Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  Clarisse hung back.

  “Come on,” he called. “You don’t have to go too close.”

  I felt the same reluctance she did. When guiding visitors to the car, I always parked myself on the end of the path and waited for them to gawk their fill. I’d never been close. I trailed after Erl Jack, stepping where he had mashed down the wildflowers because I despise ticks. They’re nasty little acrobats, slinging themselves from a rocking stem onto bare legs. Halfway through the field, I could make out gray, spittle-worked paper pressed against the windows. The nest hummed along with the endless sawing of the cicadas. Where the glass was broken, gray bulged out—the whole thing suggesting a car and speakers from some weird, abandoned movie drive-in.

  “A barn near the mill is packed with nest,” Erl Jack said. “They’re going to torch it this winter.”

  He flattened the weeds in a two-yard radius and told us to stand there to watch.

  “It seems like the end of the world,” I murmured. I had a strong sensation of horror mixed with fascination.

  Clarisse was whimpering and dragging on my hand, but I didn’t brush her off.

  Maudie, however, was staring with interest at a squad of incoming yellow jackets.

  Erl Jack Falchion waded closer to the car, carrying the hibachi. “They say that there are ten or eleven queens in each of these things,” he called, “and that there may be one hundred thousand insects inside, or more. But people do strange things for love.” He sounded quite cheerful as he set down the hibachi; afterward, he still had something in his hand.

  It was a jar of honey. He began anointing his body from the waist up with driblets of the stuff.

  “Erl Jack, no!”

  He just smiled at me.

  With that many yellow jackets sailing in and out of the windows, it didn’t take long for them to find Erl Jack. He threw a handful of powder that made the fire shoot up black cumulus, and he kept moving to stay in its path. The yellow jackets settled a breast plate on his chest, shielded his belly, stuck epaulets on his shoulders. Within three minutes, he was a tigerish, seething mass. His eyes were open, staring.

  Clarisse howled, swaying back and forth in an ecstasy of fright.

  “Maudie,” I whispered, “take her home. Very slowly, before she attracts their attention.”

  I wanted to go with them.

  My legs had gone wiggly, and I dropped to my knees, letting out a moan that blotted out the noise of the yellow jackets and cicadas. Big stinging tears were pushing out of my eyes as the pelt of black and gold rippled across his heart. My throat felt jammed with grief and death.

  Erl Jack was a goner.

  He must’ve been a bit panicked, because he dropped the sack of powder onto the grill. The coals gnawed through the bag by degrees, consuming more powder and setting off fresh bursts of gray and black.

  Erl Jack’s shape writhed in the billowing cloud, wheeling slowly. When the wind blew, I glimpsed yellow jackets pelting his bare feet. He stepped gingerly out of the smoke with only a few dozen insects still clinging on, and these he whisked away with his fingers. For yards around, yellow jackets toppled and reeled like drunks.

  “Your hair,” I croaked, and he scattered a few more with his fingers.

  He broad jumped out of the yellow pool, landing beside me.

  “India.” His voice was shaky, and I took him by the hand and led him through the wildflowers. My legs still trembled. I looked back once to make sure the yellow jackets weren’t coming after us. They were flying up from the ground, bumbling in the air. The mammoth nest reared up behind them, a dozen insect kingdoms ruled by pitiless queens.

  When we got to the trail, I started to cry, and in earnest. I used to sob like that when my mother was carted off to the hospital—until I got hardened and didn’t care because she didn’t care, not about me or anything except getting seriously high.

  “Hush, hush, India,” Erl Jack said, and he didn’t sound as cocky as before. He put his arms around me, and I hit him on the chest two or three times, though I’d never struck anybody in my life.

  “Don’t you ever, ever, ever do anything so stupid, ever again.” I head butted him, my face slick with tears, and when I looked up, his eyes were wet.

  After a while I stopped, and he retrieved the cloak and shirt, along with a rag and a bottle of insect repellent. He doused himself liberally, scrubbing at the honey until his skin glowed. I felt as empty as a dried-out nest of a castle, abandoned by queen and workers.

  The cicadas’ song was unbearably loud in the wood. We didn’t talk until I’d quit sniffing and wiped my tears away with Grandpa’s worn-out shirt.

  “Power and magic, India,” Erl Jack teased, his usual air of nonchalance coming back.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, stopping. “Now, when my face is streaked with snot, and I’m madder at you than I’ve ever been in my whole life?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “I want it whenever I can get it.”

  I touched a swelling on his shoulder and slipped my arms around his neck.

  “But don’t you dare ask me for another, you hear me? Wait until I ask you, even if you have to wait until hell is a major block of ice.”

  He nodded meekly—put on, of course.

  So I paid him. I’m a girl of my word, and that was magic and power, even if the latter was weirder and just plain more than I ever care to see again.

  Gran has an old, old refrigerator. It has a seal on it that won’t quit. Once that baby’s shut, it’s shut good. My first thought was that Erl Jack Falchion kissed like that refrigerator. He was going to make sure that if it was only one kiss, it was no chicken peck on the lips but one that would last him a while. I giggled, though I was mad at him, and I got serious and kissed him as tenderly as I knew how because he had, after all, delivered on magic and power and, in the end, deserved it. Just for an instant, I thought that our feet floated up from the path. The honey and molasses in me melted entirely away, and my veins lit up like a big silver tree with its branches flying and leaves going like mad.

  “Now that was magic,” Erl Jack said, once he caught his breath.

  When we got back to the mimosa tree, Clarisse dropped her doll and stared at Erl Jack. Her sister trotted right over.

  “How many stings you got?”

  “Three, maybe four,” he said, kneeling to show her. “You got a credit card, Maudie? That’s the best thing for sliding the stingers out.” He hadn’t put my grandpa’s shirt on because I wouldn’t give it back, not after I’d blown my nose on it.

  She choked with laughter. “I’m not old enough for a credit card!”

  “No? I knew for sure that India didn’t have a card, but I thought you and Clarisse might.”

  “You are one crazy boy,” Maudie said admiringly.

  “That’s what they said about the last guy to win a Darwin Award,” I told her.

  “What’s Darwin?”

  “I can’t get into that right now,” I said. “Ask the rocket scientist. She’s bound to know.”

  “It’s the prettiest flower I ever saw.” Clarisse hugged her doll and looked with intense longing at my blue rose.

  “A rose of magic and power.” I slipped the flower from my hair. The petals still had a faint perfume, but I was astonished to see that they were no longer genuine but silk, though the dusting of gold seemed to be pollen.

  “I thought you might like to keep it as a souvenir,” Erl Jack said.

  For once, I looked at his face and had nothing to say. That was a feat in itself—shutting up India—though I should’ve needled him for assuming that a kiss from Erl Jack required a memento.

  “I need another bath,” he went on. “And you’re a mess. Want a lift to the café in about forty minutes?”

  We drifted away from the girls, toward the truck.

  “All right,” I said, stopping him to peel a wing from his arm. My mind kept roving from the kiss to the car-shaped mound of spittle-paper, from the blue rose to the soles of Erl Jack�
��s feet, floating on air.

  “It ended happily,” he said, sliding his hand along my cheek.

  “You got the kiss.”

  Gran came out on the porch with a trowel, and we both waved at her. She just can’t quit gardening. She’s got every inch of the yard covered with zinnias and coleus and a hundred other plants.

  I stuck the rose in my hair and took Erl Jack’s hand.

  “I really love only two people in this world,” I told him, “but don’t take advantage, you hear me? I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and not even you and Gran could ever stop me.”

  “We’re probably the only ones who wouldn’t try,” Erl Jack said, squeezing my fingers.

  For a moment my heart felt packed with fluttering insect wings. I was bound to leave for the wide world, despite the pink mimosa flowers and the cicadas’ song and the laughter of Erl Jack and Gran that was in me like honey and molasses in girl-growing weather on a summer’s day.

  “Yeah,” I said, a little bitterly.

  But it was okay: two was a lot for somebody with no parents, who grew up smart but downwind from the dump in a house like a mossy growth on the slope of a hill.

  MARLY YOUMANS is the author of Ingledove and The Curse of the Raven Mocker, two very southern fantasy books that braid together Celtic and Cherokee culture (both are available in Firebird editions). In addition, she is the author of a collection of poetry, Claire, and the novels The Wolf Pit (winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction), Catherwood, and Little Jordan.

  Forthcoming is Val/Orson, a short novel inspired by the legend of the noble young Valentine and his wild twin brother Orson, set among California tree-sitters, as well as stories in many anthologies, including a four-novella collection from Prime that contains “The Seven Mirrors,” a tale that begins with a teenage girl conjuring the ghost of Poe.

  Marly Youmans lives in Cooperstown, New York, with her husband and their three children. Her Web site is www.marlyyoumans.com; she can be contacted through her blog, www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In part, I wrote this story as a gift for my magic-loving teenage daughter, who finds that real boys often can’t compete with make-believe ones. I also wrote it out of homesickness for southern landscapes and out of memories—the pet boar at the boat shop, a tin washtub on a Georgia front porch shaded by a glossy hedge and noisy with bees, the powder puffs of mimosas cool against my cheek.

  As for the intelligent, combative, sun-weary India, she sprang like armed Athena from the head of Zeus. She appeared, and she immediately had it in for little girls who weren’t as armed against danger as she. Like all small children, Clarisse and Maudie are reading the world with insufficient knowledge, though I imagine that they learned something from India and Erl Jack on that overheated summer’s day.

  Sherwood Smith

  COURT SHIP

  Along, low, rake-masted ship drifted into Smuggler’s Cove under a single foresail. The deck was almost flush except for the jut of the aftcastle, on which an old woman sat at a little table pouring hot chocolate from a silver pot.

  “That’s the Petal?” asked the newcomer.

  “Yes,” said his guide, a young boy from the village above Smuggler’s Cove.

  “It looks like a pirate ship,” ventured the newcomer.

  The boy snickered, then said with the superiority of the sea expert instructing the ignorant land rat, “That’s because it was, before Granny Risa’s family got it. They were smugglers. Which is why we’re called Smuggler’s Cove.”

  “Oh,” said the newcomer, peering under his hand at the old pirate ship.

  The boy added, “Old Granny Risa was a pirate-fighter as well as a smuggler.”

  To his surprise, the newcomer murmured, “Yes, so I was told.”

  A girl of about twenty leaped from the Petal’s rail to the dock. With practiced movements she made the bow fast, as a crewman aft secured the stern.

  “That’s Young Risa,” he said. “Talk to her or Granny Risa. They both do hiring and trading.”

  The newcomer smiled down at him. His tunic and riding trousers weren’t exactly toff—like what the nobles wore when they rode in their fancy coaches to Remalna City—but they looked rich anyway, hinting at largesse. “Thank you,” he said, pressing a six-sided Sartoran silver into the boy’s hand, which sent him whooping up the trail to his mates.

  On the dock, Aurisa paused at the unexpected sight of a young man coming down the narrow switchback trail, his long pale hair neatly tied back with a ribbon. She put her fists on her hips and waited. She liked what she saw. He was tall, slim, but moved with the swinging stride of someone used to being active; he was dressed plainly except for excellently made high blackweave cavalry boots.

  Risa flicked a glance at the fellow’s face: square, pleasant expression that didn’t give much away. Long hands, no rings.

  Altogether an interesting anomaly. Good. She liked interesting people. And hoped he would not open his mouth and promptly become a bore, or worse, a snob. She knew how to handle snobs—except that Granny Risa didn’t like her being rude to them. Bad for business, which had been all too scarce ever since the war.

  He reached the bottom of the pathway and started down the dock. She watched his gaze travel down her own form, and mentally assessed what he saw: medium height, plain face, curling dark brown hair tied up in her kerchief, wide hips, castoff blue tunic-shirt, ancient deck trousers that had, in fact, belonged to her father before he returned to Fal to join his cousin’s cavalry force during the war. Bare feet.

  What he saw was, in fact, quite different. He liked the strength hinted at by the set of her shoulders, the easy stance accentuated most attractively by the generous curve of her hip, her wide-set dark eyes, her generous mouth with a sardonic shadow at the corners. Her face was framed by the dark tendrils of hair that had escaped her kerchief.

  She crossed her arms and waited.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  Yes, he had a toff accent.

  “I need to hire a boat, or ship—a seagoing vessel—to take me to Send Alian—”

  “There is no more Send Alian,” she interrupted.

  He paused, regarding her with mild surprise. “I realize that. I ought to have said, what formerly was Send Alian. Or more exactly, I guess, the port at Al Caba, as I understand the shoreline along what was formerly Send Alian is too flat for landing.”

  Risa nodded. So far, so good. “All true. Will it just be you, or are there servants lurking around with a lot of baggage?”

  “Just—”

  “Hai! Raec! Wait up!” a young man called from the top of the bluff.

  The handsomest fellow she’d ever seen loped down the mountainside. He was tall, like the one he’d called Raec; but unlike Raec, who was slender, the newcomer was heroic in build, with curling black hair escaping most romantically from his white ribbon tie, his eyes thickly fringed with black lashes below winged brows. He gave Risa an openly appreciative up-and-down through blue eyes, startlingly light in his dark face. When she gave him the same appreciative up-and-down, he grinned. His grin was decidedly rakish.

  Then, to Raec, “You can’t go off without me. If you do, my death will rest upon your head, and I swear I will haunt you at the most inopportune times for the remainder of your sorry life.”

  Raec sighed. “Nad. This is one journey I could have made alone.”

  “Impossible,” Nad retorted. “You need my gorgeous face along.” He bowed extravagantly to Risa, adding, “Nadav, at your service.” Then to his friend, “We have been friends too long for you to shut me out of sailing on the prettiest boat I’ve ever seen, with the prettiest captain.”

  “That,” Raec said mordantly, “is the problem, not the solution.”

  Nadav raised his hands. “I didn’t want to say it, but it’s your fault I can’t go home. My sister found out you’re gone, and somebody somewhere—probably that fool of a royal messenger—hinted a
t the reason.”

  Silence, during which the only sounds were the thumps and rattles of the crew making the Petal fast, and the distant cry of seabirds round the bluffs.

  Then Raec turned to Risa, who had been watching with undisguised interest. He said, “Two—Nadav, here, and myself. No servants. Our baggage—such as it is—is on the hill, with my—”

  “Our,” Nadav put in.

  “Our mounts, for which I will arrange stabling for the interim. After which we can leave whenever you wish.”

  “Without even asking the price?” Risa asked. “My!”

  Raec actually blushed, which intrigued her the more. Nadav laughed. “He’s not quite made of money, but he’s the next best thing.”

  “Oh, yes, yap that out and watch the price double,” Raec said in Sartoran.

  “It would have doubled anyway,” Risa responded in Sartoran, and hopped back to the rail of the Petal. Unfortunately her splendid retort was spoiled by one of those bump-and-lurches so common to moored ships. She windmilled her arms, started to topple. A pair of strong hands caught her by the shoulders and gave her a boost. So much for splendid parting shots!

  She glanced back, saw in Raec’s rueful grin that he knew what she was thinking, and had to laugh as she leaped to the deck and sped aft.

  Her grandmother looked up from her chocolate. “Business? Or pleasure?”

  Risa snorted. “They’re toffs. Remalnan, from their accent. I told ’em I’d charge double,” she added. “We can get all the repairs done at Al Caba—”

  “Who are they?”

  “The dark one is Nadav, and the blond one Raec.”

  To Risa’s surprise, her grandmother nodded slowly. “There will be no charge.”

  “What? ” Risa squeaked, then lowered her voice as the two on the dock looked sharply her way.

  “I recognize the pale-haired one,” Old Granny Risa said in her slow, mild voice. “That is, unless I am mistaken, the grandson of Prince Alaerec Renselaeus. I understand they gave this boy the modern version of the old name, which would make him Prince Alaraec Renselaeus, heir to Remalna. And I promised my dear friend Lark that he always have free board with me. He and his family.”