Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21

by Kelly Link Gavin Grant

  An apathy spreads from here on certain nights; you may find you don't mind the peculiar smell that fills the halls, as of a roast beginning to burn; later you may wonder why you're still sitting when you should have gone to bed long ago. If you do sleep, your dreams will be boring in the way that a labyrinth is boring; but likely you will find sleep difficult.

  The maid carries a wax candle, simple and clean, of her mistress's manufacture. To the one who slips from the square door and follows her, its light is a yellow nimbus around her silhouette. She is not hard to follow, and in this quiet part of the castle, away from the others, he can come as close as he likes. The rooms here are empty; the other men have remained behind the door.

  How did the monk know to be here tonight? I recall the message came unexpectedly from a boy; or rather, from a man, a stranger, an ordinary man in trousers on his way to work. He has delivered the message and now he bolts across the square. But what are we doing in this seaside town? Things are losing their coherence: I was afraid for a moment that the message had come through a network of tubes underground.

  The note itself is concrete enough: black ink on a white feather of a slip of paper, weightless and translucent. The script is ornate:

  "Another one for the brothers. The men do keep them coming. They will be at it again six days from now; if you can come then, the girl will meet you as usual. This one is deformed in the hindquarters, but not poisonous."

  Behind the square door, an atmosphere of genial bonhomie prevails. Well-dressed men exchange cordial words over snifters. There are not many of them, though the room is large. (The men are going to expand; to run against each other would be unpleasant.) Look at their hands—no, blink for a moment; after the dark outside and a single candle in the passage, the light here may be too rich. The long chains from which the chandeliers hang have been mirror-plated by some exotic artifice. Mirrors trim the room below as well, in the baseboards and the chair rails, whipping on the light of the candles at every corner. The inside of this room is the inside of a firecracker. The silver is polished to a shine and the linen is white as snow.

  Look at their hands. What is it about them? Does the skin change color slightly at the wrist? Are they too small for the arms? It may be only that they are entirely without hair: there in the alcove the servant with his tiny razor is putting the finishing touches on the back of the last skeletal finger. But there is something else as well, something metallic about the flesh. The men have eaten little.

  Stand here in the center of the room and face the square door. The key-plate, too, is mirrored. Watch the funhouse reflections of the men as they rise from their chairs. They are not wearing shoes. Now look up, up to the faraway ceiling, and there to the left, off in the shadows behind that beam. At first, seeing with the corner of your eye, you may have mistaken it for an elaborate molding; in fact there is a small door in the ceiling, unmirrored: a simple plank with a hook latch and a leather strap to open it by. A postern.

  The servants are driven from the room and the square door is sealed. In the floor is a spiral portal some dozen feet in diameter. It gleams like black marble but is tacky to the touch. The men follow a simple choreography that extinguishes all the lights but one, which the mirrors of the room hold in a fulgent haze that leaves the portal below in gloom. Although it opens, there is no sound of opening. The men's breath and the murmur of their movement dwindle to faraway sounds, like sounds heard through a seashell; the air dims, then clears. The men are expanding, not like balloons but like cats: the hair of their heads stands on end, and the invisible parts of them which ordinarily lie neatly against their bodies inflate and stand erect in a halo extending some distance from their skin. There is a smell in the air, the smell of plenty, as of meat roasting over an open fire.

  I remember this castle a friendlier and more expansive place. There were tournaments here, bright pennants: the blue fleurs de lis, the green boar, the golden horn of a bull; underneath them animals roasted on spits, the juice sizzled on the coals and filled the air with smoke; men played artfully on stringed instruments, gruffly with women, violently with each other; there were goldfish in the moat. The scene is familiar to all of us. I remember an elaborate barbican and a bit of high ground beneath that made the place heroic. Now there are only the wall and the gate.

  The weight of solitude in certain wings of the castle is pronounced tonight, more so for one accustomed to full rooms and loud men filling them, one wandering now on a strange whim through unfamiliar halls. He is a broad fellow with rubbery skin, pink ears, and great freckled forearms, a clean and honest beast, trusting of his brothers, lonely in this place; no one can blame him for following this woman in white. But ought he to have followed her to the loneliest part of the castle?

  In the rain and the dark the castle is a still place, a place where time flows more like a scent than a sentence. But there are things happening here. There are things happening everywhere. This honest fellow thinks of the forest as a still place, yet the monk forges a new path amid the silent trunks of trees while leaves riot overhead. This honest fellow sees a stillness in the maid. There is movement everywhere.

  Her breath becomes faster, although she is not afraid. A year ago she might have panicked, might have tried to run. But she is a woman, and burdened; and there is the infant to think of. At the next corner a window opens on the west courtyard far below; in front of it, a wooden bench—light enough, maybe, if her footwork is quick. She runs, not to escape, but to compel him to run after her. She hears the slap of his bare feet against the stone. She takes the corner as fast as she dares, cursing as her sandals threaten to slip on the tile; at the last second her foot shoots out, catches the leg of the bench and flings it behind her, and she throws her shoulder forward to shield the infant as she slams into the wall. The silence of the hallway explodes in the clatter of the bench, the man's cry, the crunch and tinkle of the window. She steals a glance over her shoulder. He has not fallen through, but caught the stone frame with one hand. He begins to pull himself back.

  The lead of the window lattice gleams in the torchlight. She punctures him under the ribs, just as she ought. Once is enough: he slumps again into the glass, which crumbles under his weight; in the courtyard the shards and the rain shine in the sudden moon, and he floats out after, like a dreamer who believes in the lights, and follows them down to earth.

  I find I am comfortable here. Maybe I know the brutal ingrown ways of this place better than the easy gaiety of former times. I find now that I have no memory of the great gates opening, not ever.

  The people here enjoy a reputation as breeders (dogs, horses, more), and, necessarily, as veterinarians. They go forth with chests of mysterious unguents, salves, and powders; also smoldering embers. Do not examine their baggage too closely.

  Their horses, though highly prized, demand diligence from the farrier: the iron shoe begins to sink into the hoof, or the hoof to grow out and envelop the shoe, so that the demarcation between shoe and hoof fades day by day. When the old emperor fell behind the enemy line, his horse stayed near though the battle raged hotly all around. The tide turned and the men rushed to his side, and found the horse nuzzling the great wound in his belly: not, as they first thought, in grief at the loss of its master, but in quest of the sweet imperial gizzard. The animal, its muzzle full of blood, was put to death. The new emperor has not the love of riding that his father did; but the services and the animals of this castle still command a certain price.

  Our maid knows that even the crash of shattering glass will not draw the guards for some time. Her mistress only sends her out when the slowness is on the castle; tonight the only guards are the young, the infirm, and the unfavored. It may be that no one will come until morning. The infant squirms in her arms. Has it scratched her? She is nearly at the postern. She recalls the great fires deep in the castle's belly, in the rooms of her mistress; she recalls their orange light on the wood. She recalls waking to a light from beneath her mistress's door and the
smell of warm linen. She has learned to keep secrets from herself. She fixes her thoughts on the fire, on the room below ground and her mistress's voice, and leaves her arms to hold the infant on their own. Has it bitten her? It writhes and rustles against her breast just as though it were something else.

  The room below ground is high, as high as the tower above. The fires are high and they shine on the blonde wood up to the black beams of the ceiling. Servants feed the fires from without; only the maid is permitted here. In the corner, steps rise from the tiled floor to a dais. There, behind screens, lies the maid's straw pallet, and beyond that the door of thick polished planks lashed with sinew. It is from the door that the voice comes, like the voice of a woman. The maid has never opened the door, nor knocked, nor does she bring food. She does not know whether the voice is always there but sometimes silent, or whether it goes away. The fires never burn low. Wood rumbles down the chutes like an earthquake and its noise mingles with the far-off voices of men, the servants. Their voices are not frightened, but they are not bold. In the clay basin beside the mistress's door, objects appear. They appear while the maid sleeps, while she attends the mistress's business above. Infants appear. The maid keeps the room clean. She fetches the things the mistress needs: rusted iron (horse shoes, slop pails), human teeth (children, brawlers), linens stiff and stained, filth from the feet of unconscious men. Four stairways lead from below ground up to the castle, all of them beginning and ending in doors bound in red copper and locked with locks of red copper to which the maid has never seen any keys but those on her own ring. It is her duty to shine the copper. It is her duty never to remove her shoes. From the clay basin, things disappear.

  Does it bother her not to see the sun? She lies at night with the lamp dark and lets the orange eye of the fire watch her through cracks in the screen, and she imagines that its roar is lust. Under the mistress's door, an arm's reach from the edge of her pallet, there is darkness. She has never been lonely. Above her pallet are paper, inks, chalks, and charcoal, and next to them, bound in twine, a stack of drawings: men mainly, and mainly dull men. Men with flat chins and dirty feet. Gray men. They may have one or two talents. They do not ride well. When she cannot sleep she lights the lamp and draws, comfortable between the fire and the black strip under the door, unmindful of time. I do not think we can follow her there.

  The infant has not bitten her; the rough patches on its skin have only rubbed her ragged inside her wrists. None of the infants she has brought here has harmed her.

  The postern opens onto the storm where the monk waits, and has been waiting. The rain has plastered his robe to his watermelon belly. How many posterns in the castle tonight? He takes the bundle and peers under the blanket and grimaces. Below the child's waist the smooth pink skin is a segmented carapace like lava rock; violin-bow legs squirm mechanically and two pupilless eyes stare into something not present. The monk glances up at the maid. Has he seen her before? He nods politely and takes the bundle away.

  The child herself will not remember this moment. If she comes back to this castle, she will not recognize it and she will not recognize the maid. She will recognize the forest, but she will not remember why. After the rain stops at dawn, she and the monk will sleep a few hours, huddled on the drier ground on the lee side of a basalt boulder like a whale's tail. All day they will climb the mountain and arrive at the monastery in the early evening. But the child will remember the road in the deep part of her as though it never ended.

  The day on the mountain is sunny and warm. It is dusty here, and high enough that the vegetation is meager: scrub and thorns and small, twisted trees with sticky sap and savory leaves. Above us a crag of rock throws cold shade on the huts that hug the slope. Below us spreads the valley, the old aqueduct and the ruined road, the distant speck of blue smoke from the fires of the village. Two spots of brown stand out against the yellow of the path, nearby under the first switchback: two monks gone to gather leaves to flavor the stew. It is from that direction that our monk and the child will come.

  The place to wait for them is in the kitchen. In the afternoon it is alive with chopping and boiling: eight cooking monks at three long work-tables and a stream of others bringing lemons, apricots, olives, and dates from the gardens. They will have their meal before the sun fades and our monk will arrive afterwards. He will not come to the kitchen at once: he will arrive and they will welcome him, he will eat something alone in the refectory, and they will bathe and feed the child. But afterwards he will bring her here to the kitchen. Then the scent of the fire will be dying and the smell will be of clean stone, the dusty wood of the building, the iron of the great black pots. Knives hang beside the tables, their wooden handles stained gray with the sweat of monks’ palms. He will carry her into every corner. The sun has nearly set and the kitchen is full of shadows. It is warmer here where the ovens are still cooling, and the warmth pacifies her.

  He will bring her into the courtyard and they will mingle with the other children. There is the one he pulled from the fire, the one whose neck and chin, pink where the flame held his head in its burning palm, will match forever the pink scar on the monk's arm. This child has a short tail; that one carries a batt of wool awkwardly under his arm, his hand pale and fleshy and shaped like the claw of a crab. Coming from the nursery are the three blind children. One way or another they have all found a home here.

  Behind the square door, the black portal opens smoothly. A wind roars up from beneath; the men jump northwestward and cling to the ceiling on all fours. Hairless hands sparkle and the men emit a faint glow. A hook clinks free of an eye, a simple plank door swings open. The floor is empty. The room is empty.

  Finally the guards come, listlessly, to the corpse under the high window. Soon the warlord and his men will come too, descending gently on invisible stairs or rising up from the stones, and then the guards will finally begin to speak, though in dialects not their own. The corpse will be laid out before dawn. They will sacrifice wine and meat and women. The sun will rise on a funeral feast.

  The warlord is reminded for a moment of a day when he was young, a day he courted the woman who would become his wife. It was a tournament day: the banners, the roasting joint, the jugglers. Always before, as a boy, he had hated the tournament, the smell of dung, the flies and the sweat, the shouts of the men. But on that day these things belonged to him. The orders were his to give; that day, by the arcane algebra of power, was the end of his servitude. What caused him to choose her out of the throng? He knew her well enough; they were of similar age, from noble families. She was without beauty, charm, or wealth, and he was without nostalgia for a childhood spent together. But that day, when he had come out of his dead father's chamber and into the air, when the people came to him and touched him and murmured inconspicuous words—that day she too came to him, she too opened her mouth; but she could not speak. He chose her then, believing that she, out of all of them, knew and best feared the distance he had come.

  What is this distance? The distance to the monastery is many miles, but the monk, arriving footsore with the last rays of the sun, will soon forget them. The distance to below ground is twenty-six stairs of mossy stone; though forbidden to others they are light to the maid. The distance from servitude to power is short, even too short: one season and an old man's fever. The distance from one end of servitude to the other—as I say, I have had this scene in my mind for many years, I do not remember how many. The duration of one night's carnival rites; the space between the cooling oven and the dusk blue rectangle of the door; the length of a contemptuous gray brow sketched in charcoal—who can contemplate these distances?

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Mysterious Mr. M by Abby Denson

  * * * *

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Coder by Benjamin Parzybok

  I had to climb a ladder up to the roof and every time I joked to myself about how I was climbing the corporate ladder. Here I am, climbing
the corporate ladder, I'd joke. Really getting high in the world now. I'd have the corporate cafeteria lunch on a tray, or perhaps two, one for each of us, trying to balance it as I climbed. This was all the Coder ate—one corporate cafeteria meal per day, tasting slightly of aluminum. Though I often thought that before the Coder went crazy he'd only eaten a single daily meal at the corporate cafeteria anyway. Crazy. Is that what he went?

  I sat and ate my own lunch and watched him work from a giant air duct on the roof. We were four stories above ground. He let me do this, watch. Or he did not notice. I'm not sure which. He wouldn't eat his lunch until he finished working, be it ten minutes later or the next night. He was in his usual position, cross-legged on the tar roof, bent deeply over a stack of papers, pencil in hand. He was thin, so thin that I worried that he wasn't getting enough food. It was my job to worry about these things. He had sharp cheekbones and clumps of straw and gray hair that blew in the wind, whether there was wind or not. He was wearing his glasses now, comically stereotypical glasses, the thickest, coke-bottle glasses you could imagine. His face was taut with weather burn, and with his clumps of gray hair it was impossible to determine his age. When he worked he rocked ever so slightly in rhythm with the pencil. Occasionally he leaned up from the work, often with eyes closed, and waved his pencil and arm in the air, as if he were a conductor, keeping time. Sometimes I mimicked the motions, trying to feel what he felt.