Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Nancy Springer - KINGMAKER

  Nancy Farmer - A TICKET TO RIDE

  Christopher Barzak - A THOUSAND TAILS

  Chris Roberson - ALL UNDER HEAVEN

  Ellen Klages - SINGING ON A STAR

  Louise Marley - EGG MAGIC

  Kara Dalkey - FLatLaND

  Candas Jane Dorsey - DOLLY THE DOG-SOLDIER

  Margo Lanagan - FERRYMAN

  THE GHOSTS OF STRANGERS - NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

  Jo Walton - THREE TWILIGHT TALES

  Carol Emshwiller - THE DIGNITY HE’S DUE

  Marly Youmans - POWER AND MAGIC

  Sherwood Smith - COURT SHIP

  Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple - LITTLE RED

  Laurel Winter - THE MYTH OF FENIX

  Nick O’Donohoe FEAR AND LOATHING IN LALANNA: A Savage Journey to the Heart of ...

  Clare Bell - BONECHEWER’S LEGACY

  Elizabeth E. Wein - SOMETHING WORTH DOING

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  FIREBIRD

  WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT™ WHERE SCIENCE FICTION SOARS™

  FIREBIRD Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02228-3

  Introduction copyright © Sharyn November, 2009

  Decorations copyright © Mike Dringenberg, 2009

  “A Thousand Tails” copyright © Christopher Barzak, 2009; “Bonechewer’s Legacy” copyright © Clare Bell, 2009; “Flatland” copyright © Kara Dalkey, 2009; “Dolly the Dog-Soldier” copyright © Candas Jane Dorsey, 2009; “The Dignity He’s Due” copyright © Carol Emshwiller, 2009; “A Ticket to Ride” copyright © Nancy Farmer, 2009; “Something Worth Doing” copyright © Elizabeth Gatland, 2009; “The Ghosts of Strangers” copyright © Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 2009; “Singing on a Star” copyright © Ellen Klages, 2009; “Ferryman” copyright © Margo Lanagan, 2009; “Egg Magic” copyright © Louise Marley, 2009; “Fear and Loathing in Lalanna” copyright © Nick O’Donohoe, 2009; “All Under Heaven” copyright © Chris Roberson, 2009; “Court Ship” copyright © Sherwood Smith, 2009; “Kingmaker” copyright © Nancy Springer, 2009; “Little Red” copyright © Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, 2009; “Three Twilight Tales” copyright © Jo Walton, 2009; “The Myth of Fenix” copyright © Laurel Winter, 2009; “Power and Magic” copyright © Marly Youmans, 2009

  All rights reserved

  CIP is available

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for Lloyd and Janine Alexander

  —I miss you—

  INTRODUCTION

  Here’s a question: How does one write an introduction for the third anthology in an ongoing series?

  If this is the first Firebird anthology you’ve read—welcome! If this is the second or the third—welcome back! Repeat readers already know the following:• I hate reading introductions myself, so this will be short.

  • I won’t tell you anything about the stories.

  • This book has been sequenced to allow you to read it all the way through in one sitting, although you probably won’t.

  • I want to hear from you, so my e-mail address is at the end.

  But there’s more to this book than four bullet points.

  Each Firebird anthology sets the standard for the next, and, needless to say, each is a hard act to follow. This is the most substantial book yet. Its nineteen stories range in length from a few pages to almost one hundred; the settings range from 25,000,000 years ago to far in the future; and there are a number of stories that can’t be classified as science fiction or fantasy, exactly. You might wonder why they’re included. Simple. If someone has a wide range, I want to have the freedom to show it. It’s more fun to blur the boundaries, anyway. Thus, the subtitle refers to “speculative fiction,” which I consider more generous than “science fiction” or “fantasy.”

  The second bit of boundary blurring is visual. I asked the artist Mike Dringenberg if he’d like to be a part of the book, and to my delight he said yes. This meant that he became something of a collaborator; since he wanted to do “decorations” for each story, he read things right after I had selected them. More than a few times I was surprised by the images he’d chosen. But everyone sees a story differently, of course—especially a visual artist. (For those taking notes, he painted with powdered graphite mixed with water.)

  You can’t miss the third boundary blur—it’s right in the middle of the book. If you’ve been keeping track of the list, you’ll know that 2007 was Firebird’s fifth anniversary, and we celebrated by publishing three short novels, each by one of Firebird’s biggest names: Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, and Charles de Lint. Other people had written short novels, too; one of them was Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and I couldn’t resist making it the centerpiece of Firebirds Soaring.

  So what’s next for Firebird? Well, more good books, of course—I am perennially looking for non-dystopian science fiction. Help me!—and more anthologies, if you’ll have them, and surprises where I can fit them in.

  Of course, I want to know what you think of Firebirds Soaring. Please e-mail me at firebird@us.penguingroup.com. I actually do read all of the e-mail I receive and take your suggestions into account, so let me know what you think I should be publishing, what’s missing in the marketplace, what we’re doing right, and what we could do better. This is your imprint as much as anyone’s, remember.

  Speaking of which: you named this book. The acknowledgments in the back will tell you everyone who sent me Firebirds Soaring as a possible title. Thank you.

  And, as always, thanks for reading Firebird books, and allowing me to publish more of them!

  Sharyn November

  January 2009

  Nancy Springer

  KINGMAKER

  Destiny, I discovered upon a fateful day in my fif-teenth year, can manifest in small matters.

  Tedious matters, even. In this instance, two clansmen arguing about swine.

  Barefoot, in striped tunics and baggy breeches, glaring at each other as if they wore swords instead, the two of them stood before me where I sat upon my father’s throne. “His accursed hogs rooted up the whole of my barley field,” complained the one, “and there’s much seed and labor gone to waste, and what are my children to eat this winter?”

  “It could not have been my hogs,” declared the other. “I keep iron rings in my pigs’ snouts.”

  “Better you should keep your pigs, snouts and all, where they belong. It was your hogs, I’m telling you.”

  Outdoors, I thought with a sigh, the too-brief
summer sun shone, and my father, High King Gwal Wredkyte, rode a-hawking with his great ger-eagle on his arm and his nephew, Korbye, at his side. Meanwhile, in this dark-timbered hall, I held court of justice in my father’s stead. No easy task, as I am neither the high king’s son nor his heir; I am just his daughter.

  My cousin Korbye is his heir.

  But I could give judgment and folk would obey me, for I had been guiding my father’s decisions since I was a little girl, sitting upon his knee as I advised him who was telling the truth and who was lying. In this I was never mistaken.

  This is my uncanny gift, to know sooth. When I lay newly born, I have been told, an owl the color of gold appeared and perched on my cradle. Soundlessly out of nowhere the golden owl flew to me, gave me a great-eyed golden stare, and soundlessly back to nowhere it flew away, all within my mother’s closed and shuttered chamber. “This child will not die, like the others,” she had whispered from the bed, where she lay weak after childbirth. “This child will live, for the fates have plans for her.”

  If those plans were only that I should sit indoors, on an overlarge chair draped with the skins of wolf and bear, listening to shaggy-bearded men quarrel, I wished the fates had kept their gift.

  The accused clansman insisted, “But it cannot have been my pigs! They can’t root, not with rings the size of a warrior’s armband through their noses.”

  “Are you telling me I’m blind? You think I don’t know that ugly spotted sow of yours when I see her up to her ears in the soil I tilled? Your pigs destroyed my grain.”

  I asked the accuser, “Did you see any swine other than the spotted sow?”

  “His sow destroyed my grain, then.”

  “Answer what I asked.”

  “No, I saw only the spotted sow. But—”

  “But how could one sow root up the whole of a field by herself?” cried the other clansman. “With a ring in her snout? It could not be so, Wren!”

  I scowled, clouds thickening in my already-shadowed temper. I possess a royal name—Vranwen Alarra of Wredkyte—yet everyone, from my father to the lowliest serving boy in his stronghold, calls me Wren. Everyone always has, I suppose because I am small and plain—brown hair, brown eyes, clay-dun skin—but plucky in my stubby little way. Although no one, obviously, is afraid of me, or they would not bespeak me so commonly.

  “Wren, I am not a liar!” insisted the clansman with the ruined barley field.

  I held up my hand to hush them. “You both speak the truth.”

  “What!” they exclaimed together.

  “You are both honest.” My sooth-sense told me that, as sometimes chanced in these quarrels, both men believed what they had said. “The real truth flies silent like an invisible owl on the air between you two.”

  “But—but . . .”

  “How . . . ?”

  But how to resolve the dispute? they meant.

  Customarily, in order to pass judgment, I would have closed my eyes and cleared my mind until my sooth-sense caught hold of the unseen verity. But on this day, with my father and my cousin out riding in the sunshine, I shook my head. “I will sit in the shadows no longer. Come.” I rose from the throne, beckoning dismissal to others hunkered against the stone walls; they could return on the morrow. “Show me this remarkable spotted sow.”

  Surely, striding out on the moors, I looked not at all like a scion of the high king, the sacred king, Gwal Wredkyte, earthly avatar of the sun. I, his daughter, wore only a simple shift of amber-and-brown plaid wool, and only ghillies, ovals of calfskin, laced around my feet. No golden torc, no silver lunula, nor am I royal of stature or of mien.

  Nor did I care, for I felt like a scullery girl on holiday. Laughing, I ran along the heathery heights, gazing out upon vast sky and vast sea, breathing deeply of the salt-scented wind making wings of my hair.

  “Take care, Wren,” one of the clansmen called. “’Ware the cliff’s edge.”

  He thought I had no more sense than a child? But my mood had turned so sunny that I only smiled and halted where I was, not so very near to where the heather ended, where sheer rocks plummeted to the breakers. Long ago, folk said, giants had carved these cliffs, playing, scooping up rocks and piling them into towers. Atop one such tower nearby balanced a stone the size of a cottage, rocking as gently as a cradle in the breeze that lifted my hair. It had teetered just so since time before time, since the giants had placed it there.

  “Wren,” urged the other clansman, “ye’ll see my pigsty beyond the next rise.”

  Sighing, I followed.

  A sturdy circle of stone it was, but no man has yet built a pen a hog cannot scramble out of. For this reason, and because swine require much feeding, customarily they roam from midden heap to midden heap, gobbling offal, with stout metal rings in their snouts to tug at their tender nostrils if they try to root. Otherwise, they would dig up every hands-breadth of land in search of goddess-knows-what, while the geese and sheep and cattle would have no grazing.

  Laying my forearms atop the pigsty’s stone wall, I looked upon the denizen.

  The accused, doubly imprisoned. Tethered by a rope passed through the ring in her nose.

  There she lay, a mountainous sow, unmistakable, as the complaining clansman had said, because of her bristly black skin splotched with rosettes of gray as if lichens grew on her. A great boulder of a sow, all mottled like a sable moon. Shrewd nosed and sharp eared, with flinty eyes she peered back at me.

  I felt the force of something fey in her stare.

  Almost whispering, I bespoke her courteously, asking her as if she could answer me, “Are you the old sow who eats her farrow?” For such was one of the forms of the goddess, the dark-of-the-moon sow who gives birth to a litter, then devours her young.

  I sensed how the clansmen glanced at each other askance.

  The great pig growled like a mastiff.

  The clansman who owned her cleared his throat, then said, “You see the ring in her nose, Wren?”

  “Yes. She looks disgruntled.” Still oddly affected, off balance, I tried to joke, for a gruntle is a pig’s snout—the part that grunts—so disgruntled could mean a hog with its nose out of joint, as might be expected when a ring of iron—

  I stared at the ring in the sow’s snout, all jesting forgotten.

  No ordinary swine-stopper, this. Despite its coating of mud, I saw flattened edges and spiral ridges like those of a torc.

  “Where did you come by that ring?” I demanded of the owner.

  “Digging turf one day, I found it in the ground. She needed a new one, hers was rusting to bits, so—”

  “I want to see it. Come here, sow.” Reaching for the rope that tied her, I tugged.

  “She won’t move for anything less than a pan of buttermilk.”

  But as if to make a liar of him after all, the sow heaved herself up and walked to me.

  Reaching over the stone wall, with both hands I spread the ring and took it from her snout, feeling my heartbeat hasten; in my grasp the ring felt somehow willful, inert yet alive. It bent to my touch, so I fancied, gladly, then restored itself to a perfect circle after I had freed it from the pig and from the rope.

  Still with both hands, as if lifting an offering to the goddess, I held the dirt-caked circle up in the sunlight, looking upon it. Pitted and stained it was, but not with rust. Rather, with antiquity.

  “That’s no ring of iron, fool,” said the complaining clansman to the other one.

  “Some softer metal,” I agreed before they could start quarreling again. And although my heart beat hard, I made as light of the matter as I could, slipping the ring into the pouch of leather that hung at my waist, at the same time feeling for a few coppers. I would gladly have given gold for that ring, but to do so would have excited the jealousy of the other clansman and caused too much talk. So with, I hoped, the air of one settling a matter of small importance, I handed threepence to the sow’s owner and told him, “Get a proper ring to put in her snout. Then she will trouble
your neighbor no more.” To the other man, also, I gave a few pence, saying, “If your children grow hungry this winter, tell me and I will see that you have barley to eat.”

  Then I left them, striding home as if important business awaited me at the stronghold.

  In no way could they imagine how important.

  All the rest of that day I closeted myself in my chamber, with the door closed and barred, while I soaked the ring in vinegar, scrubbed it with sweet rushes, coaxed grime from its surface with a blunt bodkin, until finally by sunset glow I examined it: a simple but finely wrought thing made not of iron or copper or silver or gold, but of some metal that lustered even more precious, with a soft shifting green-gray glow, like moonlight on the sea. Some ancient metal I did not know—perhaps orichalcum? Perhaps this had been an armband for some queen of Atlantis? Or perhaps a finger ring of some giant who had long ago walked the heath and built towers of stone?

  Such an ancient thing possessed its own mystery, its own power.

  Or so my mind whispered.

  Was I a seer as well as a soothsayer? The odd sort of recognition I had felt upon seeing the black moon-mottled sow had occurred within me at intervals all my life, although never before had I truly acknowledged it. Or acted upon it.

  Perhaps I was an oracle. Druids said that the wren, the little brown bird that had fetched fire down from the sun for the first woman, possessed oracular powers.

  I should feel honored to be called Wren, my mother had often told me while she still lived, for the wren is the most beloved of birds. It is a crime to harm a wren or even disturb a wren’s nest. Except—this my mother did not say, but I knew, for I had seen—once a year, at the winter solstice, the boys would go out hunting for wrens, and the first lad to kill one was declared king for the day. They would troop from cottage to cottage, accepting gifts of food and drink, with the mock king in the fore carrying the dead wren. Then they would go in procession to the castle, and the real king would come out with the golden torc around his neck; the dead wren would be fastened atop an oaken pole, its little corpse wreathed with mistletoe, and a druid would carry it thus on high while the king rode behind with his thanes and retainers in cavalcade. Therefore the wren was called the kingmaker.