The Iron Dragon’s Mother
Page 33
Caitlin had thought herself incapable of being astonished by anything that might come out of her mother’s mouth. Now she knew herself to be wrong. Horrified, she cried, “Why are you telling me this?”
“For once in your life, just listen. It’s important that you do.” Fleetingly, the Dowager’s lips curled in that forceful disdain that Caitlin knew so well from her childhood. “My father was the wonder of the world—strong, masculine, amoral, mighty. I loved him, of course. He was my daddy, my hero, my everything. But as I grew, he seemed to wither. Where once he had struck down servants for imagined insolence and refused them right of cremation, now he was all reason and persuasion. By the first flush of my adolescence, he had grown so very frail and virtuous! It was obvious that he was close to transcendence. I so dearly wished to keep him bound to the world. I could see that was what he wanted.
“Also, the thought of losing him was unbearable.
“Even then, I knew about men. The seeliest of them could be called back to corruption with a hand job and a promise of something more. I promised my father much, much more. And I delivered on my promises.”
The Dowager looked directly into Caitlin’s eyes. “Do you wish me to be explicit?”
“No! Dear gods. Please, please no.”
“As you wish. The affair passed pleasantly at first. What innocent young maiden doesn’t fantasize about being debauched beyond the bounds of all decency? By age fourteen I knew more about sex and passion than all but the most depraved adults.
“By age fifteen, my wrists were a mass of scars from my attempts to kill myself. By projecting my body into my father’s desires, I had traded one evil for another. He was no longer the man I wanted to save. I loathed him with all my being.
“So I withheld myself.
“That was when I learned where the imbalances of power truly lay. That was the night I turned from provocateur to victim.” The Dowager paused. “Again: Do you wish to hear the details?”
“Let’s just assume that every time that question comes up, the answer is no.”
“Very well. I fled, he pursued. I hid, he found. He bound me helpless in his trap, I turned the tables on him. He begged me for forgiveness. I gave it and was flogged for doing so. I had a knife. He bled. We both enjoyed that particular game. Are you sure you don’t—?”
Caitlin shook her head.
“I enjoyed the game far more than my father did. Thus, he died.
“I remember the smell of his corpse burning on the funeral pyre. Oh, it was foul! The stench filled the air. It has never entirely died away. Even today, it lingers in my nostrils.
“My guilt and pride and disgust at what I had done were enough to keep me rooted in this world to this very day. Was it worth it? Today, I look back at what I did and see only the folly of youth. It is even possible to imagine my actions to have been the kindness they were intended to be, for my father so very much loved the world and desired to remain in it. Even at the cost of becoming something he would earlier have abhorred.
“In the aftermath of the funeral, I broke down and confessed my guilt to my mother. We were both dressed in mourner’s white. The ashes had not yet blown from my father’s pyre. Can you guess what that wicked old woman did?”
“No,” Caitlin said, “I honestly cannot.”
“She shrugged and said, ‘Same old same old.’”
“Umm…”
“I had a very long talk with that evil battle crow, that compilation of sins, that cesspool of bad intentions, that most loathsome of all creatures. Unlike you, I asked for all the details. I was sorry I did for they were all of them familiar to me from experience. This was the story my mother had lived and her mother before her and her mother before her, ad infinitum. Every detail was the same. No one could say how far into the past the chain of incest and guilt extended.
“Somewhere along the way, I met your father.
“Despite all my misgivings, I married him.
“You can imagine how relieved I was when, on first try, I gave birth to a male heir and needed not pass the curse of pity on to a daughter. You can imagine my horror when your father brought home a female bastard—you.”
“But nothing like that ever happened to—”
“You’re welcome,” the Dowager said.
Caitlin bit her tongue, tasted blood, did not speak.
“You think that just because nothing happened, it didn’t take tremendous effort to make that nothing come about? Oh, you are every bit the fool I always feared you would become. I thank all the gods and daemons there are that I did not give birth to you! Was I cruel to you in your childhood? Well, who had a better right? Who refrained from strangling you in your crib? Who spared you the doom that has haunted our female line since time beyond imagining?
“Was I cruel to you as an adult? Your entire graduating class was about to be sacrificed by your beloved Dragon Corps. By persecuting you first, I gave you a chance to escape and survive. As, you will note, you alone accomplished.
“Was I right to do the things I did? Was I wrong? It is not your part to judge. I look back now and I would forgive everyone everything, yourself included, if I could. Where I could not, I would offer oblivion were such a thing possible in this world. But, alas, neither forgiveness nor oblivion is in our power to offer. All we can offer is understanding.
“Which I have now given to you.”
A long silence hung over the room, so profound as to be a living entity in its own right, a beast capable of sucking the oxygen from both their lungs forever and calmly watching them strangle and die. Caitlin could all but see it, a disembodied creature impervious to any weapons save one—words. Her fingers twitched. But she stilled them. If she was to use words as weapons, she needs must choose them carefully. So she did.
“Are you done?” Caitlin waited. “Here is my judgment upon you: You will live, Mother, until you die. Then you will be mourned, who knows with how much sincerity? Until that time, you must live and I must put up with you.” She went to the door. “I shall inform the help that you will expect cocktails at six. As usual.”
* * *
Caitlin found the note when she was cleaning out Helen’s things. She hadn’t realized that they were Helen’s until she no longer had the old woman in her head. Then, when she poured out the contents of her duffel bag, it suddenly became obvious that some of her possessions had no relevance at all to her anymore. The note was in a plain white envelope, addressed To Whom It May Concern. Which, Caitlin thought, after all the two of them had been through together, was pretty fucking cheeky.
The world is choking on old stories, the note read. Tell new and better ones.
It was signed Helen V.
Caitlin put down the paper.
The room looked very different than it had an instant before. A burden had been lifted from her, there was no denying that. But something had been lost as well. Caitlin was at a loss as to whether she had gained or been diminished by this instant of comprehension. It would take a lifetime to sort it all out. She turned her back on everything that had come before and faced into the harsh sunlight of everything that was yet to come.
Stepping out of the old woman’s shadow, Caitlin was astonished to discover that …
* * *
“What, Mommy?” young voices clamored. “Tell us!” And, insistently, “What did she find?”
“Enough, monsters.” Caitlin mussed Amelia’s hair and drew her up, along with Natalia and Alana, in one tremendous hug. “It’s time for bed.”
“But I want to know!”
“So do I!”
“We all do!”
“I want to know, too—a great many things. But merely having questions doesn’t mean you’re entitled to answers. I learned that the hard way.”
“Just tell us what came next.”
“Yeah!”
“Pleeease?” Amelia made her most calculatedly winsome face.
“That is another tale,” Caitlin said in her firmest there-is-no-appea
l voice, “to be told another day when you’re old enough to hear it. If you live that long, which given your antics I tend to doubt, and even then probably not, because what could you possibly do to deserve it? Now. Hands, face, teeth, horns! And straight to bed.”
Willful as kittens and thrice as adorable, the girls lingered, sulked, argued, defied, and were finally, efficiently, swept away by Missy Tibbs, their nurse. Who, when they were at last abed, returned to report to Caitlin on their doings and sayings, concluding as usual that all was well. At the end of her narrative, Tibbsy added, with the not-quite-insolence of a servant who has been with one house all her life and who knows that no one will overhear, “Why do you tell the children such terrible lies?”
Caitlin closed her eyes to keep her thoughts from showing, and, with an expression on her face that could not have been read by the Goddess herself, shook her head. “Nobody ever believes a word I say. Story of my life.”
ALSO BY MICHAEL SWANWICK
Chasing the Phoenix
Dancing with Bears
The Dragons of Babel
Bones of the Earth
Jack Faust
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
Griffin’s Egg
Stations of the Tide
Vacuum Flowers
In the Drift
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Not So Much, Said the Cat
The Dog Said Bow-Wow
The Periodic Table of Science Fiction
Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures
A Geography of Unknown Lands
Gravity’s Angels
Moon Dogs
Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary
Tales of Old Earth
The Best of Michael Swanwick
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL SWANWICK is a highly regarded author in both science fiction and fantasy literature. He has served as an influence on genre fiction as a whole as well as an inspriation to many leading authors. He has been a finalist multiple times for every major award in sci-fi/fantacy, from the Nebula to the Hugo.
Visit him online at michaelswanwick.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Also by Michael Swanwick
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE IRON DRAGON’S MOTHER
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Swanwick
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Gregory Manchess
Edited by Jen Gunnels
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-19825-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-19826-6 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250198266
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First Edition: June 2019