by Various
The woman takes a first step but her dead legs won’t hold her and she stumbles. She reaches out a hand for the garage wall and gets herself right, leaving red finger smears on the yellow painted blocks.
Pansy leaps down from the Wanderer’s wall, vaulting past the pig, which is rolling the bottle down the pavement with its nose, trying to get the last licks of sour milk trapped inside.
“Please, your Majesty” Pansy says to the woman, “show us the way out. Take us to the door.”
At her words, the woman jumps like a rabbit and lurches into motion, walking fast. Her sandals crunch in the broken glass. She cuts into the alley that leads to the front side of the shops.
Pansy runs after her and I grab her arm as she passes. “The Fixers are out there. We have to hide.”
Pansy shakes free. “We have to follow her. The King knows the way out.”
I want to scream at her stupidity, but with the men so near, I don’t dare. I scuttle after her down the alley, my back against the block wall. I stick close to the building, crouch in the shadow.
The woman is on the other side of the open street, standing in front of the cracked glass of a restaurant window. She stares at her broken reflection. Pansy crosses towards her, and just then the line of Fixer men appear, marching together with tools in their hands, wearing their blood-stained overalls like uniforms. There are only six, but they bulge in the deserted street, filling it side to side.
The man in the lead, red-haired and broad, raises his fist, the blood-smeared blade held high. Beside him, two boys with first-haired lips lean into a sprint and streak towards Pansy.
My hand closes around the handle of the knife in my belt. Pansy and I have been together forty-five days, and we look out for each other. She is the only thing I have left in the world. But in my mind, I remember before. I see my own hand holding a knife, see the blade slice into flesh, part the seam of life and turn a living body into a nothing bag of skin.
Everyone said the Wanderers would kill us first. My head ran pictures of them slinking in from the forests with their dirty feet and animal noses, whispering their secret songs and carrying wet bags of gleanings, water dripping from the blades of their crook-armed diggers. On Day 3, I saw the crowd holding a girl down in my street. Her name was Bel. Grown men and women were spitting on her and kicking her and making her cry. My heart skittered, and I ran and joined them. The furnaceman’s wife threw a stone. A boy next to me gave me a knife. Bel called me by name and begged me not to kill her. Snot ran from her dirty nose, and she jumbled up frightened stories, trying to remind me how we used to play frogstones together in the street when we were small.
My hand shakes. The Fixers are coming, and still I can’t draw the knife.
I could step out into the road and tell the men I come from a Fixer family—that’s one thing that Pansy already knows—but we are too late in the days for that to matter anymore.
Pansy runs away down the street, arms pumping, her skirt flying around her legs, looking too late for somewhere to hide. A mustache boy lunges, and brings her smash down in the dirt. I feel her hit in my own chest, bite to stop from crying out. The other five stomp forward, dust and stink and hungry blades.
In my eye’s corner, I see the horns move. The woman turns her head from her reflection to Pansy, and the antlers swivel. She kicks a bare foot through the restaurant window and heaves up a table as she leaps back into the street. With both hands overhead she smashes it down, breaks off the leg. She grips the end, double-fisted. She holds the sharp tip high, and walks into the crowd of men.
She swings into their stomachs, jabs into their ribs, cracks the table leg against their skulls. The men fall, toppling into the dirt.
Pansy runs to my side, unhurt. She holds onto me and I hold onto her. We watch the men destroyed, one after the other, until they lay scattered in the street.
The King drops the sword, and then she speaks.
“Where am I?” she says. This time I know she is seeing us.
I shove Pansy in the back. She made the King, so it’s only right that she explain.
“You’re the King,” Pansy says. “You’re going to take us to the right-side world.”
“I was on my way somewhere.” She says vaguely. She digs into her pockets, comes up with little belongings—a slip of paper, a coil of wire, a coin. Each one she holds up in confusion, lets drop from her hand. They fall on the dirt next to her sandaled toes.
A man on the ground groans, and his body shifts. His arm flails, and I stomp it.
“Can you take us?” Pansy asks.
“Yes.”
• • •
The King leads us out of the city. We follow her along the Wanderer’s wall into the country, where blackthorn tumbles over its fallen stones. Blood drips from the King’s missing fingers. It bothers me that she is still bleeding. I tear the sleeve off my shirt and take the King’s hand, wrapping the cloth over the stumps, tying it off across the palm.
As we travel, Pansy tells the King her story, the one she has already told me, about the man who lived next door.
“I used to call him Uncle,” Pansy says. “He and his wife looked after me when my parents were out gleaning. When I heard about the killings in school, I ran to him and asked him to protect me. He dragged me down the stairwell, and pulled my hair and slapped me. He held a chisel to my face and told me I was a dirty Wanderer sow. He made me take off my clothes.”
I go up behind and put my arm around her, but she shrugs it off. “When he was done,” she says. “He sat over me with the knife, and I could see him wondering what to do. But then more men came up behind him, and beat him in the head. He fell on top of me. His blood—” she says, wiping her eyes with both hands.
The King walks ahead, her antlers against the blue sky.
“The Fixers,” Pansy says. “I don’t know why they started it.”
“This time,” I say. “But we all have something to answer for.” The blackthorn reaches out from the side of the road, tears my legs.
Pansy looks at me sharp. “You told me your parents never hurt any Wanderers.”
“They didn’t,” I say. “The fightermen herded the Wanderers into the hall. They handed out stones and knives to all of the Fixers and told them to kill the Wandering wood lice. My parents refused. The fightermen said if they wouldn’t kill the Wanderers they were traitors and had to die. My parents still refused. So the other Fixers killed them.”
The King turns her head, the golden antler eyes gleaming out at me from under the black wing brow.
I am telling the truth. I watched my father stand in front of my mother and take the first cuts. I saw him fall down, screaming, at her feet. I saw her cover her face and bend over him as the Fixers fell on her with their tools and fists.
• • •
When the sky dips dark, we lay down in the forest to sleep. The blackthorn is on the air, sweet with a scratch like hay, up my nose in the starlit air.
The King is stretched out on the ground, her neck propped on a stone to give her antlers clearance from the ground. Pansy sleeps, curled in front of the King.
I pull the knife from my belt, and creep up beside them. The way the King looks at me with her antler eyes. She knows what I did, and I can’t bear it. I raise the knife, hold it over the woman’s head, ready to plunge into her eye.
Then, I see the bandage, the piece of my own shirt wrapped around the King’s hand. She is already a bag of skin. She has crossed the line from living to dead, but here she is wrapped around Pansy, keeping her safe, taking her out of our upside down sunken world.
I put the knife away.
• • •
We follow the King all the way back to the potato man’s house. The house has been set on fire, but the flame is out, smoldering. From the distance, we see dogs circling, running through the potato fields, but when the King passes in through the yard, they are gone.
The dark house smells of smoke, and the body of the potato man is gone
. The dogs bark in the distance, and out the window I see their brush tails disappear over the hill.
Pansy hangs close by the King, who steps carefully over the place where the potato man laid. She picks up the loft ladder and leans it against the wall above the door. The empty nail hangs above the sill, where we lifted the crown.
Pansy holds the ladder, and the King climbs. At the top, she unwraps her bandaged hand. The blood runs new from her missing fingers. She dips the first finger of her other hand into the blood, and, starting at the nail, draws a square on the smoke-smudged wall above the door. She dips into the blood again and again until the line on the wall is clear and dark.
I stand by the small window, where in comes the blackthorn air, faint over the smoke and molded potato.
The King dips her head forward and taps the wall with her antlers, one-two. The wall splits along the blood-drawn line. Click, and a new door springs open. Inside the door she has drawn, instead of outside the potato man’s house and a view of fields and forest, is a hollow space. Inside the space, steps lead up, a long staircase. Leaving the door open, the King backs down the ladder and stands in front of a wooden bench pushed against the wall.
Pansy watches, and wipes her hand across her eye, still trying to get the blood out. I wonder if she will still see it in the rightside world.
Pansy kneels down and kisses the King’s undamaged hand.
“We’re going up,” Pansy says, looking at me.
I think about Pansy, how we found each other among the fertilizer, how we have traveled and survived for forty-five days, hiding and crying into each other’s hair. I think about the knife in my hand, and the moment when the seams of life split and Bel’s self fell out.
“You go first,” I say. The King is patient, watching. The drip of blood from her fingers is drying up.
Pansy puts her foot on the ladder, and begins to climb. When she reaches the top, she lets go of the ladder and reaches one hand through the new door the King has drawn. She holds it there, watching, waiting. To see if she really can go. Then she brings her hand back, closes her eyes. Waits. Finally, she crawls up and over the ladder, and through the door. I see her legs, her calves and ankles below-skirt, and I watch each bit disappear up the stairs.
The King-drawn door bangs closed behind her. Its bloody edge-lines swallow back into the plaster wall.
I’ve always known I wasn’t going. I am fixed here, stitched in place by what I have done. But that doesn’t make no way out easier to bear.
The King drops down on the bench, and slumps back, the tips of the antlers clacking against the stone wall.
My knees go and I fall on the sooty stone floor in front of the King. I grab her hand, hold it to my chest, hanging on. Potato root is in my nose. “Oh, King,” I say. “Don’t leave me alone.” I want the King to say something. That she understands. That she forgives me. That I had reasons.
She looks sympathetic, but she is dying. A last drop of blood falls from the stub of her middle finger. And then the King is just a bald-headed woman several days dead.
My throat closes up, my lids bang down on my eyes, shutting my mind, trying to stop me. The King is gone. Pansy is gone. The world where I have lived the first fourteen years of my life is over. If there is any world left for me to go, it is the one inside of me.
I let go of the woman’s cold hand. I stand and face the empty room. It feels like the knife is back in my fist, only this time I am slicing into myself.
“I wanted to hurt Bel,” I say. These words are the point of the knife, digging against resisting skin.
“It was a relief,” I say. “It felt good.” I work the truth harder, split the tough seams I have sewn. Something gushes out, warm and sour. “Once I hit her, I couldn’t stop. It was the only way to be safe, the only way for the world to make sense again. I made Bel a bug, a germ. I struck and slashed with that knife, and my fear fell away.”
I hold out my hand, staring at it. “Then she was dead, and her blood was wet on my skin. And I was even more afraid than I had been before.”
Some last bit slumps out of me onto the floor of the potato man’s house, and I am left standing in an empty bag of skin.
New things fill up my eyes. I can’t see where Pansy has gone, but I can see all of the potato man’s life. I see the lines of him before they cut his throat. I see the bald-headed woman under the antlers. How she was just a woman on her way to the shop with a man who loved her and how she was cut down. I see the puddle of my frightened self on the dirty stone floor, wet and lumpen. The lines stretch and go in every direction.
Down my front, the potato air blows through the tattered edges of the self I have left. I am empty, open.
I go to the woman. Her face is blank and bloodless. I unfasten the antlered cap and take up the crown.
Laurel Amberdine became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Airship Hope” in Daily Science Fiction (May 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden.
Visit her website at amberdine.com.
* * *
Flash: “Airship Hope” ••••
AIRSHIP HOPE
by Laurel Amberdine
First published in Daily Science Fiction (May 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden
• • • •
THE AIRSHIP was made of spider silk, and held aloft by prayer. Monks had labored a thousand years to build it, directed by prophets who foretold the end of their world. At least, the end of Rynille. For what purpose could there be in building an airship, if nothing lay beyond the ocean?
If only the prophets had said how long the journey would take. Bishop Oyen wished that often, as he scanned the featureless ocean.
A storm darkened the northern horizon. Oyen adjusted the prayer schedule to steer them even further south. Had he not turned already? He reviewed their past course and noticed an irregularity. A small turn north, every seven hours. He dimmed the navigational sphere, and smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from his robe.
“Brother Kir, it seems that doubt has arisen within your third choir,” Oyen whispered into the transmitter. He wondered who it was.
“Apologies, Excellency. I will isolate it. Tonight?”
“Yes.” Oyen paused and did not sigh, and held that sorrow in his heart beside all the others. “Tonight, at the Balcony of White Stars.” He did not wait for acknowledgment, but stood and walked through a black door, along a corridor illuminated by unburning violet torches, and parted the scarlet veil.
Chanted prayers, both soft and loud, harmonizing in polyphonic waves filled a vast white silken space, keeping the airship in flight. Groups knelt or stood, while some processed in solemn order between the airship’s slender iridescent titanium framework. The faith of the remnant of Rynille impelled them toward a new home. Except when someone doubted.
• • •
Once, in Oyen’s grandfather’s time, a test ship had attempted to cross the ice peaks. When the wreckage was found a decade later, the journal said that doubt had crept into the ranks, first touching only one. They fought it, trying convincing arguments, but the arguments themselves fostered confusion. Doubt festered until the ship became unsteerable, and crashed. Doubt could not be tolerated.
Bishop Oyen scanned the throng. It wasn’t any of these. Third group was off shift now, eating or sleeping or taking recreation.
He began to descend to his quarters, but Brother Kir approached and touched Oyen’s sleeve.
“Excellency, we must speak,” he murmured. All at once, Oyen knew who doubted. It would not do to distract the current prayers with a protest that discussion was needless, though, so he followed Kir off to a staging chamber.
When the screens had closed. Bishop Oyen allowed his heart to break. “Tipnya?”
“You knew?”
It approached an accusation. “Only because you came to me.” Tipnya, his only child, born long before this life as bishop. With ebony hair and cinnamo
n eyes like her mother, who had died in the cataclysm of Rynille.
“Maybe you could talk to her?” Kir said, thinking it a favor to offer hope.
Oyen savored the thought. Yes, he could speak to Tipnya, This ship crosses the sky upon wings of faith, how can you doubt? The devastation we left behind was foretold by prophets in ages past—how can you not trust? She would assent, and smile, and resume her prayers once more. Oyen clung to the dream, then let it fall.
“We both know better. It will go as it always does.”
• • •
Oyen could not sleep. He stared at the ceiling of his small chamber, at a fresco which had once adorned the Basilica of Unceasing Grace. It showed the creation of Rynille from nothing, a forested green jewel set upon the aquamarine sea. Perhaps the Maker was creating new lands for them now. Perhaps that was where they flew. No one knew. The prophets had not explained.
In such a situation it would be so easy to doubt. As bishop he only guided their course—his faith did not lift the airship into the sky. He questioned, wondered, doubted continually. Why did they not know their destination? How could this endless journey be what the prophets intended?
Tears ran down the sides of Oyen’s face, dripping chill into his ears, his hair, his pillow. At last he rose and wiped his sorrow dry. It was time to cast his only child, his beautiful daughter, into the sea.
On the Balcony of White Stars, Tipnya waited, hair mussed, lips pressed tight, demeanor calm. Two burly brothers held her arms, though she did not resist as some had. Behind them, the celestial maiden’s amulet of stars glimmered in a clear sky.
Oyen said the funeral prayer, choking only when he spoke Tipnya’s name. He glanced over the side. Were there shadows above the dark water? “Farewell,” Oyen whispered, too soft to be heard. The brothers lifted Tipnya up and over the railing and let her fall.
Oyen waited, listening. Tipnya did not cry out. He thought he heard a murmur of voices, but it might be just the whisper of waves mixed with desperate longing.
