by Bill Fawcett
showing a river like a great hand flattening the page.
But I confess:
I am an old wretched beast, and my tail,
waiting in the spangled dust,
is made of quartz-shot boulders
clapped in moss.
I deny you, say the desiccated lodes.
I deny you, say our great-grandchildren, with such clean hands.
I deny you, says the highway, blithe and black.
V. THE DEVIL OF MINE CANARIES
Watch the sun peek out over the Siskiyous
with their lavish snow like ladies’ bonnets—
see my feathers, how bright, how brave!
I open my wings over the thin green
boyish arms of the Russian River,
yellow as sulphur, yellow as gas,
wide as any Italian angel.
What is a devil
but death and wind?
I come golden as a mineshaft,
and how black, how ever black,
come my eyes!
Who remembers where they got the songbirds?
Bought from Mexico, from Baja with shores
like sighs? They got the cages
out of their wives’ bustles, wrangled
to hand and wing. Pretty bird, pretty bird!
Don’t be afraid of the dark.
Yella-Girl loved her miner, thought
her black demon,
white eyes showing clam-shy through the dust,
was the greatest raven born since Eden.
She pecked corn-meal from his palm,
stood guard at his bedknob,
little golden sentinel. She’d draw the gold
for him, she thought, like to like.
For birds, the angry gases
have a strange color:
pink, almost pretty (Pretty bird, pretty bird!)
curling up from the dark like beckoning.
Yella-Girl seized up in midstroke,
falling onto a carpet of jaundiced feathers
half a leg deep. She fell thinking
of her miner, of corn in his black hand,
and I stood up
out of the canary-grave,
body crawling with pretty, pretty birds,
beaks turned out
like knives.
I deny you, says the buried mine, long stopped up.
I deny you, say the crows, too big to tame.
I deny you, says the miner, a new bird swinging at his side like a
lunchbox.
VI. THE DEVIL OF ACORN MASH
I am hard to see.
You will have to look carefully.
Carefully down,
at your well-shod feet
to see the shallows in the rock,
where she and her son,
light beating their black hair like blankets,
worked rough-husked black oak acorns
into mash and meal,
bread and pancakes.
Like horse-hooves driven into
the granite, the hollows still breathe.
These are my footprints.
I have already passed this way
and gone.
I deny you, says the forest, full again.
I deny you, say endless feet.
I deny you, says the treeless plain, flat and brown.
VII. THE DEVIL OF THE RAILROAD
If I just try, I can taste bitter tang
of the golden tie bent over my toe
somewhere in Kansas,
like the memory of licking clean a copper plate.
But here at my head,
between the Santa Lucias and two crescent bays,
ribboned and raw-boned, bonneted in iron,
coal-shod and steam-breathed, I taste
corn-freight and cattle, pallets of tomatoes
and stainless steel screwdrivers, and there, behind my
tongue,
the phosphorescent traces
of silver forks and weak tea shaking on linen,
burning the air where they no longer
drink themselves down to calm nerves like baling wire,
to spear Pacific salmon before the conductor ever sighted
blue.
Out of the slat-cars come thousands of horns,
honest black and brown,
bull-thick, tossing in the heat.
In the slick, wet turn of my silver-steel against the rail
Li-Qin sings a little song, full of round golden vowels.
She wore gray shapeless things, hammering ties,
taking her tooth-shattering turn at the drill,
laying rail with bloody, sun-smashed hands
while the pin against wood sounded her name over and
over
like a command to attention:
Li-Qin, Li-Qin, Li-Qin!
She had tea from thrice-used bags
and a half bowl of rice at the end of the day,
one grain of sugar dissolving in her cup
like snow.
With her hair bound back she plied the drill
until it slipped like splashed water,
hammered into her heart,
laying track for the train to bellow through her,
blood red as cinnabar on the wooden stays.
There is a car swinging back and forth
between a shipment of umbrellas to San Francisco
and swordfish packed in ice for Santa Barbara.
I have such a tail, you know, enough to bring them all
from the mountains and the sea.
With silver forks and weak tea
they sit at a long table with a cloth of cobwebs,
clinking their cups as I rattle them through the desert:
a Boston goblin with drowned lips violet,
a bridal imp, her veil torn and burning,
a gnomish grandmother,
sucking tea through slices of strawberries,
an old, wretched, bustleless beast, smug as a river,
a yellow bird, brimstone-wings folded around
a little urchin in deerskin, her hands full of acorns,
and a demon in gray with a huge flayed heart
hanging in her breast like a pendant.
I brought them on my tail,
my endless black tail,
like a dragon out of books older than any of us,
I brought them like freight,
like wagons,
like horses,
and we are coming to dance on the shore
by the great golden bridge,
we are coming to remember ourselves
to the tide,
to sing at the moon until it cracks,
to stamp our hooves under so many crinoline
dresses,
to stamp our hooves under so many rags,
to stamp our hooves on the earth like pickaxes,
and sunder California along every wrinkle,
send her gleaming
into the sea.
I deny you, shudders the sky, whole and inviolate.
I deny you, whispers the unwilling sea.
I deny you, trembles the fault line.
The sun dips deep into salt and foam,
and a long engine-whistle
breaks the blue
into seven pieces.
THE ANDRE NORTON AWARD
First presented in 2006, the Norton Award, chosen by a vote of SFWA members, is given yearly to outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy intended for young adults. Its name honors the late Andre Norton, a SFWA Grand Master who influenced generations of young readers and writers. While not part of the Nebula Award voting, it is given each year at the Nebula Awards banquet. This year’s winner, Ysabeau Wilce, began writing in 2007. The complete name for her award-winning novel is Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room)
AN
EXCERPT FROM THE ANDRE NORTON AWARD-WINNING YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
FLORA’S DARE
YSABEAU S. WILCE
Flora Fyrdraaca wants nothing more than to become a ranger, but first she must master the magickal—and dangerous—language of Gramatica. In her search to find a teacher, Flora discovers that Firemonkey, a notorious magician, and someone who owes her a favor, is playing with his band at the Poodle Dog. She persuades her best friend Udo to accompany her to the show. Her plan: confront Firemonkey and ask him to cancel his debt by taking her as his student. But Flora and Udo turn out not to be the only ones at the Poodle Dog on serious magickal business. They’ll be lucky if they get out of the Poodle Dog alive—and home before their curfew.
THREE
UDO’S BANK ACCOUNT. SOLD OUT. UDO DROOLS.
Mamma had to return to the Presidio for an evening inspection, so she dropped me off at Case Tigger on her way. This ride lessened my lateness a bit and saved me the horsecar fare. At Case Tigger I ran the gauntlet of parents (one mamma, two daddies), siblings (six—all absolute horrors), and various pets before finding Udo in the loo, primping.
Udo is sickeningly good-looking: his jaw perfectly square, his hair perfectly gold, and his eyes perfectly blue. He is also sickeningly vain and spends much of his time trying to improve upon perfection. I pried him away from his mirror, where he was taking forever to decide between red lip rouge or blue, and if his hair looked better on the top of his head in the shape of a rolled doughnut, or braided into five plaits and dangling free. After I told him that the red lip rouge made his face look too thin and the doughnut hairstyle made his face look fat, he quickly decided on braids and blue and we were able to make our exit.
We caught the N horsecar just as it was pulling up, and managed to get the last two seats. Udo fished a silver case out of his greatcoat and lit up a foul clove cigarillo.
“Don’t you think you have enough nasty habits, Udo?” I waved my hand ineffectually through the blue smoke. “You’ll ruin your lungs.”
“Ha,” he said. “Ayah, but I can blow a smoke ring.”
“That’ll be some consolation when you die of black lung,” I said. “We’ll put that on your memorial stone: Ayah, but he could blow a smoke ring.”
“You are an old crab, Flora.” Udo added insult to injury with a nip from his flask—another bad habit I did not intend to acquire. “And you get precious little fun out of life.”
“I’d get even less if Poppy had his way. I have to be back by midnight,” I said morosely. “Can you believe it? On the first night of vacation.”
Udo hooted. “Midnight! That’s outrageous. The Horses of Instruction won’t even have gone on by then, probably. You’re going to miss the show.”
“We’re going to miss the show.”
“I don’t have a curfew.”
“If you plan on coming back to Crackpot with me, then you’re on the same curfew I am.”
“The whole point of going home with you, Flora, is, that way, the Daddies don’t know what time I get home. If you’ve got a curfew, then that defeats the whole purpose.”
“Sorry,” I said, not in the least bit sorry. Before I could tell Udo about my plan to approach Firemonkey, he started up on his favorite topic.
“Look, Flora, I’ve been thinking about the Letter of Marque.”
Oh no! Here we went again. Udo’s pirate ambitions had not abated, not even after the Dainty Pirate incident. If anything, they’d grown even stronger, and now he was even more obsessed about obtaining a Letter of Marque. A Letter of Marque is a document issued by the Warlord authorizing the bearer to seize and confiscate property. It makes piracy legal, as long as you are willing to give the Warlord a cut of your prize.
If the Dainty Pirate had had a Letter of Marque, Mamma would not have been able to sentence him to hang. And of course since Udo didn’t want to end up dangling from a rope, he was determined to get a Letter of Marque, but they cost a lot of money. Udo is cheap and pinches every diva until it squeaks, but he was still a long way away from the purchase price. And all his money-making ideas were harebrained and ignored the most obvious solution: Get a job. I was sick of the subject, and anyway, I had other things to worry about, like Firemonkey.
“Can’t you leave it alone for one night, Udo?”
“Ha! The Fyrdraacas are one of the most wealthy families in the City. Easy for you to say to forget all about money.”
“Maybe so, but I’m not the Heir to my House, so I get zippo, zilch, nada, nothing. Idden gets all the swag and the House, and I’m a pauper.”
Udo waved dismissively. “You’ve got your allowance from Buck, but I must make my way through life on my wits, and ships don’t grow on trees. Neither do Letters of Marque. Do you have any idea how much one costs?”
The exact amount was seared on my brain by Udo’s constant whining. “A hundred and fifty thousand divas. But the Warlord doesn’t issue Letters of Marque anymore. The Dainty Pirate didn’t have one.”
“Only because he refused to recognize the Warlord’s authority, not because the Warlord wouldn’t give him one. If Florian sees enough of my gold, he’ll write me one up, I promise. That’s why I need cash!”
“You could get a job, Udo.”
Udo rolled his eyes dismissively. “I have a better idea.” He took off his hat and fished a crumpled piece of paper out of its crown. I knew what was coming: another crazy scheme. Earlier crazy schemes: chicken-farming in Case Tigger’s backyard (nixed by city zoning), organizing the siblings into a street-sweeping brigade (nixed by the Daddies), renting his little brother Gesilher out for medical experiments (nixed by Gesilher’s demand for 20 percent). Now what?
Udo continued. “Look, I have a cunning idea of how to get some cash, and it’ll be easy, too. I happened to be walking by the post office on the way home this afternoon, and look what I noticed on the wall!”
I smoothed the crumples out of the paper and angled it toward the overhead light. “‘Dead or alive,’” I read. “ ‘Ringtail Peg, the Masher Queen. Wanted for grand larceny, gambling, fixing, mashing, arson, and murder. Five thousand divas in gold payable upon delivery of prisoner or corpse. By command of the Attorney General of Califa, under the Warlord’s Sigil and Sign.’”
“See?” Udo waved more papers. “There are tons of them. Droolie Bee, wanted for larceny, fifteen hundred divas in gold. Firefly Andrews, tax evasion, two thousand divas in gold. Springheel Jack, fifty thousand divas in gold. It would be easy money! Just like taking candy from a baby. We’d be rich and we’d be doing the City a favor. What? Why are you giving me that evil eye?”
“You want to take up bounty hunting?” I said. “You have got to be kidding me!”
“Think on it! Five thousand divas in gold. And keep your voice down—I don’t want anyone to steal my idea.”
“Udo, you don’t like to get your hands dirty and now you are suggesting that we go out and track down criminals and bring them in? How are we going to do that?”
“Well, I figure we’d need some capital, but I’m willing to put out a little to get a little back. We go South of the Slot and—”
“And get ourselves robbed. Remember what happened last time we went South of the Slot? We were jacked by a ten-year-old kid!”
Udo ignored my cold hard truth. “And check out some of those dives.”
“Remember the last dive we checked out? Pete’s Clown Diner? We got caught in a riot!”
Again, with the ignoring: “Grease a few palms—”
“We’ll be killed, or worse.”
Udo said huffily, “Would you let me finish! Grease a few palms and then track them down, tie them up, and bring them in. It will be easy. I mean, they don’t even have to be alive, so if they give us any trouble, we just peg ’em and we still get the cash. And even though it was my idea, Flora, I’ll be happy to cut you in for 10 percent.”
“Oh how kind,” I said sarcastically. “Ten percent of being robbed, killed, or worse. You are so generous.”
“It’s a good idea, Flora. Didn’t Nini Mo go into bounty hunting for a while?”
“Ayah, but she was Nini Mo, the Coyote Queen. She had her reputation behind her. They just took one look at her and folded. I don’t think the people you have mentioned are going to let you walk right up, introduce yourself, and say, ‘Oh by the way, I’m taking you in, dead or alive; would you please come with me.’”
Udo said, exasperated, “Well, of course they will not. I’m not an idiot, Flora. I thought of that, too. See?” This time he fished in the inner pocket of his greatcoat, then displayed a small red enamel case. “This is going to make all the difference in the world.”
“It’s a compact. Are you going to powder their noses if they refuse to come with you?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, I am. This is no ordinary powder—no, don’t open it! If you spill it, we’ll be in super-big trouble. It’s Sonoran Zombie Powder. One whiff of this stuff and you are no more willful than a piece of cheese. They use it in Huitzil to control sacrifices and wanton wives. Makes the most obnoxious hellion as smooth and easy as glass.”
“Where’d you get it?” I took the compact from him and inspected it more closely. The red enamel top was embossed with a sigil shaped like a spiky wheel, and the clasp was cunningly fashioned like two hands holding each other at the wrist. The label pasted on the bottom read: MADAMA TWANKY’S SONORAN ZOMBIE POWDER.
“Oh, I have my sources,” Udo said mysteriously.
“You got it from an advertisement in the back of the Califa Police Gazette, didn’t you? Those adverts are all cheats, Udo. Remember when you ordered that lotion that was supposed to turn your skin the color of bronze, and it turned you green instead? You’ve wasted your money.”
