reached their majority, Luz,” he said. “You know that. But since you all just saw . . . what we all just saw . . .” He hesitated for a moment. “It’s basically what I said earlier, Luz,” he continued. “Your friend there has a personal car, and that’s the source of so much bad in the world I can’t even begin to explain it to you. It can’t be allowed.”

  Luz rolled her eyes and walked over to the pile of debris beneath the scaffold. She pointed to it and said, “This, you mean? It doesn’t look to me like he has a car anymore.”

  She turned to Fizz for support, but he was still staring at the wreckage. For once, he had nothing to say. I’m his advocate, she remembered.

  “You should let him go,” she said. “We should let him go.”

  Before her father could respond, the chairwoman called him closer. They exchanged a few murmured words. Then she said, “The young man is no longer a danger to our community, or to the earth. He’s free to go.”

  Papa added, “He must go.”

  The crowd stood and milled around, everyone talking about what had just happened. Luz spotted her father approaching, and then saw her abuela shake her head to stop him from coming near.

  Luz went and stood beside Fizz. She thought about what she had learned about making and repairing things from her father. She thought about what she had learned about scavenging from her mother. She thought of the stories of gliding across an ocean’s wave told to her by her grandmother. She put her hand on Fizz’s shoulder.

  “I know where we can get some parts,” she said.

  Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms

  The buildings, the tumbled stones, the ground, they are all sandstone. Blasted, pockmarked sandstone. Great blocks are tumbled and thrown about. The color of the blood stains runs from near black along one wall to the darkening brown beneath his shoulders and thighs to the violent, living red running from her forehead and mouth.

  His gauntleted hand lies inches from her bare left foot. Deep furrows scar the rock beneath his fingertips, the tracks of his last attempt, his final angry clawing.

  His body is a bulk of metal and muscle. The firelight and the sunlight across it are distorted by greasy smoke.

  His armor is red and black, damaged. The plate at the right shoulder hangs by a frayed strap. Her target. The white bone stands out against the black metal.

  The helmet is all stylized angles and nightmare shapes, horned mantids. It still covers his head, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. The visor is shoved against the ground. A froth of blood has swelled through the vents.

  A scabbard lies discarded beside him. It is empty, but ornately decorated. Silhouettes have been inlaid along its length by a careful craftsman. Women, men, children, engines of war. The silhouettes do not march the whole distance from open end to gilded close. There would have been room for her portrait.

  One end of the weapon is embedded in a slumped wall. Its flanges and vanes, a complexity of barbs, glower through the dust and smoke.

  The heavy, tooled shaft stretches across his body; the cruel weight of it presses against her thigh.

  Calmly, calmly, calmly, she sits, still. Her hands, nails trimmed short, fingers stained with potter’s clay, grip the weapon so tightly.

  The torn rags of her tunic are muddy with a mixture of blood and dust and sweat and sand. Her muscled shoulders and midriff and legs are exposed, revealing testaments: scars, burns, bruises, welts, blisters, stretch marks, wounds.

  Strands of hair that have escaped from their band are soaked to her forehead. Her broad face is still. Her flecked green eyes are unblinking. There is nothing behind her eyes.

  Finally, movement. A shadow. The light from the sun and the fires delineates a shadow falling across a ruin of sandstone. A large shadow, the head a mantid nightmare. Her hand grips so tightly.

  Gather

  At the very end of autumn, Gather had thirty-four coins to spend. Commerce—that’s the kind of buying things that used coins instead of goods—was not an opportunity that arose in the north town very often. He planned to spend all thirty-four.

  There was a lot to regret about that. All of Gather’s coins were beautiful. They had curling, unknowable writing on one side and little pictures of God on the other. Gather loved to study the coins. He was intimately aware of all their differences and similarities, and aware, too, that with winter coming he’d have few chances to get more.

  Besides his work assignments, his sisters would usually each give him a coin for good-bye and remembrance when it was their turn to go down the river to wife for the bad batch men. He’d found one copper coin in a wagon track, where the ground had split from thawing and refreezing in the inconstant autumn temperatures. It showed God’s eyes, all steaming. He’d won a rough gray coin at a fair, when he’d rowed a skiff faster than a sweepsman off a southern barge.

  Another obstacle to transactions was the way the act of spending could complicate itself so hypnotically. Offer the merchant a coin for those pepper seeds spilling out of twists of dead, unflickering paper, then put the coin to heart, to lips. Do it again and rock forward and backward and then forward and then backward and put the coin to forehead, to heart, to lips, and on like that, and on until the merchant loses patience and raps one hand against the table and shakes the seeds with the other, arrhythmic. All wrong.

  “Liveborn fool,” the merchant said. “A grown man, getting lost in counting games! Buy if you’re buying; we’re closing this fair down.”

  Gather snapped to, because these barges were the last before winter, and it would be long years to huddle with just the cold comfort of money before spring.

  The merchant spoke again. “Ice chokes the river, boy, and if it freezes over it’ll be y
ou pushing our barges, skate like, you and all these holy men down from their chapterhouse.” The southerners were bad-batch men, mostly, with useless legs bundled up under them if they were merchants or captains, legs self-amputated if they were hard men who needed speed, like the sweeps handlers.

  Gather had liked rowing the skiff so quickly, and would have asked about a job on the barge but he had to stay up the river with the preachers and his sisters. Only bad-batch men can be southerners. That was from a bible. So he worked on the docks or on the fishing boats for now, and would work chopping holes in the ice when the river was frozen. Gather was stout and steady.

  He considered whether to buy the twists, which would yield long red wreaths of hothouse peppers, if he was careful. He considered his thirty-four coins.

  “You can plant a coin,” one of his sisters had said when he’d accumulated two dozen of the coins. “You can plant them, but they won’t grow into anything useful out here.”

  But that wasn’t quite true, it wasn’t exactly the truth, and Gather required things to be very exact indeed. Precision was his watchword and his sacrament.

  In the end, he bought four twists of seeds from the southern merchant. He bought an old blanket that the seller claimed had been woven by a machine. He bought forty candles, forty pounds of sugar, and forty minutes’ worth of a storyteller’s time.

  Forty minutes was long enough for the national anthem, the long night in the garden at Gethsemane, and the history of the first people to come down onto Virginia, who were called Pilgrims and who had starved to death before they were born again for God.

  Counting coins again.

  The twists and the blanket and the candles and the sugar and the time and that’s down to eleven left for imperishable food. Eleven coins on smoked fish like muskie, or eleven coins on ground grains like spelt, or eleven coins on dried pulses like beans.

  Peas and lentils all winter, then.

  Weeks later, when the river was frozen hard enough for foot traffic, some of the children came to Gather and asked him to pull their sledge across to the far side. This was forbidden, but their leader, a little girl with green eyes, was PK—a preacher’s kid—which warranted a lot of deference. But more than that she said, “One, two, three, four, Gather walks across the floor . . .” and on like that—a very clever little girl, very good at rhymes and rhythms. So Gather bundled up in his heaviest coat and his machine blanket and trudged out onto the ice with a towrope slung over his shoulder.

  The PK girl had him skirt north of the island where the watchtower stood. (“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, farther up so we are not seen.”) There were no preachers manning the tower top that Gather could see, which was a curiosity. Then he heard hammering and work-chanting farther down the river and remembered that today was the first day the preachers would be pushing the big wagons across to the far side to cut up big blocks of frozen soil—the good kind of soil that things would grow in. Many work points, but only for preachers, who had special dispensation from God and specific instructions on where to gather the soil from their bibles.

  The PK snapped her fingers in time with her counting to get Gather moving again, and pulled them on up and across. Her voice faltered with her courage a dozen yards shy of the eastern shore. The bank was choked with evergreens right down to the ice, towering pines that cut off any view of what lay farther back. Which was just as well, because God lived on the far bank and to go to the house of God was forbidden. That was from a bible, too.

  “S’ko back, y’all.” One of the other children finally spoke. Earlier, the PK had hushed the girls whenever they started to speak, which Gather had appreciated because it was rare for a pair and nearly impossible for a group to keep the rhythm.

  Gather was pretty sure the speaker was a niece of his, or possibly a very young aunt, some kin anyhow from the tangled net of cousins and sisters who stayed up the river for the preachers. She said, “S’kome.”

  The option of returning to town lay out there on the ice, but the PK was clearly not convinced. She stood, considering, and nobody moved to turn the sledge around.

  A thick shelf of snow slid off the lowest hanging branch of a nearby tree. It made a noise like SHHHH-CHOOM. None of the children jumped or screamed or carried on, but Gather said, “Oh, Lord,” because he thought that maybe God was coming down the bank.

  The PK girl said, “Home home home home.”

  For Gather, home was his apartment in the carriage house behind the post office. Once he and the children were back on the side of the river where people lived, Gather walked down Dock Street with the river to his left.

  He turned into the alley between the post office and the courthouse—he’d shoveled the brickway clear the day before—and crossed the courtyard to his door.

  Gather’s apartment was on the ground floor of the carriage house, so he didn’t have to worry about navigating the treacherous wooden staircase tacked to the fieldstones of the exterior wall. The stairs were thick with ice and snow, because Miss Charlie, who lived upstairs, didn’t use them. Instead, she clambered up and down along the rope contrivances she engineered for bad-batch men wealthy enough to afford her work. One was always hung through the trapdoor in the ceiling of Gather’s kitchen.

  Before he opened his front door, Gather pulled a canvas tarp back from where it covered his rick. He took an armful of split yellow wood, well-seasoned, for the kitchen stove. Yellow was native Virginia wood, not like the Pilgrim pines on the bank. Not good for making useful soil, but good enough for burning.

  Inside, Gather found Miss Charlie working at his kitchen table. She was tipping the pepper seeds out of one of his twists and into a clay jar. Gather saw that she’d already emptied the other three—the dead papers were spread across the tabletop.

  “You told me, Gather, I remember your very words, you said, ‘I don’t like those hot old things.’” Miss Charlie was suspended amongst pulleys and weights, testing a new configuration. She was wrapped up in one of the soft hides people made from deerskins sometimes. Getting them soft was hard—Gather’d had a job doing that for a while but he hadn’t been good enough at it.

  “I can grow ’em in the house, though, Miss Charlie,” he said, then dumped the wood into the metal box beside the stove. “And if you share your dried apricots, I can make the spicy jelly the preachers like.”

  “Strong thinking, Gather,” said Miss Charlie. “Stronger than you were doing this morning when you let that pack of children lead you off into trouble.” Gather started to say that they hadn’t gotten into trouble, but he remembered a lesson: not getting into trouble isn’t the same as not getting caught.

  Miss Charlie untwisted the paper she held and smoothed it flat next to the others with her skinny, clever fingers. Miss Charlie was a scientist. Everything about her was skinny and clever.

  She arranged the four papers into a pretty, even line. They were rectangular, but not the same rectangular as the oiled wood top of Gather’s kitchen table. The ratios of the different rectangles were plenty enough different, which was a good thing. If they’d been close-but-not-quite, it would have been upsetting.

  Miss Charlie leaned over each of the papers in turn and examined them through her glass. Gather could see that there were letters on the papers.

  “Is that writing the same as on the”—Gather thought of the word—“exempla you’ve got upstairs in your kitchen?” Gather glanced up at the open trap door. Miss Charlie looked up at him but forgot to take the glass away from her face, so her eyes were huge—one green, one brown.

  “My laboratory,” she reminded him. “I’m a scientist, we don’t have kitchens. The ones I have upstairs have a little life in them. This writing here is stuck on dead paper.”

  Gather was afraid that she might lecture him for a while then, which she sometimes did, but she was too distracted by her work. Her work, Gather remembered, was always the question at hand. The question at hand meant something Gather didn’t know about.

  �
��And anyway,” said Miss Charlie, “I don’t think these letters wrote here are like the letters on my papers upstairs, or on coins. They’re more like the letters on the mayor’s stick, or in a bible. Not quite, but that’s closer.” Gather had seen the mayor’s stick before—he’d felt it before, the bad way, across his backside—but he’d never seen the inside of a bible, as only preachers were allowed to uncover their tops. Once one of his sisters had pointed out that if the preacher reading from it wore a glass, you could see the writing in the green glow reflecting off his face.

  “The paper—the medium . . .” And she looked at him and raised her eyebrows the way she did when she used a word she wanted him to learn. “The paper is about the same as what I’ve seen before, though.”

  Miss Charlie chewed on her thumbnail for a second, then said, “Let’s do an experiment.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”

  “Hush,” said Miss Charlie. “It’ll be fine. I’ll go upstairs and get our aprons and goggles. You’d better go get a bucket of water.”

  Miss Charlie swung up onto a rung threaded through the web of ropes hung from Gather’s ceiling, then hand-over-handed up to the laboratory above. Gather had never seen the laboratory except from this oblique angle. Oblique.

  He felt a little bit concerned about what was likely to happen next, but Miss Charlie did outrank him, so he went back out into the courtyard to sweep snow into a saucepan, then popped it onto the stove for melting. Gather breathed the metal smell of the new water and hoped it wasn’t meant for an experiment that would leave him with less furniture, as so many of them had in the past.